A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [51]
I watched those old ladies and, more important, experienced them. I knew from overhearing my grandmother’s gossip about the calamity in their own lives, yet I saw them encourage others when they themselves were suffering, when a child of their own was in trouble, when their own husband had lost his job, when their own spirit was in need of renewal. I got hugs when my good grades were announced, even when their own grandchildren had slipped into a gang. Their ability to love selflessly was constant and certain.
I have had so many blessings in my own life, so many improbable gifts, that I am long past questioning whether there is an invisible hand at work in my life. To me, God is real. But my years at Cosmopolitan, and the experience of those old ladies in hats, emphasized that faith is less about what you say you believe and more about how you live. I came to see those old ladies as embodiments of the faith we were taught. They showed me how to welcome and embrace all the people who walked into our church and into our lives, from whatever station. They meant “embrace” literally—a hug, a tactile expression of oneness and support.
Scripture itself is full of poetry about kindness and magnanimity, about the charge to care about and help your fellow man. In the words of the prophet Micah:
He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.
These truths are nondenominational. They can be found in the Koran and the Talmud as well as in the Bible. When Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, gave a speech at the Kennedy Library in Boston in 2008 on the strategic importance of foreign aid to poor countries, he described how all the major religions of the world have some version of the Golden Rule, that we treat others as we wish to be treated. Humanity cries out for this in every language on earth. Still, so little of our behavior, public or private, reflects what we all know to be true.
Some of these simple truths of faith traditions are lost in the pomp of organized religion. The pageantry of the Catholic mass or the rituals of Islamic prayer seem sometimes to overtake the message itself. Black ministers and white evangelical preachers, with their capes and dancing and speaking in tongues, sometimes let the showmanship and the fundraising crowd out the lesson of compassion in the text. Islamic “fundamentalists” obscure the gentleness of Islam and turn disenfranchised Middle Easterners into radicals who blame nonbelievers for all their troubles. It is hardly new in history to have religion used to justify oppression, hatred, or even violence. Still, it is jarring. More than once I have sat in a religious service and wondered what in the world the sermon’s message had to do with the simple command to show justice, mercy, and humility in our lives.
But the old ladies of Cosmopolitan keep calling to me. It is probably thanks to them that social justice has been at the core of my professional life. Social justice is faith in action. Judaism summons a charge to all believers: “Tikkun olam,” to repair the world. The notion, as our friend Amy Gorin puts it, has come to mean to live life as if you bear some responsibility for improving the lot of others. Tikkun olam is a call to look beyond ourselves and to see our stake in one another. That is the essence of community. We do not have to save the entire world on our own, but we can each repair some small corner of it. Our responsibility is to try. That is what the old ladies of Cosmopolitan were