Doris Kearns Goodwin on Work, Love, Play, and a Bit of Memoir

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin combines her knowledge of American presidents with Eric Erickson’s observation that we need to balance three needs–love, work, and play–in order to be fulfilled people.

She describes Lincoln’s love of the theater and storytelling and contrasts his ability to play with Lyndon Johnson’s fixation on work. She herself has mastered the art of telling stories. If you listen to her all the way to the end, you will discover a treat. Her tribute to her father and to baseball is a mini-memoir masterpiece.

How do you combine love, play, and work in your life? Is play the hardest one for you, too?

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Love and Death: Forrest Church’s Testimony and a Mini-Memoir

Forrest Church’s voice rings in my head today. I finished his memoir last night, and  many of his themes are ones deeply embedded in my own life.  His 2008 book, Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, published by Beacon Press, focuses on the two big ideas of the title, especially as they have crescendoed  in the last three years– since the Fall of 2006 when he received the diagnosis of esophageal cancer.

Forrest Church is former Idaho Senator Frank Church’s son. He chose ministry over politics in order to become his own person. Church begins the book by telling us that love and death have been the subjects of almost all his sermons at All Souls Unitarian Church–even before he got cancer. When he was 19, his closest friend at Stanford died, leaving him bereft and changed forever.  This death taught him that “We cannot protect love from death. But by giving away our hearts, we can protect our lives from the death of love.”

When the doctor gave Church his recent cancer diagnosis, what surprised him most was the immediate acceptance he felt facing death.  He had no unfinished business.  I hope you can listen and watch him on a Religion and Ethics Newsweekly broadcast last October as he talks to Bob Abernethy about both his own acceptance and his wife and family’s rejection of that acceptance.

Church’s themes are repeated in this book many times. They illustrate the genius of simplicity, the kind that lies on the far side of complexity, and his approaching death seems to have boiled down even that simplicity into the most exquisite sauce. Like a fine chef’s reduction, each chapter of this book returns to what Church calls his mantra:

• love what we have
• do what we can
• be who we are

Church is a Christian Universalist and therefore uses the life and teachings of Jesus as a framework for his theology.  As a Mennonite, I appreciate this emphasis, which helps me to see the universal truths of my own tradition.

Forrest Church has come into my own life through an interesting set of “coincidences.”

• Our family spent Christmas eve of 2007 in New York and chose to attend the All Souls Christmas Eve Service before any of us had we ever heard of Forrest Church.  We heard him give the now-famous closing prayer (read it here) of the service, which is included in this memoir as the last chapter.
• Our son Anthony was with us and also heard the prayer.
• A few weeks later, he was searching on Match.com and noticed a young woman who was an active member of All Souls
• On Sept. 12 of this year, almost two years later, he and Chelsea will marry–at All Souls
• I ordered Church’s memoir because of Chelsea’s admiration of her minister and my appreciation for her as we welcome her into our family

None of us, including Forrest Church, know the time when death will come.  But all of us can learn from him how to prepare–by loving what we have, doing what we can, and being who we are. Only the love we gave away will remain behind.  The motto on the wall of my childhood farmhouse home said it in a more Mennonite way:  “Only one life, ’twill soon be past.  Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Next Sunday, May 31, 2009, I hope to hear Forrest Church deliver the sermon at All Souls, something he has not done in a long time.  Anthony and Chelsea will be celebrating their engagement that weekend with friends and family and have invited all of us to attend church with them. Our daughter Kate and her own fiance’ Nik will be there also. Love has already enveloped us this year, and for that we can only respond with gratitude.  What better place to do that than church?

Chelsea tells us we will need to arrive early in order to be sure to have a seat. Apparently, love attracts a crowd.

Forrest Church does not know that his story has woven itself into a Mennonite family from the midwest. But he already knows that love is the greatest force in the universe.  He has lived this truth all his life–and, having looked into the jaws of death–is living it even more!

Mini-Memoir: What I Learned from Students in Haiti and the Ivory Coast (on SST)

The question comes to me from a blogger in Orange County, CA, who has a following in her own blog from ex-patriots all over the world.  What did you learn from your students in Haiti and in the Ivory Coast?

First of all, you need to know about the Goshen College Study-Service Term (SST).  This program, begun in 1968, is unique in American higher education.  First, it is a general education requirement.  That means the vast majority of students study abroad for one semester.  Second, it takes place in a significantly different (not junior year abroad in Europe!) culture from that of the U.S. (right now that means Jamaica, Peru, China) and over the years students have studied in more than 15 countries.  And third, it includes some kind of service–a mini-Peace Corps-like experience.

My husband Stuart and I were faculty leaders in Haiti 1981-82.

We had another group of Haiti SSTers whose picture I could not locate.  Anyone reading this post who has such a picture–please send it!

Below is our Ivory Coast group (1993).

A number of our students during these three semesters are now our friends on Facebook. I invite them to make comments on what they now value about the experience, looking back.  Here are a few memories labeled by what I learned.

Curiosity

I was 33 years old, the mother of a 5-year-old and a recently minted PhD when our family went to Haiti.  I loved the country immediately and was heartbroken by it at the same time.  So much poverty and ecological degradation, yet so much beauty, joy, and spiritual energy.  When our first group of students disembarked, one month after our own arrival, Stuart, Anthony, and I were excited.  We rode with them from the airport to the unit house on the little bus driven by Danilo, our storytelling driver.  The students wasted no time in jumping into the new culture.  “Bon soir!” they shouted to bystanders as we pulled out of the airport driveway.  Soon they were kissing host family members on both checks.  And then they were whisked away.  They told us tales in their journals of how they learned.  Often it was from their younger “brothers” and “sisters” whose simpler vocabularies, patience, and curiosity turned them into great teachers.

Here’s one of those young teachers–Francesca–cavorting in the wild flowers with our son Anthony.

Courage

It takes a lot of courage to live in someone else’s home in a strange land, speaking their language imperfectly, and losing the comfort of the familiar.  As leaders, we had our own family around us and our own house to live in.  Students were quick to point out that they were subject to more culture shock than we were due to these facts.  They were right.  Of course, it takes a little courage to take on the responsibility of the health, wellbeing, and learning of 12-23 other people, but we didn’t argue about who was braver.  We helped each other focus.  There were mishaps of all kinds from the minor cuts and scrapes to some truly scary situations.  And some students were struggling with difficulties at home that we knew only superficially.  But every student taught us something about our own fears and how to face them.

Students read their journals aloud in some of our meetings.  We would laugh and cry together, releasing fear and gathering strength from each other.  I remember stories about witnessing a beating, seeing vigilante justice in the streets, trying to explain complicated ideas in French and feeling like a fool, feelings of anger toward “ugly Americans” on cruise ships who tossed quarters into the ocean to watch the poor Haitians dive for them.  Students absorbed these shocks and found equilibrium in the midst of great change.  We admired them and found it easy to put our arms around them, literally and figuratively.

Humility

We were not experts in almost anything on SST.  We were not excellent speakers of French or Creole.  We were not anthropologists or comparative religion or literature savants.  We were instead immersed, like the students themselves, in reading as much as we could about the culture, making friends at the university with professors who lectured on their specialties to all of us.  We learned that we could be servants of our students in facilitating learning and that as they learned something new, we did also.

Students also learned humility.  The majority of them were white and the majority of the host country citizens were black.  The complications of navigating racial difference in this setting helped them become more aware of what it feels like to be in a minority.  The perceptions of America abroad, often created by television and movies, made it hard for our students to feel understood as individuals rather than types.  This, too, was humbling.

Love

The most important lesson our students taught us was love.  At the end of every semester, after students had returned from spending six weeks in the villages and towns outside the capitol city, they greeted us and each other with shouts of joy and tears of gratitude for all that they had learned.  They shared stories of looking up at the stars at night through the open roof of a shack and feeling wonder–wealth–in the midst of what would have seemed like deprivation before.  They told us of the farewells they had experienced as a whole village walked with them, carrying their bags to the bus station, and they marveled at the way their complicated lives had simplified when there was time to talk and walk and experience nature.  Sometimes they told us they felt wrapped in God’s love and in the prayers of friends and family even in the loneliest, scariest times.  Othertimes, they trusted us with the depth of their despair–another form of love. They thanked us for being their surrogate parents, cultural guides, nurses and doctors, guidance counselors, and friends.  We thanked them for their resilience, curiosity, comradeship, energy, and insight.

But we can never thank them, and the people of Haiti and Cote d”Ivoire who shared their lives with us, enough.  We lived enough in these three semesters to continue learning the rest of our lives.

Thank you, SSTers, wherever you are!  And I hope at least a few of you add your own thoughts below.

What have you learned from your experiences in a foreign land, whether on SST or in any other setting?

Six-Word Memoir Valentine’s Day Special

If you have not yet discovered the joy of the six-word memoir, here’s a past post that will fill you in–a lecture at Google by the authors of this book:

And if you missed this week’s long NPR segment on six-word memoirs on love and heartbreak, here’s the link that will take you there.

Below is a sampling straight from the NPR website of love-related six-word memoirs.

Red-eye. Him window. Me aisle. Love.
- Joanne Flynn Black

What do you want for dinner?
- Drew Magary

If only he wasn’t a Republican.
- Holly Fitzpatrick

Best family ever. Thank you, Match.com!
- Alexa Young

Marriage, children, empty nest: Now what?
- Oliver House

Excerpted from Six-Word Memoirs On Love And Heartbreak from Smith magazine, edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith. Copyright 2009. Reproduced with permission of the publisher, Harper Perennial.

Want to try your hand at a six-word love story memoir.  Leave one in the comment space!

Fetzer Workshop on Reflective Writing: The Conclusion

Today I finished leading the last 1.5-hour workshop in a series of four which took place at the Fetzer Institute. I think the title of this workshop–Timed Writing–may have scared away potential participants.   Sounds as jolly as retaking the SAT.  Despite the title, and despite the fact that four people on the list could not make it, we gathered around the candle in The Commons area and delved into the topic of writing and love–with one 15-minute timed writing assignment.  I offered the choice of two topics:  (1) walk through the house you grew up in until you uncover a story (2) think about who taught you about love in childhood and describe what you learned using all five senses.

I learned to appreciate timed writing when I took a workshop with Barbara Samuel, who is also Barbara O’Neale and has just published a new book:  The Lost Recipe for Happiness, a novel, which is off to a great start. Here’s how Barbara herself describes her recent life:  “It’s been a thrilling few months, with auctions in the US, between the UK and Australia, and in Germany. The book has also sold to Denmark, Holland; to Recorded Books (read by the wonderful Bernadette Dunn, who has read all of my books). It’s also available in electronic form. My new website should be up and running by the end of this week: www.barbaraoneal.com and you can always still find me at my regular blog, A Writer Afoot.”

Barbara used a lot of five-ten-minute writing assignments last summer at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.  I was amazed to see how much good work and insight can come from asking interesting questions in a safe and stimulating environment.

I can’t tell you what the students learned from me, but I can describe a few things I learned from my students today:

• each of them wrote a gem of a story within 15-20 minutes
• each of them has nourished a hidden desire to write, perhaps even a repressed calling to write
• each of them experienced love in childhood that still exists as sensory-rich memory
• workshops give people a structure and an audience, two things aspiring writers cannot take for granted
• loving and truthful criticism helps writers gain courage
• writing helps people sort their thoughts
• writing helps us deal with fear and anger without taking out these feelings on others and may help the writer transform fear and anger into love and forgiveness
• learning more about each other in a setting like this workshop brought us closer together even though we work in three different units of our organization. Writing increases love!
• love naturally leads us to gratitude. We were grateful that on a very wintry day in Michigan we could experience together our organization’s mission through the powerful combination of writing and memory.

Memoir and Love: The Vital Connection

All during the long holiday season/vacation I took this year, I have been mulling over the connection between memoir and love.  Intuition tells me things that I can only later articulate.  This has happened to me all my life.

I love the story, whether it be true or apocryphal, that Einstein saw himself riding on a beam of light before he was able to come up with the general theory of relativity.  I too see visions, or more frequently, read something or feel something, that shouts, “Pay attention.  This is what you are looking for!  This is a clue to the meaning of your existence.”  When this happens, I become alert as a beagle with a fresh scent.

My experience with writing has been extensive.  But almost all the writing I have done has been instrumental–writing to persuade, to inspire, to connect, to explain.  The Roman poet Horace said more than 2000 years ago that poetry’s purposes boil down to three words;  “utile et dulce,” usefulness and sweetness.  Today we might say instruction and entertainment.   Or ethical and beautiful.

Oscar Wilde and other aesthetes exult in “dulce” and scoff at “utile.”  Propagandists push “utile” and incarcerate “dulce.” Most modern literary writing values “dulce” most but has at least some “utile” motives, whether they are overtly acknowledged or not.

Robert Frost described the dream of making one’s vocation and avocation one and the same.  I have that same dream.  In some ways, I have been able to live that dream because I have been involved in two vocations–education and foundation leadership–that unite my values and strengths.  I sense that I am ready for a deeper kind of marriage between these two.

Ever since joining the Fetzer Institute four years ago, and then again before my 60th birthday last summer when I created this blog, I began to feel one of those strong intuitions about my vocation of leading people and programs that foster awareness of the power of love and forgiveness and my avocation of writing, including the kind of writing (literary memoir? blogging about memoir? teaching workshops about memoir?) that allows “dulce” to emerge yet maintains an important role for “utile.”

“What is the connection between memoir and love?”  This was the question that prompted my quest.  So often, when I frame the question clearly enough, some new gift of words or image floats into my hands or unto my screen.  This week, my answer came in the form of a poem of Wendell Berry’s in Wednesday’s Writer’s Almanac .

Thursday I told my colleagues, in program staff meeting, that I would be content to have this poem serve as my eulogy or even my epitaph.  Children, writing, and work–all of them came from the same nameless place of Love.  These Wendell Berry words about wordlessness stung me.  I recognized the tears of truth:

The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

An Op Ed–Memoir Style–About Socialism

I was hoping that Newsweek would want to take this article for “My Turn,” but since the election is tomorrow and the time will have passed for the relevance of this essay, I offer it here to you.  What good is a blog if you can’t self-publish?

I love when old categories are rearranged as a new paradigm emerges.  I think we are in the midst of experiencing such a transformation in our political and social life in this country.  What do you think?

Socialism or Family Values?

By Shirley H. Showalter

I know a thing or two about family values, thrift, and faith. I grew up Mennonite in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1950’s.

Here are some lessons I learned from my parents: Grant everyone equal dignity. The wealthiest and poorest members of the congregation are equal in the sight of God. The most seemingly impoverished person might be the richest in wisdom and love.

Here are more lessons: If people are hurting, come to their aid. When death occurs, be there – and take a cake, flowers from the garden, or a card. After a medical emergency, take up a collection. A disaster? Send a team of carpenters, painters, and cooks. Give away clothing your children have outgrown. Turn rags into rugs. Use the butter wrapper to grease the cookie sheet. When you move out of a house, whether you rented or owned it, shine the windows, the walls and the floors and leave a blessing for the next occupant. Help each other. Love each other.

My mother used to require us five siblings to sing a song when there was friction or fretting or complaining: “When your work is my work and our work is God’s work, when we all work together, how happy we’ll be.” I hated that song and would groan every time she started it. But usually by the second verse, I would join in, perhaps with some mocking extra treble. But my mother knew what she was doing. The principles she trilled into me in youth have not departed from me.

I am reminded of these values during the election campaign, especially since socialism has become the focus. Joe the Plumber objected to Barack Obama’s economic plan because Obama proposes to increase taxes on those who make more than $250,000 a year. The phrase “spreading the wealth” has brought out a refrain of “socialism!” Sarah Palin has taken to calling her opponent “Obama the Wealth Spreader.”

The idea for graduated tax rates was implemented during the Woodrow Wilson administration when the income tax was first introduced in 1913 through the sixteenth amendment to the Constitution. Most people were unaffected by the first taxes imposed, and the rates were seven times higher at the top than they were at the bottom. Since then, the principle of a graduated, or progressive, income tax has been a staple of American tax policy. Yes, such a tax does “spread the wealth,” redistributing income from the highest income earners to the lowest through social programs. But this redistribution into social programs is a relatively small part of the federal budget, much of which goes to the military.

I encourage Americans of all political persuasions to look past inaccurate labels like socialism and ask the following questions about all candidate. Does this candidate play well with others? Does he or she have a compassionate heart and a clear mind? Does the candidate know how to put a whole team together, roll up his or her sleeves, and get the work done? Could this potential leader be trusted with the lives of fellow citizens?

One of my colleagues has a phrase that helps me when I disagree with someone–“assume integrity.” I want to assume, despite the shrill tone, attack ads and robocalls of the last weeks of this campaign, that America is longing for basic decency and community spirit. We are the kind of people who created public libraries, a national park system, and a national capital full of museums totally supported by tax dollars. Locally, we unite to help each other when someone’s house burns down, another needs dialysis, or children show up in school hatless and coatless during the winter.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, Sr. have both said they are willing to pay more taxes and support a heavier tax burden on the very rich. The coming Social Security crisis could be averted if those earning more than $102,000 (the current ceiling) would be taxed on their total earned income. And capital gains taxes are only 15 percent, lower than they have been in previous administrations. They could be increased too.

If Warren Buffet can sing “when we all work together,” so can I. I’m no billionaire, but I could end up paying more taxes if all of the above increases take place. I was socialized to call this community, and I think our country craves it. Help each other. Love each other.