Dig deep. Keep-a-goin. Hang in there. Parents try to teach their children those critical lessons, first as toddlers learning to walk, then as first graders learning to read, and well beyond. Perseverance is the character strength that bridges the gap from inspiration to execution. “I think I can, I think I can,” the Little Engine That Could reminds us, until he could.

This month our Heroes section features one such poster child for perseverance:  Louis Braille.  Blinded in a pre-school accident, young Louis never accepted that he would not be able to read.  If he could not see the page, he wondered, wasn’t there another way to bring its meaning to life?  This nineteenth century French boy, who thought he could, ended up developing the system of raised dots that allowed the world’s blind to read.  His perseverance through his own childhood adversity opened doors not just for himself, but for all the world’s blind.

If only we had some of that spirit today.  But wait – we do!  Look at twenty-three-year-old Marissa Koscielski.  As an eighth-grade gymnastics student in Columbus, Ohio, Marissa suffered a back injury that left her paralyzed on the left side from the waist down.  Surgery at the Mayo clinic could not restore her functioning, and she was told a wheel chair would be her fate.  That prognosis she refused to accept.  Stubborn by nature and persistent in adversity, Marissa began designing her own equipment to train herself to walk and run again.  In a long trial and error process, she succeeded, and developed a walker that she now realizes has applicability for many others who suffer mobility challenges – particularly lower limb amputees.

​Marissa has gone on to study Math and Neuroscience at the University of Notre Dame.  But eager to help others get back on their feet again, her graduate work found her starting a company called Enlighten Mobility.  Find out more about her extraordinary story and how one young woman, through perseverance and hope, has become an entrepreneurial force for good.
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The American Founders were surprisingly unanimous in their understanding of educational goals for the young republic:  “common schools” were needed, they insisted, to ensure “the diffusion of knowledge and virtue” among the people. In a republic, where ordinary citizens (not kings or nobles) would write constitutions, elect leaders, formulate laws, constitute juries, and steer the tiller of state, knowledge was the indispensable intellectual base. Diffusion of knowledge, Jefferson wrote, was the means “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, [and] enlarge their minds.”  
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Virtue, however, would provide the moral rudder, and life in a democratic society required it.  The twin goal was to “cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue” so that a youth would come to “understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; to know his rights … and, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed,” Jefferson concluded.

Philosopher Josef Pieper wrote Leisure: The Basis of Culture in 1948, and seventy years later his insights still reward us.  In a culture that enshrines work over play, we are tempted, Pieper said, to reduce all life to purposeful activity energetically pursued.  But human flourishing requires not just effort and socially useful action, but the ability to marvel, behold, and spiritually celebrate.  Leisure is a step beyond the work-a-day world and feeds a quiet wellspring from which we live. 

Watching the sunset in a sea both violet and amber, listening to the distant caw of gulls and waves lapping the shore, drinking in a star-studded sky at the park as a symphony swells  around us, fishing in a quiet pond, meeting the dew in your garden in an early morning walk, waking in a tent on a mountain summit.  Or reading poetry beneath an old oak tree, dancing unobserved, reveling in the cool breeze through an open window as you gaze on a beloved cityscape. 
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Leisure is about allowing oneself to be awash in life’s goodness, celebrating the inherent beauty and mystery of our lives and our world. Philosophers assure us that leisure – which seems to insinuate itself to us naturally in July -- is not the same as idleness.  It is the quiet celebration of the world and life in which we find ourselves.  If work involves effort, leisure involves openness to awe.  This summer, whether your leisure involves quiet reading under a tree, days at the shore, concerts in the park, or fireworks in the night sky, we wish you the joy of an uplifted spirit open to festivity. 

And if you’d like to read more about leisure (under some shady maple tree), pick up a copy of Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture. or check out this article:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture-josef-pieper/   

Did you know there is a “neuroscience of stories”?  Experts in the fields of psychology and neurology are looking at what happens to the human brain when we are told a story.   How does the brain react to this form of verbal communication, particularly when stories are told to a group?  The results affirm something Core Virtues teachers have long intuited: the telling of stories creates a bond, and puts the student audience “on the same wavelength.”  That facilitates communication and promotes harmonious interaction in the classroom.  “It gives us a common language,” one teacher told me. 

We are now learning that this sense of “being on the same wavelength” when you listen to a good story, is literally true.  Research scientists at Princeton University, led by Professor Uri Hasson, want to understand when our “cortical activity” is idiosyncratic (unique to individuals or to subgroups) and when are our responses are shared. Are there times when brain activity synchronizes, facilitating communication? Or is human brain activity largely idiosyncratic? At Professor Hasson’s lab, they’ve been investigating this for years, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and intracranial EEG (iEEG) recording to chart brain activity. 

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.

​April fifteenth is Corrie ten Boom's (1892-1983) one-hundred-twenty-seventh birthday.  She had something to forgive. During World War II, the middle-aged Dutch watchmaker was imprisoned at Ravensbruck concentration camp. Corrie was not Jewish, but for nearly two years, she and her family had hidden Jewish refugees from Nazi occupiers. When the ten Booms were betrayed by a Dutch informant, the S.S. carted the family off to prison, where shortly thereafter, her father died. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the horrific Ravensbruck camp for women, where sadistic guards, starvation, disease, slave labor, and the gas chamber constituted daily life.  Betsie, abused and mocked by guards, died in the camp. In December 1944, Corrie was released--the result of a clerical error.   Buoyed by her faith, Corrie ten Boom spent the rest of her life reflecting on and writing about the meaning of her experience, and speaking about the importance of forgiveness. 

That’s true:  the quality of mercy is not strained, and droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.  It always feels that way to the recipient of mercy, anyway.  We perceive mercy as an unmerited gift from above, and we tend to see the heroically merciful (Buddha, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa) as superhuman:  mild, meek, beyond anger, and detached from the things of this world.  Maybe that’s the reason “mercy” is so hard to cultivate.  We know we should be merciful, but who actually wants to be meek and mild, passionless and detached?   
 
Yet the heroes/heroines we feature this month—those who showed compassion to the wrongdoer or the weak—are anything but mild, aloof and remote individuals.  They are technicolor human beings with passions, energetically engaged in the world, and specifically engaged in service to those in need.

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world
and moral courage so rare.” - Mark Twain
 
Mark Twain’s words from the nineteenth century resonate today.  We live in an age when extreme sports (sky-diving, bungee jumping, snow-boarding, kite-surfing, wake-boarding, to name a few) have soared in popularity, as has the audience for “survivor” style dramas.  We celebrate those who push themselves beyond “safe” in high-risk feats that demand great physical courage.  One thinks, for example, of President George Herbert Walker Bush skydiving on his 90th birthday.  We admire him.  We celebrate physical prowess at the Olympics and elsewhere.  We celebrate it doubly when extraordinary physical courage combines with commitment to others on the battlefield, when brave men and women risk their lives to save others. Medals of Honor herald their sacrifice.

“I have been extra good this year, so I have a long list of presents I want,” young Sally writes to Santa Claus in the TV classic A Charlie Brown Christmas. “Please note the size and color of each item, and send as many as possible. If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself. Just send money. How about tens and twenties?”

Every December, millions tune in to watch Charlie Brown struggle to find the true meaning of Christmas. The program is a holiday favorite partly because it tackles a problem we all know to be true. Too often, this time of year seems to be all about getting gifts and putting up decorations. Santa Claus, with his bottomless sack of toys, becomes the symbol-in-chief for a month-long shopping fest.

​If you’re searching for the real Christmas spirit, take a look at Saint Nicholas, the Christian bishop who lived during the fourth century in what is now Turkey, and whose name we associate so much with Santa Claus.

There is an old story about Nicholas and his remarkable generosity. When he was a young man living in his hometown of Patara, word reached him that a nearby family had fallen on hard times. The desperate parents were too poor to provide dowries so that their three daughters could marry. They decided that the only way to keep their children from starving was to sell them into servitude.

Nicholas put a few gold coins he had inherited into a small bag and, one night when the family was sleeping, tossed it through a window into their home. It was enough money to provide a dowry for the oldest daughter, who was soon married.

When Nicholas saw the effects of his gift, he returned and tossed another bag of gold through the window so the second daughter could be married. When he came several nights later with a third bag, the tearful father was waiting to see who their secret benefactor was. Nicholas begged him not to tell anyone, but his act of generosity set him on the path to becoming the world’s most famous gift giver.

Nicholas was a man of God who worked tirelessly for his flock. But the most remarkable part of his story comes after his death. People began to tell stories about the bishop and his power to change people’s hearts. Because all the good he did was a kind of miracle, they told stories of the miraculous—stories of a man who could accomplish things no ordinary person could.

One old tale tells of Nicholas when he was living in the town of Myra, on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, during a time of severe famine. Hearing that some ships carrying grain from Alexandria to Constantinople had stopped off at Myra’s port, he hurried to ask the captains to sell some of their cargo. “We can’t,” they told him. “If we arrive in Constantinople with less than a full hold, we must answer for it.”

Nicholas led them through Myra’s streets to show them the desperate people. “Trust in God,” he said. “Look into your hearts and do what you know to be right.”

The captains talked it over and decided to unload a portion of their grain. They sailed off knowing they would have some explaining to do in Constantinople. And yet, the story goes, when they reached port, they were astounded to find just as much grain in their holds as when they had left Alexandria.

Such are the stories of Nicholas that have come down to us through the centuries. With time, he became known as the Wonderworker. He was an international phenomenon in the Old World. By the end of the fifteenth century, more than 2,500 churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and works of art had been dedicated to him in Western Europe.

His reputation suffered during the Reformation, when Protestants turned against traditions surrounding the saints. The most zealous reformers took hammers to sculptures of Nicholas and other saints. They smashed stained-glass windows depicting their deeds. Pages containing lives of the saints were used to polish boots or wrap fish.

Nicholas was driven from many churches, but he could not be driven from people’s hearts. Over the centuries, something extraordinary happened. He moved into homes and became a hero of the hearth.

In America, of course, he transformed into the champion bringer of gifts. Those three bags of gold became Santa’s sack of toys. Yes, Santa Claus (whose name comes from Sinterklass, the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas) is sometimes overexposed and exploited. At his best, though, he stands for virtues that Saint Nicholas championed: generosity, selflessness, largeness of spirit.

​So if we’re looking for models of generosity, let’s not forget the original Saint Nick. Santa Claus, in a very real sense, is the manifestation of his decision to give to others. May the good old bishop help us remember and keep the true spirit of Christmas.
 
 
Bill Bennett is the author of a new edition of The True Saint Nicholas: Why He Matters to Christmas (Howard Books, 2018).

​Last month, my husband and I hiked the Camino in Spain.  The thousand-year-old pilgrimage road is a lot like life.  Parts are densely forested, only a pinprick of light visible through an arcade of trees.  Some sections stretch flat and open, an easy day’s hike.  Others are uphill – old Roman roads so rocky, muddy, and slick that to lift your gaze from the stones ahead invites a fall. Then there are summits that afford mountain views over vineyards, olive groves, and ultimately, the verdant pastures of Galicia. Glorious heights that allow you to look back and marvel at it all.  Awash in gratitude.