What’s Creed Got to Do With It? (A Meditation)

by Wendy Willis

Yesterday was my birthday. Though I know it is undignified to admit in such a serious gathering, I love birthdays. First of all, of course, there is cake. And who doesn’t love cake? And, secondly, we Americans have become such workaday creatures that we don’t get to celebrate, let alone ceremonialize, that much anymore. We can answer our email and grocery shop and pay our gas bill anytime and anywhere. One day bleeds into the next. It is as if—as we Catholics call it—all time is ordinary time.

But birthdays give us a chance to slip out of ordinary time and reflect, a chance to assess the old year, to plan for the new one, to reconnect with our values and how we want to live them out.

And yet, as much as I love birthdays and the few other blow-out celebrations we allow ourselves—graduations, weddings, even funerals—they mark individual milestones, and the aspirations they prompt us to reflect on are also individual.

Don’t get me wrong. These reflections—these values and goals and aspirations—can and often do involve other people. As in: I love my mother. I value my relationship with my mother. And therefore, this year, I resolve to be more patient with my mother.  All good.

But both the values (my love for my mother) and the goal (to be more patient with her) are entirely within my control. My mother has no say in the matter. To be clear, the implementation is not entirely within my control because things happen to interfere with the execution of the plan.  Maybe my mother will stop talking to me this year, taking away my opportunity to be more patient with her.  But the intention is entirely my own.

This leads us to the question I would like to ponder with you here: What are our shared values and aspirations? Do we have shared values and aspirations? How do we discern them? How do we announce them? How do we attend to them in the face of pluralism and inequities and structural oppressions? What—in the face of all that—is our shared creed? What—in the face of all that—can be our shared creed?

Here I am going to digress for a moment. Many of you in the room are scholars and academics. I, on the other hand, am not. But I do teach poetry. And by that I mean I teach students who want to write poems.  Most of my students are well into adulthood. If they’re going to go to college, they’ve already done so. But they—for whatever beautiful and unfathomable reason—love poems. And they want to get better at writing them.

But I will tell you this:  the students who struggle the most with writing poems are those who have seriously studied literature in college or graduate school. It’s not that they struggle intellectually, exactly. But they struggle emotionally. There are many reasons for it—intimidation, fear that they can’t live up to their own high standards. But the biggest, most immobilizing reason that they struggle and flail is that they have become adept at critique, that critical theory has lodged itself in their experience of language, in their experience of the world. They have become expert at giving words the side-eye, at reducing words down to the power relationships between writer and reader—between speaker and hearer. They have become ruthlessly skilled at shredding an argument, a poem, a novel, a speech, a tweet, sometimes before it even hits the page or the airwaves. And this is a seductive way of looking at the world.  I know. I’ve been there. Because once you get good at it—deconstructing everything you read and hear—you are relieved of the almost unbearable burden of confusion and uncertainty. You are relieved of the burden of having to name what you care about and embrace meaning.

But here’s the downside. Once you get really good at deconstruction, it’s hard to write a poem.  My smartest, most educated, most literate students spend a lot of time casting about and suffering when it comes time to write something. And that is because poems—actually making poems—requires something different of them. Making poems requires a dramatization of what does matter to them. Of what does break their heart. Of what does confuse and perplex and keep them up at night. Making poems requires them to reveal themselves, to declare themselves.

And that is really hard to do when you know that the deconstructionist—whether it is yourself or someone else—is lying in the weeds ready to tear you and your brand-new poem apart.

That, I realize, was a long digression in poetry. And I know that it ends where I started—on our ability and willingness to declare our own intentions. But the dilemma is worth re-examining because it is hard. It is hard to raise our heads up out of our own little burrows and say aloud or in writing: This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I intend. It is hard to declare our values and intentions because—even if we are not attacked for them—once we’ve stated them, then we have to hold ourselves accountable for them.

But I return to the question of declaring our own values because what we are asking of ourselves in a pluralistic democratic society is even harder. Much harder, actually. Because, like my poets, we have become better at declaring what we are against than what we are for. But in a pluralistic democracy, we are asked to sign on to a set of values and aspirations—to a creed—that we did not entirely generate ourselves. We are asking ourselves not only to be makers—like my poets—but also to be joiners. We are asking ourselves to declare our intentions and hitch our world view and our way of life to people we don’t know, we probably don’t like, and we suspect don’t have our best interests at heart.

Given what our political culture looks like at the moment, that seems like an almost ridiculous proposition. It seems like a dangerous proposition. It seems like a self-destructive proposition. But—and here I ask this sincerely—what are our alternatives?

Because while I most certainly do not want to peek out of my rabbit hole to offer my dearest values to people I suspect are craven and bigoted and corrupt, I also do not want to live in a world—or have my children live in a world—where this is as good as it gets. I don’t want to just throw up my hands and say well, that’s it. We can’t come together to tackle racial injustice or radical income inequality or climate catastrophe because I need to protect my own neck. Because I’m too invested in the fight. Because I’m not willing to try to find a way that we—at least a slim majority of us—might put some shared ideals out there that we can defend even in the face of the haters.

For those of us who are Americans in the room—and I apologize to those who are not because this thinking is seriously rooted in American-ness—we are about to hear a whole bunch of presidential candidates tell us that the United States is exceptional because it is a nation of ideas. But what are those ideas? And who do they belong to? What does the affirmation of a renewed American—or German or Nigerian or Costa Rican—creed look like? Do we reaffirm the values we have inherited in the Constitution? In the Declaration of Independence (or their equivalents in your own countries?) Do we scrap it all and start over? And if we were to do that, how would we do it?

No one of us alone can have the answers. But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates said earlier this week in his Congressional testimony in favor of reparations: “Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach.”

So it is incumbent on us to try to figure it out together. And maybe over the next couple of days, we can turn our intentions toward one another. Maybe we call one another close enough to be vulnerable and creative and speculative.  Maybe we can invite one another to be makers and joiners.

At the heart of all this, of course, is a sleight of hand. Woven into the fabric of this talk are the threads of my own values, the strands of my own aspirations. So let me state a couple of those values outright: I do believe in words. I think they are alchemical. I think they are magical. I think words can help conjure what we imagine into being. I think they offer spaces of connection and communion in addition to the rending power of  bare-knuckled conflict and division. I believe that, skillfully and empathetically wielded, words can make us better—more moral, more imaginative, more alive.

And I believe we are all in this together. I believe that my well-being is intertwined with your well-being. And I don’t think that my values matter that much if they don’t consider your fate and your dignity and the miracle of us all being right here right now, together.

And you know what else? I think we need to use words—our most aspirational and imaginative words—to come closer to one another, rather than further apart. I think when we encounter one another, we need to lead with a fierce affection—one that doesn’t suffer fools or injustices gladly—but an affection that is shot through with the faith that we can look out for one another.

And though it is hard,  I do believe that it is possible for us—we the people of good will and fierce affection—to declare ourselves to a waiting world.