Find your Heatsong

Mattie's Message

“I believe that religion should be a structural framework to strengthen faith, rather than an organized force to divide, or even conquer...I believe that we should never use our religion, our faith, our spirituality, or even our choice of non-believing, as a reason or basis to diminish the freedom or rights of another person...”

                                          Mattie J.T. Stepanek

My friend, Ethel, brought me this quote yesterday. Mattie Stepanek, poet, essayist, and peace pilgrim, died one month before his fourteenth birthday from a rare form of muscular dystrophy that had also taken his siblings. In those few years, he packed a lifetime of work in the field of peacemaking and bridge-building among races, cultures and religions. He considered himself to be an emissary to the world regarding how we should live knowing that we, too, will die one day. His life and his words remind me of the Cat Stevens song, “Boy with the Moon and Star on his Head,” the last line of which says, “I'll tell you everything I've learned, and Love is all...he said.”

Mattie's message is one of coming together, of spreading love and acceptance of people regardless of race, religion, or any other category or label that we might devise to separate us. We were talking about this yesterday in the spirituality group. About the way we humans develop pat descriptive labels that we slap on people, put them in a box and set it on the shelf...done! Labels like, “angry black woman,” or “gay,” or “bi-polar,” or, “retarded”, or just plain “crazy.” Our label then becomes the totality of that complex and complicated, intricately woven and miraculously created human being. Like books on a shelf, we can alphabetize and categorize and never have to think about them again.

Mattie especially didn't like the way we use our religious beliefs to separate us. Instead, he said, “The structured rituals of our particular faith should serve as a support during crisis, pain and difficult times in life, not as a battle cry.” We should all listen to the voice of one who lived close to the bone his whole, short life, and did more than most of us ever will to further the cause of peace.

“...Everyone in the whole wide world,

has a special Heartsong.

If you believe in magical, musical hearts,

and if you believe you can be happy,

then you, too, will hear your Heartsong.”

                          Mattie Stepanek (Heartsong)

                                        In the spirit,

                                            Jane