Christmas to Epiphany XII - Tenderness as the Fruit of Patience and Closeness

 On this 12^th Day of Christmas, my final entry in response to the question of Fr. Delp – How are things different now that Christ is born – and the three characteristics of God – the Patience of God, the Closeness of God, and the Tenderness of God.

I desire to live a life of tenderness. I have had glimpses of this in relationships with people facing difficulty. 

When my dad was progressively weakening with congestive heart failure, my wife and I would make more and more frequent drives to Chicago, the six hours each way opportunity for preparation and reflection. For those condensed weekends, I was able to focus caring and kindness, knowing that my wife and I would soon be back in our car with time to reflect and recharge our batteries.  An unforgettable experience was that of my dad who was not expressive of his emotions looking into my eyes and saying “Johnny, you’re so kind to me.”

When my friend Fred had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, I had the opportunity in my retirement to sign up to spend time with him once a week.  As with my dad, the focused, short-term time with him allowed me to be very kind and loving.  I was free to be the best of myself.  Fred came to know me at my best, and in his eyes I saw myself at my best as well.

My relationships with people experiencing homelessness has mellowed over time, allowing me to focus on them, help them see their own dignity and value…because I have been blessed to see them as good, as my dad and Fred saw me. 

As I have reflected on these experiences of tenderness, I realize that tenderness is a fruit of patience and closeness.  These times with my dad, with Fred, with my acquaintances on the street are really effortless. The effort that preceded them were being getting past impatience and isolation. 

So today on the 12^th Day of Christmas, I’ve outlined what I’ve come to learn about Patience and Closeness, and set out some closing thoughts on Tenderness.

1.    Patience

a.    With myself: allow time to be simply loved by God, to learn God as source of all, and my primary and essential identity as beloved

b.    With others

                                          i.    Grace to keep in mind they will not grow as I think they should

                                         ii.    Grace to keep in mind that they are as imperfect as I am

c.    With God

                                          i.    God as friend – is not made in my image; God’s ways are not my ways. God is perfection, harmony, truth and beauty, goodness…but not as I define or expect.

d.    Withal: nature other than man shows growth as slow, seasonal

1.    Do I accept starts and lags in myself and others as natural, or as failings of consistency and persistence, as imperfection to be grown beyond?

2.    Do I respect the season of my own life (retired and aging)?

2.    Closeness: as night and day guide all of nature to work and rest, closeness to God in solitude and closeness to God in human companionship are gifts in alternation as well as combination.

a.     To others

                                          i.    This Christmas gift of God-as-Love calls me to be accept the gift and share it.  Being drawn into relationships is natural.

                                         ii.     Aversion to others is based on fear of them or of my own inadequacy, each a failure of trust in God’s love.

                                        iii.    Physics and grace consort to draw me to the other.  As I get closer, attraction increases, grace providing what is needed for the relationship.

b.    To myself - sitting with myself, accepting of my imperfection, respecting my own needs, physical and emotional

c.    To God: time for nothing but God, in prayer, liturgy, nature

d.    To all: delight in beauty of nature, including people, without taking responsibility to nurture or change, to remake them according to my preference

3.    Tenderness:  My tenderness has come in focused relationships, condensed periods of time.  I thought momentarily that it was like putting on a costume of kindness and acting out the part.  But I think it was actually removing the shell of my self-doubt and fear and acting as my true self. What difference it makes to me that Christ is born – Fr. Delp’s question – will show in the degree that I am this true self with my wife, my children, my neighbors, those who I see without the gift of preparation and focus.  

But I need to remember that the Pope spoke of these three characteristics as characteristics of God. They will never be mine except through the unearned and freely given gift of GRACE!

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Christmas to Epiphany XI: Step Two, and a Longer Walk

This is the Eleventh Day of Christmas, and Epiphany approaches quickly.  

Fr. Delp’s question, how has the birth of Christ changed me, has been playing in my mind – falling asleep, waking, and in moments of quiet that have somehow invaded my busy days.  The question has found paths in my darkness by the light of the three characteristics that Pope Francis says that God is to us, and calls us to be to others – patience, closeness, and tenderness.  I notice now that these paths, having been walked on repeatedly, are becoming easier to recognize, easier to walk.  God’s way is becoming worn in me.

Walking ,walking, walking…this brings me right back to where yesterday’s story left off – my learning from relationships with people living on the street.  Step one was finding a way to actually sit down with them.  Step two is walking the streets with them.

I’d been helped through the first step – sitting down with Malcolm and feeling my kinship to him.  But when our parish’s shelter week was over, I lost the opportunity for a relationship with him.  It was a Warming Center that let me proceed toward God’s call to me to “touch them.”  Sts. Peter and Paul is a parish in downtown Detroit that is staffed by the Jesuits.  With the urban mission of the university and the urban commitment of the Jesuits and the Sisters of Mercy, the parish opened “Sts. Peter and Paul Warming Center”.  http://www.sspeterandpauljesuit.org/center.html   Brother Jim was a Jesuit who had started the Warming Center, but led from the rear, empowering those who began as guests to become hosts.  So the luncheon was prepared by those with the gift of feeding, and the speakers were those among them with the gift of words.  The room was filled with people sitting at round tables.  They were law school people on lunch break, parishioners, street people, Jesuits and Mercys, and others who supported the center. 

I’d shared that Ignatian Contemplation, inviting us to enter the story, to be there in it, and not just intellectualize, had been a powerful influence on me, driving me to take the first step.  And it was that gift that drew me powerfully to take the second.  The luncheon speaker told us that the Warming Center was special to him and the others who were homeless because it was a place where they were welcomed, not shunned.  He told us something that I never thought about.  While there are numerous places that those on the street can go for lunch and dinner and shelter, the in-between times find them walking from place to place because to stop is to loiter or freeze.  Duck into a restaurant or store to get out of the cold and you are asked to leave.  Sit down and you are dangerously cold…and seen as loitering, being seen as an eyesore or a threat.  So, he said “We walk, as if we had somewhere to go.”

Just as my retreat had “taken me in” – to the story of Jesus and the crowd – His simple mention of “walking as if we had somewhere to go” took me in to life on the street.  As a passionate introvert, I feel capable of being social when there is something that I can do, some use I can fill.  But ask me to simply mix with people and I’m tortured by self-consciousness.  So at conferences when I am presenting or participating in sessions, I’m comfortable.  But put me in a “reception” in a large room full of strangers, and I want to escape.  Since escape was not appropriate, I’d found a way to cope.  I’d walk randomly through the room as if I had somewhere to go.  I’d do this until we were free to sit down for the meal…just like the person on the stage was saying.  So those words “as if I had somewhere to go” transported me into a person on the street doing the same thing.  I was walking to stay warm, self-conscious of the fact that I didn’t belong, averting my eyes, looking at the cracked sidewalk.  And then I realized that I smelled, and that the clothes that I was wearing were not my own. 

My retreat experience of Jesus calling me beyond my revulsion to the crowd was so real that I knew it as truth for me.  And this very real walk on the streets of Detroit in clothes not my own had the same certain truth for me.

I’d been given three gifts.  I knew in my mind what a Warming Center was.  I knew in my mind why they were valued.  But me than anything else, I found that we have something in common, the street people and me.  We have words to speak…and we find similar ways to cope with our gifts being unneeded or undesired.

And three responses emerged. I left the luncheon shocked to know that there were thousands of people on the street in the city I held proudly as my own.  I felt ashamed that I had lived so long and thought of myself as a caring person so deeply, while this went on and I did not feel it.  And I was determined to make this reality a part of my life. 

The story has continued to unfold since that day at Sts’ Peter and Paul.  After becoming deeply engaged with people on the streets in Detroit and those who care about and for them, retirement in Northern Michigan gave me the opportunity to find caring on a smaller and more personal scale. 

See more about this; learn about my developing ministry with Home Sweet Homelessness, a board game designed in a shelter that serves as a learning tool to help close the distance between those with homes and those without. www.HomeSweetHomelessness.org

Tomorrow – Tenderness as the fruit of patient closeness.

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Christmas to Epiphany X: Getting Closer – the First Step

On this tenth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.  And we return to the model of the good life provided by Pope Francis in his Midnight Mass homily as we look toward Epiphany, the opening to that good life: The patience of God, the closeness of God, the tenderness of God.

LEARNING AN UGLY TRUTH ON RETREAT

Yesterday’s posting began to look at the closeness of God by proposing that being close with another calls us beyond fear and self-doubt through the gift of “actual grace”, a gift given freely to us as we begin to act, to reach out.  And I promised to share the story of my own becoming close with people who are homeless…despite my strong aversion to it!  Here’s the story of the first small step.

In my first 8-day Ignatian retreat, my director had given me a story to enter in prayerful imagination. 

There I was in the crowd as Jesus walked down the road, the crowd attracted by his healing and his speaking. By now I had been on retreat for a few days, and felt very close to the person Jesus.  And as I saw him coming closer to where I was, each of us being moved by the crowd, I felt in myself a desire to walk with him, right next to him, like the white minister I recall walking next to Martin Luther King in a march in the 60’s. 

But the crowd was thick and aggressive, pushing toward Jesus, saying “Touch me, Jesus!” “Love me, Jesus!”  “Heal me, Jesus!” 

I looked at Jesus, flanked by some of his closest followers, who were trying to give him room to walk.  I wanted to be one of them, one of Jesus’ friends.  I found myself next to him, on his left, and as he looked straight ahead, I said “I want to touch you, Jesus.”  “I want to love you.”  I want to heal you!”

He looked at me deeply, calmly, and with the pity of someone who loves one who does not understand, and gently said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them!  Love them! Heal them!”

I looked down, to where my heart sank. I felt revulsion for the crowd. They were dirty.  They smelled, like the baskets of dirty laundry that I remember my grandmother bringing for my mother to wash when I was a small child. I literally sobbed to Jesus, “I don’t want to touch them!  I want to touch you!”  I realized that I was pleading with him.  But he looked again at me, kind but firmly repeating, “Touch them. Love them.  Heal them.”

In my revulsion of the crowd despite Jesus’ clear mandate to me, I knew that my contemplation had taken me to a truth in myself. Where Jesus was calling me to compassion for the crowd, I was stuck with my revulsion, my distaste for them.  I did not come to resolution on this.  I took it home with me.  If one can look at “sin” not as a shameful act deserving punishment, but sin as distance from God, I would say that I went home knowing my sin.  I committed it to prayer, but I did not resolve it.

BEING MOVED A FIRST STEP CLOSER

Some months later I was in the kitchen of our church hall making sandwiches for the guests of our rotating homeless shelter, with other members of my prayer community.  I was concentrating on being productive, spreading the peanut butter and jelly, bagging the sandwiches, there in the clean, bright kitchen, so I could get back to my afternoon’s work across the street at my job on campus.  I was in the huddle of my friends doing something charitable.  Our quiet conversation paused as we realized that the evening’s guests had arrived on their bus, and were walking single file down the hallway outside the kitchen. We could see them through the narrow opening of the door.

Suddenly I was back in that retreat chapel, and they were the crowd, and I knew that Jesus was telling me to touch them, but I was glad to be separated by the kitchen wall.  Again I decided to retreat with my sin in place.  I finished my work and got back to my job.  But I knew that I needed to get past that wall.

The next day I went to the woman coordinating our rotating shelter and told her I’d like to cook and serve a meal. We did not serve the hot breakfast from the kitchen, but from long tables out in the cafeteria.  There was no wall to separate us from the shelter guests.  After serving breakfast on that first morning, I hesitatingly took my own breakfast and as directed joined the guests at table.  They were speaking to each other, and I felt incapable of being of any use to them.  My eyes seemed glued to my plate.  I felt like a failure.  On the second day I took my plate and scanned the room for someone sitting alone.  Malcolm was a slight light-skinned African-American perhaps in his late 30’s.  His eyes were glued to his plate too.  I felt so different from him.  I had no words.  But I told him my name, and he told me his, and despite the fact that no more was said, I felt that I had taken a first step closer.

On the third morning, I watched for Malcolm to come through the line, repeating his name in my head. Malcolm…Malcolm…Malcolm.  I wanted to remember it despite my jangly nerves, feeling so out of place, so ineffective.  It was toward the end of the meal when he did come in, and my heart leapt.  He glanced at me as he held his plate out for the scrambled eggs I was serving.  “Good morning, Malcolm,” I said, smiling.  I weep as I recall the transformation in his face, his slight brightening as he looked at me fully and said, “You remembered my name.”  I told him I’d been looking forward to seeing him, and each of us continued with our tasks – him to getting his breakfast and me to serving others.  I joined him again with my plate.  A third person was at the table, and conversation did not grow much. 

The week ended after a few more mornings.  Malcolm and I said little to each other, but he gave me a gift that took me to more and more steps closer and closer to others who had previously been the crown I’d passively resented as getting in the way of my getting close to Jesus.  Malcolm had let me see his face, and had let me look into his eyes as he looked into mine.

While I felt better about taking that step, I knew it was still about me.  But Malcolm remained with me as a person as real as myself, and his gift of being companion at that breakfast table soon had me taking another big step.

Tomorrow: a next big step closer. my walking the streets in other people’s clothes.

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Christmas to Epiphany IX: The Closeness of God: Gotta Have a WITH-ness!

On this eighth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born, through the Pope's three lenses: the patience of God, the closeness of God, the tenderness of God. 

I don’t know what to do with it, I just do with it. My friend said this the other day about moving beyond his reluctance.

Fr. Delp’s question calls us not to answer, but to action, to our letting the birth of Christ make a difference in our lives, to be, as Pope Francis says, the patience, closeness, and tenderness of God in the world, as Jesus was.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.  I have three faults.  I am resistant to patience, closeness, and tenderness. I want to move quickly, which I find easier alone, and find tenderness difficult in light of my perceived masculinity.  Fear and doubt are names I give this resistance in myself.  But Delp’s question calls me to action. And I know that it’s God’s grace that has taught me that action is not only possible, but rewarding.

A lifetime Catholic, I was taught in grammar school that there are two kinds of grace, actual and sanctifying.  I think of sanctifying grace as a something like habit.  Virtuous activity leaves breadcrumbs along its path, making it easier the next time, and eventually a trail is formed in our psyches.  Modern neurology would call this our brain forming neural pathways. 

I think of Actual Grace as a cartoon, or a science fiction special effect.  The character stands at a chasm, driven to get to the other side.  Urged by some assuring force, the character steps out in trust, and (cue the special effects) with each step, a bridge forms under the outstretched foot.  The means of crossing is formed as the crossing is made. 

We Make the Road byWalking is the title of a book by Miles Horton and Paolo Freire, two advocates of social change from the 70’s.  Miles Horton came out of undergraduate studies ready to get the poor in Appalachia organized to escape poverty.  But he learned from the people there that change came from something more like a conversation than a lecture.  

Change is something that we do with people.  We change too.  The Samaritan was changed by the man on the side of the road, perhaps more than the man he “helped”.

The bridge that Actual Grace builds across the chasm of fear or doubt has, according to Fr. Howard Gray, S.J., four steps: See, Feel, Help, and Change.  If I allow myself see the person in need, I will feel compassion.  If I allow myself to feel that compassion, I will reach out to help.  If I allow myself to help, I will commit to do all I can to help things (in the world and in myself) to change so that the kind of thing that is hurting that person will not hurt others.

Seeing, feeling, helping, and changing is not a practice of walking a trail alone.  My friend’s comment in our earlier discussion of New Year’s resolutions added a word to the Swoosh brand mantra.  He didn’t say “I just do it.”  He said “I just do with it.”

We make the road by walking with.  And the path is made in us as well as in the world.

For the story of the photo, see this link

Tomorrow – I witness my with-ness and homelessness.

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Christmas to Epiphany VII: Pazienza de Dio (The Patience of God)

The Road (Oh, Hell!) of Good Intentions

On this sixth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

It’s New Year’s Eve morning as I write.  Tonight my wife and I will go to the traditional New Year’s Eve party at the home of some friends.  Having already eaten too much over Christmas, we will eat too much more.  There will be those among the large gathering, I suspect, who will drink too much, too.  But this excess is very, very good, because it takes us right down the entrance ramp to the American tradition of New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s an enormous highway, a dozen lanes filled bumper-to-bumper…for a few days.  Traffic thins out pretty quickly, and pretty soon lanes merge and then merge again and by the end of the year, the road to good intentions has narrowed to a lightly traveled footpath.

Pazienza di Dio,

vicinanza di Dio,

tenerezza di Dio.

The patience of God,

the closeness of God,

the tenderness of God.

As mentioned in yesterday’s posting, Pope Francis gave us a tricycle to ride, stable and certain transportation.  And how perfect that the first of the three characteristics to which he called us this Christmas season is patience.  It is good, as well, that he calls us not merely to patience, but to the patience of God. 

Our own patience is inadequate.  At an Alanon meeting a few years ago, someone shared a maxim that has stuck with me: expectations are premeditated resentments.  He was speaking of our expectations of others, but I believe that the statement is equally true of our expectations of ourselves.  Remember Francis’s essential premise, that the central meaning of Christmas is not our call to love God, but to accept our smallness and let God love us!

Yesterday morning I had coffee with two close friends, and our conversation began with a query about…New Year’s Resolutions.  A blessing of our threesome is our spectrum of preference and style on many things, even as we share the same values.  The spectrum shown in a rainbow draws us to look at something ordinary – light – opened to expose for a moment its mystery and beauty.  Here are some statements that opened us to a colorful and stimulating conversation about intentions and hopes. As we respect and appreciate each other, we spent some time looking at New Year’s Resolutions from each other’s perspectives.

What do I stand for every day?  What do I stand for any day?  One was inclined to desire consistency and continuity in his life, persistently caring about certain issues or values.  The other was inclined to wake up each day and be present to the specific experiences or awarenesses that emerged that day.  Mission and Mindfulness.

Don’t “should” on me.  I’ve already should on myself.  He might as well have said “’should’ is shit!”  For years I’ve tried to discourage my wife from saying we should do something when what she means is that she’d enjoy us doing something.  But “we should” and “we’ve got to” remains a common phrase.  But when my friend shared this phrase, I realized that the reason that I’m so sensitive to my wife (or anyone else) putting a demand on me is that I’ve already put too many demands on myself.

More – Enough: In our threesome, one of us was quite inclined (driven?) to want to do more, while another was quite content with the desire to reflect on the sense that he has, is, and does enough. 

And this last statement calls me to close.  Among Jesuit-formed people, a name for God is “Magis” – the more. This Jesuit-formed Pope and our Jesuit-formed martyr Fr. Delp call us to know that it is God who is enough.  It is God who calls us to “Basta” – Enough!  We are not called to be Magis; that’s God’s work.  We are called to allow God to love us, and that, sweet Jesus, is enough!

I believe that God calls me not to the ten-lane expressway of New Year’s Resolutions but to walk with Him on the narrow daily path, to experience God’s patient love. 

Should I resolve to take God up on that?  It would, I’m certain, be enough.

Tomorrow – the closeness of God

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Christmas to Epiphany VI: Becoming the Words

Before watching Pope Francis celebrate Midnight Mass, there were two times when I recall understanding a foreign speaker without knowing his language.  Francis was the third.

Pazienza di Dio,

vicinanza di Dio,

tenerezza di Dio.

On this sixth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

  

The first was an Italian, like Francis.  Velio was describing to us the work in his alabaster studio in Volterra, where our students spent their summer.  His whole body spoke, and his old eyes gave off a light that made his words clear.  

He became his words, and to see him was to know what he was saying.  

The second was a priest, like Francis.  In a side chapel that provided intimacy in the cavernous Frankfurt Cathedral, the celebrant’s homily was about the Good Shepherd. 

He became his words, and to see him was to know what he was saying. 

“The Word of God”; that is what John calls Jesus in the first chapter of his Gospel.  There was a point at which Francis illuminated that name without speaking it.  Francis read from his text with bodily gesture and eye contact, tempo and inflection, making the words come to life.  But at one point his eyes paused on the congregation, and he looked intently at them, breaking the cadence of his presentation.  And his words that were born in that silent pause “became flesh.”

Pazienza di Dio,

vicinanza di Dio,

tenerezza di Dio.

The patience of God,

the closeness of God,

the tenderness of God.

Francis became the words – patient, close, and tender with us. 

He became his words, and to see him was to know what he was saying.  

What difference did it make to Pope Francis that Jesus was born?  He was changed by the experience enough to become the words of truth that emerged from his soul, filled to overflowing with awareness of God.

Incarnation.  Words becoming flesh.  Velio, the German priest, and Francis call me to the almost irresistible beauty of this incarnation.  Almost.  I will need a lot of grace to pull it off myself, to be the words I’m given, to change into God’s patience, and closeness, and tenderness.

Over the next three days we’ll spend time reflecting and praying with those three words.

Meanwhile, here is a link to Francis’s Midnight Mass homily…inEnglish.

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Christmas to Epiphany V: Simeon’s Certainty

"Now you let your servant go in peace." 

Simeon knew.  

He was certain.

On this fifth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

Yesterday at breakfast, two of our adult children (in their 40’s) were sharing about their visits to church on Christmas.  Both enter church as outsiders, grateful for the way we raised them but not “practicing Catholics”.  That we could have a conversation about their experience was a gift to us.  They noticed things, about the way the priest said and did things.  These ways of expressing the priest’s own faith evokes a sense of the holy in themselves.  They mentioned, too, their sense of freedom to enter, to observe, and not be bound or forced.  And finally they shared that it was interesting to hear the congregation mumble together the Creed.  While the celebrant’s pace and tone and inflection at the Consecration made it apparent that this was a very holy moment, the droning of the Creed seemed to bring into question the reality of their belief.  It seemed merely words.  They agreed with my invitation that they consider the tonal character of Buddhist chants that they have both experienced.

The point was clear.  The reciting of the Creed was hardly convincing.  And that is why Simeon’s certainty meant so much to me.  “Listen” to these words of his as he sees Jesus in the temple where he has served for many years:

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon.  This man was righteous and devout, awaiting the consolation of Israel,* and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Messiah of the Lord.

He came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform the custom of the law in regard to him,

He took him into his arms and blessed God, saying:

“Now, Master, you may let your servant go

in peace, according to your word,

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you prepared in sight of all the peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles,

and glory for your people Israel.”

The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;

and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted

(and you yourself a sword will pierce)* so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Simeon's certainty brings him peace.  I often suffer indecision which I believe is based on self-doubt.  Fr. Ron Rolheiser wrote of John the Baptist that as he was asked, “Who are you?” he could answer clearly; he knew who he was because he knew who Jesus was.

Like John, Simeon spoke clearly and decisively; one might say prophetically.  I consider again my children’s observations while “visiting” Mass.  The words of the priest were to them more like Simeon, proclamations of their truth.  Prophetic.  Perhaps my own indecisiveness and self-doubt are more like the droning of the congregation reciting the Creed.  More pathetic than prophetic.

What difference does it mean to me that Jesus was born?  I want to be more like Simeon. I want, in believing in Jesus, to allow myself to be loved (as the Pope pleaded in his Christmas homily), and to believe in myself.  I want to know with Simeon’s certainty who I am because I know who Jesus is.  And that means that my self-knowledge is inextricably intertwined in my coming to know Jesus.

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Christmas to Epiphany IV: “God is in love with our smallness”

"Do I allow myself to be taken up by God, to be embraced by him, or do I prevent him from drawing close?" 

Pope Francis asked this in his Midnight Mass homily. "'But I am searching for the Lord' – we could respond. Nevertheless, what is most important is not seeking him, but rather allowing him to find me and caress me with tenderness. The question put to us simply by the Infant’s presence is: do I allow God to love me?”

We look again at Fr. Alfred Delp S.J.’s ultimate question in light of the Christmas event: What difference does it make to me?

Five years ago I was given medical news that made me aware that I could die at any moment. It is the reason I began this blog, and whence its title.  I thought that I’d been given lemons. Everything changed because I saw death for the first time as real and present.  I acted more lovingly and caringly toward my wife.  I didn’t sweat things. I delighted in the present, and was continuously grateful for the past.  My life changed.  But I must confess that my life has mostly changed back.  

What difference does it make to me that I felt death near? I’m ashamed to say, not enough.  I too often fail to delight in things, including my life companion.  A worry about the future, and that worry robs me of the present.  But most of all, I allow my sense of inadequacy to distract me from everything. 

So the Pope’s question, and Delp's rings familiar; it stops me and turns me around.  God is actually in love with the thing about myself that I most reject – my smallness.  Did I earn enough money in my lifetime to enjoy growing old with my wife?  Can I drop my fears about the good that I can do with others based on my reluctance to accept myself, flaws and all?  Can I enjoy the company of others undistracted by my thoughts that I don’t matter to them?

So as we contemplate the Christmas event, as we sit before the image of the manger scene, perhaps you will join me in allowing the story to take me in.  Allow yourself to be lifted up into the story with me.  Will we find ourselves as the babe, feeling the warmth of Mary?  Will we be Mary, or Joseph, or a shepherd, or a sheep? 

Contemplative prayer, like life in the love of God, is something that the Pope reminds us is not doing something, but accepting something.  Being drawn into the presence of God, or for that matter, God in the present, is a gift.  It is a gift already given. It is offered every moment. 

Pope Francis’s question is Delp’s.  Will I let God love me, and experience my life changing?  Will you?

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

From Christmas to Epiphany III: He's YOURS!

This is the third day of the “12 Days of Christmas” leading to the Epiphany.  In 1944, Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J. was writing in his cell in Tegel Prison, writing to us the faithful about Christmas, and our response to the encounter.  His last writing would be about Epiphany, which means “opening”.  It would for him be the opening into the afterlife.  He would be hanged by the Nazis the day after Epiphany.

How would we respond to the encounter of the Nativity if we were actually there? 

Years ago in a prayer and study group at Manresa Jesuit RetreatHouse near Detroit, a woman sat in prayer for days following Christmas, and shared the following story. 

"I had imagined my way to the manger lighted by the star.  The path through the arid vegetation was well worn, and my feet could feel the little stones through my sandals.  The path itself seemed to draw me, giving me a sense of what “forward” was.  I was in kind of a fog of this feeling of the power of the path when I realized that I had come upon the manger.  It was just a rough structure, just enough to hold up a roof, a kind of alcove into which animals could…"

"...As I was looking at the baby, my eyes drawn to the swaddling, and the way it embraced and comforted him, Mary gently lifted him…and held him out to me!"

" 'Take him; he’s yours,' she said!" 

The woman began to weep now, as she had wept there in prayer.  Her vivid description of the experience had brought us along, and as she was drawn into this unexpected gesture of Mary, we were too.

What about you?  Here is Mary, holding out Jesus to you.  She is telling you that he is yours.  She is waiting for your response.  How will you respond?  This is what Fr. Delp is asking us.  He challenges us not to make in our minds kitschy nativity scenes with a cute little baby Jesus and a sweet little family of three, with ox and ass and drummer boy. He challenges us not to walk away from the manger.  He asks us what difference it makes to us that Jesus was God taking our flesh.

When I revisit the woman’s experience, and I find Mary holding out the baby to me, I recall that my tears on her telling were awe and gratitude and honor.  That she would give me her precious child!  But this year as I went back to that moment, I took the baby to my breast in embrace, and felt him rooting at my breast for food.  I felt embarrassed and then inadequate.  I recalled having held one of my newborn daughters that way, and can still physically recall the feeling of their rooting, their tiny mouth searching intently.  I had looked with humor and confusion at my wife, and can hear her saying, “Hold her in your arms, but not against your chest.”

And I remembered that my cute little baby daughter…needed…to…be…fed!

To accept Jesus into our life is to care for Him.  The God who is born to us is really human, really flesh.  The incarnation means this.  God made man is a God who needs us to respond, not just watch, or pray, or even adore. 

I think now as I write how this unspeaking newborn infant and His calling me to responsibility brings to mind the Gospel of a few weeks ago, calling us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked….

Christmas calls us to incarnation as well, to know that we are flesh, that our faith is faith-in-the-flesh, just as this baby that Mary is holding out to us as our own needs to be FED!

Perhaps you will find some light in sitting with this story, sitting with Mary holding the baby out to you. For some tips on Ignatian contemplation, praying by entering the story, click here.

Tomorrow: The Pope’s “piccolezza”

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From Christmas to Epiphany I: Baby Jesus? Le's Get Real!

A gift of this Advent has been the writings of Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J. from his cell in Tegel, the Nazi prison in which he was hanged the day after Epiphany, 1945.  In gratitude for the gift of this experience, I aim to write on each of these “12 Days of Christmas” between the Nativity and Epiphany.  And I am writing to force myself (and encourage you) to process the challenge that he gives us as his parting gift in a question:  What difference does it make to us really, that Christ is born?

Satisfied or Searching?

Today on Christmas I begin with his caution that we not simply walk away from the Nativity Scene satisfied, but rather searching.

Fr. Delp meditated on the Christmas Vigil 1944, writing:

“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….”

As he struggles every day to rise above his own human condition (Germany being bombed by the Allies, the Catholic Church having capitulated to Hitler, and most immediately his imminent execution) he continues:  

“Oh, you need to have counted the hours until your next piece of bread in order to know what this means, and what tension is involved in rising above the human condition.”

He goes on to explain, 

“Eliminating the tension…may have seemed like a relief at first, like liberation from an uncomfortable burden. Yet over time, one cannot avoid recognizing that these burdens are among the fixed conditions and prerequisites of life.”

“Tension” is the term that Delp used in the temporal/eternal relationship within each of us.  When Mary answered “yes” to the angel, she relieved this tension, and within her grew the God/man who could die/rise and save us from…what?

So here our soon-to-be-murdered young Jesuit warns us not to avoid the tension that is real, remains real, between the promise of our own salvation and the work of participating in the salvation of others.  We searched for the Manger, after waiting for The One.  He calls to us: “The God whose coming we celebrate remains the God of promise!”

We are not finished with the gift of Christmas.  We have simply come to encounter The Way.  

Our search for Christ continues; it is a search for justice.  As Delp experienced true hunger, he experienced more acutely the meaning of our call – to “hunger and thirst for justice.”

Tomorrow: Papal Midnight Mass: from Pieta to Manger to Pieta.

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

The Holy Spirit will come to you, and power of the most high shall overshadow you.

Here in the temperate climate, we may think of shadows as negative – places of threat or sadness.  The root of the word in Latin languages is “somber.”  I grew up with a politically incorrect image of a Mexican man leaning against a wall asleep under his sombrero – which means “something that makes shade”.  Mexico and the location of the Gospel story share a reality different from ours.  Both are hot climates.  Shade is a source of safety from the threat of the burning sun.

In our culture, being “overshadowed” means that something – or someone – is rendered less important than the thing or person overshadowing them.  In our culture, we can miss something beautiful in this line.  The Spirit is not diminishing Mary.  The Spirit is enfolding her in a protecting embrace.  But more.

Albert Delp S.J. speaks of Advent as relieving the “temporal-eternal tension” which we experience as existential longing, an ache that frames our very existence.  The enfolding of the angel (and Mary’s acceptance of it) is the first stage in this process of relieving.  The angel in its immortality (never ending-ness) is a forerunner of the eternity of God (God’s always having been and never ending)   Don’t the wings that we have used to depict the angelic image provide a kind of shawl (see Catherine McAuley’s spiritualityof the shawl, enfolding and including the other) or umbrella or canopy or…sombrero?  The Angel, who cannot embrace (for lack of touch) , can enclose and shelter, without touching, without completely closing the distance (or satisfying the longing).  Perhaps the angel is the promise, the foretaste of the union to come, to come with her “Yes.”

With Mary's “Yes” comes the complete relief of this “temporal-eternal tension” the complete closing of the distance between temporality and eternity, the touch and physical embrace of God.  In that moment of conception, immortality surrounds Mary and Eternity fills Mary.  And in that moment she is the first of us humans who know that truly God is within us and God is all around us.

For much of my life I felt the celebration of my birthday, on this shortest day of the year, to be overshadowed by Christmas. While resentment of God would have been beyond me, I spared no self-pity.  I felt that the proximity of these two annual celebrations made my birthday somehow less.

Fr. Delp, in his "Meditation on the Third Sunday of Advent from Tegel Prison December 1944" (quoted above) continues more deeply into the “temporal-eternal tension” by writing, as if of me (two weeks before his hanging, two years before my birth) “He has fallen into the experience of limitation.  He experiences himself, and the world, and all things, even though the colorful wings of his mind, of his yearnings, press beyond all limits.”

In this Advent Season of expectant waiting, in this season of my life when age bends me more naturally to reflection,  I am grateful to Fr. Delp for this birthday present of turning my eyes from the darkness of the meteorological season to the “colorful wings” of God’s Spirit, and the joy of being overshadowed by God who longs to be one with me, and yet waits for my  “Yes”.

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