Douglas Fisher

Years ago I attended Sekou Sundiata’s one-man show “blessing the boats” – the story of Sundiata’s journey through hard-living-induced long-term hypertension, kidney failure, dialysis, and transplant, with a lot of emotional and spiritual flesh around those bare bones of a story line. What moved me most about the story, I think, was his absolute reliance on others, acknowledged in the fore, if however briefly. Sundiata’s was a story of personal resurrection enabled by connectedness with others – “unearned grace” as he says — ranking right up there with the story of the paralytic found in Mark 2, and Luke, and the like – but in this case, I was present for the telling of it, so in my heart it ranks even higher.

You can find a short summary, in Sundiata’s own words, at http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~dfisher/DougsArchetypes/BlessTheBoats.html. Midway down, opening with “But the story of how I got the transplant is the most enduring”, is the portion that began the tears – we’d laughed and cringed, and now cried, but not tears of sadness, I think, though perhaps some of the tears stemmed from longing. Sundiata’s resurrection from hard-living (and I’m acknowledging an imperfect memory here) is very much on the sidelines in “blessing the boats” – it’s the resurrection from the “hole” of despair to Sundiata’s “inkling that there was something fresh and compelling in my personal story”, enabled by friends, that is front and center.

Sundiata’s story is in my Web folder because it’s something that I speak during yearly public readings at Vanderbilt, together with excerpts from Shirley Chisholm’s “Unbought and Unbossed” on the role of women in politics and from MLK’s sermon “The Drum-Major Instinct”. Each of these readings recognizes the importance of connectedness and of following (Sundiata went along for the ride , but all of these readings reject false humility as anything but a manifestation of broken ego, though in MLK’s sermon, you have to wait until the very end to see where he really stands on that. Sometimes you are supposed to lead. I think too, that possibly, none/few of us have a drum-major instinct per se, but rather we have an instinct to belong and contribute, which is sometimes perverted by the broken ego into “the only way that I’ll belong is to be in charge” — if our species has any fatal flaws, one might be that we promote, at times, those with deep, but masked, insecurities to the top. 

Last week I learned that Sekou Sundiata had died back in July 2007, just as I was starting my time at NSF – you can Web search – Sekou Sundiata obit. The discovery saddened me. Here is to depending on others Mr. Sundiata, and to shining. RIP

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“None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness and into the light”. (Dean Koontz, One Door Away From Heaven)

“Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.” - This Momentous Day, H.R. White