Turning and Knowing

I’m blessed with two daughters.  One has light hair, the other dark.  One has Kathy’s blue eyes, the other my brown eyes.  Like two seeds that fall adjacent to each other on the ground and germinate, they grow with their roots intertwined, but the each grows toward the light their own way, branches often in opposing directions.  Their comments on Saturday’s posting (We Cannot Jump Off Our Own Shadow) share two perspectives worth a look.  Amy looks at the turning, and the stillness within it, referring to T.S. Eliot’s Quartets, specifically “Burnt Norton”.  Margie points out that the very existence of a shadow is evidence of light.   Remember making shadow puppets on the wall?  Remember how you could make them bigger by moving closer to the light?

In any real life, we will be turned around.  Will we feel for the stillness in which we are rooted, and know our stability, our source? 

When we face nothing but darkness, will we understand that the largest shadow is cast by the nearest light?  I pray for these two gifts for all of us – for the sense of stillness in our center, undisturbed by turning; for the sure knowledge of the light, and its closeness in the darkest times.

Thanks, my two bright girls.

We Cannot Jump Off Our Own Shadow

(Dealing With Crises, Midlife or Other)


At 7 AM, I’d report to my boss Tony Cordova and his cousin Modesto so we could get most of our work done in the cooler parts of the day.  Each summer they drove up from Texas, leaving their families behind and sending their money south to feed them.  They worked my Anglo butt pretty hard, I a willing idealist glad to give them the upper hand, knowing my time at hard labor was not, as theirs, a life sentence.  By 3:30, they piled into their Chevy Hardtop and I hit the showers for my evening job staffing the motel swimming pool until 9.  

And that’s when I developed a way of orienting myself to the sun.  I was a teenager, a guy who thought having a tan made me look good.  Working on the grounds gave me a farmer’s tan.  From a distance, when I put on my trunks for my pool job, you’d think I was wearing a tee shirt, my pale skin refused the sun all day.  So as soon as I’d arranged

Happiness?

Spreadsheets or bedsheets:

our striving calls us either

to crude oil or wine.

Is THIS Better, or THIS?

Most of us have had our eyes checked.  We sit and look through a contraption that allows the optometrist to give us a choice of lenses.  “Is this better, or…this?”  At the beginning of the test the differences are obvious.  But as the print gets smaller, finer and finer distinctions are needed.

Karen Armstrong reminds us again and again in her works, most notably in The Case for God that we are given two very different lenses to make meaning of life’s print, especially as it gets smaller.  

Logos is the application of logic.  It’s the root of the word, in fact, as well as the root of theology, psychology, sociology, etc – the meaning and understanding of god, mind, and groups, respectively.  But she reminds us that there is another lens that allows us to see clearly at the parts of reality that are illogical: mythos.

Instead of laying out steps of understanding Scripture to teach us their meaning, Bernie Owens would open us up to allow the Scripture to teach us from within, to enable the words to sound their note and help us feel for resonances arising from within ourselves.  In one of his homilies, he played a hauntingly meditative piece of music, Pachelbel’s now overused Canon in D

Risen, Sights Raised

Bill and Billie choose a new word each new year.  Last year, the year that they sold their perfectly wonderful, wonderfully comfortable house to move to a much more challenged part of Detroit in order to participate in urban gardening, their word was “resilient”.  While their move was within the city limits, the contrast between their old and new neighborhoods was enormous.  Their old neighborhood near the University of Detroit Mercy was among the most desirable in the city.  Neighbors took care of their homes on tree-lines streets and most yards were beautifully cared for.  Their new neighborhood has streets that are worn, with less than half of the original houses occupied, many no longer standing.  It is also the locus of a hopeful community, that plants food in the broken places, farming the empty lots.

It was almost February by the time I realized I did not know Bill and Billie’s word for this year, after they had worn last year’s “resilience” so nobly.  The new word, it turns out, is “tranquility”.  Because I was in Germany when I’d asked him, he included the German translation of the word, Ruh, used in the German original of Silent Night, designating the “peace” in which we sleep, heavenly. As soon as I read the word Ruh, I recalled it as a word in the powerfully moving closing song of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.  Auferstehen, the song begins: “Rise again” the song tells us; our ashes, after a short “rest”, Ruh.  I first heard Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony, “Resurrection”, when I was crafting a sarcophagus, a box for the cremated remains of a friend.  

For hours while I worked on the box, I listened over and over to the music.  While the wood of the box was changed forever by my tools, I was forever changed by Mahler’s music.  Bill knew of that experience, and some years later he gave Kathy and me a pair of tickers to experience its performance at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall.  We sat in center seats, just twenty feet

Mysterium Inhabitum

My friend Dave shares about his life with a voice that quivers easily.  He’s so aware of the holiness of everything and especially everyone that he often has to hesitate in speaking to let the wave of emotion to wash over his heart so his tongue will speak clearly.  He’s in a holy place all the time when he considers his life.

With a recent experience, I was reminded of times when I felt this experience of being in a holy place, at times when holiness flared up, like the Aurora Borealis, bright enough for me to see it even amid the bright distractions of my life.  These were time when I was inclined to recline, to stop everything and allow my body to be weak and still, to be absent from everything else to respond to the presence of the moment.

When my brother Dan died I was visiting my son in Spain.  I’d known that he would die, lost as he was in a self-destructive lifestyle from which I was forbidden by him to meddle.  I was not tough enough to intervene, to try to use force on him, my older brother who had force on his side even in the way he loved me.  I knew that my time with Chris was the present calling to my mind and heart,

Shake Shake Shake…Shine Shine Shine

Salt of the Earth. Light for the World. This Sunday’s Gospel has Jesus following up his blockbuster Beatitudes that beats Mapquest for a certain, simple route to the beautiful life:  Be salt.  Be light.

On Tuesday mornings I enjoy what is in many ways the lynchpin of my retired life, the commitment around which my other-than-Kathy life revolves.  I drive three miles to Immaculate Conception Church to meet with a small group of men to look at the following Sunday’s Gospel together, to seek in it some guidance for us as men wanting to live beautiful lives as heads of families. We gather in early morning darkness, into a warm circle of light in a room adjoining the church.   For decades I had enjoyed something similar in Detroit.  It was men only too, but it started because the women we knew were way ahead of us, getting to know each other more easily than we more individualistic males.  So here I am again, sitting in a warm circle of increasingly candid and trusting men as we look for guidance from God in scripture and each other.

This Traverse City gathering concerned me when I first heard about it, because it specifically called out to men who were heads of families.  The Men of St. Joseph it is called, from a group that started in the South.  I was afraid of this man thing, men taking and holding the lead in their families, their communities, their church.  I long for a Church that opens all doors to women.  To have them follow a step behind so that men can remain out front is repulsive to me.  But last Tuesday was an example of how the group is freeing me from that concern about male supremacy.

Steven had agreed to play the weekly role of reading and studying the week’s gospel, and preparing for us some introductory remarks to help us discuss it together.  He is among the quieter of us, less likely to speak up, and when he does speak, he speaks quietly, gently, modestly, with gestures that soften, rather than harden, his words.  And when he prepares remarks, they are thorough, and carry their own authority.  He writes like a theologian, with carefully crafted sentences that build logically, that end not in a conclusion, but a call to us to provide our own. 

This week’s Gospel, Matthew 5:13-16 is about salt and light.  We are called to be salt of the earth, light to the world.  And Steven did not disappoint.  Salt preserves, he said.  Salt preserves.  His study provided us with all kinds of insights about salt, about light, about the small windows in the houses of the time, and the way lights had to be raised high for the light to spread.  We listened in rapt attention as he spun his story, and then it was finished, and he was smiling shyly at us in his spent silence…and it hit me.

Steven was the salt.  He was the light.  Nothing about his message was about him.  It was all about the Scripture, about the message.  Nothing was about the messenger.  Salt does not serve itself.  It preserves the thing salted; it flavors the food on which it is used.  It dissolves and becomes part of that thing on which it is used.  We can’t see light; we see only what light shines on.  Light serves us by showing us what is.  It does not show us itself.  So here we were, Men of St. Joseph, heads of families, learning from the words of Jesus by the effective teaching of one of his messengers, who was teaching us by well crafted words and uncrafted example, by being salt of the earth for us, by being the light of Christ to the big world in our little circle.

Riffing Through our Hearts

One morning last week I woke up from a dream with a vision, an image.  It was a heart that could be riffed through like a stack of cards, and each “slice” was like a record, with grooves, baby.  It turns out that it was the birthday of Etta James.  Her “Roll with Me Henry” was also titled “Wallflower”.  I was only 9, but already knew that I would be a wallflower for awhile.  My cousin Cathy would unselfconsciously jitterbug with the black-painted post in my uncle’s basement in front of everybody, beckoning me to dance with her.  But to my shy self, the thought of dancing was terrifying.   But by the time “At Last” was recorded I was 14, and indeed a wallflower, and understood completely how wonderful it would be if at last a girl would come along and save me from my wall. 

Our daughter in Cleveland serves the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in spreading the good news – that our hearts are indeed stacks of records, juke boxes of memory.  Research supports the connection – here’s a link to a recent study.   But I like my waking image, the heart as a stack of records.

I said records, not internet- downloaded MP3’s or laser-cut CDs, or even magnetic tapes.  Records were discs of vinyl that started out like our brains, smooth and clear.  The vibrations of music were gathered by a microphone, connected by wires to a

Cable Cars, Lake Shore Drive, and a Banker Moved to Tears

Sinatra was wrong.  Isolated in full view of thousands of neighbors, this image from my first home town blew me away, like the snow off Lake Michigan.  “I started to worry I might run out of gas and be frozen,” Ms. Theroux, 23, recalled on Wednesday in a tired, strained voice. “I’m from a small town in Minnesota, where if you get stranded, you’re basically all alone. But here I was, right here, and I felt the same way — completely isolated.”  The quote saddened me.  Chicago was not, for these unfortunates stranded in a blizzard on Lake Shore Drive, “one town that won’t let you down.” 

Meanwhile, in our little wind-blown latest home town in northern Michigan, 300 of us drive through that same storm to a warm and welcoming place to hear a report on “Poverty to Progress”  after the first few years of our Poverty Reduction Initiative.  The program began with a video of a local banker who gives us a teaser, describing how he received a call asking him to help another bank’s customer.  The PRI "Navigator" wanted to help a neighbor not lose their home, and they needed him to call his competition to encourage him to use an available federal program.  But he didn’t tell us how the story ended.  He told us that we’d see as the morning progressed.  He was right.

We heard from the champions of the program, the founders of PRI.  They showed us slides that described the mission, the strategy, the progress.  Then they introduced us to neighbors who had been served by “Navigators”, those who were not threatened by poverty who had the time and means to help neighbors connect with available resources. 

We heard Carron tell us how she had grown up so poor that as a small child she would fall asleep with a bit of food in her cheek so that she would have something for the next day…and we wept with her.  We heard Mike tell us how he had for years “used substances to

Maypoles, Cable Cars, and Yoga Socks

In Excess, Access, and the State of our Souls  I suggested that the great divide in much of our world is between those trying to climb out of the darkness of poverty and those who have slid all the way down the other side to lives of detached comfort.  And I proposed that detached comfort is its own darkness, more insidious than poverty because it is bereft of striving for escape.  The poor can strive to escape poverty, after all, but do the successful or comfortable strive to escape success or comfort? 

“MasterCard, I’m bored” says the roughly handsome, gravelly voiced actor, and the commercial responds to a cacophonous sequence of stimulating “opportunities” for distraction from boredom.  Kids pile out of the family van at the Grand Canyon and instead of looking at the canyon, eagerly sit in front of a large-screen television showing the same image.  The mother who found meaning raising her grown kids, the professional who retires…at some point many who are comfortable or successful begin to sense that there is something that has been lost.  But in Excess, Access, and the State of our Souls I suggested that the climb out of the darkness of comfort is difficult.  It’s hard to get a grip. 

Kathy and I were visiting our son in Europe when we happened upon a May Day celebration, with all attention on the climbing of a Maypole.  With German music playing and lots of beer flowing, a few men would swagger up to the pole and make very serious attempts to climb up.  They would wrap their arms around the smooth wooden pole, then wrap their legs around, and by alternating grip on their arms and legs, try to “shinny” up.  As we watched, it became clear that the more clothing that they wore, the greater their disadvantage.  Their sleeves and their pants legs would kind of roll back every time they re-gripped the pole.  Their progress was kind of two feet up, one foot back.  Eventually this would exhaust them.  Those observing this began to roll up their sleeves, remove their shirts, and even roll up their pants legs, and they came closer to the top before eventually giving up and sliding down.  Finally an inebriant stripped down to his jockey shorts, trying to keep his back to as much of the crowd as possible, and was able to shinny up without the impediment of sleeves or pants legs.

In order to get a grip, he needed to abandon those things that made him appear decent.  I wouldn’t have done that.  I would have been embarrassed.   I think that to the extent that we are comfortable, we face the same dilemma.  To climb out of the ennui or lack of meaning that we experience, we need to get a grip on life enough to climb out of comfort.  It can be humiliating.  We can appear foolish. 

Yoga socks?   I have learned that on cold mornings when I’d like to do yoga before the heat comes on, my temptation to put on warm socks is foolish.  Like the Germans shinnying up that maypole, my feet slip out of the socks.  So I deal with cold feet, and find that it’s not long before the exercise warms them up.  When I walk along the snowy roads up and down our peninsula here in northern Michigan, I find I warm up going uphill and cool off coming down.  The uphill climb toward a life of justice warms us.  But there is in this argument so far a foolishness born in individualism.  

Tomorrow, the answer of the San Francisco cable cars.

Access? Excess? The State of our Souls

This morning as I was scanning The Daily Beast  for responses to the State of the Union Address, a misread word gave me a great insight: I’d misread the word access as excess.  This Sunday many churches will preach on the Sermon on the Mount, and what many see as a high point in Jesus’ rhetoric, the Beatitudes.  They speak of satisfaction, of seeing the face of God, of inheriting the Kingdom of God.  Just a week ago we remembered another great orator tell a multitude gathered in Washington that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the Promised Land.

But the mountain that appeared in my mind (clear as the electronic bell on my cell phone that woke me) was a bell-curve, what statisticians call the graph of normal distribution.  On the leftmost “tail” of the curve I saw the word “access.”  On the rightmost end, I saw “excess”.  And in this simple chart I saw the dilemma of my world, my country, and myself.  We fight for access to what we need, and those of us who acquire what we need are often carried forward in our momentum to acquiring what we want.  We felt our needs from the inside, from our stomachs and our hearts and our cold fingers and the faces of our children.  But these wants come from the outside, from advertising and the smell of perfume on a passing mannequin. 

In our climb up the mountain of equitable distribution for access, our momentum carries some of us all the way down the other side, to a life of comfortable and comforting excess.  There the bright lights of success keep us from the truth that we are not, after all, in the Promised Land, but again in a valley, kept from the mountaintop of true happiness not by affliction, but by comfort.

In our times of compassion, we consider the hard climb for the poor, out of the valley of their need; we consider the justice of providing access.  But how often do we consider our own inability to climb that same mountain from our comfortable side, where our possessions are an impediment to the journey?

Next:  Maypoles, Cable Cars, and Yoga Socks

Persons Start Big and are Edited Smaller

It seems to me that persons start big, and are edited smaller and smaller.  I woke this morning from an interesting dream.  Dan Mulhern is a kind of soul-mate, a dreamer engaged in leadership development who happens to be the husband of the now former Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm.  I have known Dan casually and professionally for all of his wife’s two-term tenure, and because I receive his weekly leadership newsletter, I suppose he has been on my mind, including moving out of their home and lifestyle with the election of the new Governor. 

When our son was in High School, he was able to spend a weekend in the Governor’s Summer Residence, not for any political engagement, but because the father of a friend of his was an architect who helped keep the historic building up to its character and history.  So in my dream last night, I imagined Dan and Jennifer packing for their move out of that huge building, the place full of boxes and boxes of stuff, knowing they could not keep it all, and trying to decide what to keep and what to pitch.  The pile got smaller and smaller, but every decision was hard, and there was an accumulating cloud of awareness of what was being lost in the culling. 

This morning Dan’s newsletter was quite relevant, all about repotting.  Here’s a link.  When I woke from the dream, I thought of the folks I work with at Goodwill Inn, homeless people who have felt so much behind, who are bereft not only of belongings, but belonging.  Their careers are gone, their homes, their families.  I thought of children in Newark, after watching “Brick City”  , a five-episode film of a few months of real life in that real place. We’re told that we love to look at babies because their eyes are adult sized when they are born, and so their faces are so beckoning to us.  

Agnosticism and the Cost to Love

Psychologists in the 60’s coined "S-O-R" at the same time a group called "The Teddy Bears" sang “To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him….”

A newborn baby, wrapped in a soft blanket, shiny, tiny face sleeping.
  

A shivering puppy nuzzling into your hand, feeling warmth. 

A tender green leaf breaking through soil in the spring. 

If you were not moved by any of these three, stop, take two deep breaths and read them again.  If you’re still not moved, hold your thumb on the hollow of your neck and feel for a pulse.  If you find a pulse, then imagine something else, beyond a baby, or a puppy, of a fresh green shoot that arouses you. 

S-O-R represents a human experience: Stimulus, Organism (that’s us,) Response.  S-O-R: try it.  Choose one of the three examples above – baby, puppy, green shoot.  Imagine seeing it.  Now imagine yourself seeing it.  What would you do next?  I find myself coming closer, putting my face closer to the baby, the puppy, the shoot.  And I find my hands reaching, as if they had their own sense, not even wanting to wait for my brain to inform them.

S-O-R was a pretty obvious model for the psychologists to invite us to consider.  We see Something.  Ohhh, something inside us happens, and moves us to Respond.  It all starts with accepting the fact that the baby

Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, God…

Our granddaughters are wild.  They’re awful.  Let me explain.  They are 6 and 10, home-schooled as a continuation of a home that is centered on their development.  The day our daughter brought her first child home, she kind of warned us.  She was determined to be wrapped up in this child, totally dedicated to this child’s becoming.  We watched as the child was fed on demand, in virtually constant contact skin to skin, whether in a sling or in a co-sleeping bed.   We had raised our kids with a love that required them to tolerate distance from us.  They would be fed on schedule, by and large, not on demand.  (This was, I know, more my idea than Kathy’s, and perhaps my son-in-law is more deferent than I was, letting the mother mother as she is called to mother.)

The girls are, in the best sense, wild.  For ten years we have watched this constant relationship and feeding on demand develop into home schooling and readiness teaching.  The girls do what they desire.  Our daughter and son-in-law respond to their natural instincts and provide opportunities for them to explore them more deeply.  They grow as they naturally would without television, media, and the pressure of politics and society.  They need not manipulate; they need only to ask.  They need not throw tantrums or act out.  They simply express.  Now, I must say that watching them these ten years was sometimes tough.  I would have expected them to be spoiled, to be self-centered.  But they are kind, warm and purposeful in communication, and have long attention spans.  They are seen by adults and their friends as enjoyable to be with.

This home culture has also made them awful – in the original sense of the word – to have a sense of awe, of things bigger than themselves, beyond them.  Fairies have been a big part of a sense of mystery in their house.   When the ten year old was about three, her parents saw how enraptured she was with the big girls who were fairies in the Nutcracker.  So on her next birthday

Consuming Love

C.S. Lewis and Franz Kafka pick up the thread that I wrote about yesterday – the 500 bottles of wine.  The title of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is probably his greatest literary device.  Gregor, a young man living in an apartment he provides for his sister and his aging parents, turns into a cockroach.  The reader is led to assume that the metamorphosis is just that, and our inner eye sees the story from his perspective.  It is only when he dies that we realize that it is that characters in the background, his parents and his sister, who have been changing. In his atrophy, they have been slowly emerging from the large shadow that he had cast over them in his providing for them a place to live.  It is only at the end that we realize that in his love they had been consumed, had been made small by his largesse.

Like Kafka’s main character, Lewis' Orual casts a large shadow, which in her noble thoughts she imagines to be perfectly loving.  Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is based on the story of Cupid and Psyche, which, not coincidentally, is from a Latin work entitled Metamorphoses.  The central character, beautiful Psyche’s homely sister, rises to the throne and uses it to bring order and security to her people.    But as in Metamorphosis, it is toward the end of the story that she discovers (and the reader realizes) that her nobility has blinded her from seeing that she was consuming the very people she most loved. 

We are forewarned.  Human love can be consuming.  Even (or perhaps especially) love we think of as self-sacrificing.  How does this pick up the thread of the idea of more wine than we can drink?  Largesse consumes the lover as well as the beloved.  We overestimate our capacity to love.  We run out of wine.  God alone is enough.  I see Evelyn Coffey’s face smiling at me, saying the words as Theresa of Avila said them.  Dios solo basta! See (and enjoy again) an earlier blog entry for this: 

http://freelemonadestand.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-old-enough.html

Tomorrow: Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, God

What Do We Do With All This Wine?

So you’ve invited family and a few friends to a wedding, maybe 200 people, and you start to run out of wine.  One of the guests, Mary, is reputed to have a wunderkind, a son who they say can work miracles.  You ask her if he can help get you out of this embarrassing situation, and after trying to keep out of it, he has the wait staff fill six water jars and he turns the water into wine.

Cool story, eh?  But as Benedict XVI says in Jesus of Nazareth, the details of the story suggest that you now have about 500 bottles of wine and your event is almost over.  The question Benedict asks is, “Why would Jesus turn so much water into so much wine?  He suggests that it is a sign of the character of God, a source of plenty.  It would be repeated in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. 

The title of this blog arose from my circumstance a year ago.  After a very healthy and active life, I had been diagnosed with an aortic aneurism, a bulge in the main vessel carrying blood from the heart.  Such aneurisms could be fatal, so I was restricted from activity

Shepherd and Lamb

“Look.  There’s the lamb of God,” John said.  And they followed him, this lamb, who they sought as their shepherd.  Shepherd and lamb: the paradox had never struck me before. 

This Monday morning all along my entire walk I did not see a single car, nor a single garage door opening, kids running out to pile in.  No school buses.  No School.  We remember today a man who was unusual because he was, as the Lord whose salvation and pacifism he preached, shepherd and lamb.  To lead in such a way that we lay down our lives is the lesson for today in the school of remembering, the school that calls us to attention in our hearts, to reflecting on the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Eucharist: Gift Exchange, Shame, and Miracle

“Eucharist.”   Strange word, no?  We might think of it, candidly, as a fancy word for a second-grader’s word – communion, or the more sophisticated among us, the Mass as a whole, a celebration of thanksgiving.  But I was struck anew, in the wake of Christmas, to notice that the word Eucharist shares the same root as the word charism, the Greek word for gift.

As a Catholic, Mass is too often something that I sleep-walk through, or something that goes on while my mind is elsewhere.  But finding Eucharist and charism growing from the same root of gift had me thinking about Mass not merely as a celebration, but the exchange of gifts. 

Don’t we struggle with how to exchange gifts at Christmas?  Exchange suggests some kind of equity, doesn’t it? 

I found myself stunned with the shameful inequity of my reality.  Part of my Sunday ritual is sitting at my desk, taking my checkbook from its place, and writing in a pretty small amount.  I feel some shame at the paltriness of the weekly gift, but justify it by thinking about the limits of our savings, our need to stretch them over our possible lifespan.

But then I think about the simplest reference for Eucharist – that wafer that we receive, the bread that recalls Jesus saying that we should take it and eat it, that it is his body which, sure enough, was given up for us, much earlier than his possible lifespan would suggest.  And I think of the awfully accurate scene of a celebration and gift exchange, like Christmas, when we have given our common little pair of gloves to someone, and then we open their gift, and it is something huge, or something incredibly precious, something on which the giver had spent a fortune of money, or a lifetime of effort.

I sat in this shame, wondering how we can do this, we Catholics, Mass after Mass.  How can we participate with such gross inadequacy time after time, year after year? 

Maybe, at age 64, I’ve finally begun to understand the Consecration.  Maybe transubstantiation is more than a tough spelling word for a second grader.

Civility: An Example

David Brooks is a voice that I can listen to, even though he speaks for the other side of the political spectrum, the Conservative side, that is, if we must take sides.  Kathy and I love to catch the News Hour on PBS, especially on Fridays when "Shields and Brooks" take a look at the week's events through Liberal and Conservative eyes, respectively . . . and respectfully.  So this week even as I look forward to the program, I was grateful to see David's essay in today's Times.  Please take a look yourselves.

He reminds me of my good friend Joe Walsh back in Detroit, who while he answers to being a Republican and lives in a top 1% house, has a generous heart and lives in response to it.  Joe taught me by catching me being divisive, looking for differences in values and intentions where evidence pointed only to differences in approach.

But he reminds me too that we all have healing to do, that the idea of evil in the world and in ourselves is one to consider in our minds and in our hearts, and in the company of those with whom we share town or table.

Tucson bids us to consider: Friendship, Kindness, and Kingdom

I gotta tell ya, I’m surprised to be really liking the Pope’s book Jesus of Nazareth ...because, you see, it’s written by the Pope.  My “reading” in audio format as I walk the pre-dawn hills in the lake-effect snow that is normal here has put me in diverse but endlessly stimulating company, from Karen Armstrong (The Case for God, the Battle for God) to Sue Monk Kidd (The Mermaid Chair) to Maria Doria Russell (The Sparrow) and most recently C.S. Lewis (Miracles, Mere Christianity).  After writing every morning for almost a year since facing the reality of my mortality last November, I found that my wound-up spring of ideas and insights wound down.  I felt the need to listen.

Instead of daily blog postings, I have been, from this reading, jotting down ideas and insights from these writers on “sticky notes” on my laptop, for future writing.  But sometimes like today, I’m moved to write immediately from seeds planted on my walk.  Tucson and the righteous Right...and Left set contrast hard to ignore.

Pope Benedict has released for publication the first half of his intended book on the life of Jesus of Nazareth…because he’s not sure that he will live long enough to finish the rest of it. 

Regarding “Miracles” - Running from Horses?

I left my last posting with a Trinitarian stutterance: perhaps, perhaps, perhaps God loves us that much (to be born a baby in a stable, to come down and hang with us homies, so save us by showing us how to be human, and to introduce us to the God he invited us to address as he did – Father.)   That God would do that is what C.S. Lewis calls “The Grand Miracle.”  This morning in the crisp darkness, I finished the book, Miracles, that had sat on my “must read” bookpile for ten years since it had caught my eye on the bargain rack at Borders back in Detroit.  I bought it because of its author, and in spite of its subject. 

You see, I doubt miracles.

God With Us? Credo? Or Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

I’m “reading” Miracles by C.S. Lewis – listening to it in audiobook form on my long morning pre-dawn walks.   Lewis refers to the Incarnation as “The Grand Miracle.”   Do you believe in miracles?  I have my doubts, but the book is nudging me off balance in that regard.  It is a book I had tried repeatedly to read, but seemed more tenaciously logical than I cared to be while reading it.  My repeated attempts to read the book came from my appreciation on C.S. Lewis and my doubt regarding miracles.   

When I was a kid, there was a female evangelist, Kathryn Kuhlman, who would open every program by looking intensely into the camera and saying “I believe in miracles…because I believe in God!”  Her intensity seemed manic to me, and from then on, “miracles” seemed, well, a little crazy.   Even Lewis candidly questions “how Mother Egaree Louise miraculously found her second best thimble by the aid of St. Anthony”. 

So here we are, looking at (and perhaps into) the scene of a baby in a manger, and we are asked to believe that God has come down to save us by becoming human.  Do we believe this “Grand Miracle”, really?

Recognizing Our Family

Knowing family is not a birthright.  It is a lifelong occupation.  It is at worst a duty.  It is at best a dance.

When our son was going off to a job in Spain soon after graduating from car design school, our family was pretty intensely involved in connecting with him.  Kathy and I and his sisters worked to find ways of spending time with him, time for conversation, for committing to memory the curves of his face, for stealing not-really accidental glances of touch.  Now more than a dozen years later he thinks about moving back to the U.S., maybe even back to Detroit where he can be closer to old friends, and to us.  And again Kathy and I and his sisters are working to find time to encourage him to follow through on it, to let him know how much it means to us.

When Chris was on his way to Europe, he said that we didn’t really know him.  

Epiphany: an Eye-opener and 2nd Chance

Epiphany: to Christians it is the coming of the wise men, the Magi, to the manger to find the Messiah and bring gifts and worship.  In language, it is a word that suggests an opening, the lifting of a curtain, the beginning of awareness that changes our thinking.  The word comes from the Greek epi-phainein, “to show to, to reveal”.

The wise men had found the location of the infant messiah by logic.  They followed the star that they knew from their study of the skies to be unusual, to see if it would take them to the one who they knew through their study of scripture was promised.  

But when they arrived by the grace of their logic, their knowing proved inadequate.  This was a poor couple in a stable, their baby in a manger, a food crib, the only thing that would hold it off the night-cool, dung-soiled ground.  It was not what they’d expected. 

And that is why it is called the epiphany.  They came to the place of unknowing, of illogic. 

Hurt and Help and Hope

Perhaps it’s a gift of the sol-stice,

the turning back of the sun

to save us from the accumulating darkness

that has provided the date to start a new year,

a place to put a stake in the ground,

a post on which we mount a sign

that says on one side “past”

and on its reverse “future”. 

Except for that solstice, the place we put that stake might be arbitrary,

but because we have that same sky to gaze up to

we are in a great, extra-denominational family
regardless of what name we use for God. 

And perhaps we are fortunate if our spirits have sagged under the weight of this darkness,

if we are nearly broken by it,

our guts compressed under those heavy skies so hard

that a primal word which in pride 

we had tried to suppress

has erupted from us:

Help!

The Return of the Light - HONEST!

Jim Reilly’s funeral Mass was celebrated yesterday, the day before Christmas.  How perfect.  How perfectly awful, you might think.  Sartre spoke of a God-shaped hole left in man with the death of God.  How awful that Ann and the family discover in themselves a Jim-shaped hole, and at Christmas.

Jesus was likely not born on December 25^th.  The calendar itself didn’t exist until centuries later.  But the story of the brightness of the star in the Scriptural story suggested that he would have been born during a long and thus dark night, and so placing Christmas near the longest, darkest night made sense.  Placing Christmas near the Roman celebration of Winter Solstice gave Christians something to celebrate while the Romans of the area were celebrating the “stopping of the sun” in its moving lower and lower in the sky, and coming back toward them, bringing back the light.

Have you ever missed a bus or a train or a ride and stood there watching it speed away from you?  Don’t you feel abandoned?  Imagine the sun doing that, taking with it light and warmth.  And so we can understand that the “pagans” would make the Solstice a huge celebration. 

And it is no accident that so much of today’s celebration of Christmas is about light, and about it shining in the darkness. 

Jim Reilly Finally Passes Through

They’re not pearly gates at the celestial portal.  And sorry, Bob Dylan,  there is no heaven’s door to be knock, knock, knockin’ on.  There’s just the thinnest, clearest membrane, and on Monday the sun stopped while Jim Reilly finally slipped through.

Jim was the first man I met who walked away from it – success, I mean.  President of his Law School class, soon working for a good firm and living the kind of life we’d see on TV when I was a kid.  Nice house, wife and two kids, lots of friends.  And he walked away from it.  For me, it was like I was in a long line to finally buy a ticket for the trip of a lifetime and seeing someone in line in front of me turn around, put their money back into their pocket, smile at me, and walk out.  I realize that one hand is in my pocket feeling the smooth surface of my money, feeling it like a blind man would feel Braille bumps, trying to decipher whether the trip might not be worth it, wondering why he did that.  I watch him to try to figure out why he did that.

Contemplating my Navel at 64

64 today.  I woke on my birthday with an enigmatic phrase over the doorpost at the exit of my dream: future through one.

I found the idea of a future through one to be contrary to reality.  Future comes from bee-flower combinations, from egg-sperm polkas and stamen-pistil ballets.  I lie on the sofa after my early morning walk, the furnace on now and Kathy rousing in the back of the house.  Alone, but not really.  The one-day-past-full moon was coming in through the window, and I thought of my aloneness, those words future through one and the idea of the navel that Karen Armstrong had tossed out in The Case for God.

Navel-gazing referred, in the 60’s, to a self-centered focus, an egoism that ignored the world and its needs.  But this morning I thought of my navel like Armstrong thought of it, and classical philosophers East and West.  It’s reminder of a connection, of a relationship.  If we really do contemplate our navels, we might recognize them as the isthmus of our humanity, the remains of the umbilical cord that is clear evidence that there is no life in isolation.  And for me today it is a reason to wonder about the large body on the other side of that narrow strip 64 years ago plus a day.  Actually, Eleanor Lydia Luprich Daniels was small – 5’1” and about 90 pounds.  PFC Frank A. Daniels had embarked from the war in LeHavre France on December 22, 1946 and 1 year to the day later I arrived from my own nine month voyage from their egg-sperm polka back in Chicago.

So go ahead.  Check out your navel.  Everybody’s got one.  We are, each of us, the future, and the one through which we came, quite literally, is still a part of us.  Here’s to you, mom.  Thanks. 

And this time of year, here’s to you, Mary of Nazareth, who danced with the Spirit (Polka?  Dabke?  Boogaloo?  What fun to imagine!) and gave us the One, the long-awaited one, who calls us to live in love, to live as love, to build a future without fear because we are never alone…not as long as we have navels to contemplate.

Letting the Ass Decide: the Truth Revealed

It finally made sense

the beyond me-ness of it, I mean,

when Ignatius let the his ass decide

instead of his head.

He had met the Moor on the trail

or what was left of the deferent Moslem

who accepted Chritianinty to keep his job

and for his family, their home.

And so the proto-Jesuit and the Mohammedan

rode their donkeys wherer their two roads met

and their minds met, too, until the road

and their minds branched off, diverged.

The Moor affably admitted

that Jesus as Christ made sense to him

but he was stuck on the Virgin birth

and bowed a goodbye to Ignatius.

As he lost sight of the moor

Ignatius’ battle wound throbbed,

the place where he was broken

from his military past.

He wanted to pull the animal round

and go back to the fork in the trail

where the likable Moor had disparaged Our Lady,

had questioned her Virginity and gone his way.

He wanted to draw his sword

and draw heretic blood.

But he wanted, too

to stay the course of the Spirit.

He had found it along another trail

along the quiet Cardoner,

the cool water flowing

from Montserrat to the Sea.

Hot blood or cool water?

It was more than he could decide.

He dropped the reins onto the neck of the ass

and let the animal discern the way.

For years at work I would fault the Jesuits

for indecisiveness, even as I loved their Spirit.

and this Advent I came to know Joseph better,

and know how the meek do indeed inherit the earth.

St. Joseph: Statue?

Did Joseph study His face, I wonder.

Is it blasphemy, do you think, to imagine the carpenter,

in quiet moments when he could hear the Newborn suckling

against his Virgin wife’s soft breast

 (is the softness of the Virgin’s breast, the whiteness of it,

is that perhaps blasphemy too?)

Did he measure the Baby’s face

(like Hers, but unlike his)

to extrapolate the face of the Father

like he would measure the location for a hinge,

where it would attach, and where it would extend

beyond?

Or did he just find himself just naturally noticing,

like he noticed grain in wood,

that would guide his tools or vex them

as he did his work,

making things needed

out of materials provided?

Seems to me (or is it blasphemy

to think) that maybe

it was not as simple for Joseph,

no dumb animal whose mere breath

would warm the scene

until the Magi came with wonder

until the cross came with terror

to make sense of all this

Mystery.

No wonder people bury him

head down in the yards

of houses that don’t seem to sell,

to make the best of a terrible market.

Blasphemy, it seems to me.