Spiritual Common Sense

I was late to marry.  As soon as I approached puberty, my father began drumming into me the notion that marriage was most important decision of my life.  He told me to wait until I finished my education and warned me not to pick the wrong woman for the wrong reason.

He said I should find a good woman and suggested I look in the churches rather than in the clubs and bars.  My sense of humor was such that I told him I would do as he said and wait for them outside the confession booth – the theory being the longer they were in there the more likely they were to be worth waiting for.

My mother advised me to follow my heart.  She said I would know when I found the right person.  When I asked her how I would know, she always had the same infuriating response – “You’ll just know.”

As a result, I thought long and hard about marriage and the kind of person I wanted to share my life.  In law school, I even went so far as to make a list on a legal pad of all the attributes I wanted.  I compared every woman I met to that ideal.

Through the years, I found a number of women who met all my criteria.  They had all the qualities I thought I was looking for – and more.  I couldn’t find fault with them; still, something held me back.  It just didn’t feel right.

My friends – many of them married for years – watched from the sidelines with amusement.  Some, like Henri Landwirth, doubted I would ever marry.  Finally, he was bold enough to press the issue.

“Stop all this running around,” Henri said, “and just pick one.  It doesn’t matter whether it is this one or that one.  Just pick one and get it over with.  Pretty soon no one will have you.”

When I told him I had no intention of marrying until I was sure I had found the right person, he laughed and told me to stop kidding myself.  “You don’t even know what you are looking for,” he said.

When I said I did and began to describe the woman I hoped to find, Henri stopped short.  Something I said brought to mind a girl who worked with him at Give Kids the World.  It was one of the few times I have seen Henri at a loss for words.

Henri made the connection a month later.  He asked her to pick me up from the airport in Orlando the next time and I came to visit him and gave her $20 to buy me a drink.

One drink was all it took.  The connection was natural and immediate.  Neither one of us said anything about it for a while, but we both knew we were meant to be together.

When Angie accepted my proposal, twenty-one years ago today, I called Senator Moss to tell him the news.  Senator Moss was responsible for bringing me to Washington and through the years had become a friend, mentor, and second father.  I told him how wonderful she was and began listing her many attributes.  When I took a breath, he reminded me he had met her once.

“You know the package isn’t bad either,” he said.  He was in his eighties by then but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight.

They were all right – my mother and father, Henri and Senator Moss.  My life changed when she said, “Yes.”  Asking her to marry me was the best decision I have ever made.

When you are a boy playing soccer, probably the last thing you are thinking about is being safe.  For twelve-year-old Sead Bekric it nearly was when artillery shells blew up the ground beneath his feet in Bosnia.

The last memory Sead has before the darkness closed his eyes was watching a friend’s head being blown off.   He has no memory of the shrapnel that struck his eyes or the helicopter that would later come to fly him to Tuzla.

All he remembers is the pain.  He screamed in agony, seemingly forever, until he heard his younger brother’s voice.  Summing up his courage, he said, “I’m all right.  Don’t be afraid.”

A CNN crew passing by caught this touching exchange.  Within hours the image of this brave blind boy was broadcast around the world.  Millions of people saw the story.  Many undoubtedly wished they could do something to help.

One man did.

Bob Macauley, founder of AmeriCares, was watching from his office in Connecticut.  He told his assistant, Terry Tarnowski, “Let’s go get him.”

“Most of us can be terribly moved by something and even say within ourselves – ‘Oh, I wish I could do something.’  Bob never stopped there,” Terry recalls.  “With Bob that was just the beginning. The desire was just the first step and for him it was never a big step.   For Bob, it was as simple as I want to respond.  I will respond.  The best way to respond was the next step.”

At that time, Tuzla airport was not open for humanitarian relief flights, but somehow Bob persuaded the UN to let AmeriCares land long enough to collect the boy and bring him out.  Less than 24 hours after the boy lost his sight, a rescue team was en route.

The trip was harrowing.  Going in, the helicopter had to refuel at Split before the final leg to Tuzla.  Fighting was so fierce, the helicopter had to touch down, gas up, and leave in less than ten minutes; but two hours later, they were in Tuzla.

Sead lost his sight on Monday.  By Friday of the same week, he was in California being treated by the Jules Stein Eye Institute.

“It seems your approach is total commitment,” I told Bob when I heard this story.  “You decided you were going to get this kid one way or another and just went for it.”

“That’s right,” Bob said.  “If you know what the right thing to do is you just do it.  And if you explain to people what you are trying to do, they will want to help.  People love to get aboard.  They get a lot of satisfaction out of being part of it.  In Saed’s case, when we got him to the Netherlands the people at KLM had all seen his picture and wanted to help.  They put him on a plane and flew him to LA free of charge.”

“When you see an opportunity like that, go for it.  Don’t weigh it back and forth, up and down, or go half way.   Don’t think of all the reasons why it won’t work, or second-guess yourself.  Just do it.  Make your mind up you are going to go and go.”

“If you are doing it for someone else, that’s almost a guarantee of success.  If you are doing it for yourself, that’s almost always a guarantee of failure.  If you don’t go for it when the window is open, it will never open again.  If you lead, others will follow.”

(Taken from “His Name Is Today,” the story of Bob Macauley)

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.