December 11, 2004

Dear friends,

Friends of Bob Massie , concerned about his failing health, have started working together to help him find an organ donor. His wife, Anne Tate, describes both the need and the opportunity in a companion letter.

As we widen the network of people who receive this appeal, it’s clear that some of the recipients may know little or nothing about Bob. On behalf of those who know him and those whose lives he has touched, I would like to offer a few words about this extraordinary man.

Ask any of Bob’s many friends, colleagues, or admirers to summarize – or even to sketch – the range of his interests and achievements, and most likely you’ll get a laugh and the bemused reply, “I don’t know where to begin.” Priest. Teacher. Writer. Political candidate. Social activist. Prize-winning historian. Medical miracle. Executive. Environmentalist. Advocate for the poor and disenfranchised.

Scan through Bob’s curriculum vitae and your jaw is likely to drop. Here’s a guy who’s done everything from helping to found a homeless shelter in New York to coining the term “climate risk” and giving keynote speeches around the world on such topics as sustainability, globalization, moral integrity in complex organizations, and theological education in the environmental era. Here’s a guy who lectured for years on ethics and public policy at Harvard Divinity School, who ran a parish church in a working-class suburb of Boston, who directed the Harvard University Project on Business, Values, and the Economy, who has written for such publications as The Nation, The New Republic, and Christian Century, and who published a seminal book (Loosing the Bonds) on how U.S. economic sanctions and the divestiture movement helped to bring down apartheid in South Africa. Just a few years ago Bob founded one of the most ambitious and successful worldwide efforts (known as the Global Reporting Initiative) to establish uniform disclosure rules regarding the social, environmental, and human rights records of large companies.

In the long list of Bob’s accomplishments, that’s only a start.

People who know Bob are ardent in their admiration. I asked a few of Bob’s friends to comment on what makes him special, and received immediate and fervent replies. Joan Bavaria hired Bob in 1996 to serve as the Executive Director of CERES, a national coalition of many of the largest environment groups and institutional investors in the U.S. , who work in partnership with large firms such as General Motors, Ford, and Bank of America to promote disclosure and improvement of environmental performance. Joan comments: “ Bob Massie is an incredible individual whose lifetime of service to society should be just beginning. His intellectual scope and ability to communicate complex concepts in passionate speeches or elegant and forceful writing are almost without equal. Bob's courage and optimism in the face of a lifetime of serious physical challenges is inspirational. This is a person who is very much alive, living life to its fullest, and who has a lot more life to live and a lot more to contribute.”

Bob elicits the same passionate response from Anthony Cortese, the former Mass. Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection and former Dean of Environmental Programs at Tufts University . Cortese considers Bob “one of the most ethical, effective, committed and politically astute leaders … with whom I have ever had the pleasure to work. His lifetime devotion to these concerns extends over two decades in his government, public interest and advocacy work.”

Bob Massie has a rare spirit and moral intelligence. He has a wonderful grasp of history and how things happen, and he also understands what motivates people and how to inspire change. He’s not just a visionary, although anyone who knows him can attest to the wealth of ideas that spin out of his head. He’s also a level-headed strategist and pragmatist. When he ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts , the Boston Globe’s editorial board endorsed him as “the very embodiment of hard-headedness balanced by compassion” and “refreshingly uncynical… Massie’s candidacy promises an integrity of head and heart that doesn’t come along often these days.”

Writer David Michaelis, a long-time friend, puts it clearly. “I don’t know anyone else who is so completely devoted to the idea of making a difference as one person. I would call Bob a radical individualist – not in the sense that he acts alone, because he doesn’t: he is always forging community and he has built his whole life around a commitment to others. And not in the sense of being grandiose, because he’s not: in many ways he’s quite humble and unassuming. But Bob does have great confidence in himself, and he is convinced that one person can make a difference.”

Bob has faced adversity and pain for many years. Though he grew up with severe hemophilia and later contracted HIV and hepatitis C from blood transfusions, these experiences have paradoxically propelled him into a life of joy. Bob knows that his life – like everyone’s – is pure gift. As he put it years ago in an interview with Boston Magazine, “We live in a challenging world marked by finality. To me it’s all free time. I didn’t know I would make it this far, so I’m going to give it all I’ve got.”

And that’s just what he’s done. “Tremendous new things can take place,” Bob told the New York Times some year ago. “Hope is the vehicle through which we transform things…To those who say the unexpected can’t happen and the outcome of boldness is sure defeat, I say ‘Behold the unexpected.’”

This is our chance to stand with Bob and together to behold the unexpected. The gift of a liver would be an expression of hope not only in Bob and what he can yet achieve, but also in the values that shape his life.

I will close with a comment and a confession.

First, the comment: I have seen Bob in many settings; in 2001 he and I were arrested together when we participated in an interfaith prayer vigil in Washington DC to protest the Bush Administration’s intention to dr ill for oil in the Arctic Refuge. Now, as he slowly fades in energy and health, Bob is undergoing a kind of house arrest. He must bear the frustration of being full of ideas that he no longer has the energy to birth. I pray that through the power of the community now forming around Bob in his weakness, and through one person’s generosity, together we w ill set him free for many long years of creative life.

Here’s the confession: it is not so much Bob’s outward accomplishments that inspire me, but the spirit behind them and the faith from which they spring. Like Bob, I am an Episcopal priest. I am touched by the ways that his faith – especially in an era when God-talk is cheap – sustain his social conscience.

In an interview for Boston Magazine he tells this story: “In my junior and senior years [in college], I found myself not really knowing what I believed in… It sounds simple, but through the process of prayer, I came to a profound sense of the reality of God. With that, I realized there wasn’t anything to fear. So much of our world is based on fear: fear of what we don’t have, fear of what we won’t get, fear of death. I found that once you believe that there is profound love at the center of the universe that transcends deprivation and mortality, it frees you to live a life of joy, a life of helping others.”

For Bob’s sake and that of his beloved wife Anne and children Sam, John, and Kate – to say nothing of the whole wide world that could use his ongoing vision, passion, and intelligence – I dearly hope that someone w ill come forward soon to respond to his need.

Sincerely,

(The Rev.) Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Ph.D.

Priest Associate, Grace Episcopal Church, Amherst , Massachusetts

Lecturer in Pastoral Theology, Episcopal Divinity School , Cambridge