Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. Our guest today is someone we are lucky to get today because he is juggling so many balls in the air. It is amazing he could find time, even on a restful weekend to come and join us.

Dr. Tim Shriver is the chairman of Special Olympics, where he oversees the involvement of more than three million athletes and 175 countries. He is president of the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty based here on the Cathedral close. He is the cofounder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). In his spare time he produces movies such as the well-known Amistad, movies that are intended to address public issues and address major moral questions such as the story of slavery and the journey from Africa to America.

We are going to touch on many of those things today, but first let me just say, Tim, how happy we are to have you here.

Dr. Shriver: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you. (Applause)

Lloyd: Well let’s start with the Special Olympics. Something we know you have given many years to, since 1996?

Shriver: Here in Washington since 1996 with my family, yes.

Lloyd: You have called it a civil rights struggle, something that your family has known a fair amount about, but you said that at the heart of Special Olympics has something to do with the civil rights of everyone. Tell us about that vision and what you see to be critical about the work of Special Olympics.

Shriver: Well, thank you all for coming, and especially on Memorial Day. Let me say what an enormous gift you are making to us to be here. I can’t imagine anybody being up here that would draw me in, so I am very appreciative of everyone joining us this morning—and especially having been educated next door and being terrified of this building and all it represented in terms of the judgment and weight of history. It is a huge honor for me to be, so to speak, either near or on the altar. Not on the altar, just near it. (Laughter)

I was introduced to the ideas of the Special Olympics movement as a child. I was introduced to them largely through the work of my mother, who, when I was really four or five years old we had summer camps at our house in Rockville, not far from here. And at those camps children were coming with intellectual disabilities which used to be called mentally retarded children. Now we use the “people first” language, “people with an intellectual disability”—and even in that shift in language you could hear a shift in perspective and a shift in attitudes. So in other words, instead of somebody being a retarded person, they are now a person with and then you, everyone, could fill in their own blank.

We are all people with differences. We now think of people with intellectual disabilities.

In those early years of my own exposure—five, six, seven years old—I can remember seeing school buses pull up at our house and a hundred or so children would empty out of these school buses.

They were coming from institutions. In the old model, the institutions: places removed from society, places where societies’ forgotten, lost, hopeless, invaluable, people went. Those who couldn’t be included, those who didn’t count.

And they would tumble out of these buses and sort of process to the front of our house. There was a flagpole and I can remember so many different times looking out my window—I don’t know how old I was or why I wasn’t out there—but looking out my window, watching these children, you know.

Some wearing helmets, some of them with all sorts of differences, gathering around, and we would raise the flag and there would be a trumpet playing the national anthem tune with great reverence for the flag. Then we would break into songs like, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands, if you’re happy and you know it, stomp your feet,” and all of that kind of thing.

I think really, Dean, from the very beginning I was wondering… I couldn’t, even as a child, really understand what was this all about. Why were these children here? Where were they coming from? Who had put them away?

Why were they different?

What did it mean that my mother in particular wanted them so badly, so badly to be included, to have fun?

What was this concept of happy, if you’re happy and you know it? Were they happy?

So these questions stayed with me, in one form or another, really my whole life. They continued to guide me, to cause me to question what I am doing. And they have led me to believe that when you take a person who is ostracized, marginalized, devalued, where the measure of success we apply to most of our daily lives—the clothes we wear, the jobs we get, to the houses we buy, to the cars we drive, all the success measures that we use in thinking about our daily lives are overturned or changed.

Because a person with Down syndrome… my colleague Chris Parker was just telling me about a mom and dad, who just this week had a child diagnosed with autism. And the diagnosis comes back and what happens to mom and dad?

The world, so to speak, ends. All of their hopes and dreams are over. The child will not go to St. Albans or NCS. The child will not become a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, an engineer, an artist, whatever you are as a parent.

The child will not end up standing on the sidelines of the high school football game making mom and dad proud. None of that will happen. None of the success measures that the world gives us that we reinforce. They are all over, all over, finished—must be changed.

So I think of the concept of civil rights in that context. In the context of a group of people who have a claim on us, who have a claim on us that is counter cultural, that is in some ways at odds with the way we live our daily lives.

And the claim is that, even though I can’t perform, even though I will not meet your definition of measure of success, even though I will not belong in the way you want me to belong, I matter, I count, I deserve a chance.

So when we run these races—when my children, my daughter Caroline and my wife Linda, who organizes, you know, special events right here in Bethesda and all over the District—when we run these events, when we play in these games, an athlete who has all that history, all that history… Remember, mom and dad, my life is over. This is often the beginning and no friends, you know, the difficulty of friends, the difficulty at schools, the difficulty of being included in a religious congregation.

All those difficulties we suspend and the athlete plays, the athlete runs her race, she finishes at her best time, and she is rewarded.

She is told, you count, you are Olympic. The spirit matters. You, you matter. It is a complete reversal of value, and so I think of it sometimes as a civil rights movement of the heart. Perhaps in this context, one could say civil rights movement of the spirit.

Our issues are less about the law now and more about the attitudes of society; less about changing public policy although that is important; more about changing community life. Less about demanding that politicians do certain things, more about asking people in places like this to think differently, to feel differently, to overturn the prejudices that we all bring to human communities and say that the spirit is the starting point.

That you matter, that you are valuable, that you are good, that you can contribute regardless of the challenges, or the differences, the disabilities you may bring to the table. It’s a long answer. Sorry.

Lloyd: And that’s also led into a consistent campaign of yours—to address derogatory references to people who face the kinds of challenges you are talking about. You even had a brief engagement with our new president, and a film came come out in the past year. You are trying very straight forwardly to address the ways the public refers to people facing these kinds of challenges. Tell us about that.

Shriver: Well, you know there is a lot of “PC” language about you. This is how you talk about something and people are sort of exhausted with politically correct language or the politically correct movements, in some respects. But here is our population, two hundred million people, no large campaigns, no broad public awareness

And yet the language issue is huge for them. There is not a single person in this room, I don’t think, who if you have someone with special needs in your family hasn’t heard the word retard used casually. Hasn’t said, oh stop being so retarded, or I feel so retarded, or I am a retard, I dropped the ball, that was a retarded move.

Now people are quick to point out to me, well I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it about someone with Down syndrome. I didn’t mean to be making fun of them when I called my friend a retard.

But the word gnaws at human dignity. It grinds away at people with special needs. It reminds them over and over again that you are using the word that used to be applied to me to connote something humiliating, stupid, hopeless, weak, vulnerable, hapless, buffoon-like. All those things.

You are using that word and what you are saying is when you do something hopeless—when you drop the ball, when you make the mistake—you’re like me. So we try to use this language, use the word retard, not to go around being a thought police, but to awaken people to the fact that the discrimination against this population is subtle.

It is often not intended. It is allowed to pass as part of day-to-day life without attention, without remark, and yet it is as pernicious and as poisonous to those who are suffering from this discrimination as it is to those who in their ignorance do not attend to the dignity of those who have these kinds of disabilities.

So we have done these campaigns. We have set up a website. We have fifty thousand signatures on the website, mostly kids, pledging not to use the “r” word, the word, retard, replace it with a different “r” word, respect. We had college campuses and high schools all over the country on a special day have teach-ins, to help kids understand that there are children…

The kids with special needs in the average American high school are still over on the special ed wing. They are still eating lunch by themselves. They are still riding what some people call the retard bus to school.

They are still alone. The biggest complaint you hear from parents and from young adults with intellectual disabilities is loneliness. It’s not health complaints. It’s not curb cuts.

It’s loneliness. So we are trying to use language as a way of inviting people to think differently and not again because we want to launch a major punishment campaign against those who make mistakes with language. We are not about that. But we are about awakening people to the power of language and to the symbol that language plays in everyday thought.

So, it is a bit of a tricky one. A lot of people have been very critical. They go, this is ridiculous, I don’t mean it. People would, you know… The president made his comment about bowling like a Special Olympian. Oh come on, have a sense of humor. He didn’t mean it. I don’t know, but you know we didn’t… The point wasn’t to punish the president or to give a pass either way, he is a public official; he is an extraordinarily important leader. The point was to say to people this is an example. He didn’t mean it perhaps but it is an example just as another example of how this stigma has migrated into the popular consciousness and people don’t even realize it.

Lloyd: Your hard work addressing this through the years was building on the work of your Mother, Eunice Shriver, and part of the reality that this struggle has touched your own family, her own sister. Could you just tell us a little bit about that very beginning point where your own larger family had to address this struggle as well?

Shriver: I really try to keep up with two extraordinary women. My mother was one and my wife is another. But I will weave them together in a second.

My mother’s family, is well known, certainly. Nine children, three boys very active in politics: senators, attorney generals, congressmen, and president of the United States; very well chronicled for the good and the bad. What is remarkable about that family is that there was also one child who was none of those things.

And like many American families for the first thirty or so years, thirty, forty years of her life, was hidden. Because my grandparents, I think like almost everybody and still like people today, thought well we don’t want people to see Rosemary. We want people to see Jack, or Bobby, or Teddy. We want them to see them as strong and active and intelligent.

We don’t want them to see this other child who is none of those things.

My mother, I think, because she grew up as a sibling in a family where she saw her sister be isolated and excluded; she saw her mother be told no over and over again, and she still tells the story of seeing her mother putting down the phone, being frustrated, can’t find a doctor, can’t find a school, can’t find a therapist, can’t find anything for my sister.

And imagine in this case a little ten-year-old Eunice or a twelve-year-old Eunice seeing her mother suffering, seeing her sister being excluded. For her I think the anger and humiliation and the pain of that wore her right down to the core of her spirit and made her act.

So she became a relentless advocate for change, driven I think, for better or for worse, to a great extent by anger, but also by conviction, also by faith, also by the firm belief that society was wrong, that her sister was not worthless.

Today, I try to keep up with my wife—and this is just not to be personal about these things—but to raise children with that belief is an extraordinary challenge. Any of you who are parents, to have your child grow up with the conviction that other children matter, that kindness and compassion, and openness, and tolerance, and acceptance are values you put into your blood, you know, they are not values you do because they are ethically right you don’t care about someone else because you have an ethical mandate to do it.

You care about someone else because you want to create a more loving community for yourself and others.

Because you are in love with them, really. That is the challenge of our faith, here, is to love one another and not to do a check box and give to one another with some degree of formulaic financial transaction. I mean that is part of it but that is not the core. So Linda has really inspired me and challenged me to raise our children with those values and that is also an enormous gift and invitation.

Lloyd: You said that in a number of different contexts that we have important things to learn from these people who are so challenged. In fact society needs them; that we would be a lesser society without them. Say something about why that is.

Certainly within the context of our faith. Jesus says bring the children onto me. He speaks of the least and the lost. Unless you have done to the least of these, my brethren… You do it to me. So it is very much a part of the Christian ethos but that is one of your things that these people matter for us. Why is that?

Shriver: I would say… I haven’t even thought of this before but in the context of when Jesus says, you do for the least of these you did it to me. I think a lot of people will hear that as an admonition to do something.

I don’t think a lot of people necessarily hear that as an invitation to find Jesus.

Like in other words if you go down to give a day at the homeless shelter, are you doing it because Jesus told you to do it or because Jesus is there?

Are you doing it because there is a rule that says give to the poor, give to the homeless, give to the people with disabilities, or because you believe that on the other side of the table, when you serve breakfast down at So Others May Eat or down at the soup kitchens, you will encounter Christ? You will see. You will have the experience of the divine. I guess I would throw that back. I have a lot of answers to your question, but I wonder what people in the room would say?

Everybody here has met or seen or has some kind of encounter with a person with an intellectual disability. What gifts have you found in them? Not what gifts have you found in yourself, or what gifts have they radiated unknowingly to you, but what gifts do they have?

What did you learn? What did you see? What did you encounter in that person that you would want your child to become like? A great marketer said to us about ten years ago, look, we would like to support your Special Olympics but we also support the NBA and the NFL and the NBA and the NFL, those are aspirational brands. People want to grow up and be like Michael Jordan. We love Special Olympics but nobody wants to grow up and be like a Special Olympics athlete.

Do they? Well, I don’t know. Not sure in this day and age. I am not sure that I don’t have as many role models for myself or for our children who are Special Olympics athletes as I do who are politicians or lawyers. Politicians get a lot more press but again, I mean nothing against politicians, believe me, but I think I would ask you, you know, what gifts have you discovered?

What gifts tend to be clustered in a population that has experienced the sting of rejection? That is what happens, the sting of being put out, being told no, of being daily awakened to the fact you can’t keep up. Then what do you learn?

I asked Nelson Mandela about this. He is not a person with a special need, but prison in a way is a similar experience. How many people have come out of… When you see him he smiles, he is calm, he is at peace. Twenty-seven years of having a little cell.

We visited the cell on Robben Island. It was the size of this dais here. He says, “Oh,” he says, “we had such wonderful experiences in prison. We all learned simplicity. We all learned humility.” He said, “That is why we are all so happy. All of us who were together in prison. We learned simplicity, we learned humility.”

The question is how do you learn those things without having to go to prison for 27 years? That is your job to teach us, I think, Dean.

But I think there are many, many gifts in this population, individually and collectively. Certainly in many people with special need it is the gift of openness. I think of Troy Daniels, a person with Down syndrome, who was asked by his high school to give the graduation speech and he gave this beautiful two-minute little speech where he talks about the law that says I am allowed to come to this school.

“In the old days,” he starts out, “I couldn’t come to school with other children because they called me ‘retard’ and I had to go to a special school. But when I came to school”—this is Troy speaking—“the law said I can come here. But the law couldn’t get me any friends.”

He said it was only the kids, “my friends that we were little kids together. We grew up and we did things together and they were real friends to me. They said, ‘TD’”—that is his nickname—“‘Come sit by me.’” He said that is the lesson.

That gift of understanding with that level of spiritual clarity what it means to be a friend, what it means to be open. That gift comes from people who know the alternative; they know what it means not to be. They know authenticity.

Jesus… so much of the gospel is about hypocrites. This population knows hypocrites. And they know the difference. That’s a gift. So, I could go on, on these ones but I hope maybe your thinking to yourselves, what have I seen not with the eyes of pity, but with the eyes of the spirit as the gifts of people who are frequently seen by society as having none?

Lloyd: You have recently gotten involved in a whole new endeavor addressing profoundly vulnerable people in your involvement with CIFA, the Center for Interface Action, a new very exciting nonprofit addressing global development issues and global poverty, around the world. It is not as if you didn’t have enough going on—

Shriver: Right.

Lloyd: —also with your work with Collaborative for Academics, Social and Emotional Learning, with your PhD in Education, another piece I hope we will get to in a moment, but in the midst of all the things you are doing and the tremendous growth and excitement within special Olympics, you decided to make a whole new commitment to global development. What made you do that and what excites you about what you are seeing in CIFA?

Shriver: Well, the reason I did it is because you took me to lunch and told me I ought to do it. (Laughter) And I would never say no to the dean.

Lloyd: It was an easy pitch.

Shriver: No, I… The reason I wanted to do that, more than anything, is because I do believe… The interesting part of the CIFA challenge, in my view, is that it is saying that religions have something in common—first of all, to offer the world—second of all. And that that can be done through action: not through dialogue, not through talk, not another interfaith dialogue about Christians, Jews and Muslims and all sitting here and, you know, Mohammed and Moses and Jesus and while we have some things in common.

This is action. This is the common ground of action that religious traditions inspire in people. Action, in this particular case, in pursuit of saving lives.

Three thousand children will die today on this Sunday of Memorial Day where we celebrate those who have given their lives to our country. Three thousand children will die today of malaria.

Every single one of those deaths is preventable, every single one of them preventable for ten bucks. Ten bucks, every one of us. Ten bucks out the door, and that many numbers of lives could be saved today.

So there is an enormous urgency. There is an enormous call to action and there is an invitation to the faith community in effect to leave behind what I would call the dogmatic emphasis, the dogmatic discussions, the discussions of creed, the discussions of creedal difference and find its common ground in action.

So I think there is a larger challenge here for us, Dean Lloyd, that says that CIFA is not just about what we can do in Nigeria to bring the archbishop and the sultan together, the great leader of the Islamic tens of millions of Islamic Nigerians and the leader of many Roman Catholic Nigerians. Put them together as common leaders in pursuit of a solution to malaria and invite their congregations to be part of distribution of bed nets and teaching people to use them. Why not make the churches into real powerful vehicles for this core health need?

But also, in doing so you can’t help but watch the archbishop and the sultan and see in them a new pattern of how we have to present religion in the twenty-first century. A new pattern grounded on the common spirituality maybe not the common religion, the common conviction, the common energy, the common mission-centric passion for the love of neighbor. Those kinds of things I think are where the churches all need to go, so I am just kind of in there to watch and help and listen. And in a way I hope be part of a new model of how we can present the spirituality of our faith to a world that is hungry for spirituality but is very wary of religion.

Lloyd: There is a real sense, certainly talking to the people involved in CIFA that it is the faith communities on the ground, across the developing world, that are the primary social unit, for one thing, other than the family, and the best distribution unit imaginable for all the resources for global development. So, by going directly to the faith communities and those who work with faith communities from World Vision, to Catholic Relief Services, to Lutheran World Relief, to those of other faith traditions, and getting them collaborating, there is a multiplier potential using what is on the ground to deliver resources.

Shriver: All that and using the spiritual energy that they bring, which to me is so important. It is not that they bring a confessional.

It is not that I am a Catholic, or a Methodist or a Lutheran or Muslin and I bring my Koran or my gospel.

It is that I bring what those things have given me. I bring a determination, a conviction. It is a little bit like the Special Olympic story. I think some us in movements like this don’t rest because our faith wakes us up every morning and says, my goodness, you are invited to go out again and see the face of God.

That is not to say that someone from a secular perspective can’t be committed to social justice. They can.

But there is a special energy, I think, that comes from strong faith-grounded commitments, and that is a relentless energy, a tireless energy. I saw fifteen women yesterday profess final vows for the Missionaries of Charity over on Monroe Street NE.

Fifteen women. Every one gets up and says, I commit my life to the poorest of the poor. I mean that’s a very powerful thing to see in a human being, in my view; and so many of you, so many people in this room have done the same thing. But, that energy that says I don’t, I am not stopping. This is my life. I will not rest. I see the face of God. That is what I want to pull out in my own…that is what I am most interested in.

How do we pull that out of the cloak of clericalism and all of the religious trappings that the world sees? The people that are criticizing churches and there are plenty of them. If you want to see them, read my blog. You can see the people that comment. I mean they are angry at religion. There are a lot people furious at religion. But they don’t necessarily see and I think we have a real challenge as faith communities, as people of faith to remind them of the spirit that guides us and in places like Nigeria or Uganda you know the people that are at the end of the road, as Rick Warren says, those churches at the end of the road, they’re there because they have… They’re there for a reason that transcends just a belief in a malaria bed net. They’re there because they see the spirit and they are trying to be, I think, powerful in following it.

Lloyd: You mention your blog, writing the OnFaith blog for the Washington Post and Newsweek. You have developed your own voice and your own following as you articulate a vision of life grounded in faith but trying not to speak in a sectarian way out of the depths of one tradition. You talk about being a Catholic yourself. But you talk about for example the word God leads for you not so much to a set of answers but to a set of questions. And you talk about the dawn of a new spiritual age, that something new seems to be emerging.

Say something, if you will, about how you as a person of faith—obviously that is so much a part of how you think and what you are doing—how you are struggling to articulate something that even unbelievers and doubters and arguers can hear and people of other faith can hear you. It sounds as if you are trying to speak from your faith in a way that makes room for a lot of other points of view.

Shriver: Whew! Ooh, that’s a toughie.

Lloyd: I’ll tell you what, I will go back. Explain what you meant by saying…

Shriver: No, no the question is fine. I am just reflecting on it. Even Jesus takes a few seconds you know... give me a minute. You know that scene where he draws on the ground for—

Lloyd: Yeah.

Shriver: No one says how long it takes him to answer. It might be ten minutes. (laughter)

I think that the traditional definition of religion is under siege in large part because we live in a world where our children are growing up and they are unwilling to accept the idea that, because someone is of a different faith, they are less likely to be loved by God. Bluntly.

The exclusivity of religious traditions, the concept of this tradition, my tradition, whatever it is, being the right answer, is under siege. And I think that is in large part because we are so much smaller, so much closer together, so much easier to see the face of another person. I mean, you know, my aunt, who I never knew because she died before I was born, raised in a Roman Catholic family, was almost put out of her family for marrying an Anglican.

Lloyd: Understandably. (laughter)

Shriver: I know, who can blame… no, just kidding.

So, this is a big change. I mean that is my aunt which is not my great grandmother. But that is my aunt. You all know what I am talking about here because we have all grown up and we have seen the past and we see the present. To be sitting here fifty, 75 years ago would have been unthinkable, right? Unthinkable.

The idea that there would be respect across these kinds of barriers of religious tradition, not to mention, I also married an Anglican, which I am very proud of, but anyway, so what’s the point? The point here is that if those barriers break down, and they must, the idea of ostracizing or labeling or excluding because of difference is untenable, I think, to our children’s generation.

Then the question becomes, does that mean the transcendent is also gone? Because I go to church not to be a better Catholic but to be a better follower of the divine. And so I think our traditions, collectively the great religions, carry an enormous invitation to transcendence. And I think the world is very hungry for that. I don’t think they are hungry for, tell me why I should believe there are seven sacraments instead of two. I don’t think that is going to sell. You may have a good argument. I may have a good argument. We can sit up here and debate forever but I don’t think it is going to bring people in off the street.

People are going to come in off the street if I have an argument for how to live your life closer to love, peace, meaning, fulfillment, and purpose. And I think we have that in the tradition. But I don’t think we are there yet, at least in my own, in offering people the gifts of how to live your life close to God, as much as we still spend a lot of time teaching people how to live and prepare for death, prepare to see God. It is a lot of emphasis on ethics and morals and behaviors and creed in the tradition. Not as much emphasis on spirituality, on search, on the inner life, on emotion.

And yet if you read the great mystics you read the great saints of all traditions, they are always rebels because they go inward.

They go away from the tradition to recover the spirit.

Those are the people, I think, if we pull them forward, will help us to find the voice we can have in a spiritual age; people who are interested. I would contrast spirituality with religion, not because they are different, but because they are parts of the whole.

I don’t think you can be spiritual without being religious, even though people say that all the time. I do think you cannot see in religion a spiritual message, and as a result be turned off and say, I am not going to go there I am going to go to the self help section of the bookstore, or I am going to go watch Oprah, or I am going to go on a nature walk because I don’t get it in the nave. Especially today. No, just kidding.

I think we have to make these places as you have done so brilliantly here on the close make these churches, these places into places of invitation to discover your proximity, your longing for God as opposed to a place to discover the truths of whatever tradition you happened to come from.

Lloyd: Let’s go to questions from the audience. Please pass your questions forward. Deryl, are you ready to go?

Deryl Davis: We’ve got a couple here to start with. This first one is: Ask the parents and family members of Special Olympic athletes, and perhaps ask the athletes themselves, they have often gone through an amazing faith journey. Could you speak to that, as you have traveled around the world and met with these athletes and their families?

Shriver: I’ll just tell one story. Because, again, I think many people have their own stories on this and if the answer were think of your own story. And if this were more of a classroom environment I’m going to ask you to write down your own story that would be the best answer I could give. Because I think probably if I gave you time to think of your own story you would have one. But I’ll tell one.

Linda and I and the children went to South Africa. I’ve mentioned Mandela already once. As part of that trip we went out to a small institution outside of Cape Town. It is a place that has about thirty people, forty people with intellectual disabilities, and most of those people have what the language calls severe or profound limitations, many non ambulatory, many nonverbal.

And it wasn’t a horrible place, but you have ten or fifteen people to a room. No carpets, concrete floors, very little bits of attention and support, people pretty much sitting hopelessly all day long. So we were out there to organize a day we call a Motor Activities Day.

Motor Activities is very simple activities: throw a foam ball, catch a ball, stand on one foot, whatever you can do. Push a ball off of a tray. Little activities, right? So, I was… There was a group of the athletes and one of our trainers doing these activities. They were throwing foam balls up in the air, and I was sitting next to an athlete who was not involved, a resident.

He was in a wheelchair, immobile, nonverbal. And sitting next to him was his mom. I turned to her and I said you know we’re here in the country and we are trying to figure out what we can do to help support people like your son. What could we do to make the services better and she sort of looked over at me and said, “Oh everything is fine.”

I said there must be something we could do. There must be some ways in which there could be better policies or better health care. I’m thinking, probably like the son of a political family, there must be some change we can make. And she said “Oh no,” she said, “Everything is good, everything is fine.” Then she kind of put her arm on her son’s shoulder like this. And I said well there must be something. Couldn’t we improve the services?

And she looks up at me with her hand on her son and she says, “Mr. Shriver,” she says, “My son Daniel has taught me the lesson most parents never learn.” And she started rubbing the back of his shirt. She said, “He has taught me the meaning of unconditional love. And I will be forever grateful to him. Together we’re fine.”

And I thought to myself, how many parents ever learn the meaning of unconditional love? I mean really, honestly, meaning of unconditional love? How many parents really learn that lesson? She learned that lesson.

That is the journey parents of children with exceptionality tend to travel.

Not all children will have the same limitations that Daniel has. Not all mothers will come through it that way. Some will become bitter; the stress will be too much. The pain, the struggle will be too difficult. And understandably so.

But many will find themselves in their faith journey finding a new sense of purpose; a new sense of themselves. You hear many mothers say, I found a part of myself I never knew existed; almost as though they are describing a second falling in love with their child. A new kind of falling in love. A new sense in which their faith has reminded them not to give up, not to abandon that child to the mercies of the world but to continue to believe.

So it’s, you know, I have to say people say with your job you have to travel and all that stuff. It’s is true that you have to travel but what a privilege. What a joy. How many times do I sit someplace like that and think to myself how lucky I am to meet that mom and to try to bring that lesson to my own life, just selfishly, to try to be a parent like she’s a parent.

Davis: You’ve written about the stresses of the No Child Left Behind system of testing and the importance of spirituality and learning. How can spirituality be brought into the classroom, and can it be brought into public classrooms?

Shriver: Man, this feels like St. Albans again. These are hard questions. (Laughter) I think the problem that most children… Let’s put it this way. No Child Left Behind as public policy has focused the country on measuring outcomes, measuring performance which is completely appropriate, understandable, and I think legitimate goal for public policy, specifically in education. I don’t think there is anything wrong with asking schools if they are teaching children to read. Most parents send their children to school hoping they will come home reading, hoping they will come home being able to do math. I don’t see any reason to allow an institution to not be accountable for that outcome.

On the other hand, the question the teachers face is how do children learn?

Not what the outcome ought to be but how to get there.

And what are the ways in which children learn? My own belief is that learning is a relationship, that every form of learning is a form of a relationship. People say, well, you need relationships to support learning.

No, I don’t agree. Learning is a relationship. It is a relationship between a teacher and a child, between two children, between content, between the story of the Civil War, or the poetry of Mary Oliver and the learner. It’s a relationship. Relationships have many dimensions; especially in childhood. A core part of that relationship is emotional, it’s spiritual, it’s aspirational, it’s longing.

As children get older, particularly in high school, they ask big questions of the world. If schools don’t help them answer them, particularly children on the margin, they will leave. They will say this school is not helping me answer fundamental questions. I don’t see it in my chemistry textbook. If I don’t hear it from my teacher and if I don’t see it in this community I will not stay.

So I refer to those elements in learning as the social and emotional elements in learning. They have a kind of… You can use different language and talk about the spirituality of learning, questions of ultimate meaning and value—ultimate meaning and value—are in my view spiritual questions. Kids ask them all the time in schools.

The extent to which schools become places where they feel those questions are safe, that there emotional life can be safely welcomed. That it can be connected to the academic outcomes we want for them and the citizenship outcomes we want for them, I think will be the extent to which those schools will be effective, particularly for the most vulnerable learners.

So that is a little 101 on the educational philosophy I have, but there is a lot more meat on those bones. But I did say that I did go back to St. Albans after twenty-five years and they told me since having gone there in the Seventies that St. Albans had become a kinder and gentler St. Albans. So I am sure that this kind of—

Lloyd: You might want to check that out with current students) (Laughter)

Shriver: I think this approach is out there. It just needs a stronger voice nationally, I think. I hope this administration will find ways to complement the approach on outcomes with an approach on the process of learning.

Davis: What have you learned, specifically, about your own faith or faith journey through your work both in Special Olympics and in international development?

Shriver: Well, a lot. I have learned that the invitation to compassion and to social change is an invitation to experience the divine, It’s an invitation to an experience the most important… I cry more at Special Olympics events than I do, you know, in emotional movies or even in my own personal life.

I’m brought, I think, closer to the message of my faith in watching my daughter Caroline run up and down the court with her special needs partner shooting baskets than just about anywhere in my life. It reminds me that the outcome we seek in life is there.

The promise exists. The openness to one another is the ultimate gift. The challenge to rid ourselves of any other, you know, what we call sin in the religious traditions, the challenge to remove from our lives the biases, the fear, the sense in which we can’t take a chance on that kid. We really can’t, you know, we got to… It’s nice to be nice to them but no, no, no they are never going to be good enough. That’s what I would consider the purgative way, the way of ridding myself of that fear and opening myself more fully to God’s presence.

That’s what I get from my work. I feel very lucky in that respect. I can’t tell you whether everybody else feels the same way, but I can tell you I have met tens of thousands of people who will say to me, “I went to a Special Olympics event once. I will never forget that day.” And if I ever have time with that person, if they are stuck sitting there next to me on an airplane I grill them: “What do you mean? What happened?” And before the flight is over they are usually in tears just for covering the memory and rethinking it in the context not of what they think they did. You know, what they will usually say is, oh it was wonderful to see their smiles. That’s why I had such a good time.

I said, “Well, that is interesting. You say you had a good time because they were smiling, but I asked you about you. What did it mean to you?” And they go well it meant to me I was happy to see them smile.

I said, were you happy when you hear somebody goes to Disney World? They are happy. Why aren’t you happy? Well, no, no, no, wait a minute. Then they think what did I get out of it? And they usually go, whew, wow, I never thought of that.

And then a few minutes later they tell you their life story. They tell you this was my place to belong, I saw a different side of myself, I found a sense of openness, I trusted them, I felt like I was in a different world.

They will describe very much what you would hear if you were kind of recreating the Sermon on the Mount into a venue. All of a sudden blessed are the poor, and blessed are the sorrowful, and happy are those who seek. It is just like all of a sudden they’ve crossed over. They went through a veil. I feel that all the time. I feel that all the time.

Lloyd: One more question.

Davis: You are writing about volunteering, in this sense, and one person writes simply to testify to the life changing power of this person’s experience working at I believe it’s White Haven Hospital in Pennsylvania for persons with intellectual disabilities and could you speak, maybe we turn that into a question. Could you speak about volunteering?

Shriver: I think volunteering is built into the American system. We all have volunteered. If I asked everyone to raise their hand if they have volunteered, I am sure you would all say yes. I am sure your congregation would say yes.

Lloyd: Of course. (laughter)

Shriver: Right? And I would say many of you would say you volunteered in the last month or two; some this week. Some are volunteering here today. I am sure there are people volunteering right here in the Cathedral as we sit here. It is very much a part of who we think of ourselves as being.

It is not common outside the United States. People do not necessarily understand the concept of giving freely of themselves, [volens?], for the love of it. But it is an enormously powerful American export and it is an enormously powerful, I think, engine of citizenship.

From a personal point of view, what does it do? I think it helps define who you are. You define your life by what you do with it. And so much of what you do with your life you think somebody makes you do. So if you are a mother you have to do this. If you are a lawyer you have to go to work. Or if you are a religious leader you have to preach on Sunday.

The volunteer moment is, nobody is telling you you have to do any of it. You choose. It is a deliberate moment where you say this is who I will create as myself today. I think we have to talk about it again in a more spiritual language from the inner life point of view and invite more and more people to see in it not a responsibility.

All of our kids who go to school in Maryland have to get their volunteer hours, which I think is a good thing. My cousin was the one who pushed the law, so of course I agree with it. But at the end of the day it is only an invitation to discover what it means to voluntarily give yourself. To be in that because you want to be in that. So I think it is a great tradition of our country and we have got to do more. I am grateful that…I will give you an example.

Brady is here—I can’t really see that well, but our president, the president of Special Olympics and COO, Brady Lum, is here. We hired him because his wife is a minister, by the way, just wanting to infuse our faith, the traditions with our social change traditions. But he comes from a Points of Light and Hands on Network, which is this massive network of organizations and people committed to the volunteer spirit.

The president has signed a new legislation inviting more Americans to volunteer and give service. I think we are at the beginning of a new dawn on that. I do still think we need a little bit more of a sense of why we are involved in volunteerism. We’ve got to identify these great challenges… bring this all the back to malaria. We have to say, yes volunteer, yes give, yes contribute, and give of yourself. And if you do that we can eradicate malaria.

We can eradicate the number one killer of children, if we get your help. Don’t just volunteer because someone says check a box. Volunteer because there is not only a great purpose in it for you, but also a great purpose in it for the planet. This could be the generation that ends malaria.

Volunteer. Help. I think that is a compelling story for our country and for especially young people today.

Lloyd: This has been a great conversation. We are going to take a couple of weeks off now from the Sunday Forum to celebrate the feast of Pentecost next week and we will have some sc