Friday, November 30, 2012

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.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

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….” 


Wednesday, November 28, 2012

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!?

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

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 33rd 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.