National Day of Listening

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

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

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

See my reading in the column to the left

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

PEACE

john

A Last Word For Awhile

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

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

Who IS it? Come INNNNNNNNNNNNN!

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

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

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

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

Beauty at Our Threshold

Beannacht

("Blessing")

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

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

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

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

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

 ~ John O'Donohue ~

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

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

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

Are You Seeing Anyone?

Caravaggio's "Narcissus"

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

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

Writing on Empty

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

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

Face to Face

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

Afterword on Afterlife

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

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

How Subtile! (Not a typo)

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

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

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

Rise and Shine

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


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

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

Impassible: Impossible Here NOW?

Marcel Ayme' memorial, Montmarte, Paris

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

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

Heavenly Bodies

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

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

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

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

Hereafter? HereNOW? Both?

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

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

Suffering, Loss, and . . . Blessing?

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

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives,