Pastor Walter Mitty’s alarm went off on May 1 at 6:30 as usual. He sat up, turned off the alarm, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and realized he wasn’t immediately reaching for his bathrobe. It was nice to have the cold weather in the rearview mirror — at least for the next few months
He actually enjoyed how the seasons change, but he was now ready for spring to arrive in full force. As a boy he couldn’t wait for school to let out and summer to begin, but by Labor Day he was looking forward to school again.
It’s a paradox, thought Mitty as he turned on the coffee maker, life is linear and at the same time circular. Life is change but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Before getting dressed, he checked the calendar on his phone and discovered to his delight that he had nothing scheduled for the day, so instead of putting on his “pastor’s uniform” he pulled on his jeans and the sweatshirt Susan and his nephews had given him for Christmas, the one with the submarine and the words “Wisconsin Maritime Museum” on the front.
“I’m going to do today in second gear instead of in overdrive,” the pastor of Poplar Park Community Church decided. “I’m going to let the day unfold on its terms and be open to surprises.”
He poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and through the window watched a robin in the backyard poking for worms. “Consider the birds of the air,” came to his mind. “They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”
“I’m like that robin,” he thought. “God has always provided. Even though I have worked my whole adult life, I have always had a sense of being taken care of.”
But immediately, troubling questions came into his mind. “Why don’t I feel free as a bird so often, and what about those starving, traumatized kids in Gaza? I bet they wish they could be like birds and fly away to green pastures and still waters.”
That’s how Mitty’s mind worked. A few minutes after starting to feel that the glass of his life was half full, he would realize that it was also half empty. And what about those hungry kids in Rafah? Who is taking care of them, and how responsible am I for being a Good Samaritan to them?
Then Mitty’s mind segued to the encampments of university students protesting on behalf of Palestinians and the counter-protests defending Israel’s attempt to eliminate the threat of Hamas by using its military power. Right after Oct. 7, he was completely on Israel’s side, but as the death toll in Gaza mounted, he shifted to sympathizing with the Palestinians.
So far the death toll score was 1,200 Israelis dead and 34,000 Palestinians killed.
Mitty’s tendency to see both sides of every story caused him to internalize the tension in the Holy Land as well as the polarization in this country. He simply could not tolerate simplistic solutions to complicated problems.
He recalled his friend Michael saying that, in his synagogue, everyone was pro-Jewish. But being pro-Jewish, he said, did not mean that everyone was pro-Israel.
The tension in Michael’s temple was matched by the uncertainty in Mitty’s head, and maybe more importantly the ambivalence in his soul.
That’s what happens sometimes when you take your mind off its leash and let it wander. Thoughts appear at random which almost contradict each other.
There were always at least two sides to every story — always an “on the one hand” in tension with an “on the other hand.” He got that perspective partly from journalists like Jim Lehrer.
He also got it from Martin Luther who taught that when two ideas seemed to contradict each other, they might in fact be forming a creative tension. Like a guitar string, the music is not in the tuning peg, nor in the bridge, but in the tension created when the guitar string is pulled tight between the two.
This morning he found himself seeing both sides of the conflict. The guitar string was being pulled tight between the bridge and the tuning peg. “Martin Luther,” Mitty realized, “would call what was happening in his head dialectical thinking, not either/or but somehow both/and.”
It’s not a compromise or finding a happy medium. It’s creating a new “synthesis” that neither side ever thought of. It’s not a win/lose game.
“If you measure the emotional temperature in the protester encampments,” Mitty observed, “and among the counter-protesters, both are acting with feverish, righteous conviction, mirroring the postures of Hamas and Netanyahu. I wonder what Luther would say about that!”
While Mitty moved to the coffee maker to refill his cup, he thought, “I might be driving in second gear, but my mind has already covered a lot of ground.”