An Important Question

“Tell me something,” she asked on the phone, “what makes your heart happy?”

It gave me pause. It’s not a question that is easily answered. It is certainly not one that’s honestly answered. We cite clichés or lie to ourselves by saying the things that should make us happy but don’t really. So we say Jesus or our kids or spouses or friends or work or windsurfing or something exciting. Such things should make us happy but many times … in spite of them we’re not.

When Bill Berry (not the former drummer for R.E.M. but the other one that I went to Seminary with) and I were standing in the middle of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration in Poland, I kept asking questions of our guide, a Holocaust survivor. I would impatiently blurt out questions of things that I wanted to know.

“What became of the Kappos?”

“What happened to Rudolph Hoess’ lamps?”

His name was Martin and he was dignity personified. I stood there wearing a red and white University of Georgia coat with the matching hat, knowing that I already knew everything.

As I blurted out the questions he would pause and his eyes would lock mine. He had this way of letting the moment linger so that tension was created. Then he would clap his hands together in the cold February weather and smile.

“That is an important question,” he would say. “I will answer for everyone.”

I was put in my place.

Later that day Martin and I disappeared together. He left the British tour group he was leading that Bill and I hijacked. We stood in front of the gallows where Rudolph Hoess, the most infamous Commander of the Camp, was hung after the war.

“Why do you know these things?” he asked me standing there.

And I didn’t know how to answer. In a history class at Groves High School in Garden City, Georgia of all places, Wayne Seay showed a film of the liberation of the camp. My mind and my heart woke up that day.

And it led me to college, then to Seminary, then to the worlds of homelessness, AIDS, the uninsured, the worst of poverty … and then to Denominational Headquarters, City Halls, State Capitols, Governor’s offices and Congress.

I’ve been to some bad places.

“Ummm,” I finally answered her. “I got to think about that.” Then I quoted Martin, “It is too important a question.”

I sit here now pondering it. Balmy tropical weather makes my heart leap. Islands and oceans do too. Writing comes from somewhere deep in my heart and bursts out and always surprises me. The things that I’ve done and the places that I’ve been stagger me. The smell of the marsh in the heat (sex in the tropics is what it smells like).

Goddess.

The people I love.

More important recently are the people who love me and are not afraid to show it.

Special ones who have my heart in their back pockets.

When God touches me and I cry.

When I’ve helped justice roll from the mountain tops or watched something that I said birth hope in somebody’s eyes.

It’s an important question. It will take a long time to answer.