By James Riordan

As a hospice chaplain with Allegheny Health Network, Wray Fanton has spent most of his life helping people deal with traumatic situations and, as such, is a very relevant interview subject for our Men of Value series. I asked him how his values have affected his life, “I grew up in New Hampshire,” he replied. “I grew up in a simple and hard working kind of environment. I think that upbringing really helped me get grounded in the basic values of life. You work hard, put the time, the energy and the effort into things and you generally see a positive result. That simple, basic value has helped me out all my life.”

Wray maintained there are many avenues to inspiration, some of them less obvious than others. One strong example to him is actor/writer Sylvester Stallone. “He’s an example of a man who put a great deal of effort into something he believed in and it paid off for him. He worked really hard and went through a lot of rejection with that first Rocky screenplay but he kept trying to get it out there. When you think about how many hours there are in a day and how many minutes you have available to you in your life, there is only so much you can dp. If you waste big chunks of time doing stuff that useless, it’s less time you have to do something meaningful. . You only have so much time. You need to make every second count because it’s a finite amount.”

Like many spiritual leaders, Wray recognized that there is a great amount of division in the world today that must be overcome if we are to continue to grow. “It was this way before the Corona virus and it’s worse now. You have one group of people that are clearly conservative and you have another group that is clearly liberal. They both have their agendas and it is impossible for the two groups to get along and to actually work together for the common good.”

One of the clear examples of this is that the media itself is less concerned with deter-mining the truth than pushing their own agenda. “Journalism isn’t journalism anymore, Wray Fanton acknowledged. “It’s simply rhetoric. It’s always polarized. There’s never an effort to try to draw people in together to work together. The people that seem to try to get people to work together get lambasted by the forces that are for polarization while those who are clearly trying to cause division just pound their chest and say how they’re trying to get everyone to work together. It’s like, ‘No, you’re not. You’re just not.’ I can’t even conceive of how this impasses can come to an end because there’s such an overwhelming desire to create division, Discourse is dead. You cannot talk to somebody if your very words cause them react defensively. They take every question and make it a personal issue.”

Press conference have become a joke, a forum for opposing groups to shot at each other. “As an example I recently heard a reporter say to President Trump, ‘Considering all the people who have died, do you really think that you should run for reelection?’ How is that a journalist question? That is commentary, not journalism and it pushes division. Democracy and our Republic is based on the rule of law. The writers and the framers of the constitution used reason and logic to lay it out. That is the way that the constitution was framed by the people who wrote it. It was contained a series of assumption that they had agreed would be law and laws were something not to break. Now days, if you break the people act as if that isn’t a bad thing as long as it furthers your agenda. Nothing is off limits.

Wray, like many others, sees this divisional type of reasoning as being so prevalent that he is not sure our nation can ever go back to objective thinking and working together. “I don’t see it coming back. You look at history, at the fall of Rome, the fall of democracy in Germany before World War II and you can see the pattern of decline. It leads to destruction, unless people decide to objectively look at the truth and objectively recognize their flaws and see where that has led before. You have to want truth before you can have hope. But I just don’t think that people want truth anymore. I feel we may be in what the Bible describes as the end times. I don’t know how far into them we are, but we are definitely headed in that direction.”

His desire for truth and true reasoning is one of the things that make Wray Fanton, a man of value.