The Pleasure Of Doing Good. Love And Devotion

The pleasure of a good act is something to be cherished and remembered -not so that we can feed our own egos and pat ourselves on the back, although that can be fun.

Perhaps it’s so that we can be reminded that virtuous actions and small acts of great kindness are not only possible; they become much easier and productive over time than the acts of anger and cruelty and greed that would oppose and frustrate them.

I don’t want false humility rob me of the pleasure of doing good, this feeling is essential for my spiritual life, especially as I struggle to change and learn.

Something important is happening at Bishop Maginn High School.

People from all over the country are finding the pleasure of a good act – in this case, helping a school with a moral mission life up and nurture some of the neediest and most vulnerable children on the earth – powerful and uplifting.

These are refugee children that risk being abandoned by the very country that gave them a name and a dream. I was a reporter for a long time and saw some horrific things, but I never heard the depth and length and scope of the suffering that these children and others I have met in the past several years have experienced.

But something is stirring in that school and among the people who are responding to it. This spirit is a lot bigger than me or my beloved blog.

Something about that school has a holy spirit inside of it, a reminder to me and others of the extraordinary good that faith can do, when it is not mired in scandal and corruption and politics. The school doesn’t care what religion its students practice. It just wants to make then safe and help them cross the bridges they have to cross.

This afternoon, I spent two hours tracking down a pair of sneakers that would fit two refugee children who have never had sneakers. Because they came from a different country and had a different bone structure, I could not at first find a sneaker in their size, and this frustrated me, because I have become a whiz at online and offline shopping through my Mansion work at finding anything the residents need online, and none of them have simple sizes for anything.

Maria has pointed out that when I am frustrated, I just get stubborn.

I finally located a prominent web shoe site and encountered one of those rare but wonderful customer service people who does really want to help. She got into my search for these shoes right away and we settled down to roll up our sleeves and just get it done.

We spent the rest of the afternoon studying foot and shoe conversion charts and we finally found what we needed. It was not easy.

The sneakers are on the way, they are bright and colorful and will shock these two children, because they have nothing, and such a small thing would be almost unimaginable to them.

This will not alter the world much, but it sent me soaring. This act of good did not wipe out a single one of my many faults. It certainly does not make me a saint. That is the pleasure of doing good, which teaches humility. Because I know now that you don’t have to be good to do good. That is a cruel myth, and it is liberating to know better.

This is something Bishop Maginn Art And Theology Teacher Sue Silverstein and her principal, Mike Tolan, already know. Sue and I work very well together, we are different in many ways but in sync in others. She has accepted me into her world and let me in, opened the Gate Of Good.

This evening, this wonderful message appeared in my inbox, the kind of message that revives my faith in the Internet. It was from Sue, who always makes sure to give thanks.

“I mentioned today,” wrote Sue, “that we’d gotten a special box, I assume from a reader or member of the Army of Good. We have been blessed with so many amazing and wonderful gifts in the past two weeks, so much more than I could have imagined, such generosity and love. I wondered why I was so taken by the box that arrived today. After the very busy day calmed down a bit and I had some time to think, I remembered a story that I read to my own children.

The box arrived with well loved colored pencils, erasers and other small things. It was lovingly packed with grocery store bags and contained a small note that simply read, “Dear Art Class, Best wishes to you all. With love from Colorado Springs, Colorado.”

The return address was from Deanne A. (I know the name, she is a member of the Army Of Good.)”

“The story I read to my own kids,” added Sue, who also teaches theology at the high school, “was of an angel who had nothing to give the baby Jesus, he was a child and had only a small box of what he considered his treasures. The box, worn and battered contained the following things: Well, there was a butterfly with golden wings, captured one bright summer day on the high hills above Jerusalem, and a sky-blue egg from a bird’s nest in the olive tree that stood to shade his mother’s kitchen door. Yes, and two white stones, found on a muddy river bank, where he and his friends had played like small brown beavers, and, at the bottom of the box, a limp, tooth-marked leather strap, once worn as a collar by his mongrel dog, who had died as he had lived, in absolute love and infinite devotion.

“When I opened this box today,” Sue wrote, “I thought of the art that had been made with these treasures and I was honored that Deanne would pass them on to us. We will try to do them justice. There is goodness everywhere these days!”

Goodness seems to have found the address of Bishop Maginn High School (75 Park Street, Albany, N.Y., 12201. People from the Army Of Good are sending them money, keyboards, boxes of music, checks for tuition, vegetables for the garden, art supplies, the return addresses come from all over the country.

(I hope we keep the address of the school handy when the cruel upstate winter comes and the jacketless and bootless refugee children walk through the doors of Bishop Maginn in T-shirts and sandals. I am saving up for it, Jon Katz, Shoes And Clothes, via Paypal, [email protected] or Jon Katz, Shoes and Clothes, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge,N.Y., 12816.)

I know soon after we launched the Army Of Good that goodness is indeed everywhere. Absolute love and infinite devotion. I love the way that sounds and feels.

I think in the beginning, the somewhat selfish pleasure of doing good is necessary.

Eventually, I think I will have to learn to make sure that I do the good things I want to do for more reasons that my own pleasure. That, I suppose, is the real spiritual challenge.

I’m not entirely certain yet what those reasons are, I suspect they have much to do with the feelings of deprivation and abandonment I so often felt when I was a child. I have not been through what they have been through, yet something in me knows what it feels like to go through what they have gone through.

For me this work was inspired by my grandmother Minnie, a refugee herself, who also suffered greatly, risked her life and surrendered much of it so that me and the other children in the family might live in a free country. I owe her my life.

This work honors her.

I’m sure a shrink would go right to all that. But in the meantime, I don’t want to ever be afraid again to seek the pleasure of doing good. It feels great.

1 Comments

Ardene says:

June 4, 2019 at 10:20 AM

I ran across a poem this weekend that reminded me of the Army of Good.

Choose

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

Carl Sandburg

It’s so much more fun to meet with open hands, and open hearts.