A banquet of consequences

"Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences." Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson, confined to his bed and recovering as a young child from his first brush with tuberculosis, watches as the lamplighter lights the street lights as night descends. Stevenson turns to his nurse and says, "Look, he's punching holes in the darkness."

Following President Obama's inaugural address in 2008, one of the many inaugural day commentators made the connection between what Stevenson said as a young child from his sick bed and the job that lay ahead for the first African-American president of the United States. The anecdote and its underlying metaphor have stayed with me in the same way that Bob Dylan's song Blowin in the Wind has stayed with me. Their messages are haunting and persistent because they feel eternally true. In our lifetimes, we will inherit many consequences--we will be blown by many a wind--and if we're lucky and even a little bit brave, we might invent for ourselves, and consequently, others, a better shot at making the darkness that much lighter.

This morning, I listened to an interview with Peggy Wallace Kennedy, daughter of the former governor of Alabama George Wallace. Today marks the 50th anniversary of Governor Wallace's attempt to block two African-American students from registering for classes at the University of Alabama, thwarting efforts by the federal government to integrate schools in the South. In 1963, Ms. Wallace Kennedy was 13, and while she did not share her father's views on segregation, she found herself living in the shadow her father created when he stood in the doorway of the University auditorium 50 years ago. Like Stevenson's lamplighter, Wallace Kennedy now sees that she has a chance to recast that long-reaching shadow by shining a light on what happened then as a catalyst for changing attitudes today. Wallace Kennedy said that it has taken her a lifetime to find her voice on this issue. But as I have investigated this story further today, I think she began to find her voice years ago when she first attempted to respond to a question posed by one of her children as they looked together at a picture of the governor infamously blocking that schoolhouse  door: "Why did Paw Paw do that?" one of her son's asked. Wallace Kennedy remembers answering "I have no idea." And for her that was the way in. She figured if she could continue the dialog, beginning as it had with her uncertainty, that eventually it might lead to some understanding.

In the movie The Philadelphia Story, socialite Tracy Lord, played onscreen by Katherine Hepburn, delivers the following axiom about people and judgment to co-star Jimmy Stewart who plays the newspaper reporter Mike Connor sent to cover Lord's second marriage: "The time to make up your mind about people--is never." It took Wallace Kennedy a lifetime to discover the light in that long shadow that her father left behind. Now she wants the world to know that the man who once stood stalwart and stern in the schoolhouse doorway also, once, many years later, asked those same two African-American students, as adults, to forgive him. George Wallace grew beyond that angry man in the doorway caught in a photograph taken 50 years ago. Wallace Kennedy believes in her father's story of redemption because it is a very human story. It is everyone's story.

It is no small thing to change. George Wallace suffered greatly in the years following his segregation showdown. But listening today to his daughter, I believe the bigger legacy is that Wallace ultimately decided not to die a bitter man. When Wallace sat down at the banquet that Stevenson says we all will face, he decided against a procession of poisoned meals. Instead, he chose to learn all over again how to feed himself, and consequently others have learned by his example what it is that nurtures the body and soul.

On one hand, Stevenson's banquet of consequences has a direness about it. But it also contains its opposite. Considered from, let's say, the other end of the table, Stevenson's banquet is all levity. When one of my fellow ashtangis and fledgling teacher offered to teach a free community class at our Shala, she was treated to a trade in services by one of her very grateful practitioners. A free facial for the free yoga. The consequence: Each one is helping the other to be more beautiful. During our daily practice, we show up for ourselves, sure, but we also show up for one another. I'm learning that the consequences of our practice together are bountiful: We remember how to breathe; we are reminded how to honor our bodies; we learn that we are guardians of tremendous spirits; we begin to understand that we all sit down at the very same table.


I understand now why the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh makes the distinction between the Western notion of ringing or striking a bell and the Eastern notion of sounding a bell. The bell's sound is inherently true like the messages in Dylan's song and Stevenson's metaphor. It is the bell's nature to be sounded, and, thus, heard. What is heard, then, can persist, and, therefore, endure.