Look after others

Today when we think of a poem, I suspect we will imagine something short, a page or two at most but it is not always so - consider Tennyson’s In Memoriam or  the poem I have in mind this morning “Leaves of grass” by Walt Whitman which is really a whole book. And the reason that I have this in mind is that little passage we have heard in this morning’s reading from Philippians:

“Let each of you not look to your own interests but to the interests of others.”

Whitman believed that everything joins up with absolutely everything else that amazing diversity and individuality and oneness were the same thing. He wrote\;

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.”

Like many in the nineteenth century he thought that the triumph of democracy was inevitable and of course that America was the epitome of that ideal and would lead the way for the rest of the world. 

“Thou Union holding all, fusing absorbing tolerating all / Thee ever thee I sing”

I cannot help thinking that we (and surely the Americans) have lost our way and the principal reason for this is that we have been inattentive to that verse from Philippians. Somewhere in the struggle the tenets of unbridled self interest triumphed over the nobler thought of loving our neighbours. Our wisdom is that if everyone does what is good for themselves then the clockwork mechanisms of supply and demand, profit and loss, labour and capital will gently ratchet to the common good. Sometimes to be fair this can be true, there have been long periods [Macauly writes eloquently of these) over the centuries when prosperity has been generally increased. God’s wisdom is that if everyone does what is good for others then the result will be better. It is I think important to note how revolutionary, how upside down this is, so it was in Jesus’ time and still is now. 

2020 America is very different from 1885 America - a lady from Boston sitting in my house recently said she would not like to go back home to her country, for all the division, racial strife, economic disparity and political ugliness there now. It is hard to disagree, when Frances and I lived there now over thirty years ago it was still a place full of hope with an extraordinary appreciation of geography, flora and fauna - I am not sure we would recognise it now. 

 But it could have been different, if instead of looking after ourselves we had learned first to look after others. The paradox is that the clockwork would be the same but working consistently and more certainly. This looking after others is the missing skeleton of our modern democracies, the substance that would hold all the bones together. As Paul says:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit

Then perhaps Whitman could again write:

“And a song make I of the One formed out of all. “

Amen.