Success

I have been reading a book and I am almost done.  This will come as a complete shock to people who know me.  It is the second this summer.  I read so slow and infrequently I do well to finish one a year.  It is actually one of the things about myself that I find quite embarrassing.  Most of my friends are avid readers.  It makes them interesting, well informed, it keeps their vocabulary sharp where they can throw out words other than “right?” every five seconds.  So for me, this is a huge success.

Which lands me on the word I am concerned with, success.  The book I am reading is by someone who lives life constantly in the raw.  Raw is the place most of us visit from time to time but hell no!  I would not even consider taking up full time residence there.  My Mom spent time in the raw when my Grandmother was dying of cancer.  Pregnancy is time spent in the raw.  To me, these are places where life and death are sitting in my lap.  My brain shifts under the weight and processes differently.  Everything seems to be in Technicolor.

The man who wrote this book functions under these conditions pretty much full time.  He is a Jesuit priest and has lived in the middle of the largest gang area in the world for over 25 years.  To me, this in and of itself is a huge success.  People do not stay in hard jobs.  When the book was written, he had buried 168 young people in his community.  Most of them he knew or knew of.  He has been the guy who knocks on the door of the loved one most of those times and watches them crumble.   It doesn’t get much harder than that.  When that much death and sadness pervade in a community, how do you measure success?      

One of the stories he told was about a woman who raised four sons in the projects.  Her son Ronnie evaded joining a gang, success; graduated high school, success. He went into the military and served in Afghanistan, success.  He came home and was shot because he did not give the code answer for not being in a gang.  He said he was a marine.  Fail.

Eventually her son Angel pulled her from her grief, just in time for her to be happy and then devastated when Angel was shot and killed in his front yard.   A gang lost the guy they were chasing but figured Angel would do.

As luck would have it, this woman ended up in the ER, right next to one of the kids in the gang who killed her boys and was possibly involved.  He had been shot himself and was fighting for his life.  Pause here:  how many times on the news, on FB, in front of the school have we heard of a situation where a good person has been wronged and we form our own little revenge gang.  “Let that heartless no good so and so die.  He deserves it.”  I have done it.  I have sat right here on my little couch throne and wished another person dead because my third hand perspective knows everything.

This woman prayed with all her heart that he would live because when she looked at him, blood spurting from everywhere she did not want his mother to endure her pain.  She could never wish that on another person.  Success.

I was so mad when I read her second son had died.  I was so angry when this boy ended up beside her.  I was instantly diffused and left in awe of her grace, so much more powerful than the first tendency for revenge and punishment. 

There is a reason the Mother Teresa’s and Gandhi’s and Father G’s of the world are so revered.  They reject what the rest of us think of as success.  They walk a path where the undesirables of this world are embraced.  Where others would lock their doors and put a gun by their bed, the holy of the world leave their doors open and invite everyone in.  They do not let fear and hate drive them.  They succeed living in the raw because even there, they find love and compassion.