Mirrors and Selfies and Eyes of Love

Courtesy LocalStew 1/22/2015

How many times, I wonder now, had Gary sensed the unasked question in Suzanne’s face: “How do I look?”

How many times did she hear the response in his unspeaking eyes: “You look beautiful.”

The Pope spoke on January 9th about “mirror men and women” who close themselves off from others, building a superficial and fragile sense of self from their image reflected in a mirror.  And research last year spoke of the compulsion to post “Selfies”, our image taken literally from arm’s length.  Francis said that focusing in on ourselves hardens our hearts.  Selfie research considered the need to establish one’s existence by posting evidence of it, kind of a “Posto, ergo sum” corollary of the Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” premise.

Maybe it’s simpler than that.  Maybe we just look in the mirror or take a selfie to answer an ordinary question: “How do I look?”

Since reading about the Pope’s Mirror People reference, I’ve reflected on my friends on the street, the ones who live there, without mirrors or selfies to see how they look.  And I shudder to consider that they rely upon our gazes for their sense of self-worth. 

There is a car commercial that shows a pretty plain-looking guy walking unknowingly in front of a good-looking car.  Women look admiringly at the car, but he thinks they are looking alluringly at him.  

Pretty soon his posture and bearing change; he’s feeling pretty darned good about himself.

Cut to a guy in layers of clothes, unshaven and carrying his most essential belongings in a plastic bag. How many looks of disdain or averted eyes does it take before he feels pretty darned bad about himself?  Aversion and disdain are, spiritually speaking, looks that kill.

Yesterday I saw the photo on top that showed me that the opposite is true too.  Looks of love can give life.

Gary Lichtman is a real mensch.  Wikipedia describes that word adeptly as “a person with the qualities one would hope for in a friend or trusted colleague”. For years Gary was a colleague and friend at University of Detroit Mercy.  A few years ago we learned that his wife Suzanne had been diagnosed with cancer, and that the prognosis was not positive.  Yesterday was saw on his Facebook page that Suzanne had passed away.  The photo!  Look at their bright young faces in the lower half of the photo!  I see promise and hope and possibility and potential.  But it is the one on the top half that blows me away, because I see Suzanne’s beauty and the love in Gary’s eyes. 

Suzanne and Gary and their daughter had visited us last year, five years since our retirement had put us across the state from them.  Gary was his usual smiling self, all attention and encouragement and affirmation and gratitude.  So was Suzanne.  I reflected on her freedom to be her best self despite the hair loss and swelling that come with the cancer fight.  After only moments of thinking of their fight with cancer, I was fully drawn into their dance with life, their enjoyment of the moments with us surrounded by the beauty of nature.

How many times, I wonder now, had Gary sensed the unasked question in Suzanne’s face: “How do I look?”

How many times did she hear the response in his unspeaking eyes: “You look beautiful.”

I was just sitting with my writer friend Steve, who is “winter camping” in his van these months.  As we shared an order of toast and a couple of cups of coffee, I shared with him that I was writing this note about Suzanne, and her feeling beautiful because that’s the way she was seen.  And I shared too my fear that those on the street may learn to feel ugly.  He looked at me gently, and said, “For us, it’s all about finding relationships that help us see our value.”

Gary will, I hope, continue the work he does at the university, helping people see our best face, the beautiful things and people at our school.  And I pray that he will see Suzanne just looking at him, from time to time, with the same loving eyes as those with which he looks at us, that tell him he is a beautiful Mensch, that help him know his immeasurable value.

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

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.

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

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.

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