Eileen Flanagan

Thanks to Justamere Tree Farm Blog for this pictureThis story didn't make it into the book, but I've always loved it. The facts came from the Yale alumni magazine, though the interpretation is my own:

We live in a culture that values being tough and scorns those who are seen as naïve. But it is not naïve to look for the best in people. It really works, often better than defensive battling. One example comes from Yale University during the turbulent days of the Vietnam War. In May 1970, the Black Panther Party called for a large march in New Haven, home of Yale, while provocative leaders like Abbie Hoffman vowed to burn Yale down. The threat didn't seem idle. A month earlier there had been a march at Harvard that went bad when marchers found the Harvard gates locked, resulting in 214 hospitalizations and $100,000 worth of property damage. Yale President Kingman Brewster decided not to repeat Harvard's mistake. When the protesters came, he declared, Yale would not only keep its gates open; the university would coordinate their sleeping arrangements and serve them granola. Moreover, Brewster met ahead of time with student leaders to ensure a peaceful protest. The strategy worked. Although state troopers and Marines had been brought in by the state to quell the anticipated violence, the protests went relatively smoothly with the only vandalism caused by a fringe group of out-of-town provocateurs whom Brewster suspected of being "dirty tricks" operatives of the Nixon administration.

What strikes me about this story is the wisdom of keeping the Yale gates open and welcoming the protesters. We live in a culture that assumes grenades are stronger than granola, however, and Kingman Brewster was harshly criticized for these actions, accused of giving in to radicalism, even though his strategy for keeping the peace worked better than Harvard's. Even thirty-six years later, an article about this incident in the Yale alumni magazine provoked a diatribe against Brewster being soft on the radicals.

Kingman Brewster was a white man in control of a rich and powerful institution. His decision to yield came from a position of power. But what about when we don't have much power to begin with? Although we still have to accept our limited control, we may face a different challenge: the need to make sure we are not giving up too much. Indeed in promoting the spirituality of acceptance, I must quickly add that this real spiritual truth has sometimes been misused to keep people more passive than they need to be. In some ways, it is simple for a rich white man like Kingman Brewster to yield. The process is more fraught when someone like him is the one telling someone less powerful to yield.

Wallis' point about many of us not living with the poor was illustrated one night several years ago by my perceptive daughter. We were celebrating Lent, the forty days before Easter, when many Christians fast or give up some comfort, while trying to practice a heightened concern for the poor. We had decided to eat a simple meal once a week and donate the money we saved to Catholic Relief Services, which provided a small cardboard rice bowl and simple recipes from around the world for this purpose. One night when I was coaxing my five-year-old to try rice and black beans she asked, "Why can't we eat what we want and just give the poor people our rice and beans if they like this kind of food?" I tried to explain that many of the people who needed help lived far away, and it was easier for the organization to send our money, rather than our food.

"Aren't their poor people who live near here?" she asked. Well, yes, I responded, there were.

"So why don't we bring them our rice and beans?" she persisted. I had to explain that, while there are many poor people in Philadelphia, we don't actually know anyone who would appreciate us showing up with our unwanted rice and beans.

While I was still trying to explain this awkward fact, my daughter pointed to the Catholic Relief Services rice bowl and asked one more question: "Why do all the people on the box have brown skin?"

I tried to explain the history of colonialism to a five-year-old, but I'm not sure she got it, just as many middle class Americans don't understand that the African, Asian and Latin American faces on the brochures of relief organizations reflect a colonial legacy that made the West rich. We tend to assume that people are poor because of their own laziness or stupidity. Even the idea of learned helplessness can be used to blame the poor for their condition. That old Calvinist idea that the poor must somehow deserve their fate is more comforting than all those Biblical injunctions to care for those in need. When the people are far away, psychologically if not literally, and especially if they look different from us, it's easy to image that we are not connected to them.

This became clear to me when I returned from my two and a half years in Botswana. Friends and family often asked, "Were you alone in your village?" When I answered, "No, there were ten thousand people in my village," there was usually an awkward moment as the implication of my answer sunk in. Of course what they were really asking was, "Were you the only white person?" Or perhaps, "Were you the only American?" Their question reflected an unconscious assumption that those people were somehow too different from me to count. Such prejudice is one common barrier to compassion. I can't help thinking that if the 20,000 people who were dying of poverty each day were white, we would be paying more attention.

My Quaker meeting recently had a session where we shared some of our experiences with money. Dealing with poverty–our own or other people's–was one of the themes that emerged. Afterward someone asked me what I thought of a famous Gospel quote about the poor. As it turns out, I have a few paragraphs about that which got cut from the book, so here's another deleted scene:

Sometimes the things that need to be changed don’t affect us directly, making us unlikely to do anything about them unless we feel connected to those who do need help. Evangelical minister Jim Wallis makes this point, talking about Christians in the United States who do not live with people who are poor. Author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn?t Get it, Wallis explains:

Some people try to argue that when Jesus said, "The poor you will have always with you" (Matthew 26:11), it somehow provided justification for doing little or nothing about poverty, as if Jesus had said there would always be poor people among us, so why do anything about it? However, this misreads both the immediate and the broader contexts of his words.

Wallis argues that there are thousands of Bible verses that compel us to care for the poor, and Jesus' comment reveals his assumption that his followers would always be close to the poor, something Wallis points out is no longer true of many middle-class and wealthy Christians.

      In Jesus' time, ending poverty was a dream, something only God could achieve. In the twenty-first century, however, human beings could actually do it. All the experts say so. Yet the New York Times reports that more than 20,000 people perish every day from extreme poverty. Every day. (Some aid organizations say the number is higher.) What's lacking is not the ability to end or reduce crushing poverty. What's missing is the political will. Although the New York Times argues that global poverty poses a national security threat to the United States, solving poverty is not a priority for the US government, or for the US electorate, for that matter.

Here's another story from Sophie's interview that didn't make it into the book. Sophie had been previously described as a petit white woman with blond hair and blue eyes:

I recall another story Sophie told me once before she was ill. One night she was walking to her car on a dark city path in a neighborhood with a high crime rate. Sophie, who was in her sixties at the time, grew nervous when she heard footsteps. Then she heard a voice inside her say, "Turn around and go talk to the person behind you." Sophie turned and walked back toward a tall, young black man. As soon as she spoke to him, the fear left her. "Excuse me," Sophie said in her high, soft voice. "I'm walking alone to my car, and I would feel so much safer if you would escort me." Surprised, the young man agreed, and they chatted to the parking lot. As Sophie climbed into her car, she thanked the young man, who shook his head and said, "Lady, I was planning to mug you, but you were so nice to me, I couldn't do it." She thanked him again and said goodnight.

I love this story because it shows the difference between real wisdom and conventional wisdom. Because most white women are taught to fear black men (either by their mothers or by the stereotype-filled culture), approaching a tall black man on a dark city path is not what most sixty-year-old white women would do. But obeying the voice turned out to be much wiser than running would have been. Not only did it keep Sophie safe, it also may have helped the young man. Maybe it kept him out of jail. Maybe it prompted him to change his life. We don't know. All we know for sure is that the young man was moved enough to admit to Sophie his original intentions. We also know that she didn't hurt him, as people sometimes do when they are afraid. If she had heard a voice telling her to turn around and shoot the person behind her, that would have been a sign it was not God talking, since that would have contradicted several of the fruits of the Spirit.

Although this story was originally in the chapter about listening to your inner voice, it also makes me think about how our expectations of people–for good or for bad–affect them. 

Those of you who have read The Wisdom to Know the Difference may remember Sophie, who thought she was dying of leukemia and then had a remarkable full recovery after coming to complete peace. Well, here's a piece of her interview that never made it into the book, even though I was very touched by this story:

Near the end of our interview, Sophie told me with some urgency that there was one more story she had to share. She had been visiting her grandchildren when her two youngest granddaughters, ages five and six, pulled her aside in secret. The six-year-old sat her down and said, "We know that you're going to die soon, Grammy."

"You do?" Sophie asked, astonished because the girls had not been told about her cancer.

"We do," said the little girl. "And Grammy, it's OK. It's really OK because you're going to be an angel. It's going to be lonely, Grammy, but you will be there for us." Then the girls said, "The sad thing is, our mothers are not ready to hear this, so please don't tell them." Sophie said she wouldn't and asked the girls what they would do. "Don?t worry," they said, "When you die, we will take care of our mothers."

Although many people would have found such a conversation with their grandchildren painful or awkward, Sophie was deeply moved and joyful. She concluded our interview saying, "I've been given so much. See, I could have gone home and died the next week. I thought, "That's all I need. They have given me permission to die. What more could you want?"

How often do we underestimate our children's wisdom or their ability to see us more clearly than we see ourselves?