Maternity and The Price of Wings

There was a moment when I realized that my mother had let me go.  It came twenty years after I had walked away. 

I remember vividly sitting down in my first desk on my first day in first grade.  I was eager to go, because my brother Danny had, for the past year, left in the morning for school, leaving me to wonder what it was like.  So here it was.  School.  I went to the desk that Sister Dorita, the kind old nun, had pointed me to and sat down, smiling to myself proudly.  

I looked at my mom talking with the sister, and for a long time I’ve known what they were talking about.  The price of wings.

Twenty years or so later, I had swept into my mom and dad’s house with my wife and three kids and all of the stuff that came with us on the road from Detroit, where I’d moved for college, and stayed for life.  While my sisters and my dad settled in the living room with Kathy and the kids, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee.  I don’t know if she pointed me to sit down there as Sister Dorita had to that first desk, but I’ll never forget the conversation.  It was about wings.

“Johnny, how did you get to be this way,” she asked. 

“What do you mean, mom?”

“You’re so different than you were when you lived at home….” 

I knew she meant that I had become more.  The university had made me bigger than I had been at home with her and my dad.  Kathy had given me not only love and children, but a sense of myself as part McGuyver (who could figure out how to solve problems) and Robert Young, who had played the TV father who “knows best.”  I had grown into someone she could not have imagined.  And I had grown 300 miles away.

In Advent, we wait for Christmas, but it might be worthwhile to consider young Mary large with child.  Perhaps her cousin Elizabeth had been for her the equivalent of my brother Danny, making her as eager for the birth of her first child as I had been for first grade. 

Yesterday I had a conversation with a young mother about wings.  She was feeling the cost of them. 

I’ve reflected, since that conversation, not about Mary large with the child Jesus, but about Naucrete, the mother of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun.  While the father of Icarus who had crafted the wings (Daedalus was a kind of a McGuyver himself) for his son was a member of the Court of King Minos, Icarus’ mother was a slave.  How appropriate.  Aren’t all mothers slaves to the aspirations of their children?  Don’t all mothers slave their lives away to pay the price of a gift they’d rather not buy…wings… for their children?

 As we approach Christmas, all of us born of mothers might consider our own, and the gift they have given us, these wings, to become different than we were when we were living at home, to become bigger, and perhaps to grow farther away, closer to our suns, dreaming not merely of lifting ourselves in the freedom of flight, but lifting the poor into the freedom of dignity and lifting the lost into the belovedness of relationship.

Advent: Light goes Viral

Fiat Lux! 

“In the beginning,” we’re told in Genesis, the world was in darkness.  Creation began with these words.  “Let there be light!” 

And as we enter Advent, and anticipate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the Winter Solstice, we may fail to notice that we are indeed intensely longing (whether consciously or unconsciously) for this first day of creation to find its way into the dark spaces of our world, and our hearts.

Go to the source article in the New York Times and the Facebook page  where it all began. 

Look at the light in the photo.  What do you see when you look at the light? 

• I see it illuminating a profoundly human interaction, one so similar to The Story Of One Who Comes Down To Save.
• I see it coming from a place I don’t often see light coming from – a store.
• I see it illuminating the feet of the barefoot man, and I see the shadows on the sidewalk where it dies not penetrate.

 Oh, I see the light.  Do you?

What did NYPD Officer Lawrence Deprimo see that led him to do what he did?

What did Arizona tourist Jennifer Foster see that prompted her to take this snapshot with her cell phone?  Florence Arizona is the home of a sprawling state prison, and she is a public safety officer.

To me this morning, this photo is my Christmas.  This is what it’s all about.  Fiat Lux indeed!  Let there be light in our world, in our hearts.  And Lord, that we may SEE.

By the way…the officer’s name Deprimo…in Italian, it means “In the beginning….” 

Advent and expectant waiting

Entering Advent:  
Think pregnant, men!
Think!  Pregnant men!

On Tuesday mornings I meet with a group of guys to pray and share our reflections on the following Sunday’s Gospel.  Jesus is meeting with his homies too, warning them to be vigilant while they wait for change-a-coming.  "Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life….” 

I look around the room.  It’s 7 AM, for God’s sake.    I don't think these guys were carousing last night.  So I looked again at the language.  Carousing…drunkenness…anxieties. Some change in wording might be helpful, I thought, in looking at how we ought to spend this time waiting for Christ to be born. 

Carousing makes me think of bumping shoulders in busy, noisy, senseless places and not going home.  Carousing for us might be shopping, I think, on that morning after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  It might be buying more stuff.  Oh, it’s for others, of course, and so giving is in the middle of it, but it does get distracting, no? 

Drunkenness for us might giving in again and again not to booze, but to whatever addiction we use to avoid whatever we ought to be doing to become more completely who we are.  Surfing the web aimlessly?  Watching TV?  Working?  Eating?  Worrying?  We all know our addictions.

Anxieties is a word that works just as it is, at least for me.  Recently retired, I am in varying states of anxiety about living responsibly on what we have saved.  I worry about the cars breaking down, and the price of gas, and how we can stay connected with the kids without blowing the budget.  Like our addictions, our obsessions are not hidden from us – not really.

We do stuff that’s bad for us.  We take in junk and let it rattle around in us, because the rattling saves us from silence. 

I looked around the room and said, “Imagine if we were pregnant, guys.” 

Imagine if we were pregnant guys!  We’d learn pretty quickly that carousing would be bad for the baby that grows best in stillness.  And the stuff we take in compulsively – the stuff that is not healthy for us – is doubly bad for the baby.  Anxiety that constricts our blood vessels would make it tough on the baby’s, too.

How different would we be if we were pregnant?  I found out that the word “expecting” arose in the 50’s when Lucille Ball’s pregnancy in real life created a problem with the I Love Lucy television show.  The word “pregnant” was not acceptable for TV censors.  So they used the word “expecting”. 

So this Advent, What are you expecting?  Or should I say…What?  Are you expecting!?

Advent and the Fiscal Cliff

Advent.  It begins Sunday in Christian churches.  As of today, we are in the last week of what is appropriately called “ordinary time”. 

Ordinary.  Same old same old.  Like politics.

The readings for the First Sunday of Advent begin with this from the 33^rd chapter of Jeremiah

In those days Judah shall be safe
and Jerusalem shall dwell secure….

Sound like a campaign promise?

But while the word gospel means “good news”, this first Advent Gospel reads:

People will die of fright
in anticipation of what is coming upon the world….

Sound like the “fiscal cliff”?

Oh, this is perfect.  We’re given a promise, but we’re warned too, that the promise is to be earned, and we are required to wait.

Oh, we’re waiting for the politicians to get their act together…but what about us?  What are we doing while we wait?  Advent, it seems to me, is a “grass roots campaign”. 

Luke goes on to suggest what not to do:

"Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of daily life….”

Carousing…shopping?  Drunkenness…our habitual routine?  Anxieties of daily life…yup.

Hearts.  Hearts awake.

Paul gives us some sensible advice:

Brothers and sisters:
May the Lord make you increase and abound in love
for one another and for all,
just as we have for you….

So there, my Jesuit friend used to say, you have it.  Promise, threat, distraction, love.

Welcome to Advent 2012.

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

Auntie Annie's Smile and the Bread of Life

Craig's brief kiss, Auntie Annie's constant smile.

To my cousins Marilyn and Joan and Susan in celebration of your mom's life.

Perhaps it is not merely coincidence that Ann Skowron joined her brother Joe passing into their new life just as in the church into which they were born, we are in the third Sunday of the “Bread of Life Discourse”.  Two Sundays ago Jesus fed the multitude, even though what He had seemed ridiculously inadequate to the task.  Then last week He said that he was the Bread.  This Sunday, even as we consider the meaning of Ann’s passing in our own lives, He tells us to eat his flesh and drink his blood that we might have eternal life.

So here we are, with two of life’s deepest mysteries greeting us:  What is death, and is this Jesus to be taken seriously.  Or perhaps more practically, what difference does either of them make in the way we live in our lives?  I feel blessed by you in my generation, my siblings and cousins, as we become the aging edge of the Daniels family.  I smile to see you in the next generation as you grow into adults with much of the same passion and self-determination as your grandparents, struggling in these challenging times as they struggled in theirs.  And I watch in awe as your children become the growing edge of the family. 

What does death mean, and what about eternal life?  That’s up to us to figure out, if we care.  Perhaps the grief is an ache to fill this emptiness, this chasm of unknowing,   Perhaps it is the first gift of Ann Skowron’s new life.  Perhaps her gift to us is this very being confused about these things, death and eternal life.  Perhaps we’re fortunate if we can’t break the words down.  Perhaps it is we who are to be broken down by the words, and it is being broken that we enter our own new life.  Perhaps we are called to consume this life of hers which is not dead, even though the body is.  Perhaps we are called to fulfill the experience of Ann Skowron by remembering, re-membering, that she is indeed part of the blood that flows through our hearts and the memories that flow in our brains and the breath of the Spirit that lifts us on often weak wings.

Perhaps she invites us, as Jesus did, to enter eternal life now, while we can bless this world as she did with a peace and calm and kindness that are unshakable.  Perhaps for those parts of us who have a difficulty believing in a long-ago Jesus who invited us to new life, we have this gift of a smiling Ann Skowron - Mom, Grandma, Aunt, friend - who invites us to that very same new life.   

So let’s take it all in, and let it break us, break down the walls of doubt in the eternity of this life, and the love of this God who never ceases to look at us with this same smile.

Real Presence: A Sleeping Dog(ma) Wakes

Buddhists talk about Presence as connecting us to all of life.  Catholic beliefs include one that contrarily separates us from other faiths – the belief that the bread and wine consecrated at Mass are really the body and blood of Christ.  This belief is the dogma that we call the “Real Presence”.   

I reflected during my weekly men’s Gospel conversation group that we can be guided toward better connection with all of life by looking at this dogma.  And since the group comes together to help us serve appropriately as leaders of our families, I found it calling us to “real presence” with our wives and children.

We are, in the churches that use the shared book that is a three-year cycle of Sunday Scripture readings, in the third week of looking at a problem that Jesus had with people recognizing him.  We call it “the Bread of Life Discourse.”  The men in power in the Jewish community are observing this “son of the carpenter” preaching about Scriptures and saying “who does this guy think he IS?”  And Jesus responds by showing them, and then telling them.  He feeds an incredibly large group of people, and then he says “I am the Bread of Life”.  As those men in power eventually find removing Jesus as their solution to his insubordination, he feeds his followers at one last supper with them.  But this time he says the same thing more clearly.  This time he says that the bread is his flesh, and that they should eat it.  And for the sake of clarity, he offers them wine, and says that it is his blood, and that they should drink it. 

As a Catholic kid, I have to say this raised two responses in me – mystery and revulsion.  I was always relieved to find the taste of wine and the texture of bread in communion, instead of whatever blood and flesh would taste and feel like.  But that aroused in me a kind of fearful skepticism, sensible but threatening – hell and all, after all.  Those feelings have never left me, and for most of my adult life I’ve let that sleeping dog-ma lie.   

So it was a moving experience to be in this group of men, most husbands and fathers, and find that it all made sense.  The drift of the Gospels these three weeks has been those in control refusing to see Jesus as who he was.  They judged him by his history, holding him as the son-of-a-carpenter.  Their restricting him to his historical identity was in such powerful contrast to his real impact on society that it led them to complicity in his death.  What a tragedy.  What a waste.

So when we began to reflect on this in our group, the first focus was on Jesus calling himself the “Bread of Life” and the way that followed the previous Sunday’s story of his feeding the multitude by blessing, breaking, and distributing the apparently inadequate few loaves and fishes, and more than satisfying the need.  Pretty soon one of the guys mentioned the dogma of “Real Presence” and how we Catholics need to treasure this belief and share its truth.  I’m always leery when we focus on what makes us different as Catholics, because I fear we put up walls.  But I found the group’s collective wisdom and grace letting this stone make ripples in our pond.  Someone mentioned how our judging the bread and wine by their appearance was like the Pharisees’ judging Jesus by his history.  And then someone else, a recent convert to Catholicism, said that if we want to get to the root of our difficulty in believing in Jesus or the Real Presence in the Mass, we could start with our believing in our wives and kids, believing that they are so much more than they appear to us. 

Life is simpler for me, easier to accept, when I can taste the wine and feel the texture of wheat at communion.  I can leave the mystery on its shelf and go on with whatever is my preoccupation or plan.  And I think it’s simpler, easier to manage, if I think I know my wife, know my kids, based on my perception of them and my sense of their history.  But just as the bread and wine are transformed in mystery, I know that the same is true of my wife.   Like the bread and wine and Jesus, she is so much more than she appears.  Everything she does is, if I’m open to see it, her human unfolding and her human giving and her human encounter.  Her making coffee in the morning is no less mysterious and meaningful than the ritual of the priest breathing “this is the cup of my blood…” into the chalice at my Catholic Mass.  That morning coffee ritual is part of a deep mystery of our life together, our having come together 43 years ago, and our dance through the doorways of our shared life path.  And it is part of her mysterious unfolding, from maiden to mother of babies to Nana and still somehow mother.

One of the guys talked about bringing communion to those in the hospital as an experience of “standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down into the darkness and depth and going ‘Whooooaaaahhhhh!’”  

I know that I often am afraid to really look into my wife’s eyes.  It’s easier to stand back from the edge, to think of her rituals as mere habits, to think I already know her.  But the Buddhists have something that completely agrees with Jesus, and with my wife. To be connected to life requires presence.  Real  Presence.

The Feeding of the Multitude: beyond our human inadequacy to our human priesthood

Just as in the Baptism of Jesus we learned that to be human means that we are beloved, the feeding of the multitude offers to us the truth that to be human, we are priest.  

Imagine yourself Jesus, this carpenter’s son from a hick town near Jerusalem looking at the crowd who, despite your efforts to get away from them, has followed you.  There are maybe 15 THOUSAND of them, men and women, some of them with kids.  Imagine that it all started with caring about one person, touching them gently, looking into their eyes and touching them with the love and sympathy that welled up inside you, flowed out from you as naturally as the tears from the normally quiescent wells just behind your eyes. 

I can touch this ONE, you’d thought.  And when that one worn man seemed to unwither at your touch, like a brown plant grown somehow green again, you’d though it pretty neat, to have happened to have touched him just as he’d somehow come out of whatever had been wrong.  It couldn’t have been you….

And now here you are, after that one becoming two, and those four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two…fifteen thousand.  You find your eyes looking at the ground, trying to find there some escape from what is facing you.  But their eyes call to yours, and soon you are looking into theirs.  They are, it strikes you, all different, and yet so like the eyes of that first withered man.  But now the wells behind your eyes seem to have been drained, and you are too tired to stop your brain from considering the time of day and the distance from the nearest town, and you hear your own voice say to your companions, “How can we feed them?”  Before they even hear your spoken words, you hear their unspoken echo. “How can I possibly feed all these people?  Oh, my GOD!”

If you’re with me, if you’ve been able to imagine with me coming to this point of logical, valid sense of our inadequacy, we can look together at what choice is held out to us.  We can choose the paralysis of inadequacy or we can take the next step toward our own humanity.  We can decide to accept the priestly function to which we are all called as humans. 

I believe that just as in the Baptism of Jesus we learned that to be human means that we are beloved, this feeding of the multitude offers to us the truth that to be human, we are priest. 

We return to the story, facing our own inadequacy.  We are in the moment of mental math aware that we are not equal to the task.  It is too great for us, beyond our logical capability.  And so we ride on the cloud of the story, watching what happens next.  Jesus looks up to heaven.  Just as his gaze was called from the ground of his self-doubt to the eyes of the people in the crowd by compassion, his eyes were called from them to the heavens by his need for help, and his faith that help was there. 

He could have been drawn back to the ground of logical self-doubt, accepting his limitations.  Some of his apostles invite him to do this, to accept the feeding as unrealistic, unreasonable, unexpected.  But he allowed his gaze to be lifted up, and his aspiration with it.

And guided by that vision, he did the priestly thing.  The blessed the paltry, inadequate all that he had, and without being distracted by the inadequacy of its appearance, began doing what needed to be done.  He began feeding all those people.

To be human is to accept our belovedness, and not merely as a platitude, but as a practice.  The practice of belovedness calls us to accept ourselves as priest, not because we are given by the world or our church some garment or title, but because we are given by our creator spirit the truth of this gift, of being able at all times of our life to look up, beyond the call of compassion to the call of faith, and in that call of faithful compassion to bless the measly, inadequate all that we are given, and by blessing, breaking, and sharing it, to find that it is indeed more than enough.

Exhaustion: the Sign of One Heart Loving

In “Love on the Run” I mulled the challenge of my friend whose cancer gives him a life expectancy of “five weeks or five years.”  How does he love?  If he loves (his wife and kids and grandkids and friends) as if he has five weeks, will he be exhausted if he lives to week 6?  And if he loves as if he had five years and finds himself dying in one, will he regret his moderation in loving?

One of my kids reminded me that love is not an individual act, but the dance of a relationship.  She wrote “I feel that to love means freely, getting exhausted and that's when your beloved picks you up.” 

The common koan “the sound of one hand clapping” came to mind when I realized my limiting love by isolating the one attempting to love.  A koan is a Zen riddle that, being unthinkable, stops us from thinking so we can simply be present.  But while we know that it takes two hands to clap (only a fool would try to it with one) we commonly try to love with one heart alone.  I believe that my daughter pointed out to me the foolishness of my thinking.

I am blessed in companioning with my friend in his living with cancer, because he accepts my companionship, listens and shares, and together we grow in our capacity to love and be loved.  

A few weeks ago I had visited for the third time my brother who moved far from family into the woods in another state.  I’ve admired a great deal about him and during the forty years of our adulthood, we’ve had a sometimes challenging but respectful and loving relationship despite significant lifestyle differences.  We share an older brother who similarly isolated himself from family and died at age 60 after years of drinking, smoking, and finding a place of joy in part-time work while continuing to fight demons of resentment and disillusionment, much of it related to family.

So when this brother moved into the woods, I wanted to do all I could to go and visit him, to let him know that he was important to me, that I supported his dream.  Perhaps the word that right or wrong describes this desire of mine was to “validate” him in his new venture.  Now that seems arrogant, but I get ahead of myself.

A few weeks ago we had a family reunion near his place, but far enough (and noisy enough) that he could justify not attending, or joining as little as possible.  So I talked with him about coming up and staying with him rather than camping with the others, so we could spend some time together as well.  With a couple of our kids, we enjoyed a loving visit, lots of conversation, and delight in the beauty of the place he’s made for himself. 

Three days after returning home, I was happy to see a letter from him in our mailbox, anticipating a reprise of the good times we’d shared.  Instead was a brief note that said he’d had more than enough of me and that I was not welcome in his house.   Since then, both of my letters to him have been returned unopened.

Arrogant.  I think my attempts to love as an act were arrogant.  Perhaps I’m learning that love is not an act by a lover, but presence to another that sometimes results in a loving relationship.  Love does not emerge from the will of a lover, but from the relationship between or among people present to each other. 

Now by some irony, I have just one hand for the next two weeks.  A bicycling injury resulting in a broken shoulder has my right arm in a sling following surgery.  I am coming to experience the need for help to do so many things that I thought within my power, simple things like mowing the grass or taking a shower or driving the car.  Things much easier than loving.

Love on the Run: We don’t run a sprint the way we run a marathon.  But how do we pace our love?

I’m blessed, these months, with a precious gift I’d never wish for.  I’m accompanying a friend my age with aggressive, incurable brain cancer.  On Tuesdays I spend time with him while his wife can focus on her own needs, free for awhile from the need to care for him.

With a disease survived by 50% in the first year, my friend wants to consider himself among the 5% who survive for more than five.  Prior to his diagnosis, he’d been unusually fit and trim, finding in cycling most of what he had found as a runner when his joints were younger.   While his body is heavier due to prescribed steroids and a diminished exercise regimen, his spirit seems as light as ever.  He lives with hope and determination and gratitude.

I don’t know how he does it, how he makes decisions with this one-to-five year window.  And I don’t know how he paces his love. 

When my dad was gradually wearing out with congestive heart failure, Kathy and I would make the drive from Detroit to Chicago at shorter and shorter intervals, not only to see him, but to support my mom, who was his caregiver.  With our own kids grown and out of our nest, Kathy and I were free to focus on this relationship, and from the moment we arrived on Friday evening until we left on Sunday afternoon, we loved in a sprint.  We had that luxury.

Once while I was patiently helping my dad, he looked into my eyes – contrary to his habit of looking away – and said, “Johnny, you’re so good to me.”  But before I could process my internal response into an appropriate and honest reply, he added “Why can’t your mother be like this?”  I didn’t need a second to process this.  I immediately laughed a staccato “HA!” and watched the confusion form on his face.  “Dad, mom has to love you all the time; I get to love you for awhile and then go back home!”  He seemed hurt by that, that I found loving him so intently to require recovery.   I, sprinting through the weekend, could love him hard and strong and incessantly.  My mom, on the other hand, had to pace herself for a much longer run.

At any given moment, a sprinter is running faster and harder than a distance runner.  But the sprinter would not be able to finish the long race, exhausted well before the end.  Each different race calls for a different style of running, and each different situation calls for a different style of love.  My friend retired after a very successful career as an engineer.  Perhaps his dispassionate application of logic toward a desired end moves him to pace his love for the distance.  I don’t know.  But I am confident that if he finds the finish line approaching sooner than he now thinks, he’ll adjust his pace of loving accordingly, and sprint to the tape.

NEXT – Overloving and withdrawal

DIS R-E-S-P-E-C-T

The Queen of Soul was right in calling for respect.  Perhaps “Respect” remains an epic hit because it resonates with the wailing song in each of us that call for the same thing, the same respect.

As the daughter of a preacher, she’d appreciate the story read in thousands of churches this Sunday.  The established religious leaders look at the son of a carpenter as he is teaching, and ask each other how he could possibly have anything of value to offer.  The story ends tragically with the death of the protagonist.   And it’s all because of, you guessed it, disrespect.

The story is called “The Rejection at Nazareth.  Here’s a link.  http://www.usccb.org/bible/scripture.cfm?bk=Mark&ch=6&v=49006001

But in carrying out this assassination, the bad guys were guilty of disrespecting themselves as well, and disrespecting the God they claim to serve.  At it is our own unvoiced wailing cry for respect that calls us to account for ourselves, not as a victim like the carpenter’s son, but a perpetrator like the powerful.

Respect, I’ve often quoted my college Philosophy professor Vaughn Adams, means to “look again.”  Had those hearing Jesus “looked again” at him, looked past their prejudices about sons-of-carpenters, they might have found the brilliant thinker and inspiring speaker who could speak to their hearts, and the caring man who could have become their friend. 

I spend Tuesday evenings preparing and serving dinner at a shelter for homeless people, and follow it with a class on "mining" their value.  You might simply call it “resume preparation” but that would indeed be superficial.  The evidence of their worth is often buried under years of disrespect, from others and eventually from themselves.  I go because I know that unless I do, I’ll fall into the same shallow thinking as the ones in the story. 

Perhaps the kind of disrespect illuminated in this story is that of thinking someone is without capacity.  And a closer look at the story exposes three lacks of re-spect. 

First, disrespecting others, we allow ourselves the sloppy habit of referring only to what we already know about who the person has been.  In this, we foolishly only consider only the past, and only the part of the past that we know and that has gotten through the tight filter of our biases and fears.

Second, we disrespect ourselves by seeing the other as a threat to our own intrinsic value, subjecting ourselves to the same history-bound, static consideration of our own value, devoid of growth, learning, or development.   We fail to reframe our worth as companion, and instead build up our defenses, foolishly attempting to establish our worth by devaluing the other.

Finally, we disrespect the unseen grace of God or human spirit to work in the other, and to work in ourselves.   

Jesus found his value in finding the value in others.  I guess you can call that soul!

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

I Wonder...

It’s Christmas morning, and the Nativity Stable is crowded.  

My friend Dave shared a thought that really threw me.  “If Mary and Joseph were not able to find room at an inn because of all the people traveling to the census, there must have been lots of other people in that stable, too. In Detroit there are “warming centers” where the street homeless can come in out of the cold.  There are no beds, just rows of folding chairs.  The room smells of sweat as clothes worn for days without access to showers begin to raise the humidity in the bare room.  There is no apparent joy in the room that I picture, in a place that used to be called the “24-hour walk-in center”.  There are dedicated people who staff that room during the day, helping people try to find housing, healthcare, and maybe the odd job.  But at night, it’s just the security staff, whose gift to these lost is not encouragement, but merely alertness and equity.  The chairs are as hard as the life that these lost live, in a city to big and too poor to give them hope.

When Dave reads the Gospel story, I hear that the Shepherds leave and spread the joyful news.  But I’m still stuck in the 24-hour walk-in center, and the smell is in my nostrils, and it is worse than a stable.  What sends the shepherds out with enthusiasm? 

He said that in those times, guys who could not find other work often were hired as shepherds.  These guys might have been day-laborers, the bottom of the manpower barrel.  For the last ten weeks I’ve been working with a crew of homeless guys.  Eleven guys started out at Goodwill Inn, half of them Veterans, just three of them who have remained through the program.  What has made me feel like a failure in working with them is that despite their considerable talent and goodness, I can’t seem to lift their sights higher than mere survival. 

So these three are the ones I see as shepherds in my imagination, and I think “what in this scene succeeded where I have not; what has given them enthusiastic hope?  This morning Kathy and I will go to the morning Mass, what is called “The Shepherds’ Mass”.  The church will not smell like the walk-in center, and none of my three day-laborer companions will be there…not physically.   But I am inhabited by these images, and they will enter the church with me.  

Wonder will enter the church with me this morning.  Not wonder as in wonderful; wonder as in I wonder.  I need to experience whatever those shepherds experienced, so I can leave not in disappointment and despair, but with excitement and joy, eager to spread the story of whatever they saw in that crowded stable. 

Promise…Reality…Legacy

photo courtesy of Washington Post

Mary and Zechariah both learned something that I need to remember.  Patience, people!

Zechariah sees this angel, you know?  

Angel says, “Hey!  Zech!  Elizabeth’s pregnant!” 

Zechariah says, "My old Lizzie, she’s too old!"

Angel says, “God can do it, and God did.  She’s six months pregnant, dog!”

Zech says, “No way!  Can’t be!”

Angel says “Shut Uuuuuuuuuuup!” and old Zechariah, he shut up, all right, ‘cuz he can’t speak.  God thinks “Hmmmm…I gotta let this talker think some on this.

And so Zechariah thinks for three months, reflects on things, goes about his work in silence.  And by the time Elizabeth gives birth to a son three months later, Zech has changed his tune.  He’s changed his thinking, and adjusted his view.  He had opened his mind, and when Elizabeth’s body opened up and produced a son, Zechariah opened his mouth and pronounced his name: John.

Mary sees an angel too, and she says yes, and then her body is closed around the child forming in her, closed for nine months.  These days people get ultrasounds, and post fuzzy images on Facebook.  But then it was just mystery, just trust.  Nine months.  She had said yes to something that would change the world.  Her life changed.  But do you suppose that when the angel disappeared and she was alone again there in the recesses of her parents’ house, that she felt any change?  What about the next week?   I would have had doubts.

These weeks I’ve been working with a group of guys; talented, promising…and homeless.  Like the first homeless person I’d known in Detroit and thought I could “fix” when I saw how good he was, I have found myself suffering disappointment by what I see as a lack of progress.  This morning I came upon an article in the Washington Post about 79 Seat Pleasant Elementary School students.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/local/seat-pleasant-following-the-dreamers/?hpid=z2 The video is a great start; please watch it.  

But the three titles of the three articles are what helped me most. 

The Promise

The Reality

The Legacy

Mary and Zechariah waited, each in their own way, from the promise to the reality.  But just as they suffered the reality, the not-quite-as-I’d-hoped-or-imagined, and just as we do, you and I, all of us are held to discover the legacy only as it unfolds…and keeps unfolding, generation after generation.  Whether homelessness or salvation or family…patience, people!

Celebrate Disillusionment!

image courtesy verticalblue.net

Father Anthony Citro shared that today’s readings (4th Sunday of Advent) regard three main characters all of whom were disillusioned.  David thought he’d build a Temple for God, but God said he had something greater in mind – the House of David bringing forth the Messiah.  Paul of Tarsus thought he’d be a hero of the status quo by persecuting the Christians, but got knocked off his high horse and ended up preaching the salvation of Christ.  And Mary of Nazareth thought she’d be a traditional Jewish woman, practicing virtue in the recesses of her home, and the Angel called her to a true light.

None of them, Father Anthony said, ended up with what they had thought.    They all had to let go of the false light (il-lusion, from lucis, the Latin word for “light”) of their preconceptions in order to move into the bright light of truth, and become their true selves. 

If someone came to me and said that they were disillusioned, my response would be sympathy, and I would be inclined to console them.  But to become disillusioned literally means to be relieved of a false light.

This is the season of light, celebrated in many faiths in the northern hemisphere because the days are shortest now, and darkest, and we long for brighter days.  For Christians, it is looking to a star, and following that star to the Bright Babe, who would grow to learn that being the Chosen One would be…different than he might have expected.  He would follow the true light to the Cross, and then beyond the grave, and knock at the tightly shut door of our hearts, we securing ourselves in the darkness that is our illusion, our false light.

This is a time of illusion being stripped from most of the “developed” world.  We are learning that our prosperity is not what we expected.  Our misconception has led to a miscarriage, and our false dream is stillborn.  Mary conceived, and soon hope will be born…again. 

Shall we abandon our sparkly darkness and step into the light?  I think we’d better hold hands.  It will take our eyes some time to adjust to being able to SEE as we come to discover the joy of our humanity, our true selves, our real brightness, our translucent humanness.

Wait, Watch...or WORK? The Call to Christmas

“Waddya waiting for…Christmas?”  My dad would say that if somebody was in his way in traffic.  That was before “road rage”.  While it didn’t seem to faze the driver in front of him, it certainly linked “Christmas” and “waiting” in my psyche.  And didn’t we, as kids, have a hard time waiting?  But we were stuck with it, and so we learned…to…WAIT.

Maybe that’s why last Sunday I was surprised by the word “Watch” in the Gospel.   I guess my default position is more passive and indifferent, a vestige of my childhood – to wait.  I found the call to watchfulness a perturbing call to a more adult engagement in Advent, and my immaturity surprised me.

But this Second Sunday of Advent calls us further.  It calls us to past waiting and even watching.  It calls us to work.  “Prepare the way”….  Oh, yeah?  How?  Make the high places plane and fill in the low places, so that the son of justice can quickly come. 

We read daily about the growing gap between rich and poor.  The high places are getting higher and the low places lower.  How do we turn it around?  How do we?  Who can we lift up?  How can we bring the cry of the poor to the ears of those living so high that they do not hear?

There are 25 working days 'til Christmas.

O Christ! Christ, Come QUICKLY!

My last post suggested the “watch” as defense against threat.  But Advent is a watch not against conquest, but a watch for liberation.  I find myself needing this reminder on this morning after what is called “Black Friday” and before the First Sunday of Advent.  The shopping madness is called “Black Friday” because, we’re told, lots of stores run the whole year in the red, at a loss, and only turn profitable after the holiday shopping surge.  But I think of it as a reminder of the darkness that we create by shading our eyes from the light. 

This morning, if we care to look, we can find all kinds of stories of the madness of yesterday’s bargain-hunting bedlam.  Despite this binge, the likelihood of a profitable year for merchants and suppliers is in doubt because of the weak economy not only here in the U.S., but in Europe as well.  Today’s financial front pages are full of frightening headlines…just as yesterday’s and last week’s and last month’s were.  The Arab Spring seems to have sowed a lot of seeds on rocky ground.  The Supercommittee turns out not to have been super at all.

Perhaps this is why when I realized that Advent was coming, I realized that my watch for the coming of Hope was urgent.  “Come, Lord Jesus, Come” was not sung sotto voce but emerged as a shout!  “O Christ!  Christ, come QUICKLY!"  I am reading, thanks to one of my friends from Tuesday mornings, Exiles, a Novel by Ron Hansen, about Gerard Manley Hopkins… and the five young German Nuns whose death at sea inspired his greatest poem “Wreck of the Deutschland”.  There on Tuesday morning as we prayed for the coming, yet again, of the Son of God, I found myself calling out as the 28 year-old Sister did, 

Away in the loveable west,	185
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails	190
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

Hopkins wrote from his safety in Wales, torn to his heart as he imagined them in the gales.  If not for ourselves in the relative safety from which we access this internet, then for those in the storm, must we not cry out?  And as I reflect on the madness of “Black Friday” and other distractions, I find insight in the way that 78 people (including the five newly-vowed nuns of Hopkins’ poem) died.  The S.S. Deutschland did notsink in the depths of the ocean.  It ran aground in shallow water 15 miles from shore - water too deep to sail in but deep enough to drown.

Perhaps we too are aground, stuck while the world swirls around us.  Or perhaps like Hopkins we are in safety as others drown.  Or perhaps we are just oblivious, wrapped in our safe isolation.

Hockey, Chutzpah, and Holiness

20 years ago my brother Dan went with our mom to try to find the place in Europe where her mom grew up.  They succeeded in finding her town, and shared a story that lives on in me though they are both gone.  And it shines a light on Advent as I reflect on this Sunday’s Advent-opening Gospel.

Rosina Luprich served as a watch nightly – and so did the other women in their town of Deutsch-Proben, midway between Vienna and Krakow, Poland during World War I.  With their men all conscripted in the war, the women patrolled the perimeter of the town with pots and pans through the night.  If enemy soldiers came into sight, they would start banging the pans to wake the mothers of the town, so that they could protect their children.  They walked the wall between safety and threat, and they watched.

The Gospel focuses on the word watch as a verb, calling us to remain alert.  But it also describes the four watches of the Roman system, three-hour divisions of the twelve-hour night, in the words “evening, midnight, cockcrow, or dawn.  The Palestinians, on the other hand, broke the 12 hours into three watches, and theologians liken them to childhood, adulthood, and old age. 

I found myself thinking about a line change in hockey, with five guys heading over the boards onto the bench as their replacement “line” of five come flying off the same bench onto the ice with fresh legs.  They do it so quickly because when the line changes, they are vulnerable, because the other team’s players stay on the ice, and stay in the flow without the chaos of change.

I looked around the room on Tuesday morning, I noticed the two generations of us, and I thought of the ages of man.  Half of us there are moving from child to man and half of us are transitioning from manhood to old age.   The chaos of change is within us, and all around in our society.  We’re called to watch as we are, from our own reality.  Rosina Luprich walked the hills around her town with pot and spoon, because that is who she was and what she had.  I realized as I look around the room that I’m in the chaos of line change in my own life.  I feel too young to me an old man, but too old to be a young man.  Maybe I feel the loss of my productive life as I go flying off the ice onto the bench, watching the fresh legs take the puck.  I wondered whether the young guys similarly feel the loss of the freedom of their recent adolescence, as they are called to the non-stop challenges of raising their own kids.

And I think about Rosina Luprich, who didn’t waste time with such mental games.  She just grabbed her pot and spoon and walked the wall and watched.  It would be ten years later, after my grandfather came back home from the war, that they would pack up their kids and immigrate to a farm near Chicago, a farm where my mother would grow up, where pots and spoons were for cooking, not for standing watch. 

Next: the ages of our lives

Off the Wall Comments

It’s Advent.  And boy, do I need it.

This morning I read a Facebook posting from Dave Koukal, my former colleague at UDM, about a “Homeless-Themed Halloween Party” thrown by a Buffalo, NY law firm that processed foreclosures.  A year ago the firm had encouraged their employees to celebrate Halloween at a homeless-themed party, complete with the staff dressing in costumes that made them look destitute and signs describing the various faux problems their characters had.  The story disgusted me, then saddened me, then angered me, then left me numb. 

It wasn’t until later that I read next Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 13:33-37) that I realized that Dave’s posting prepared me perfectly for Advent.  Matthew calls us to be watchful and alert.

 

On Tuesday mornings I join a group of guys to look at the coming Sunday’s Gospel.  One of us prepares an explanation of it, and we all have a conversation.  So I took my Halloween homeless party numbed self to the gathering, and one of the guys explained the gatekeeper’s watch.  He had to remain alert at the gate because it was from that location that he could be aware of the dangers outside the town.  I thought of walled cities we have visited while with our son in Europe, and the vista from up on those walls.  Within those walls were the tightly-knit buildings of the town, the shops with their goods, the apartments above them with their bright laundry drying in the safe sun. 

I realized that I’m generally “off the wall”.  I tend to remain down in the safety and warmth of community, letting the wall hide from me the reality of evil.  Call it idealism.  Call it wearing rose –colored glasses.  I think that is why the story of the tastelessness, the collective insensitivity of the staff of that New York foreclosure firm had blind-sided me. 

I’m called, this Advent, not wait, but to watch, to take off my rose-colored glasses and stand where I am aware not only of the warmth and hope and companionship of community, but also of those equally real forces that threaten this.  And I watch for the coming of a God who is much more than a cherubic little baby.  How about you?

Next: the watches, and the ages of our lives.