Essay from Mark Thomas

On Moral Gravity

by Mark Thomas

After the 11 p.m. celebration on 11/11/11 of Emma Leavitt, my granddaughter’s eleventh birthday, which followed hours of playing soccer with my grandsons, I sense a slight, and mysterious pain in the medial portion of my left knee. Still, as I trip into my sixties, the major problems of aging do not yet plague me. Perhaps some of my success in keeping gravity at bay can be attributed to my daily exercise routine coupled with an effort at proper nutrition. I like to think that it’s not only the luck of the gene pool that has kept me on the winning side of the battle with gravity. I track my age out of the corner of my eye.

Still, there is my knee. And. I remember my aunt and uncle on the Young side of the family---both in their late nineties--- stricken, both mentally and physically, with the gravity of age. This collapsing from the pull of age reminds me that unrelenting gravity, both physical and the social, is one of the fundamental principles of the moral and physical universes in which I live. Basic texts on physics tell us that gravity is the natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their mass. Gravity causes objects to fall, dispersed objects to coalesce, and coalesced objects to remain intact. Human life is inconceivable without it.

The human skeleton is built, in part, by gravity and, wisely enough, to counteract gravity. Gravity helps build and maintain the functions of the body. The pull of society is no less universal and essential to the function of the individual human. Yet that which builds, also destroys. Gravity compresses and bends the spine, and the powerful pull of those around us may destroy the very moral sentiment that they seek to encourage. Given the risk of a humped back caused by physical gravity and a timid moral will caused by giving way to the power of excess social pull, the healthy life requires the ability to overcome our various gravities when they work to our detriment.

To be bound by the earth and to our various societies is the grace of a blessed life. However, if we do not exercise the muscles in our physical and moral backbones, we slump, and die, both morally and physically. If we do not exercise the healthy independence of moral autonomy, we abandon the will that is the base of all moral freedom. If morality is not based on individual choice, it necessarily ceases to exist. By combating the moral and physical pulls that pervade all creation, we fully exercise the highest manifestations of our humanity.

Our mothers have taught us to stand straight and throw our shoulders back to maintain good posture. However, we cannot delegate the effort to stand up tall to our mothers or even to our personal trainers. Similarly, the responsibility to make ethical choices hourly over the course of a lifetime cannot be handed to psychologists or politicians or ecclesiastical leaders. Ours alone is the responsibility to exercise the greatest courage of all, the courage to be imperfect, especially against the constant social forces pulling us to the ground. To exercise our daily freedom responsibly against the constant pull of social gravity is the high calling of the moral man and woman. It requires of us the divine second sight of compassion—the sight to see hidden pain and heal it, the outward focus to find the lonely face and smile, the searching the moral compass for the prodigal and reaching with the arms of an embrace, the inner search (not on Mt Sinai) but within our own subconscious for a burning bush, and the strength to clear the high moral hurdles that stand between us and the sunset of each day.

We need not wait for a major crossroads or the spotlight of renown. The day to stand as fully human is today. The moment to see with new eyes is now. The time to lift the head and throw back the shoulders begins as we exit our beds. This moral courage, this defying the selfish gravity of Unthinking and Unseeing and Uncaring is a daily task. Towering moral pyramids are built by placing the pebbles one by one at our own feet as we walk. The height of the pyramid we build will be proportional to the breadth of its base. Gravity dictates that it is so.

With gratitude and grace, let us accept the blessings of physical and societal gravity. But, in the same moment, let us gird up our loins and stand. By this physical and moral token, we remember that our highest humanity is realized by becoming independent of those gravitational powers that create us. As we stand tall with our shoulders back and our head up, we will walk with courage and confident calm through the wilderness of this world.