What Do You Stand For?

Standing for something is often fighting against things pushing us down.  But some golden times, it is giving in to something lifting us up.  Moses is standing there, high up where he can see his armies, high there holding his arms up to his God.  As long as he can stand, holding high the staff, the rod that God had turned into a serpent, and then into a staff again, the armies advance.  When he tires and cannot stand like that as God has instructed him, the armies falter.  It is a battle not only against the Amalekites, but against his own exhaustion.  The armies, which had been advancing as Moses stood strong, were now struggling as Moses was weakening.  The day was saved by the support, literally, of his older brother

Aaron and a friend Hur.

I can identify with that battle against exhaustion, if I substitute a swimming pool deck and my 16 year old body with that hill and old Moses.  Brother Ron was a Holy Cross Brother, one of the worker bees in my High School in Chicago that was run by Priests who wore full length cassocks with wide sashes at the waist into which some of the portly among them would rest their hands, as we would do in our pockets.  But Brother Ron was not portly.  He was lithe and quick moving, with a kind of sly friendliness that observed you from the bookstore outside the cafeteria, where the Notre Dame High School letter jackets hung alluringly, the ones that the athletes could buy for the big ND Letter that they’d earn for serving a year on one of the school’s vaunted teams.   The jacket most prominently displayed had the symbol of a swimmer on the back; Brother Ron was the Coach of the swim team, and that’s why I decided to try to get to explore the source of his sly smile, and to try to earn that jacket, by trying out for the swim team.

I made it through one practice.  That’s all.  In a school full of athletes, the tryout was crowded, and his first task was to select the stronger candidates.  He did it by simply putting all of us through a normal training practice on the shiny tile deck of the pool.  “Callies” they called calisthenics, the exercises in which we were drilled on alternating days in the school gym.  Grinning, eagle-eyed Phys Ed teachers watched us menacingly as we were drilled through jumping jacks, knee bends, pushups, and back bridges.   I was pretty fit, proud of my wiry physique from lifting weights in the garage with my older brother Dan.  Like Aaron, he’d “spot” me on the last couple of “reps” of the arm presses, lifting the barbell over my head until my arms were straight.  So I thought I’d get through the tryout fine.  But the exercise that I remember most, the one that knocked me out of consideration, was standing with knees slightly bent holding my arms up level with my shoulders, locked at the elbows, palms flat, hands making little circles in the air.  It’s easier to imagine if I tell you the name: flies.  He simply had us all do them until we became exhausted.  Once a boy gave in to exhaustion and let his arms down, Brother Ron put a check next to our name, and we suspected the truth, that we were out.  After mine had dropped and I saw him look at me blankly and make a mark on his clipboard, I let the burning in my shoulders stop and raised my arms again, resuming the flies and hoping to redeem myself.  I did this four or five times before he finally ended the exercise with half of the boys still going strong – the returning swim team and just a handful of others.  My shoulder muscles ached for days, but I liked to imagine the Brother Ron looked at me with a touch of recognition from his bookstore as I walked to and from the cafeteria.  I could feel the burning in my shoulders every time I saw him.

But “standing for something” strikes me as something quite different than fighting exhaustion to hold off armies or make the swim team: the”Standing O” – the ovation that gets us off out of our chairs.  While the plight of Mighty Moses or my skinny self at sixteen is a struggle against dissipating energy, the standing ovation is the busting of energy from within us.  You know what it is like when a room erupts after a stirring speech or a hall bounds up immediately upon the sounding of the last note of a performance.  How can one not stand?  Our feet seem to spring us up despite their distance from our brains; they have mind enough to know when it is time to stand up for something great.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote in Inpetration, Incarnation a few weeks ago http://freelemonadestand.blogspot.com/2010/09/inpetration-incarnation.html about one such occasion, Bruno Leon’s return to the School of Architecture that he had founded fifty years ago and led with such wisdom, courage, passion, and inspiration.  I had ached for the distance that Bruno had felt since leaving his school ten years ago, a distance that he had allowed to develop, a distance which was like an unhealing wound.  The school was not the same.  It could not be, of course.  Vince Lombardi’s football teams, Igor Stravinski’s orchestras, and Martha Graham’s Dance companies were not the same after their departures either.  But the pain in my heart every time I saw Bruno was like the burning in my shoulders every time I saw Brother Ron.  No, it was much worse.  I’d wanted to be accepted by Brother Ron; I was accepted, respected, and loved by Bruno.

So as Bruno finished his remarks to his former students in that grand room on Belle Isle, tears cooled my warm face as I joined the hundred or so people standing to applaud him, standing because the energy to stand could not be held back.  The wisdom and courage and passion and inspiration that Bruno had planted in us as seeds a decade or more ago had gone viral in the room, like in Lombardi’s locker room or Stravinski’s Orchestra Pit, or Martha Graham’s stage. 

Standing for something is, indeed, often fighting against things pushing us down.  But some golden times, it is giving in to something lifting us up.