The First Great Silence

Tomorrow it begins. We call it Holy Thursday. The downhill movement begins, gathering momentum, clearly unstoppable, riding on tracks laid by Roman occupation and legalistic dehumanization of the Scribes and Pharisees and the complicity of the Judases who thought they knew what the Messiah OUGHT to do. Then there is Good Friday, and the question of why we call it GOOD. But today, Wednesday, has no name.

Can you remember riding a roller coaster? Which part of the ride do you remember? Was it the height of it; was it the weightlessness of the drops? Was it the way the car eventually slowed down, the ups and downs becoming less and less steep the feeling of it coming to an end? Was it sitting in the car while it is loading, listening to the voices of the strangers who would soon be screaming and bouncing, all of us one voice, one 64-armed, 32-mouthed caterpillar that screams. Or was it the forward lurch of the coaster as it is grabbed by the hook under the track, the hook that is attached to the enormous, silent motor that pulls the cars up and up and up, 64 eyes looking into the blue sky, 32 hearts whose pounding would be audible except for the clank-clank-clanking of the ratchet that prevents the car from a backward slide in case that enormous silent engine failed?

I recall the moment at the top, when we are being nether pulled up nor let fall, when 64 lungs involuntarily suck in all the air that they can hold, all the air that will, moments later be released into the first of a number of screams that will be heard past all of the other screams and laughter and calliope sounds and not –so-silent enormous motors and cotton candy sellers all the way across the amusement park and into the mundane world beyond.

I’ll call this unnamed Wednesday the First Great Silence. Did the morning creatures two millennia ago feel in the stillness of the soil that the enormous engine had stopped? Did the birds hear the clank-clank-clanking slow, and then stop, and did they choose not to sing? Did the folded beggar at the gate notice, while the busy ones walked by, on their good legs? Did the women somehow know, at the morning well, looking at the dust, unable to look the truth of it in each others’ eyes?

We are here, you and I, at the top. Once it begins, we are carried wherever it takes us. That’s what the word Passion means. Tomorrow we will feel the movement begin, and soon it will be hurtling, and there will be screaming and it will be too late to get out. And so soon we will be there at the bottom. There at the bottom will be Saturday...
The Second Great Silence:
Momentum all spent, all humanity’s weak legs will disembark,
Will step fumblingly onto ground that is so unmoving,
All ears will hear no bird in air that is so still,
All eyes will look at the dust,
All hearts slowing,
Not yet knowing.

Morning will reveal
Stone rolled away,
Evil derailed.

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

Enough, Already!

I grew up in a pack. Dan and I were 20 months apart; three years later Bob joined us, and two years after that, Dave. The moderating influence of our sisters came later. Things would get pretty raucous in our little house, when four boys turned carbohydrates into sugar and sugar into movement and noise. One of us, chosen at random by the fates (no God could be so mischievous) would “start something” up in our room and pretty soon there was a cacophony of joyful energy swelling to a crescendo when the tiny woman from whom we had all somehow emerged would yell up the stairs, “Enough already!” All became quiet; we’d stop for awhile.

One day a co-worker came to my office with a little package and a big smile. “I made something for you,” she said. I self-consciously unwrapped the shiny, brightly colored paper as she stood smiling at me. “EEEENOUGH” the yarn spelled on the white plastic needlepoint screen, the screen not even hidden by other stitches, just serving to hold those essential letters, satisfied with its enoughness. I knew what she meant.

Fr. Jim Lohtse was our kind, humorous, and very hard working pastor. He had a little dog that was a visual mistake, a characteristic he used to his advantage on his walks, attracting the kids in the mostly Black neighborhood so they could receive the warm smile of the white priest. “What’s your dog’s name”, they’d ask. “His name is Jenkins” he’d reply.” “Jenkins?” they’d remark. “Yeah”, he’d say, smiling broadly, his eyes twinkling at them. “That was my first girlfriend’s name; isn’t he ugly?” They’d laugh, and he’d continue on his ministry in this neighborhood in his city, his city in which children were bereft of so much, but he and Jenkins could at least give them a smile. But Jim was never satisfied with his efforts. Time after time he’d do really good things, but every time I’d thank or congratulate him, he’d kind of look down, shake his head a little, and point to some inadequacy in the result. There was so much more he could have done. One night, his heart just stopped, there in his bed in the rectory in the neighborhood in the city where he and his perfectly ugly dog had just begun their work, and had so much more to do. I had told Kathleen that I thought Jim had bequeathed me the word “enough” because he never used it, and knew I ought to.

This week is called Holy because millions of Christians try to recall the pastor two thousand years ago who wept over his city, his work not nearly finished, his followers still not quite getting it, still thinking sometimes that it’s about status, and not service. And most of us will find our work week shorter by one day, God’s way (no fates would be so foolish) to try to slow us down, to quiet our cacophony, so we can think, reflect, or perhaps even weep over the fact that there is more work than we could ever possibly finish. Two thousand years later we still don’t get it, still thinking sometimes that it’s more about status, and not service.

But we do stop, for those three hours on Good Friday, and maybe, for now, that’s enough.

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

Just Watching?

In Lent and in life, merely watching is not just. Entering the Good Story of the passion and death of a man from Galilee offers all of us, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Agnostic, or Atheist to consider the ethical call to response in the face of an innocent victim.

Imagine this scenario vividly, as if it were really happening to you: You are standing on the sidewalk waiting for a friend to come out of a shop, when you see two things happen simultaneously

• A man on a bicycle who looks homeless and a bit confused catches the leg of his pants in the chain and almost falls. He stops the bike near you and is struggling to get off without dropping the bag he is carrying and falling over. If you move quickly, you can probably prevent his getting hurt.
• A little child, perhaps three years old, is smiling up at her mother as they walk along the sidewalk. Two feet from you, the door of a shop opens wide, the hard edge of the metal frame just a foot in front of her face. She is going to walk right into it. If you move quickly, you can probably prevent her getting hurt.

What do you do? QUICK!

To NOT help: is that a moral choice? Edmund Burke said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil to triumph for good men to do nothing.”
Which to help? Proximity, power, innocence, and identification: these are four factors that influence how we make decisions that involve helping someone in trouble. The closer we are, the more likely we are to help. The more capable we are of being effective, the more likely we are to help. And the more we see the victim as innocent, the more likely we are to help. And the more we can identify with the person, connect them with someone in our life, the more we are likely to help.

What did you do? If you’re just reading, please stop. Go back. Enter the scene; make the people real. What DID you do?

If we distance ourselves, consider ourselves powerless, if we judge, if we don’t see people as part of our lives, we...let…evil…triumph.  Sounds ugly; it is. And if you’re like me, you do it every day. This week let’s stay with the story of the passion of Jesus as a scenario that enables us to learn about ourselves as moral agents, as people free to do good…or to watch from the sidelines, tacitly cheering for evil’s triumph.

Get in the game.  Enter the Story (click for a link). Examen nightly the experiences of your day, and how your moral compass guided you. Start or continue your fast in order to remind yourself repeatedly of your relationship with God, with your truest self.

And notice those who share your sidewalk.


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

My God, My God: Abandoned in Translation – a Tale of Two Songs

"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"  This cry is perhaps the most heart-wrenching part of the crucifixion of Jesus. “Where is his God now”, an observer taunted; “why doesn’t his God come and save him?”

I had unwittingly set myself up for a display of grief at a French border town a few years ago. Andrea Bocelli, a popular Italian tenor, had recorded a song, "Con Te Partiro", translated misleadingly as “Time to Say Goodbye”; the lyrics in English played in my head, focusing on the separation as people part. I was with Kathy, saying goodbye to our son as he dropped us at a not-yet-open station where we would rent a car and be on our way into France, and then back home. We see him only once or twice a year, his work as a car designer holding him in Europe for a dozen years now; parting is always hard on us. We had spent a week with him in the intimacy of his little apartment in Barcelona, reminding me of camping trips that we had enjoyed with our small kids, bunched into a little tent together. As he came around the car to embrace me, I began to sob HARD. Until this morning, I had not understood the violence of that weeping. This morning I know. I felt abandoned. Bocelli’s singing the English translation had misled me to focus on separation in this parting, while the true Italian lyrics console the listener with the deepest truth, that when we part, our son remains with me, that all I do I do with him, because he is part of me.

Like “Time to Say Goodbye”, this statement of Jesus on the cross is interpreted as abandonment, hiding a deeper meaning that is lost in translation. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me” is the first line of Psalm 22, a song sung with lyre that eventually resolves to its truth in a later line: “For God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out.”  There on the cross, Jesus wept the first line of that Psalm, that song that he knew in his heart in its entirety. Consider that as a way of Entering this Good Story, this unfortunately hidden Good News, as hidden as the real meaning of that song that was going through my head that morning in Collieure. The deepest truth about my relationship with our son is that I hold him within, that I see life with him, here inside. And the deepest truth for Jesus - and for us - is the song that is insinuated in our hearts.

God never turns away. We are never lost…despite poor translation and words removed from the context that give them true meaning.

Please read the part of the Passion (click here for a link) where Jesus says these words. Then read Psalm 22 (click here for a link).  Finally, please listen at least once to “Con Te Partiro” with the real translation, the truth of love never broken, hearts never parted. (Click for a link) thanks to TheNewCitizen.

Consider again those words of Jesus in their context, not as words of abandonment, but trust.

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

Coming Up Empty

This morning as I found myself awakening, I felt empty. I climbed into it and found a treasure.  We are in the middle of two weeks of reading the Passion of Jesus, a man who some of us call the Christ, the anointed one of god, the son of god. It’s a grisly, troubling experience. It’s messy. And to add to the challenge, this blog has invited you its readers to enter the story, to climb into the mess, to experience it from the inside. I confess that I am not eager to do so, to enter a place where suffering and death will surround me, especially when the suffering and death involves an innocent victim.  So I have been in no hurry to move into this long text (click for a link)  from the time Jesus had his last meal until his death and burial the next day. I have gone back to the beginning, to the meal, and gone ahead only until something stops me; some inner door opens and invites me in. This morning it was the cup.
In Entering the Story, I have encouraged us to find ourselves as a part of it, one of the characters, or perhaps an observer at the periphery of the scene. This morning I found myself to be the cup. I was, by then, in my study, and at my computer I had typed the first line of this posting: “This morning as I found myself awakening, I felt empty.” I turned off the light and sat in the dark, feeling my emptiness, climbing into it. The climbing into led me to climb into the story, and I realized that I was the cup. I sat in my cup-ness. I imagined hands holding me, soft on my hardness, bringing me to their lips, warm on my coolness. And I realized that I was not the wine, I was just the cup, the hollow place that was useful in holding the wine, the shell that gave the hands a grip. I felt my durability; as the wine eventually became poured out and consumed, I remained.

Crusades were fought over this sacred cup, saving it from the Islamic people who occupied Spain. The term “Holy Grail” continues to be used to refer to the thing sought but never quite found, the unreachable goal.  And we have it all along, this Holy Grail, this treasure…within our reach. It is our emptiness.

Here is a link to something that you might consider using today to discover and embrace the treasure of your own emptiness. It is a Latin song. Ego sum pauper; nihil habeo; et nihil dabo; ego sum pauper. I am poor; I have nothing; nothing to give; I am poor. Listen to the harmony and beauty in it. Let it play in you today and during this Holy Week to come. (Click to play)

And this emptiness is put to use in availability.  Prayer is the practice of the presence of God, availability to God; are we?   Almsgiving is the pracice of the presence of another person, availability to them; are we?  Emptiness alone does not give us meaning.  That comes from being open to our capacity, our participation in divinity.  Here is a song worth listening to.  (Click to play)


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

Sideline Safety

Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out of the car that had ferried him to Marquette Park on Chicago's Southwest Side to lead a march of about 700 people. The civil-rights leader and his supporters were in the white ethnic enclave to protest housing segregation. Thousands of jeering, taunting whites had gathered. The mood was ominous. One placard read: "King would look good with a knife in his back."
As King marched, someone hurled a stone. It struck King on the head. Stunned, he fell to one knee. He stayed on the ground for several seconds. As he rose, aides and bodyguards surrounded him to protect him from the rocks, bottles and firecrackers that rained down on the demonstrators. King was one of 30 people who were injured; the disturbance resulted in 40 arrests. He later explained why he put himself at risk: "I have to do this--to expose myself--to bring this hate into the open." He had done that before, but Chicago was different. "I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today," he said. Chicago Tribune, August 5, 1966.
I had finished my sophomore year in college and was working as a groundskeeper for a couple of Mexican-American migrant workers, Tony and Modesto Cardoza.  King’s activism did not play well in conversations in my parents’ home. King was a rabble-rouser, who should go back “down south”.

"Down South” was Birmingham Alabama, where two weeks after Easter 1963, King is in the City Jail for continuing to lead nonviolent protests against racial inequality. The appropriately named Police Chief “Bull” Connor is on a rampage. Wikipedia reports: When Connor realized that the Birmingham jail was full, on May 3 he changed police tactics to keep protesters out of the downtown business area. Another thousand students gathered at the church and left to walk across Kelly Ingram Park while chanting, "We're going to walk, walk, walk. Freedom ... freedom ... freedom." As the demonstrators left the church, police warned them to stop and turn back, "or you'll get wet". When they continued, Connor ordered the city's fire hoses, set at a level that would peel bark off a tree or separate bricks from mortar, to be turned on the children. Boys' shirts were ripped off, and young women were pushed over the tops of cars by the force of the water. When the students crouched or fell, the blasts of water rolled them down the asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks. Connor allowed white spectators to push forward, shouting, "Let those people come forward, sergeant. I want 'em to see the dogs work."

In those three years of King’s activity, I had remained safe on the sidelines. In the summer of 1967, I had decided to work in Detroit rather than returning to my parents’ suburban Chicago home, and the action on the field spilled over the sidelines. Fires burned all over Detroit, the center of the riot just three miles from campus. We watched the smoke from fires burning just blocks away. Nearby black merchants spray painted “Soul Brother” on the windows of their shops, to keep looters away. Somehow I felt safe. Perhaps it was my whiteness. Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses attacked students my age with black skin. But I know too that I felt safe because I knew that I was good. My heart was kind. I never hurt Aanybody. I was, in the parlance of the time, “a lover and not a fighter.”

So here I am in this Good Story. (click for a link) Jesus is in jail. People are milling around, standing near fires to stay warm in the darkness. Somebody says, “Hey, didn’t I see you with Him?”

“Me?” I say my voice too loud, too high. “I was just watching.” 
...Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
(from "The Gift Outright" by Robert Frost, courtesy of Bill, and The Writers' Almanac)

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

Asleep With Grief

Opening my eyes during a long sermon, I saw them all of them looking at me, all three of the kids, and Kathy too. They were kind of smiling. I remember this vividly, from one Sunday in our pew at Gesu Church 20 years ago, when the kids were all visiting from college. As we walked home after Mass, I asked them why they were smiling at me. They divulged that they had a kind of bet among themselves whether I would weep or sleep first, whether I’d be overcome by emotion or by sleep deprivation.

Reading the Passion, I was stopped by words I don’t remember seeing before: “He found them sleeping from grief.” He’s weeping over the city he loves, grieving so intensely that he breaks into a sweat. They escape into sleep.

Tears became an active part of my emotional life all at once on a retreat when I was in my late twenties. Drawn into the depth of prayer during an 8-day retreat at the nearby Jesuit Retreat Center, a subterranean spring in me pushed through my northern European constraint and began to gush. From that time, when I am taken to deep places, tears come. They are not tears of grief, like those shed in Gethsemane, but tears of what I’d describe as awe, as being moved beyond words. Gesu has always been blessed with worship that is shot through with God; it is an awesome place. So I’d often be moved to tears during good homilies, or simply looking at the faces of people in our congregation. The kids had become accustomed to the little sounds that would erupt despite my attempts to constrain them as my chest burst with racking sobs.

But a contrasting practice they came to expect from me was gently sleeping during the homilies that didn’t grab me. I’d found a technique to save myself from embarrassment by crossing my arms, placing one fist sideways under my chin as a prop, and closing my eyes as if in reverent meditation. It was in this latter pose that they had caught me that Sunday, and I realized that I had reached the age of being a dad who is the sport of his adult children.

Sleep or tears. What shall it be for us this Lent, this time walking through the passion and death of this good man to whom we are companion?

The kids are watching me again now, watching for tears, listening for weariness, smiling at me with love as we all move toward my heart surgery - Kathy too, but not in visits or phone calls, but right beside me. I’m not going to be nailed to a cross, to face humiliation and death; I’m going into a well-practiced procedure with a 99% rate of success. But these four who love me most, and especially the one who is constantly at my side, are in a situation like in this Good Story. They’re stuck being my companions. And I find consolation for them in this line – “He found them sleeping with grief” –suggesting that Jesus was not hurt or angered by their sleeping. He understood. Sometimes we are called to attention, but sometimes we are called to inattention, to acceptance of our helplessness, to rest in trust.

When are we called to weep? When are we called to sleep? When are we called to face things we can change, to accept things we can’t? God help us discern the difference. God help us accept our role, active or passive, not in the drama of Gethsemane, but in our daily lives.


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

The 8th Sacrament

30 Years ago today, my friend Bill reminds me, Archbishop Oscar Romero met with death. This grisly contemporary Pieta at the foot of the cross of the one who preceded him by 2000 years is a clue to his story. He followed the example of Jesus, and those in power in the so-ironically named El Salvador (“The Savior”) followed the example of Christ's killers.

A confession: this reading of the passion of Jesus has always been a pain for me. In the Catholic Church, it is traditional to stand during the reading of the Gospel. Perhaps it’s a way to keep sleep-deprived people like me awake. So the reading of this long gospel often made me aware of my own small pains more than the suffering of the main character. I would shift my weight from one tired leg to the other, my thoughts wandering to the things happening in MY life, things small, things not related to life and death, to good and evil. How petty of me.

Unlike his Savior's, Archbishop Romero’s death did not come after a day-long trial, an overnight humiliation, and a morning trudge up a hill to suffer for hours in naked humiliation. It came in an instant while he was celebrating Mass in the chapel of La Divina Providencia Hospital – the Hospital of Divine Providence. It came by a bullet from an American-made M-16 assault weapon wielded by an assassin trained at an American facility. He had aroused the ire of those in control of the poor country by preaching about the abuses of power. He had, just the day before, called to the soldiers to answer the call of God to love, rather than the call of their superiors to suppress the poor. He did not shift from leg to leg. He did not let his mind wander to petty things. The pain of the people was his burden; serving their needs was his mission.

On Monday we got word that we can anticipate surgery in a month. As with Lent, I have the opportunity to be present to this weeks-long journey or to waste time and wish it would just arrive. As with this Good Story, this long reading of the Passion, I can shift from tired leg to tired leg and let my mind wander to petty things. Or I can live the life of Oscar Romero, present to those around me, responding to them, serving them. But such service is not sacrifice.

Yesterday I asked you to just read this long story, read until something stopped you and stay with that as long as you can. What stopped you? For me, it was Jesus’ institution of Servant Leadership. Perhaps it is the 8th Sacrament, but we missed it. His followers quickly fell to petty things – which would have the power when Jesus was gone. Jesus response was calm and clear: “the first among you must be the servant of all.”  Today as we feel the tiredness in our legs and the reluctance of our mind to stick with this long reading, this slowly unfolding journey of Jesus, we recall the quick death and eternal life of such a Servant Leader. You can learn more about Oscar Romero by clicking (here).  Learn about Servant Leadership by clicking (here).


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

The Eclipse of Hope

Yesterday was one of those perfect days here. The first day of spring was …promising. Warm sun promised of warm air to come. Softening soil promised of soft green growth. Green spears erupting promised of erupting crocus and tulip and day lily.  I remembered the look on our daughter’s face with the first snow six months ago. It was a Bergman face, making words unnecessary, opaque to a momentary darkness within. Recalling the relentless winter a year earlier, her normally joyful face had disclosed, for just that moment, dread.  Autumn and spring. Dread and promise. On Sunday we enter the deepest time of Lent, Passion Sunday, when the dreadful, promising journey of this Jesus begins.

The God I know is one who lays out divinity and humanity like a pair of socks on the bedspread of my life, laying them flat and parallel so it is clear to me that they are a pair. Yesterday when I came in from raking the last few leaves of the autumn – the ones that had spent the winter in the darkness under the bright, now-melted snow – I found a phone message from my doctor’s nurse – that my heart surgery is set tentatively for April 21st.
Last night Kathy courageously decided to join me as I watched the second of Bergman’s trilogy of spiritual films – "Winter Light". While the first, "Through a Glass Darkly", came to some resolution, some growth, this one was a relentless experience of desperation, of the absence of God, the inability to love. It was literally dreadful. Watching it brought to mind, on this day of promise of surgery and healing and new life, the dread of the threat insinuated in it all. When our daughter had looked at that that first snow, the promise of spring had momentarily abandoned her to despair. But yesterday she and Kathy were together for a vernal frolic in the warming woods, a perfect dance of the promise of life breaking through the last banks of melting snow.
Now we courageously enter the Passion, the part of Lent that is the dance of promise and dread. The spinning partners alternately eclipsing each other; we see alternately light and darkness, hope and despair. At times, as in the aptly titled film "Winter Light", darkness and despair will tempt us to forget the hidden dancer, the bright promise, the spring, the life, the love. It will be like that momentary look on our daughter’s face caught on camera interminably. How will we stand it?  While Jesus waited in full potential at the gate of life, the womb of the young girl, Mary was greeted by an angel.  The angel's words are appropriate for us as we wait to join Jesus at the gate to new life, which we call death: “Fear Not!” We will see, as we step however reluctantly into this Good Story that seems so bad, that Jesus in never abandoned by love, though he experiences the moments when in this dance when the light is eclipsed and seems to have been extinguished.

Fear not! Pull up your socks and Enter the Good Story firm in faith in goodness, in the relentlessness of Love. The dark Winter Light is an illusion. This Gospel is too long to memorize; read until something moves in you; stop there and stay with it until you feel like going forward. (Click for the text of the Story)

 

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

Lent - It's Not Too Late!

As the number hit 215 on the Health Care Reform Bill vote last night, the Democrats began cheering “One more vote! One more vote!” The number hit 216 and a shout went out from their section of the floor. Just like the NCAA Basketball Tournament games. With no television, I check in online to see the scores; when there is a close game in its closing minutes, I click in and watch. Kathy hears my cheering and comes in, and we watch together as the numbers on the clock superimposed over the action tick down to zero.


Over the weekend, Kathy and I had mused about how often Lent zips by and we come to Holy Week having done nothing. There we were last night enjoying the waning moments of the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill, seeing how similar the last-period excitement was to watching the last minutes of the close games, when I remarked “It’s a lot like Lent; it’s not too late to tune in for the last quarter.” Kathy smiled at the idea. “You should put that in your blog”, she said. “Good idea”, I said.
It’s not too late to begin your Lent. A Good Story used during the year is the one about the owner of a vineyard who hires workers in the morning, and then more at noon. At the end of the day he pays them all the same. Like that owner, God seems to reward us for where we end up, forgiving our late start. These two weeks, these 14 days, provide all of us the opportunity to finish the journey, to share the doubt, and to share the win.
Here’s the daily drill:

• Enter the Good Story. This week it’s a long one, (Click here for a link) so we’ll take a few verses each day. Don’t just read it; enter it like the Good Story that it is, like when you were a kid sitting in a sunny window with a good book. Start with the first few paragraphs, while they are at table.
• Examen – each night as you are ending your day, look back. What experience brought you closest to your most true self, made you feel whole, made you feel good in your skin? And what experience did the opposite, made you feel uncomfortable with yourself, wrong in the way you acted? Feel inside yourself as you recall these contrasting experiences. Which draws you to itself; which repels you?
• Fasting – like a ring on your finger that reminds you of a relationship, what can you do over these next 14 days that reminds you of the company we are keeping on this uphill climb?
• Almsgiving – watch each day for the humanity in those you see – your spouse, your co-workers, your neighbors, the strangers on the street. Look into their faces. If you see a need there, be present to it. Respond as your heart calls you.

No matter the point at which you join the walk, we end up at the same place together. We share the terrible view of the cross, and we share the calm joy of the stone rolled away, and the victory of Love. We all get a full day’s pay.


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

Come Together

“If we don’t come together, we will come apart.” Vance Havner said it. I’m not surprised to learn that he was a preacher.  We come together, don’t we, at times of great celebration or great calamity. May 8, 1945: Germany surrenders and people around the western world pour into the streets. A fire erupts in a neighborhood and everyone is out on their porches, gathering in little groups, talking, shaking their heads, embracing each other. And then we drift off to our own little worlds, our own private affairs. I write early, in morning darkness. I find it easier to focus, to follow the quiet thoughts in my head, the quiet movements in my heart, as I try to integrate my thoughts and my belief. But Havner and this man Jesus knew: we need emerge from solitude or we will come unglued; we need to bring our thoughts and our beliefs into the noisy, busy world, to integrate our inner life with our public life.

Next week the great coming together begins, as this preacher we’ve been spending time with rides his donkey into town with a throng of people surrounding him. Celebration or calamity? Yes. Lent which began with this man in the desert now builds to a crescendo as his internal search for human authenticity becomes a very public matter.  In Through a Glass Darkly, David portrays the father of young adult children, a writer who leaves them for long periods to write his novels while they…and he… struggle with their demons alone. His daughter Karin is in treatment for schizophrenia; his son Minus suffers powerful longing for communication with him, his distant father. As he comes to recognize the agony he is causing them, he escapes to the empty kitchen and weeps provately.  Karin waits, in her contorted mind, for God to come through the door of an abandoned room in the cottage they share. Minus struggles privately with his worth. Only after calamity strikes his daughter does David come together with his son. The two are framed in the same kitchen window in which David had, in his private agony, been framed earlier, his arms out as on a cross.

We begin this week to experience the comings together and the comings apart that make the Good Story so much like our own. We come to see coming to God means coming together with family, in the light of morning.  Consider with me how private, how hidden, this Lenten journey has been. Perhaps it is time to come together with those from whom we have been apart.  As we approach this calamity, this celebration, perhaps we can do it together.


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

Down and Dirty . . . and Only Human

One of the great things about a Good Story is the way the writer brings in the details, letting us paint a mental picture. Gatsby looks across the water at the green light on Daisy’s house, for example. F. Scott Fitzgerald may have placed some significance on the fact that the light was green, but that detail, that color, helps us make the scene real in our minds, doesn’t it?  Or there is William Carlos Williams’s poem, elegant example of how poetry's power is its coming alive in us.  Can't you see it as you read?

The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

In our Good Story this week (Click for a link) the main character “bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.” and a few lines later “Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.” Along with the Examen, Entering the Story is an important technique on our journey, a way of making the story our reality. Entering the Story lets us open our eyes, ears, senses to receive more of what we’re given each moment by this God who longs for us, who stands at the top of the hill straining to see the first glimpse of us. But when we sense something, we process it too, with our logic.  And so when I sat with this story, quieted myself and climbed into it while I was doing my stretching this morning, while the teapot heated up (see, busy people can weave this Entering into occupied lives!) it was that dusty finger of Jesus that made the story real to me. Like Daisy’s green light and Williams’ red wheelbarrow, I saw the flat gray/ochre of the temple area dust on the matte glossy tan finger of Jesus hand.
Humus . . . Human. We began Lent with the image of ashes on the forehead, thumbed on with the words “remember that you came from dust and to dust you will return.” So now we have Jesus faced with the “earthy” behavior of this woman, brought before him having committed a “sin of the flesh.” The Scribes and Pharisees, his antagonists all through the story, are standing upright, with clean hands itching to pick up stones, to use the stones to kill the flesh of the woman. For them, flesh and dirt are to be kept separate.
The really wild idea of this Jesus being God-in-the-flesh flashes out to us like that green light, or that red wheelbarrow. God’s in the dirt with us. God’s dirty too.  For me this morning, my mind races and I see Jesus looking at me, his dirty finger stalled in that dust. And I am the woman, seeing God saying to me, “Sometimes it really stinks to be physical, doesn’t it?” And the antagonists who brought me here heckle him again, and he smells the perfume on their hands and speaks words that lead them to unconsciously wring them...as if washing.

We’re only human. Do we forgive ourselves? Do we accept our humanity? Are we willing to accept forgiveness, to get up and try (yet again) to be better?  I am the woman, rising from the dust in the temple area, walking away, wondering how I will face my life.

I look at the dust on my hands, flat gray/ochre....

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

ASBD - Detroit Banquet in Mid-Lent

I am moved to serve up this Laetare (it means Rejoice) Week Banquet in the middle of the fast of Lent.  I write it thanks to those who on Wednesday served it to me, the 50-or-so Wayne State University students now finishing up their 7th Annual Alternative Spring Break Detroit.  I was honored to join them for a morning of climbing into homelessness in their hearts, of feeling it from the inside, facilitating their morning with a panel of people who serve the homeless every day, from soup kitchens and job centers and help lines and outreach vans.  This remarkable group of generous students who live in and around Detroit actually choose, year after year, to climb deeper into their city while so many others get away from it for Spring Break.  They sleep on gym floors, spend their afternoons-into-evenings serving the poor who surround them every day, now becoming visible to them, becoming human, finding themselves so much more like them than they would have imagined.  And they come back year after year to do this, and they climb deeper and deeper into their city and deeper and deeper into their hearts, discovering there a call to compassionate participation in making their Detroit a more just city.

This was the third or fourth year they had invited me to help them see the beauty of human kindness, to find somehow in the apparent hopelessness of homelessness the song that emerges from within themselves, that rises among them in their relationships with each other and with those they serve.  And this time, even though they've blessed with their goodness before, this time they blew me away.  I saw their faces contorted with the pain of homelessness that they felt as their own.  I met them as they left, telling me how they have come to know that they need to keep doing this, being, as one young woman's father called it, "foolishly compassionate."  My moist eyes looked into their moist eyes as we shook hands, as we embraced.

They were going on to their afternoon of serving those poor they are coming to know as neighbors.  I was going on to join my brother-in-law to cook for our Irish-American wives while they enjoyed Detroit's St. Patrick's Day at Trinity Church.  Somehow my hands couldn't turn the wheel of my car onto the expressway to the suburbs.  Somehow I found myself driving down Jefferson to Belle Isle.  It was, after all, a rare and perfect day, when the weather matched the perfection of the humanity in that room, was as bright and beautiful and warm as those 50 or so Wayne State University students.  I parked my car on the west end of the island, where you can see the skyline of the city, this city where I spent 45 years, coming from Chicago when I was their age, going to University of Detroit and getting hooked like they are, hooked on this city, and on the possibilities of being human here.  Now my Detroit wife are retired, living in Traverse City, finding a ways to be human, to transplant their kind of generosity of spirit, their kind of hope and determination. 

There on Belle Isle I realized that I needed to just let the goodness that they had poured over me soak in.  I got out of my car in the warm, perfect sunshine and strolled along the river, and felt the gift of seeing my city transfigured not only by the perfect weather, but by their perfect humanity.

This morning as I wrote my Lenten blog, I happened upon the Robert Frost poem below, and I knew that it was only in poetry that I could attempt to capture all of this perfection in paltry pixels.  My poem follows, and then Frost's.


Belle Isle March Wednesday
Mid-March is not supposed to be like this in Detroit.
It’s not supposed to be so warm, so bright.
It’s not supposed to make me smile, to see hope,
except maybe that the street-splashed snow, gray not white,
melts and just… goes… away.

The sun’s not supposed to feel this good,
to warm my shoulders like this.
The ice isn’t supposed to let the warming river
rush it, diminishing, down and out… of… sight.
It’s not supposed to be this light.

There’s not supposed to be a man sitting in his car
his little dogs in the warm sunlight
him playing that sweet worn flute
those old tremoring fingers setting
such smooth young notes into the so warm breeze.

Detroit’s not supposed to look so good,
even from this island in the river,
even from here where you can’t see the homeless
and the lost
and the losing it all fast, or slow, but losing… it… all.

Robert Frost was right.
What happiness lacks in length,
it makes up in height.
John Daniels - 3/19/2010

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length
by Robert Frost
O stormy, stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—

Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.

If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.

I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

Thanks, ASBD students.  May you be blessed by the god who you might or might not Name, who rises from within you whether or not you call that spirit divine.  You are the smooth young notes on this so warm breeze of hope.

For information on ASBD, (click here).


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

Power and Love and Lent

The prodigal’s father runs down the hill to forgive and welcome and console his wayward son. The radical preacher cleverly outwits the bullies and saves their victim. If we experience these acts of kindness we may well feel good inside. Daniel Goleman (click for a link) writes in Social Intelligence that he was surprised by research into brain chemistry that showed not only an expected chemical change in those who performed good acts and those who were the recipients of these good acts, but also an unexpected change in those who observed these good acts. The prodigal’s father reaches down to toward his weeping son. As his finger first touches the youth’s dusty shoulder, serotonin is released in his blood and finds its way to his brain, and he feels happy. At the same moment, the receptors in the weeping youth’s skin feel the softness of the father’s touch, sense the forgiveness in it, and the same serotonin flies from his red blood cells into his own brain, easing his sobs and regulating his breathing, even before he looks up to see the love in his father’s face.


But we call these “feel good” stories, because they make us feel good. The gift of these particular Good Stories is that we can see in ourselves how they affect us, whether Goleman is right, that we as observers share in the kindness effect.  Now join me in recalling the opposite in your own experience – where you were treated badly, or where, if you are like me, you may have really gotten hacked of at someone when you were driving. Somebody sits on your tail, even though you are driving the speed limit. You find yourself looking at them in your rearview mirror; feel the stress growing inside yourself. You turn on your hazard flashers in an e=attempt to get them to back off, but they don’t. Your anger builds until they finally decide to pass you, and as they go by, maybe you fight the urge to give them a sideways look, but then they pull so quickly in front of you that blow! Words you thought you’d forgotten fly from your mouth, words that you wouldn’t say in front of people who think well of you. How do you feel? If you’re like me, it’s not a great feeling. I feel spent by it, worn out and disappointed in myself. I feel bad. I feel the foolishness of control, the madness of power. Maybe sin is like pornography; it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it. It is the ugly feeling inside. Power corrupts.

In our Examen, we have the opportunity to recall the feel good moments in our day, and the feel bad moments too. We quiet ourselves, enter into the whole-iness within our deepest selves, recall these experiences, feel again the feelings they elicit, and then think about these feelings. What do we do about the bad feelings; how do we respond to them in the future. What can we do to turn toward the good, re-lean, re-pent, as our hearts and minds yearn for us to do? 

Fasting reminds us that we are on this journey, that we are in companionship with the Divinity within us and all around us.

Prayer as the practice of the presence of this Divinity is helped along by our Entering the Story like this week’s adulteress (Click for a link and go to the Gospel) and honoring our nightly Examen.

And Almsgiving can take the form of simple acts of kindness, a smile, a compliment, a little bit of help or thoughtfulness that releases serotonin into our brains, and Grace into our world. Love trumping power, going viral.


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

Hearts are Trump

This week’s Good Story is an easy one to memorize, to play over and over in our heads. (Click fora link and go down to the Gospel) Its simplicity and brevity invites us to Enter the Story, to walk into it, to be present within it, to allow it to open to us the truth that it has for us, the truth about ourselves. The scribes and Pharisees, the ones who follow the letter of the law without compassion, bring an adulteress to Jesus, and he cleverly finds a way not to overturn the law, but to make it impossible for them to carry it out. They have pointed to her unworthiness, and he points them to their own. They walk away. He helps her see that she is free.

Nobody played cards in our house when I was growing up. When I was in second grade, my Uncle Joe and Aunt Arlene brought we with them to her parents’ dairy farm in Wisconsin. She would tuck me into the big double bed in the room under a dormer at the top of the stairs, and I’d fall asleep to the sounds of the four of them playing pinochle. Ten years later I went away to college, and a lot of the guys in the dorm played euchre. I’ve never been a card player. Too much work, too much attention to the game. I’d rather enjoy conversation, the freedom to go wherever it leads. But euchre was so much of the culture that I was often put into service as the necessary fourth player and nursed along in the rules of the game. Like pinochle, I found it too much work, and my attention often wandered. I was never invited to the same game twice. But both games had this thing called “trump”, where any of a whole suit of cards would beat any card of the other suits, even the highest. I was slow, but I knew that having a lot of trump cards was always a good thing.
I think I know why Jesus was crucified. In these card games, you always have to follow the suit of the card played, playing the same suit. If the player puts down a club, you have to put down a club, too; whoever has the higher card wins that “trick”. But if you have no cards of that suit, you can play a trump card, and you win. Again and again in these Good Stories, the scribes and Pharisees play power, and Jesus trumps it with mercy. They play law, and Jesus trumps it with love. I think he was crucified for making hearts trump, and having a hand full of them.

I’m up in that big double bed in the dormer room, feeling the warmth of the feather comforter, looking at the stars out the low, wide window with all those little panes. The laughter and the teasing of the four voices at the bottom of the stairs don’t give me a sense of how the game will end. I always fall asleep too soon to know.
But in this game that Jesus is playing, he calls us to stay awake, to watch with him as those playing power cards get fed up with his trumping them with mercy and compassion, and rendering their high cards useless. The end of the game gets ugly. Memorize this short scene. Let it fill your mind during the day, and from time to time find a quiet place and let it occupy you. Let’s stay awake together.

Tomorrow – power and love in our Examen


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

Feeling Those God Vibrations

Yesterday I used a term “God vibes” to try to describe the resonance that we experience as a kind of rightness, and kind of authenticity in ourselves, those times when we arrive at a place in ourselves that feels like our home.

Like a lot of people who grew up in the 60’s, I’ve almost always had a guitar. When I was in High School, my mom drove me to Sears where I bought my first one, fully equipped with six strings, a shoulder strap, a demonstration record (one of those 14” black round things that you played on a phonograph) and a pitch pipe with the notes of each of its six strings. When the strings are first put on the guitar they continue to go “out of tune”, their note going lower and lower as they stretch for the first few days. So I learned that the pitch pipe was my friend. The darned guitar sounded bad enough with my struggling attempts, but when it was out of tune, it was even worse. I practiced in the basement, as far from my poor mother as I could. Those first few days required me to tune those strings again and again. I’d blow the pipe of the string I was tuning, and then tighten that string until it matched the sound that the pipe was making. When it matched, I could kind of feel it in my ears; at a certain point the dissonance, the irritating wrongness between the pitch pipe and the string would disappear, and this kind of relief, this warmth and purity would replace it, soothingly.
The pitch pipe held the true note of the string in its unchanging reed. And we, in our deepest center, hold the true note of our humanity, written there by our Designer. I can remember struggling with this tuning procedure, listening hard for that wrongness to soften into rightness, for the dissonance to flatten out into that sweet, soft resonance, like when someone’s face softens, all tension dissolves. Remember the exercise with the thumbs in "On Wings of Desire?" If not, (click here for link) try it now.  It's the Ahhhh.
We have three ways of feeling these God Vibes, all of the ways that we use on this journey. Fasting as a reminder of our relationship lets us know we are not alone as we walk this path. Entering the Stories draws us in, invites us not only into the story, but into our own hearts, where we find the source of this resonance, this rightness in the feelings we experience there. Our nightly Examen recalls the times of sweetest resonance and harshest dissonance in our day and draws us to feel our natural preference for resonance, for our rightness. And awareness of others sounds in us our true note, evoking our humanity, awakening in us the human response of compassion.


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

3/16 Surgery Update is in the "About Me" section below our photo

Almsgiving: Practice of the Presence of the Person

Almsgiving: this old word was part of the old three-leafed Lenten practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We’ve spent a lot of time on fasting in this blog, seeing it not as punishment, but as a ring that reminds us again and again of relationship. And we’ve encouraged engagement in prayer through Entering the Stories and the nightly Examen. But I’ve said nothing about “almsgiving”.


Prayer was defined as “the practice of the presence of God” by Brother Lawrence, a 17th Century French monk. And we have been, in our entering the stories and examining our feelings during the day, coming to know “the God in us”, the times when we felt movements of our most authentic selves, the times when we resonated with what I’ll call “God vibes”.
Almsgiving is the practice of the presence of the other person. “Alms for the poor…alms for the poor” was the cry portrayed in old movies, showing the poor prostrate in the street, their hands held up for a coin dropped by passersby. But I believe what we’re called to is different.

I grew up in near-poverty, while my hard-working father returning to a laborer’s job after World War II spun his worn tires in the sand of recession struggling for economic traction. Moving at age three into a slowly building post-war subdivision, we lived far from the streets where we would see people, rich or poor. As pre-schoolers, accompanying our mother on the bus into Chicago for groceries once a week was our only routine exposure to others who were different from us; even then, those we saw were not unlike our similar neighbors in the nearby Catholic church. I don’t remember a single time that any of my relatives gave money to the “poor”. We dropped no coins into outstretched hands. We saw no outstretched hands. Money was something to be conserved, penny by penny.
Just as in this blog we’ve spent time peeling the dried outer layers of the words “prayer” and “Fasting” to reveal their nourishing inner flesh, I feel the need to do the same – for my own sake on this journey we share – with the word “almsgiving”. With this good man Jesus we have in this week’s story an example of almsgiving, of practicing the presence of the woman caught in adultery, of seeing her as a person, of feeling her pain, of valuing her humanity, her personhood.  For the years at the end of my working life that I worked with the homeless in Detroit, I received from them a great gift, again and again. I discovered that simply seeing them as people aroused in me a joy in their humanity, a delight to be with them, even in the guise of the chronic ally homeless who lived literally on the street, in layers of worn clothing that smelled even worse my high school gym locker at the end of the school year. Like fasting and prayer, this awareness awakened in me an energy to respond, to reach out, to share not an external coin, dropped-and-not-placed into their hands to avoid touching them, but the warmth of my face, my voice, and my outstretched hand empty but of the touch that they longed for. “Coins” in the form of tangible goods come from time to time as they are needed, and as they are available. But they are placed-and-not-dropped into the hands of these my acquaintances who I’ve come to know by the fact that I caught them in the act of homelessness.

Please read the Good Story of the way Jesus responds to the woman caught in the act of adultery. Let’s consider how we give alms today, this week, this Lent. (Click for a link and scroll down to the Gospel)


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

March Madness, and the Final Push

Three weeks of Lent remain, the last of which is the week we call “Holy Week. I feel that the sudden and the gradual converge. Lent which had seemed so long now seems to speed toward its climax. This Good Story that we face on the Fifth Sunday is yet another story of mercy and forgiveness, but this one would have a soundtrack in a minor key, its harmony with an undertone of gravity. In this Good Story, Death is cheated of its victim by love.

And meanwhile, March Madness, the national college basketball tournament, begins, with 64 teams playing each other to determine which one will survive as national champion. Having worked for my whole life at a struggling, nobly urban, marvelously idealistic little university, I looked at this national tournament as our opportunity to get some national attention, and perhaps have a better time attracting students. I thought of the season as three seasons, really, three chances to make the big time. One was the whole series of games before the tournament, all 35 games. If we did well in the whole season, we had a chance to get into the tournament. If we got off to a lousy start in the first ten or so games though, a second “season” was the twenty of so games against the teams in our own conference, with the possibility that we could do well there. Finally, there was the conference tournament, the local tournament with our own dozen or so teams, the winner of which would automatically get into the national tournament, even if we had had a losing season otherwise.
Consider these last three weeks as a second chance at a good Lent, a new season, an opportunity to really get into Holy Week on a roll. This Good Story of forgiveness, for defeating death, (Click for a link) is the last consoling story this Lent, the last deepest promise of hope. We have this opportunity to prepare ourselves for the toughest part of the journey to death, to build up enough momentum to carry us through it to the life on the other side.
In this new season, the same rules apply: 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. We engage our will and desire by lacing on our two shoes of what might be called “prayer”: Entering the Good Stories and our nightly Examen. And we wear the ring of Fasting that reminds us that we have committed ourselves to this relationship with the wholeness within ourselves, the Holiness that is our name written on the heart of God. Finally, we consider an old word, almsgiving, which means seeing the poor around us and responding with compassion and generosity.  More about almsgiving tomorrow. Please join me in taking this opportunity to start again, even if your Lenten “season” has been lousy so far, so we can enjoy together the rich mystery of Holy Week, and the promise of Easter.

Lace up!

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

God’s Helpless Love – being THERE for us

I was surprised this morning to discover in this story of the Prodigal Son an answer to the biggest question of faith: the absence of God in the presence of evil. Even yesterday, I thought of the story as being about the foolish and forgiven son, the loving and forgiving father. But I did not anticipate finding the helplessness of God.

Please do this. Look around the place where you are, take mental note of your surroundings.  Now close your eyes, and when they are closed, consider: it all still there, what you saw? 

A few years ago stuck in a long checkout line I was reading the day’s Scripture on my palm pilot. The man standing in front of me asked what I was reading. When I told him, he said, “I only believe in what I see.” I put one of my hands where he could see it, and then put it behind my back, and asked him, “Do you not believe my hand is there?” “Smart guy” he said, and turned around again, shaking his head. I hoped that he was having a theological conversation with himself.

Now back to our Good Story. Imagine yourself a bystander. What kind of father would let his son go off and blow his inheritance? What kind of father would just stand by as his son starves, going from job to job, living in rags? Where the hell is that kid’s father? For three years in a row, I was invited to do a project with the nearby Jesuit High School, helping the parents with their seniors graduating and going away to college. I asked all of the guys to answer two questions, and I shared the results with the parents. “If you were all open and honest, what would you like to say to your parents before you go; what would you like your parents to say to you?” Every year, one of the things they most wanted to say to their parents was, literally, “Thanks for being there for me.” It wasn’t until the third year that the pain of this struck me, right in the middle of my sharing it with the parents. They said being there for me, not here. They were glad we were where they could get to us, but didn’t want us in their faces. They wanted to close their eyes to us, but know we would be there when they opened them.
The parents had asked me to do this because they felt helpless in the face of their sons’ freedom. They knew that they needed to let their sons lead their own lives, but their heats were troubled.  We go our own ways, don’t we? You and I, I mean. But the bigger “we”, neighborhoods, nations, civilizations; we go our way, too, seeking our own maturity, expressing our independence. What kind of God would let one tribe be slaughtered by another? What kind of God would just stand by as a generation of urban youth becomes illiterate and disempowered?  Look to this story. This is the kind of God. He waits on the hill, watching….

When you closed your eyes a minute ago, you could still remember your surroundings; you could describe out loud what was out there, beyond your eyelids. The longer you kept your eyes closed, the more of that you would forget. Perhaps this is what Lent is about – recalling that the God who created us free, and that includes free to walk away, remains where we left him, watching for us there on the highest hill, watching for us to appear as the tiniest speck in the farthest distance, so that he can run to meet us.
A. A.Milne knew this struggle for us to remember that the person from whom we separate ourselves creates in us a fear that they might disappear. On the page under the photo above is this text, appropriate to children of all ages – you and me.

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered.

"Yes, Piglet?"

"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you."

Perhaps Lent is our call to re-turn, to turn back, while on the closed eyelids of our heart we can still recall God’s love. And perhaps there is an urgency, to open our eyes before we forget that they are closed, forget where we are, forget our surroundings, and begin to deny that they are there.  Perhaps it is time to recall the security and peace in walking hand in hand.


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

Lent – Who’s Your Daddy?

Who’s God, anyway? Is God, after all, in the middle of this messed-up world at all? Does he exist? Does he care? Frederick Buechner has written more than 30 books, all flowing from the same primordial question: “Can this possibly be true?” He refers to the question that is deep inside each of us, whether there is a loving God, who is not just a father, who planted a seed and let nature take its course, but a daddy, who continues to care, who longs for us.

Father McKendrick, we called him when we first met him. But as he became a close friend, Kathy and I came to call him Norm. He’d come by on his bike for a glass of iced tea and conversation, to enjoy Kathy’s smile and our children’s antics and unfolding complexity. My favorite of the interesting tee shirts he would wear said “Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Daddy. He, the brilliant Jesuit, was Father. But he came over to our house where he recognized and honored me as Daddy.

This Good Story of the Prodigal Son shows us the difference, and suggests an affirmative answer to Buechner’s question. Read the story (click for a link) until you can enter it, and this time focus on the father, on everything he does.

• When one of his sons asks for his inheritance right then, rather than waiting until the father dies, the father divides his property between them. Imagine yourself that father. How do you feel?
• When the prodigal returns, the father catches sight of him while he is a long way off, and is filled with compassion. Are YOU filled with compassion, or are you still stuck with hurt or anger?
• He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him, ordered his servants to put a fine robe on him, gave him a ring, and declared a feast. Can you imagine doing that yourself?
• The second son, the one who stayed home, was upset by the father’s behavior. The father said to him, “My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”

Do you see the brother’s point, like I always have? But some days ago in this blog, I gave the secret away: God’s love is mad. The story is telling us that God is more than Father, planter of seed and provider of need. God is beyond logic and law. God is a Daddy, who longs for us when we are distant, and weeps for joy when we are close enough to touch, to embrace.

Do we hold ourselves away, looking at God with logic and law, judging him for inconsistency, for not complying with our expectations? In Robert Bresson’s 1951 film “Diary of a Country Priest”, the young new pastor finds a woman who has isolated herself from her family and from her God after the death of her young son. Like the prodigal, she had left this god, who did not satisfy her. who did not fulfill her expectations of a love that followed rules. In anguish he tells her, “If our God were the god of the pagans or philosophers, though he might take refuge in the highest heavens, our misery would drag him down to be with us…He is not the master of love. He is love itself. If you would love, don't place yourself beyond love's reach”

Perhaps if we reject God who is Father and thus place ourselves in misery of isolation, this Good Story appeals to our broken hearts to notice, out of the corner of our eye, the sight of this foolish Daddy God running down to us there in a heap on the path that we thought was too far from Him.

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