From Christmas to Epiphany II: From the Pieta to the Manger to the Pieta

Midnight Mass in St. Peter’s.  Our sweet human new Pope cradles the “Gesu Bambino” in his arms, walking with his wobbling gait to the recessional hymn of the same name.  In front of him are eight young children, just waist-high to him, in brightly colored clothes of their various cultures.  At the elaborate Manger scene, Francis places the baby Jesus in the manger, blesses and thanks the little children one by one, even giving one of them a zucchetto (the papal skullcap) that he had momentarily placed on his own head, in a smiling, mute blessing.   

Was it merely coincidence that Pope Francis and the procession to the altar for Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s passed the Pieta on the way, and again at the end of Mass, the recessional, “Gesu Bambino” with full choir, orchestra and organ vibrating the incense-smoky air?  Here the stiff plaster Gesu Bambino in the soft arms of the smiling old Shepherd of Rome and there in Ferrara marble the flaccid corpse of the King of Heaven in the arms of his grieving Mother….

Yesterday we considered the caveat from Fr. Delp in Nazi prison on the eve of Christmas 1944, on the way to the Nazi gallows himself the day after Epiphany.  Fr. Delp warned us: “One must take care to celebrate Christmas with a great realism.  Otherwise, the emotions expect transformations the intellect cannot substantiate.  Then the outcome of this most comforting of all holidays can be a bitter disappointment and paralyzing weariness….”

For me, validity of the symbol of the journey to the Manger by way of the Pieta was reinforced on the recessional, the strains of the sweet Gesu Bambino hymn still reverberating in Brunelleschi’s grand dome in clear D major, but bent to an ominous minor key in passing the Pieta a second time.

The reality is that the story of salvation is not accomplished at Christmas; the stage is merely set.  Delp’s warning is that we look at the baby in the manger not merely with emotions that warm our hearts with joy, but with our intellect as well, that notices once, then twice that the joyful throng passes by the Pieta once, and then twice.

We are called not to joy but through joy, transformed to hope that just as the story does not end at the manger, it does not end at the cross.

Tomorrow:  It’s a boy; He’s YOURS.

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

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.

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.  

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….”