Religion

A winter’s day to say farewell to the living

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

Exactly two weeks from tomorrow, it will have been four years since I last saw my mom alive. She was on her final days of her life’s journey. We spent some of that time together, quietly, in her room at a care facility, and in the facility’s dining room, where I fed her and was able to witness a lovely church service, where a woman sang hymns and played piano and made many smile. I smiled a bit too. My mom died less than two weeks later, just before the pandemic descended on the world, and there wasn’t time to stop and process things for a long time. But after Alzheimer’s disease, there wasn’t a lot left to hold on to, when the person you had known already and slowly had disappeared as their brain was collapsing. This weekend, I may take down the photos I have had taped to my living room walls since that time. It could be the moment to let this finally go.

Genghis Khan, the revolutionary reformer

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When I say the words “revolutionary reformer,” I bet the words Genghis Khan do not come to mind. He was both—a radical and a change agent unlike few others ever.

Before winning his honorific name of Genghis Khan, Borjigin Temüjin (1162–1227) rose from obscurity to mythical status, also becoming one of the most misunderstood figures of world history.

He was an unimportant son of an outcast family. His family was abandoned by its clan to die on the Mongol steppes. For a time, the young Temüjin, before his rise to power, was even a slave. He never forgot this humiliation.

Genghis Khan was the greatest conqueror in human history and a radical promoter of egalitarian reforms.

Through harsh life experiences in what is now Mongolia, he honed his abilities to unite disparate groups and people of different religious traditions and end archaic practices that stymied egalitarianism and the rights of those oppressed.

Genghis Khan drew his leadership ranks from those who proved themselves in battle. He was able to identify and promote capable subordinate leaders using a promotion system based strictly on merit. This proved dramatic on the field of battle.

These methods also challenged the orders and religions of the era, including Christianity and Islam in the West and Chinese traditions of Taoism and Confucianism in the East. In creating warriors loyal to his cause, he persuaded them to abandon their religious traditions and pledge allegiance to his vision of a united kingdom.

Unlike other cultures and rulers of his day, Genghis Khan also promoted religious tolerance studied and learned Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity. He was remarkably tolerant to the local cultures in the administration of his cities. He provided order in exchange, of course, for taxes.

Above all, he and his armies were unrivaled innovators in the art of warfare. He became the world’s single greatest military conqueror, building a land empire two and a half times larger in its territory than the Roman Empire at its zenith. At the height of their power, the Mongols controlled an area which stretched from central Europe to the Pacific Ocean.

Historian Jack Weatherford, in his work “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World,” summarizes Khan’s amazing feats this way: “In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan together with his sones and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any many in history.”

In the many lands they controlled, the Mongols provided security for travelers and they promoted trade. They reduced taxes and encouraged travel and commerce. This so-called “Pax Mongolica” allowed for the caravan routes of central Asia to flourish. Persian businessmen would visit lands in China regularly, and a diplomatic envoy from the Mongols could visit Europe and take communion with the pope in Rome.

In addition to the creation of cross-continental trade, the Mongols created an efficient and modern postal system. The Yam postal system, similar to the more modern Pony Express, relied on horses and provided the Mongols a rapid communications system, which they also extended to merchants. The merchant Marco Polo in fact used the Yam system to support his travels.

Few have changed world history like Genghis Khan.

He was, when needed, remarkably violent, conquering what is now modern-day Beijing in 1215, as he subdued the kingdoms of what is now modern-day China. The Mongol armies in 1241 decimated Czech, Polish and German knights in Poland in 1241.

In Europe, which fell as spectacularly as the earlier Chinese kingdoms did just decades earlier, the writers of the era branded the Mongol armies as an almost supernatural evil.

Describing the Mongol army that conquered Europe, also known as “Tatars,” after Genghis Khan’s death, a chronicler named Matthew Paris in 1241 wrote “they swarmed out and, like locusts, overwhelmed the face of the Earth. They devastated the lands of the East with dreadful destruction, laying waste with fire and carnage. Traveling through the lands of the Saracens, they leveled cities, cut down forests, tore down fortresses, ripped up vineyards, destroyed agricultural fields, and massacred city dwellers and rural folk.”

Mongol forces won everywhere because they employed superior tactics, weaponry, and speed.

They also were brutal when they needed to crush their foes and send a message to their rivals. In 1258, nearly three decades after Genghis Khan’s death, they besieged, sacked, and burned the great Caliphate of Baghdad in a feat not replicated until the American and British invasion of the city in 2003.

To those defeated by the Mongol’s lightning-fast cavalry and steppe-raised soldiers, organized along egalitarian principles and commanded by the most proven leaders, the Mongol army was the representation of the devil itself. They brought the planet’s mightiest and non-egalitarian systems to their knees unlike any military and political force before or since.

Yet Genghis Khan and his successors were astonishingly modern and enlightened.

John Mullin, writing on the innovations of Genghis Khan for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in 2021, notes: “The Mongol empire was full of juxtaposition. In their military conquests, the Mongols countered resistance with ruthless violence. Yet after establishing control, their rule over conquered territories could be more nuanced. In the ‘Yasa’ legal code that Genghis [Khan] promulgated to complement customary Mongol law, the death penalty was ubiquitous. Acts of robbery and treason were punished with severity—but the Yuan legal code that the Mongols established in China had only half the number of capital crimes as the Song dynasty code that it supplanted, and the death penalty appears to have been used only sparingly on civilians.”

It is also important to remember Genghis Khan’s first acts as a leader. After taking power in 1206 of a united Mongol people, he wiped out practices that had cruelly subjected nearly all women to property status, brutally harmed bastard-born kids (illegitimate kids), and had ordinary people turned into slaves. He ended all of these oppressive systems. He had experienced and witnessed all of these cruelties during his life and rise to leadership. He never forgot what he had learned from the harshest of life lessons.

Today, it is no surprise those who accused Genghis Khan of barbarism were those who lost to him—the Chinese, most of the Muslim kingdoms of the Mideast/Near East, the West, and what is now Russia and Ukraine. Those defeated also were the ones who wrote the recorded history following their staggering defeats. They chose most lurid and exaggerated prose.

Yet, those who wrote the historic record, ultimately, stayed stuck in ways that Mongols were not. The social and religious systems that outlived the Mongol empire kept alive archaic and non-egalitarian systems that continued to the modern era and even today, especially the treatment of women. On the plains of Mongolia, nearly 1,000 years earlier, Genghis Khan had at least temporarily freed a generation of people from their societal prisons.

Planning for the inevitable is not a fearful thing

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

My mother’s misfortune of developing Alzheimer’s still shapes my way of navigating the world. She endured the horrible disease for more than seven years, before finally dying, with little left of her cognitive functions.

Roman artwork Memento Mori, in the Naples National Archaeological Museum

To deal with the illness as a family member, I had to readjust my way of navigating the world. I had to deal with stress. I had to deal with family conflict. I had to deal with helping someone who could never be cured.

Most of all I had to practice what philosophers did more than 2,000 ago, meditate on one’s mortality, or memento mori.

Death, as the ultimate end of my mother’s condition, became relentless as a nagging thought. I had to think about it because it was the way her suffering would end. This is simply an honest reflection, because that is what Alzheimer’s was truly like. It was worse for my step-father, who was her dutiful and loving caregiver.

However, practicing memento mori was not a scary thing. It was and remains a pragmatic thing, as all human life ends, and avoiding thoughts about this is folly. All of us will die, regardless of our station in life or our deepest fears about the end.

Because of this knowledge, I continue to tidy up my plans. I have attended to my probate planning instead of putting off the boring but critical details.

I also realize that by living alone, I am at much greater risk of misfortune, mostly because no one will care for me. This is also a byproduct of being adopted, which is a related and complex story.

So I have started making plans for logical “what if” possibilities.

What if I am hit by a bus? What if I have a bike accident that goes tragically wrong if I am struck by a car? What if I get a serious illness that arrives suddenly?

Too many things have happened in my immediate world of family and friends lately to forestall such thinking and planning.

Tonight I took another small but practical step. In my apartment, I hung a very visible sheet of paper on a wall that could be seen and found in the event of an emergency. It is my cheat sheet who to contact if I am not there and there is a need to reach my emergency contacts. It is a small thing, but it was both easy to and logical. I will add this to my wallet too. And why not?

My mom and step-father had a similar list on their refrigerator door for years as she was sliding to her end. I know hundreds of thousands of others may have done the same thing. They are like the paintings Romans made of skulls and skeletons, reminding all of us our end will eventually come.

Saying Goodbye

/ Rudy Owens / 1 Comment

In December 2019, my mom began her stay at the Barnes-Jewish Extended Care facility in Clayton, Missouri. The place is close to my stepfather, who decided at last to put her into a care home. He has been my mother’s primary and dutiful caregiver for years. The decision was entirely his alone to make.

He felt good about the facility and its staff. It is partially owned and managed by the most respected medical system in metro St. Louis — Barnes and Jewish Hospital.

I first arrived at my mom’s new and likely final home on the first night of my four-day trip in late January 2020. I had flown out from my current home on the West Coast, in Portland. My plan was simple: spend as much time as I could with my ailing mother.

From the outside, the place looked remarkably plain, testifying to its focus on function. The three-story brick building has a gated courtyard and no fancy design features. It mostly resembles thousands of other care homes, where families, loved ones, and our society place our sickest, frailest, and oldest residents to live out their final days and die, hidden from public view.

My trip here also marked the final arc of my family’s life, not far from where we spent our early years together. Over the course of four days, I visited my mom daily, spending a couple hours each day with her.

My mom turned 83 last fall. When I came, she was at the end of her long, seven-year odyssey since she was first diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2013. That diagnosis changed everything. Those who care for patients with Alzheimer’s, like my stepdad and my mother’s husband of more 35 years, travel in the deep and dark valley of this horrible disease for intolerably long periods, with few moments of joy.

Though I lived nearly 2,000 miles away, my life also changed completely. I stopped taking vacations. Nearly all the free time I could pull from my work schedule went to trips two or three times a year to see her. I ceased to care about petty squabbles at my job, wanting to conserve my energy and health to focus on my family. It probably allowed unhelpful situations at my job to get worse because I refused to waste time on inconsequential issues and people who were not important to my life.

Every time I saw my mom, her conditions had deteriorated more. By time I came out this January 2020, my mom had already had two emergency room visits the previous month. She first stayed at another care facility nearly 30 miles from her and my stepdad’s cozy home, where her offered loving care for years. He found the Barnes-Jewish facility after lots of rejections and queries. It offered extended care, and he immediately liked it.

This is an expression I had much of the time during my four-day visit to see my mother at her new care home.

Over my four days in St. Louis, I visited my mom’s room on the third floor, where I got to slightly know some of the patients. Most of them were mentally sharp. Some had severe cognitive disabilities. Many were old and friendly to me. I had several conversations with mom’s neighbors during two lunches.

For those lunchtime meals, I spoon fed my mom what little amounts of nourishment she could swallow. When she did, she would smile at me, but not really see me because of her eyesight had long since failed.

I also befriended some nurses and nurses aides. All were cheerful and caring. They lovingly helped my mom with her basic functions: showering, eating, being wheeled in and out of the recreation and dining room. They were pros at moving her around. They also did the diaper changes and clothes changes. I couldn’t do that. Most were African American.

This sign decorates the rec room/lunchroom at my mom’s care home.

I particularly liked a day nurse, a man with tattoos covering his arms and about my age. I also liked another nurse, a South Asian woman who helped me get my mom out of bed and ready for lunch one day.

Since I last saw my mom in September 2019, she appeared to have aged about five years. She now had nearly totally gray hair. She was so weak, she was unable to walk.

According to my stepdad, on most days, she slept. Sometimes the TV was left on. Other times my stepdad said he put on music, which she liked. He set up some pictures on her bureau of happier times for all of us and put one of my mom’s favorite posters, from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, above her bed.

My stepfather has arranged a loving display on the bureau in my mom’s room.

During each visit, I talked to her. I held her frail, withered hands. Sometimes she smiled. I liked that a lot.

The last morning of my final visit, a Sunday, began as a beautiful winter day in St. Louis. I awoke at 6:30 a.m. I took a brisk walk to clear my head. During those three miles I exchanged friendly hellos to friendly Midwesterners. I wondered to myself how many of them might have family members who were ill or experiencing dementia like my mother.

I arrived at my mom’s facility shortly after 10 a.m. It was quiet. As usual I signed in and walked to the elevator upstairs, through the institutional hallways.

I first went to my mom’s room and it was empty. I briefly panicked. I thought, she might have died the night earlier. I went back to the recreation and lunchroom. There she was, in her red sweat pants, a red sweater, and curled in a fetal position on the chair next the table below the blaring TV. I walked up to her and told her it was Rudy. I could see her smile, but I knew she did not see me.

That morning, a woman minister in her late 60s, wearing a blue turtleneck and blue pants, was leading a Protestant church service in the same room. About 10 of the mostly older patients participated.

I heard the minister speak the Lord’s Prayer, and half of the patients said it with her. She came up to me and asked if we wanted communion. I asked mom, and she agreed, likely not understanding what I asked. She ingested about one half of the wafer.

Mom began to curl up, wanting to sleep again. I ran to her room and grabbed a pillow to give her something more comfortable than a wooden chair arm to rest her head on. The minister, having finished her service, then sat at the piano and began to play hymns. She played and sang How Great Though Are, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Down by the Riverside, Amazing Grace, and other hymns I didn’t recognize immediately. At that moment I couldn’t think of a better thing to be doing for those here, and for visitors like me.

I started crying when the minister and an older African American patient sang Amazing Grace.

This was it, I realized. This was the end. I knew I would never see my mom alive again. My eyes were turning red and I wiped away the tears on my jacket.

I told my mom I was leaving. She smiled and asked where I was going. I said, I’m going to Portland. She smiled. I don’t know if she heard me. I blew her a kiss, not wanting to give her my minor throat illness. Then I got I got a nurse’s aide to punch in the security code to open the secure elevator to leave.

Alone, I started to cry. I mostly kept up my straight-faced appearance in the lobby as I signed out. Once in the small parking lot, I bent over and wept. It has been years since I cried like this. I must have been a pitiful sight to someone looking out a window.

I got in the car and continued to weep. I turned the ignition and began to leave the parking lot, still crying.

Enough of this, I told myself. I wanted to be strong. So I pulled out my stoic shell and put on my public mask. It is the face I show the world, even when things go very, very bad.

I turned my rental car onto Forest Park Parkway, turned north on Interstate 170, and headed to St. Louis International Airport to catch my flight home.

Letting go of the living

/ Rudy Owens / 1 Comment

During the last six years, I have been forced to confront the collapsing health of my family. Not by coincidence, my reflections on these changes and death itself led me to writers like Viktor Frankl and branches of thinking such as Existentialism and the Greek and Roman school of philosophy known as Stoicism.

The Stoic philosophers from ancient Greece and Rome provide a roadmap that remains remarkably relevant today. The most famous ancient stoics—Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius—did not focus on abstractions. Rather, they wrote about the most pressing realities of life and issues of what define us and how we live each day.

At this point in my own life’s journey, I found comfort in old ideas that embraced questions about death. As Seneca wrote, “A man cannot live well if he knows not how to die well.” Stoic ideas helped me think about how all of us can prepare ourselves for misfortune and navigate through the worst possible events, in order to confront what inevitably lies ahead.

My journey, with my family, was now one confronting inevitable loss. This chapter of my life story, with my family, will perhaps soon end in the death of the remaining two members of my nuclear family—my mother and sister.

Losing my Mom

My father died in 1985, when I was 20, and I can scarcely remember him as a person. He was an alcoholic and unimportant in my life. I unfortunately lost my mother more than six years ago, but this loss is ongoing.

In 2013, she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The illness has been especially cruel to her husband, my stepfather, who saw his intimate partner and best friend of 30 years slowly lose her mental abilities and her ability to function as an independent adult. I have observed her slow decay, mostly during short visits and on phone calls that always got worse with each week, month, and then year.

My mother changed from being someone with a razor-sharp mind and who loved crosswords to a woman who could no longer remember the names or even faces of her neighbors and family.

On this last trip to St. Louis in September 2019, we were alone. I asked her, “Who am I?” She gave me a long look with that blank stare, created by the destruction of her neurons and the accumulation of amyloid plaques in her brain. She replied with my stepfather’s name. I said, “No, mom, it’s your son, Rudy.” She didn’t reply. She then asked me a question she had asked half a dozen times earlier in the last 15 minutes.

I have spent these last six years flying back and forth from Seattle and then Portland to her home in the St. Louis area. My trips were motivated by personal concern for her and her husband caregiver and a sense of duty to help as her son.

I have shed tears. I have felt anguish. I have gnashed my teeth. I have cursed scores of times to myself as I walked alone after work, daylight or dark. I have felt powerless. I have felt my desires for my own dreams bend and be extinguished, just so I could be there for her, albeit from afar.

When I read about my friends’ lives, involving travel or a life where the future is filled with promise, I compare it to my stepdad’s world. His involves non-stop and constant care for my mom.

I have, in the end, simply abandoned thoughts of vacation and time alone that don’t involve flying halfway across the continent, so I can spend time with her. On past trips we have held hands and took walks. We could even squeeze in visits to the St. Louis Art Museum and Missouri Botanical Garden. Even those stopped on my last trip.

On this trip, like the ones before, she asked me questions she had asked dozens of times before: Where do you live? Why do you live n Portland? Why won’t you live here? Do you have a girlfriend?

My mom often chastised me, saying, that’s too far away, you should be closer, even when she has no idea who I am or that she even had a son.

Losing my Sister

During these last six years, and for at least a decade earlier, I have also watched my sister slowly spiral out of control.

She has battled addiction, obesity, mental health issues, a long spell of homelessness, and finally the collapse of her body. Her obesity finally made it nearly impossible for her to walk. After living on the mean streets of St. Louis for months, and then in an unsanitary drug house in a very unsafe St. Louis neighborhood, she rebounded with the help of my mom and stepdad. My sister found a low-paying but stable job with Missouri’s welfare office.

Yet each visit, from 2000 on, turned into a portrait in loss. By the last time I saw her in January 2019, just before she had a heart-attack, she was out of her job, living in squalid conditions alone, and having no contact with anyone or any person except a former drug addict neighbor in a poor south St. Louis suburb.

Each time I came, her apartment looked dirtier and more cluttered and chaotic. I am choosing not to share the details. They are too depressing and also private.

Finally, in July 2019, she called for first responders who discovered her collapsed on her apartment floor, unable to walk. She had deep and open pressure ulcers and was immediately taken the emergency room at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. From there the hospital managers and social workers placed her in skilled nursing facility in the city that accepted Medicaid eligible patients. She moved into the facility that month and has been bedbound and no longer able to walk.

Her new home is a facility for indigent patients, all eligible for Medicaid-paid care. The population is a mix of mostly older African Americans and fewer whites. When I visited in September 2019, more than half appeared bedbound. Patients with mental illnesses wandered the halls, without interference from staff. The front door was coded, and no one but staff could get out without the punch key.

To me, it felt like a madhouse from the Victorian era, with staff unconcerned with the patient wards in their care or visitors from the streets who could walk in the facility without even signing in.

No staff member required me to present my ID or sign in. So I could wander the facility without interference, startled that no one cared who I was. In one of the community rooms, I saw silent, elderly, and sick patients gaze blankly at their television. Others sat in the courtyard, silent and hunched over. Still others in their rooms lay silent, with their televisions blaring reality shows and their faces staring blankly at the blue light. I imagined this was like hundreds of others similar facilities nationwide.

My sister looked like she had aged 10 years. She had lost one of her front top teeth. She had a bad rash and dirty, unkempt hair. She remained unable to walk.

The hardest part of my trip was visiting my sister’s cluttered, dirty apartment that had long gone to hell. Amid the clutter that littered each room, I found evidence of her past life. I located her diaries she had kept from the time she was in her 20s, still with dreams of living a good life, even as it was slowly going sideways from her substance-abuse problems. I found her jewelry she made as a hobby for years, as her mobility began to decline and her world closed in on her.

I spent about two hours finding all of her legal documents and her writings. That was my plan from the start. I put those in a pink plastic tub and filled another with her nicest dresses, pants, and shirts, even though I knew she likely would never wear them again.

We had a falling out when I refused to help her rent a storage locker to put her stuff. She cried, feeling betrayed. I knew from all I had seen she would not leave this place or another. She still believed she could walk again and live on her own with her public assistance.

On my last morning in St. Louis, I visited her room again. Her roommate, who is in her 30s and likely had a mental health disorder, was there. I held my sister’s hand and said I was happy I had come to see her. She looked at me, and said, “I love you.” I responded the way I always had in the past, with a smile.

I then left her room and found one of the young, African-American nurses dressed in purple scrubs. She smiled, punched the code, and the door opened. I walked out into the fresh-smelling fall morning and the sunshine on a beautiful St. Louis day. It was time to catch my flight and leave behind this warehouse for the infirmed.

Why We Embrace Traditions of Denial and Sacrifice

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Tonight is Ash Wednesday. It is an important date on the traditional Catholic and Protestant church calendar. It marks the beginning of Lent, the 40-day period before Easter. The period mirrors the reported 40 days Jesus of Nazareth spent  fasting in the desert.

Observant Christians mark the season attending Ash Wednesday services. There, they will have a cross marked on their head with the ashes made from palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday celebration. The marking of an ashen cross on the forehead is often accompanied with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Catholics will practice fasting, repentance, and abstaining from some foods, like meat. Protestants, like the Lutherans I grew up with, would focus on self-denial or charity work. Most Christians are supposed to contemplate on the coming of Easter and its meaning.

Tonight I attended my first Ash Wednesday service in more than 35 years. I needed the quiet time, in a quiet place, with quiet and thoughtful people, to contemplate my life and sacrifices that some people I know are making for others.

The sermon by the Rector at the Episcopal Church I attended focused on the importance of not running from our grief and contemplating on the world’s problems and the individual’s relation with God. Though I am not a true believer in any faith, I found these words comforting, and I had a few tears because of all that is happening with those close to me.

For those of us who have far more than we need, the idea of purposefully sacrificing something and denying one’s self pleasure seems incongruous. What would you do if you had to give up your smart phone? Your email account? Your morning coffee? What about something more radical, like running water or medicine?

We live in a world where many don’t have these luxuries, and yet we who have them are even afraid to consider life without them. So let those thoughts stay with you as we head into this period of Lent. It is one of many religious traditions that demands sacrifice. There is a good reason to practice this to think of others and not ourselves.

Confronting the void, with a friend

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In the more than the three decades since I graduated from college in Portland, I have maintained a good friendship with classmate of mine. He now lives in southern California. I have been visiting him periodically in Utah and there now for nearly 30 years.

Rudy Owens, on the far left, and my friend are among this group of Reed College students shown here in 1987, in front of the Reed College Library.

As we have aged together, we have encountered different and also similar challenges. I stayed single. I moved to more locations. He got married,  got divorced, raised his daughter, became a river guide, succeeded professionally in a grander way than me, and always stayed true to his curious, creative self.

Though we were raised in very different circumstances—him in a Jewish family in the West, and me in a Lutheran family with a single mother in the Midwest—we had more in common than I would have thought possible when we first got to know each other at our college library steps on long evenings.

Last night we caught up on the phone. I was sharing my feelings of loss concerning people I am close too, including my mother. She is still mostly well, but her issues are ones I will not share in detail here. My friend also shared stories of his mother, who has passed away.

Taken in 2014 in southern California during one of the greatest trips of my life.

During that call, we experienced a moment of understanding that transcended our distance of nearly 1,500 miles and the time we have spent not seeing each other in person the past few years. I learned things about him I did not know. I also shared things about myself I seldom share with others.

I am by nature private and stoic, and I have learned how to control my negative emotions and also my public displays of sadness or anger. I also realized during our talk about life and its inevitable end with death that my embrace of existentialism has given me the ability to confront these challenges I face more clearly.

I told my friend that in suffering, we really can find purpose and meaning. And whatever I did as a result of these circumstances, I would be making choices to respond to the challenges before me.  Those actions would be mine alone, and freely chosen. I was mostly telling myself these points, as I considered those actions yet to come with my mum.

That is pure Viktor Frankl. But it is also how I can face up to what is inevitable on the road ahead. I shared these thoughts with my friend, and he listened in the right way. He did not need to do much other than let me know he listened.

Mostly, I felt relieved to know I could unload to a friend and share my fears and also my resolve. Facing the world alone is not easy for anyone. Maybe it will be easier because I will have friends there to listen when the moment of the void arrives in full force.

Learning the power of forgiveness and why it mattered the rest of my life

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At some point in all of our lives people will do bad things to us, intentionally and unintentionally. This may happen many times, in fact. And these can be awful things. They can be crimes. They can harm our family and friends. They can disrupt and destroy our lives. The victim will then have many choices to respond. Among the most powerful and liberating of all responses to injustice, violence, and evil is forgiveness.

President Abraham Lincoln, an ardent practitioner of forgiveness.

President Abraham Lincoln, an ardent practitioner of forgiveness.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong,” said Mahatma Gandhi, a man of peace who also was murdered in 1948 by a fellow Hindu for his efforts to reconcile the violence that divided the Indian Subcontinent between Muslims, Hindus, and other faiths as the British pulled out of their Indian colony. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the world’s most revered leaders, also deeply embraced a philosophy of forgiveness while trying to lead his country out of a system of slavery and through the nation’s most bloody war. During his famous and searing Second Inaugural Address, prior to his assassination on March 4, 1865, he called for the warring sides to embrace forgiveness. When urged to punish the violent slaveholding South, Lincoln responded, “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.” And, like Gandhi, Lincoln too was killed, by a Southerner who considered him a traitor.

Clearly, forgiveness is not easy, and some of its most ardent practitioners have met with violent ends. “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth,” writes philosopher Hannah Arendt. “The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense.” The Christian gospels written in the years after his crucifixion are premised on the very notion of Jesus’ ability to forgive his tormenters. According to the Gospel of Luke, 23:34, the dying Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Again, another practitioner of peace, killed.

Source, Forbes

President Nelson Mandela (source, Forbes)

Former South African freedom fighter, prisoner, and president Nelson Mandela chose to embrace forgiveness as a tool of reconciliation to heal his nation after decades of the racist Apartheid laws that relegated non-whites to second-class status and excluded them from all forms of politics, education, and economic opportunity. After his release from Robben Island, he took many actions to heal the wounds the could have erupted in more bitter violence that was seen in neighboring countries like Mozambique and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). As Barbara Mutch, a white South African noted after Mandela’s death in 2013, “Nelson Mandela sat down with his enemies and forgave them and moved on. And in doing so, he rescued his country, and he rescued each one of us, and gave us hope that there could be a future for our beautiful, fractured land. And for the greater earth that we all share.”

For me, my moment of action came when I was 18. I had finished high school and was working to save as much money as I could for college that hot summer in University City, Mo. I knew that this marked a pivotal transitional point in my life. I wanted to begin my journey was a clean slate, free from the baggage I carried from my earlier years. I wanted to explore a new path and forge a destiny  that broke from the past. I knew the most important thing I could do for myself was to let go of what I harbored against someone who caused great pain and hurt to me and my family and to themselves, in ways that I still cannot forget.

The only one who could really control the outcome of this experience was me. I had to own it for what it was. That meant I had to own accepting what had happened, and more importantly, letting it off my back and from my heart and soul. I remember the long drive I made on a hot August day with a stranger to Cleveland. I confronted the person who had done many wrongs. I told that person, with great sincerity I felt inside, that I forgave them for what they had done. I meant it. And then, a day later, I took a long bus ride back to St. Louis. Within two weeks I was in Portland, Ore., starting a new life in college, charting a new path that I would define and that would not be defined by this person or the experiences resulting their actions earlier in my life.

It was one of the most important moments I have ever had. I never forgot what it did for me and the party I forgave. Within three years, that person would be dead, and that chapter in my life would be closed.

According to Howard Zehr, the author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice, “Forgiveness is letting go of the power the offense and the offender have over a person. It means no longer letting that offense and offender dominate. Without this experience of forgiveness, without this closure, the wound festers, the violation takes over our consciousness, our lives. It, and the offender, are in control. Real forgiveness, then, is an act of empowerment and healing.”

Years later I am struck by what I gained during the few days in my life when I was striving to define who I wanted to be, and doing that through intentional deeds with a clear mind and a clear sense of purpose.

Some days still I lose focus. I stray from my path. I am tempted to go to a place that I know Lincoln and Mandela would not want to be. At those moments, I go back in time to that place when I became the kind of person I always wanted to be. Then I find the strength to do the right thing, even when it is perilous, as so many good persons have learned.

The American ‘Philomena’ story that is also my own

/ Rudy Owens / 1 Comment

I love great acting. A good actor or troupe of actors can make things accessible that are scary, complex, or just distant. They become real through good art.

Dame Judi Dench stars as the main character, Philomena Lee, an Irish woman searching for her son giving up for adoption.

Dame Judi Dench stars as the main character, Philomena Lee, an Irish woman searching for her son given up for adoption.

I found this to be true with the highly acclaimed 2013 film Philomena, starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. The film portrays, in brutally painful terms, how a Catholic-run adoption system in Ireland forced young pregnant girls, usually orphans or wards of Catholic homes, to give up their kids, who were sold to wealthy American parents. The film alludes to young mothers who died in childbirth, and their kids, at these places—a national scandal in Ireland to this day.

Watching the film, one really feels for these young girls and the heartache they had giving up their young children. The pain they feel is, as is the case of the main character, Philomena Lee, a lifelong loss. The film begins with her pain thinking of her son on his 50th birthday. Fate pairs her with a journalist, Coogan’s Martin Sixsmith character, and they embark on a journey of discovery.

As an adult adoptee, naturally I become curious, what was the “system” that my birth mother found herself in during the 1960s? Who was helping her? What were her support networks? Who were all these other actors who made this work? I started Googling the name of my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit, Mich. This hospital apparently has been torn down and moved. I also discovered it was part of a national philanthropic organization started in the late 1800s to help unwed mothers, known by many as the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers.

Dr. Kate Waller Barrret is one of the co-founders of the Florence Crittendon Homes for Unwed Mothers (courtesy of Wikipedia).

Dr. Kate Waller Barrret is one of the co-founders of the Florence Crittenton Homes for Unwed Mothers (courtesy of Wikipedia).

In 1976, the Florence Crittenton Association of America merged with the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), and the Florence Crittenton Division of the Child Welfare League of America was established. In 2006, the National Florence Crittenton Mission became the National Crittenton Foundation and broke with Child Welfare League of America and returned to being a stand-alone organization that is linked with dozens of Crittenton-affiliated agences around the country. Oddly enough, the National Crittenton Foundation‘s headquarters are in my current home town, Portland, Ore. I find this coincidence fascinating.

How the Philomena system worked in the United States

A number of online bulletin boards have allowed adult adoptees to swap information, including for this organization and the hospital where I was born. These queries stretch over many years, and it appears there were many of us.

A Facebook page was created that is devoted to these homes nationally and larger issues of accessing records. Comments on that Facebook page call these homes the American equivalent of the one portrayed in Philomena.

The creator of that page also created the Florence Crittenton Home Reunion Registry, and I found her story touching.

The “about us” page for the registry notes: “Before society had accepted pregnancy outside of marriage, my birth mother age 18, became pregnant while in nursing school. Her mother was not around and had left the family to get jobs where ever she could to live. Part of my Birth Mother’s life was raised in an orphanage after her father had died in the coal mines. Times were extremely hard and she had no place to turn.”

As an adult adoptee who has now known about his birth ancestry more than 25 years, I continue to discover new things about the past. Today’s discovery illuminated just how many people came together as part of these hard stories, particularly for birth mothers. There were doctors, nurses, social workers (in a weird role as baby brokers), families, and the mostly hidden and also central figures, the father of “illegitimate” children.

Like the system portrayed in the film Philomena, this country had social and child adoption networks and maternal care systems operating largely under the radar because of social norms around illegitimacy, sex, birth control, and more. All of these people operated with the prevailing culture and social values of the time, which promoted secrecy and, for many, shame. A major outcome of this shame-based system was having multiple parties, from the state of Michigan to social service agencies, deny giving identity information to adult adoptees like me. I, like many others, had to spend years and many resources tracking down information to what we are entitled to as a human right—to know who we are.

Years later, the mothers and kids have revisited these past times and the systems with different values, and the story looks vastly different. In the end, this is a story that matters not just for those who were a part of this large and nationwide network. The film Philomena shows that these stories are tales about love, about loss, about life, about connection, and about identity. These are universal stories, accessible to all of us.

Turning off everything except your mind

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

 

Tonight, the rains returned to Portland. That dark winter gloom fell on cue just after 5 p.m., and I took to the streets of Portland’s so-called Alphabet District to experience this dense neighborhood.

St. Mary's Cathedral Photograph

St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

It is easy to feel isolation and gloom in this weather. People in Portland tend to avert their gaze like urban dwellers in many cities and walk purposefully.

I stumbled on one of the prettiest religious building complexes in the city, St. Mary’s Cathedral. As I noted on my photo blog, the cathedral sits in a five-block area that also includes Temple Beth Israel and Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. I like this part of town a lot.

I stepped inside as the 5:30 p.m. mass was beginning. It felt warm and cozy. I decided tonight was not the night to sit, but I thought about the need to do that more frequently.

I am not a religious person, but I like that houses of worship are one of the last remaining places in our country where people intentionally turn off their cell phones, disconnect from the media and the material world, and perhaps connect with something beyond themselves. That is what I like about them. I am not a fan of charismatic churches that are full-on multimedia spectacles that turn on media to prevent contemplative thought.

When I was a kid, I was forced to sit in church nearly every Sunday for years, until I was 18. I initially I could not stand it because I did not and do not adhere to the tenets of any organized religion. But as the years came and went, I realized I had learned a great deal sitting in the wooden church pew, gazing at beautiful stained glass windows at Bethel Lutheran Church in University City, Mo. Sitting for a forced period of time stilled my mind and my generally active body.

Bethel Lutheran Church Photograph

The place where I spent many an hour contemplating things in a quiet, peaceful place–Bethel Lutheran Church.

To this day, nothing else will quiet my mind like a church pew. Though churches are not my house of worship, they still remain my quiet place. I think all of us could benefit from turning it all off for at least an hour regularly and contemplating things bigger and more important than our small, insignificant selves. For me the place is a church pew. What is it for you? If you have not gone to that place for while, maybe you should pay it a visit.