Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [77]
Lewis described, in his first talk, the politics of compassion in the context of his work trying to stem the tide of HIV and AIDS in Africa. It was a stark tale, full of death and misery, interspersed with anecdotes about his encounters with rape survivors, AIDS orphans, and genocidal militias. In the midst of all that, he described his own efforts and the efforts of others like him to put a halt to a disease with infection rates in some parts of the continent close to 50 percent. The common reaction to his talk was a sort of loose-jawed awe: the sense that, though you did not doubt his words, you simply could not believe the message. How can so many be dying, in pain, tortured, and helpless and I have not lifted one finger to come to their aid?
What was more humbling was that this man was doing something. He was dedicating his life to a mission, applying his passion, and not surrendering to the hopelessness that his experiences must have impressed upon him. And all I was doing was accepting false credit for bringing him to town (and successfully pointing out the location of the washrooms).
Things might not have been so bad had he not been scheduled to speak again that evening. The speech itself, once he delivered it, just reaffirmed my interest in his topic and my anxiety at my lack of a meaningful contribution. It was the prespeech meeting that really caused me problems.
Mr. Lewis was brought to Chris’s office. Another member of the organizing committee and I had been given the task of entertaining him, more or less, while he awaited his turn to speak. The benefit, the quid pro quo, was that we had the opportunity to speak with him. I was mindful of the intrusions on Mr. Lewis’s schedule and was determined not to bother him. Graciously, however, he invited some conversation. We talked of his university days, his father, and volunteering. I was invigorated, but at the same time I had a lingering sense of a lack of personal accomplishment.
I’m not sure it struck me at the time, but this is the very force that drove me to take up this virtuous journey—the notion that I just wasn’t doing enough with my time on this mortal coil. Stephen Lewis was just inadvertently reinforcing that feeling.
I am not sure why I said what I said next. Maybe I sensed that this was a chance for some guidance—an opportunity to learn from a giant of virtue. Maybe I was just overwhelmed with the enormity of what he had been talking about at the conference. For whatever reason I said, “Mr. Lewis, as I get closer to forty, I am beginning to feel an impending sense that I should be doing more.”
I’m not sure what I expected him to say. A little pep talk maybe, a gem of moral guidance. What he did say caught me completely off guard.
“How do you think I feel? I’m sixty-eight.”
Here was this man of accomplishment—author, politician, activist, humanitarian, UN envoy, ambassador, philanthropist—expressing his own discomfort over his lack of achievement.
Everyone senses the ticking clock of mortality. Surely Franklin felt it as well. He was a great believer in the common good. He wrote: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” That is the nature of Franklin’s style of accomplishment, his idea of civic-mindedness—it is simply never enough.
You know by now that I am a believer in coincidence as evidence of the presence of something greater. Surely my few moments with Stephen Lewis, just as I was beginning to feel good about my efforts with Benjamin Franklin, were a reminder from . . . someone . . . that this course of virtues was about more than having a clean closet or a well-ordered desk. The pursuit of virtue was not a selfish journey for Benjamin Franklin, and neither, I was reminded, should it be for me.
CLEANLINESS