Stillllll Waiting.

Stilllll Waiting.

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

John Milton, Sonnet 19

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

Can Ants Learn to Fiddle?

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

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

In a field one summer's day

Danny's Coming to Dinner

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

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

Luke 14:12-14

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

Faithful? Free? So What?

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

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

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

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

Holy Smoke

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

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

A Word With You?

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

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

St. Francis or Dr. Laura? YOU Decide.

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

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

Choice 1:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith ;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

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

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

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

Amen.

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

There is a lot of flap about the racist nature

God's, Mine, and Ours

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

Halcyon Days

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

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

Lectio Divina - Arrested by Beauty

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

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

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

Mary, not Magic

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

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

Asparagus, Anticipation, and the Trust Bucket

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

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

BIG Grant Yours. Please Reply.

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

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

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

Complacency and the Magis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hearing the Fourth Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow.  Come back.

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

Hot Dogs and Heroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Change? Loose Change?

Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.   Paul wrote this to the Hebrew Christians 2000 years ago. 

The last two postings flowed from Robert F. Kennedy’s address to students in South Africa, a call to them to build a better world.  He was encouraging them to change things.  It was 1966, and he was encouraging these young people to change the world.  In 1967, John Lennon wrote these lyrics for a song titled “Across the Universe”.

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes
They call me on and on across the universe

Thoughts meander like the restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe

Sounds of laughter, shades of life are ringing through my open ears
Inciting and inviting me

Limitless undying love, which shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on and on across the universe

Nice words – taking in words and sounds, being caressed by emotions, and being called on and on across the universe, across the universe like those ripples, those ripples that build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Wowie!  Sounds promising.  But in the song, the refrain which is repeated three times is “Nothing’s gonna change my world, Nothing’s gonna change my world; Nothing’s gonna change my world, Nothing’s gonna change my world.

What do we hope for?  What is the evidence that we have of things unseen?  What incites us and invites us?  What calls us on and on?  And what brings us to despair?  Please comment – simply, briefly.

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

Cop-outs and Regret

Regret: to remember with distress and longing.  The root of the word, from Old English, is graetan, “to weep”.  As soon as I had proceeded through the intersection, I regretted leaving the woman and her kids behind.  Maureen coined a good phrase in her comment to yesterday’s posting, required reading to understand today’s.  Please read it first, and then read on.  Click to go back to it.  “Asleep at the wheel” she suggested as a potential fifth cop-out.    But I was quite awake, aware and processing even in the minute at that light.  I was, in that sixty seconds, quite mentally active, active enough to have gone through every one of Bobby Kennedy’s list of “dangers” strewn before those who wish to change the world order;  I would say, to be human.  I’ll go through my thinking point by point, and you’ll see that I could not claim sleep as an excuse.

Futility:

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.

I thought that these two feuding boys had developed an attitude, a resentment of each other that was deeper than anything I could have undone by helping.  Bobby Kennedy countered this cop-out with this contrary vision: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”  By the time I had turned the corner, I was imagining the memory those boys would have, of this old guy who left his car in the intersection, gave them a funny smile, took them each by the hand and walked them across the street.  Just a tiny ripple, but aren’t the pools of our hearts filed with just these ripples?  Isn’t it just this kind of memory of these Good Samaritans, these simple, courageous kindnesses that are the current of our caring?

Expediency:

The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities.

I just wanted to get home, that’s all.  I was not exhausted from a day of work, or rushing to respond to a need there.  I could not even claim to have been in a hurry, like the seminarians in the research, rushing to prepare a sermon on the Good Samaritan, too busy to stop and help the person in distress placed, by the researchers, on their path.  I had no excuse, and perhaps that is why I felt cheap the moment my car had gained momentum, pushing me through the thicket of ethical weeds that I had not even seen as I observed the woman and her kids. Kennedy said that “human faith and of passion and of belief (are) forces ultimately more powerful than all the calculations” that we do in thinking about trade-offs of our time.  We’ve spoken of the folly of the “zero-sum game,” of thinking that I lose the time I give, rather than investing it in a win-win deal, in which I receive back more than I put in.  Like Maureen, we proceed through the intersection of moral failure snared with an anchor of regret that impedes our progress, while the wings of moral success (go ahead, call them endorphins) speed us forward, the wind at our backs.

Timidity:

A third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.

Oh, it’s so much easier to blog about nobility and the milk of human kindness here in the still-dark morning in my study than to face even little battles on the streets of reality!  The truth is, the wimp in me did consider turning on my hazard flashers and getting out of my car, holding up what little traffic there was and helping the family across the street.  Was there the imposing, powerful grille of a big truck behind me, or a shiny one of some expensive marquee, rendering me a bug worth squishing?  What made me so timid?  Kennedy quoted Aristotle, “At the Olympic games it is not the finest or the strongest men who are crowned, but those who enter the lists.”  I lacked, in that moment, the courage to enter the situation, and left a loser.

Comfort:

For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success ….

I am certain that our cars, like our homes or offices, become a comfort zone in which we are susceptible to indifference, to the objectification of subjective fellow human beings.  We look from our windows and windshields like we look at a television screen or computer monitor; people become pixels, a mouse-click eliminates them, or a light touch of the gas pedal and a simple turn of the wheel.  But Kennedy spoke words to those young students in Capetown in 1966 that we need right here today.  This road of comfort is not the road marked out for us.  We are called to greater things, not merely from laws and customs or even Scriptural stories and sermons.  We are called from within our hearts, in the moment of encounter.

 And this is where Maureen is right.  We are too often asleep at the wheel, missing these opportunities to stop and become more human, like the Samaritan whose little ripple on that Road to Jericho does today as Kennedy proposed the courageous act would, sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance first in ourselves, and then the rest of the world.  Lives without regret call to us from the side of the road.

Tomorrow – Change.

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

Kennedy's Quartet of Cop-outs

Why does compassion not reign in our world but merely ring in our ears?  Why is it so often merely an aching aspiration, or an occasionally recurring dream?  Do you, like me, speak of the Good Samaritan, but so often see yourself more truly as one of those who passed by?

In his Day of Affirmation Address   to the Union of South African Students in 1966, a forty-year old Robert Kennedy offered four reasons.  They ring true in me; how about you?

Futility:

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.

Expediency:

The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities.

Timidity:

A third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.

Comfort:

For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success ….

By compassion, I don’t mean ending homelessness or illiteracy or inequitable distribution of wealth.  I simply mean helping those in need as we happen upon them. I think that Bobby Kennedy’s Quartet of Cop-outs can serve us in understanding our failures to be Good Samaritans.  They may provide us the opportunity to ask ourselves the question that a well-known radio shrink asks again and again: “What were you THINKing?”

I’ll use myself as an example.  Yesterday I was on my way home from a meeting with a potential client, waiting at an intersection.  I was not pressed for time. The street that I was on ended at the busy, curving road ahead, and I needed to turn left, meaning that traffic needed to clear in both directions.  There were four cars in front of me, and eventually three, and then two.  On the sidewalk on my left was a young woman, holding a toddler on her hip and holding the hand of one little boy who in turn was holding the hand of another.  I assumed that the woman was their mom, and I was focused on the fact that the brothers were upset about having to hold hands.  The mother’s attention was divided between her desire to get the kids safely across the street in front of the car ahead of me and getting the boys to obey.  While she remained on the curb, trying to get the boys to comply, traffic ahead momentarily cleared and I followed the car ahead of me, completing my left turn. 

I immediately regretted leaving the woman in her dilemma, and had the desire to turn around.  But by the time I could safely do so, I could no longer see her.  As I drove the last mile home, I asked myself “What were you THINKing?”  Actually, I was thinking about how the boys fought their mom over holding each others’ hands, while my granddaughters eagerly protect each other in such situations.  I wondered why it was so different wit these boys.  I had observed them, but I had not seen them.  I had fallen into the trap that Martin Buber calls an “I-it relationship” that considers the other as an object, or I would say even worse, a concept or idea, to be considered in my mind or discarded when the traffic clears.

As I look at Kennedy’s Quartet of Cop-outs, I score a perfect 4, failing on all points.  Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you how.  But in the meantime, please comment below how you would have measured me against Kennedy’s Cop-outs, or how you have similarly failed to stop and help, and how you feel to restrict compassion to its café place as idea?

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

Every Person Counts

Yesterday I spent some time recycling, and I voted, and I helped at the homeless shelter.  In each place I met a hero, and in the company of those heroes I felt less overwhelmed by the call to a life of humanity and compassion.

When I’ve met people who talked about “sustainability” in terms of natural resources, I saw in their enthusiasm for our stewardship of stuff a distraction from our stewardship of people.  My work with the homeless in Detroit placed the needs of discarded humans over discarded plastic and urban sprawl.  But I learned it was different.  Recycling is big here, and Andy, who arrived at my first gig of the day with his two sweet kids on the worksite, is one of the effective champions of recycling as part of a lifestyle responsible to what we are given, a sense of stewardship of nature.  He brought his two sweet kids, Jacob and Jenna.  Gretchen, another volunteer, arrived a few minutes later, finding in my University of Detroit Mercy tee shirt a connection we shared, a faculty member who was a lifelong friend of hers since their youth in downriver Detroit.  Jacob and Jenna busied themselves emptying the contents of the water and pop bottles that Andy and Gretchen and I sorted.  (Their dad let them each “explode” one of the pop bottles on the cement behind the garage to light them up, get them going.)  Then I took a pile of the returnable to Oryana, the local hub of healthy and responsible groceries, and cashed in the bottles for Bay Bucks.  I found that in supporting this stewardship of stuff, I was in a community of people who had a sense of mutual stewardship.   Guys in tie-died shirts counted and sorted my returnables.  Smiling women at the checkout counter took my return slip and gave me the local currency with raccoons and morels on the front, and not Dead Presidents.  A gray-haired couple pedaled up on their bikes as I drove off.  I found recycling as connected in every activity to social relationships, a stewardship of society. 

When Kathy and I went to vote, it was not the poll workers that struck me.  It was the stickers.  There on the table where we were given our ballots was a pile of them, little oval stickers with an American Flag and two little words: I Voted.  I smiled as I picked one up, peeled off the shiny backing, and stuck it on my shirt.  I smiled because I was thinking about Pat Eaton, the man I met in Detroit who went out on the streets in his van to try to talk the people who lived on them to get off, to get into shelters, into programs that would help them face their addictions, their anger, their ghosts.  And Pat was a man on fire the months leading up to elections, telling every homeless person he knew, and everybody else for that matter, to vote!  “You may not have a home.  You may not have a job.  You may not have a family or even a friend.  But you have a vote.  You matter.  You COUNT!”  His passionate statement morphed into the motto “Every Person Counts” that engaged hundreds of people to go out on the coldest night of the winter and try to count every person outside of shelter, to let HUD know how many homeless we have in Detroit.   But what made me smile is that on the night of every election, Pat coordinated an “I Voted Dinner Dance” for the homeless and their advocates on Belle Isle.  It was a dressy affair, with great food and music.  And every homeless person knew that they counted, because they had those little stickers that said I Voted.”

I thought of a scene in the film “Garbage Dreams” a film about the Zaballeen who for generations have collected and recycled the garbage of Cairo, Egypt.  Adham, one of the young men who saw the recycling of plastics as God’s calling, his vocation, was invited to see what a multinational recycling company in Wales did to make money recycling.  When he found that they were only recycling 20% of the waste for the sake of maximizing profit, he was aghast.  He reached onto the conveyor belt that carried the non-recycled plastic and started picking up pieces, as he did at home, saying, “What about all of these!  Why are you not saving THESE?”

I suspect that this return, again and again, to Howard  Gray’s call to the Good Samaritan Story may be wearying, this call to see, to feel, to help, to change things and change ourselves.  I suspect that you, as I, think it is just too much.  But then I think of yesterday, Andy and Oryana, and Pat Eaton, and finally of my two final heroes at Goodwill Inn.  I go on Tuesday afternoons to serve dinner, and to facilitate a “Goals Group” of seven or eight guests who are trying to get back on their feet.  My job is to encourage them to keep hoping, to keep working on finding income and affordable housing, to get beyond the thinks that put them on the streets. I feel responsible to come in prepared, and to use their time well.  But yesterday instead of leading the session, I turned it over to Catherine and Lynn, two of their peers who designed a game based on “Chutes and Ladders” that uses the ups and downs of the game to simulate the ups and downs of homelessness, the slides from security into the gutter, and the ladders that seem so hard to reach.

One of the Zaballeen voices over the trailer linked above, the words “Can I really say ‘No’ to God?” as he considers the possibility of letting the multinational company replace his labor.  His God calls him to see every bit of garbage as having value.  How can every one be saved?  In Cairo, the answer is 60,000 Zaballeen, who are often treated as garbage themselves.  In Traverse City, it is Andy and Jacob and Jenna and Gretchen and the guys at Oryana with the tie-died shirts and the smiling women with the Bay Bucks.  And it is the Lynns and Catherines who help us understand that those lifted up join in lifting up others.

When it comes to stopping to pick up what some see as garbage, or who some others see as garbage, Can I really say “No” to God?  

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

I love Humanity; It's People I Can't Bear

Charles Schultz said it, or maybe it was Charley Brown.  The idea of compassion is easy.  One of the heroes in my life is my Uncle Joe, now 92.  As a boy I admired his ability to pursue his interests – rock collecting, tropical fish, music, photography, and reading, reading, reading of serious books.  Then he and my Aunt Arlene adopted a child, and their lives got busy.  His interests were put on hold until Joanie grew up and married.  Then Aunt Arlene’s dad died, and her mother moved in with them and they were busy again.  When she passed away, he retired and they moved to a little development in the high desert or Arizona, where he bought a little pickup truck and spent lots of time in the hills collecting and polishing stones.  The two of them would drive back to Chicago to visit from time to time, and I’d delight in the return of his freedom to pursue his interests.  Then Aunt Arlene was diagnosed with cancer, and he cared for her, his life absorbed in that role.

When Aunt Arlene died, I told their daughter Joanie that I hoped he would find some relief in her passing.  She lashed out angrily, “How could you say such a thing? My mother is dead and you think about relief?” Mea culpa.  Back when the Catholic Mass was in Latin, the congregation would read along with the priest, and in the first prayers at the foot of the altar, he would tap his breast three times while saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa….”  It meant though my fault, through my fault, through my terrible fault.  Now the youngsters have a simpler way to sat it: “My bad!”

The vehemence of Joanie’s rhetorical question burned the moment into my memory, or perhaps my soul.  It returns to me again and again, reminding me that my way of looking for the positive in things sometimes blinds me to the pain of others.  I had meant that I hoped the uncle I loved and admired could find consolation in knowing he had done all he could, had loved his wife through worse as well as better, sickness as well as health, and now awaken free to do the things that he enjoyed.   Joanie’s explosion told me it’s not that easy.  You don’t just turn the page and go on as you were.  Kathy’s friend Peg had calmly challenged my attempt to encourage her as she looks at an uncertain future in tough economic times.  I don’t remember what I’d said, but I remember her reply.  “That’s facile, John.”  There’s more to it than that.

It’s easy to love and not touch, whatever that kind of love is at all.  The idea of love is facile, easy.  It’s like imagining good times around the corner, or the idea of losing weight, or controlling an addiction.  It’s the doing that challenges us, the doing of love and compassion that puts us in a place where our ears are more important than our mouths, our understanding more than our ideas, our waiting more than our charging ahead.  If I recast the story of the Good Samaritan, perhaps the first person seeing the man beaten and left in the road would be not a Rabbi, but a guy saying, “Well, now he doesn’t have to worry about getting where he was going.”  The second might be not a lawyer, but another guy saying “Don’t worry, buddy, somebody is sure to come by soon who knows how to handle this.” 

God, why do I see myself playing those roles?  I’d rather be the third guy, who says nothing, whose love does the talking.  Charles Schultz knew what Bonhoeffer knew.  Talk’s cheap, like cheap grace.  Rilke knew.  In his Book of Hours he wrote (I, 14)

You see, I want a lot,
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as thought untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet,
it's not too late to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

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

Bent But Not Destroyed

A few years ago Kathy and I were walking a familiar trail through a woods at Cranbrook near our home in Detroit when my eyes were caught by something unusual on a tree I had passed a dozen times.  The tree was an ancient cottonwood, so big around that it would have taken three people holding hands to reach around it.  Reaching for light in the dense growth, the tree had grown tall and straight, its first branches reaching out so high above us we had to hold on to keep our balance when we looked up at it.  A nearby tree had fallen against the trunk years earlier, maybe decades, and scraped a five foot swath of bark from the old cottonwood, ten feet above the ground.  Over the years, decay and healing had battled each other as the cambium had tried to grow over the wound, and a hollow had formed.  The hollow prevented complete healing, because the new cambium and bark had nothing to hold on to.  In its confusion, the tree began to send roots down, and a profusion of roots cascaded from the wound.  Finding no water, they eventually grew bark, but never leaves.

Bill’s eloquent comment on yesterday’s blog gives me an opportunity to point out something that I noticed when I took the photos here.

When I asked Riet Schumack if I could photograph the plan of the project they were working on, she adeptly slid Johannes’s drawing under a convenient branch oddly protruding down from the trunk of their own ancient cottonwood.

I had recognized that oddly downward-pointing branch immediately.  And I had immediately thought how providential it was that it would be here to hold Johannes’s drawing of “Spiral Bench Around Cottonwood Mother Tree”

Years ago something had caused a wound in the side of this tree, this mother tree.  And as in Cranbrook, in the attempt to heal, it had sent out a root, and that root, finding no water had grown bark, but never any leaves.  It had hung there, apparently useless, foolish limb, for years.  Silly root, six feet above any water!

And now, the silly root has found its source of life in the spirit and labor of Riet and Mark, Billie and Bill, Johannes and Thomas and the Brightmoor neighbors and kids from the nearby school.  There it is, the perfectly located clip, don’t you know, holding up that vision, that source of growing hope.  I am often moved, when something like this happens, when some long-ago seemingly insignificant event or even mistake turns out to have been God all along, planning way ahead for this act of love today.  How He was loving me all along, all those years.  And that makes me think of the Hopkins poem to which Bill referred:

7. God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins

  THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.        

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;    

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil     

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod*?         

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;            

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;              

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil       

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.          

And for all this, nature is never spent;    

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;             

And though the last lights off the black West went          

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent    

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

* “reck his rod” is interpreted as follow his leadership, his scepter.

Bright wings indeed.  Spinging forth indeed.  Bent but not destroyed.  Spirals, indeed.  Yes, indeed.  

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