Nobody Is a Stranger

Best known as the star of movies like "Bull Durham" and "Thelma and Louise," Susan Sarandon also plays a major role as an activist. From her 1993 Oscar-night plea to help AIDS sufferers in Haiti to her current advocacy for the homeless, Sarandon has kept humanitarian causes in the spotlight. She spoke with Beliefnet recently about her spiritual path, her work with Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, and what she hopes for her children.

How would you describe your spiritual path? Do you identify with a particular one, or it is mainly the activism you're involved in that fulfills you?

I try to live my life every day in the present, and try not to turn a blind eye to injustice and need. I wish I did more. I feel my family's needs are a priority. I'm not comfortable with the idea of serving the many and ignoring my family. In the bigger picture, I see myself getting more and more involved as they leave the nest and don't need the daily attention.

Which ethical and spiritual lessons do you most want your children to learn?

I want them to respect the divine in everyone. And understand that with privilege comes responsibility. Everyone has a responsibility towards this larger family of man, but especially if you're privileged, that increases your responsibility. I want them to understand the joy of empowerment, of service. I want them to understand that doing the right thing is a joyful experience, that it isn't a grind.

So volunteering -- like your work in soup kitchens -- has never been a grind for you?

Not at all. We have a tradition in our house. I was always envious of bar mitzvahs and people having really defined rites of passage and being able to mark that with some kind of community service. My kids were not particularly ready at thirteen, so we do it at sixteen. My daughter wanted to do something with kids, and she found a shelter and she and her friends and myself and our friends spent a few days and did over a huge room at a shelter.

To celebrate her coming of age?

Yes, and to have something to mark her passage into womanhood that was positive and creative and that she figured out herself.

[A] group I work with that's really fabulous is Habitat for Humanity. This year my son Jack was turning sixteen. We had about 22 people, half were kids and half of them adults, friends of mine who have known him forever. Everybody showed up at 8:30 in the morning and we put in all the drywall of a four-story brownstone in Harlem, working with people that knew what they were doing more than we did, obviously.

Just being there at 8:30 was tough for some of these boys. They were filthy; they worked so hard all day long. And they had something to show for it. They laughed, they carried on. I think it really was special for them, because it was very dramatic -- because sometimes you end up just painting or doing little things -- in this case, you actually took a skeleton of rooms and tuned them into [ones] with walls. Everyone was filthy and weary by the end of the day, but it was great.

It's so rewarding to know you're capable of doing that. I want my kids to understand the joy of that. Not the self-congratulatory "I'm such a good person" kind of thing, but just the sense of accomplishment. You're working with people who are going to live there. So I would hope they would develop some kind of habit that involves understanding that their life is so full they can afford to give in all kinds of ways to other people. I consider that to be baseline spirituality. The heart is a muscle like every other muscle. The more you use it... I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you. As my little guy said when he first learned about the origins of man, he said, "So Mom, I guess there really isn't such a thing as a stranger, is there?"