This I Believe

I shall never forget a lesson in responsibility my mother taught me. She showed me that a younger brother learning to throw a baseball was really not responsible for breaking the bay window of the parsonage. She told me, “You should have known better than to play catch with him so close to the house. You are your brother’s keeper.”

I was fortunate in having fine parents who insisted that I participate fully in the work and play of building a successful family life. This meant doing my best at school, working at odd jobs, attending church to hear my father preach, and being responsible for my every act. There were six children. As a preacher’s family we moved often, a sometimes-painful process, but it taught us how to make adjustments easily and find new friends. To go to college was a privilege to be earned because there wasn’t much more than enough money for the family necessities. Life was always good and hopeful but involved many sacrifices.

I believe the family is the chief factor in shaping our habits of behavior, whether they are good or bad. Believing this, I take my responsibilities as a parent seriously. Because of my own wonderful family, I feel that I am the most fortunate of men. I have an able, thoughtful, and yet, gay wife, and four lively, interesting children entrusted to my care. In them I see the wonder and uniqueness of the human personality and spirit in all its luminosity.

I believe in the perfectibility of man and in his essential goodness. Adventurous, fast-moving years in the study and practice of medicine, in teaching and research, and in administrative work have given me intimate contact with all kinds and conditions of men. Almost all of them were good people. No one of them was really bad at heart. All of them were trying to find happiness, and to accomplish this—paraphrasing Justice Holmes—they were fighting consciously or unconsciously for the kind of a world they wanted.

I believe that I can best find security within myself and with my God if I explore our always-changing world of men and nature unafraid, giving of myself freely along the way. An active exploration of the world of nature and of men, of their ideas, ideals, and moral values, can lead me to reflection and toward understanding and maturity of judgment, and even, perhaps, to wisdom and to truth. I believe that creative people are traveling ever-brighter roads which converge toward an ever fuller understanding of man and his place in the universe, of nature and of God, and toward a better world.

I believe that men who are free to be creative are solving the age-old problems of how to find security without losing freedom. While history is a story of man’s successes and failures in achieving the good life, the record shows a steady, though often interrupted, rise toward higher ground. I have faith that men who have lost their freedom to an all-powerful state will one day break their chains and be free again to develop their potentialities to the fullest and to seek God and worship Him as they choose. I am grateful to be an American in this period of the greatest renaissance of the human spirit in history, when all that we hold dear is being put to the ultimate test.

Finally, I believe that if we keep faith with ourselves and our God, no power on Earth can destroy us.