Cities Have Skin

I woke with the word “ribbons” in my mind, imagining Peg’s bed, she having risen in my imagination, her bed a bowl-like affair, mattress a hollow, resting on a nest of rattan.  Nest, hollow, bowl, something that holds her, keeps her from falling out, out of the fifteenth floor window, the east-facing window, looking to the sun rising over the endless lake Michigan, the beach, the Lake Shore Drive, the quarter mile of trees and lawn and flowerbeds that is Lincoln Park.  Ribbons, I wondered.    There it is, the sun rising over the lake . . . no, from the lake, like Venus, no scrap of drape to hide any of her, too bright to look at anyway.  The ribbon, I thought, might have been the symbol of this strip of the image of Chicago, the Miracle Mile, north of the cluster of crystalline growth of skyscrapers just behind the Drive and its parkway, the right way to design a city on the water, so you can stand back, like a grandmother who holds the young child at arm’s length, eyes twinkling, voice saying “let me take a look at you.”  Or maybe there were ribbons in that nest, whimsical bright things, long and flowing things, functioning to hold it together, the fragility of it, the holding-of-life up-high of it.

This East-facing view.  Perfect.  

But we had gone west last evening, west a mile or two, to where the Vietnamese restaurant was, where the winds blew not smooth water into waves, nor shining sand into those perfect ripples, but discarded papers and wrappers into their dance as stringless kites and dirt into squinting eyes.  The people here were not white-skinned joggers and strollers, but yellow-skinned, brown skinned, black skinned, not a Nike “swoosh” or NorthFace shoulder patch in sight, no running shoes; they wore simple clothing, functional, worn.  The sidewalks and streets were pockmarked by winter salt and wind and rain, worn like some of the old faces in the doorways of the shops.  Here in the West, the interior, under the Lake Shore skin , the wounds and the guts and the blood were visible.  The beggars reminded me of southern Europe, sitting on the sidewalk legs out, so passing pedestrians would need to step over them, perhaps look down, perhaps into the eyes of the plea, words not necessary, but spoken nonetheless, or more accurately mumbled.  And the eyes locked in on us, the bloodshot eyes of the one who saw us coming out of the Vietnamese grocery with our cart, moving with us across the street, close to us as if there had been a crowd holding him there, or as if he was entering some exclusive area with us, wanting to look as if he were one of us, one of our party.  When we got to the car and I had opened the hatch, he began to reach for the bags, and I thought of the Gypsies that had done this in a train in Spain, come close, grabbed.  “Please let me do work for you; please for fifty cents!”  My Detroit instinct, not to give money to a “panhandler,” money that would feed not him but his habit, rose in my will like a handy phrase in a foreign language, like “Parlez-vous anglais”, or Sprechen sie….”  I was too busy securing our bags to process his face, dark like many in the under-skin of my city, dark of life in the sun, the burning of it, the relentlessness of it.  He changed his phrase from the repeated please let me work.  “I am human!  I am human,” one hand tapping his chest, his heart, while the other continued to reach for the bags, the bags that were mostly in the car now.  “I am refugee, Somalian.”  I thought of Augusto, quiet, docile, gentle, deferent, not from Somalia, but from equally poor Guine-Bissau, who had lived with us years ago.  

As I squeezed the last bag into the car, another hand was reaching for my arm.  My eyes followed the arm to a small body, thin, and a face as thin, this one Asian.  He looked at me, and at the cart, and he pointed to the cart, and back at the store, and I understood, and nodded yes, and thanked him as he took it back across the street.  I closed the hatch of the car, pressed the “lock” button on my keys, pressed it again just in case, listened to the beepbeep…beepbeep that told me my bags were safe, and would likely be there when we returned after dinner there, in the Vietnamese restaurant there, there among the yellow faces in simple clothes who were quiet, docile, gentle, and deferent.

Facing East.  The sun is an hour over the shining lake now.  It glints off the roofs of cars whizzing by on Lake Shore Drive.  Beyond them, dots of runners’ heads bob along the beach. Strollers walk their dogs down below the window here, dogs that seem to know they are high class, prancing, noses high.  The owners hold long, slack leashes in their right hands, little bags in their left.  Mustn’t leave any anything unsightly, smelly, here where it would show, here on the skin of the city, the outer side of it, the miracle mile of it, the glistening skin on covering the toned muscles of its broad shoulders.   

Peg’s awake now, offering us coffee and a smile.

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

Unleaving

To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

The word “unleaving” came to me, oddly, I thought, with the full moon setting through the thinnest curtain of leaves not yet opening here in northern Michigan.  Hopkins writes of a child’s innate sense of mortality, grieving over the falling of leaves.  I woke up this morning in surprising synchronicity with the campus where I spent the 44 ends-of-April prior to this one.    I put on the teakettle and decided to stroll in the spring moonlight along our quiet street here in northern Michigan.  The last few robins were singing the sun up with songs not quite pure enough to have attracted mates, while their red-breasted Pavarottis were sleeping in, mated.  Their songs sounded sweet to me; I thought of myself as a kid, last to be chosen on the backyard baseball teams.  Reverie having joined me on my stroll, I realized that at the university, the unleaving is beginning, the students falling from the stairwells and doorways, blowing from the sidewalks, being carted off in cars and vans and some, even, U-Haul trucks, as the end of final exams approaches.   

This was always a melancholy time for me, especially in those last few years when I considered, like Margaret in Hopkins’ poem, my own departure from that nest that had shaped me.   Still on e-mail there, I watch the general announcements.  Sister Beth Finster is at her post, one last cookie table outside Campus Ministry, picking up money to support the service trip to Jamaica that starts next week, the first week of leisure.  Fr. Jerry Cavanagh and Dr. Mary Lou Caspers will pile a group of students into a university van and drive to Shenandoah for their annual backpacking trip.  The campus will smell of fresh mulch and flash with dots of color, flower beds filled by staffers who spent a morning of their work day this week getting the campus ready for another graduation ceremony.  I wonder if my friend Ken Henold will weep and know why, looking back as I do at his life spent there and  preparing to retire in a couple of months.  And I wonder too how G-Stock, Fr. Gerry Stockhausen feels, stepping down as president, moving on after leaving it all on the court, a game well played for ten years

I’m at leisure now, packing for a drive to Chicago to see my siblings…because I can.  Oddly it seems, I greet this little trip like going on vacation, vacation from this retirement that began a year ago.  I seem to be clinging to the tree, reluctant to participate in this great unleaving.  I think of myself as part of the factory, where things are produced.  Generally by these closing lines of the daily blog, I come to some conclusion, some discovery, some revelation.  But this morning I guess I’m just standing here, like Margaret, and this unleaving goes on. 

All of this reverie was prompted by my wondering, on that stroll, whether I would blog while we’re on our five-day trip to Chicago.  I dunno.  If you don’t see anything new for a few days, know that it’s just that I’ve closed the factory and gone fishing.  I’m gone, but not leaving.

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

Prayer as Air

Kathy did something the other day that made me smile.  Without realizing it (we rarely do) I had spiraled down into a really negative space, impatient and resentful.  We were sitting at breakfast with our usual view of our back yard – Kathy’s garden.  Spring had brought me out of my workshop into the things that “needed” to be done in the yard – this yard that we were looking out at while munching our toast and coffee.  My eyes darted from one thing to another, things that I felt the need to get done. 

And Kathy dropped the bomb.  “Do you pray in the morning, when you write?”  I think that there is a little sticker somewhere in the bed that we share, between the sheets.  As we roll around in our sleep, one or the other of us happens to get it stuck to us.  It identifies the “stickee” as the “asker” for that day, the one who watches the other intently and asks the question.  Kathy was it the other day.  She asked the question: “do you pray?”  At other times when I am mid-spiral and still capable of recovery, the question might be “Are you OK?”  It would as a nudge, a deflection, bouncing me back upward.  But this question was the real deal, the whole nine yards, the Full, naked truth, Monty.  A few mornings earlier, I had had the wake-up sticker on me, and Kathy had spiraled down into her negative space, which is decorated different than mine, different dark colors and different hard edges.  And I had asked her that same question.  “Are you praying lately?”  We find, in loving each other and respecting each other’s “space” that if that space is without God, it tends toward the dark and sharp-edged.

This time of year in our particular church, the annual readings from Scripture find us in the time when Jesus, risen from the dead, is showing up from time to time, cheering up the troops, and getting them ready to surge, led not by him, but by this invisible guide, this Spirit.  He breathes it into them.  So we’ve gone from bread and wine and fish cooked over a fire on the seashore, substantial sustenance, to this . . . invisible . . . element, air, air of life, air without which we don’t live, but invisible, invisible air.

Prayer and air.  Can’t see ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.  Please understand me; I believe that each of us defines “prayer”, just as each of us defines “love”, and each of defines “God”. 

Perhaps sometimes, for some of us, prayer is sitting, like Einstein in awe over the order of things and wondering about the source of that order, the missing factor in the equation.

Perhaps sometimes, for some of us, prayer is reflecting on the character of a person who loved and healed and forgave and fed, and even washed our feet.

Perhaps sometimes, for some of us, prayer is simply breathing in the invisible and vital, and pulling out of that spiral down into the dark and sharp-edged space that our gravitas pulls us toward.

I wonder for so many people I know who don’t share bed sheets between which is this wake-up sticker, stuck to a partner whose task it is to ask them if they have taken time to breathe.   Maybe we’re all “stickees”.  Who do you know who’s in a spiral?  What can you ask them that might help them come up for air?

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

Beauty: the Flower of Humanization

I am to Bruno Leon as Bruno is to Eduardo Catalano.

Catalonia is a beautiful place, hugging the northeast curve of the Mediterranean from Barcelona and the Costa Brava through France’s Cote d’Azur and into Italy’s Cinque Terra.  The land, like the lithe young Catalan people, runs to the sea, from the foothills of the Pyrenees past villages clinging to the seaside slopes, across white sand, into the waves, the waves, the waves.  The architecture in the cities that dot the stretch of land spans centuries, including the gems of Antonio Gaudi, who imagined buildings’ structures and thus their forms not like pure straight lines from rulers, but like trees, like the nearby peaks of Montserrat, softened by rain, rain, rain.  But the architecture of the towns and hillsides between the cities is nested in the gardens, in the vines and flowers of the south-facing shores.  Like a ring on the finger of a beautiful woman, the sparkle of the architecture draws us to the beauty of the face of the land, to the flowers.  The habitations are built not to steal the eye, but to invite it to look around.

Back on campus in Detroit, I heard my favorite music – the sound of a circular saw – and saw some dust coming from the Architecture building. During the summer, the campus really slows down.  Most faculty members are off for the summer, most students gone to summer jobs.   Bruno Leon, the Dean of the school, was there with his son Mark installing exhibit boards along the length of the central hallway of the building, bridging the spaces between the doors of each studio.  The floor-to-ceiling boards would allow the students to post their work for all of us to see, and facilitate their “crits”, their practice of presenting their work to classmates and visiting architects for critique.  By the time the students returned in September, the boards were ready for their work.  

Above the door of each studio was the name of a great designer.  But above the entrance portal into the building was this inscription: “Beauty is the Flower of Humanization”.  This was Bruno’s Manifesto, his invitation and caveat to all who entered.  Architecture is about designing places of beauty, but beauty is not the sparkling ring, but the face.  Good architecture guides the spirit of its inhabitants and pedestrians to their own humanity, to the beauty that is innate, urges it to erupt, to grow, to blossom.

A few weeks months ago when Bruno told me that his mentor was dying, the name Eduardo Catalano did not hold significance for me.  Then he mentioned the flower..the flower that Catalano built, Floralis Generica, the flower that is made of shining metal, the flower whose 40 foot long petals open with the Buenos Aires sun and close with its setting.  Born in 1917, he was 85 years old when he designed, built, and donated The Flower to the city of his birth. 

But it is Bruno who I think of like that flower, that flower that opens in the light, that reflects its surroundings.  Bruno was a student of Catalano when both were young, at North Carolina State University.  Catalano would go on to MIT, Bruno would come to University of Detroit and start his School of Architecture, where he would do for his students as Catalano did for him – to open to the light, to the source of beauty, to grow large with it, to stretch...not to dazzle but to reflect the beauty, the beauty, the beauty that is humanity. 

Who has been mentor to you?  Who has opened you to receiving and reflecting beauty?  Who do you mentor?  Learn more about Eduardo Catalano by clicking (here). 

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

Why Blog? Why Write?

Words are like roots, aren't they? 

They anchor idea,

pull our sun-striving to earth, where others can share with us,

share ideas, and not just this big, big big ball of dirt,

this circle that we break up into square plots and call them “mine”. 

Words written DOWN are pulled out of the air,

not caged, not even tamed, but perhaps befriended.

Words shared can be seen by pairs of eyes

different pairs of eyes

from different angles,

roots spreading, wider wider,

now not mine, but ours.

word…world.

Words are like wings, aren’t they?

Perhaps they are like those maple seeds

dry, high in the branches, so far from the roots

but attached, sharing DNA

now falling, not down, but around,

slowed in their descent by the spinning of it,

the turning, twirling, winding

the slowing and now the blowing,

the blowing in the wind

the going where the wind blows

the landing,

the resting on different land,

the rooting in a different place

in a different mind

the roots going down in different soil

the seed of idea the same

but the downness of the roots

growing in to a different angle,

toward the same still-hot center

and the sun-striving up-ness

is a different up

but up nonetheless,

all of those same words

all over this same world

all sun-striving the same up

on a globe wise enough to turn,

giving each up a chance,

time in the light of the same sun,

(universal solipsism; who but God?)

sharing the enlightenment.

My granddaughters watch the red dots on the map, (Click for a link) and learn about books, and walls, and countries.  When the spinning stops, their roots will grab, and grow, and they will provide shade, and millions of seed-ideas called words.  To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season.  A time for wings, and a time for roots, for words sent out and words taken in.  (Click for a link to Ecclesiastes 3) 

Goethe was right.  The two greatest gifts that parents share with children are roots and wings.  And the greatest gifts we share with each other are words, the giving and the receiving of them. 

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

Elevator Speech: Who ARE You?

In a moment of unguarded honesty, he hears her silent question: "Who are you?"  The camera catches him averting his eyes, and then looking back into hers.  The director has let us know the mute truth that he struggles with the subject of her question - his identity.  When we arrived here in our new home town almost a year ago, this was the question in everyone's eyes.  Neighbors walking by the Akey house see that it has finally sold, and there is a not-quite-as-old couple working on it.  Hi!  You must be the new owners.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

I sit with Ingmar at a table outside the coffeehouse, in the spring sun.  He's agreed to meet me, to fill me in on the work that he does with the special needs program that he runs.  He sees that I am struggling with the "unemployed" aspect of retirement, the non-paycheck, the non-engagement.  His blue eyes, that were just looking at me a moment ago, now look at me, and there are no words.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

Kathy and I sit across from each other at our little table at the window, the one with the view of the back yard, the one where we share every meal when it's just the two of us, which is most of the time now.  She's having a difficult time with my accepting the possibility of dying, as we adjust to the likelihood of heart surgery, the possibility of sudden rupture of my just discovered aortic aneurism.  She looks at my placid face, hers wearing heavily the very idea of life without us.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

I'm the new guy at Goodwill Inn, the one with the clip-on tag that says "Volunteer", sitting down at the Goals Group table, responsible for making some good use of their next hour.  I reach across and offer my hand to each of them, these homeless strangers who are new to me, in this new town whose problems I don’t yet nearly understand.  “I’m John,” I say, and some of them tell me their names, but names don’t tell the story, do they.  One by one their hands let go, but not their eyes.  Decoded: "Who are you?"

Kathy spent years as a Career Counselor preparing students for their job interviews.  She helped them develop their “elevator speech”, a statement about themselves, their talents and hopes, concise enough to express even on a short elevator ride. Sister Jackie Laster, a newly-minted Mercy Sister and seasoned grandma used to look at me when I was struggling on life’s elevator, asked for a response so concise that it did not leave room for escape.  “Stand in your truth,” she’d say, and I’d wonder how much of the wisdom of that statement came from her Grandmaternity and how much from her Sister-ness.  “Your truth,” she said.  Decoded: "Who are you?"


I look into the mirror as I brush my teeth, and I see a face looking back at me.  It was a day of making sawdust, with a few breadboards almost ready to be added to the stack, the maybe-ness of my new life.  Simultaneously we ask each other, "Who are you?"  

Who are you? 

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

The Ears of the Heart

We talk about the eyes of the heart, but I know that it has ears, too.




When our granddaughter Nadia was a toddler we went to the Detroit Zoo.  It was a beautiful autumn day, sunny and mild, the trees and ground mottled in golds, scarlets, and browns of the falling leaves.  When the rest of the family ducked into the restrooms, I found a bench to recline on and closed my eyes in the warm sun.  As soon as my eyes closed, I heard vividly the sounds of distance children’s delighted squeals, the squeak of buggy wheels, the breeze in the trees.  It was as if my mind was exploding with sounds.  I opened my eyes, and it all returned to its muffled normal.  Again I closed my eyes and the crescendo re-emerged.  I learned later that vision is a brain hog, taking up most of our capacity to process experience.  Closing our eyes opens our other senses.

This realization came back to me this past week when Kathy and I had a long conversation with our son Chris from Europe, where he had lived and worked for a dozen years now.  We miss him; his reliance, like so many others these days, on a cell phone makes long conversations a costly proposition.  We finally succeeded in getting on Skype together, he on his laptop in Frankfurt and we on ours here; for an hour Kathy and I sat in my study comfortable in our chairs, Chris forming the third point of the triangle, warmed by each others’ voices as if around a virtual campfire.  On the speakers, I could hear him with both ears instead of my half-deaf telephone mode of listening.  Their fidelity picked up not only the rich sound of his voice, but the slightest sounds of movement there, 4400 miles away.  We could hear him picking up his glass and putting it down again, turning in his chair, leaning forward to think, and back to laugh. 

When Chris was small, we would listen with him and his sisters to “The Spider’s Web” on WDET, Detroit Public Radio, program that would serialize what we now would call audio books.  With the sounds of Madeline l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to Jack London’s Call of the Wild, our ears would paint images that our eyes would never see, anchored as we were in our living room around that braid rug.  It was our hearing that set us free to travel, carried on the wings of the human voice.  We would put the kids to bed, their eyes closing, their minds miles away, in Carmazotz, or along the Klondike. 

That night after our conversation, Kathy and I climbed into bed, and our prayers for Chris were for our son who was, in that wrinkle in time, not in Frankfurt, but just down the hall.  We live in a time when the voices of those we love are all we have in a too-large world.  Perhaps there is a gift waiting for us, a small world right between our ears, just a few inches from our heart.  All we have to do is close our eyes and listen.

Ring…ring…ring….

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

Ausgespielt

My mom was small and energetic.  There were six of us kids, four boys then two girls.  I would often awaken to the smell of steam, mom ironing in the not-yet light house after my dad had left for work.  By the time evening came, we’d be in the living room watching TV and she’d be on the couch falling asleep.  We’d watch her head nod back, he mouth opening, and we’d find it funny. 

But the truth was that she was ausgespielt, a German word she would use that literally means all spilled out.  When I began writing this blog, the words began coming to me as I began to stir while still in bed.  My motivation for writing it was, after all, to let people know what was going on inside me, so that if my heart condition ended my life, they would know that I was in a fine mental state, grateful for a good life.  Daily I had the experience of waking as if with the first line of a poem, the rest of it coming to me as I sat at my keyboard.  I was stunned sometimes at how much was stored up in me.

After four months of this daily discipline, of beginning my morning at this computer committing my thoughts to those who choose to read it, I began noticing that my material was coming not from this apparently endless reservoir of memory and insight, but from the gifts of the previous day.  At first this troubled me, and I recalled a good friend who was a columnist at the Free Press, who confided that coming up with good stuff three times a week was sometimes a real pain.  But then I realized that this is a certain growth, a turning out for the substance of my life, rather than turning in.  All spilled out, I began to look outside of myself for new material

There is a great Gospel song that I’ve shared about here, (Click for a link)  but just now made sense to me, made sense of this change in my source of meaning.  “My storage is empty,” it goes, “and I am available to you.”  I think that we often tend to fill ourselves up and then pour ourselves out.  We talk about running out of energy, or having to recharge our batteries, or being exhausted.   We can all recall, I suspect, driving along on the interstate, our minds on what awaits us, or processing the experiences of the day, when we notice with a shock that the fuel gauge needle is pointing to the E.  Our pulse quickens, our pupils dilate, and we are intensely aware of our surroundings, fully in the present.  We’re in the moment.  We are grateful for every mile we cross, the gift of every drop of fuel.

It hits me what a gift this is, to be running on empty.  I am energized not by what I’ve stored up, but by the experiences of the day.   And in turn, I realize that I’m more aware of every drop of experience, and how it moves me, how it energizes me.  

I’m more aware of grace, this thing that comes to me, moves me, the wind in my sails, my engine now stilled by an empty fuel tank.

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

Crucible of Humiliation

"Accept whatever befalls you, in crushing misfortune be patient; for in fire gold is tested, and worthy men in the crucible of humiliation."

To avoid bristling at the 18^th word – men – Connie would simply speak, again and again in the deepest white-haired holiness of her prayer, just the last four words: “the crucible of humiliation.”  In our circle of chairs at these prayer meetings Kathy and I were young and untested, our lives darned near perfect, in our idealistic way. We had our little house two blocks from my job at the university, two beautiful, healthy little girls, and a VW bus that got us where we wanted to go in 29 cent-a gallon gasoline.  I didn’t know what the heck she meant, but the way she was transformed by the words, the way she climbed into them, stuck with me.

This morning, my heart is occupied by Connie’s words, and I Binged the phrase to find their source.  I thought they’d be in T.S. Eliot of C.S. Lewis.  They are from the Book of Sirach, Chapter 2.  The crucible is a melting pot for metals, a stone container t used to hold metals in a furnace hot enough to melt the metal so the impurities can be skimmed off.  In her aging, Connie had been released from her usefulness, her responsibility in working society.  The women’s college she had served for a lifetime now had someone else caring about the girls she had lived with and loved.  She was in that furnace of aging, and God was the stone bucket, impervious to the heat, that held her even as she melted.  Until this moment, I had thought of the crucible of humiliation as something negative…like the wall. You know, THAT wall: the one that you run into, made of brick; the one that your back is up against. 


In the last three weeks I’ve sat with three young men whose love has moved me with its purity, its certainty.  And all three, it strikes me, have their backs against that wall.  Would they have come to this degree of honesty if not for the heat of the fire?  One fights the fight to be dad his twin sons, the dad he did not have at 15.  Wounds he received in the military before they were born have him on pain medication and oxygen.  I hadn’t seen him since his student days, and my hope to meet him was dashed by his being sent by his good wife to bed, to recover from a too-generously spent Sunday with young men that he mentors.  The second looks at the life he’s lived, the foolishness that he fell prey to before he met his wife, and found a church, and can’t get over how far short he falls from where he ought to be, as loved as he is.  The third is facing the limits of love, unable to open his beloved to receive it. 

These three have their backs against the wall and face the fires of incapacity, unworthiness, and powerlessness.  And even as I delight in the bright glow of their goodness that is being refined, I fear for them, and feel my own helplessness.  I imagine Connie, 20 years gone from us, looking with love across that circle of chairs at my three young friends, worthy men in the crucible of humiliation.

What is your wall, your fire, the refinement that calls you to endure, and the crucible holding you?

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

Enthusiasm: God or Gottas?

Enthusiasm.  A god within.  That’s what it means.  From the Greek, in-theos, it seems to be appropriately used to describe a person who’s overflowing with energy.  But the Greek gives us another word sometimes confused with enthusiasm: mania meaning madness.  When I was a kid, I’d hear my dad say someone was driving “like a maniac.”  As a Psychology major in college, I learned about manias, triggers that bring on an unreasoned response.  A kleptomaniac steals without thinking; a pyromaniac lights fires for the thrill.   Bipolar disorder describes a person as manic-depressive, levels of energy too high and then too low. 

Sometimes enthusiasm and mania can be confused with each other.  I suspect that it is a matter of the nature of the “god” that is within.  A god of vengeance breeds killers, while a god of love breeds healers.  A god of fear breeds anxiety, while a god of unconditional aceptance breeds calm. There’s a great clip from a Mel Brooks movie in which he plays Moses, come down from the mountain where he saw God.  He says to the people “I brought you the law from God, the Fifteen (he drops the tablet, breaking a third of it to pieces) er…Ten Commandments.”  Had he been even clumsier, dropping it until only the first was left, I think we’d have enough to guide us to a good life.  It tells us not to worship false gods.

Who’s the god at the altar at which we worship?  Every morning when we get up, we start burning incense there, lighting candles with every step we take.  Here are some of mine.

Gotta earn my keep, to deserve what I’ve been given.

Gotta hold my own in this conversation.

Gotta get this done today.

Gotta put enough away to retire without worry.

Gotta do all I can so they know I’m a good person.

Gotta save this person.

Gotta save myself.

Gotta keep my kids safe.

Gotta make more money.

God of my wife’s smile;

God of my children’s love;

God of my grandchildren’s joy;

God of the flowers popping up through the spring grass;

God of things that seem to work out;

God of other people’s faces;

God of generous people;

God of slow speed limits and slow checkout lines;

God of standing up and sitting down….

Enthusiasm or mania? God or gotta?  How about you?  As I read over my list just now, I noticed myself become agitated as I read my gottas, and calm as I read the aspects of my God.  Try it yourself.  What does that tell you about where to light your candles and burn your incense today?

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

Priest and President

Why would a quiet person throw a party?  There’s something about a room full of people that has always turned me into a three-year old, needing a mommy or a daddy to hide behind.  But when The New President stepped into his office six years ago, he started throwing parties.  Every semester he would invite the faculty and staff to the President’s Dining Room for wine and cheese.  Everybody was invited – from the vice-presidents to the secretaries, from the popular faculty to the guy who drove the putt-putt “elephant” around campus vacuuming up litter.  The table in the middle of the room was covered with the good stuff – fresh fruit carefully prepared and arranged, generous chunks of various cheeses, and bottles of wine and bowls of non-alcoholic punch – just like the big shots had in that room. 

His inauguration had been no coronation.  He had chosen instead  a red tee-shirt and a pair of work gloves and joined in living the inauguration theme,  the theme that would characterize the place for his presidency: leadership and service in the community.

Caroline was near retirement, having been a secretary at the university since High School.  Having worked hard for four presidents, her persona had become somewhat vestigial, her office moved to the margins of the top floor, where she was busy but invisible.  She had fallen in her office, and was rushed to her hospital in Grosse Pointe where her broken hip was surgically repaired.  When she opened her eyes, there he was, The New President, sitting in the chair at her bedside, just smiling at her.  He wanted to be sure she was OK.

The St. Ignatius Chapel had been marvelously refurbished, its worn and dreary character illuminated by cherry and ebony furniture, tile flooring, brass lights and stained glass windows.  At the Eastern end, in front of a mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe was a commanding bronze baptismal font, looking as if it had been forged and hammered in some Arthurian workshop.  The New President stood there, his white chasuble placed over his head flowing to his wrists at his sides and to his feet in the front and back, as he waited for the music to end, so he could bless and dedicate the font, its holy water silently pumped to its rim and rippling down its ancient looking sides.  With his left hand he freed his right arm, pulling back the chasuble and the long white sleeve of the alb beneath it, all the way to his bicep.  Raising his right arm to the ceiling like a sword to the ceiling, he said the prayer of blessing and sliced down through the glassy surface.  As he withdrew his forearm from the dark water, I felt as if I had seen something somehow holy, that somehow he had defied the elements, quietly conquering them.  With a bundle of reeds he used that same bare arm to sprinkle that water, now holy, onto the altar, and ambo, and tabernacle, and crucifix… and all of us, now also somehow holy.

He seemed to do this when he was not tied up at lunchtime, The New President.  He would sit on one of the benches around the fountain in the square of the Student Union and eat his sandwich, and perhaps an apple.  He’d watch the water “Springing up into life eternal” the little bronze plaque read, and he’d listen to the squawks of the peregrine falcons in the clock tower beyond it, the ones he could see from his fifth floor office.  From time to time some of us would come by and join him, one at a time, as if we were visiting an anchoress, walled into a corner of the cathedral, dedicated, wise.

The convocation at the end of each summer brought the faculty back with a week to collect and prepare for the return of the students, and gave all of us a chance to find out how our struggling urban university was doing, and then have lunch together outside and have some fun, including a great baseball game that brought out the minor-leaguer in a lot of us.  The New President took the podium in his Titans baseball cap, shorts, and polo shirt, dressed for the game, but prepared for the presentation.  An economist, he would let the charts and graphs tell most of the story, on the huge screen behind him.  He’s point out the ups and downs, help us to understand the trends…and he’d let us know how critical each of us was to the mission of the place.  Oh, and just in case we would take him too seriously, to mistake his leadership as displacing our own, he’d pepper his presentation with the world’s worst one-liners, like he would at the shorter town hall meetings he’d host every semester.

The priest who was The New President hosted his last wine and cheese reception yesterday.  The Next President will officiate over the convocation in mid-august.  This New President steered us through six years of graphs and charts that had upward trends, on campuses that like the new chapel honor the holiness of their function, a place where students grow to hear and respond to the call to lead by serving.  Oh, by the way, that’s why this quiet person, this guy who was The New President, Fr. Gerard Stockhausen, SJ, throws a party.  Take and eat.  Take and drink.  

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

It Happened One Night

Sometime in the middle of the night at our granddaughters’ house – those nights before their birthdays – the “fairy curtain” appears.  Nadia, soon to be 10, has experienced this probably six or seven times.  When she was 3 or 4, she greeted everything new with suspicion and reserve.  So when this gossamer-thin divider appeared between the sleeping side of the house (where the bedrooms were) and the waking side, I imagine that she stopped in her tracks and just looked, eyes wide and mouth agape.  And like most little ones uncertain about anything, she looked back at her mother, smiling in complicity with her dad.  And I imagine her mother saying “Oh, Nadia, do you think it might have been the fairies that you saw in the ballet last week?”  And with that suggestion, Nadia accepted it as the Fairy Curtain, and reverently passed through it from the sleeping side of the house to the waking side, and back and forth and back and forth. 

She lives in a house where children learn from their own questions, where teaching emerges when learning is desired.  Home schooling there is a matter of feeding the native curiosity of the girls, and these days in Nadia’s house, this whole question of the unseen reality, and with it the idea of God, is in the air. Perhaps it's spring, and all of that life poking out of the soil.

What are the characteristics of the division between the holy and the commonplace for us?  Call it sacred/profane, human/divine, or natural/supernatural, how thick is the “/” between them?  Is it gossamer-thin, like the Fairy curtain at Nadia’s house?  Or is it maybe like the blanket that Clark Gable hung from the ceiling between his bed and Claudette Colbert’s in Frank Capra’s 1934 movie “It Happened One Night” in an effort to satisfy the heiress’s need for modesty?  Even as a teenager, I knew that a wall that thin was futile in keeping them apart.  Capra thought so too, and had them conversing through it easily.  Or is it a hollow-core interior door, that looks solid but could be kicked open, exposing its cardboard structure, only a show of solidity?  Or is it a solid hardwood door, or a fire-rated metal door, or one of those foot-thick drawbridge gates that took a battering ram and a long, long movie to break down?

I suppose the thickness of the separator has something to do with the relationship that we have with the holy.  For Nadia and the fairies, the gossamer is enough.  For the Huns and the Romans, the foot-thick drawbridge was not.   For Gable the divider was not really needed at all, nor was it for Colbert, except for her equally futile façade of unapproachability.  I often struggle, in writing this blog, with respecting a diversity of readers who might find gossamer too thin, or demand a blanket, or anything at hand that might spare them from the G word.  I side with Gable.  Any separation at all is silly, and a waste of an opportunity.

What’s yours like, the divider between you and whatever is beyond you?  What’s it made of?  Does it ever come down?

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

Released into the Love that Tamed Us

Two days ago I used the word taming in relation to the students on campus.  I had learned 40 years ago that the last thing an 18 year old wanted around was another parent figure.  And so in order to serve them I needed to show them that I would not try to control them, and that I was a source of encouragement, help, or just companionship that comes from caring about them.  For some this “taming” was a very gradual process, like with a squirrel.  With some, it was all of a sudden, like the fable about the boy who befriends a lion by pulling a thorn from its paw.   

Once these relationships developed, I delighted in seeing their faces, remembering their names.  I delighted in their seeing me delight in them.  I enjoyed watching them get to the end of their first year, learning to survive and even thrive in the dorms, scream with them at basketball games, and sit in with them on that same basketball court when they were protesting an action of the administration.  I enjoyed climbing the ropes course with them, learning to really rely on them, discovering that real trust is mutual.  And I enjoyed seeing them changed by compassion as we went into the city together to literally feed the homeless.

While it was true that after four years of undergraduate studies most of them would leave, it was my own leaving after forty that called me to appreciate the importance of releasing them, “untaming” them, calling them not to my voice but to the one within themselves.   I found that I was saying less, my message was more and more simple, essential.  You have all that you need.  You are good, and talented, and called from within the deepest part of yourself to discover that goodness, and engage it through that talent, responding to compassion.  And while others share that same goodness, their different talents will help you collaborate, to do the right things the right way, and you will be sustained.  

I found the same simple truth all that I had to share with Kathy and my kids when I thought that death was near, and I felt the same comfort in that truth.  Like the students, they had all they needed, and each other.  

And I see the same simple truth in the things that Jesus said to his followers as he showed up from time to time after his death, letting them know that he’d soon be leaving for good, and releasing them to their own inner voice, guided by the same goodness, the same Spirit. And in today’s Good Story (click for a link) http://www.usccb.org/nab/readings/041810.shtml#gospel he shows up out on the lake, standing on the water, and calls Peter to step out of the safety of the boat and trust that he will not drown.  Think Obi wan Kenobi saying “Use the force, Luke.”  Forget about the external threat.  Listen to the voice within, the Spirit.

We are given guides, who love us and encourage us, and release us into the same love that tamed us.  And aren't we afraid to leave?

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

Rain and Religion, Silence and Faces

My name is John, and I’m a Catholic.  I’m not a Catholoholic, mind you; there’s no picture of the pope on my wall, no Infant of Prague in his seasonal clothes promising to keep us in the money as long as we display him to all who enter our house.  

Why am I Catholic?  The response that comes to mind is that if I go out in the rain I get wet.  I don’t take credit for getting wet, it just happened.  But I did decide to stick with it, Sunday Mass and such, when I went 300 miles away from home to college.  I thought I’d take the safe route, keeping up the Sunday Mass thing just in case it was true, you know, God and everything.  And I met Bernie Owens, a Jesuit who had a neat way of defining “religion”: - re-liggio, like a ligament, connecting us, holding us together, to our true selves, and perhaps to each other.  And I think that I have found that true, that there are ways that the rain that I have walked out in has kept me from drying up.

Smells and Bells, it is called these days, the idea of incense and ringing hand bells and ornate vestments, distinguishing Catholic worship  from the simplicity of others, the here-and-nowness of them.  For me, the rituals and accoutrements of Catholic worship have been bridges to otherness, doorways to mystery.  Incense rides on smoke, smoke that rises, raises eyes and faces, raises them upward.  Look in any direction but up, and you’ll see something.  Look up and you see nothing, nothingness, the sky, the forever of it.  I grew up with Latin prayers and songs.  Watch a movie with the sound turned off.  You will be drawn to find meaning in faces, in body language.  We are left to wonder, in the silence, what is happening. 

Congregation, from the Latin, con-gregare – to gather as into a flock – made perfect sense as Kathy and I married and made our home in Detroit.  Gesu Church gave us the gift of a gathering of like-minded people finding safety in staying close to each other.  Together, we kept our ideals in a world different from us.  We lived black and white; we shared burdens and gifts, problems and solutions.  We worked together to make sense of a world, and to work and learn in it.  Even now after 40 years, Gesu Church is a feast of faces.

Like the earth has its seasons that show themselves in the sky and the soil, the Scriptural stories in the Catholic Church follow an annual cycle, following the life of the real historical man named Jesus who some called the Christ, the one anointed with Chrism, the anointed one, chosen by God.  And this time of year, after Easter, these stories turn mysterious, like the smoke and the silence.  He rises from the dead and shows up, physically I mean; he cooks for his friends, and joins them in eating.  But he shows up less and less, and then leaves behind a Spirit.  

For some, Easter is a holiday, and when it’s over, it’s over.  For me, this passing into spirit is an annual question that turns down the sound, leads me to look at faces, to find, in the silence, meaning and hope.

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

Become … Becoming

I observed them for 40 years.  Sometimes I was able to get up close, to be able to befriend them.  But just when we were getting comfortable with each other, they’d be gone, replaced by others and the taming had to start all over again.  Their seasons became mine.  They would arrive at the end of the summer, unsteady and disoriented, wary and nervous.  By autumn they would have learned the habits of their elders, ways of surviving, of staying safe, of digging in and making a place for themselves.  They would generally find their way into little packs, coming and going together, enjoying each other.  They would become noisier, their movements more pronounced.  Winter would slow them down, their coats would thicken.  Spring was fun to watch, because they would shed their coats, show early stages of mating behavior, and resume their group noises, similar to those in their mid-fall groups but much louder, and more movement.  Watching them made me smile.

But about this time every year watching them took me to a deep part of myself.  I would watch as the things they often carried on their backs became heavier.  Now they seemed to be changed by these things, to be slowed down and quieted.  The groups began to break into pairs and individuals, and their scurrying become more purposeful.  The week before they would disappear was always hard for me, because I knew that they would be gone for a few months, and that about a fourth of them would not return, replaced by new ones.  After a few years, I’d learned to distinguish the ones who would not return, and tears would come to my eyes sometimes just watching them. I began to notice, year after year, how they had grown, had filled out, had become more confident, more beautiful. 


These last weeks that they were around had a certain reverence, a deep quiet, as they seemed to climb into themselves, when the season’s activity and noise and coming and going seemed to become muscle and bone, seemed to be the times that they would …become.  This time of year was the time of this intense becoming, that inspired them, and eventually called them away.  At graduation I would watch them in their caps and gowns, their final bright colors, their final gathering, winding across their paths, all together now, these older ones who would be disappearing.  I would remember some of them, who they had been in their furtive freshman year, and who they had … become.  But the time that moved me most, year after year, was these two weeks before exams were over and they disappeared, when the campus resonated with this quiet, insistent sound of becoming.

For them, the campus provided this place of becoming.  What was it for you?  What is it?

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

What's Your Story?

It seems that when we open a book, the book opens us. Last night we joined our daughter Amy and he family and friends to toast their great work in launching The Books For Walls Project, (Click for a link)  and notably its being featured on Interlochen Public Radio (Click to listen).  I sat across from a poet/cellist/dancer who had just returned from Chile and a writer who loves to stack firewood since she did it with her dad as a child and is helping light the fire under this project that celebrates not books, but the reading of them, not stories, but the stories of our reading stories. Further down the table were a freelance journalist who recently had the courage to quit his job and step out onto the thin ice of the work he loves, a dad who makes shoes in his tiny and profitable shop and aches to love his teenage daughter through her increasingly complex life. Kathy and Amy and her family have their stories too, of course, and you read mine right here.

We used to have a saying, sometimes asked rhetorically when somebody couldn’t figure us out. “What’s your story?” Like “Just who do you think you are?” asking someone for their story is a deeply intimate question. Books for Walls’ first challenge to its readers was to write in with their favorite book as a child. Like our daughter Margaret in her work at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, (click for a link) www.rockhall.com who knew from the start that music links us to our memories, Amy learned that recalling our childhood books takes us to the experiences of our childhood. We sit in the place where we sat reading then, like I sat in the swing in the back yard, and feel the cool chains on the tender skin on the insides of my elbows, there behind the garage where my mother could not see that I was not playing with my friends, which she thought would be more normal. We recall our feelings, as I just did now, and remember ourselves, become reacquainted.

I remember, almost ironically, “I’m Mister Blue”, a song about a guy who lost his girl, and standing shyly against the wall at the 7th and 8th Grade dance for the kids from St. Mary’s. I’d followed my brother Dan’s encouragement to join him, but I almost literally hugged the wall in my fear of dancing with any of the girls that I saw every day in class, feeling somehow even more clumsy and uncomfortable than the innumerable other boys lining the wall with me.

Books and music can do that, can transport us to parts of ourselves that we’ve long forgotten.  Go ahead; think back. Recall a book you read when you were 10. Recall a song that played when you were a teenager with an increasingly complex life.  When you return, you will be more yourself than you are now.

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

Who's In There?

Who’s alive in you, inside you? I just received an e-mail from a man I knew as a university student. After just a few moments he came to my memory in surprisingly clear detail. I could hear his voice; see his face, not just static, like a photo, but moving and expressive. I remembered his energy, his vitality, his talent shared so generously, even restlessly, insistently. I looked for information about him on the web, and found that his dynamism continues, the track of his activities easy to find there, an architect and radio DJ just as he was at school, where he brought so much life to the Student Union, and to me. I’m surprised at how clearly I remember him, and how prior to reading his e-mail, I was unaware of him, and had been for ten or more years.

Last night I was back at Goodwill Inn, serving dinner to homeless strangers and then getting to know six of them in a “Goals Group” afterwards. My job as a volunteer there is to use an hour to help the homeless residents to stick to their goals, to find income, housing, and balance. I find that it starts by helping them rediscover the self they’ve forgotten, and the ones who brought that self to life. I did an exercise with a name tag, asking them to write on it:

• the name they like to be called
• knowing themselves, the animal they’d be if they were an animal, other than human (opening them to metaphor, and a playful way of identifying and sharing their characteristics)
• a person who is a hero to them, who gives them hope and example
• a place they remember where they feel safe and happy

And finally, I help them relax and quiet themselves, and ask them to imagine themselves in their safe and warm place with their hero/exemplar, feeling the joy of the place and the companionship. And I ask them to ask their hero/exemplar to tell them what their gift is, what their hero/exemplar finds good and enjoyable in them. The hour is, for some of them, transformative, reminding them of something good, something forgotten. Others are blocked, held back by some invisible gate, a place or person or experience that holds them back, giving them only a longing so specific that it borders on hope.

Who plays in you, plays with joy and delight and vitality, despite your layers of activity, perhaps of struggle? Who is there all along, all these years perhaps, dancing in your blind spot of occupation, inviting you to join, to remember, to delight? What are the places that invite you back into the familiar that you’ve forgotten, places where you will recall your innocence, your simple joy, the lightness of freedom?

Around that room, my six companions returned to cavern, fishing spot, woods, and church. They basked in the companionship of grandmothers, Jesus, coach, spouse, and child. They found, in those places with those companions, that they were good and talented and treasured, that they had value. They found in the din of difficulty in finding income and housing and balance this quiet, convincing voice that reminded them who they are.

Who reminds you?

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