Father Thomas Joseph White Extended Interview

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Fred Yi

Read more of the interview about Flannery O’Connor with Father Thomas Joseph White, O.P., a Dominican priest and instructor in theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC:

I myself am from Georgia and had never discovered Flannery O’Connor while living in the South, but while I was in a boarding school in Massachusetts at age 16 had works of Flannery O’Connor assigned to me in English class and read her for the first time, and shortly thereafter a friend of mine gave me her letters as a Christmas gift, and I read those somewhat assiduously and became very interested in her person, in her stories.

Reading Flannery O’Connor for the first time did change my life a little bit. I mean it was the first time I had read a Christian thinker, or a Christian writer who I thought was impressive intellectually and challenging. I was a secular person, and her worldview was so different, so abrasive in some ways, very jarring.

I found it offensive and fascinating and problematic and attractive, and so I acquired a sort of new sensitivity to Catholic thought. It was the first time I read a Catholic intellectual, and then I started reading some of the people she wrote about in her letters, the works she was reading of philosophy or theology, and discovered from that something about the Catholic intellectual tradition, and that led me to actually become a Christian. My mother’s from a Protestant background, so I initially sought baptism as a Protestant and then remained interested in Catholicism partly through [O’Connor’s] influence and then kept reading authors in that tradition, and eventually, within about three years, became a Roman Catholic.

Father Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

I can’t say that Flannery O’Connor’s writings directly influenced my decision to become a Catholic priest. I think that came from a higher source and intervention. But I think she was the first person I ever read who gave me the impression that Thomas Aquinas’s thought would be maybe quite important, and I joined the Dominican order eventually, which is an order that Thomas Aquinas was a member of, and where his thinking is very prevalent, so she gave me a first initial sympathy to his thought.

Many of her characters are people struggling with the question of whether there’s any meaning in the world at all or any meaning in life, and she has a great capacity to at the same time in a certain way project what that personality is—the searcher, or the person who questions meaning, and she also satirizes that person, sometimes brutally, and it’s both showing the pain of the person in disbelief or with lack of religious orientation and at the same time making fun of them. That is so provocative and almost painful, and I think it gave me the impression that someone could both understand me or understand something about me and also challenge me very deeply in my conception of the world religiously. I think that understanding of modern unbelief, and at the same time that kind of almost robust satire of modern unbelief was very provocative to me. It gave me the impression she had some perspective that would be interesting to chase down.

Flannery O’Connor’s said “people who read my works tend to think I’m a hillbilly nihilist, but I would like to be seen rather as a hillbilly Thomist,” and one of the things I think she’s clearly taken from St. Thomas is this understanding of what a sacrament is. In the Catholic tradition there are seven sacraments, and a sacrament is both a sign and an instrument of grace, so that it symbolizes what it also confides, that is to say the grace of God. She says very clearly in a number of places her stories are about how God’s grace works invisibly in the world for people who don’t have sacraments. So she’s trying to write as a kind of hillbilly Thomist about how God works in a non-Catholic terrain of southern Protestantism, of skeptical southern progressivists etc., and in that context looking at how kind of grace manifests itself in signs that are instruments, but you don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God. Someone throws the book across the room at someone they’re angry at, and the book is called “Human Development,” and when it smacks the person on the head you have the confiding of grace. The book is a sign and instrument of human development, and the absolute becomes manifest in this very concrete, sacramental way. In her story “Greenleaf” you have Miss May who’s gored to death by a bull, who represents Christ, and as the horn of the bull pierces her heart she looks up to heaven, and the bull is a sort of sacramental presence of grace. That’s very odd, it’s very provocative. It’s Catholic but with a very strange twist. The second thing I’d say about sacraments for Aquinas is they’re only suggestive of a glory to come. They’re not a full realization of what we will see in heaven, and so there’s a lot in Flannery O’Connor about a partial, almost secret unveiling of God in the world, leaving the reader with questions and leading the reader toward more questioning about God. So there’s a sort of mysterious ambivalence. If God’s at work in the world, we don’t find him very easily. His grace can explode onto the world, but it also leads us to a higher aspiration to see God, to know God beyond this world. That’s very Catholic. She talks about how she wants to stimulate an understanding of God’s grace hidden in the American South.

I think she’s trying to both teach and shock. Teach and shock are not opposed for her. She says that in a very secular world that we have trouble recognizing the sacred except under the signs of violence. But it’s not a violence that is from the outside. I mean she’s clear about that. The violence of the external, physical events that are shocking is meant to reflect an inner violence of the conversion of love, and she says this when she talks about the title of her book The Violent Bear it Away. She says St. Thomas says the violence that bears us away to Christ is the violence of love that allows us to overcome the defects of our own nature that’s fallen and that’s fragile and can be selfish and egoist. So it’s about the violence of love converting itself to God. The shocking violence of the exterior world is supposed to mirror the internal conversion of love. It’s not something that’s opposed to the will or destroying our freedom. It’s something opening our freedom. She’s very clear about that. Her stories are humorous because her stories are about liberation, but it’s often a liberation that comes despite our selves. We don’t want to be free. We actually want to be free from the love of God, and the love of God comes in kind of comic ways, almost violently frees us to be our better selves.

Flannery O’Connor was a very intuitive, I would almost say shoot-from-the-hip kind of Catholic. She had a deep intuitive sense of the truth in Catholic faith.

She says in one of her letters I am a Catholic not in the way some people are Baptists or Methodists, but in the way some people are atheists. It has a kind of evidential force for me that I find difficult to question’, not in the sense that she was an anti-intellectual. If anything she read avidly, lots of secular as well as religious authors and theologians. But there’s a sense in which she’s grounded in something prior to speculations or deductions or arguments. She’s got a deep intuitive sense of Christ present in the Mass. She says Mass is the stable pillar of her life, that it’s what makes life in the modern world tolerable for her. So she’s a fairly traditional Catholic, I think.

Flannery O’Connor says repeatedly in her letters to Betty Hester that dogma is not a force that’s anti-intellectual for a believing Catholic, nor does it cramp one’s freedom, but rather dogma preserves and safeguards mysteries that open the mind to contemplation and preserve the freedom of the person to approach God more intimately. So she sees dogma not as something anti-intellectual or hampering the development of the human person, but opening the human person up to the mystery of God. She was very concerned about the Catholic Church’s moral teachings in the sense that she was very committed to them. She knew in her own day about the controversy about the question of regulation of birth and birth control, and she was pretty clear that she was on the side of the church’s traditional teaching. She said we should be prepared to move over and get used to being crowded rather than anybody commit the least sin with regard to the Church’s teachings in this domain, so I don’t know how she would have reacted to the liturgical changes of Vatican II, but I think in terms of the teaching of the Catholic Church concerning doctrine and morals, she had a very deep reverence for the church’s tradition.

She says a southern writer is challenged to write as a Catholic because you’re writing in a Protestant culture. It’s not a Catholic culture, and so you’re showing how certain truths that Catholics may have even become numb to about their own faith can be discovered under grotesque or ironic forms by Protestants. She tells a story about this where she mentions a real event in the ’50s of a Tennessee revivalist minister who for his Lenten revival tied a living lamb by a chain to a cross for his congregation and then sacrificed it there in front of the congregation. She said, well, he may have been doing that for show, but I think that’s just as close to the Mass as he can get, and she says what he is doing there represents, in a certain ironic way, under forms that Catholics might not even recognize easily, a truth they’re living day to day in Mass. But she says if I wrote things that I think are truly grotesque, like if I wrote about people with totally meaningless lives, it might be considered normal in the north—she says that—but when I write about anything southern it would be considered grotesque in the north. She says in the south, because it’s Christ-haunted, you find, at least in her day and age she could say that, because it’s Christ haunted it’s not Christ-centered, you find she says a disfigured image of Christ in people’s suffering and in their brokenness, even if it’s disfigured and broken it’s better than no Christ at all. In the end of the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” when The Misfit kills the grandmother, and the blood of the grandmother is on his eyes, on his glasses, and he cleanses them, her death—he kills her because she’s compassionate to him. She’s compassionate to him because she sees he agonizes over the person of Christ, and there’s a moment in which grace touches her and saves her but also invites him to salvation, and his eyes are open for a moment by her blood, and he says she would have been a good woman if there had just been someone there to kill her every day of her life. And I think what Flannery O’Connor is saying in part is the Catholic life of expiation and suffering for others is what also makes us good people. We don’t have, as Catholics, someone there to shoot us every day of our life. What we have every day is the Catholic Mass. We die with Christ in the Mass, we live with him, and she says the suffering of human beings everywhere is in some way an initial participation of that mystery, an anticipation of redemption in Christ. So she’s looking at Southerners in the imperfections of their faith, their deep human imperfections, and she’s seeing how Christ is sort of hidden in them in ways that foreshadow or speak of Catholic realities, of God uniting us in our suffering to the mystery of the cross, so I think that there’s something like that going on.

Thomas Merton is a person whose whole life is characterized by movement, and even up until the end of his life he’s really trying to figure out what he believes in a certain way, and there’s a dynamic there that fascinated his generation, because it’s somebody really trying to find the truth whose a nonbeliever, who becomes open to Catholicism, who converts, who writes eloquently about his conversion, but he was restless, whereas with Flannery O’Connor you get the impression of somebody who accepted herself as a Catholic and as a person who’s Southern and as a person from the rural South, as a person who is sick and had to go home physically ill and live with her mother and be cared for until death. There’s a certain solidity to her, a bemusing certitude. But also, I think, more than Merton she’s fascinated by speaking with unbelievers. I think Merton is trying to articulate his experience of faith for his generation, how to believe in the world today. I think she’s much more interested in communicating traditional Catholic truths to people who are radically separated from the Christian tradition.

Sophocles points out the tragedies in life and the monstrous dimensions of human existence, and Flannery O’Connor doesn’t have a tragic worldview, but there’s a tragic moment in her stories. She’s very Augustinian. She says the truth of the doctrine of original sin is at the base of all my stories, and also the truth of redemption. So where she’s very different from a lot of our contemporary sensibilities is she thinks it’s both necessary, but also somewhat humorous, to see our fragilities and our weaknesses and our brokenness. She’s very interested in showing human brokenness and even our ugliness, not as an end in itself, I mean that’s where it is the tragic dimension, and almost the grotesque dimension, but it’s ultimately comic for her, because once you admit your brokenness, or you can admit your brokenness if you see the flip side of it, which is the mystery of redemption and grace, and the fact that God in the end is compassionate. So the way grace breaks in and makes use of our disillusionment with ourselves, the tragic conundrums we’re in, is almost playful. It’s almost a violent playfulness, but there’s a sort of gravity of love that comes into characters’ lives, disillusions them, shows them the tragic component of their life, shows them their brokenness, but also only ever does that to introduce them into something higher, which is God’s love and mercy, and there’s something comic about it in the way she writes about it.

I think the most important thing for contemporary Catholics about Flannery O’Connor’s work is that she has the mindset of a person who’s expecting to be misunderstood in contemporary culture. She’s writing provocatively, elliptically, suggestively about what she treasures most or believes in most deeply, the mystery of Christ, mystery of grace, but in a world where she expects to be misunderstood, perhaps resented, even despised, and that tension that animates her work is very suggestive for modern Catholics who increasingly understand themselves to be in a very secular surrounding society that doesn’t necessarily understand their viewpoints. So she’s trying to talk to people who are even hostile or very different in mindset. She has a very strong consciousness that she’s speaking to and with people who find Catholicism alien or strange, and she’s attempting to convey truths of the Catholic faith in elliptical or suggestive or inviting ways, provocative ways, but she wants to defy immediate expectations and instead move on to more substantive conversation, and she’s found a way to do that through a literary format, and I think that’s one of the great challenges for Catholics in an increasingly secular world is how do you talk about your faith when it’s likely to be perceived as alienating to people in ways that move beyond the initial constraints of provocation and into a deeper, substantive discussion, and Flannery O’Connor’s figured out a way to do that in a literary motif.

She is an artistic genius, so just on a natural level her work has an incredible originality to it, and she can embody something of the genius of her culture, so to speak, in a very raw, almost primitive way. She has this deep absolutism, this deep, concrete way of writing. She’s mastered the Southern dialect, so there’s something just as a literary art form very original and very inviting, and a lot of the people who originally read it were not particularly interested in the religious ideas, the religious content, and I think as time goes by, as people read more of her letters and see what the whole corpus of her writing is about, it becomes more evident that you have to have a theological level of reading to see her deepest aspirations. She is very explicit about that herself, and I suppose also because she says really, basically in her letters, the two choices in the modern world, she says that it’s—in rural Georgia 1955 the two choices in the modern world are really between nihilism or Roman Catholicism, and that’s a very odd viewpoint in Protestant, if I may say, Biblicist, southeastern culture in America in 1955 but that doesn’t seem like such a strange juxtaposition to us 50 years later. She talks about the advent of an age of nihilism, and I think she means by that an age in which all values seem relative and a matter of subjective preference, and it’s impossible to discern if there’s any transcendent meaning in life. She says that leaves you a humanity like certain chickens where they bred off the wings, made them smaller to get more white meat, so humanity becomes a bunch of wingless chickens. She says, “I think that’s what Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead.” In the absence of a value system in a relativistic world, people become just kind of non-vital. They lose their vitality, and she’s offering up a vision of a deep Catholic vitality based on grace, based on a sacramental view of the world.

Martin Heidegger

I think we’re living in a time when there’s an increased de-Christianization or secularization of contemporary culture, and what happens in that sociologically is that a majority of people who were previously educated in the Protestant or the Catholic tradition tend to gravitate toward a more secularized stance of interpretation of the world, so that to be a Christian in contemporary Europe or America tends to make you more of an anomaly. That being the case, the people who actually persevere or tend to continue to want to be religious tend to have a countercultural identity, and you see that more in evangelical movements and in the Roman Catholic movement in America. So young people today who are devout Roman Catholics tend to expect to be misunderstood, maybe even disagreed with frequently, so at the same time their interest in recovering their tradition, also because they feel like it’s under threat, the identity of the very church and her tradition is perceived as being subject to perhaps ceasing to be.

There’s no question we live in a more secularized America than in the age of Flannery O’Connor. I don’t know what her influence will continue to be, but I think the fact that she understands her writing to be geared towards a very secularized world, or that the real choice in her writing is between a robust Catholic identity or capitulation to a very secularized world, I think that tension or juxtaposition is something she lived very personally in her own decision to be a believer. I think that she continues to speak to people who are confronting that decision. She read Nietzsche, she read Sartre, she read Heidegger. And Hulga or Joy, in the story “Good Country People,” is a person who moves from a cynical, dark view of reality based on her own very superficial understanding of Heidegger, pseudo-intellectual, really. Flannery O’Connor’s making fun of herself and moves to this shocking conversion of realizing her need for grace in the end of the story, at least we can suppose, I think, and she really represents Flannery O’Connor herself who walked on crutches while she was writing the story, who doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so to speak, if you put her in terms of Joy or Hulga, and who discovered her need for grace, that she can’t just live by her own powers, and has moved from a secular worldview to a religious worldview. I think that the juxtaposition in Flannery O’Connor’s life itself between the decision to practice her Catholic faith versus her encounter with secular thinkers like Nietzsche and Joyce and Heidegger, that juxtaposition continues to be one that is very visceral for a lot of Americans, or a lot of modern people, that her writing speaks to—the decision between a radical unbelief, which is in her character Hazel Motes before his conversion versus radical discipleship in a very secular world, which is Hazel Motes after he’s converted and puts his eyes out and converts to God in a really radical way. She, of course, sees him as a saint. He’s a nihilist before, he’s a saint afterwards, and that is an interesting commentary on options that a lot of people would consider still viable options, to pursue a life of God or to pursue a life without God. So she’s really trying to put the choice in front of us.

HIV-AIDS in DC

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Fred Yi

REV. CHRISTINE WILEY (Covenant Baptist Church): We pray for health, O God, that you would pour your spirit into them and heal their bodies, O God.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Reverend Christine Wiley has been ministering to AIDS patients in Washington, DC since the early 1980s. Back then people were dying from a disease they didn’t understand and had no idea how it was spreading. Reverend Wiley first met AIDS patients when she allowed the health clinic across the street to move into her church when the clinic’s roof fell in.

WILEY: What I found was a profound privilege of being able to work with people who had contracted this disease, and being able to talk with them to help them get to a place where they had hope and understood that they were still loved by God.

Rev. Christine Wiley

SEVERSON: Twenty years later, Reverend Wiley is still preaching and teaching about HIV-AIDS, which we now know a lot about. We know that it’s preventable and treatable, and yet it has reached epidemic levels in the nation’s capital. The most recent statistics are sobering. Three percent of local residents have HIV or AIDS—triple the number that is generally considered a “severe” epidemic. But among African-Americans residents, the overall rate is above four percent, which is higher even than parts of West Africa. And among the District’s black men the infection rate is even more alarming—almost seven percent. Authorities are worried that the number is actually higher because so many residents are spreading the virus without knowledge they’re infected. This is Bishop Rainey Cheeks at the Inner Light Ministries Sunday worship service.

BISHOP RAINEY CHEEKS (Inner Light Ministries): We live in a city that has the highest infection rate in the country. We live in Ward 8, and it has the highest infection rate in the city, and here we still operate in a state of ignorance, and the Scripture tell us “my people perish for lack of knowledge.”

SEVERSON: Bishop Cheeks is not your typical preacher. He is openly gay and has been HIV-positive for 25 years.

CHEEKS: People would say, what would Jesus do? And I say stop asking that question. Do what he did. Heal people. Love people. He said feed, clothe, shelter people. That is all HIV is asking us to do.

SEVERSON: The church has long been the most influential institution in the African-American community. But Bishop Cheeks says when it comes to AIDS, too many black pastors have been silent, or preaching when they should have been teaching.

CHEEKS: Throughout our history, the information has always been disseminated through the church. Imagine if all the churches on Sunday morning gave just the facts and where they could go get help. How many people would we reach?

Bishop Rainey Cheeks

WILEY (preaching): Have you ever felt persecuted just for living, just for being who you are?

SEVERSON: At the Covenant Baptist Church, Rev. Wiley, who has a doctorate in pastoral psychotherapy, tells her members who have the disease that they are not sinners, that God loves them, and she explains ways to safeguard against the virus to anyone who will listen. Some think the epidemic has passed and don’t want to listen. Some don’t want to know. That’s why Rev. Wiley offers weekly AIDS testing like this, right in church. She says she discovered that many African Americans do not view the black church as a safe place to get counseling about AIDS.

WILEY: There is such a heavy stigma. Then often it’s not talked about. And, of course, within the context of the church one of the things that is difficult is interpretation of Scripture. Many persons within the black church, generally speaking, are very conservative. We find that the issue of sex is not talked about at all in many, many churches, and so if you don’t talk about sex it’s difficult to even talk about risky behavior.

SEVERSON: Bishop Harry Jackson’s Hope Christian Church is typical of many black churches, if not most. Many members here consider drug abuse, premarital sex, and homosexual activity as sins.

BISHOP HARRY JACKSON (Hope Christian Church): Black clergy typically are very conservative socially, and they are much more liberal in terms of other issues. But the heart of the black church is the preaching, and the preaching has to be from the Bible, and that biblical message has been the source of the conservatism of the church, and it’s also the strength.

JACKSON (speaking at rally): And I would rather be biblically courageous than politically correct.

SEVERSON: Bishop Jackson has been a leading spokesman in the District in favor of marriage only between a man and a woman. He agrees that black pastors have not done enough, but sees the problem more as the breakup of the black family.

JACKSON: We haven’t done the preventative work that puts it in the mind of a young teenage girl or boy, hey, you shouldn’t have sex this early. You’re having all the babies out of wedlock, all these things, and I’ve got to take responsibility for it. The only institution that stands between our community and what I’m going to call basically the destruction of family as we know it today is the church.

WILEY: We’ve got to talk about drug addiction. We’ve got to talk about sex. We’ve got to talk about relationships, because women who are heterosexual and have relationships are also having relationships with men who sleep with men.

SEVERSON: Nationwide, the leading cause of HIV-AIDS is still men having sex with men. But here in the District the principal mode of transmission for new cases is heterosexual for both men and women, and 70 percent of those infected are over 40 years old.

CHEEKS: We put condoms out right here in the church on Sunday. You can walk and pick them up right here, and people go, isn’t that a little extreme? Well, what do you call extreme? Saving someone’s life?

SEVERSON: Bishop Jackson remains skeptical about the reliability of condoms and is firmly convinced that abstinence only is the best policy. He blames much of the problem on immoral behavior and the prevailing culture.

JACKSON: The moral message is not being grasped. The culture is shaping much more what happens in the black church. If I say it this way, in all deference to our stars, Beyonce may be listened to more than the bishop.

SEVERSON: And the bishop has no intention of bending his message about the sin of premarital and homosexual sex, although he doesn’t oppose testing and wants his church to do more to help those who are infected.

WILEY: Even with a person who is a conservative we still have to acknowledge that there is a disease in our community, and it has not gotten better. It has gotten worse.

JACKSON: It may be that we’re going to reach people that trust us and trust our interpretation of Scriptures. But if you don’t believe the Gospel as we believe it, maybe you will not feel comfortable coming to us for help, and maybe that’s where someone else has to work, and my point would be we at least need to touch the people we can touch, and I’m not so sure we’re touching them yet.

SEVERSON: On that point they would all agree.

CHEEKS: I’m more concerned with how do we save our community more than I need to be right or any of that. How do we save our community? And then we can have all the other theological debates later on. But right now, we are in trouble.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.

Eid al-Adha

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Fred Yi

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The festival of Eid al-Adha begins with sacrifice. Those participating in the hajj, and all other Muslim families with the financial means, slaughter a sheep, lamb, goat, camel, or cow.

DAWUD WALID (Council on American Islamic Relations Michigan): This sacrifice is in remembrance of what the Qu’ran says, as well as the Bible, of when Abraham was inspired or he had a dream that he was to sacrifice one of his sons, and then God told Abraham that he did not have to sacrifice his son, and a ram came, and Abraham then sacrificed the ram.

LAWTON: American Muslims typically buy meat slaughtered according to Islamic requirements from a market or grocery store. The immediate family eats one-third of the meat. Another third is shared with the larger community of friends and relatives, and the rest is donated to the poor.

WALID: It’s a religious obligation for us to give to other people. We would not be good Muslims or following our religion, because the third pillar of Islam is charity, so we’re obligated to give charity.

LAWTON: In the United States, recipients include places such as Gleaner’s Community Food Bank of southeastern Michigan. They partner with over 400 outlets in their network of feeding programs to distribute thousands of pounds of frozen lamb meat donated by the Muslim community annually.

JOHN KASTLER (Gleaner’s Community Food Bank): It’s a high-protein item, and it’s certainly the type of food product that we really like to provide during the winter months where you get a nice, hearty meal out of the donation. Groups like the Salvation Army, the Cabbage & Soup Kitchen, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and different feeding programs around town will be able to enjoy this blessing.

LAWTON: Through the soup kitchens they operate, mosques and Islamic centers also serve as distribution sites. Those who come in to pray are offered bags of lamb to take home, as are all non-Muslims seeking food assistance.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Listen Now

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Fred Yi

Listen to this episode now:

[powerpress]

Muslims in the Military

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Fred Yi

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Before President Obama left for Asia he visited Fort Hood in Texas, where 13 members of the military were killed allegedly by an Army psychiatrist who is an American-born Muslim:

President Obama at Fort Hood memorial service: “No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world and the next.”

The Fort Hood killings have raised questions about whether the accused shooter’s zeal about Islam could have played any role in the tragedy and about being Muslim in the US military. Imam Yahya Hendi is the Muslim chaplain at both the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and at Georgetown University in Washington. He had met Major Hasan.

Imam, welcome. Is there anything in what you’ve heard or read about Major Hasan that could explain to you what happened?

The Obamas at Fort Hood memorial service

AM YAHYA HENDI: Actually, no. It is a shock for me. I met Major Hasan a few times, and every time I met him I understood him to be a loyal American, loving of his country, and he wanted to join the military in support of America.

ABERNETHY: Is there anything about his being a very devout Muslim that could explain to you his shooting?

HENDI: For me it was….

ABERNETHY: …his alleged shooting.

HENDI: For me, what happened on that Thursday (November 5) has nothing to do with Islam. Islam does not stand in support of such shooting. Actually, according to Islamic law what he did was criminal, immoral, and unethical and against the teachings of Islam in every way, shape, and form.

ABERNETHY: When he apparently—when he began shooting he shouted out “Allahu akbar” in Arabic—God is great.

HENDI: Yeah. You know Muslims use that phrase, “Allahu akbar,” like “Oh, gosh” in English, “Oh, my Lord, Oh, my God.” It does not really have a religious motivation always and all the time.

ABERNETHY: You have counseled a lot of Muslim soldiers and sailors and marines. Is there any conflict for some of them, at least sometimes, between being Muslim and then having to go some place where they are fighting Muslims?

HENDI: You know, overall most of the soldiers we have, Muslim soldiers in the US military, are loyal Americans and have joined the military, again, to defeat terrorism, to defeat extremism. After all, on September 11 we were attacked, and Islam gives Muslims and America the right to defend itself against terrorism and, therefore, Muslims should be proud and are proud of their service in the US military.

ABERNETHY: There’s a concept, if I understand it correctly, within Islam called the ummah, which is a sense of intense brotherhood with all other Muslims. Now does that conflict with having to go into Afghanistan?

HENDI: Actually, no. If I love my brother and when my brother does something wrong, Islam requires me to stop him from his wrongdoing. You know, Prophet Muhammad—and in the Koran we are told that we have to enjoin good and forbid evil. What happened on September 11 and the aftermath of that terrorism, extremism, what is happening in Pakistan, suicide bombing, and in Afghanistan is against the teachings of Islam, and Muslims are required to join any military in self-defense and to defeat terrorism.

ABERNETHY: What about in the Muslim community in this country? What’s going on there since the shootings?

HENDI: You know, American Muslims feel proud of being American, but at the same time are suspected on daily basis. Their religion is under siege; the community is under siege because of suspects. What we want America to do is to understand that we are a part of the fabric of America. We love America, our country, and we want to fight with everyone in defense of America.

ABERNETHY: Imam Yahya Hendi, many thanks.

HENDI: Thank you.

Juvenile Sentencing

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Fred Yi

Originally broadcast January 30, 2009

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This past week (November 9) the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it’s constitutional to sentence juveniles who commit crimes other than murder to life in prison without parole. Tim O’Brien reports.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young had just turned 15 when he committed a string of hotel robberies in the Tampa area, acting at the direction of 25-year-old Jacques Bethea, a neighborhood drug dealer with a long arrest record. Bethea would hold the gun. Young would take the money.

KENNETH YOUNG: The only thing he told me to do was get the money and the tapes, and that was it.

O’BRIEN: What tapes?

YOUNG: Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security camera?

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: And you did that?

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young says he had little choice. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine and had stolen drugs from Bethea. He believed her life was in danger.

YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

YOUNG: Kill her.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along.

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother blames herself for her son’s problems.

STEPHANIE YOUNG: Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, I mean …

O’BRIEN: But that didn’t keep Kenneth from being sentenced to life in prison with no parole.

JUDGE J. ROGERS PADGETT: What we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

Judge J. Rogers Padgett

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him, so we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Florida, like many states, allows prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults for serious crimes, and the state legislature did away with all parole in 1995. As a result, there are now 77 inmates in the state serving life without parole for non-homicides committed when they were under 18, more than in all other states combined. Paolo Annino runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University:

PAOLO ANNINO: This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children. Do we want to do that as a society? Do we want to ignore our Western traditions?

O’BRIEN: This week (November 9) the U.S. Supreme Court took up that question in two separate cases involving Terrence Graham, who at age 17 committed armed burglaries while on parole for a previous armed robbery, and Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of raping and robbing a 72-year-old woman when he was only 13.

BRYAN STEVENSON: We don’t think there’s any dispute that sentencing a 13-year-old to life in prison without parole is unusual. It’s happened only twice for non-homicides. We also think that to say to any child of 13 that you’re only fit to die in prison is cruel.

O’BRIEN: But Stevenson ran into some skeptical justices, including Antonin Scalia: “I don’t see why it is any crueler to an adolescent that it is to an adult… Where do you draw the line?” Justice Sam Alito: “What about …brutal rapes, assaults that render the victim paraplegic but not dead …the person shows no remorse… the worst case you could possibly imagine? That person must at some point be made eligible for parole? “You are correct, your honor,” answered Brian Gowdy, the attorney for Terrence Graham.

Brian Gowdy

BRIAN GOWDY: If the court rules in Terrence’s favor, about one hundred persons who committed crimes as adolescents will benefit by getting a chance to show some day that they have changed, and that’s all we’re asking for. Not for immediate release, but a chance to show that the kid has changed.

O’BRIEN: In court, Gowdy pointed to a landmark Supreme Court ruling four years ago in which the justices rejected the death penalty for juvenile offenders, relying heavily on evidence showing that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do. Several justices observed that that was a death penalty case, and death is different.

GOWDY: Death is different, but not in any critical respects when you’re talking about an adolescent. Both sentences condemn the adolescent to die in prison, both give up on the kid, both determine that the adolescent can’t be changed, and both say that, based on an adolescent mistake, you can never live in civil society.

O’BRIEN: The attorney for Florida said the state’s sentencing practices were aimed at addressing a serious crime problem and that such policy decisions should not be second-guessed by federal judges.

SCOTT MAKAR (Florida Solicitor General): That’s a quintessential states’ judgment, and 21 states have said no to parole and our position is that the court shouldn’t impose something on the states that the states themselves have rejected.

O’BRIEN: Chief Justice John Roberts proposed a compromise requiring judges and juries to consider a defendant’s youth, but allowing life without parole in extreme cases. Defense lawyers dismissed the idea as too little.

STEVENSON: Because poor kids and minority kids and disadvantaged kids are always the ones who end up with these harsh sentence.

O’BRIEN: Conservatives on the court dismissed it as too much. Meanwhile, back in Florida, Kenneth Young and more than a hundred other prison inmates nationwide serving life without parole for crimes they committed as children got some support from what might seem to be an unlikely source. The judge who sentenced Young, J. Rogers Padgett, has come out against laws that deny parole to juveniles in non-homicide cases.

PADGETT: If I went and talked to Kenneth, I might have sympathy, too, because I firmly believe the Department of Corrections ought to be given the latitude to determine when these people are ready to go. What do I know? At the time of sentencing I’m doing a snapshot, so what do I know?

O’BRIEN: The justices appeared sharply divided, making any decision unlikely before the end of the term next June. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

ABERNETHY: Among those who have filed briefs with the court are 20 religious groups that argued that the values of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion are central to their faiths. They said judges have a responsibility to consider those values, along with the possibility of rehabilitation, especially for juveniles. They urged what they call “restorative justice.”

Jeni Stepanek on Faith and Grief

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Fred Yi

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.

Jeni Stepanek Extended Interview

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Fred Yi

Read and watch Kim Lawton’s interview with Jeni Stepanek, author of MESSENGER: THE LEGACY OF MATTIE J.T. STEPANEK AND HEARTSONGS (Dutton, 2009):

Q: Why was it important to you to tell Mattie’s story now?

There were a couple of reasons. One is Mattie’s been gone for five years now, and in those five years more and more good things have come from his life. We have parks and libraries and school curriculum, school curricula growing, the Just Peace Summit where teens come from all over the world to study his message, and I thought, people are so inspired by Mattie’s writings, by Mattie’s message of hope and peace, I thought it mattered that people know who was the child behind that message, that people know the details of Mattie’s life story, particularly because Mattie believed that he was a messenger, that that was his reason for being. and I knew that if something happened to me, nobody would ever know the truth of Mattie’s story. So that was one goal, was to really lay down the details of Mattie’s life. The other reason that I wanted to tell Mattie’s story is people very often come to me and they say, “I’m so inspired. How could I ever be like this child?” And what I wanted people to know is that he was really an ordinary little boy who made extraordinary choices and that each of us can make those same choices, that each of us can live an extraordinary life regardless of the blessings and burdens that are balanced into each day. And I thought that that mattered to share with people so they could identify with Mattie and—you can’t be Mattie, you can’t raise your child to be Mattie, we can’t ever be another human being, but we can use other human beings as our role models, and I wanted to show how plain and simple my son was. He was as witty as he was wise.

Q: You write in the book about how he really did feel that he was a messenger. In what way? How did he feel that? He really felt it came from God.

Mattie first started telling me when he was about three or four years old that God put messages in his heart, and that his reason for being, that God’s role, God’s plan for him was that he was good with words and that he was to shape words around God’s messages and offer them to other people so that they would hear God’s message as well. Now when your three- and four-year-old says this, I thought it was very sweet, I thought he had some nice things to say, but I couldn’t understand—I didn’t really understand about what he was trying to tell me about God putting messages in his heart, and when he hit about four years old, he began doing things like, in the middle of playing, he would drop to his knees, meditate for two minutes, 10 minutes, and then stand up and say, “I need to write this down. I have a message from God, and I need to put words to it.” And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice? High pitched, low pitched?” I didn’t understand what he was saying, and he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart, and my job is to give words, to give voice to God’s message.” Mattie spent his entire life saying things like this, and I spoke with priests and rabbis and ministers about this, and I have to admit I don’t think I ever, during his lifetime, fully understood his role as a messenger. I believe he believed that he was a messenger for God. I believed that what he was saying and doing was all good. I could not understand how you could actually hear God’s voice in your heart and use your own words and voice to offer a message to others. I think it’s been more since he died, and the ongoing letters and emails and calls that I get from people who tell me that they remember Mattie from when he was alive, or they’re just learning about Mattie now, and how he continues to inspire them—that is almost like they’re getting a message from God. And I think I’m now beginning to understand that he really—his spirituality and morality were really intertwined, that he did hear messages from God, not in a voice, not in some delusion, but that he was truly inspired with something good, which is God.

Q: What were some of those messages? For people who aren’t familiar with him and his poems, how do you distill the messages?

I think the messages that Mattie offered us from God really fell into two categories, and one could easily be summed up as hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy, and he has poem after poem, essay after essay, speech after speech where he discusses, or shares in a literary form, how those look. You know, why hope is real, why it’s not just wearing rose colored glasses or being in denial or turning your head to the truth, that hope begins with an attitude and an attitude is a choice. So I think that’s really one part of the message is all about hope and peace and life, regardless of challenges or the joys in somebody’s life. And then the other side, the other flow of messages that he talked about as coming from God, was what he started calling “heart songs” when he was about 5 years old, and trying to help people understand that we all have a reason for being. Just like you read, or hear, in church God’s plan—Mattie called it our reason for being, our heart song. And the best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi taught us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: in giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens. That doesn’t mean you become rich in money. It doesn’t mean you get miracle after miracle and you live longer. It doesn’t mean that your life is peachy because you’re doing good things, but it means that if you’re open to God being a part of your life, if you can understand your reason for being and offer that to other people, it will come back to you. [It] took me a long time to understand that as well, and I finally came to understand that what he meant by heart song—he told me once when he was about 12 years old, because I said I don’t know what my heart song is, I really, I don’t know my heart song. And he said, “What do you need? What do you want most in life? What do you ache for? What would you do anything to have in your life?” He said that’s the first part of your heart song, because you know why it matters. You’re close to it. If you need money, if you need love, if you need happiness, if you need to be known, you understand why that matters. Your reason for being is to offer that to others. And what Mattie needed and wanted was happiness and love that lead to hope and peace. So he gave that freely to other people through his writings, through his speeches, and in giving other people these messages of hope and peace, that came back to him, and I began to understand that—that is God’s plan for us, to be fully who we were created to be. And what we need we offer it to others, because we get why that matters.

Q: And that’s a spiritual ministry? I think people hear some of the poems and miss the spiritual dimension that seems to be the foundation.

Yes. Now not every poem that he wrote had a spiritual dimension. Some were just pure fun. Some were—people would often ask him to write poetry for an organization or for a specific cause. But the bulk of his poetry, if you really read it carefully, there is a message of hope, of peace, of life, of offering, of finding what’s at your core. When he—I mean one of the most depressing poems I think he ever wrote is called “Abyss,” and it’s when he began really wondering, is my life ending? Am I going to get another miracle? When is my mortality going to end? And he really wasn’t looking forward to death, and he just really felt that he was in a dark space. But in writing about this so people go, “Yeah, I understand and I feel like this,” he said when you’re in this abyss, all you have to do is look up and realize even if you’re at the bottom, there’s the light. You just have to choose what you look at, choose your vision, and once you see it you climb right out. So even when he was struggling, he still would find some way to find inspiration or offer inspiration to other people by identifying with other people’s challenges or sharing his own so that other people could identify with him.

Q: What do you hear from people? You still get letters and emails. What kinds of things do people say, even today?

I get a lot of letters from school children who didn’t think they liked poetry until they started reading Mattie’s material, and then they realized poetry is not something beyond them, it’s not something way intellectual and that you can’t understand, that it’s shaping words in a special way on a page and carefully choosing each word so that it matters. I would say the bulk of what I get is where people say this is how my life has changed because of Mattie, because of what I’ve read, because I saw him on TV, because a friend gave me one of his books. Right now there’s History Associates, a local archive company. They’ve taken 50 boxes from my basement of fan mail and publicity information about Mattie, and they met with me a couple of weeks ago, and they said, “We’ve really tried to sort it, because everybody says they’re inspired.” So they’re trying to say I’m inspired to be a better person, I’m inspired to pray, I’m inspired to be a better parent, I’m inspired to think gentler, to be less judging. They’re trying to now categorize what that inspiration looks like or feels like to different people. I also, especially since it’s been 5 years since he died, get lots, or a fair number, of letters and emails from people who ask questions like when is Mattie going to have a committee for sainthood? What is the prayer I can pray for Mattie, for his cause? I’ve had a dozen or so people ask me for relics. And I go back and I tell people there’s been talk, but there is no formal committee. That doesn’t even begin until year five. But I even get, after he died I got mail from people all over the world that was addressed to “Mattie—Child Poet of America.” Or “St. Mattie—First Child Saint of America,” no other address, and these things would just end up in my mail box which, was very—I mean that’s an overwhelming—it’s beautiful, but the responsibility for me, when I sit back and think my son not only touched lives when he was alive, but since he died, he is continuing to touch lives, to inspire people. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world to have somebody write to you.…

Q: What’s that like as a mother, to know people think your child is a saint?

Well, I’m really careful with that because, one, he’s not recognized as a saint. I mean, if you take a saint as an ordinary person who lived an extraordinary life of holiness and called others to be their best self, absolutely my son is a saint, though not recognized. There are many, many people who are saints though not recognized, and yes, I do hope that one day there is an investigation for his cause, not because that would make me proud, because I think my son could continue being a source of intercession and inspiration for the world, which—that happens more when people are aware of him. So yes, for that reason, I think it would be lovely. But, you know, when I step back and think of me as Mattie’s mom, well, I was the one who would say, “Mattie is your bed made?” And he would say, “Does it look made?” It’s like, well, that wasn’t the question. I was the one that would have to answer his questions of, “If I’m going to be a writer and peacemaker, why do I need trigonometry and chemistry courses?” I saw the little boy, the human side, the child who cried when his feelings were hurt, who was scared of certain things. So I think that’s a blessing for me that I saw the full spectrum of my son. But the responsibility that I feel and the privilege that I feel to think that my son is touching people and touching lives long after my lifetime, long after this generation’s lifetime, is a profound thought that is very humbling, very, very humbling to sit back and think as rough as my life is I would never will or wish my life on anyone else in the world, but how grateful I am that I was chosen to be this child’s mother, that that was part of my reason to be. What a beautiful gift that was that I got to be Mattie’s mom, including the unmade bed. I’m just thrilled about that.

Q: What is that responsibility that you feel?

I think the responsibility is to—part of that was the reason I chose to write this book. I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, “Oh, Mattie,” you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t—that’s not who Mattie was. So I think the responsibility is for me to share as much information as I can about my son, about his life, so that people do know that he was real. They do know that living a good life doesn’t mean living a perfect life. It means always having God being a part of your life, always, if you have one of those dark moments, that you know instead of saying well, okay, I’m down, I might as well stay here. You pick yourself up, you choose to get out of bed another day. I think it’s my responsibility to offer that information to other people which was kind of hard for me, because I’m more of a private person. Mattie’s an extrovert. I mean he just loved sharing anything and everything with crowds. I’m a little more private, and it was a little more difficult to go out in public to share all the details of our life, but I think when the details of your life can inspire people to find hope when they’re really struggling, or to realize, you know what, I am doing a good job parenting, or despite my burdens I have blessings—whatever the inspiration is that you draw for yourself, for you family, for your coworkers in whatever you’re doing, I feel like it’s my responsibility and my privilege, they’re hand in hand, to share that message—my story, Mattie’s story—and to share those details in a way that brings people closer to him in a very real way—not in a little guru way, but in a very real way.

Q: How has your faith changed in the last five years? How has everything that happened affected your spiritual journey?

I don’t know that my faith has changed dramatically in the last five years. I can say that my faith has grown dramatically across the 20 years that I had with my children, and it’s continued to grow on that spectrum since I’ve buried my fourth and only surviving child, which was Mattie. I think one of the greatest changes I had in faith came during Mattie’s final months. I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs. And I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize, towards the end of Mattie’s life, prayer is not just giving God your wishes and your to-do list, it’s asking God to be on my to-do list for the day. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day, so that really started before Mattie died. Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I think about a year and half after he died, you know, people think if you get through that first year it’s all going to be okay, you get through that first year, and everybody’s there for the first anniversary, because everybody remembers Mattie died. Even my first three children, people are there for the first Christmas, the first birthday, the first anniversary. But then people go back to their everyday life, they go back to their norms, and I can never go back to my everyday life. I can’t go back to my norms because my norm was parenting my children. And it’s not that your life ends, but there’s this dramatic shift. Your path is no longer—you’re still going to end up at the same end point in your life, but you’re taking a totally unplanned path. You’re really starting all over again. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed. And I think that’s one of the gifts from God, is that God is present in other people, in my kin family, in my friends. So as sad as some days are, and as much as I miss my children, I really work hard to open my spirit to God’s presence through other people, because I believe my children are with God. I don’t believe that heaven is some place up in the sky, up in a cloud. When people say, oh, Mattie’s right up there, I don’t see that. I see Mattie as right up here. I see spirit and heaven as being wherever there’s goodness, and if that goodness is in a space or in nature or in other people, that goodness is God, and my children are with God. So, you know, I seek to feel what I am looking for, a connection through heaven and goodness, through whatever I can find in the world that’s good. I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but that’s where I am. I’m more praying that God just shows me doors and windows, because I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to be doing in life other than doing good, being my best self. So I ask God to help me recognize any opportunities to do that.

Q: You have an incredible support network. You have some really close people who’ve walked with you from the very beginning. Talk a little more about the role those people have played in your life.

I think if you were to stop and think about the details of Mattie’s life and my life, you think, okay, there’s been financial problems. There’s been a divorce. There’s been four children with disabilities who’ve died. I have a disability that’s progressing every year. You think about those details, and you think, wow, what a horrible life. And since all of my children have died you would look at me and think I’m very much alone. And in all honesty, there are times when I feel alone, because I love my children and miss them. I will never stop mourning the loss of my children, but I also don’t go through each day miserable, because Mattie and I have always had people around us that bring light to our life. In the book you learn more about what Mattie called our “kin family,” and he said you’re related to kin through life, not necessarily blood. It may or may not be blood. But he said blood relations can sometimes be sweet or sour, and kin relations are through life, and life is always good. So Sandy Newcomb is more like a sister to me than a friend, and her three children, who are now adults, two of them with their own children now, they’re like family to me. They’re my kin, and we celebrate holidays and, you know, when one person’s sad we’re all sad, and when one person’s having a moment of joy we all feel joy. I do talk about in the book at one point Mattie asked Sandy, why do you always do such good things for my mom and me? And when Mattie asked her this question he had been in the ICU for about 5 months. At the time Sandy still had two children living at home. She was working two jobs. She herself is divorced and a single parent, and yet she came to the hospital at least three days a week and would spend most of the night there with Mattie so that I could go in the waiting room and take a little break. And she said because that’s all that God asks us to do is to do good for others, to love your neighbor. And she told Mattie that your neighbor is whoever God puts in the path of your life, and if we just all reorganize that and do what we can in the moments that we can, life goes on. Mattie and I have often prayed in gratitude that we have people like that in our lives, that we have such an incredible circle of support. I mean, I’m in two different churches. I’m a Roman Catholic, I love Catholicism. I love the Holy Eucharist. Sandy is Presbyterian. I go with her to her church as well, where I find the most wonderful fellowship, the group of people that are there, just—there are good people everywhere. You just have to be open to that.

Q: You’ve mentioned your speech about not looking at life as how long you live, but how you live. Tell me about that.

One of the speeches that I give is called “Our Dash in Time.” I first heard it in the Presbyterian church from a minister who was talking about the difference between chronos and kairos. Chronos is really a two-dimensional look. It’s a measurement of life in seconds and centuries, whereas your kairos isn’t just seconds and centuries, it’s looking at the depth of the time that you live. So you can look at Mattie’s life, and the dash that marks 1990 to 2004 was not quite 14 years, and you think, what could somebody do in less that 14 years? But because of how Mattie chose to live, because of the kairos of Mattie’s life, the depth of his time, my gosh, I mean he lived an incredibly full life—not just with opportunities to do things, but with how he thought, how he chose to treasure a sunrise, a sunset, a baby holding his finger, I mean, just taking little tiny moments and cherishing them and making them that memorable, that celebrated, and inspiring others to do the same. Not that we don’t want many, many moments in our life; everybody wants to have as many heartbeats as they can. But it really is the measurement of your heart songs, or the depth of your life, that is how we’re going to be remembered. So Mattie, in less than 14 years, is remembered with this powerful legacy, and people smile when they hear his name. It’s sad that he’s gone, and people shake their head at that. But anybody that you say the word “Mattie” to that knows who he is. They smile. That’s powerful. That’s how I want to be remembered, with a smile, not as, oh, that poor woman, she buried her four children, but, wow, that poor woman, she buried her four children, but boy did she love life, and boy those kids were sure happy. I want to be remembered as a smile on people’s faces just like Mattie, and that comes from how you life your life, not how long you live your life.

Q: How are you feeling these days?

Health-wise I have a progressive condition, which is very frustrating. Mattie and I are very resilient, optimistic people. When you have a disease that’s constantly changing, getting worse, you can’t ever just get used to it. You know, we moved into this house a little over three years ago, set it up accessible, and everything was right where I could reach it. Oh, my goodness, a year later, it’s like, well, I can’t reach this anymore, I can’t reach this, so you change things. It’s like, every year, you don’t notice it day to day, but when you go to decorate your Christmas tree or when you go back to the same place, you go to the beach every summer, and you suddenly realize I can’t lift my arm high enough to do this, I can’t transfer independently, you know, out of my wheelchair, I can’t decorate even the closest branch on my Christmas tree anymore. That’s not a lot of fun. Losing the ability to drive, you know, I feel like as I hit middle age, where you have the opportunity to really synthesize academic knowledge and experiential knowledge and spiritual knowledge, and you’re hitting a point where you just feel so blessed with it’s beginning to come together, you actually can do less and less and less physically, and you become dependent on other people, and that’s been really hard for me. And medically I’ve hit a few scares in the last year, with, like, cardiac-type things. It’s kind of scary, but I try as hard as I can to live in each moment and to not think about what’s going to happen. You have to think about what’s going to happen tomorrow, but you can’t focus on that. You have to have a vision for it but not get lost dwelling on it, in the same way with the past you can’t look at the past and get stuck in it in a way that you can’t move forward, and you can’t look at the future and what might happen tomorrow in such a way that you’re afraid to enter it. So I think that’s what Mattie meant with hope. You don’t live in denial, you don’t say the past didn’t happen and the future’s not going to bring its challenges, but you move through it the best you can and have a good attitude. You reflect the moment in a way that God’s there with you.

Q: For a lot of people it’s about control—what you can control and what you can’t.

I’m all about control. I’m an OCD, love control, absolutely, and it’s hard giving that up, you know, and it’s little things, you know. I like cleaning my own house. I like folding my own laundry because I fold in thirds. I’ve learned compulsive people fold in thirds. But now it’s I’m so grateful for anybody that does my laundry I don’t care if it’s folded in quarters or halves or thirds or fifths. I’m happy that people are doing it. But it’s really hard letting go of that control. It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

Q: What are you doing professionally these days?

I would say I’m an advocate and a consultant, a motivational speaker. I love writing, speaking, doing research, and the fields that I work with range from education, health care and family-centered care collaboration, but also peace and hope. I do a lot of mentoring of teenagers around the world who want to understand, how is peace possible? And I help people understand Mattie’s premises. Mattie called it the three choices for peace. What are these choices, how can we embrace them—that peace is not just an absence of violence, peace is also a conversation with people you don’t know or don’t understand. Peace is taking care of the earth. Just helping people understand how basic needs, equitably meeting basic needs of people, leads to peace. So my speeches are everything from how to work with families whose children might be dying to why does it matter that people feel happiness, hope, and have food and water and education? How does that lead to peace? And I love the work that I do.

Q: And the Mattie J.T. Stepanek Foundation?

After Mattie died, people that are in my neighborhood, in the city of Rockville [Maryland] in the King Farm community, they said Mattie’s message is not one that we want to get lost with the fact that he died barely a teenager. Had Mattie been [in his] 30s or 40s when he died, there’s a chance that he would have had an automatic place in history, and there were people who knew Mattie as a person, and part of the reason that I said I wrote this book—that he wasn’t a guru, he was witty and wise, he was very real. So people who were his neighbors said we need to make sure people understand who Mattie was, what was his message. So they started the Mattie Stepanek Foundation, and really the mission of our foundation is to make Mattie’s message available and accessible, accessible meaning understandable. So we are working on curriculum guides so that teachers who want to incorporate peace or poetry or character development into preschool, into high school, into a university course, that there’s different worksheets or presentations, videos that they could rely on to introduce anything from “Heartsongs” to the three choices for peace to their students, and there are actually schools around the country who are already doing this type of work, and we’re trying to help incorporate what they’re doing with what we are doing. But it’s really just keeping that message of hope and peace out there and alive, and I think what we believe the foundation is, is that Mattie’s message is not unique. He offered us the universal message, you know: Give and you shall receive. Mattie’s life was unique. Mattie’s experiences were unique. Mattie’s choices as a young child were unique. So as a messenger he’s very powerful, you know. People listen when they hear Mattie’s words either on a page or on TV or even in the park named after him, the sound bites you can listen to. So because of that the message is the same thing other people say, but as a messenger he’s very unique, and people are drawn to him for any number of reasons. So it’s to keep that available for people, and I’m proud to be the eternal chair of this foundation.

Q: Other people say they have sensed Mattie. Have you?

I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child or touched their spirit or turned them back to God or prevented them from suicide. I have gotten messages; some of the messages I think are very profound and very believable. Some I think are people who want to feel something good. I personally have not felt my son, I would love to feel him, but I think if—I think my son, if he is speaking into people’s hearts or spirits, if he is interceding in people’s lives, and people recognize it…things like that are very powerful for me to hear, and what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say hi or yo, just say anything, just touch me, but I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot. I would be trapped, thinking OK, if he could do it once, this must be the magic portal. I’m going to stay right here, and I find that the people who tell me they have received some message from Mattie are ones that are able to move on after that. Those are the ones I believe more….

Before Mattie died, in the final week of his life, I mean, Mattie knew he was dying and I did, too. But a parent can never, ever just say, OK, it’s time, you can go. I mean, that’s a really tough thing, even as your child is dying in front of your eyes and your heart. You can’t give them permission. You can’t be OK with it. You can give them permission, but you can’t really be OK because that goes against everything that parenting is. It’s not okay to bury a child, it’s not OK. No matter how good a life that child lived, no matter how graceful the death is, the death of a child—nothing makes it right. So Mattie was clearly ready to go but wanted me to be, he wanted me to let him know that I’d be OK, and he had said things that he had said to other people before: you can’t lie down in the ashes of another person’s life. He had said all kinds of profound things: Take my message forward. Your message, my message are so similar, Mom, be a messenger for me. You know, take the torch, give more light to your own message, beautiful things. I think the thought that was most meaningful, and if I ever write about my life story about grief—because this book is not my story, it’s Mattie’s story. It’s not my story of loss. It’s his story of life—if I ever wrote my own story it would be called “Choosing to Inhale,” because that was the challenge my son gave me. He said when I’m gone, promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day, but it’s the most worthy choice. Once I’ve made that choice to move forward, to move with God, to be a messenger, to give a speech, to write a book, to serve as a consultant, all the different things I do, I have to choose that, because the easiest thing to do would be to lay in bed until it’s my time to be with my son again. But he challenged me to make life more than breathing. Choose to inhale.

I had four children in a four-and-a-half year time span, which makes me a very firm, good Irish Catholic woman, which is what I am. But when I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children, I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree, had no clue—and it was clear something was wrong with the children, but they were misdiagnosed, and with the misdiagnoses came the misprognoses of recurrence. So I thought the first one was a fluke of nature, the second one was recessive, you know, they told me the third one would be healthy. Mattie’s my fourth. I had, I mean, I was doing, practicing many ways not to have a fourth. He was clearly a spirit meant to be, not an accident, a spirit meant to be. So yes, by the time Mattie was born I had already buried two children and had a third that was going to die from the same condition, and I knew that Mattie, short of a miracle, was going to have this mystery ailment that afflicted my children. We found out when Mattie was two what was wrong with me, and that’s when they went back and backtracked and figured out what was wrong with the kids, and I had no more children after that. What kept me going through all of that—while one of my children was alive, what keeps you going is very different than what keeps me going now. When your child’s alive, your number one focus is keep that child alive, and if the child’s not in an active medical crisis, then make that child know life is good despite the equipment, despite the ventilator, the trach, the needles, being in the hospital. Why would you want to celebrate life? Why would you want to live longer? So how I coped during the bulk of the 20 years when I had my children was by teaching them that life is a celebration….I gave my children a celebration of life in whatever few months or years they had. So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. You can’t give them your grief just because you miss their sibling. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role? It’s really difficult to be a mommy to children who have died. You know, bringing flowers to their grave, cutting the grass around their marker, that’s—it’s a very unnatural role, but you don’t suddenly not feel like you’re a mommy any more. You want to nurture, you want to take care of things, and you want to teach somebody to celebrate life. So while my children were alive, clearly I coped, you know, through religion, through faith, through spirituality, but also I had my children. That was my celebration. It’s a very different thing once there is no child there, and you really are relying on God, your spirituality, and the kin family of support that’s around you to help you choose to inhale everyday.

Mattie knew his entire life that he had a condition that could lead to early death, that he had a life-threatening condition. When he was 10 years old, he realized that that possibility of an early death was becoming more of a probability. We really thought he was going to die before his 11th birthday. We’re not quite sure how he eked out those last three years. We’re thrilled that he did. I think it was when Mattie was 13, it was the fall of 2003, Mattie had several conversations with me where he said, “God’s no longer giving me messages. God’s just walking with me through my life,” and at that point he realized his time on earth was complete and that he would probably die sometime during the coming year because he had fulfilled his reason to be. And he was not excited about that. He really wanted God to say you’ve done such a good job I’m going to give you five bonus years. I mean, he was not anxious to die. But I think he realized when he was 13, I’ve done what I came to do. I’ve done it well. There was a sense of urgency that he felt to get as much in place as possible that could go on after him. He called it his echo and his silhouette. You know, get as much writing down; get as many video tapes in so that things would last. So he always knew that he would die soon. I think at 13, I think on the day that he turned 13 he knew he was not going to turn 14. He was very clear. He tried to tell me spring of 2004 before he went into cardiac arrest. He kept trying to prepare me for what was about to come, and I couldn’t listen to him. I just—I couldn’t. I knew what he wanted to say, and I thought, if I listen to you I’m going to tell you, it’s almost like saying, OK, all right, and I couldn’t do it, and I feel very badly about that now. I feel like I didn’t—it was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult, you must feel very alone. But I thought if I did that he’d think I’m saying, wow, this is really sad but it’s—you’re right. So I wouldn’t even let him talk to me about it. I just—I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me, I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

Gray Land

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Fred Yi

Photographer Barry Goldstein spent two years with the members of the Third Brigade Combat Team. He interviewed over 50 members of the Second Battalion, Sixty-ninth Armored Regiment, beginning in 2005 when they returned home from their second deployment in Iraq. When they deployed again in 2007, he was embedded with them twice. The result is the book “Gray Land: Soldiers on War,” a collection of portraits, field photographs, and candid narratives in the soldiers’ own words about serving in the army and the toll of war. Listen to Goldstein’s thoughts about his project and excerpts from his interviews with the soldiers, edited by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly senior associate producer Patti Jette Hanley.

Watch “Gray Land”:

Listen to photographer Barry Goldstein:

Listen Now

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Fred Yi

Listen to this episode now:

[powerpress]

CONNECT WITH US
Learn More
Providing Support for pbs.org
What's New

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

CONNECT WITH US

What's New