Conscious Choice: Reverence for Life

July 2001 | Choice Books

Reverence for Life

by Mark Harris

Albert Schweitzer was a renowned European intellectual, theologian, and concert organist who in the early years of the twentieth century gave it all up to go back to school, become a medical doctor, and tend to the sick as a missionary in Africa. Yet even in Africa the famous doctor felt "sick and disheartened" by his own uncertainty about life’s meaning. While on a long river voyage, Schweitzer found himself pondering the ethical dilemma of civilization. As his boat made its way past a herd of hippos at sunset, a phrase suddenly occurred to him: "Reverence for life."

That’s it, he thought. A human being’s life is ethical only when he or she conducts themselves by the belief that all life is sacred. We should embrace devotion to the cause of all life that is in need of help. Reverence for life became then the motto and inspiration of the doctor’s philosophy and life’s work.

Richard Rhodes shares Schweitzer’s story in his exceptional memoir, A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, as a way of explaining his own efforts to find meaning and hope in life. In Rhodes’s case such reverence was discovered not among the sunsets and hippos of Schweitzer’s African river, but out of the wreckage of an abused childhood. The story is told in the author’s original 1990 memoir, recently reissued by the University Press of Kansas in a tenth anniversary edition (with a new preface and epilogue). It’s a powerful and deeply moving exposition in which Rhodes excavates the tangled roots of his story out of emotional subsoil once fertile with wounds. The faith evoked is of the hard-won kind, gathered along the way and despite beginnings in which trust and certitude in an adult’s protective love — something every child needs and deserves — were barely evident.

Rhodes, now in his sixties, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Here he describes a different kind of explosion, one that began literally enough with the death by shotgun-blast-suicide of his mother. The year was 1938 and Richard was thirteen months old. His first years were itinerant times marked by a widowed father and railroad work and a family on the move. Richard and his older brother Stanley were swept along, looked after by a succession of neighbors and baby-sitters. In 1947, their father remarried, to a then forty-eight-year-old woman from Texas named Anne Martin, and the story took another turn as the new stepmother descended upon the boys’ lives like the wicked witch of the Kansas plains.

The Beginning of a Nightmare

"Slashing us, kicking us, bashing our heads with a broom handle or a mop or the stiletto heel of a shoe, slashing our backs and the backs of our legs with the buckle of a belt," Rhodes writes, "our stepmother exerted one kind of control over us, battery that was immediately coercive but intermittent and limited in effect." The other kind of control was more lasting — the boys were starved, belittled, forced to put up with bizarre rules like being forbidden to use the bathroom at night. Rhodes goes on to tell of the adult self he became — drinking too much and suffering long bouts of depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder.

As a writer Rhodes is prodigious in his descriptive power, exhibiting a capacity to take you into the nuance and detail of things. You learn what it was like to slaughter chickens, for example, or to toil in the fruit and vegetable gardens at the state school where he and his brother lived. Or to live in close quarters with cruelty, casting about for a child’s hope. You also learn how the author came to believe that "the child within me that I was trying to guard, the soul that my stepmother with my father’s complicity had tried to murder, could be protected and nurtured."

A Hole in the World is inspirational but no Cinderella recovery story. Rhodes is candid about the anger he held onto for longer than was good for him. Despite years of therapy, he also drank nearly every day for thirty years. Discovering in the bottle a "cold, glittering darkness where I saw the world contemptuously for what I thought it really was, a blasted place, a mire of beasts contending." But then Rhodes quit drinking, abruptly. "One fine day I met a woman who needed me as much as I needed her," he explains. "I realized one night a few weeks after I met her that I would lose her if I savaged her with the bitterness and contempt I spewed when I was bingeing. I stopped drinking then suddenly and entirely, with enthusiasm, all at once and on my own, gladly, after thirty years, and didn’t and don’t miss it in the least." Sometimes love will do that to you. Perhaps also the familiar comfort of the abyss had begun to lose some of its compulsive allure by then?

In his original review eleven years ago, Russell Banks complained that Rhodes made little effort to discern the unconscious agendas of his father and stepmother; what motivated them to act as they did. Banks’s desire to learn more is understandable. But I would also ask if every writer who speaks of child abuse in their background is somehow obligated to explain the perpetrators’ inner motivations? Why? So that they can then forgive them? Rhodes is under no obligation to do so. What he does do is reveal the reality of what they did, and of what it did to him. Considering how much he has given us, I venture to say that’s more than enough.

A Hole in the World is not a story of high-pitched drama as much as one of dogged perseverance out of a Kansas hell. Rhodes’s writing flows with a rugged honesty and indignation also tempered by the underlying compassion of his voice. It’s a powerful combination. Going back to the story now reminds me of the floodgate of emotions I felt when I first read the book ten years ago. Rhodes’s story resonates with his deep desire to honor his brother Stanley, who emerges as the hero of the early days. He is one among a succession of human beings in Rhodes’s life whose love and generosity time and again save him from the "stark isolation" of his wounded soul.

Since its original publication A Hole in the World has rightfully come to be considered a classic of sorts in the genre of modern memoirs exploring the dark legacy of child abuse. For good reason. In the life of Richard Rhodes, writing became reverence for life.

Heartfelt Living, Heartfelt Activism

Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say that he believed in living with a "tough mind" and a "tender heart." I have always liked that way of putting things because we live in a tough, contentious world that asks a lot of us — a world that courses with social injustice and moral challenges that take us to the core of how we define ourselves as ethical human beings. It’s a complex world that demands a certain strength and independence of mind to intelligently discern the truth of things and live in a loving way in a world that is not always so loving.

We also need tender hearts. Not so much as an antidote to mental toughness but to keep our critical intelligence alive with spirit and compassion. With reverence for life. Our tender hearts serve to remind us why and for whom we need to be strong. Of course, a tough mind does not always completely protect a tender heart. I know personally how hard it can be to stay optimistic. Indeed, I’ve had my moments when I wish my own heart wasn’t so tender, that I didn’t feel so much the suffering and injustices I see around me. I’ve known my own version of that cold, glittering darkness that once covered Richard Rhodes’s world. But I’ve also learned how some of the struggles or suffering in my own life have taken me to deeper levels of intimate self-awareness, made me a stronger, more emotionally open, and — I would like to think — compassionate person.

Colorado-based writer Susan Skog understands this. "Life is a process of being broken open," she declares in her new book, Radical Acts of Love: How Compassion is Transforming Our World. "And many people who bring light to the world had hearts that were rent apart." In this new offering from Hazelden, Skog addresses that choice between letting what most challenges us break us, or turning adversity into a path of growth, connection, and compassionate engagement.

Refreshingly, Radical Acts of Love goes beyond the frequent limitation of many self-help books, which seem to run on the assumption that all the problems in our lives, or at least the ones we can do anything about, remain exclusively, inherently personal. Skog instead is motivated by what she sees as an epidemic of social disaffection in this country, a contagion of unmet emotional needs, loneliness, lack of caring, and depression that speaks to an underlying turmoil and alienation in the American soul.

"There is a fracture, a raw and painful fissure that runs through the heart of each one of us," she writes. "From our hospitals to our schools, our homes to our boardrooms, we have created a culture lacking in much-needed compassion, decency, and tenderness. Despite great economic affluence, we suffer from a form of emotional poverty. And this world we have created, this emotionally impoverished society, is breaking our hearts."

Skog offers in response a kind of prescriptive guide to the greater meaning, fulfillment, and spiritual purpose so many of us desire. It’s a prescription that weaves personal transformation and social activism into the blend of a healing mosaic inspired by the power of our hearts to rouse us through the darkest adversity. Accordingly, Radical Acts of Love offers a treasury of stories of unsung heroes of compassion, individuals who have blended tender hearts and tough minds in service to a better world (or at least to some corner of it).

This is not, however, some la de da chronicle of New Age do-gooders, out of touch with the harsh realities of American life. You learn here, for example, about AbaGayle, whose nineteen-year-old daughter, Catherine, was murdered in 1980. You see AbaGayle’s eight-year descent into a rage of grief and the dark and utter hopelessness of her world. You also learn about her slow journey back to the living, taking a meditation class or attending a Unity Church in Auburn, California, gradually assembling the beginnings of a new life and a renewed faith, and recovery from depression. Skog recounts AbaGayle’s remarkable correspondence with the man who killed her daughter. How gradually she began even to lay down the hatred she felt for her daughter’s killer, a man whose execution she had once personally hoped to witness. It’s a courageous story and one that eventually leads to AbaGayle’s emergence as an anti-death penalty activist.

Of course, not everyone in Radical Acts of Love evolves into an activist for major social reform. Nor do they need to. There’s the friend of writer Parker Palmer, for example, who when Palmer was suffering from depression, just came by every afternoon at five o’clock to massage his friend’s feet. No words on what he had to do to fix his condition, just support and some gentle touch. The meaning of unconditional compassion....

Admittedly, it’s easy to talk about love and compassion. We have a president now who does so quite freely, actually, peppering his speeches with frequent references to a "compassionate conservatism" that I must admit mostly leaves me wondering what exactly that is. Indeed, what does our compassion as a nation mean when homelessness has come to be considered an acceptable backdrop to our prosperity, like bad weather? Or when prisons remain cesspools of inhumanity, where broken people are taken and broken some more? What does compassion mean when millions of people today subsist on a minimum wage that is nearly impossible to survive on? Or when our own government steadfastly supports economic sanctions against Iraq that have contributed to the deaths of an estimated 750,000 children under the age of five, according to UNICEF and other groups?

I’d rather read about Robin Casarjian, whose nonprofit Lionheart Foundation Skog profiles. This organization provides emotional support and counseling to individuals in prison, delivering a message to the most abandoned of the abandoned that they are not alone. Like the Lionheart Foundation, Radical Acts of Love reclaims talk of love and compassion on larger, more solid grounds, rooted in service to a kind of fearless activism of the heart.

Radical Acts of Love is a book for people who dream of changing the unchangeable, who believe — dare we say! — in the possibility and promise of love. Not as some cheap advertising sentiment or political spin to the latest electoral campaign, but as potentially the greatest lever for personal and social transformation and cultural change. As a writer, Susan Skog envisions the kind of social change that can lift our collective hearts, beyond the present mire to new plateaus of fairness, equity, and compassion, to new heights of reverence for life. The remedy is always in finding the path of human connection, she says, translating our compassion into skilled, tender, heartfelt living.

She lets us know that all the power we need to create a better world is already in our hands.

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

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