A Life Well Lived

[maxschnell]

Perhaps this doesn't belong in the clown bin but I still thought readers of
this forum would appreciate and cogitate on this essay. For those who
disagree, I beg your forbearance:


A Life Well Lived

Reading obituaries is a remarkably insightful pastime. Each of us does it more and more as we grow older. The obituary writer obviously cannot recall all the twists and turns of a single life. Indeed, for the world to take note of a particular death in the obituary pages of a major newspaper at all, there has to be something special, something significant that lifts that particular life into a dimension of human meaning. So one searches the obituaries to discover that source of his or her qualification. Longevity without meaning is not necessarily noteworthy.
I recall that story in the Book of Genesis about a man named Methuselah, who is said to be the oldest man described in the Bible. The biblical text says of him: "Methuselah lived 969 years and he died." I have always thought that was a remarkably negative commentary on his life. Even though Methuselah lived 969 years, all that anyone deemed noteworthy about him was that he died!

I thought about Methuselah a few weeks ago, while I was in Montreal, Canada doing a series of lectures. Each morning I read Montreal's English speaking daily known as "The Gazette." One day the obituary page featured five persons whose deaths were treated as being of national or international note. The one that intrigued me was the story of an 83-year-old Mississippi woman named Florence Mars. Her name called up no images from my memory bank and rang no bells of recognition. Why, I wondered, was the death of an 83-year-old Mississippi native receiving attention in the Montreal Gazette? Reading the story, I discovered much about what gives value to human life.

Florence Mars was born in 1923 and grew up in Philadelphia, not the well-known port in Pennsylvania, but a small Mississippi town by the same name, located in Neshoba County. This town was not unlike many towns in the rural south in those early years of the 20th century in that its citizens seemed to believe unquestionably in white supremacy and its corollary of segregation. Indeed this racist conviction was called "the invisible hand" that directed the public and private life of people in this region. The story of the South in the 20th century was the story of conflict that arose and intensified, as this prejudice was first challenged and then began to die. By the late fifties and middle sixties that conflict had actually begun to recede, yet in parts of the South it still fed deep emotions of hatred. In 1964, ten years after the Supreme Court ruling on desegregation but a year before Congress was to pass the National Voter Rights Act, three civil rights workers whose stated task was to register black voters came to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their names were Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20. That summer was destined to be a hot and unforgettable time. The idealism of these three young men, two of whom were white and one black, collided with that unrelenting racism that had long informed the South's way of life. After a short time these three civil rights workers disappeared. The official story passed around among local people was that their disappearance was part of a hoax invented by outside agitators to gain national attention. Some of Philadelphia's citizens even questioned whether the presence of these young men had actually been itself just a rumor to agitate the local people. If their presence was deemed to be nothing more than a rumor, then their disappearance was reduced to the status of sheer fantasy. In that same time frame a black church in Philadelphia had been burned. The Ku Klux Klan claimed credit for that but the local folks dismissed even that burning as one more publicity stunt orchestrated by outsiders, designed to split and embarrass the white community. This "common wisdom" was generally regarded as "the gospel truth" by the white community, with one solitary exception. A forty-one year old local businesswoman, a daughter of the town, named Florence Mars was publicly skeptical. She had actually seen these three young men in Philadelphia. She knew their presence was not fabricated. She also suspected that their disappearance was not just real but the result of foul play, so she began her own quiet investigation, listening, watching and questioning. On one occasion, she confronted the editor of the local paper about his prejudiced coverage of the racial violence that was gripping her town. She quickly emerged as the unwanted and disturbing "conscience" of Philadelphia, but her continued efforts kept the issue alive until searchers finally discovered a deserted place where the surface of the earth had been disturbed. Digging in this place, federal authorities uncovered the bullet-riddled bodies of the three victims. However, even after these murders were revealed, there was no prosecution and no arrests. This crime thus entered the records of Philadelphia's "unsolved" murders. Florence Mars, however, continued to speak out, making it impossible for this episode to fade into the forgotten past. It, therefore, became one of the wrenching and memorable incidents of the civil rights movement.

The white community, eager for this crime to be forgotten struck back with a vengeance at Florence Mars. She was vilified and harassed, as so often happens when guilt is not allowed to be eased. She was ostracized and threatened with death and violence. The KKK launched a successful boycott that ruined a cattle auction business she ran, forcing her to sell out at a depressed price. She was even arrested and jailed on a bogus charge of drunk driving as part of a planned campaign of public harassment. Pressure from members of her church forced her to resign from her position as a Sunday school teacher. Ten years later, she wrote a book entitled, "Witness in Philadelphia" that kept the pressure on even after charges for these murders against suspected Klan killers had been either dropped or dismissed by hung juries. Her work finally met with success in 2005, 41 years after these murders, when 86-year-old Ray Killen, a local preacher and Klan member, was convicted of these murders and sentenced to jail for the balance of his life. In a wheel chair, Florence Mars attended every minute of that trial, overjoyed that justice had finally come to her town.

At her recent death she was memorialized throughout the nation. Her role in this episode had made her life one of great significance. A local attorney, a member of an interracial organization known as the "Philadelphia Coalition," that had lobbied for the reopening of this case and the subsequent trial and conviction of Killen, said of her, "I shudder to think how little progress we would have made if not for Florence. She was our guide along the path to resolution and redemption for our community." Florence Mars' single gift was that she was not willing to be silenced or to be passive in the face of evil. She had little obvious power. No one thought of her as a community leader. Armed only with the conviction that if citizens can murder one another because they do not like their victim's opinions, then no life is finally safe. In obedience to that conviction Florence Mars found the courage that enabled her to absorb the slings and arrows of a dying racism. She lived to see her faith in that conviction vindicated and to gain the appreciation of her world. It is because of people like Florence Mars that a new consciousness about what it means to be human was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where this woman lived her entire life. Because she lived her life so well serving a universal human principle, her death was noticed around the world. The obituary in the Montreal Gazette was a signal tribute to the power of her life.

Heroic activity is not always reserved for heroes. In almost every sense of the world, Florence Mars was an ordinary person. She lived on a very small stage, in a place not likely to be noticed by the world's power brokers. Yet in the commonplace action of raising her voice against hatred and of lifting her conscience against intolerance, she changed her world. She left this earth a better place for having been in it.

Is that not the ultimate criterion on which all life must be assessed? Wealthy people who dominate great industries retire and die every day and are quickly forgotten. Political figures who achieve great power in one century are lost in the pages of history in another. How many Americans today can relate any fact about such persons as Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk or Millard Fillmore? Yet each was elected in the 19th century to the highest office of this land. Millions of best selling authors suffer the fate of being unknown twenty years after their deaths. Who in 2050 will know the name of Dan Brown? These things cause me to wonder about the value system under which we live. The discovery of meaning is something that touches the dimensions of timelessness and eternity and access to meaning is within every person's ability to achieve. It demands only that we escape our self-centered zone of comfort and place an ideal at the center of our lives from which we never waver. To enhance life is a virtue. To diminish life is a vice. To seek truth is a virtue. To kill truth in the service of prejudice is a vice. That is all it takes to enter into the realm of meaning. Florence Mars did just that. That was why she was remembered at the time of her death the world over. To serve truth without compromise, to be willing to pay the personal cost of abuse, harassment and rejection in the service of that truth is the pathway into meaning and thus I believe the pathway into God. Truth does not compromise to achieve a lesser goal like unity, popularity or personal well-being. Unity is never a substitute for truth or justice. That was the simple lesson that Florence Mars knew well. It is a pity that so many of our political and religious leaders have not yet embraced this elementary understanding of reality.

Florence Mars was not born to lead but lead she did and history will remember her. How many of us will it occur to the editors of the Montreal Gazette to memorialize when we come to the end of our days?

John Shelby Spong