When Life Codes Disappear

The images on the television are haunting. And they are relentless. They pile on me until I can somehow feel rather than simply hear the dying black man cry “I can’t breathe”.

I see the stone face of a white policeman with his knee on the neck of a black man who cries for his dead mother, while over a slow, agonizing eight and a half minutes his own life silently slips away. I see two white men chase down a black man on an evening jog, threaten his life with a gun, and in the struggle the black man is shot dead.

I see a young gentle soul weighing a slight one-hundred and forty pounds tackled by three white policemen because he was wearing a face cover during a pandemic. He suffered an anxiety attack, was tranquilized, and as a result died shortly after.

The list goes on and on as I trace our history over the years. To be sure, the trail of violence and evil we are doing to each other goes back to the dawn of man. Evil has always been around since Cain murdered Abel, but why does it feel so close to me today? This is not the evil of war and genocide. This is the constant dripping in our society and world of one neighbor’s violence towards another.

It feels as if it has landed at my doorstep, demanding a personal response.

While all this is going on, my children posed a question to me. They asked me to begin recording some thoughts about my life experience to put into a sort of memoir for the grandchildren. Their first question they put to me was “Do I have a motto I live by?”

A motto to live by? What a concept.

I thought of some common “Motto’s” or “Codes”, such as The Ten commandments and Hammurabi’s code.

These were codes focused on community justice, with hundreds of corollaries describing  specific ways to fairly and justly interact with others, and outlining punishments for failure to do so.

However, my experience is that a life code gets simpler as one grows older. As Jesus once said, “there are only a few things necessary—really only one”.

Some moral codes come from various sources but say basically the same thing. To me, that is a strong clue that I should pay attention to this one—it contains a truth that transcends cultures and time.

For example, both the Dali Lama and Jesus have laid out basically the same code of living: Dali Lama says the secret to a happy and meaningful life is to “Harm no one and help when you can” while Jesus says the same thing when he told an expert in Jewish law “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The next question was a game-changer; “Who then is my neighbor”. Jesus follows this with the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. The message— is everyone is my neighbor, especially those who do not look or believe like me.

The fundamental moral codes of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam—representing the religious codes of 90 % of the world’s population, is do only good to others whenever and as often as we can.

Motto’s are not life codes. They may sound nice, make great bumper stickers, or screen savers—you can post them on your desk or refrigerator. But they are not especially useful in directing my actions as I get up in the morning and go out to interact with this world.

In 1965, in the midst of the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, my 7^th grade class was assigned to design and make a banner for a school festival. The banner was to express an idea or thought important us.

My banner depicted the earth with generic figures of humans holding hands around the globe. The figures were alternating colors of white, brown, & black. Above the banner in quotes was the phrase “What the World Needs Now IS Love, Sweet Love”, the title of a 1965 Burt Bacharach hit sung by Jackie De Shannon. I remember feeling distinctly proud and self-satisfied with myself, even though I did not have one non-white friend. Nice motto, but it lacked a lived experience.

Codes are more than motto’s. They are behavior- based, driving concrete actions. They should point to our interactions with others.

On March 18, 1958, Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk, and writer, was in downtown Louisville when he had an experience that would change his life. It has had such a world-wide influence on modern spirituality that the spot is marked with a historical marker.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

So, what is your code of life? When faced with “grey” areas, with challenging situations, with people you disagree with, with injustice, what drives your response? Do you have a code that guides you to right actions in trying situations?

This makes we wonder— what was the code of these white men who ended the lives of these black-men? How did it become OK to inflict suffering and death with such apparent discrimination?

Maybe what we are seeing today is an opportunity for all of us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves just as important a question–What is My code of life, and how am I living my code each day?  Is it more than a sticky note on my desk? Without a conscious intentionality, I might as well not really have one. I am sure that at some point these men who committed these acts were taught some sort of code of love. What happened to it?

Can I lose mine? Yes, I believe I can. I can let fear and anger push to the side the courage it takes to act faithfully under my code of life to love my neighbor, who may in the moment be in opposition to me. It demands courage to live within a code of justice—justice being nothing more nor less than seeking to give what is due others; Kindness, understanding, respect, dignity, compassion, forgiveness. In a word, love.

As mentioned above in the Ten commandments and Code of Hammurabi and other religions, life codes are often broken down into corollaries that help to describe what living under a particular code of morality and ethics would look like.  Here are a few corollaries that fall under the code of “Love Your Neighbor”:

1. Don’t be a busy body. Mind my own business.
2. Live and Let Live
3. Don’t offer advice I am not asked for.
4. Don’t Judge others, for I am in need of Gods help and mercy daily.
5. Don’t envy others
6. Do not withhold from others what is in my power to give (respect, dignity, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, help)
7. Make it my daily mission to find someone who needs help and give it.

It is too easy to fool myself into believing that I am the sort of person I would like to think I am without the courage to look for this concrete evidence.

I know this is a stretch, but what if I go back to my 7^th grade banner and ask “What if we all loved our neighbor as our self? What if we were committed to harm no one, and help when we can?  What if it is true—that “What the World Needs now, is Love, Sweet Love”.

What if it became more than a banner, a slogan, a bumper sticker, a motto? What if it became a code that we lived under, regardless of the personal cost? What if we could recognize each other as our neighbor, walking around, “shining like the sun”?

Yes, it’s a stretch. It may be just a silly 7^th grade banner—a pop song title.

All I know is that it still rings true to me today.

Kind Regards,

Bob