My wish for you is that you continue to be who you are and how you are to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.   Maya Angelou

Each human life is special and sacred. If we truly believe that it is more likely that we will not insist on imprinting our own beliefs and dreams on any person. Instead we will learn to honor our differences and strive to insure that every person who walks on this earth has the opportunity to be whomever he/she seeks to be. 

Sadly we humans have a tendency to judge people by our own personal beliefs rather than attempting to understand theirs. I suppose that I am more open to the multiplicity of human thought because of the influence of my mother. She was a devout Catholic who read her Bible every single day. She died holding a statue of the Virgin Mary, in whom she had placed great trust during her lifetime. That being said, she was incredibly open to the idea that religious beliefs are very individual. She did not think it was important to force her thoughts with regard to God on others. In fact, she encouraged me and my brothers to decide for ourselves how we thought of a divine spirit. She believed that the variety of religions in the world corresponded to our cultural differences and that God was God in many different forms. She was even open to a continuum of religious belief that ran from atheism to agnosticism and the many religious sects that humans accept. In the end, she made her choice to remain faithful to the Catholicism of her youth but she did not believe that it was her task to force others to agree with her. 

My mother taught me the importance of seeing that it is kindness that is a true indicator of a person’s character. She saw that many highly religious people were ugly when it came to their treatment of other people while those with no beliefs at all were often intensely loving souls. She encouraged me and my brothers to follow our hearts as long as we treasured each person as an important figure in this world. 

People like Mother Teresa and Gandhi were Mama’s icons even as each of them represented different faiths. What made them great in her mind was their love of fellow humans regardless of status or religious and political beliefs. She was never impressed with titles or wealth or power. She wanted us to be helpers in the world who were blind to differences that she believed did not matter. 

There is little wonder that my brothers and I are quite individual. We grew up knowing that we were free to follow our own instincts about how to live. I have continued with my Catholic faith just as my mother did. One of my brothers joined a Protestant church and is a faithful parishioner. The other brother believes in God but not in organized religious groups. He worships in his own way as an agnostic.

The same is true of the roles that we chose to follow. I became a teacher and eventually a school administrator in spite of efforts from outside forces urging me to consider medicine or law. One brother became an electrical engineer and spent his entire career working as a NASA contractor. The youngest brother earned a degree in marketing and then proceeded to the Houston Fire Department Academy where he had a long and fulfilling career as a firefighter and eventually a District Chief. Our mother was over the moon with pride for each of us and happy that we had found the niche by which we were able to bring our talents and our kindness to others. 

I suppose that my mother taught me to never be a busybody spouting indignation over people who chose to be very different from the cultural norms. She always insisted that our true goal in life was to find the goodness in everyone. Of course she understood that we might also encounter evil but she reminded us to be careful about judging too harshly or too quickly. She did not want us to live by prejudices that precluded the possibility that even personal choices that we do not understand more often that not are simply the result of our human variety. The yardstick that she gave us for interacting with our fellow humans was to look for each person’s willingness to love and embrace others. 

My mother was a first generation citizen of the United States. She suffered the slings and arrows of prejudice against herself and her family. They were judged simply because they appeared to be different. Her answer to the taunts was to ignore them and to prove her own worth with a giving heart. She did that for all of her life and so that is how I try to be even when meanness seems to be on the rise. I do my best to follow her example and love people for who and how they are. If more of us followed that ideal the world would be a most remarkable place.