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  To my families—the one my parents gave me, the one Linda and I created, and the thousands from New Haven to New Delhi who have welcomed me as one of their own. Family is a blessing anyone can give, and family is a gift that matters most.

  The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

  —Irenaeus

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: A School of the Heart

  1. Boat Races

  2. Much Is Expected

  3. Pity or Purge

  4. Rosemary

  5. The Greatest Effort

  6. Daybreak

  7. As Simple as Possible

  8. Being in Love

  9. Social and Emotional Learning

  10. Loretta

  11. Tough World

  12. The Fun That Lasts

  13. I Am So Proud

  14. The Heart off Guard

  15. Humility and Simplicity

  16. Fully Alive

  17. Storm the Castle

  A Note on Language: Label Me Able

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction: A School of the Heart

  The Yale Bowl was already eighty-one years old in 1995, but it looked one hundred seventy-five. Its crumbling concrete walls were overgrown with trees, its warped bench seats painted over dozens of times to withstand the cracking. It wasn’t ready to handle seventy-five thousand cheering fans. It wasn’t designed for a presidential visit, either, with the massive security requirements, extensive evacuation routes, and shielded spaces a president requires. Nor was the field big enough to hold seven thousand athletes with special needs, along with coaches and volunteers, or to accommodate a stage fit for a stadium show. Parking wasn’t adequate, because entire lots had been taken over for other purposes—one for a helicopter landing pad for the president, others for makeshift soccer fields, and still others for bus staging.

  But we chose the Yale Bowl for the Special Olympics World Games Opening Ceremony anyway. So on the evening of July 1, 1995, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton landed in an adjacent field on Marine 1 while athletes from one hundred fifty countries arrived by bus and paraded through the single entrance tunnel and seventy-five thousand spectators fought their way through neighborhood streets to sit on wooden bleachers and cheer the arrival of the biggest sporting event in the world. It was chaos.

  As the athletes arrived at the Yale Bowl that night, each participant was given a disposable camera to record images of his or her triumphant moments. For most of them, the experience of parading into that stadium must have seemed surreal. Coming as they did from institutions and isolated classrooms and lonely corners of despair in villages and towns around the world, most of them would never have been applauded for anything before. They were society’s outcasts, lost in the circle of life and rarely found. Over and over, in the countless languages they spoke, they each would have heard “retard,” “defective,” “sick,” “delayed,” and, maybe worst of all, “in-valid.” Success experiences were nonexistent. Gentleness in the company of strangers was rare. Acceptance among peers was a distant dream. “I am never,” one parent of a child with special needs wept, “able to be proud of my child.”

  But this was their night, a star-studded evening just for them. Sandra Bullock was part of the show. So were Bill Cosby, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Louis Gossett, Jr. A thousand-voice choir assembled below almost two hundred international flags and welcomed the athletes as they paraded into the stadium. Native Americans on horseback charged around the perimeter in a ceremonial pageant of celebration. Aerial flybys of fighter jets boomed overhead in their honor. The greatest soccer player in the world, Pelé, walked with them and stood for a thousand pictures. Hootie & the Blowfish sang their number one hit “Only Wanna Be with You.” The supermodel Kathy Ireland cheered. The hip-hop stars Naughty by Nature and Run-DMC made the stadium explode with energy.

  One heroic Special Olympics athlete, Loretta Claiborne, was selected for a major role: to introduce the president to the massive crowd in the stadium and to the national television audience. The Secret Service had insisted the president address the crowd from the top of the stadium. Perimeter security at the Yale Bowl was porous, and the athletes had not been screened through metal detectors—there was no way the president was going to be allowed to walk down onto that field to mingle; no way he was going to stand onstage in the middle of that stadium, given the security unknowns. Instead, he was going to have to speak from one of the highest vantage points above the athletes and trust the television monitors to project his image on the jumbotron.

  Midway through the opening ceremony, Loretta rose from her perch atop the Yale Bowl. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she bellowed, her voice rising with an excitement bordering on glee, “the president of the United States, Bill Clintonnnnnn!” The crowd roared. For the first time in its thirty-year history, a president was in attendance at Special Olympics—smiling, waving, and applauding the athletes. The stadium may have been old, but in that moment, it was electric.

  Down on the field, a professional photographer watched as a group of athletes clad in African dress raised their disposable cameras to take pictures of the president. But there was something peculiar about it. All of them, he realized—and there must’ve been a dozen—held their cameras backward, the lenses flush against their noses as they peered through the viewfinders. Clearly, he thought, they had never used cameras before. As Clinton’s voice boomed across the stadium, the photographer burrowed through the crowd to get closer to the athletes, to help them avoid wasting all their film on blurry images of their own faces.

  Not knowing whether they spoke English, he gestured to one of the athletes to lower his camera. “You’re trying to get a picture of the president?” he asked. The athlete didn’t reply—just looked at him, apparently unable to speak or to understand. “Yes, you’re trying to get a picture of Clinton and he’s way up there, but you have to turn the camera around. Let me show you.” The photographer flipped the direction of the camera. “You see, you have to point the lens toward the president and then look through the viewfinder, and then you can get a good picture of him.”

  “Oh,” said the athlete, in clear and conversational English. “Thank you, sir. But may I show you something? If you turn the camera around and hold your eye up to the viewfinder and look backward, it still works. It works like a telescope and you can see the president very clearly. So we’re using these little cameras so we can get a good view of the president. But thank you for helping us.”

  The photographer was speechless. His mouth must have hung open as he looked into the eyes of that unnamed athlete. The athlete simply said that the camera works in reverse, that was all—“backward, it still works.” But the photographer couldn’t help feeling surprise and embarrassment: he’d had it all wrong. He’d assumed his own knowledge as a professional was superior, that a “disabled” man needed his help. But this man standing in front of him wasn’t incompetent or stupid at all.

  In that small moment amid the chaos of noise and humanity, it was as though the athlete changed before the photographer’s eyes—or rather, as though the photographer’s eyes changed as he looked at the athlete. It wasn’t the athl
ete who was reframed; it was the photographer who donned a new lens. In a flash, he saw a different person—no longer “retarded” or hopeless. He saw someone else: a clever young man, a resourceful athlete, a kind person. The label disappeared, as did the traumatic if unconscious history of low expectations. He saw without assuming. Simply put, he saw from within.

  There is a tension in this story that fascinates me and always will. Who was changed in this moment? Who was “disabled” and who was “gifted”? Who was treated to the experience of a lifetime and who did the treating? Who gave and who received?

  In retrospect, the answer is as obvious as it is difficult to learn. Both the athlete and the photographer received, and both gave. Both had “disabilities,” one from biology and the other from attitude. Both were gifted, one in cleverness and the other in kindness. Both were wounded by the assumptions of their pasts, and both were healed by a simple transforming revelation: you can see another view of the world if you turn your lens around. Keep your eyes open, and you will see both what is close and what may seem far away.

  * * *

  In the year 1112, Bernard of Clairvaux opened a new monastery in the French village of Claire Vallée. A reformer and a preacher, he was determined to inspire a new generation of men and women to see and act differently. He termed his monasteries “schools of the heart” and urged his followers to discover the presence of God in the here and now, where they could encounter it as “a love so great and so free.” He became known as the “honey sweet teacher.”

  Although he lived almost a thousand years ago, Bernard confronted challenges that are not so different from our own. We live in a time when many have lost faith in God and, along with it, faith that anything is sacred or enduring. We live in a world that is changing faster than ever but at the same time is more rudderless than ever, too. We hunger for stability and safety, but we’re surrounded by uncertainty. We place enormous value on lasting friendships and authenticity, in part because they’re so hard to find. We wonder about ultimate things without knowing if our wondering is even worthwhile. “Consider your ways,” the Jewish prophet Haggai wrote 2,500 years ago. “What do you really want? You sow much but bring in little; you eat but still hunger; you drink but still thirst; you clothe yourselves but can’t get warm, and your wages run out through the holes in your pockets” (Haggai 1:5–7). Some elements of the human condition defy the particularities of a given period. Just as others did millennia before us, we live in a time of restlessness.

  But like mystics in other religions, Bernard had a hopeful view of our searching. The search can be successful, he taught, but we’ll be frustrated unless we focus on the right destination. Bernard called that destination a “love that is both great and free,” and he tried his best to interest others in living for it. Some people—me included—use the common nickname for that love: “God.” Others call it “peace” or “nirvana” or “unity” or “enlightenment.” But whatever we call it, we know we want it. And if we want the kind of love that makes us want to get up in the morning and live; the kind that makes us feel held and cared for; the kind that leads us to believe in the exquisite beauty of one another and the goodness of life; the kind of love that has no conditions—then we have to direct our attention to it and not to the alternatives. That kind of love is what matters most, but how to find it isn’t obvious.

  Or is it? When teaching us how to search, almost all of the mystics agree on the path: we shouldn’t waste our time trying to change ourselves or to meet the perfect mate or wander the world or learn some fancy skill. Just slow down and be awake to the present. “What you are looking for,” Francis of Assisi said, “is what is looking.” If we want to find that “something bigger,” we don’t have to go anywhere. To each of us, the poet Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi writes, the goal is “nearer to you than yourself.”

  Although it may seem counterintuitive, I believe that people with intellectual disabilities are brilliant teachers of that something bigger we’re all looking for. They led me to the Special Olympics classroom of self-discovery, where my heart was caught off guard and blown open. It turned out to be a complete education with painful injustices, raucous field experiences, unexpected tenderness, and the breakthrough lesson that all life is beautiful. It was led by the most marginalized people in the world, who were well acquainted with suffering but also masters of healing. I met them in my backyard playing games, in institutions drenched in despair and injustice, in the eyes of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters hungering for welcome, and in my own family. They taught me that we are all totally vulnerable and totally valuable at the same time. They modeled lessons in love and fulfillment that I didn’t even know were possible. They changed everything.

  Like all great educators, the athletes of Special Olympics taught me more about how to see than what to see. But isn’t there just one way of seeing?

  Not exactly. Over the years, I started to learn that there’s another way of seeing: from the inside out. I couldn’t learn the lessons the athletes of Special Olympics were trying to teach me until I learned to see the inside of things. Like most people, I tended to think that seeing required only a simple glance, but I was wrong. I needed to learn to see not just what was in front of my eyes but what was lurking silently beneath the surface of things, too. I needed to be able to use my mind to see the real stuff in the physical world but also to quiet all the distractions of my mind to see the equally real stuff of the heart that lay beneath them. I needed to practice seeing each and every little thing but also practice being open to the whole of the big things. I needed to understand how to see from within if I was going to learn anything worthwhile about finding the something bigger I was so eager to find.

  The great Sufi mystic Rumi suggests that such a way of seeing creates a consciousness that enables us to see possibilities and realities that might otherwise be hidden:

  The intellect says: “The six directions are limits: there is no way out.”

  Love says: “There is a way. I have traveled it thousands of times.”

  The athletes of Special Olympics taught me to trust Rumi’s belief that there is a way of seeing the world given by love. I started out in a very different place, in encounters like the one between the photographer and the athlete on the field at the Yale Bowl. I arrived at those encounters with a misguided expectation that I would serve “them,” but my expectations were turned inside out—and I began to see that the whole ethic of “serving the needy” could itself be an obstacle to opening my eyes. I discovered a new way of seeing individuals whom I thought of as “powerless” but who turned out to have a power I didn’t even know existed. I found myself over and over again confused by the strength of people who seemed to be experiencing both pain and triumph at the same time. And, in my confusion, I felt yanked out of my narrow way of seeing and awakened to seeing from a space of soul and silence. Often just hanging out with the athletes was enough to crack me open to a power within them and within myself that I didn’t know I was looking for. In short, I found my encounters with many of the people in this book to be windows into the eye of love, the “organ of perception” that Bernard wanted to cultivate in a school of the heart so that he could come close to the “love so great and so free” that he framed as the mind of God.

  I found my way to the athletes of Special Olympics because the family I grew up in and the family that I made with my wife, Linda, and the God to whom I prayed all pointed me to them. I was restlessly looking for something that mattered. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I was looking and looking and looking and found myself staring right into the eyes of the most vulnerable and broken and powerless people on earth. I thought I had arrived at them in order to tell them what mattered, but of course, I had no idea what to say. Instead, they were patient enough to wait for me to listen. And when I finally listened, they told me what to do with my “one wild and precious life”: charge into the world with fearless enthusiasm, bearing the simple gift of myself and shar
ing it recklessly and gratefully and peacefully wherever and whenever I can.

  ONE

  Boat Races

  When I was about five years old, I fell in love with my first game: “boat races.” My mother and I played it on the little streams that ran through the woods at the edge of the vast field that stretched out behind our house. Those woods were a whole world to me. Looking out from my back door, all I could see was the field, and then the magical woods. On dark nights, beyond the vast expanse of the empty black field and the uneven, inky line of the woods rising above it, I could also see a row of four radio towers blinking red and white like silent sirens.

  As a little boy, many nights I’d lie in bed and look out the window and watch those radio towers blinking their secret signals of warning. I knew they were located in the faraway city, but all I knew of the city was that my mother and father went to work there. Sometimes they came home with lots of friends, and sometimes they came home with beaten looks on their faces. Little children remember only moments of heaven or hell. One time when I was four, my mother came home to tell me my uncle had been murdered and I should run along and find something to do. But on other days, she would take me off alone, just the two of us, down through the field and into the woods to play our special game of boat races.

  It was not an easy game. The “boats” were actually small sticks, and the race was actually a competition between my stick and my mother’s to see which could go down the stream fastest. So the first challenge was to find a good stick—one that floated well and didn’t have any protrusions that would get stuck on a leaf or a rock. A good boat was small enough to be quick but hefty enough to catch the current.

  Once we’d picked our boats, the second challenge was to throw them into the stream at the count of three, hitting the water in just the right place so they would catch the current and go. Then came the breathless part: watching my boat wiggle and wash its way down the stream toward an imaginary finish line, cheering like crazy, encouraging it on its journey toward (I hoped) victory. And then heaven’s most often repeated exclamation: “Let’s play again!”