Promise Keeper

Ted Reads Promise Keeper

9:23

The other day, a man I’ve known since he sat in my high school classroom decades ago wrote to me. There was a tone that seeped through his written question. A tone I recognized because I can sing that tune also. The kind of statements dressed in their mocking, sarcastic, dismissive, judgment wrapped in its thin costume skin that from a distance sounds like a question.

He asked, “Do you really believe anything you write, in your newsletters, your posts, makes a difference, changes anybody’s mind?” 

A very fair question. One I’ve heard before. One I’ve asked myself more than once. One with an easy answer. “No.” 

Saying anything at all about anything at all is risky. Religion, politics, money, you know the “Do not talk about if you want to have a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner” stuff.  To do so, as the old Jim Croce song warns, “You don’t tug on superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off that old lone ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim” (Or the afore mentioned hat trick.)   

I don’t write to change anyone’s mind. For me to believe I carry that kind of power would be its own kind of arrogance. Yes, some people tell me they’ve been moved by something I’ve said. Some tell me they’ve been pushed away. Some tell me they once liked me and no longer do. None of that ranks in the realm of changing things in any kind of consequential life changing way.

So no, I am not causing change in a significant way. Schools still do what they do - kill spirits. The mental health system hasn’t changed; it still destroys as many people as it helps. Churches and religions still keep killing the spirit. Politics still destroys hope. My political musing have changed nothing.

So why DO I write? To keep a promise. A promise I made to an eight-year-old boy. A boy who noticed things. He saw currents moving through his family that didn’t feel right, currents he had no language for then and certainly no power to influence or stop.

He also read about the world war he was born into. He read first-hand accounts of soldiers who proudly boasted of the violence they had done to Native people in his country. Something in him leaned towards the victims, to those on the receiving end of power, not the perpetrators. He felt the imbalance. The weight of it. The wrongness of the violation. Even if he couldn’t have named it, he experienced it.

Quietly, silently, in the way children make sacred vows without witnesses, he vowed to be one of those who, if ever given the chance, would speak up, even if he didn’t know quite what that meant. He vowed he wouldn’t be one of those who remained silent. Complicit.

He grew up. Without knowing, his speaking out became the stone in the shoe of every system he was a part of. College student.  Public school employee. Church member. Religious believer. Mental health practitioner. Political advocate. Irritating member of it all. Always questioning.  

He was more an irritant than an overt crusader. If you asked him why he couldn’t “Just go along to get along,” I am not sure he would have known how to answer that question. One thing that always seemed true was that his behavior was an attempt to protect and advocate not only for himself, but also for those who had less power than he did.

There were many moments when he was threatened with excommunication by every system he was a part of. His actions were never enough to change anything, but his hand in the air was impossible to ignore.

He wrestled out loud. He asked questions that made rooms shift uncomfortably in their chairs. He pointed toward things others preferred not to see. Sometimes he was called difficult. Sometimes incompetent. Often inconvenient. He lost friendships. A marriage. Opportunities slipped past him. He lived close to the edge of being shown the door more than once. But a stone in the shoe does not exist to be liked. It exists to remind the body that something is not aligned, not quite right.

Now he finds himself inside another system. A larger one. A country. And the same currents he felt as an eight-year-old are present. A familiar one. Old wounds beneath fresh language. Histories that prefer to be forgotten. Voices that would ask him to move on, as if forgetting were the same as healing. But forgetting is not healing. It is burial without mourning.

So, he writes. Not because it will change the world. Not because it will convince or change anyone or anything. Not to be right. Not to be agreed with. He writes because silence would be a broken promise. Somewhere, there is still an eight-year-old boy who is watching, seeing, hearing, feeling.

He still tries to understand what he sees, hears, feels. Why people he knows to be good people hurt others the way they do. Why they don’t notice. Why they don’t speak up. He isn’t nor does he need to be a hero. He doesn’t need to win an argument. He needs to not look away and he wonders how others can.

I write to keep a promise I made to myself, way back when, to do something, to honor what I see, to at least speak up. And maybe, to let someone else know that they are not alone. Giving someone else what I had wished for, way back when and still do.

I was saying to a friend the other day that consciousness is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in the sense of having a clear picture of what is happening, a curse in the sense of never being able to turn it off when I would like to not see, hear or feel.

Though there are many promises I’ve made to myself over the years I haven’t kept.  I have kept this one.