With the Deepest Gratitude

I take Thanksgiving very seriously. As we here in the United States prepare to celebrate this major holiday this week, I am thinking about the rich diversity of experiences, places, and especially the people I have seen, met, and know. I am deeply grateful for the wide expanse of opportunities I’ve had to live a good life and the richest of human connections. I hope that I’ve lived a life of unselfish service. The people I’ve met have inspired me to do my small part to help make this world a better world because I have been in it.

Having the privilege of seeing and hearing in person three Nobel Peace Prize recipients speak - South African Bishop Desmond Tutu giving a sermon on love and hope, Romanian author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel delivering a commencement address to graduates at a local college, U.S. senator and future president Barack Obama challenging the crowd to live lives of commitment and service for the common good.

Each experience listening to these men was one I will forever cherish, as each one called those of us listening to change the world for the good through our work and everyday lives.

What incredible encounters with immense ideals and examples.

Planting sugar cane in the hot July sun in the countryside outside of Havana, Cuba, when I was a graduate student. Each day, a non-speaker of Spanish, I gestured and pointed at everything I could to have my Cuban and Nicaraguan co-planters tell me how to say the Spanish words for everything I pointed to. In a coastal community south west of the capital Kingston, I labored alongside Jamaicans and fellow members of my own church to rebuild a church school for young children, one demolished by devastating hurricanes. Touring hospitals, orphanages, churches, soup kitchens, and living in the apartments of families in Kyiv and Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, I experienced the transformative process of creating a newly-freed country out of the rubble of the Iron Curtain, after it fell. 

Very different cultures, each, these experiences branded me with a small understanding of the miraculous resilience of the human spirit. In countries in which its citizens were proud of their unique heritage and culture, I felt their strength, determination, and willingness to do the massively hard work of building societies that enabled people to thrive and live and to be their best. 

In the sharpest contrast to the fields, hurricane devastation, and the aftermath of totalitarianism, I’ve also witnessed firsthand the pageantry and pomp of royalty. In London, as a 17-year old, I saw Queen Elizabeth II ride a horse in the annual Trooping of the Colour parade in London. Years later her son, then Prince and now, King Charles III, just a few away from me, on a visit to Boston, Massachusetts to give an address on the 350th anniversary of Harvard University. I’ve had the thrill of meeting the great, late actor Jimmy Stewart, a Pennsylvania native and getting his autograph, at the college I attended, which was in his hometown. I’ve seen another great actor, Matt Damon, just a few feet away during his appearance on The Daily Show episode I attended in New York City. He spoke about a beautiful documentary he co-produced about how music united people in war-torn Bosnia, a country I have visited with my oldest son. I’ve been just a few feet away from the great British actor and singer Cynthia Erivo, in her Tony-winning performance on Broadway, in The Color Purple, which propelled her to the heights of music,cinema, and fame. Both New York City experiences were along with several of my Someone To Tell It To team membersIn a Hershey, Pennsylvania Playhouse production of The Crucible, I acted in scenes opposite the teenage Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who last year won an Academy Award for her performance in The Holdovers. Each experience was such a gift to my spirit. 

And, earlier this year I had the absolute and most thrilling experience (which I’ve written about before) to portray Fred (Mister) Rogers in an original production of I’m Proud of You, based on the memoir, I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers, by my dear friend journalist Tim Madigan. To embody that icon was one of the best gifts I've received in all my life. 

In the diverse listening work I’ve done alone and with my colleagues, my life has been enriched more deeply than I can rightly convey by those who have trusted me and us with intimate and very personal life stories. The now 99-year old World War II veteran who couldn’t shake off the trauma he experienced during his war-time service. The six-year old girl who could best unveil her feelings about her parents’ impending divorce, not through words, but through the crayon drawing she made and the broken heart she revealed as we watched. The shame and regret expressed by the 68-year old woman who poured out in writing, over several years, her past and the abuse she endured as a child, and how it severely fractured nearly all her relationships since then. The 20-year old young man of mixed race who is so lonely and alienated from the emotional dysfunction of his family and the prejudice of the people around him. The 20-something young man to whom I was the first person he came out to as he wrestled with the anxiety-producing task of telling his parents that he is gay. The 40-something woman who spent time in prison for murder and who wanted her life to end because the pain of the abuse and shame she experienced in her life was too much to bear. The 30-something year old man who came to the U.S. via a long, circuitous path from Sudan, after escaping the horror of the Sudanese civil war as a teenager. The 40-year old woman, whose wedding I officiated just months before, who called in utter shock to tell me that her husband, a pilot, had been killed in a tragic plane crash while flying Pennsylvania’s senior U.S. Senator John Heinz to Philadelphia. 

These are merely a very few of the thousands of people who invited me and our wonderful compassionate listeners into their pain, their loneliness, and their grief. Their stories are by turns tender, angry, disbelieving, gut-wrenching, and tragic. The diversity of their circumstances does not belie the commonalities of the feelings connected to them.

I am far more richer emotionally, a far better listener, a far more empathetic person because of the depths of the struggles I have been invited into, entrusted to hold those stories with care, grace, and love. 

Then there is the diversity in my own nuclear family. My three sons, as well as they get along, are all different people, of course. One is an incredible mathematician, an actuary, who works with a team located in Europe, Asia, and South America. Another is a skilled manager of people who currently oversees much of the state of Pennsylvania for home health care recipients under a large health care system. Another has profound  intellectual disability and autism and requires 24-hour constant attention and care. His two brothers and their wives and young children accept him as an equal and integral part of our family and shower him with love. The caregivers and drivers we have now and have had for helping with him and taking him to and from his day program are diverse, too. From Kenya, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic. With different stories, different accents, and different journeys here to the United States. Each is absolutely invaluable to our son’s and our families well-being. We could not do this without them.

And then there are my five young grandchildren. Their diversity comes through their personalities and temperaments. In the different musical instruments they play - a cello, a clarinet, a saxophone, a bass, a trumpet.

In the sports they participate in - wrestling, swimming and diving, karate , soccer, baseball, flag football, and gymnastics. Several are artistic, some are singers. A few love roller coasters. A few don’t. And one is a shopper.

Each one is unique and special and smart and funny and I love them passionately. I love them all the same, in their uniqueness, in their divergent gifts and interests. 

I am immensely grateful for every one of the experiences and people I’ve written about today. They each broaden my thinking, enhance my knowledge, create more understanding, deepen my empathy, and teach me ever more about the richness of the human family and the many gifts we all bring to make this world a magical, wonderful, beautiful place. 

For this Thanksgiving, I celebrate all of them.