The Miracle Worker

Out of the thousand things I learned teaching for 45 years at The San Francisco School, one was my bird’s eye view of human growth, promise, potential. I’ve witnessed it all. Working with the same kids for 11 years gave me a lot of insight.  Fabulous 3-year-olds who went on to become fabulous 8^th-graders and grew into fabulous adults. (My first students are now 60 years old and I’ve kept in touch with many, so that’s a real testimony.) I’ve also seen fabulous 3-year-olds end up struggling mightily in middle school, difficult 3-year olds blossom into fabulous 8^th graders, wonderful kids the full eleven years have melt-downs in high school, difficult kids the full eleven years blossoming into wonderful adults. In the midst of all these variation, there was the abiding  sense that a school that valued kids, welcomed them, gave them the love, attention, information and skills they deeply need, made a lifelong impact on their lives. It made a difference. 

 

But it was no guarantee. School was just one part of the kids’ lives. There were so many other influences—family at the top of the list, but also peers, genetics, inherited blessings and trauma, circumstances— that you never can quite predict how things will go. Why can one kid struggle with small and large traumas and come out the other side more compassionate, more aware, more loving and another be beaten down by it all?  Let’s face it—the complexity of human beings, the extraordinary number of possible connections in the human brain, the myriad ways the human brain and human heart can disconnect, the utter unpredictably of human beings —more pronounced now than ever before in the age of anxiety, disinformation, purposeful misinformation, makes the idea of nurturing communities as salvation more unreliable than ever before. 

 

As noted in my recent post, the happy fantasy of Scrooge’s utter transformation has felt more recently like the territory of fiction and fairy tales than real life. People get stuck in their issues and simply never change.

 

But yesterday’s Thanksgiving gathering made me pause yet again and consider. The details are important, fascinating and essential to the story, but it’s simply too much for a short blog post. But the shortest story is that I have a step-grandson who was a fun 8-year-old when I first met him and as a teenager, went down some dark rabbit holes into toxic places from which it seemed he would never escape. (To give just one example in this extraordinary story, he is a mixed-race kid who joined the Proud Boys!). I hadn’t seen him for the last five years, only hearing the stories from my daughter and her husband of him buying a gun, getting fired from job after job and now moving back from Portland to Rhode Island with his pregnant girlfriend who he has dated for one year with no job waiting for him there.

 

But recently my daughter had made some good re-connections with him and invited him and his girlfriend to our Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. In a few short hours, he blew my world open and restored my faith in human transformation. The high level of his conversation, the reading he had been doing, his shared vision of a more human-centered urban planning, his extraordinary deep insight into his Dad’s current re-surfacing of old traumas, his passion for ideas, his gentleness and honesty— I was simply astonished. Perhaps at 25 years old, he just needed his frontal lobes to develop. 

 

My step-grandson’s name is Alijah and so I looked up his namesake from the Bible, Elijah. Turns out he was a prophet and a miracle worker. His miracles were things like causing and then ending a drought, multiplying flour and oil for a widow and raising her son from the dead, killing 102 soldiers with fire and lightning. Ho hum. Same old same old and so much less interesting to me than the miraculous transformation of the present-day Alijah. 

 

Not to overstate the case. Like us all, but more than most, Alijah has his own issues to sort through and coming back into fatherhood in a place that hasn’t always supported his best self and back to a Mom who likewise has often fallen short will not be easy. But I rarely have been so impressed by someone ready to use his struggles to enlarge his soul. There’s so much more to say about it, but for here and for now, it’s enough to report that everything the poets and depth psychologists and spiritual traditions have told us is true— that our pain and suffering, used rightly, is the window to our joy and liberation. On that Thanksgiving Day, that gift of remembrance received the full measure of my gratitude.