by Tom Summers
Board Member, Pastoral Care Network
for Social Responsibility

    With the awareness of the approaching September 11 Anniversary, my summer activities have often been accompanied by my contemplation on various issues related to power.  In our going about everyday tasks of integrating social/ecological justice with pastoral care, counseling, and education roles, I share some of these notions in hopes that they might prove useful.

    For instance, I have continued reaching out with one hand, so to speak, to hold my dear 98-year-old mother (50 miles away), whose once powerful presence in life is slowly melting.  With the other intergenerational hand, I hold to my vivacious 2-year-old grandson Thomas (20 minutes away).  In his energetic development, he seems to greet each new day as if it's a miraculous workshop for learning and delight.

    In the middle of life's complex ebb and flow, what an awesome gift it is to have the privilege of journeying through this mixture of potentializing life-cycles, as unclear or painful as they might be at times.  The power of such mystery is amazing.

    However, everyday you and I are besieged by the wrenching awareness of how mobilized human power is so strongly being misused on a broad systemic, international level.  Human strivings to survive and thrive are being cataclysmically interrupted and demolished on a worldwide basis through brutal external military and political power.

    In this global crisis besetting us, we must attempt to reach our hands out to other persons, especially those from cultures different from our own.  It is this cherishing of a universal life-cycle emphasis -- one so embedded in our pastoral tradition -- that demands a partnership between social/ecological justice with the cyclic nature of the human developmental process.

    Such an allegiance implies a hope: that every human being, anywhere, deserves the dignity of clean air, food, water, nurture, and systemic support so that a precious life-long pilgrimage from cradle to grave can be made.

    From this standpoint, no longer can it be afforded to study, for instance, Erik Erikson or any other personality theorist, who focuses on life's development phases, without at the same time considering the broader social and ecological justice dimensions.  For, they indeed hover like an umbrella over our power-packed life transitions.

    Also I have had an opportunity this summer to explore power in -- of all places -- baseball.  No, not the greedy and overly commercialized stuff of the U.S. major leagues.  Instead, my path has taken me back into the more innocent and exciting sports era of the late 1940s.  Perhaps my boyhood passion of wanting to become a sports writer has finally caught up with me!

    Nevertheless, I embarked on a writing project related to semipro baseball.  In particular, it had to do with the baseball that was played more than 50 years ago in my lowcountry South Carolina hometown.

    I listened for hours being absolutely enthralled with hearing charming baseball tales that fell so potently from the lips of some very elderly baseball veterans.

    For example, one 83-year-old man said, "Do you remember what Babe Ruth said once from the 1920s?  You know, he was being criticized for making more money ($80,000) one year than the president of the United States.  Well, the ole' Babe told 'em: 'Yeh, but the president didn't have as good a year as I had.' "

    Another account implied that it had rained so much in a game that the infield mud almost became like glue.  A ball, the storyteller mentioned, was hit to the shortstop with men on base in the bottom of the ninth inning.  The player, however, couldn't budge to reach out for the ball.  The slush on his shoes had him clamped down to the ground like a suction cup.  The narrator reminded me that it was the mud that caused his team to lose, certainly not the fact that he nor his teammates got very few hits that night.

    During this project, I was reminded once again that the pastoral care/counseling principle of listening to another's reminiscence and inner story represents an almost matchless experience.  Being allowed to listen to the context of another person sets up a soul-bridge between human hearts.

    Hearing about Babe Ruth, mud, and other ball field subjects has helped me to ponder this question: Has the community of nations lost its way in today's world by neglecting to hear deeply each other.  Because humans are considered to be story creatures at their very core, we all -- whether an individual or a nation -- have an inner story that is itching to be told and cherished.

    As pastoral-care providers invested in social/ecological justice, our tradition of listening can encourage us to remind our political leaders to open their ears and hearts to the international cacophony of stories hungering to be heard.

    A third resource, which has allowed me to reflect on the issue of power, has come from the summer reading of John Shelby Spong's book, A New Christianity for a New World.

    One of the themes in his work is the analysis of how the human evolutionary struggle has been so tied to power and domination.  We humans, Spong asserts, have been dedicated to put ourselves first. In order to have survived the long human journey, an energy of defense and domination has been major in the evolutionary quest.  But from our contemporary perspective, such selfish striving is no longer viable.

    To continue the outworn patterns of subduing, conquering, and destroying is to bring peril to our human history.  A new way must be sought because we are at a crossroads in our evolving as a species.  Needless to say, this transforming road toward the sharing of mutual power and hopes is not one being boldly taken by our international leaders.

    What, then, is our pastoral care, counseling, and education role in helping to redirect systemically this evolutionary power of domination to that more life-giving pathway represented by the vigors and grace and commonality?

    That question has been one that I have sometimes carried with me as I have gone into my backyard to give attention to my tomatoes.  These lively plants, through receiving water and nutrients, have birthed constant miracles of ripened fruit.  One of the great moments in life, I think, is that of contemplating the issue of power around tomato plants.  To witness the budding of a little green tomato from a yellow blossom, and then on toward a maturity into a larger luscious redness, is to behold the universe in action.

    The summer resource of these juicy provisions has aided me to give shape to various questions about pastoral care-giving.  For instance: What can be done in our vocational lives to help prevent our current ecological travails from ever despoiling the natural power seen in yellow blossoms?

    The request by an organization to secure some historical data on a deceased paternal uncle has ushered me into an additional encounter with the matter of power; and that is war's tragic power.  As I re-read the files one morning, my eyes remained moistened.

    My uncle Tom, whose first name I inherited 67 years ago, was 3 months shy of graduating from college in 1918.  Under the influence of patriotism he entered the army so that he could join the military forces in Europe, even though World War I was winding down.  In August a bomb blew up near the desk which he sat in a Belgium building.  While he lay dying later in an evacuation tent, it was reported that this 21-year-old man -- once so filled with brightness and a joy about life -- directed the medical personnel to give care to others more wounded than he.

    It required several excruciating weeks before the family back in South Carolina could get proper clarification that indeed its beloved family member had been killed.  During that interval, my grandfather Abram (my middle name) had gone through tormenting days of trying to sort through garbled messages from the U.S. War Department.

    Within 3 months my grandfather was swept away from the family by the flu epidemic of that year.  But many townspeople felt that he had died just as well from a shattered heart.  In often being around my grandmother as a child, I sensed the deep gentleness that was hers but also the brokenness that burdened her.

    My guess is that most of us have some unique War Story to tell: kinfolks snatched out of life by war's wrath; a tour of duty in the military during wartime; a conscientious objection to any military service; the loss of friends and colleagues; daily witnessing of war's carnage on TV; or the toll of war's economic, social, and spiritual effects on each of our daily lives.  This warring power that exists between nations exerts an undertow that eats away at the beachhead of our very human existence.

    In my own journey, I have a feeling that for most of my life the thread of my uncle's war-death is entwined through the crevices of my own history.  One day, I hope to be able to visit the spot in that far-away land where the light of his life was extinguished.  As an archetype, perhaps his demise and heroism empower me to keep trying to do what I can to prevent war and its horrible capacity to take the life of anyone's dear uncle.

    As I entered into the summer of 2002, little did I know that the element of power would meet me in such an unusual combination of hide-and-seek games, Babe Ruth, revisiting Darwin, shiny tomatoes, and an uncle whom I never got to know.

 

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