Fully Alive

by Timothy Shriver

  I was heartbroken, but it was the best thing that could have happened to me, because it forced me to myself. I had nowhere else to go. My search for new eyes entered a solitary phase. Linda was gone. My parents and siblings were back in Maryland, but psychologically they were worlds away. I thought night and day about poverty and how to help kids survive on the smallest amount of money. I thought about racism and all the subtle ways it appeared: in television sitcoms, in stares in public spaces, in history textbooks, on the front pages of newspapers that chronicled the lives of political and business and entertainment leaders—almost all white. There were precious few people of color in those roles, but I had never noticed that until I tried to understand my students and the way they saw and felt. All of a sudden, my world seemed oblivious, blind. I wasn’t the solution. I was the problem.

  Four weeks later, I moved out of the apartment I shared with two friends and into the rectory of St. Martin de Porres Church on Dixwell Avenue in the heart of the housing projects and community centers and Baptist churches and street life of the African-American community in New Haven. I was five blocks from Hillhouse High School, across the street from the Elks Club, and a block away from the fire station, whose ambulance was busy almost every night. I wanted to be close to that community, because I somehow knew that the community was close to the answers I was trying to find. And what better place than in a church rectory, so I could focus on my religious practices? Maybe, I thought, only God has the answers to the restless searching in my heart. Maybe praying more or reading the Bible more or talking to priests and nuns more would unlock the secret I was trying to name. Jose Salazar, the pastor, rented me the spare room above the church, and Bertha Corley, the woman who kept the church running, welcomed me in. I was living in a church.

  During this time, my dad arranged for my family to spend Christmas vacation in Rome and meet the new Pope, John Paul II. So off we went. I had been impressed with the Pope’s dramatic story of growing up in communist Poland, an athlete, an actor, an agent of political change. He was drawing crowds in the millions as he left the confines of the Vatican and journeyed around the globe, but I was on edge as we headed to Europe to meet him. I was still focused on the scene in New Haven. A trip to Rome for a private audience with the Pope only reinforced the distance between my world and that of my students. I resented being confronted with the reality of the gap and the fact that privilege was inextricably a part of me. Flying to Rome and arriving at the Vatican with Swiss Guards in elaborate costumes all around me was just another reminder.

  We were escorted to a small holding room and asked to wait. My father had a dozen or more rosaries, which he’d brought for the Pope to bless. There were few chairs, and it became obvious that our meeting was going to be brief—most likely just a passing handshake and quick greeting. Suddenly the door opened and an official came through and told us to line up: the Holy Father was coming. Seconds later the Pope bounded through the door, dressed in simple but radiant white, with a big smile and arm outstretched. He greeted my father and mother, then shook hands with each of us. We assembled for a picture in near silence.

  Then my father stepped forward and asked a question that surprised me in its sincere and spontaneous expression of faith: “Holy Father, we believe that you are the vicar of Christ, so I’d like to ask your guidance. What should we do with our lives?”

  John Paul gave my dad a wry grin. “You are doing good things. You should continue doing what you’re doing,” he replied.

  My father wanted something more than that. “But what else should we do, Holy Father? What can we do for you?”

  I couldn’t tell whether the Pope was pleased or annoyed by my father’s persistence.

  “Continue doing what you’re doing,” he repeated, “and pray as much as you can.”

  Then, surprising even myself, I blurted out a question of my own: “But how should we pray, your holiness?”

  The Holy Father looked over at me, curious to see who had spoken. He smiled slightly and answered in the strong Polish accent I will never forget: “As simple as possible.”

  Seconds later, one of his assistants intervened and told us that the Pope had to go. He blessed the rosaries, shook hands again, and headed for the door.

  “How should we pray?”

  “As simple as possible.”

  The words stunned me. The rest of the trip was full of churches and museums and adventures and laughs, but the four words of the Pope were by far the most memorable. I returned to New Haven thinking, “‘As simple as possible.’ Those are words worth trying to understand.”

  But how? I loved the prayer group at St. Martin’s that convened on Thursday nights. There were about ten of us in the group, and we met in the church basement, a one-room hall with ceiling-level half windows looking out onto the street and the Elks Club bar. From week to week, we shared prayers, studied prayers, and listened to the prayers of one another. It felt like a twelve-step program, not for substance addicts, but instead for refugees of the anxious and fearsome world around us. We sat on metal folding chairs arranged in a circle. We read, shared, and held hands with our eyes closed to call upon a higher power, which we named “the Lord.” All my restless struggling and searching must have been more obvious to others than I thought, because after a few weeks, our leader, Elaine Fitzpatrick, gave me some advice. “Have you ever given centering prayer a try?” she asked. “I think you would enjoy it. There’s a book you might like—Centering Prayer, by Basil Pennington.” Something in the way I was searching must’ve made it clear that I was searching for something deeper. I took the book and began to read it. Without realizing it, I was diving into a whole new world.

  Pennington was a Cistercian monk, which meant he was part of one of the most austere religious orders in the Christian tradition. The Cistercians are known for their strict observance of the ancient rule of Saint Benedict and for their emphasis on simplicity, silence, prayer, and manual labor. Needless to say, Cistercians are not the type of people you meet every day at the grocery store or at the pub. They were, and are, apart. I knew nothing of them.

  Pennington’s book opened with a quote from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that I had heard before, but never really heard. “Out of his infinite glory, may God give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong.” This time, I did listen, and I was embarrassed to realize I had not the faintest clue what my “hidden self” was.

  The book went on to describe a way of being that would turn my world upside down. Pennington taught that prayer wasn’t about asking for things or telling God what I wanted to have happen or about apologizing for not being good enough. Prayer was about listening, emptying myself, and being silent. Faith wasn’t about a powerful God in the sky who could alter the course of the physical universe but was rather about an experience of inner gratitude for all that is seen and not seen. Prayer was about pausing the inner noise of thoughts and feelings and words and drawing yourself toward nothingness. Most dramatically for me, religion wasn’t about judging others or fixing others or conforming my will to an abstract set of principles that were arbitrary and hard to explain. Instead, religion was the pathway to experiencing my soul as a part of me that was already joined to the divine.

  The lesson was as simple as it was radical: within each of us, Pennington explained, lay a shrine of ultimate holiness that was empty of all material things but full of love. St. John of the Cross taught the lesson in what seemed outrageous terms: “The soul is somehow God.” As I read his words, I couldn’t help but stop in shock. “My soul is somehow God?” I thought. Yes, the book offered, and centering prayer was a means to reach and give life to my soul, a means for allowing my soul to find rest in itself and in its source.

  As I read, I came to understand that centering prayer relied on insights from the Jewish psalms and prophets, from the Buddhist sutras, from Sufi mystics, from the ritual prayers of Hinduism, as well as from the largely forgotten teachings of the early
desert mothers and fathers of Eastern Christianity. Centering prayer was as old as religion itself. Spiritual practices focused on simplicity and union with the divine have existed in most of the world’s great religious traditions. But those practices had been all too often forgotten over the course of time, in favor of things that are easier for the reasoning mind to latch on to: dogma, organization, activism. In centering prayer, the goal of prayer is not to fix the world, or the church, or even oneself. The goal is to be at peace with the world and at peace with oneself.

  I began to feel as if I had been missing the whole point of religion, and similarly that Pennington might be offering me a path for better understanding the gulf that was separating me from my students, too. Pennington broke it down into a simple framework that was accessible to someone like me, who had never really reflected on my own inner life and, worse, who had been unconsciously afraid of what a little soul-searching might reveal. In my world, therapy was for the weak, help was to be given by the strong, and knowledge and values were my ego’s tools for exercising my need to make a difference. I’d made religion into duty.

  Centering was different. To be strong was to be silent. Being silent required patience and vulnerability, two qualities I didn’t have but all of a sudden wanted to acquire. Knowledge and attention were distractions. They were most often the work of my false self, acting out. Help was what we all needed in order to slow our lives down and find the still space within. To make a difference in someone else’s life, I had to start with knowing the difference between my false self and my true self. And I had to have some idea of what my true self was searching for.

  For years, I had been frustrated with my inability to change my students, yet also drawn by the mysterious intensity of their search for meaning. I had been stuck between wanting them to conform to a more stable way of life and wanting to imitate their nonconformity and their passion and fearlessness. Chapter five of Pennington’s book ended with a story that helped clarify the situation for me.

  Among the Syrian Jews there is a series of stories about a very lovable old fellow by the name of Mullernestredon. One day this good man was seen busily searching in the village square, around the trees, under the carts, behind the trash cans. A sympathetic friend approached and asked if he had lost something. “Yes, my key,” he answered. The friend joined in the search. After several fruitless and frustrating hours, the friend began to interrogate the old man: “Are you sure you lost your key here in the square? Where did you last see it?” “On the table in my house,” was the reply. “Then, why in the name of the heavens are you looking for it out here?” “Because there is more light out here.”

  “Is that me?” I wondered. Was I searching for a way to meet “expectations” by searching for a solution to poverty, searching for the key to improving education, but looking for both “out there” in the light of ideas and programs and experts? There was more “light” in the world of action and social change and fixing, I thought. And there was no light in my inner life and no light that would let me see the inner lives of my students. But what if the lost key of my purpose and its fulfillment was in some other place—in a darker space, where I’d lost it? What if I had missed the most important lesson of meeting expectations and helping others—that it had to start in silence, doing absolutely nothing?

  Maybe my problem wasn’t just that I couldn’t find answers; maybe the problem was that I wasn’t looking in the right place. Pennington continued:

  Like Mullernestredon, we often look for God in our thoughts and imaginings, our feelings and affections, because they seem to us more lightsome. But that is not where God is ultimately to be found. God is to be found in the depths of our being, at the center, at the ground of our being, perceived by the searching light of faith or the knowing embrace of love. All the feelings, thoughts, and images that float around in our prayer do not really put us in touch with him. These are “out in the square.” He is within. And there we are so one with him that we are communion, union, prayer.

  I don’t remember where I was when I read the first few chapters of this book, but I remember exactly where I was when I read these pages. I was sitting in the Church of St. Martin de Porres at night by myself, with only the altar spot lighting on.

  The church is small and rectangular, with a single center aisle dividing about a dozen pews. The altar is simple and the side statues—one of Mary, the other of Joseph—are also simple carved brown wood. Dominating the small church is a work that covers the entire front wall behind the altar: a floor-to-ceiling fresco of two scenes from the life of the indigent monk Martin de Porres—Martin of the Poor.

  Martin was a man of mixed African and European descent, scorned because of his mixed race and consigned to cleaning toilets at a Dominican monastery in Lima, Peru. Legend tells us that this simple man did not fight the treatment he received but welcomed the lowest duties in the monastery without bitterness. His humility was in itself a form of holiness. But he is remembered today for his frequent forays outside the monastery walls to bring whatever small amounts of food or medicine he could to Lima’s teeming masses of indigent and often starving street dwellers. We have nothing that he ever wrote or said to count him among the great saints. We have only the stories of his generosity and personal poverty.

  Centuries after his death, I sat alone in a New Haven church at night, paperback book in hand, the story of Mullernestredon in my mind, silence all around me except for the sirens of the street outside my window. I stared at the frescoes. In the scene to the right of the altar, Martin towered from floor to ceiling, clad in simple monastic garb. His eyes were cast down as he handed morsels of food to the poor folk of Lima, who lunged desperately toward him. In the scene on the left, Martin cradled a dying man in his arms, while below him others lay in want and squalor. “What am I seeing here?” I wondered. I turned back to the book. Pennington wrote:

  There is another story told of a rabbi—Rabbi Zuscha. On his deathbed he was asked what he thought the Kingdom of God would be like.

  The old Rabbi thought for a long time; then he replied: “I don’t really know. But one thing I do know: When I get there, I am not going to be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Moses?’ or ‘Why weren’t you David?’ I am going to be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Zuscha?’”

  This is what Centering Prayer aims at: being who we really are.

  At that moment, I felt Rabbi Zuscha rise out of that book and, as far as I was concerned, he took a seat right next to me in that dark church. He was as real as the wooden pew I was sitting on. Without saying a word, the two of us looked up at the Dominican saint, and I understood as never before that Martin de Porres was a saint for only one reason: he’d become Martin, the Martin God made him to be, the Martin God loved, the Martin God cherished. He was a saint because he’d filled his unique purpose and no one else’s. Now, in effect, Rabbi Zuscha turned to me as if to give me a preview of what I, too, would be asked someday, a question I had never considered: “Why aren’t you being Tim?”

  I had no idea how to answer it. I had worked hard to become like the scholars at Yale. And I’d tried hard to become like my father the poverty warrior and like my mother the relentless fighter. I’d tried to be like my friend Bob Brown, who was beloved by thousands of young people. And I’d tried to be like my uncle Jack, the gigantically famous hero of millions around the globe—and my mother’s hero, too. But I’d missed the point where it all came together—my political zeal, my educational insights, my love interests, my religious longing. God was not “out there,” waiting for me to perform some act of brilliance or fame, but was rather within. God’s presence wasn’t to be sought in grand designs but in profound simplicity. The faith that had so animated my search had been missing the critical piece: God’s satisfaction with me, which I had no need to earn. I sat in that dark church and for the first time in my life, I felt the ultimate presence of God sitting with me. But she wasn’t a moving statue or a voice talking from the clouds. The ultimate was th
e restless longing within my own spirit, the same longing that had urged Martin to be Martin de Porres and feed the hungry, that had urged the Cistercians to know themselves by seeking God in the center of all things, that had brought me to that moment in that church to offer me a different way.

  My mind continued to scramble to understand what was going on. If I could follow Rabbi Zuscha’s lesson, I thought, and believe that it was worth being who I was created to be, what might happen? It sounds simple in retrospect, but “Be the unique person you were created to be” was a goal I had never imagined. I had no idea what it meant to be me. But I felt tears well up in my eyes as I sat with Rabbi Zuscha and with St. Martin and realized that I’d never really thought this “me” was a person worth being. And I realized in that dim light that all those struggles with my students were really just a struggle with myself. If I wanted to be of any help to those teenagers, I would first have to practice recognizing the unique beauty of each one of them. And I would have to start by recognizing mine, as well.

  That was the first step in learning how to see from within, how to see with the eye of love. And although I was just a beginner, I started to see differently almost right away. Right away, religion had a new goal: to find God at the depth of my being. It was a goal that I needed to reach with my heart, not my head. Teaching had a new goal: not to “fix” anyone but to see my students from the inside out and to love each one so each would love the life they were meant to lead. And I had a new career goal, too: to follow the rabbi’s deathbed admonition and learn to understand how the world could have so much suffering and yet be so filled with love, too.