Fully Alive_Discovering What Matters Most

by Timothy Shriver

  We left Father Appledorn’s small office at the end of the hour in an awkward silence and walked down the narrow hall of the monastery, out past the heavy wooden door, and down the short sloping hill to the parking lot. We walked to our car as if in a “no talk zone,” wound into silence by the tension of whom we each thought we were and whom we each wanted to become together. We were creating something new, something that was foreign and unknown. We were beginning the intensive part of the marriage journey—the part where romance and attraction and play yield to constructing a new life together. We were beginning the inner work of deciding what to hold on to and what to let go of as we struggled to create one common life from the distinct and often opposing histories of two. We were trying to express the love that had drawn us from our separate worlds to each other—the kind of love that is beyond any name.

  If I’d been paying attention to Zuscha or Lonergan, I would’ve known I was the one who needed to change. The challenge was right in front of my eyes; after all, I was in graduate school precisely to learn how to express the longing for God in words other than “God” or “Yahweh” or “Jesus.” How could I hope to convey to kids in the streets of New Haven that my world had been blown open by a mysterious power that promised life-changing energy and purpose if I couldn’t even convey it to the person I loved most? I already knew that my future teaching in public schools wasn’t going to be able to depend on the language of Christianity, but I hadn’t realized that the first test of my spiritual worldview was going to be our wedding ceremony.

  That’s where I was able to turn again to Bernard Lonergan. His investigations into consciousness explored not just the ways in which questions of ultimate meaning and value are experienced but also the way in which they are fulfilled. In simple terms, he developed a theology of how to find God: by falling in love. When a person falls in love, he wrote,

  One’s being becomes a being-in-love. Such being-in-love has its antecedents, its causes, its conditions, its occasions. But once it has blossomed forth and as long as it lasts, it takes over. It is the first principle. From it flow one’s desires and fears, one’s joys and sorrows, one’s discernment of values, one’s decisions and deeds.

  Being-in-love is of different kinds. There is the love of intimacy, of husband and wife, of parents and children. There is the love of one’s fellow men with its fruit in the achievement of human welfare. There is the love of God with one’s whole heart and whole soul, with all one’s mind and all one’s strength (Mk. 12:30). It is God’s love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us (Rom 5:5). It grounds the conviction of St. Paul that “there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths—nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God…”

  As the question of God is implicit in all our questioning, so being in love with God is the basic fulfilment of our conscious intentionality. That fulfilment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite humiliation, failure, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. That fulfilment brings a radical peace, the peace that the world cannot give. That fulfilment bears fruit in a love of one’s neighbor that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth. On the other hand, the absence of that fulfilment opens the way to the trivialization of human life in the pursuit of fun, to the harshness of human life arising from the ruthless exercise of power, to despair about human welfare springing from the conviction that the universe is absurd.

  Here, there was yet another breakthrough for me: the highest aspiration of life was falling in love. That was my first principle. It was Linda’s first principle. It was everyone’s first principle. We are made to fall in love with each other, with ourselves, and with all things. Slowly—ever so slowly, a light went off in my head. Here, in Lonergan’s otherwise dense philosophical theology, was a framing of the code that I hadn’t understood: the search for God that I felt in myself and sensed in others could be satisfied by falling in love—not by talking about it or teaching about it, but by falling into it. Believing in God is not thinking God. It’s believing that we are happy and true to ourselves only when we give ourselves away to another, to the whole of creation, to love. That’s what faith is all about: trusting that you must give yourself away and only then discover the self you were made to be. That’s what it means to be made by and for transcendence, to be a being made like God. It means that you are made to give yourself to all things. No exceptions.

  The God experience that I so wanted to have and to share was right in front of my eyes: it was in my breaking through to Linda in love.

  “At this point,” the Franciscan Richard Rohr notes, “it’s not like one has a new relationship with God; it’s like one has a whole new God!” Words that I had heard before as creeds began to sound like experiences. In the Christian gospels, Jesus says, “the Father and I are one,” and all of a sudden I heard him talking about his own experience of unity and love with all things. The Jewish psalmist says, “God himself is my counselor, and at night my innermost being instructs me,” and all of a sudden I heard him talking about his experience of a deep trust in the divine. Rohr extends the insight to its fullest meaning: “God is operating with you, in you, and even as you.” It finally dawned on me that the feeling of being in love was an experience of God. That was fabulous!

  Over the course of my studies in spirituality and Linda’s and my preparation for marrying, we both started to understand how to bring the parts of our lives together. Understanding isn’t the same as doing—the doing would take years. But at least we started to realize we didn’t need to know perfect answers anymore. The right questions were enough. The longing of my heart was Linda, and I was hers, too. We’d been in love, but now we needed to fall in love. That meant being vulnerable with each other and letting go of our moorings. It meant becoming believers—becoming “beings in love.” We were learning to trust each other and to believe in each other enough to compromise on our most cherished ideas. With faith in each other, we were learning to fall.

  At the end of the academic year, Linda Potter and I celebrated the sacrament of falling in love. We tried with everything we had and everything we were to make the ceremony a celebration of the spirit we shared and the spirit we received from our many friends and family. We were married in the 150-year-old chapel at Georgetown University, Linda’s alma mater. Presiding was a friend of ours, Father Richard Fragomeni, who made the congregation laugh when he mentioned that Linda and I had a weakness for needing to “discuss everything!” The small, beautiful gothic-revival chapel in the middle of the Georgetown campus was jammed with more than three hundred guests. The New Haven gospel choir the Vernon Jones Singers sang with joyful exuberance, “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine,” and the entire congregation—Christians and non-Christians alike—beamed with enthusiasm. We read the prophet Micah’s exhortation to “love tenderly,” and we read St. Luke’s story of resurrection, where travelers on the road to Emmaus felt the presence of God as their “hearts burned within.” And seated on the altar next to Father Fragomeni was the six-foot five-inch Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, who happened to be Linda’s godfather. I don’t know that I’d ever heard of a wedding with both Catholic and Episcopal clergy sharing duties in a Catholic church, but there they sat together.

  We were in territory that was uncharted for both of us, but we were trying to do what our love called us to do: announce the power of unconditional love in a way that anyone could understand and see and feel as divine. Two days later, we took off on our honeymoon to Nepal and India to explore the ancient holy sites of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. And when we came home, Linda and I headed back to New Haven together. I was no longer intent on trying to teach English or history; I was intent on trying to show my students how much I loved them and trust that English and history would take care of themselves.

  NINE

  Social a
nd Emotional Learning

  Linda and I moved back to New Haven in the fall of 1986. Linda launched her legal practice as a staff attorney at Yale Legal Services, representing children in neglect and abuse cases. I returned to Hillhouse High School, where a New Haven basketball icon, Salvatore “Red” Verderame, had just taken over as principal, and a fiery educator from out of town, Dr. John Dow, Jr., had taken over as superintendent. In my first week back, a student was shot just a few feet from where I was standing at dismissal. Blood splattered my clothes as cruel evidence of the drug wars that were escalating all around the city. The urgency of change was inescapable. More and more kids were looking for belonging in the wrong places—deadly wrong places. Linda and I were exactly where we wanted to be: trying to do something about it. And within a month, she was pregnant and our family adventure was under way, too.

  Over the following years, our first child, Rose, was followed by another, Tim, and then another, Sam, and then another, Kathleen, and then another, Caroline. Our life as a family was enormously full and happy and exhausting. At work, I searched for ways to give students a chance to integrate their inner lives with academic tasks. Red Verderame became my mentor and gave me broad latitude to try to figure out what new ideas might reduce the crushing dropout rate and the persistent violence at Hillhouse. Impatient with the pace of change, Dow pressed Red and the whole team at Hillhouse for new solutions. I reached back to the Comer team at Yale for practical ideas and helped start a Hillhouse “mental health team” and a site-based management team to engage parents and community leaders.

  And I kept looking for ways to teach students how to see from within and believe from within, without using those words. I was lucky to meet great educators such as Bridget Hardy, Karol DeFalco, Dee Speese-Linehan, Mickey Kavanagh, Burt Saxon, and Gary Highsmith—all innovators in elementary, middle, and high schools seeking ways to connect meaningfully with their students. We found our way to another Yale professor, Dr. Roger Weissberg, who was writing and implementing new curricula that taught middle school kids “social problem-solving” skills, and we decided to try it in a couple of grades. Another curriculum, for example, taught first graders to develop an awareness of how their words could affect their peers. We taught them the difference between saying something positive, calling it a “warm fuzzy,” and saying something negative, calling it a “cold prickly.” I’d never seen a first grader discuss “warm fuzzys” and “cold pricklys,” and it was fascinating. It was one of the most important lessons I ever saw taught. Middle school students learned to create “stress thermometers” so they could measure their own emotional reactions and thereby be less inclined to act impetuously and destructively. Try to create one for yourself. It’s a fantastic way to monitor your own emotional ups and downs. High school students learned to set positive goals that insured nonviolent and healing approaches to interpersonal conflict and community problems. That, too, is a great skill to master.

  Without knowing it, we were the first district-level team in the country to try to create a comprehensive approach to what we later named “social and emotional learning.” Working with Roger Weissberg, Red Verderame, John Dow, and my fellow teachers, I founded a citywide initiative to promote the teaching of these skills in every grade throughout the entire school system. At the center of all this ambitious effort was Roger’s stoplight problem-solving curriculum. During many years of research, he had developed a system for teaching children how to manage their inner lives and interact positively with others. He created a month of lessons that could be taught in an average sixth-grade class and that covered a powerful array of skills and relationship opportunities for children and adults alike. The whole curriculum was encapsulated in the symbol of a stoplight: the red light represented the many skills needed to calm down in a stressful situation and take stock of feelings and goals—the key elements of self-awareness. The yellow light represented the package of skills needed to sort your way through the anxiety and confusion of stressful situations and shape clear and achievable goals—the key elements of self-empowerment. The green light represented the array of behaviors and actions needed to act positively to resolve problems in a way that neither harmed others nor harmed oneself—the key elements of building positive relationships. The underlying lessons were rich in texture and insight, but the stoplight made it seem easy, as it broke those lessons down into six easy-to-remember steps:

  When you have a problem:

  Stop, calm down, and think before you act

  Say the problem and how you feel

  Set a positive goal

  Think of lots of solutions

  Think ahead to the consequences

  Go ahead and try the best plan

  I watched Karol DeFalco, a master teacher, lead her students in these skills, and I could see that she was teaching kids not only important skills but also powerful experiences of interior discovery—some lessons prompted students to try to trust their peers and adults in an almost spiritual way. I watched children practicing stress management techniques such as quiet breathing, and I could see them learning to find the quiet and peaceful spaces within themselves, much like Pennington or Maharshi taught. I watched kids struggle to set positive goals, which often required forgiveness, and I could hear echoes of spiritual teachings on healing and the prophetic politics of Gandhi and King. I watched children thinking deliberately and reflectively about how to muster the energy to take action in the face of adversity, and I could hear echoes of the World War II–era mystic activist Simone Weil and the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who acted in the face of horrific conditions with resolute and self-possessed strength and faith. “Social Development” classes were a combination of emotional self-awareness, relationship skills, values, and inspiration. They were terrific.

  More or less. I brought the problem-solving framework to an after-school group I started for students at Hillhouse, the Young Men’s Leadership Group, and asked the twenty-five high school young men to learn a shortened version of the program. For a few weeks, our meetings were focused on problem-solving skills and role-playing among ourselves. Doug Bethea, an outspoken and charismatic junior, always wanted to lead the discussions and plan service outings and dances and anything to promote positive activity among his peers. He’d join the other young men in making fun of the simplicity and childlike nature of the stoplight, but then he’d dive into issues of immediate concern. “Some guy dissed you, Lamont, last week in the cafe and you started a huge fight. You think you couldda ‘calmed down’ before you punched him?” After a short pause, Doug bounced in: “Hell no you wasn’t gonna ‘calm down’ but you shoudda.”

  Lamont Young was a broad-shouldered, strongly built athlete of a kid with a huge smile and a quiet shyness. He walked through the halls of Hillhouse like a gentle charmer. Girls liked him, his football coach liked him, and he had an older brother, Larry, who always looked out for him. Lamont laughed at Dougie’s example of his recent fight, but agreed. “Next time,” he muttered. “Next time, I’ll call Shriver and have him bring me a stoplight in the cafe. Watch me!” He smiled as if to show he had an understanding of what he should do when trouble found him next. But his tone was honest, too: he grinned, as though admitting that the challenge of being calm amid a conflict was probably more than he could handle.

  And so the conversations went. We discussed girlfriend conflicts, parent conflicts, gangs, grades, teachers, clothes, churches, counselors, and more. The guys seemed to welcome the whole idea of having the safe space of the group in which to talk among themselves about their experiences and the tension of school and community life. For more than a month or two, problem solving was the center of the Young Men’s Leadership Group, and I was thrilled by the chance it was giving me and the students to open up and try to face the real challenges of life. It wasn’t therapy and it wasn’t school, either. It was a group of young men trying to discover the source of goodness within themselves and trying to find ways to keep it safe in the world around
them. It was intimacy and ultimacy. It was fantastic.

  Until it wasn’t. One morning, I arrived at Hillhouse to a report of another shooting of one of our students. I went to the main office to ask our principal, Red, what he’d heard from his police sources. He delivered the quick update without emotion: “One of your ‘young leaders’ was gunned down last night. Shot seven times. A kid named Lamont Young. You know him?”

  I was stunned. “Are you sure? I can’t believe that! Are you sure it was Lamont Young, the same one in my group?” Red knew enough not to answer me. There was no answer that wasn’t already obvious. Of course it was the same Lamont Young. Of course it was the Lamont Young in the Young Men’s Leadership Group. Of course he was sure. He just stared down at me over his six-foot-six frame with the wordless look of a man who knew of the brutality of the world in which our kids were living and wasn’t sure I had understood it yet. “They shot him seven times at point-blank range, Tim. Believe it or not, he’s still alive, but I’m not sure how long he’ll last.”

  “He’s still alive? Where is he?”

  “He’s at Yale New Haven Hospital. I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.”

  I stumbled out of Red’s office and back to work—to classrooms, to hall duty, to monitoring the cafeteria, to activities. I was intent on getting down to the hospital as soon as my workday was over and only hoped that Lamont would hang on long enough for me to say goodbye. I could feel a sense of déjà vu come over me as I went through my day: there I was again, confronted by the same heartbreak, the same shock, the same enveloping despair that I’d felt before. Lamont was a magical kid with rock star good looks, a kindness that was unmistakable, and a sixteen-year-old’s naïve but eager desire to find his way. I realized I was crazy about him—that he and I and the others in the group had developed an understanding of one another, a trust among ourselves born of confidence, a powerful bond born of mutual affection. It was awkward to think of how all we males had become so close and, though we never showed it openly, so loving toward one another. And now Lamont was dying because none of us had been able to protect him from forces too strong to oppose.