You Can't Always Be Right, But...

“You can’t always be right, but you can always be kind.”  Yesterday I wasn't right.  Hope is not on the list of the nine “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” mentioned in Scripture.  Blame it on my not having learned it from Sister John Francis in the fourth grade.  

The Fruit of the Day is Kindness. When Kathy and I moved to Warrington Street with our freshly minted little Margie, they called it “Widows’ Row.  There were 60 apartments on the block, upper flats and narrow lots making efficient little places for widows to move into from the bigger houses in the center of the “University District” named for the Jesuit University on the southern of the neighborhood.   Blue-haired ladies would peer out from their upper flat windows at the cute young couple with their little baby, admiring but vigilant too, wondering about these too-young interlopers and their too-noisy friends.

Mrs. Ronan was a stern, mind-her-own business neighbor across the street.  She had owned her house since it was new, in 1928, and raised her kids there after her husband had died.  Her morning ritual involved caring for her tiny, meticulously landscaped front yard, typically miniscule plots of land squeezed in between street, sidewalk, driveway, and front steps.  She never stopped to talk with anyone, limiting herself to muffled greetings to her contemporaries walking by on their way to and from morning masses at Gesu Church around the corner.  

I was proud to have a place of my own, and to participate in this culture of front yard landscaping in the morning before I walked to work at the University.  To brighten up the base of the mature red oak tree in the corner of our little lawn, I split the Hosta that had been in the back yard, planting it between the “toes” of the tree, the roots splayed out providing little spaces that invited splashes of color.  One of the spaces was left empty, though, the Hosta not having quite enough splits to fill all of them, leaving the arrangement looking like a smile with a missing tooth.  For the next few mornings, I was sure to water the transplants, to be sure that they had a chance to take root. 

I was surprised by a voice behind me.  “Hey, bud!”  I turned around, surprised to see Mrs. Ronan gesturing to me.  “C’mere!  Come and take these.  Put ‘em in there.”  She gave me some little shoots from her Hosta, pointing to the toes with the empty, Hosta-less gap.  As I reached out to accept her gift, I thought I saw the slightest smile, perhaps just a loosening of the tight line between her lips.  I carefully planted her gift in the empty space and watered it in, smiling at her, calling my thanks to her.  She just smiled silently back.

Over the next ten years, we developed a relationship of quiet mutual admiration.  There would be other little handfuls of perennial shoots, and the sapling of a rose, a “Chrysler Imperial,” she’d said.  I’d help her with the occasional leaky faucet or blown fuse or clogged gutter.  She’d always try to pay me, and I’d always refuse, saying it was just the return of her kindness.  One time when she was really determined to have me accept something, I told her to give me the first chance to buy the old ’62 Chevy that she had covered up with blankets in her garage.  When a broken hip required her to move into a rehab facility, her daughter came from California and convinced her to come back with her.  I never saw her again.  But before her daughter left, she came over one morning, as I was watering my front yard full of Mrs. Ronan’s transplanted gifts.  “My mother tells me you’d like that old car in the garage.”  For years we drove that old car, well preserved except for a scrape along one side, the scrape that Mrs. Ronan had made trying to maneuver that big car along her narrow driveway past the corner of her house.  It was an Impala 2-Door Hardtop, popular with enthusiasts.  Every once in awhile, stopped at a light, I’d hear “Hey bud!”  I’d turn and see a stranger’s smiling face, and hear “Ya wanna sell that car?”  I’d just smiled silently back.

Kindness is sustained by its own reward.  It fills the emptiness of the receiver, and giver sees the beauty of the replenishment, the healing of the wound, the filling of the gap.  The homeless person called by name stands taller, the child relieved of needless shame makes eye contact, the person feeling trapped in the long line is softened by the friendly invitation to conversation.  They become mirrors, returning to us the light we’ve shared with them, and we have created something from nothing, defying the scientists who follow the law of conservation of matter, saying that there’s only so much to go around. 

The list of Fruits of the Holy Spirit may not include “Hope”, but perhaps it should include Hosta, the Chrysler Imperial Rose, and the ’62 Chevy Impala 2-Door Hardtop.  

Tomorrow – Goodness.

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

Hope and the Homies

For days I have known the person who would blow into our ears so we would follow him to the meaning of Hope. Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience, Hope….  These days as I move through the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” I find that as soon as I post the morning’s blog, I take in the seed of the next day’s word, and throughout the day I till the soil around it, water it, warm it with my heart.  During that day, the seed germinates, delighting and surprising me with shoots of insight, unseen birdsongs of grace that make everything seen more beautiful.  Sometimes a person comes to mind, as Kathy did as I reflected on Joy. 

Father Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest who for 24 years has been serving among the gangs in East L.A.  New to Delores Mission at the beginning, he would walk the streets at night, right into the middle of gang warfare and gunfights.  “Mothers in the projects,” he said in a recent interview on NPR’ Fresh Air, “put their babies to bed in the bathtub at night, preparing for the warfare that would happen at night.”  (Click here for a link to the program) 

The lethal absence of hope.  When he realized that solidarity alone would not stop the violence, when one crazy white guy loving them didn’t stop them hating each other, he began to discover in the gang members that “when they went into these fight, they didn’t do it because they wanted to live, they did it because they wanted to die.  There was in them the lethal absence of Hope.” “The best way to stop a bullet is with a job” was the truth that led him to found Homeboy Industries (click for a link) that for more than a decade has put into the same room the “homies” who would not have allowed each other onto the same street.  Silk-screening, maintenance, and hospitality food service have helped them hope for life.

And the reduction in street violence has helped the community hope for its end.  When Fr. Greg, “G”, as the “homies” call him, described this, the community daring to hope for the end of this seemingly endless problem, I remembered my own small work with the homeless in Detroit.  I remembered how like “G” riding his bike into the middle of a gunfight, I would stroll into the middle of those who worked with the homeless in Detroit, actually suggesting that we could end homelessness.  And I saw their faces find in me not madness, but hope. 

Hope in what is seen is not hope.  2000 years ago, another crazy white guy wrote to the Romans “we were saved in hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for that which he sees?  But if we hope for that which we don’t see, we wait for it with patience.  In the same way, the Spirit also helps our weaknesses, for we don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which can’t be uttered.”   

Hope in the unseen, even the unimaginable, like Fr. Greg Boyle’s work with Homeboy Industries, is a sure sign of this Spirit, its groaning the birth pangs of peace, streets free of homelessness, free of gunfights.  Hoping for the possible abandons us to the ways of the world, the ways of the street.  Falling into the arms of the Infinite requires us to dare to hope that the wings of the Spirit will save us, that Hope will lift us above foolishness and despair.  

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

Patients, Patience

I was surprised by the essential meaning of “patience”, not as waiting, but as suffering.  As we look at the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit”, those signs that we’ve got the virus, the Spirit of Love, the Godly Groove, we look now at patience.  

When my aortic aneurysm was found six months ago, I became a patient.  Everything changed.  My wonderfully long, deliciously hard bike rides up and down the bayside hills of our peninsula stopped dead, so I wouldn’t.  “I need you to be a slug”, my doc said.  My heavy woodworking, my pushups, my running on the treadmill because walking just didn’t kick out the endorphins . . . . I’ll tell you a secret.  It felt good to stop.  I missed it, but I felt good to be free of that compulsive drive, drive, drive.  The first step of being a patient was not so bad.  I began to write, to enjoy Kathy more, to watch and notice what was happening around me, because there was not as much me going on. 

Being a patient was starting out pretty good.  But being patient was not so easy.  I looked at the aneurism as something that called for quick action, for repair.  My doc referred me to a cardiologist, and she to a surgeon, and he to another surgeon for a second opinion.  But this consultation and referral process was tough, because it was so slow, like watching paint dry, or like watching a flower open.

Evelyn Coffey, the poet and mystic, the sweet, over-the-top appreciator of my woodworking who was our neighbor in Detroit, once stayed awake through the night to watch a gardenia open up.  Someone had given her the flower as a bud, and she had been moved to experience this.  Having slept through too many lectures and homilies, I’m afraid I would have fallen asleep.  But this experience of Evelyn’s haunts me.  When I watched the movie “The Bucket List”, I confess that this experience came to mind as something I’d want to do before I die. 

But the person who came to mind with regard to patience was Bruno, my friend the architect, my friend the passionate Italian, my friend the agnostic, my friend the compassionate human.  Bruno has a son who is in his 50s, who has lived with Bruno since his birth, through brain surgery that removed a tumor and left him with a child’s mind, needing a father for the rest of his life.  From time to time Bruno and I write or call, to see how each of us is handling life after jobs we loved.  A recognized architect who spent the first decade or two of his retirement transplanting his practice from Detroit to Santa Fe, Bruno now sees his life as his son’s dad.  He says of his days that Mark considers himself a recycler, and has real passion for it, real dedication.  So he drives him, lots of days, down the roads around Santa Fe.  He stops when Mark sees stuff on the side of the road; Mark gets out retrieving it, walks perhaps an eighth of a mile, picking up anything that he sees, and then comes back, loading the trunk.  Bruno says, “I’ve learned to bring a good book; I sit and wait for him.  We spend hours doing this.  This is my life now.”

Patients and those who are patient have something in common.  But I don’t think it is suffering, at least not in the Godly Groove, the Spirit; not if they’ve got the virus that Evelyn and Bruno have.  They find that there in that powerlessness there is magic that happens, there is something holy, there is mystery that unfolds like the petals of a flower, like the relationship of a father and a son.

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

Let Peace Prevail on Earth

Leo Tolstoy didn’t do us a favor, writing War and Peace.  He led us to associate the word peace with the word war, a too-easy association that may dissuade us from looking deeper.  This third “fruit of the holy spirit”, third litmus test of our energy source, is so much more than the absence of war. 

Shortly after 9/11 when the terrorists struck in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, “Peace Poles” began sprouting across the globe, in front of schools, churches, and community centers.  “Let peace prevail on earth”, its message, was printed in more than 100 languages.  That phrase was popularized decades earlier by Masahisa Goi, (Click to learn more about him)  a teacher, philosopher, poet, and author who began a world peace movement after seeing the destruction caused by World War II. 

Prevail is from the Latin, pre-valere, “before power”, or “greater power”.  What is the power of peace?  I think of Alicia Renee Farris, an Adjunct Professor at my lifetime school, University of Detroit Mercy.  Adjuncts are paid a small fraction of full-time faculty.  But Renee came to campus year after year from the other jobs to teach our students about peace through non-violence.  Fighting illness, tragedy, and pushing away poverty in her own life, she would be there in her classroom in the late afternoon, sitting in the stool behind her podium, smiling warmly, lovingly at each of her students as they walked in, equally exhausted, from their day jobs. On the first day of class, Professor Farris would give her students a choice.  “You can, if you choose, write a twenty page annotated research paper on one of the topics we cover in class.  It will count for a significant part of your grade for this course.  Or you can spend fifteen hours in service to those who are pushed to the margins of our society, who are subjected to the violence of inequity, or its eventual result, physical and psychological violence.”

Masahisa Goi was Japanese.  The violence and destruction that he witnessed was nothing less than the atomic bombs dropped on his family and friends.  And the kanji, the Japanese characters for “peace” consist of two characters, hei and wa.  

Wa consists of the symbol for grain (rooted, growing, yielding) and a mouth (the open square).  Peace begins with people having what they need.  It is more than the absence of war.  Peace is a way of living in response to the needs of people.  Goi lived with “heiwa” all of his life, and knew that peace would prevail by moving not against war, but toward providence and human welfare.  

But how can all of the hungry(and all hungers) be fed?  More than this, how can all of the hungers, be fed?  Where would all of this come from?  He lived with the answer to that, tooHei consists of a symbol that includes a “+” symbol for threshing, with two grains “ '  '  “ flying off, and the source is heaven, symbolized by the line above the cross.

Christians seek this Spirit, this “Holy Spirit” left to them by Jesus, their heaven-sent Christ, who died on a cross, who shed his blood, the blood he had told them to “take and drink” that they might live.  And here in the pre-Christian kanji that guided Masahisa Goi, is this symbol of this same providence, this same source of peace, this feeding of all of us, all of our needs, all of us – Christians and Muslims and Jews and Athiests, Black, White, Yellow, Brown, and White.  

Peace will prevail on earth when we look to our shared heavens for this fruit of this same Spirit.

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

I’m married to a serotonin machine.

Today’s reflection is on joy.  And I want to tell you about Kathy.  I noticed recently that when we are walking together, I find people smiling at me.  On sidewalks, in stores, in church, I find this happening again and again.  When I first realized it, I turned to Kathy to mention it to her, and I found the reason: Kathy was smiling at them, and they were smiling at her, and then at me.  It’s like that situation where person A waves to person B, but person C thinks that person A waved to them, so they wave back at person A, and person D thinks person C was waving at them, so they wave back, and so on.  Pretty soon everybody’s waving, and none of them know each other.  It’s like that with Kathy.  Go someplace with her and pretty soon everybody’s smiling, as if they know each other, glad to see each other.

I saw raindrops on the river;

Joy is like the rain

Bit by bit the river grows

Till all at once it overflows

Joy is like the rain. 

In college, before I’d met Kathy, I heard this song, and it has stuck with me.  I comes back to me now, as I consider Joy as the second in our list of way of being aware of the Spirit in us, that Spirit that Christians call the Holy Spirit, that Spirit that is called by countless other names by people of countless religions or none, that Spirit that sleeps in us if we suffocate it, but does not die, that rises in us and gives us life when we let it, that smiles and waves and dances every chance it gets. 

In Detroit, among Kathy’s closest and most persistent friends were the other women from our old Prayer Group.  The “Fruits” and the “Gifts” of the Holy Spirit were significant to them, because of their having been brought together decades, children, and grandchildren ago, at those Charismatic Renewal prayer meetings.  A few years ago, Kathy was with a group of them, and their attention turned to her.  They told her that her gift was Joy.  

Tears come to my eyes as I type this, because even as much smiling and waving and dancing as Kathy does, her Joy does not come from a painless life.

I saw raindrops on my window;

Joy is like the rain.

Laughter runs across my pain

Slips away and comes again,

 Joy is like the rain.

I saw clouds upon a mountain;

Joy is like the cloud.

Sometimes silver sometimes grey,

Always sun not far away

Joy is like the cloud.

The lightness of Joy we’re considering is not the absence of gravity in life.  Einstein once said simplicity itself is worthless, but that the simplicity on the other side of complexity, beyond complexity – that’s worth everything. In Letters of C.S. Lewis the author writes "All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."

Joy is the art of living among our wantings, not being suffocated by them but knowing that those wantings are sparks sent off by something that we hold inside, longings that speak of what we already hold deep within us, like the bright songs of whales – coming from a place that we might mistake as silent and dark.

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

Love? Meet Brother Bob

Love, love, love: all we need is love.  Songs of amorous delirium relate to the dizzying mix of pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, of the drive to procreate, that relate to romantic love.  Birds do it.  Bees do it.  Even educated fleas do it.  Ask Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong. 

But what of the love of caritas, charitable love, the giving of self out of compassion and care?  What of a love that seems to simply give and give and give?  I’d like you to meet Brother Bob.  I met this Capuchin Franciscan  on a panel of people who came together to discuss service to the tens of thousands of homeless and hungry in Detroit.  Brother Bob was there representing the Capuchin Soup Kitchen  .  He’s called the Pastoral Director.  That means he’s not the hardworking guy who keeps the doors open, he’s the guy who serves the people who walk through them.

I was moved by Brother Bob’s face as I reached out to shake his hand.  I seemed to feel love just being emitted from him.  The feeling made me look hard to figure out why.  A saw a face without a wrinkle, a face that seemed completely relaxed.  His eyes were comfortably open, looked calmly at me without any judgment or – as mine must have betrayed – analysis.  Even the smile on his face seemed to be there without muscular effort.  It seemed, as I took this in, that his face was a smiling face.  But the smile was not a grin.  There was no mischief in it, no unspoken joke, no challenge or dare.  Here in this brown-robed man’s face there seemed to be a delight in me, a stranger to him. 

I asked Brother Bob what his job was at the soup kitchen that serves 2000 meals daily to Detroit’s hungry.  He tilted his head to the side a bit, reflecting, and opened his palms, almost shrugging, as if to say “it’s nothing.”  “I’m the person who tries to do what others are not already doing for them.”  He went on to explain that there are staff and volunteers who cook and serve food, who see that showers and phones and toiletries are provided, and help with finding jobs, with clothes and shoes.  “But these days we don’t get as many donations, because with the tough economy, our usual donors are not replacing their own clothes as often.” 

“Sometimes we don’t have shoes for them.”  The hands are rising again, the palms upward, the shrug, and I put his gesture into words: “What do you do when you have no shoes for them?”  Again the tilted head, a smiling, humble reply “Sometimes I take them to the store and try to get them shoes.”  I picture Brother Bob in his worn brown robe climbing into his simple car with this stranger, driving to a shoe store and doing what – begging?  “They see me coming, I know.”  Now his shoulders fall a bit, his back arches a little, his body becoming just a bit a beggar’s body, smaller, vulnerable, shedding any sense of dominance or power.  “Somehow, we usually get the shoes.”

Love, the first “fruit of the holy spirit” is to me the most elusive indicator of living in the spirit of our creator, the sign most of us would fail to exhibit.  Brother Bob sees an endless line of poor, looks into countless pairs of eyes, greets them with the same calm face and warm gaze that he greeted mine.  How does he do it?  How does he walk from his simple cell down the street to the soup kitchen and “do for them what others are not already doing for them?  I realize now that there’s another physical characteristic that Brother Bob has.  He’s thin, not emaciated, but without an ounce of reserve.  He doesn’t carry anything for tomorrow.  He gets by from day to day. 

Maybe Brother Bob's the only way to love, really, to practice caritas love.  The Spirit blows in his ear, and he follows.  He gives not from himself, but from the love he is given.  He provides from an endless Source to the endless need of the poor of a city that used to proudly turn out cars from its factories, but now shamefully turns out people from their homes.  If you'd like to help, here's a link.    

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

Blow in My Ear...

“Blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.”  Funny that Sharon Simone would say that to Pat.  How prophetic. 

I wanted Kathy to meet the Simones.  After all, I’d never even thought of dating a girl from Grosse Pointe, and here I was getting serious about one.  I wanted her to know the simple kind of people I admired, so if I was the wrong number for her, she’d know right away.  Pat greeted us in beat up pants and an undershirt.  I don’t mean a tee-shirt, I mean a good old sorta white crew neck undershirt.  I don’t know if I looked at Kathy’s face, but I figured that she’d get to know the real Simones for sure.  They had two kids, Patrick and Dotty, because they were Catholics who took ‘em as they came.  (Four or five more would come eventually.)  Pat was an engineer for the city and Sharon was Mom.  I think we had spaghetti or something simple like that.  They loved the dickens out of Kathy, and she loved them too.  I breathed a sigh of relief, and in less than a year we were married and moved in next door to Pat and Sharon. 

Pat was a paragon of sensibility and practicality.  Sharon was, well, not.  She was all emotion and joy and worry and enthusiasm.  It wasn’t long after we had moved in that Sharon began telling us excitedly about "prayer meetings" on Wednesday evenings.  Pentecostal Catholics, she said; they called it “Charismatic Renewal.”  I was of two minds on it.  I didn’t wanna get weird, but I noticed that even sensible, practical Pat found it “interesting” and “worth trying out.”  It was pretty clear that the prayer meetings taking place in the catholic school basement found parishioners being of two minds, as well.  Some thought it was a bunch of holy rollers; others thought it was something that came out of Vatican II, and the pope calling for renewal of the church, to “open a window and let in the fresh wind of the Spirit.”

The Jesuit pastor broached the subject elegantly.  “By their fruits you will know them.”  The “Prayer Group” was no bunch of holy rollers.  They were . . . we were . . . serious-minded and responsible parents and professionals, teachers and engineers, young and old.  So the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” that we’ll walk through these next nine days in this blog are not just a list of esoteric words to be regurgitated as dogma or creed.  They are way-points on our journey that let us know we are going the right way, the way that delights our hearts because it is our true way, the way to our own becoming and fulfillment. 

The world shouts to us, calls us to itself.  The Spirit breathes into us, calls us to ourselves.  She blows in our ear, and if we notice, we will follow her anywhere.  Reflecting on the fruits of this Spirit can help us consider the direction of our lives.  The fruits along this nourishing way guide us to our true destination, our fullest humanity.  Tomorrow we will begin with Love: Latin caritas.  We will meet Brother Bob from Detroit’s Capuchin Soup Kitchen.

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

Finding the Flame

What if somebody zapped you and suddenly all of your imperfections were gone and you became your best self?  What if there were a doorway that you could walk through and the same thing would happen.  Would you walk through it?  Yesterday was the feast of Pentecost, which in the Christian faith is a story that is relevant to any of us.  People gathered together were zapped, and were changed.  They found in themselves capabilities that they had not previously exercised. 

Animated characters.  Does that term make you think of Shrek or Homer Simpson or Mickey Mouse?  The folks that got zapped became literally animated, filled with a spirit, in-spired, breath/life breathed into them.  They came alive.  When I was a kid, television was new.  It brought into our little living room wonders akin to the internet today, except that there was just one screen, smaller than a laptop’s, that all of us would watch together.  Parents would sit on the couch and kids would lie on the floor, our chins propped up on our hands.  And among the wonders was a Walt Disney program that showed the process of animation, of bringing Mickey Mouse to life.  First the artist would draw and paint in a picture of Mickey on a clear sheet.  Then he would lay another clear sheet on top of it and re-draw the picture with a little bit of movement.  Mickey’s eyelid would begin to blink, his hand would begin to move, and his foot would come forward.  The next sheet would continue these movements, until the artist would take the pile of drawings and riff through them and bingo, there was Mickey walking, his eyes blinking.  A voice track would be added, and Mickey was walking along singing.  It was as if he had come alive. 

Don’t we all have times in our lives when we come alive, when we become animated by some circumstance or situation?  A child is about to walk into the busy street.  Zap!  We’re running to grab them.  Somebody says something that we just can’t accept.  Zap!  We’re speaking up.  We are walking by and see a perfect scene, a sunset perhaps, or the rising of the full moon.  Zap!  We’re sitting fully present to the beauty of the moment.  Oscar Ichazo, a South American psychologist, designed a way of describing this animation, this coming to our true selves, rising from that place of half-sleep where we seem to spend most of our time, in our ego, our personality, our veneer of quirks.  "We have to distinguish between a man as he is in essence, and as he is in ego or personality. In essence, every person is perfect, fearless, and in a loving unity with the entire cosmos; there is no conflict within the person between head, heart, and stomach or between the person and others. Then something happens: the ego begins to develop, karma accumulates, there is a transition from objectivity to subjectivity; man falls from essence into personality."  (The Enneagram Institute – click for a link)  Here is the ninth of his types, as an example.

Characteristic role: The Peacemaker
Ego fixation: Indolence, self-forgetting
Holy idea: Love
Basic Fear: Loss and separation; of annihilation
Basic Desire: To maintain inner stability and peace of mind
Temptation: To go along to get along
Vice/Passion: Indifference
Virtue: Right action
Stress/Disintegration point (what pulls us apart): may become anxious, suspicious, and negative and may express more aggression
Security/Integration point (what pulls us together): may begin to work at developing themselves and their potential and move into greater action in the world

I happened upon Ichazo’s Enneagram because of the image in the photo at the top of this blog, that popped up on my web search for the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit”, the characteristics of those 2000 years ago who were “zapped”, who were in-spired, who were animated. Over the next several days, I want to commit myself to spending time with you looking at each of these nine “fruits” of the Holy Spirit, not as articles of a particular faith, but as facets of the humanity we all share.  Perhaps we can walk through that door, to allow ourselves to be zapped by the spirit that is like a pilot light inside us, the flame of essence in ourselves, to be illuminated and warmed by it, to return to our best selves from this pile of quirks and fears and adaptations that we call personality. 

Love (Latin: caritas)

Joy (Latin: gaudium)

Peace (Latin: pax)

Patience (Latin: longanimitas)

Kindness (Latin: benignitas)

Goodness (Latin: bonitas)

Faithfulness (Latin: fides)

Gentleness (Latin: mansuetudo)

Self-control (Latin: continentia)

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

Holy Spirit (alias The Holy Ghost)

We used to call Him the “Holy Ghost”.  That was the end of His name – Fathersonanholyghost.  We knew about father; we had one.  He went to work, brought us magazines from the office when they got old, played catch with us, fixed up the house, taped us up when we broke, brought home the money we needed to survive.  He was strong, he was powerful.  We knew about “son”.  We were sons.  Two of us, then three, then four.  When our father was not around, we did what he wanted us to do.  We sanded the drywall seams and dug out the bushes and pulled the weeds and cleaned the garage.  So the father-son part of God we could maybe get, kind of understand, of course, except bigger.  But the Holy Ghost; hmmm.  Casper the Friendly Ghost was not much help.  He was a kind of wimp, afraid of his own shadow - if he could cast one.  Too much like me to be God.  And then there were the three ghosts in the Scrooge story – past, present, and future.  They were all pretty scary.  The one thing that they had in common is that they would kind of fade into the scene and fade out.  We thought it was cool to be able to come through walls, though.  But mostly, the Holy Ghost was just the part of God that made Him a mystery, something that was beyond us, beyond explaining.

Then when I was an adolescent, the third person of the Trinity got a name change, kind of like Cassius Clay becoming Mohammed Ali.  Now He’d be known as the Holy Spirit.  It was about the time we went from glass bottles to aluminum cans for pop, and cars got too long to fit in garages.  It was about the time when we weren’t sure if we were supposed to say AY-men or AH-men in church.  I’m glad all of this happened when I was an adolescent, when change was something that was welcome, when the idea of God changing was welcome, rather than unsettling.

Now that I am – what, - old? – I think differently about who God is, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  I know that a father is not merely powerful, but also powerless, too, especially in the light of the freedom of others, and the overwhelming forces of nature.  I know that sons are not merely clones of their fathers, but something more, something called beyond their fathers, to reach, to strive, to explore.  But just as when I was a kid, the Spirit, aka Holy Ghost, is still a trick to describe.  I think that the word spirit gives better clues than the word ghost did, though. 

Spirit is something that shows through, not like a ghost that shows up; the Holy Spirit is the person of God that needs us in order to be.  Holy smokes!  Can God need us in order to be?  A lover cannot be a lover without the beloved.  A father cannot be a father without the child.  Above cannot be above except that there is a below.  Perhaps in this regard, the Holy Spirit is still that part of God that makes Him a mystery, something beyond us, beyond explaining. 

Our granddaughters are a precocious ten and six.  When they were younger, and there was a question that they asked that our daughter could not answer (like why the wind blows sometimes, but not others) they’d accept her shrugging, head-tilting “It’s a mystery” as an answer.  Now they are old enough and clever enough to revisit some of those questions, to apply their experience and yes, Google, to reconsider these mysteries, to follow their curiosity in the hope of understanding.  The notice that the wind wakens with the warmth of the sun, and sleeps with its setting most of the time.  I wonder if they will discover that God is like the wind, that we see in the movement of the trees that surround their little house, and on the surface of the water on their little lake. 

I wonder if we will see the Holy Spirit as they see the wind, that remarkable gift of the who-ness of God that needs our face to show kindness or our bodies to lift, or feed, or comfort.  Perhaps the greatest gift of this third person of the Trinity is that just as Nadia and Sonja discover that the invisible is understood by seeing its effect on the visible, we have the instinct to explore the nature of God by looking at the spirit that shows in the way we move in it, the way our surface is changed by it.  It is to our visible selves we look to know the invisible God.

“Blow, blow, blow ‘til I be

but breath of the Spirit, blowing in me.”

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

Being There

When I was in college I studied in upper stairwells to avoid visual distraction.  Ironically, I saw something that I am changed by today, 45 years later.

Fr. Jack Schuett was a typical Jesuit, which is to say that there was nothing typical about him.  He was about 5”9, black curly hair and a boxer’s nose, a smallish mouth that had a kind of smile, like he knew something about you, like he had your number.  He taught existential phenomenology, which he said was really phenomenological existentialism, if you know what I mean.  He taught in the cassock that the “Jebs” wore back then, the kind of thin black robe that flowed from the roman collar past fitted shoulders and down  over black trousers to the tops of the black shoes that were almost shined.  When he taught, he taught with a kind of intensity, that half smile keeping us on our toes, making the deeply theoretical material seem somehow relevant, that boxer’s face seeming to suggest it was a good thing for guys to know about.  I guess as I describe him through my adolescent eyes, he was what I would call a guys’ guy.  He was cool.

Perhaps it was his philosophy textbook I was attempting to study there in the third floor stairwell in the Briggs Liberal Arts building, a back stairwell rarely used, especially on the top floor.  There was a window that let natural light in, good to study by, but providing a view of a bit of sidewalk, also lightly traveled, from the Jesuit residence to the back of the campus; not much was there to be distracted by. 

But as luck would have it, there was Jack Schuett, walking back and forth along that sidewalk, walking slowly, meditatively, holding open in his right hand his small, thick breviary, the book of daily prayers called “the office”.  The prayers were said at dawn, mid-day, evening, and night, and consisted of psalms, gospel readings, repetitive refrains, and commentary, meant to keep the person connected with God and Godly things.  Here was the guys’ guy with the boxer’s face walking with God, on the back sidewalk where there were no distractions.

This alone may have been a life-changing insight, this being-with-God in the middle of the campus life.  But it gets better.  As I had tried to get back to my study, I noticed his pacing stop.  I looked and saw him pull a green ribbon down the page he’d been reading and close the book, crouching down and opening his arms.  Then I saw the reason.  A young woman was walking toward him with a toddler, a little child who by now had accepted his outstretched invitation and was sitting on one knee, looking at that little smile of his, then up at his mom’s face, and back and forth.  Then he stood, shook the hand of the young woman, and shared a smiling conversation while the toddler explored the curious tent of his cassock.  After a few minutes of this, the mother and child went on their way, and he pulled the book open with that green ribbon and returned to his meditative pace.

I will never forget his crouching down to the toddler’s level and holding open his arms, that breviary in his right hand.  God will wait.  There is a child to be welcomed, a former student to be affirmed.  Oh, yes.  Existential phenomenology is a way of looking for the meaning of life by considering a human’s being there, there in life’s world, there beneath all of the science and philosophy and theory.  It is seeing the child and getting down on the plane of the child, looking up at its mother . . . or, even by accident or grace, looking down from a philosophy book through a side window in a back stairwell and seeing a priest enjoy his humanity, his being there.

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

Brother Charlie's Breathing

Brother Charlie: even the name made me like him, before he’d even spoken.  From time to time the Jesuits would invite us over to their residence on campus for a program that would enrich our spiritual lives.  Our work was always intense, our mission of surviving as a comprehensive university in a poor city always challenging.  So I found these programs encouraging, not only in their content but in their sense of inclusion and community.  The “jebs” were bright and eloquent, especially in matters of relationship with God and life in the world.  So I was surprised when they introduced Brother Charlie as the presenter for the day’s workshop on prayer.  He was a Trappist monk, wearing a brown robe with a hood and a rope belt.  Trappist – I thought of the lore from my adolescence, their reputation as the toughest order, the strictest.  But here was Charlie, his face almost translucent with a smile that was edging on mischievous, his humility showing in the way he chose the diminutive form of Charles as his called name. 

He sent us to our rooms to breathe.  How do we meet God?  How do we slow down so we can be aware of his quiet presence in us?  Just breathe, Charlie said.  He told us (and I invite you to try this) to sit comfortable and pay complete attention to our breathing, focusing especially on the moment when our inhaling turns to exhaling, and the moment our exhaling turns to inhaling.  Go ahead and try it. 

There is a moment of stillness, where our breath is neither coming in nor going out.  With time, we are able to hone that moment finer and finer until we are almost inside it.  And in that stillness, we found God, and came to recognize him as the source of our breath.  It was God who was breathing in us, every breath his giving us life.  We realized that the involuntary nature of breathing – something that happens regardless of our will – suggested God’s gift in every breath.  Breath became, from that moment, an image of God.

Fr. Greg Chisholm was a Jesuit, a young Black professor of Engineering with a voice that was rich and deep and reverent.  On Pentecost, he spoke of Jesus breathing his Spirit into the world, describing the wind as ruah Adonai, the breath of God.  As he said the words, a gust of wind lifted the sheer curtains of the chapel as if on cue, filling the room with fresh, cool air.  All of our heads turned toward it.  It was as if God was breathing the world, breathing for the world too weary, too poor, too beaten to breathe for itself. 

From time to time I will sit on our porch, and look at the trees waving in the breeze, and I will think of that chapel curtain, and Fr. Greg’s introduction to Ruah Adonai, the breath of the Spirit that Jesus breathed into the disciples still blowing, breathing for this whole wounded weary world.

But mostly, I think of my homeless friends here at Goodwill Inn.  I think of how persistent they have to be, finding work where there is so little, finding places to live that they can afford with nearly nothing, turning away from addictions and fighting psychological disorders.  I think of the tall, quiet one who spoke of the desire, in the night in the tent in the woods outside the city, that the morning would never come.  But in his chest, his breath continued to come, and his lungs continued to fill with air and the morning did come, and he got through it, and I’m grateful for the weekly opportunity that I have to help him know that there is within him this gift of life, and a God who loves him even in the middle of this mess, who loves him with every breath.

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

A Dog's Life . . . in the Spirit

When you hide your face, they are lost. When you take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust from which they came.  When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.  (Psalm 104: 29-30)  The Psalm were, verses sung to the accompaniment of harp or lyre, like the folk songs of the day, like country music. 

God’s face was a really big deal.  Look at it and you would die.  Hide from it and you are lost.  Somewhere between the insolence of equality and the flaccidity of indifference lies the Life in the Spirit. 

My two daughters have married dog husbands.  I don’t mean that badly; they’re great guys who love our daughters and because of their love of dogs have given me a gift of putting canine faces on this really basic theological nugget.

Cleveland was (and remains, as the Jews would say, “in beloved memory”) a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.  He had this way of being present to you without looking directly at you.  He’d sit next to you, not in your face but maybe three feet away, and yet there was no doubt that he was all about YOU.  He was like the waiter in a really good restaurant who would not hover or distract you, but at the moment’s slightest sign of desire or need, would be there – to refill your water, clear an empty plate, or bring more butter or bread.  He was big and strong and absolutely loyal.  By the time that Margie met Jeff, Cleveland was already in his prime, and by the time Kathy and I got to know him, he was an old guy, with aches and dignity.  But his attentive loyalty was ageless.

Puck is Amy and David’s Labradoodle, one of those mixes that is not supposed to shed but does.  They’ve had him from a pup, and trained him by the book – some monks wrote it, honest.  He is well named – by our granddaughter Nadia, I suspect, for the energetic trickster/jester in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  And those monks must have been inspired, because somehow all of that puckish energy is channeled, focused, on his attentiveness to David, Amy, and the girls.  “Puck, Place!” and two things happen.  At the sound of his name, he’s all ears and eyes.  If he could speak, I suspect he’d say “Yezz, Boss?”  He looks up, looks right at the one of the four of them calling him, intently listening for the command.  “Place” means back to your rug.  “Do it” brings smiles to the girls’ faces, because it means he’s out the door and answering nature’s call in that place in the woods next to the driveway where he does his business. 

Oh, that I were as good a Christian as Cleveland and Puck are dogs.  That I would be as attentive, that I would hold my energy and strength and cleverness in suspended service, watching the face of God, listening for my name, attentive to the emptying bread basket, the water glass half-full. I have a friend Aimee, a former student, who sent to her friends an email sharing her grief over her departed dog.  I struggled interiorly as I read her describing her Mya as if she had been human.  And yet I think of Cleveland and Puck, and think how those of us who look in books for answers to the questions of God’s nature and our relationship with God miss something that dogs can show us. 

When you hide your face, they are lost. When you take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust from which they came.  When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.  

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

Truth is God is Love is Truth?

“For a long time I believed that God is truth, but now I know that truth is God.”  In Deepa Mehta’s beautiful and troubling film “Water” (Click for a link), Gandhi shares this statement with the crowd gathered to see him at the train station after he has been released from prison by the British.  Among those in the crowd are two widows, main characters in the story of their marginalization, which continues today, justified, as the film states, by the sacred texts of Manu.  Among those on the train that takes Gandhi toward his role in the liberation of India is the young Brahmin law student, who has been inspired by Gandhi’s teachings.  As the train pulls away, he takes into his arms the youngest widow, a nine year old girl who has been put into prostitution to provide money for the widows’ home to which she was sent. 

As Gandhi breathed into the people of India and the world this spirit of nonviolent protest against injustice, Christians soon celebrate Pentecost, when a departing Jesus breathed into his followers the Spirit with which he was filled, and which he wanted to breathe into them.  “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  And he said "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."   As Gandhi departed, he shared this central tenet with his followers who he would leave in the station; as Jesus departed, the said to the followers he would leave on earth, “"If you love me, you will keep my commandments.  And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you.”

John’s Gospel, from which these quotes are taken (its 8^th and 14^th chapters), is the poetic Gospel, the one that plays on our hearts and imaginations, that resonates within us, draws us to mystery.  And this mystery remains in us: what is the relationship between God and truth, between faith and knowledge, between holiness and justice?  When I heard this statement of Gandhi, truth is God, it disturbed me.  It troubled me.  I thought of it like a mathematical formula: Truth = God.  It seemed to constrain God.  But what about Breath = Life and Life = Breath?  What about Faith = Justice?  Troubling?  Pentecost is not a celebration of closure, the end of a story.  It is the spread of a virus, borne on the breath, on the breath that brings us word, and song, each with their own truth. 

Truth = God = Love: somehow I find that easier to accept.  The deepest truth is loving.  To accept as truth something that stops short of love is to accept a partial truth.  It was so to Gandhi.  Perhaps the Spirit of God may be calling us to this.  Pentecost readings: (Click for a link) 

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

Darkness My Old Friend

“And they say that angels are only in heaven.”  Youssef speaks this love of his wife from the darkness of his blindness, where the truth is bright and clear.  Majid Majidi’s film “The Willow Tree” challenges us to reconsider what is darkness and what is light.

“Hello, darkness, my old friend;”  the words of the Simon and Garfunkel seemed to come to my tongue this morning as I awakened in my familiar darkness, after two or three consecutive mornings of awakening in the light.  I noticed that in the darkness I am called inward, called to memory, to listening, to wondering, while in the light I am called to activity, to what is ahead, to result.  The mornings of writing in the light have been challenged by distraction of action.  But this morning in the darkness, I found myself called to the ritual of brewing a pot of tea, of listening to the sounds of the warming kettle, feeling the embrace of the waiting, preparing the pot, pouring the hot water, smelling the tea leaves, the vanilla, feeling the water against the stirring of the spoon, moved from its stillness.  I found myself called not to this chair at my keyboard, but to the chair next to my desk, the Carolina rocker that we bought in the 60’s, that we bought because John Kennedy sat in one like it.  It is covered with a horse blanket from New Mexico, its hard rush seat padded by a folded old moving blanket made from shredded jeans.  It is a chair in which I do nothing. 

Feeling the warmth of my mug of tea, I sat there in this darkness, watching the scene of memory play in my mind.  There was Dr. Budzinowski, the D.P from World War II calling across the parking lot behind the engineering building  to a couple of students under the hood of an old car, testing a Claxton horn they were either installing or repairing: “ah-OOOOOOOOOOOOO-gah, ahOOOOOOOOOOO-gah.”  “Quiet, you boys,” He shook his fist at them; “This is a University!”  It was my first visit to campus.  My brother Dan was living in the dorm.  This is a University.  Wow.  I was hooked.  There was Dr. Turner, my freshman philosophy professor, who had the remarkably natural habit of placing the chalk with his one hand, his writing hand, into the crevice between the stump of his other arm and the sleeve of his gray suit.  He did it so naturally, inviting us to philosophy not merely as a subject, but an opportunity to consider life, its impact on us, and our response to it.  And here was Nadia’s so-casual flute performance yesterday, her first, pulling of her solo as if she had been doing it for years.  I wondered at the difference between this still-dark morning and the already-light ones of the past few days.  I soaked in the calm of the darkness, the stillness in myself.  The light would come in its time, and so I enjoyed this darkness, this respite from light and activity.

But Joussef lived in constant darkness, and seemed to live in stillness and contentment, in what he called “his little paradise” of loving wife, happy little daughter, and a his life as a teacher of theology.  His contentment was shaken by the discovery of a tumor behind one of his eyes.  He prayed that God would not take him from his good life.  But his good life was changed not by death, but by the discovery that the tumor was benign, and with its removal his sight could be returned.  Now his prayer was for the light, for release from the darkness.  His first prayer – for life – he had typed in Braille and placed it in his leather-bound volume of Rumi’s Masnavi, a Persian classic of mystic theology, the subject of his teaching.  He is given the sight that he prayed for, but it draws him from the darkness, the stillness, the awareness of the “little paradise” in which he had lived.  The Masnavi opens with these lines:

 Hearken to the reed-flute, how it complains,
Lamenting its banishment from its home:
"Ever since they tore me from my osier (willow tree) bed,
My plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears.
I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs,
And to express the pangs of my yearning for my home."

Youssef is pulled by the light of sight, torn from the osier bed, the underwater roots of the willow tree that rooted him to the love of his life.  Deprived of the stillness and dark, he becomes lost in the attraction of light, drawing him forward, or what appears as forward, until he loses his way.  The film calls us to look again at what is light and what is darkness, what is blindness and what is sight.  Here is a link to the film, (Click for a link)and a link to the Masnavi. (Click for a link) 

There is an old friend in darkness; there is a home in stillness.  There is a relentlessness in light and action that can pull us until we are lost . . . unless we feel our roots, which call to us in the dark, the darkness that is a gift to us early, if we are early people, or late, if we are late people.  

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