National Day of Listening

Today is the National Day of Listening.  Black Friday?  Today is the National Day of Listening! Check this link on The Books For Walls Project or go right to the Story Corps website for more.  Instead of going to the mall, project leaders suggest, listen to someone’s story.  Yesterday Kathy and I were driving from our home in northern Michigan to our daughter’s home in Cleveland to celebrate Thanksgiving.  NPR carried a story about this project, asking listeners who we might want to interview, living or dead, among our relatives or friends.  Not famous people, mind you, but normal folks.  Kathy and I both thought of her mother, who died when she was 12, long before I met her.  We mused about other family members – grandparents who died or disappeared before we were born, whose English was so spotty that we were permanently cut off from them.

But a story in this morning’s Detroit Free Press  brings me back to our conversation.  While Kathy was thinking about grandparents, I was thinking about people like B. K. Gaskins.  He’s the guy in the picture above.  I’d ask him to tell me his story.  What was life like at its brightest?  What went wrong?  How does he survive?

I find this photo like one of those gold-limned icons

See my reading in the column to the left

It started with Krista Tippett's "On Being" weekly program on NPR.  John O'Donohue's voice drew me in.  Then I discovered Karen Armstrong's book.  And I found in their writing what I wanted to offer you.  So instead of writing these days, I'm soaking, making notes, so that when I'm moved to write again, it will be worth the extra words.  Please consider this reading, as well as browsing Tippett's programs for inspiring audio and video - http://being.publicradio.org/programs/

PEACE

john

A Last Word For Awhile

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.   We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Nelson Mandela said this in his 1994 Inaugural Address.  I’d like to use this as my last posting on intimacy, and my last posting for awhile.  As Mandela’s release from prison marked a great turning in South Africa, Churches that use the seasonal series of Scripture readings in their services called the Lectionary  approach a great turning, too. 

Who IS it? Come INNNNNNNNNNNNN!

Some quotes from the Speaking of Faith interview I linked yesterday:

That's what I call spirituality, the art of homecoming. So it's St. Augustine's phrase, "Deus intimior intimo meo" — "God is more intimate to me than I am to myself”.  And I think when you begin to get a sense of the depth that is there then your whole heart wakens up.

 I love Irenaeus' thing from the second century, which said, "The glory of God is the human being fully alive." And I think in our culture that one of the things that we are missing is that these thresholds where we can encounter this, and where we move into new change in our lives, there are no rituals to help us to recognize them or to cross them worthily.   I think that the threshold, if you go back to the etymology of the word "threshold," it comes from "threshing," which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.

This sense of threshold really stuck with me.  In the Petri dish of my reflection

Beauty at Our Threshold

Beannacht

("Blessing")

On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble,
May the clay dance to balance you.

And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window
and the ghost of loss gets in to you,
May a flock of colours, indigo, red, green, and azure blue
come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays in the currach* of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so

May a slow wind work these words of love around you,
an invisible cloak to mind your life.

 ~ John O'Donohue ~

*a currach is an Irish boat, lightweight because it is made from canvas stretched over a wooden frame.

John O’Donohue wrote this for his mother on the occasion of his father’s death.  I heard him read it in an interview with Krista Tippett, an interview that kept me from writing yesterday.  Here’s a link to the audio  and one to the program page with several links 

I encourage you to listen and be stopped as well.  Doesn’t God use beauty to cross the threshold of our resistance to intimacy?  

Are You Seeing Anyone?

Caravaggio's "Narcissus"

Intimacy is to know and to be known on the inside.   Erik Erikson  placed intimacy right after identity in his sequence of human development.  Identity is based on the Latin root idem meaning same.  Having an authentic identity means that we allow ourselves to appear on the outside as we really are on the inside. 

Erikson suggests that this task of identity normally takes place in our teenage years; that having achieved that task, we move on to intimacy, belonging to someone or something that resonates with us, that stirs our identity

Writing on Empty

Two hours ago I sat down at this keyboard and came up empty.  I looked at my closing “bridge” from yesterday, about spending the next few days on intimacy.  I looked at the “seeds” that I had described as being scattered next to the keyboard.  The phrases, vivid and moving to me yesterday when I wrote them, were dry and lifeless.   I went for a walk in the twilight, in the quiet, beautiful hills north of our house, into the Old Mission Peninsula, hills that were once covered by cherry trees, hills that provide a foothold now for us, on a rise of land between one beautiful bay and another.  As the road crested and I had a glance of the gilt reflection of the dawning sky on the still water of the East Bay, I remembered S’s face, telling me about the guy they found dead in the car submerged in the bay behind me, West Bay, the one nearer town. 

“Suicide”, S said; “I know it.”  He mentioned the guy they found burned in the smoldering car in the middle of the woods a week earlier.  “They couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, his facial muscles too exhausted to show the slightest emotion. 

Face to Face

The idea of the “Courting Chair” blew me away.  Blew me away: it took me by its power away from where I was, from whatever I was doing.  As I approached retirement, the thought of making something for each of our three adult kids was a recurring fantasy.  And from somewhere in my memory, I thought of the perfect heirloom: a courting chair.   It’s also called a tete-a-tete chair, because it provides seating for two, face to face, and even makes it natural to hold hands.  What a gift, I thought, inviting them to this kind of intimacy.  Even as I gathered photos of examples over the centuries and the construction details began t come together in my head, the practicality of the chair itself seemed to come apart

Afterword on Afterlife

I’d intended to move on today, beyond reflecting on the afterlife, which had been prompted by yesterday’s Scriptural readings from the Catholic Lectionary that focused on that issue.  But our priest delivered a masterful homily, and that homily brought me right back where I had been last Tuesday.  I had distracted him, he had said, when I admitted to not really believing the phrase from the Creed “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”  How could a person who worked for his whole life at a Catholic university say he did not believe this article of faith of his church, he’d said, shaking his head.  And yesterday he gave me a challenge by way of invitation.  Read the story yourself.  See what it does for you.

In the early 1900s, Charles Blondin became famous around the world for his tightrope walking.  When he had gathered a huge crowd at Niagara Falls and wowed them by crossing the gorge several times, he brought a wheelbarrow out onto the rope and asked if they believed he could walk across the rope with it.  The crowd roared that they believed he could.  When he asked the crowd if they believed he could wheel someone across the falls in that wheelbarrow, again the crowd roared their belief in him, applauding wildly.  But when he asked “since you all believe that I can do it, which of you will be the first to volunteer to climb into the wheelbarrow and prove it to the rest of the crowd?

How Subtile! (Not a typo)

Lithe & Lengthening, Thrifty & Thickening, and Soft & Slowing: Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson had their theories of human development; I have mine.  And as I look at the three generations of the Kathy and John family, it is clear that we move toward the next life whether we think about it or not.  Tomorrow’s readings are about that next life, occasioning this look of mine, this final day of it focusing on agility and subtility. 

I shared at the outset of this reflection on the next life that I’ve never felt bound by the Catholic Church Teaching on things.  If the root word of religion is, as in our word ligament something that holds us together, it is the example and words of Jesus, including the love of his Father and the constancy of their Spirit that hold me from coming apart.  But those Catholic Church Teachings gave me a great gift in sharing the four qualities of the body that it claims will rise after death and ascent to the heavenly realm.  I’ve shared about impassibility and brightness.  It is my family and the development of our generations that provide me with a way of looking at agility and subtility.

A week ago Kathy and I joined our granddaughters and their parents at a swimming pool.  Nadia has, over the past year, developed a swimmer’s body.  Almost as tall as her Nana and fresh from the summer’s swimming lessons, I watched in disbelief as she sliced smoothly through the water; backstroke and breaststroke were  equally graceful and natural. Her sister Sonja is growing quickly too, and so our grandkids together personify the lithe and lengthening stage

Rise and Shine

Our "risen" bodies, according to the Catholic encyclopedia, will have four qualities.  The first is "impassibility", which shall place them beyond the reach of pain and inconvenience.  The second quality is "brightness", or "glory", by which we shine freely, like the sun.  


Yesterday I wrote of the distractions of inconvenience in the bodies we walk around with, now-bound and not-so-heavenly.  But I wrote little about pain, about the darkness of it that holds us back from the second “quality” of the bodies that Catholic tradition projects will be ours in the next life. That quality is brightness. And remember that my own premise is that “afterlife” doesn’t wait, but lurks, looms, lives in us now, if we claim it. 

Ah, this word claim reminds me of a story.  There was a professor loved by his former students, one of whom sent him, without fail, a beautifully boxed and wrapped handkerchief every Christmas.  After a few years, he had quite enough handkerchiefs, and stopped opening the boxes, simply stacking them in his closet.  He would write a kind but cursory thank-you note, expressing his gratitude for the “gift”.  Eventually the student died, and the professor grew old.  Without a pension, he struggled to pay his rent

Impassible: Impossible Here NOW?

Marcel Ayme' memorial, Montmarte, Paris

I'm struggling with risenness. Our risen bodies, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, will have four qualities.  The first is "impassibility", which shall place them beyond the reach of pain and inconvenience.  The others are brightness, agility, and subtility.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel ignited elegantly my speculation when he wrote the phrase “hereafter and here now.”  As next Sunday’s readings revolve around life after death,  Rabbi Heschel’s phrase gives me license, I think, to consider that God is not bound by time, and perhaps, as Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven,” that we live

Heavenly Bodies

This morning we are looking at red and blue again, and blues are feeling, well…blue.  Two years ago some of us had blue yard signs that said CHANGE.  Two years ago we couldn’t help being swept up in a sort of Messianic fervor, looking for somebody who could save us from what was.    And sure enough, we found out that the messianic figure that we elected ran into a few walls.

Jesus had his walls too.  The structures that were in place were holding him back from this love, love, love thing: The Father loves me, and so I love you, and so love each other.  It seemed like he fought all sides. 

There were the priests and the Levites, the ones who conducted sacrifice and codified Jewish law, who controlled the religious aspects of Jewish life.  The Romans left them with that power, to mollify them and weave them into the fabric of sustainable control.  There were the Pharisees, who looked at external conformity, while Jesus looked deeper.  And this Sunday, Jesus takes on the Sadducees, who recognize only the first five books of Scripture, the history and law, and reject even the prophets.  They also believe that there is no afterlife, and that is what they take up with Jesus in the form of argument.  They come up with a conundrum, a hypothetical case of law regarding a woman with seven widowed husbands and no children.  Which of them, they ask him, will be her husband in heaven?  Their intention is to make him look foolish, along with the whole idea of the afterlife.

The readings put me in a jam.  I’m not sure about this heaven thing. 

Hereafter? HereNOW? Both?

“You mean you don’t believe in General Resurrection?”  My friend john was incredulous.  He’s known me since college, admired me as his counselor . . . and considered me a “good Catholic.”  That was a week ago.  This morning I will sit with the men in my Tuesday morning fellowship, and we will look together at the coming Sunday’s Gospel.  And wouldn’t you know, it’s about just that subject. 

Take a look at the readings for the day:  .  Old Testament characters accept death courageously, assuming that they will live beyond death.  Jesus takes a trick question.  And perhaps we are invited to consider something that we sweep under our prayer rug.   I know I am.  I hope you check out my daily reflections on this as they unfold this week.

Suffering, Loss, and . . . Blessing?

I will not let you go until you give me your blessing.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke eloquently of happiness and the reality of suffering on a recent program on Krista Tippet On Being  .  Perhaps it was not accidental that he had just arrived at the panel discussion after “sitting Shiva”  , the Jewish ritual of mourning, for his mother.  Tippett had asked him how, with its well developed awareness of suffering, Judaism considered happiness.  And that is when Sacks referred to the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives,

Zeke II - The Sequel: Convert or Revert?

The past four days I’ve reflected on the story of a self-seeking guy who has a turnaround.  He has an epiphany – which means an opening, a window through which he sees life differently, a door through which he is drawn, into a place that calls him to change.  We don’t know what made Zeke climb that tree.  We know that Moses and his burning bush, and Paul got knocked off his horse by a voice.  We know from their becoming ongoing characters in Scripture stories that those epiphanies pretty much stuck, that by and large they got turned around and stayed that way.  But Zacchaeus/Zeke is a bit player, steals a scene or two and then is gone.  We don’t know if he stayed changed, or if he reverted to his old self after awhile.

Heart and Home

A good story can fool you; it can take you where courage would not.  A good storyteller knows your heart, and knows how to get in.  But the really good storyteller knows how to take you by the hand and walk you through your own heart.  This story of Zeke in the last two postings is our own story, and the house Jesus is entering is not merely our house, messy as it is, but our own heart. 

As soon as Jesus tells Zacchaeus he is coming over, Z starts to clean up.  He’ll give to the poor half of all he has.  His home and heart are crowded with stuff that he thought would make him happy, perhaps.  He needs to make room for this Rock Star who knows his name, and apparently knows his heart, knows that if there’s to be room for him, Z’s got some cleaning out to do

Guess Who's Dropping In!

In yesterday’s posting, I played with the story of Zacchaeus  and Jesus calling him down from the tree he climbed on to get a better view than his short legs would give him.  I gave him a casual name, Zeke, in the hope of bringing the story into the present, making it easier for us to put ourselves into the story.  I want us to be able to enter the story because it is basic theo-logy, the meaning of God to us.   I called Zacchaeus “Zeke” to make him more like a common person, more like you and me.  Zeke was a “what’s in it for me” kind of guy.  

When I was working in Student Life at University of Detroit Mercy  I was always looking for ways to get us in the media, to let folks see how good we were.  On the Monday of Halloween week one year, I had the brainstorm of calling a local DJ who was a UDM alumnus for help.  On Friday nights, he was “Count Scary,” the ghoulishly costumed host of a horror movie show on local TV.  His character was just kitschy enough to make him popular, especially around Halloween.  I called him and asked him if as an alumnus he would make an appearance

Are You Out Of Your Tree?

Zeke was clever.  No flies on him!  Even if there had been rocket scientists around in 61 BCE when the Romans world conquest included Jerusalem, it would not have taken one – a rocket scientist that is, to see the advantages in joining the conquerors.  The Roman Empire seems to have been able to spread expand so broadly not only through military might, but through their policy of leaving locals in charge.  Local religious customs were allowed to continue, and local government.  The Romans posted soldiers and collected taxes to cover the cost of occupation and send some money back to Mama and the bambini in Roma.  This is where Zeke comes in.

Zeke was clever.  He was always looking for an angle.  He felt like he needed an angle to make up for the fact that he was the shortest of the kids he ran with.  His mother told him he ought to be a lawyer.  And so

Gift of Story; Story of Gift

Did you ever think of how a gift is like an onion?  I see a brightly wrapped box.  Then as I unwrap it, it becomes a sequence of clues, and a challenge not only to discover what it is, but how I should act receiving it.  Will I like it or not?  How will I act if I do not so that the giver is not hurt?  Then it becomes a thing, an object that I can identify, that has a connotation, a name that it is generally called.  It is, for example, a toaster. 

“A toaster", I might exclaim, and before the words reach the nearest wall, it becomes a matter of why-ness.  Why did this person give me a toaster?  I look at the toaster, but it gives me no answer.  So I look at the face of the giver. 

Whose Heartbeat?

Le Pichon’s references (in the previous postings) to the heart being educated by relationship, and the idea of our being born not with full humanity but with full potential of humanity drew me into powerful musing, and a powerful experience.

One of the gifts of a lifetime in relationships with Jesuits was the theological garden of delights of Karl Rahner, S.J.    One of his essential ideas is that humanity perfectly developed is divinity, that since we are formed in the likeness of God, it is Godliness that is our true nature. 

Kathy has been out away for three or four days, returning today from a visit with friends in Detroit.  When she is gone, my sleep changes.  I waken at night and do not fall immediately back to sleep.  And so instead of waking quickly and clearly and early, I find myself stirring slowly, doing what most of call “sleeping in”

Educating the Heart

 Xavier le Pichon (see the previous posting) said it: we are not born all at once with fullness of humanity, but with the capacity for full humanity.  We grow human (the French would interchange the English word “humane”) as we choose to live in relationship.  Educating the heart, he says, is not done by ourselves alone; it is done in relationship.  When the kids were infants and toddlers, we lived in a very simple flat with one small bathroom.  In that bathroom was a window with a type of privacy glass that was designed

The Gift of Fragility

“It is at this instant that I suddenly discovered that my life would never be the same: I could not go back to my lab and continue to live as before. The “Poor” had knocked at my door. I had opened it. He had entered and was now with me forever. Borrowing the words of Isaiah⁴, I had recognized in this child my own flesh and I could not escape any more. I did not know his name and yet he had given me a new name that I had been expecting for years. Within his suffering, my new friend had a mysterious power of presence that had enlightened my own self. In exchange for the small amount of love that I had been manifesting in my own poor way, I had received the gift of the Spirit of God who was dwelling in him. Through this gift I had been confirmed in the depth of my living being, that is of my loving being, who needs presence and who needs at the same time to give himself and to be received fully within a unique relationship.”

Xavier le Pichon: do you know who he is?  Rather than writing today, I encourage you to listen to Krista Tippett’s interview with him, to read his essay “Ecce Homo”.  My words would be a shallow reflection of his.  HERE is a link to the “On Being” web page   Enjoy.

On Wings of Doubtful Prayer

We’re told that the cry of the poor reaches the heavens and does not return until it has done its work.   I think we’re taken there too, when the poor who cry out in prayer is us.

The question of God answering our prayers is perhaps akin to that of asking why a loving God would allow tragedies.  When I read this chapter of Sirach, there is a part of me that wings heavenward, and a part of me that remains here in the mire of doubt. 

I watched a film, simply entitled “Paris” in the opening scene of which a character is told that he has a potentially fatal heart condition.  He wanders

Do We Listen?

Sometimes in my waking, I find that it is words that stir me.  When last year I thought that my life might be radically shortened by the aneurism that now seems benign, I would take these waking words as legacy, as a gem to polish and display for the sake of its beauty, as a gift I was given to leave behind.  I would gratefully and dutifully rise and write.  More often now when I am stirred by waking words I am fooled by their clarity and brilliance to believe that they are unforgettable, that they will return to me

Puck the Dog on Freedom

I sit here wondering why I do this, why I write.  Are there not already words enough to . . . what, to lift the curtain of unknowing, to enkindle a flame of hope, to scrape against the heavy stone of our lives some flint that gives off a spark – of hope, or passion, or dream?

Kathy hasn’t said “hello” very often lately.  She hasn’t seen me returning from being absent-minded, self-centered, somewhere else right here.  For the first year or so, of retirement that is, I confess I wanted to be released; I just wanted to be free to do what I wanted.  I’d worked for 41 years, been married for 40, woken on 3000 Sundays thinking “Mass”.  She would find me arriving several times a day, returning from wherever I had been, right there beside her.  And so several times a day, she’d say “Hello.”

I took Puck for a short walk last night.  He’s a really good dog.  Our daughter and son-in-law trained him

Justice: Let it RAIN!

I confess that I have misunderstood the Bioneers.  I thought that they were dreamers who would not even see a hungry person while rushing to clean up a river.  There’s a lot of land conservancy activity up here, a lot of bird counting and removal of dams to let the fish spawn more naturally.   So I won’t beat myself up for turning my back on the Bioneers in order to give my time to working with homelessness and poverty.  But I’m glad I discovered that they’re into justice, too.  It is Bioneers weekend here, and their promotional information has been everywhere for the past two months.  About a month ago, I bothered to read the elegantly clear and simple motto for the Great Lakes Bioneers 9^th Annual Conference:” Inspiring Action for People and Planet”.  The word “People” jumped out at me

What Do You Stand For?

Standing for something is often fighting against things pushing us down.  But some golden times, it is giving in to something lifting us up.  Moses is standing there, high up where he can see his armies, high there holding his arms up to his God.  As long as he can stand, holding high the staff, the rod that God had turned into a serpent, and then into a staff again, the armies advance.  When he tires and cannot stand like that as God has instructed him, the armies falter.  It is a battle not only against the Amalekites, but against his own exhaustion.  The armies, which had been advancing as Moses stood strong, were now struggling as Moses was weakening.  The day was saved by the support, literally, of his older brother

Did You SEE That Beggar?

I said yesterday that I had been awakened by the word more.  After a Tuesday of prayer first thing in the morning and spending time with my homeless friends at the shelter last thing in the evening, I had wakened to that one word.  And I know why.

Find God in them, we were told, in the ones we couldn’t stand, in the ones who drove us nuts.  Find Christ in them.  It was probably grade school, and it was possibly the nun who was teaching us that was one of those in whom we tried to find God.  What sounds like a call to compassion was more an application of fear in those days when heaven and hell were used far more often than today, when life was a slow but certain progress toward one or the other, and when we were never, except in those moments of blissfully weightless strolls from the confessional, quite comfortable with where we would end up.  

Finding God in them meant “you’d better not ignore me if I show up.”  The Messiah would, you know – show up, I mean.  Jesus said he’d come back.  He also said that at the end of the world there would be a big sorting out.  Wheat would go into the barns and weeds into the fire.  Sheep would go into heaven and goats to hell.  And the bad ones would find out that the beggar they ignored was, you guessed it

Time's a-Wastin'!

"Cows in the Morning" courtesy Michiel1972

It was the morning ritual.  My Aunt Arlene’s dad, Gust Kopack, would sweep into the back porch of the farmhouse after milking the cows, peeling off his striped denim coveralls with their faint sweet smell of fresh milk, the first strap off his shoulder before the screen door thwacked behind him, and he’d hang them all in one motion on the hook next to the door to the house, calling to my Uncle Joe, “Come on, Joe, time’s a-wastin’!”  And off they’d go to fish for the trout we’d have for breakfast.

Time’s a-wastin’.  “Gust” was what

The Wait of Words

I write in the morning, the still dark mornings of autumn, before the time change, when it seems that is the middle of the night and I should be sleeping, but words begin.

At Mass yesterday (does this make it prayer?) I was musing about my writing lately, about how it felt, often, like a pile of words, a too-heavy pile of words added to words.  I thought about poetry, about how it gives the reader not an answer, and not even a question, but an unknowing that calls for time, time to slow down, and perhaps even stop, to listen, like when you thought you heard something and stopped

A Wolf in the Meadow?

New York City, Manhattan Island: so many people, so little that eye contact.  On our little block on Warrington in Detroit, we had thrived on eye contact.  Our faces helped each other feel safe, cared about, known and appreciated.  But here my brother Dan warned me, as we left his nondescript red brick ten-story apartment building in the Garment District, to stop that, greeting people on the sidewalk, saying “good morning.”  I gave him my little brother “Yeah, yeah” smile but he said it again, big brotherishly.  “You don’t do that here.”  Even in the Grand Street Subway station, when people entering the turnstiles faced those exiting the adjacent turnstiles, there was not a glance at each other.  On the subway as we rode up toward Central Park I noticed that people would look at others, but look away when their looking was noticed by their subjects.  There was curiosity, but not communication.  When we

Prayer and Works III: God's Math

In the Kingdom, it’s a whole new ballgame.  Here’s a box score a colleague sent my years ago after a frustrating committee meeting during which I refused to give in to pessimistic assumptions.  He admired my resolute optimism.  To the logical person, this doesn’t add up.  The idealists scored one in the second and one in the eight, and thus have only two runs, thus losing the game.  But my friend Jeff was a minister, and knew God’s math is different.

My name in John, and I’m a workaholic.  I don’t like to stop.  Back in the 50s when I was growing up, the Catholic Mass was in Latin.  The priest, robed in heavy brocade chasuble and lace-hemmed white surplice would say Mass with his back to the congregation, but every once in awhile he would turn, face the people, open his folded hands toward them and say “Oremus”: Let us pray.  There would be

Prayer and Works II

We had a great babysitter when the kids were small, a generous, mature young woman who, through high school and college, was so good and loved us so much that every year or two, she would encourage us to leave not just for an evening, but for a whole weekend, her gift to us.  The kids loved her, and she enjoyed getting out of her own house, one of eight kids there.  One such weekend Kathy and I drove across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario and took the train to Toronto. 

Neither of us had been on a train for years, and we thought it kind of exotic.  But in actuality, the rail beds were in such disrepair that instead of the train gliding through the little towns on the way, it had to slow down terribly, rocking and rolling over the uneven tracks, to avoid derailment.  On the way back, about a half mile from Windsor’s Walkerville Station, the train did actually come to a grinding halt off the rails, despite having slowed down to less than

Prayer and Works I

When I stop working with the homeless, I forget that the world is wounded in a way that I can help heal.  When I stop reading Scripture, I forget that I am wounded in a way that God can help heal.  I wrote this to a friend, Dave Nichols, who in his retirement continues to serve much as he did in his “working” life as a Baptist Minister, writing and serving.  Every few days I receive from him the latest in his reflections on Scripture.  Often my busyness finds me giving them a cursory look and filing them in my “ought to read” file.  Yesterday by Gods grace I happened to really read what he sent, and it was so good that I dropped him a note of gratitude.  It ended with the statement above, which struck me with their elegance.

Prayer and “works” – the way of a person of faith.  Last month when our nephew died suddenly, one of our daughters blessed us with a fruitful reflection.  She was so struck by the goodness and perseverance of our nephew’s parents, in light of their having lost both of their adult children in two years.  She said that all of our lives ride on two rails, joy and tragedy, and the path of our lives curves to shift our weight onto one or the other, but we are always in contact with both.  We keep from overturning by accepting the support of both rails.  Yesterday my note to Dave seems to have pointed out to me two such rails on which the person of faith moves forward without falling over.  I’ll take this for a ride tomorrow.

Now You're Cookin'

In leisure there is reverie.  Memoires that have been following us, perhaps running on little legs to keep up with us when we are busy, finally can catch up with us.  Sometimes they seem to secretly run ahead of us when we are not looking and stand there, waiting for us to come face to face with them, so they can see the surprise on our faces.  My parents have been doing that these weeks of summer have given way to the hunkering down, the husbanding of homes toward the great and welcoming winter quiet. 

Just now as I was cleaning out yesterday’s ashes from the wood stove and starting today’s fire, my mom came back to me.  I was nursing the new fire along as it struggled to catch from paper to workshop scraps to newly seasoned and split logs.  It makes me think of the nation’s economy, as I

Grounded and Graying...GASP!

Mile after mile I had to fight the urge to just turn my head left and gawk!   I had flown down to Tucson to visit my uncle in the hospital there, and after lifting his spirits I was driving his car southwest to his house for a night’s rest.  I grew up near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, waking each morning to the sound of the jets warming up, and fell asleep watching them line up in the sky to land.  It would be a decade before I would actually fly on one, but my imagination soared for years of my childhood.  These silver birds were a symbol of freedom and adventure for me.  Here in the Arizona desert, their silver was oxidizing to dull gray in sand-locked formations, wing-tip to wing-tip, nose to tail, mile after mile.  An unceremonious chain link fence, gray like their wings, completed the picture of uselessness and decline.  In Detroit I saw miles and

We make the road by walking

It happened again, even with that job, the one I loved so much, the last one.  Kathy and I were driving from our room at Manresa to the campus for an annual dinner, one of these traditions that will likely bring us back down to Detroit from our new home 250 miles north.  As I drove the route down Woodward that I had taken every day for the last ten years at the university, I was surprised to feel it: revulsion.

My first job was washing dishes at the Crestwood Snack Shop, a typical strip mall mom and pop restaurant that was a three mile bike ride from my parents' house in Des Plaines, a suburb of Chicago.  I was 15, but fibbed about my age so I could start working.  For that summer halfway through High School I washed dishes the old fashioned way, in a huge stainless steel double-tub sink, with dish soap that was so caustic that

Frugality and Faith

Slo-Poke.  If you tried to bite it, it would pull your teeth out.  Your only choice was to suck on it.  Well, I suppose you could lick it, but the tongue alone was not enough to really work at that hard caramel, to soften it with (ha!  my mouth just started watering) the saliva that did its job so well,  transforming that hard, sticky candy into sweet syrup that could delight every one of the 10,000 taste buds, not only on the tongue, but under it, and on the insides of the cheeks, and on the lips.    

But the best thing about a Slo-Poke was that it lasted for a long time.  The Sisters of St. Francis of Mary Immaculate had come from downstate, from Joliet, in 1924 to be exact, to teach the children of St. Mary’s School, and they introduced me, I discovered years later

Go Ahead...USE It!

If someone gave you a new car, would you leave it in the garage?  Seems like a waste, doesn’t it? 

Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,
so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
if it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late.

I was probably 50 when I began taking evening courses at the University, long after I had received my last degree.  I took them because I realized that soon I’d be retired and not be able to do so.  It seemed like a waste not to use this resource that was free to me as an employee.  When some of the traditionally aged students saw me walk into the classroom and take a seat at a desk just like them, they squirmed and commented to each other that they might have a poorer chance for a good grade with old guys like me there.  But it was one of those students who provided me

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