We love By Loving...Unwrapping the Gift

I have a friend who is afraid to try to love.  He doesn’t see how it can be done, loving someone for a lifetime, continuing to care.  It seems impossible to him.  He doesn’t think he can do it.  He’s right.

Lunch conversation with Michael was one of the good things about the work I loved so much at the University.   As I had grown older, more and more of my colleagues ended up being a generation or two younger than me, opening the door for the occasional “avuncular” relationship – allowing me to be “like an uncle”.  This was a holy thing to me, because I had benefitted from being on the receiving end of such relationships during my lifetime there.  When I was in had been young like Michael, I had befriended older colleagues who comfortably shared their points of view on things that concerned me.  I found their perspectives stable and comforting, taken from a long view and solid footing.  While I looked at things from my rocking little boat, they seemed to look at the same things from solid ground.

And so it was with Michael, who looked ahead at love, while I looked back, and all around me, finding my self inextricable from the context of my life, which had become a network of loving relationships.  Michael saw loving a walking on water, a frightening and unsustainable activity.  I saw it as being part of a raft.  He often said that he felt calmed by our conversations, felt himself stepping back and sitting down, looking more clearly at things.

But I look back now at the work I loved and I don’t know how I did it.  From here in my retirement I find a certain revulsion in the idea of returning to it, the endless mornings driving from the comfort and quiet of home into the needy city, the cars changing gradually from Bimmers to beaters, the faces from white to black, the buildings from being built to being torn down.  I don’t see how it could be done, working like that for a lifetime, continuing to care.  From where I am, it seems impossible to me.  Michael seems to have been right.

I’m reminded of what I said to Michael, and it puts all of that into perspective.  Paolo Friere and Miles Horton were two social change guys in the 60’s who graduated from colleges with the determination to lift up the downtrodden of society, to empower the poor in Brazil and in Appalachia.  The felt equipped by the studies that they had completed, but soon found that they were completely unprepared for the task.  Their 1990 book We Make the Road by Walking speaks the truth that they discovered, the truth for Michael, and for me, and for anybody foolish enough to try to love.  Love is something that is created by our effort to love, by our taking one step at a time, one foot in front of another. 

Someone gives us a gift – the invitation to love.  We are afraid to open it, afraid that maybe we won’t be able to deal with it, won’t have what it requires.  I told Michael that every gift is wrapped in what is required for us to handle it.  A Jesuit friend, a chemist, told us that food scientists made a mistake by developing oranges that would peel cleanly.  The rind, he said, helped us to process the vitamin C in the fruit; the peel enabled us to make best use of the fruit inside. The opportunities to love that we are given in life are not invitations for us to bring our perfectly prepared, perfectly capable selves into a relationship we can handle.  They are invitations for us to make the road together by walking…together, each of us lover and beloved, step by step. How quickly, in retirement, I have forgotten that it was the act of walking that made the path walkable, the path that I called work.  I was in good company, much of it black faces in beaters, like the simple country people from whom Horton and Friere learned that love is not about capability, but interdependence.

You can search for We Make the Road by Walking at your local library by using  Worldcat (click for a link)  the search feature on a great blog The Books for Walls Project (click for a link).  

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

All is Gift

Saturday was Kathy’s birthday, and on Sunday she wanted to take a half-hour drive to our friend Fr. Norm Dixon’s parish for Mass.  A Jesuit friend from Detroit, he had often told us we’d love the congregation at St. Aloysius.  We did.  And they loved him.

One of the things Norm does here as he did in Detroit is to memorize the Gospel and tell it like the story that it is.  He’s a great teller of stories, with animated face, gesturing hands, and lots of vocal inflection, so his proclamation of the Good News has a ring of authenticity to it.  The story was Luke chapter 7, the woman with a reputation washing Jesus’ feet.  Jesus was having dinner with some Pharisees – rule-followers – when the woman came in and washed Jesus feet, drying them with her hair and anointing them with perfume, kissing them repeatedly.  One of the Pharisees accused him of inappropriate behavior for letting her waste perfume on his feet and for letting her touch him.  There was an act of love and reverence and respect going on, and here was an accusation, trying to sully it.

How do we feel when we are accused?  I feel defensive, then angry or ashamed.  All of these are negative emotional states.  How do we feel when we are affirmed, treated with love, reverence, respect?  I feel pretty darned positive.  In his homily, Norm raised this contrast, mentioning that one of the names given to the Evil Spirit is “The Accuser.”  Accusation, he said, challenges us to fight for our dignity, places on us the burden of having to earn our worth in an uphill battle.    

Affirmation, on the other hand, finds in us the innate value that we need not earn. So often, “Faith” and “Religion” are turned into codes of rules, and questions about them tend to be accusations, challenges to our life choices, threats that we need to dig ourselves out of the hole that we’ve gotten ourselves into, and we better get cracking.  And here was Norm, holding out another option.  “All is gift” he said.  Our lives are spent not in desperate efforts to earn love that we want, but in gratitude for the love that we have been freely given.

After the Mass, Norm encouraged us to go to the social hall for coffee and donuts.  "You're gonna love 'em," he said.  The room was full of smiling people, enjoying the goodies on the overflowing pot-luck table – fruit salads, sweet breads, muffins, cookies – and sharing happy conversation.  They knew we were guests, old friends of their new pastor, and they let us know how much they loved him.  They told us how much better parish life was since he came, how grateful they were for that.  They told us what a gift he was.   “He’s so human” they said.  He’s not up there (accusing?); he’s just one of us.”  "We love 'im."  And they took us over to the table.  "Help yourself!  We've got plenty!"

Tomorrow - accepting gifts

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

Bread for the World

Farmers and teachers.  Social workers.  Some ministers.  Nurses.  So many others who don’t come to mind right now but will after I post this article – those who are Bread for the World.

My friend Bill sent a poem that came to his magnanimous mind as he read a recent posting on this blog.  That poem, about the Body of Christ on a street in the inner city of Detroit, was so good that I Googled the name of the poet, Michael Lauchlan, and found a few others there.  Since this one is available on the web already, (click)  I’ll include it here it here, with my deepest gratitude to the author.

In America

for Bob Mott, after decades among refugees

Michael Lauchlan

On a night when you dozed and woke
against a window, you walk into the cold
black of some flat town where no one
would know if you crumpled into a ditch
or got beamed away by aliens. But you don’t.
You wait, swallow your tea, lean
against the terminal and watch exhaust
coalesce behind the bus. This is not lush
Cambodia, where you fed infants in camps,
wrapped legs or stumps when mines
blew kids into the sky, and marched
for peace with saffron monks, though
Maha Ghosananda scared you shitless,
by calling you Christ. Here, you wait
in the absolute Ohio of the mind,
lacking end or beginning, framed by trucks,
stars, diners, a road, and the vast
American hunger you don’t get,
nibbling each day your one ball of rice,
cupping your takeout tea
like a handful of smoke.

I also found a syllabus – the requirements of a course the he taught at my university.  By the description of the course and his office, I suspect that he is an Adjunct at UDM, and like his friend Bob Mott living a life of sacrifice.  Adjuncts are college teachers who do not have full-time appointments, with the salary and benefits and tenure that is the closest thing in today’s world to a guarantee of a job for life.  They are rather are the part-time “filler” faculty that colleges use to staff courses for which they have no available full-time faculty.  I had a paycheck for 40 years, and benefits.  It was not a princely sum, I often reflected; my working children earned more right out of college.  But seeing the compassion in Michael Lauchlan’s writing and knowing how little he earns as an Adjunct, I realize that like the others in the professions I mentioned at the beginning of this posting, it is understandable that he would appear to me, as his friend Bob Mott did to Maha Ghosananda, Christ.  Taken, blessed, broken, and shared.  Self-sacrificing.  Sacrifice does not mean burned or killed on an altar.  It means “made holy”.  

The farmer works and hopes: seed, old family soil, weather, markets.  The Social Worker, like Sisyphus, pushes the boulder of injustice uphill all day, only to wake from a too-short night to find it rolled back down.  The nurse swims into a daily current of patients in an endless sea of need.  Ministers can choose to go into the world as Jesus did, equipped only with love against all that the Accuser has to offer there.  And Michael Lauchlan and his adjunct colleagues drive their old cars from one campus to another, working and hoping that the fire that has been ignited in them can somehow catch in the hearts and minds of the students facing them in these desks, the fire of sacrifice.

Thank you, Michael, wherever you are.  I’m sorry not to have met you at UDM.

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

Breaking Bread with Toni

A broken woman; that’s what comes to mind when I think back to seeing Toni that first time.  My work at the university gave me the opportunity to hire “work-study” students to get more work done.  The federally funded program provided financially challenged students with funding for us to hire them, making it a bargain for us.  Wisely or unwisely, I felt that I could always use another good student worker; there was always more we could do.  

Toni came to the door at the beginning of a summer term, when our other fresher, younger work-study students had gone home to their full-time jobs.  She seemed so worn out that she she barely had the energy to smile.  Perhaps it was contrast that moved my heart; perhaps it was just the lack of other students.  I hired her on the spot and told her she could start the next day.  It was one of the best hiring decisions I’ve ever made.  

Toni was worn but wise, entering not from High School, but almost literally from the streets.  Homeless after the death of her father, she had done what she had to do to survive, and had gone to prison for it, finishing high school equivalency there and returning to the streets to help those in her situation.  Her good work was recognized by an agency serving female ex-offenders, and they sent her to the university to earn the degree she’d need for professional certification. 

Like the woman in “A Mother Theresa Story” (click for a link) who shared what little she had been given, Toni had, from the start, shared what little she received.  She talked about her “kids” though she had never given birth to one.  They were young women and girls she’d pick up off the street and bring home, to the place she could just barely afford as an entry-level caseworker, or an “outreach” worker, driving the streets trying to save them.  She would talk about her “brother” though her family had abandoned her decades ago, the man who she took in, who helps her guide her son, who she adopted because she couldn’t bear having another foster child moved to another family, or “aged-out” of the system at 18. 

I was befuddled by the way Toni, who lived in poverty, so easily took people in, shared what little she had.  As she worked with me that summer, I realized that she came in every day already spent by her life on the margins, giving all that she could muster from what was left of her, drawing up from a reserve I eventually came to discover was her faith.  Every morning, we’d sit down together and review what needed to be done that day.  I’d put on a pot of coffee and pick up a fresh loaf of Ciabatta, simple, coarse, nourishing bread that Kathy and I had discovered while visiting our son in Spain.  Unequipped with silverware and plates, we’d break off chunks of the loaf and enjoy it with our coffee, sitting across the table in my office.  Toni, in her life of faith, referred to it as “breaking bread”.  

And there at table, in the same thirty minutes that it would take to celebrate Catholic Mass, I came to realize that Toni was like that bread that we broke.  My first impression of her had been right.  She was broken.  But as I came to know her more and more like a sister over the years until she graduated, she helped understand that she had been taken from the streets by a loving God, blessed by His Spirit within herself and within those who saw value in her there on the margins that “decent” people never see except in quick glimpses as we flee to comfort and safety.  And I came to know that she was indeed shared.  For the years she worked with us, she mothered the younger work-studies, challenged and inspired the groups of incoming freshmen who would go briefly out into the streets that were her turf.  The year before I retired, Toni graduated.  17 of her “kids” came to cheer for her.  

She continues, health worn by life on the streets, to save others from it, to take them in their brokenness as they are, by blessing them with a sense of their value, by sharing what little she has with them, and by sharing all that she is with them, as she did with me.

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

Tale of Two Cooks

Both of our daughters married men who come to mind when I think of our God Who Feeds Us.  Take-bless-break-share: I’d like to look at that sequence that Jesus used in feeding the multitude on that bright day on the hill and feeding his friends on that last day in the upper room.

Jeff loves to cook.  In the suburban woods outside of Cleveland, a meal is something that forms in his mind and takes hold of him from there, using his skilled hands and alert eyes and instinctive nose to turn ingredients into the feast in his imagining. 

Take: I’ve had the marvelous experience of shopping for a meal with Jeff.  Whereas I’m one of these guys who looks at what we have and cooks from a waste-not-want-not mentality, Jeff aims as the perfectly satisfying meal, and starts with a trip to the market for the perfect ingredients.  While I cook from a perspective of conservation, he cooks from a perspective of satisfaction to those he's feeding.  He shops with a quiet, focused joy.

Bless: The three of us – Kathy, our daughter Margie and I – will sit at the table in the kitchen and catch up with each other while Jeff slices, grinds, mixes, marinates, his hands precise and efficient, the vessels of his rite the sharp knives and smooth cutting boards, the mortar and pestle, the heavy pots and pans.  The vapors rise like incense, filling us with the promise.

Break: Jeff’s meals are not passed around in big serving platters.  He prepares a plate for each of us, the part of the entrée that we like best, the size of the portion just right, the side foods arranged beautifully around the entrée.  The now-familiar scents of the spices and the ingredients emerge from the plates that he brings to each of us at the table.

Share: Jeff’s is always the last plate to be made up.  While he enjoys his food and our conversation, he checks with each of us to see how the food is, if it satisfies us as it did in his imagination.  He did not simply imagine, from the start, that the meals would be perfectly attractive and delicious.  He also imagined it being perfectly satisfying.

Meanwhile in the woods of Benzie County Michigan, it’s the Sunday Morning 360, Captain David in the Kitchen, With Amy and their daughters Nadia and Sonja slowly stirring.

Take: It’s all there, the flour, the butter, the farm-bought milk in the glass bottle, complete with the buttery ring around the inside of the collar.  It’s gotta be there, because it’s a long drive to town.

Bless: The kitchen is full of stuff like the house is full of life.  Dave’s cooking is a three-ring act of mixing the batter for pancakes, pouring batter into the pan, cleaning and setting the table while pancakes cook, trying to convince Puck the Dog that it’s not time to play.  “Hey guys, they’re coming up!” He calls to his three ladies, who shuffle out and take their places at the table. 

Break: As soon as their keesters hit the chair, David is putting their favorite sized pancakes on the plate and tossing it onto the table in front of them followed by a fork.  Amy forages in the fridge for their drink of choice, and pretty soon the little girls are wiggling with the energy of the pancakes and Grampa’s maple syrup, sugarhigh, sugarhigh, sugarhigh!

Share: Ya know, it’s a circus, and it doesn’t follow this four-part analysis.  The elements are all kind of mixed in.  But there is one element that has always felt to Kathy and me eerily like Mass.  As the wiggling torsos and swinging feet at the table increase in frequency, pretty soon all eyes are on David as he pours the last of the batter and makes the biggest pancake of all.  It’s not for him; he’s been nibbling at the stove as he cooked.  It’s for the 360.  Puck sits and watches intently, his tail shining the floor in a fan-shaped arc.  David turns from the stove, the big frying pan held in both hands, bobbing it up and down a little to be sure that the last big pancake is not stuck to the bottom.  He looks left and looks right as the audience taps their hands noisily on the tabletop; their traditional drum roll increasing in intensity until . . . UP goes the pan, flipped toward the ceiling, while David spins around 360 degrees, watching for the pancake over his shoulder and attempting to catch it in the pan.  Just as in church, there are prayers to be said at this holy moment.  But here in the woods of Benzie, the prayer to be said is determined by the outcome of the effort.  “AYYYYYYYYYYYYY!” is for the times it hits the pan, David smiling proudly, finally sitting down to eat it.  “AWWWWWWWW!” is for the times that it doesn’t land in the pan, and Puck finally gets a pancake. 

Eucharist is all around, if we watch for it.  And there is no shortage of priests, or sacred liturgies; there is only shortage of eyes to recognize them.

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

My Brother the Agnostic

I sat at the table in My Brother the Agnostic’s kitchen and watched him perform a rite that I’d consider great Eucharist.  Here in the place he had run to from the hopelessness of Detroit’s Cass Corridor, he had sublet a rent-controlled apartment in a complex occupied mostly by Hasidic Jews.  Here among these mystics who seemed to passers-by to be withdrawn in their long black clothes, Dan the Doubter performed Mass for me, not with Bread and wine, but with Toast and Coffee.

My brother Dan was my Other for the first 17 years of my life.  We were the bookends of our neighborhood ragamuffins’ pick-up baseball games, he the best and first to be picked and I the last.  He was the shortstop, who could perform the prefect double-play; I was the absent-minded outfielder.  He was the Golden Student at St. Mary’s School, I the younger brother who disappointed his teachers a year later when they found out I was, unlike him, a “daydreamer”.  Later at Notre Dame High School for Boys, that title would change to “underachiever”.  But when I followed him from Chicago to Detroit to the Jesuit university there, now University of Detroit Mercy, our lives developed a certain parity; I began to make branch off from the trail he had blazed for me and make my own path. 

Now twenty years later I was working at the university to which he had welcomed me, married to the woman I had met there, raising three kids in a two-flat two blocks away from campus, walking to Gesu church on Sundays for Mass and to the Social Hall on Wednesday evenings for Prayer Meetings.  Faith and life wove a seamless garment for Kathy and me; neither would make sense without the other.  Dan meanwhile had returned from the army during the Vietnam War having found his own hell not in the war itself, but in the depersonalization and mindless power of basic training.    He’d come back and rejected everything he’d done, leaving his profession in Chemical Engineering for a mindless clerical job, and leaving his wife for a life of hitchhiking across the country and working only when it was necessary to make enough money for the next few months.

This apartment was his cell, the place in which he could live a monastic life, not of a churchy holiness but of withdrawal from relationships in a city so full of people that one did not look into the eyes of strangers; 8 million looking past 8 million others sharing the same busy sidewalks.  He was very happy that I came to visit him, meeting me at Grand Central Station and walking me briskly to the subway to his Lower East Side apartment, one of a dozen that looked just like it, 17 stories of stark red brick monolith broken by oxidizing aluminum window frames and dull glass.  Inside was a tiny kitchen, a sparse living room shrunk by his bookshelves, with a couch and a TV and a little desk by a window with his computer.  After a day of walking, walking, walking, dinner at a Senegalese restaurant, and more and more walking, he made up the couch as a bed for me and we called it a night. 

I was in his comfort zone, he leading and I following, trusting, appreciating, marveling.  The talk we talked was the talk he enjoyed – politics, world affairs, and economics.  There would be no talk of intimacy, commitment, and certainly no talk about faith or belief or religion.  In the twenty years that I had diverged from his trail, we had come to speak different languages, and I had developed the young brother’s habit of deferring to him when we were together.  And now I was in his Space. 

I look back to that morning twenty years ago, though, as sharing Communion with Dan, of passing the Bread and the Cup.  The two of us squeezed into his tiny kitchen, a chair relieved of its books for me to sit in as he followed a rubric so like the priests we would watch as Altar Boys.  He took down coffee beans from a shelf – “Coffee beans” he made clear to me, not that stuff that comes in a can, like we lemmings buy.  Quietly placing two measuring cups of the shiny, aromatic beans into the grinder, he covered it, pressed the button, and just smiled at me, as if to say, “This is my real coffee.”  Water measured into the bottom section of his palm-sized cast aluminum vacuum pot and freshly ground coffee into the top; he lit the burner of his stove with a wooden match, dropped the blackened stick into a pile of its spent siblings in a cup on the stove, and turned to the precise slicing of bread.  “This is real bread, not like that stuff that you get at the store.” 

The bread toasted; the coffee perked.  Their smells filled the little room, where he served me at his little table, the toast, the coffee.  We spoke of politics, world affairs, and economics, partaking in wordless intimacy, and commitment, Dan performing his ritual of faith, belief, and religion as adeptly and silently as he had, decades earlier performed the perfect double-play. 

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

A God Who Feeds Us

Those of us who choose to find life’s source as a God who out of compassion took human form in Jesus of Nazareth form do not have a lock on certainty.  But we do have, by faith in this particular man as the son of God, a doorway into the warmest memories of our lives, times when we have been fed.

“Oh, Johnny, I made your favorite” my mom would say as I carried my stuff into the house on my visits from college.  She was tiny, five feet-zero and maybe a hundred pounds, but with a huge smile that already imagined my delight with the “favorite” – probably Swedish Meatballs – about which she was for more excited than I was.  I don’t know what gave her the idea that these things were my favorites, but tears come to my eyes when I recall how much she wanted to feed me, to delight me in doing so, to make me feel special.  She was like the father of the Prodigal Son, and Swedish Meatballs was the Fatted Calf.  For years after that visit from college, Swedish Meatballs was one of the entrees at every family celebration.  We would gather around the ping pong table in their basement, my dad’s Polish Palace, all six of us kids, and soon our wives and husbands and soon, too, our kids.  The Thanksgiving after my dad almost died from a heart attack, he wept through his attempt just to say he was thankful to be with us.  This was our “new” old man, who could allow himself to be moved.  Something in him had broken when his heart almost stopped.  It was his shell, the covering over his feelings, his feeling s of love, and of gratitude.  Those of us who were able to, wept with him, but all of us were aware of the holiness of this table around which we were gathered, covered with food prepared by this tiny woman, several entrees, everybody’s “favorites”.  “Amen,” somebody said. “Pass the Swedish Meatballs!”

Denis was grilling chicken in his backyard as Kathy introduced me to her half-sister Mary in San Francisco.  He seemed to know that Mary was the star, the center of this reunion between women who shared the same father but different mothers, mothers who died when they were still children.  As we chatted around the kitchen table, Denis would come in from time to time to check on the food in the oven, the sauce on the top of the stove.  Soon he brought in the chicken, and we all sat at the table with Denis, Mary, and their three kids.  Denis looked at me and said, “I’ve prepared something you might like,” his smile suggesting there was a story.  He opened a serving dish and out came a delightfully fragrant cloud of flavor, of butter and something like lobster.  He sliced the tender white abalone, describing to all of us how he and his son had scuba dived for it, taking their limit before the sea otters got to them.  It was delicious.  The potatoes were passed around, and the steamed broccoli, and the salad.  I filled my plate enthusiastically, following quite literally Denis’s encouragement to do so.  The beautifully barbecued chicken remained piled on a plate in the middle of the table; none of them had even looked at it.  I asked Denis why he did the chicken when the abalone was so good.  “I didn’t know if you would like it, so I did something safe for you.”   I will never forget his thoughtfulness.  In the twenty years since that dinner, Denis has lost his Mary; the otters and his age have deprived him of diving for abalone.  But every time we visit, there is the same warm smile, the twinkling eyes, the beguiling “I’ve prepared something you might like.”

Tomorrow – more about a God who feeds us - My brother Dan the agnostic and his morning coffee rite, and breaking bread with Toni.

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

A Mother Theresa Story

In 1982 Mother Theresa visited Detroit to establish a convent of her Missionaries of Charity the Hispanic community there.  Those of us who served in Christian Service Commissions were invited to meet her.  At the time, she had not yet been lionized by the media, but was spoken of in quiet and reverent conversations as an example of compassionate service to the dying and the poor since Malcolm Muggeridge had interviewed her in 1970.  This excerpt from that interview, as she walked through the streets caring for the people in the filth and squalor of the streets of Calcutta, recalls to us the characteristic candor and simplicity of her faith.

“Do you do this every day?” he began his interview.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, “it is my mission. It is how I serve and love my Lord.”

“How long have you been doing this? How many months?”

“Months?” said Mother Teresa. “Not months, but years. Maybe eighteen years.”

“Eighteen years!” exclaimed Muggeridge. “You’ve been working here in these streets for eighteen years?”

“Yes,” she said simply and yet joyfully. “It is my privilege to be here. These are my people. These are the ones my Lord has given me to love.”

“Do you ever get tired? Do you ever feel like quitting and letting someone else take over your ministry? After all, you are beginning to get older.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “this is where the Lord wants me, and this is where I am happy to be. I feel young when I am here. The Lord is so good to me. How privileged I am to serve him.”

When she entered the room and greeted the fifty or so of us, Calcutta seemed to enter the room with her, on her blue-edged habit and in the deep wrinkles in her face.  I immediately felt revulsion for our privilege here, our good clothes, and our relatively comfortable lives.  She seemed to read my mind. 

“You don’t need to come to the streets of Calcutta to serve the poor.  They are here among you.  There are all kinds of poverty; you will find it, if you look, in your homes and in your neighborhoods.  You can serve the poor for Jesus right where you are.”  But she was calling us not to sacrifice, but to joy.  We would find, she said, the face of God in those we serve; we would learn from them as she and her sisters did.   She told us a story to elucidate this.

Two of my sisters and I were taking a bag of rice to a mother who we had heard was starving, and her children with her.  When she came to welcome us, we gave her the bag of rice, and she expressed her gratitude and excused herself.  We assumed that she was going into her kitchen to get us some water; it is expected that when a guest arrives, even if you are poor, you bring them some little thing to honor them.  But a few minutes went by, and I was beginning to be a little put off, because she seemed to have simply left us.  Some minutes later, she came in with three glasses of water.  I asked her “Mother, where did you go?”  She answered, bowing, that the mother next door was starving too, and she had taken half of the rice to her, and stayed to share a glass of water.

In this week following the Feast of Corpus Christi, tears come to my eyes as they did in that little conference room with Mother Theresa.  The goodness of that starving woman to share the rice with her neighbor reminds me again how little I trust that there is enough bread for all of us, how I tend to be self-concerned, to store up, to want to be self-sufficient.   

Taken, blessed, broken, and shared.  I want to share, like that starving mother did.  And these next few days I will reflect on this four-step ritual that was given to us by the simple carpenter who became a preacher and healer, and who gave himself to us, who gives himself to us as bread, and who is enough.

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

Food, Glorious Food!

"One of the great things about Jewish Holy Days is there’s always food!"  The last course I pursued at the university where I spent my working life was Introduction to Judaism, taught by a local Rabbi.  And now, during the week following the Feast of Corpus Christi, I recall this great statement he made about food and celebration. And there in the Gospel on Corpus Christi was Jesus feeding the multitude: lotsa fish, lotsa bread.  Eat, eat! 

The “Miracle of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes”   is a great food story.  Here is a crowd of Jewish people, listening to their Rabbi.  It’s meal time, and you can tell that Jesus’ gang is primarily male, because women would have thought of this, would have prepared lotsa food.  So one of the guys comes to Jesus and says, “How the heck are we gonna feed all these people?”  The “miracle” is that Jesus collects what is on hand, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it . . . and it turns out to be enough, and more.  Later, at his last meal with his homies, he will follow the same rubric, used in the Sabbath service with the loaves there: he takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with everyone there.

Taken, Blessed, Broken, Shared: somehow, all what we have is turned into all that we need.  Here in the cool shade of Corpus Christi, I want to spend some time considering this holy rubric, this way that we are fed, and the holiness that is the oven in which the bread is baked.  For the next several days, I’d like to encourage us to recall stories of how we have been called to table to eat, and of how we’ve been called to be bread, taken, blessed, broken, and shared.

Tomorrow we will begin with a story that Mother Theresa told us in Detroit.

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A New, Old "Enough"

In my working life, I was worried I could not do enough.  When I stopped working, the same word troubled me, but now it was fear that I would not have enough.  Sunday was the feast of Corpus Christi, the reminder that we are fed by the Body of Christ, not simply the round, white wafer, but the water-to-wine, loaves-and-fishes, in-the-flesh reminders that Dios solo basta . . . God alone is enough.

There was that phrase – God alone is enough­ – mentioned almost incidentally by Fr. Reuben Munoz, our sweet, smiling, beguiling assistant pastor from Colombia, holding up a coffee cup.  To engage us in his homilies, he often brings something that he was given on his last trip home, using it to motivate us to answer questions, to get involved in discussion of the Gospel.  He had spoken about the problem faced by the disciples, a large crowd of people that remained listening to Jesus through what should have been a meal time.  One of them asked Jesus how they were going to feed all those people.  Jesus replied “Give them something yourselves!”  I confess I’d forgotten this line in my leap to what follows, the “miracle” of multiplication of loaves and fishes, the feeding of the multitude from no apparent source.

Dios solo basta; I remember the first time I heard it.  Evelyn Coffey (Click for a link to her Cousin Pat Kyser’s blog about her) was a sweetly smiling, white-haired mystic, who shared this phrase with me once as we sat on her front porch, musing about life.  When she said the three words, she said them as if they were a secret which I was privileged to know, that others did not, and how lucky we were, we two there on that porch on Warrington Street.  I confessed to her that I did not know what it meant, afraid that she might think less of me.  “Oh, it’s from St. Therese of Avila,” she said, and recited:

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

Here in retirement, I have no job from which to earn a weekly paycheck.  We draw from a finite amount of money saved, that might or might not be . . . enough.  I grew up on the edge of poverty; my father a factory worker in a post-war economy of boom and recession, our family often growing faster than his ability to earn.  I was formed with a habit of saving, of conserving, preparing for the times when there would be nothing coming in.  And now in retirement, I relapse to this feeling of insufficiency, and it becomes a source of fear, fear that displaces love and repels joy.

So there at Mass was Fr. Reuben holding up the coffee cup, reading the words on it, the words of Theresa of Avila, holding it high so that we would see it, would want it, would speak up for it, telling what we heard in the Gospel, in his homily.  As I remembered Evelyn and that secret shared on her porch, tears broke free from my eyes and ran down my face.  I wanted to raise my hand and tell the story of hearing those words, of her sweet smile . . . but my weeping would make my story inaudible, I knew, and I sat in silence, deeply aware of Evelyn’s reminder, that God does suffice, without anything else.  Throughout the Mass I felt relieved of worry; how could I have forgotten Evelyn’s sweet secret again and again? 

At the final blessing, Fr. Reuben retrieved a monstrance from the side table and brought it to the altar.  From the tabernacle he retrieved a little gold vessel; bringing it to the altar, he opened it and placed the consecrated host within it into the monstrance.  Without a cue, the congregation knelt as he held it up high so that we would see it, would want it, would speak up for it, would know that this alone, this little white wafer that is the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, the water-to-wine, loaves-and-fishes, flesh-and-blood reminder that this alone is enough.  The ancient monstrance here in this new place; Fr. Reuben's new smile reminding me of Evelyn's one of beloved memory: the continuity of God's love and the simplicity of this message embraced me.  

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

Tomorrow: Take…break…bless…share – looking at living with the "enough" that we are given.

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Mystery - Lived, Not Solved

He missed the mystery of my churchy childhood last Sunday.  Our priest decided to base his sermon on Memorial Day, a pretty good sermon recounting the long list of wars in which Americans fought and died in the brief history of our country.  The fact that it was Trinity Sunday was mentioned only on the masthead of the parish newsletter that we picked up on our way out.  Too bad, I thought.  I love a good mystery. 

I was an inquisitive kid.  While the other 10-year olds were out playing baseball, I was in the shade of the hedges playing with magnets, wondering why they pulled at each other one way, but pushed at each other if I flipped one of them around.  By 14 I was in the basement taking old broken radios apart, trying to make one good one out of them.  Back then, what made radios work was glowing filaments in silvery-hazed bulbs, exciting electrons and sending the invisible messengers from anode to cathode, through a mesh screen that, like a controllable magnet, sent some of them forward and some of them back.  Somewhere there was a place called Cedar Rapids, and I knew because late at night after the little stations shut down, the big ones could bounce their invisible signals off the invisible stratosphere and get all the way to Chicago, and to my hungry ears.

Perhaps that same native curiosity about the invisible was one of things that attracted me to God.  He was invisible.  He could see me all the time, I was told, and punish (ouch) or help me, depending on whether I was being good or bad.  His glowing filament exciting an infinite number of those electrons, He is the Great Anode and we all of the pleading little cathodes of the world.  Me God, bless ME, Little Johnny down here in the shade of the hedges!  Or me, goofball Johnny walking to the bus with his homework not done, his chapter not read, dealing as they did with boring, visible stuff.   The nun would teach us the “mystery” of the Trinity, that there was just one God, but three persons.  In all of us little wigglers preparing for Fist Communion, there was a silent, collective, “Whaaaa?” 

A mystery, we were told by the Nun Who Knew These Things, was something we could not understand, but had to believe anyway, to be good Catholics.  Ha!  I was hooked for life.  Just tell me something can’t be done and I all over it.  The Trinity was like the world’s largest pair of magnets, like a radio with a gazillion silvery tubes.  Cool!  But t the idea of it made God an idea, like all of the wars and all of the dead soldiers.  Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi.  Another great mystery, that this Jesus on whom our religion is based was God and man, divine and human.   This person of the three who God is, this person knows our hunger from his own, and knows our thirst from the dryness in his own mouth.  This person of the three who God is pushes us out of the way of the careening truck in the street and gets whacked instead of us.  This person of the three who God is tastes salt on the corner of his lips when he sees us cry. 

Today is the feast of the mystery that calls us beyond mystery, calls us out of our heads, our heads that are all about solving puzzles, how three can be one, and divine can be human.  Today is the feast that calls us to eat, to accept the real food that will never let us be hungry again, to drink what will never again let us thirst.  Today is the feast that calls us not to the invisible, but to the visible, the touchable.  Today calls us to the heart that pumps real blood through a real body, a body with eyes that see the loneliness of our companions and ears that hear the silence of their despair.  Today calls us to see and hear, and to know that the greatest mystery is that we can be infinitely compassionate, fed and hydrated as we are by this endless source.  

This is a mystery we are called not to solve, but to live.

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Fruits Happen

There is a look of calm about him, of a deep resignation that is not withdrawal but rather a wise acceptance of things-as-they-are.  His family farm is one of those here in northern Michigan, orchards of apples, tart and sweet cherries, some plums and apricots.  Hugging Lake Michigan’s leeward shores that moderate the weather, the fruit trees begin the season as a blanket of flowers that are not merely beauty, but promise.  We had met him at our daughter’s house, he one of the young people among their community of young parents, attentive to their children as they broke fairly consistently between men talking of fishing and farming and “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” and women, speaking of organic food and homeschooling and old-fashioned, simple things.  They were an attractive lot; there was contentment about them.  But the Fruit Farmer was, among them, a calm within the calm.

As the cherry harvest approached, I mused at the life that the region took on, the quiet two-lane roads now traveled by heavy trucks so filled with cherries that the outside of its curves were sticky and dark from centripetal syrup. I heard that it was an overabundant crop that the Fruit Farmer was, like all other growers, leaving a quarter of his trees unpicked to keep prices from falling.  On my early bike ride one morning, I felt the embrace of the harvest.  It was as if I were in the heart of the place, inside, included; I wanted to be involved.  I called the Fruit Farmer and asked him if Kathy and I could spend some time helping to pick cherries in return for some to take home.  He said that he had enough help, but that he’d be glad if we came and took all we would like, that he’d be glad if we could put them to good use. 

I will never forget his hands, cupping around a cluster of dark sweet cherries and pulling gently, coming away overflowing with perfect fruit.  I was glad he showed us how to “pick”; I’d imagined plucking cherries one by one.  Here they were available to us literally by the handful.  He smiled as he saw the awe on our faces and left us to fill our buckets.  After a couple of hours, our buckets were overflowing; full measure, shaken down and running over.

My blogging about Pentecost began with words of the Gesu pastor assuaging people’s fears about a Charismatic Prayer Group in the Catholic parish.  His words were spoken calmly, the words from Scripture: "by their fruits you will know them."  And I finish this Pentecost series with the image of our old car loaded with white buckets brimming over with dark sweet cherries, fruit that we did not earn, but was given to us by the bounty of nature and the magnanimity – great-spiritedness – of the Fruit Farmer. 

I’ve come to know the Fruit Farmer by his fruits, to understand his calm.  He tends to his trees.  He puts his arms around them, places his hands on them.  He trusts nature to do what it can and does all that he can to help it.  The fruit shows up as a sign that things are right.  Apples, tart and sweet cherries, some plums and apricots.   Oh, yes, and Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control.  Full measure, shaken down and running over, and all that is asked of us is to put them to good use.

  

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Self-Control According to Johnny Francis

“Poor self-control”.  


Our St. Mary’s Elementary School Report Cards were yellow cardboard folded in half and slipped into a brown envelope the long way.  There was a little half-moon shape at the top of the envelope so the card could be slid all the way in and still be retrieved.  On the envelope was my name in careful, precise, nun writing.  The nun was Sr. John Francis.  I was in third grade, in a split classroom in a walled-off corner of the lower “school hall” that served as an auditorium and sort of theatre for the 400 or so good Catholic children who were students there.  Actually, 399 good ones and me, it seemed that day. 

The cards, folded vertically as they were, had a front, an inside, and a back.  On the front was a kind of cover, with the student’s name within a certificate-like description of the school.  The inside was a listing of academic areas for grading: arithmetic, handwriting, geography, English, and so on.  The back was reserved for conduct.  It was a letter grade, like the academic subjects; “E” for excellent (seemed to be reserved for girls, and for boys who stayed after school to clean the blackboards and sweep the floor)  VG for very good, G for good, P for poor, and U for unsatisfactory.  Under the conduct section on the back were four lines for parent signatures for each grading period. 

The mediocrity of my academic subjects seemed to suggest that at the mere age of eight I had intuitively discovered Aristotle’s Golden Mean, that perfect middle between deficiency and excess.  I…was…Good!  There was the occasional VG, probably some lapse of memory or involuntary act of charity by “Johnny Francis” as we called the brown-habited teacher when she was not there to hear.  And there was, in Aristotelian balance, the occasional P, which signaled the requirement for the signature of both parents, and had my eyes glued to my dinner plate on the evening of Report Card days, at the end of which my mother would somberly hand my Report Card to my father for his review and reluctant signature.  Had he been a lawyer and not an assembler of little red Radio Flyer wagons, I suspect he would have included a disclaimer above his signature, making clear that his signing was in no way an endorsement of my Poor behavior. 

Today’s final Fruit of the Holy Spirit is “Self-control.”   Two years later, in the fifth grade, I would (perhaps) learn it as this last of the nine fruits, as distinguished from the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, as we prepared for Confirmation.  The Bishop would come in his groovy red cassock and beanie and slap us on the cheek to remind us that we were “Soldiers for Christ.”  But there was something in that slap that failed to deliver this particular fruit, in God’s retroactive power over time, so that it would reach back to my third grade self and save me from a “P” grade in Conduct.  Johnny Francis’s script stated the truth as she saw it.  “Exhibits poor self-control.” 

I still do.  I’m still subject to the approval of others.  I still get angry from time to time, stewing on things until they erupt.  I still look glum when others are smiling, and grin when others are serious.  And I still have some tenacious reluctance to follow the consoling, calming Spirit that descends on me even now as I type these words, balm to my wounded ego, argument to my self-doubt. 

There is a sweet irony in this term, self-control, because it is not claiming control, but relinquishing it, letting go with our ego and letting our (so well named, Dr. Freud) superego take over.  But while Freud’s superego, called “uber-ich” “over-self” was a kind of imposed compulsion, this fruit of the Spirit of a loving God is not the controlling hand, but the consoling breath, the breeze that inclines our life-boat to its true destination, that shows us the way of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness.  The breath of this Spirit guides us to discover and to befriend our true Self, a self by which we long to be controlled.

Spirit of God, God who created us, God who became one of us and showed us human love, who gave us over to this Spirit; help us to be still enough to feel the morning breeze of your Spirit.  Help our leaves dance in You.  Help our limbs wave in You.  Help our swaying trunks convince our roots to nestle into You, so that we may be nourished by You, and bear Your fruit, the only food that will sustain us and even begin to satisfy a so-hungry world.

Tomorrow - a final Fruitful look.

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Gentleness (Latin: mansuetudo)

Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control…I looked at the list of nine “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” last Monday after Pentecost, considering using them to channel my blog by channeling my mind, taking seriously the idea that God blew in my ear and now I wanted to follow her anywhere.  But when I looked at the list, the words seemed like the faces of a family, some so similar to others that I wondered how I would distinguish each of them in a day’s reflection, and have that days’ reflection give fruit in the next morning’s blog.

On several Christmases, our Son Chris has come home from his job in Europe for a week or more, to have time to really catch up with us, with Kathy and me and his two sisters.  The time gives us all an opportunity to get a little goofy together.  One morning Chris used PhotoShop to replace every face on our Christmas portrait with Kathy’s.  There we were, the five of us and even the girls’ husbands and one baby, all with the same smiling Kathy face.  There was truth in that funny photo; Kathy’s smile had a way of becoming part of ours, and all of us did come to resemble each other by being together.

But funny photos notwithstanding, it is fortunate that the list I’d found on that Monday after Pentecost included the Latin roots, because today I needed it.  Gentleness seemed so closely akin to goodness and kindness that I felt it redundant.  So I looked at the interesting Latin meaning, mansuetudo.  The first part of the word, man… is the root of our word “hand”, giving us words like manual, manipulation, etc.  The second part, suetudo, was more obscure, and more revealing.  It is a form of suesco, which means to become accustomed .  Together, these Latin guides tell us that gentleness is a hand to which we are accustomed, as an animal is tamed by the hand that has become known as that of a friend, someone we can trust.

I cannot hold Kathy’s hand without being tamed.  And every time I look at my neighbor Gary’s face, or my friend Bill’s, I become calm, relaxed.  There is in me a feral self, a wild self on a level of survival, afraid of being adequate to the demands of life.  To this beastly self, others are a threat, competing for those things I need to live.  I’m aware of my vulnerability, the weakness of my body, and the lapses of my thinking.  Kathy’s hand, Gary’s face and Bills somehow turn me away from fear and toward delight

Gentleness is the music that soothes the wild beast in us, the face into which we look that calms us, the hand that we hold that lets us walk without fear, that calls us not to flee, but to dance. 

I feel in this an opportunity to invite you to stop and consider: who in your life tames you?  Whose are the faces that calm you, the hands that relax you, relieve you of your primal fears?  And also consider, when do you practice gentleness?  When is yours the face that calms others, the hand that relaxes them?  How does it feel?

Tomorrow, the final Fruit of the Spirit: Self-control (Latin: continentia)

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