Fully Alive

by Timothy Shriver

  My first stop was to try to figure out my relationship with the love of my life, Linda Potter. My challenge was to figure out how to tell her and everyone else what I had discovered.

  EIGHT

  Being in Love

  Being Tim.

  That sounded great, but it also sounded weird. I wasn’t about to call my friends and announce to them that I’d found the secret of life and it was “being Tim.” I was afraid that “seeing from within” sounded silly in the real world of thought and power and struggle. I worried that centering might just be an escape from reality. As it rumbled around in my mind, I worried that it might be just a nice-sounding way of deluding myself. I wasn’t about to admit to anyone that I had been so confused about myself or my work that I’d been reduced to sitting alone in a Catholic church and doing some time travel with a dead Syrian rabbi and a dead Peruvian monk.

  If you want to know what I felt like, try looking in the bathroom mirror some morning and saying to yourself: “I really want to be me today. I don’t want to be inauthentic, fake, or superficial. I want to be me because being me is enough.” If you’re like me, this can feel really good to say as long as no one is listening! But by the time you leave the bathroom, if you’re like me, you will have forgotten about it altogether. Within moments, you’re getting dressed and getting ready for the tasks ahead of you that day: work, family, money, health, fun, friends, whatever. If they require you to act confident when you’re not, you do it. If they require you to pretend to be someone you’re not or do things you don’t really want to do, then so be it. That’s the attitude I had, at any rate. Being myself sounded amazing, even liberating, but I didn’t know how to turn it into an option for the real world. I was excited by the idea that I could fulfill all those high expectations of my childhood simply by being myself. But I was clueless about how to turn my true self into a skill for me or a message for anyone else.

  In retrospect, I can see that throughout most of my work in New Haven, I had been trying to prove that I mattered, not just that I could do work that mattered. I think people in their twenties often confuse the two, and for many the confusion is lifelong. It’s hard to believe in yourself when you’re trying to prove yourself. In my family, we mixed up believing in one another with proving ourselves to one another all the time. Doing well and achieving great things seemed to result in more attention, more affection, more love. And the formula seemed clear and reasonable: if you want to be someone who counts, do something that counts. My cousin Patrick Kennedy served in the U.S. Congress for sixteen years. But, as he once noted, “I didn’t run to get a seat in Congress. I ran because I wanted to get a seat at the family dinner table.”

  Therein lay another problem. If you wanted to win attention in my family, you knew the goalposts were painfully high. The primary goal against which everyone was measured was becoming president of the United States. I didn’t need to be a math major to realize that given the fact that I had twenty-seven cousins, we weren’t all going to make it. I wasn’t as funny as the charismatic people in my family, and they were hilarious. I wasn’t as smart as the successful people in my family, and they were brilliant. I wasn’t as good-looking as the entertaining people in my family, and they were so good-looking they’d splashed themselves into history books and magazines by the thousands. In my worldview, self-doubt was justified. It was obvious to me that I was never going to live up to those high expectations.

  So how could I possibly become self-aware? When I tried centering prayer and sitting in silence, I mostly fidgeted and wanted it to end. When I read poetry that captured the emotion of self-awareness, I mostly worried that it was just a distraction. When I went to church, I mostly worried that I was in a private club that had little relevance to the real world. Most people are at least a little like me: they want the benefits of self-emptying and detachment, but they have a hard time paying the price of working through the discomfort to get there. As much as I wanted to believe that finding my “inner self” was the solution, my head kept telling me to face the real world and get to work.

  And then, another breakthrough. Linda wrote and then called me and then swept me off my feet by telling me that she wanted to come back into my life. Linda had spent the fall during her first year after law school running the issues research team for Al Gore’s first Senate campaign. During those six or so months, she’d written me several times, and the message was always the same: “I love you. I hope someday we’ll get back together.” I always read the letters quickly and put them away. I wanted to believe them but wasn’t strong enough to trust them. I was living in a rectory and trying to move on from our relationship. She was dating other guys and I was dating the idea of priesthood. I just put the letters away and tried to ignore them. I would only reread them several times a week.

  When she called to say she wanted to come visit me in New Haven, I had my defenses ready. “Why come?”

  “Because I want to see you and talk to you.”

  “We can talk on the phone.”

  “Did you get my last letter? I want to come tell you that I love you.”

  “I got your letters, but we have to move on. You’re on your way to other things and so am I.”

  “Can I just come see you?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “How about I just come up for the day? What about next week? Wednesday?”

  “Wednesday? I’ll be around, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Okay. I’ll come Wednesday. We can have dinner.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Great, see you Wednesday.”

  Yes!

  And so we fell in love again—not that we’d ever fallen out—and we started over. She finished with the Gore campaign and left Nashville to move to Washington, DC, for a job at a major international law firm. I finished my fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center and decided to go to graduate school to study spirituality and education—in Washington, too. I’d learned a huge amount about child development and become enamored of James Comer’s idea that schools needed to be retooled around the social, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual needs and developmental abilities of children. As I packed my bags in the rectory of St. Martin de Porres Church in New Haven, I set off for a year of graduate school with the hope of finding professors who could help me understand both the developmental needs of children and the longing of their spirits, too. I wanted to learn about the “lure of the transcendent,” but I also wanted to learn about the science of child development so I could make the search for ultimate meaning and value into inspirational teaching and learning. And I wanted to do both with Linda.

  In September 1985, I arrived on the campus of the Catholic University of America to begin a master’s degree in religion and education with a focus on spirituality. It was an unlikely destination, because I didn’t really want what I thought a “Catholic” university would teach: a lot of dogma and papal proclamations. On the other hand, it was in Washington, where I wanted to be, and it had the combination of disciplines I wanted to learn. So I showed up in September for my first class: an introduction to spirituality.

  Much to my surprise, it was scheduled to be taught by a visiting professor from Georgia State—a public university that was hardly known as a bastion of Catholic piety. Dr. James Robertson Price III was young, intense, and Episcopalian, no less. He had recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago with a concentration on a saint from the Eastern Church, Symeon the New Theologian, who was utterly unfamiliar to me. His special interest was the teachings of the mystics. But he was also trained in philosophy. He’d mastered the work of the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan and his massive study of human understanding. Price was just as interested in how to think as he was in how to pray. That was a combination I was desperate to find.

  Professor Price was twen
ty minutes late to our first class and entered our small seminar room on an upper floor of a gray gothic building out of breath. “I forgot the syllabus,” were his first words, “but I will give you a quick overview of what we’re going to do this semester. This is a science course, and you are the lab. Our experiment will be about the interiority of religion. We will explore the work of the mystics, and we will learn a method for applying those lessons to everyday life. Both are essential to an understanding of spirituality. The head and the spirit are never separate. Head and heart always operate together. In this class, you’ll learn how.”

  In the weeks and months that followed, we read Buddhist teachers on the science and practice of non-attachment, and we learned that non-attachment is another way of removing anxiety and fear from your mind so you can see clearly. We read the unknown medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing on the practice of interior silence and self-emptying consciousness, and we learned that self-emptying is a way of creating the openness to be able to see your own unity with the universe and thus to see clearly the unity of all creation. We read the German mystic Meister Eckhart on understanding that within each of us, there is “a spirit that alone is free,” and we learned that spiritual freedom liberates the mind to see without judging and thus to see clearly. We read Julian of Norwich on the power of love to make a world where “all will be well,” and we saw in her the practice of the kind of peace that reveals love in all things. And we read the Hindu guru Ramana Maharshi on the power of non-dual consciousness to sustain a way of seeing unity always.

  On top of the lessons of the great spiritual masters, we also read the philosophy of religion to make sure that we could not only experience the eye of love and the presence of God, but also learn how the search for God was actually operating in all of our action and thinking. Price taught Aristotle and Aquinas and introduced Lonergan’s “method” for applying them to the moral and political and religious issues of our time. I had always been afraid that the whole religious undertaking rested on a quirky and indefensible image of God as a magical being with a white beard, whose existence was unsubstantiated by anything other than fantasy. As it turned out, the opposite is true.

  Price taught that there is ample evidence of the existence of God, but the evidence doesn’t necessarily come from the clouds or the Bible or some other revelation. It comes from within each of us, from an honest examination of our own consciousness. Despite the enormous variations in human experience, Lonergan argued, we all have one thing in common: we are all conscious. Consciousness begins with pure experience without any interpretation. It’s awareness without any object. It isn’t being aware of “this” or “that” but rather pure awareness itself. If you can be aware of your own awareness and aware of the questions that draw you from awareness to action, you begin to experience consciousness itself, and you begin to see that it is infinite possibility and infinite desire with no beginning and no end.

  Lonergan called the source and destination of consciousness God. In our day-to-day search for knowledge and meaning and belonging, we invariably find ourselves seeking what we can’t get: perfect happiness, harmony, justice, beauty, the “peace that passes all understanding.” In one way or another, everything we do is a form of searching for the unconditional truth we call God. Turning inward allows us to see this wellspring of energy and to see ourselves searching for it, too. The best way to reach for the presence of God is to peel back the layers of our thinking and feeling and see that God is in all of it. Whenever we have thoughts of any kind, we are also thinking about the one perfect thought: God. And regardless of how many millions of different ways we answer the question of God, whether we be theists or atheists or agnostics, our asking and searching and wondering and hoping are enough to show us that it is our nature to want to belong to the one thing that is beyond all things: God.

  That was class with Professor Price. It was amazing. It taught me that searching for the inner eye of my heart was the way to understand all my thoughts and actions, not just religious ones, and that the eye of the heart was within others, too. It taught me that my longing to believe in the God of unconditional love was the most reasonable way of seeing the world, despite all its apparent flaws and pains. As I listened and studied, I could feel my students back in New Haven with me, too—frustrated but searching in their own smart ways for what matters most.

  But unconditional love is not a theoretical experience. Weeks after my first course with Dr. Price, I pulled a sapphire ring I had bought in New Haven out of my pocket and asked the most loving human being I had ever met, Linda Potter, to marry me. We had been together off and on for eight years, but even before we had started dating, I had fallen in love with her at first sight when I was only eleven years old and we played tennis together. Her eyes were happier and more curious and more gentle than any I’d ever seen. She was flirtatious, too—just enough. All I can really remember is the sight of her on the court, smiling, laughing, asking me for advice on how to hit a forehand. I was transfixed.

  But getting married is not the same as being crazy about someone. Linda and I came from different backgrounds and different cultures. Her family had roots in the Mayflower and old New York; mine in the famine ships of the nineteenth century and upstart Boston. Hers was private and circumspect and Episcopalian; the Potters were nice. They were restrained in the outward expression of emotion, but they cultivated strong relationships. My Irish Catholicism, on the other hand, was extroverted, communal, but not gentle. It was political in the broadest sense—striving, assertive, proud, hungry for social justice—but it steamrolled delicate feelings in the exuberance of its activity. It could trample people on its way to championing a cause.

  Linda’s parents had their children baptized, took them to church on Sunday, and introduced them to the ideas and rituals of religion. But her dad believed faith to be a personal pursuit, so he never forced the children to do anything religious. Linda’s mom was generous and compassionate, but not religious in any traditional way. In her experience, religion was all too often a vehicle for exclusion, judgment, and bias, and she wanted no part of that. Linda grew up under her mother’s wing, never taking an adversarial stance against faith but never embracing it, either.

  Then along came me. As much as we loved each other, we had a ton of differences that needed reconciling and letting go. We approached the big questions from opposite directions. I was all about figuring out the God question and trying to get it right. She was trying to figure it out, too, but her focus was on being inclusive. I wanted to go to church; she wanted to help people. I wanted to read theology; she wanted to read beautiful novels. I wanted to practice centering prayer and analyze spiritual ideas; she wanted to talk and make sense and connect emotionally. When I used words that were drawn from the Bible, she heard Catholic superiority. When I brought up what I thought were beautiful parables from the gospels or poetry from the prophets, she heard proselytizing and dogmatic arrogance. When she focused on core values like kindness and fairness, I heard relativism. When I wanted to say a “Hail Mary,” as I had done all my life, she wanted to take a break.

  Our struggle came to a head one evening as we began the “Pre-Cana” process, a series of meetings required for marriage in the Catholic tradition. Pre-Cana is the post–Vatican II Church’s way of preparing couples for the serious and lifelong commitment of marriage. All couples are required to pursue a short course of reflection and preparation. We decided to do ours with a wonderful Franciscan monk, who was also a marriage counselor of sorts.

  We rang the bell to the dark Franciscan monastery that sits on the hill overlooking Catholic University. In time we heard the shuffle of footsteps. Father John Appledorn, OFM, came out to welcome us. He was wearing his long brown Capuchin robe, and he walked slowly with a gentle air.

  “Hello.”

  I leapt to connect and engage. “It’s great to meet you,” I gushed, as if campaigning. “We’ve heard so much about you. Thank you for being willing to see u
s. We’re very appreciative.”

  He just looked at us. “Let’s walk down the hall here a bit. There’s a quiet room over here.”

  That first night with Father John, as we began to talk about the wedding celebration itself, Linda opened with her concern: “I don’t want the ceremony to mention Jesus, because there will be people of many faiths, and I don’t want them to feel excluded.”

  “You don’t want to mention Jesus?” I said incredulously. My mind raced. Should I fight her on this? And how? “Linda,” I said as calmly as I could. “Jesus is the center of my religious beliefs. And we’re going to be in a Catholic church. We can’t not mention Jesus. That’s a nonstarter.”

  “Father Appledorn,” she countered, “do you know what I mean? Catholics always want to emphasize their superiority and when they mention Jesus, it’s all about Catholics telling the world they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong. Do you see what I’m trying to say to Tim?”

  This Franciscan had known us for only a few minutes and already he was in the middle of a premarital spat, and a pretty profound one. But with the generosity of spirit for which the Franciscans are known, Appledorn took a long pause and said, “I can see you two are going to be an interesting couple to work with! And yes, Linda, I know what you mean. Jesus can seem like a judgmental and non-loving figure if you listen to the way some people talk about him. But let’s see if we can find a way around this.”

  A part of me wanted to power my way through Linda’s resistance and demand that the wedding fit my definition of a religious ceremony in the Christian tradition. And a part of me felt I was being totally reasonable in doing so. What could be more reasonable than wanting to call upon the name at the source of Christianity and the name at the source of the spiritual journey that I considered central to my life? But there was another part of me that recognized that Linda’s concern wasn’t coming from a place of disdain for the gospels but rather from a place of compassion for everyone else who would be in the church on our wedding day.