Recognizing Our Family

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

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

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

Epiphany: an Eye-opener and 2nd Chance

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

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

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

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

Hurt and Help and Hope

Perhaps it’s a gift of the sol-stice,

the turning back of the sun

to save us from the accumulating darkness

that has provided the date to start a new year,

a place to put a stake in the ground,

a post on which we mount a sign

that says on one side “past”

and on its reverse “future”. 

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

but because we have that same sky to gaze up to

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

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

if we are nearly broken by it,

our guts compressed under those heavy skies so hard

that a primal word which in pride 

we had tried to suppress

has erupted from us:

Help!

The Return of the Light - HONEST!

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

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

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

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

Jim Reilly Finally Passes Through

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

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

Contemplating my Navel at 64

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

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

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

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

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

Letting the Ass Decide: the Truth Revealed

It finally made sense

the beyond me-ness of it, I mean,

when Ignatius let the his ass decide

instead of his head.

He had met the Moor on the trail

or what was left of the deferent Moslem

who accepted Chritianinty to keep his job

and for his family, their home.

And so the proto-Jesuit and the Mohammedan

rode their donkeys wherer their two roads met

and their minds met, too, until the road

and their minds branched off, diverged.

The Moor affably admitted

that Jesus as Christ made sense to him

but he was stuck on the Virgin birth

and bowed a goodbye to Ignatius.

As he lost sight of the moor

Ignatius’ battle wound throbbed,

the place where he was broken

from his military past.

He wanted to pull the animal round

and go back to the fork in the trail

where the likable Moor had disparaged Our Lady,

had questioned her Virginity and gone his way.

He wanted to draw his sword

and draw heretic blood.

But he wanted, too

to stay the course of the Spirit.

He had found it along another trail

along the quiet Cardoner,

the cool water flowing

from Montserrat to the Sea.

Hot blood or cool water?

It was more than he could decide.

He dropped the reins onto the neck of the ass

and let the animal discern the way.

For years at work I would fault the Jesuits

for indecisiveness, even as I loved their Spirit.

and this Advent I came to know Joseph better,

and know how the meek do indeed inherit the earth.

St. Joseph: Statue?

Did Joseph study His face, I wonder.

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

in quiet moments when he could hear the Newborn suckling

against his Virgin wife’s soft breast

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

is that perhaps blasphemy too?)

Did he measure the Baby’s face

(like Hers, but unlike his)

to extrapolate the face of the Father

like he would measure the location for a hinge,

where it would attach, and where it would extend

beyond?

Or did he just find himself just naturally noticing,

like he noticed grain in wood,

that would guide his tools or vex them

as he did his work,

making things needed

out of materials provided?

Seems to me (or is it blasphemy

to think) that maybe

it was not as simple for Joseph,

no dumb animal whose mere breath

would warm the scene

until the Magi came with wonder

until the cross came with terror

to make sense of all this

Mystery.

No wonder people bury him

head down in the yards

of houses that don’t seem to sell,

to make the best of a terrible market.

Blasphemy, it seems to me.

The Freedom of Dogma

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

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

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

Man's Search for Distraction

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

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

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

To Know Ourselves is to Forget Ourselves

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

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

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

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

Wisdom of the Heart

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

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

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

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

God of My Blind Spot

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

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

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

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

Samtsirhc! OH, OH, OH!

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

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

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

Have an awe-ful Advent.

Love and Habit

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

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

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

Awake and Watchful

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

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

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