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.

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!?

Dogma Or Mystery...YOU Decide.

Does He really rise?  Was He even really the Son of God?  During this week, I hope we all face this, this unknowing.  As soon as I had typed these two questions, I heard in my mind the howls of dogmatic Catholics calling me an infidel for even questioning these beliefs.  But in asking the question, I show the very faith they might argue against.

Faith is belief in the thing not known.  We don’t have faith that all points on a circle are equidistant from the center; we know (at least those of us who know geometry.)  We don’t have faith that two plus two equals four; we know.

But the gift of this mystery of the death and rising of the Son of God is something that, like love, we can fall into, something that we can allow to submerge us, to embrace us, a cloud into which we can enter.  Karen Armstrong says that the gift of mystery (like the Trinity – three persons in one God) is that it does not make sense, and so it calls us to abandon thinking.  To sit with mystery is difficult, because we want to figure it out.  Figuring things out is important to us.  We figure out what is good to eat, what is safe to give our kids, how to get to work safely, all so that we survive.  To stop and not think is contrary to our learned survival instincts.

How do we handle mystery (or more accurately, how do we let mystery handle us?)  Armstrong suggests three things: prayer, ritual, and charitable acts. 

• Prayer is the practice of the presence of God.  It is not logical or didactic.  It does not make sense.  Like meditation and contemplation, it slows us down, allows us to let go of our attachments, and our body responds with what we call peace but is perhaps a homecoming, and arrival at the place that gave us birth.
• Ritual – it’s really over the top during Holy Week, appropriate to the over-the-top mystery that we’re encountered by, the death and resurrection of the Son of God.  “Smells and Bells”.  Watch kids at a parade.  They’re all eyes and ears.  They’re taking it all in.  They are unaware of hunger, of cold, and even the presence of their parents.  They are taken by the spectacle.  So fancy vestments and clouds of incense and extra-melodic song and the repetition of verse and litany and jeweled monstrance…help us to forget taxes and mortgages and even pains and worries.  While we find it hard to stop, ritual replaces all that we do, and all of it stops.
• Charitable acts bring us to another place that makes no sense – another human face.  Isn’t every person honestly encountered a mystery?  Doesn’t the “homeless person” become so much more when we stand and really look at him…and so much more like us?  Thomas Merton’s encounter with the “bag lady” on the streets of Cincinnati changed his life, and all of us in the circle of his light.

Prayer, ritual, and charitable acts take us outside ourselves, beyond the constraints we put on ourselves.  We are like the Samaritan Woman understanding, the blind man seeing, and Lazarus walking out of his tomb.