Cynicism and Hope

I’d like to believe about my mother and me that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. But I’m not sure that I deserve such a high compliment.

What I do know is that her legacy lives on in each of her five children. That’s why we nominated her for Cincinnati Woman of the Year for 2010. She didn’t win, but she should have. My nominating letter tells why:

On behalf of her five children and her extended family, I nominate my mom, Pat Sweeney, as a Cincinnati Woman of the Year for 2010.

I was told that in this nomination I should focus on my mom’s work as a board member—and now board president—of Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services. She has made a great contribution there, raising the agency’s visibility and starting Champions of Hope to raise funds, recognize community leaders in the field, and educate the community about living with mental illness.

But to me, Mom’s role on the GCB board is not a standout accomplishment, something to set apart from everything else she does and is. Heading the board of the agency that has long served her youngest son is simply a logical next step in a lifetime of service to her family and the community. “GCB was a place I could go for help in a difficult situation,” she told me. “I wanted to help make that available to others.”

This is Mom. Practical, generous, and above all determined. Ask her how she made it through the early 80s—managing a house full of teenagers after she and my dad divorced—and she will say simply: “You do what you gotta do.”

A lot of people survive divorce. They do what must be done to keep their children on track and enough money coming in while they are suffering the greatest crisis of their lives. Mom did all of that too. But here’s why she’s a standout:

Mom knows that what you “gotta do” is a lot more than take good care of the people who live in your house. She knows that just as healthy families require time and commitment and hard work, so does a healthy community.

At every phase of her life, Mom has devoted herself to building the Cincinnati community. My memory is filled with snapshots of my mother serving others. As a preschooler I watched her cut out cardboard figures for my Montessori class. When I was eight years old we saw her on TV as she served communion during Archbishop Joseph Bernardin’s installation service. A few years later we chatted in her bedroom as she organized donations for an auction to benefit the Resident Home for the Mentally Retarded. When I was in high school she would hustle out of the house one evening each month for “Network”—the Cincinnati Women’s Network, which she and some friends founded. When one of my sister’s friends was going through a family crisis, Mom took her in as another daughter.

And she did much more that I didn’t see. Mom volunteered for the United Way for years and chaired one of its allocations committees. She served on the pastoral council and co-chaired the Family Life Bureau of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. She served on the boards of 4Cs (Comprehensive Community Child Care) and the neighborhood homeowners association.

Mom had to cut back on her volunteer work during the years when she traveled frequently on business, but when her sixty-fifth birthday approached in 2005, she was all set to retire and take on a full slate of new commitments. Right away, she joined the boards of GCB and Women Helping Women, whose Sunday Salons she chaired in 2007 and 2008. She conducted architectural tours and served as a poll watcher and continued to devote a lot of time to parenting her youngest son.

Here is Mom’s lesson to me and my siblings: It takes time, hard work, and unflagging commitment to raise a healthy family—especially when all seems to be falling down around you—and you must give extra time to the ones who need you most. But if you steadfastly press on, someday you will see the fruits of your labor: a healthy new generation, interdependent and compassionate, carrying your legacy forward.

Likewise, building a healthy community requires time, hard work, unflagging commitment and extra care for those who need it most. But if we follow Pat Sweeney’s example and do what we gotta do, we will see Cincinnati make it through these trying times and emerge stronger, healthier, more interdependent and more compassionate, carrying on the legacy of the city’s most dedicated leaders.

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

Says my neighbor who spends her days walking, “By your house is always clean. You know I many walk. Thank you.” Then she beckons me to the unshoveled section where the alley crosses the sidewalk. Saying “Please,” she motions for me to shovel there too. I do, and I enjoy her gratitude.

To build community, it helps to make it easy for folks to drop by and visit.

Here’s one way to do that. Friends of mine posted this picture of a puzzle on Facebook and invited friends to come over and help put it together:

Jeremy had that look on his face this morning. His shoulders were slumped, his face was frozen, and when he turned to me his face crumpled into pain.

A month ago we’d started – really he’d started – to strip the paint from our fireplace mantle and later the brick. Eighty years of paint – we counted 20 layers – was proving a stubborn adversary. And it was taking its toll on my husband.

I walked into the living room and looked over the mess – the top of the mantle, which he’d dismantled earlier in the week, was half resting on the rubble on top of the brick, half lying in the hallway. The bricks were at various states of having been attacked – I saw green, white, blue, pink, some raw brick. The closer I got to the fireplace, the stronger the fumes of the environmentally friendly paint stripper got.

And that’s when the words from last night came echoing back to me. I’d even been the one to quote my mom last night – after Suk Maya, a friend from Bhutan, insisted we read Matthew 6.

My mother used to look me in the eye and say with a stern voice and her finger wagging, “God gave everyone a gift to share with others. Are you going to pretend you don’t have a need – pretend you don’t have a hole that needs to be filled – and ROB that person of their opportunity to give to you? How dare you prevent them from giving by refusing to receive!”

And so I called Suman and Nathaniel.

There were several reasons not to. They are newly arrived refugees from Bhutan. Suman already has 2 jobs – some days he works 16 hour shifts. He supports his wife, his mother and his 3 sisters. They all live in the same 2 bedroom apartment a couple of blocks away. Nathaniel has relatives arriving tonight from Nepal (his mom is Suk Maya from last night’s storytelling group).

But the look on my husband’s face – he’s an extrovert who gets energy from being with people, and doing this huge project alone was killing him – made me call anyway.

Nathaniel wasn’t sure what stripping paint from brick meant but I asked him to come over to take a look. He came. Suman showed up just a few minutes later. They put on the jumpsuits Jeremy gave them and soon paint chips were flying everywhere.

A couple of hours later Suman had to go to work, so the three men stopped for the day. Jeremy offered money but Suman said,

“You shouldn’t even offer. Aren’t we friends?”

Yes, of course! Jeremy replied.  We’ve shared meals and so much tea, brought them gifts, visited and told stories in the evenings in a sweaty one-bedroom apartment crammed with the whole extended family.

“Don’t you help me?” Suman said.

We did help him move about a month ago. We’d gotten the truck and driven it because he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet. Jeremy just paused.

“Then alright,” Suman concluded, and they all said good-bye.

In the middle of one night back in August, a bullet came through our friends’ fourth-story window then went through the ceiling. No one was hurt.

As soon as they heard about the incident, some members of our congregation went over to keep our friends company and help them clean up. I wrote about it here.

I was out of town at the time so I didn’t hear the epilogue about the resurrection ivy.

A living vine, broken by violence, now multiplies.

A friend just sent around an email thanking members of our congregation for sharing the burden of cleanup after a bullet came through her window in the middle of the night earlier this week. (Apparently it was from a random shot into the air from the street four stories below. No one was hurt.) She named five people—a pastoral team member, two other adults, and two preteens—who came over to help clean up the mess, then wrote:

Thanks for the fussin’! By asking for help, I got to dwell on thoughts of the team effort this community is for us. We’ve laughed through this, a way to cope with stress. With everyone’s care, it’s a light burden. We’re so glad to be here on the corner!

I’m most struck by the joy conveyed in the last sentence, the peace in a place of danger.

When the folks at Wipf and Stock (publishers of Cascade books) designed the cover of the Cynicism and Hope book, they make the “o” in “Hope” a bullet hole. Like my friend’s email, the cover perfectly captures the theme of this blog, the book, and the conference that preceded it.