Remember...

Imagine:

Here then is Jesus standing, facing the blind man.  In his left hand he has the dusty dirt into which he has spit.  With the thumb of his right hand he is grinding the dirt and spittle into mud.  Then with that thumb he rubs the mud on the closed eyelids of the blind man, saying to him “go and wash in the pool of Siloam (where I send you) and you will see.”

And now here is any one of dozens of priests and lay people over the years who have, on the 64 Ash Wednesdays in your life, standing facing you.  In their left hand they hold a small bowl of ashes.  With the thumb of their right hand they rub the crunchy soot on your forehead and say…

Do you recall the first word that they used to say, before the dust to dust?  The word was “Remember.”  For the last several years, the incantation has been something about having courage to live the Gospel.  The change seemed refreshing.  The old one had seemed morbid, calling us to remember that we came from dust and we would return to dust.  I didn’t like the old words and their reminder of death.

As I imagine the parallel posture and gesture between Jesus and the blind man and the persons smearing ashes on my forehead each Ash Wednesday, I am struck by this, halfway through Lent, as a reprise of that same Ash Wednesday action, calling me to life. 


I remember the feeling that surrounded and filled me 18 months ago when I thought I might soon die.  Somehow, bereft of future I was free to appreciate the present.  I saw as I had never seen before.  In the 18 months since then, I confess that my eyes have gradually closed.  I fail to notice the gifts in my life, the beauty that calls me to fullness.

I think that four weeks ago as we began Lent we were called not to darkness, but to light, not to death, but to life.  Perhaps we can imagine ourselves the beggar, feeling the grainy mud being rubbed by Jesus into our blind eyes and feel the crunching of it, the pressure of the thumb that is familiar to us, as we push back toward the pressure, not to be pushed back.  Perhaps we can consider to what we have been blind, and what, when we look at it, will call us to life in presence in the moments we are given, when our eyes are opened by Grace. 

We have the second half of Lent to prepare to accompany Jesus in his passion, as he once again shows us that the future (including the certainty of death) is nothing to fear, that God is present, that where we are sent by Grace is where we will see.  

Out of Control

I see, said the blind man.  This Sunday’s Gospel is about seeing beyond understanding.  John’s 9th chapter tells this great story about Jesus making mud with spit and dirt and rubbing it on the eyes of a blind man who after washing it off could see.  I’ll share daily this week on this story, but wanted to start with the argument that ensued. 

The Pharisees and even Jesus’ homies, the disciples, were stuck on trying to understand, and the story gives Jesus an opportunity to teach them, and us, the limits of understanding.  They all referred to rules and traditions to interpret the man’s blindness, and Jesus’ act of healing on the Sabbath.  There is a great cast of characters, even including the parents of the man blind from birth.  And the long version of the Gospel is rather tedious…just as the argument was.

Understanding, like ego, can move us forward to our truth, but only to a point.  I smiled to consider the word as two: under and standing.  The roman architect (literally, builder of the arch) was, it is said, required to stand under his completed arch while the scaffolds that had supported it during construction were removed.  If his work was faulty and the arch failed, he’d be crushed under his failure and never be able to build a second faulty arch.  It did not take trust for him to stand under his arch.  It took only understanding.  He considered the math, the measurements, the materials, and the men he supervised, and he could calculate the safety of standing under it.

Understanding allows us to stand under only those things we control.  That same architect standing under the arch of a stranger would need trust.  Understanding seems reasonable, rational, doesn’t it?  But in this story about blindness and sight, perhaps a deeper message is about stepping out of the safety of control, beyond our calculation, and stepping into the unknown in search of our deeper selves, ourselves as loving and beloved.

Shame and Isolation

On a Saturday afternoon with some students delivering sandwiches to hungry folks in the inner city, I saw a woman sitting alone on a bench, not joining the other worn ones who came to our car.  I carefully and slowly approached her, and from a few feet away asked her if she would like a sandwich.  She turned from the sound of my voice like a turtle crawling into its shell, and the words she spoke still echo in my heart: “I’m so ashamed.”

“Jesus met the woman at the well…” the Peter, Paul and Mary song went, and that story is retold today in thousands of churches around the world as John’s Gospel Chapter 4, verses 5-42 “…and he tells her everything she’s ever done” Noel Paul Stookey’s baritone voice informs us.  But I think the story is not about what she’s done, but what she’s done about what she’s done.

My late brother Dan lived in an alcoholic haze for the last several years of his life, and the phone would be our bridge across the 600 miles from Detroit to St. Paul.  He is part of the fabric of my life, the part that was woven during the first 20 years of my life as he preceded me through life 18 months ahead of me, blazing the trail for me, if only because I chose to follow.  When I chose rather to leave the smooth waters in his wake and go of on my own, our paths diverged significantly, and eventually we were quite different.  I lived a life of faith and hope and striving and he grew cynical and angry.  I had a job that greatly defined me and he found work to be a four-letter word.  But perhaps the biggest difference was that I lived in a family in a community while he lived alone. 

Alone with his cynicism and anger, he began to drink.  His drinking allowed him to reinforce his arguments about the foolishness of society, and our phone conversations consisted primarily of his soliloquies railing against the foolishness of pretty much everyone but himself.  I’d gently challenge his arguments; any aggressive move on my part would lead to his belittling me or hanging up.  But sometimes he would share his profound sadness, his ruined life.  He would speak of his ex-wife, his loss of the favor with which he grew up as the golden child, the   bright and hard-working one, the shortstop, the quarterback. 

One night his mood was more mellow than angry, and he said, “John, I read this story about a guy who climbed into a hole deeper than he could climb out of.”  When he did not say more despite my waiting silence, I asked him about it, but he changed the subject.  It seemed ominous to me, and in subsequent conversation I’d ask him about it, but he said little more. A few months later he’d fallen dead on the street, his heart stopped, his groceries including his nightly jug of wine.  I think he knew that he was drinking himself to death; that was his hole.  In his cynicism and anger and disillusionment, he’d isolated himself and taken on the identity of victim and loser.

Jesus did not seem to be taken aback by the woman’s having had a number of husbands, and living unmarried with one then.  He called her beyond her coming alone to the well, too ashamed to come with the other women of the town.  He called her to himself, to his forgiveness and his Father’s endlessly flowing love and providence.  Perhaps he saw that she was climbing into a hole, a bottomless abyss with a sign that said “SHAME”.  Perhaps he saw, rather, that she was beginning to spiral into accepting her identity as a loser, step by ashamed step. 

What struck me about my brother’s ominous story was the decisiveness about it, the moment of climbing IN.  I think that while many of us would not do that, many of us do gradually wear a circular path of shame and despair that becomes so deep that we cannot climb out of it, and that perhaps it becomes so deep that we cannot accept the lifelines dropped down to us in love, the lifelines of Grace, that plead with us to let go of our shame.

Praying Hands

Before I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous or the “Serenity Prayer” of Reinhold Niebuhr or Durer’s “Praying Hands”, a pretty, sad-eyed, white-skinned and dark-haired teenage girl gave me a silver keychain with Durer’s image on one side and Niebuhr’s verse on the other. I still remember the look on her face as she gave it to me, because I did not understand it.  I was in college; she was young enough for me to consider her as a little sister rather than a source of infatuation.   I saw in her face a calm that seemed like resignation as she placed the keychain in my hand.  Calm and resignation were not in my adolescent arsenal.  I thought, like Archimedes, that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, I could change the world.  As I looked admiringly and quizzically at the beauty of the image and the words, she said “It’s the Serenity Prayer.  Alcoholics Anonymous uses it.  My dad gave it to me.”  I used it most of the way through college, and have no idea whatever happened to it.  I think of that silver keychain whenever I see the Serenity Prayer, or Durer’s artwork.  And now reflecting on it, I wonder whatever happened to Susan of the sad eyes. 

While in Frankfurt helping our son tie together loose ends for his return to the US, I worked my way through Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace.  Recommended by a good friend who lives a life of courage and wisdom in the serenity of Grace, I found it to be not so much about addiction to alcohol that I fear in others, but addiction to what May calls “stress”.  I have a hard time stopping.  I’m constantly in the need of an accomplishment fix. 

The image above from Japan struck me.  To be still amid chaos, to know that stillness and inactivity are at some moments more honestly human than activity, and more loving…is perhaps the wisdom that knows the difference, and both the root and the flower of serenity.  It shows a resignation, perhaps like Susan's, that is not a retreat from reality, but a graceful standing in that place, a presence that changes the world without the need for leverage or force, that accomplishes all that is possible without the need for stress.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.  

Gust and Calm

It was the morning ritual.  My Aunt Arlene’s dad, Gust Kopack, would sweep into the back porch of the farmhouse after milking the cows, peeling off his coveralls with their faint sweet smell of fresh milk and hanging them, all in one motion, on the hook behind the door to the house, simultaneously calling to my Uncle Joe, “Come on, Joe, time’s a-wastin’!”  And off they’d go to fish for the trout we’d have for breakfast.

Time’s a-wastin’.  “Gust” was what everybody called him, short for Gustavus.  While the unknowing person would have called him “Gus”, that added t gave him a truer name, a name more befitting him.  He was like a wind that kept us moving.   And this ritual greeting of his seems to have found a home in me, because I have a sense of eagerness to make the most of time.  It has me waking early as he did, early enough for him to milk the cows, push the squealing-axled, milkcan-clanking, morning’s produce to the roadside for pickup, and get to the trout stream with his smiling son-in-law and yes, back to the kitchen by the time his grinning wife Ida had brought in the morning’s eggs from the henhouse.  Whew.  His pace was as breathless as that sentence. 

Gust was not a prevailing wind.  He could be calm, too.  He smoked a corn-cob pipe from time to time, generally in the evening when the chores were done and it was not quite

Where do we Stand?

My dad worked in a factory.  He worked there his whole life, starting when he was still a kid, dropping out of high school to help support his family because his dad, a carpenter, had fallen into drinking and couldn’t support his seven kids.  He went to war in 1943 and then came back to the same job, never getting his diploma, because now he had a family of his own, my brother Dan and me, and later, four more. 

He was a worker.  He wanted better things for us kids, though.  No “dirty jobs” for us.  He and my mom pushed us to aspire for white-collar jobs, and college.  Of the six of us, only one was defiant enough to choose the joy of working with his hands, and as a carpenter, at that.  The rest of us dress up for work, work with our heads, work in offices, and none of us have ever been in a union.

So my friend Bill’s comment led me to reflect on my own family of siblings, on our lives as Catholics, and to what extent we care about the workers who are getting whacked in today’s economy.   Having lost our oldest member

What Would Jesus' DAD Do?

When I was in college, I remember that Beth had the courage to stick with her boyfriend back home.  Tommy was a plumber.  Her friends at Marygrove were all meeting us “college guys” from U of D – engineers, architects, accountants.  Beth wisely stuck with Tommy.

Our society recently went through a marketing cycle with WWJD bracelets, t-shirts, cards, even graffiti: What Would Jesus Do?  Today it’s the Feast of St. Joseph, the Worker.  In a story where the Kid grew to know Himself as the Son of God, there in the background was his father, the carpenter.  When Joseph the carpenter found out that his betrothed was pregnant with God’s Kid, he didn’t do what the high and mighty would do, divorce her quietly or with arrogant flourish.  He married her and supported her and found workmanlike ways to be daddy to the Son of God. 

We sleep under roofs built by voiceless carpenters, and wake to hot showers piped by silent plumbers.  We plug coffee pots into outlets wired by mute electricians and wait for our coffee while we think, perhaps noisy thoughts, noble, professional, Christian thoughts,  perhaps thoughts about what Jesus would do.

Today, let’s add a “D” to WWJD and think about the silent workers of our world, the ones who make things work, who stand not for things, but behind them.  WWJDD: What Would Jesus’ DAD Do?

Let's take a moment, well slept and showered, with our steaming cup of coffee, and consider how we can silently serve, can do something tangible that rests and warms and stirs others.

Stoppers

Fast cars need powerful brakes.  And fast lives need powerful stoppers too. Here are some ideas:

Power Fasts – The Jesuit Volunteers use a weekly power fast.  That day, they cannot use any energy in their house – no electricity, no gas…no cheating and using flashlights either. 

·         Media Fasts – what about hours each day – or maybe a day each weekend – when you use no media – including the internet.

·         Pray-as-You-Go is one of the “tools” in the upper left hand corner of the blog.  Another is The Examen.  Try them as ways of stopping.

·         Nothing Appointments – don’t we set aside time for appointments, on our calendars, in our organizers, on our smartphones and computers?  Make a recurring appointment with…nobody, to do…nothing.  If your phone or computer or organizer has an alarm function, better yet!  I set my phone with a marvelously sacred “gong” sound.  It is calming and inviting.

·         Sit with a cuppa – We had a Chinese friend who would heat a cup of water and enjoy it as we would tea.  Another Chinese woman I knew had a cup with a cover; the act of drinking it was a slow and slowing ritual to me as I watched it.  

·         Standing in line time; traffic light time – these heavenly gifts seem like curses to us in our too-rushed lives.  They are gifts waiting to be unwrapped and enjoyed.

·         Microwave time – what do you do while your cuppa is heating up in the microwave, or your leftovers?  What a great time to stop, to just sit and wait for the bell to call you back.

What are some of your ways?

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!

Happy Lent.  Oxymoron?  No.  It’s Ash Wednesday.  The Gospel for Sunday is a dandy – Jesus runs for the desert, runs for cover from the “You’re IT, Baby” that he heard when he emerged from the cool silence of the Jordan.  He gets the drum roll from The Big G “Heeeeeeeeeeeeere’s JESUS” and what does he do?  Does he take the seat of honor, to the applause of the studio audience and in the focus of the camera?  Naah!  He heads for a dry, warm place, where there’s nobody, where he can just stop.

Just stop.  The first act of the Messiah was to just stop.

The Gospel for today, Ash Wednesday, is a harbinger of Sunday’s.  Joseph is anticipating his marriage to Mary, and she takes him aside and tells him she’s with child.   He’s figuring out what he’s gonna do (a quiet separation, perhaps an acceptable, compassionate excuse) when an angel (it takes something supernatural to do this) tells him to stop.  He does.  Plans go forward; the marriage happens.

Lent.  How will we STOP?  Some ideas tomorrow.

Parenting: Role or Function?

In A New Earth Eckhart Tolle makes a provocative distinction, between parenting as a role and as a function.  As in The Power of Now, Tolle works at our distraction from being truly present to ourselves, to the truth that Jesus said would set us free.  In past brief attempts to read Tolle, I would have been argumentative, because I rejected his writing as agnostic egoism.  I ascribe this to my own narrow-mindedness, and am glad that our son started reading his copy, encouraging me to read mine.  Visiting with us for the longest time since he moved to Europe 13 years ago, his presence at home with us, his retired parents brings out in me a gladness to be father to him, but Tolle’s distinction helps me sit in that father-ness and consider it from the inside.  Who am I as Father?

A few days ago I listened to a father admit that he was very angry at his daughter, who had brought misery on his home with choices she had made.  His wife later shared her deep sadness in the loss of her dream of a life with an adult daughter who would be her friend now and her caring helpmate in her old age.  When I woke up this morning, sure enough, I was still a guy.  As a parent, that means I continue to know

We, We, We, All the Way Home.

Often when I’m writing, Kathy’s reality comes to me.  Not Kathy, who is wise enough to get a good night’s sleep, but her part of “me” that is not just...me.  If I describe “my” life, she occurs to me, because it is not “my” life but “ours”.  We’ve been married twice as long as we were single; how can I consider life to be “mine”?  A clearer description of this false ego is when I start to say something about “my” daughters or “my” son.  Well, duh! I didn’t make them myself!  It is at times like these that even as mine is the only body in my study while I am writing that I know it is not just “me”.

I’ve begun listening to Eckhart Tolle read his second book, A New Earth on my morning walks while the rest of the world sleeps.  He spends a lot of time helping us understand ego, adeptly using story, metaphor, and example.  While ruminating on this, I was struck by the Papal “we”, the way of the Catholic Pope, when speaking, to say “we” instead of “I”.  He would not say “I am troubled by what I see when….”  He would, rather, say “We are troubled by what we see when….”  This bothered me because the I felt the Pope was making himself bigger, more imposing by pluralizing himself; “we” is at least one more than “I”.  But I thought of the honesty that comes

Enthusi-Leaks

“My three year old is in a remarkable new stage; she gets so excited about what she’s doing that she forgets to stop to eat, or go to the bathroom.  When we stop her, she gets frustrated with us.” 

I heard the “bathroom” part, and my mind was already imagining what this young dad soon shared.  His daughter had urinated in her bedroom.  It took a bit of work to return the toys, books, and carpeting to their pre-accident state. 

I delighted in his calm, describing his daughter’s “stage”, her first date with enthusiasm.  Because he understood her and respected her, the accident was understandable too.  How many parents would demean the child?  How common would scolding be, mild or severe, in an effort to discourage a repeat of the behavior?  How easy would it to ask the rhetorical question, “What’s wrong with you?”

What are the ways we as adult parents (or bosses or “guiding” family members) fail to be this understanding of the person and focus instead on the behavior?  This young Dad helps me aspire to my own fatherhood, understanding and appreciating my wife, my adult kids, finding their lives “remarkable” enough to wonder and take them in.  I aspire to do as he did with his leaky daughter, to be able to put behavior in context of the gestalt, the life-space or context, of their remarkableness. 

I suspect that in his understanding the why of her behavior, he helped her understand it too, and not demean herself.  All of us deserve to grow to embrace what's right with us.