Spiritual Common Sense

The girl looked like nothing so much as what she was – an awkward adolescent, with pale hair and a plump body trying to make the painful transition into adulthood. She looked nothing like what she had been – a prostitute working the streets of LA.

This was no Pretty Woman fantasy of happily ever after for the hooker with a heart of gold. This was the cold hard reality of a young girl forced to live on the streets because the streets were safer than home, the kindness of strangers more constant and reliable than the concern of her own kin.

In testimony to the depth of the scars left by her childhood, the first place she worked was the small town where she was raised and her father served as sheriff.

“Didn’t it occur to you that he was bound to find out?” I said.  “Didn’t it occur to you that maybe that is why I did it?” she said.

The girl was one of a dozen I met at Children of the Night and one of thousands Lois Lee, the program’s founder, has rescued from the streets. In the process, my perception of prostitution was forever changed. Until that time, I always looked down or looked away. Thanks to Lois, I came to understand the distance between us and them is not as far as it might seem.

In our own way, many of us spend our whole life prostituting ourselves. We live with the illusion that we can buy love with good behavior, good grades, success, money, or material things. Often, we become what our parents want us to be, do what our children want us to do, behave the way our friends want us to behave in the hope that they will love us or love us more.

We are responding to the subtle message of conditional love communicated to us at an early age. It comes disguised as “if”. I will love you if you give me what I want, if you do what I tell you to do, if you look the way I want you to look, if you marry well, if you graduate from college, if you become a doctor or whatever.

The “ifs” populate the psychiatrists’ offices, distort our self-image, and fill us with insecurity and doubt. In accumulation, the “ifs” can kill you. But in our hearts, we know love can neither be bought nor sold. To be real, love must be unconditional. Love is a gift of a willing heart or it is nothing at all.

Brianne Schwantes was born with thirteen broken bones. All the major bones in her arms and legs were broken, along with a number of her ribs.

The doctors told Brianne’s parents she would only live a few hours. The hospital priest was called in to give her the last rites and her parents cried.

But Brianne wouldn’t give up. Somehow, she made it through the night.

The next day she was diagnosed with a rare bone disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta. The doctors now said they didn’t know how long she would live, but they were certain her bones were so brittle they would never bear weight. The doctors told Brianne’s parents she could never have a normal life and live independently. They said that the best thing to do was to put her in an institution and forget about her.

But they didn’t know Brianne. They saw the size of her body but they could not see the size of her heart. Nor could they see the strength of her spirit.

Fortunately, her parents did. They decided that if she wouldn’t give up they wouldn’t give up either. They took her home on a feather pillow, popsicle sticks taped to her limbs as makeshift splints, and went looking for alternatives.

They found a group of physicians who were just starting a research protocol for children with this disease and enrolled her in this program. Brianne was so fragile she could break a bone by sneezing, but they encouraged her to learn to walk and challenged her to grow.

Since then, Brianne has had face surgery, leg surgery, and back surgery. She spent her sixteenth birthday in the emergency room with a neck brace, and has had, in her words, more broken bones than Evil Knievel. But each time, she wouldn’t quit. And each time, her fragile body has gotten stronger.

“It’s hard to stop listening when people tell you to quit,” she says. “It’s hard to ignore the world when it seems no one thinks you can succeed; but it gets easier. The first time you believe in yourself enough to accomplish the impossible an inner strength is created that lasts a lifetime.”

To be blessed, like Brianne, we must be willing to step out into the unknown with only faith to face fear. Risk must be taken. If we do not extend ourselves, we simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, or live.

Brianne surpassed all expectations for her future on the second day of her life. In the years since, she has single-handly rewritten the protocols for treatment of her disease. She graduated graduated from American University and is currently in graduate school at Marquette. She lives independently and walks without assistance. She still breaks an occasional bone with the frequency the rest of us get the flu, but nothing can break her spirit.

On this day, 176 years ago, Richard Lawrence tried to kill President Andrew Jackson.  It is the first known attempt to assassinate an American President.

Lawrence was unemployed and mentally ill.  He had succumbed to the delusion that he was King Richard III of England and believed the American government owed him a large sum of money.  He held President Andrew Jackson personally responsible and decided to kill Jackson in anger and frustration.

Jackson was attending the funeral of South Carolina congressman Warren
R. Davis when Lawrence made his attempt.  He found a space near a pillar where Jackson would have to pass when he left the funeral, stepped out and fired at Jackson’s back.  When his first pistol misfired, Lawrence leveled the second, but by this time he had drawn the attention of the crowd.  He was tackled and wrestled to the ground by Congressman Davy Crockett before others – including Jackson himself, who struck Lawrence several times with his cane – assisted in subduing the deluded assassin.

Lawrence was brought to trial on April 11, 1835.  The prosecuting attorney was Francis Scott Key.  After only five minutes of deliberation, the jury found Lawrence not guilty by reason of insanity.  The first would be Presidential assassin like the last, John Hinckley, Jr., was committed to Government Hospital for the Insane (later renamed St. Elizabeths Hospital) where he remained until his death in 1861.

Considering the bitter acrimony between Congress and the last few
Presidents, I can’t help wondering how this story would have played out in our time.

Bob is still on my mind.  He is not well.  He has not been well for some time. And he seems to be getting increasingly unwell – one thing compounding another.

A profound interest in everything, empathy so profound it embraced the world, an enormous intellect, and the ability to focus with equal intensity on macro and micro issues characterized his life.   Now, nothing seems to interest him for very long. You can’t help feeling the man who once said anything worth doing is worth doing to excess has finally had enough.

In Areopagitica, John Milton wrote, “It was from the rind of one apple tasted that knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leaped forth into the world.  And perhaps this is that doom that Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil…He that can consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true ‘warfaring’ Christian.  I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and ‘unbreathed’, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race…that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”

A warfaring Christian – that is the phrase that leaps to mind when I think about Bob Macauley. His life reminds me the knowledge of good and evil is both a burden and a blessing. Only by bearing witness to Evil can we truly know what is Good.

Bob has made a conscious choice in his life to direct his considerable energies and bend even his less-godly impulses into a godly manner. He is a renegade and a street fighter. He doesn’t mind cajoling, manipulating, begging, doing whatever it takes to get something done. He has made a conscious effort to surround himself with and reach out to godly people, to seek them out, to seek ways to be used, and to use his gifts, talents, and resources in a way that helps make things better for others.

A born entrepreneur and fearless philanthropist, Bob has operated with a sense of urgency rare to the world.  In the process, he has become a man who was the measure of men.