Transfiguration: What Sticks?

In a final look at today’s Good Story of the Transfiguration in Luke 9:28-36 (Click here for a link), let’s consider what sticks. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a popular book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference that mentioned “stickiness”: what makes a story a good one is that something sticks to us after it is over. We remember something. We are forever changed, even if only in a subtle way. The friends of Jesus had seen him transfigured, and they would never be the same. One of the purposes of the nightly Examen, even a moment of reflection as you are falling asleep on the events of your day, is to reinforce or strengthen the memory of those things that stood out. Some people use “journaling” to do this, writing down their thoughts and reflections of the day, and in doing so writing them on their hearts.

Here is a powerful such description by Thomas Merton of a transfigurational moment that changed his life, a doorway through which he entered a world of empathy that he never left. Thanks to Bill Hickey for sending this as we began looking at transfiguration.  It is set off by his seeing, really seeing, a bag lady on the street in Cincinnati.  Look how it stuck!

I was suddenly overwhelmed with a realization that I loved all these people,
That they were mine and I theirs….
It was like waking from a dream of separateness,
Of spurious self-isolation in a special world,
The world of renunciation and supposed holiness.
The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream….

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy
That I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form
In the words, "Thank God that I am like other men (and women)."

I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own.
It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone,
And when I am alone they are not "they," but my own self.
There are no strangers! The gate of heaven is everywhere.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts,
The depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach,
The core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes.
If only they could see themselves as they really are.
If only we could see each other that way all the time,
There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed….
But how do you tell people that they are walking around shining like the sun?
I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down
And worship each other.

From Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Please consider one last reading of this Good Story before we go on tomorrow to look at words of life from an unexpected place.  Apply your senses. Get into the story. But do so as one of Jesus friends. Be Peter or James or John. You look up after the brightness fades and see that it is only Jesus there. He comes down and joins you. How do you find that you are looking at him having seen him in his full glory; how you feel about him, and about yourself? What sticks?


Tomorrow: returning to desire and will with a word from Death Row
Tuesday: the two feet of the Lenten Journey: Examen and Imagining the Good Story
Wednesday: The gift of Sudden; the gift of gradual: doors within doors



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God's "Get Out of Jail" Card

On Easter, that morning that ends Lent, the French plaster handbills like the one in the photo (click for its source) all over the place with the words “l’Amour de Dieu est folie!”:God’s love is mad!

One of Detroit’s hidden treasures in the 80’s and 90’s was the Graystone International Jazz Museum. It fought an uphill battle finding ways for old Black jazz musicians to get gigs and grants here and there to keep them and their music alive. The organization was named after a long demolished ballroom in Detroit where in the segregated 30’s Black musicians could play for White folks six days a week, but where on one night a week, (“Nig_ _r Night”, they told me with a smiling wink) Black folk were allowed to enter Graystone Ballroom as patrons, you see, as regular folk, to listen and dance to their own musicians. And so the Graystone Ballroom meant something to these now aging Black musicians; they wanted to keep its memory alive with a little museum and a big band, The Graystone Orchestra. In my job at University of Detroit Mercy, I was able to arrange for them to use our Student Union ballroom for their weekly practices and monthly concerts, in barter for free admission to our students and staff. And so the Graystone musicians loved me. Dr. Beans Bowles was the Director and conductor of the Orchestra; whenever he would see me, he’d give me a big hug, then with his hands still on my sides would move his head back to be able to look into my eyes, and he’d say the words that were the title of a great old song: “I love you madly.”
Maybe that’s why years later I would be so deeply struck when I discovered that French quote. There was something great about being loved madly by this sweet old Black musician. But if we carry inside ourselves the spirit of a God whose love is mad (walking on water and crucifixion and rising from the dead and such) it can be more than a little scary. Maybe that’s why we sedate God. For fear that the madness of that unbridled, uncontrollable love that might otherwise have its way with us, maybe we keep God locked in the tabernacle of our belief, where we can worship him, or maybe just wonder about him, but certainly not get carried away, used as a pawn of his mad love.
I believe that compassion is God’s “get out of jail” card, the wrecking ball that breaks through our heart’s tabernacle. When we are with a person who is suffering, God’s mad love pushes against the defenses of our fear and sensibility and moderation and logic. If we dare to look into their faces and see the anguish there, this god of our worship and wonder becomes the god of our love, and shows on our face, and transfigures us. And that suffering person, whether stranger or spouse, sees our softening face and the doors of their own prison of fear and despair are opened, and the God of their hope breaks free, and their face is similarly transfigured. For that moment of encounter, each sees the humanity of the other in its full brightness. As in Chapter nine of Luke’s Good Story, the moment of transfiguration can change us forever, draw us into a relationship that is divine madness, which is in fact nothing more than the freedom of human love. Truly human love is fed not by the poor pond of our will, but by the running spring of spirit, as endless as the mystery in the face of this person that we see.

On Easter morning three weeks from now the French will post their handbills celebrating the mad love of a stone rolled away, a dead God risen. But all along this Lenten way to that morning, we have this invitation to be transfigured by compassion, to be and see the face of God.

Tomorrow:  Thomas Merton's Bag Lady
Monday: a word about will from Death row



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Transfiguration: Seedling to Sunflower

We have witnessed transfigurations.  If we stop to reflect we can recall them. The story of Jesus being transfigured is a human story, the emergence if the inner, truer, emerging self in all of us.  In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye is raising five daughters in a world encroaching on the values with which he himself was raised. In reverie of his daughters’ transformation from little girls to young women, he sings the song “Sunrise, Sunset”.  He describes their transfiguration: “seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze."
On my birthday just before Christmas I witnessed such a transfiguration. My granddaughter Nadia is nine now, and growing like a weed. Since infancy, she has had an interiority, into which she often retreats not suddenly, but as a slow ballet: now she’s here, now she’s there. But every once in awhile, PRESTO! She’s startled into a full run offstage. As she is aware of her own growth spurt, she is also aware of her own being called beyond the simplicity of childhood, in which her five year old sister blissfully remains. So it is a rich time, of seeing her dance not only between her secret world and the one we share with her, but also between her childhood and the world of our adulthood.
Just before Thanksgiving, I had been told by my doctor that I had an aneurism on my aorta.  I would have open-heart surgery to avoid the possibility of a sudden death. Kathy and I had gone first to Nadia’s family, to tell our daughter and her husband. Until then I’d acted as if I were 36, not 63. I’d been exceptionally active and fit. Now I was a heart patient, required to “be a slug” until life-saving surgery could be scheduled. We shared the news as positively as we could, hopeful and grateful. Nadia excused herself, saying that she had to go to the bathroom. She had learned a new ballet step, one to mask a slip so the audience would not notice. After a few minutes, her knowing mother went in to talk with her, and the two of them returned, Nadia coming into my lap, tall and lithe, hugging me gently and letting herself weep words that would not come, would not come.
A few days later Kathy and I joined our daughter’s family at a flute concert presented by Nadia’s flute teacher. She had retreated from the class, nonplussed by the idea of standing before a group and presenting. I was, much like her, twirling between my interior life, considering death, and polite attention to the social situation that I was in. The children’s music was delightful, their sweet faces more than compensating for their not-so-sweet notes. Their teacher had arranged for a few of them to read a couple of seasonal poems as an interlude to the music. The youngsters rushed through the poems, reading them like shopping lists, half inaudible. But the opening line of the second poem shocked me into recognition, not only of the poem, but of my condition. “Whose woods these are I think I know….” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (click for a link) was familiar to me, but until that moment I did not know (as I now somehow knew) as I listened to its speed-reading. Perhaps it was Frost’s prescient repeat of the closing line – “miles to go before I sleep.” I realized, as I privately contemplated the relief that death would be should it happen to me, that I too had promises to keep, to these beloved of mine in this room and my other children too. I felt, as Frost, called to life, called not to tarry before a place that is not mine to consider. I sat red-faced trying to hold back hot tears that I hoped would not come, would not come.
A month later, Nadia and her family came over to celebrate my birthday. It was a special one, of course, because we were living in the only truth, that birthdays are not promised. There were the usual gifts of thoughtful sentiment and more “happy tears” than usual. The girls each gave me a hand-drawn card, and five year old Sonja gave me a felt flower she had made for me to pin on my shirt. When it was Nadia’s turn to give me her gift, she stood empty-handed. She looked at me unblinkingly, gently smiling, swallowed twice, and began; “Whose woods are these I think I know….”
I saw her face change before me, glowing not as Jesus’ white garment, but as a girl facing womanhood, a child who until months ago had struggled to read and now, out of love for a grandfather she had noticed red-faced at a concert, had read and memorized this poem, and fought her stage fright enough to recite it, slowly, now when he could let the tears come, the month-old tears, cooled by the calm in the face of this child who could feel adult fear, and adult love.

tomorrow Thomas Merton's Bag Lady
Sunday: Compassion:our transfiguration



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To See A World in a Grain of Sand...

...And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. (William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence")

This Sunday, the second in Lent, gives us another really Good Story, in which son of a carpenter who has been impressing the locals and gathering a following is transformed before their very eyes. The 9th chapter of Luke’s Good Story starts like this. (Once upon a time…)…Jesus took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray. While he was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.
For those noticing, this makes two; two times that weird things happened that made them look closely at this guy Jesus. You know, like there’s something different about him, good different, special. First there was The Voice when he was baptized, remember? The thunder, the dove, the “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him!” And now this bright light, this appearance of two heroes of Jewish history.
As you read this Story (click for a link) come to your senses; apply your senses in the story. It is a doorway to experience. Imagine yourself having walked with Jesus to this place. Your feet are hot; you’re a little tired from the walk, perhaps a bit thirsty. He walks up the hill and you decide to just sit down and wait for him to come back down. And then you see the light, and everything has changed. It’s like that Jordan River scene all over again, except this time it’s That Light, like it was coming from inside him. Jesus! It’s just him; you can recognize the face, but he’s different. He’s magnificent, made bigger somehow by that light, more than he was before. Then you see Moses and Elijah, and you turn your face away, afraid that you should not be looking. Suddenly you are a child, and this is not something you should not see. Then the light behind your turned face dims, and disappears. It is only Jesus. He’s back to his old self. Did it really happen? You’re not sure, but every time you look at him now, you wonder.
Transfiguration – it happens all the time. For the next three days we will look at examples of it. A poem, a nine year old girl, and a bag lady will be our guides. During these days, re-read the Good Story that we will hear on Sunday, and know that it is YOUR story, happening all around you.  In “God’s Grandeur” Gerard Manley Hopkins is moved by this awareness that God lurks behind everything, accompanying us, wooing us, stalking us. Lured by love for us, he sneaks us glimpses from time to time. You see something, or think you saw something. It upsets and scintillates you, wakes up something strangely familiar in you. Did it really happen?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? (carry his banner; follow him)
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.


And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

They are everywhere, Hopkins suggests, these shinings, these oozes, these springings, and with them come these Ahhhhs, like with your thumbs yesterday, these times when something inside your resonates, feels the rightness of an unseen truth.  They are a distant thunder, a flash of light that is over in a minute, and maybe you wonder if they ever really happened. You’re not sure, but every time you look at anything now, you wonder.

Tomorrow: Sunrise, Sunset; a nine year old girl and her poem
Saturday: Thomas Merton’s Bag Lady


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On Wings of Desire

If Lent is to be a time of unwrinkling, of standing to our full height, of growing toward the light of our deepest desire, how do we come to know its source?  Our deepest desire is always within us, speaking n a voice quiet beneath the din of our lives. The certainly of its sound is so strong that even in its quiet we can hear it, hear the elements of the din in resonance with its pitch, hear those that are dissonant with IT. The daily Examen gives us the opportunity to learn to hear this resonance, this harmony. Would you like to experience the difference between this interior harmony and dissonance?
Please do this. You will understand. Put your hands like the ones in the photo. Notice that one of your thumbs – right or left – naturally ends up on top. Switch thumbs, so that the other one is on top. How does it feel? Strange? Uncomfortable? Weird? Now switch back to the way that happened naturally, the way that happens to be right for you. Feels better, doesn’t it? Switch back and forth. You are feeling dissonance and resonance, conflict and harmony. If you put the “wrong” thumb on top and slowly switch to the “natural” one, at a certain point as you approach the “natural” position, you may feel the Ahhhh that comes, like Quaker song that suggests “’twill be our delight when by turning, turning we come ‘round right.” The thumb technique is something that in just a moment demonstrates this delight on the surface. The Examen (click for a link) invites us to feel this delight in a deeper way.  Don’t let the word “God” distract you, or the “religious” language. Look at the five simple steps as Presence, Gratefulness, Clarity, Review, and Conversation. Presence is simply focus, centering our attention. Gratefulness relaxes us. Anything for which we are grateful – the sweetness of our tea, the feeling of warm water on our hands and face are examples of this. It need not be some major experience. Clarity moves us to ask. Ask who, if not God? Our inner self, perhaps, our conscience, our Jiminy Cricket? We all have one. And now the review. What happened today? It will take some energy to recall even these last 16 hours! But one by one, the memories will come. Each experience, when we recall it, will have some resonance or dissonance, a little or a lot. Some of these experiences felt a rightness, a fit. Others felt a wrongness, a pinch. Remember the story of the yoke. Which experiences chafed, pinched, irritated you? And which were like the soothing ointment, the healing hands? And like the thumb exercise notice the feelings of rightness or wrongness inside yourself. It’s not about thumbs; it’s about your interior feeling of rightness-for-you. The Linn’s’ book Sleeping With Bread suggests a much simpler way of reviewing: What fed you today? What nurtured your truest self? The last step, conversation, calls us once again to take a leap of …faith. Maybe it’s God you’ll talk with. Creator/Father? Jesus? Holy Spirit? Perhaps you have a kind of ambassador, the memory of a person in your life to whom you are beloved, who knows you, and knows whatever the beyond is. This conversation is really between ourselves-in-time and our deepest center. Some of us name it God.
When we hear something beautiful, we naturally turn our heads toward it. We instinctively turn toward the source of our desire, as the still-blind newborn roots for the little bump that something delightful comes from. That it is called “breast” is not important. What is important is that eventually the child comes to know the source, and give it a name:Mom. If we root for what nourishes us, we will instinctively find the source, and we will name it. And we will come to know that Source, by whatever name we call it, and we will seek it. Among the cacophony of stimulations of the day, we will come to know which nourish us, and we will desire them.

The Source of that desire will lift us on its wings through Lent – and through life – lightening the burden as our weak wills struggle for a foothold.

Tomorrow: a glimpse of our truest self – the Transfiguration

Fear of Fastening - the Story of the Yoke

Lent is a time of lengthening, of growing toward our truest desire, the source of our fulfillment. And as the word Lent finds it source in the slightly longer word length, the word fast takes its meaning from the slightly longer word fasten. Fasting requires us to “stick to it”, to that something we’ve decided to do for Lent, and that can be punishing.
There's a part of most of us that fears attachments. Perhaps that is why we during Lent we would rather struggle with our will by pushing ourselves to do something than by fastening ourselves to our desire. Why are we afraid to belong?  Perhaps we're afraid of being hurt.  In Matthew’s good story, Jesus invites us to “Place my yoke over your shoulders, and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble. Then you will find rest for yourselves.”
Remember that a good story is not a blackboard on which words are written, but a doorway, an opening. And the word YOKE provides just such an opening, one of the most illuminating words Jesus speaks. His listeners in an agrarian culture knew exactly what he meant. He could tell a long story in a single word to people whose ox was their tractor, without which they could starve. Jesus knew what a yoke was. Here’s the untold part of the story that was written in the memory of the hands of his listeners.
The yoke is a wooden bar that is fastened across the shoulders of the ox, to which ropes are tied. Those ropes then pull the plow, or cart, or whatever the farmer needed to grow food for the family. By tilling the soil and bringing in the crops, the ox was essential to the success of the farm and thus the survival of the family. That yoke transferred all of the weight of the plow or the cart to its shoulders, to its bones and muscles and skin. As the ox pulled, those shoulder bones and muscles would move, squeezing the skin between themselves and the wood of that yoke, with it burden tugging on the ropes. The farmer with a new ox would cut a block of wood that would receive the ropes and fit the shoulders of the animal. Then he would harness the ox to it and take it for a short pull with a light load, as we would take a short stroll in new shoes, to break them in, to let their pliable materials take the shape of our feet, to avoid blisters and injury.

Now please read this part of the story with your imagination. Apply your senses. See, smell, feel, taste, listen.

After each session of work, the farmer removes the yoke, and then places both hands gently on the shoulders of the ox. With sensitive touch he feels for heat, his eyes following his hands to look for signs of chafing, places where the new yoke pinches, irritating the ox’s skin. When he finds these chafed areas, he massages them with ointment. Then he turns to the yoke. With his chisels, the changes the shape of the yoke where it has irritated the ox, making the rough places smooth, gouging deeper to mate more gently with the protruding bones and muscles of his particular animal. The memory in his hands feels the changes in the now smoother wood of the yoke, matching them to the contours of the ox’s warm shoulders. This ritual is repeated each time the farmer and the ox finish their work. The yoke, by the daily adjustments of the farmer, comes to conform more perfectly to the shoulders of the ox, becomes easier. The ox comes to know more and more each day the healing hands of the farmer and the increasing ease of the work. The farmer comes to know more and more each day the fit of the yoke and the natural capability of the ox.
Imagine someone who loves you, at the end of each day, touching your skin where you carry your burdens, a touch that somehow knows more and more each day where your burdens "rub you the wrong way", where they pinch, where they chafe, where they bruise you. Imagine them gently massaging soothing ointment there; feel its cooling relief. Imagine them helping you to chisel away the yoke of your work, smoothing out the rough places, rounding out the places where your skin or your psyche protrudes. Jesus calls this learning.
Lent calls us to fastening, but not to a heavy rough rope over our bare shoulders pulling a punishing load for the sake of suffering, a no pain – no gain fight with our will. The good story of the yoke calls us to fasten ourselves to the teacher who promises us a yoke that fits, a burden within our capacity, and a daily ritual of being taught by what touches us.

Tomorrow, the Examen as this daily ritual of learning from what touches us.



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Of Baby Slings and Chocolate Pietas

The five foot high chocolate Pieta was not the biggest shock that Kathy and I discovered in the Barcelona Chocolate Museum while visiting our son. That biggest shock was the discovery that in the Middle Ages, chocolate was developed as food during Lent, to replace the calories provided by the meat that was forbidden during that season. Food! It was made in the monasteries all year long and sold to the people during Lent as FOOD! Why the heck did we give it up? Why were our childhoods tested by looking at Easter Baskets for days and days before finally being able to dive into them on Easter morning . . . after Mass? What a rip-off, I thought; what a waste! My inner child pouted, my bottom lip protruding in protest of a wasted youth. Why do we give anything up? Why do we fast?  Fast. The word comes from the same root that is used in the word fasten. It means to attach ourselves to something. 
When our daughter Amy came home from the hospital with her first daughter, she looked deeply into Kathy’s eyes, and into mine, and told us “David and I are going to be raising Nadia in a certain way, and I need you to accept it. This is the only time in my life that I will have the opportunity to live life through a baby, a growing child, undistracted from her, present to her and aware of her every moment. If we are blessed with another child, my attention will be divided, and this opportunity will have ended.” She spoke the words with a voice at once quivering with emotion and firm with certainty. Like indigenous infants on the prairie, Nadia lived fastened to Amy all day, on a sling in front of her that made nursing natural. At night Nadia slept not in a crib, but in a “co-sleeper” a crib with the mattress fastened to Amy and David’s.
Amy and David’s fastening themselves to their role as parents was not an act of the will. It was an act of desire, fed by delight. Somehow Amy knew that her time as mother-of-infant, mother-of-child, and mother-of-adolescent would pass quickly, and her desire was to live every moment of it. And somehow David’s desire was to be her companion in this, to be fastened by his love to his wife who chose to be fastened to their child. 
Lent is not about fist-clenched determination to master our wills. It is fastening ourselves to our deepest desire, carrying it around with us no matter what we’re doing, knowing that it is in that desire that we find our truest, whole-est selves. Amy’s desire was to see the world through the eyes of her child. David’s desire was to share this experience with his wife. The parents in the camps fastened their children’s hands around crusts of bread to hold in their sleep out of desire that they have hope. Jesus’ desire in the desert was the spirit that drove him there: to follow The Voice, to discover what it meant to be beloved, to have the courage to speak. We did not need to jump from the parapet and be saved by angels. He was already being carried on wings of desire.
What is your deepest desire, the thing to which you would fasten yourself for these forty days?

Tomorrow – fear of fastening – the yoke story
Wednesday – finding your desire in your nightly Examen
Thursday – our whole-iest selves; the Good Story of the Transfiguration





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Good Story - YOUR Story?

A good story is one that involves you, that draws you in; it becomes your story. Were you there in that desert? Did you smell the dust in the air; feel the rough ground through your thin sandals? Or did you realize that after forty days without food, you might have stretched your ethical principles a bit to turn that stone into bread?
Do we know the pain of hunger? Is there anything that we ever wanted so badly that we have literally ached for it? Do we want something that badly now? Would we stretch the truth to get it? Would we cheat a little?

Francis Shen came to live down the street from us in the city. He had emigrated here from China, just after Mao Tse Tung died. He saw me trying to fix my car and asked if he could help, and joined me under the hood. Soon I realized that he was a mechanic, and asked him where he had learned the trade. His one-word answer shocked me: “Prison”. I felt an involuntary shudder of fear slip from my left shoulder to the small of my back, aware now of my closeness to this man, this ex-con, under this hood. “Prison”, I asked? “I was in prison for twenty-eight years in China; I was a diesel mechanic there.” twenty-eight years, I thought! Murder? What had he done to be in prison that long? “Francis, may I ask why you were in prison” I asked carefully. He looked at me as if I should have known. “For being a Catholic!”
I was stunned to realize that Francis was one of those about whom we protested when I was in the third grade, sending letters to Mao asking him to free the Catholics from the prisons. I had thought it was Catholic propaganda. In the intervening years, I had grown up, gone to college, found the love of my life, had three children, and worked for ten years in a job I loved. Francis had lived in a prison camp and worked on trucks. I learned from him and from others I met through him that all the Catholics had to do was say that they would follow Mao; just to say it. Twenty eight years for carrying a “Legion of Mary” card in his wallet, and continuing to say that God came before Mao. Say the words and you can go home.

Would I have said the words? Would You?

Francis made this Good Story my story. When I heard the words of the devil say to my hungry ears that I could turn that stone to bread, I began to imagine its gray roughness turn brown and smooth. I began to smell it, and tears came to my eyes. In a good story, we begin to feel that we know the characters; they become parts of our life. And often we find that we identify with one of them, we begin to think that we and they are the same. I was no Jesus. I was not even Francis. In this desert story, it’s pretty likely that we would want to identify with Jesus, but I can understand the devil’s logic here. Come on, Jesus, be practical. Be sensible. I think of Francis, and imagine that Legion of Mary card in his wallet, and those soldiers taking him to prison as a young man.

I never get to the parapet of the temple, to wonder whether I’d give in; I never get to the round-the-world invitation to power. I’m stuck with that stone, and the way I’m turning it into bread.

You?




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Once Upon a Time...

Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. Sleeping with Bread – practicing a nightly Examen – was offered as a first tool for Lent. A second tool is seeing the Jesus Story not as prescriptive, but evocative, not as blackboard, but as doorway; it is to read the Gospel as Story, to enter it as real.

Because tomorrow is Sunday, the first of five in Lent, I’d like to climb into the story that you will hear if you happen to go to a Catholic church, or that you may experience on your own. We’ll do a bit more of it tomorrow, then spend some time looking at our two Lenten tools – the nightly Examen and this weekly process of entering the next Jesus Story, the next Gospel.
The word gospel is from the Old English godspel: god-spel :good-story. We often refer to a similar translation as “Good News”, and that will be important during Lent, where the story takes us through experiences of betrayal, brutality, and death. We will find the good in it; more precisely, the good will find us from within it. The story begins: the Good Story of Luke, Chapter 4, verses 1-13, included at the bottom of this posting.
What we’re after is to get into this story. A young man is in the desert, brought there by a spirit that has just entered him when he let his friend John baptize him in the nearby Jordan River. When he lifted his head from the water in which John had submerged him, he had heard a voice, loud and clear as day say to all present there by the river “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!” Imagine that happening to you. Imagine at a work luncheon, or a school play with your kids, or maybe right there in the grocery store a voice coming from the sky and saying that about you, and maybe a dove flying above your head, just in case the people around you don’t know to whom The Voice is referring. That's where this story starts. A man is in the desert hills above the river trying to make sense of the words that The Voice had just said about him. Imagine that it is you. You have just heard those words. You are the beloved daughter, the beloved son. The people are to look at you, to listen to you. And you have fled to the desert hills above the river.

Experiencing this is what we’re after; entering it so that it becomes more than words, words that we may have heard so often that they’ve lost meaning, if they ever had it. The Monks centuries ago meditated on Scripture when there were dozens of them sharing one enormous hand-scribed Bible. They did it by taking time in the Chapel reading the text again and again until they remembered it, word-for-word, but more importantly scene-by-scene. Then they would go to their room and let the story play in their mind, over and over until a door opened and let them in. This is what I hope you will try. Remember, this is not a math problem or a speech to memorize or solve in your head. Come to your senses! The door that opens to you will not be a concept or idea. It will be feeling rough ground on the soles of your feet, or feeling your knees weaken on the parapet of the temple, or seeing the town below. Suddenly you find yourself inside. Play the story from there, from inside. Who are you there? Are you an unseen observer? Are you Jesus, or the devil? Your role will be given to you. Don’t take a role. Read the story over and over with your imagination, as a story, until you can close your eyes and keep the story looping.
Why do this? The Jesus story is about a man who was able to reach out and touch; some would say to heal. He was a man who calmly challenged the powerful. He was a teacher who was followed by crowds. And when who he was and what he did got him in trouble, he accepted death rather than conform to what he saw as wrong. He did all that he did with only the power of love and the certainty of his father’s love. That Voice remained with him through this entire story of his journey to and through death. And his story has remained with our human civilization. This story. And it begins here, in the desert hills above the Jordan where he heard that Voice….

Filled with the holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'one does not live by bread alone.'" Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, "I shall give to you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me." Jesus said to him in reply, "It is written: 'You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.'" Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written: 'He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,' and: 'With their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus said to him in reply, "It also says, 'You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.'"

If you get stuck, let me know. Comment (so we will all learn with you) or e-mail me. Enjoy the "good story".





FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

His Story, Your Voice

Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. Sleeping with Bread – practicing a nightly Examen – was offered as a first tool for Lent, working on our will when it is at rest.
A second tool is seeing the Jesus Story not as prescriptive, but evocative, not as blackboard, but as door; it is to see the Gospel as Story.  This second tool frees us to discover our deepest desire.

The Gospels are stories written long after their subject had died, written by some of those who could not forget him so that the story could be shared with others. The power of a story is that it involves us. The word involve comes from the Latin root volvere meaning to roll. Our word “revolve” means to roll over and over. involve means to roll us in. The good story wraps around us, takes us in, embraces us.

A good story embraces us like a good mother. To a good mother, each child is wonderful, and each child is different; each child grows differently, needs different nurturance. A good mother’s embrace makes the child know its worth. What makes a mother good is not how the child feels about the mother, but how the child feels about itself. What makes a story good is not that we understand the story, but in reading it, we understand ourselves.
With a story, meaning is something we make, not something we find. If we were to spend ten seconds making swirls with a pencil on a piece of paper and ask an observer what they see, they might look not at the paper, but at our face, trying to read on our face what we are looking for. They might search for our answer. But children might be more likely to look at our swirls like clouds, and feel comfortable to say “I see a bunny” or “I see a mouse”. Children have the native imagination and courage to find their own answer - the truth that arrives to them in their imagination. Seeing the Jesus Story as a tool for our own “unwrinkling” - growth and healing beyond constrictions and traumas – can be difficult for some of us who have been frightened by the Bible as prescriptive, as judging, as constricting. Some of us have lost the child’s freedom to make meaning. All of us have, to some extent, learned to answer questions with the answers that are expected of us to avoid criticism or sanction. That’s why we look at the face of the questioner for clues to what they are looking for, for the “correct” answer. We will look at the Jesus Story as evocative. The word is from the Latin ex- meaning "out of" or "from" and vocis, meaning voice. A good story, like a good mother, calls our voice from within us.
In this particular 40 day lenten journey, we will use the Jesus Story from the Gospels like the embrace of a good mother. In the safety and warmth of that embrace, we can find the courage to open doors, to find meaning for ourselves. In the nurturance of that experience, we can find ourselves lengthening, unwrinkling as we grow beyond constrictions and traumas. We may find, as more and more of our interior doors are opened, that we do indeed live not in a tight little self, but an interior castle.

Tomorrow we will be offered a first embrace of the Jesus Story, his own 40 days in the desert after which the length of Lent is patterned. The gospel of Luke, Chapter 4, verses 1-13. (click for a link)  Please read it with your imagination.  Let it roll you in, wrap you up.  It is a story, not a problem. Don't try to figure it out, try to enter it.  Read it again and again until you begin to sense it.  Feel the heat of the desert; look down from the high places. Smell the dust in your nostrils and taste it on your tongue; listen to the voices, and to the wind.  More on this tomorrow.  For those who will be going to a Catholic church on Sunday, this is the Gospel that you will hear again; for all of us, it is a story we will know.

Sleeping with Bread

Think of a nice warm sweater, or a beautifully hand-knit blanket. Consider that they are made of knots, lots and lots of knots. Lent is not a time of undoing all that makes us who we are, of wiping out our memories and starting clean. That would make no more sense than un-knotting that sweater, or that blanket. We have been woven by life into the human fabric that we are by a combination of desire and will.

Lent is literally about new life, not about death. "Ashes to Ashes" is not want Lent is about. That’s just Ash Wednesday, meant as a shock to get our attention. Webster’s New World dictionary unlocks this true meaning for us: Middle English lenten comes from the Old English lengten, meaning "the spring", with its lengthening of the days.

Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. It is a way of emerging, like the shoots of the spring, from the dark places where we are cramped and compressed, unfolding and stretching into the light and warmth that draws us yet further, to blossom, to increase, and to provide.

Will and desire. Oh, what a frustrating combination they are; what an odd couple, so often struggling with each other, each becoming an ugly caricature of itself in war paint of effort. “Giving things up for Lent” is a common way, like New Year’s Resolutions, to conform our will to our intentional desires. But if you are like me, desires fit the hand like a glove, but will fits the hand like sand. Our efforts seem to run through our fingers, and we are left with a sense of failure.

Sleeping with Bread is a way of describing a technique that forms the will when it sleeps, when desire is most active in us. The book (click for a link) uses a Holocaust story to introduce a nightly exercise of consciousness to help us unbind our will, to put it at the service of our deepest desire.

There were families in the camps, the story tells, parents who were interned with their small children. To help the children bear the horrors and maintain a sense of hope, the parents would hide in their pockets a morsel of bread from their meager dinner. Their ritual of going to sleep included placing hose morsels of bread into the hands of their children, so that they might sleep in the comfort of food for the next day, so they might be blessed with dreams of a future. The parents trusted the gift of sleep, the blessing of timeless time when desire danced and stretched without the encumbrance of painful memory or weak will.

This little book describes a simple process that I hope you’ll try these next forty days.

Here is a link to it (click for a link), called the Examen.  It invites us to a ritual of going to sleep with a morsel of the day – something that fed us, that evoked the best in us. It invites us to sleep dancing with our truest desire, unencumbered by painful memory or weakness of will.

Lent - Companions on a Hero Journey

I began this blog because I found myself on a journey that might end in sudden death. Sounds dramatic. It was. In mid-November my new doctor had called me to come in and review the results of the previous week’s stress test, and everything changed. He said that a bulge on the side of my aorta leading from my heart could rupture if I was not careful. He said I was lucky we caught this early. He said that this would have been a game-changer if we had not caught it. He said to be a slug. Everything changed, as I returned home stripped of the illusion of tomorrow, and I found the gift of today. I saw Kathy clearly, felt my love for her without inhibition, and expressed it. I knew my life’s treasure. Life with children, grandchildren, and friends had a certain sharpness and clarity. Since I felt responsible to stay alive for them, I followed my doctor’s direction scrupulously: I was a slug. As we learned more about my aneurism from my cardiologist, we began to understand that sudden death was not likely an issue, but that its location and early detection required a careful analysis of the best approach to repair. I was free to engage in limited exertion: use a snow blower, but don’t shovel; lift no more than twenty pounds – make that 10. Walk on the tread mill, but don’t set it on a heavy workout. It is now three months from the discovery of that aneurism.

Did you ever wonder why in heaven’s name ancient cultures would sacrifice humans to a volcano? They had an existential awe at the idea of this nexus, this connection of inner-ness and outer-ness, this place where membrane that separates the cool, firm, outer world from the fiery, molten inner world was penetrated. It was a secret door into another world. They did not understand the phenomenon scientifically, they gave it a sacredness, ascribed to it a holiness, a mystery. Those sacrificed were sent not to death, but into mystery, into the “other world”, and idea included in most cultures, like our own “heaven”. And don’t we talk about someone being “at death’s door”? While I anticipate open-heart surgery, perhaps months from now, perhaps sooner, I know that this dance on the rim of the caldera blesses me with insight, and I also admit that the clarity of my living waxes and wanes with the heat and the smell of sulphur. I observe that I’m best in this world when I’m at the doorway to the other.

The season of Lent, while practiced by Christians, is an opportunity for all of us to approach death’s door not in terror, but in awe, not as a candle that draws the moth in us, but as this nexus between the here-and-not-here that calls us here. The door is Jesus, a man who is recorded in Roman records as living 200 years ago. All of us are free to look at the real, historical Jesus regardless of whether we call him the Christ, the anointed one of God, the son of God, the Messiah. As with other epics, we have the opportunity to take a hero journey with him, as he lives, approaches death, dies, rises, and becomes Spirit.

This blog began as a way of cherishing and sharing my life on a journey, my life lived with intensity and clarity by the uninvited grace of threat. Join me daily or from time to time on this path toward the path of Jesus for these forty days. I do not know the way. But in that week of brightest illumination when I thought my life might quickly end, I knew from moment to moment the best way to spend the time I had. I discovered what importance was. I am formed most of all by the love of my wife, and of our children who are in many ways the incarnation of her love. But I am formed next by the life and example of this Jesus, who calls me not to himself, but to Kathy, and our children, and others.

Let’s see what we can learn about life by companioning Jesus, the nexus of holiness and humanity.  Please join, whether our hero is stranger to you or friend, God or not.  I’ve pulled off the previous posts, so we can focus on this.

Tomorrow - Sleeping with Bread

FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Transfiguration

What would it be like if we could really see just one person as they really are, their truest self? It was said in the Old Testament that if a person were to see the face of God, they would die. I suspect that the same sense of overwhelming awe would overcome us if we could see the face of a person, really see.
Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman tells the story of a David, a psychiatrist who realizes that he is drawn to dispassionately chronicle his adult daughter Karin’s descent into mental illness. He fails to see her, until he has his own episode with consideration of suicide, and is given a grace that he describes to his son: “From the void within me, something was born that I can't touch or name. A love. For Karin. For Minus. For you."

Face to face. Perhaps we choose to hide behind our face, to keep our truth inside, acknowledging Blake’s poetic claim of the human face as a “furnace sealed”. I have noticed Kathy and our children studying my face when something is going on in my life, most noticeably in those weeks following my doctor’s discovery of this aneurism. When all of us were considering the reality of my death, they searched my face for the words I might not speak, for truth that I might hide.
And sometimes we choose not to see. In I and Thou Martin Buber writes “All actual life is encounter.” But he is quoted as saying “I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.” Perhaps like Buber we step back from the awe of encounter, into deep books and deep places that are shallow in comparison to any human face. We choose to see through a glass darkly.

And so I ask the question again. What would it be like if we could really see just one person as they really are, their truest self? We have a hint of it in the Gospel story of the Transfiguration. "After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him. Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them, then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and do not be afraid.” And when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one but only Jesus."
I think of this story as an invitation to the ordinary experience that awaits us in each human face truly seen. Transfiguration is from the Latin trans (across) and figura (shape,form). On that mountain, Peter and James and John got it. They saw the real Jesus. Jesus let himself be seen. In that moment of nothing more than truth, the whole truth, the nature of this man was so clear that his friends were almost blown away; when they looked up again, they saw “no one, but only Jesus.” They had had a momentary glimpse that took root in their memory, and they would forever know Jesus’ true identity.

Perhaps Buber hides in his books and David observes his daughter only as a subject in fear that the Old Testament warning applies to human faces as well, that if we look at them we will die. But Buber, and David, and you and I each emerge from this darkly fear into the clear light of encounter, into the truth and grace found face to face.

And we experience in the moment of that encounter an eternity of awareness that takes root in our memory; and we will forever know the true identity of the person into whose face we have looked.

Lent begins tomorrow. Perhaps instead of giving something up, we can intentionally allow ourselves to be seen, can intentionally see, can intentionally be face to face, to know and to be known.

Tomorrow – Sleeping with Bread: a Lenten practice of daily reflection

Note to FreeLemonadeStand readers: I have been encouraged by some of you to write a book, something I have long considered.  Since I plan on massaging parts of this blog into that book, please honor my request that you keep this text here on this site and in your heart, and not duplicate or copy it! Thank You! And thank you so much for reading my musings….

What do we do with those we have lost?

What do we do with those we have lost to death? After reading “Vocatis Atque Non Vocatis, Deus Aderit” four days ago, my friend Bill shared a quote from Simone Weil: “Love is not a state, but a direction.” He had been struck by my reference to a God who waits and waits and waits, who is with us in the present and moves with us toward our future. And he suggested that perhaps Love is both a state and a direction, and he said something profound about our relationship to God:

"We are advent people with an advent God. The great mystery of 'already but not yet.' … Dan's waiting is over. His direction and God's have merged."

My brother Dan is clearly a part of me, Dan who we say is “dead”. I remember my emotions taking me when I first used the past tense to describe him, there at his memorial service. “Dan is…was….” Whether there is some afterlife, where we have an individual identity, an autonomous self, is a question that arises when death is near to us. But I am certain that Dan is in the present tense in me, and in all of us who re-member him, bring him to life in our memory, bring him back to our company.
Simone Weil uses the word “state” to describe what love is not. We describe the body of the deceased available for viewing as “lying in state”. Stationary, status, static…it means that they’re not moving; it means that they are still. She suggests that our love for those we have lost to death is not static, unchanging, not just that stillness that settles on us in memory, but that by loving them, we take them in some direction.

What do we do with those we have lost to death? Bring them with us; go where they need to go to grow to their fullness. Consider the woman who is “with child”, carrying inside her this life that is part of her, but itself, too, an identity that is part of hers, but not hers. The development of that unborn child is determined by what she does for herself, how she eats, works, sleeps, feels, handles stress, loves. The child is “already, but not yet”. Perhaps this is the first stage of grief. But I think that there is a second.  Our direction and theirs merge as we move together toward God. I cannot take Dan where I do not myself go. If I want him to feel the love of God, I must feel it myself, he will be refreshed in the rain in which I dance.  If I want him to enjoy the laughter of children, then I must enjoy it myself, and let the Dan in me hear it.

Perhaps we bring those we have lost to death here within as we ourselves move toward the God of our own wholeness and healing. Perhaps they are, like that unborn child, still within our movement, but not a burden we carry, but rather bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit as we ourselves move toward the timeless God, the God who is already but not yet, who both accompanies us in love and awaits us in love. Perhaps they are healed in our healing, and arrive at their own wholeness as we do.

Tomorrow - Transfiguration.