Chapter 27: Survival of the Friendliest

Listen, I know 2020 has been rough, and I know that my last few episodes haven’t shied away from the hard stuff, of which there has been plenty, and I don’t at all want to underplay the reality that many of our brothers and sisters have suffered greatly during this pandemic. There’s no way to adequately pay respects to the losses that many have had to endure over the last year. As if that’s not bad enough, we’re also more divided than ever. Yet even though we can’t seem to stop fighting over everything, I really do believe that it’s not all bad. The last year really has been mixed. Nothing is all one thing, and even 2020 has had plenty of moments replete with truth, beauty, and goodness.

I’ve had more than my fair share of moments where I felt stuck at the bottom of the Pit of Despair. [Coughs in Princess Bride] Sorry, the pit of despair. But it certainly hasn’t been—nor can I pretend that it is—all doom and gloom. I promised early on in this project that I was going to reflect not only in the struggles of the spiritual life, but also on what Lewis calls those “far-off and momentary coruscations of light.” And it’s been a while since I’ve really focused on some of the brighter sides of the world, so that’s the plan today. As I was recently reminded by my dear friend, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light.” So let’s turn on the light.

Generally speaking, happiness feels like a pretty cheap word to me, but I think the sentiment is true, that we need not fear the dark, because we’ve been equipped with light. Even before Dumbledore spoke these words, it was true for Frodo in Shelob’s lair, as he held the fire of Galadriel aloft to fend of the murderous, flesh-eating, demon spider, high in the climbs of Cirith Ungol. Light can shine all the more brightly when surrounded by the dark. I want to be clear, though: this isn’t simply an episode about optimism, looking on the bright side. Nothing in me wants to overlook the crappiness of 2020, and, really, there isn’t any way that I could.

But avoiding false optimism also shouldn’t lead us to despair. I don’t want to run the risk of framing this as all-or-nothing, black-and-white. I don’t think it’s helpful to write off 2020 as a sucky year and just hope that 2021 is better. As important as it is to call out the bad stuff when we see it, it’s got to be just as important to call out the beautiful stuff when we see that, too. Otherwise we’re likely to take a trip on an increasingly rapid downward spiral. Perhaps this is why St. Paul urges the Philippians, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious: if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

This is why the focus at Y2AM, both in our video series and in our podcasts, has always been to “be the bee,” as St. Paisios and others would have us. That is, to have the eyes that are drawn to the beautiful and that which is good, rather than the eyes of a fly which are merely drawn to that which is stinky and corrupt. It’s easy to see the crap right now. Our eyes can easily be drawn to it. But we’re going to look through it, and we’re going to see goodness, a goodness that I think has actually been born out of all the junk that is going on in the world right now.

On a personal level, I have to say that one of the best things about the pandemic has been my ability to stay home, to slow down rather to travel around, away from my family, once or twice a month. Before COVID, I felt like I was always too busy, living with an overcrowded schedule, running from appointment to social gathering to plane flight, and back to work the next day. It really wore on me. In fact, I felt like I was beginning to have a breakdown at the beginning of the year. And for me, COVID came at exactly the right time. It gave me the much-needed hiatus from over-planning that I desperately needed.

Suddenly, I found that I got to be home every night and to hang out with my family, to put my kids to bed and to begin reading them Harry Potter. We even bought bikes so that we could take evening rides as a family. Back when trash cans weren’t melting in Phoenix and before the sun scorched my apricot tree, I delighted in our bike rides, and I revelled to see my kids grow to love Harry, Ron, and Hermione. At this point, even my one-year-old Amelia joins in singing the theme song to the Harry Potter movies. [Harry Potter theme, courtesy of Amelia]

It is so sweet to share such a wonderful story full of friendship, sacrifice, and the cosmic battle between good and evil with these young souls. I am constantly shocked by how moved I am when I read about the moments of utter kindness and goodness between these characters: Ron, sacrificing himself in the life-size wizard’s chess game; Hermione’s utter devotion to her friend as she cheers on Harry at Quidditch; and, of course, every time they see that lovable oaf, Hagrid, upon their annual return to Hogwarts.

Beyond literature, however, I taught my sweet Ava how to ride her bike in the initial weeks of the pandemic, and she took to it like an otter to the sea. She was a natural. That isn’t to say that she didn’t fall—she did, and I let her—but I was immediately there beside her, to comfort her, to reassure her that Daddy was right there, and that I, without a shadow of a doubt, knew that she could do it. These are the moments that I will relish forever as a father, and these are going to be the things that I remember with great joy when I look back on the great lockdown of 2020.

In this time, my family and I have also taken to visiting a local park every couple of Saturdays just to hand out food to those experiencing homelessness. My wife and my children have hearts of gold, and they can’t stand to see people suffering alone, so they absolutely needed to do something about it. Now when we miss a couple of weeks, I even feel myself beginning to think that something is missing from our routine.

As restrictions have begun to lessen, we started having my brother-in-law and his wife over for dinner once a week. My wife and I had the honor of being their sponsors when they got married, and now we really are getting to live into that role, as we share meals, stories, and grow ever more close. This has truly been one of the highlights of 2020. I love my brother and his wife, and I eagerly anticipate sharing veggie tacos tonight.

But it isn’t just within my family that I’ve seen goodness, truth, and beauty emerge. It has even occurred at the level of my parish. An anonymous parishioner donated $100,000 to our church’s budget, but it wasn’t for a building project; it was for the express purpose of caring for widows and orphans, sadly, an element of Christian spirituality that is put on the back burner for far too many Christian individuals and communities. The name given to this philanthropic effort? The St. Basil the Great Fund. Someone stepped up, taking the call to love “the least of these” seriously. And I am so blessed by it.

To add to the greatness, a group of my friends and I have all been moved by this, and so we started meeting to discuss St. Basil the Great’s butt-kicking, inspiring, painful, and incisive poverty homilies. As we gather, we have decided that we need to do something about all the excess junk that we’ve been accumulating over the years. So we decided, as a group, to start selling our belongings and adding every dollar that we make to a common fund that will, eventually, go to helping somebody in need. We’ve raised over $300 so far, and we’re just going to keep adding to it.

Now I say these things not to boast or to brag, but honestly I’m moved by the depth of faith that these fine people demonstrate, and I’m honored to call these people my friends and my family as we gather around shared values and begin to align our own principles with living the call that Christ gives us. There is so much goodness to see if only we will open our eyes. Yes, it’s true that things need to change around this, but there’s nothing that stops us from beginning to make those changes at a local level first.

In fact, I think Christ would demand that we do so, but goodness, beauty, and truth isn’t just the work of “some Christians” in the world. I’ve even seen some incredible art come out of this difficult time of the pandemic. Even secular musicians are catching on to the fact that our time, though rife with conflict, is also replete with opportunity. Steven and I recently did an episode of Pop Culture Coffee Hour on the Fleet Foxes’ studio album, Shore. Now, I’ve been a huge fan of the Foxes, but if I liked them before, this album only reconfirmed the fact that I can’t get enough of Robin Pecknold and his sweet tunes.

Normally Pecknold is drawn to some pretty sad themes, and a lot of his music seems to be about lost opportunities, the days of yore, and the many ways in which the human spirit can be caught in the pangs of longing for something better. In this album, however, Pecknold trades his regret for resilience, and paints a beautiful picture, not of disconnection and loss, but of togetherness and hope. As a guy who lived in New York when it was a hotspot for the virus, he saw the toll that it could take on a place, but he emerged from that experience with a sense of vitality. He even suggests that this pandemic helps him see that whatever problems he may have in his life, they were largely inflated by his being enamored by his own suffering and isolation.

Right out of the gate, Pecknold presents his listeners with a beautiful image of aligning with someone, ostensibly a girl, as he saw her crossing Second Avenue. Immediately Pecknold lifts us out of the quagmire of self-determined pain and puts us in the joy of a new love, a love which later begins to rewrite some of the stories that he has believed in himself. In the song, “Can I Believe You?” he confronts his own view of himself, and for the first time seems to really question whether he actually is as tragically flawed as his last three albums seem to indicate.

This is the kind of stuff we all need to believe. Yes, we’ve done some bad stuff, and, yes, there is hope for us to change, to grow, to become good and beautiful people. Even now, in the midst of a global and destructive pandemic, his uncharacteristically upbeat lyrics place him in the company of musical giants that have come before him as he pays tribute to those who have inspired him in his life. On a few tracks, Pecknold even includes audio clips submitted by thousands of fans who offered the background vocals to his new songs. For Pecknold, the message is clear: if we’re going to find a way through this, we’re going to have to do it together; if we’re going to have a vision of hope, it has to be shared.

All of this actually reminds me of a show that I really love: Lost. As the characters of Lost are desperately seeking a way to survive the complex nature of a threat from an unseen monster on a mysterious island on which they’ve crash-landed, the main protagonist, Jack Shephard, tells the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 that if they can’t find a way to live together, then they’re going to die alone. In fact, this seems to me to echo one of, if not the, most important understandings of what it means to be human as it is presented by attachment theory. Yep, here we go: that namely the chief survival strategy for human beings is our ability to bond and to cooperate with others.

Many people say that it’s human nature to be selfish, competitive, to look to one’s own survival over and above the good of others. After all, resources are scarce. But our theology first of all, and our history second of all, seems to indicate that this is absolutely not the case. First of all, for the Orthodox it is never accurate to say that human nature is selfish, destructive, or in any other way evil.

Human nature, we confess, is ontologically good, made by God, and declared to be “very good.” Now, that doesn’t mean that people don’t make bad decisions, but that’s not human nature driving the bus in those cases; that’s sin, that’s fear of death, that’s our desperate response to life in a fallen world, those are spiritual wounds that obscure the image of God within us, our intrinsic goodness. But to say somehow that humans are bad? Well, that’s just blatantly wrong from a theological perspective.

Secondly, to say that human beings are hard-wired for competition and selfish ambition doesn’t make sense from a historical point of view. If human beings merely wanted to compete, to destroy one another, and to hoard resources, then we would not be very long for this world. We would have annihilated one another in a never-ending battle for resources, but that’s not what’s happened for humans. Rather, we are the most prominent species on the planet. We have risen to a place of utter preeminence in the world, a position which would have immediately been compromised had we simply been looking to destroy one another.

Here’s what I mean. We aren’t really the strongest creatures on the planet. One need only to look at lions and tigers and bears, oh my. They are far more ferocious than any single human being. We definitely aren’t the fastest creatures. I mean, have you ever seen a cheetah or an ostrich? I mean, they’re goofy-looking as all get-out, and they’d still cream anyone in a land race. We aren’t even necessarily the smartest creatures on the planet. Chimpanzees, for example, perform better than humans in memory tasks. Goats have incredible long-term memory. Dolphins are currently plotting to overthrow their human overlords and to take possession of the planet. Hey, The Simpsons predicted it, so you know it’s going to happen.

But, seriously, when you break down things that make the human beings most unique, most capable of rising to prominence on the planet, it’s not that we have the biggest muscles, the sharpest teeth, or even the brightest intellects. Nope, it’s our ability to bond with others and to cooperate with them. How else could civilizations been built? How else could we have built this country, despite political disagreements that divided even the Founders? I mean, the fact that we exist is not because we somehow thrived in a cruel, brutal survival of the fittest. No, we rose to our position in the world because we learned to cooperate, to communicate, to coexist, to share ideas and to refine them.

Winning as a species isn’t about survival of the fittest; it’s survival of the friendliest. I love that phrase, and I honestly wish I had coined it—but I didn’t, alas. I first came across it in Humankind:  A Hopeful History, the incredible book by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. I highly recommend it. I mean, if you’re feeling down about how we’ve been behaving the last few months but need a breath of fresh air, then Bregman’s book is definitely the one for you. I read it early on in COVID, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. The entire premise of the book is debunking the myth that humans are selfish creatures. Bregman argues that human beings are essentially good, bound to one another, and seek to work together for the good of one another.

Now I can’t think of anything more good, true, or beautiful that our world needs to hear today. We are made to cooperate. We are made to find our lives intricately bound and woven together. In fact, Bregman even goes so far as to explain that it is this very strength of human beings that has actually led us to commit such atrocious acts throughout history. Every war, he suggests, is born out of our innate ability to bond with our people and to do all that we can to defend them. This, of course, can be exploited. Bregman suggests that our constructed communal instincts are even directly responsible for the horrors committed by Nazi leaders who were just “taking orders.” He suggests that these people had been so sold on the thought that they were actually doing something good in the name of their people that they were able to enact egregious acts. I find this to be a really fascinating idea, that even our most abhominable moments would have been inconceivable without our most essential trait of bonding and cooperation.

But Bregman’s book isn’t just about explaining why Nazis did what they did. It’s a book about human beings doing what we’ve been made for: surviving together. While the background of World War II is filled with terrorism, he also relates how the blitzkriegs in London strengthened the British. Nazi bombing campaigns actually deepened English camaraderie and their ability to stick together, and even inspired some classically dry British wit. When Nazi bombs busted holes in the sides of their buildings, British shopkeepers put up signs that read, “More Open Than Usual.”

Bregman also tells of the Christmas truce of 1914 during World War I, when soldiers put down their guns when they heard enemy combatants singing Christmas songs. They even went so far as to cheer for one another when they completed songs in their native language, and then they sealed the deal with a good old-fashioned game of soccer right in the middle of no man’s land.

Bregman tells the story of how a handful of boys landed on an island after being shipwrecked in 1965. They were able to survive for more than a year despite the fact that William Golding’s 1951 novel, Lord of the Flies, filled the mind of the ‘60s with its “accurate” portrayal of brutal human nature. He speaks about how the boys were able to democratically work out a system in which they were able to endlessly keep a fire burning to signal ships, how they helped one of their own when he broke his leg, and how the one rule that they made for their time together was simply that they weren’t going to quarrel. When disputes arose, the boys sent the offending parties to opposite sides of the island, they gave them a few hours to cool off, and then when they came back the tribe made the two apologize, make up, and hug it out. They knew that if they were going to survive their involuntary tropical getaway in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they were going to have to survive it together.

Over and over again, Bregman points out that human beings are made for collaboration. We are created for cooperation. If we are going to make it through the madness of this world, then we have to do it as a community. We cannot believe in the survival of the fittest. We have to accept that it’s only going to be survival of the friendliest, and we need to start acting like our lives depend on it—because they do.

As I’ve reflected on this book and on the things during the pandemic that truly make my heart sing, the things that have brought me to life, the things that have brought me peace, and the moments where I have felt the most human, I realize that all of them have one thing in common: coming together with other people. The moments that have been the most stressful, ugly, and painful? All of them have been shaped by isolation, conflict, or the inability to work with others.

When I remember the good parts of 2020, they look like teaching Ava how to ride a bike, reading Harry Potter with my kids, sharing meals with my brother and his wife, meeting with friends to discuss how we can better care for the poor, listening to Robin Pecknold join his voice to thousands of his fans, and reading stories of human kindness that remind me of the intrinsic drive for goodness that all human beings share, and unfortunately continue to live by.

As I’ve said it from the beginning, I believe that God gave us this pandemic as somewhat of a reckoning, because it is truly in calamity where people have the capacity to let their God-given ability for love shine through. It is in these moments where we must call upon St. Silouan’s words and believe with utter conviction that “my brother is my life.”

Despite our division and conflict, we need to remember that our war is not against other people but against the powers of darkness, the principalities and the demons. When Voldemort comes back from the dead, Dumbledore swears to the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, that his only battle is the one against Voldemort, and that if Fudge joins him in this battle against true evil, then they need not worry about being on opposite sides. Dumbledore knows that the fight is not against Fudge: it is against Voldemort. But if Fudge ignores Voldemort’s return, then Dumbledore has no option but to make himself very unpopular in the eyes of the ministry, not because he’s mean, not because he’s anti-Fudge, but because he’s anti-evil—and that’s the only battle that matters.

We need to get our stories straight on the power of being human. We need to have a serious realignment of our values, both as individuals and as communities. I spoke about this in the last episode. We need to draw on the strength of the collaborative nature of our species as we band together around the values and virtues of God’s kingdom, because this is truly what makes the Church a spectacular place, the true and living body of Christ who gave himself for the life of the world. Why would we think that our call would be any different from his? We must defend the orphan, plead for the widow. We need to take Jesus’ words seriously and seek out those who do likewise. It’s time now to find those who share the values of God’s kingdom—justice and righteousness—to band together with those who wish to live in accordance with the principles of the Gospel—to love God and to love others—and to establish ourselves as a community of people who can work together to do some real stuff in the real world, because if we can’t figure out a way to do this together, then we’re going to fail alone.

So let’s get real here. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand and figure out a way to remember that Voldemort is the real enemy here, and that we need one another if we’re going to survive, because he’s stronger than any one of us. If we’re going to win, it’s not going to be survival of the fittest; it’s got to be survival of the friendliest.

So what about you? What have been the highlights of 2020 for you? Do you find that they revolve around any particular theme? Do you find that the moments you were most grateful for this year all involve other people? I wouldn’t be surprised, because it is hard-wired into us to people of connection, to be a people of love. We are, after all, made in the image of the triune God who is love, and we are most ourselves when we act in accordance with this image, as a communal people who share the deep bond of love.

Let’s stop fighting with one another and team up against the forces of darkness, the forces of oppression, and the forces of death that seek to divide us. And if we can’t do that perfectly, then let’s at least try to surround ourselves with people whose values align with ours so that we can make the world a little more good, a little more true, and a lot more beautiful. Forgive me and pray for me.