Undefeated

Let me tell you about a woman I know. I’ll call her Kate and alter some details. A child of the Sixties, she came of age full of ideals. She married young to an artist, a beautiful man, creative, inspired, free. He would earn the money, and she would raise magical children on the land to contribute to an enlightened society.

(My read-aloud version. It conveys something extra I think.)

They never did manage to save enough money to buy that homestead. The husband took up carpentry. He did beautiful work, but his ghosts got the better of him, and it took more and more pot and alcohol to chase them away. Her days and years were consumed with raising five children with never quite enough money.

Before the last child was out of the house, the grandchildren started coming. You’d need two hands to count them. Kate’s children did not become the minstrels and poets and inventors of the Age of Aquarius, but instead entered the lawn care business and the gas station business, became truck drivers and medical billing specialists. They are all busy. Even two jobs are barely enough to support a family, so both parents had to work. Grandma took care of the kids. Now the grandchildren are older. Child care is no longer needed. What is needed is money, and Kate has little of that. She loves to grow plants. Maybe she could sell flowers at a roadside stand, she thought, and give a bit of money to her children. She spent a summer doing that and made zero dollars. So there she is, feeling useless.

And she remembers those days of youth, with her hopes and ideals, a glorious life ahead of her. How could it have come to this? She never wanted to be rich or famous. She only wanted to contribute to humanity’s emergence into a magnificent New Age. She never imagined her husband would be a pot and booze addict. She never imagined her angelic, creative son would end up spraying chemicals on lawns.

Kate’s sense that life betrayed her echoes through modern society. Why else would “New Age” have become a term of scorn? It is because its promise was never redeemed. It is hard today to remember (since most of us were not yet born) that the New Age wasn’t originally about crystals and angel decks. The New Age was to culminate an all-fronts social, political, and spiritual revolution. The peace movement, civil rights, women’s liberation, global decolonization, the back-to-the-land movement, and the environmental movement fed the wellspring of 1960s idealism, inseparable from the psychedelic awakening and the entry of Eastern spiritual ideas and practices to the West. What we know today as “New Age” is the forlorn orphan of the broken marriage of 1960s politics and spirituality.

The popular movements of the 1960s recorded some significant achievements, but they certainly did not redeem the promise of total world transformation. Humanity today is better off in some ways than in 1960, and in other ways far worse off. What hippie in the 1967 Summer of Love would have believed that the world of the impossibly futuristic year 2025 would be one of accelerating ecological collapse, of genocide in full public view, of political leaders spewing hate, of shattered communities, crushing loneliness, rampant addiction, and chronic disease?

No wonder we disavow the starry-eyed idealism of the 1960s, are even a little ashamed of it, in exactly the same way that a mature man might be ashamed of his own youthful dreams. But is that man really mature? Or is he merely defeated?

Is the Great Expectation of the young person something to demean and discard, a youthful foolishness, a puerile fantasy to dispel so that one can proceed with the tedious business of “real life”—a job. A mortgage. The bills. Mondays. Debt. Struggling to make ends meet. A brief respite called the weekend, or drink, or drugs. Shopping. The Super Bowl. Empty, performative holidays. Santa Claus. Pretending to care about things you secretly don’t care about. A normality you never can quite make yourself believe in, or a hell you can’t wait to see the end of.

There you were, bursting with great expectations and the energy to fulfill them, eyes bright with hope on the brink of life’s magnificent journey, only to end up with this? It numbs the pain a bit to pretend that the vision was false all along. If there is nothing else but this, “real life,” it is easier to resign ourselves to it.

On the cultural level too, maybe it numbs the pain to dismiss the visions of the 1960s, the New Age, the Great Society, and for that matter all the rest of humanity’s glimpses of a Golden Age, the Krita Yuga, the Taiping, the Frashokereti, the Maitreya Age as pleasant fantasies at best, and at worst narcotic distractions from actionable real-world solutions. Let us resign ourselves instead to tiny incremental changes that, while they may merely slow down the world-destroying machine, are at least doable.

Is this realism? Or is it defeatism?

Shall we counsel our youth to abandon their idealistic dreams and knuckle under to what the older generation has decided is realistic? Or dare we face that, maybe, the young people are actually right in their idealism; that they reach for a real possibility; that our patronizing dismissal of it might come from unresolved grief over our own disappointments, defeats, and lost idealism; and that we are afraid that it would be robbed from us if we were to believe in it once more.

Dare we believe that the discarded Utopias of the Sixties and before emanate from an authentic future? Dare we raise our eyes again? We may not realize that vision in our lifetimes, but we can send the pulse of love/life toward it through what we give to the children and to the world. In that intention we may find that the paradise that beckons lives already inside.

I would say to Kate, “You were not wrong! It wasn’t a delusion. You are not crazy for feeling this grief for the life you never had. If you weep for it, you are sane. You are whole. And if you are still able to weep for it, then you are not yet defeated.”

She never was defeated. How else was she able to access the patience to care for all those babies through the long years, without thanks, without praise?

That is what I want to tell Kate, and those like her, and maybe even myself, but especially the women who pour their love into their babies and grandbabies without celebration or praise or recognition for the mighty service they do to life. In any sane society, they would enjoy a status above all others, for they send the pulse of love into the future. Do you suppose that those moments of baby care, toddler care, those endless tedious hours, are in vain? Do you suppose that the love doesn’t land in those children? They may grow up with no conscious memory of being held, so patiently, so lovingly, of being comforted, of being played with, of being protected, but all of it lodges within them and becomes them. Not every child is fortunate enough to receive the embodied knowledge of the Grandmother archetype, but those who do are better equipped to engage the world with kindness and patience.

Somebody has to do that work to lift the world from the state into which it has fallen. Someone has to do the glamorous work too, the “leadership,” the “impact,” the organizing, the peacemaking, the inspiring, the big visible things that attract praise. Worthy praise. The quotation marks are not facetious. They are just to indicate the inadequacy of our concepts of leadership and impact. Someone must do those things, but someone must also do the humbler work that does not bring with it money or praise, and sometimes not even thanks. Those are the ones I admire most. They are the ones laying down the foundation for a time when the New Age can actually take root. The promise of the Sixties, of every golden moment that has diffracted from Utopia onto history, may be redeemed only by healing all the unfinished story lines that lock humanity in the roles of persecutor, victim; rescuer, bystander; us, them; ally, enemy; hero, villain. As long as we perpetuate those roles, we will create social systems that embody them.

Just as every act of love lodges in the grandbabies Kate cared for, the same for any act of love, whether toward a child or a dying person or anyone in between. It lodges in the world. It lodges in God’s witness. It declares: “This is what a human being is. This is what a human being does.” It tugs the future into conformity with the truth of human nature it establishes.