By Scott Graber
It is Monday, and it is hot — our thermometer says it’s 95 degrees.
Some of you know that I’m listening to a Jesuit priest, Richard Rohr, who talks about “containers.”
Rohr says that the during first half of our lives we focus on building an identity, finding our place in the world, creating what he calls the “container.”
It’s a time of graduations, starting a career, building relationships and finding income stability. “It’s about solidifying your sense of self and whom you are in the world.”
The second half, however, is when we adjust, change.
We should, according to Rohr, abandon our resume’ building pursuits and embrace humility. This second half is often triggered by some kind of failure — a spousal death, bankruptcy, some sort of seismic event that changes our worldview.
During the first phase my life my container was often reduced to a narrative — a monologue delivered at dinner parties after a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir — that began with the fact that I was a disappointment to my father.
My father was in medicine (burns and transplants) and he wanted me to go to medical school. He was also a competitive tennis player and wanted me to develop a big serve, a backhand that came with a spin, a shelf of small statuettes.
I accomplished none of these things, ushering-in a lengthy, unhappy estrangement.
For a while after that my mother was my refuge, often entertaining me with her views on the South.
In the summers of my youth, we would walk the beach from Ocean Drive to Cherry Grove (all of which is now called North Myrtle Beach), and all the while she would tell me stories about battlefield bravery at Ft. Fisher and at Petersburg.
She believed that the South had fought a long and courageous fight; that its people were kind and well-mannered; that slavery was regrettable.
I pretty much bought that narrative.
For reasons that I cannot explain I chose a college, The Citadel, that came with its own Civil War history. That history began with a cadet battery that fired on a ship, Star of the West, trying to re-supply Fort Sumter. Later I would learn that Lee’s surrender flag was carried to General George Custer by Captain Robert M. Sims, The Citadel Class of 1856.
My time in law school coincided with the Civil Rights movement across the South and, from time to time, spilled-onto the Mall in Washington, D.C., where I toured Resurrection City.
When I moved to Beaufort, my internal narrative was influenced by two non-fiction books, Face of An Island (Edith Dabbs) and Black Yeomanry (T.J. Woofter) — books dealing with the culture on St. Helena Island in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
These two books revealed a vibrant, self-sustaining community (on St. Helena Island) that thrived when the rest of the South was descending into a Jim Crow kind of hellscape. These books were testament to resilience, and a will to survive in spite of horrific characters like Pitchfork Ben Tillman, who organized a “Constitutional Convention” in 1896.
Tillman’s convention, held in Columbia, was designed to remove Black folk from the voting rolls. That effort was fought by Robert Smalls, Thomas Miller, William Whipper, James Wigg and Isaiah Reed from Beaufort, Ben Tillman calling Whipper, “the ablest colored man I ever met.”
I also learned that another outspoken Black lawyer, John Mardenborough, moved to Port Royal about this same time, where he became the Postmaster, raised his family and built a columned, double-porched house on 9th Street. I happen to be sitting in Mardenborough’s study as I write these words this morning.
This then was part of the “narrative” I carried around in my head for most of my adult life. But these days I find myself reading Rohr and wondering what parts of that narrative remain “authentic” and what parts need an upgrade?
These days I am also reading David Brooks and I’m drawn to his distinction between “resume values” and those values we sometimes hear at funerals. Brooks calls this second group “eulogy values,” and that category would include generosity, kindness, empathy and humility.
Switching to a life centered on humility is much harder than repeating a self-serving narrative around the dinner table. Shifting to consistent, systemic kindness is more than writing a check and getting a tote bag. Finding and giving love is, of course, the “impossible dream” we all seek.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
