A Song in the Night (13 page)

This person, whose two-thousand-year-old story was sitting in millions of bookshelves and pews, was not, by my reading, someone who floated with gentle detachment above the sufferings of the world. This was a man who loved those around him with an intensity that even he sometimes found hard to bear.

My own faith was still in its early stages, but what I read moved me and drew me in. I didn’t know if I really understood it, or if I could live up to it, but the reverberations of his fervent way of seeing the world began to resonate inside me. And once that resonance started, it started me down a path of wonderment and growth and change.

While I was in college, I considered becoming a minister, but I rejected the idea decisively. It seemed like the ministry would demand too high a standard of behavior. I knew my own weaknesses and flaws, and I knew that even if I managed to control my greed, resentment, pettiness, lust, and pride, they would all still reside within me—and somehow that seemed even worse than acting on them. How could I pretend to be someone pure and loving when there were plenty of moments when I was not? How could I represent an institution with so many glorious ideals and so many ugly historical failures? The answer seemed clear: I could not.

The decisive moment came for me at the end of my years in college, when I experienced a reawakening of my faith that is difficult to describe and even more difficult to explain. It came at a time when I felt broken and adrift, uncertain about my deepest values and my direction. I was not sure whether God existed and whether it mattered. I felt caught in a spiral of expectations about what I desired to be and knowledge of how frequently I failed. And at that point I met a young woman who asked me a very simple question: Had I ever mentioned my unhappiness in prayer? Had I ever actually spoken to God about the matter?

I was embarrassed to say no. My first reaction was that it didn’t make sense to do so. Later I turned the thought around: What could I lose if I tried it? The greatest risk, it seemed to me, would be silence—and the resulting disappointment. So outside on a small bench one evening I cast my prayer into the vastness of the world, as one might throw a message in a bottle into the sea. My prayer rambled, but it was heartfelt.

And oddly enough, that’s all it took. I didn’t see lights and I didn’t hear voices, but when I opened my eyes I felt different.
Profoundly different. A burden had been lifted from my heart. I could breathe. The part of me that had felt empty since my birth felt complete. And, more than anything, I felt awash in grace.

We all go through life carrying so much guilt and anxiety; we are constantly being measured and judged. In many of our daily roles we are expected to meet ever higher standards: as students and employees, as children and parents. We are told that our identity and our success depend on our performance, and we have internalized this message all the way into our deepest core. But the message of God’s grace—the center of the “good news” proclaimed by Jesus—is that in the eyes of the one who really matters, the Being who gave us our being, our performance is immaterial. We are endlessly, boundlessly loved. This love is not a sentimental characteristic that overlooks the innumerable ways in which human beings have hurt themselves and each other or that ignores the self-centered qualities in all of our lives. I came to believe that God is fully conscious of these, yet fully forgiving. Love is not an emotion and it does not hinge on behavior: it is an irrevocable decision about the essence of humanity and about each person, made by God in advance, which stands as a counterbalance and a cure to our endless self-judgment and fear.

When I experienced this reawakening of my faith, just before the fall of my senior year in college, I wanted to understand how people in previous centuries and in our own had responded to this kind of experience. Returning to campus, I discovered that there were not many people to talk to about
this, and so I did what many of my peers were doing when they wanted deeper exposure to a topic: I enrolled in graduate school. I received a scholarship from Yale Divinity School, a program that seemed to combine the intellectual rigor I wanted with the humanity and warmth that would make the exploration worthwhile.

I arrived in the fall of 1978, and I swept through some of the happiest weeks of my life. I instantly fell in with new friends who treated each other differently from any group of people I had ever met. They were warm, thoughtful, attentive, curious, and unusually happy. Most, but not all, of them were Christians of one denomination or another. Some were recent graduates, like me, and others were coming back to school to pursue ministry as a second career. There were many women, some of whom had to show real grit in applying for positions of leadership in churches that still resisted the idea of women’s ordination. I was a throwback to an older model of ministry student: I was a young man who had come directly from college.

I spent the crisp fall evenings throwing Frisbees on the green or playing my guitar in the dorm. I bought a huge stack of books with tiny print that I carried back and forth to the library. I made friends not only among the students but also among the faculty. One of my closest friends was a Catholic priest named Henri Nouwen, who I later learned was one of America’s most popular spiritual authors at the time. I often visited Henri’s daily services of communion to enter a deep place of reflection and peace.

Even as I experienced the warmth of this exceptional community,
I was not sure that I was going to pursue an actual career in the ministry. Still, everything proceeded wonderfully well for the first ten weeks, until just before Thanksgiving, when I came down with an illness that no one could identify. The symptoms resembled the flu, and I suffered from moments of extreme lethargy, when I could barely move or make decisions. I reported this to my doctors in New York, who urged me to go to Yale–New Haven Hospital in case I was experiencing a cerebral hemorrhage.

For five days the doctors performed tests. Was it the flu? Or some other virus? Or perhaps even a seizure disorder? They scanned my body and analyzed my brain waves, but they came up with nothing. Although my condition improved, I lost the energy to do all the things that my schedule required. I muscled through the next few weeks to finish my exams, but when I returned after Christmas, I realized that the unnamed condition was still plaguing me. With enormous regret I said goodbye to my friends, withdrew from school, and went home.

It was not easy living again with my parents, in my childhood room, without knowing what was bothering me or what I would do next. My friends were all making great strides in school or in their first jobs, while I was adrift. Slowly my physical condition improved, but I was still without direction and purpose.

After a long car trip exploring the United States, I moved to Washington, D.C. I was fortunate to get a job as a researcher for Congress Watch, an organization that focused on the hidden
pathways of dollars and influence that affected decisions in Congress. I worked directly for Mark Green, a dynamic young lawyer who had already written half a dozen books as part of Ralph Nader’s network. Nader at that time was still doing extraordinary work on behalf of American consumers, and he had set up small advocacy groups that focused on different topics, such as pharmaceuticals and health-care reform, automobile and transportation policy, and corruption in Congress. Though I later broke with him over his decision to run for president in both 2000 and 2004, in the 1980s I found him a provocative and in many cases inspired analyst of the structure of the American economy and the flaws in our politics. Mark Green was an equally brilliant scholar and organizer and went on to be elected president of the New York City Council (known as the “public advocate”) and to run as a candidate for both the U.S. Senate and the mayoralty of New York City.

When I arrived in Washington, Jimmy Carter had been president for three years, and he was gearing up for his reelection campaign in 1980. I immediately fell in with a dynamic network from different parts of the American activist community: environmentalists, labor leaders, consumer advocates, and elected officials. The Republican Party and the corporate interests that tended to support it had been pushed back forcefully after the Watergate scandal, leading to the election of a huge number of new congressional representatives in 1974 and the election of Carter in 1976.

By late 1979 the political mood of the country was changing. The inflation and unemployment rates were running unacceptably
high. In November 1979, radical students invaded the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took fifty-two embassy employees hostage, triggering a year-long standoff. Carter, anticipating conservative pressure, seemed to many of us to be trimming his sails and slowing down on his commitments to progressive causes. Still, it seemed unlikely that the nation was about to take a major turn to the right. To many, Ronald Reagan seemed unelectable in early 1980 because of his strong brand of conservatism and because he was sixty-nine years old. Our job that year was to remind the president that he needed to stay faithful to the coalition that had elected him.

We also wanted to educate voters around the country about corporate power. I was initially given the responsibility of investigating the role of large corporations abroad—something I was naturally interested in because of South Africa—but increasingly my assignments focused on the behavior of a few large U.S. corporations and the role of aggressive business lobbying organizations, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Eventually I became the national research director for a network of organizations that were behind what became known as “Big Business Day.” Modeled loosely on Earth Day, which had been established ten years before and in which many of my new associates had been involved, the idea was to hold teach-ins and demonstrations around the country to object to the increasingly aggressive influence of corporations on government at all levels. Though not all corporations took such a belligerent approach, we were seeing a surge in corporate
campaign money entering politics, attacks on environmental regulations, soaring executive pay, slashed hourly wages, attempts to dismantle workers’ rights and labor unions, and fierce battles over consumer and product safety standards for everything from drugs to toys to automobiles. We also saw a refusal to consider energy efficiency and unquestioning support for right-wing regimes (like that in South Africa), where business felt it had a freer hand. Our effort was not simply a list of complaints but a campaign to provoke a deeper discussion about the relationship between economic power and democracy.

Around Thanksgiving in 1979 I received a phone call from Ralph Nader himself, asking me to take on a particularly challenging task. Would I create an anthology of articles on corporations in America? Sure, I responded—when did he need it? Well, he said, it needed to be published the week before Big Business Day in April.

“What?” I said. “That’s only four months from now! How can we gather, select, compile, edit, and print an anthology from scratch in four months? ”

“I’m sure you can do it,” he replied.

This was a much bigger task at that time than it would be today. There were no personal computers and no such thing as word processing. There was no Internet, no Google, and no e-mail. Everything would have to be done by hand. I immediately went to the Library of Congress, which had just invented a new cataloguing system that included a large number of recently published books and articles. One could gain access
to the library’s ancient computer terminals only by waiting in a long line, and then one was limited to two hours at a time.