I BELIEVE IN LIFE
November 16, 2008
Deane Oliva

I would like to share with you a story that is working its way through the internet right now.  It’s smaltzy; it’s romantic, the kind of story that calls for a handkerchief or a tissue.  Yet, as with most of these beloved internet tales, it taps into our deepest emotions and our deepest truths.

            We all know what it's like to get a phone call in the middle of the night. This night's call was no different. Jerking up to the ringing summons, I focused on the brightly illuminated numbers on my clock. Midnight. Panicky thoughts filled my sleep-dazed mind as I grabbed the receiver. “Hello?"  My heart pounded.          "Mama?" I could hardly hear the whisper over the static. But my thoughts immediately went to my daughter. "Mama, I know it's late, but don't...don't say anything, until I finish. And before you ask, yes, I've been drinking. I nearly ran off the road a few miles back, and...and I got so scared. All I could think about was how it would hurt you if a policeman came to your door and said I'd been killed...I want...to  come home. I know running away was wrong. I know you've been worried sick. I should have called you days ago, but, I was afraid...afraid..." 

            Sobs of deep-felt emotion flowed from the receiver and poured into my heart. Immediately I pictured my daughter's face in my mind and my fogged senses seemed to clear. "I think--"

            "No! Please let me finish! Please!" She pleaded, not so much in anger but in desperation.  I paused and tried to think of what to say. Before I could go on, she continued, "I'm pregnant, Mama. I know I shouldn't be drinking now...especially now, but I'm scared, Mama. So scared!"

            The voice broke again and I bit into my lip, feeling my own eyes fill with moisture.  My husband left the room, returning seconds later with the portable phone held to his ear.  She must have heard the click in the line because she continued, "Are you still there? Please don't hang up on me! I need you. I feel so alone." 

            I clutched the phone. "I'm here, I wouldn't hang up," I said.

            "I know I should have told you, Mama. But when we talk, you just keep telling me what I should do. You read all those pamphlets on how to talk about sex and all, but all you do is talk. You don't listen to me.  You never let me tell you how I feel. It is as if my feelings aren't important. Because you're my mother, you think you have all the answers. But sometimes I don't need answers. I just want someone to listen"   

            I swallowed the lump in my throat and stared at the how-to-talk-to-your-kids pamphlets scattered on my night stand. "I'm listening," I whispered.

            "You know, back there on the road, after I got the car under control, I started thinking about the baby and taking care of it. Then I saw this phone booth and it was as if I could hear you preaching about people shouldn't drink and drive. So I called a taxi. I want to come home."

            "That's good, Honey," I said as relief filled my chest.

            “But you know, I think I can drive now."

            "No!" I snapped. My muscles stiffened, and I tightened the clasp on my husband's hand. "Please, wait for the taxi. Don't hang up until the taxi gets there."

            "I just want to come home, Mama."

            "I know. But do this for your mama. Wait for the taxi, please." I listened to the silence in fear.

            "There's the taxi, now."

            Only when I heard someone in the background asking about a Yellow Cab did I feel my tension easing.

            "I'm coming home, Mama."

            There was a click and the phone went silent.  Moving from the bed with tears forming in my eyes, I walked out into the hall and went to stand in my sixteen-year-old daughter's room. The dark silence hung thick. My husband came from behind, wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I wiped the tears from my cheeks. "We have to learn to listen," I said. 

            He pulled me around to face him. "We'll learn. You'll see." He studied me for a second, then asked, "Do you think she'll ever know that she dialed the wrong number?"

I believe in smaltz.  Yes, I watch reruns of 7^th Heaven, Touched by an Angel and you name it, if it appeals to the heart, to compassion, to the vulnerable me, I am touched in ways that say this is important to me. 

I believe in life.  I believe in the spirit of life, that indomitable spirit that says yes! To striving to be the best you can be.  Like the Army slogan, I want to be all I can be. But I didn’t learn it from the Army, I learned it from the picture stories of Catholic Release time religious education. I learned it from my father, I learned it from Horatio Alger.  Did you know that Horatio Alger was the son of a Unitarian minister, graduated from the Unitarian Harvard Divinity School in 1860 and from time to time served as a minister. His fame however, was for writing children’s stories. Although they are generally called boy stories, I devoured them. The typical Horatio Alger story featured a downtrodden youth who, against great odds, working with extraordinary diligence, perseveres to gain great success, not wealth, mind you, but fulfillment. This was my core belief system.

Not very theologically elegant, but theologically true. And certainly, I can adorn it with the conventional trappings of ministerial rhetoric.  Consider this:

My theological framework derives from my well developed sense of human nature. It is a transactional ecological model.   Humanity is driven by a survival instinct. Body, affect and mind, inextricably enmeshed with environment and context result in behavior.  Decisions are made and revised continuously, with each subsequent decision influenced by its physical, emotional, rational, environmental and contextual environment. 

My theological worldview includes an ardent belief that everything affects everything.  We are interdependent in the most primal sense of the word.  Our energies, the results of our feelings, thoughts and actions ripple in the container of our existence.  Like Charles Francis Potter, while I believe cosmic energy obviously exists, I see no evidence that it is directed by a conscious force. 

I believe that “soul” is the theoretical construct of a person’s translation of experience into meaning.  The soul conceives and holds reverently my higher being, that is, it makes my definition of the best person I can be.  Conscience is the judgmental quality of the soul.

My theological mentors include John Locke, John Dewey, Subcommandante Marcos, John Dietrich, Charles Francis Potter, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha, Jiyu Kennett, Paul Tillich, and Thomas Merton. I adhere to all versions of the Humanist Manifesto, the truths of Buddha, most particularly, the validity of the Eightfold Path, and the interconnectedness of all. I view the Unitarian Universalist principles as givens.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson states, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”[1]

See?  I can talk the talk, and at many levels it defines me.  Yet, my passion also defines me.  I know that when I cry at a movie, I am expressing my innermost convictions.  When I think of Horatio Alger books, I actually lift my head slightly, the Protestant ethic is instilled in my bones.  When I listen to or read about Barbara Jordan, the uniquely gifted African-American lawyer, public official, and educator, I am imbued with inspiration.  It is not just her presence, her oratorical skills, or her love of the Constitution, that draw me to her, it is also her drive, her manipulative skills, her predilection to considering self interest in her strategic planning.  To me, it is her whole person, strengths and weaknesses wrapped together as she strove to be the best person possible that mesmerizes me.

Barbara Jordan was a forensic expert.  I believe that debate skills are another way to ferret out one’s core beliefs.  It is only when we are stretched, required to confront the Swiss cheese of our analytical processes, forced not to skim but to dig deeper into our favorite theological clichés, it is only then that we can really flush out our true beliefs. It is only when we turn passionate, that we own our convictions.

James Luther Adams, the preeminent Unitarian Universalist theologian speaks to the talking points of our discussion: passionate interest, art as instructor, and the need to confront our conversational values. Consider this autobiographical statement:

One of the great surprises of my life came at the end of my senior year in college. I had been taking a course in public speaking, and all my speeches had been vicious attacks on religion as I knew it—at least, they had been as vicious as I could make them. The shock came one day when on leaving the classroom, I happened to say quite casually to the professor that I did not know what I was going to do after graduation. I was already profitably engaged in business, but I was thoroughly discontented. The professor replied in a flash, "You don't know what you are going to do? Why, I have known for months. Come around and talk to me some day." And then, right there in the presence of my enemies, the Fundamentalists, he smote me. "There is no possible doubt about it," he said. "You are going to be a preacher!" Later, I went by night, like Nicodemus, to question this strange counselor. Within six weeks the arrangements were complete. I was to attend Harvard Divinity School…. “ And at another point

“Nathan Soderblom has remarked that Bach's St. Matthew's Passion music should be called the Fifth Evangelist. So was Bach for me. One night as I sang, with the Harvard Glee Club, the Mass in B Minor under Koussevitzky at Symphony Hall, Boston, a renewed conviction came over me that here in the Bach Mass, beginning with the Kyrie and proceeding through the Crucifixus to the Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem, all that was essential in the human and the divine was expressed. My love of the music awakened in me a profound sense of gratitude to Bach for having displayed as through a prism and in a way that was irresistible for me, the essence of Christianity.”

And Adam’s biographer writes ….Another group of which JLA was a charter member, while related to Harvard, was the "Brothers of the Way." They, too, maintained a discipline, this one requiring every member to adopt devotional disciplines and also to be a participant in a controversial "secular" organization, feeling that only by means of the abrasive clash of important disputes are deep-seated values exposed. [2]

I learned of this need for depth to reach clarity when I confronted my anti war beliefs. For a time, I thought that I, like John Haynes Holmes, was a pacifist.  My mind worked down from war to family disputes and I was now swayed from my belief. Then, in my mind’s eye, someone tried to harm my daughter. Whoops! I’m not a pacifist.  Just where is my dividing line, I had to reconsider. I love those internal dialogues and the external discussion groups that challenge me to discern my core value system.  Give me six to ten people sitting comfortably any night of the week and discussing altruism, gun control, abortion and I know that I will learn more about my most tenacious beliefs.

I believe in smaltz, the kind that you find on the internet, forwarded to you from old friends, the heartwarming, tender, tear jerking stories that haunt you after you’ve read them through.  The ones that touch your heart and remind you of your values. 

Yes, I believe in smaltz, in those sappy stories that make you cry and remind you that you of your deepest vulnerability, that you have a heart that can never harden enough to keep out the deep truths, a heart that yearns for purity in the face of sometimes selfish reality, a heart that recognizes both its every day lapses in compassion and the extraordinary goodness that appears through grace.

SHOES IN CHURCH[3]
I showered and shaved... I adjusted my tie.
I got there and sat...In a pew just in time.
Bowing my head in prayer...

As I closed my eyes.
I saw the shoe of the man next to me...
Touching my own. I sighed.
With plenty of room on either side...
I thought, 'Why must our soles touch?'
It bothered me, his shoe touching mine...
But it didn't bother him much.
A prayer began: 'Our Father'...
I thought, 'This man with the shoes...
Has no pride. They're dusty, worn, and scratched.
Even worse, there are holes on the side!'
'Thank You for blessings,' The prayer went on.
The shoe man said...A quiet 'Amen.'
I tried to focus on the prayer...
But my thoughts were on his shoes again.
Aren't we supposed to look our best when walking through that Door?
'Well, this certainly isn't it,' I thought, Glancing toward the floor.
Then the prayer was ended...And the songs of praise began.
The shoe man was certainly loud...Sounding proud as he sang.
His voice lifted the rafters...His hands were raised high.
The Lord could surely hear...The shoe man's voice from the sky.
It was time for the offering...And what I threw in was steep.
I watched as the shoe man reached...Into his pockets so deep.
I saw what was pulled out...What the shoe man put in.
Then I heard a soft 'clink'...As when silver hits tin.
The sermon really bored me...To tears, and that's no lie.
It was the same for the shoe man...For tears fell from his eyes.
At the end of the service...As is the custom here,

we must greet new visitors...And show them all good cheer.
But I felt moved somehow...And wanted to meet the shoe man.
So after the closing prayer...I reached over and shook his hand.
He was old and his skin was dark...And his hair was truly a mess.
But I thanked him for coming...For being our guest.
He said, 'My name is Charlie. I'm glad to meet you, my friend.'
There were tears in his eyes...But he had a large, wide grin.
'Let me explain,' he said...Wiping tears from his eyes.
'I've been coming here for months...And you're the first to say 'Hi.''
'I know that my appearance is not like all the rest.
But I really do try...To always look my best.'
'I always clean and polish my shoes...Before my very long walk.
But by the time I get here, they're dirty and dusty, like chalk.'
My heart filled with pain...And I swallowed to hide my tears.
As he continued to apologize...For daring to sit so near.
He said, 'When I get here...I know I must look a sight.
But I thought if I could touch you...Then our souls might unite.'
I was silent for a moment...knowing whatever was said,
Would pale in comparison...
I spoke from my heart, not my head.
'Oh, you've touched me,' I said...'And taught me, in part;
That the best of any man...Is what is found in his heart.'
The rest, I thought, this shoe man will never know;
Like just how thankful I really am...
That his dirty old shoe touched my soul.

May we each touch a soul today.