In the Long Line of Human Life, Reach Back and Lend a Hand

“How many times have I been put at the front of the line without even knowing there was a line? How many times have I walked through a door that opened, invisibly and silently, for me, but slammed shut for others? How many lines have I cut in a life of privilege?”   --Andy Crouch, author

Sometimes getting ahead in this life all depends on where your find yourself standing in line.

Take Verdah Tetteh, a member of Fitchburg High School class of 2021, first in line among her classmates, at least academically. At the school’s June 4^th graduation ceremony Tetteh, a first-generation daughter of her mother from Ghana, was awarded her school’s General Excellence Award, that included a $40,000 scholarship.  The Harvard University bound Tetteh might have been content to just accept the check and head for Cambridge, take the money and run. But then she did the most surprising and selfless of acts.

She gave it all away. Yup. All of it. Every last penny.

Tetteh decided on the spot that day to ask that the school instead award those funds to a fellow classmate in greater financial need than her. A person of deep faith, Tetteh did what most folks do not do when they are standing at the front of the line. In first place. In a place of great advantage. She looked back and knew in her heart that her responsibility was to help the folks who were in the long line behind her.

Said Tetteh, “I am so very grateful for this, but I also know that I am not the one who needs this the most. Knowing my mom went to community college, and how much that was helpful, I would be so very grateful if administration would consider giving the … scholarship to someone who is going to community college.”

What would our world be like if more and more folks like Tetteh remembered just where they stand in the line of life and chose to look back and then do something? Be more generous. Help others to move up in the line. Show mercy. Act with compassion. Maybe even move backwards to stand in solidarity and support with the many at the way, way back of the line.

It’s been a hard year for the people in our world who are at the back of the line. Folks who suffered through COVID, low wage workers who could not afford to stay home, neighbors who had poor access to health care and got sick or died because of this disparity.  That’s a very long line. There’s also the line of racism that tells folks of color they don’t get to move to the front, a line that’s been holding them back for so, so many years. A line that once led to the very back of the bus, not so long ago, not when you look at the long arc of American history. 

Makes me look at where I stand in line.

At the very front, truth be told. I’ve got a great place in line; have since the day I was born. Not once in my long life have I ever been told to go to the back of the line because of my gender or because of my skin color or because of who I choose to love or because of the faith I practice or because of my heritage. Nope. Sometimes I’ve actually been ushered to the front. This way sir!

Our country is caught up right now in a struggle that is at once very new and as old as our republic. Is there really equality of opportunity when it comes to deciding where each of us as citizens get to stand in line? Or are there instead systemic forces that try their best to keep certain people at the back and certain people right up front, behind a velvet VIP rope in fact, first among unequals?

The person who began the faith I try to practice was an infamous line cutter. But the strange thing, is that he always seemed to be moving backwards in line, not forwards. Standing with the powerless and not the fat cats. In his world he chose to be with the poor and the excluded, the orphan and the widow, the sick and the lonely. He knew he could not be truly free, and his world would not be truly just, unless the line was in fact, flipped. Reversed. The first last and the last first, as he once said.

What a crazy guy, huh? Who’d want to live in a world like that?

Where the rich and the powerful, the privileged and the advantaged, have to stand in line like everyone else, maybe even give up their place for someone who does not get the breaks or the perks. People like me at the very front. Maybe like you too. What would this life be like if we all followed Tetteh, as she seemingly took the wrong way on her graduation day? On her way to Harvard but not before taking the hand of another, a fellow child of God, and inviting them to move up in the line.

Thank you Verdah: for your example and for your challenge to others, to all of us, in the line called human life. Something tells me that even before you got into Harvard, with your big heart, you were already first in line.

 

   

    

                  

 

 

 

A Week of Grief and Gratitude For Lives Well Lived

"And it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love, ‘til we find ourselves on the path unwinding in the circle of life.”          -- Elton John and Tim Rice, “The Lion King”

One week. Just seven days.

One birth. One death.  One beginning. One ending. One life about to blast off into possibilities unknown and dreams yet unfulfilled. One life concluding, the final note of a life’s song played. It echoed and then it faded and then there was silence.

That was my wonderful and sad, amazing, and heartbreaking week.

So, on a Thursday afternoon, I watched my 23-year-old Goddaughter Chloe graduate from Harvard University, mortar cap affixed to her head and adorned in the flowing robes of an academic career concluded. The fact her family and I watched Chloe do her graduation walk in the TV room of my house, as we viewed the ceremony virtually because of COVID; this took nothing away from the import of that moment, its joy and wonder. 

So, on the following Wednesday afternoon, I visited my 72-year-old friend Manley, and laid my hand on his warm arm, as he lay unconscious in a hospital bed, in the front room of his home. I watched as his chest rose and then fell, as he breathed slowly, in and then out, aware this was probably the last time I would see him. A dear and trusted spiritual teacher, his wisdom and guidance steered me through the hardest times in my life. Manley died about 12 hours later.

Sometimes this life is just too beautiful and too awe-full to understand, to take in all at once. Sometimes our Creator gives us a sacred synchronicity of events like those I experienced, that in their stark contrast, wake us up to the truth that we are all mortal beings. That the gift of life we are given is a miracle, that yes, we all start out fresh from our mother’s womb, all pink and wrinkly and squirming. And yes, we will all one day take in a final lungful of air, and then depart from this earth for mysterious places unknown.

You can’t really prepare yourself for what it is like to arrive at such crossroads. We can anticipate, imagine how these moments might unfold, how we’ll react. But then it happens. As I watched Chloe, my proud “Uncle” heart expanded and grew and I could not help but think back to the cooing and quiet infant that lay gently cradled in my arms, just weeks after her birth.  And as I sat and kept watch with Manley, I was brought back to all the times we sat together, cups of coffee in hand, talking about life, he patiently steering me away from the rocks and the shoals.

It does all go so fast. 

The river of time carries us along swiftly and inexorably and though we might wish for it to slow down, it moves on and on, and so all we can do is enjoy the journey as best as we can. When we are young, of course, we don’t think much, if at all, about death. No. With bodies that seem to be invincible, and thousands of days that we trust still lay before us, we rush headlong into the future. If there is one youthful mistake it is in thinking that we can go on forever. Life is somehow infinite and all that lies before us is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

But then things turn. Something happens. Our minds shift and our hearts change and our bodies stumble. We realize that the march of days has an end. That this story of life we’re authoring and living: it does have a final chapter. My mortality epiphany might have come on the day we mourned and said goodbye to my father. As I walked alongside the casket in the church, on a warm and sticky August day; as the pallbearers accompanied him on his final journey, I just knew one day I too would be in his place.

If there is one mistake so many of us commit in growing old, it is acting as if we’ve got all the time in the world. We hang on to a grudge and say we’ll get to resolving it one day and then time runs out. We hold back showing our love to others out of fear and then one day, that opportunity has passed. We declare we’ll be happy “when”—as in “when I retire”, or “when I have more time I will…” and then our time ends. 

Seize the day!  If I had but one philosophy to try and live by now that I am into my seventh decade, let it be that.  As the Psalmist writes, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Godspeed Chloe, as you take on the world. I will be cheering you on, every day. And Godspeed Manley. You are on your way to the place Shakespeare called, “the undiscovered country.” I will miss you every day.

And the circle of life continues.