No Man Is an Island - Frederick Beuchner

Abandoned house we spotted (and loved) in Harper's Ferry, WV.

"No Man is an Island," Dr. Donne wrote, intire of it self; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannoir of they friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefor never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

Or to use another metaphor, humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling. Sometime during the extraordinary week that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, the newspapers carried the story that when that crusty old warhorse, Andrei Gromyko, signed the memorial volume at the United States embassy in Moscow, there were tears in his eyes; and I do not think that you have to be either naive or sentimental to believe that they were real tears. Surely it was not that the Soviet Foreign Minister had any love for the young American President, but that he recognized that in some sense every man was diminished by that man's death. In some sense I believe that the death of Kennedy was a kind of death for his enemies no less than for his countrymen. Just as John Donne believed that any man's death, when we are confronted by it, reminds us of our common destiny as human beings: to be born, to live, to struggle a while, and finally to die. We are all of us in it together.

Nor does it need anything as cataclysmic as the death of a President to remind us of this. As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place we search for that unfound thing too, even though we do not know its name or where it is to be found or even if it is to be found at all.

--Frederick Buechner

Comments

[Kristen]

I think that the surging waves that have been going through that web lately are at the base of my constant underlying anxiety. I think, if I did not listen to the news, that thing that takes one end of the web and snaps it like a clean sheet in an afternoon breeze = that my own heart would not feel so subtly and constantly shaken.

I read Donne a million years ago.

I was in seventh grade when the announcement came over the speakers that someone had shot the president, and that he was dead. I remember the moment. And I remember the emotion - so quick, so devastating. Not because I loved the man, but because I loved the office, the solid background of peace and country and the deep illusion of security in life. I didn't know some one, some single one, could come along and shake the solid basis of life that way. But then, I was born after the second world war.

We could turn all this around. And every night, I pray for blessings on every person who has ever had mercy on me. Perhaps we have forgotten mercy, because every human being, in every condition, has to power to wield it.