I recently reached out to David, a former student who is now an emergency room physician at a hospital in New York City. I wanted to thank him for all he was doing during the pandemic to care for our vulnerable neighbors. He was exhausted but grateful. When I asked him what I could do for him from sheltered-in-place San Francisco, he replied, “Please send dog or child or nature pictures frequently…It helps me remember what we’re fighting for.”
I happily obliged with pictures of my joyful and affectionate dog, Harriet. David asked how Harriet got her name so I described the heroines who inspired me to choose this name. As silly as it sounds, every time I call to Harriet, I think of these women. Reflecting on these role models again with David, I discerned some wisdom provided by their examples that might help us now.
Harriet Jacobs wrote the first female-authored slave narrative. Her remarkable story of hiding and escape to freedom, followed by an active life in service to the Union cause, teaches me patience. To elude her slaveholder and protect her children, Harriet hid for seven years in a small attic. Her patience in enduring the physical and emotional hardships of confinement, of persisting despite the dangers of discovery and the uncertainty of the outcome demonstrate that she did what she had to do to survive the circumstances and prepare for a new life for herself and her children.
Harriet Tubman, the better-known abolitionist who, like Frederick Douglass was from my home state of Maryland, demonstrated a fearless ability to lead, inspire, and support others in the face of seemingly intractable and dangerous circumstances. She resisted the idea that confinement was a permanent condition; she kept her eyes on the prize. However long it took, freedom was where she was always going and she seldom walked alone.
Harriet Powers was a formerly enslaved Georgia folk artist who lived a hard life in the South while farming and raising nine children. But she made time to quilt, to use whatever scraps she could muster to bring beauty to her world and peace to her life. Of the few quilts that survive, one is in the Smithsonian collections. Combining biblical, African, and southern folkways in a visual representation of her inspired view of creation, Harriet always knew where she stood, no matter what was happening in the world around her.
Harriet the Spy gave me hope, as an awkward young girl who wasn’t sure what the future held, that maybe one day my strange ways would make a good story, too. Harriet is called a spy, but what she really does is pay attention to the world around her that doesn’t pay attention to her. And she writes about it all and that gets her in to trouble but it also helps her find her voice and her way and find her friends, all while hanging on to her truth of life as she sees it.
If we can be like the Harriets, all shall be well.
Taking a Long View: A Reflection on the El Salvador Immersion Experience
Rose Garden at University of Central America, El Salvador
Originally written August, 2012
Fidel Castro once remarked: “A revolution is not a bed of roses.” While in El Salvador I observed the crushing reality of this statement as the country continues to recover from years of civil war and corruption. But I also saw its opposite—a country where roses flourished in the midst of depravation, just as they had for the peasant Juan Diego, on the dry and barren Tepeyac Hill. It was December when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to reassure Juan Diego by blessing him with roses as proof of God’s everlasting and ever-present love.
December is also the month when Jean Donovan, a lay minister, and 3 colleagues who were nuns, were raped and murdered for supporting the Salvadorian campesino’s revolution. As we learned from Father Schindler and the documentary, Roses in December, the women’s murders came not long after Jean wrote home to explain her recommitment to staying in El Salvador, despite its growing danger. Her love for El Salvador was expressed in her astonished appreciation: “Where else do roses bloom in December?”
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and her roses and their combined symbolic potency of restoring hope in the midst of despair continued to appear throughout our journey in El Salvador—in the rose garden at the UCA, planted to commemorate the martyred Jesuits; in the silk rose-draped image of Guadalupe hanging on the wall of the Ramos’ residence where mother and daughter were murdered by the Salvadoran military; in Archbishop Romero’s lyrical homilies that opened up hearts likes rosebuds and in the actual roses countless pilgrims strew across his crypt; in the serene bravery of Guadalupe who bloomed despite her desolate harassment by the state and the FMLN, persevering to eventually fulfill her dream to teach, finally, after she surrendered years of labor in sweat shops so her sisters and brothers could reach their goals; in the expensive floral tributes women sacrificed to buy and bring to the altar at Father Luis’s vibrant parish amidst the slums; in the rosy red soil that Vladimir, the FMLN veteran, shaped into adobe bricks to provide a home for his family; in the rosy cheeks of an ever radiant Maria, Minister of the Interior, whose FMLN origins were preserved in her utilitarian cropped hair; in the thorny persistence of Jenna and Maggie who won’t give up the struggle to create a country where young people can root and thrive.
All I encountered became a recurring reminder of the Lady of Guadalupe’s promise, symbolized in her roses that bloomed in December—“ Am I not here, I, who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need anything more? Let nothing else worry you, disturb you.”
This sense of protection in the midst of danger, of welcome among strangers, and of companionship among colleagues characterized a relationship that was building among those of us who had made the journey from USF to San Salvador. We began to see each other across the roles we played in our academic setting and to view each other with familiarity. Gently escorted around razor wire and armed guards by locals who knew us by name, we began to understand accompany as a theological concept. In coming to know each other and know El Salvador and its people, our familiarity was returning to its linguistic root: we were becoming family.
Taking a cue from this growing feeling of attachment, I made a point to make sure one of us had asked about the family of each generous soul we encountered. Whether cabinet minister or peasant, priest or infidel, male or female, young or old—what they all had in common was a joyful and grateful response to a question about their family: “How did your children grow up?” Did they go to school?” “How is your husband’s health?” “Where is your wife buried?” Whenever one of asked about someone’s family, the polite reserve dropped, the smile spread, the soul rested, and the essence emerged. We encountered humanity in its fundamental aspect in spite of the circumstances that that challenged the very existence of families. What we lived and what we learned was familia—from the intimacy of our community and those who opened it and entered in, to the intimacy we now felt as witnesses with a responsibility.
I initially avoided any thought of how to act on that responsibility when I returned home. I mindlessly resumed my routine, like walking my dogs on our regular route through a county park at the site of an abandoned quarry. But El Salvador continued to creep back into my world as I discovered on that first walk after returning home. Quite unexpectedly, while I had been gone, some earnest beings had built a labyrinth on the quarry floor. There is only one way in and out of a labyrinth; to walk it is to take an intentional journey of surrendering one’s own plans to take steps on a journey towards enlightenment and communion with magis. One walks a labyrinth as one reads a poem. Billy Collins advised that when reading a poem, it is a mistake to ask what the poem means. That question shuts down our imagination and limits what the poetic experience can accomplish. But when we ask, “Where is it going?” “How does it get there?” we open up a world of possibility and set out on an adventure that just might bring us to a moment of meaning.
When the universe presented in my own neighborhood a ritual reminder of Collins’ prescription, what I had learned in El Salvador came back to me as a journey I would continually repeat. Now every time I walk the labyrinth, another image from our trip returns, another sign appears. Moreover, even the received knowledge about which I had presumed expertise has begun to take on a new depth of meaning explicitly shaped by the encounter. For example, I went to El Salvador with academic proficiency in nineteenth century African American slavery, particularly the slave narratives composed by ex and fugitive slaves. But when I listened to the testimonies of those who had suffered or witnessed the oppression of others, I heard through my own ears and subsequently felt in my gut the sad reality that these narratives of slavery continue to be told by oppressed peoples around the world.
Maria, the rebel turned cabinet minister reminded us that “the biggest slavery is to be ignorant,” and everywhere we saw the effects of this maxim. But we also came to understand that ignorance extends well beyond those denied formal education. Even those of us fortunate to enjoy the privileges of earning advanced degrees were still, in some respects, slave to our ignorance of how much of the world lives. Fredrick Douglass’s claim about slavery, that “to understand it one must needs experience it; or imagine himself in similar circumstances,” came alive for me as I made the journey through my imagination by listening to the Salvadoran stories. I experienced what I thought I already knew. What I heard returned to me the same message communicated by countless iterations of the slave narrative tradition: Write because you believe in and want to inspire change; but do so knowing its only effect may be to reaffirm your own humanity.
How I heard music also changed. The Ballad of the Fallen is the title track of an album by Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra that I have written about and long appreciated. It is a song from El Salvador, based on a poem found on the body of a student who was killed when the U.S. backed National Guard of El Salvador massacred people at a sit-in at the university in San Salvador. This song tells two stories: one the story of the martyred student who composed the words and also the story he tells in his poem. I had heard the song countless times before, had analyzed the diction and remarked on its historical context. But after being in El Salvador I heard more than I ever heard before.
“The Ballad of the Fallen” is a significant liberation anthem because, characteristic of the slave narrative tradition, the character of the protagonist is established in his humility; he wishes to be remembered as one of the people. He writes, “Don’t ask me who I am/Or if you knew me/The dreams that I had/Will grow even thought I’m no longer here. /I’m not alive, but my life continues/In that which goes on dreaming/Others who will continue the fight/Will grow new roses/In the name of all these things/You’ll find my name…” The poet directly links his own identity to the dream for which he fought and sees his immortality embodied in a future of liberation as symbolized, of course, by roses.
As happened in El Salvador, we are invited by the song to adopt his transformative imagination: “Cry with us all those who feel it/Suffer with us all those who loved them/Fall to the earth on your knees/tremble with fear/All those who on that fateful day…assisted in the murder.” The poet establishes a clear sense of justice for the righteous and the unrighteous and links his identity with the future: “My true age is the age/Of the child I have liberated…”I only die/If you give up/For those who die in combat/Live on in every companero...”
The urgency of the poet is expressed as strong horns that bellow out a sweet and floral melody while maracas keep a gentle rhythm accompanied by the sensitive strumming of a guitar. Humming The Ballad of the Fallenagain while walking the labyrinth after our journey in El Salvador, I let the mystery of the poem happen beneath the surface and kept walking. I understood better where the poet was going and how he got there. And this time I went with him as his sister. As family.
These experiential moments cast into sharp relief the more typical academic adventure I had immediately preceding our trip to El Salvador. I had come from Atlanta, Georgia, where the heat was similar but not much else. There I spent a week with 24 other academics, in a hotel conference room, discussing fine points of comparative theologies and theories of religious pluralism. While ostensibly the seminar was designed to promote dialogue across religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries, this seminar was all in my head; it made few demands of my soul to wake up as El Salvador would do a week later. Mostly the seminar challenged everyone to compete for the title of who knows the most or says it best. The memory of this recent encounter came back to me as an extreme juxtaposition when Marco, our gentle and thoughtful and ever practical spirit guide, asked us to reflect on our El Salvador experience for a USF documentary video.
Language left me and all my academic Jedi mind tricks were useless in trying to conjure up a response for Marco. I realized that all I learned could be summed up in a word: surrender. There is no appropriate academic answer to a question about our El Salvador immersion experience. So I surrendered to the example of the people we met, described aptly by Sister Eva as “swimming in grace”: live life with alert deliberation, sincere gratitude, and enduring patience.
When Harriet Jacobs wrote of her experience in slavery and freedom, she traced the movement from one to the other as the result of a God who “raised me up a friend among strangers.” Those of us who went to El Salvador experienced a similar transition, an alteration that is particular to each of us depending on where we started but shared in our journey from strangers to friends to family.
Given the symbolic trajectory of my experience, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when my subsequent research into Romero unearthed a poem that said it all and said it best. “Rose Garden” has an evocative power that is the poetic equivalent of the experience we shared in El Salvador. Like the labyrinth it takes us in to God and sends us back out to the world believing that we can do something and do it well.
Rose Garden
It helps, now and then,
to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts;
it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime
only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise
that is the Lord’s work.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted
knowing they hold future promise.
We lay foundations
that will need further development.
We provide yeast
that affects far beyond our capabilities…
We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very, very well.
USF asks its students to “change the world from here.” In 19th century America, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), gave students similar advice. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” he encouraged newly emancipated and educated citizens in his classic work Up From Slavery (1901). The autobiography describes Washington’s enslaved childhood on a Virginia plantation, his struggle for education and his schooling at Hampton Institute, and his ascendancy to the founding and presidency of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington never leaves the rural South. He represents himself as an ordinary African American whose success can be shared by all.
The ideas Washington sets forth were controversial in their time and remain so today. Washington emphasized black achievement in terms of vocational training and is often contrasted with his contemporary in the urban North, W.E. B. DuBois. Both men promoted education as the primary way to lift the race, but they disagreed on the type of education, DuBois insisting on African Americans’ full entitlement to a liberal education, while Washington believed the best opportunities for African Americans so recently removed from slavery were to be found in an education that prepared them to offer a service to society. Both promoted racial pride but in distinctly different ways and for different ends. Yet despite the ways in which Washington is often criticized for limiting the vision of black achievement, universal strains in his text resonated with most Americans. His promotion of and demonstration in his own life of the virtues of honesty, industry, frugality, self-reliance and self-discipline, make Up From Slavery a classic American success story that has never been out of print since it was first published. In the text are many episodes where Washington displays an extraordinary talent for achievement and many passages where he distills his experience into memorable aphorisms. Here are a few:
On Leadership
Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
Most leaders spend time trying to get others to think highly of them, when instead they should try to get their people to think more highly of themselves. It’s wonderful when the people believe in their leader. It’s more wonderful when the leader believes in their people! You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.
On Respect
One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
On Work
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.
Cast down your bucket where you are.
Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.
On Execution
We must reinforce argument with results.
On Friendship
Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.
On Service
My whole life has largely been one of surprises. I believe that any man’s life will be filled with constant, unexpected encouragements of this kind if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life—that is, tries to make each day reach as nearly as possible the high-water mark of pure, unselfish, useful living. I pity the man, black or white, who has never experienced the joy and satisfaction that come to one by reason of an effort to assist in making some one else more useful and more happy
The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for—and dying for, if need be—is the opportunity of making someone else happier and more useful.
On Success
Success always leaves footprints.
I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.
In some classes, I’ve asked graduate students in management ethics courses to read Up From Slavery for their final exam and then to demonstrate their understanding of theoretical concepts of ethical decision making by using them to analyze, assess, and apply Up From Slavery as an effective source for ideas about ethical leadership.
Students begin by describing the event in Washington’s life that each found most compelling and explain why they chose the event and what they learned from the episode as it applies to moral conduct. Using the ethical and leadership theories from our readings and observations from class activities and discussions, they then craft an essay that suggests how the lessons from Washington’s life and writings could make a difference in their organizational settings as well as commenting on what lessons can be applied more generally to leadership roles in society. Then they are asked to apply their theoretical position to an actual or hypothetical case study—a moral dilemma from their work life.
The responses to the assignment have been overwhelmingly positive as students appreciate the opportunity to become deeply knowledgeable about Washington. Although initially skeptical of reading a work of literature, they come to recognize the value of wisdom from the past as it applies to contemporary challenges facing the for-profit, public, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors. Washington was skilled in collaborating with each sector to promote his vision of a just society. Indeed, what was most surprising to me as the instructor was how quickly the students translated Washington’s advice in to action.
Many students cited Washington’s emphasis on etiquette, hygiene, and courtesy as models for how to deal with the public they serve and made actual changes in their attitude and appearance. Two students stood out for how they cited Washington as the inspiration for changes they made in how they performed their public administration roles in practical and philosophical ways.
One student, whose final paper coincided with a rare freeze in northern California, wrote, “When I read through portions of his speeches, it was so evident to me how clear Washington was with his own personal mission, and that he was there to advocate for the disadvantaged.” While working on her assignment, she thought of a dilemma she faced with the homeless population she served in Sonoma County. “I thought of all of the red tape that people have to go through in order to try and do something. During this sleepless night I thought of several things, but one of the things that came to me was the reading I had done about Washington. I was so inspired by Washington’s example of the ethical theory of virtue that I decided I had to do something. I couldn’t sit around and wait for red tape to clear while people were suffering.” Within twenty-four hours she had organized a variety of stakeholders to create “warming shelters” for the duration of the cold, a successful effort that established a model for communities county-wide.
Another student’s relationship with Washington’s text was more personal. He titled his final essay “A Love Letter to Booker T. Washington,” and described all the ways Washington served as a model for black men like him who were planning a career in public service. He was inspired to develop an organization for at-risk young black men in Oakland. The student concludes his essay, reflecting on a piece of Tuskegee brick I had given him. I acquired it while on a Civil Rights trip of the South, led by the revered public servant Julian Bond. While touring Tuskegee University, I noticed a building being demolished and asked the construction workers for a brick, remembering a chapter in Up From Slaverywhen Washington describes in exhausting detail the trial-and error process students experienced learning to make bricks to build their own school.
I gave this student a piece of that brick, a little bit of inspiration for what he intended to build. He concluded his paper with a personal manifesto motivated by Washington’s enduring influence: “This work has inspired me to work on myself. Because, how can I get others to connect with their heart if I struggle to connect with my own? This is a campaign of love and understanding. Though they may walk in with heavy hearts, my team’s ambition is to make sure that all parties leave knowing that they are supported and encouraged to play a part in building a healthier and safer Oakland. It is going to take a wealth of resolve to push during those hard times. It is those times that I remember Washington. In my lowest moments, I hold a piece of brick from Tuskegee. I found purpose and strength from it.”
As our faculty collective bargaining community initiated negations with the administration to find ways to address the financial challenges brought on by the pandemic, we began our discernment by reading the following blessing. I hope you may share and widely use this blessings in other settings where we take time to honor the dignity of labor and those who labor.
A Workers’ Blessing
We gather today seeking opportunities of beautitude. Together let us bless:
All who have been left behind by the economy, who are unemployed or underemployed, or who are unjustly employed, working hard and yet living in poverty;
All who work in the shadow of a broken and unjust immigration system;
All who fear losing their jobs, their homes, and their communities;
All who struggle to feed their families, pay their bills and weep over the loss of their children’s opportunities;
All who feel disillusioned by their vocations and frustrated in their callings;
All staff who are furloughed, fearful of losing their jobs, or struggling to meet the expectations of their jobs under unfamiliar and challenging conditions;
All Contingent, Probationary, Term Faculty and Librarians, persons core to our academic and intellectual community, and to the quality of education we provide our students;
All Senior Faculty who recognize their privilege and seek equity for their colleagues who do not benefit from the same privilege;
All collective bargaining representatives and leadership for their work and commitment to the common good;
All who dignify labor, either for pay or as volunteers, in jobs or at school, in the workplace or at home, in government or on the streets, in churches or bars, in the U.S. and around the world.
May we as a collective work to build a new world in the midst of the old:
A world where all workers and their labor are valued.
A world where those who clean houses are also able to buy houses to live in.
A world where those who grow food can also afford to eat their fill.
A world where those who serve are also served;
A world where those who care for others are also cared for;
A world where workers everywhere share in the abundance of creation, supported by an economy that honors the dignity of all who labor.
Together may we find the courage and strength to live out our love in deeds more than words, in the workplace and the marketplace, sheltered at home and among each other. May we continue to seek opportunities for beatitude in these troubling times and always.
