Lives of Service in a Line of Service Yet to Cross

Loyola College’s Maryland Day Keynote Address   

March 28, 2008
Ralph E. Moore, Jr.

You may have seen this item in the papers recently:

Dear Abby,

My husband is a liar and a cheat.  He has cheated on me from the beginning, and when I confront him he denies everything.  What’s worse, everyone knows that he cheats on me.  It is humiliating.

Also, since he lost his job seven years ago, he hasn’t even looked for a new one.  All he does all day is smoke cigars and cruise around with his buddies, while I have to work to pay the bills.

Since our daughter went away to college, he doesn’t even pretend to like me.

What should I do?

Signed: Clueless

Dear Clueless:

Grow up and dump him.  Good grief, woman. You don’t need him anymore!  You’re a United States Senator from New York running for President of the United States.  Act like one!

Father Linnane, Bishop Madden, Trustees of Loyola, fellow honored guests, faculty, staff and friends of Loyola College, my amazing wife, Dana, my marvelous daughters, Zahra and Nia, and my most beautiful ball of fun of a granddaughter, Sylena, my sister, Toni Moore-Duggan and (Mike Duggan, my brother-in-law and sister, Emily Moore), my special guests: the Oblate Sisters of Providence: Sister Annette Beecham, Sister Mary Alice Chineworth , Sister Brenda Motte, Sister Reginald Gerdes and Sister Helene Therese Stanislaus,  Dr. B. Curtis Turner, incoming principal of St. Frances Academy, and other sisters and brothers of mine in God, present this afternoon: Good afternoon to all and thank you for the opportunity to spend a few moments discussing the theme of today’s Maryland Day ceremony, “Lives of Service”.  I read in the letter of invitation that the “seeds of the Maryland Province were planted in 1634 when Jesuit priest Father Andrew White and two colleagues landed on St. Clement Island in southern Maryland with a group of Catholic and Protestant settlers”.  To receive an award given in his name is again a very high honor and a distinct pleasure.

I have to tell you, getting word of this award has messed with my head a little, I’ve tried to follow the lines in my life that perhaps brought me to this place today. Let’s see there were lines we, St. Pius School children, walked in under the direction of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, from class to recess and back or in formation the three blocks to St. Pius V Church for Mass in inner-city West Baltimore. There were the three bus lines that took me, right past this college, to Loyola High School for four years until I graduated in 1970.  Then, I recalled the picket lines I walked in downtown Baltimore with Jesuit priests (such as Fathers Jack Martinez, Bill Watters, Lucien Longtin and then Father Frank Fischer, my main man for others) alongside local civil rights workers and against housing speculators and blockbusters.  And, there were the lines in a speech I wrote but were delivered by a classmate at Johns Hopkins University the day we graduated: lines opposing the wars then in Viet Nam and Cambodia, asserting the needs of the African American and the women students and the lines in the speech challenging the university to reach out more and better to its surrounding, less fortunate neighbors.  And the lines went on: unemployment lines, more picket lines, sometimes being on the front lines, many times fighting for those below the poverty line and other times feeling as if I were behind enemy lines… wherever those lines led me, I followed them.  When all is said and done, I hope I will honestly be able to say, that after some prayer and reflection at each transition, I went where I was sent.

In all humility and sincerity, I am proud to be recognized among such great, distinguished servants: Bishop Madden, Sister Helen, Mr. Ken Hackett and Mr. Mitchell Posner.  And it is humbling to be honored at this institution of such fine quality run by a leading order of religious men who taught me that “the end goal of a quality education is service to others”.  I learned something about being a “brother for others” from the Jesuits.  But before my four years of Jesuit education at Loyola High, I made it through nine years of “service boot camp” with the Oblate Sisters of Providence.  I heard what they told me.  But like most folks, then and now, I’d rather see a good sermon than hear one.  So I watched what they did. 

Thanks to the likes of Sister Justina Matthews in Third Grade, it was they who taught me the importance of schoolwork: how to read, write, compute and think at the same time they schooled me in the dignity of all physical work: including how to clean up, fix up and paint up (walls not portraits).  But just as importantly, they advised me as a Seventh and Eighth Grader to get a good education in life and come back to “the community from where I came” to give service.  I remember being told that many times in the classroom, particularly by Sister Carmella Duncan. 

Sister Annette Beecham, the Superior General of the Oblates and a school mate of mine at St. Pius V, reminded me in a talk she gave to the Oblate Associates a while ago, how the Oblates fed soup and sandwiches to area hungry men at the back door of the school building in Harlem Park where students could happen to see what they were doing.  The unspoken lesson was compatible with the spoken one: matter-of-factly give service to others in need.  I had forgotten the silent line of mostly men, in those days, who were cared for by the St. Pius Convent through the kind hands of Sister Alphius Gross and later Sister Sagrada de Corizon.  I later learned that community of Sisters didn’t have much for themselves, but whatever they had, they split the vat of dinner soup in two and gave it away.  There’s a lesson in service there: good service involves sacrifice.

But while I was going to St. Pius, I also learned about service at home, especially at the hands of our mom, Lorraine Vance Moore.  For example, I recall many summer late afternoons sitting out on the front steps of the row house on Mosher Street, where all eight of us siblings lived, in a small two bedroom, second floor apartment with our momma and daddy.  And sitting down on the front steps there as a boy with my momma, we could see down Fremont Avenue for about a block or so… Well, when a neighbor would become visible about a half a block or more away, my mother would order one of us to “get up and go help her with those bags, boy!” And one of us would scurry off the steps and down the street to relieve our neighbor of her shopping bags.  It always so happened to be a neighbor in need of assistance who lived on the third floor of one of the row houses.  But once you carried her burden up the three flights, she would invariably give you a couple of quarters.  And in my younger, more naïve and prideful days, I would come back to our front steps and brag to my mother about what I had gotten paid.  Her response was simple and direct, “Take it back!” And I would have to take those three flights of stairs again to return my reward.  On occasion, when I would return from helping the neighbor, I wouldn’t say any thing, I’d just sit down next to my mom and resume watching passers-by and enjoy any breeze we could catch.  And my mother would let me sit there for a few minutes before she’d ask me rather casually if the neighbor had given me anything for carrying her bags.  And I’d confess to having a couple of quarters in unreported income…,”Take it back!” she’d insist and I’d have to take the tip money back up the three flights to the neighbor.    I think my mother was trying to teach us all not to expect something back for kindnesses shown… in that lesson is the essence of service.

But enough about me and how I was shaped and formed.  We’ve all heard Martin Luther King’s lines about service, "Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve:  you only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love."   Knowing that, we realize there are many opportunities for greatness in Baltimore because there are so many opportunities to do service:

As long as there are 200,000 unemployed persons out of the 631,000 citizens in the city of Baltimore, there are that many opportunities to serve them. [We need a full employment campaign in Baltimore].

While one out of every three children in the City of Baltimore lives below the poverty line, we have the chance to give them great relief and provide them advancement services.

Since approximately 3,000 homeless Baltimoreans sleep on the City’s streets each night, and 38% of the adult population can’t read beyond the fifth grade level (with 6,000 kids dropping out of the Baltimore City Public Schools each year)  and there are probably 60,000 of our city neighbors addicted to drugs and a countless numbers who are alcoholic.  Not to mention, there are countless folks who go to soup kitchens and food pantries to eat and still countless more who don’t have health insurance so they visit hospital emergency rooms for all of their medical attention.  Therefore, we can serve them and answer Martin Luther King’s call to greatness at the same time.  And furthermore, if we look broadly beyond our little town, we still have a couple of wars to end, an environment to clean up and peace to make and prosperity to share with our neighbors around the world.   It will be in recognizing, what the educator and statesman, W.E. B. DuBois said in 1925 that "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." And expounding on his thought: the problems of the twenty-first century are manifold: they are the problems of economic, color, gender, ecological and freedom lines.

I believe we can be a better society as John F. Kennedy surely believed when he ended his Inaugural Address in 1961 with the words, “Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.”   And shortly thereafter, Martin Luther King in his April 16, 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” said pretty much the same thing, “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men (and women) willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

I believe we are on the brink of changing times.  I believe there is a growing recollection that we can be a better society.  I believe the forty years, since King’s assassination, that we’ve wandered in the desert, are coming to a close.  We have been challenged to change. We have been invited to come together.  We have been cautioned to begin dialoguing across the great racial divides, before it is too late.  We have been encouraged to be boldly hopeful.  What is stopping us?

In closing, over the years, I have enjoyed immensely my association with Loyola College.  Over ten years ago I worked with my ole buddy, Father Tim Brown and others, on anti-poverty issues while he was director of the then named Center for Values and Services here and I was at the Center for Poverty Solutions.  And more recently, I worked with Father Brian Linnane and his staff to bring St. Frances Academy and Loyola College together in cooperation and commemoration of “The Year of the City” he declared last school year. And there have been several opportunities to work with Loyola College in between.   I hope we can continue to work together.

We must all get ready to make that better future so many of us want for all.  Finding the energy, the inspiration, the prayers, the sacrifices and the hope we need to make life better for others, is not just a choice we can make but our responsibility in the line of service.  Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund, said it best, “Service is we rent we pay for being.  It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.”  To get from where we are, to the better place where all women, men and children are fed, clothed, educated, drug and drink free, sheltered, healthy, loved and happier, because as poor folks they are no longer rendered invisible by society, will take courage, sacrifice, persistence and a strong heart (and we might even need to color outside of the lines sometimes). 

But I hope I’ve come to realize the best lines to follow are the lines of service marked by the courageous lives of service I’ve been fortunate to learn about (lives such as Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, the founder of the Oblate Sisters and Father Andrew White, the founder of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, in whose memory we are gathered today).   It will be in following their lives of service, as individuals and as a society, that we will take our human family out of the desert and back to the idyllic existence of the Garden of Eden, to the place Moses and Martin called the Promised Land.  There is a line in the sand to cross to a more morally correct, more just society: Let us all grab someone’s hand, get in line and get a-going.  We can make it to the Promised Land.  Dare I say it, “Yes, we can!”

Thank you.

Peace,

Ralph E. Moore, Jr.

Director of the Community Center

St. Frances Academy

3/28/08