A View from the Shoulders

As soon as my kids were old enough to sit, I’d put my hands around their waists and put them onto my shoulders.  I’d put their legs around my neck and circle my forefingers and thumbs around their soft little wrists cupping my hands around theirs, holding on firmly but gently, so they could sit up there safely.  Sometimes I’d exaggerate

Inpetration - Incarnation

Their faces come back to me in my falling asleep and in my waking.  Their eyes are looking into mine, mine into theirs.  We are smiling.  Even as we are looking into each others’ eyes, our peripheral vision is taking in the changes that the faces have undergone in these intervening (good Lord!) 20 years since they were my students.  We had come together in one of the really grand places in Detroit, old diamonds in the new rough.  They had done this kind of thing before, planning a big, dressy party in places we forget about, places that deserve not only to be remembered, but to be enjoyed.  Twenty years ago on this same Belle Isle, the 985 acre island park in the Detroit River, the Marusich Brothers coordinated the annual Beaux Arts Ball, renting generators and

Walking With Myself

I joined myself for a walk yesterday.  We live, Kathy and I, in a new world. A little more than a year ago we left the city in which we lived for forty years to a town 200 miles away. But I wonder, after yesterday, if we ever really moved.
Our little street in Detroit, Warrington Drive, borders Livernois Avenue, a boulevard in the center of which was for decades traveled by streetcars, its rails and wooden ties unearthed just four years ago in a landscaping project. Livernois stretches from Historic Fort Wayne along the Detroit River to the south to Eight Mile road, the city limits on the north, and even wider thoroughfare running east and west between Lake St. Clare on the East and well, eventually Lake Michigan, with thousands of towns and a few cities in between. But in the shadow of the noise of traffic on Livernois, Warrington is more like a village. And that

Why Do We Wait?

“Why are we waiting for the Messiah; why are we waiting for the Mahavir?  Your eyes will suffice to give tired men hope.”  In “New York, I Love You” Mansuhkhbai, a Jain diamond merchant sits with Rifka, a customer bargaining with him for a diamond.  In the process of trying to soften up each other to have the advantage in bargaining, they each disclose a truth at the busy, hazardous intersection of religion and love.  His wife has left him

Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part III

An irony of the Dives and Lazarus story struck me.  Dives’ Hell was simply an extension of the way he had chosen to live his life: separated.  In life, he trusted the wall to keep Lazarus on the outside, away from himself.   In death, he found himself wanting contact but being sentenced to isolation.  He was so distressed by heat and thirst that he wanted the dirty beggar to dip his scabby finger into water and touch his tongue!  My, how his aversion has melted in the

Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part II

A simple follow-up to yesterday’s look at Dives and Lazarus.  It seems to me that there are some questions that arise from the story that might serve as lenses through which we can examine our own lives.

What are the walls we put up, or leave up?  What are the structures in our daily routines, in our habits or “order” that enable us to avoid others, not only in our world or community, but in our family?

What are the things that make others repulsive to us?   What do we allow to be “turn-offs” that let us justify the hardship of others or justify not seeing them?

Who do we hold at a distance?   Who do we wall out? 

What are the doorways, the openings through which we could be going, to approach the Lazaruses in our lives, to touch the untouchables?  Where can we cut some newdoors?

Tomorrow – Hell as Chasm, Life as Insect. 

Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part I

Gates, walls, fences, and in days of old when knights were bold, moats: all meant for the same purpose, to separate.  Distance works, too, or chasms.  Next Sunday’s Gospel  is a classic.  The names of the two main characters are from Latin (Dives means “rich man”) and Hebrew (Lazarus is a form of Eleazar, which means “helped by God”.)  Lazarus is a poor man with sores on his flesh.  Oh, did you find at least a little “ewww” or “yuuuck” involuntarily shudder up at you from inside?  Did you feel a little repulsion at the open sore thing?  So maybe it’s not totally alien for you

Here's Looking at You.

I look down the table at the homeless shelter, at the faces of these people with whom I share Tuesday evenings, and find myself, ironically, at home.  They have allowed me to put them in the tomb with Lazarus (Sartre’s Stare, God’s Gaze from a few days ago) and they have shared with me what fears would keep them from coming out, of coming to life, to a new life, another chance to be alive.  But these women and men are so wounded.  Some suffer a major wound, one so large that healing is slow, and hope for recovery is thin.  Other are so covered with small wounds, each minor by itself but the very accumulation of them saps their energy, weakens them like a fever that keeps us in our beds when we want so badly to get up, get going.

They were trusting, forthcoming, and candid

Sunday Looks

If looks could kill

The look of love

Wipe that look off your face.

He gave me a dirty look.

I see that look in your eyes.

When I grew up, Sundays were different.  Stores were closed – ­all of them, even gas stations.  The reason was that servile work was not allowed on what the Christian world considered the Sabbath.  In Jewish communities, Friday evening would find families dressed in somber clothes walking to temple, walking because sundown was the beginning of the Sabbath, and driving was prohibited because driving was, before cars, hitching up horses and taking the harness and pulling on the reins and the brushing them properly and putting food in their bins and watering them – work that was prohibited on the Sabbath.  Servile work – I recall religion classes at St. Mary’s School, remember trying to figure out what servile work was.  Servile is derived from the Latin, servus, meaning servant or slave.  Servile work was work you didn’t do for pleasure, work that would be done by servants or slaves if you had them.  When I was growing

Sartre’s Stare – God’s Gaze

Lazarus – Come out!  What if Lazarus hesitated, to come back to life?  That’s what I asked my group at the shelter last night.  And what they said showed me once again that we are so much alike, we with homes and they without.

Several years ago, Marion Love did an exercise at Manresa with the twenty or thirty of us who were part of a two-year internship in Ignatian Spirituality – briefly, wishing to “Find God in All Things”, and perhaps to help others do so as well.  She gave us each a flat stone – the kind you might toss spinning into the lake to try to skip it, weightlessly, across the surface of the water, flying again and again until gravity finally wins, but not before delighting us, convincing us that maybe it, for this time, would escape, would simply float into the sky.  Imagine this stone much larger, rolled across your tomb.  You wake up, as Jesus did, finding yourself risen from the dead.  All that is between you and new life is this stone.  All you need to do is touch it and it will roll away, and you will be alive again.

What is Your Net Worth?

I bet you think I’m asking a financial question.  But I’m not, and that’s just the point.

It’s been just over a year since I received a paycheck.  For the previous 40 years, University of Detroit Mercy had validated my service to its students and colleagues with regular checks adequate to support a simple lifestyle.  As long as we were spending less than we received, I felt confident that we’d be fine, and we were.  We raised the kids, sent them through Catholic school, and got them started in college.  As we approached age 62, our earliest opportunity to begin drawing Social Security benefits, we both began to look at the benefits of retirement.  We’d learned that health is not to be taken for granted, and did not want to postpone it any longer than necessary.  We had made conservative investment decisions, and it seemed that we had adequate resources to take the plunge.  I told my boss that

Endless Summer, Endless Vacation, and Retirement

I was ten, I imagine.  I think we had company, but my brother Dan and I had been excused from sitting politely, excused to play outside.  Summer was, more than anything else, playing outside.  And it was staying up beyond the 7:30 bedtime that our parents thought was necessary for us to be able to get up for school alert.  It was the Fourth of July.  We could hear fireworks north of us, and a few seconds after each big boom the dark sky would brighten.  We sat on the north-facing front porch, hoping one of the skyrockets would go up enough for us to see, high over the trees next to the Petropuolos farm and in the back yards of the houses along Scott Street.  Three houses down Pratt Avenue, the Duda kids were sitting on their roof.  They got away with things.  Their parents weren’t strict.  But seeing them gave Dan and me the idea that if we stood on the railing of the porch and held on to the rain gutter, we might be high enough to see something.  No, we didn’t fall, but no, we didn’t see anything either.  I tell the story because even as I ached to see the excitement in the sky that was promised by the sound of it, I ached because the Fourth of July meant that Summer was half over, that we’d be going back to school.  Playing outside and staying up late would soon come to an end.  That ache would remain with me, like ringing in my ears that I could forget or be obsessed by, but it was always there.

When I was thirty, the same aching was true with vacations, but now instead of a three-month summer to anticipate and mourn, we had three weeks.  We would pack up the

Meeting the Prodigal Son on Woodward Avenue...Part II

Woodward Avenue paved over the old Sauk Indian Saginaw Trail for one purpose: to close the distance between Detroit and Pontiac, for moving commerce and eventually cars from one to the other in the shortest time.  It is straight as an arrow as soon as it clears the hills north of 16 mile road, now known as Quarton Road on the west (old Doctor Quarton’s big house is just off Woodward) and Big Beaver to the east, named for a mystery skeleton that temporarily halted a widening and paving project when it was thought to be a small dinosaur.  It turned out to be a big beaver.  Even the mile roads, many renamed now, make it clear that the destination is Detroit, and anything between her and there is an obstacle to be driven past.  And that includes drivers.    

My dad used to call people who drove slowly “Sunday Drivers.”  Another wide avenue in Detroit, Grand Boulevard, was the antithesis of Woodward’s

Meeting the Prodigal Son on Woodward Avenue...Part I

Walking on a narrow trail, we get to see faces of the people we pass.  Walking slows us, and we have a chance to notice their gait, their posture, their way of holding and moving themselves.  When they are ahead of us for some time, don’t we wonder about them, like we wonder about a distant house, its lighted windows calling to us in the night, its inner life a mystery to us? 

My route to work, those last ten years at University of Detroit Mercy, had begun as just such a foot trail from Saginaw Bay to the nearest part of what is now called the Detroit River.  It was members of the Sauk Tribe, pushed south from the St. Lawrence River by other tribes, who walked along it, hunting and trading as they followed the trail over wooded hills, stream-flooded valleys, swampy and riverside flood plains.  In 1701 Antoine Cadillac and other French speaking found that settlement at Detroit River end of that trail a good place to disembark on their quest for settlement and commerce, and that narrow trail with its way of bringing people close to each other would begin to change, as European settlers began to widen it, and to .  By 1805 Thomas Jefferson’s appointed magistrate for the territory, decided to make it 100 feet wide, as a matter of fact, from the river to the town of Pontiac 27 miles to the north.  By the time it was accomplished, it bore his name – Woodward Avenue.  And a century later Henry Ford and leaders from General Motors conspired to pave the old Saginaw Trail with concrete to speed travel between their headquarters and factories in Detroit, Highland Park, and Pontiac. 

Now Woodward Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Downtown Pontiac remains six lanes wide, a center lane in places for left turns, and on long stretches a wide, landscaped median.  While the Saginaw trail brought members of the Sauk Tribe slowly through hill and valley and swamp, Woodward Avenue brings rich and poor of many cultures as quickly as possible

God's Crazy Love Film Festival

The Gospel for Sunday  in many churches is a festival of shorts, little vignettes that feature crazy people.  Luke wrote the screenplay from a story told by Jesus when he was asked by some holy rollers why he hung out with riffraff.  They figured, you see, that he ought to hang out with holy people, being as he was saying he was the Son of God and all.  So he kind of smiles at them, and he starts telling stories, in hopes that they’ll understand why he cares about imperfect people, people with flaws – like us.

First he tells the story of a mad shepherd.  He counts his sheep and realizes that one is missing.  A shepherd in his right mind would keep his eyes open, not to lose any more.   He might consider what price he will get for the 99, maybe fatten them up a bit more and raise the price to cut his losses for the one that got lost in the process. But noooooo, not this guy

Autonomy, Intimacy, and Relationship

Kathy and I have spent the past two pleasantly cool days doing gardening.  Now, in your mind’s eye you might imagine a sweet gray-haired couple side by side in their yard, bending and moving and pulling and tossing in a dance of companionship.  Sorry to disillusion you.  She works on hers, and I work on mine, and each of us comes around from time to time to help the other, to observe and comment or encourage.  And we stop to have lunch together, and stop each other in the afternoon in order to retain enough energy to prepare dinner.  During these days of working like this, I have reflected repeatedly on our dance of autonomy and intimacy, and its difference

Social Security, Providence, and Responsibility

Fr. Jim O’Reilly walked with a major-league gimp.  It seemed to me that for every three-foot stride of forward progress, a bad hip tossed his head back and forth about the same distance.  Despite all of this zigzag movement, his face constantly framed a certain mischievous smile.  He always gave me the impression that he had something on me, like he knew something that I’d rather he didn’t know, that at any moment he’d blurt it out publicly, whatever that truth was.  But this time as he walked past a number of his fellow Jesuits in the dining room at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House, he motioned me over, and then bent close to my ear to share a private comment.  “Don’t ever retire around Jesuits; they’ll give you three jobs!”  In his case, it was true.  He worked - and still works - at Loyola High School, in the adjoining parish, and as a Spiritual Director and mentor for trainees.

We had a visit from a couple of Jesuit friends on Saturday.  As soon as they pulled into the driveway, I realized that they were sacrificing something that I was not.  I’m not speaking of celibacy.

Moral Holiday: Let Go and Let God…?

I remember Kathy’s anguished forehead that first time we went out and left our first child with a babysitter.  I don’t remember what we did, but I do recall that it was not long, despite the babysitter’s comforting and confident manner, before Kathy found a phone and called to check on the baby.  Soon after that we truncated our evening and returned home early.  There was a book around that time entitled Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.  I could have written a sequel: “Real Moms Don’t Eat Out.”  Man has a lot to learn about ethics from good Moms.  And Kathy’s dilemma is the way I’d like to invite you to look with me at a pair of words that has troubled me since I read them a week ago: “Moral Holiday.”  You can see an earlier post, “Faithful, Free; So What?” and yesterday’s setup for this, “Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday”  to see the string of thought on this.

While Freud built his psychological theories on sexual and parental relationships, a contemporary, William James, looked to relationships with God.  While he questioned (and personally rejected) the existence of God, he observed that people’s thinking and behaving was unquestionably affected by their experiences of God, their

Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday

What justifies indifference in the face of need?  I dunno.  You won’t find answers here.  But maybe we can consider it together.  I’d like to start us on our way by looking at the words.

Leisure – I found it up a narrow stairway that was never really meant for the public.  It always reminded me of the back stairways in the biggest houses in our neighborhood in Detroit, the neighborhood where the live-in servants had quarters

If Freedom Isn’t Free, is Leisure Leisurely?

Back in the 1965 Paul Colwell wrote a song – “Freedom isn’t Free” – that worked in me.  It stuck.  The 60’s brought with them a concept of “Free Love” that began what I’d call “the great confusion”, an idea that spread virally, that we were free to act without consequence, to enjoy without regard for the other, who we assumes would enjoy too, would feel their own pleasure.  Everything was “groovy”, baby.  In 1965, troop levels in Vietnam had increased from 24,000 to 185,000.  Colwell’s song tried to call us back a young generation from the misguided sense of freedom, with little apparent impact.  By 1969 half a million American soldiers, mostly draftees, were slogging in the muddy fields of Southeast Asia, another half million American youth were slogging through the mud of a dairy farm near Bethel, New York.  It was not a war protest, one in the mud here in solidarity with one in the mud there.  It was Woodstock, a music festival where people were high on music, love, and a haze of smoke that was far friendlier than that in the rice paddies

God is My Flight Attendant

“Yo, J – your mother and your brothers want to talk with you.”

“Tell ‘em ‘Later’. I’m busy with you; you’re my mother and my brothers.”

 Sounds troubling, like this “J” is dissin’ his mother.  More troubling – “J” is Jesus, and the exchange comes from Matthew’s Gospel, at the end of Chapter 12.  A good friend, a man that I admire as an example of kindness and passion for humanity, finds this a barrier to following Jesus.  Who the heck would slam the door on his mother because of his “public?”  This week’s Gospel, it’s Luke, another evangelist, who quotes “J”: "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”  I hear Ronald Reagan saying “Well, there you go again, Jesus

At the Shelter Last Night

They sat all around me at the table last night, these beautiful people who I’ve come to know over the past two months only because they’re homeless.  No, I need to correct that; only because they are in the situation of homelessness. 

One is finding herself, finding her worth, as she loses weight after mustering the courage to leave a physically abusive husband.  She

Stillllll Waiting.

Stilllll Waiting.

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

John Milton, Sonnet 19

Waiting…Waiting…Waiting…Waiting….  Waiting in line, waiting at a light, waiting for a call, or a letter, or word from a friend in trouble.  Waiting for the coffee to brew, waiting for the toast to pop up, or for a pain pill to kick in.  All of these random thoughts, these examples have come to my mind as experience of the helplessness of waiting share one blessing.  Something’s gonna happen, eventually.  We’ll get to the front of the line, the light will

Can Ants Learn to Fiddle?

I don’t know if there was a picture of the Pope hanging anywhere in the house of my youth, or of the President.  I can’t remember any photos at all.  But if there had been a picture of a leader to emulate, it would have been, in scientific parlance, Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Vespoidea, Family: Formicidae.  It would have been an ant.

Remember Aesop’s story of the ants and the grasshopper?    

In a field one summer's day

Danny's Coming to Dinner

Our kids remember the lost ones as part of our Thanksgiving dinners.  They remember the welcome.  I’m glad. 

“When you hold a lunch or a dinner,
do not invite your friends or your brothers
or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors,
in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.
Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Luke 14:12-14

I didn’t plan on our relationships with these lost ones.   Danny lived across the hall from me in what I now recognize as a “Men’s SRO” (single room only, bathroom down the hall) above the garage at Marygrove College.  I lived there because

Faithful? Free? So What?

“Theories become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest.”  So wrote William James a century ago in lecture entitled “What Pragmatism Means.”  So what?  Precisely.  So what?  James was saying that anything we learn should not make us satisfied, grinning like a cat in the sunny patch on a wintry floor.  What we come to know should . . . must make a difference in how we live our lives.

Complacent, smug, self-satisfied.  I belong to two groups that can with some validity be seen this way: those retired with savings and those “saved” by faith.  Retirement is something I hesitate to write about.  It’s like a female voice rising from a room full of Catholic clerics.  I feel like an outsider, someone no longer going to work, no longer being validated by an albeit perhaps smaller-than-desired paycheck, no longer engaged

What a Friend We Have In . . . you know?

A couple of days ago I went to an early morning men’s group at church.  Scheduled at 7:00 to give guys the opportunity to participate before heading to work, it is an attempt to call us to bring our faith into our family lives.  The leader, retired as I am, mentioned the importance of prayer and meditation.  One of the young guys shared his recent attempts to spend 15 minutes morning and night just being quiet and listening to God.  So yesterday I made it a point to be more deliberate, more intentional, in my taking time to be present to God.  A funny thing happened.  I realized what an old friend God is.  Gee, this sounds hokey.  But give me a shot at sharing it.

Holy Smoke

Three comments from Monday’s blog make me want to say more about words.  “Disagree Again” is right.  Words are misused too.  Yesterday evening I was at my Tuesday post, behind the serving counter at Goodwill Inn here.  On the menu were roast pork, local broccoli, and cheesy cornbread.  On the radio was a rock and roll station with a couple of male disk-jockeys that were trying to out-cute and out-shout and out-harangue each other after every song.  As much as my Tuesday evening a get me in a groove, their blather was driving me nuts.  I felt myself distracted and tense.  I was welcomed to change the station, to another rock and roll station with just one DJ, who was not so bad.

Even as I was finishing Monday’s blog, the antithesis was forming in me: talk’s cheap.  And this morning, I write that some talk is cheap, some is

A Word With You?

God as Word.  I don’t know why my waking was entranced by that.  It was like snorkeling along the edge of the lake, Deep Lake, where we went each summer with the kids, weightless and mesmerized by the bright world there, green waving things within which were schools of fish, like gems in a tapestry.  It was like opening my eyes in the hammock that summers in our back ward, opening them because I hear the music of the breeze and look up and see innumerable shades of yellow-green undulating beneath a blue dome of sky.  Word.  Word.

Why did I wake in wonder?  These days we have an oracle, one so easy to consult.  We call it Google.  I typed in “God as word” and

St. Francis or Dr. Laura? YOU Decide.

Blame it on NPR.  This morning, instead of sitting right down at the keyboard with a quiet mind, I put on a pot of coffee and turned on my NPR station.  I think that what I enjoy most is the friendly voices, women and men who listen, who inquire before they respond, and who give their guests a sense of their own importance.  I guess it’s their culture of respectful discourse that makes me want to spend time with them.   What I happened to hear was the apparent resignation of a loud voice on the radio.  And I was glad.

Deuteronomy Chapter 19: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose….”

Choice 1:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith ;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Choice 2: listen for yourself. (Be aware that racist language is included) 

There is a lot of flap about the racist nature

God's, Mine, and Ours

On Sunday AM radio, a young Baptist pastor said that retired people finally have time to do God’s work full-time, and should not be distracted by the idea that it’s time to kick back and do whatever they want.    Meanwhile, on FM radio, an old commentator names Steinmorten or something said we old people should not feel guilty about not being constantly involved in our kids’ lives, that we have our own lives to live.  I was in my workshop, blissfully working on

Halcyon Days

If we could turn around faster, I think we’d see them sitting there, just out of our sight, these words, crocheted from memory, whittled from time that has made them ours, made us theirs.  So it was yesterday with the words “halcyon days”. 

Norm McKendrick is a Jesuit friend who lives in memory, a man of words that he hoped would embrace us as he could not.  One evening on a trip back from a movie we had gone to see together, that phrase came to Kathy or me, and we mentioned it, mentioned that we did not know what it meant, but that it seemed to be subliminally appropriate to the peaceful setting of the film.  Norm said that in fact we were right, that the word is used to describe a peaceful time, a time when nature calms us.  Halcyon also refers to the Kingfisher, a bird immortalized by the same Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote “Pied Beauty” that closed yesterday’s posting.  Myth suggests that the Halcyon Bird built its nest

Lectio Divina - Arrested by Beauty

Yesterday it was hard not to notice nature.  After a week of hot, muggy, unmoving air, air that you could see as a stale haze, that you could feel in your throat, yesterday was a day of wind-borne freshness. 

The evening before, windows that had been shut to keep out the heat and humidity were now opened wide to receive the cool, dry air.  It had been a great night for sleeping, awakened from dreams to hear the wind in the late-summer trees, their stiffening leaves resonant messengers. 

The sun rose in clear air and a cloudless sky, the East Bay a spectral kaleidoscope, blindingly golden as I looked northeast into the just risen orb, and

Mary, not Magic

By making Mary pseudo-divine, we rob ourselves of a model of our own humanity.  There.  If you’re in a hurry, that’s all this is about. 

When we were young and raising our kids we would visit my folks in Chicago, so the kids would know their grandparents and vice-versa.  Part of the weekend visits was going with them to 8:00 Mass at St. Stephens.  There was a 10:00 Mass, and a Noon Mass, but it was 8:00 Mass that they went to.  We Catholics come to know that wherever you are, these early, middle, and late Masses take place on different continents, the cultures being absolutely foreign to each other.  8:00 Mass takes place on a continent on which children are rare, where 80% of the inhabitants are 80, and brevity is the first rule.  10:00 Mass finds

Asparagus, Anticipation, and the Trust Bucket

Up here on Old Mission Peninsula, there are lots of orchards, and at this time of year their produce is sold from old-fashioned farm stands, weathered and sagging wooden barnlets of all sizes and shapes, but all including a shelf and an awning over it shading the offerings on view to those driving by.  There’s always a big, crudely lettered sign, a sandwich board, letting folks know what’s in those baskets or bags on the shelf: “Peaches today $4/pint”, or apricots.  Sweet Cherries are gone, and most of the blueberries.  Tart cherries are yet to come, and apples and pears. 

During peak times, and especially on tourist weekends, the farmers are

BIG Grant Yours. Please Reply.

Ding-dong.  Your doorbell rings.  No, scratch that.  Your cell phone rings.  You instinctively look at the screen to see who’s calling and it says “Mr. Big.”  No, scratch that.  It says “Big,” just that one word, “Big.”  You press the button and say, your voice betraying your ambivalence and curiosity, “Hullo?”

A female voice, nasal, matter-of-fact, comes straight out of a black-and-white movie, telling you that she is calling for Big, who has come to appreciate your talent and vision, who wants you to accept a lifetime fellowship, a stipend for life, that will support you and cover all expenses of any projects that you take on. 

“Yeah, right.” you say, “Who is this really?” 

Complacency and the Magis

Contentment and change:  I typed the words into my Chrome search window for ideas and came to this elegantly enjoyable posting by Andy Wood, and this photo.  I’m grateful for Andy’s gift as I recall Joe Barrett’s calling me out.  And I thank him for his word – it’s what Joe Barrett convicted me of thirty years ago: complacency.

Joe was a character in my life, a real character.  His wife Lynn had been an “early adopter” of the Charismatic Renewal meetings that had come to the social hall of our progressive, Jesuit-administered Catholic parish.  Like many husbands, Joe had been kind of dragged in, encouraged to meet the other men, to find out why the heck we came.  He joined us in a way that was pretty risky – by accompanying seven or eight of us men on the second of our annual camping weekends, times we used to get to know each other more intimately, preoccupied as we were by our jobs, while our wives were free to meet on weekdays and share lunch, albeit with hordes our kids in tow.  Joe was a super bright person coming through hard times.  He was a film maker, training and educational films, and was full of entertaining stories.  He ran us through his latest film, “Dust-Free Rides Again”, a parody of an old Western (Destry Rides Again) that was intended to motivate soldiers to change the air filters on Abrams Tanks.  Every comedic device in the film came alive in Joe at that campfire.  He told us about his Army buddy Jeff Bruney, so often in trouble that he was on perpetual latrine detail, who on the day of the General’s inspection put a suspicious looking dollop of peanut butter on the seat of a meticulously cleaned toilet for the General to discover, and then tested it by tasting it when asked by his red-faced Sergeant what it was.  “Why, it’s SH**, Sergeant!” Joe blurted out, saluting.  We laughed so hard that tears came.  But every once in awhile, Joe would realize that he was in the woods (he was no camper) and look around at us one by one, grubby and red-eyed from smoke, and say “This is ridiculous!”

Joe survived the campfire and the frying pan campfire food, and became one of us.  The intensity that he had shown on that camping weekend never left him.  Everything he did was at double speed, and his mind was always coming up with the next two ideas even as he was finishing one.  The house he and Lynn welcomed us to for rotating home Masses was filed with books, framed art, a kind of yin/yang of Lynn’s calm water and Joe’s fire.  By now our “Prayer Group” had been together for five or six years, and it seemed to me that the women were always coming up with things for us to do, projects to be involved in together.  This bugged me.  Always busy with my own projects, I wanted to stay clear of their wacky ideas (or so I branded them in my mind.) 

One such evening in Joe and Lynn’s house most of the group was huddled around the food table discussing one of these ideas to get us moving.  I sat on the couch and page d through one of their coffee table art books.  Joe came over and asked me why I was not participating in the conversation that was growing in its enthusiasm.  I smiled, and quietly said “That’s ridiculous.”  Joe asked me what I meant, returning a half-smile.  I told him my gripe, that the group was always thinking up schemes to get us deeper, more involved.  I told him that I found myself busy and happy.  I told him I was satisfied.

Joe’s face erupted.  “SATisfied!  Be anything, but for God’s sake, don’t be satisfied!”  He turned and left me.  I assume he went and rejoined the rest of the group.  I was too startled to notice. 

The Jesuits have a term: Magis.  It means more.  It is a term that can be troubling, even addictive.  It does not call us to be workaholics, but to know that the God who calls to us is always more that we can imagine, and is capable of more that we think.  Change happens.  Things are not as they ought to be.  Hunger and homelessness and violence persist in eating away at love and kindness and joy.  Andy Wood put it elegantly in his Blog: “There’s also something that looks like contentment but isn’t.  Complacency is ugly; it’s spiritual cholesterol.  It’s not resting in the Lord, it’s snoring.  While contentment is desire under surrender, complacency is desire under siege.”  I think that the word I’d used when I told Joe that I was satisfied was closer to complacency than contentment.  I think Joe was right.  If we claimed to be followers of this Magis God, our work should never be finished.  But how do we do it?

Tomorrow – the place of faith in a life of engagement in justice.

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

Hearing the Fourth Word

For a quickly passing ten years we lived in a century-old farmhouse on the property of Manresa,  the Jesuit Retreat House north of Detroit.  While on weekdays I worked with students and faculty at the university with our service-learning program on weekends I would do woodworking projects in exchange for our rent.  I worked in a large workshop in one of the old white-painted barns on the property that had been an orchard and “gentleman’s farm”.  Heat was provided by an old black wood burning stove in one corner of the shop, making it a cozy place to work during the winter, its windows providing views of the bare trees and the Tudor-style retreat house across the snow-covered rolling landscape. 

On one particular early Saturday morning I was working on a walnut altar, using a mallet and a large, spoon-shaped chisel to surface the base of the piece, to give it a sense of age appropriate to the chapel in which it would serve, a chapel honoring Our Lady of Montserrat, whose heart won that of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits in 1500.  There in the ancient Monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, he knelt before the stature of His Lady through the night of his pilgrimage, and he changed everything.  Laying his sword at the feet of the statue, he forswore his life of wealth, took on the rags of a beggar, and began to live as a mendicant preacher, sharing the good news of Jesus and relying on alms for his survival.  North of Montserrat in the Basque country of his birth, the Loyola Castle where he was born, and the room in which he was nursed back to health after his leg had been badly broken by a cannon ball in a battle at Pamplona in service to his King, would be without him forever.  Instead he would sit on the steps of the church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona and preach to whoever would listen.  He would see the poor, and feel their poverty.  He would notice these feelings inside himself and how they moved him to act, to reach out to them.  And he would recognize how in their sufferings he would come to know his suffering savior, Jesus.  Eventually he would be moved to write down what he was learning, in a cave in a little town of Manresa, where the nuns would feed him and watch over him until his writings had become the Spiritual Exercises, the foundation of the Jesuits who would grow from the little band of men who began to follow him.

Here in my comfortable workshop, I was mystically content.  My hands felt at home on the mallet and chisel, my eyes delighting in the reflection of the wood fire flames on the surface of the walnut altar, the muscles in my arms and shoulders happily swollen with blood that was pumped generously from a heart strong and healthy, at my age when my dad’s had begun to fail.  I was grateful for this moment, this place, this life. Like John Lennon slipping out of his warm bed and his wife’s falling-asleep talking to write his refrain “nothing’s gonna change my world”, contentment with my life here was palpable. 

But I had decided to do something that would turn out to shake me from this contentment.  After a year of enjoying the see-feel-help model that I spoke of yesterday, I had decided to listen again to the audio tape on which I had discovered it, to enjoy it again.  Fr. Howard Gray had presented a workshop there at the Retreat House several years ago entitled “Spirituality and Social Justice,” and had used the Good Samaritan story as its basis.  While it played on the little boom box on the workbench, I smiled and enjoyed hearing it again, anticipating what he would say next, feeling good to know, to be familiar with his words, to hear them emerge from my heart as well as his mouth.   But after he had gone from the Samaritan seeing to the feeling of compassion that he had to helping that came as a natural response, I realized that he was not finished that the tape continued on the other side.  I turned it over, clicked the door shut, and hit play.

And I heard the fourth word, and felt revulsion, and then heard its truth, and began to weep.  The word was change.  “As humans, we are called not simply to help, but to make things better for when we’re gone” he was saying.  The words stopped me in my tracks: “for when you’re gone.”   I had been at the university for more than 35 years.  I was loved and respected, I was free and trusted, and I had a life that had grown as fitting to my spirit and psyche as my hands had to the mallet and chisel.  Everything was just right.  I imagined leaving my work, leaving the university where I had spent my entire adult life, leaving the comfortable nest of Manresa.  I turned the tape off, put on my coat, and took a long walk, my warm tears turning immediately cold on my face, in my beard.  Change things; make things better for when you’re gone.   Yeah.  Jesus was gone, wasn’t he!  And when he had realized that he had to leave his friends, he had wept too.   I was stunned.  Everything . . . changed.  Fr. Gray’s words had cut into me like that chisel had cut into the surface of that walnut.  The world looked different to me, reflecting differently off the surface of my changing self. 

It was days later that I recalled Joe Barrett’s exploding at me with a spitting caveat that I now understood; after ten years of thinking it was just his temper, I understood that it was our truth.

Tomorrow.  Come back.

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

Hot Dogs and Heroes

I find myself struggling to write.  I'm leaving my comfort zone.  For the past few weeks I have been working/walking through the Fr. Howard Gray’s little but profound reading of the story of the Good Samaritan as a lesson in becoming human, of making real what is hidden inside us, of putting on the garment we are given at birth, of taking that car for a spin that sits in our fleshly garage.  It calls us beyond ourselves by responding to senses and feelings and moving to action.  He says that if we see (a person in need of help) we will feel.  Contemporary neuropsychology finds evidence that this occurs in the brain – that “mirror neurons” fire off in my brain in the same way that they do in the brain of the person I see in need of help.  I am feeling the same pain that the person is feeling, and I will want to relieve that pain.  It will move me to help.

These first three steps of his model were encouraging to me.  See-feel-help.  Great!  I can see that.  Just open my eyes and follow my heart, or my motor neurons, or whatever.  Do what I can.  This model fit nicely in the work I was doing at my university, arranging community service opportunities for students.  It guided me to help them to understand the importance of seeing, of opening their eyes and ears, of being aware.  It gave me reason to challenge them to notice what was happening inside themselves when they were noticing what was happening all around them.  And it was guiding me to encourage them to follow that feeling, to reach out and do what they can.

I loved this.  It made sense.  One day we hosted a few busloads of middle school kids on campus, providing the campus for use by City Year Detroit volunteers and staff, as they sponsored a week-long camp for the kids.  I told the City Year people I wanted to personally welcome the kids to our university.  The night before the camp, I lay in bed considering what I would say to them, how I would describe to 4^th and 5^th graders what a university was.  The key came in the culture of City Year.  They are big on the use of the word hero.  They have a program for these kids called “Young Heroes” and another for high schoolers called “City Heroes.”  So I thought of what I was doing with my own college students, and how it related to the work of their City Year hosts, and crafted my message around “Hero School”.

I told them that our university was a place where people learned that there were three kinds of people, victims, observers, and heroes.  I used the Good Samaritan story and invited them to act it out.  They were great.  And in the learning of the story and the doing of the story, they learned a simple response to the question of what people learn in college, in “hero school”.  While I was grilling hotdogs for them later in the day, I noticed that the line was getting long, and they were getting fidgety.  So I asked them, “OK, Kids, in order to get your hot dog, you gotta shout out the three things a hero does!”  I smiled with tears in my eyes as they found a cadence and hollered together, “SEE!  FEEL!  HELP!”

But today I feel the weight of the word I’d not heard the first time I listened to Fr. Gray’s lecture: CHANGE.  It's out of my comfort zone.

Tomorrow, hearing the fourth word.  Tuesday, Joe Barrett’s warning about contentment.

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