By Robert R. Schwarz
preface to an upcoming series of articles
preface to an upcoming series of articles
"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness"
Jesus speaking to the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians: 12:9)
Many years ago I was dismayed by the death of two friends whom I had considered paragons of human strength—emotional, physical, and intellectual. Their deaths left me confused about what should define human weakness and strength. Now, decades later, I am impelled to resolve this confusion by reporting—I am a former newspaper editor—on the lives of eight unique people who appeared to the world as anything but paragons of strength.
First, a brief word about those two friends: One friend, whom I shall call Dillon, was a college varsity wrestler and cross-country runner who later wore captain bars as a U.S. Infantry paratrooper during the Korean Conflict. He married a smart, classy woman who lovingly bore him three children and saw that they were raised on a good ole fashioned regimen of American morality and patriotism. Dillon became vice president for an international consulting company, managing several hundred employees. According to Dillon, drinking with boys was part of the job. "You find out what the competition is doing at the hotel bar," he once told me. Dillon could come home at 3 a.m., fall asleep on the living room floor watching television, then rise at 6:30 a.m. with full steam for work. "Dillon has amazing recuperative powers," his wife would say. After twenty-five years of riding the corporate high, Dillon's "powers" were not recharging so quickly. "I can stop drinking anytime I want", he explained in a huff to his wife after walking out of his first and last AA meeting.
One afternoon Dillon , his wife and I were sitting in my home making arrangements for a funeral. I knew of the reoccurring troubles Dillon’s drinking had brought to his work and family life. I turned to him and, as if asking an academic question, said: "Dillon, would you sacrifice anything for the love of you wife?" He thought for a moment before realizing he was being confronted about something that was off limits, bad manners. "Oh," he said, dismissing my question as unworthy of much thought, "you mean the drinking." He said no more, and, unfortunately, neither did his wife or I . But the point was made: Though you love your wife dearly, Dillon, do you have the courage, the guts to do something extremely vital to your family's happiness?
A couple of years later, Dillon , now separated from his wife and drinking a tumbler of vodka before noon, sat down one day to measure the combat zone he was in. The mind that once sorted out directives for cadres of managers and handled the self-sacrificing logistics of raising two daughters and a son, was not about to think that Dillon, for the very first time, could not help himself. Next, he tried to rise from his chair but couldn't. The legs which at college could run three miles in less than 15 minutes and which once could seize the ground after a chute drop from ten thousand feet up, had suddenly become paralyzed. Dillon—I know God loved him-- died a few weeks later.
My other friend was Dr. Rudy Sunburg, a psychiatrist whom I met in an interview for a series I was writing about a mental health center. He was 42 then, a tall, balding, cigar-smoking good ole North Carolina boy with an I-like-people personality. Rudy had a hearty laugh which compensated for the barely tolerable puns he told to staff and patients alike. Everyone wanted claim friendship with Rudy. He was a fun-loving father to a Mexican boy he and his wife had adopted soon after Rudy had left a successful general practice for psychiatry. We and our wives bonded during the years Rudy and I served on the board of a county mental health association.
Rudy was a card-carrying atheist, a fact which seemed to bother no one, that is, until Rudy was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. My wife and I often visited Rudy in his home. Pain had forced him to sleep in a hardback chair at night, facing the back of the chair and resting his head on folded arms. A few days before Rudy was hospitalized, I looked for an opening to say what I knew must be said to a good friend. I waded in: "Rudy, what if you're wrong about God and everything. At least cover your bases and—". I was still too young in the faith to know what next to say. Rudy politely listened, then smiled. He had heard it all before.
The next week I visited Rudy at a Chicago hospital Lutheran General Hospital. Still the atheist, Rudy joked about the morphine which constipated him so much that it required a nurse—a friend of his-- to give him relief by hand. A Jewish lady chaplain entered, and we all talked and made witty humor. Though Rudy was expected to easily go several more rounds with his foe, he died— quite unexpectedly, I thought--the next day.
Later, I couldn't help but ask myself: Had Rudy not ever been aware of the love of God ? Did he believe he was facing the absolute end of him—forever? If so and if he saw his last days without any meaning and without cessation of horrible pain…I couldn't bear to carry this thought any further. I now understood, in my gut, why hope was a necessary virtue.
A colleague of Rudy’s, who also was a pastor, wrote a book for strong-willed people who were sinking into a final abyss. Its title, Let Go and Let God, I unwisely thought then, was wimpy.
So, my definitions of human weakness and strength have gradually reversed themselves with aging. Now, at 76, expressing my empathy—or lack of it--for so-called weak or so-called strong individuals has, it seems, put me at loggerheads not only with the culture of the middle-class suburb in which I live, but with that of the world. I take no pride in this stance, for it is neither unique nor rare—just unpopular.
So, my definitions of human weakness and strength have gradually reversed themselves with aging. Now, at 76, expressing my empathy—or lack of it--for so-called weak or so-called strong individuals has, it seems, put me at loggerheads not only with the culture of the middle-class suburb in which I live, but with that of the world. I take no pride in this stance, for it is neither unique nor rare—just unpopular.
The eight people I now write about (and loved, though not nearly as much as I should have) are becoming an endangered species. There is Bull, an ex-felon and Shrek-like character whom my first wife and I palled with in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York ; Bapin, a brilliant blind-deaf man from India whom I met during his training with a Leader Dog; Philip, a modern-day hermit, when he's not stocking furniture at the department store that has benefited for his 45 years of selfless loyalty and honesty; Aji and Fadme, a poverty level man and wife who emigrated from Iran to escape religious persecution and a hopeless economic future; Karl and Lucy, friends who care for each other's mental and physical afflictions; and my brother, Lester, a disabled veteran who has survived five decades of paranoid schizophrenia , much of it in spiritual warfare. I have begged off from profiling myself as either weak of strong for dread of my wife chastising me for both understatement and overstatement.
My personal need to redefine human strength and weakness was also prompted when I recalled the inner strength of those " weak" people who, despite being brutally clubbed and chewed by police dogs, kept on marching in Selma , Alabama. I reacted the same upon rereading an account of those defenseless men even more brutalized in Gandhi's 1930 Salt March. And then there was the Wall Street Journal article that appeared a few days after Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs. In describing the SEAL's training as the hardest training in the world , where only 10 to 20 percent of trainees graduate, Lt. Cmdr. Eric Greitens , himself a SEAL in the U.S. Navy Reserve, wrote: " Almost all the men who survived [ his own training class ] possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more that a 'fist' of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose."
While my eight friends made no bloody freedom marches nor were forced to the limits of human endurance, each I believe, deserve Purple Hearts. Though it might appear that in writing this I have tiptoed into waters of discourse too deep for me, know that I chiefly want to give recognition , to sing a song to my eight friends . No one ever has nor likely will do this. My enthusiasm for writing this report is not too unlike that of what I imagine some old wagon train scout had experienced when riding back with news about the trail ahead.
I have changed some names, places, and dates. This liberty and a few others, I assure you, do not significantly alter facts or meaning.
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