Free Lemonade Stand

I Wonder...

2011-12-25T08:15:00.000-05:00

It’sChristmas morning, and the Nativity Stable is crowded.

My friend Dave shared a thought that reallythrew me. “If Mary and Joseph were notable 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 Detroitthere are “warming centers” where the street homeless can come in out of thecold. There are no beds, just rows offolding chairs. The room smells of sweatas clothes worn for days without access to showers begin to raise the humidityin the bare room. There is no apparentjoy in the room that I picture, in a place that used to be called the “24-hourwalk-in center”. There are dedicatedpeople who staff that room during the day, helping people try to find housing,healthcare, and maybe the odd job. Butat night, it’s just the security staff, whose gift to these lost is notencouragement, but merely alertness and equity. The chairs are as hard as the life that these lost live, in a city tobig and too poor to give them hope.

When Davereads the Gospel story, I hear that the Shepherds leave and spread the joyfulnews. But I’m still stuck in the 24-hourwalk-in center, and the smell is in my nostrils, and it is worse than a stable. What sends the shepherds out withenthusiasm?

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

So thesethree are the ones I see as shepherds in my imagination, and I think “what inthis scene succeeded where I have not; what has given them enthusiastichope? This morningKathy and I will go to the morning Mass, what is called “The Shepherds’ Mass”. The church will not smell like the walk-incenter, and none of my three day-laborer companions will be there…not physically. But Iam 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 canleave not in disappointment and despair, but with excitement and joy, eager to spreadthe story of whatever they saw in that crowded stable.

Promise…Reality…Legacy

2011-12-19T08:58:00.001-05:00

photo courtesy of Washington Post

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

Zechariahsees this angel, you know?

Angelsays, “Hey! Zech! Elizabeth’s pregnant!”

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

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

Zech says, “Noway! Can’t be!”

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

And soZechariah thinks for three months, reflects on things, goes about his work insilence. And by the time Elizabeth givesbirth to a son three months later, Zech has changed his tune. He’s changed his thinking, and adjusted hisview. He had opened his mind, and whenElizabeth’s body opened up and produced a son, Zechariah opened his mouth andpronounced his name: John.

Mary sees anangel too, and she says yes, and then her body is closed around the childforming in her, closed for nine months. These days people get ultrasounds, and post fuzzy images onFacebook. But then it was just mystery,just trust. Nine months. She had said yes to something that wouldchange the world. Her life changed. But do you suppose that when the angeldisappeared and she was alone again there in the recesses of her parents’house, that she felt any change? Whatabout the next week? I would have haddoubts.

These weeksI’ve been working with a group of guys; talented, promising…and homeless. Like the first homeless person I’d known inDetroit and thought I could “fix” when I saw how good he was, I have foundmyself suffering disappointment by what I see as a lack of progress. This morning I came upon an article in theWashington Post about 79 Seat Pleasant Elementary School students. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/local/seat-pleasant-following-the-dreamers/?hpid=z2The 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, thenot-quite-as-I’d-hoped-or-imagined, and just as we do, you and I, all of us areheld to discover the legacy only as it unfolds…and keeps unfolding, generationafter generation. Whether homelessnessor salvation or family…patience, people!

Celebrate Disillusionment!

2011-12-18T11:24:00.002-05:00

image courtesy verticalblue.net

Father Anthony Citro shared that today’sreadings (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 bringingforth the Messiah. Paul of Tarsusthought he’d be a hero of the status quo by persecuting the Christians, but gotknocked off his high horse and ended up preaching the salvation of Christ. And Mary of Nazareth thought she’d be atraditional Jewish woman, practicing virtue in the recesses of her home, andthe 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 oftruth, and become their true selves.

If someonecame to me and said that they were disillusioned, my response would besympathy, and I would be inclined to console them. But to become disillusioned literally meansto be relieved of a false light.

This is theseason of light, celebrated in many faiths in the northern hemisphere because thedays are shortest now, and darkest, and we long for brighter days. For Christians, it is looking to a star, andfollowing that star to the Bright Babe, who would grow to learn that being theChosen 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, wesecuring ourselves in the darkness that is our illusion, our false light.

This is atime of illusion being stripped from most of the “developed” world. We are learning that our prosperity is notwhat we expected. Our misconception hasled to a miscarriage, and our false dream is stillborn. Mary conceived,and soon hope will be born…again.

Shallwe 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 tobeing able to SEE as we come to discover the joy of our humanity, our trueselves, our real brightness, our translucent humanness.

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

2011-12-01T07:46:00.001-05:00

“Waddya waiting for…Christmas?” My dad would saythat 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 certainlylinked “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’swhy last Sunday I was surprised by the word “Watch” in the Gospel. I guess my default position is more passiveand indifferent, a vestige of my childhood – to wait. I found the call towatchfulness a perturbing call to a more adult engagement in Advent, and myimmaturity surprised me.

But thisSecond 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 thelow places, so that the son of justice can quickly come.

We readdaily about the growing gap between rich and poor. The high places are getting higher and thelow places lower. How do we turn itaround? How do we? Who can we liftup? How can we bring the cry of the poorto the ears of those living so high that they do not hear?

There are 25 working days 'til Christmas.

O Christ! Christ, Come QUICKLY!

2011-11-26T08:03:00.001-05:00

My last postsuggested the “watch” as defense against threat. But Advent is a watch not against conquest,but a watch for liberation. I findmyself 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, lotsof stores run the whole year in the red, at a loss, and only turn profitableafter the holiday shopping surge. But Ithink of it as a reminder of the darkness that we create by shading our eyesfrom the light.

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

Perhaps thisis why when I realized that Advent was coming, I realized that my watch for thecoming of Hope was urgent. “Come, LordJesus, Come” was not sung sotto vocebut emerged as a shout! “O Christ! Christ, come QUICKLY!" I amreading, thanks to one of my friends from Tuesday mornings, Exiles, a Novel by Ron Hansen, aboutGerard Manley Hopkins… and the five young German Nuns whose death at seainspired his greatest poem “Wreck of the Deutschland”. There on Tuesday morning as we prayed for thecoming, yet again, of the Son of God, I found myself calling out as the 28year-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.

Hopkinswrote from his safety in Wales, torn to his heart as he imagined them in thegales. If not for ourselves in therelative safety from which we access this internet, then for those in thestorm, must we not cry out? And as Ireflect on the madness of “Black Friday” and other distractions, I find insightin 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 ranaground in shallow water 15 miles from shore - water too deep to sail in butdeep enough to drown.

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

Hockey, Chutzpah, and Holiness

2011-11-25T08:21:00.001-05:00

20 years agomy 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, andshared a story that lives on in me though they are both gone. And it shines a light on Advent as I reflecton this Sunday’s Advent-opening Gospel.

RosinaLuprich served as a watch nightly – and so did the other women in their town ofDeutsch-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 thenight. If enemy soldiers came intosight, they would start banging the pans to wake the mothers of the town, sothat they could protect their children. Theywalked the wall between safety and threat, and they watched.

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

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

I lookedaround the room on Tuesday morning, I noticed the two generations of us, and Ithought of the ages of man. Half of usthere are moving from child to man and half of us are transitioning frommanhood to old age. The chaos of changeis within us, and all around in our society. We’re called to watch as we are,from our own reality. Rosina Luprichwalked the hills around her town with pot and spoon, because that is who shewas and what she had. I realized as Ilook 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 tooold to be a young man. Maybe I feel theloss of my productive life as I go flying off the ice onto the bench, watchingthe fresh legs take the puck. I wonderedwhether the young guys similarly feel the loss of the freedom of their recentadolescence, as they are called to the non-stop challenges of raising their ownkids.

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

Next: theages of our lives

Off the Wall Comments

2011-11-24T06:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Good to the Last Drop

2011-06-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

Courtesy Gayle Dollinger redbubble.com

I met two people just now as I was weeding and planting in the dawn light turning to sunrise. One recently stepped down from a very prominent position and said something I admire: “Sometimes it appropriate, even after a good show, to get off the stage”. I don’t remember his name. The other just ascended. His name I remember. I decided, in their company, that I need to follow their example.

This is my final posting. I’ve deeply appreciated the company of you who have read this blog over the past two very good years. Your companionship has helped my find meaning in my life entering retirement, which I now see as my present calling…and relocating to this new place that Kathy and I now really feel as home.

As I’ve read and written, I have observed that easy search engines give us all a ready access to very good writing. At times I’ve considered my writing good, but no better than (and often not nearly as good as) much that I have happened easily upon.

So this morning as I mused on God’s wisdom in trusting the presence of the Spirit to continue in secula seculorum the work that the Word Made Flesh began, I decided to follow the truth that I find happy within myself. I believe I’ve written enough words, read mostly by my old friends from Detroit.

Ha! I smile and wonder what Jesus does up there. I wonder whether He gets up early and pulls weeds and smiles at the flowers, still weighted with the night’s dew bending even more under the weight of the first bee. I wonder if He takes long walks, and thinks about those with whom he lived such a good life. I wonder if He wonders about them, but I am certain that He longs.

I am certain, however, that He trusts His Spirit, trusts completely in Her life within all of those about whom He wonders, and who he loves with a love, even at a distance in space and time, undiminished.

If any of you who have read this blog and would, in fact, like some of my particular words from time to time, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll make a list for the future.

But you know that I’m here regardless, and find you as unforgettable as God.

Toward Pentecost: "Imagine Me Gone."

2011-05-31T10:59:00.001-04:00

Next Sunday’s Gospel, John 17:1-11, is all ablur in pronouns.

Ablur.

Jesus is standing with us, but instead of talking to us...about the Father, he starts talking to the Father…about US. And we’re left to listen and try to make sense of it. There are, by my quick count, 56 pronouns in the reading, 25% of the words. It takes some time to figure out who Jesus is referring to.

Time.

Perhaps that is the reason for the blur of pronouns; he wants to get us confused, so we listen. It’s time for him to leave, to leave us, to leave us to our own devices.

Imagine someone who means (or meant) the world to you…leaving. Everything changes, doesn’t it, at least for awhile? This is what Jesus is trying to invite us to consider, as we sit around in an untidy, squirming circle, wondering why the heck he is talking to the ceiling.

He's saying "Imagine me gone."

We have nine days from this Thursday to consider this, to join those confused disciples.

Perhaps you have lost someone who...

was everything to you. Imagine that person speaking to God in heaven, but every time the word “they” is used, insert your own name (and for the grammatically sensitive, change the verb to fit.)

All of our life, we are left and we leave. Being accompanied by the Spirit of the departed is a door that is open to us.

I referred to the film “Cherry Blossoms” a posting ago. It is a story of finding the spirit of those who have physically left us, finding them within ourselves, not merely them but the unbound part of themselves, the free and dancing part of themselves…their Spirit.

Between now and Pentecost, I’d like to return to The Free Lemonade Stand from time to time and share my reflections. Please share your own reflections as well in comment below.

John 17:1-1

Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said,
“Father, the hour has come.
Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you,
just as you gave him authority over all people,
so that your son may give eternal life to all you gave him.
Now this is eternal life,
that they should know you, the only true God,
and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.
I glorified you on earth
by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do.
Now glorify me, Father, with you,
with the glory that I had with you before the world began.

“I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world.
They belonged to you, and you gave them to me,
and they have kept your word.
Now they know that everything you gave me is from you,
because the words you gave to me I have given to them,
and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you,
and they have believed that you sent me.
I pray for them.
I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me,
because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours
and everything of yours is mine,
and I have been glorified in them.
And now I will no longer be in the world,
but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.”

An Eternity Together

2011-05-19T07:31:00.000-04:00

This Sunday’s Gospel invites us to continue circling the tree in the morning mist, trying to find the bird that is making the music that slows our pulse, softens our step, and pushes back on our preoccupations and worries and fears, as long as we keep listening. Jesus is talking with his disciples again about being gone, and remaining.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he begins, knowing that this is not a head trip, but a journey of consideration by the softer part of his male companions, the more vulnerable. He will leave them. All of us leave each other, don’t we? We know this is true because we have been left by others, others who have been parents or friends, or God help us, children.

Jesus is leaving, but he will remain, he says. And in this is our greatest hope, of never being abandoned, never being alone. The film “Cherry Blossoms” finds Rudi, losing his wife as we who watch know something that he does not, that he himself is dying. That we know allows us to see his days of living after his Trudi’s death as his most precious. And in these days, he circles the tree in the mist of death and listens to the silence, and tells his children “I want to know where Trudi is!”

In life, she attempted to dance him, to bring him to the miracle of the moment, to the intimacy of touch and movement, of being one. It was not until she was gone that he allowed himself to be surrounded by her, to be drawn in to her, to understand that he and she were indeed one.

Perhaps it is the same with us Christians, we who struggle with the “gone-ness” of Jesus and circle the tree in the silence and mist, trying to recall the song that we have heard sung from time to time, wondering if there ever really was a bird, or if it was just our imagination. We want to know where God is!

And here He is all along, so inextricably wound in us, in the love that is beyond imagining, but is hinted at by duets in dance and song. Perhaps that is why it is these duets that can move us to tears? Perhaps it is the insinuation of voices and arms that are the notes of that birdsong finding our ears through the mist of our hoping. Yes, it is real. It is not just my imagination.

Doing Daringly Despite Doubt

2011-05-14T07:55:00.000-04:00

How dare we even try? The world seems so messed up, so far beyond our control, problems so much bigger than us. Does this ever touch you, this sense of the response that aches to…?

Last night while we were having dinner with our neighbors who just returned from a winter away, a little bird thumped into the dining room window and fluttered, dazed, to the arm of a deck chair. After a brief chorus of sympathetic “Aww’s” we found ourselves back in conversation. But from time to time we would glance over, one or the other of us, and check on the little bird’s progress. When at one point I looked over and it was gone, I shared the good news and we all smiled, relief displacing nagging but deferred sympathy.

In tomorrow’s Gospel, the Good Shepherd has something to say about Bad Shepherds, remarking about “thieves and robbers”. My friend Dave shared with us last Tuesday morning that Jesus was following up on some tough words from Ezekiel 34:

Are not shepherds meant to feed a flock? Yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock.

You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the injured ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost.

My flock is astray on every mountain and on every high hill; my flock has been scattered all over the world; no one bothers about them and no one looks for them.”

"For the Lord Yahweh says this: Look, I myself shall take care of my flock and look after it.

Dave’s translation used the words “You pasture yourselves,” and the words thumped into my heart, and since then, I have been looking over from the dinner of my days at the poor and hungry and homeless outside the window of my safe, warm, secure house, the deferred sympathy nagging at me.

I don’t know that any of us at the table last evening would have known what to do with that little bird. We may have done more harm than good. And our relief may have been wishful thinking, with half of such birds dying later of brain injuries. This link explains it, and gives us ideas about avoiding bird strikes.

But what of the poor and hungry and homeless? There are so many! Where’s that manual on how to help them?

Here we return to the message of Jesus: What now, that I am dead and risen and will soon return to my Father? What now, indeed? What do we do? How do we even enter the world of so many to be fed, so many weak to be made strong, so many sick to care for, so many injured to bandage, so many lost to bring back? So many!

I’m the way, Jesus says. Enter through me. Like Peter, he calls us from our boats of safety across the water to himself. “Just look at me.” Like Moses at Meribah, I doubt myself. How could God possibly get enough out of this rock-self of mine to quench so much thirst! And Jesus stands at the sheep gate of the sick, injured, lost world and calls me, and calls you, too, I think. “Just look at me. Don’t look down.” And for God’s sake, don’t look away and go back to dinner-as-usual.

Perhaps it was not coincidental that at the table, our neighbor Gary mentioned a video about a runner not hesitating to get up and try the impossible, or we recalled the Derrick Redmond race. Please watch it and listen to Josh Grogan’s song.

Raising up the fallen may be simply responding as we are called, doing what seems only natural.

Get up.

When is a Door Not a Door?

2011-05-12T06:22:00.000-04:00

“How did you get in here,” the heroine screams, clutching her spidering-tense fingers to her mouth, as if to protect herself from the unseen intruder.

Sunday’s Gospel, John 10: 1-10 begins with Jesus saying “Amen, amen I say to you….” This is like saying “look at me; I’m going to say something important.” And what he has to say is that “whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber.” And he goes on to tell us that he is the sheep gate through which we should enter the world.

Do we enter the world through love, or some other way? If there were signs over the various doors, what would they be?

Members Only

I accept exceptionalism. I feel comfortable with those who speak as I do, who act conventionally, who conform to the norms I accept. They are Catholic, perhaps, or White, or Educated, or Male. And they accept me just as I am: Catholic, Educated, Young, and Male.

Security

I’ll do what will keep me safe. I’ll hold on to what I have so it will be there for later when I need it. If I’m sure I have enough I’ll share some of the extra, but I’ll hold on to some of it too, just in case.

Faculty Entrance

I know, you know. I have an education, and lots of experience. I should be able to walk right in, and people ought to know that I know. What do I know? What they don’t. I’m special, and need to be treated as, well, above them.

Baggage Pickup

I gotta bring my stuff. I choose the car that is attractive, that shows whatever it is I need to show others. I’m frugal, or I’m sensible, or I’ve really arrived, or I’m hot, baby! Cell phone in my left pocket (smartphone, you know, with all my numbers and my calendar too) keys in my right, wallet in my back pocket, with clout.

(Your Name Here)

This guy is just standing there, holding as sign with your name on it. He’s looking at you with an expression that is calm, and his mouth betrays a certain mirth, warmer than a smirk, as if he knows you. I walk over to him, and he says, “Amen, amen I say to you. Come with me.” You start to follow him, and he says “Leave you stuff here; all you need will be provided.”

OoHOO! A...men!

So here we are, facing these five ways in. How do we choose, really?

Dance of Days

2011-05-10T06:43:00.000-04:00

A grain of wheat in nature falls to the ground and roots itself. I saw a film of this several years ago, before computer videos became so common. The hairy strand at the top of the seed curled and uncurled with the changing humidity of night and day, curling and uncurling, making a place in the soil to take hold, pulling the seed into the soil and beginning the germination process.

Of the seven children of the five mothers I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, I knew six. No, I know six. With the nights and days of my life, my memory of them plants them in my soul soil, curling and uncurling and finding purchase. I remember them in their vitality, and their “gone-ness” makes me aware of my “here-ness”. They give me the gift if presence, of breathing and seeing and smelling and tasting and touching, of longing and striving and slowing down, too, and being still.

They make me aware of my own adult children's here-ness, too, of the gift of their todays.

When an Arab man becomes the father of a son, his name in changed. My name, John Daniels, would have become John abu-Christopher 36 years ago. It would remind me each moment that having become a father my life is forever changed, and my very identity. I think of these five mothers, whose names were not changed in the moment of their children’s passing, but that everything else did, especially at that first terrible moment.

For all of us who grieve, the probing of that tendril, curling and uncurling in our troubled hearts to find a place to grow in us determines and occupies the time of first shock. My prayer for these five mothers is that as in the process of those grains of wheat in nature, the green shoot that emerges reaches to the light, dancing them in that phototropic gentleness and grace, teaching them the steps, accompanying them in that place that might otherwise seem like abandonment, that life somehow become for them the green dance of days.

Grieving Mothers

2011-05-09T07:23:00.002-04:00

Mathilde Roussel Giraudy "lifes of grass"

The pastor’s Mothers’ Day homily was masterful…but in the end, he was just a guy, well-honed logic too dull to cut through the binding cord of loss.

The Opera Turandot was written by Giacomo Puccini – up to the first few lines of the final duet, when the composer died of a heart attack while being treated for throat cancer. The pastor, a lover of Italian Opera, waxed romantic, inspired by the idea that Puccini’s students completed the work he had begun, allowing it to become one of the world’s greatest and most often-performed operatic works. In the same way, he said, that God’s saving work is to be completed by the Church, a mother takes God’s miracle of conception and completes it by nurturing it with her own life.

Wow. I imagined myself shouting “Bravo!” at the end of his homily, as one might do at la Scala in Milan, where Turandot was debuted. How elegantly he had touched each mother’s heart, ennobling them with the holiness of their charge, to bring God’s work to fruition. I did not shout. This was, after all, not an opera hall, but a typically conservative church. But I did hold on to that glow of appreciation for the composition and delivery of his homily. Mother completes the unfinished work of God. Wow.

Then I saw Sarah at the other end of our pew, and tears came to my eyes. She had lost her son a year ago. God’s miracle of conception entrusted to her for completion…. I thought of the burden of maternity, of carrying out the work that God has begun in creating a life, and tears flowed
as Sally’s reddened eyes brought to mind Kathy’s sister, who has lost both of her children, and three other women who have lost sons in their youth.

Turandot was the name of a princess whose heart had been hardened by abuse in her youth. Any man who wished to marry her would need to correctly answer three riddles, knowing that if he failed, he would die.

The prince who came forward just as the previous suitor was being executed did indeed answer the three riddles posed to him by Turandot:

What is born at each sunset and dies at each dawn? “Hope.”

What flickers warm and red like fire but is not flame? “Blood.”

What is the ice that makes you burn? “It is you,Turandot!”

The Gospel, which found little reference in the pastor’s homily, was about a couple of guys trying to make sense of Jesus’ death by argument and logic. They were so taken up by the senselessness of it that they failed to recognize the risen Jesus who had fallen into stride with them on the road. Their heads were so busy that they did not feel their hearts burning for the nearness of Jesus, their lost love and quenched hope.

Sarah’s loss of her son is a riddle to me, and Kathy’s sister’s and the other three mothers’. I try to get my mind around it, and all that comes is tears. In the night of my unknowing, though, I do feel hope. I hope for these grieving mothers that they can believe that the seed that has fallen so prematurely into the ground does indeed germinate, does indeed bring life and sustenance to the hungry world, even if in some way that is beyond our logic and argument. I do hope that they can feel in the pumping of their own blood the unquenchable fire of life that is passed on and on and on. But even as the Prince answers the last riddle, one last barrier to their marriage is put forth, and their life together is saved not by male logic, but by female sacrifice. Liu, the prince’s female servant, accepts death rather than divulging the secret that would doom the prince.

Having cast off the useless tools of argument and logic, I look to the pumping of my own heart and the hope that occurs to me in the night of my unknowing as I look across the pew and beyond our own happy lives at the grieving of these five mothers who have lost children, even as we continue to delight in our own. This hope yields an image that seems to cauterize this wound in me, the image of a five sheaves of wheat, still green and blowing in the wind, with seven grains missing.

Next: seven grains self-seeding

The Eyes of the Heart: Alma Mater

2011-05-08T07:17:00.004-04:00

Do you notice how the main characters in these after-Easter appearances of Jesus – the locked room and the road to Emmaus – are guys? In the U.S., today is Mother’s Day as well as the Third Sunday of Easter. No doubt.

Earl the Twirl - courtesy UDM Athletics

ALMA MATER
In this morning’s Detroit Free Press is a story that warms my University of Detroit Mercy heart. It’s on the Sports Page. It’s a Mother’s Day story – about a guy. “Earl the Twirl”, we called him back in U of D’s Calihan Hall, this 6’ 9” basketball transfer who ran with his thumbs up all the time, most noticeably when he was loping across the court after scoring, like he was giving himself a thumbs-up, and maybe us, the cheering throng, too. We guys saw him as points and rebounds, our hope to get back to the NCAA tournament after the Dick Vitale/Long/Duerod/Tyler years that gave our struggling urban university some time in the spotlight. His mom saw him as a college student. And she believed in him.

I think that the reason Jesus kept appearing to guys after that first Easter morning was that

we are half blind; we see with our eyes. Theologian Karen Armstrong writes of the trap of Logos, clinging to objective meaning in the way we see the world – the logic of the previous post. Mythos, on the other hand, “provides people with a context that makes sense of their day-to-day lives; it directs their attention to the eternal and the universal. It is also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind....” (The Case for God)

Earl Cureton and his mom PATRICIA BECK/Detroit Free Press

I prefer to substitute Armstrong’s use of “unconscious mind” with her Ted Prize-winning “compassionate heart”. While we guys in the Calihan Hall seats were looking at her son’s points and rebounds, Minnie Mae Turner was looking at the mythical aspect of her son, seeing him graduate from college, past his late father’s illiteracy, past her own third grade education. So today, thirty years later, Mick McCabe wrote a Mother’s Day story in the Free Press sports section, about Earl Cureton graduating next Saturday with his Bachelor’s Degree in Human Services, and giving that diploma to his 94 year old mom.

But the story leaves us guys some hope in the examples of UDM’s Ron Naski and Mike Witkowski and Fr. Justin Kelly, who advised and taught Earl Cureton, who believed in him because they saw with the eyes of their heart that he was more than points and rebounds. They saw with their own compassionate hearts the man that his mom saw. Earl would say it without opening his mouth. Two thumbs up for my unforgettable colleagues Ron, and Mike and Fr. Kelly. Here’s to guys who give other guys hope that we, too, can see with the eyes of the heart…just like our Moms.

An afternote. On my way to church, I thought of the phrase "Alma Mater", which we use to refer to the colleges from which we have graduated. These three guys have helped University of Detroit Mercy live up to that, to being part of the "nourishing mother" that my Alma Mater - and Earl the Twirl's is. Check UDM out at http://www.udmercy.edu

An oh so inadequate word of thanks to the mom I’m married to, whose heart shows me so much more than my eyes ever could. I love you Kathy!

Risen? It Just Ain’t Logical

2011-05-05T06:16:00.000-04:00

Caravaggio - "Emmaus"

Puppy or baby – take your pick. They whimper at night, alone in their place, while you are in the next room. You peek in, comforting them, “I’m right around the corner. I’m here. Don’t be afraid.” Maybe you reach out and touch them, so they know you’re really there. And bit by bit, day by day, they begin to understand that out of sight does not mean gone. They begin to feel better just knowing you’re near.

So Doubt Week is the first week after Easter, and during this second week we begin to enjoy a process of reminding, of Jesus peeking in again and again telling us, “I’m still here” and tucking us in, comforting us, teaching us faith. On this Third Sunday after Easter, Jesus begins to teach us not in our heads but our hearts. Two men are walking “conversing and debating”

about the death of Jesus, and the rumors of his rising from the dead. Their exchange of logical argument is joined by Jesus, who they don’t recognize. They begin to give him information, to bring him up to speed, so he can participate in their debate and help them arrive at the truth.

It’s a prolonged “duhhh moment”. The truth is that Jesus is right there with them. But their heads are full of argument and logical analysis, and all of that fails them right up to the time that he disappears. They recognize that it is Jesus not because of anything that he says, but in something he does. He breaks bread with them, and then he is gone.

After he is gone, they see the source of truth that they failed to consider. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” Their hearts, they realized, had been telling them the truth all along. Jesus had given them a tip about this earlier, but they had missed it. He had said, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke!”

I am of the male persuasion. Evidence tells me that men are inclined to come to conclusions logically based on facts. See, I’ve just done it, based that statement on evidence, just like the guys on the road to Emmaus. But Jesus peeks around the corner and in our whimpering in doubt and fear consoles our hearts. Our breathing becomes regular, our sniffling stops, our heartbeat slows. We are at peace. We feel better. But God invites us, as he does there with these two goombas in Emmaus, to draw aside the word-curtain of logic so that we might enter the consoling, knowing peace of myth.

When, after comforting our puppy or baby we return to our room, we become myth to them: true though unseen. To the extent that the puppy or baby accepts that myth, they are comforted.

Next: Logos and Mythos, Belief and Faith

Meribah – the Field of Dreams

2011-05-04T07:11:00.000-04:00

It has been the homeless who have helped me see the Doubting Thomas in me, and it has been they who have shown me the Doubting Moses. Kathy and I were for decades members of a “prayer group” in Gesu Parish in Detroit. The prayer that the group did was less and less overt; we simply grew together in the growing edges, the wounded edges exposed to each other in prayer. Every year Gesu would host a group of homeless neighbors for a week during the winter, part of a rotating shelter program in the city. I would use my over-committed life at the university as an excuse to avoid volunteering for the program. But one year when I was working (from a safe academic distance) with the problem of homelessness, the prayer group people let the word out that we would be making sandwiches one day for the homeless to take with them when they got on the bus after breakfast that day, to spend time back in the inner city while the kids were in the school that had been their home the previous night.

Jesus' “Touch THEM!” that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog came to mind, and I saw keenly my hypocrisy in studying the idea of homelessness but not serving those in front of me. The experience that I had with my prayer group made a small crack in my heart,

just enough to allow a wedge of additional experiences to take purchase and open it wide. Soon I was engaged with the homeless on the street of Detroit, bringing hot food to the cold tarpaulin and cardboard box shelters in urban fields and caps and gloves to those huddling in the leeward recesses of Hart Plaza along the river downtown. I was touching them, and their eyes were showing me glints of appreciation, not just for us who came to them, but appreciation too of their own humanity and worth, because they were important to us.

Moses (in chapter 20 of the book of Numbers) was besieged by his followers who were thirsting in the desert. He and Aaron fell on their faces before Yahweh and prayed for his guidance. Yahweh told Moses to gather the people and tell them that water would come from the rock there at Meribah if he struck it; then to strike the large rock there and that water would come out of it in abundance. Moses did gather the people, and did tell them, but when he first swung his staff to strike it, he doubted that it Yahweh would come through. He doubted that water would come from a rock, and the staff glanced off of the rock with no result. He struck it a second time, though, and sure enough water did come out despite his doubt.

For me, the Moses Meribah experience came in my car, driving south from our quiet, safe old farmhouse at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House north of Detroit. Here I was, driving into the city to my job, where I had after six months of promotion found myself in the middle of a city-wide engagement in my dream of counting our thousands of street homeless. The project had “caught on” like a fire in dry tinder, and I was overwhelmed by the work it would call for. I was being caught up in my own conflagration. I began to sob, there at a red light, with my inadequacy. What had I been thinking?

Like Moses and Aaron, I was, in a way, falling on my face to God, right there in the middle of Woodward Avenue. And as in the Meribah story, God spoke to me. I found myself crying “God, I can’t do this!” But even before the light changed to green, God said “But I can. Just bring me along.” I felt (and I feel it now, as I type) a physical relief, my shoulders rising as if a load had been lifted from them. The project was a huge success. Just as there had been enough water from that rock in Meribah, the night of the homeless count found a ballroom full of helpers.

So the Meribah story of Moses’ doubt and the Easter story of Thomas’ doubt are a pair, encouraging us toward relationship. If we come, God will give us all we need to build it.

Next: Use your heart, stupid!

Entering the Wound of the World: Revulsion

2011-05-03T06:35:00.000-04:00

Around age 35 I was invited by Jesus to do what Thomas was invited to do, and I can still feel the shame of my response. Psychologists suggest that most of us are held back in our psychosocial development to a point in life where we suffered trauma or loss. Most of us, they say, find ways of coping with this retardation, compensating one way or another, some combination of masking, withdrawing, or creating a false strength, like the Phantom of the Opera. One way or another, they say, to be healed and to grow authentically we need to return to that place of trauma, face it as truth, and integrate it into our lives.

Perhaps the same is true of a hard truth encountered, an insight or knowledge from which we have fled. We cannot honestly become ourselves unless we are honest about that truth we’ve attempted to evade. For me one such hard truth was revulsion at touching the wound. My first “Ignatian” retreat, 8 days in silent prayer and meditation in the style of the Jesuits under the guidance of a Spiritual Director, found me, as in its essential method, experiencing a scene from the Gospels (Luke 8:43ff) in which there was a crowd following Jesus.

The woman with the hemorrhage was the subject of the story, and her faith that if she could just touch Jesus she would be healed. “Touch me, Jesus,” I heard her say, and soon in my ears I heard the crowd murmuring the same plea, “Touch me, Jesus; heal me Jesus, Love me Jesus!” I found myself joining the crowd, murmuring with them, and then I stopped, realizing that I wanted to be his companion, his friend. I wanted to be someone special, and not just one of the crowd. In my room alone in prayer, I said the words aloud: “I want to touch you, Jesus, to heal you, to love you.”

Jesus looked at me (this can happen in this kind of prayer, by grace) and said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them,” gesturing to the crowd. I looked at them, and smelled them, and felt revulsion. “I don’t want to touch them,” I said to Jesus, “I want to touch YOU!” I cannot recall the look on his face, of the tone of the words, but I remember clearly that he repeated his words. “Touch THEM.”

I sat and wept. I wept the tears of a pupil with a paper full of corrections and a poor grade from a teacher I admired, emulated. I wept in shame at my revulsion. But in that meditation, I did not touch them. I let the scene close and ended my session. I had been given my truth. I did not want to touch the dirty, needy crowd. I wanted to hold myself above them. Shame on me.

So when I experience Thomas’ invitation to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side, I feel this revulsion of touching something…what…germy? This is Jesus, for God’s sake! But it’s there, that revulsion, even with Jesus. It’s not doubt, though that’s not resolved, merely overshadowed by revulsion.

Next: the gift of the homeless

Thomas: Reluctance Beyond a Doubt

2011-05-02T08:02:00.001-04:00

I felt this cool, pudgy little hand worming its way into mine. It was a practiced movement, it seems to me now, the fingers pursed into a kind of spongy spear, opening inside my passive palm to make room, making a place for itself inside. Startled, I turned to see the smiling face of the little girl in the pew in front of me, smiling up at me, smiling the word…PEACE.

While we call Thomas “Doubting” and focus on the same hesitation that kept Moses from entering the promised land (“Go ahead, Moses, hit the rock with your staff and water will come out for your thirsty followers”) the little girl’s hand reminded me that perhaps the greater, though more subtle message of the story of Thomas and the risen Jesus is the reluctance to enter relationship.

God is a God of relationship. “Go ahead. Put your finger into the wound in my hand. Go ahead. Put your hand into the wound here in my side. No, no, it’s OK, really.” And hoping that the revulsion that is literally turning our stomach doesn’t show on our faces, we try to politely say to the God who just four days ago died out of love for us, “No, thank you.”

It was, so perfectly, at the “Kiss of Peace”, the ritual of greeting at the Catholic Mass after we say the Our Father and before we receive Communion. Before we moved here to Traverse City, we spent 40 years of Sundays in Gesu Church in Detroit, where rather than the usual restrained, polite handshake with those within an arm’s reach, this greeting took several minutes. We left our pews and walked around hugging, slapping backs, sometimes weeping momentarily in each others’ arms, sharing some deep loss or great joy. After years of sharing the same urban reality black and white, young and old, secure and poor, we had come to know each others’ wounds. Tears come to my eyes as I recall walking all the way across the sea of people one Sunday to embrace Henry Bellaimey, the kind, gentle man who I had watched for those 40 years change from a ramrod straight-backed dark haired smiling business owner to a white haired old man bent to a right angle at the waist, but still with the same broad glad-to-see-ya smile. One daughter lost to cancer, a wife sick with the same for years at home until her own death, a beloved son moved far away in geography and faith, here was Henry with his other daughter, opening wide the arm not bracing himself on his cane, opening so that I can enter and be embraced within that bent-over body of his, wrapped in his warmth and kindness and history.

Here in our new parish, the greeting is more restrained, more proper and polite. We maintain a certain distance. Kind of like Thomas. We just don’t want to go deep. We don’t want to impose.

Oh, I hope this little girl never loses this innocence, this freedom to enter, to make a soft little spear of herself and to gently find an opening in another’s envelope, into another’s soul.

Next: entering the wound of the world: a lesson from Thomas and Moses

Beyond Doubt

2011-05-01T07:52:00.000-04:00

A locked room full of fear. A trumped-up charge by a controlling state. A missing corpse. Wow. The makings of a mystery. But I think you’d agree that the lead-up is to the entrance of the missing gang member. I’m talking, of course, about today’s Gospel, the one about “Doubting Thomas”: http://www.usccb.org/nab/050111.shtml#gospel He’s the guy who personifies doubt, is absorbed in his role.

Over the past three evenings I’ve watched the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. “The Girl” is Lisbeth Salander, a young woman besieged by troubling memories and a lifetime of sexual abuse and manipulation. Her role is played by Swedish Actress Noomi Rapace. No. The role is not played. The role totally absorbs the actress. I was shocked to see the actual actress, in an interview with Charlie Rose, her face warm, her speech animated, her personality self-disclosing and trusting. Gone were the piercings, the black makeup, the face a locked room full of fear.

How she had allowed herself to enter Lisbeth’s wounds!

Thomas finds a way to escape the fear that has brought his companions to this room after their leader Jesus is executed. He lets doubt absorb him and goes about his business. He forgets the whole thing and goes on with his old life, the life he had before Jesus.

We can do the same. Jesus came back a second time. Thomas had heard from his gang that Jesus showed up. He rejoined the gang in that room, and sure enough Jesus comes back and … you know the story.

What stuck with me as a kid was the (ew, gross!) thing about Thomas being told to put his finger and hand into the wounds. And it strikes me now, but in a different way. I think that if we’re going to escape the escape, the withdrawal from hope into lives of despairing forgetfulness, we going to need to be willing to get into something that can absorb us like those wounds did Thomas’s finger and hand: life in the real world.

The locked room and business as usual: these are the popular options available to post-Easter Christians. But there is, too, the invitation to enter the woundedness of the world, as Noomi Rapace entered the woundedness of Lisbeth Salander. She did not enter the role alone. The credits following each film ran for several minutes, listing the hundreds of people who made her successful role possible. And we do not enter the real world alone either.

Jesus knows in his own humanity that these guys are going to need a lot of help. He breathes his Spirit into them (literally inspires them) and begins to give them “sacraments” (literally, “holy-making” tools) like reconciliation and ordination. We need help too, and so these next weeks we’ll find more of the same: more surprise appearances, more sacraments. Will they convince us to be absorbed by the role?

The wounded world depends on our response.

It's Doubt Week!

2011-04-27T07:29:00.002-04:00

It’s Doubt Week!

What, you don’t believe me?

GOOD! You’re getting into it already. But since you so wisely doubt that this is Doubt Week, here’s my evidence. The Revised Common Lectionary is used, believe it or not, by all Catholic and many Protestant churches to walk their congregations through the richest Scripture on a three year cycle. Each of these years follows the life of Christ from Advent (the coming of Christ) through his birth, public life, crucifixion and death, and rising from the dead (now) and showing up repeatedly until he physically ascends to the Father, leaving us the Spirit.

The Lectionary guides us through this one-year cycle three different ways, with three different sets of readings (Hebrew Scriptures & Psalms, New Testament letters and Gospels) to give us varying angles on the same basic truth and issues.

But Doubt Week is celebrated best during Year A (the first if those three cycles) because this year we use John’s Gospel, which is more poetic, long on imagination and short on detail. And the particular Gospel reading for Easter morning is one that ends, well, let’s say inconclusively. It’s kind of like a teaser for a mystery show – just enough to make you wonder, to disquiet you and make you want to find out. John 20:1-9 leaves us lots of room for doubt.

The doubt – what happened to the body, did Jesus really rise, as the Scriptures promised – is put to rest in this coming Sunday’s Gospel when Jesus shows up in dramatic fashion, appearing to his hiding disciples, and returning later for “Doubting Thomas”.

Didn’t you feel a bit like Thomas? Don’t you? The fact that this week exists, allowing us to stew in our doubt, is for me a validation of doubt as an appropriate Christian response, soil broken and barren and waiting for seed to be planted. If we hide from our doubt, our attempts at faith will be a sham.

Take time today to sit with your doubt. It’s a gift.

Entertaining Doubt

2011-04-25T07:05:00.000-04:00

Waddyathink? Did Jesus rise from the dead? Too flippant a way of asking the question? How dare one even ask; people have been burned at the stake for even speaking of such…DOUBT.

Some walk right past the tomb, never entering. Mystery has a way of troubling us, so most of our society doesn’t even spend time thinking about this. For them, Easter is about clothing sales and candy. But those of us who have listened to the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the tomb, I think of three ways of living with it.

Faith

Some consider it true and live believing, considering the resurrection a tenet of their faith, something that makes them who they are. I can’t write much about this without study; I’m not one of these. I think of the Crusades, of the holocaust, of ways this kind of certainty can decompose into dehumanizing exclusiveness and elitism. The image above of Meryl Steep in the Film Doubt reminds us of this example of the devil in certainty.

Hope

I suspect that many apparently untroubled by doubt might more honestly rely on hope. Accepting unknowing and uncertainty, a lot of us, if we were to speak honestly, consider the resurrection a possibility, and perhaps even long for it to be true. Or we might long for what seems to us to be an untroubled, unquestioning faith.

Love

Some who have entered the tomb have walked so far away from it or are so wearied by considering its truth choose not even to spend time thinking about it. The pious believers might consider them heathens. But these, and I know so many of them, who spend no time considering the validity of such dogma, occupy their lime by simply loving.

Struggling with Dogma and Doubt can distract us from loving lives lived in real moments. On the other hand, letting in the twilight of mystery can guide us in uncertain steps of toddlers’ feet to the truth that resides in our humanity, in our deepest center of meaning.

I pray not that we invite Jesus into our hearts these days after Easter, but that we entertain doubt.

It’s in season. All that Jesus does in Scripture these next weeks helps us to respect the truth of this so that we may step beyond it in a direction toward our truth, our best reckoning of Truth that is God. And that God is Love.

Robin Sings of Resurrection

2011-04-24T06:35:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday mornings I meet with a group of men to read and reflect upon the next Sunday’s Gospel. Lots of the guys come looking for answers – like the disciples running to the tomb in this morning's Gospel. The guys take turns preparing a kind of study of the Gospel, to bring us into conversation about it. Tuesday it was Larry, a retired M.D., a Pathologist. Pathologists study the cause, method, structure, and consequence of disease. We need them to find answers. True to his trade, Larry looks in Scripture for answers: Here are the facts, here’s the analysis, here’s the result. He squirmed in his chair as he read John’s Gospel:

…he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.

The usually reverent, gentle, gray haired old man slumped in his chair, shook his head from side to side, And said disdainfully “well, now, that’s a heck of a Gospel; it just kind of leaves you hanging.” And so we are, aren’t we. There’s no big Ta-Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Just a couple of burial garments in different parts of the tomb, one rolled up on the other side of the tomb. Jerusalem CSI!

Again I repeat Frederick Buechner’s repeated Big Question, asked here by most of us on Easter morning: Can it really be true? When we lived in Detroit, the Way of the Cross was all around us every day. To the skeptic the roles were reversed. It was the crowd that was carrying their crosses up the mountain, while Jesus stood to the side and looked on, or possibly wept. God seemed, sometimes, to have abandoned us. We who tried to live Christian lives sometimes felt overwhelmed by the demands of charity. The needs were so great in our poor, dear city. And so in Gesu Church there in the city, we identified with Holy Week, felt it as our own. Good Friday put us into a real darkness, and we longed for Easter. We dared to hope that somehow things might change, that God would find a way for our city.

Holy Saturdays have always been long for me. As a kid, I would spend them looking longingly at my still-cellophane-wrapped Easter basket. As a working person, I would itch to treat the day like one to get projects done, to be worldly and set Lent aside. But on Holy Saturday 1999 there I sat with the ache. In my heart and in my soul and on my mind one thought possessed me:“I need you risen!” It had entered me as I walked out of the quieted church at 3:00 on Good Friday, the bell tolling slowly into a neighborhood suddenly on its knees. I wept flaccid tears in bed that Holy Saturday night, repeating those words as a prayer, a glossolalic litany. “I need you risen; I need you risen; I need you risen….”

It was a warm night, one of the first of the spring when the bedroom window could be cracked open, to let in fresh air. I slept poorly, partially because of that open window, and the way sounds from the street made their way into the bedroom. When I’d stir, I’d think of the waiting that the disciples did, the lostness, the despair, and I’d repeat my plea: “I need you risen!”

And then, hours before sunrise and before any distinguishable hint of light in the eastern sky, a robin began singing in the tree just outside our window. He sang a song of joy. Despite the lack of substantial evidence, he knew.

Hope

Oh! Easter morn's elusive flight

From hearts whose hope is almost gone!

Oh, Oedipal eyes' mad grope for light

'Mid nightmares of the gibbet's Pawn!

Good Friday vespers' echoes fill

The heart weighed down by reverenced cross,

And redolent incense lingers still

In Friday's garments' listless toss.

Yet through night's window sweet confection

Penetrates the curtains drawn,

As robin sings of Resurrection

Long before the hint of dawn.

April 2, 1999…Easter

Was Your Good Friday GOOD?

2011-04-23T07:30:00.004-04:00

Today is Holy Saturday. Will it be holy? Perhaps it will be determined by the degree to which your Good Friday was…good.

What Makes Good Friday Good? If we get it we’re literally stunned, stopped in our tracks. The air escapes from our balloon. Our car runs out of gas and coasts to a stop. The computer crashes. The dog stops barking. The power goes out.

I read Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace because someone I treasure was going through a really tough bout with alcohol. But I discovered that I am addicted to momentum. I like to be moving. It’s hard for me to stop. Good Friday service at Gesu Church in Detroit ended with a somber but clear message, a caution and invitation.

"The Great Silence has begun."

What made Good Fridays good was not the intensely reverent reading of the passion, crucifixion, and death of the man we had begun to know as Jesus. It was not about the kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing and trying to get a sense of what it was like for him carrying that cross up the path to the top of the mound, or whether we could feel the nails going into our hands (or was it into the wrists, so the nail would not rip through and drop our bodies into the bloody dust?) It was not whether these attempts to be there, to be Him actually took. It was not the sensation of the cross on our own shoulders or the gentle hands and loving faces of those who paired up to let us feel its weight, lightening the load on those already bent by age but letting the rest of us be bent by it. It was not even consuming the day-old Eucharist, set aside the night before after the Last Supper, when the altar had been stripped.

What made Good Fridays good was the silence, the death knell, the non-ringing of the gone-bell in our vacant steeples. Jesus was dead. What made Good Friday good was the non-socializing as the feast of faces that normally was spread before us was instead a dusty plain of downcast eyes, the sound of shuffling amplifying the silence.

Yesterday Kathy and I were able to come back home alone together. Our son who has brought life and joy and humor into it for the past two months was spending a few days with our daughter and her family. The noise of Livernois Avenue in our back yard in Detroit and Quarton Road in Birmingham are not here on Bloomfield Road in Traverse City. It was silent. Years of pruning on this day had shaped Kathy and me into a ready form for receiving silence, and it was a quiet day. In the evening we found a stunningly good film to watch, As it is in Heaven, and we wept in gratitude for the gift of it, the perfect relevance of it. Try it today...or any day.

What is Holy Saturday? It is the Day of Internment. When my mother’s intimately close brother died, I watched in curiosity as she sternly tossed a shovel of dirt onto his coffin, her chin pushing her bottom lip up into a momentary There! as she turned away with a sense of completion and finality. It’s done. He’s dead and buried. We got through the family meal and she thanked everyone for coming, and then she came home and let it hit her. Steve is DEAD. Until she fell asleep that night, it was all she could think of.

Holy Saturday is the day when the Tomb shouts deafening silence. Perhaps we should blow eggs today, violating the shell so that we can blow air into it, displacing the promise of life that had been protected there so that our decoration will not be spoiled by its internal decomposition. Oh! That sounds edgy, doesn’t it? Maybe Holy Saturday is feeling the edge, feeling the bite of the drill that threatens to empty us of hope and promise, challenging our attention to the superficial so that when tomorrow dawns we can enjoy a deeply blessed Easter, a celebration of the truth that death is not real.

Heads Down, Wearing Beige

2011-04-22T08:32:00.001-04:00

Scene One: Good Friday morning. There they are, the apostles, or at least the ones who did not betray Him. We call them saints, don’t you know: Saint Peter, Saint Andrew, Saint James, Saint John, Saint Philip, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Thomas, Saint Matthew Saint James, Saint Thaddeus, Saint Simon.

It's good that you should know what they’re wearing. They’re dressed like mothers of the groom. Mothers of the bride, in the movies, are the ones in charge (to the dismay of their daughter who is merely the bride). Mothers of the groom, meanwhile, are bit players without speaking lines. Now, if we were to give IQ tests to mothers of the bride and mothers of the groom, there would be no significant differences in their native intelligence; ditto for education, languages spoken, projects undertaken and completed, weight, height, and circumference of the widest part of the skull.

Because of this consistent lack of innate difference between the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride, the mother of the groom needs to be coached in remembering she’s not in charge. There’s a specific piece of advice that’s passed down from mother of the groom to mother of the groom: Keep your head down and wear beige!” While it’s possible that women might benefit from such a rule of not ruling, the behavior seems to come natural to men, or at least these 11…and me. We tend to hide when we’re not in control.

Good Friday morning. Peter, you know, the one who Jesus puts in charge, takes the lead in denying that he even knows Jesus. But they’re all, for all we know, keeping their heads down. So this morning, as I make an effort to put myself in the story, I find myself one of them. The fire that we huddled around last night is smoking ashes, and my eye sockets feel as dry. I’m sitting slumped over, my shame and my fear rooting my rear end to the dust on the side of the road where we sit. We don’t even want to look at each other.

...

Scene Two: some days later. It has taken a number of appearances from the dead and risen Jesus to get them beyond their shame, and even with their shortcomings we 2000 years later wake up and know it’s Good Friday.

So, we’re out of control. So, we hide. He will show up, again and again, and every time he’ll greet us as the angel Gabriel, as the Prodigal’s Father: Don’t be afraid. I’m with you. I find two messages in this. In a world beyond our control, we need to learn together how to live and act and respond regardless of our lack of control. Second, this song that sings itself in me from our years in Gesu Church in Detroit.

Even these eleven sinners became saints. Let’s get over ourselves and focus not on our fear and lack of control, but on the hope that Goodness and Love is in charge, and we need to keep our eyes on that truth.

Get up!

2011-04-21T07:43:00.000-04:00

Washing the Feet by John August Swanson

Have you noticed that in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we find the story of the Last Supper, but in John we find another way that Jesus teaches the same lesson? In John He washes his disciples’ feet. Yesterday a person I admire did an exceptional thing. While she is not outwardly “religious” she did What Jesus Would Do. When asked, she gave all she had and stepped aside in hope and trust. The person who had asked her for help had become impatient and ugly. She calmly stood in the face of it, gave the person what they had asked for, and calmly stepped aside. The treatment she had received had hurt. Shortly after the encounter the person called her, apologized for their impatience and rudeness, and remarked on her calm and helpful response. They said that she was their hero. The person got it. They learned the wordless lesson. They looked in the mirror and saw that they had some growing to do.

In both of these stories, the Last Supper and the Washing of the Feet, we can easily get into the theology of the act itself, the self-giving, the stepping down and being servant. But in both stories, Jesus ends with the same essential point. Do likewise. It is as if he looked at them, fed and cooled of feet, and smiles, and said, “Get it?” In the image above by John August Swanson, I am moved by the rendering of enlightenment. May we be moved, in the wake of our activities and encounters, to reflect on the example we are given in calm service, and may the light go on in our heads!

Pisteo in Christus Resurrexit

2011-04-20T09:06:00.002-04:00

I believe that my wife is a treasure to me. But when I fail to act on that belief, what does it say about me as a husband? And if I believe that Christ rose from the dead, but that belief doesn't impact my life choices, what does it say about me as a Christian?

As we leave church on Good Friday we stand like Lazarus, facing the exit from our tomb of doubt. The possibility that faces us outside is the Easter Mysterium, the rising from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth. In The Case for God Karen Armstrong makes a distinction that can serve us well as we confront the stone imprisoning us. She names the stone Credo.

Credo, the Latin “I believe” gives us the word “creed” a statement of belief that we can accept…or break into sects or religions over, or as in the Crusades, use as a reason to kill. Credo entered the Latin Vulgate Bible in translation from the original Greek pisteo which means not claiming or holding a belief, but being impacted by it.

So as we encounter this week the real stretch that Easter is, perhaps we can spare ourselves the intellectual flagellation of doubt, and look instead at our lives lived in response to the possibility that this might be true, that death does not really matter.

Can we be pistons, the things inside our car engines that are propelled by the explosion of the gasoline in our cars that is ignited by the spark? Can our lives be similarly energized by the spark of the Spirit that we feel in even considering the possibilities that we see laid before us this week?

A song goes through my mind. It’s not a church song, but one that makes me think of my wife when we were dating. It’s Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”. Kathy was only 10 in 1957; I was just 11. But ten years later, she’d become the spark of my life, and she’s sent me ever since. Are we willing to let God who lives beyond death send us? What a ride!

Dogma Or Mystery...YOU Decide.

2011-04-19T06:40:00.001-04:00

Does He really rise? Was He even really the Son of God? During this week, I hope we all face this, this unknowing. As soon as I had typed these two questions, I heard in my mind the howls of dogmatic Catholics calling me an infidel for even questioning these beliefs. But in asking the question, I show the very faith they might argue against.

Faith is belief in the thing not known. We don’t have faith that all points on a circle are equidistant from the center; we know (at least those of us who know geometry.) We don’t have faith that two plus two equals four; we know.

But the gift of this mystery of the death and rising of the Son of God is something that, like love, we can fall into, something that we can allow to submerge us, to embrace us, a cloud into which we can enter. Karen Armstrong says that the gift of mystery (like the Trinity – three persons in one God) is that it does not make sense, and so it calls us to abandon thinking. To sit with mystery is difficult, because we want to figure it out. Figuring things out is important to us. We figure out what is good to eat, what is safe to give our kids, how to get to work safely, all so that we survive. To stop and not think is contrary to our learned survival instincts.

How do we handle mystery (or more accurately, how do we let mystery handle us?) Armstrong suggests three things: prayer, ritual, and charitable acts.

Prayer is the practice of the presence of God. It is not logical or didactic. It does not make sense. Like meditation and contemplation, it slows us down, allows us to let go of our attachments, and our body responds with what we call peace but is perhaps a homecoming, and arrival at the place that gave us birth.
Ritual – it’s really over the top during Holy Week, appropriate to the over-the-top mystery that we’re encountered by, the death and resurrection of the Son of God. “Smells and Bells”. Watch kids at a parade. They’re all eyes and ears. They’re taking it all in. They are unaware of hunger, of cold, and even the presence of their parents. They are taken by the spectacle. So fancy vestments and clouds of incense and extra-melodic song and the repetition of verse and litany and jeweled monstrance…help us to forget taxes and mortgages and even pains and worries. While we find it hard to stop, ritual replaces all that we do, and all of it stops.
Charitable acts bring us to another place that makes no sense – another human face. Isn’t every person honestly encountered a mystery? Doesn’t the “homeless person” become so much more when we stand and really look at him…and so much more like us? Thomas Merton’s encounter with the “bag lady” on the streets of Cincinnati changed his life, and all of us in the circle of his light.

Prayer, ritual, and charitable acts take us outside ourselves, beyond the constraints we put on ourselves. We are like the Samaritan Woman understanding, the blind man seeing, and Lazarus walking out of his tomb.

Handling Mystery: My God!

2011-04-18T09:33:00.000-04:00

A funny thing happened when I thought I might die. I knew it would be fine, that it would all work out. It was a knowing beyond knowing. There was a peace in it like none I have never known.

Perhaps part of it was my faith, knowing that it worked out OK for Jesus. That sounds perhaps childish, but it is my truth. This character Jesus has been with me all through my life, a relationship that I can comfortably call a lifetime friendship.

The thing that troubled me most during his passion was that cry before he died – “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” But if we look at the place where he got that from, we can rest in his knowing that it would be fine, and despite the pain and sadness that he was experiencing, he was not abandoned. Psalm 22, which begins with that “My God, My God…” line expresses doubt and fear for several verses before remembering in verse 25 that “God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, Did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out.”

Perhaps the deepest mystery was that Jesus could, amid such evidence of abandonment, know that he was loved and cared for and would get through this. My friend Toni is going through cancer in Detroit, and wondering how God will provide for her son. My friend Michael has his newly-minted Doctorate along with a pile of debt and is working as a substitute teacher. Bart wonders when his time is up in the shelter whether he will go back to drinking because he can’t find work and there are seven months left until he receives his Veterans’ retirement pension.

Tomorrow I will meet with my “Men of St. Joseph” and we will have a cup of coffee and look together at next Sunday’s Gospel. Here as we begin Holy Week and see ahead of us the misery, pain, torture, and apparent abandonment of the Godly Son who came to save us, we are skipping to the end of the story to see how it all comes out. Seems like cheating, doesn’t it?

But the “coincidence” that we guys would be reading the ending just as the crisis is forming doesn’t ruin the story for us, but exposes the real mystery. Perhaps it is that Jesus could trust all along what was happening to him because he knew the ending, and that is the message he gave us when he called out his last words. My God! Help me to believe, as I did those weeks when I thought I might die, that your love is that real, your companionship that intimate, that the darkness does not matter at all. Please sit and read Psalm 22. It can change your Holy Week. It can change your life.

What do we do in the face of this mystery? Tomorrow.

Open Up in the Name of the Lawd

2011-04-17T07:34:00.001-04:00

In the old cops and robbers movies, the cops would come to the door in their tight uniforms and lean in toward the door of the robber’s apartment. ‘Open up in the name of the law!” they’d shout (usually in an Irish brogue). If their command was not enough to motivate the robbers, the biggest among them would put his shoulder to the door and they’d all follow him in like water rushing down a drain.

Revelation 3:20 takes a slightly different approach. “Behold, I stand at your door and knock.” And unlike the cops and robbers, the open or not is up to us.

Knock, Knock. It’s Holy Week. It roared in last night with howling winds and late snow. I awakened a number of times with the ominous sound of it, chilling the air and frosting the ground after two weeks of warm spring weather. And I thought of the verses of today’s long Gospel referring to the moments after Christ died on the cross, that the old movies showed with such an ominous change in the sky, its portents clear:

And behold, the veil of the sanctuary
was torn in two from top to bottom.
The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened,
and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised.

The opening of the graves generally struck me in the past as, well, ghoulish, like a scene out of “Night of the Living Dead”. But this year I recognized something different and encouraging

Open up, Jesus has said for the past three weeks in the Gospels. Open up, woman! Open your mind to the possibilities of living water instead of daily self-defense. Open up, blind man, and see. Open up, Lazarus, and come alive. It was up to them to tear it down, the door that had become a wall, the closed mind, the closed eyes, the lost hope. And those three “Open up” calls seem to be ratcheted up in today’s Gospel. As the ultimate act of sacrifice is finished, Matthew draws from the orchestra a crescendo that would make Mahler blush. The curtain is torn in the Temple of Jerusalem, and now the door to God is eternally open. The tombs open us and we are free to remember, to heal and be healed in memory, to again be accompanied by the blessed spirits of our own histories.

The Grand Opening is announced: our own opening to all that God is all around us, and can be within us. Seven days to prepare.

Tomorrow – handling mystery

Creation and Crucifixion

2011-04-15T06:43:00.002-04:00

The cross is depicted most commonly as two pieces of squared lumber joined in a right angle, perfectly square. The geometry of it struck me, the perfection of it, and reminded me of a kind docent at Notre Dame in Paris. Kathy and I were looking, agape, at the Rose Window, on the south wall where it would embrace and diffuse the most light into this magnificent cathedral. A kind docent who spoke good English asked us if we would like to know about the window. Instead of obscuring the beauty of the window with names and dates and minutiae, he said: look at the circle, and look at the square corners at the base. The circle represents God’s creation – planets, suns, orbs and orbits. The square represents the human act of continuing God’s creation, like the stones of this building.”

The elegance of his bringing these contrasting forms, square and circle, into relationship in the act of creation stuck with me; the concept returns to me again and again, and now in the crucifixion. There is the round face of Jesus, the mouth agape, the eyes, the shape of his crowned skull, the curved forms of God’s creation. And there he is hung on a perfectly square cross of human design and construction.

Bill Hickey, who frequents this blog with rich comment and inspiration, is on his way with his wife Billie to Oak Ridge Tennessee for tomorrow’s “A Safer World is our Right” protest rally. The sponsoring Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance describes itself as “a collection of eternally hopeful souls who believe we have the power to create the world we hope to live in. Even though most of them are old enough to know better, they’ve been insisting that nonviolent actions—speaking at public hearings; grassroots organizing; public workshops; civil resistance actions; letters to the editor—can lead to a world free of nuclear weapons. OREPA is committed to nonviolence and believes in using every tool in the toolbox. Our main focus is stopping nuclear weapons production at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

Nonviolence and creation. While the Norte Dame rose window is a bright blending of God’s creation and man’s, the crucifix, like nuclear weaponry, is a dark fusion of God’s creation and man’s desecration. It was the perfectly built argument of the leaders of the church of Jesus time that pushed the Roman procurator to allow the use of the efficient method of torture and death to be used for Jesus, this living threat to their power. Christ crucified.

And so it is that across the nave there in that cathedral in Paris, all the way against the dark north wall, that the crucifix shows how far we have diverged from the bright creation of God in our power-perverted acts of de-creation. To Bill and Billie and the thousands who are gathering at Oak Ridge tomorrow, our prayers and thanks for turning us all to the light as God’s spring blooms all around, creation pleading that we learn from its beauty.

One Hand Clapping

2011-04-14T06:59:00.001-04:00

He stands before Pilate with his hands bound.

Mashad* sees the irony, and says to Lazarus, “See who is bound now, even as he unbound you.”

Atashaah* hears his silence, this man of words, this man of truth, and wonders why he does not speak up. “It is as if those cords that bind his hands strangle his throat too.”

Lazarus remarks, “One is unbound within the bindings.”

Hands that cannot be loosed to heal, words that cannot be set free to teach; in my aging, I think of the restraints put on us in age. But I can remember being a tongue-tied little boy with my hands in my pockets too; restraints have no limitation in time.

I find in this image of a silent, immobile Jesus a koan – the sound of one hand clapping. A koan is a Zen technique that is akin to Jesus’ parables, meant to release us from thought and its traps. What is the sound of one hand clapping? It is silence.

Christians often look at the Passion as Jesus teaching us not to fear death. But even as the Passion begins with his being placed in restraints, he begins to teach us that helpless is a condition, not an identity. He prepares us not merely for death, but for a life in which constraints are part of being human.

Who are Mashad and Atashaah? See previous posts.

Asleep in the Garden

2011-04-13T07:05:00.000-04:00

I awoke thinking of my first failure every year during Holy Week. Year after year, you see, I doze off during the reading of the Passion. So it’s easy for me to avoid judging the disciples for their shortcomings while Jesus was being humiliated and tortured, starting right in by falling asleep right there in the Garden while he was in such distress. I’m one of them. Here at the mere entrance to the week, the Sunday that starts it all, I’ve blown it already, even as the child in me is determined to be good, to be His perfect friend, the kind this Perfect Friend deserves. And with that failure my holy Week becomes a reprise of my flawed Lent. I’m like the seed that falls on shallow soil. I spring up quickly but having shallow roots, fade quickly too.

Just as I begin to feel despair at my imperfection, I remembered that I’m in this with some friends I’ve picked up along the way: the Samaritan woman at the well I have named Atashaah, my best estimation of the word “thirst” in Arabic. From her I will seek the senses of taste, smell, and hearing; the man born blind I have similarly named Mashad for “sight”, from whom I will seek that sense; and Lazarus, from whom I will watch for awareness of touch.

In my story, I am there with the disciples…no we four are there with the disciples, and as my eyelids are getting heavy, I hear my three friends having a muffled but intense conversation.

Mashad: "Look at that slight tremor in his hand. Can you see it? Look at the way his vein catches the shadow if the evening twilight, at the way it throbs with his pulse, as if it would burst."

Atashaah: "Listen to the quiver in his voice, to the rasp in his breathing!"

Lazarus: "I have felt this myself, as I was dying."

Mashad looks at me, sees my eyelids drooping, while Atashaah hears my breathing slow as I approach sleep. Lazarus feels my slowing pulse he shakes me awake.

Atashaah: (to me and the sleeping disciples, strong and stern in her demeanor) "Wake up! How can you sleep?

Mashad: (sitting, reaching out as if begging them) "You have spent weeks with this man and yet you cannot see what a blind man could see, how he suffers!"

Lazarus: (voice quivering as he weeps) "What is the rock you hide behind that separated you from him? How can you be so close to him and yet separate yourself?"

And now I turn from this and prepare begin my day. These three come with me as I set out. I bring with me the doubt of my sincerity, my faithfulness, my perseverance even as I look at Holy Week ever so slightly showing on the eastern horizon. But I know that I have these three, and I have hope that they can help me be a more true companion of this most true Friend, to be my eyes and ears and nose and tongue and touch as I enter my numbingly compulsive patterns of living.

Making Sense of the Passion

2011-04-11T08:05:00.001-04:00

Two weeks until Easter and I have a confession to make. When I realized that next Sunday is Palm Sunday, I had the same thought I have most years. I wondered how I might avoid standing through the long Gospel, the reading of the story of Jesus’ passion. This man I like to think is my lord, my savior, and somehow my brother and companion is suffering humiliation, torture, and death, and I’m thinking of my discomfort. I feel like a hell of a Christian. But my psychology background comes to my rescue and tells me that my feelings are understandable; I’ve become desensitized. Desensitization is a condition in which our brains do not process the stimuli received from our senses. Old married couples talk about “selective hearing” for example; hearing the other’s voice so often, we stop paying attention. Or when the first warm day of spring occurs, we go outside and feel the refreshment of the same warm air that we will soon not even notice as we become accustomed to it.

So here I am, wanting to walk with you through the next two weeks, the last two of Lent, our last chance to make something of Lent, and to share the most profound mystery of Christianity, and my senses fail me. As I began to scan the Gospel for Sunday and felt this flat response inside myself, I felt the flatness, and felt too its contrast with the stirring stories of the last three weeks, the discourse with the woman at the well, the healing of the blind man, and the raising of Lazarus.

The thought came to me to bring these three along on the journey of thee next two weeks, so that they may guide me sensibly along this way to which I have become somewhat numbed by repetition. I’ve given names to the first two.

The Samaritan woman at the well I have named Atashaah, my best estimation of the word “thirst” in Arabic. From her I will seek the senses of taste, smell, and hearing.

The man born blind I have similarly named Mashad for “sight”, from whom I will seek that sense.

We are already blessed with the name of Lazarus, from whom I will watch for awareness of touch.

I know that I am lack what they have been so recently given by this same Jesus whose way seems out of reach of my own senses. I pray this morning that in their company, I will enter fully this greatest mystery of Christianity with all of my senses at my service.

Going, Returning, Remaining

2011-04-10T08:38:00.000-04:00

A final word on today’s Gospel, the raising of Lazarus. In the final line of the scene, with Lazarus having emerged from the tomb wrapped in his burial shroud, Jesus says, “Unbind him and let him go.” When I was perhaps eight years old, a friend of my parents gave us a dog, which my brother and I named Poochie. It is only vaguely that I remember his physical characteristics - a lean white shorthaired mutt; what I recall viscerally, even after more than 50 years, is that he would run away if we let him go. I suspected then, as I do now, that it was my mother’s severe punishment of him when he eventually returned that reinforced his bolting when he could. But I do remember how he would bolt as soon as he could break free from his leash.

I felt akin to Poochie, weeping with him as he shivered after a beating. The same strap or hairbrush that had been used on him had been used on my brother and me, and the same frustrated shrieks of anger had come from our mother as she had swung it with her wiry, muscular arm. I would hear the train whistle from the track a half mile away at night and wonder what it would be like to bolt.

So somehow this closing line seems odd to me, that Lazarus, so loved that he would be brought back to life would be let…GO; I imagine him bolting, pulling himself from the restraints of their loving arms. When Poochie came back, he looked like hell. He was filthy, thin, and cold. While the Prodigal Son returned in hope of being forgiven or at least fed, this poor beast came back knowing he’d be beaten. What was it, I wondered (and wonder still) that made him come back all those times until he eventually did not return at all? I think of Peter’s words when Jesus asked him if he would leave. “Lord”, he said in John 6:68, “to whom would we go?”

I’ve found an image that brings harmonizes this bolting escape of Lazarus with Peter’s truth that lets me accept Jesus’ words, “Let him go.” A vehicle stops by an open field or a beach and a dog and its master emerge. The master puts the dog on a leash and walks with it to the field or the beach. The dog’s feet dancing, the master bends down to disconnect the leash, and off the dog runs, free, free, free! It runs back and forth, away from and back toward (but not to) the master again and again, until it tires and trots back, wagging its tail.

Perhaps the most precious freedom is to freely follow, even in our animal nature, is the instinct to return, to remain.

My mother was not an ogress, but a woman beyond her capacity to bear gracefully the demands of that period of her life. Unlike Poochie, she could not run away from us. I am consoled that as the demands of poverty and childrearing eased, she mellowed. She often asked for forgiveness from us for those times when she acted out of anger. I hope that as she died she felt the forgiveness. I hope that she knew that when she returned to her God, there would be no belt or hairbrush in sight, but a nice dry towel, and a dish with fresh water, and another with her favorite food. Oh, my, I hope she is OK with this image of her as Poochie in heaven!

Here we are in this Lenten season, asked again to return, to remain.

Please Release Me

2011-04-09T07:44:00.000-04:00

This last day before we hear the story of the Raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45) in church, come with me to the scene as Lazarus emerges from the tomb. He’s not wearing his Sunday clothes. John says he came out “tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.” I got a call from a reader in Santa Fe last night, bringing my attention to the wrapping, and the last command of Jesus. I went to sleep with that command in my mind, and awakened convicted and sentenced to life unbound.

In my scene, I find myself as Lazarus, and as I stumble out blinking through the bands of cloth that wrap me, Martha and Mary are running to me to do as Jesus told them: “Untie him and let him go.” They embrace me, weeping, the three of us born of the same salty water now confluence of the same salty tears. And as Martha’s fingers begin to feel for the beginnings of the strips of cloth that bind me and Mary studies my face, I hear myself say, “Never mind, I’ll get it myself.”

I am there now, even as I type, and I feel Jesus’ hand on my shoulder, and hear his gentle voice say to me, “Let them help you. It’s impossible to unbind yourself.” I’ve shared the story of the young man appealing to the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, asking him in the middle of some deep, esoteric treatise, “But Fr. Rahner, how does one pray?” Even as the audience responded to his seemingly childish question with laughter and derision, Rahner smiled at him and said, “Lassen sie das es in sie anbaten.” “Let the it in you pray.” I wept over the word “Let…”. And so when I hear Jesus say that same word to me, I know it is the deepest truth I need to hear.

Today I will consider this self-sufficiency of mine; if you suffer the same need to try to heal yourself, perhaps you can place yourself in the story as Lazarus, and feel the coolness of the damp cloth on your cheeks, having soaked up your tears, and the warmth of your exhaled breath on the cloth over your nose, and the probing hands of your sisters. Where does the story take you? What are your feelings? Who are the people unwrapping you?

Tomorrow: “Let him go.”

I'm Calling You Out!

2011-04-08T07:48:00.001-04:00

My friend Marv’s jokes included sweet sacrilege, to wit Sunday’s Gospel.

"Lazarus, come forth!" Jesus calls into the now opened tomb where his friend has been buried.

There is no response.

Jesus repeats, a bit louder, “Lazarus, come forth!”

Again, there is no response.

Finally, Jesus says, “Lazarus, are you in there?”

Lazarus replies, “Yes, Lord.”

Jesus: “Then why didn’t you come out?”

Lazarus: “You said that I should come fourth; I’m waiting for the first three!” (rim shot.)

We laugh, but there’s truth in this. Don’t most of us find it more comfortable to stay in our caves? I mean our rooms, or our houses, but I essentially mean behind the walls that we have built up that keep life outside.

For thirty years we lived in a little house that looked out on a front porch that was just four feet from the sidewalk. The sidewalk had been poured in 1928, evidenced by the brand that had been set into every fourth or fifth section: “Gentile 1928.” The sidewalks that lined the narrow street provided playground, meeting hall, city square and, once a year, ice cream parlor. Our inner spaces could be small because the sidewalks and street were part of our homes.

For ten years we lived at a Retreat House that was nestled in a neighborhood of huge houses, inner spaces that attempted to slake the thirst for openness. We rarely saw neighbors, even children. They had all they thought they needed inside. We saw clues to their lives on trash day, large cardboard boxes that had held large-screen televisions, exercise equipment, and furniture.

But I know that my pointing a finger at those in McMansions belies my own truth. I often choose to stay in my own cave, not only socially, but spiritually too. I choose to hide in the shelter of the comfortable life I’ve built around myself.

And Jesus is saying “I’m calling you out!” That’s a current phrase that means “You’re busted!” Or, as we used to say “I’ve got your number” or “Who do you think you’re fooling?” What is the “life” to which we are being called, not just in the seasonal Scriptures but in morning robin song and blooming crocuses? What is the “death” in which we choose to remain? Why do we remain?

Today is my brother Dan’s birthday. He would have been 66. He chose to stay in his room. We didn’t call him out.

Where are You Bound?

2011-04-07T09:17:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I was moved by the circumstance of Mary and Martha in John's Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus. They had lost their brother. It was memory of my niece, the heartbreak of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law fresher on the anniversary of her death that made me think of the grief of those left behind by death.

But I have been moved since then by the call to enter the story as Lazarus, and what is in my mind is how he was bound, bound, bound. Two weeks ago, it was the Samaritan woman at the well whose attitude of stubborn self-determination that bound her. It took repeated logical argument to draw her beyond her suspicion and hostility to trust and hope. Last week it was the blind beggar who was given sight not instantaneously by magic mud, but also by going where he was sent and doing as he was told. They were not zapped, healed in a moment by the touch of the healer like they do on some of those “faith healer” TV shows.

Healing is not an event, but a process of letting go of what binds us.

So I’m Lazarus. Bound, bound, bound. The stone is rolled away, and the voice calls, the voice of my friend Jesus is one I recognize even through these wrappings. I’ve awakened from my acceptance of the Big Sleep, and decided to return to the life I left, with the complex love of my sisters for each other and for me. I’ve decided to return to the world of mornings and their call to action, and nights and their call to rest. I’ve agreed to accept hunger and thirst in exchange for savor and refreshment.

But I emerge haltingly, my hands and feet tugging at the rags of my shroud, like a convict being let into court in shackles. And I do not weep at the sight of blue sky or the faces of my sisters, or Jesus. My sight is obscured by that same shroud, even as the coins had fallen from my eyelids when I’d sat up. It strikes me that Lazarus is bound in his mobility by the shroud...and all of his senses too. I see in myself that when I was given freedom to retire, to be released from the daily requirement of going to work, that I discovered that I was not able to move around freely, my mobility bound by another layer of binding. I discovered that my senses were not open to my new surroundings, bound as I was to my past.

So here we are nearing Holy Week, called to drop our daily grind like the Samaritan Woman and accept our gift of sight like the beggar, and now to let go of our bindings, bindings, bindings that we have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned in, just as Lazarus. We’ll not climb Calvary in our shroud. We have a couple of weeks to get with the program, to not only emerge from our cave but to reclaim our mobility and respond to our senses as we try yet again to believe that we can take on death with Jesus, and emerge from it.

As If Death Does Not Matter

2011-04-06T12:22:00.001-04:00

Three years ago today the unthinkable happened. As Kathy and I were packed up for our trip to the airport after a perfect visit with my family in Phoenix, my cell phone rang, and we learned that our niece had been killed in a horrible traffic accident.

In three weeks or so the unthinkable will be remembered in Christian churches across the globe. The only Son of God, sent to save mankind from our self-destructive path, will be humiliated, tortured, and hung on a cross as a spectacle. And he will die.

This Sunday’s Gospel, a foreshadowing and harbinger, is John’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus. Martha and Mary were upset with Jesus, the great healer, for not coming to save Lazarus from death, failing to show up to heal him. We know the story. Jesus raises him from the dead.

Yesterday morning I met with the group of men, husbands and fathers who look at the Gospels for help in playing those roles as we should. One of them, Rick, a young father with two toddlers, found it interesting that before raising Lazarus from the dead, he asked Martha whether she believed that he was the Son of God. She said she did, and in the moments between her expression of belief and her brother returning to life, this young father said that Martha had come, in her faith, to realize that it really didn’t matter whether Jesus could do anything about her brother’s death. Rick considered the possibility that if Martha really believed that in that faith would be acceptance of everything, freedom from distress, even in the face of the death of her brother.

I came home from the meeting thinking how clever these gospels leading up to Easter are, how they give us three weeks to get used to the idea that death is not all it is cracked up to be, so that when Jesus dies, we will look beyond his death, and ultimately beyond our own. My head could get around that, and I smiled.

But just now, as I left a message on Mollie’s parents’ phone trying to express inexpressible feelings of condolence, I felt the reality of this in my heart, that the journey to accept death and not blame God is a tough one, perhaps because it is so unthinkable. Maybe that’s why sitting in the story and becoming Lazarus, or Jesus, or Mary, or Martha might help us get beyond our heads, that grace might find some fragile foothold, someplace in the broken soil of our hearts in which to dig roots of hope and healing, where death doesn't matter.

Sent to See

2011-04-03T07:57:00.001-04:00

The last word in this look at Jesus giving sight to the blind beggar is something easy to miss. After smearing mud on the man’s blind eyes, he sent him to the pool at Siloam, the text stating “which means sent.”

“Come and see.” “Let’s go see.” “Go and see for yourself.” The beggar did not see until he went where he was sent…and either do we.

To the extent that we live in neighborhoods with people like us, away from those who are different, we live in blindness. When Jesus emerged from the Jordan, he fled to the desert to consider his calling. After forty days of facing his silence and his hungers and his temptations and the echo of the voice of his Father “You are my beloved; my favor rests on you” he went to the synagogue and stated his mission, from Isaiah 61:

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
   to proclaim freedom for the captives
   and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor
   and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
   instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
   instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
   instead of a spirit of despair.

Don’t you think that when we go where we are called or sent, what we see will guide us and sustain us? Haven’t we had that experience e from time to time in what we might refer to as “peak experiences”? Don’t we often hide in blind safety, dead to the life that awaits us? What are we afraid of?

Here’s Mud in Your Eye!

2011-04-02T07:33:00.000-04:00

Would you let him do it? Would you let a guy spit into the dirt in his hand and put it on your eyes so that you could really see?

I’ve been badly near-sighted all my life. In second grade my teacher suggested to my parents that I have my eyes checked. We were, if not dirt poor, pretty close to it. My dad worked in a factory and spent all of his time at home working on the house he and my mom had bought as a “shell” – walls and roof – right after the war. Pennies were things to be pinched, dimes to be turned over before spending. So taking the drive into the city to have my eyes checked and then returning a week later to have my glasses fitted and paid for took a lot of sacrifice. The sacrifice would be made again and again, each time I’d broken my glasses playing and my dad’s attempts to repair them finally failed.

I wonder now how much of my physical and social clumsiness developed thanks to the fragility of my spectacles. So now I’m 14, and tired of these darned glasses, and the way they look like coke bottles (people tell me so from time to time and it hurts) and this guy comes along and spits into the dust in his hand and offers to save me from this.

“Hey, buddy! I can fix that for you, your eyes I mean, so you won’t need glasses anymore.”

I look at the mud in his hand, pushing the bridge of my glasses up with my forefinger. He sees the doubt in my eyes, even through my thick lenses.

“You don’t trust me, do ya?”

I shrug my shoulders and shake my head “no”.

50 years later I still wear glasses. And so I admire the beggar’s courage in John’s Gospel. And I think about receiving communion.

“Hey, buddy! Eat this bread; it’s my flesh.., and drink this wine; it’s my blood. You’ll really live.”

I do eat it, and drink it. But do I’ like the beggar with mud-smeared eyes, go to the pool, to where I’m sent, and take the next step?

Tomorrow: Going to the pool.

Oh…”Here’s mud in your eye” (try it with an Irish accent) was a toast made at the horseracing track, referring to the rider in the back having mud from the hooves of the winning horse.

Blind to the Blind

2011-04-01T07:35:00.000-04:00

John’s Gospel tells the story of Jesus giving sight to the man who begged because he was born blind. I wonder how old he was – the blind man, I mean. I wonder how many years it had been that people went by him without seeing him because they justified his blindness. Somebody sinned, either he or his parents. He got what he earned. The story is the second in a row (last week’s was the Samaritan Woman at the well) during which Jesus disciples have what a friend calls “DUH moments.” Last Sunday they came to the well and saw Jesus in conversation with the woman and all they could think about was lunch. This time they see the blind man and are moved not by compassion, but legalistic curiosity. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” OMG, as texters would text; these are supposed to be the GOOD guys!

But don’t we often do the same thing? Our language is replete with discompassionate expressions. “He made his bed, let him sleep in it.” “They’re where they want to be.” “She got her comeuppance.” “That’s the way they choose to live.” “I took care of myself, so can they.”

I know a brilliant woman from a poor family who fell into homelessness after a divorce. When she became homeless, her daughter began to see her differently, to shun her. When the woman queried her daughter about this, her daughter told her that she must be stupid. When the woman asked her daughter why she would say that, the daughter replied, “You’re homeless, aren’t you?” Her daughter subjected her own mother to her stereotype of the homeless as stupid.

To whom have we become blind? Why?

Tomorrow: Here’s Mud in Your Eye!

Remember...

2011-03-31T07:31:00.001-04:00

Imagine:

Here then is Jesus standing, facing the blind man. In his left hand he has the dusty dirt into which he has spit. With the thumb of his right hand he is grinding the dirt and spittle into mud. Then with that thumb he rubs the mud on the closed eyelids of the blind man, saying to him “go and wash in the pool of Siloam (where I send you) and you will see.”

And now here is any one of dozens of priests and lay people over the years who have, on the 64 Ash Wednesdays in your life, standing facing you. In their left hand they hold a small bowl of ashes. With the thumb of their right hand they rub the crunchy soot on your forehead and say…

Do you recall the first word that they used to say, before the dust to dust? The word was “Remember.” For the last several years, the incantation has been something about having courage to live the Gospel. The change seemed refreshing. The old one had seemed morbid, calling us to remember that we came from dust and we would return to dust. I didn’t like the old words and their reminder of death.

As I imagine the parallel posture and gesture between Jesus and the blind man and the persons smearing ashes on my forehead each Ash Wednesday, I am struck by this, halfway through Lent, as a reprise of that same Ash Wednesday action, calling me to life.

I remember the feeling that surrounded and filled me 18 months ago when I thought I might soon die. Somehow, bereft of future I was free to appreciate the present. I saw as I had never seen before. In the 18 months since then, I confess that my eyes have gradually closed. I fail to notice the gifts in my life, the beauty that calls me to fullness.

I think that four weeks ago as we began Lent we were called not to darkness, but to light, not to death, but to life. Perhaps we can imagine ourselves the beggar, feeling the grainy mud being rubbed by Jesus into our blind eyes and feel the crunching of it, the pressure of the thumb that is familiar to us, as we push back toward the pressure, not to be pushed back. Perhaps we can consider to what we have been blind, and what, when we look at it, will call us to life in presence in the moments we are given, when our eyes are opened by Grace.

We have the second half of Lent to prepare to accompany Jesus in his passion, as he once again shows us that the future (including the certainty of death) is nothing to fear, that God is present, that where we are sent by Grace is where we will see.

Out of Control

2011-03-30T08:13:00.001-04:00

I see, said the blind man. This Sunday’s Gospel is about seeing beyond understanding. John’s 9th chapter tells this great story about Jesus making mud with spit and dirt and rubbing it on the eyes of a blind man who after washing it off could see. I’ll share daily this week on this story, but wanted to start with the argument that ensued.

The Pharisees and even Jesus’ homies, the disciples, were stuck on trying to understand, and the story gives Jesus an opportunity to teach them, and us, the limits of understanding. They all referred to rules and traditions to interpret the man’s blindness, and Jesus’ act of healing on the Sabbath. There is a great cast of characters, even including the parents of the man blind from birth. And the long version of the Gospel is rather tedious…just as the argument was.

Understanding, like ego, can move us forward to our truth, but only to a point. I smiled to consider the word as two: under and standing. The roman architect (literally, builder of the arch) was, it is said, required to stand under his completed arch while the scaffolds that had supported it during construction were removed. If his work was faulty and the arch failed, he’d be crushed under his failure and never be able to build a second faulty arch. It did not take trust for him to stand under his arch. It took only understanding. He considered the math, the measurements, the materials, and the men he supervised, and he could calculate the safety of standing under it.

Understanding allows us to stand under only those things we control. That same architect standing under the arch of a stranger would need trust. Understanding seems reasonable, rational, doesn’t it? But in this story about blindness and sight, perhaps a deeper message is about stepping out of the safety of control, beyond our calculation, and stepping into the unknown in search of our deeper selves, ourselves as loving and beloved.

Shame and Isolation

2011-03-27T09:05:00.000-04:00

On a Saturday afternoon with some students delivering sandwiches to hungry folks in the inner city, I saw a woman sitting alone on a bench, not joining the other worn ones who came to our car. I carefully and slowly approached her, and from a few feet away asked her if she would like a sandwich. She turned from the sound of my voice like a turtle crawling into its shell, and the words she spoke still echo in my heart: “I’m so ashamed.”

“Jesus met the woman at the well…” the Peter, Paul and Mary song went, and that story is retold today in thousands of churches around the world as John’s Gospel Chapter 4, verses 5-42 “…and he tells her everything she’s ever done” Noel Paul Stookey’s baritone voice informs us. But I think the story is not about what she’s done, but what she’s done about what she’s done.

My late brother Dan lived in an alcoholic haze for the last several years of his life, and the phone would be our bridge across the 600 miles from Detroit to St. Paul. He is part of the fabric of my life, the part that was woven during the first 20 years of my life as he preceded me through life 18 months ahead of me, blazing the trail for me, if only because I chose to follow. When I chose rather to leave the smooth waters in his wake and go of on my own, our paths diverged significantly, and eventually we were quite different. I lived a life of faith and hope and striving and he grew cynical and angry. I had a job that greatly defined me and he found work to be a four-letter word. But perhaps the biggest difference was that I lived in a family in a community while he lived alone.

Alone with his cynicism and anger, he began to drink. His drinking allowed him to reinforce his arguments about the foolishness of society, and our phone conversations consisted primarily of his soliloquies railing against the foolishness of pretty much everyone but himself. I’d gently challenge his arguments; any aggressive move on my part would lead to his belittling me or hanging up. But sometimes he would share his profound sadness, his ruined life. He would speak of his ex-wife, his loss of the favor with which he grew up as the golden child, the bright and hard-working one, the shortstop, the quarterback.

One night his mood was more mellow than angry, and he said, “John, I read this story about a guy who climbed into a hole deeper than he could climb out of.” When he did not say more despite my waiting silence, I asked him about it, but he changed the subject. It seemed ominous to me, and in subsequent conversation I’d ask him about it, but he said little more. A few months later he’d fallen dead on the street, his heart stopped, his groceries including his nightly jug of wine. I think he knew that he was drinking himself to death; that was his hole. In his cynicism and anger and disillusionment, he’d isolated himself and taken on the identity of victim and loser.

Jesus did not seem to be taken aback by the woman’s having had a number of husbands, and living unmarried with one then. He called her beyond her coming alone to the well, too ashamed to come with the other women of the town. He called her to himself, to his forgiveness and his Father’s endlessly flowing love and providence. Perhaps he saw that she was climbing into a hole, a bottomless abyss with a sign that said “SHAME”. Perhaps he saw, rather, that she was beginning to spiral into accepting her identity as a loser, step by ashamed step.

What struck me about my brother’s ominous story was the decisiveness about it, the moment of climbing IN. I think that while many of us would not do that, many of us do gradually wear a circular path of shame and despair that becomes so deep that we cannot climb out of it, and that perhaps it becomes so deep that we cannot accept the lifelines dropped down to us in love, the lifelines of Grace, that plead with us to let go of our shame.

Praying Hands

2011-03-26T10:21:00.002-04:00

Before I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous or the “Serenity Prayer” of Reinhold Niebuhr or Durer’s “Praying Hands”, a pretty, sad-eyed, white-skinned and dark-haired teenage girl gave me a silver keychain with Durer’s image on one side and Niebuhr’s verse on the other. I still remember the look on her face as she gave it to me, because I did not understand it. I was in college; she was young enough for me to consider her as a little sister rather than a source of infatuation. I saw in her face a calm that seemed like resignation as she placed the keychain in my hand. Calm and resignation were not in my adolescent arsenal. I thought, like Archimedes, that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, I could change the world. As I looked admiringly and quizzically at the beauty of the image and the words, she said “It’s the Serenity Prayer. Alcoholics Anonymous uses it. My dad gave it to me.” I used it most of the way through college, and have no idea whatever happened to it. I think of that silver keychain whenever I see the Serenity Prayer, or Durer’s artwork. And now reflecting on it, I wonder whatever happened to Susan of the sad eyes.

While in Frankfurt helping our son tie together loose ends for his return to the US, I worked my way through Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace. Recommended by a good friend who lives a life of courage and wisdom in the serenity of Grace, I found it to be not so much about addiction to alcohol that I fear in others, but addiction to what May calls “stress”. I have a hard time stopping. I’m constantly in the need of an accomplishment fix.

The image above from Japan struck me. To be still amid chaos, to know that stillness and inactivity are at some moments more honestly human than activity, and more loving…is perhaps the wisdom that knows the difference, and both the root and the flower of serenity. It shows a resignation, perhaps like Susan's, that is not a retreat from reality, but a graceful standing in that place, a presence that changes the world without the need for leverage or force, that accomplishes all that is possible without the need for stress.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Gust and Calm

2011-03-21T12:18:00.000-04:00

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

Time’s a-wastin’. “Gust” was what everybody called him, short for Gustavus. While the unknowing person would have called him “Gus”, that added t gave him a truer name, a name more befitting him. He was like a wind that kept us moving. And this ritual greeting of his seems to have found a home in me, because I have a sense of eagerness to make the most of time. It has me waking early as he did, early enough for him to milk the cows, push the squealing-axled, milkcan-clanking, morning’s produce to the roadside for pickup, and get to the trout stream with his smiling son-in-law and yes, back to the kitchen by the time his grinning wife Ida had brought in the morning’s eggs from the henhouse. Whew. His pace was as breathless as that sentence.

Gust was not a prevailing wind. He could be calm, too. He smoked a corn-cob pipe from time to time, generally in the evening when the chores were done and it was not quite

time for dinner. He had a certain way of sitting at times like that. He’d sit on a chair, or a stool, or a tree stump and with a single motion cross his lean left leg over his right, even as his right hand unfurled in his right overall pocket to withdraw his pipe. By the time he had clamped the pipe between his teeth, his right hand had already plunged back in for his tobacco pouch, his fingers nimbly opening its flap while his left hand removed his pipe from his teeth and placed its bowl between the thumb and first two fingers of his right, the stem just barely crossing over the top of the open pouch. Then with the left thumb and pointing finger, he’d delicately deliver pinches of tobacco from the compressed pad of shreds in the pouch to the blackened opening in the top of the corn-cob bowl of his pipe, precisely teasing it into that narrow opening with the stubby-strong tip of his pointer finger, yellowed by this regular duty. Soon his left hand was bringing the filled pipe back to the waiting clamp of his teeth, his right hand adeptly flapping the pouch closed and returning it to his pocket while the left hand retrieved his pipe lighter from his left pocket. It was a “Nimrod” pipe lighter, good for nothing else because it was perfect for lighting a pipe. With his left hand he positioned the hole of the lighter over the bowl, then with his right hand pulled the lighter open so his left thumb could flick the wheel across the flint and ignite the wick, the huge flame flaring bright between puffs of his puckered cheeks, one…two…three and click, the right hand tossed the lighter closed into the left hand and grasped the warming bowl as he smiled and blew out the first savored mouthful of aromatic smoke. His left hand dropping the lighter back to its place in his pocket, his restin’ would commence.

As full of motion as his going was, his restin’ was as bereft of it. Except for the fact that that pipe would go out unless he took a drag on it every minute or two, he was absolutely still. Oh, except for the almost indistinguishable formation of a tiny, satisfied smile that just barely turned his placid lips upward as his almost unmoving eyes slowly surveyed whatever he had done that day. Perhaps it was the section field freshly plowed, or the sweet-smelling manure from last year half gone, loaded onto the wagon for the next day’s spreading, or maybe just the cows ambling back to pasture after their evening milking.

I learned a lot from Gust by watching his working, but what brings tears to my eyes now is that he’s still alive in me 55 years later, reminding me how wonderful it is to rest and take in the day’s work, and like the creator, call it good…and know that it is enough.

Where do we Stand?

2011-03-20T04:17:00.000-04:00

My dad worked in a factory. He worked there his whole life, starting when he was still a kid, dropping out of high school to help support his family because his dad, a carpenter, had fallen into drinking and couldn’t support his seven kids. He went to war in 1943 and then came back to the same job, never getting his diploma, because now he had a family of his own, my brother Dan and me, and later, four more.

He was a worker. He wanted better things for us kids, though. No “dirty jobs” for us. He and my mom pushed us to aspire for white-collar jobs, and college. Of the six of us, only one was defiant enough to choose the joy of working with his hands, and as a carpenter, at that. The rest of us dress up for work, work with our heads, work in offices, and none of us have ever been in a union.

So my friend Bill’s comment led me to reflect on my own family of siblings, on our lives as Catholics, and to what extent we care about the workers who are getting whacked in today’s economy. Having lost our oldest member

, I’m the cutting edge of the five of us, the first of two to retire as the other three see the least of their kids moving out on their own. Each of the five of us grew up and grew older with a sense that if we worked hard now, we could relax later. That was so with our dad and his generation, the ones that fill the restaurants at dinner with old couples having the “senior specials” and driving home in their Buicks and Mercurys and Chryslers.

The five of us have three kids each, good Germans that we are, orderly and such. Those 15 have entered the work world with blue collars as well as white, and are more like our parents’ generation than our own. They are hairdressers, soldiers, carpenters, teachers, landscapers, and child care workers, more of what we would call “service workers” than we their parents, who have generally been “office workers”.

Few of them have health insurance; we’d never have considered being without it. Few of them have significant retirement plans, having moved around from job to job too quickly to have them stick, sometimes withdrawing their savings to pay bills between jobs.

As I consider how they will struggle like our parents did, I consider how we “boomers” are tempted to hold onto the work-now-relax-later mentality our parents fought for, even as we watch our children struggle as our parents did. In Michigan, I discovered with shock, we retirees pay no state income tax on our retirement income, even as our children do. We relax and don’t pay, they struggle and do.

Yesterday I wrote of St. Joseph, the Worker who stood behind Jesus, enabling him to develop his potential, just as our parents did for us “boomers”. But it’s important that we “Christians” consider that Jesus did not work for awhile to relax later, to contribute to his 401k and find heaven on earth on the edge of a golf course with beach privileges. He called u to be laborers in the field, fishers of souls. He led us by example to fight for justice, to heal and teach and always be present to the God within us, calling us to compassion and courage.

Bill and his wife Billie are not kicking back. They are, as Joseph, standing behind those who need nurturing, and like Jesus touching and teaching and healing and accompanying and speaking out.

I, for one, need to consider where I stand.

What Would Jesus' DAD Do?

2011-03-19T05:40:00.001-04:00

When I was in college, I remember that Beth had the courage to stick with her boyfriend back home. Tommy was a plumber. Her friends at Marygrove were all meeting us “college guys” from U of D – engineers, architects, accountants. Beth wisely stuck with Tommy.

Our society recently went through a marketing cycle with WWJD bracelets, t-shirts, cards, even graffiti: What Would Jesus Do? Today it’s the Feast of St. Joseph, the Worker. In a story where the Kid grew to know Himself as the Son of God, there in the background was his father, the carpenter. When Joseph the carpenter found out that his betrothed was pregnant with God’s Kid, he didn’t do what the high and mighty would do, divorce her quietly or with arrogant flourish. He married her and supported her and found workmanlike ways to be daddy to the Son of God.

We sleep under roofs built by voiceless carpenters, and wake to hot showers piped by silent plumbers. We plug coffee pots into outlets wired by mute electricians and wait for our coffee while we think, perhaps noisy thoughts, noble, professional, Christian thoughts, perhaps thoughts about what Jesus would do.

Today, let’s add a “D” to WWJD and think about the silent workers of our world, the ones who make things work, who stand not for things, but behind them. WWJDD: What Would Jesus’ DAD Do?

Let's take a moment, well slept and showered, with our steaming cup of coffee, and consider how we can silently serve, can do something tangible that rests and warms and stirs others.

Stoppers

2011-03-10T09:15:00.002-05:00

Fast cars need powerful brakes. And fast lives need powerful stoppers too. Here are some ideas:

Power Fasts – The Jesuit Volunteers use a weekly power fast. That day, they cannot use any energy in their house – no electricity, no gas…no cheating and using flashlights either.

· Media Fasts – what about hours each day – or maybe a day each weekend – when you use no media – including the internet.

· Pray-as-You-Go is one of the “tools” in the upper left hand corner of the blog. Another is The Examen. Try them as ways of stopping.

· Nothing Appointments – don’t we set aside time for appointments, on our calendars, in our organizers, on our smartphones and computers? Make a recurring appointment with…nobody, to do…nothing. If your phone or computer or organizer has an alarm function, better yet! I set my phone with a marvelously sacred “gong” sound. It is calming and inviting.

· Sit with a cuppa – We had a Chinese friend who would heat a cup of water and enjoy it as we would tea. Another Chinese woman I knew had a cup with a cover; the act of drinking it was a slow and slowing ritual to me as I watched it.

· Standing in line time; traffic light time – these heavenly gifts seem like curses to us in our too-rushed lives. They are gifts waiting to be unwrapped and enjoyed.

· Microwave time – what do you do while your cuppa is heating up in the microwave, or your leftovers? What a great time to stop, to just sit and wait for the bell to call you back.

What are some of your ways?

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!

2011-03-09T07:51:00.000-05:00

Happy Lent. Oxymoron? No. It’s Ash Wednesday. The Gospel for Sunday is a dandy – Jesus runs for the desert, runs for cover from the “You’re IT, Baby” that he heard when he emerged from the cool silence of the Jordan. He gets the drum roll from The Big G “Heeeeeeeeeeeeere’s JESUS” and what does he do? Does he take the seat of honor, to the applause of the studio audience and in the focus of the camera? Naah! He heads for a dry, warm place, where there’s nobody, where he can just stop.

Just stop. The first act of the Messiah was to just stop.

The Gospel for today, Ash Wednesday, is a harbinger of Sunday’s. Joseph is anticipating his marriage to Mary, and she takes him aside and tells him she’s with child. He’s figuring out what he’s gonna do (a quiet separation, perhaps an acceptable, compassionate excuse) when an angel (it takes something supernatural to do this) tells him to stop. He does. Plans go forward; the marriage happens.

Lent. How will we STOP? Some ideas tomorrow.

Parenting: Role or Function?

2011-03-05T08:28:00.001-05:00

In A New Earth Eckhart Tolle makes a provocative distinction, between parenting as a role and as a function. As in The Power of Now, Tolle works at our distraction from being truly present to ourselves, to the truth that Jesus said would set us free. In past brief attempts to read Tolle, I would have been argumentative, because I rejected his writing as agnostic egoism. I ascribe this to my own narrow-mindedness, and am glad that our son started reading his copy, encouraging me to read mine. Visiting with us for the longest time since he moved to Europe 13 years ago, his presence at home with us, his retired parents brings out in me a gladness to be father to him, but Tolle’s distinction helps me sit in that father-ness and consider it from the inside. Who am I as Father?

A few days ago I listened to a father admit that he was very angry at his daughter, who had brought misery on his home with choices she had made. His wife later shared her deep sadness in the loss of her dream of a life with an adult daughter who would be her friend now and her caring helpmate in her old age. When I woke up this morning, sure enough, I was still a guy. As a parent, that means I continue to know
from the inside only the father role, and the father function. So my sense of sadness for that woman came, as I listened to her and observed her face, came through guy-vision. But when I listened to Tolle’s distinction this morning, I considered again my reflection on hearing her. Her sadness seemed to me to come from her expectation that her life with her daughter would be as hers had been with her own mother. Someone said expectation is premeditated regret. I feel sadness for her that she burdens herself with that regret, and wonder whether she does not burden her daughter with it as well. I wonder too whether her husband is equally blinded by the expectation that he would be married to a happy woman, that when the daughter grew up everything would be done.

Konstantin Stanislavsky helped actors bring life to their portrayals by a method that drew them into the role, becoming the person they were portraying. While other directors would actors, Stanislavsky directed characters. While other directors’ actors would leave the studio as themselves at the end of the day, his actors would leave as the characters they had, for the duration of the production, become. By taking on the personality of the character, the actors chose to set aside their own identity for awhile, and stay in the role.

But even Stanislavsky’s actors eventually returned to themselves. Tolle has some good things to say about our relationships as parents and with parents. Here is a short clip of his comments about being ourselves in relationships; part of it relates specifically to parent and child.

I am struck by the absurdity and sadness of the actor remaining in role coming home and not being able to be himself. And I wonder how similar that absurdity and sadness is for the parent who cannot step out of that role. It is the sadness that grabs me, a I recall the face of that mother, whose clinging to role and expectation festered into righteous and immobilizing self-pity. What a waste that she is unable to see her self, in all of her goodness, talent, and beauty, and find joy in that. What a waste that deprived of herself, she cannot share herself with her daughter and her husband.

We, We, We, All the Way Home.

2011-03-04T08:16:00.000-05:00

Often when I’m writing, Kathy’s reality comes to me. Not Kathy, who is wise enough to get a good night’s sleep, but her part of “me” that is not just...me. If I describe “my” life, she occurs to me, because it is not “my” life but “ours”. We’ve been married twice as long as we were single; how can I consider life to be “mine”? A clearer description of this false ego is when I start to say something about “my” daughters or “my” son. Well, duh! I didn’t make them myself! It is at times like these that even as mine is the only body in my study while I am writing that I know it is not just “me”.

I’ve begun listening to Eckhart Tolle read his second book, A New Earth on my morning walks while the rest of the world sleeps. He spends a lot of time helping us understand ego, adeptly using story, metaphor, and example. While ruminating on this, I was struck by the Papal “we”, the way of the Catholic Pope, when speaking, to say “we” instead of “I”. He would not say “I am troubled by what I see when….” He would, rather, say “We are troubled by what we see when….” This bothered me because the I felt the Pope was making himself bigger, more imposing by pluralizing himself; “we” is at least one more than “I”. But I thought of the honesty that comes

to me when I describe what I think of as “mine” but realize that it is not exclusively mine at all. And in the footprints that this honesty leaves in my mind, I notice bright glimmers that on closer inspection show themselves to be intimacy, the “we-ness” that stops me with gratitude and awe.

So I’m thinking that the Pope has something to offer us in his use of “we”. And each of us might benefit from reflecting on what I'll call “the lie of I”. It I-solates us. Self-protection, self-deception, self-control, self-sufficiency, self-awareness…when we consider these things, how do we feel? How do you? When, on the other hand, we are aware that we are in relationship, that we belong, that we live in someone else and they live in us, how do we feel then? Do we perhaps feel a certain at-home-ness? Do we feel that we have entered someplace, and are welcomed there?

Try it. Say the word “we”. Who is with you; who are you with? How does it feel? If the Pope’s we refers to himself and God who is Jesus, and Spirit, and Creator, then indeed he is in good company, and their voice is preferred to merely his. Of course, if he is not in their company, but says “we”, he is a guilty of egoism as “I”.

Enthusi-Leaks

2011-03-03T08:42:00.001-05:00

“My three year old is in a remarkable new stage; she gets so excited about what she’s doing that she forgets to stop to eat, or go to the bathroom. When we stop her, she gets frustrated with us.”

I heard the “bathroom” part, and my mind was already imagining what this young dad soon shared. His daughter had urinated in her bedroom. It took a bit of work to return the toys, books, and carpeting to their pre-accident state.

I delighted in his calm, describing his daughter’s “stage”, her first date with enthusiasm. Because he understood her and respected her, the accident was understandable too. How many parents would demean the child? How common would scolding be, mild or severe, in an effort to discourage a repeat of the behavior? How easy would it to ask the rhetorical question, “What’s wrong with you?”

What are the ways we as adult parents (or bosses or “guiding” family members) fail to be this understanding of the person and focus instead on the behavior? This young Dad helps me aspire to my own fatherhood, understanding and appreciating my wife, my adult kids, finding their lives “remarkable” enough to wonder and take them in. I aspire to do as he did with his leaky daughter, to be able to put behavior in context of the gestalt, the life-space or context, of their remarkableness.

I suspect that in his understanding the why of her behavior, he helped her understand it too, and not demean herself. All of us deserve to grow to embrace what's right with us.

Turning and Knowing

2011-02-28T07:51:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

Thanks, my two bright girls.

We Cannot Jump Off Our Own Shadow

2011-02-26T08:28:00.001-05:00

(Dealing With Crises, Midlife or Other)

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

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

the deck chairs, I’d take advantage of the hour before the after-work crowd came to the pool with an hour to me…in the sun. I learned to look at my shadow and use it to orient the deck chair, turning it to parallel to that when I lie down on it, the sun would be full on my face, and on my pasty chest.

My shadow was my guide to the light. I used it and turned from it. Perhaps this poolside ritual set me up for Victor Frankl’s quote in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning – that we cannot jump off our own shadow. Don’t we eventually (including "midlife crises") get turned around by life circumstances, turned away from those things that warm us and give us light? And don’t we find our view filled by the darkness that is our own shadow?

It was near the epiphany of Jesus, the coming of the Magi, when I read Frankl’s book. I thought of those wise men, but not as they felt the light of the Christ on their faces and the warmth of hope on their chests. I thought of them as they turned around, when they faced not their guiding star, but its shadow. The skin on my chest remembers, even after the intervening 50 years, the cooling that occurred when I had to stand and get to work, greeting my after dinner customers, my time in the sun halted. And my heart remembers times during those 50 years that I’ve been turned away from the light and promise of my guiding star, forced to face my…dark side.

What were the Magi thinking after the Epiphany? We can’t read their epilogue, but we live it. Carl Jung wrote generously of the idea of the shadow, and much of his value to us is in respecting – that is, looking again – at our shadow. We cannot, as every child learns, jump off of it. It is ours for life. But we can learn the steps of the dance, the dance of emotional maturity and spiritual grace that invites us to know our shadow and guide it through life’s turns to our gradually emerging musical score.

Happiness?

2011-02-25T07:56:00.000-05:00

Spreadsheets or bedsheets:

our striving calls us either

to crude oil or wine.

Is THIS Better, or THIS?

2011-02-17T03:08:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

, and stood at the lectern in silence for a round of the music. At each repeat of the refrain, he would speak one of the I am names spoken by Jesus. “I am the bread of life”, Bernie would say, and close his eyes, inviting us to do the same, and feel for recognition inside ourselves. In a normal ten-minute homily, the priest might craft enough of a logical presentation to move us to think, feel, consider, based on facts. Bernie was different. So when I found out that Bernie was teaching a course on campus, I immediately enrolled.

In the first class he told us that he would be inviting us to enter together into the Jesus myth. I was shocked! “Myth” was a word that meant to me something that was not really true, something that lost its validity when you applied logical analysis to it. But Armstrong again and again reminds us that mythos provides a lens that enables us to interpret concepts and ideas, as well as logical analysis; she encourages us to look through its lens as well as logic, saying again and again, “Is this better, or…this?”

In the next few postings I’d like to invite you to try this. Next: Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Jesus Christ.

Risen, Sights Raised

2011-02-16T04:52:00.001-05:00

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

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

For hours while I worked on the box, I listened over and over to the music. While the wood of the box was changed forever by my tools, I was forever changed by Mahler’s music. Bill knew of that experience, and some years later he gave Kathy and me a pair of tickers to experience its performance at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall. We sat in center seats, just twenty feet
from the conductor. By then I knew the music by memory, and by the time that last song, Auferstehen was sung, I was weeping into my hands. I was thinking of the friend for whom I had made the box. I was thinking about my dad who had recently died. I was thinking of countless others. I was weeping out of hope for them, not because of the opening words, promising that they would “rise again” but the closing line that I awaited. “That which you have suffered will lead you to God.” It was their suffering that struck me so deeply. For Roger, whose box I had made, it was a slow, disfiguring death from facial cancer. For my dad, it was years of debilitation after a life marked by his physical ability. It was the closing line that grounded the promise of new life in the very suffering that seemed to have vanquished them.

Here in Cologne, I was on one of my ritual morning walks when I came upon St. George’s Church and found there a remarkable crucifix, formed not with cross-members, but three branches, two curving to accept Christ’s outstretched hands. I thought of the Trinity, and how he was nailed to his relationships of it, with the Father, and the Spirit, nailed to their gift of him, the sacrifice of themselves in him. Then I noticed that the baptismal font in front of that crucifix was covered with a bronze casting with a flying dove whose wings were raised in the same manner as the arms of the cross.

I followed my eyes to the words cast around the bronze cover of the font, and saw the word Auferstanden, “Risen”. It was the words of Colossians chapter 3: “You have been raised with Christ, so set your minds on the higher things.” I think of those who struggle, who from that struggle are drawn up, drawn back to life.

I think of this as a call to risenness. Through your suffering you have been brought back to life. Now that that is so, look at the higher things. I don’t think it means to achieve greater things. I think it means to be inspired by higher values.

Mysterium Inhabitum

2011-02-15T07:42:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

and that one of my brothers and sisters would be there with his uselessly resuscitated body while it was allowed to join his brain in death. But in those next days in Chris’s ancient neighborhood on the Avenida del Born, I find myself again and again walking down the street from his apartment to the cool, dim, quiet of the church to fall into a pew, let my face fall into my hands, and just be numb. Exhaustion forced me to let down my guard and allow the gravity and holiness of the experience to inhabit me. This went on for days, during which Chris accepted the company of a companion who was mostly absent-minded.

When knowing or understanding fail us, we make a choice between polar opposites. We escape into cynicism and doubt or, contrastingly, enter into the not known, allowing our emptiness to expand within us. The natural, logical, explainable is pushed to our margins, and we are filled with mystery.

So it is perhaps the commonly guarded and often cynical society that people like Dave disturb, with his speaking from the mystery that fills him, inhabits him, holds him by the hand, lifts and embraces and calls to him. I am challenged and blessed to sit regularly in his company, to allow the Mystery that modulates and vivifies his words to enter me, to disarm me, to displace my cynicism, to find in me hearth in which It can burn, a home in which it can sleep, and waken, and grow, from which it may depart from time to time to spread its Mysterious essence in the world.

Shake Shake Shake…Shine Shine Shine

2011-02-05T08:00:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riffing Through our Hearts

2011-02-04T09:18:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

needle on a turntable. The disc was turned and a needle dragged across it, cutting a groove that carried those vibrations. The finished disc was a record of that music. It could be retrieved, put on a turntable, and the needle would ride that groove and liberate those same vibrations from their dormancy, and they would find their way to a speaker, and…music.

But as the research above describes, the music that enters our ears does the same thing. It cuts a groove in the mental disc of moment. When we retrieve the music, it is the moment that is awakened in us, liberated from its dormancy. Music takes us back, not by means of internet or laser or magnetism or wires; music takes us back by blood, this fluid of life that is pumped by our hearts that beat, beat, beat.

Oh, just eight years after Etta James recorded “At Last”, my love did come along. That was 42 years ago, and we’ve been dancing in front of everybody ever since.

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

2011-02-03T08:36:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

We heard Carron tell us how she had grown up so poor that as a small child she would fall asleep with a bit of food in her cheek so that she would have something for the next day…and we wept with her. We heard Mike tell us how he had for years “used substances to
erase my day” until people in PRI helped him believe in himself…and we wept with him. We spent some time brainstorming at our table, how we who are not threatened by poverty might help others like Carron and Mike.

And then Sid VanSlyke, the banker from the video that started the program was at the podium. He began to tell us the way the story ended, the way he had “just made three or four calls to the other banker, thinking nothing would come of it.” Unlike Carron and Mike, Sid’s story was not one of being helped out of a bad situation. But as he shared the story of saving that neighbor’s mortgage, he began to weep the same tears, and we wept with him. “These faces keep coming into my mind when I tell this story”, he said, apologizing for losing his composure.

In San Francisco, the cable cars are able to travel up and down steep streets, not because they have huge motors or enormous brakes. They can do it because the ones needing to climb up are connected by those cables to those going down. Those rising are helped by slowing the descent of those on the other side of the hill – or on the other side of the distribution curve.

I went to the Chicago Tribune website and watched a news report of cars being towed out of snowdrifts near the Wisconsin border. “If you look closely,” the reporter said, “you can see faces in these cars, being freed from the snow after ten hours.”

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond helps us see the factors that led to dense populations, from band to tribe to chiefdom to town. And he helped us reflect on the loss of connection, in which there is no motor strong enough to carry one person up the hill, nor any brakes strong enough to keep another from careening down the other side.

At the PRI “Poverty to Progress” program here in Traverse City, we saw that what humanized the little girl with the food in her cheek and the young man erasing his days with substances was the same thing that helped Sid discover Banking as a profession worth serving. It is connection; it is relationship. Relationship is the way out of the shadows at either end of the distribution curve, rich and poor, comfort and survival.