South Carolina doesn’t know what to do with its governor.  Gov. Mark Sanford disappeared into the ether for several days, and apparently no one–not his staff and not his family–knew where he was.  When queried, his staff said that he “was hiking the Appalachian Trail.”  When he finally appeared, he admitted that he had been in Argentina visiting his mistress, Maria Belen Capur. 

Since then he has made a number of puzzling statements.  He has said, variously, that

–his Argentine mistress is his “soul mate.”

–he wants to patch up his marriage.

–Christian friends have advised him, concerning Capur, “the first step is, you shoot her.  You put a bullet through her head.”  (Apparently he didn’t quote them literally.)

–he has in the past asked permission from his wife, Jenny, to visit Chapur.

–he has had dalliances with other women, but never had sex with them.

–he wants to continue to be governor.

Many of the leading S.C. Republicans and at least 6 newspapers are calling for his resignation.  But there is no law in the state that would require a governor to stand down unless the governor is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”  The state constitution says nothing about resigning if you find your “soul mate” and fall off the deep end. 

So what happened to Sanford, and what should he do?  Let me take a crack at it.

Gov. Sanford was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, who called him “the most boring man I’ve ever met.”  Now Stephen must have met lots of really boring people, so this statement is interesting.  What makes people boring?  (Because no person who is genuinely alive to the world is boring.)  Well, as my gestalt therapist/trainer used to say, “Boredom is keeping the lid on.”  I think Sanford his been doing just that.

So I want to suggest that perhaps the scenario went something like this.  Sanford has for years been going to meetings where people pose and posture.  He withdraws from this.  He has seen lobbyists wheel and deal, and big money win the day most of the time.  He grows cynical.  He and his wife–well, she has been involved with the children.  Perhaps she and Mark have grown apart during the years he has been in public office.  Maybe they no longer make love, or have any erotic connection.  Maybe what they have is an arrangement, a practical arrangement, but not a speck of passion.  So he withdraws from her, as well.  He has four sons–they don’t know him well, for he isn’t home much.  He begins to feel that his life has no integrity, no meaning.  Everything seems flat and tasteless.  He endures this condition for months, then years.  He thinks he will never be vital and alive again, as he once was. There was a time when he had dreams, when life seemed full of possibility, but now he plods ahead, one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, day after day.

Then Mark Sanford meets Chapur.  They have a few drinks.  She smiles.  She listens.  She touches his hand.  Both his body and his emotions respond, and he is swept into a new world, a world where the flesh is tied to spirit, and he feels regenerated.  The life force that he thought was gone forever has returned, in spades.  He knows only that he has to be with Chapur.  Nothing else matters. 

He is married, he has children.  So he knows he shouldn’t have sex with Chapur.  And at first he doesn’t.  And then he does.  The strange thing is, it’s not the sex so much that matters.  It’s the woman.  She is his life now.  He continues to see her, because he must. 

But wait a minute!  Each time he leaves Chapur in Argentina or in New York, where she flies to be with him, and returns to South Carolina, he enters the Old World again, the world of the Dead.  He knows what is required.  He goes through the motions.  But his colleagues find him distracted, unfocused.  His aides shepherd him through, but he is increasingly ineffective as a leader.  Colbert finds him truly boring.  He is actually not there at all during the interview.  He is in Argentina. 

So what is he to do? I think he should choose life.  I’m not sure if Chapur is that new life, or just represents it, but he has been dead, and he has a taste of what it means to be alive, and he should follow that leading.  Relationships cannot stay the same when any one of the couple changes–so his wife may change, or they may decide to part.  If they part, it is important that the four sons have both a mother and a father in their lives.  But giving them a father who is dead to the world is not giving them a father at all.  If he does not love their mother, the children will know it even before the parents themselves know it, so exquisitely tuned are they to the emotional life of the household. 

Right now Sanford is torn and confused.  He has to choose.  He may think that his choice is between two women, but this is not the case.  His choice is life, or not-life.  He can be governor–that is, he is able to govern, however poorly.  The question is whether or not he really wants to be governor.  Does this job lead to more life, and that more abundant, as the scripture says?  Or is it cutting off his life and killing his spirit? 

So the choice is not between women, or countries, or jobs, really.  The choice is what gives life and what diminishes it.  Only Mark Sanford knows.  I hope he chooses well.   

Everybody’s hurting–economically, I mean.  Or at least, they think they are.  Rich people, poor people, and all the people in between.  And cities and states are slashing their budgets drastically, as well.  But let’s stop kidding ourselves: who is really taking the hit?  It’s, as per usual, the most vulnerable in our society.  The cuts come in education and in services to poor people.  Health care for indigent families gets sliced, and college loans for young people who want to better themselves.

I read in the newspaper that in tight times, the call for cosmetic surgery is down.  It appears that 25 percent fewer people since 2007 want to have their fat siphoned off with liposuction.  Twenty-one percent fewer want their stomachs “tucked.”  Breast augmentation is still, well, relatively big, with a loss of only 11 percent. 

So one woman is complaining because she can’t really afford that blepharoplasty (that would be “eyelid surgery”) this year, while another woman is wondering how she’s going to feed her children that evening, if she pays the electric bill. 

Imagine this: a group of people are on a luxury liner cruising the ocean, and they suddenly see a small craft, sinking in rough water, the family on board calling for help.  Would the liner just cruise past, with the passengers complaining about the minor jostling of the rough sea–or would they do everything possible to save the family?

Or suppose a well-to-do family went on a picnic, and on their grassy path, they came upon children who had not eaten all that day and who were asking for food.  Would not they open their bulging picnic basket and share their food with these children?

Sometimes I think those of us who have plenty simply suffer from lack of imagination.  We somehow have the idea that we deserve what we have.  Who deserves anything at all?  We live through grace and the work of many others.  Or another way of looking at it–who does not deserve?  Who does not deserve food and shelter?  Which human beings do not deserve this?

People say, “I work hard!”  I say I know people who work twice as hard and don’t make enough to live on.  People say, “Poor people are just lazy,” and I think of the young Hispanic man who is busing their table at the restaurant, or the maid from Puerto Rico who is cleaning their toilet in the hotel, and who will take the bus home late at night to a small rented house where eight others live. 

Perhaps compassion comes down to nothing more than specifics.  Numbers, statistics–how boring!  So let us leave the abstract and be present with the real.  Let us notice the hole in the shoe, the fly on the wound, the limp in the walk, the shout in the night.  Let us notice, and care.

This past week I spent several days in Homer, the little N. Louisiana town where I grew up.  I went there to attend my 50th high school reunion, and once I got used to the idea that I actually graduated that long ago, I began looking forward to the event.

Almost as soon as I arrived at the afternoon gathering which opened the festivities, I learned that 11 of my 48 classmates were dead, 2 from suicide.  Then I talked with another classmate to whom I was particularly close, and I asked about his older brother.  He spoke in hushed tones: “Oh, he’s been dead for 30 years.  He killed himself.”  Welcome to Reality Reunion.  I wondered if this percentage of losses was normal, or if we were particularly prone to death–at least the men in our class, for 10 of the deceased were men.

My classmates were grown-ups.  They were (mostly) not playing games or being shy or competing.  They were just who they are, and glad to be there with one another.  The beauty queens were still pretty, if a bit thicker at the waist.  Some of us nerds had blossomed into more attractive adults.  People mainly had stayed married, many to hometown friends.  One woman I knew well had had a stroke and needed to remain seated.  Another who had been my college roommate had had a double mastectomy and had almost died a couple of years ago from a blood clot racing to her heart.  The top student in our class looked great–he had become a doctor, board certified in two specialties.  But his wife barely made it to the reunion.  She was suffering from a neurological disease which almost killed her last year, he said.  She looked pale and drawn.  He reminded me that in high school he and I “had been competitive.”

Maybe we had.  I didn’t remember it that way.  And now, what did it matter?  My classmates and I laughed and talked, lost in memories,  There was nostalgia and real joy, and yet all the talk seemed somehow laced with a nervous hum.  We were all standing on the edge of time, and we knew it.

The slights were recalled: the time I was left out of the pallet party, the way I always sat on the end when our group went to the movie, the fact that I never, never had a date, not even to the prom.  It didn’t matter.  Many dreams had been dashed, mine and theirs, sooner or later.  We had all suffered, and we would all suffer still more.  And each of us would die.  We had each had our little triumphs, our moments of joy.  Each had taken a.different path, some more exalted than others, and yet each had in common, this keen sense of mortality. We came together for this brief time, we touched, and all was forgiven. 

So you can’t go home again.  There’s no margin in doing so, for that home is frozen in time, is merely memory, and no longer exists, as soon as you step out of that page of your life.  You bring this new self, your changed self, back into that remembered time, and you smile.  You wish you had known then what you know now: we’re all afraid that we’re not enough.  In those trying high school years, each of us needed a little bit of kindness, some affirmation.  We still do.  It’s never too late.       

Students in the current graduating class of M.B.A. students at Harvard are being asked to sign on the dotted line–no, not for a fancy job that will bring in six figures–they are being asked by their peers to sign the “M.B.A. Oath,” a pledge to act responsibly and ethically and to refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of other people.  Seems simple enough.  Doctors have to sign a pledge saying that they will try to heal people.  Judges have to pledge that they will uphold the Constitution.  Ministers promise a variety of things, often including the exceedingly difficult one, “to speak the truth to power.”  But only a scant 20% of the Harvard M.B.A. class was willing to sign. 

The headline in the NY Times (5/30, p. B4) reads “A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality,” and the writer seems to be impressed that all these young business people are signing such a vow.  I’m wondering about the other 80%–are they not planning to act responsibly and ethically?  Are they planning to advance their own narrow ambitions, in spite of who gets hurt?  If so, could we have the names of the non-signers?  They’ll probably be investing our retirement funds in a few short years.

When I read this article, I was reminded of a graduating law student, a member of First Unitarian Church, who told me some years ago that he had asked his fellow graduates to sign a pledge reading: “Before I take any job, I will ask myself whether or not this job contributes to the greater good.”  Note that the pledge doesn’t ask anyone to refuse a job that doesn’t contribute to the good, but merely to “ask myself” the question.  As I remember, seven law students agreed to sign.

So what’s going on?  Change is rearing its difficult head, and it’s going to take a while before ethical behavior becomes the norm in business, if it ever does.  But this is a new leaning in the right direction.  The norm can shift.  People will become ashamed of shoddy behavior  when enough of their compatriots clearly disapprove of such behavior instead of admiring it, if it makes a buck.

This is not to say that all business people are unethical and money-hungry–not at all.  And when I see a business like Neil Kelly or New Seasons and watch the values they operate by, I take hope for the future.  It’s just that they seem to be the exception and not the rule. 

Bruce Kogut, director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Company Center for Leadership and Ethics, says that students are beginning to think about how they earn their income, not just how much.  (What a concept!)  He says,”They see inequities and the role of business of address them.”  I ask you, how could business students at a school this sophisticated not understand the role of business in addressing economic inequities?  Adam Smith understood something about the relationship of capitalism to community and the larger good–don’t Harvard M.B.A. students read Smith, like in the first semester of B school?

The fact is, though, it doesn’t matter what you read, or what your teachers say, if the cultural ethic is all about greed.  People will do what other people do, almost always.  Those who don’t, surprise us with their integrity. Change will come with leadership and education around these issues, and when the norm becomes service, these grads will want to serve.

Sleazy business practice will then become like smoking–you’ll have to leave the group and sneak around out back to do it.  I can hardly wait.

You know somebody like this.  I’m talking about a person who is consumed with anger about having been treated unjustly.  A  person who can think of little else but how to wreak revenge on the person or persons who caused his pain.  A person who talks about this injustice incessantly, and who can’t seem to get on with his life.  Now psychiatrists have named this quality and are saying that it is a bona fide mental illness–it is known as “embitterment.”  It could also be called “the Ahab Syndrome” for Melville’s Captain Ahab, who was willing to sacrifice his ship and his men to capture the white whale that had taken his leg. 

Dr. Michael Linden, the psychiatrist who named this behavior, says that people suffering from the syndrome are generally good people who have worked hard at something–such as a job or a relationship–and then suffer some unexpected loss.  They get fired.  Or the wife runs away with their best friend.  They turn into helpless victims and stay mired in their hate and aggression.  Linden says that these people rarely come in for treatment, because they feel that the problem is outside, in the world, not inside themselves.  “They are almost treatment-resistant,” he says.  “Revenge is not a treatment.”  (La/Times-Washington Post, 5/26)

The same day that I read the Post article reprinted in the Oregonian, I read another piece: it was the horrific story of a mother who picked up her two children, a daughter 7 and a son 4, from their father for a weekend parenting visit, and then forced the children off the Sellwood Bridge, apparently an act of revenge against her estranged husband.  (Oregonian, 5/27)  The little girl was saved only by the quick action of a stranger who heard the children scream.  The man, David Haag, went out in his boat, found the children in the water, and dived in after them. Haag said he thought the girl had been holding onto her little brother, for they were right together in the water.  But he could not save the boy, who was already dead.

I look at the picture of the mom on the front page of the paper–her name is Amanda Jo. She has long dark hair, disheveled now; a dazed look on her face, she looks almost like a child herself.  What could she have been thinking, to push her two babies off a bridge?  What could she have been feeling?

This mom had lost a custody battle for her children–this was the second time she had lost custody of a child, for this past February, the court ordered an older son, by a different man, to stay in the sole custody of his father.  I can only imagine that she might have felt helpless and hopeless.  And because she could not control the courts or her husband or her own out-of-control life, she exercised influence over others by hurting the children.  She had become truly mentally ill.  Her act was akin to the man who loses a job and then goes in and shoots up the office.  Or the man who shot people in a Nashville church because his estranged wife used to go there.  I’ve been treated unfairly, they say.  And somebody has to pay.

It should be said, however, that even though few people will kill to justify themselves, most of us have sucked on this bitter rag of revenge.  At some time or other, we will have been treated unfairly–by another person, by society, or just by the universe in general.  And this typically makes us very, very angry.  Generally time takes care of our bitter feelings, and we move on to more productive activity.  We forget.  We may even forgive.  We understand that justice is not something we can expect or demand, in this world. 

Speaking of justice, now–what would justice be for this woman?  What would you say, if you were on the jury?  What crime is more horrible than killing one’s own children?  What demons are at work within this woman?  Are they different from the ones at work in you and in me? 

I have no answers to these questions.  I am struck with the horror of the crime.  I wonder at the reaches of human pain, about the genesis of evil.   I acknowledge the darkness in myself and in all of us.