RESILIENCE
Until Tested, Can We Really Know How Resilient We’ll Be?
As I reflected on this week’s prompt several stories emerged.
I had a friend in Bible school who went to Haiti for his internship year. I myself had gone to Puerto Rico that year, a neighboring island in the Caribbean. When we met several months later — he came to visit while renewing his visa — he shared a brief anecdote to describe his experience there.
He said that when we’re in school at this isolated campus, studying and going to classes is like a popsicle stick being dipped and re-dipped in chocolate, layer after layer so that after a while it is quite substantive. But hold it over a hot fire and in two minutes it all melts off.
For many Americans, our lives are like that stick dipped in chocolate. We may be aware that a billion people go to bed hungry each day, but it really never touches us because there’s an unreality to it.
I’ve been reading a lot of Solzhenitsyn lately, Nobel laureate who wrote numerous books about the horrors of life under Stalin. His Gulag Archipelago is a massive account of what was taking place in the prison camps of Siberia. If you prefer a novella-length book his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a great starting point.
Solzhenitsyn was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature not because he simply wrote well, but also because of his commitment to be a voice for those whose voices were not being heard.
Closer to home, I live in Duluth, Minnesota, the home of Commander David Wheat, who spent seven years as a captive POW at the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp. Several years ago a statue was commissioned to honor him. I was present when it was unveiled at a ceremony in 2015.
One of the speakers that day had flown in from Texas, Dr. James R. Tuorila, a licensed psychologist who learned about the life of POWs by listening to their stories. The theme of his doctoral dissertation was “Humanity in the Face of Inhumanity: The POW’s Search For Meaning Through Suffering.”
His research showed him that there seemed to be three common denominators amongst those who survived the exceptionally harsh treatment as POWs in WW2 on the Asian front.
1. Having grown up through the depression they were made tougher and learned how to stay strong on less food. 2. Belief in God. 3. The conviction that someone has to survive in order to tell the stories of what happened, what people are capable of doing to other human beings.
I had a chance to interview Commander Wheat as an assignment for the local historical society. He did not grow up in the Great Depression, but he did believe in God and had a deep conviction that someone had to survive in order to tell the story of that horror these human beings were inflicting on fellow human beings.
This conviction didn’t come from a book. It was birthed in his heart by this experience. I shared the story of Commander David Wheat and His Seven-Year Stay at the Hanoi Hilton on my personal blog in 2015 and here on Medium in 2018. This anecdote from my visit with him is the one that most moved me.
The worst sound in the prison was not that of the jailer’s keys, but the sound of other men being broken through the horrors perpetrated by their captors. Hearing grown men whimpering like babies and crying out for their mothers was heart-breaking. Despite the Pavlovian reaction generated by the keys Wheat said he would prefer to have been the one tortured than to have to hear the sound of others being thus inflicted.
As Dr. Tuorila learned, resilience came from that the deep-seated motivation to tell the story of what was happening there. I myself believe that for each of us, this is somehow at the heart of our own resilience. In some deep way resilience is associated with purpose and motivation. This is why I believe we must learn how to write well, so we can better articulate our own stories, stories that need to be heard.
No story is too small. Including yours.