Maypoles, Cable Cars, and Yoga Socks

In Excess, Access, and the State of our Souls  I suggested that the great divide in much of our world is between those trying to climb out of the darkness of poverty and those who have slid all the way down the other side to lives of detached comfort.  And I proposed that detached comfort is its own darkness, more insidious than poverty because it is bereft of striving for escape.  The poor can strive to escape poverty, after all, but do the successful or comfortable strive to escape success or comfort? 

“MasterCard, I’m bored” says the roughly handsome, gravelly voiced actor, and the commercial responds to a cacophonous sequence of stimulating “opportunities” for distraction from boredom.  Kids pile out of the family van at the Grand Canyon and instead of looking at the canyon, eagerly sit in front of a large-screen television showing the same image.  The mother who found meaning raising her grown kids, the professional who retires…at some point many who are comfortable or successful begin to sense that there is something that has been lost.  But in Excess, Access, and the State of our Souls I suggested that the climb out of the darkness of comfort is difficult.  It’s hard to get a grip. 

Kathy and I were visiting our son in Europe when we happened upon a May Day celebration, with all attention on the climbing of a Maypole.  With German music playing and lots of beer flowing, a few men would swagger up to the pole and make very serious attempts to climb up.  They would wrap their arms around the smooth wooden pole, then wrap their legs around, and by alternating grip on their arms and legs, try to “shinny” up.  As we watched, it became clear that the more clothing that they wore, the greater their disadvantage.  Their sleeves and their pants legs would kind of roll back every time they re-gripped the pole.  Their progress was kind of two feet up, one foot back.  Eventually this would exhaust them.  Those observing this began to roll up their sleeves, remove their shirts, and even roll up their pants legs, and they came closer to the top before eventually giving up and sliding down.  Finally an inebriant stripped down to his jockey shorts, trying to keep his back to as much of the crowd as possible, and was able to shinny up without the impediment of sleeves or pants legs.

In order to get a grip, he needed to abandon those things that made him appear decent.  I wouldn’t have done that.  I would have been embarrassed.   I think that to the extent that we are comfortable, we face the same dilemma.  To climb out of the ennui or lack of meaning that we experience, we need to get a grip on life enough to climb out of comfort.  It can be humiliating.  We can appear foolish. 

Yoga socks?   I have learned that on cold mornings when I’d like to do yoga before the heat comes on, my temptation to put on warm socks is foolish.  Like the Germans shinnying up that maypole, my feet slip out of the socks.  So I deal with cold feet, and find that it’s not long before the exercise warms them up.  When I walk along the snowy roads up and down our peninsula here in northern Michigan, I find I warm up going uphill and cool off coming down.  The uphill climb toward a life of justice warms us.  But there is in this argument so far a foolishness born in individualism.  

Tomorrow, the answer of the San Francisco cable cars.

Access? Excess? The State of our Souls

This morning as I was scanning The Daily Beast  for responses to the State of the Union Address, a misread word gave me a great insight: I’d misread the word access as excess.  This Sunday many churches will preach on the Sermon on the Mount, and what many see as a high point in Jesus’ rhetoric, the Beatitudes.  They speak of satisfaction, of seeing the face of God, of inheriting the Kingdom of God.  Just a week ago we remembered another great orator tell a multitude gathered in Washington that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the Promised Land.

But the mountain that appeared in my mind (clear as the electronic bell on my cell phone that woke me) was a bell-curve, what statisticians call the graph of normal distribution.  On the leftmost “tail” of the curve I saw the word “access.”  On the rightmost end, I saw “excess”.  And in this simple chart I saw the dilemma of my world, my country, and myself.  We fight for access to what we need, and those of us who acquire what we need are often carried forward in our momentum to acquiring what we want.  We felt our needs from the inside, from our stomachs and our hearts and our cold fingers and the faces of our children.  But these wants come from the outside, from advertising and the smell of perfume on a passing mannequin. 

In our climb up the mountain of equitable distribution for access, our momentum carries some of us all the way down the other side, to a life of comfortable and comforting excess.  There the bright lights of success keep us from the truth that we are not, after all, in the Promised Land, but again in a valley, kept from the mountaintop of true happiness not by affliction, but by comfort.

In our times of compassion, we consider the hard climb for the poor, out of the valley of their need; we consider the justice of providing access.  But how often do we consider our own inability to climb that same mountain from our comfortable side, where our possessions are an impediment to the journey?

Next:  Maypoles, Cable Cars, and Yoga Socks

Persons Start Big and are Edited Smaller

It seems to me that persons start big, and are edited smaller and smaller.  I woke this morning from an interesting dream.  Dan Mulhern is a kind of soul-mate, a dreamer engaged in leadership development who happens to be the husband of the now former Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm.  I have known Dan casually and professionally for all of his wife’s two-term tenure, and because I receive his weekly leadership newsletter, I suppose he has been on my mind, including moving out of their home and lifestyle with the election of the new Governor. 

When our son was in High School, he was able to spend a weekend in the Governor’s Summer Residence, not for any political engagement, but because the father of a friend of his was an architect who helped keep the historic building up to its character and history.  So in my dream last night, I imagined Dan and Jennifer packing for their move out of that huge building, the place full of boxes and boxes of stuff, knowing they could not keep it all, and trying to decide what to keep and what to pitch.  The pile got smaller and smaller, but every decision was hard, and there was an accumulating cloud of awareness of what was being lost in the culling. 

This morning Dan’s newsletter was quite relevant, all about repotting.  Here’s a link.  When I woke from the dream, I thought of the folks I work with at Goodwill Inn, homeless people who have felt so much behind, who are bereft not only of belongings, but belonging.  Their careers are gone, their homes, their families.  I thought of children in Newark, after watching “Brick City”  , a five-episode film of a few months of real life in that real place. We’re told that we love to look at babies because their eyes are adult sized when they are born, and so their faces are so beckoning to us.  

Agnosticism and the Cost to Love

Psychologists in the 60’s coined "S-O-R" at the same time a group called "The Teddy Bears" sang “To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him….”

A newborn baby, wrapped in a soft blanket, shiny, tiny face sleeping.
  

A shivering puppy nuzzling into your hand, feeling warmth. 

A tender green leaf breaking through soil in the spring. 

If you were not moved by any of these three, stop, take two deep breaths and read them again.  If you’re still not moved, hold your thumb on the hollow of your neck and feel for a pulse.  If you find a pulse, then imagine something else, beyond a baby, or a puppy, of a fresh green shoot that arouses you. 

S-O-R represents a human experience: Stimulus, Organism (that’s us,) Response.  S-O-R: try it.  Choose one of the three examples above – baby, puppy, green shoot.  Imagine seeing it.  Now imagine yourself seeing it.  What would you do next?  I find myself coming closer, putting my face closer to the baby, the puppy, the shoot.  And I find my hands reaching, as if they had their own sense, not even wanting to wait for my brain to inform them.

S-O-R was a pretty obvious model for the psychologists to invite us to consider.  We see Something.  Ohhh, something inside us happens, and moves us to Respond.  It all starts with accepting the fact that the baby

Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, God…

Our granddaughters are wild.  They’re awful.  Let me explain.  They are 6 and 10, home-schooled as a continuation of a home that is centered on their development.  The day our daughter brought her first child home, she kind of warned us.  She was determined to be wrapped up in this child, totally dedicated to this child’s becoming.  We watched as the child was fed on demand, in virtually constant contact skin to skin, whether in a sling or in a co-sleeping bed.   We had raised our kids with a love that required them to tolerate distance from us.  They would be fed on schedule, by and large, not on demand.  (This was, I know, more my idea than Kathy’s, and perhaps my son-in-law is more deferent than I was, letting the mother mother as she is called to mother.)

The girls are, in the best sense, wild.  For ten years we have watched this constant relationship and feeding on demand develop into home schooling and readiness teaching.  The girls do what they desire.  Our daughter and son-in-law respond to their natural instincts and provide opportunities for them to explore them more deeply.  They grow as they naturally would without television, media, and the pressure of politics and society.  They need not manipulate; they need only to ask.  They need not throw tantrums or act out.  They simply express.  Now, I must say that watching them these ten years was sometimes tough.  I would have expected them to be spoiled, to be self-centered.  But they are kind, warm and purposeful in communication, and have long attention spans.  They are seen by adults and their friends as enjoyable to be with.

This home culture has also made them awful – in the original sense of the word – to have a sense of awe, of things bigger than themselves, beyond them.  Fairies have been a big part of a sense of mystery in their house.   When the ten year old was about three, her parents saw how enraptured she was with the big girls who were fairies in the Nutcracker.  So on her next birthday

Consuming Love

C.S. Lewis and Franz Kafka pick up the thread that I wrote about yesterday – the 500 bottles of wine.  The title of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is probably his greatest literary device.  Gregor, a young man living in an apartment he provides for his sister and his aging parents, turns into a cockroach.  The reader is led to assume that the metamorphosis is just that, and our inner eye sees the story from his perspective.  It is only when he dies that we realize that it is that characters in the background, his parents and his sister, who have been changing. In his atrophy, they have been slowly emerging from the large shadow that he had cast over them in his providing for them a place to live.  It is only at the end that we realize that in his love they had been consumed, had been made small by his largesse.

Like Kafka’s main character, Lewis' Orual casts a large shadow, which in her noble thoughts she imagines to be perfectly loving.  Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is based on the story of Cupid and Psyche, which, not coincidentally, is from a Latin work entitled Metamorphoses.  The central character, beautiful Psyche’s homely sister, rises to the throne and uses it to bring order and security to her people.    But as in Metamorphosis, it is toward the end of the story that she discovers (and the reader realizes) that her nobility has blinded her from seeing that she was consuming the very people she most loved. 

We are forewarned.  Human love can be consuming.  Even (or perhaps especially) love we think of as self-sacrificing.  How does this pick up the thread of the idea of more wine than we can drink?  Largesse consumes the lover as well as the beloved.  We overestimate our capacity to love.  We run out of wine.  God alone is enough.  I see Evelyn Coffey’s face smiling at me, saying the words as Theresa of Avila said them.  Dios solo basta! See (and enjoy again) an earlier blog entry for this: 

http://freelemonadestand.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-old-enough.html

Tomorrow: Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, God

What Do We Do With All This Wine?

So you’ve invited family and a few friends to a wedding, maybe 200 people, and you start to run out of wine.  One of the guests, Mary, is reputed to have a wunderkind, a son who they say can work miracles.  You ask her if he can help get you out of this embarrassing situation, and after trying to keep out of it, he has the wait staff fill six water jars and he turns the water into wine.

Cool story, eh?  But as Benedict XVI says in Jesus of Nazareth, the details of the story suggest that you now have about 500 bottles of wine and your event is almost over.  The question Benedict asks is, “Why would Jesus turn so much water into so much wine?  He suggests that it is a sign of the character of God, a source of plenty.  It would be repeated in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. 

The title of this blog arose from my circumstance a year ago.  After a very healthy and active life, I had been diagnosed with an aortic aneurism, a bulge in the main vessel carrying blood from the heart.  Such aneurisms could be fatal, so I was restricted from activity

Shepherd and Lamb

“Look.  There’s the lamb of God,” John said.  And they followed him, this lamb, who they sought as their shepherd.  Shepherd and lamb: the paradox had never struck me before. 

This Monday morning all along my entire walk I did not see a single car, nor a single garage door opening, kids running out to pile in.  No school buses.  No School.  We remember today a man who was unusual because he was, as the Lord whose salvation and pacifism he preached, shepherd and lamb.  To lead in such a way that we lay down our lives is the lesson for today in the school of remembering, the school that calls us to attention in our hearts, to reflecting on the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Eucharist: Gift Exchange, Shame, and Miracle

“Eucharist.”   Strange word, no?  We might think of it, candidly, as a fancy word for a second-grader’s word – communion, or the more sophisticated among us, the Mass as a whole, a celebration of thanksgiving.  But I was struck anew, in the wake of Christmas, to notice that the word Eucharist shares the same root as the word charism, the Greek word for gift.

As a Catholic, Mass is too often something that I sleep-walk through, or something that goes on while my mind is elsewhere.  But finding Eucharist and charism growing from the same root of gift had me thinking about Mass not merely as a celebration, but the exchange of gifts. 

Don’t we struggle with how to exchange gifts at Christmas?  Exchange suggests some kind of equity, doesn’t it? 

I found myself stunned with the shameful inequity of my reality.  Part of my Sunday ritual is sitting at my desk, taking my checkbook from its place, and writing in a pretty small amount.  I feel some shame at the paltriness of the weekly gift, but justify it by thinking about the limits of our savings, our need to stretch them over our possible lifespan.

But then I think about the simplest reference for Eucharist – that wafer that we receive, the bread that recalls Jesus saying that we should take it and eat it, that it is his body which, sure enough, was given up for us, much earlier than his possible lifespan would suggest.  And I think of the awfully accurate scene of a celebration and gift exchange, like Christmas, when we have given our common little pair of gloves to someone, and then we open their gift, and it is something huge, or something incredibly precious, something on which the giver had spent a fortune of money, or a lifetime of effort.

I sat in this shame, wondering how we can do this, we Catholics, Mass after Mass.  How can we participate with such gross inadequacy time after time, year after year? 

Maybe, at age 64, I’ve finally begun to understand the Consecration.  Maybe transubstantiation is more than a tough spelling word for a second grader.

Civility: An Example

David Brooks is a voice that I can listen to, even though he speaks for the other side of the political spectrum, the Conservative side, that is, if we must take sides.  Kathy and I love to catch the News Hour on PBS, especially on Fridays when "Shields and Brooks" take a look at the week's events through Liberal and Conservative eyes, respectively . . . and respectfully.  So this week even as I look forward to the program, I was grateful to see David's essay in today's Times.  Please take a look yourselves.

He reminds me of my good friend Joe Walsh back in Detroit, who while he answers to being a Republican and lives in a top 1% house, has a generous heart and lives in response to it.  Joe taught me by catching me being divisive, looking for differences in values and intentions where evidence pointed only to differences in approach.

But he reminds me too that we all have healing to do, that the idea of evil in the world and in ourselves is one to consider in our minds and in our hearts, and in the company of those with whom we share town or table.

Tucson bids us to consider: Friendship, Kindness, and Kingdom

I gotta tell ya, I’m surprised to be really liking the Pope’s book Jesus of Nazareth ...because, you see, it’s written by the Pope.  My “reading” in audio format as I walk the pre-dawn hills in the lake-effect snow that is normal here has put me in diverse but endlessly stimulating company, from Karen Armstrong (The Case for God, the Battle for God) to Sue Monk Kidd (The Mermaid Chair) to Maria Doria Russell (The Sparrow) and most recently C.S. Lewis (Miracles, Mere Christianity).  After writing every morning for almost a year since facing the reality of my mortality last November, I found that my wound-up spring of ideas and insights wound down.  I felt the need to listen.

Instead of daily blog postings, I have been, from this reading, jotting down ideas and insights from these writers on “sticky notes” on my laptop, for future writing.  But sometimes like today, I’m moved to write immediately from seeds planted on my walk.  Tucson and the righteous Right...and Left set contrast hard to ignore.

Pope Benedict has released for publication the first half of his intended book on the life of Jesus of Nazareth…because he’s not sure that he will live long enough to finish the rest of it. 

Regarding “Miracles” - Running from Horses?

I left my last posting with a Trinitarian stutterance: perhaps, perhaps, perhaps God loves us that much (to be born a baby in a stable, to come down and hang with us homies, so save us by showing us how to be human, and to introduce us to the God he invited us to address as he did – Father.)   That God would do that is what C.S. Lewis calls “The Grand Miracle.”  This morning in the crisp darkness, I finished the book, Miracles, that had sat on my “must read” bookpile for ten years since it had caught my eye on the bargain rack at Borders back in Detroit.  I bought it because of its author, and in spite of its subject. 

You see, I doubt miracles.

God With Us? Credo? Or Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

I’m “reading” Miracles by C.S. Lewis – listening to it in audiobook form on my long morning pre-dawn walks.   Lewis refers to the Incarnation as “The Grand Miracle.”   Do you believe in miracles?  I have my doubts, but the book is nudging me off balance in that regard.  It is a book I had tried repeatedly to read, but seemed more tenaciously logical than I cared to be while reading it.  My repeated attempts to read the book came from my appreciation on C.S. Lewis and my doubt regarding miracles.   

When I was a kid, there was a female evangelist, Kathryn Kuhlman, who would open every program by looking intensely into the camera and saying “I believe in miracles…because I believe in God!”  Her intensity seemed manic to me, and from then on, “miracles” seemed, well, a little crazy.   Even Lewis candidly questions “how Mother Egaree Louise miraculously found her second best thimble by the aid of St. Anthony”. 

So here we are, looking at (and perhaps into) the scene of a baby in a manger, and we are asked to believe that God has come down to save us by becoming human.  Do we believe this “Grand Miracle”, really?