conviction

"The real calling was not the drama of being stabbed and surviving.  The real drama is what you do when the drama is over and the reactions are all settled," says the Reverend Al Sharpton in this week's "The Moth" Podcast. He tells a compelling story about conviction, which is hard to retell with the justice it is due.  It deserves to be heard in Sharpton's own words.

Sharpton asked a judge to release the man who had stabbed him and though the man was not released, Sharpton felt satisfied with having tried. Prompted by his mother to follow the example of his hero, Martin Luther King, Jr., he had forgiven his attempted murderer.  But he was further challenged when the young man wrote to him and thanked him for being the only person who had ever "spoke for him" in his life and encouraged Sharpton to always speak up for those who others would not speak for.  The men began to correspond and eventually Sharpton knew he had to meet the  man and talk to him.  He found it to be the most difficult thing he had ever done.  "I trembled a little," said Sharpton, as he sat at the table about to meet the man who had tried to kill him.

The young man thanked him for his forgiveness and told him that it was what he needed to pick up and carry on with his life when he was eventually released from jail.

"I really didn't come for you," said Sharpton.  "I came for me.  I had to find whether I was convicted, or just talented.

"I told him, 'I learned a lesson because of you.'  You can't pass a test you never take and sometimes those that bring you to the point of death will help you discover the point of life....

"I shook his hand.  I walked away, convicted.  He was the last person that it mattered to me what he thought of me.  I knew now what I thought of myself.  And the remaining days, I've tried to know that conviction and speaking for those that had noone to speak for, even if it's those that try to harm you, is the reason I was here and I wanted to help others find out the reason they were here."


I once heard "This American Life" cover the story of a sixteen year old driver who hit and killed a biker, a classmate.  There was no possible way for the driver to have avoided the accident, but as he was interviewed over twenty years latere, he still struggled daily with the part he played in the young girl's death.  He spoke of how it changed his romantic relationships when he told girls he dated, how at every major life event he celebrated, he thought that she and her family would not be celebrating such an event, how he often wondered at the randomness of her death and why it could not have been him that died that day and not her.  The program ended with Ira Glass telling the listener this: research shows that drivers in accidents causing death because of driver error are better able to grieve and move on with their lives than drivers like the one in the story, who are involved in accidents causing death through no fault of their own.  The theory behind this phenomenon is that drivers who were involved in an accidental death have a sense of randomness related to suffering and death, while drivers who cause accidents, though they have a negative experience, made choices--had control--leading to the experience. 

These two stories intersected in my thoughts about the nature of suffering, perception, reaction, creation.  It seems that every negative thing that happens to a person could be classified into "an accident created and thus controlled" or "a random accident and thus controlling" with all the reverberations that each would effect.  I was left a little breathless by the appropriateness of the metaphor and how I could apply it to so much pain I see in so many different students, co-workers, friends, family members, myself.  Does the pain happen to you and control you?  Do you cause the pain and control it? 

What Sharpton did was extraordinary because the pain was literal, and though he could not control the situation he decided to control his response to it.  "You  never will know until you are faced with something that you don't control and that is not scripted," he said. I love this story and I want to remember his words and his example.  Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.