Fractured

In doing research for my doctoral dissertation (Character Education and the Development of Moral and Spiritual Values … Brigham Young University… [1984]) I read a 1978 address given at Harvard University by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn titled “A World Split Apart.” His address, and a book he wrote a few years before, “The Gulag Archipelago,” had a profound influence upon me. Now, thirty-three years later we are still a world split apart, we are still imprisoned—only in different ways. We are not split apart by communist or fascist totalitarianism, but we are split apart by other ideologies, by political loyalties, by religious beliefs, by unkept marriage vows and forgotten family hopes. We are imprisoned by selfishness.

When we have a broken limb we splint it, we cast it and protect it, we rest it; we don’t just automatically cut it off. Most of the time it will heal just fine. In the meantime, we do things for the person who is doing the work of trying to heal. We serve them, and when we do we come to love the object of our service.

In seeking for freedom, for expression of individual pleasures, for wealth, for ‘entitlements,’ we have lost our sense of unity, of ties that hold us together as ‘one nation, [or family] under God,’ indeed we have lost our connectedness as a human family. In fighting for our ‘position,’ or our distorted ‘identity’ we lose sight of the larger picture and our place in it.

We need to seek things that encourage our cohesiveness as families and as a nation and as a world community of people who have the same fears and aspirations, the same needs and hopes as we have. We are more similar than we are different. We all bleed when cut. We all can rest when the noise ceases and the cold is kept out, when we are fed, and we have some place to lay our head.

One thing that holds us together is our history—family history and national history. We need to learn it better. We cannot expect an individual or a family or a nation which has lost its memory to keep its vision. There may be rough brush strokes in what we paint of our families, there may be blemishes in our national history, but we are much more than the flaws—we are more good than bad. We must remember the good things and emphasize these things and hold out hope. And we must do this for others.

Things can get better; fractures can mend. Remember, “Faith, hope, [and] charity [all are needed]…but the greatest of these is charity.”