Recognizing Our Family

Knowing family is not a birthright.  It is a lifelong occupation.  It is at worst a duty.  It is at best a dance.

When our son was going off to a job in Spain soon after graduating from car design school, our family was pretty intensely involved in connecting with him.  Kathy and I and his sisters worked to find ways of spending time with him, time for conversation, for committing to memory the curves of his face, for stealing not-really accidental glances of touch.  Now more than a dozen years later he thinks about moving back to the U.S., maybe even back to Detroit where he can be closer to old friends, and to us.  And again Kathy and I and his sisters are working to find time to encourage him to follow through on it, to let him know how much it means to us.

When Chris was on his way to Europe, he said that we didn’t really know him.  

Epiphany: an Eye-opener and 2nd Chance

Epiphany: to Christians it is the coming of the wise men, the Magi, to the manger to find the Messiah and bring gifts and worship.  In language, it is a word that suggests an opening, the lifting of a curtain, the beginning of awareness that changes our thinking.  The word comes from the Greek epi-phainein, “to show to, to reveal”.

The wise men had found the location of the infant messiah by logic.  They followed the star that they knew from their study of the skies to be unusual, to see if it would take them to the one who they knew through their study of scripture was promised.  

But when they arrived by the grace of their logic, their knowing proved inadequate.  This was a poor couple in a stable, their baby in a manger, a food crib, the only thing that would hold it off the night-cool, dung-soiled ground.  It was not what they’d expected. 

And that is why it is called the epiphany.  They came to the place of unknowing, of illogic. 

Hurt and Help and Hope

Perhaps it’s a gift of the sol-stice,

the turning back of the sun

to save us from the accumulating darkness

that has provided the date to start a new year,

a place to put a stake in the ground,

a post on which we mount a sign

that says on one side “past”

and on its reverse “future”. 

Except for that solstice, the place we put that stake might be arbitrary,

but because we have that same sky to gaze up to

we are in a great, extra-denominational family
regardless of what name we use for God. 

And perhaps we are fortunate if our spirits have sagged under the weight of this darkness,

if we are nearly broken by it,

our guts compressed under those heavy skies so hard

that a primal word which in pride 

we had tried to suppress

has erupted from us:

Help!

The Return of the Light - HONEST!

Jim Reilly’s funeral Mass was celebrated yesterday, the day before Christmas.  How perfect.  How perfectly awful, you might think.  Sartre spoke of a God-shaped hole left in man with the death of God.  How awful that Ann and the family discover in themselves a Jim-shaped hole, and at Christmas.

Jesus was likely not born on December 25^th.  The calendar itself didn’t exist until centuries later.  But the story of the brightness of the star in the Scriptural story suggested that he would have been born during a long and thus dark night, and so placing Christmas near the longest, darkest night made sense.  Placing Christmas near the Roman celebration of Winter Solstice gave Christians something to celebrate while the Romans of the area were celebrating the “stopping of the sun” in its moving lower and lower in the sky, and coming back toward them, bringing back the light.

Have you ever missed a bus or a train or a ride and stood there watching it speed away from you?  Don’t you feel abandoned?  Imagine the sun doing that, taking with it light and warmth.  And so we can understand that the “pagans” would make the Solstice a huge celebration. 

And it is no accident that so much of today’s celebration of Christmas is about light, and about it shining in the darkness. 

Jim Reilly Finally Passes Through

They’re not pearly gates at the celestial portal.  And sorry, Bob Dylan,  there is no heaven’s door to be knock, knock, knockin’ on.  There’s just the thinnest, clearest membrane, and on Monday the sun stopped while Jim Reilly finally slipped through.

Jim was the first man I met who walked away from it – success, I mean.  President of his Law School class, soon working for a good firm and living the kind of life we’d see on TV when I was a kid.  Nice house, wife and two kids, lots of friends.  And he walked away from it.  For me, it was like I was in a long line to finally buy a ticket for the trip of a lifetime and seeing someone in line in front of me turn around, put their money back into their pocket, smile at me, and walk out.  I realize that one hand is in my pocket feeling the smooth surface of my money, feeling it like a blind man would feel Braille bumps, trying to decipher whether the trip might not be worth it, wondering why he did that.  I watch him to try to figure out why he did that.

Contemplating my Navel at 64

64 today.  I woke on my birthday with an enigmatic phrase over the doorpost at the exit of my dream: future through one.

I found the idea of a future through one to be contrary to reality.  Future comes from bee-flower combinations, from egg-sperm polkas and stamen-pistil ballets.  I lie on the sofa after my early morning walk, the furnace on now and Kathy rousing in the back of the house.  Alone, but not really.  The one-day-past-full moon was coming in through the window, and I thought of my aloneness, those words future through one and the idea of the navel that Karen Armstrong had tossed out in The Case for God.

Navel-gazing referred, in the 60’s, to a self-centered focus, an egoism that ignored the world and its needs.  But this morning I thought of my navel like Armstrong thought of it, and classical philosophers East and West.  It’s reminder of a connection, of a relationship.  If we really do contemplate our navels, we might recognize them as the isthmus of our humanity, the remains of the umbilical cord that is clear evidence that there is no life in isolation.  And for me today it is a reason to wonder about the large body on the other side of that narrow strip 64 years ago plus a day.  Actually, Eleanor Lydia Luprich Daniels was small – 5’1” and about 90 pounds.  PFC Frank A. Daniels had embarked from the war in LeHavre France on December 22, 1946 and 1 year to the day later I arrived from my own nine month voyage from their egg-sperm polka back in Chicago.

So go ahead.  Check out your navel.  Everybody’s got one.  We are, each of us, the future, and the one through which we came, quite literally, is still a part of us.  Here’s to you, mom.  Thanks. 

And this time of year, here’s to you, Mary of Nazareth, who danced with the Spirit (Polka?  Dabke?  Boogaloo?  What fun to imagine!) and gave us the One, the long-awaited one, who calls us to live in love, to live as love, to build a future without fear because we are never alone…not as long as we have navels to contemplate.

Letting the Ass Decide: the Truth Revealed

It finally made sense

the beyond me-ness of it, I mean,

when Ignatius let the his ass decide

instead of his head.

He had met the Moor on the trail

or what was left of the deferent Moslem

who accepted Chritianinty to keep his job

and for his family, their home.

And so the proto-Jesuit and the Mohammedan

rode their donkeys wherer their two roads met

and their minds met, too, until the road

and their minds branched off, diverged.

The Moor affably admitted

that Jesus as Christ made sense to him

but he was stuck on the Virgin birth

and bowed a goodbye to Ignatius.

As he lost sight of the moor

Ignatius’ battle wound throbbed,

the place where he was broken

from his military past.

He wanted to pull the animal round

and go back to the fork in the trail

where the likable Moor had disparaged Our Lady,

had questioned her Virginity and gone his way.

He wanted to draw his sword

and draw heretic blood.

But he wanted, too

to stay the course of the Spirit.

He had found it along another trail

along the quiet Cardoner,

the cool water flowing

from Montserrat to the Sea.

Hot blood or cool water?

It was more than he could decide.

He dropped the reins onto the neck of the ass

and let the animal discern the way.

For years at work I would fault the Jesuits

for indecisiveness, even as I loved their Spirit.

and this Advent I came to know Joseph better,

and know how the meek do indeed inherit the earth.

St. Joseph: Statue?

Did Joseph study His face, I wonder.

Is it blasphemy, do you think, to imagine the carpenter,

in quiet moments when he could hear the Newborn suckling

against his Virgin wife’s soft breast

 (is the softness of the Virgin’s breast, the whiteness of it,

is that perhaps blasphemy too?)

Did he measure the Baby’s face

(like Hers, but unlike his)

to extrapolate the face of the Father

like he would measure the location for a hinge,

where it would attach, and where it would extend

beyond?

Or did he just find himself just naturally noticing,

like he noticed grain in wood,

that would guide his tools or vex them

as he did his work,

making things needed

out of materials provided?

Seems to me (or is it blasphemy

to think) that maybe

it was not as simple for Joseph,

no dumb animal whose mere breath

would warm the scene

until the Magi came with wonder

until the cross came with terror

to make sense of all this

Mystery.

No wonder people bury him

head down in the yards

of houses that don’t seem to sell,

to make the best of a terrible market.

Blasphemy, it seems to me.

The Freedom of Dogma

Karen Armstrong, a prolific author of theological books, left the convent because she could not pray.  It seems to me that she failed at the formula, and was freed into the presence of God beyond its restrictions.  She finds God, she says, in study, much as Jewish scholars do during long hours of relationship to text.  On many mornings instead of sitting down at my keyboard to write, I put on layers of warm clothes and go out into the eternity of air and space and silence in the wintry dark.  And as I am consoled by the beautiful, challenging, curving roads that give my feet ways to walk, I give my mind similar trails by listening to good books.  For several days I listened to Karen Armstrong read her book The Case for God.  I deeply enjoyed her thinking, and one particular idea opened a door, freeing me into the presence of God not by leaving my church, but by entering it more deeply.  The Door was marked DOGMA.

Her statement was elegant: simple and clear.  Dogmas like the Trinity and the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection are at worst tests of fidelity, mental shibboleths that justify our exclusion or annihilation of anyone who cannot pronounce them as certainly true.  But at best, Dogmas are mysteries that take us into a silence beyond words.

To de-fine God literally means to set his limits, de fine the Latin words for “to the end”.  The Jesuits refer to God as the Magis, the “more”.  Like Armstrong, Ignatius invites us not to the restriction of words and definitions, but to the beyondness of God, to an initiation that is not the cloak of some secret society, but an initial step into a new open, fresh and freshening world.  By climbing into dogma, we do not enter a cave, but the world in its entirety, its endlessness.  In a world without walls, God is found in every direction.

Man's Search for Distraction

Give in.  That slice of pie in the refrigerator.  The TV remote within arm’s reach when I’m trying to get into a good book.  The latest electronic chachki in the circular in the Sunday paper.  The shiny new car in the neighbor’s driveway.  That pair of shoes, or new cell phone.

Give in.  All the while, we’re tuning out of life.  Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist, working with patients who wanted to be happy but were not.  That he died in 1997 surprised me.  His Man’s Search for Meaning dealt with his life in Auschwitz, and that seems to me a long time ago.  But he lived long enough – just long enough to write his last book, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning – and refer to pornography as the overwhelming example of giving in, of relieving tension.  We give in and for the time that we are eating the pie or flipping through the channels or fiddling with the new gadget or smelling the new car smell or looking at those new shoes on our feet or the feel of the new phone in our hand, we’re distracted.  The tension that we felt not having that pie or that cell phone is gone.  For a few moments, we are blissfully preoccupied.

Frankl refers repeatedly to Arthur Schnitzler’s three human virtues – objectivity, courage, and responsibility.  If we look at reality, at the world, as it is, at people, at conditions of life, our hearts will be moved, and a meaningful tension will be created in us, a tension which we must relieve by responding.  Perhaps that is why Frankl speaks so certainly about the harm of pornography.  It turns people into objects.  Rather than calling us to virtue and lives of meaning, it provides us with a too-often compelling source of giving in to distraction.

To Know Ourselves is to Forget Ourselves

Most of us have read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search of Meaning.  I remembered it as his finding some reason to survive Auschwitz, to emerge looking not at it but beyond it.  I confess that I found in him a break with a kind fixation on the Holocaust of many who wrote of it, as many do today of 9/11, for looking at it rather than beyond it, too. 

I return from a fourth morning of walking up and down the roads on the silent, snowy hills in the still-dark listening to his final  book, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning.  I realize that what I had learned from that first book was perhaps his basic message, but it refers not to the prison of Auschwitz, but to the prison of self.

Conscience, he says, is the “wisdom of the heart” that calls us to look at ourselves so that in following our true desire we might look beyond ourselves.  He said that this is like Aquinas’s idea of virtue.  Through effort we practice some good act until it becomes habitual, and we eventually do it without thinking.  It becomes “second nature” to us.  We become virtuous. 

Consciousness, he says, is the awareness of what is while conscience calls us to what is not, but ought to be.  This brings to mind the Examen, the call to find in our day what in the world moved us, what drew us, pulled us from beyond ourselves.  And it brings to mind the seemingly paradoxical statement of Jesus, “He who loses his life will find it”.  And the whole idea of being born to new life seems not religious psycho-babble but good sense.

Wisdom of the Heart

Frankl sees conscience as the call beyond the self, as the "Wisdom of the Heart".  I saw it yesterday.

I noticed her walking with a kind of regal air from the dance floor, her simple black dress and gray hair, her lithe, ageless nobility.  She seemed to look into the distance, as if she were in a realm of her own, the rest of us somehow merely mortal.  Kathy and I were finding our way onto that dance floor, enjoying the too-rare opportunity to dance to a real band, and soon we were among our smiling contemporaries, most of us retired, here to celebrate another year as “newcomers” to northern Michigan.  It was as if all of us were back in college, recognizing in each other dance steps that younger people did not know.  A couple of fast dances and then we’d returned to our table, waiting for a slow dance.  Slow dances were always a chance to hold a girl close, to feel the mysterious curves of her body, to smell her perfume, to long for her to put her head against the side of your face, to close the distance of politeness and caution.  On the dance floor again, Kathy did those things and our steps became shorter, and we remembered how this kind of dancing was really just an excuse, in an inhibited society, to hold each other close. 

It was in that slowly turning circular movement that I noticed the tallest man on the dance floor, a full head above his partner, the woman with the regal bearing.  Her face was resting on his chest, her eyes closed, her face relaxed and expressionless.  Then as I watched, they stopped moving, stopped taking little steps to the rhythm of the music.  He did not change his expression.  He simple continued looking out, though his eyes seemed to be unseeing, his mind absorbed in their contact.  Then she opened her eyes, and began, while holding his hand, bobbing her own to a kind of beat, a bit faster than the tempo the band was playing, and then she stepped into that beat in her head, and he picked up her tempo, gently and smoothly leaning back and forth, back and forth, to the music in her head.  As Kathy and I turned in our own dancing, I would lose sight of them and regain it, and I began to suspect  that she was in a kind of twilight, Alzheimer’s, perhaps, or some similar presence in some other place.  Tears came to my eyes as I watched her gallant partner, the tallest man on the floor, stopping when she stopped, waiting calmly and peacefully,  resuming to her beat when she heard it, focused on the the familiar curves of her body, and the smell of her perfume, and her face on his chest, on his beating heart.

His heart.  Perhaps that was the tempo that called her back from her silence, a bit faster than the music the rest of us were slowly turning to.

God of My Blind Spot

In Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning Victor Frankl provides an adept analogy for the unknowability of God.  Our eyes have a physiological blind spot, where the optic nerve passes through the retina.  I remember experiencing this in biology class in high school; maybe you do too.  It was an odd experience.  They eye just can’t see there, at the source of the connection to the brain.  But the truth is that we can’t see the source of our sight.  And so it makes sense, Frankl says, that we can’t know the source of our knowing, which is often given the name God.

In the eye, the retina covers the back wall and transmits images to our brain – except for the small place where the “wiring” has to attach, to carry those impulses to the brain.  If receptors covered that hole for the optic nerve, we’d “see” in our blind spot, but nothing that we saw anywhere on our retina would get to the brain.  We’d be blind, our eyes disconnected from our brain for the sake of ridding ourselves of our blind spot.

Perhaps refusing to accept the unknowablilty of God, we cover over that incapacity, and in doing so blind ourselves to the transcendent in all of life, in all of experience.  Re-ligion, this widely read logotherapist says, is – in the literal sense of the word, re-connecting to the spiritual aspect of our lives. 

So to the word re-pent we add the word re-ligio: re-connect.

Samtsirhc! OH, OH, OH!

Advent’s first message is to repent, to literally, re-lean, to “Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways.”  So as Kathy and I watched Miracle on 34^th Street, I realized that Karen Armstrong is right.  She says in The Case for God that we as adults hold on to a juvenile concept of God, a god who is like Santa Claus.  Whaddyawant for Christmas?  Have you been good or bad?  And my, how can you consider looking into the eyes of the sweet little nine year old Natalie Wood and telling her that sometimes believing in Santa Claus doesn’t mean you’ll get that house for you and your mommy to live in, with a smiling “daddy” to boot! 

We have it exactly, except we need to step inside ourselves and look at it from the inside.  Christmas is more than HO, HO, HO!  God is more than Santa Claus, and we are more than starry-eyed nine-year olds.  God is beyond imagining, beyond formulating, beyond, as Armstrong writes, “ourselves, writ large”. 

Repent.  Turn around.  What we mistake for Santa Claus coming and HO, HO, HO is even better.  Christmas is about God coming to join us in our not so naively miraculous world.  God with us!  OH, OH, OH!

Have an awe-ful Advent.

Love and Habit

Sue Monk Kidd writes, in The Mermaid’s Chair, of the patterns of love and habit that shape our lives.  How apt to close a chapter with these words, giving the reader at least the time it takes to turn the page to reflect on this, perhaps a deep truth of the book.  I don’t know; I’ve just begun it.  But this pair of words, like heads/tails or God/Caesar, rang like a coin pinged into flipping by an adept thumbnail, glistening even in the starlight on my walk just now.  Love…habit…love…habit.  

Yesterday’s comment – please read it – brought a word to me, a word of my own truth, my own curtain: inhibition.  The word comes from the Latin, and its root is the holy word in Anonymous’ comment: to hold.  In-hibition means to hold in.  A habit, a repeated pattern of behavior, holds us in, restrains us, just as the nun’s habit did, or St. Francis’ brown robe.  The habit says “don’t touch”, not only to the person on the outside, but the person on the inside.  And I’m speaking not only of garments, but patterns of behavior.

Do we put on our habits when we get out of bed (or, as Anonymous shares, when we get into it?)   Who, besides ourselves, are we depriving of love by doing so?  How indeed does a pattern of habit shape our lives?

Awake and Watchful

The final paragraph in Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God tells the story of the person seeing a monk in prayer, being overcome by a sense that this monk was the most alive, most wise, most powerful person in the world.  The person waits until the monk stirs, and tells him this sense of his vitality, wisdom, and power.  The monk calmly said “you simply saw a person fully awake.”

Advent brings with it the suggestion that we remain awake and watchful.  Do we see those around us, strangers on the street or companions in our homes?  Evelyn Coffey, an enigmatic poet and neighbor, told me that once she had stayed awake all night watching a camellia bud open.  It remains beyond my impatience.  But I imagine often the wonder of it, watching…waiting….  She knew that the flower would open. 

I am stunned to be that present to strangers, to companions.  Do we sit, once in a wonderful while, watching in rapturous certainty that they will indeed open, become their fully bloomed self?  Or do we just think, once in awhile, of how wonderful that would be?

National Day of Listening

Today is the National Day of Listening.  Black Friday?  Today is the National Day of Listening! Check this link on The Books For Walls Project or go right to the Story Corps website for more.  Instead of going to the mall, project leaders suggest, listen to someone’s story.  Yesterday Kathy and I were driving from our home in northern Michigan to our daughter’s home in Cleveland to celebrate Thanksgiving.  NPR carried a story about this project, asking listeners who we might want to interview, living or dead, among our relatives or friends.  Not famous people, mind you, but normal folks.  Kathy and I both thought of her mother, who died when she was 12, long before I met her.  We mused about other family members – grandparents who died or disappeared before we were born, whose English was so spotty that we were permanently cut off from them.

But a story in this morning’s Detroit Free Press  brings me back to our conversation.  While Kathy was thinking about grandparents, I was thinking about people like B. K. Gaskins.  He’s the guy in the picture above.  I’d ask him to tell me his story.  What was life like at its brightest?  What went wrong?  How does he survive?

I find this photo like one of those gold-limned icons

See my reading in the column to the left

It started with Krista Tippett's "On Being" weekly program on NPR.  John O'Donohue's voice drew me in.  Then I discovered Karen Armstrong's book.  And I found in their writing what I wanted to offer you.  So instead of writing these days, I'm soaking, making notes, so that when I'm moved to write again, it will be worth the extra words.  Please consider this reading, as well as browsing Tippett's programs for inspiring audio and video - http://being.publicradio.org/programs/

PEACE

john

A Last Word For Awhile

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.   We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Nelson Mandela said this in his 1994 Inaugural Address.  I’d like to use this as my last posting on intimacy, and my last posting for awhile.  As Mandela’s release from prison marked a great turning in South Africa, Churches that use the seasonal series of Scripture readings in their services called the Lectionary  approach a great turning, too. 

Who IS it? Come INNNNNNNNNNNNN!

Some quotes from the Speaking of Faith interview I linked yesterday:

That's what I call spirituality, the art of homecoming. So it's St. Augustine's phrase, "Deus intimior intimo meo" — "God is more intimate to me than I am to myself”.  And I think when you begin to get a sense of the depth that is there then your whole heart wakens up.

 I love Irenaeus' thing from the second century, which said, "The glory of God is the human being fully alive." And I think in our culture that one of the things that we are missing is that these thresholds where we can encounter this, and where we move into new change in our lives, there are no rituals to help us to recognize them or to cross them worthily.   I think that the threshold, if you go back to the etymology of the word "threshold," it comes from "threshing," which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.

This sense of threshold really stuck with me.  In the Petri dish of my reflection

Beauty at Our Threshold

Beannacht

("Blessing")

On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble,
May the clay dance to balance you.

And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window
and the ghost of loss gets in to you,
May a flock of colours, indigo, red, green, and azure blue
come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays in the currach* of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so

May a slow wind work these words of love around you,
an invisible cloak to mind your life.

 ~ John O'Donohue ~

*a currach is an Irish boat, lightweight because it is made from canvas stretched over a wooden frame.

John O’Donohue wrote this for his mother on the occasion of his father’s death.  I heard him read it in an interview with Krista Tippett, an interview that kept me from writing yesterday.  Here’s a link to the audio  and one to the program page with several links 

I encourage you to listen and be stopped as well.  Doesn’t God use beauty to cross the threshold of our resistance to intimacy?  

Are You Seeing Anyone?

Caravaggio's "Narcissus"

Intimacy is to know and to be known on the inside.   Erik Erikson  placed intimacy right after identity in his sequence of human development.  Identity is based on the Latin root idem meaning same.  Having an authentic identity means that we allow ourselves to appear on the outside as we really are on the inside. 

Erikson suggests that this task of identity normally takes place in our teenage years; that having achieved that task, we move on to intimacy, belonging to someone or something that resonates with us, that stirs our identity

Writing on Empty

Two hours ago I sat down at this keyboard and came up empty.  I looked at my closing “bridge” from yesterday, about spending the next few days on intimacy.  I looked at the “seeds” that I had described as being scattered next to the keyboard.  The phrases, vivid and moving to me yesterday when I wrote them, were dry and lifeless.   I went for a walk in the twilight, in the quiet, beautiful hills north of our house, into the Old Mission Peninsula, hills that were once covered by cherry trees, hills that provide a foothold now for us, on a rise of land between one beautiful bay and another.  As the road crested and I had a glance of the gilt reflection of the dawning sky on the still water of the East Bay, I remembered S’s face, telling me about the guy they found dead in the car submerged in the bay behind me, West Bay, the one nearer town. 

“Suicide”, S said; “I know it.”  He mentioned the guy they found burned in the smoldering car in the middle of the woods a week earlier.  “They couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, his facial muscles too exhausted to show the slightest emotion. 

Face to Face

The idea of the “Courting Chair” blew me away.  Blew me away: it took me by its power away from where I was, from whatever I was doing.  As I approached retirement, the thought of making something for each of our three adult kids was a recurring fantasy.  And from somewhere in my memory, I thought of the perfect heirloom: a courting chair.   It’s also called a tete-a-tete chair, because it provides seating for two, face to face, and even makes it natural to hold hands.  What a gift, I thought, inviting them to this kind of intimacy.  Even as I gathered photos of examples over the centuries and the construction details began t come together in my head, the practicality of the chair itself seemed to come apart

Afterword on Afterlife

I’d intended to move on today, beyond reflecting on the afterlife, which had been prompted by yesterday’s Scriptural readings from the Catholic Lectionary that focused on that issue.  But our priest delivered a masterful homily, and that homily brought me right back where I had been last Tuesday.  I had distracted him, he had said, when I admitted to not really believing the phrase from the Creed “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”  How could a person who worked for his whole life at a Catholic university say he did not believe this article of faith of his church, he’d said, shaking his head.  And yesterday he gave me a challenge by way of invitation.  Read the story yourself.  See what it does for you.

In the early 1900s, Charles Blondin became famous around the world for his tightrope walking.  When he had gathered a huge crowd at Niagara Falls and wowed them by crossing the gorge several times, he brought a wheelbarrow out onto the rope and asked if they believed he could walk across the rope with it.  The crowd roared that they believed he could.  When he asked the crowd if they believed he could wheel someone across the falls in that wheelbarrow, again the crowd roared their belief in him, applauding wildly.  But when he asked “since you all believe that I can do it, which of you will be the first to volunteer to climb into the wheelbarrow and prove it to the rest of the crowd?

How Subtile! (Not a typo)

Lithe & Lengthening, Thrifty & Thickening, and Soft & Slowing: Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson had their theories of human development; I have mine.  And as I look at the three generations of the Kathy and John family, it is clear that we move toward the next life whether we think about it or not.  Tomorrow’s readings are about that next life, occasioning this look of mine, this final day of it focusing on agility and subtility. 

I shared at the outset of this reflection on the next life that I’ve never felt bound by the Catholic Church Teaching on things.  If the root word of religion is, as in our word ligament something that holds us together, it is the example and words of Jesus, including the love of his Father and the constancy of their Spirit that hold me from coming apart.  But those Catholic Church Teachings gave me a great gift in sharing the four qualities of the body that it claims will rise after death and ascent to the heavenly realm.  I’ve shared about impassibility and brightness.  It is my family and the development of our generations that provide me with a way of looking at agility and subtility.

A week ago Kathy and I joined our granddaughters and their parents at a swimming pool.  Nadia has, over the past year, developed a swimmer’s body.  Almost as tall as her Nana and fresh from the summer’s swimming lessons, I watched in disbelief as she sliced smoothly through the water; backstroke and breaststroke were  equally graceful and natural. Her sister Sonja is growing quickly too, and so our grandkids together personify the lithe and lengthening stage

Rise and Shine

Our "risen" bodies, according to the Catholic encyclopedia, will have four qualities.  The first is "impassibility", which shall place them beyond the reach of pain and inconvenience.  The second quality is "brightness", or "glory", by which we shine freely, like the sun.  


Yesterday I wrote of the distractions of inconvenience in the bodies we walk around with, now-bound and not-so-heavenly.  But I wrote little about pain, about the darkness of it that holds us back from the second “quality” of the bodies that Catholic tradition projects will be ours in the next life. That quality is brightness. And remember that my own premise is that “afterlife” doesn’t wait, but lurks, looms, lives in us now, if we claim it. 

Ah, this word claim reminds me of a story.  There was a professor loved by his former students, one of whom sent him, without fail, a beautifully boxed and wrapped handkerchief every Christmas.  After a few years, he had quite enough handkerchiefs, and stopped opening the boxes, simply stacking them in his closet.  He would write a kind but cursory thank-you note, expressing his gratitude for the “gift”.  Eventually the student died, and the professor grew old.  Without a pension, he struggled to pay his rent

Impassible: Impossible Here NOW?

Marcel Ayme' memorial, Montmarte, Paris

I'm struggling with risenness. Our risen bodies, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, will have four qualities.  The first is "impassibility", which shall place them beyond the reach of pain and inconvenience.  The others are brightness, agility, and subtility.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel ignited elegantly my speculation when he wrote the phrase “hereafter and here now.”  As next Sunday’s readings revolve around life after death,  Rabbi Heschel’s phrase gives me license, I think, to consider that God is not bound by time, and perhaps, as Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven,” that we live

Heavenly Bodies

This morning we are looking at red and blue again, and blues are feeling, well…blue.  Two years ago some of us had blue yard signs that said CHANGE.  Two years ago we couldn’t help being swept up in a sort of Messianic fervor, looking for somebody who could save us from what was.    And sure enough, we found out that the messianic figure that we elected ran into a few walls.

Jesus had his walls too.  The structures that were in place were holding him back from this love, love, love thing: The Father loves me, and so I love you, and so love each other.  It seemed like he fought all sides. 

There were the priests and the Levites, the ones who conducted sacrifice and codified Jewish law, who controlled the religious aspects of Jewish life.  The Romans left them with that power, to mollify them and weave them into the fabric of sustainable control.  There were the Pharisees, who looked at external conformity, while Jesus looked deeper.  And this Sunday, Jesus takes on the Sadducees, who recognize only the first five books of Scripture, the history and law, and reject even the prophets.  They also believe that there is no afterlife, and that is what they take up with Jesus in the form of argument.  They come up with a conundrum, a hypothetical case of law regarding a woman with seven widowed husbands and no children.  Which of them, they ask him, will be her husband in heaven?  Their intention is to make him look foolish, along with the whole idea of the afterlife.

The readings put me in a jam.  I’m not sure about this heaven thing. 

Hereafter? HereNOW? Both?

“You mean you don’t believe in General Resurrection?”  My friend john was incredulous.  He’s known me since college, admired me as his counselor . . . and considered me a “good Catholic.”  That was a week ago.  This morning I will sit with the men in my Tuesday morning fellowship, and we will look together at the coming Sunday’s Gospel.  And wouldn’t you know, it’s about just that subject. 

Take a look at the readings for the day:  .  Old Testament characters accept death courageously, assuming that they will live beyond death.  Jesus takes a trick question.  And perhaps we are invited to consider something that we sweep under our prayer rug.   I know I am.  I hope you check out my daily reflections on this as they unfold this week.

Suffering, Loss, and . . . Blessing?

I will not let you go until you give me your blessing.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke eloquently of happiness and the reality of suffering on a recent program on Krista Tippet On Being  .  Perhaps it was not accidental that he had just arrived at the panel discussion after “sitting Shiva”  , the Jewish ritual of mourning, for his mother.  Tippett had asked him how, with its well developed awareness of suffering, Judaism considered happiness.  And that is when Sacks referred to the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives,

Zeke II - The Sequel: Convert or Revert?

The past four days I’ve reflected on the story of a self-seeking guy who has a turnaround.  He has an epiphany – which means an opening, a window through which he sees life differently, a door through which he is drawn, into a place that calls him to change.  We don’t know what made Zeke climb that tree.  We know that Moses and his burning bush, and Paul got knocked off his horse by a voice.  We know from their becoming ongoing characters in Scripture stories that those epiphanies pretty much stuck, that by and large they got turned around and stayed that way.  But Zacchaeus/Zeke is a bit player, steals a scene or two and then is gone.  We don’t know if he stayed changed, or if he reverted to his old self after awhile.

Heart and Home

A good story can fool you; it can take you where courage would not.  A good storyteller knows your heart, and knows how to get in.  But the really good storyteller knows how to take you by the hand and walk you through your own heart.  This story of Zeke in the last two postings is our own story, and the house Jesus is entering is not merely our house, messy as it is, but our own heart. 

As soon as Jesus tells Zacchaeus he is coming over, Z starts to clean up.  He’ll give to the poor half of all he has.  His home and heart are crowded with stuff that he thought would make him happy, perhaps.  He needs to make room for this Rock Star who knows his name, and apparently knows his heart, knows that if there’s to be room for him, Z’s got some cleaning out to do