Spiritual Common Sense

Most of our formal education is dedicated to the perfection of skills without considering their application.  For many people, including myself, the result is often a confusion of means and ends which first manifests itself when we graduate from school and find ourselves wondering if we really want to do what we are told we have been prepared to do.

As Martin Luther King said, “Every person must feel responsibility to discover his mission in life.”  For many people, this is a question we never ask until it is forced upon us.

More often than not, direction can be found in response to a simple question.  If God is love, “What does Love require of you?”

You can begin to divine your mission in life by considering how your talents might prove useful to others.  The use of your talents to pursue your own interests is a dry hole – more than a meaningless exercise, a waste of your unique opportunity to change the world. 

What Love requires is that you listen with your heart and use the talent and skill you have been given to some good end, to do that which if you do not do will remain undone.  There is pride and dignity in any activity that helps.  There is satisfaction, joy, and fulfillment in any job worth doing. 

So long as what you do serves or contributes to the well being of others, as Mother Teresa says, it doesn’t matter what you do.  “What matters is the love you put into what you do.”   The most meaningful people in our lives do small acts with great love.

God has given each of us the capacity to achieve some end and the talent to serve some purpose.  No matter what you think you are prepared to do, no matter where you think your life should lead, there is no success, no satisfaction apart from this purpose. 

Each day you will meet indifference, ingratitude, disloyalty, dishonesty, greed, ill will, and selfishness.  A life of love requires we answer with honesty, integrity, compassion, good will, and selflessness.

Love requires you to be not less human but more human.  Love requires that we listen, not with our heads but with our hearts, and act – as God would act – with compassion for all living things.

Like many others, I was fascinated by the discovery of black holes in space.  Though they can not be seen by the eye or directly measured with any known instruments, scientists concluded that black holes exist simply because the behavior of other stellar bodies told them that there had to be something there.  Something that could not be seen was influencing the behavior of everything that could be seen.

At almost the same time, physicists discovered a parallel behavior in the smallest bits of matter.  Ernest Rutherford’s experiments found the atom was relatively vacant.  Instead of the basic building blocks of matter anticipated by classical physics, Rutherford found the atom consists of vast regions of space in which extremely small particles move more or less at will. 

Quantum physics extended these finding with experiments that demonstrate that the particles within the atom are no more substantial than the atom itself.   There are no “solid” objects at any level.  Even the smallest bits of matter turn out to be abstract entities with aspects that change depending on why they are being examined and how we look at them.  Rather than being the detached and distant observers they were trained to be, scientists found themselves participating in every experiment, influencing the results with their expectations.

In other words, everything in the universe is affected by the behavior of everything else.  Everything that happens outside us happens inside us as well.  We are at once a being composed of millions of life forms, a part of the total body called humanity, and a cell in the universe. 

Experiment after experiment in the new physics has shown how one thing influences another across the boundaries of our seeming separateness.  The movement of the stars in the sky is identical to the movement of the atoms in our bodies.

Everything is relative.  Everything is related.  In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, “When the electron vibrates, the universe shakes.”

The dismantling of the classical vision of the separateness of things confirms the understanding theologians have long held about the unity of life.  We have one relationship on earth.  That relationship is repeated in endless variety with everyone we meet and everything we see.  

God, man, and the universe are one indissoluble whole.

‘Tis the season to remember and celebrate the power of love. 

What is the one indispensable ingredient of life?

What is the most potent force in the universe?

How is God manifested in the world?

What is God’s greatest gift?

Where can we at once find the solution to the problems in our lives

and the problems of the world?  

We were created out of love to love and be loved.

Love is all we need.   

I can’t write about politics any more.

They say you should only write about things you know.  I grew up on Capitol Hill and spent half of my professional life there.   Once I knew it like the back of my hand, but I don’t recognize it now.

When I came to Washington, giants walked the corridors of the Capitol.   One of the largest was a small woman from Maine – Margaret Chase Smith.   A moderate Republican, she was the first to call out Joe McCarthy for the liar and bully he was.  She did it to his face on the floor of the Senate when most of her colleagues where sucking in their balls, ducking, and running for cover.

In a “Declaration of Conscience”, she denounced “the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle.”   She said McCarthyism had “debased” the Senate to “the level of a forum of hate and character assassination.” 

While acknowledging her desire for Republicans’ political success, she said, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”

Paul Douglas of Illinois was another hero.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called him “the greatest of all the Senators.”

There is plaque at Paris Island that pretty much says it all. It reads:  “Graduating from Parris Island in 1942 as a 50-year-old Private, Mr. Douglas was an inspiration to all.  He rose to the rank of Major while serving in the Pacific Theater where he was wounded at Peleliu and Okinawa.  Retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. The former economics professor later served as a U.S. Senator from Illinois. By his personal courage, fortitude and leadership, the Honorable Paul H. Douglas demonstrated the personal traits characteristic of a Marine leader.”

Douglas received the bronze star and two purple hearts.  The last injury cost him the use of his left arm and left him permantly disabled.   In the Senate, he personally wrote the Senate’s first ethics manual and earned a reputation as a man of incorruptabilty. 

Ted Moss was another pillar of integrity.  Moss refused campaign contributions he sorely needed from the Senatorial campaign committee of his own party because they came with strings attached.  When he squeaked out a victory, he took on the tobacco industry to inform the public of the danger of smoking at a time when their lobby supported half of Congress.  The Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes is one of his contributions. Then Moss took on the automobile industry, which, believe it or not, insisted it was too expensive to put seat belts in cars. Now you can’t drive without one.

I also fondly remember Jacob Javits, George Mitchell, Bobby Kennedy, Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey.  Goldwater and Humphrey come to mind a lot these easy because they were politically as far apart as you could be.  They disagreed about everything but they were never disagreeable.  They were both gentlemen.  They respected each other, listened to each other, and would even take the time to answer the impertinent questions of an elevator boy.

That was the first of my many jobs on The Hill.  Over some twenty-five years, I did just about everything you can do there.  As a professional, I worked for four Senators – two Republicans and two Democrats.  I did so without hesitation or compromise.  While there were some differences between them, there were far more commonalities – most of all a commitment to “make things better.”  Significantly, all four of them left Washington with less wealth than they had when they arrived.  That doesn’t happen much these days.

These are the people I remember.  These are the people I miss.

In A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt writes,  “If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly.  And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes.  But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all…why then perhaps we must stand fast a little –even at the risk of being heroes.”

The moment is upon us.  Perhaps there will be those who will step forward and stand on principle.  Perhaps a hero will emerge.  There is always hope the better angels of our nature will prevail.

Sad to say, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Alexis de Tocqueville provided the first – and perhaps best – analysis of American society.  

The French philosopher and historian came to this country in 1831 and spent three years in the United States.  He timed his visit deliberately, in his words, to be here “near enough to the time when the states of America were founded to be accurately acquainted with their elements, and sufficiently removed from that period to judge some of their results.”

Asked to sum up his observations when he returned to France, de Tocqueville said, “America is great because America is good.  America will cease to be great when it is no longer good.”

In Democracy in America, published in 1835, de Tocqueville explained his conclusion saying there is an “enlightened self-interest” that governs nearly every public and private action in America. 

“They show with complacency,” he wrote, “how an enlightened regard of themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other.”

De Tocqueville was talking about the core value at the heart of America – Compassion.  It’s a value as old as civilization itself, adapted, perfected, and structured by the founding fathers to fulfill the promise of a new land.

Five centuries before Christ, Sophocles observed, “kindness begets kindness.”  Later, in Rome, Tertullian observed, “He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.”

Our Judeo-Christian heritage emphasizes this value.  The Torah reminds us “deeds of love are worth as much as all the commandments of the law,” while Christians are bound to “love one another as I have loved you.” 

The founders of the American republic were animated by their Christian faith.  They established compassion as the central value in our social, economic, and political systems.  Without it, our society would self-destruct. 

As I watch the daily news, I can’t help wondering if we have reached the tipping point.  Is de Tocqueville’s prophecy coming true?

Compassion is the bridge between us.  It connects our lives by a thousand sympathetic threads.  Daily it seems that bridge is being destroyed.  The threads that connect us are being shredded.  We have never been so divided and alone.

I have drunk deeply from the well of goodness at the heart of America.  I have tried to contribute to it in my personal life and with programs I helped create.  It has enriched the quality of my life more than I can say, but the tide seems to be turning. 

The dogs of darkness have been unleashed.  Fear is rising and the better angels of our nature being oppressed.  Nothing less than the future of our society is at stake.

A poem stands at the entrance of the United Nations, carved on buildings we helped erect to support the alliance we helped create at a time when we were the light of the world.  The words were written by the Persian poet, Saadi Shiraz.

All the sons of Adam are part of one single body,

They are of the same essence.

When time afflicts us with pain

In one part of that body

All the other parts feel it too.

If you fail to feel the pain of others

You do not deserve the name of man.

This is compassion distilled to its essence.  It rests on the difference between saying, “I am my brother’s keeper” and saying “I am my brother.”   

That understanding is what has always made America great.  That fundamental goodness is what is now being challenged. 

In the words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  As always, the question is how will we respond.  America will be whatever we choose to be.