Spiritual Common Sense

At our house, we never knew who would be joining us for dinner. My mother lost her mother at an early age. All of her life she carried vivid memories of being passed from hand to hand, relative to distant relative, doing without and never quite feeling like she belonged. In her house, all were welcome. Everyone belonged.

Food was love. No one ever went away hungry. After my brother and I grew old enough to live independently, the chief beneficiary of my mother’s affection was an Airedale, Cassie, who was so well taken care of I affectionately nicknamed her “Little Sister.”

Cassie was the runt of the litter, but under Mom’s care she grew to be about as wide as she was tall. It was not uncommon to find her cooking an egg or boiling a chicken to “sweeten” the dog’s dinner.

At the time it seemed funny. Since then, I have come to understand it as something more – You can’t love without giving.

The truth of this observation is borne out daily in the market place. In fact, much of modern commerce is built around this fundamental aspect of our nature. Implicit in many advertisements for goods or services, explicit and inescapable in the buying occasions organized to coincide with celebrations of those we love – Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Father’s Day, and, of course, Mother’s Day – is the knowledge that we can easily be persuaded to demonstrate our affection for someone we love by buying something for them.

The impulse to give to those we love is irresistible. What we call humanitarianism is nothing more than a healthier extension of this basic instinct and a broader, more inclusive love. We give to each other out of love, but the gifts we give pale by comparison to the gift of love itself.

When I wrote to tell JoAnn Cayce she had been nominated for a national award, JoAnn responded:  “I don’t know this fellow that’s nominated me – he happened to be the mayor of an adjacent town – and I don’t know what I’ve done that he thinks is so special.  I’m just doing what my mother and grandmother have done before me.  And besides, I don’t have much use for awards anyway.  The President wanted to give me an award last year and I told him to put it in the mail.”

I loved her response so much I tried to call her.  For six months, she wouldn’t talk with me.  She was too busy taking care of the poor to be bothered talking about it.

Finally, one hot summer day we got together at her home in a wide spot in the road, called Thornton, Arkansas. When I asked her why she did what she did, she told me her earliest memories were of her mother taking care of people.

“My mother always saw after everybody who couldn’t see after themselves.  We never knew who would be eating or sleeping with us.  She would take in prostitutes, alcoholics, anyone.  She was always filling out papers for them, taking people food or clothing – whatever.  In her later years she would get up in the morning and put on a big pot of turnip greens or beans or soup and she would watch the people coming down this road out here to see who might be hungry.”

JoAnn followed her mother’s lead for more than forty years.  A one-woman Salvation Army, she did whatever needed to be done for the poor in the four counties surrounding the little town of Thornton, Arkansas.  It is a mark of her impact that many government agencies referred problems they couldn’t solve to her.

When I asked about it, she said “I do nothing” and pointed to the contents of her two storage sheds.  “All this stuff has been given to us.  I’m just a tunnel it flows through.  It didn’t come from me.  It comes from caring people.  A lot of them, I never see.  I don’t even know how they find out about me, but they will come here and bring things or drop them off on the porch.”

JoAnn believed human begins cannot be fully happy until they serve the purpose God intended for them.  She found her joy in helping others and felt blessed by the process.

“The poor have done for me more than I will ever do for them,” she said.  “They make me feel needed.  What would I do with my life if I didn’t have people who needed me?  Play bridge?  Collect dolls and clean house?  Anybody can dust!  It’s a joy to just be alive and be of service to somebody.

“I don’t care how who you are,” she said.  “You can find a way to help somebody.  When you want to find a way, there is a way.  Don’t ever be afraid to do what is in your heart.”

Jane Goodall’s vision for her life began to form at the age of five when she hid in a chicken coop to see if she could discover “where on a chicken was there an opening big enough for an egg to come out.”  She still recalls tumbling out of the hen house in excitement to tell her mother her discovery.

Shortly thereafter — by the age of eight — she had fallen in love with Tarzan and decided she wanted to live in Africa.  “I knew that, somehow, I would go to Africa and live with the animals,” she says.  “I don’t think I spent too much time wondering exactly how I would do it.  I just felt sure the right opportunity would somehow come.”

At the age of twenty-three, her dream came true.  She was invited to visit a friend whose family had bought a farm in Kenya.  While she was there, she met Louis Leakey — the man who, more than anyone else, shaped the direction of her life.

The renowned anthropologist offered her a job on the spot, at first working as his secretary, then in the fields of Olduvai Gorge.  But Jane wanted more.  She wanted to find a way to watch wild animals living undisturbed lives.  She wanted to bridge the distance between man and beast and move among them without fear.  She wanted to return to the hen house and discover the secrets of the natural world.

She was twenty-six when she first set foot on Gombe National Park.  On her sixty-second birthday, 18 years ago today, we met in Washington.  The thirty-minute morning meeting we had scheduled turned into lunch, dinner, and then a bit of scotch as we talked into the night about the state of the world, the gift of the forest, and the “fuzzy line” between man and beast.

“Chimpanzees are so like us,” she said. “Their blood and their response to disease are like ours.  A lot of their behavior is like ours.  They learn by watching one another, then imitating.  Most important, they feel pain, sorrow, and fear just like we do.”

She illustrated the closeness of the connection by telling the story of Old Man, a chimpanzee brought to a zoo in North America when he was an adolescent.  “We still don’t know what happened to him there,” Jane said, “but whatever it was, he came to hate people.”

When Old Man was rescued, he was put on an island with three females.  A young man named Marc Casano was given the job of looking after them.  He was told how dangerous these animals were and instructed not to go on the island with their food.  Instead, he was told to paddle a boat toward the island until he was close enough to throw the food on the shore and then leave.

Marc did as he was told but as he watched the animals he couldn’t help noticing how affectionate they were with each other.  He decided he wanted to have a better relationship with them and tried to make friends.  He came closer and closer to shore until he could actually hand Old Man a banana.  Soon the two were playing together.   Eventually, Old Man would even let Marc groom him — an act of complete trust.

One day, Marc slipped and fell, startling an infant nearby.  The mother heard the cry and charged protectively, leaping on Marc’s back and biting his neck.  Before Marc could get up, the other two females joined the attack.  He felt his arm go numb and blood running down his neck.  He looked up to see Old Man flying toward him.

But instead of joining the attack and finishing him off, as Marc feared, Old Man seized the females, pulling them off and hurling them away. He stayed close as Marc dragged himself to the boat, threatening the females every time they tried to attack again.

“Old Man saved Marc’s life,” Jane said.  “There is no doubt about it.  The chimps could easily have killed him.”

“I tell this story a lot,” she went on to say, “because it says so much about our relationship with chimps and other animals.  If a chimpanzee can reach out to help a human, then surely humans can reach out and try to help chimps and other living creatures.”

Jane’s understanding of nature — the gift of the forest — and her resulting reverence for life has led her to campaign for compassion.  The woman who yearned for the jungle at the age of eight and spent 36 years living in solitude and solidarity with wild animals, now spends most of her time on airplanes, traveling from one urban area to another, never spending more than two weeks in one place at a time.

“I hate my suitcases, packing, unpacking.  Ironing — I hate ironing,” she says.  “But it is all made worthwhile when I think of the forest and what it has given me.  It makes me sad that I can only get back there for short visits, but then I think of how lucky I have been.  I have spent years doing what I wanted to do most of all – being with wild, free chimpanzees in the forest.  Now is my paying back time.”

Her central message is the unity of life.  “It is not one thing to save man and another to save the animals,” Jane says.  “Together, we can make the world a better place for all living things.”

Many people, myself included, have pursued happiness and pleasure in places where we know it will not be found.  It is tempting to seek the comfort of material things and indulge yourself, pursue appetites and the satisfactions of the flesh.

When I was young, my mother watched my pursuit of pleasure with sadness at the thought that I could be so consumed by such superficial interests.  While I always suspected her displeasure, nothing was said until she found the proper occasion – a neighbor’s dog injured while chasing a car.

When I commented on this sad incident, my mother took the opportunity.   “Let that be a lesson to you,” she said.  “Don’t chase anything you don’t want to catch.”

Her comment gave me pause – then and now.  If you think about it, it has a broad as well as a specific application.  It makes you question your priorities and the way you spend your time.

What do you chase and why?  Is what you are chasing – the object of your activities and desires – something you really want, something worth keeping?

Who among us would prefer a series of superficial relationships to true love?  Who would want great wealth if it came with the condition it could not be shared?  Would anyone knowingly choose a life of ease and comfort over a life of meaning and purpose?  If not, why do we do so much of what we do?

“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick,” Rollo May observed, “just as your legs would wither if you never walked.”  Much of this sickness is evident in the world despite our attempts to camouflage our failings with the pursuit of meaningless things.

The greatest regret we can have is not that our lives shall come to an end, but rather that it shall never have a beginning.  To be what we are, and to become what are capable of becoming, is the noblest end in life.  Our duty is to become useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

Becky Simpson remembers watching her little brother die of pneumonia when she was five.  Two years later her sister almost followed him.  The house was so cold, she recalls, it was warmer outside.  She also remembers making, at that tender age, a promise that she would never ever watch someone die without trying to help.

Ten years after their marriage, her husband, Bobby, lost his sight and could no longer and work.  Hard times got harder.

“We nearly starved to death,” Bobby remembers.  “What we had to live on was what we raised ourselves – garden stuff.”

What saved them was an even bigger catastrophe.  One summer, when it seemed things couldn’t get much worse, the skies opened up.  It rained seemingly without end for days and their valley was hit with a series of floods.  The damage done by the deluge was complicated by the ecological damage caused by strip mining in the mountains above them.  Soon, there wasn’t a bridge left in the county.

The way Bobby remembers it, “There were maybe three good cars left in the whole valley.  We lost all of our wells and the water in our house was four feet deep.”

What Becky remembers is the hopelessness of standing on a crate near the bank of the river crying in frustration the third time her brother was flooded out.  While she cried, she remembered her promise to herself and in the back of her mind a thought formed.  What came to her was the knowledge that she had friends she hadn’t met yet.

Acting on that thought, Becky got on the phone and got to work.  She organized, cajoled and testified.  She arranged meetings, put together petitions, and testified at hearings.  Before she was done, she had obtained a million dollars to dredge the silt out of the creek.  Then she went to work looking for money for reclamation of the mountains.  Surprising even herself, she was able to raise $940,000 to stabilize the mountains and restore their ecological base.

From that success and her new understanding emerged the purpose and direction of her life.  Though they live on nothing more than Bobby’s disability pay, the Simpsons founded the Cranks Creek Survival Center, which sees to those in need in a dozen counties in the tri-state area of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee.

“Human suffering has always moved me,” Becky said, “but I had no idea that any one person could really do anything about it.”

Becky and Bobby do whatever needs to be done.  Thousands of volunteers – Becky’s unknown friends – have come to help.  They have come from the entire east coast and more than a dozen foreign nations, including India, China, Africa, and Brazil.   It is a testimony to the depth of poverty in Appalachia that residents of countries we tend to think of as poor have traveled halfway around the world to aid Americans who are even poorer.

Bobby supervises their building projects and directs the gathering of supplies.  Though sightless, he has learned the highways by heart, navigating his driver with a collection of audio and visual cues he has stored up in his mind.

“A lot of handicapped people just sit down and don’t try to do nothing,” he explains, “but there is always something you can do if you try.”

“Somebody once said it was my work,” Becky concludes.  “I said, no, it ain’t my work.  It’s my life.  I had a dream since I was a child that someday I was going to help needy people and now I can do it.  It has to be a miracle.  That’s the only way I can explain it.

Everyone is needed.  As the Simpsons demonstrate, everyone can contribute.  No one needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.