Turning and Knowing

I’m blessed with two daughters.  One has light hair, the other dark.  One has Kathy’s blue eyes, the other my brown eyes.  Like two seeds that fall adjacent to each other on the ground and germinate, they grow with their roots intertwined, but the each grows toward the light their own way, branches often in opposing directions.  Their comments on Saturday’s posting (We Cannot Jump Off Our Own Shadow) share two perspectives worth a look.  Amy looks at the turning, and the stillness within it, referring to T.S. Eliot’s Quartets, specifically “Burnt Norton”.  Margie points out that the very existence of a shadow is evidence of light.   Remember making shadow puppets on the wall?  Remember how you could make them bigger by moving closer to the light?

In any real life, we will be turned around.  Will we feel for the stillness in which we are rooted, and know our stability, our source? 

When we face nothing but darkness, will we understand that the largest shadow is cast by the nearest light?  I pray for these two gifts for all of us – for the sense of stillness in our center, undisturbed by turning; for the sure knowledge of the light, and its closeness in the darkest times.

Thanks, my two bright girls.

We Cannot Jump Off Our Own Shadow

(Dealing With Crises, Midlife or Other)


At 7 AM, I’d report to my boss Tony Cordova and his cousin Modesto so we could get most of our work done in the cooler parts of the day.  Each summer they drove up from Texas, leaving their families behind and sending their money south to feed them.  They worked my Anglo butt pretty hard, I a willing idealist glad to give them the upper hand, knowing my time at hard labor was not, as theirs, a life sentence.  By 3:30, they piled into their Chevy Hardtop and I hit the showers for my evening job staffing the motel swimming pool until 9.  

And that’s when I developed a way of orienting myself to the sun.  I was a teenager, a guy who thought having a tan made me look good.  Working on the grounds gave me a farmer’s tan.  From a distance, when I put on my trunks for my pool job, you’d think I was wearing a tee shirt, my pale skin refused the sun all day.  So as soon as I’d arranged

Happiness?

Spreadsheets or bedsheets:

our striving calls us either

to crude oil or wine.

Is THIS Better, or THIS?

Most of us have had our eyes checked.  We sit and look through a contraption that allows the optometrist to give us a choice of lenses.  “Is this better, or…this?”  At the beginning of the test the differences are obvious.  But as the print gets smaller, finer and finer distinctions are needed.

Karen Armstrong reminds us again and again in her works, most notably in The Case for God that we are given two very different lenses to make meaning of life’s print, especially as it gets smaller.  

Logos is the application of logic.  It’s the root of the word, in fact, as well as the root of theology, psychology, sociology, etc – the meaning and understanding of god, mind, and groups, respectively.  But she reminds us that there is another lens that allows us to see clearly at the parts of reality that are illogical: mythos.

Instead of laying out steps of understanding Scripture to teach us their meaning, Bernie Owens would open us up to allow the Scripture to teach us from within, to enable the words to sound their note and help us feel for resonances arising from within ourselves.  In one of his homilies, he played a hauntingly meditative piece of music, Pachelbel’s now overused Canon in D

Risen, Sights Raised

Bill and Billie choose a new word each new year.  Last year, the year that they sold their perfectly wonderful, wonderfully comfortable house to move to a much more challenged part of Detroit in order to participate in urban gardening, their word was “resilient”.  While their move was within the city limits, the contrast between their old and new neighborhoods was enormous.  Their old neighborhood near the University of Detroit Mercy was among the most desirable in the city.  Neighbors took care of their homes on tree-lines streets and most yards were beautifully cared for.  Their new neighborhood has streets that are worn, with less than half of the original houses occupied, many no longer standing.  It is also the locus of a hopeful community, that plants food in the broken places, farming the empty lots.

It was almost February by the time I realized I did not know Bill and Billie’s word for this year, after they had worn last year’s “resilience” so nobly.  The new word, it turns out, is “tranquility”.  Because I was in Germany when I’d asked him, he included the German translation of the word, Ruh, used in the German original of Silent Night, designating the “peace” in which we sleep, heavenly. As soon as I read the word Ruh, I recalled it as a word in the powerfully moving closing song of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.  Auferstehen, the song begins: “Rise again” the song tells us; our ashes, after a short “rest”, Ruh.  I first heard Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony, “Resurrection”, when I was crafting a sarcophagus, a box for the cremated remains of a friend.  

For hours while I worked on the box, I listened over and over to the music.  While the wood of the box was changed forever by my tools, I was forever changed by Mahler’s music.  Bill knew of that experience, and some years later he gave Kathy and me a pair of tickers to experience its performance at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall.  We sat in center seats, just twenty feet

Mysterium Inhabitum

My friend Dave shares about his life with a voice that quivers easily.  He’s so aware of the holiness of everything and especially everyone that he often has to hesitate in speaking to let the wave of emotion to wash over his heart so his tongue will speak clearly.  He’s in a holy place all the time when he considers his life.

With a recent experience, I was reminded of times when I felt this experience of being in a holy place, at times when holiness flared up, like the Aurora Borealis, bright enough for me to see it even amid the bright distractions of my life.  These were time when I was inclined to recline, to stop everything and allow my body to be weak and still, to be absent from everything else to respond to the presence of the moment.

When my brother Dan died I was visiting my son in Spain.  I’d known that he would die, lost as he was in a self-destructive lifestyle from which I was forbidden by him to meddle.  I was not tough enough to intervene, to try to use force on him, my older brother who had force on his side even in the way he loved me.  I knew that my time with Chris was the present calling to my mind and heart,

Shake Shake Shake…Shine Shine Shine

Salt of the Earth. Light for the World. This Sunday’s Gospel has Jesus following up his blockbuster Beatitudes that beats Mapquest for a certain, simple route to the beautiful life:  Be salt.  Be light.

On Tuesday mornings I enjoy what is in many ways the lynchpin of my retired life, the commitment around which my other-than-Kathy life revolves.  I drive three miles to Immaculate Conception Church to meet with a small group of men to look at the following Sunday’s Gospel together, to seek in it some guidance for us as men wanting to live beautiful lives as heads of families. We gather in early morning darkness, into a warm circle of light in a room adjoining the church.   For decades I had enjoyed something similar in Detroit.  It was men only too, but it started because the women we knew were way ahead of us, getting to know each other more easily than we more individualistic males.  So here I am again, sitting in a warm circle of increasingly candid and trusting men as we look for guidance from God in scripture and each other.

This Traverse City gathering concerned me when I first heard about it, because it specifically called out to men who were heads of families.  The Men of St. Joseph it is called, from a group that started in the South.  I was afraid of this man thing, men taking and holding the lead in their families, their communities, their church.  I long for a Church that opens all doors to women.  To have them follow a step behind so that men can remain out front is repulsive to me.  But last Tuesday was an example of how the group is freeing me from that concern about male supremacy.

Steven had agreed to play the weekly role of reading and studying the week’s gospel, and preparing for us some introductory remarks to help us discuss it together.  He is among the quieter of us, less likely to speak up, and when he does speak, he speaks quietly, gently, modestly, with gestures that soften, rather than harden, his words.  And when he prepares remarks, they are thorough, and carry their own authority.  He writes like a theologian, with carefully crafted sentences that build logically, that end not in a conclusion, but a call to us to provide our own. 

This week’s Gospel, Matthew 5:13-16 is about salt and light.  We are called to be salt of the earth, light to the world.  And Steven did not disappoint.  Salt preserves, he said.  Salt preserves.  His study provided us with all kinds of insights about salt, about light, about the small windows in the houses of the time, and the way lights had to be raised high for the light to spread.  We listened in rapt attention as he spun his story, and then it was finished, and he was smiling shyly at us in his spent silence…and it hit me.

Steven was the salt.  He was the light.  Nothing about his message was about him.  It was all about the Scripture, about the message.  Nothing was about the messenger.  Salt does not serve itself.  It preserves the thing salted; it flavors the food on which it is used.  It dissolves and becomes part of that thing on which it is used.  We can’t see light; we see only what light shines on.  Light serves us by showing us what is.  It does not show us itself.  So here we were, Men of St. Joseph, heads of families, learning from the words of Jesus by the effective teaching of one of his messengers, who was teaching us by well crafted words and uncrafted example, by being salt of the earth for us, by being the light of Christ to the big world in our little circle.

Riffing Through our Hearts

One morning last week I woke up from a dream with a vision, an image.  It was a heart that could be riffed through like a stack of cards, and each “slice” was like a record, with grooves, baby.  It turns out that it was the birthday of Etta James.  Her “Roll with Me Henry” was also titled “Wallflower”.  I was only 9, but already knew that I would be a wallflower for awhile.  My cousin Cathy would unselfconsciously jitterbug with the black-painted post in my uncle’s basement in front of everybody, beckoning me to dance with her.  But to my shy self, the thought of dancing was terrifying.   But by the time “At Last” was recorded I was 14, and indeed a wallflower, and understood completely how wonderful it would be if at last a girl would come along and save me from my wall. 

Our daughter in Cleveland serves the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in spreading the good news – that our hearts are indeed stacks of records, juke boxes of memory.  Research supports the connection – here’s a link to a recent study.   But I like my waking image, the heart as a stack of records.

I said records, not internet- downloaded MP3’s or laser-cut CDs, or even magnetic tapes.  Records were discs of vinyl that started out like our brains, smooth and clear.  The vibrations of music were gathered by a microphone, connected by wires to a

Cable Cars, Lake Shore Drive, and a Banker Moved to Tears

Sinatra was wrong.  Isolated in full view of thousands of neighbors, this image from my first home town blew me away, like the snow off Lake Michigan.  “I started to worry I might run out of gas and be frozen,” Ms. Theroux, 23, recalled on Wednesday in a tired, strained voice. “I’m from a small town in Minnesota, where if you get stranded, you’re basically all alone. But here I was, right here, and I felt the same way — completely isolated.”  The quote saddened me.  Chicago was not, for these unfortunates stranded in a blizzard on Lake Shore Drive, “one town that won’t let you down.” 

Meanwhile, in our little wind-blown latest home town in northern Michigan, 300 of us drive through that same storm to a warm and welcoming place to hear a report on “Poverty to Progress”  after the first few years of our Poverty Reduction Initiative.  The program began with a video of a local banker who gives us a teaser, describing how he received a call asking him to help another bank’s customer.  The PRI "Navigator" wanted to help a neighbor not lose their home, and they needed him to call his competition to encourage him to use an available federal program.  But he didn’t tell us how the story ended.  He told us that we’d see as the morning progressed.  He was right.

We heard from the champions of the program, the founders of PRI.  They showed us slides that described the mission, the strategy, the progress.  Then they introduced us to neighbors who had been served by “Navigators”, those who were not threatened by poverty who had the time and means to help neighbors connect with available resources. 

We heard Carron tell us how she had grown up so poor that as a small child she would fall asleep with a bit of food in her cheek so that she would have something for the next day…and we wept with her.  We heard Mike tell us how he had for years “used substances to