A Song in the Night (21 page)

But whenever I started to fantasize or worry about “all the money I really deserved to be making,” I would look through the Bible, and the fever would leave me. The morning before my finance exam, the lectionary pointed me to a passage from the First Letter to Timothy which combined words of warning with words of support:

The spectacle of hundreds of students desperately searching for work was not without irony when one remembered the ease with which these same students proposed to shut plants and fire workers who had been employed for twenty-five years. The students, however, did not consider themselves to be in the same league as workers; they had become managers. Having put up tens of thousands for tuition and earned a degree from Harvard, they felt they deserved a job.

Over my years at the business school I gradually came to understand more about the creative power of American business and I became less critical about some things. I understood, for example, how extraordinarily difficult it is to run a business, how many complex and divergent parts—finance, marketing, sales, production, distribution—all have to be coordinated. And I came to believe that there is much that is good about a few people coming together, pooling their resources, and trying to provide a service or a product for which they earn a return on their investment. In other words, I have become a huge fan of small business.

For the serious person of faith who commutes between a church on Sunday and a corporate job on weekdays, who is drawn by the hope and joy and freedom of the gospel yet must
live amid the rules of the marketplace, the only choice is to cultivate an active, brave, and responsible capacity for moral choice, often in defiance of social and institutional pressures. Church leaders fortunate enough to have money to set aside cannot escape the difficult question of how to invest those funds in a manner consistent with their beliefs. And on a global level, no person who professes that all human beings are beloved children of the same God can be complacent in a world where billions live in subhuman poverty.

As the years progressed, I came to realize that the most profound question posed by a place like Harvard Business School is one common to every human endeavor: What greater goal or God are we individually and collectively called to serve in life? I found myself wondering constantly what the school was really teaching. Some might argue that it communicates a useful and value-free body of knowledge, in the same way that a school for auto mechanics communicates certain functional skills. But an alternative view occurred to me when I returned to a gathering of the members of Grace Church and someone welcomed me back as “one of our three seminarians who have gone off to study.” Another speaker commented, “I know we live in Orwellian times and war is peace, but I never thought I would hear Harvard Business School described as a seminary. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s true.”

Though the hours were long and demanding, I did my best for my congregation, for my family, and for the doctoral program
I was in. My mind and intellect were learning volumes of valuable information from Harvard University, while my heart and soul were growing at Christ Church. For one thing, I realized that no matter how hard we worked to provide for one another as a congregation, there were certain physical problems that a small community could not solve by itself. We could provide support and comfort and companionship, but not medical care and housing and a decent job. We could help people through their personal crises, but we could not educate their children, clean their streets, protect them from crime, or offer them a park in which to play. The voluntary commitment and extra effort made possible by a loving community was an important piece for some of our members, but the line between health and disease, education and deprivation, homes and homelessness, unemployment and a job, was not drawn by us. It was drawn by the government, as part of a basic promise to the American people that each person would receive the elementary requirements to build his or her own version of the American Dream. Government might seem like an abstraction to people who can provide everything from their own abundance, but to people in a city like Somerville, access to the building blocks of a decent middle-class life meant the difference between poverty and prosperity, misery and joy.

Second, I learned that no matter how good people’s intentions might be, we are all stretched and easily overwhelmed. Being the part-time pastor of a church that had no resources required me to make hundreds of phone calls to terribly busy, pressed people who had virtually no money and asking them
to take on some responsibility for the church—serving on the vestry, reading the lessons, teaching Sunday school, visiting the sick, leading the stewardship campaign. At first I thought they would jump at the opportunity, but I didn’t fully appreciate how complicated and stressful most people’s lives were in trying to make ends meet. I learned to ask the question and wait for a polite and somewhat embarrassed no. What was amazing to me in retrospect is how many people said yes.

Most churches have leadership retreats during which a small group of involved individuals, including the clergy, go away for a day or two to discuss the direction and priorities of the church. Christ Church had never done such a thing, at least within living memory. I called a friend of mine at a church about ten miles away, and he offered to provide meeting space and to prepare lunch for us.

“How many people will you be?” he asked.

I did some quick tabulations in my head.

“I would say between twelve and fourteen,” I answered.

We agreed on the date and I publicized the event. I phoned every person and I was delighted that my numbers seemed about right—I had twelve people who were planning to come.

I made a list of passages we could discuss and of challenges facing the church. I wanted to urge us to move past our worship together and into offering more services for the people in the community. I wanted to develop more leadership skills among my small but talented group of committed participants. I was excited about everything that was about to happen.

We were to meet on Saturday morning at the church and
then drive together to our host. The night before, I got two phone calls at home. One person had been called away to work. Another couple gave me some sketchy reason that they couldn’t attend, which I didn’t push too hard to explore. Well, I was down to nine people plus me—still a good showing.

When I arrived the next morning, there were two notes on the door from people in the neighborhood who said that for various reasons they could not come. Now I was down to six. I unlocked the door and saw the light beeping on the church answering machine, indicating two messages. My heart sank. Sure enough, two more people had discovered urgent reasons—at this point I no longer cared what they were—why they couldn’t come. They were, of course, very sorry. Very, very sorry. Would love to do it next time. Hope that you have a great time and look forward to hearing about it.

At this point I blew my stack. Four people. Twelve had said they would come, and now I was down to four. How could I plan for the future of the church with four people? I stomped out into our tiny little garden and marched in a circle around our single scrawny rosebush.

At that point Tony Cucinotta, a hardworking plumber who undoubtedly would have preferred to rest after a long week, showed up. I couldn’t hide my anger and disappointment with the others.

“They told me that they would do it!” I shouted. “They said that they would come and then they backed out. They committed to being here for each other and to help build the community for all of us, and they dropped the ball. I am upset
for myself, because I worked hard to put this together. I am embarrassed in relation to the church that has prepared twelve lunches for us. But more than anything, I can’t believe that all these people couldn’t stick with their own commitments.”

Tony watched me carefully and stroked his chin.

“You’re upset because they are not doing something they promised,” he said.

“Yes!” I replied.

“Well, Bob,” he said with a wry smile, “now you know how God must feel.”

And with his words, my anger evaporated and we laughed long and hard.

E
very morning when we awake and look at the news, we see almost everything through a single powerful belief. The institutions and arrangements of the world are fixed, we think, and we must operate within their boundaries. All the normal structures of life in America—the limits set by our Constitution, the laws constructed by our legislatures, the rules and practices established by our most powerful institutions, including our corporations, and the social standards and practices reinforced by daily life—seem to be made of steel.

These structures of society represent a body of received wisdom that developed over many years and that we now silently accept. They function as the rules of the road for our
collective behavior. Only rarely, within a few communities or at key historical moments, are our practices ever fully debated from first principles.

Yet clinging to old answers is not always the right solution for difficult problems. By doing so we face the danger that our institutions will slowly slide away from our aspirations, that they will grow in rigidity without reason. We can become so accustomed to everything around us that we find ourselves increasingly trapped by the past and by forms perpetuated without function. It is as though we started off swimming in a pool of water into which time pours a slow stream of powdered cement. Without being aware, we find ourselves swimming against a thicker and thicker liquid, which gradually slows us down, dries out, and imprisons us forever.

Though we may firmly believe that we are stuck, the truth is that European and American society has been changing constantly for centuries. Every generation has faced a new social and political reality with new problems, new rules, and often new freedoms. For many people, such questions seem abstract, far removed from the demands of daily life, but every now and then the opportunity arises for people to design from scratch a new organization, or perhaps an entirely new social system. In the United States, this happened over the fourteen-year period from 1775, when Americans began armed resistance to British authority, to 1789, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. In those rare historical moments, people get to step back and ask: What is the best way to organize our lives? To achieve our goals?

One of the greatest experiences of my life was the opportunity to observe at close hand the complete transformation of a whole country—South Africa—as it remade itself from a nation driven by force and fear into one that now embraces the goals of liberty, justice, and equality. The transformation was not without difficulty, and the result has not been perfect. Yet seeing the complete reconfiguration of a nation unfold before my own eyes without widespread violence permanently changed my view of what is possible. I saw that the goals and structures of society can be controlled by the values and dreams of its citizens, and not the other way around.