Hope Matters: The Untold Story of How Faith Works in America

By John A Calhoun

Mary Gonzales strolls the streets of Chicago's meatpacking district every evening, keeping a watchful eye over "her" neighborhood kids. Tony Ortiz encourages young men in California state prisons to break free of the brutal gang life he once knew all too well. Joe Hynes, Brooklyn's district attorney, champions women and children, not wanting them to suffer as he suffered.They, and the twenty-one other amazing people interviewed by Jack Calhoun, are reshaping lives and communities across America. They include Christians of every denomination, Muslims, Jews, and others, some who pray five times a day and some who are, frankly, "not that religious."But each tells Calhoun, there's much more to the story.You may have heard of some of these Americans. Several are in the news. The good words of all shine brightly in their communities. What you haven't heard about is the underlying force, the hidden source of their seemingly endless energy and selflessness.It is faith -- a deep and, in some cases, unsuspected spirituality. They have the unshakable sense that they work not only for their organizations -- and each individual they encounter -- but especially for God.Calhoun was once an eager divinity school student, hungry to make a difference. Through the years he rose to national prominence in the field of public policy, spending twenty-plus years as the founding president of the National Crime Prevention Council. However, something wasn't right. Caught up in a parade of committee meetings, speaking engagements, and policy and program initiatives, he had lost touch with the bedrock of his vocation. It took an encounter with an unusually clear-sighted volunteer to reconnect his daily work to his faith in God.Reinvigorated, Calhoun embarked on a two-year cross-country quest to find out how faith motivates some of America's hardest-working public servants. They pursue a range of innovative and ambitious plans to help their communities, and their accomplishments are impressive. But just try telling them so.They have been chosen, they'll explain, to fulfill a larger purpose. Their paths have been rocky, their burdens heavy, and the work hasn't always been fun. Yet they feel blessed, emboldened by their trust in a higher power to live lives of acceptance and unbounded love.Some recent books have laid divisiveness and hostility at faith's door. "Hope Matters" brings to light the togetherness and reconciliation that faith truly engender when good people heed its call to action.You won't hear Mary, Tony, Joe or the rest preaching from the pulpit, or even in the streets. They have no sermon or script to follow. There is a ministry of open arms and second chances, of waking up each morning with new challenges and going to bed each night with renewed faith. Their stories just might inspire you to make your own "place of worship" a little bigger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bartleby Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2007
• ISBN: 9780884003700

Book preview

Preface

I lost something during my long career in public service. Or

perhaps it wasn’t lost, but hidden, grown over.

I have spent the better part of my life helping to design and administer programs in the public policy arena. After serving as commissioner of Youth Services in Massachusetts, I was appointed by President Carter to run the Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF), which put me in charge of such programs as Head Start, The National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, and Neglect, Foster Care and Adoption Opportunities. Following this, I served as Vice President of the Child Welfare League of America for two years, and then took the post of president and CEO of the National Crime Prevention Council, a position I held for almost twenty-one years.

But my resume hides something. Lost in the welter of speeches, testimonies, legislative work, and the administration of programs and policies was that which spurred me in the first place. I was successful and proud of my accomplishments, but I felt something was missing. Mattie Lawson reminded me of what it was.

While I was attending the California Wellness Foundation’s annual conference and awards ceremony in San Francisco several years ago, I casually asked Mattie, a fellow board member, how she came to the attention of Wellness.

Both of my sons were shot in street violence. One was killed, my firstborn, she replied.

As a father of two, I could not imagine a more horrible pain. But Mattie, because of her deep faith, was not destroyed by her staggering grief. Instead, she turned to action. She felt commissioned by God to use her pain to heal others. Then she said something that stunned me: I no longer have two children. I have four hundred. Not one more child in my neighborhood will die.

Mattie showed me an unshakable faith that commissioned her to be there for others in spite of her devastation. Her words astounded me, and confronted me with the powerful reminder not of what I had done throughout my career, but why I had done it, and what I had forgotten. She reminded me of what had animated me in the first place and launched my forty-year career in public service.

This epiphany stopped me in my tracks. She reminded me of faith that trumped reason, of courage beyond rationality… where I began.

My initiation into public service began forty years ago with a spark ignited by the work and words of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was smitten by King’s approach to the battle for social change. Had he begun with law and regulation alone—policy issues—I believe he would have failed. Of course, the policy changes that came from his work had tremendous impact, including the eventual ratification of such monumental laws as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts. But although Dr. King’s actions were strategic, he began with passionate moral commitment and a willingness to put his life on the line for his beliefs. His life text was Exodus: escape from slavery, wandering in the desert, a view of the Promised Land, a dream of equality. The story found its way into living rooms and hearts across America. Everyone has experienced some injustice, some pain, some wilderness. The story of Exodus brought us home.

King made his journey without the basic protection we so often take for granted: the criminal justice system and a sympathetic community. He and his followers were harassed and beaten, and sometimes killed. He confronted massive structural injustice—segregated restaurants and schools, exclusion from state universities, public drinking fountains, and juries, restricted voting rights, and more—with the only resources he had: his body, his talent, his determination, a Spirit-filled community, and faith. He refused to meet hate with hate; rather, he returned good for evil so that the oppressed would not become as hate-filled as the oppressors.

King’s spirit caught me in 1962, my last year in college. Before new policies and new programs, before the Great Society and the War on Poverty, the faith community led the struggle. I joined that struggle and went to seminary, largely because it was a locus of political action that could spark political and community change. My beliefs, then emerging, hold that the God I celebrate is mud-spattered, engaged, bruised, and forgiving, angry at our neglect and injustice, but always hopeful. This is a God who doesn’t promise a painless life, but offers healing; one who doesn’t guarantee a relaxed, uneventful existence, but offers joy; one who says, Don’t worry about heaven. Worry about your neighbor. He needs you now. Get moving. You’re human, and you’re going to mess up. But you’ve got a spark of Me in you.

King’s was a passionate, joyful, embracing faith, not the bland, polite religion I had tasted in my church growing up. Those I met in the early days of the Civil Rights struggle manifested a faith that was courageous and fully alive, founded in motion: Oh be swift, my soul, to answer him. Be jubilant, my feet.

Underscored by sermon, prayer, and song (such as This Little Light of Mine and Amazing Grace), this faith propelled a movement that aimed to change law and hearts, and thus its language embraced not only civil change, but sacrifice, reconciliation, and life after pain. It aimed to change law and create community based on love, not hate and separation. Time-honored laws and intransigent mores slowly crumbled, not because one power confronted another, but because good people were willing to suffer at the hands of unjust laws. Jonathan Daniels, one of my good friends who lived on my floor at the Episcopal Divinity School (then the Episcopal Theological School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was shot-gunned in half while working to register voters in Hayneville, Alabama. A kneeling statue next to the School’s chapel memorializes Jonathan’s life and death.

My own most vivid experience during those idealistic times took place in the sweltering summer of 1964 in Folsom, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town just south of Philadelphia.

A second year seminarian, I was working that summer as the director of an urban camp out of the Church of the Advocate, located at 18th and Diamond Streets in the heart of one of Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent areas. We seemed always to be in the middle of the action, both personal and political. For the kids there were street games, a six block hike to and swim in the municipal pool, church school lessons, and work with their families. In the evening the camp staff and volunteers attended or hosted meetings of SNVCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and we often picketed the then-segregated Girard College. The kids, political action, song, and worship were woven together in a rich, joyous, and often tumultuous and exhausting whole.

One night we received an emergency call from the American Friends Service Committee. A young black couple, she a nurse and he a lab technician, had just bought a house in Folsom in an effort to integrate an all-white neighborhood. The caller was hysterical, shouting that the couple was huddled in the basement of their new house with a Friends Service Committee staffer behind an overturned hot water heater. Their lawn and car had been drenched with gasoline and torched; every window and most of the frames had been smashed by stones. An angry mob surrounded the house, screaming, Niggers, go home. The local police sat on horses smoking cigarettes. You have to help us! was the message.

What could we do? What did we have? Not much. Ourselves. Our bodies. A little madness. The certainty that we had to respond. Hardly thinking, I grabbed the large cross and a handful of choir robes and yelled for volunteers. As I recall, there were about seven of us, maybe eight. A pretty motley bunch we were, most in our early twenties, and a few young assistant counselors still in high school.

We sped to Folsom and parked a few blocks from the address. We could hear muffled yelling. It sounded like a football game. We donned our red robes and white cassocks in the steaming mid-Atlantic summer heat. One of the counselors, Garland Dempsey (I cannot believe I remember his name), refused to march (even though he was hopelessly in love with one of the marchers), saying he was going to save us, rescue us from our madness, perhaps from our deaths. Civil rights workers had been slain. As it turned out, Garland wasn’t the coward he seemed: he saved our necks.

I led, holding the cross high. I had no plan except to start singing, which we did as soon as we rounded the corner and saw the mob. What we saw seemed like an apparition: roughly a hundred people were in the street in an arc in front of the house. Many were women in curlers holding the hands of their children. Sure enough, three or four policemen sat calmly on their horses. A car, presumably the new owners’, sat blackened in the street sitting on cinder blocks. All of the windows had been broken. Stones littered the yard. Niggers, go home was probably the mildest shout we heard.

We started to sing. The feeling of unreality suddenly became mutual. The crowd stopped shouting and gaped at this rag-tag bunch, slowly parting so we could get through. We sang our way up a small hill over the lawn. It grew so quiet that I could hear the crunch of the charred grass under our feet.

We stopped in front of the house and kept singing. What to do? Eventually we were going to run out of songs.

After a few minutes, it seemed to dawn on the crowd that they weren’t exactly facing a juggernaut. The silence broke with a shout: Nigger lovers, go home. That’s when someone had the bright idea of throwing rocks, not at us, but over us onto the roof, where the stones rolled down and hit our heads and shoulders. We moved a few feet away from the eaves and kept singing. Now we were clear of the rocks, but, unfortunately, closer to the crowd.

The standoff might have lasted only a few minutes, but it felt like a day. The situation shifted abruptly when someone started throwing stones against the house much harder. We felt them ricocheting into our backs; sometimes they shattered, showering us with pieces of rock.

It’s strange, but I don’t remember being scared. I was consumed by another worry. I have two junior counselors in this march, I thought. They were probably no more than sixteen. If they get hurt… I was beginning to fear their parents’ wrath more than the mob.

Suddenly, the wail of police sirens drowned out both our singing and the mob’s shouting. With lights flashing, three or four state police cruisers roared in and broke up the stalemate.

It was over. By that time, we all needed a bathroom break and a Philadelphia cheese steak. We found out that Garland had gotten a prominent DJ at a local radio station to sound the alarm, who reported the news over the station and somehow alerted both the governor’s office and the state police.

I visited the young couple the next day. We stood together amidst broken glass and splintered wood on the windowless second story, staring at the blackened lawn and the remains of their car. I never forgot what the man said.

It is hate, he whispered, but the hate hurts them. They throw rocks at themselves. It makes me sad.

The sadness and fear was too much for them; I soon heard that they had left the neighborhood for good.

That fall I returned to the Episcopal Theological School to complete my degree. I did not seek ordination. I turned down a job teaching New Testament and (I think) Religion in Literature at Middlebury College in Vermont. Instead, I chose to work in public service in an urban area.

Thus began a long career. Yes, I pushed boundaries; yes, I started innovative programs; yes, I took risks. But along the way, something got buried—the something that had started it all. That is, until Mattie Lawson pulled off the barnacle.

I have been very fortunate. My career armed me with skills, knowledge of programs and policies, a platform, and prestige. But did these carry me through? Could these alone have given me the courage to put my body on the line? No.

Politics and programs had only been the manifest superstructure of my life, not the foundation. Mattie led me back to faith, to my anchoring belief: as I was loved by God, so was commissioned to love my neighbor—especially to the neighbor most in need, and whatever I would risk, I would be sustained. Amazing, I thought, that something as important and fundamental as faith—the ground on which we stand—stays hidden. We don’t talk about it. People who bring their faith to work tend not to talk about what’s sustaining them, propelling them to be there for others despite the cost.

When faith is made a topic of public discussion, the conversation too often becomes polarized and distorted. Discussions of faith frequently feature language that divides, that pits one group against another, that does not bring us to the common goals that most of us share. A reporter asked a neighbor of the accused London transit bomber whether she noticed anything different about the accused. He had become increasingly religious, she responded. In the public mind, more religion can now equate to more intolerance, more violence. Not so for the people you will meet here.

This book is about people working in the public sector—cops, teachers, directors of non-profit organizations, and administrators, all whose shared faith tells them, I am my brother’s, my sister’s keeper. They are real people doing real work, some of the toughest work in the country today. They don’t beat people up with their faith or lord it over others. Instead, they put themselves on the line. They are not unreachable titans. They are you and me.

These magnificent lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Four Quartets sum it up:

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Eliot’s reference to the end leads me not to reflections on mortality, but to overwhelming gratitude to Mattie and the others who led me back to my inspirational starting point. I now better understand why I committed myself to a life of service. Before audiences across the country and abroad, I have always cited the necessity of policies and programs for family support, education, employment, health care, community supports, and the like. But now I add reflections on the deeper principles, the essential fuel: forgiveness, reconciliation, sacrifice, thanksgiving, using pain as an instrument of healing, and serving one’s neighbors.

Over the past two years I’ve zigzagged across the nation, logging thousands of miles, finding and listening to the voices of other Matties. Most of the interviews took place in 2005, although I have followed up on some people’s current situations. Their stories uncover the beauty and power of people of faith laboring in the public sector, and of all those who bring their faith to work and whose faith works. They have responded to Martin Luther King’s question to each of us:

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness, says Dr. King. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

Acknowledgements

It would take at least a chapter to list the many friends and

colleagues who helped to mid-wife this book from concep-

tion through articulation to publication. Family, friends, neighbors, and work colleagues here and abroad (as well as unsuspecting seat mates on airplanes) suggested people I might interview, read draft texts, provided me the opportunity to share thoughts from various podiums, and constantly affirmed the importance of the effort.

So I risk insulting a raft of friends and colleagues by selecting only a few, but I will take that risk. Amidst the outpouring of caring and encouragement, five special tributes must be given. First, to Julie Sulc, project officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, a woman of deep faith who has served both in the academic and political arenas. She indicated to me early on that this book simply had to be written, that my observations had to be recorded, that the book would fill a void. Julie, a rare combination of kindness and steely intelligence, provided me with funding from Pew to get started as well as the belief that it could get done. On more than one occasion, Julie asked in her inimitable way, What does your heart tell you to do? Do you think God is finished with you yet?

Second, to Elinor Griffith, a former Senior Editor at the Reader’s Digest and close family friend, who served as my editor. Ellie, a model of depth and caring, pushed and prodded this book and deserves every kudo for perception, perseverance, many late night conversations (into which we roped her husband Peter), and endless e-mails and meetings in New York. Ellie’s humor, persistence, and eye for quality never flagged.

Third, to Jeremy Kay, Publisher at Bartleby Press, and his Project Editor, Kacie Glenn, both of whom chipped at my text and my stubbornness—Kacie with gentleness and Jeremy with a hard (but accurate) chisel. Their commitment and incisive, persistent questions pushed me to articulate connections I had not seen and to a clarity that raised the book to new and compelling levels.

Fourth, to a dear family friend, Paula Lecky, a freelance researcher who after reading portions of my book strongly encouraged me to contact Jeremy, someone she felt would be very interested in publishing my book. She was right.

The most special tributes I reserve for my family: my children, Hollis and Byron Calhoun, his wife Allyssa, and my sisters Deane Bunce, Helen Jaeger, and Martha Wintner—all, in spite of being enmeshed in extremely busy lives, provided the depth of loving criticism and critical loving that only a family can give. My wife, Ottilia, deserves special recognition for enduring the long nights, early mornings, and weekends I spent writing, taking time from us and other pursuits, having faith in my belief that this book would see the light of day, and patiently reading (and commenting on) chapter after chapter.

Introduction

Today, faith divides. Never in our history has the nation

been so awash in—and so torn by—discussions and

debates about faith. Civil libertarians decry the blurring of the line between church and state. Judges attempt to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Schools petition for the right to pray while others fight to remove under God from our Pledge of Allegiance. The issues of abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage trigger huge fights about the sacredness of life, the nature of marriage, and what is acceptable in the sight of God. A church group from Topeka, Kansas, even pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, thanking God for dead soldiers. Why? They want to drive home their belief that God is killing soldiers to punish Americans for condoning homosexuality.

That’s all we seem to hear about. We don’t hear about the ordinary people whose faith inspires them to do the extraordinary: cops, teachers, social workers, district attorneys, directors of non-profit organizations, state officials, youth workers, and so many others. They are Christians and Jews, Muslims and Baha’is, Hindus and American Indians. They are real people doing real work, people who don’t beat others up with their faith or lord it over nonbelievers. They are doing some of the toughest work in the country.

And they keep their faith hidden, quiet, even silent. Their amazing stories don’t get told, and we don’t hear about a faith that spurns blame, a faith that serves.

Yes, religion can kill. Catholics and Protestants have fought for centuries in Ireland. Europe witnessed millions of deaths during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. America has recorded its own sad chapters of persecution of blacks, of Native Americans, of Mormons, often in the name of religion. The West is under attack by Islamic extremists who claim to be people of faith. And many in the West label Islam as a violent religion or a religion of the violent: I think Muhammad was a terrorist, stated the Reverend Jerry Falwell on 60 Minutes in October 2002. He said we should blow them all away in the name of the Lord.

Sam Harris, in his bestselling book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, lays intolerance and killing at religion’s door: A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion… It is what we do with words like ‘God’ and ‘paradise’ and ‘sin’ in the present that will determine our future. Will that future be more of what Harris documents, like the one million people dying in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan? Will it be the dark, extremist side of faith?

Harris and others miss the untold story of a faith that bridges, not divides, that accepts, not judges, that nourishes, not crushes.

Indeed, the international conversation about faith and public life is far from complete. Implacable hostility and division are not the last words. Millions of good people are anchored in and guided by faith, people who feed the hungry, shelter the poor and homeless, visit prisoners, work with the wounded, protect abused and neglected children, and house victims of domestic violence. They work with the crime victims, those who have been sexually assaulted, with communities that gangs have terrorized, with children whose parents are in jail, and with the legions of teenagers who have no positive adult role models in their lives.

Those who work in the trenches as well as those at the highest levels of public policy are helping to reshape and unite lives. Forgiveness, purpose, freedom, sacrifice and thanksgiving are the hallmarks of their work. These people pray not to be extolled in God’s sight, but to garner strength to continue to serve. The light of their faith serves neither to illuminate the sins of others nor to spotlight their own self-righteousness, but as a beacon to guide their footsteps in the service of others.

Not surprisingly, these people tend not to vest energy in trying to figure out the theological meaning of the tsunami that killed more than 225,000 in Asia right after Christmas in 2004, or Hurricane Katrina, which virtually wiped out the city of New Orleans in August 2005. These people would be measured not by their interpretation of those events, but by their response to it: What should I do?

Or, in three simple words: Watch my feet.

These people live by the core value shared by all major religions: the Golden Rule, whose essence—in everything, do to others as you would have them do to you—is often lost in the melee of sectarian bickering.

In this book you will read amazing stories of how people balance their public work with their private faith. You will see how their faith