NAIS - Much Ado About Trusting the World

When Liam, our 23-year-old son, decided to move to Cincinnati 16 months ago, the first thing I did was look up crime statistics in the Northside neighborhood where he and a friend had placed a security deposit on a fifth-floor walk-up. Accustomed to dealing with my worries, Liam gently reassured me that he would be fine: “You have to trust the world, Mom.”

Trusting the world. This was an easier task when I was Liam’s age. At 21, I left Ann Arbor, Michigan, B.A. in hand, and moved to Miami to begin my teaching career. Was I worried about crime statistics? Was I concerned about navigating a complicated international city located 1,500 miles from my hometown? Was I nervous about teaching five sections, coaching three sports, and running several clubs at the culturally diverse Episcopal school where I had landed? Not really. Sure, I was taxed and tired and overwhelmed at times, but excitement is the main emotion I remember feeling.

Trusting the world is more difficult in my mid-50s for a tidy trio of reasons: I have seen more, I know more, and I’ve endured more. Comparatively speaking, my journey has been a genuinely blessed one, but no one arrives to the age of 55 unbruised, and no one who pays close attention to history and current events for five decades escapes the grim awareness that the world is badly broken.

I taught with a science teacher named Victor all those years ago in Miami; he was a bit younger than the age I am now. “Why is he always so worried?” I used to think. “Maybe he should stop watching the nightly crime reports. Will his obsession with the contamination of the aquifers really solve anything?”

These past few years, especially when I sink into spiraling pits of worry about climate change or political extremism, I sound exactly like Victor. I realize now that he wasn’t histrionic or atypical, he was instead a deeply thoughtful person in his 50s.

I just finished studying Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing with my seniors. A new play in our 12th grade English curriculum this past fall, I was struck by how dark the plot landscape grows in Act 4 when young Hero is so viciously rejected by her fiancée Claudio and her father Leonato for a crime she did not commit. Only two people trust Hero’s innocence: her friend Beatrice and the Friar. Friar Frances goes so far as to put his own reputation and dignity on the line to exonerate Hero. Why?

Beatrice’s loyalty is understandable—she and Hero are cousins and have clearly been best friends since girlhood—but why does Friar Frances believe so completely in this young girl’s purity?

Cue The Little Prince and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s reminder that we must see with the eyes of the heart. Because Friar Frances is a man of faith, because he is well practiced at looking for a reality that exists beyond the awareness of the optic nerve, because he trusts the intuitive messages of his own heart, he can discern Hero’s true essence:

FRIAR
Call me a fool,
Trust not my reading nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error.

***

“Stay gold,” Johnny Cade tells Ponyboy just before dying from injuries incurred while saving several small children from a burning church. Concurrent with teaching Much Ado About Nothing, I’ve been guiding my younger students through S.E. Hinton’s 1967 classic, The Outsiders. While talking about Johnny’s phrase and the Robert Frost poem from which it derives, I referenced William Blake’s innocence—experience—higher innocence paradigm, a philosophical idea I was first exposed to in 1983. “We begin in innocence,” I told these wide-eyed 12-year-old scholars, but eventually we realize that the people around us are not perfect and that life is filled with ugliness and suffering alongside beauty and gladness; we come to understand, in other words, that “joy and woe are woven fine.” At that moment we enter “experience,” a realm most of us occupy henceforth. A fortunate few (I think here of Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, Linus from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip, Mother Teresa, my own mom at her best, a few pastors I’ve known, and all of us in certain lovely moments that we never forget) are able to access a realm that Blake called “higher innocence,” wherein we retain the knowledge that the world is a mess, but find a way to train our inner eye so intentionally on the pure, good, and beautiful that we become a kind of channel of such.

Perhaps trusting the world is a gateway to higher innocence. Of course, we need to use common sense, and we should not (as Bono recently said in an NPR interview) become complacent about the injustices all around us. But choosing to believe instead of doubt, hope instead of despair, trust instead of mistrust opens our heart and life to all kinds of joy and delight.

***

I flew to Rome via Atlanta and Amsterdam in March 2018. A flight delay that began in Atlanta put me at the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport well past 10 p.m. and from there I took the express train to Termini Station. New to Italy, alone, jet-lagged, without a smartphone, and dragging my rolling suitcase along the cobbled streets, I began searching for the Hotel Dorica. After close to an hour of fruitless searching using only a paper map, the directions my husband had printed for me back in St. Louis, and several Italians’ earnest attempts to bridge the language divide and help me, I was close to tears. When I doubled back to a tiny storefront where I had already been to ask the night clerk once again for directions, he took one look at my stricken face and said, “I will guide you.” He left his open and unattended store and walked me several blocks to the fairly well-disguised entry that led to my hotel. The concierge, a lovely young woman in her early 20s, had stayed well past the end of her shift to welcome me. Despite all the stories I had been told about the dangers in Rome, this is the story I carry with me and share with others: a story of kindness and compassion.

“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” wrote Anne Frank. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” asserted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps we make progress the more we adopt the courageous assertions of these two momentous souls. Although daily news reports can be crushing, they are not—in the end—the only story. We can choose to look and listen for the deeper, higher, more eternal news: news of the good, true, and beautiful. That posture requires trust, hope, and faith—a spiritual trio that is well worth making much ado about.