Communication—the human connection—is the key to personal and career success.
Paul J. Meyer
The art of successful communication has everything to do with connection. Our ability to share and compare thoughts and ideas with others depends a great deal on the bond we forge with the people we seek to communicate with. The closer the bond, the easier it is for us to understand them and the more open they are to receiving what we have to say.
Unfortunately, the year I graduated from high school—1968—was one of the most divisive periods in America’s history. Our nation lacked connection, which led to tragic results. I remember vividly a moment a couple of months before my high school graduation. It was April 5, a Friday morning. We’d watched the evening news the night before, but my parents hadn’t listened to the radio or talked to anyone outside our home for the rest of the night. I had been up late and gotten up early in the morning to do homework in my bedroom. I walked downstairs and saw my father sitting at the dining room table in his pajamas and bathrobe. For the first time in years, I saw that he was crying. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I am so upset,” my father said. “Martin Luther King has been assassinated.”
I knew this was an awful blow to my father because he admired Dr. King tremendously. In addition to hosting Dr. King in our home and escorting him to the graduation of the first black student from Little Rock’s Central High School, my father had visited him in a New York hospital after a deranged woman had stabbed him.
I was simply shocked. I sat at the table with my dad, where we prayed and discussed what a terrible time it was for America.
Two months later, this scene played out a second time in an eerily similar fashion. On Wednesday morning, June 6, I again walked downstairs and found my father sitting at the dining room table, tears in his eyes. He told me that US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy had been shot early that morning after winning the California Democratic primary.
This time, my first response was anger. “That’s crazy!” I said. “What is going on? What is wrong with America? America is going to hell.” The next morning, Robert Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.
These events coincided with the start of a trip I was to take to England for a summer work-study experience before starting classes at Antioch. I’d arranged to stay with a friend in New York City before flying on to England. I canceled my plans to spend time with my friends in New York and instead went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Kennedy’s body lay in repose. I sat for hours near his closed casket in one of the front-row pews. For much of that time I was unaware of the people around me. I felt completely alone.
I was not only angry but also overwhelmingly sad. Just a few days earlier, I’d watched this energetic man on TV speaking about the importance of civil rights and the changes he hoped to make as president. My close high school friend Tom McQuain was a volunteer for Kennedy’s campaign and had recruited me to help on occasion. I looked up to Kennedy and felt he was the best hope for our country’s future. Now, suddenly, he was gone.
God seemed absent as well. For years my faith had wavered between belief and doubt, plagued by fears and questions and damaged by inconsistencies I saw in the attitudes and actions of members of my father’s congregations. As I grew older, I drifted away from my faith. I met an atheist friend who influenced me. I did not rebel openly against religion or my parents’ views about God—my father was a pastor, after all—but I quietly pushed Him out of my life. For a long time, I felt no link to the Lord, no sense of communication or presence.
As I sat in front of Robert Kennedy’s lifeless body, the spiritual void in my own life had never felt more pronounced.
God, where are you? I prayed. What’s wrong with you? How could you allow this to happen? I thought, Maybe people are right. Maybe there is no God. It was a bleak time for the nation and for me personally. I entered my college years excited about the opportunity to grow and learn, yet with many questions about my place in the world and what I believed.
I left New York for England, where I had been accepted, along with a host of other college students, to join the Winchester Excavation Committee directed by prominent archaeologist Martin Biddle. For the next twelve weeks, I would assist in one of the world’s pioneering efforts in urban archaeology. I was of course the only deaf student at the site. When our training started, I had difficulty understanding what was being said. I was thrown immediately into survival mode—I had to act quickly or I would fall hopelessly behind. There was no time for worry or fear. I went from one student to the next, asking, “Hey, can you help me?” One after another was either reluctant to cooperate or hard to lipread, so I moved on.
Finally, after about two hours, I approached a huge, bearded student from Northeastern University named Randy. When I quickly explained my predicament and asked if he could help, he said, “Sure.” He was a nice guy of Italian descent who gestured often as he talked. His movements always seemed to match his words, which made him easy to understand. Randy also listened well, watching my face and lips closely. He was a huge help to me.
My team leader, Carolyn Heighway, was about six years older than me. I walked up and introduced myself. I had a little trouble lipreading her despite her British accent. She was easier to understand than Martin Biddle, who smoked a pipe and often talked with a pipe in his mouth.
Carolyn and those of us on her team were responsible for the ruins of the bishop’s palace behind Winchester Cathedral. Our job was to discover and identify what was below what had already been excavated. In addition to careful digging, we took photos and cataloged everything that was uncovered.
I liked the work, but after a few weeks I began to grow restless. I didn’t want to spend the whole summer in one spot. I approached Carolyn and asked if I could take on other responsibilities as well. She was reluctant.
“Paul, when I explain something to you,” she said, “I have to explain it in more detail, two or three times more than for other people.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t agree. You tell me exactly the same thing that you say to the other students. It just takes a little bit longer because you’re more conscious of talking precisely and of your facial expressions. The number of words is the same.”
Carolyn’s face registered surprise as she thought about it. “Yes, yes,” she said. “You are right.”
I was fortunate that Carolyn was open to having her opinion challenged by a member of her team. She put me in charge of the water pump, which meant that I arrived an hour and a half before the other students every morning to drain any water that had seeped into our dig sites overnight. I took satisfaction in the new responsibility, and Carolyn came to appreciate that she could depend on me. As the summer went on, she entrusted me with more duties. I found myself communicating more easily with Carolyn. We had formed a connection.
I also formed a connection with a student named Alicia Campi. Alicia was from Smith College and has since become an expert on Mongolia and served as a diplomat in Ulaanbaatar. She was easy to understand—when we talked, she looked me in the eye, enunciated clearly, and had an expressive face. If I didn’t understand something she said, she rephrased her words instead of repeating the same thing. Alicia was my best friend that summer. If I missed anything, she let me know what was going on, including any gossip about the other students.
I wanted to see a London discotheque, so one Saturday I persuaded Alicia to join me on a visit. We missed the last train that could take us home and were stuck in London. We walked the streets all night and then attended a worship service at Westminster Abbey the next morning. Westminster has been the site of numerous coronations and royal weddings as well as the resting place for kings, queens, and other notable figures from England’s history. While sitting inside, I sensed the powerful concentration of past, present, and future, all in one place. Although my faith was tenuous at the time, I also sensed the presence of God.
In just three months that summer, we excavated material from the 1800s all the way down to Roman ruins, a period of more than a thousand years. One day another team discovered a human skull in the kitchen of a bishop’s palace. The skull was from the Anglo-Saxon period, sometime before 1066. Everyone was excited and speculated on what had happened. Did this poor man get into a fight with the cook? Or was he the cook himself, and the bishop didn’t like his food? There was no way to know.
My time at Westminster was a fulfilling adventure. Whether our job was digger, note-taker, photographer, team leader, or any of a host of other assignments, everyone had a role. I felt I belonged, that I was part of the team and of the significant work going on. The Winchester excavations have been described as among the most important in the world during the twentieth century.
The summer was also fulfilling to me because of the bonds I forged with people like Alicia, Carolyn, and Randy. Although many students passed through, some staying only two weeks, others worked as I did for twelve weeks. Looking back, I believe that the communication between us all that summer was stronger and more satisfying because of that sense of belonging and connection.
I would soon be reminded of how rare that feeling can be.