A culture that has lost its vision and had its dream die and has relinquished the reins possibility and responsibility is a culture that is slowly degenerating and dying. Whatever powers it once had may persist for a long while, but in time it will wane as the energies and legacy of the past are consumed. The comfort and security of its current members will in some ways only serve to weaken them by failing to demand of them the same energies that caused their predecessors to produce the world that they live in. By taking their position for granted instead of producing it as the result of a vision and an assumption of responsibility, they become less, not more capable, of sustaining and producing it.

When you look for a culture that is growing and living, you must ask yourself, what does it hope for? What hope, what belief in the future, drives it on? What vision and purpose imparts life to it? What land does it hope to arrive in, what country does it seek, and how is it seeking to reach it? You can ask these questions just as easily of invididuals to determine what life there is in them, what direction, what purpose. Where is their intended destination? Do they have one? Or are they merely swimming in midstream? Do they have something drawing them on, defining their direction, giving clarity to their actions and the actions of others, guiding them in their heroic journey?

I am not saying that every life has to meet some extravagant standard. Every person and every culture can have a hero’s journey, and every one has their villains, both internal and external, to be overcome. A life that appears quite ordinary can be, given all the dangers and challenges and the ubiquity and power of chaos both within our lives and in the world around us, a heroic accomplishment.

Few people outside of myself know the names of my next door neighbors growing up, the children of German immigrants who came to a small town in America to build a life as farmers and carpenters. But there is no life so small that it can’t be moral, and therefore heroic. There is no life where chaos and surrender to it, embracing it, and even causing it is not possible, no fully human life that escapes the risk of evil. However few the people may be who know my neighbors’ names, I know that they lived a hard life, a difficult life, a heroic life, a human life; a life of many triumphs and many defeats, some endured, some caused, and a life worth having lived. And I am grateful for all the good they did, particularly to me.

Those lives were small, but it on the foundation of such lives that a society is built. Their parents came to this country pursuing a vision, a hope, a future. That same vision motivated many, many who came to that same place. It motivated my own family, who arrived as poor Dutch settlers. The forces of chaos and villainy (both internal and external) proved a bit strong for my ancestors, so they were lucky to survive.

But I am here today. In part because each person before me took one step in the journey that led us to the future we inhabit today. It was slow and difficult; it could have been lost so easily, it was so fragile. And the vision was often lost and forgotten. And sometimes the winds blow and you cannot hold your footing, and what you hoped for is swept away.

So it is with lives, and so it is with whole cultures. The question is, what makes you lift yourself from the ruins and stand on your feet afterward? What makes you able to get up? What makes you able to take on that burden? What makes you able to face the sun and take those next steps? What keeps your culture going through the dark times that lie before it?