THE GREATEST GIFT

Dear Harry,

It started the other morning as I sat in meditation. I could hear our grandson Luka stirring in the room behind me and the question popped up: what is the greatest gift I could ever give him? Not money, of course, nor any material thing. Not even a great education. It occurred to me that the greatest gift I could ever give him would be the skill I have learned myself in the course of many years: the skill of meditation. Once you've mastered that--or, well, have begun to master it, since you're always at the start--it applies to everything you undertake in life and improves your chances of success. He's a restless 10-year-old at the  moment, though, so that gift will likely have to wait a few years yet...

Thinking about this, though, I started wondering what might be the greatest gift I received from you, Harry, father to son. It was not your religion, which I soon abandoned. It was not my more than privileged education--though that was a true gift, one that has stood me in good stead throughout my working and post-working life. It was not even the skill you had with words--a gift that I myself have worked long years to hone. No, I believe the greatest gift you gave me was my conscience.

Not consciousness. That's something I had to learn I needed, something I have learned slowly through the years, the need to be present and to pay attention. No, I do mean conscience, an infallible, sometimes annoying moral compass, that indefinable place in the heart, brain, and mind where I quite simply know without question what is right and what is wrong. It can be a burden, when it turns back on me in the form of a "guilty conscience." Guilt rarely serves me well. More valuable than guilt is recognition, realization, and based on that the intention to do better when I fall short.

Not indistinct from that personal moral compass is the social conscience I also learned from you. Usually without much debate, I know what social justice looks like, and what injustice looks like, too. You took the side of underpaid, underserved workers in the coal mines in the north of England, where I was born. You militated for the improvement of working conditions that compromised their health long before the National Health Service came along. You were the champion of the poor, the sick, the underprivileged. You never questioned what you knew to be right, and never shirked the responsibility to speak out against the wrong.

It is a quality much needed in America today, and much lacking. I look to the politics of this country and find them dominated by the lust for power and the fear of acting forcefully for the public good. I look to business and see the predominant compulsion of the bottom line. I look to religion, for God's sake, where moral issues are subordinated to political advantage. We could use man of your conscience to model what it means to be in service to humanity, not self.

So, I do thank you for that gift, Harry. It's a hard one to honor in the observance in a world that so dishonors it, but I value it nonetheless. Who knows, I might even find ways to share it with that restless great-grandson, who will need if he is to be worthy of the life you passed on to him through me and through his mom, your granddaughter. I trust that it may be so, or humanity will soon find itself in a sorry state indeed.

Respectfully, your son, Peter