As if the photos last
week of Pope Francis comforting a man afflicted with a terrible, painful genetic disorder weren’t heart-tugging enough, a video hit the internet about a touching gesture by a middle school football team in Olivet,
Michigan. The two news stories, one international and one local, demonstrate
the transforming power of compassion.
The video report featured Keith Orr,
a sweet but learning-disabled boy at Olivet Middle School who “struggles with boundaries,” as the reporter
says (you can see Keith in the
video unself-consciously hugging everyone he encounters). Without their
coaches’ knowledge, the football team plotted a special play for him during a
recent game.
After intentionally downing the ball at the goal line rather than taking an
easy score, the team brought Keith in, hiked the ball to him on the next play, and
escorted him in a wedge of blockers into the end zone. Keith scored untouched,
and became a football hero at school.
One player told the reporter, “We really wanted to prove that he was part
of our team, that he was one of us.” Another, wide receiver Justus Miller,
said, “It was just like, to make someone’s day, to make someone’s week, to make
them happy.”
But the story didn’t end with Keith’s big moment. It was also about the
transformative effect on those who gave Keith that gift. When the reporter
asked Miller why Keith’s touchdown made Miller himself so happy, he replied,
“Because he’s never been, like, cool or popular,” – at this point Miller gets
emotional – “and he went from being pretty much a nobody to making everyone’s
day.”
The handsome Miller, who probably is one of the cool and popular kids,
tearfully admitted that previously it would never have occurred to him to think
about doing that for Keith, but that it changed him: “I went from being
somebody who cared mostly about myself and my friends to caring about everyone,
trying to make everyone’s day and everyone’s life.”
At that, I got up and asked at the counter to see the manager, who came
expecting me to deliver a complaint. Instead, I told him I’d never seen someone
work so diligently as his employee, and I wanted to make sure he was recognized
for it. The manager smiled and said, yes, Jerry’s an outstanding worker and they
were lucky to have him. Did I want to deliver the compliment to Jerry
personally? I said I thought it might mean more coming from his boss, and I sat
back down.
The manager called him over and moments later I saw Jerry grinning from ear
to ear and hustling even harder. He was bursting with pride; the earlier mean
remark that had disturbed him was erased.
“Lord, teach us to step
outside ourselves,” Pope Francis tweeted a few
months ago. Compassion is not pity; it is acting upon our
interconnectedness – a solidarity of the heart, as Christians and Buddhists
alike call it. That’s what these stories are about: stepping outside
ourselves, as Justus Miller learned to do; recognizing the very human needs of
the quietly disadvantaged; and showing them, like Keith Orr’s teammate said,
that they are one of us.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 11/8/13)
