A Momma's Boy's Meditation on Mothers' Day....

It's Mothers' Day, that annual celebration of all things maternal and, for many, that one day of the year in which we try to live up to being (and/or make up for not being) the son or daughter that we can and should be.  And yet, we are comforted by the reality that, for most of us, our moms - some of whom gave us life and others of whom helped to 'raise us right' - will still be (forgiving and) proud.

Mothers' Day is always a bit of a challenge for me now, especially since my own mother passed on almost two decades ago.  Mainly it's faintly painful because of the regret that it brings back to my consciousness: I regret that my mother did not live to see me enter adulthood fully and, most importantly, to meet her three diversely-gifted, crazy and wonderful (now teenage) grandchildren.  So, knowing, loving and honoring her in remembrance as I do, I am left to smile as I am sure that she would at observing what her love and my attempts to live up to it have wrought: we are an unusual bunch, to be sure, but I am sure that she would revel in her family, a reflection of her love that will echo eternally through and beyond us....

And I am also reminded of regret in another way: on this day in particular, I am anguished by my numerous failures to be the son that I could and should have been while my mother was alive.  Other days of the year, I remember the delight that I often engendered in her and the love that both protected me from the world and inspired me to seek to make my way in it that I received from her.  (To this day, I'm convinced that the truism is indeed true: there's nothing as unconditional as a mother's love.)  And I continue to be grateful for her love as it lives on in and through me long after she left me/us/this world physically (and too soon, to be sure).  But on Mothers' Day - which, in a personal sense, is Mother's Day - I am more reminded for some reason(s) of those times that I disappointed her.

Like the only time that I remember her ever reprimanding me physically, when, as a somewhat cynical teenager, I suggested to her that her much beloved pastor was a "hell raiser" because of my disdain for his fire and brimstone oratorical style.  No, the slap wasn't very painful, but the shock was.  To this day, I remember the horror of feeling so disappointed in myself that I would be so unkind to my mother that she was moved to reproach me so viscerally.  (I also remember the look of horror in her eyes that bespoke of the regret for her appropriate but reactive action.)  Though I believe that we should carry few regrets in life - after all, who of us can change the past? - I do wish I could get a 'do-over' for this unfortunate mistake.

Or the time about a decade later that I didn't call her for Mothers' Day until late that night.  I had been helping a friend move into a new home and - in the era before ubiquitous cell phones - had made the decision to wait until I returned home to call her.  (To make a long story short, I knew that the delivery of her gift had been delayed but didn't realize that  my friend's move would prove to be much more involved, take much longer than expected and, nor that, since my friend didn't yet have phone service, I wouldn't have the opportunity to call during what turned out to be the day-long endeavor.)  When I did reach out to her - at approximately ten o'clock at night, a time that was normally at or just past her bedtime - she was hurt and disappointed and let me know it.  She wasn't harsh, just candidly honest, bluntness that I had probably never experienced as fully with her until then ... and I'm still ashamed almost three decades later that I hadn't prioritized her better.  The only good news to come from this was that I learned my lesson after this sole mistake: never again did I fail to get her gift to her in a timely fashion nor did I miss another morning opportunity to help her start her special day feeling as treasured as she was then (and is now).

Thankfully I have a few positive Mothers' Day experiences to salve the continuing psychic wounds of my missteps:

Like the time when - sometime in the period between ages 6 and 8 - my father gave me a little money and told me to get my mother a gift for Mothers' Day.  I was really proud of what I picked out - some sort of cosmetic thing - a case, perhaps? - as I remember it - and the thing that makes me chuckle now is the irony inherent in the situation: if my memory is correct - and I admit that it may not be, this having been more than four decades ago now - I think that it was my mother who took me to J.L. Hudson's department store to buy her gift.  (Every day, as I am reminded of this and so many other examples, I thank God that my mother invested so much time and energy in developing me in my youth, especially teaching me what being a gentleman truly means as well as how to rise above my father's example of a rather casual approach to such recognition, et. al., opportunities.)

Or the time that I drove home to surprise her for Mothers' Day.  She really appreciated this as it was during my freshman year of college and it was to have been our first Mothers' Day apart.  I couldn't get many things by my mom, but this was one mutually delightful and successful example.

So, as I reflect on these memories and moments, the reality that I miss my mother's loving presence makes itself known more painfully than I'd like to admit.  Almost twenty years later, I still miss my mother, her warm and welcoming presence and her inspirationally unconditional love.

So I cloak and salve this ache by focusing my own children on honoring their mother today (a situation that is a tad more complicated now that we are divorced).  And I focus on passing on that legacy that I learned so many years ago from their paternal grandmother: that though I think of her and try to make her proud every day, on at least two days a year - her birthday and Mothers' Day - I want to be sure that through whatever gestures and representations of love, she knows just how much she has meant, means and will mean to me throughout my life.  I have endeavored to achieve this during the remaining decade of her physical life (after that horrible 'missed Mothers' Day' incident) and ever since.  I would like to believe that her spirit knows and is buoyed by this even now ... and even more gratified by knowing that her grandchildren are being raised to be thoughtful, honorable and contributory people, too.

In this spirit, then, I wish you all a Happy Mothers' Day and hope that, in addition to recognizing her today, you, too, find every day's effort to make mom proud as rewarding a gift of love as the countless ones with which she has gifted you....

Carpe Diem: It's Time, Stupid....

Just got back today from the funeral of a friend, a 37-year old mother, who died tragically trying to save her 8-year old son who also perished in the fire.  No words ... except, perhaps, "gone too soon"....


A month or two before, I had attended the funeral of a former protégé, a young man in the prime of his adult life at not-yet 43 years old, who succumbed to cancer.  Also gone too soon....


The month before that, someone who was a new friend whom I had recently met but who seemed to be a kindred spirit and with whom I shared a deep interest in emotional intelligence and wellness and spiritual development passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at 49.  Also gone too soon.


As much as I grieve, I can only imagine the depth of the sorrow, hurt, loss and absence being experienced by their families: in one case a father whose ex- and effervescent son were lost without warning, in another a spouse who was really just beginning to live the good life with her soul mate before he became ill and in the last a mother whose daughter was reaching the zenith of her professional life and seemed to be in a great place personally, too.


At times like this, how does one wrap one's head around this grief, this aching loss, this painful sensation regret and of what could been?  As far as I can tell, the answer is a difficult one: simply put, you don't.  Nothing can explain tragedy or illness.  Like so many things in life both good and bad, they happen.  And we are left with the struggle to accept them, coming as it does after the grieving for the life that could have been in the absence of adversity.  And sometimes we just never quite learn to accept them, but move forward because life forces us to do so....


Unfortunately - or fortunately, I now understand the poet Robert Frost, who so memorably observed, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."  Yes, it does....


It goes on even when we don't want it to, when we're grieving and still hoping against hope that fate turns out differently than it has.  At the other end of the emotional spectrum, it also goes on even when we want it to stop for a moment so that we can savor a particularly transcendent moment.  And as every parent who's seen his/her infant become a very different and yet wonderful young adult in seemingly no time, it goes on too quickly....


I guess what the passing of my friends is teaching me anew is something that I know but haven't fully internalized, try as I might: that I/we must live fully today and each day, that tomorrow isn't promised and that opportunities postponed voluntarily are sometimes made permanently so by fate.


We all know plenty of things.  What we've internalized, however, is typically an appreciable but modest subset thereof (at best).  As a former colleague of mine has put it:  There are three levels of agreement: the intellectual, the emotional and the behavioral.  In order for us truly to "get it," we have to process what we know (the intellectual) fully from an emotional standpoint so that it shows up in our behavior.  Until we process it fully emotionally, we know it but we really don't.  Only when our behavior changes based on what we know - in essence, showing that we've gone beyond knowledge to learning and wisdom - can we truly claim to know something.


I know that I should seize the day.  I just don't do it as often as I should.  So I really don't know this after all, as my friendships with each of these three unique, gifted and impressive people suggest:


I had always intended to get in better touch with my devoted mom friend: we were both raising spirited young men - my two just a little older than hers - so we had our shared deep commitment to parenting in addition to our aligned professional interests to explore.  But we were both too busy raising our kids or working or....  We'd see each other from time to time and "threaten" to get together, as I jokingly described it, but we never quite pulled it off.  No more....


I had always intended to reconnect with my former protégé now that he was "all grown up" and living up to being the very pillar of the community that we had all projected and expected him to be.  And he also worked at my former firm but in a different division, so I also wanted to learn about his experiences with this, too.  We would bump into each other occasionally - usually at an event for the not-for-profit organization that had brought us together in the first place more than two decades prior - and pledge to catch up.  No more....


I had intended to get to know my new friend better as her infectious enthusiasm for some of our shared interests made her seem like one of those kindred spirits with whom it would be a pleasure to develop a meaningful collegial relationship.  In just our first few interactions - the initial one at a presentation that I made and subsequent ones via various electronic media channels - we really hit it off, so I was looking forward to learning more about how she had leveraged her (television) media experience to become a published author and columnist, among many other things.  We kept agreeing that we had to set a date to get together to talk more substantially but never did.  No more....


In each of these cases, I was left stunned, hurting and wishing "If only I/we had...."  Overcome the inertia in relationships that "busy people" often have so that my late friends and I could have made better use of the limited amount of time that it turns out we had, that is.  No more....


Life moved on while we were still planning to get to know one another better, to catch up and keep up and to be more meaningful presences in each other's lives.  And now we have no time left to do so.  A harsh lesson, but one that must be learned lest it be repeated.


So, today, after my devoted mom friend's (and her son's) heartrending funeral, I actually followed up with the handful of people who gave me cards or to whom I gave one.  I hope that indeed dates will get set, gatherings will occur and something(s) positive will come out of the depressing and deflating tragedy of our mutual grief.  If so, then it will be clear that I/we really do know the value of time in life.  To paraphrase the singular former presidential advisor James Carville, it's time, stupid.  And if I am more mindful thereof and take advantage of more of the opportunities that life suggests, then I really will have learned its value and thus truly know it.  And I will live a lot more and better along the way....


Or, as I noted in a previous recent installment of this blog,


(I)n reality, if death has any lesson to teach us in life, it's that we must live life to the fullest now.  In the words of the incomparable Bishop John Shelby Spong, we must "live fully, love wastefully and be all that (we) can be."


Good-bye, my dear departed friends.  And thank you for the smiles, memories and lessons with which you gifted me during your too short time on this earth.  Your spirits live on and continue to guide me and the many whose lives you touched, though we wish we could have shared this learning with you during our time together.  Because I/we didn't, we'll remember you and pay forward your gifts to us, thankful for having been enriched and instructed by both your presence and by your legacy....

It's Easter: All Rise....

In the spirit of the season, a disclaimer to start: I am, as far as I can tell by modern standards, a Christian heretic (in part because I actually consider myself more of Christian-Buddhist-Taoist), so what follows is, well, likely to be somewhat heretical, too.  I offer it with the confidence that the Divine One is big enough to withstand my spiritual exploration and musings, so I hope that you will be so as well (and, perhaps, find some value/meaning herein).

It's the Easter season, ostensibly the holiest time of the Christian year, so it's natural for us to reflect on our faith (i.e., what we believe about God, the Divine, etc.).  Each year, I find this to be a particularly rewarding exercise because, frankly, I am often surprised to realize what I have come to believe and how this has changed over time.  This year, a challenging one for me from many perspectives, I find myself surprisingly less surprised.  Though I have been through a lot, my sense of the Spiritual has evolved less than I would have expected, yet I do perceive that this sense is clearer: I haven't come to believe that many new things (even though I've been exposed to numerous new spiritual ideas and concepts), but I am clearer about what I do believe and how these beliefs can inform my ever-present desire to live as fulfilled and meaningful a life as possible.

For example, I continue to believe that Bishop John Shelby Spong has developed an incredible philosophy for life: to live fully, love wastefully and be all that we can be.  I am ever more persuaded that this should be my objective every day, to be open to and experience all that life has to offer (and to be thankful for the inevitable variety that this will entail), to be loving in every and all situations (especially those in which I am not naturally inclined to be so) and to operate as closely to my own limits as possible while, hopefully, expanding them over time.

What I'm also clearer about is that I have continued to fail miserably at this daily goal, both over time and in the past year.  Among the many ways that I have underperformed my chosen goal recently is that I have too often given in to fear - especially the fear of being uncomfortable - and thus not pushed myself out of my comfort zone enough.  For example, while I consider myself to be a loving, giving and supportive partner and friend, I suck at asking for help.  Sometimes this is due to my appreciable but overly healthy ego and sometimes it's just the fear of being a burden.  Truth be told, I have gotten so used to and good at figuring things out in life that I have a hard time admitting to myself that I can't work my way out of some challenge and thus have a hard time asking for the help that I need to do so.  I also realize that one of the legacies of having been raised to be an independent person is that I feel uncomfortable asking for help because I don't want to impose upon others.  This is all the more surprising to me because I have a wealth of life experience in which I have felt the appreciation of those whom I've helped, so I know how much it means to them and to me to be able to help.  And yet I have trouble returning the favor, so to speak, and allowing others to help me (even though I know that there are many who would be willing to do so).

What's this got to do with Easter, Resurrection and spiritual reflection?  Well, my experience at being able to live as fully, love as wastefully and be as much of the person that I can be suggests to me that I, too, am in need of the renewal and rebirth that the Resurrection represents.  Are you also in need of this?

Let me deal a little of what I mean about the Resurrection, because, truth be told, I have a somewhat unusual view of its symbolism and significance.  Like many non-literal or liberal or _______ (insert label here) Christians, I no longer believe in the Resurrection that I was taught as a child: that Jesus died on the cross, was buried in a tomb for two days and nights (even though we most often attribute the number three to this period) and then rose again/came back to a fully animate human/earthly life before ascending into heaven.  (As the late Carl Sagan pointed out, if the Ascension were literally true, based on what we now know about the size of the universe, even if He were moving at the speed of light He'd still be going today.)  What I do believe is that Jesus was put to death because He threatened the established order of the day - especially that of the Jewish community and thus by extension that of the Roman authorities to whom they answered - and that sometime after His physical death His spirit became a powerful, enlivening presence in the life of those who had known and followed Him.  (These early disciples - broadly conceived - then spread the message about their continuing, present experience of Jesus' Spirit and this movement - first known as "The Way" - grew into what eventually became the Christian religion that we know today.)

[N.B:  I have come to believe these things not because I've conceived of them or because they were 'revealed' to me but as a result of my extensive study of modern Biblical and Christian historical scholarship, including the works of Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Bishop John A.T. Robinson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the members of the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Stephen Prothero, Reza Aslan, Russell Shorto, Rev. Robin Meyers, Henri Nouwen, Dale Allison, Rabbi Harold Kushner and others.  I can't claim that any of the beliefs or insights that I share is original, though I can suggest that they are unique in that they are idiosyncratically formulated and assembled.  As far as I know, no one believes just as I do (which I consider to be a good thing).  In fact, I suspect that, though many of us may believe many things in common, our individual faiths are as unique as each of is.  So, it's in the spirit of sharing what I've come to believe that all of this is offered.  I have no belief whatsoever that mine is the only or even a better way to believe.  I do believe that the process by which I have come to believe what I do may be informative and thus helpful to others, which is why I share it.]

So, for me, (Jesus') Resurrection is spiritual in nature, not physical.  I do not believe in His post-Resurrection appearances in a literal sense, especially given that the Gospels that chronicle them are so symbolic in nature (and, of course, not eyewitness accounts of the events that they purport to describe).  And it's in this spiritual, symbolic sense of Resurrection that the Christian celebration of Easter has come to have great meaning for me.  I don't need to believe that Jesus rose from the dead physically to know that a loving spirit can be eternal and manifestly enhance and elevate another's life.  And it's this example of loving so completely and powerfully (or wastefully, to borrow Bishop Spong's term) - of being so loving that His legacy of love continues to affect and inspire us today, two millennia later - that I seek to re-commit to each Easter and to emulate (better) going forward.

Jesus loved so profoundly that the world as we know it was indeed changed.  To me, this raises the question of whether we, too, can learn to love in this way.  And by loving in this way, I mean having an appropriate amount of self-love to complement a primary focus on being wastefully loving with others.  This is what Easter means to me now: it is the time to reflect and challenge myself to renew my commitment to being more loving and thus to become a renewed and better person whose presence is profoundly enriching and elevating to others.

And just like I believe that Jesus is physically dead but his Spirit is eternal and present even now, I also am ever more persuaded that this is what eternal life means for us, too.  I can't get to that fairy tale Heaven that I was taught as a child, but I do believe that our spirit can be eternal in that its influence and presence can continue to enhance and elevate long after we are gone physically.  For example, I feel the loving presence of my parents daily even though they have both been physically dead for almost two decades now.  Their love as I experienced it during their earthly life lives on and I continue to be enriched and elevated by it today and every day.  Their love is eternal and will continue to impact the world even long after I'm gone, as some part of the love that I share with my own children, family and friends (and, by extension, with the world more broadly) is directly passed on/paid forward from them.  It's only in this sense that I can conceive of eternal life now: that our love lives on in the lives that we touch during our earthly life and that this legacy grows over time, as Jesus' example demonstrates.

So I wish you all a Happy Easter and hope that you are renewed in love and in your commitment to being as loving as Jesus was.  And may your legacy of love also be eternal, inspiring, enhancing and elevating others' lives today and two thousand years hence....

For Richer or For Poorer: the 'Forgotten' Martin Luther King....

In his President's Address to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the SCLC in August, 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said,

We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.  We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place.  But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Now that he is a national icon - the only 20th century American to have a national holiday celebrated annually in his honor, in fact - we tend to remember the inspirational King of the Civil Rights Movement and of the I Have A Dream speech and less so the tired and intrepid warrior whose last years were spent fighting less successfully for economic justice and world peace.  In fact, King's career had two very different phases, the first decade being focused on the social and political emancipation of Blacks in the South (with the attendant gains for the rest of the Negro community assumed therein) and a second one, far shorter (i.e., from approximately 1965 until his assassination in 1968), in which his focus shifted to the economic structure of American society and the need to achieve liberation and peace for oppressed peoples throughout the world.

Ultimately, because it was and is hard to argue that Blacks should not receive their full complement of the civil rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement - crowned by the I Have A Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963 and followed and reinforced by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - is considered a success and its most visible (and influential) leader, Rev. King, is now viewed, in effect, as a secular saint.  By contrast, the Poor People's Campaign and the economic- and peace-focused work of King's last years is largely forgotten or, if not, typically underappreciated in terms of its true significance.

To me, it's this second phase of Dr. King's work that matters most ... in no small part because the work that he began almost a half-century ago remains largely unfinished today.  And as the issue of entrenched urban poverty re-enters our public discourse from time to time - however 'coincidentally' in election years and most often raised by politicians looking to make political hay with it (as opposed to evidencing any sincere or deep concern for those so afflicted) - it occurs to me that Dr. King's vision is ever more prescient and pressing today.  As we reflect on the fact of the widening income and wealth gap in our society (both nationally and globally) and the reality that social mobility has greatly decreased (if not all but disappeared) in the past thirty years or so in modern America, we do need to begin to ask questions about "an edifice which produces beggars" and whether it does need some "restructuring."

Before this questioning leads to a reflexive suspicion that I am a Socialist - a sobriquet with exceedingly negative connotations in modern American society - I want to state for the record that I am in fact a firm believer in Capitalism ... but a capitalism that is conscious of its own natural limitations and thus practiced with a corrective intent.  (And, I feel compelled to note, this is an area in which Dr. King and I differ appreciably from a philosophical standpoint.)  I have no qualms with great wealth, but I do have grave concern that it is so concentrated and that the levers of our society have been geared to make this more difficult to address and ameliorate in recent years (which is an area in which Dr. King and I align completely).  And, even worse from my perspective, we have grown more comfortable with efforts that perpetuate and exacerbate this uneven allocation of access and opportunity (and thus lead to an even more skewed allocation of income and wealth over time).

For example, one of the great things about America has been and is that one can become wealthy from successfully pursued innovation: if you build a better mousetrap, you can indeed become rich, and often fabulously so in today's global economy.  Yet, what is equally (if not more meaningfully) true is that the vast majority of people in this society - both the now-struggling middle class and the historically struggling working class - have no such real opportunity.  In fact, collectively speaking, their life chances have diminished appreciably over the past thirty years as real/effective wages have plateaued (and in some cases declined).  And the game is ever more skewed against them, in part because of their political participation or lack thereof.  Although it is a truism that the poor don't vote (in proportion to their numbers) and that many middle class voters tend to support policies that are not in their own economic interest (i.e., they tend to vote aspirationally), these things are also true ... and troubling.

And as the gap between the rich and the poor widens - especially as it leaves many in the middle class more vulnerable/likely to slide down the economic spectrum rather than up it - our public discourse has changed as well and in ways that exacerbate rather than ameliorate this challenge.  So often now the poor are demonized as "takers" when in fact the vast majority of them are working hard to overcome the largely structural impediments to improving their economic status, a reality that rarely if ever is acknowledged in our public discourse, let alone discussed/addressed.  And we are constantly encouraged to support policies that make it easier for the affluent and rich in our society to keep more of their earned rewards under the guise of their status as "job creators."  If this last fictitious and politically motivated construct were true, based on the significant tax cuts for the wealthy a decade ago (or those a generation ago), we would be awash in jobs opportunities at present, which, of course, is not the case.  And we can now identify that government assistance to corporations and the wealthy who mostly own their stock absolutely dwarfs the oft-decried "welfare" provided to those at the bottom of our economic pyramid in need of economic and social services support.  As one popular social media meme describes it, 

If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.

And if one raises the issue of this mal-distribution of resources and the system that has been created to produce it, one is immediately and pejoratively labeled, often as a "Socialist," as if this were some morally despicable thing to be.  In fact, to question the status quo in modern America is to risk both derision and demonization - which, historically speaking, is consistent with Dr. King's experience a half-century ago - because, ultimately, it is to raise the issue of power, as in who has the right to determine the 'boundaries' within which we choose to live and how those boundaries affect the life chances of all therein.  And as the great nineteenth century abolitionist and Reconstruction leader Frederick Douglass reminded us so poignantly over 150 years ago, 

Power concedes nothing without demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Given the realities of modern American life, and especially the widening gap between the allocation of life chances that is beginning to tear our social fabric asunder, as Dr. King challenged us so long ago, it is indeed time to question the structure of our society because of the nature of the outcomes that it produces.  Does this mean that Capitalism must be dismantled and replaced by another mode of social organization that is more equitable?  No.  In fact, history has shown us that other systems, including Socialism, tend not to work as well (largely because the powerful decision-makers who lead them prove fallibly human, too).  What it does mean is that we need to take a serious and thoughtful look at how we (re-)structure our society, especially economically and politically, so that we can restore some meaningful measure of equality of opportunity (and not necessarily equality of outcome).  To make it plain, we need to consider how to make our society more equitable and open so that all may share more meaningfully in the incredible wealth and abundant experience of life that our country offers.


And we need to return to an ethic that celebrates the commonweal, not exceptional wealth.  For, as Dr. King (and Malcolm X) predicted years ago, the upheaval that will result once the poor feel they have no options will be even more costly than choosing to change proactively.  Many of us were not alive to experience the watershed societal shifts of the 1960s - and thus do not fully appreciate the attendant violence and disruption that the urban riots of that period revealed to the broader society as being a frightful consequence of economic oppression and a sense of powerlessness - but our history tells us that continuing down this path - where the few have disproportionately more and the many have troublingly less - is a road to (short-term) prosperity for a few, (medium-term) ruin and (long-term) re-alignment.


To paraphrase the great Frederick Douglass, in regard to the less fortunate among us, what we need is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.  If we commit to creating a more just society, we will also create a more sustainable one, as Dr. King envisioned so long ago....

What is Success?



Recently, a friend and former protege - someone whom I'd met as a collegian of great promise and had watched mature into an exemplary adult - passed on a few months before his 43rd birthday.  I was stunned by the news.  It had never occurred to me that someone so exceptional would be gone so/too soon.  And, yet, he was....

 

His passing led me to do quite a bit of reflection, both on his life and on my own.  With respect to his life, I was moved to compose a tribute to him, which I share below.  With respect to my life, I share the following:

 

Rationally, we all know that we will die some time and that none of us knows when.  But virtually all of us live as if that transition time is far in the future.  The vast majority of us act everyday as if tomorrow is promised to us.  And yet (we know that) it isn't.

 

This is mostly because acknowledging our mortality is difficult and scary.  What comes beyond our physical death?  Even those of us with great faith in an afterlife have to acknowledge that we really don't know.  Further, for the most part, we prefer the life that we do have - however we may quibble with our circumstances in any given moment - to one hereafter that we can't define for sure.  Very few (if any) of us are looking to die to find out what's on 'the other side', so to speak.  (Or, if we are eager to leave this life - absent any debilitating and/or eventually fatal illness - we are actually considered psychologically unwell.)

 

In short, even though we know intellectually that we must die at some time (and that that some time may be sooner than we would want), we don't process this emotionally so that it doesn't show up in our behavior.  We take life for granted and do not live fully in the here and now, often postponing meaningful experiences until an assumed better time in our future.  We do not, as the great 20th century theologian and sage Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested, "get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted" and thus "live life in radical amazement."  Mostly, we are consumed by temporal and ephemeral concerns as we tell ourselves that the future will be better for us and those we love.  And yet, we all 'know' (intellectually, that is) that we can't assume the future....

 

What my friend's passing did was to remind me that I must fight zealously against the human nature that would lead me to look to a better future and thereby live less fully today.  What his life - far too short in duration for any of us who knew and loved him - taught me is to be mindful of and motivated by my/our mortality always.  It sounds a bit morbid, perhaps, but, in reality, if death has any lesson to teach us in life, it's that we must live life to the fullest now.  In the words of the incomparable Bishop John Shelby Spong, we must “live fully, love wastefully and be all that (we) can be.”

 

So, today, I will make a better effort to live fully and in the moment, including by composing this blog post, an idea that's been rattling around in my soul for a couple of days now.  It's the best way that I can pay tribute to my friend and to live the lesson that his passing and those of the other saints in my life whom I've had the good fortune to know have taught me: to live (more) fully now and, in so doing, to encourage others to do so.  As Marianne Williamson reminded us, "as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same."

 

In this spirit, I hope that you come to know my dear friend Ramsey Rycraw and find in this tribute some inspiration to live more fully in this moment and all others....

 

A Tribute to Ramsey Rycraw

 

(Saturday, January 25^th, 2013)

 

In 1904, in response to a contest sponsored by Brown Book Magazine to answer the question “What is Success?”, Elisabeth-Anne “Bessie” Stanley of Lincoln, Kansas, wrote:

 

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children,

Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;

Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;

Who has left the world better than he found it,

Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;

Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;

Whose life was an inspiration;

Whose memory a benediction.

 

When I heard the heartbreaking news of my fellow SEO alumnus and former protégé Ramsey Rycraw’s passing, I thought of this poem … and realized that it was a great way to begin to deal with the grief of losing a fine young man gone too soon.  So I have to begin by acknowledging reality: if you knew him, you’re hurting, because life with Ramsey seems far better than the prospect thereof without him.  And yet, to paraphrase some wise person (who was not actually Dr. Seuss) who observed long ago that we should not cry because his earthly life is over, but smile because it happened.

 

And it’s in this spirit of gratitude for the gift of Ramsey Rycraw and of beginning a new chapter in our individual and collective journeys that I share some thoughts and memories today.  Simply put, Ramsey was one of my SEO “golden children,” a star in every sense of the word.  SEO, or Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, is a small non-profit that has been doing good work and changing young people’s lives for more than a half-century now.  We had the good fortune to select a young man of promise to join our career internship program in 1992 and he lived up to and beyond that promise in our eyes then and has ever since.

 

Why?  Because he was so unique.  I have had the privilege of working with thousands of young people in my more than three decades with SEO, and I have to admit that because of my middle age and their number (now approaching five figures), I can’t remember them all.  Most faces I can recognize, but, truth be told, the names are long forgotten (even if they graduated from high school or interned with one of our partner organizations just last year).  But Ramsey Rycraw I remember vividly these two decades on.

 

I remember the intern Ramsey: a polite, well-manned and intelligent young man who had an engagingly sunny disposition, mad skills and a positive attitude that drew others to him and led them to follow his example.  In short, Ramsey was a dream intern: he was open to the wisdom that we shared, played the game as we asked, did outstanding work and represented the organization and himself well and helped others along the way.  As anyone who works with young people (especially large groups of them) knows, you pray for young leaders by example like this, for someone to point to and guide the less leadership-receptive to emulate.  Everyone who met Ramsey then was impressed by his humility, his capability and that broad smile that could and did light up a room.  It was not uncommon to have a couple of hundred college interns per year in our programs at that time, and I used to wish that every one of them could be like Ramsey Rycraw.  With all due respect to Number 23, I didn’t want them to be like Mike, I wanted them to be like Ramsey.

 

And even after his intern summer, Ramsey continued to lead by example and give back to his communities, including to his new SEO family.  Many of his peers remember him fondly from his work trying to organize our alumni back in the day or from his time mentoring high school students.  And, of course, he led by example in his education (by obtaining admission to and graduating with honors from the outstanding Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania), in his career in various financial services-related (et. al.) pursuits and in his family and community.  In fact, as an adult, Ramsey was the very embodiment of SEO’s mission statement at the time:

 

To develop young people of color to become leaders by example in their families, communities and careers

 

Whenever we needed to convince a prospective partner to join us in our work of access and uplift, we would point to our stars, which meant that we often pointed to Ramsey.  It’s why, in preparation for an historic fundraising campaign over a decade ago, SEO commissioned a book entitled Stories from the Street: The SEO Career Program, A Portfolio of Success – the “Street” being Wall Street, of course – in order to profile our alumni and to make the case for why we were asking for millions of dollars to fund our programs and to buy a first-ever permanent home for our then 40-year old organization.  Radiating warmly from page 18 of this “portfolio” is the smiling visage of Ramsey Rycraw.  (In no small part due to the legacy of success that Ramsey and others helped us to create, we were able to raise over $13 million and to purchase – without a mortgage – a permanent home for SEO for the first time in its history at 55 Exchange Place in downtown Manhattan, just steps from Wall Street and literally across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.)

 

Truth be told, I hadn’t been in as close contact with Ramsey in recent years.  It’s something that I’ve come to accept over the years: when you have as many “SEO kids” as I have been fortunate to know – now numbering close to ten thousand – and they, too, reach a certain stage in life – one in which their primary foci are their families and their careers – you accept that you don’t see them as much … but you savor every bit of good news that filters in and continue to celebrate their successes and their contributions to their own and to SEO’s legacy.  So I would see Ramsey occasionally and hear about his continuing and unsurprising success and be inspired to work ever more diligently at developing the next generation at SEO, the next generation of Ramseys.

 

And that’s the lesson that I learned from Ramsey Rycraw: that as much as I was a mentor to and leader for him at one time in his life, he has been an inspiration to and for me throughout the time that I’ve known him and thereby enabled me to touch thousands of other young people’s lives spurred on by his example.  The prospect of creating more Ramsey Rycraws has always gotten me out of bed early in the morning to make yet another breakfast meeting with a prospective partner and driven me to set up yet another fundraising lunch meeting and motivated me to commit to making yet another long drive home at night from an SEO event.  I never thanked him enough for this inspiration during his lifetime – so this I do regret – but I will always be mindful of this as I continue in my work with this special little organization that changes lives every day in profound ways.  Simply put, if it were possible, I wish that every SEO student or intern could be a Ramsey Rycraw.  There’s no doubt that this world would be a much better place were this to be the case.

 

So, in tribute to my former protégé and friend, I thank him and his family for his contributions to SEO and to me personally.  As I reflect on my own life, much of what I have contributed and will contribute to SEO has been inspired by special people like Ramsey Rycraw, who’ve added so much to my life and to those of countless others.  In this spirit of gratitude and appreciation, then, I close where I began with the words and wisdom of Bessie Anderson Stanley:  Ramsey Rycraw was indeed successful, supremely so, because he lived well, laughed often and loved much, and thus his life is truly an inspiration to and his memory a benediction for us all.

 

Godspeed, Ramsey.  Thank you for what you have done in your earthly life and in advance for what you will do in your eternal one as we go forward in our lives inspired by the gift of you….

 

May God comfort and keep all of us – especially Ramsey’s family – at this time as we ache, but may we thank Him always when, soon, we will again be able to smile, which, appropriately, will be those big, room-enlightening and spirit-lifting Ramsey Rycraw smiles….

Does the God of Love Hate?

Chapters 18 and 20 of Leviticus, which form part of the Holiness Code of the Jewish Torah and the Christian Old Testament, contain the following verses:

• Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. (Leviticus 18:22 KJV)

• If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. (Leviticus 20:13 KJV)

These two verses have historically been interpreted by literalist, fundamentalist or self-described conservative Jews and Christians as clear, blanket prohibitions against homosexuality.

In the Christian New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. (Romans 1:26–27 KJV)

Elsewhere in the Bible, we confront situations of God-committed and/or -sponsored genocide - as with the story of Noah and the Flood (Genesis), the overnight killing of the Egyptian firstborn which led to the Jews being freed/cast out of Egypt (Exodus), the destruction of the Amelekites (1 Samuel), etc. - and the endorsement of slavery - whether that enslavement was due to war (Deuteronomy) or sexual in nature (as in being sold into a marriage/being a wife) (Exodus) or similar to that for which instruction was given in the New Testament, especially both the genuine and attributed Epistles of the Apostle Paul, including Colossians, Ephesians and most of all Philemon (which is in essence instruction about the necessity of reconciliation between a runaway Christian slave and his former Christian master), etc.  And, according to their ancient authors, there are numerous passages in the Bible that can be construed as God approving of capital punishment (Exodus, Leviticus, Acts, Romans, etc.).  Further, there are a plethora of other examples in the Bible of behavior attributed to and/or inspired by God that strike us today as ungodly and inhumane.  In sum, the Bible is rife with examples of an unloving and indeed hateful God.

Which raises the question, can the God of Love hate?

Well, let's start with why God could or perhaps should be considered as the God of Love.  Whether we prefer an Old Testament basis for conceiving of God as Love/Loving - as in Deuteronomy or Jeremiah - or a New Testament one - as in (the Epistle) 1 John or Ephesians or (the Gospel) John (as described by Jesus), etc. - there are literally hundreds of passages and verses that describe God as loving or as Love.  In fact, based on myriad references and attestations, it would be fair to say that, at least in the Christian conception, God's defining nature is that He/She/It is Love/Loving.

Mitigating this somewhat are the many passages that describe God as punishing, especially to enemies of His/Her/Its people the Israelites and/or to members of those Chosen People themselves who do not obey His/Her/Its laws.  Yet, invariably, the rationale for any punishment is that it is engendered by God's love for us; in other words, God only punishes us because He/She/It loves us.  (Sounds like something that our parents used to tell us, doesn't it?)  So, whether God is giving or correcting, He/She/It is ever-loving.

So, then, can God hate?

If one does indeed see God as Love or believe that God is Love, it would seem that the answer is simple: no.  Love cannot negate itself in hate, so, logically, therefore, a God who is Love/Loving cannot hate.

And yet so many self-proclaimed Christians advocate just this, that God hates.  Leaving aside groups like the Westboro Baptist Church whose views many (if not most) consider to be extreme (and thus unrepresentative), many self-described conservative (or literalist or fundamentalist) Christians do believe that God does not love some of His/Her/Its children as much as others, as their disapproval and condemnation of these others - especially those who are different in terms of religion or sexual orientation, etc. - demonstrates.  Some/many even go so far as to say that, in the name of God, we should deny various rights to these people/groups.  For example, the contemporary 'debate' about marriage equality is (most) often framed as being in violation of God's law (presumably as encapsulated in the exemplary verses above and others) and the Judeo-Christian values that undergird our American law and society (even though, technically, our foundational documents proclaim the equality of all men - and, presumably, women - and state clearly and repeatedly that there is no official religion for the country and that church and state should, in fact, be separated).

Conceptually part of the problem of God-endorsed hate can be attributed to our humanity in that we tend to read our holy scriptures selectively - if at all - and thereby value the parts that we like and/or align with our views more than those that do not.  For example, if we choose to behave in a strictly biblical way, we would endorse and practice slavery today, an option that is universally rejected as morally repugnant and unacceptable now.  And heterosexual women would be the property of their husbands (who would also be allowed to have many of them simultaneously) and children who are disrespectful to their parents and adulterers would be put to death and men could not get haircuts or trim their beards and no one could eat non-fish seafood and, well, you get the picture....

Simply put, if we claim that our interpretation of God's desires is scripturally based, then we have to deal with the myriad gray areas and outright contradictions contained therein, because, as we have seen, God has been described as both Love/Loving and vengeful/hateful/hate-filled in the Bible.  At a minimum, for example, this would complicate the so-called marriage equality debate - which is really about whether homosexuals and others of alternative sexuality should have their humanity recognized fully and thereby be allowed to exercise all of their societal rights - because if the (both Old and New Testament) biblical prohibitions of homosexuality are taken into account, so, too, must the reality that Jesus, the ostensible Patron of the religion that bears his name, is not recorded as having said anything about the subject.  And Jesus was a big God-is/as-Love guy....

In the interest of brevity, I'll confess that I tire of this 'debate' about the nature of God, as so much of it strikes me as the virtually constant human attempt to project one's own beliefs in the name of God.  I can't pretend to know what God thinks - which is in itself likely an anthropomorphically inappropriate construction - but I can glean that He/She/It leans more heavily toward Love, which we might characterize as the positive/good/beautiful/growth/etc. in life, rather than its opposite.  To me, this is demonstrated in the ever-forward evolution of our humanity and our discovery of new and meaningful ways to be human/experience our humanity fully.  (Along the way, of course, this has led to our parallel and simultaneous discovery of our almost equally great human capacity for the opposite of these - i.e., the negative/bad/ugly/inhumane/deadly/etc.)  And in this gift of life, we discover that Love is better than its opposite and that we profess it constantly and practice it less consistently (because, being human, we fail at this practice regularly).  (By contrast, think of how few of us openly profess, celebrate and practice love's opposite as well as consider how the vast majority of us react in horror whenever we become aware of such behavior.)

Following from this, then, I think that the answer to this whole question is quite simple:  God is Love and thus cannot hate.  And since God has created all of us human beings, it follows that we are all Children of God, beloved in His/Her/Its sight.  Therefore, each of us should be allowed to love ourselves and each other in ways that are beneficial to us and yet do not infringe upon others' enjoyment of their experience and pursuit of Love as they define it.

Accordingly, this invalidates every "-ism": racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, religiocentrism, heterosexism, etc.  We will accept and celebrate that no religion has exclusive claim to the Divine, that no sexual orientation is superior and more acceptable than another in the context of a loving relationship and that no person of whatever race, ethnicity, gender or nationality is inherently better than another.

Perhaps another way to look at this question is via the guidance of Jesus, who, for Christians, is our ostensible Patron.  In the Gospel of Matthew, in response to a question as to the greatest of the Commandments, Jesus responded:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40 NRSV)

Similarly, as relayed in the Gospel of John, Jesus shared a new commandment:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35 NRSV)

As Christians, if we do indeed love one another as Jesus loved us, then we will affirm our mutual humanity in spite of our superficial differences.  We can both acknowledge that difference challenges/scares us and yet stay true to our Patron's directive to be loving nonetheless (as He was).  When we think about how others should be treated, our question will be "How can I/we be loving?" not "What do I think that God thinks about this?"

What matters most is that we are all Children of God; the rest is just details.  And when we are loving to each other, we embody the God who created us all, the God of Love/who is Love, the God who cannot and does not hate....

The Best Christian I Ever Knew Was An Atheist....

This is the (partial) story of a wonderful man whom I believe to be an exemplar of the values that we all espouse as Christians … and yet he was a self-professed atheist.  I hope that something in what I share helps each of you in life and on your own faith journey.

Crawford Maxwell was a Scotsman, born, I believe in or around Edinburgh sometime in the early- to mid-1880s.  He led an interesting, diverse life and came into my life as "the neighbor next door" during my formative years who actually became a member of our extended family.  This is nice, of course, but not the full story or even the point of mentioning him.

What makes Mr. Maxwell so noteworthy, I believe, is the paradox that he represented for me then - and continues to represent even now - because Crawford Maxwell was the most decent, kind, ethical, supportive and loving man that I have ever known outside of my family and, one might say, an exemplar of Christian values in practice.  Except for one very big caveat:  Mr. Maxwell was a self-professed atheist (or so my beloved mother told me).

When I was growing up, Mr. Maxwell was the closest non-relative to my family and, in fact, was actually closer to us than some of our family members.  He was such a significant presence in my and our lives that, among other things, he:

• Came to a window overlooking our driveway and greeted my mother and me almost every morning as we left for school


• Was usually a guest at all family holiday gatherings at our home and was even invited to many of the ones at other relatives’ homes
• Would substitute for my mom if she were delayed at a meeting or under the weather and take me to and pick me up from school


• Was the very first customer of my grass-cutting business and paid my $3 fee for both the front and back lawns though he usually only had me do the former (to keep me away from his precious garden in the back yard, I suspect)


• Would often substitute for my father as my mother’s escort to arts or other more aesthetically-oriented events


• Cooked me many meals - I had Indian food for the first time in his home, a fantastic curry dish actually - where he also introduced me to foods that were exotic delicacies to me at the time (like beef tongue) and told me many stories of his life, including of his service as a very young man in the Second Boer War and of his time in India as an official of the British Empire.  So, as a young man, I explored the world vicariously through his life experiences.  (For example, while I’ve never been to India I still intend to go some day, and until then I’ll continue to treasure the indelibly vivid picture that Mr. Maxwell painted of it for me so many years ago.)


• Read avidly, a passion that he shared with my mother – with whom he would swap books and dish about the stories that they had read – and also influenced me to become the voracious reader that I am today

As you hopefully have an inkling by now, Crawford Maxwell was an incredibly interesting and special person.  Yet, this doesn’t begin to do the man justice.  For example, he lived in inner-city Detroit in the 1950s, 60s and 70s – a time of riots, white flight and social confusion (if not disintegration) – and was the last white person on what became an all-Black, mostly middle class block.  Yet, he never gave any evidence that this affected him.  He acted as if color were irrelevant, which, truth be told, it is and should be.  He didn’t fly with other whites because he saw his new neighbors as people, not Black.  And he was the best neighbor that any of us ever had, white or Black.

Simply put, he was also the most decent, kind, ethical, supportive and loving man that I have ever known outside of my family and, one might say, an exemplar of Christian values in practice.  In fact, he was the man I most admired other than my own namesake and maternal grandfather, Dr. Walter Ellsworth Johnson.  And he was an atheist (though I don't remember ever discussing the subject with him).

This was a huge problem for me because my rather diverse religious upbringing had taught me that no matter how good and wonderful a person he was, Mr. Maxwell could never get into heaven because he didn’t believe in our Christian God.  As I cobbled together my own unique spirituality from my Baptist upbringing, the Lutheran and Catholic theology to which I was exposed - and with which I was indoctrinated - in school and my participation in a Congregational youth group, I struggled with how to reconcile the concept that the most decent, “Christian” man that I knew was going to hell and some of the folks whom I knew from church - whose behavior outside of the sanctuary contrasted so completely with the beliefs that they supposedly professed inside of it - would be given undeserved entry into heaven for eternity.

As I turned this conundrum over in my head hundreds of times during my teenage years and early adulthood, eventually I decided that either God was not as good as we believed Him to be or that our theology must be wrong.  Accordingly, I continue to believe that the fault lies with our conception of God and His Grace, not with God Himself.*

It’s a potentially heretical view that I hold even today:  If there is a heaven, I expect to see Mr. Maxwell again, because the way he lived his life certainly qualifies him to be there (as, I hope, does the way that I am choosing to live my own).  I, for one, would rather spend all of eternity with good atheists like Crawford Maxwell than bad Christians of whom there are so many.  I would rather be in the presence of a person who was always giving and loving and kind than someone who is convinced that the Bible is an historical truth or that we Christians alone are in possession of the sole/true path to the Divine, etc.

As I’ve matured and developed into a self-described Christian heretic and spiritual eclectic, I trace a lot of what I have come to believe to my experience with Mr. Maxwell and his quiet, positive example of how a human being should conduct himself.  As far as I can tell, the only thing that he ever did wrong was to choose not to believe (which, I realize, is the biggest thing that one can get wrong from the viewpoint of most believers and churches).  Yet, he was such a good person that I named my youngest son after him, so that every day I am reminded of his incredible example that continues to furnish a model for me and my children – and for us all – to emulate.

So as you go forward this day, ask yourself if you will someday be remembered as fondly and with as much admiration as Crawford Maxwell.  If so, do you think that you deserve a place in heaven but that he doesn’t?  I think not.  And though I can’t pretend to know what God thinks, I sure do hope that She agrees with me….

*  I apologize for the use of the male pronoun to describe God, but that was how I was raised to see/understand Him/Her/It at the time.