Hot Dogs and Heroes

I find myself struggling to write.  I'm leaving my comfort zone.  For the past few weeks I have been working/walking through the Fr. Howard Gray’s little but profound reading of the story of the Good Samaritan as a lesson in becoming human, of making real what is hidden inside us, of putting on the garment we are given at birth, of taking that car for a spin that sits in our fleshly garage.  It calls us beyond ourselves by responding to senses and feelings and moving to action.  He says that if we see (a person in need of help) we will feel.  Contemporary neuropsychology finds evidence that this occurs in the brain – that “mirror neurons” fire off in my brain in the same way that they do in the brain of the person I see in need of help.  I am feeling the same pain that the person is feeling, and I will want to relieve that pain.  It will move me to help.

These first three steps of his model were encouraging to me.  See-feel-help.  Great!  I can see that.  Just open my eyes and follow my heart, or my motor neurons, or whatever.  Do what I can.  This model fit nicely in the work I was doing at my university, arranging community service opportunities for students.  It guided me to help them to understand the importance of seeing, of opening their eyes and ears, of being aware.  It gave me reason to challenge them to notice what was happening inside themselves when they were noticing what was happening all around them.  And it was guiding me to encourage them to follow that feeling, to reach out and do what they can.

I loved this.  It made sense.  One day we hosted a few busloads of middle school kids on campus, providing the campus for use by City Year Detroit volunteers and staff, as they sponsored a week-long camp for the kids.  I told the City Year people I wanted to personally welcome the kids to our university.  The night before the camp, I lay in bed considering what I would say to them, how I would describe to 4^th and 5^th graders what a university was.  The key came in the culture of City Year.  They are big on the use of the word hero.  They have a program for these kids called “Young Heroes” and another for high schoolers called “City Heroes.”  So I thought of what I was doing with my own college students, and how it related to the work of their City Year hosts, and crafted my message around “Hero School”.

I told them that our university was a place where people learned that there were three kinds of people, victims, observers, and heroes.  I used the Good Samaritan story and invited them to act it out.  They were great.  And in the learning of the story and the doing of the story, they learned a simple response to the question of what people learn in college, in “hero school”.  While I was grilling hotdogs for them later in the day, I noticed that the line was getting long, and they were getting fidgety.  So I asked them, “OK, Kids, in order to get your hot dog, you gotta shout out the three things a hero does!”  I smiled with tears in my eyes as they found a cadence and hollered together, “SEE!  FEEL!  HELP!”

But today I feel the weight of the word I’d not heard the first time I listened to Fr. Gray’s lecture: CHANGE.  It's out of my comfort zone.

Tomorrow, hearing the fourth word.  Tuesday, Joe Barrett’s warning about contentment.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.