So what do you believe and why?

So what do you believe and why?

This is an essential question in the religious quest, a question that the Transcendentalists would have taken very seriously. In this regard, I love these words by Charles Stephens, Jr. who wrote, “I wish for you the thrill of knowing who you are, where you stand, and why. Especially why.” In conversation, we may learn what each other believes, but we seldom learn why. And the why makes all the difference.

This dynamic was revealed to me recently in an unexpected way. I was talking to someone about the charter school that I helped to start. This K-8 school, Global Village Academy in Aurora, Colorado, offers an international curriculum and language immersion in Mandarin, Spanish, and French.

The person asked me why I was so passionate about it. I said it was because of my daughters, both adopted from China. I want them to continue to learn Mandarin so that they do not forget the country or the language of their birth. As adults, they may choose to never speak Mandarin again, but I want them to have that choice. I don’t want them to feel excluded when other Chinese-Americans are speaking Mandarin. I want them to have a deep and abiding sense of who they are as Chinese and as Americans, especially when they are discriminated against, as they surely will be. I did this because I wanted them to attend a school that reflected the ethnic and cultural diversity of the America that is being born before our eyes.

These answers were enough to explain my passion, but I then stumbled on something else that hadn’t been obvious to me. I was also doing if for the child that I had been. When my mother and father divorced when I was four, my mother tried to make it on her own, renting a small apartment above a cleaning store. We lived there for a few months, but, in the end, she couldn’t make it work financially. So we moved in with my grandmother and uncle in a tiny five room house.

I grew up in a working class family, held above abject poverty by the fact that all three adults in the family worked. The house was run down and much later it would be condemned and torn down. This was the context in which I attended Crescent Elementary School in Pittsburgh for five years, a school that was over 90% African American. We were all at-risk students. Some of my teachers taught my mother and uncle when they were young.

I don’t remember being a very good student, but each year I did better. Looking back, there is no question that education saved my life. Without the care of those teachers, my life today would have been very different. The same is true for at-risk children today. Without a good school, the challenges are often insurmountable. As radio commentator Paul Harvey was so fond of saying, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

Now you know the why of my passion. Without the why you can’t connect the dots. Without the why you can’t make sense of the what. Still, that doesn’t keep us from assuming that we understand another’s why. But that understanding is our own story, our own reason for why we would do it and not the other person’s reasons. May we have the wisdom to listen to both the what and the why of another person’s life.