“For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad….” The traditional wedding vows lay bare the meaning of faithfulness: to stand by the beloved in bright and bountiful times, and in privation and peril. “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,” J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us.

Faithfulness (an attribute of both love and justice) is a hard virtue for us moderns. Contemporary culture prizes the individual and autonomy. Should we really be bound to each other or some abstract ideal in good times and in bad? For better or for worse? That’s fine for dogs, maybe, but what if such bonds seem to anchor us to a dead weight?

Maybe we can learn something from dogs (the traditional symbols of fidelity in art). This month our K-6 literary selections feature the true story of Hachiko, the Akita companion of a Japanese professor. From 1923 to 1925, Hachi waited each day at the Shibuya Train station in Tokyo for his master to return from work. The young dog was daily rewarded with the embrace of Dr. Ueno, who showered him with affection and treats. But the professor’s sudden death in 1925 could not be explained to his canine companion. For the next ten years, until the end of his own life, Hachiko went daily to the train station to stand vigil for his master. Vendors and those who frequented the station fed and sustained him, but he would not be removed and died standing vigil.

Only a dog would do that we think. And what good was it? He missed out on his whole life watching for someone who never came. Still, a bronze statue in front of the station honors his faithfulness and young couples pledge their love to each other before it. And, there is something in the human spirit that honors this sacrifice. Did he lose his life or find it?

I have two friends (one on each coast) married for more than sixty years each, who are caring in the home for their physically failing husbands (92 and 85 respectively). The men both have dementia and are increasingly non-verbal and immobile. Neither woman leaves the home overnight anymore. Neither travels. Both rely on a network of family and friends to assist occasionally, but they are on duty 24-7 and living out what many of us think of as “for worse” in their 80s and 90s. And what strikes me about both these remarkable women is that neither complains, and both have a joyful spirit. “I took the good times. I’ll take the bad,” one of them told me. “I am so grateful for his life and that we're together,” said the other. To me it seems they have each become more fully themselves through their faithfulness, which in this case involves both service and sacrifice.

Not everyone could do this, and not all spouses should, but faithfulness to the beloved, to our ideals, and our communities remains a timeless virtue. “We are born to unite with our fellow man and to join in community with the human race,” Cicero wrote. Could he have envisioned the faithfulness of women such as these? Or the example of our “heroine” this month, Annie Sullivan, who gave her whole life to make possible the full life and growth of Helen Keller? These role models "hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles," and we are all better for it.

PS: My eighty-two-year-old friend and her eighty-five-year-old husband just adopted a puppy. 

​Her name is Grace.

Dr. Ted Stevenson, attending the dying in the Camp’s hospital, exemplified courage when he refused to falsify death certificates.  He had been indicating “malnutrition” and “starvation” as causes of death, but was told by his captors (who feared Allied accusations of war crimes) that those were no longer acceptable, and other causes should be substituted.  Dr. Stevenson dug in his heels and said “no.”  He risked being carted off to Torture Central, Fort Santiago, by refusing to do so, but found himself thrown into the camp jail instead.  

For women and children struggling to survive, courage was closely linked to imagination and hope.  The topic of food dominated every conversation, and many internees had taken to writing recipes and planning menus, as a substitute for actual food.  My mother kept a thin-lined, spiral-bound notebook with more than three hundred seventy recipes written in tiny script.  Her January entries were for Pineapple Raisin Ice Cream, Stuffed Pork Shoulder, Ham Pancakes, and Chocolate Mint Roll.  Some of the little children played restaurant.  When asked for their order by their big sister waitress, one little girl replied she’d like a sandwich.  “What kind?” big sister asked.  “I’d like a sandwich with some bread on it,” said the four year old, all earnestness. (There had been no bread for eighteen months.)

Ex-internee Curtis Brooks has written: “we shared a common moral experience, the loss of home and possessions, the loss of country in the defeat of ’42, the almost palpable sense of waiting. Waiting for the liberation which we all believed in…[we were] a community with a single purpose, to survive to the day of liberation.”
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Survival in January 1945 required every ounce of courage those internees could muster.  At a 2015 conference in Manila celebrating the 70th anniversary of Santo Tomas’s liberation, surviving internees (most of whom were children at the time of liberation) described circumstances at the end.  A high-school student in the audience asked:  “I struggle with depression, and sometimes think of suicide.  Were you ever tempted to suicide?”  Joan Bennett Chapman, the presenting internee, seemed genuinely taken aback by the question.  Then said, “No.  Never.  We were certain our boys would be back for us.  Our job was to hold on to hope.”  They did so with courage. 

Mary Beth Klee​.  Mary Beth is the author of Leonore's Suite, a novel about the teen experience of internment at Santo Tomas.  Forthcoming February 2020.

Great age-appropriate stewardship opportunities can be found in local communities too.  When children work on local litter pick-up days, they experience first-hand what it means to be good stewards of their environment (and learn a valuable lesson about what NOT to do with trash).  When they donate or organize canned goods for the neighborhood food pantry, they learn what it means to be “my brother’s keeper.” When they thank service members or first-responders (with written notes or treats), they extend not just gratitude, but care to those who keep them safe.

Too often we’re tempted to downplay these important acts of daily stewardship.  Why not have young children march for action on climate change?  Or write letters to Congressmen about gun control? Or contact state reps about minimum wage legislation?  Because there is a difference between stewardship and political activism.  Elementary schools (with parents on both sides of any given issue) should avoid the latter. Children have much to learn--academic and moral--and at this age, the important lessons of stewardship are best learned through the things they daily see, touch, and control.  First and foremost, even as adults, quality lives are mostly about stewardship of the specific tasks entrusted to our care. 
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The classic nursery rhyme “For want of a nail” drives home that very point.  The rhyme is based on the cautionary tale of King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485).  Undersupplied and in haste, the cobbler failed to shoe the king’s horse properly, trusting that three nails rather than four would do the trick. In the heat of battle, the horseshoe flew off; the steed stumbled, threw its rider, and bolted. The King’s men, already in retreat, left their sovereign to his ignominious fate, and the battle was lost. Shakespeare has the fallen Richard cry out: “My horse, my horse! A kingdom for a horse!” Mother Goose recounts it this way:

Not surprisingly, patterns of human brain activity are idiosyncratic in various situations, even when individuals are gathered as a group and even when they are listening to a lecture.  But when people in a group are told a story (such as one from “The Moth” radio hour)  the group exhibits synchronized brain activity.  For the time of the story, “brain coupling” takes place. Patterns of brain activity from the speaker are echoed or repeated in the minds of the listening audience, and the audience, composed of any number of individuals, aligns to the same wavelength.  That is a remarkable occurrence, and that synchronization dramatically facilitates human communication.
 
Hasson’s lab conducted all sorts of experiments to determine whether such brain wave alignment had to do with sound of voice, sense of words, or a specific language.  But when a given story was translated into Russian for another group of native speakers, the scientists got the same results:  brain wave patterns that were both synchronized from speaker to audience, and nearly identical to patterns generated by the English speaker.  (You can watch Dr. Hasson explain this in his TED talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDhlOovaGrI)
 
What does this sophisticated research—brought to a wider audience by Arthur Brooks in his new book Love Your Enemies—have to do with character education, the Core Virtues Morning Gathering, and ultimately, creating a more civil and fruitful society?  A lot.
 
Go back to the month just past when our focus was on forgiveness.  Imagine (or recall) the second grade teacher at Morning Gathering who begins to read Robert Coles’s The Story of Ruby Bridges to her fidgeting class.  We all know that within seconds, the fidgeting dies down, and twenty little minds and hearts are tuned in to the story of the brave six-year-old girl in Louisiana, who, because of her skin color, was unwanted as a student in an all-white public school.  The first African-American child to integrate the school in 1960, Ruby Bridges had to be escorted (for her own protection) by federal marshals while a crowd jeered, booed, spat and threw things.  Once inside she prayed God would “forgive these people. Because even if they say those bad things, they don’t know what they are doing.” That took courage.  That took largeness of heart.  Every child in the room hangs on each word, identifying with the young protagonist.  They are on the same wavelength. 
 
From then on, when the teacher points to the wisdom of forgiving classmates who may have called them names or unintentionally hurt them on the playground, they have a common frame of reference. Now when they talk about the need to respect classmates regardless of their skin color or clothes or the place they were born, the class has a common role model, and a shared commitment to higher goals based on a real-life story that moved minds and hearts in the same direction.