Do Our Departed Beloved Seek Us?

Father Angelo.  He sang to my daughters on the living room floor, they on his lap, he in his clerical black pants and shirt, his roman collar in his front pocket, arousing toddlers’ curiosity.

Piva, piva, lowlaydooleva,

piva, piva, something like that, in his Milanese Italian, he from there, spending two years at the my university as part of his training as a Missionary in his Italian order.

Just last week I was mentioning Angelo to a priest friend, a Jesuit who at age 70 is going to serve in Africa, going because he burns to serve in a place where he can serve in the face of possible death, to be so certain of love that he can serve without fear.  Angelo had gone there.

Yesterday afternoon we went to visit Fred’s family, Fred who died two months ago after letting me share his deepest thoughts and memories in the year during which he lived in the face of dying, first fighting the cancer that might be fought and then accepting the death that should not be feared. 

Kathy sat in “his” chair, and I in “mine”, under the huge east-facing window with its view of the bay, steel-gray under steel-gray sky.  His wife, widow now, his brother and sister-in-law sat across from us able to see the view to our back.  As the near-solstice light faded in late afternoon, his wife turned on the lights high in the ceiling, remarking that one bank of them, those above the window, were not working. 

As we were talking, I noticed in my peripheral vision some flash of brightness in the now-darkening sky behind me, but ignored it, engaged in our conversation, our careful, nervous conversation, here with Fred so recently gone, here with his wife just after Christmas.

Sometime later it was she who mentioned that flickering – how strange that it would be happening just now – that flickering in the row of lights there above our heads, above where he and I had sat, Fred and I, in our weekly ritual of coffee and conversation.  They began telling stories about people telling stories about being visited by their recently departed ones.  I listened, politely, thinking rather about circuitry, and whether their fancy electronic controls were saving them from the heat threat that would come from a short-circuit in our more plebian on/off switches.  This talk of visitation from the dead was not for me. 

This morning I woke with a song in my head, that song in my head, that “Piva, piva” that Father Angelo had sung to my tiny daughters.  It would be ten years later that he would die, just in his 40’s, of a disease he had picked up there in his mission, in Africa, where he had served, as it turns out, in the face of death, so certain of love that he could serve without fear.

So as I sat down at my computer, I did a search.  “Piva Piva…”  And up came the words l’oli d’uliva!  Olive oil!  I clicked on the link, and began to weep.  “Piva, piva l’oli d’uliva” is a children’s Christmas song.  It has been 40 years since Angelo sang that song to my little girls, who are now as old as he was when he would come visiting us from his mission, sitting with me on the front porch, looking old, wondering why they could not find out what was wrong with him, what was making him so tired.

Forty years that song has been in my head, coming to me in my workshop, or while I’m cutting grass, or just driving.  The flickering lights were just last night.  But now I recall Fred saying to me, sharing on his back porch his comfort in dying, that he had heard not only that we can evoke memory of those, soon like himself, who have gone.  He had heard that the way our brains store such memories, these memories can actually seek us out. 

Our memories can seek us. Those of beloved memory can find their way to us, to the conscious parts of our minds.

When Fred said that, I was thinking about circuitry, the way our fancy knowledge about brain electricity allows us to reckon such things, even skeptics like me.

This morning, half way between the birth of the Babe and the visit of the Magi, Angelo is singing to me.  I did not seek him.  He sits with me there in the floor, singing this song to me, rocking me.  I am somehow as sheltered in his lap as my little girls were.  I look down and see the worn weaving of the rag rug, and the shiny black of his Italian trousers.  I feel my head resting on his chest, and hear his heart beating.  I notice how marvelous it is, that his heartbeat and rocking and tempo are all the same.  I am not thinking of circuitry.  I am wondering how he found his way to me, today this morning.

Here is a link to the story of the song, and a video. 

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

Incarnation - Dance of Dross and Dream

When I think of the Incarnation you come to mind. 

My friends Bill and Billie (soul-mates named at birth) wrote this on their Christmas note.  Oh, thank God it shows, I thought, that part of me that makes them think this. 

What is “dross,” my friend the writer had asked a few mornings earlier when I had used the word.  I had thought he was kidding; words are his medium.  I had begun to respond literally, that dross is the scum on the surface of something, like tarnish.  But even as I was saying that, I had suspected that he was calling me to a deeper truth.  Calling us to a deeper truth…like these quiet days in the aftermath of the Christmas rush of buying presents and decorating for the season and then the flurry of wrappingcookingtravelingeatingeatingeating.

 The “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  In-carn-ation.  The perfectly pure Word of a perfectly perfect God became flesh, like us.  And with that he joined us in this – struggle or dance? – of humanity, purity and dross all mixed in. 

Dross is that part of the metal that is not metal, released from its hiding in the solid by the melting process.  The metal is melted to make it workable, to form and shape it into some use.  The impurities, that would otherwise weaken it, come to the surface where they can be skimmed off.

So my friends Bill and Billie see in me something of the pure in me.  It shows through the dross that I know is there.  That’s why I thank God it shows.  But I’m stuck sometimes with my dross, my imperfections, that I and those who have to live with me see.

I think my friend the writer was asking a rhetorical question when he asked what dross is.  I think he was suggesting that to be human is to be word and flesh, eternal and dying, ideal and real, metal and dross.  

Life is to be lived as Christ lived it, in-carnate, in flesh. 

There’s a teenager alive in each of us, more often in some of us that in others, but certainly in me.  We can look in the mirror and on a face with perfectly clear skin see one pimple, and that darned thing ruins our day.  Having an almost perfect complexion becomes having a zit becomes being a zit!

We are not dross.  That is not the ugly truth.  That is the ugly lie.  We are not the sum of our faults.  We are the sum of our humanity, this amalgam of perfection and impurity. 

Thank God that those in our life see beyond the dross, see the good that is in us.  And thank God they are, like God-with-us…with us in this struggle, this dance, of humanity.  Thank God that we can be formed, by their loving affirmation, into something useful.

Coming up

Losing it: new year's resolutions and the crucible of humiliation

LOL: Love On Legs

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

I'm the 4th of the Magi...Doofus.

My friend Fred gave me a year...his last.  And even as he lived an died an agnostic, he got me to the Manger.  But I almost missed the whole thing.

We met at a poverty reduction event and struck up a friendship just before he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a very aggressive form of brain cancer.  A few weeks ago he died.  In the intervening year, we enjoyed what most of us would compare to Mitch Albom’s much beloved story, Tuesdays with Morrie.  Week after week I’d drive up the peninsula to Fred’s house with my video camera and my notebook, and we would spend time on camera, Fred reflecting on his life for posterity. 

Again and again he would mention the bright young American-born son of Spanish-speaking migrant parents…without immigration papers.  At 12, this boy had come with his parents to a local charity looking for help with tires for their car.  The boy had struck Fred because he served as his parents’ interpreter.  Subsequently, Fred had discovered that the boy, I’ll call him Antonio, was a very bright and hard working student, and he began to find ways of encouraging and mentoring him.  From attending his school events to sponsoring him in a local summer program, Antonio became a grandson to Fred.  When Fred left video messages for each of his three grandchildren to see after he died, he left one for Antonio too.  Again and again Fred would mention his determination to see that Antonio had the same opportunities in life in America that he himself had had as an immigrant from the Netherlands at 15.

In the last week of his life, Fred asked to see Antonio, to express his pride in him, his certainty of his success in life, and his love.  Antonio, his parents and two younger brothers came to Fred’s memorial service.  At the edge of a sea of well-dressed white people, there were Antonio, his father and mother and two younger brothers in clean but worn clothes of the poor.  These were their Sunday clothes…and their Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday clothes too.  This image stuck with me, this meek, respectful family.  I thanked them all for coming and promised Antonio that I would call him to arrange to bring him a copy of the videos that Fred had made for him.

Cue the camels.  Hit the lights.  Enter Magus #4, the Not-So-Wise Man.

Weeks went by with his DVD buried on my desk.  Finally as Kathy and I were putting up our Christmas tree, Antonio and his family came to mind and we were moved to try to share Christmas with them.  I called Antonio and told him that I’d like to bring over the DVD and a gift for his family. 

I came bringing gifts, feeling good about doing it, but at the same time feeling, well, kind of alien.  Antonio had said, when he’d given me directions to pick him up to see Fred, “Watch for a big green migrant camp when you turn right.” 

A big green “migrant camp”.  It had turned out to be a pole barn, a steel-sided utility building perhaps 30 x 90 feet, with a single door on the end, and no windows.  On the right side was a pattern of windows that suggested a row of five or six rooms inside.  When I’d driven up to that door the first time, I’d not wanted to walk up to it, not knowing whether as a gringo I’d be seen as a threat by whatever families lived there.  So I’d called Antonio on my cell and told him I was parked outside the door.  He’d come out to the car and we’d driven off.

So now I am driving up to that door again, Fred’s spirit motivating me, but still afraid of entering that door. I call Antonio and tell him I’m “parked where I was when I’d picked him up before” and he comes out.  Its 40 degrees and he’s in a tee shirt and wearing socks.  I’m between my car and that door, trying to give him the envelope, explaining the DVD inside, and the gift for his parents to use for all of them, and I’m aware that he’s just in his stocking feet, and I’m feeling clumsy about how I’m doing this.  He’s got to be feeling cold.  I just want to give him the envelope and go.  I want what is in the envelope to do what I feel incapable of doing.

But he is, in his meek style, smiling and asking me to please come in.

What follows is a meal.  But it is so much more.

The next morning, I’m sitting with my Tuesday morning men’s group, and we’re looking together at the Visitation.  I’m stunned by the awareness that Elizabeth has, that she knows what’s happening there inside her house that she is certain that Christ is there.  She is so present to all of it.

Was it the word aware or the word present that opened my mind and my soul and my tear ducts?  Here, the week before Christmas, I had been there.  I had sat in this shelter that was so much less than a house, not really designed for a family to bring a child into the world.  I returned in my mind to Antonio’s family’s little room and saw his mother sitting quietly on the couch that Fred had acquired for them, sitting behind Antonio and me as we ate the delicious food she had prepared for us, just as she had prepared the “feast” that Fred had told me about again and again.

Perhaps this makes no more sense to you than the end of the world that was to have happened yesterday with the end of the Mayan calendar.  But I know that I was, this Advent of my 66^th Christmas, there at the manger.  And I had gotten there, and through the experience, and all the way back home, and slept the night and woke up the next day before I realized that I’d been there.  

Like the Magi, I’d come bearing gifts.  But unlike them, I’d not seen the miracle.

The Jesuits encourage a kind of prayer that calls us to put ourselves into the story, to be there, to make the experience not intellectual but sensual, to “apply the senses”.  So I blink back tears as I type this.  When I am at the manger this Christmas, I will see the clean but worn apartment in that migrant camp, and feel the warmth inside that door, and smell fajitas on the stove, and taste the freshly chopped cilantro, and hear the sound of Antonio’s mother asking him in Spanish to ask me why I am in a hurry to leave why I don’t stay longer.

Don’t be a Doofus.  See the miracle.  Stay awhile. 

Next: Christmas Presence

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

Dancing to Carols?

“Dance, of course, 

is embrace and steps.”

It’s noisy in the bayside resort where my friend Steve staffs the breakfast buffet.  Last night this space was the bar, and the requisite televisions, with their news, sports, and weather, compete for my hearing. 

“Say that again?” I ask, turning my better ear toward him, not only to hear better, but to let him know I need him to speak up.  I hate asking him to do that.  His voice is as soft and reverent as his words…all his words, now that I think of it.

“Dance consists of embrace and steps.  We spend too much time trying to get the steps right.  We forget about the embrace part.”

How does he do that?  How does he know that he can say something so casually, like this chat over morning coffee on my drive-by his workplace, that is like the things Jesus would say to a woman at a well, or a beggar at a gate? 

Lord, that I might dance!  I can already see, and I have no sick daughter at home, and there is no hemorrhage, but oh, did Steve just peg me!

I’m all about the steps, you see.  Getting it right.  We were that way as kids, weren’t we?  Wasn’t it embarrassing for all of us to get out there with our pimply faces and sweaty hands and try to appear comfortable and adept? 

Kathy and I are known for our dancing.  We’ve got the steps.  Everybody loves to watch us, enjoying our joy.  We do a dance that we learned 44 years ago when we met in college.  I dance with no one but her, and our daughters when I get the chance, and soon our granddaughters.  Our dance is a sacred thing.  “43 years of practice”, I tell them when they praise us.

When Kathy had her “exacerbation”, the onset of what was quickly diagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis five years ago, she was, for a few weeks, without normal balance and very low on energy.  At a niece’s wedding, the steps could not possibly come.  We stood together on the floor, she needing me for balance.  Even as the tempo of the dance music moved our skin, our muscles were leaden, our bones stone.  Kathy’s arms limp, my hands holding on to hers, our feet hardly moving, we unsuccessfully attempted to blink back the tears that came. 

I blink them back now.  I didn’t think of it as an embrace.  I thought of it as the loss of dance.

Kathy has her balance back, and most of her energy.  And we have our dance back.  But Steve is right, not only about my dancing, but my life.  I am all about the steps.  I’m all about what to do.  I’m always moving.  I’m always trying to do the right thing…and I’m always pulling away.  I live encounters like I dance: quickly into them, intensely present and in synch, reasonably adept.  But now that I think about it, I’m counting on the song ending, so I can….  So I can what?  What is there that I need to do that abbreviates my encounters? 

Why can’t I …LIGHT!?  Ahh.  In this season of light-in-the-darkness, perhaps it is a different kind of “light” I’m drawn to in Steve’s words.  Kathy asks me often, pleads with me, really: “Will you light for a minute so we can talk?”

I think Steve is coming about the same truth as Kathy’s plea.  It happens, he says, to be his truth, but it is also mine.  The dance of life is not just about the steps.  It’s also about the embrace.  T.S. Eliot refers so adeptly to this in “Burnt Norton” in his “Quartets”

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Without the stillness of embrace, without resting in encounter, there is no dance. 

I gotta work on my technique.  I gotta light in companionship. 

Christmas gives us a great opportunity to enjoy the stillness and light in the embrace of relationships, if we can remember not to be preoccupied by all the steps.  

NEXT:  I'm Doofus, the forgotten fourth Magus.  Come back tomorrow to learn why.

Christmas Spirit

Cast of characters:

Mary, teenaged virgin, four days pregnant

Elizabeth, old woman, Mary’s cousin, several months pregnant

John, Elizabeth’s son, fetus-in-utero

Jesus, blastocyst floating around in Mary’s womb

Oh yes…and the Spirit.

I always thought "Visitation" was a play with a cast of two.  Two veiled women, hugging and sobbing and laughing.  Old woman, large with child, holding the young woman’s face in her hands, looking so lovingly into her eyes, seeing there the angel’s secret.  Young woman with her hand on the bulging belly of her middle-aged cousin, closing her eyes and feeling the life doing somersaults within.  A woman thing.  A Chick Flick.

Well, yeah, there are the two Easy Riders, John and his still-floating cuz Jesus.  But a close reading of this Gospel (Luke 1:39-45) tells us that while the women were doing all the celebrating, it was the Spirit that kicked things off.  At the sound of Mary’s greeting, it is John who does somersaults and alerts his mom, the same alert that he will live for in the desert on the other side of his mother’s uterus:  Ecce!  Agnus Dei!  Look!  The Lamb of God!

The Gospels are a lot like our spouses and kids.  We think we know them…and so we fail so easily to see all that is there.  I honest-to-God never noticed that the Holy Spirit was in this scene.  I’ve neatly put the Trinity in chronological order: Father-Creator...Son-Savior…Spirit-Guide.  The Father sent the Son, who in turn sent the Spirit. 

I’m consoled by this, by the fact that the Holy Spirit was there.  I need help, you see, at Christmas.  There’s a curmudgeon in me, a humbug that peers out from a darkness that does not give way to the light of the star.  I dunno why.  My wife and kids don’t know why.  Over the years this has softened, as I’ve learned to “get over it”, or to “let it go” or to “get with the program.”

But halfway through this Advent, I’ve been to a sneak preview of the Manger, and it opened my eyes to the Spirit of Christmas that began at the Visitation.  I realized that I’ve been called not to “get over it”, or to “let it go” or to “get with the program”, but to Join the Dance.

Next:  Dance: Steps...and Embrace.  

Then: Three Wise Men and a Doofus.  

A Hanukkah Gift of Christmas

Three nights ago his name came to me, opening as a portal from dream to wakening.  

"Walk through!" 

It was Max. 

The dream had involved an old gray-haired sage, who had arrived at a place full of people. 

Perhaps it was my daughter’s family and friends at her 12-12-12 bonfire that night.  That would fit, I suppose.  They’re young, full of ideas and dreams, typical of them to realize that a triple numeric date would not happen again until 1-1-2101, when only the youngest around that fire might remain to see.

Perhaps it was the image in my mind of that so-bright fire against the so-dark, near-solstice winter sky.  The star would say so, the star I saw burning through the tiniest crack in the west-facing blinds as I padded to the woodpile to add new logs to last night’s banked coals. 

Perhaps it was that this year my granddaughters, saved by their wise parents from religious dogma, have discovered the three wise men following just such a star, making figures of them for Christmas, complete with big heads – for their oversized brains. 

Perhaps it is the very recent death of my friend Fred, who knew with certainty that he would remain in me, not merely when I sought him in memory, but when his memory sought me.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.  Quizas, quizas, quizas.

 As I walked through the portal into waking, words of clarity came. 

"The brightest among us is the one who sees the light in others."  

Oh, that was Max. 

Max Brill.  A retired professor from Oakland University, Max was friend-at-first-sight.  20 years my senior, learned and wise, he somehow found me worth listening to, as we strolled through a flea market with our wives, who were acquainted through their work.  Later I would discover, first in the company of another couple and then around Max and Mary’s huge dining room table surrounded by a dozen and a half others, that Max Brill found everyone worth listening to.  His “pre-poker palavers” started out as collegial discussions prior to poker, with other faculty members.  Over the years, the poker games had died out but the palavers had grown to fill the room.

Today on the last day of Hanukkah, I realize that Max Brill was perfectly named.  MAXimum BRILLiance.  That was the gift of my waking that morning.

The brightest among us is the one who sees light in others.

Hanukkah is the celebration of the lamp that remains, despite all logic, burning.  Max Brill’s light burns in me, sometimes like a barely-lit pilot light.  But that morning after 12-12-12, midway through the Jewish celebration of light, it was Max’s flame that blazed up in me, seeking me as Fred had said, giving me the message of my Christian Christmas.

To be a light to the world is to see the light in others, and to help them see it themselves.  We are called, all of us, to call each other, all of us, to let our lights shine.  We can, together and despite all logic, banish the darkness.  We and our world can be…

…Brilliant.  BRILLiant to the MAX.

Mazel tov!  l'Chaim!

A Dark Deed in the Season of Light. What can we do?

Maybe we turn to God when we have nowhere else to look. Perhaps in the wake of the slaughter that happened in that grade school yesterday, we need to turn to the light of the season. 

Maybe it's worth a try.  It is just this question – “What can we do?” that is asked of John the Baptist in the Gospel in many churches tomorrow, “Gaudete” Sunday the Sunday in Advent when we are called to, of all unthinkable things, rejoice.

Here is John the Baptist, outside of the towns and cities where Roman soldiers and Roman tax collectors control the Jewish people, forcing their allegiance to Rome to be first in their lives, ahead of their Yahweh.  Frustration and despair was the spice in their food, the salt in their tears.  So when they heard John’s promise of a person coming to save them, in their enthusiasm, they asked, “What can we do?”

To the soldier, John said, “don’t let your use of power abuse the people.”

To the tax collector, John said, “don’t let your greed take more than is required”.

To the crowd (that would be all of us not already included in the above) he said, “If you have two coats, give one to someone who has none.”

That last one, it seems to me, is the one that really hits us.  Does it hit you, too? 

Imagine that you hear about this brilliant speaker, who everybody is talking about.  She does Ted talks, sits with Oprah, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize…and he’s coming to speak at a city a day’s drive away.  You call your friends, your kids, your parents, and you pile in a van and drive through a snowstorm, and even though it seemed like no one else was crazy enough to be on the road, when you get to the convention center you see that the place is full.  Thousands of people have somehow got here.  You find your seats, shake off your coats, and add to the murmuring din of the crowd waiting, waiting, waiting for the speaker to come on stage.  Perhaps the storm has kept her from making it?  Perhaps all of you were somehow wrong, or this was a hoax, and you would not hear him after all? 

Just as the warmth of the bodies begins to make you squirm in your seat, the murmuring diminishes, and you see her come onto the stage.   Walking to the large, formal podium in the center, he looks at the crowd…at each of you, it seems, and now you are really here, right here. 

She begins.

“If you have two coats, give one to someone who has none. “

And just as you are drawn into the calming cadence of his voice, she turns and walks stage right, down the steps, and out of the hall.

Your hearts are pounding in your chests.  You look quizzically at each other... for clues that are not there.  You’re confused.

You hear a whirring and shoooshing noise from the stage and a curtain comes down, with a smiley face, a huge one, yellow and black, and the words, “I hope you enjoy it.”

Here we have it, friends.  Here is the good news that we‘re given on the Sunday of rejoicing after the shocking events just days before.  Here’s what we’re greeted with on Hanukkah. 

All through Advent we’ve been told of disasters and horrors to come.  Apocalypse is the backdrop of the massage – “don’t be distracted.  Stick with the game plan.”

The Serenity Prayer calls us to open three gifts.  Go ahead.  Open them now.  Don’t wait ‘til Christmas.

The serenity to accept the things we cannot change

The courage to change the things we can

The wisdom to know the difference.

We can change a lot.  Give a lot away to those who need what we don’t, really.  The joy comes from doing  just this.  

Gaudete.  Rejoice. 

20 Chopping Days 'Til Christmas

So Tuesday mornings, as I’ve mentioned, I sit with my boys, if you can call a bunch of mostly retired guys boys, and we look at the coming Sunday’s Gospel.  It’s 7 AM, and some of us have bed-head only partially camouflaged by a too-quick comb.  

But one of us has always prepared during the week ahead, and this morning Dave is that guy.  Dave’s good.  He’s got a good head, but when he shares what he’s put together, his heart takes over, and we are treated to his being moved by the truth he’s put together for us.  

He’s prepared, but he’s surprised, too…a perfect example for Advent and Christmas.

Today, this second Sunday of Advent, he’s sharing with us an old chestnut, in the season when we roast them over an open fire, or so the song goes.  You know the one.  It begins “Prepare ye….”

Making the crooked path straight and filling in the low places, flattening the bumps.  I’m 10 or 11, and in my neighborhood outside of Chicago the kids I (literally) run around with during the summer are feeling the thrum on our chests, vibrations from the diesel engines of these enormous earth-movers with CATERPILLAR in huge black letters in their dust-covered yellow sides.  They’re a block away, up there inside the fence, building up a flat-topped hill that stretches diagonally across what had been our ball field, stretches from southeast where Chicago is up toward Wisconsin somewhere north.  Their wheels are HUGE, taller that we are.  The drivers are like miniature tin toys lost in their cabs, their miniscule arms with elbows out the windows as they bound at full speed across the hill in (literally) a cloud of dust.

So the “Prepare ye” would elicit these me this image of powerful physical change, of get-out-of-the-way-baby, chest-thrumming, exhaust-belching dust-cloud-making, soil-shoving, ball field-obliterating power.

But this morning I think of the chopping of a little knife on a wood cutting board in a quiet, clean kitchen.  I have this friend Steve who is a brilliant writer working as a cook.  He has the heart of a chef, an artist with anything he touches, so food will work as well as words.   But in today’s job market, he works for his sustenance more as a prep cook than a chef. 

And this morning my stomach is still smiling from Thanksgiving, when I watched my son-in-law spend the entire early morning being a prep cook, cutting vegetables, making sauces, assembling ingredients, covering his kitchen with the components that would become our once-again wonderful Thanksgiving dinner.  By noon he would be the chef, assembling all of that, but this morning he was the prep cook.

So now I’m back with my boys, and Dave is saying (he seems to be discovering it in saying the words) “It’s popular these days to say that Christmas is about giving, but for us, Christmas is about preparing to receive the gift that God gives us.”

I’m sitting next to Dave and smiling.  His words, and my friend Steve, and my son-in-law in his kitchen come to mind, and now the word “Prepare” is not about power.  It's about being the prep cook.  I have, as of today, twenty days to prep myself, to bring out everything I have and make it available to God, so that God can use all of me.  Christmas is about giving.  The perfect Christmas the one in which we give our whole selves, make out whole selves available.  But as Dave says, it’s about receiving too. 

What we receive is the perfect surprise: what (wonder!) God can make of us.  Who’s the chef on TV that finishes every meal prep with a presentation to the camera and such a Godly phrase…”Oooo, it’s so GOOD!”

We’ve got 20 days.  Chop 'til you drop!

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

Who are we never without?

With the loss of a friend to glioblastoma I reflect on Mary’s pregnancy with a son who will be sacrificed.  Both bring to me the foolishness that we can "get over" losing someone.


And both bring me hope.

A now-cancelled series entitled “A Gifted Man” involved an individualistic, insensitive but brilliant neurosurgeon who was regularly visited by the spirit of his recently departed ex-wife, who was, as you might suspect, brilliant but compassionate and altruistic.  The nuance and effectiveness of the show came through in an episode in which what seemed to be a brain tumor in a patient turned out to be a chimera, cells of the undeveloped attached twin.  This chimera is a rare form of something we can all recall. 

When I was a boy, there was a story on TV about Siamese twins, and the dilemma of separation surgery.  Would the attempt to separate them, allowing them to live a normal life, be worth the risks of surgery?  I recall being struck (as a boy in a large family) that they could not get away from each other, that they were without the freedom to go on with their individual lives.  How often in our lifelong marriage have Kathy and I freed each other to do things without each other by saying that after all, “we’re not joined at the hip”.

The surface issue of the cancelled series was the visits by his wife, who completed him.  The deeper layer in this episode was the reality of the connectedness of the “other”; removal of the chimeric “tumor” was seen as a dilemma.  The young boy, even as he was besieged by the “voice” in his head as the tumor pressed on the hearing centers of his brain, mourned for the loss of his twin that surgery would require. 

A friend reminded me yesterday that the priest who presided at his father’s funeral had said in his homily “God so respects relationships that when we lose someone we love, he never fills the hole.”

Authentic life includes these holes, the places once inhabited by the physical presence of another.  In the mystery of life as this priest, Fr. Norm Dickson, S.J., proposed, grieving is not a matter of going on with our individual lives severed from their memory, but of embracing the gift that they remain to us, even as a hole.

Are we ever alone, really?  The word alone is from the Old English words alla ana…all one.  We can be lonely, focusing on our sense of alone-ness, but that is a dangerous delusion. 

We are not alone.  Going on is not a matter of going alone.  We are joined at the heart. 

Here is a reminder from e.e cummings – thanks to Bill Hickey for inhabiting me with this.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

by e.e.cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Mothering, Managing, and Mentoring: Waddling to Swaddling to Coddling to Modeling.

Do you suppose that the Queen of Heaven waddled around in this last month of her pregnancy with Jesus?   

My mother would push up her bottom lip disdainfully and say “Johhhhhhhnnnnnnnn! That’s sacrilegious!”  But Mary was, after all, human and Advent, which I’ll call her waddling period, begins for all of us the human condition of holding in, holding on, and humanizing.

This is not just a mother thing, or even a woman thing.  It’s a human thing.  We all, men and women, are inclined to do it with projects or teams. 

Waddling:  It’s growing large in us – this child or this project or this dream.  It is ours alone, and it is increasing our awareness of our capacity – and we like that.  But as it grows, it begins to weigh us down, inhabit us and inhibit us.  It struggles and moves in us, wanting to emerge and grow beyond our limits and constraints.  It is time for us to release it, and for it to be born.

Swaddling:  Birthing is not a letting go, it is just a letting out, a surrender to the inevitable escape of project or child or team beyond our physical boundaries.  Mothers don’t just drop babies like weeds drop seeds.  Managers don’t just drop ideas through slots in their door so that others can pick them up, interpret, and develop them.  Swaddling is an in-between time when the baby is wrapped tight, its arms and legs held close as they were in utero, so they feel the transition to freedom gradually.  The swaddled child (and swaddled project) is constrained for its own protection.  But it is as dependent as it was within us.  It continues to be an extension of our will.

Coddling:  Soon enough the project or the child or the team begins to exert its own will, to reach to grow beyond us.  Designer or manager or mother, we think (rightly or wrongly) that we are still needed to guide and form and feed and reinforce so that the child or project or design shapes up that we think is best...or is it feel?  This thinking/feeling ambivalence in us is perhaps the staying/leaving ambivalence that the child or team has, but we coddle it – applying sweet rewards to keep it close.

Until now, all of our actions are levels of control.  Perhaps it is we who are called to be born, to be released from the constraints of role as controller.

Modeling:  As the child or project or design begins to “find itself” in this chaos of external influence, we can discover the gift of becoming ourselves, of being present with the child or project or team, of letting it be influenced by us, of finding resonance and rightness within itself in those aspects of us that fit. 

Does this last step sound too confusing or complex?  That’s appropriate.  Once we abandon control and are born into our identity as no longer master but companion, life is no longer dogma, but nuance.  It is no longer math, but music.   “Right” is no longer something we prove, but something we feel.

Years from now, Mary will find her son Jesus in the temple, speaking precociously with the elders.  She thought he was “lost”.  But he was finding himself.  And, we are told, “Mary returned home with Jesus and pondered these things in her heart.”  The boy was out of control.  And, I propose, God looked at it, and said it was good.

Maternity and The Price of Wings

There was a moment when I realized that my mother had let me go.  It came twenty years after I had walked away. 

I remember vividly sitting down in my first desk on my first day in first grade.  I was eager to go, because my brother Danny had, for the past year, left in the morning for school, leaving me to wonder what it was like.  So here it was.  School.  I went to the desk that Sister Dorita, the kind old nun, had pointed me to and sat down, smiling to myself proudly.  

I looked at my mom talking with the sister, and for a long time I’ve known what they were talking about.  The price of wings.

Twenty years or so later, I had swept into my mom and dad’s house with my wife and three kids and all of the stuff that came with us on the road from Detroit, where I’d moved for college, and stayed for life.  While my sisters and my dad settled in the living room with Kathy and the kids, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee.  I don’t know if she pointed me to sit down there as Sister Dorita had to that first desk, but I’ll never forget the conversation.  It was about wings.

“Johnny, how did you get to be this way,” she asked. 

“What do you mean, mom?”

“You’re so different than you were when you lived at home….” 

I knew she meant that I had become more.  The university had made me bigger than I had been at home with her and my dad.  Kathy had given me not only love and children, but a sense of myself as part McGuyver (who could figure out how to solve problems) and Robert Young, who had played the TV father who “knows best.”  I had grown into someone she could not have imagined.  And I had grown 300 miles away.

In Advent, we wait for Christmas, but it might be worthwhile to consider young Mary large with child.  Perhaps her cousin Elizabeth had been for her the equivalent of my brother Danny, making her as eager for the birth of her first child as I had been for first grade. 

Yesterday I had a conversation with a young mother about wings.  She was feeling the cost of them. 

I’ve reflected, since that conversation, not about Mary large with the child Jesus, but about Naucrete, the mother of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun.  While the father of Icarus who had crafted the wings (Daedalus was a kind of a McGuyver himself) for his son was a member of the Court of King Minos, Icarus’ mother was a slave.  How appropriate.  Aren’t all mothers slaves to the aspirations of their children?  Don’t all mothers slave their lives away to pay the price of a gift they’d rather not buy…wings… for their children?

 As we approach Christmas, all of us born of mothers might consider our own, and the gift they have given us, these wings, to become different than we were when we were living at home, to become bigger, and perhaps to grow farther away, closer to our suns, dreaming not merely of lifting ourselves in the freedom of flight, but lifting the poor into the freedom of dignity and lifting the lost into the belovedness of relationship.

Advent: Light goes Viral

Fiat Lux! 

“In the beginning,” we’re told in Genesis, the world was in darkness.  Creation began with these words.  “Let there be light!” 

And as we enter Advent, and anticipate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the Winter Solstice, we may fail to notice that we are indeed intensely longing (whether consciously or unconsciously) for this first day of creation to find its way into the dark spaces of our world, and our hearts.

Go to the source article in the New York Times and the Facebook page  where it all began. 

Look at the light in the photo.  What do you see when you look at the light? 

• I see it illuminating a profoundly human interaction, one so similar to The Story Of One Who Comes Down To Save.
• I see it coming from a place I don’t often see light coming from – a store.
• I see it illuminating the feet of the barefoot man, and I see the shadows on the sidewalk where it dies not penetrate.

 Oh, I see the light.  Do you?

What did NYPD Officer Lawrence Deprimo see that led him to do what he did?

What did Arizona tourist Jennifer Foster see that prompted her to take this snapshot with her cell phone?  Florence Arizona is the home of a sprawling state prison, and she is a public safety officer.

To me this morning, this photo is my Christmas.  This is what it’s all about.  Fiat Lux indeed!  Let there be light in our world, in our hearts.  And Lord, that we may SEE.

By the way…the officer’s name Deprimo…in Italian, it means “In the beginning….” 

Advent and expectant waiting

Entering Advent:  
Think pregnant, men!
Think!  Pregnant men!

On Tuesday mornings I meet with a group of guys to pray and share our reflections on the following Sunday’s Gospel.  Jesus is meeting with his homies too, warning them to be vigilant while they wait for change-a-coming.  "Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life….” 

I look around the room.  It’s 7 AM, for God’s sake.    I don't think these guys were carousing last night.  So I looked again at the language.  Carousing…drunkenness…anxieties. Some change in wording might be helpful, I thought, in looking at how we ought to spend this time waiting for Christ to be born. 

Carousing makes me think of bumping shoulders in busy, noisy, senseless places and not going home.  Carousing for us might be shopping, I think, on that morning after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  It might be buying more stuff.  Oh, it’s for others, of course, and so giving is in the middle of it, but it does get distracting, no? 

Drunkenness for us might giving in again and again not to booze, but to whatever addiction we use to avoid whatever we ought to be doing to become more completely who we are.  Surfing the web aimlessly?  Watching TV?  Working?  Eating?  Worrying?  We all know our addictions.

Anxieties is a word that works just as it is, at least for me.  Recently retired, I am in varying states of anxiety about living responsibly on what we have saved.  I worry about the cars breaking down, and the price of gas, and how we can stay connected with the kids without blowing the budget.  Like our addictions, our obsessions are not hidden from us – not really.

We do stuff that’s bad for us.  We take in junk and let it rattle around in us, because the rattling saves us from silence. 

I looked around the room and said, “Imagine if we were pregnant, guys.” 

Imagine if we were pregnant guys!  We’d learn pretty quickly that carousing would be bad for the baby that grows best in stillness.  And the stuff we take in compulsively – the stuff that is not healthy for us – is doubly bad for the baby.  Anxiety that constricts our blood vessels would make it tough on the baby’s, too.

How different would we be if we were pregnant?  I found out that the word “expecting” arose in the 50’s when Lucille Ball’s pregnancy in real life created a problem with the I Love Lucy television show.  The word “pregnant” was not acceptable for TV censors.  So they used the word “expecting”. 

So this Advent, What are you expecting?  Or should I say…What?  Are you expecting!?

Advent and the Fiscal Cliff

Advent.  It begins Sunday in Christian churches.  As of today, we are in the last week of what is appropriately called “ordinary time”. 

Ordinary.  Same old same old.  Like politics.

The readings for the First Sunday of Advent begin with this from the 33^rd chapter of Jeremiah

In those days Judah shall be safe
and Jerusalem shall dwell secure….

Sound like a campaign promise?

But while the word gospel means “good news”, this first Advent Gospel reads:

People will die of fright
in anticipation of what is coming upon the world….

Sound like the “fiscal cliff”?

Oh, this is perfect.  We’re given a promise, but we’re warned too, that the promise is to be earned, and we are required to wait.

Oh, we’re waiting for the politicians to get their act together…but what about us?  What are we doing while we wait?  Advent, it seems to me, is a “grass roots campaign”. 

Luke goes on to suggest what not to do:

"Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of daily life….”

Carousing…shopping?  Drunkenness…our habitual routine?  Anxieties of daily life…yup.

Hearts.  Hearts awake.

Paul gives us some sensible advice:

Brothers and sisters:
May the Lord make you increase and abound in love
for one another and for all,
just as we have for you….

So there, my Jesuit friend used to say, you have it.  Promise, threat, distraction, love.

Welcome to Advent 2012.

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