Last night Margaret and I went to hear the San Diego Symphony play Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Schubert’s  Symphony in B Minor, and the Strauss Don Quixote (Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character), Opus 35.  While I waited at Intermission and Margaret talked with a friend, I wondered why I found being at Symphony Hall watching and listening to these magnificent pieces of music more enjoyable than listening to good recordings in the comfort of my home.  I decided that at Symphony Hall watching and listening at the same time I was more deeply engaged with the music.  I was brought into the heart of the music.  As I watched cellist Johannes Moser and Violist Chi-Yuan Chen play with the whole orchestra, I was drawn into their performances and into the music they played.  I connected with the music when I saw Moser and Chen connected with it.  

This afternoon, I read the 13th chapter of Mark Labberton’s The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, and I found the language I needed to think about why I easily avoid becoming involved in expanding my “neighborhood” to include people who don’t fit my cultural and educational background, my gender and race, my class and position in community. I listen to information about “need” in the larger community with the same kind of involvement that I have with music when I listen to good recordings of good music. I intellectually understand the need of at the homeless man or woman or child in Balboa Park or Downtown San Diego, but I don’t get it at a level that makes me want to do something that will actually change his or her condition.  Of course, I write checks, or I listen to Margaret tell me about writing checks to support needy causes in the community, but I don’t have to smell or touch or even really see them.  I give a Macdonald’s card to a homeless person with a sign asking for help, but I don’t have to follow the person in the search his or her search for my cultural and educational background, my comfortable gender and racial situation, or the comfort of my class and position in my community.  I can ride along without being deeply involved with the suffering of others.  I don’t honestly know what to do about the suffering of other people who are outside my cultural class.

Today the mail brought this month’s Atlantic Monthly magazine.  The cover piece of writing inside this month’s Atlantic is “The Mind of Donald Trump” A psychologist’s guide to an extraordinary personality.  My first response to the article, which I haven’t read yet, is fear.  I’m afraid I might learn something about Trump that will make me begin to understand and to like him.  A big part of my response is that the Atlantic wouldn’t print a piece that would paint Trump in a positive light… but what if?  In any case, I will read the piece, maybe even today after I have sent away this piece of BLOG writing.