Spiritual Common Sense

When I was thirteen, my Father told me he was dying.  He had been to the doctor for the annual physical required by his company, expecting nothing and feeling fine only to told he had black lung.  There was nothing that could be done.  His days were numbered.

I remember it vividly even now, the pain I felt as the entire landscape of my father’s life suddenly came into view:  a man raised outdoors with a love of nature forced underground, into the mines, and away from the light by the depression, the demands of feeding a family postponing then eliminating any hope he had of getting an education, the ironic tragedy of a disease commonly associated with smoking striking a man who had never had a single cigarette.

This was the defining moment of my life.  At the moment, my Father’s hopes and dreams became mine.  He said he was told he might have five years to live.  “I’m telling you this not because I want to scare you;” he said, “but because you know how important education is to me.  It looks like I’m not going to be here to help you.  I want you to promise me that somehow you will find a way to do what I couldn’t do and go to college.”

There was no choice, of course, and so I made that solemn commitment with fear and trepidation, not knowing how I would be able to do what no one in my family had ever done before.  Through the grace of God, with the help of a scholarship and a lot of part-time jobs, I was able to keep that commitment.   With my success came many benefits, but none greater than the knowledge that nothing I would be asked to do would likely be as difficult as what I had already done.

Human nature is such that we become fuller and more ourselves every time we do the thing we think we cannot do.  We gain courage with every fear we face, strength with every challenge we conquer, and confidence with every obstacle we overcome.  We learn more from losing than winning, grow more through adversity than good fortune.

Our appreciation for our health, so easily taken for granted, is enhanced by illness and recovery.  Our understanding of the value of life is shaped by our awareness of death.  Suffering enhances our ability to feel joy, while grief and loss to build our capacity for empathy and compassion.  There is a promise in every pain.

If you want to find hope in Anacostia, you have to bring it with you.  Anacostia is just across the river yet worlds away from the rest of Washington, DC.  For the most part, Washington is a place where people come to pursue their dreams.  Anacostia is a place where dreams die early.

Poverty is bone–deep in Anacostia.  Most of the students in the public schools there are at risk.  More than three fourths of these students read below basic proficiency levels and are considered functionally illiterate.

Along with our friends and colleagues at The Heart of America, we have visited schools in Anacostia on a regular basis since 1997.  One of the schools we have visited annually is Moten Elementary School.

In 2002, when we learned that many of the students at Moten would go without at Christmas, my wife and I felt compelled to go shopping.  We went to a mall near where we live, found a toy store that would give us a discount, and filled garbage bags with over five hundred toys.  We wanted to make sure every student at Moten would have at least one present to mark the holiday.

We repeated this exercise the following year, inviting others to join in.  The third year, with a better understanding of what the school’s needs were, we decided that instead of buying the kids toys for Christmas we would bring them books.

When we arrived at Moten that year, we found the principal had asked some of her best students to help us unload.  One of these kids was an eager young man named Darius whose eyes lit up when he saw what we brought.  His response was so engaging, we felt compelled to ask him to pick a book we could read together.

To our surprise, the book he picked was one we brought for the kids in pre–school.  It was painful to watch this obviously bright fifth-grader stumble through a book my wife and I had read to our son when he was three years old.

As every parent knows, once you have a child of your own you can never look at a child in need the same way again.  I felt my heart in my throat and watched tears of compassion well up in my wife’s eyes as Darius read.

In the background, we could hear faculty members rehearsing the song “The Eye on the Sparrow” in preparation for the school assembly that would soon follow and the presentation of books.  Their voices blended together, rising above and mixing with the lone voice of this lone child.

In that moment, I felt a father’s despair for a child who may be left behind, a child who may be lost before he has really had a chance to begin.  At the same time, my spirits were lifted by the hope provided by the voices in harmony and the knowledge that such beauty can be created whenever people come together for some good purpose.

Compassion means to “suffer with.”  When you touch someone’s pain from a distance and in fear it becomes pity.  Compassion comes when you share someone’s suffering and touch their pain with love.  When you do not run away from pain but walk toward it with compassion, you bring healing and strength.

Compassion is man’s highest attribute.  Most of even our best instincts have a base side.  Love, hope, faith, courage, loyalty can all be corrupted by ego, selfishness, and human frailty and transformed into doubt, fear, and hate.  True compassion stands alone, unyielding.

Compassion connects our lives by a thousand sympathetic threads.  We all need to exercise our compassion and find support in the compassion of others.  At its essence compassion rests is the difference between saying, ‘I am my brother’s keeper’ and ‘I am my brother.’

In Darius’ case, it was the inspiration for a national program that has since distributed 3.7 million books to children in need across the country.

There is a lesson mankind has long been taught but yet to fully learn.  From generation to generation, from Moses to Mohammed, Jesus to Buddha, Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa, Mandela and the rest, we are reminded:

We are here to love one another.

Love is a verb.  It is not a passive state, but an active force.

Love is the one thing you cannot get enough of and the one thing you can never give enough of.

 We receive love not in proportion to our power, possessions, or position in life, nor in correlation to our needs and desires, but only in proportion to our own capacity to love. 

The only way to have love is to give it.

No matter what the problem is the answer will always be found when we surround it with love.

Thus it is that in loving and giving we find the meaning and purpose for our lives.

All we really need is love.

For many of us this is the best time of the year.  For me it’s particularly meaningful when I consider how quickly the season of thanks preceeds the season of giving.

If the 4^th of July is Independence Day, Thanksgiving could just as easily be called Dependence Day.  It is the time set aside to formally recognize something we should acknowledge with every breath we breath – All of life and everything in life is a gift.

The essence of life is a chain of love.  Love binds all things together with interdependence.  Plants and animals trade atoms and air – oxygen for carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide for oxygen.  The water that falls on the earth passes through and is collected in the rivers, lakes, and oceans until it rises to fall again.  The earth too must give so that it can receive.

This interdependence is what gives meaning and purpose to our lives.  Much has been said on this subject but no one has said it better than Henry Emerson Fosdick.

“The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water,” Fosdick observed.  “It flows down clear and cool from the heights of Hermon and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon.  The Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it for the Sea of Galilee has an outlet; it gets to give…but the Dead Sea with the same water makes only horror, for the Dead Sea has no outlet; it must keep its bounty.”

On November 19, one hundred and fifty years ago Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.  It is one the most remarkable, if not the most remarkable, speeches in American history.

A local newspaper focusing on the length of the speech, said Lincoln “could hardly have said less.”  In truth, one would be hard pressed to say more.

There are only 27I words in the Gettysburg Address, but every word matters.  It is dense – more poetry than prose.  It is at once a reaffirmation of the past and a prayer for the future – a prayer uniquely appropriate for his time and equally valid in ours.

With his first sentence, Lincoln restates the founding principles of the United States, reminding us America is the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose.  In his words, America was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

In saying this, Lincoln echoes Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence.  “All men are created equal and independent,” Jefferson wrote and “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The printer and publisher Benjamin Franklin perfected Jefferson’s prose and gave the Continental Congress the language familiar to us today:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

It can be argued that no other concept has had such a profound impact on American society.  No single phrase is closer to the heart of America, more institutionalized and broadly accepted in principle; yet, none of our founding principles has been the source of more controversy or more frequently challenged in application.

The Civil War was the first and most significant test of our commitment to equality.  Lincoln’s remarks reflected that fact.  He spoke at 3:00 pm on a dreary afternoon four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg.  In the dusk, Lincoln looked so pale some said he was ill.  He was sad and somber.

No wonder.  In three days, more than 45,000 men had died or were wounded at Gettysburg.  Tens of thousands had preceded them.  Lincoln knew many more would follow before the war was over.  And the fate of the union still hung in the balance.

“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, acknowledging these facts, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced… that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Many wars have followed.  Many more have perished in the name of liberty.  Many battles have been fought to fulfill in the promise of equality.  The challenge to form, in Lincoln’s words, “a more perfect union” continues and is unending.

It is a mistake to assume we can ever achieve perfection.  But it is an even greater mistake to cease trying.  America is always a work in progress.  America is becoming.  America is a promise.  America is an ideal to cherish and a dream to pursue.