What I Learned in Europe About This Season in America

It is my last night on the Rhine. The river is quiet below our balcony. The castles on the hills have gone dark. Tomorrow we disembark. Tonight I want to write something down before regular life scatters it.

I have spent a lot of my life worrying about things I cannot fix. I think I have always been known for this. Lately I have been anxious about my country. About who leads it. About where it is going. About whether I should even still be part of it. These questions followed me this week across the Atlantic and up the river. They were with me in every ruined fortress and rebuilt cathedral. But somewhere between Cologne and Basel, listening to guides tell the long story of Europe, something shifted. I am going to try to say what.

I should warn you: I am probably the wrong person to be drawing big lessons from a river cruise. I have made a career of being confidently wrong about things. Ask my wife. But here goes anyway.

The First Thing

Powerful people have almost never been good stewards of anyone’s happiness even their own. This is not a new problem. America is not a special case. Every cathedral we passed on this trip was built under someone corrupt. Every border was drawn in someone’s blood. The saints were often violent men. The villains sometimes built the hospitals.

I keep getting this wrong. I keep expecting history to be a story of progress betrayed. As if there was some golden age that the current villains are destroying. But that is not what history is. History is a long human story in which ordinary people, quietly, build lives worth living on top of whatever the powerful are doing that century. They fall in love. They raise children. They make jokes at dinner. They bury their dead with tenderness. They do this under emperors and democracies. Under good kings and mad ones. Under plagues and persecutions and brief seasons of decency.

I am one of those ordinary people. So are you I expect. That is enough, at least for me.

I do not mean this as giving up. I mean it as seeing clearly. The pressure I have been putting on myself to solve problems far beyond my reach. To feel personally responsible for the direction of an entire nation. To lose sleep over decisions made by people who do not know my name. That pressure is a kind of arrogance. A small one, but real. It assumes I am more central to the story than I am.

The truth is simpler. And more freeing. I am a minor character. We all are. And minor characters can live beautifully.

The Second Thing

Jesus said render unto Caesar. I think he meant it as a shrug, not a salute.

The coin has his face on it. Give it back to him. The things that actually matter were never his to take.

I have tortured myself about where I live. About whether paying taxes to a government I distrust makes me complicit. About whether I should leave, or stay and fight, or stay and disengage. About whether my presence in one country versus another is a moral statement I need to get right.

But standing in the shadow of those castles, hearing the stories of the Thirty Years’ War, the plagues, the centuries of pogroms long before the Holocaust, something reframed. A Norwegian farmer in 1700 did not get to choose the king of Denmark. He got to choose how he treated his neighbors. How he raised his children. Whether he told the truth. Whether he was kind. His peace could not depend on the king. If it had, he would have had no peace at all.

My peace cannot depend on who is president. I am a citizen of the common man. I will live where my life is. I will not let the powerful collect my joy along with my money.

This does not mean I stop caring. It does not mean I stop voting or speaking or trying to be useful. It means I stop letting the outcome of those efforts determine my inner state. Caesar can have the coin. He cannot have my attention, my presence, my capacity to love the people in front of me. Those were never his.

The Third Thing

This one is harder to say. It is the deepest. And I am probably the least qualified person to say it, so take what follows as one guy trying to make sense of what he felt.

I believe there is something real underneath all of this. Something the mystics and prophets of every tradition have been pointing at, in their different languages, for as long as there have been humans. I do not think it is a man in the sky. I do not think it belongs to any one religion. I think the religions are human attempts to hold it. And fear and power have warped most of those attempts. But the thing itself is real. It is good. And now and then a human being gets close enough to it to come back changed.

I have felt it. Not often. Not reliably. But enough to know it is not nothing.

The Sufis call it the Beloved. The Christian mystics called it the Ground of Being. The Buddhists point at it sideways, because they know that naming it too directly turns it into an idol. My father, Pastor Jim, would have called it the Holy Spirit. I think he was right. Though not in the way most churches mean it. He meant something alive. Something that moves through people when they are open to it. Something that cannot be owned or weaponized or sold.

I do not have the theology sorted out. I probably never will. But I want to live in a way that stays open to it. I want to keep my eyes soft enough to notice when it shows up. I want to stop mistaking the container for the water.

A Word About Weaponization

I want to say one more thing about this. Because I do not think most people understand how deep the problem goes.

The weaponization is not accidental. It is not something that happens to a religion from the outside, leaving the core untouched. When fear and power get hold of a tradition, they do not just use it. They remake it. Slowly. Over generations. Until the new shape is mistaken for the original. Until the people inside cannot tell the difference anymore.

The Christianity that crusaded was not the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount. The Christianity that blessed the slave ships was not the Christianity of the early martyrs. The Christianity that burned Anabaptists in the Rhineland for refusing to swear oaths was not the Christianity of the Jesus who said let your yes be yes. And the Christianity wrapping itself in the American flag right now, threatening its enemies and demanding political power and calling that faith, is not the Christianity of the man who said blessed are the peacemakers.

I am not saying religion is bad. I am saying that what is loudest and most powerful in any tradition is almost never what is truest in it. The truest parts are usually quieter. Often persecuted. Sometimes by their own institutions. The Anabaptists were drowned. Eckhart was tried for heresy. Tolstoy was excommunicated. Jesus himself was killed by the religious authorities of his own people, with the help of an empire that found him politically inconvenient.

That pattern is not in the past. It is happening now, in my country. You and I both know who I mean. The thing calling itself Christian in the loudest American voices today is not the thing Pastor Jim preached. It is not the thing I felt when I have felt anything real. It is something older and uglier wearing a borrowed name. I do not have to take it seriously as faith. I only have to recognize what it actually is.

What This Means, Practically

When I feel the anxiety rising, about politics, about decline, about whether I am living in the right country or paying the right taxes or fighting the right fights, I want to remember that I have already chosen my position.

I am not going to be saved or ruined by Caesar.

I am going to live well. I am going to love you. I am going to be useful to the people in front of me. And I am going to keep my eyes open for the larger thing that all of this sits inside.

The arguments shrink when I rise above them. The answers are clearer from up there. Not because the problems disappear. But because from that height I can see that the problems are smaller than the life that contains them.

I am not running away from the world. I am refusing to let it steal what was never its to take.

A Young Culture Meeting Its First Oligarchs

I have been thinking this week about how little history I actually knew before I came here. I grew up on a version of the past that was mostly American. And mostly flattering. World War Two was the centerpiece. The war where we arrived late and ended up the heroes. I have used it, without realizing it, as the lens through which I looked at every other conflict, every other country, every other moment of human trouble.

I overheard a lot of conversations on the ship that sounded like the inside of my own head a few years ago. I am not above any of it. I am just a little further down the road than I used to be. And I want to keep going.

What I have been reminded of this week is that there were a thousand years of European catastrophe before America showed up to liberate anyone. The Thirty Years’ War killed a third of central Europe. The plagues emptied entire cities. The pogroms against the Jews happened in waves for centuries. In the Rhineland. In Spain. In Ukraine. In town after town whose names I never learned in school. Long before anyone built a camp at Auschwitz. The genocide did not begin in 1942. It had been rehearsed, generation after generation, by people who called themselves Christians and ruled in the name of God.

The more of that I take in, the less shocked I am at where we are. I start to recognize the patterns. I start to understand that what is happening in my country now is not a betrayal of some unique American innocence. It is the old human pattern, in a new costume, on a younger stage. The shock was a function of my education, not of the events.

The bad news is we are nothing special. The good news is we are nothing special. If we are not the exception, then we are also not uniquely doomed. The same ordinary people who built lives under the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons and the Tsars and the Kaisers will go on building lives here. The river keeps moving. It has seen worse. It has seen better. It does not stop for either.

I left this trip still angry about where we are. I do not want to pretend otherwise. The drift toward autocracy. The hollowing out of institutions. The shamelessness of people who should know better. It is real, and it is serious.

But it is not historically unusual. And part of why it felt so apocalyptic to me, I think, is that I was working with too small a frame. I was reading the present moment against an American century or two, when I should have been reading it against the longer human story it actually belongs to.

We are a young and naive culture. I have been a young and naive student of it. We thought we had figured something out that older civilizations had not. We thought our founding documents were magic spells that would protect us from the old human patterns. We are learning, the hard way, that they are not. They are just words on paper. And words on paper only matter if people are willing to defend them.

Europe learned this centuries ago. They learned it in blood, over and over, until the lesson finally stuck. And even then, only partially. Only for a while. I am just getting started.

Those of us with the privilege of relative peace owe it some gratitude. And some vigilance. But vigilance is not the same as despair. Vigilance is watchfulness. Despair is a collapse into powerlessness. I have done too much of the second and not enough of the first. This trip has been part of the correction.

What I Want to Remember

The river is still moving below us. It has been moving for longer than any of the castles have stood. Longer than any of the borders have held. Longer than any of the kings have ruled. It will keep moving after all of this is forgotten.

I want to remember that I am more like the river than like the castle. I am not a fixed position to be defended. I am something that flows. Something that finds its way around obstacles. Something that keeps going.

I want to remember that the ordinary people have always been the real story. Not the kings. Not the bishops. Not the generals. The people who loved each other and raised children and told jokes at dinner and buried their dead with tenderness. That is the human inheritance. That is what I am part of.

I want to remember that my peace is my own. No one can take it unless I hand it over.

I want to remember that there is something real underneath all of this. Something that does not depend on me getting the theology right. Something that shows up when I am quiet enough to notice.

That is what I believe. That is how I want to live the rest of my life.

Tomorrow we move on. Tonight I am grateful for the river, and the castles, and the long human story that somehow, against all odds, has carried us this far.