So, what horizon do I look towards as Advent closes?

Perhaps not a new miraculous birth, but a couple of posts ago I wrote about some signs of the times that give me pause. Here’s one that gives me hope. Just hours ago my long-time Internet friend, Hadar Aviram, swam the length of the Sea of Galilee. I can’t even imagine swimming nine and a half hours, and Hadar is quick to point out that she did not do it all by herself, having been assisted by members of her family and friends. You can read various narratives and see some photos here.

Hadar’s swim raised funds for Beit Dror, an Israeli shelter for homeless LGBT teens. According to the shelter’s website, it is “the first and only center designed to meet the needs of out-of-home GLBT youth in Israel, and one of the few similar institutions in the world operated by governmental organizations.” Opened in 2002, Beit Dror has a modest program at present, but its goals call for expanding programs and services. Hadar’s fundraising goal was a modest $2000, which she has substantially exceeded. I want to tell another story now, but I’ll come back to this.

My calendar shows that December 29, 1957 was a Sunday. I’m thinking it must have been that evening I found myself driving back to Dallas from Waxahachie, where I had a church job. I’m sure it was late, after an evening service. I was driving my four-year-old Oldsmobile 88, a lemon for sure; I had to shift the Hydramatic manually. I had traded a beautiful De Soto coupe for it, but it had a twelve-volt electrical system, whereas the De Soto had an old-fashioned six volts, which made for dim lights at night and bad radio reception.

The Oldsmobile had bright lights and a great radio. That evening, December 29, 1957 (if that’s when it was), I was listening to Monitor, the NBC weekend radio service, as host Dave Garroway mused ironically about quirky things in between news episodes with Chet Huntley, and skits by Bob and Ray and Mike Nichols and Elaine May and other Monitor regulars. At one point, Garroway chuckled about how Americans had been down recently because the Soviets had launched Sputniks one and two and made us feel inferior, or at least a little insecure. Indeed the Soviets’ capture of the lead in the space race, a race we Americans didn’t even know we were running until we found ourselves losing it, had become a major political issue at the end of 1957. Sputnik two had carried a dog and weighed a thousand pounds. We Americans didn’t even have a Rocket capable of launching such a behemoth.

But we had launched a Santa Claus, as Garroway pointed out with a gentleness that gave the cliché some cover, who had been sighted many times orbiting the earth (or at least our part of it) just days before, as he had since time immemorial. I was twenty that year, old enough to have been stung in a bad car deal, and it still embarrasses me a little to acknowledge that for a moment I took some consolation and perhaps a bit of hope from Garroway’s sentimental ramble. We had launched Santa Claus, that particularly American myth figure, whom my Grandmother had taught me to think was the spirit of Christmas: brash, jolly, generous, full of good will, and fearless—all that and a lover of children, somehow the guarantor of the good middle-class world many of our parents in my generation had died, we thought, to preserve in the preceding decade.

The Soviets might have the better of us for a little with their beeps in the night and thousand-pound flying dog houses; they may have stolen Eastern Europe and China from the good world. But Americans knew we were not totalitarians in the depths of our hearts. We were still a long way from achieving racial and economic justice, but we had repudiated McCarthyism. Our understanding of life and the world and the social contract we had based upon it offered more of the goods of life, more liberty and prosperity than any other. It disturbed us a little that some outside our country thought of us as ugly Americans, but we wished them well as we did our best to spread the same liberty and prosperity we enjoyed around the planet. Or so we thought, some of us at least.

Why think of this now? Perhaps because I hope my fellow citizens have not lost the naïve impulse towards human good will I took from Dave Garroway on my evening road home that fifth day of Christmas so many years ago. It’s problematic, to be sure. We err in its service, as I have often erred. But it’s the best thing about us as a people. Still, if the last century taught us anything it taught us the limits of our mythology. If we are to remain major stakeholders in the evolving world we shall need a better vision of ourselves than that offered by present versions of American ambition. We ultimately won the space race, only to abandon it. Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon proved to be somewhat less than a giant leap for all humans.

So who or what else might escape the surly bonds of earth and point the way for us towards a usable future? What present brightest and best might dawn on our darkness and lend us aid? I take present hope from young people like Hadar Aviram. You can read about her at the websites I’ve linked. I don’t know why Hadar chose the day of the winter solstice for her swim, but it seems fitting. It draws together both the adventurous and philanthropic aspects of the winter festival as it is celebrated in many traditions; for it isn’t just Christmas, or even the ancient Yule—it’s ecumenical whether we like it or not and always has been. It crosses seas and deserts. I will never ponder another Advent without thinking of this one and of Hadar’s Swim. Then too, there are profound ethical and human issues involved in the very existence of Beit Dror. You can read about some of those at the shelter’s website as well.

Finally, I’m thinking of the orchestra that Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said founded. To proclaim such things, to support such enterprises as Beit Dror and the Divan Orchestra, is to preach the gospel of peace, however one does it; though how fine a gesture to swim the Sea of Galilee! And I’m thinking of the words of Isaiah as James Jenyns fit them up for Handel’s music: How Beautiful are the feet of them . . . who cross such seas. Deer walk upon our mountains now, as the poet says. Great white bears still swim amongst the polar ice floes. And the universe rolls on into what heavens, what still unspeaking and unspoken Word to one who has seventy six winters and fewer tomorrows than he used to have? There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.