Ripped Off by Mother Teresa

This week Kent M. Keith ’71 released his first full-length book, Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments, published by Penguin Putnam, after a Mother Teresa quotation led him back to his own college-age prose.

Keith, self-proclaimed “public citizen” and senior vice president for development and communications at the YMCA of Honolulu, took a circuitous route to Penguin Putnam, beginning in mid-September 1997 at a meeting of the Honolulu Rotary Club. Keith was in a rut with his writing. After attending the Maui Writers’ Conference two weeks earlier, he worried that his chances of publishing anything were slim, because he had no “special hook or angle.” Bowing his head at the beginning of the meeting, though, Keith heard his fellow Rotarian J. Kenneth Sanders recite a poem he attributed to Mother Teresa. Suddenly, Keith realized that the words were his own, a set of 10 “paradoxical commandments” written in his sophomore year at Harvard as part of a Harvard Student Agencies-published booklet for student council leaders called “The Silent Revolution.”

Other aspiring writers might have felt crushed about losing ownership of their own work. Not Keith. He rushed to the bookstore and found on the last page of a book about Mother Teresa a poem called “Anyway,” which comprised eight out of his 10 original “commandments.” The book attributed the poem to a sign on the wall of a children’s home in Calcutta where Mother Teresa spent time. “That was the hook…the credibility,” Keith says. “That was the door that was opening.”

It was actually a door re-opening. Keith first penned these commandments during the politically turbulent late 1960s at Harvard, where the government concentrator in Eliot House spent most of his extracurricular time mentoring high school student council members.

Drawing on his life experiences, as well as family and church influences, Keith composed the 10 “paradoxical commandments,” a set of maxims on how to live life optimistically and fully in the face of potential failure and disappointment. “I didn’t think of it as really inventing anything,” he says, “but [rather] describing truths that were out there in a creative way.” Paying his friends minimum wage to read and critique “The Silent Revolution,” Keith was able to publish in the spring of 1968. Little did he know how far his work would spread.

After the Rotary Club meeting in 1997, Wally Amos (of chocolate-chip cookie fame) connected Keith to a small Maui company, Inner Ocean Publishing. After he expanded the commandments to a book explaining the meaning of each one, that company not only bought the manuscript but sold its rights to several foreign publishers, as well as Penguin Putnam.

Keith says he has always found the commandments essential to the way he lives his own life. What has changed during his life is “the [set of] commandments that mean the most to me.” In college, he focused on those dealing with authority, while he now focuses on the first commandment, which demands unconditional love. To college students today, he says his book can be very useful because college is “discovering for yourself what values you hold most dear and what you want to stand for…this book can be a very useful tool in helping anyone think about who and what is important to them.”

In 2000, it occurred to Keith to type in “paradoxical commandments” on an Internet search engine. He found 40 different people who had used his writings while attributing them to other people. Now he’s found at least 90. They include Rotarians all over the world, a student leadership conference, the Cambodian free speech movement and a group of folksingers called the Roche Sisters, who have penned a song called “Anyway.”

Keith makes sure to note that he’s never asked anyone to stop sharing his words. “If [people using them] don’t know who wrote them I’ll tell them the origin,” he says, but he considers it in general to be a huge compliment. The commandments, he points out, can be useful to just about anyone searching for personal meaning. “The search for success and the search for meaning are very different things,” he says. “But it’s the meaning that has given people the most happiness.”