Laura Sheahen

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. Everybody showed up at 8:30 in the morning and we put in all the drywall of a four-story brownstone in Harlem. We 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. 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.

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. I think I’m an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. 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?” It’s a spirituality that’s empowering. That’s joyful. Interview with Susan Sarandon — Beliefnet.com