Adam E. Tanney, Research Associate, RMC Research Corporation

My name is Adam Tanney. It’s great to be at Naropa for the first time and an honor to introduce you to my extraordinary friend, colleague, and mentor, Dr. Stuart Lord, a man who has made an enormous difference in my life.

I first met Stuart one evening in the summer of 2000 while I was a student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Stuart had just moved to Dartmouth to become Dean of the Tucker Foundation, Dartmouth’s Center for Community Service and Religious and Spiritual life.

Walking into his office, amidst towers of unopened boxes, my eyes locked on a sign he had already hung. “What is your passion?” the sign asked.

Before meeting Stuart, my experiences with service were mostly unsatisfying construction projects. You see my carpentry skills end at finding the phone number of the closest home depot.

“So what is your passion,” he asked. Teaching, connecting ideas across disciplines, helping people and organizations become more effective,” I responded.

Soon, I was helping the Tucker Foundation coordinate its strategic plan and design its cross cultural service and education program. I was engaged. I was challenged. I was learning lessons about leadership and putting ideas from the classroom into action.

If you’ve never been challenged to connect your passion to your academic learning and then to a service you can perform for others, then you haven’t yet met Stuart Lord—because that is his passion. I want to tell you about two other passions of Stuart. First, he’s passionate about educating the whole person— cognitively, spiritually, ethically, and emotionally.

Consider his vision for the CrossCultural Education and Service Program. Through that program, Dartmouth students and faculty supported health and engineering projects in a rural village in Nicaragua.

Early on Stuart’s insistence that before students set foot in Nicaragua they complete notforcredit courses in the history, sociology, and politics of Nicaragua was met with some resistance. But with this academic grounding students, found they were better able to grapple with the matters of the heart and soul they encountered when they began serving in Nicaragua.

You can see Stuart’s Renaissance nature really shine on a service trip: Not only is he the one who ensures the group takes time each evening to reflect on how the experience is shifting beliefs about justice, he’s the one getting everyone actually excited about showering out of a bucket, the one singing as he mixes concrete, the one modeling daily personal study.

When students would ask him if all his commitments were tiring him out, his famous reply was, “I’ll sleep when I get to heaven.”

This passion to educate the whole person fuels his determined nature. When budget cuts threatened to eliminate the weekly dinner dialogues on matters of faith and social justice that he hosted at his home, rather than forfeit the program, Stuart could be found making runs to the grocery store and then apronladen in the kitchen preparing the meals himself before he would then jump back into his suit to be the host.

He’s also passionate about serving and encouraging others. Two years ago he donated a kidney to his twin brother, Stanley. Stanley became stronger immediately, but postoperative complications confined Stuart to the hospital, tethered to an IV cart with intravenous fluids only, for an astonishing 40 days, while doctors searched for a cure.

Four times each day, however, he willed himself to march around the hospital floor, pushing his IV cart. As he set out for this exercise on about day 20 (by which time every staff person on the floor knew of his intravenous only diet), do you know what he told his nurse? “If they deliver my cheese pizza and bottle of Merlot while I’m gone, just have them leave it next to my bed, ok.”

“Ok, Mr. Lord,” she replied, as she struggled to conceal a smile. As his walk was nearly finished he came across a young doctor. After sharing hellos, Stuart sensed exhaustion in the young physician, and so paused to chat and offer encouragement.

The Doctor walked away from the exchange with a smile, his chin a little higher, but the truth is, so did Stuart.

That’s a lesson Stuart teaches me, that no matter what our condition, we can be of service to others, we can make a difference in the lives of others, and when we do, we make a difference in our own life.