Rehabilitating America

In writing to a friend I asked what it would take to rehabilitate America. While we’ve been addressing political issues — hardly appropriate for a spirituality article — the question as a whole stands.

America was the shining city on the hill. It has been up on a pedestal ever since we put it there and told the world to worship our glorified version of something that has never existed.

Sometimes my friend and I are on opposite sides of political issues. Pretty often, in fact. On one very explosive historical political issue which has affected America and the world for decades, we are side by side. And that bothers us.

What’s the story, world?

My friend and I are from very different backgrounds. It’s hard not to laugh about how even though we were both born in America and have lived here all of our lives, those lives began in regions so different as to be almost different countries. Were it not by the grace of God and the dint of a lot of hard work, we would never have met.

And isn’t that a gift!

Both of us, along with so many others we’ve encountered along the way, are deeply, passionately, committed to personal spiritual and emotional growth. To the reform and rehabilitation of the man we each were yesterday. Not just to the man we were when we turned eighteen and became legally of age.

The human being we are in this moment must be better than we were a minute ago. That is our personal obligation to ourselves, our families and to the world.

To you.

We must spiritually and emotionally rehabilitate ourselves because of you. You exist. You live. You breathe.

Whether or not we ever meet you in this life, you are an integral part of our lives by your very existence. We breathe the same air. We inhabit the same earth, if different spheres of that world. We all have basic human needs for food, shelter, a decent life.

Over the course of many millennia barriers have been built between peoples because of where they live. The languages they speak. The colors of our skin and eyes and hair. The color of their wallets — what’s in it and how much.

Some barriers have been erected that are really quite silly.

It harms us to separate ourselves by how we worship. The only race that should divide us is whether or not we run in the Olympics. Period. Yes, some people have more money than most of us. There is a basic lesson to hold in mind with money.

We all come in naked and we’re not taking it out in a U-Haul.

Our spiritual rehabilitation comes from a very basic, very democratic, very American idea.

We are all equal.

It aggravates me that I will never be able to do some things as well as others, but I have also learned a couple very basic things. You don’t have to be a Southerner to bake a mean buttermilk pie or a cocoanut cake that can make the crowds cheer. You don’t have to be a Yankee to make a good pot roast.

If we have the courage, we can make friends whatever their backgrounds. One of the best men I ever met was a homeless man fresh out of prison. He carried his life in a backpack. Somehow, he always knew the right thing to say to make everybody’s day better. His smile was infectious. He shared his love of life with everybody he saw.

He was a gift.

He had come from prison with the goal of rehabilitating his world. He had struggled to change from the man he had been to the man I knew. Whatever he might have been, he was warm, kind and generous.

Talking with him for five minutes could be the best present a person might ever receive.

Rehabilitation — making ourselves fit again — must be more than the desire to either return to an earlier time or to uproot and eradicate our past. To rehabilitate ourselves — we men and women and children are America, not some piece of land — we have to undergo serious spiritual and emotional therapy.

If you have never undergone physical therapy, let me tell something. It hurts. Like crazy. There are times you might feel like smacking the therapist or the wall, but you just push through the pain. You have to. It’s the only way to learn how to walk, write, pick up a spoon or push a pencil. I have been doing physical therapy daily for years. It isn’t my favorite thing in the world, but because of it I am able to stand, to walk.

That’s what spiritual rehabilitation is. Our spirits have become crusty. We’re hardened. We think everybody has to think and live the way we do.

Except that my friend and are friend so terribly different.

Wonderfully different.

Our differences and our dogged determination to become greater than we were defines why I love my friend like the brother he is.