Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

“Young Achievers”

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

March 16, 2008 

Last year about this time I read a series of articles in the Daily Progress about young people who had done extraordinary things.  I can no longer remember the name of the series, but it highlighted about 10 young achievers, high school students chosen in a nominating and selection process involving teachers and community leaders.  These young people were already acting as leaders in the community and in their schools.  They were organizers, volunteers, activists, and do-ers:  peer-group role models of the best kind.   

After the first few stories, I started to notice that the young people had other things in common, too.  All but one of them were white.  All were from families in relatively comfortable economic circumstances; more than half of them attended private schools.  None of them had paying jobs; as far as I could tell from the profiles, none of them was responsible for caring for younger siblings.  Their achievements were the kind that takes a lot of time outside school.  Their home environments seemed to be safe and supportive.   

I was proud of what those young people have done so early in their lives.  But I couldn’t help wondering:  Do you have to be privileged to do things that are worthy of attention?  I wondered about what kind of achievement was being selected for notice, too. 

Does achievement always mean doing something public on a large scale?  Other kinds of lives might call for equally extraordinary effort, given to very different kinds of success.  But we don’t read about them in the newspapers. 

A few weeks later, I was reminded of my questions by a small moment in the Valedictorian’s speech at Garner’s Charlottesville High School graduation ceremony.  She wondered aloud why she, and not some others of her classmates, should be considered worthy to give a speech at Commencement for everyone to hear.  After all, she said, “all I’ve done is spend four years with my nose in a book.”  She mentioned classmates who had lived rich and vivid lives outside the academic realm—some funny and some significant—who might also have something worth hearing to say. 

Again, it’s not taking anything away from her academic achievement, which was considerable, to wonder if we might not also have something to learn from a student who reflects a very different kind of dedication and persistence. What is “notable?”  What makes a person worthy of being noticed, being lifted up for admiration? 

Some people, adults and youths, exceed what is expected of them.  Their own natural gifts may be greater than their peers, but more often it is a matter of determination and discipline, courage and commitment, patience and persistence.  Those are qualities of the young achievers, and they well deserve our admiration.  Other circumstances are helpful too:  Connection with adults who support them and help them reach their potential; the availability of resources to tap into, a community or social setting that welcomes their activity.   

Who we notice, though, depends on what kind of life we think of as normal.  The same qualities of discipline, perseverance, imagination, and courage are required of the young woman who organizes a new effort to reduce the non-recyclable solid waste coming out of a school district’s cafeterias—and of the young woman who wakes up with her baby in a crib beside her bed each morning, gets the child fed and off to her grandmother’s house for the day, then goes to school, where she manages to keep a straight B average for three solid years after becoming a mother.  But only one of the two is likely to appear in a newspaper article about young people. 

We are inclined to notice young people who have economic and social advantages, and live in relative security about their own personal safety and comfort, when they exceed our expectations about what they will do with their discretionary time. Young people whose greatest expectation is survival—or for whom survival itself is a remarkable achievement—are worthy of our notice when they exceed expectations as well.   

The boy who makes sure that he and his brothers and sisters are fed and dressed and off to school every day, because their alcoholic parents aren’t able to take part in any kind of morning routine, achieves something worth noticing every day.  The girl who successfully juggles schoolwork, singing in the church choir, and a twenty-hour-a-week grocery store job her family needs her to keep, achieves something worth noticing.  The child who wrestles every day with physical, emotional, or cognitive disabilities, never giving up, often maintaining a level of effort that’s hard for most of us even to imagine, is doing something worth noticing.  Who notices any of them?  Where do we read about their achievements? 

As I was preparing for this sermon, Pastor Bates suggested I talk with his friend Bishop Michael Jackson, who in addition to his Culpeper church has a prison ministry with teens and young adults.  Bishop Jackson told me about a young woman who called him up last week, someone he’d been seeing regularly at a facility in Culpeper and then once a month in Richmond after she was transferred there.  She called to say that she’s been released early to live in a group home, and that she’d like to start attending church if he can work out a ride for her.  “That’s a success story,” he said.  Then he told me about his own cousin.  “He was a gang-banger in D.C.,” he said, “and then one day he was shot in the face because he had traveled from Northeast to Northwest.  He lost his eyesight.  But since then he’s found Jesus, and now he’s making a living as a musician.”  That new life is a success story worth noticing, he told me. 

I told the Bishop about a young man of our own, who graduated from high school and our church youth group, then made some bad decisions and ended up serving a six-year prison sentence.  At the end of this semester he’ll receive his Associates Degree in Business Administration, earned in classes it took him and his family two years of persistence to arrange.  “Praise God,” Bishop Jackson said, “that’s a wonderful achievement.”  And so it is. 

Every person is worthy of notice.  We can find extraordinary courage, endurance, patience, strength, and commitment in every segment of society, in every kind of life.  What is worthy of notice in each of us is who we become as we engage with the circumstances of our own real life.  We are all worthy of attention. 

We are all worthy of attention!  Each human being is precious. 

We are interested in the achievements of the young people who are written about in articles like the ones I read last year—and I expect there will be a new series this year—not just because they deserve recognition, but also because they have something of value to teach us, something about the potential in all our youth and young adults, even something about how we might shape our own lives and affect our communities for the better if we focus our energies and passions and gifts.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay attention to the kind of young people who appeared in those articles last year; only that we also have much to learn from our youth and young adults who live with considerable adversity in a very challenging world, and who manage in the midst of all that to live well, with integrity and with grace.  I’d like to read about them, too. 

Some young people have more than just challenging circumstances to live with; they face real danger every day.  Geoffrey Canada is a children’s advocate who has directed and created programs to fight violence and the other pressures that threaten children in New York and other urban environments.  In the reading we shared earlier, Canada makes the point that if we want to learn how to prevent violence among young people, we need to learn from the real experts:  the children.  Our children, the children who often must find ways to negotiate a dangerous world that we only think we know about, have much to teach us.  We need to listen to what their real lives are like.   

What can we learn from a child who has had to create “safety plans” to get to class or lunch without being threatened with robbery or intimidation, or getting caught up in someone else’s violent confrontation?  What can we learn from a teenager who has managed to stay out of the gangs that dominate his neighborhood and seem to be invisible to the adults who are in charge of his school?  What can we learn from children whose parents would rather not hear about the troubles they face at school—or whose parents order them to “get back there and fight like a man” when they’re intimidated—or whose parents have created an atmosphere of fear and the threat of violence at home? 

 
These are “young achievers,” too.  They are not someone else’s children; they are our own—whether they happen to be the ones in our immediate family or not, though some of them surely are.  Anyone who thinks the problem of violence is something only urban children face needs to look more closely at the news—or talk more with our own children. Children living in a dangerous world deserve our attention, our respect, and our assistance.  I’ve been speaking today about children in America, but children all over the world achieve remarkable things every day; some live in constant danger to which we ourselves contribute.  We need to know about them as well. 

“We are not isolated beings, but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to this community, and to each other.”  We live in a world and an age when these words of our chalice lighting are increasingly and concretely true—but they contain both promise and risk.  As we take note of the “young achievers” who aren’t the ones we usually think about, we widen our understanding of who we are connected with.  In this way we increase the possibility that our connections will be ones of nurture, appreciation, and hope. 

So may it be.