Weekly Soul. Week 8 - What Matters?
Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie.
-8-
Irenaeus, the great early church father, said the glory of God is a human
being fully alive. Now, if you back off from every little controversy in your
life, you’re not alive, and what’s more, you’re boring. It’s a terrible thing
that we settle for so much less… The greatest pleasure for me was being with
black civil rights leaders and followers, because they were so alive. You can
be more alive in pain than in complacency. These often very poor blacks in Alabama,
Mississippi, and Georgia, were so wonderfully alive, so cheerful, so
courageous.
You are alive as
you extend yourself on behalf of something that matters.
William Sloane
Coffin was no stranger to controversy. He certainly could have led, in his
words, a “polite” and “comfortable” life as a clergyman and college chaplain,
but in addition to these ministries, he was immersed over many years in
activism on behalf of justice and peace—c ivil rights, gay rights, nuclear
disarmament, antiwar advocacy—that brought him into conflict with the
established order.
His example of
aliveness comes from his participation in Freedom Rides of the 1960:; African
American people in the Deep South who came together in the vilified and
perilous work toward equality.
There is
aliveness in the commitment to a cause that matters to you.
When my wife and
I moved to our home in a pleasant neighborhood in a small college town in Maine
a number of years ago, the historic 1913 high school building a couple of
blocks away was in its waning days. It was finally abandoned and became, in the
words of a city official, “a magnet for vandalism and squatters.” After several
failed attempts to convert the building into something else or even tear it
down (apparently prohibitively expensive for public buildings of that vintage),
developers appeared who had particular expertise in renovating historic
properties for beneficial community purposes. They presented a plan to convert
the building into affordable housing while maintaining the design features of
the building that gave it its unique character.
Months of
planning meetings for public input followed, along with town council meetings
at which key decisions were made at successive stages of the project’s
evolution.
Early on, the
fault lines became clear. There was a large and vocal contingent of neighbors
from our part of the community who were adamantly opposed to the project. You
may anticipate their concerns. Lower income people would be a blight on the
neighborhood. Property values would go down. Traffic would increase. With one
other person who made a token appearance, my wife and I were the only public
supporters of the project. We thought that affordable housing was vitally
important to our community, that diversity increases rather than decreases the
richness of community life, and that the developer had had a strong track
record of planning and subsequently managing such renovations in a successful
way.
We were not
popular. I recall vividly the scene of sitting in a town council meeting, alone
with the primary developer in an otherwise vacant half of the room, with the
other half of the room filled with doubtful and visibly unsettled neighbors. I
recall comments to the council from nay-sayers being greeted with enthusiastic
applause and with my comments to the council being met with icy silence. I
recall angry and critical interchanges in the hallway and nasty emails.
Looking back, my
personal experience was a mixture of loneliness and exhilaration. It was
uncomfortable, and yet even in the face of criticism and disdain, I felt a
sense of aliveness, that I was standing up for something that mattered to me
and to the larger well-being of my community.
The project was
completed, by the way, and remains a vital community resource and a peaceful
and attractive element of the neighborhood. The first people who moved in were
two retired nuns.
In these
stories, there are degrees of perilousness. My experience was unpleasant, but I
wasn’t going to be arrested, beaten up, or, heaven forbid, shot or lynched as
were some of our African American sisters and brothers.
But aliveness in
extending yourself on behalf of something that matters does not necessarily
depend on degree of peril. You are alive when you make a comment that runs
counter to the flow of a conversation, when it would be easier to stay silent. You
are alive when you raise an idea that stands to move people in new and
uncertain directions. You are alive when you join a community of people who are
working together to redress an injustice. What you say or do doesn’t have to be
perfect, eloquent, or even successful. It just has to come from the heart.
Reflection
- Think
of a time when you said or did something that arose from your own values
even if you knew it might run counter to someone else’s thinking. What was
this like for you?
- Reflect
particularly on the idea of “extending yourself,” going beyond the place
where you would feel completely comfortable and safe.
- Notice,
in the week to come, opportunities to say or do something that comes from
the heart, when it would be easier to hold off.
Author
William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006) was an American clergyman and social activist. He grew up in a wealthy
New York family with a long tradition of engagement with progressive and
charitable causes. His initial passion was music, and he studied piano with
renowned teachers in Europe, intending on a career as a concert pianist. With
the onset of the Second World War, Coffin enlisted in the army and was involved
with military intelligence, subsequently continuing this work with the CIA in
its efforts to counteract Soviet influence in Europe. He left this career as he
became disillusioned with the CIA role in the overthrow of the
democratically-elected president of Guatemala, who had run afoul of American
interests with policies of agrarian reform benefitting hundreds of thousands of
indigenous people. He graduated from Yale Divinity School and served as
chaplain at Williams College and at Yale and later as pastor of the Riverside
Church in New York. He is best remembered for his outspoken advocacy and
leadership in issues of peace and civil rights, collaborating with Martin
Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and others, but he found particular
joy in individual pastoral work with young people. The quotation comes from an
interview, two years before his death, with journalist Bob Abernethy on the PBS
program, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
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