Style Blog
After a bit of a walk on the Katy trail I was descending stairs to the street, stepping deliberately, taking care as a person of a certain age does. A much younger person with grace and lightness passed me to my left. She was in shorts and T-shirt, and I heard her say as she danced on ahead, “I like your style.”
My style? I was over-dressed for the weather. I had on old green chinos, a long-sleeve striped shirt with a button collar, and a black wool cap with broken brim. It was a random assortment of clothes that were, like their wearer, of a certain age. To my mind, style is something you deliberately take on, that you go through some trouble acquiring—not clothes from various past decades that just happened to have been clean enough to wear. Which is to say, I do not think of myself as having a style.
Yet a strange feeling was left with me, a nice feeling, a touch of friendliness. Someone thought it worth reaching out to me with a complimentary word, reaching across lines of age and health and so on. And with that some other thoughts arose.
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We humans are made for communication, and one purpose of talking is for us to receive ourselves from one another. In his work Persons, the Christian philosopher Robert Spaemann points out some ways this happens. You wake up after hours of sleep. You were unconscious in those hours of course, you don’t know what has happened. But the newspaper (now more likely some “media” on your phone) informs you of recent goings-on in the world and your local community.
Scale it up: a person who comes out of a coma is ignorant of what happened to her during the period of unconsciousness. Her friends will tell her: “You had a blood vessel that burst; they did such-and-such medical procedures; your neighbors and church-friends have been to visit you; we’ve been praying for you.” The post-coma person has a hole in her life, impossible for her to fill herself; what other people do is to create memories for her of what she missed. They connect the life she remembers (pre-coma) with the life she now has (post-coma). They give herself to her, that bit of her own life-story that is her story even though she was unconscious of it.
There are other ways that we can be ignorant of who we are, and for them too we need other people to help us understand ourselves. I think particularly of correction that I have received from friends, when friends show me something about my behavior that ought to be different than it is, something that, without my friends, I had not seen. Or it can be the opposite, when there is something good that I am doing that I don’t see until it is pointed out. In many different ways, other people can give ourselves to us.
All of which is to say, I started thinking (with a grin), maybe I do have a style!
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That passerby with her random and brief comment shows that it doesn’t take much work to be friendly with someone. Friendliness is easy and possible just about any hour of the day. Yet the small courtesies of life, like grace notes in music, can make a huge difference. I suspect every one of us could be more vocally friendly than we are. And I think that for Lent, in this volatile year of our Lord 2025, the world could do with more friendliness. Shall we try it?
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Out & About: This Saturday, March 8, I am to offer meditations as part of the quiet morning program at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. (Janet Lumpkin will give talks about the stained glass windows.) The doors open at 8:30 a.m., with the program running from 9 a.m. to noon.
Wednesday, March 12, I am speaking at St. Paul’s in Prosper, Texas, at 6 p.m. The program, which begins with soup, is called “Soup and Suffering.” Guess which yours truly is providing! My topic: “Why Job is the best book of the Bible.”
The Good Books & Good Talk seminar will next meet on Sunday, March 23, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. We’ll be discussing Parts of a World by A. G. Mojtabai. Considered by some her best novel, this is about a social worker who seeks to disabuse a homeless man of his delusions.
A sad day is coming. Just as on Ash Wednesday we have to bury the Alleluia, so this Sunday we must bury Standard Time. But unlike the Alleluia, Standard Time will stay buried until the week of All Saints’. Alleluia gets buried for about six weeks, but Standard Time is gone for 34: one more of the oddities of being alive in America in 2025!