Anderson, South Carolina
There is a towering story, nearly legendary in its way, of a tribe in Africa that had a profoundly unusual way of meting out punishment to the village miscreants. If a person was found to have violated the behavioral guidelines that contribute to the well being of the community at large, he or she was required to stand still in the center of the village, perhaps for days. All members of the community were required to make a visit to the ‘square’ and hurl their own words at the perpetrator. Unlike those of us living most anywhere else, rather than hurling spittle, epithets, tomatoes, or rocks, these immensely wise people hurled compliments. Compliments? Yes. Honest sincere factually based compliments.
It was an unwritten requirement that everyone come and tell the misbehaving individual of all the good things they could think of that he had ever done. Character strengths and positive aspects of personality were to be included as well as actual good deeds. Those coming were expected to dig into the depths of faded memories and pull up any and everything thing they could find positive to present to the one standing in the docket. In some cases, with well known individuals, this process could go on for several days. A litany of validation would wash over the ‘victim’. This story contains perhaps the most powerful example of empowerment that has ever been found in the annals of cultural anthropology.
Sadly, we so often become who we are told we are by those around us. The academic literature and police blotters of the world are replete with written evidence of how disempowering destructive words can destroy a person, reducing him to believing he is scum of the earth. People universally will behave and relate to those around them based on their own sense of self-esteem and respect. A multi-billion dollar pop-psychology industry exists to attempt to empower people to develop new beliefs about themselves.
Those of us that were raised in empowering ‘can do’ environments will turn out to be empowered ‘can do’ people. There is nothing more inspiring in the world to see than positive people with a sense of self -confidence that allows them to do challenging things most of us would never attempt. Examples of such are often seen in the athletic and entertainment worlds. Occasionally a ten-year old intellectual genius makes it into the world’s consciousness. Behind most of these wonders are parents who know the power of the spoken and written word.
Those of use who were raised in destructive violent alcoholic environments may spend our lifetimes doing nothing but trying to survive the next minute. The power of words is no more evident than when used to tear down the esteem of a hapless child. The childhood quip, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is perhaps the ultimate lie in the human experience. We who have broken bones know they eventually heal. Those of us that have been the targets of epithets and spittle know those searing inner wounds of the soul may never heal. In the long run verbal abuse is perhaps the equal or greater than physical abuse.
The African people are perhaps among the wisest people that have ever walked the earth. Reminding people of their goodness will give them pause to act out their shortcomings in the future. Along the same lines, if we treat people as trustworthy, they most often will rise to the occasion. Treat them as unreliable and suspect; they will usually give us what we expect.
My own experience with words is absolutely consistent with the African experience and the American experience. In our confrontational, conflicted, and competitive culture, words often are angry, barbed, and disempowering. Many, perhaps most, of my painful experiences in life have derived from words rather than stick and stones. The disruption to my serenity that has derived from hurdled epithets and pejoratives has at times been nothing less that staggering. Hurled words have cost me everything except physical life itself - careers, mountains of money, dreams, relationships, nearly everything. Even at present, I struggle with staying in the ostensibly safe haven of my church because of the ongoing surplus of verbal poison.
On the other hand, words can constitute a sublime gift of the highest order. There have been people gifted with the ability to transform my day with a single sentence sent to me over the Internet in 10 point courier type. A single sentence can validate a life message, a calling, a purpose, a sense of self. I have the grand fortune of having been the beneficiary of such words. There have been tiny little e-mails that have buoyed me up for weeks - simply because they contained powerful reminders that having someone out there believe in what I am doing matters almost more than anything at all.
The words of Mahatma Gandhi liberated 500 million Indians from colonial bondage. The words of Nelson Mandela delivered millions of South Africans from the tyranny of apartheid. The words of Winston Churchill reminded millions in their darkest night that victory was within reach. The words of Martin Luther King transformed the American South, bringing personhood to millions for the first time. The words of Jesus saved us from ourselves.
I think of the time years ago when a troubled young man from a broken family came up to my extension ladder while I was trimming trees on a gray January day. Without preamble, he proclaimed that he considered me his chosen father. I nearly fell to the ground, overwhelmed by the validating power of his words. I was no longer the eccentric bachelor to be avoided in a neighborhood of fearful families, rather instead a safe being who could show Hope to a tormented soul.
We each have it in our power to affirm those around us with our words - to make phone calls, to answer e-mail, to send cards, to whisper to our loved ones, to offer sincere compliments at every opportunity. Not unlike the fishes and loaves that fed five thousand on a Galilean hillside, we can give our words away in perpetuity and never run short of them. Like the widow in ancient times, we can share the last of our flour and oil with a stranger, yet never lack for ourselves.
Are we hurling black stones of sarcasm, gossip, slander, anger, tearing down and disrupting, or are we casting forth with radiant diamonds of praise, gratitude, solidarity, empowerment, vision? You decide.
All of us do many wrong things. But if you can control your tongue, you are mature and able to control your whole body. By putting a bit into the mouth of a horse, we can turn the horse in different directions. It takes strong winds to move a large sailing ship, but the captain uses only a small rudder to make it go in any direction. Our tongues are small too, and yet they brag about big things. It takes only a spark to start a forest fire! The tongue is like a spark. It is an evil power that dirties the rest of the body and sets a person's entire life on fire with flames that come from hell itself. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and sea creatures can be tamed and have been tamed. But our tongues get out of control. They are restless and evil, and always spreading deadly poison. My dear friends, with our tongues we speak both praises and curses. We praise our Lord and Father, and we curse people who were created to be like God, and this isn't right. James 3:2-9
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Floral Design - The Architecture of Community 12-29-9
Anderson County, South Carolina
Traditionally we think of poinsettias as the de rigueur Christmas flower, despite their fiendish tendency to drop all their leaves at the slightest provocation. Long ago I decided on maintenance free holiday flower stock, buying a shopping cart full of silk poinsettias the day after Christmas when they were essentially free. I have had nary a drooping leaf in the years since and never worry about flower pots leaking onto my vintage 1978 wall to wall carpet.
Yet, sometimes convenience is not the primary consideration with respect to the use of floral materials to influence the well being of people. A silk plant in a plastic pot with several years of dusty patina discoloring the red petals does not lend itself to making someone feel special. On the other hand fresh cut long stem cadmium red roses, alizarin carnations, and iridescent poinsettia blooms can do much to influence community, even inciting commerce, as I just found out. Going to the trouble of making arrangements with fresh flowers and greens is a labor of love and the recipients will never need to get out a shop vac and vacuum dusty leaves in late August.
One of my favorite activities this time of year is loading my Toyota with brilliant red and green flower arrangements made up in an assortment of mason jars, vases, candle holders, soup bowls, and whatever else I can find hidden behind cereal boxes and Stove Top stuffing mix. Soup bowls with blocks of floral sponge are actually rather useful in making an arrangement effective enough to convince someone the universe is really friendly and that Christmas is not a secular myth.
After a bit of floral design work at the kitchen counter, ten hours of a recent Sunday were given over to making a county-wide run, leaving a contrail of red in nearly a dozen places. In fact, I did not get home until Monday about 1 AM. This may sound altruistic, but in reality I end up with a really good deal from this journey. To wit:
My sortie began with a drop of flowers in one of those little green floral vases that accrete in large numbers in church kitchen cupboards. In exchange for flowers and hot coffee, an older woman living alone in a well-kept vinyl house granted me a rather fine boneless chicken breast seasoned in a lemon marinade. My timing proved impeccable. This was going to be a prosperous expedition.
A nearby large formal brick home with classis columns proved to be rather dark and closed inside; reflecting the deep challenges this family has dealt with for several years. Flowers arranged in an empty host candle holder and a few words of encouragement proved exactly what was needed for these dear souls who have struggled to remember that dawn will come in all its radiant glory. I came away with a huge can of Santa Claus popcorn. Philanthropy does have its up side.
A recent widow has an active faith and this has seen her through a difficult time of transition, yet this active gardener can always use some extra color in her brick ranch house. One of those cheap green floral vases netted a bag of the highest quality party Chex mix I have ever encountered and two glasses of orange juice. I might need to go into doing some kind of visitation ‘work’ full time.
A little brick duplex on the north end of town has often proven a source of vast returns on my ‘investment’. It was a good thing I put extra balsam fir in with these flowers. The yield was incredible - an invitation to an immense banquet, right then and there. Once again, absolutely perfect timing. Following this experience of culinary nirvana, a long-time widow and her disabled daughter sent me home with nothing less than honey-baked ham, macaroni and cheese, green bean casserole, sweet potato soufflé, broccoli salad, egg dressing, chess pie, apple cake, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, in quantity. I will never ever have to shop or cook again.
Back towards the center of town is a sprawling complex of low brick buildings where hundreds of mostly older women are living out their last days. Despite a finely maintained campus, this nursing home is just not the best place to do the holidays alone. Flowers in quantity are always an antidote to some of the vast loneliness and despair that many of the residents struggle with. Even better than vast culinary largesse, are the sincere clingy hugs of gratitude for helping these women remember they are not forgotten by us here on the outside.
A non-descript ranch house near the nursing home is always shrouded in dense darkness. The three residents there have all faced neoplastic giants in their lives. They remain standing, yet so very tired. No longer able to care for their own garden, a fix of ready-made flowers is exactly what they needed. Even the darkest shadows give way to the radiance of fresh roses and carnations, scented with balsam. I passed on a grand meal; I still had more stops to make.
On the far side of town in a 1978 brick ranch with those silly skinny windows typical of the 1970s and photo-print panelling, a wheelchair bound divorcee lives, struggling to hang onto her independence. For her, flowers are a trophy. This middle-aged mother has managed to take the bitter dose of lemons in her life and add a liberal measure of sugar and produce the most succulent lemonade possible. She has always stood taller in her wheelchair than most people will ever think about doing. For my delivery of flowers today in a salvaged mason jar, I gained a jar of lupini beans and vanilla and chocolate pizzelles. Life is good.
My last stop found the Toyota nearly empty. Pushing the limits of my floral design skills, I had taken a white soup bowl, green floral oasis, red roses, carnations, poinsettia cuttings, and an admixture of cryptomerium, balsam fir, and fern and produced something fairly reasonable. It gained me admittance into the teddy bear filled house and life of one of life’s quiet saints; one who has been to medical hell and back about five times, yet still finds it in herself to make a small nephew know the universe is really friendly. For thirty-three years this school librarian provided a safe place for marginalized high school kids who never fit in with the ‘in’ crowd. I got two very cold glasses of milk, mining rights to her newly baked Christmas goodies, and a chance to hold a real teddy bear.
Will you work for community? It offers the best pay and benefits in the world. Next time you are in the grocery be sure to drop by floral and round up some provisions for your journey.
Traditionally we think of poinsettias as the de rigueur Christmas flower, despite their fiendish tendency to drop all their leaves at the slightest provocation. Long ago I decided on maintenance free holiday flower stock, buying a shopping cart full of silk poinsettias the day after Christmas when they were essentially free. I have had nary a drooping leaf in the years since and never worry about flower pots leaking onto my vintage 1978 wall to wall carpet.
Yet, sometimes convenience is not the primary consideration with respect to the use of floral materials to influence the well being of people. A silk plant in a plastic pot with several years of dusty patina discoloring the red petals does not lend itself to making someone feel special. On the other hand fresh cut long stem cadmium red roses, alizarin carnations, and iridescent poinsettia blooms can do much to influence community, even inciting commerce, as I just found out. Going to the trouble of making arrangements with fresh flowers and greens is a labor of love and the recipients will never need to get out a shop vac and vacuum dusty leaves in late August.
One of my favorite activities this time of year is loading my Toyota with brilliant red and green flower arrangements made up in an assortment of mason jars, vases, candle holders, soup bowls, and whatever else I can find hidden behind cereal boxes and Stove Top stuffing mix. Soup bowls with blocks of floral sponge are actually rather useful in making an arrangement effective enough to convince someone the universe is really friendly and that Christmas is not a secular myth.
After a bit of floral design work at the kitchen counter, ten hours of a recent Sunday were given over to making a county-wide run, leaving a contrail of red in nearly a dozen places. In fact, I did not get home until Monday about 1 AM. This may sound altruistic, but in reality I end up with a really good deal from this journey. To wit:
My sortie began with a drop of flowers in one of those little green floral vases that accrete in large numbers in church kitchen cupboards. In exchange for flowers and hot coffee, an older woman living alone in a well-kept vinyl house granted me a rather fine boneless chicken breast seasoned in a lemon marinade. My timing proved impeccable. This was going to be a prosperous expedition.
A nearby large formal brick home with classis columns proved to be rather dark and closed inside; reflecting the deep challenges this family has dealt with for several years. Flowers arranged in an empty host candle holder and a few words of encouragement proved exactly what was needed for these dear souls who have struggled to remember that dawn will come in all its radiant glory. I came away with a huge can of Santa Claus popcorn. Philanthropy does have its up side.
A recent widow has an active faith and this has seen her through a difficult time of transition, yet this active gardener can always use some extra color in her brick ranch house. One of those cheap green floral vases netted a bag of the highest quality party Chex mix I have ever encountered and two glasses of orange juice. I might need to go into doing some kind of visitation ‘work’ full time.
A little brick duplex on the north end of town has often proven a source of vast returns on my ‘investment’. It was a good thing I put extra balsam fir in with these flowers. The yield was incredible - an invitation to an immense banquet, right then and there. Once again, absolutely perfect timing. Following this experience of culinary nirvana, a long-time widow and her disabled daughter sent me home with nothing less than honey-baked ham, macaroni and cheese, green bean casserole, sweet potato soufflé, broccoli salad, egg dressing, chess pie, apple cake, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, in quantity. I will never ever have to shop or cook again.
Back towards the center of town is a sprawling complex of low brick buildings where hundreds of mostly older women are living out their last days. Despite a finely maintained campus, this nursing home is just not the best place to do the holidays alone. Flowers in quantity are always an antidote to some of the vast loneliness and despair that many of the residents struggle with. Even better than vast culinary largesse, are the sincere clingy hugs of gratitude for helping these women remember they are not forgotten by us here on the outside.
A non-descript ranch house near the nursing home is always shrouded in dense darkness. The three residents there have all faced neoplastic giants in their lives. They remain standing, yet so very tired. No longer able to care for their own garden, a fix of ready-made flowers is exactly what they needed. Even the darkest shadows give way to the radiance of fresh roses and carnations, scented with balsam. I passed on a grand meal; I still had more stops to make.
On the far side of town in a 1978 brick ranch with those silly skinny windows typical of the 1970s and photo-print panelling, a wheelchair bound divorcee lives, struggling to hang onto her independence. For her, flowers are a trophy. This middle-aged mother has managed to take the bitter dose of lemons in her life and add a liberal measure of sugar and produce the most succulent lemonade possible. She has always stood taller in her wheelchair than most people will ever think about doing. For my delivery of flowers today in a salvaged mason jar, I gained a jar of lupini beans and vanilla and chocolate pizzelles. Life is good.
My last stop found the Toyota nearly empty. Pushing the limits of my floral design skills, I had taken a white soup bowl, green floral oasis, red roses, carnations, poinsettia cuttings, and an admixture of cryptomerium, balsam fir, and fern and produced something fairly reasonable. It gained me admittance into the teddy bear filled house and life of one of life’s quiet saints; one who has been to medical hell and back about five times, yet still finds it in herself to make a small nephew know the universe is really friendly. For thirty-three years this school librarian provided a safe place for marginalized high school kids who never fit in with the ‘in’ crowd. I got two very cold glasses of milk, mining rights to her newly baked Christmas goodies, and a chance to hold a real teddy bear.
Will you work for community? It offers the best pay and benefits in the world. Next time you are in the grocery be sure to drop by floral and round up some provisions for your journey.
Fast Forward Learning 12-28-9
Greensberg, Pennsylvania
When one is facing the prospect of violent death about ninety seconds in the future, it has a way of making one think very fast, conducting a personal assessment, and determining if one has spent his or her life well. One even finds the time to consider matters of faith, even after allowing it to lie dormant for decades. So it was on a fine spring morning in late May one year that I found myself in such a state of fast forward introspection and learning. Over the North Sea just after takeoff, the jet turbine engine six feet outside my triple-paned Lexan window blew up. One can think amazingly fast and with great clarity in suspended states of, “Is this it?”
I learned we all share an inner secret we really don’t want anyone else to know about. We dread being alone. We dread dying alone. Our culture having been built on the merits of individuality and self-sufficiency; we have been conditioned and entrained to desperately want to distinguish ourselves by being different from the masses, yet underneath all the myriad trappings, we are all just about alike and want exactly the same thing, a sense of connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of value, and ultimately purpose and significance. We don’t want to travel solo. We want to touch the soul of another, reach out, and find out we are travelling the same path. When this happens, there is that delicious sensation of discovery; finding we are reading from the same page, finishing each other’s sentences. It is the stuff of epic historical romance novels and entrancing romantic comedies. The number of marriages erupting out of such an overwhelming encounter is stunning.
More stunning is the number of divorces that arise from the same entrancing encounters that suddenly blow up, just like that turbine did outside my window. Alas, while finishing each other’s sentences and falling into exquisite romantic reverie, we forget to check in with each other on whether we routinely remember to put down the lid, roll the tooth paste from the bottom, or bother to balance the check book. Rarely do we develop the skills to negotiate the choppy challenging waters of building a lasting relationship in a complex part of human history, which is moving at nearly the speed of light. The things that worked yesterday in life just might not work today; it is changing that fast.
The glitter eventually gets washed off and we are left with unplanned children, dirty diapers, repairs to the mini-van, doctor’s bills, catastrophic illness, and difficult in-laws. Tantalizing and beautiful as it can be, glitter does not make the best of foundations for something that is meant to stand against the storms of life. Millions exit the premises every year at the first hint of foul weather, making another desperate bid to find peaceful bliss beyond another distant mountain. Those left behind become heroes living lives of quiet desperation just to maintain the infrastructure of daily life.
In a couples-oriented, experience-oriented world we have been duped into thinking that is enough: Find the glitter and head for Nirvana. Those who have heard the judge pound his or her gavel and firmly pronounce, “decree of divorce granted” learn in a fraction of a second that something doesn’t compute, that Nirvana proves to be no more real than the illusion of Shangri-La on the other side of the mountain of diapers. Ten, twenty, or thirty years of history, family relationships, and self-worth are shattered before the gavel’s impact finishes echoing off the paneling on the back wall of the courtroom. Everything is called into question. The bang of a judge’s gavel can have the same stunning impact as the bang that come from a disintegrating jet turbine.
Most of us who have, for whatever reasons, not scaled the mountain of marriage are still living in the illusion that out there somewhere is the right one who can show us how to reach Shangri-La. Lots of people are making mountains of money publishing magazines, maintaining on-line dating services, keeping clubs open until 4 AM every night, just so we can keep moving towards the mirage on the other side of the hot sands of our discontent. Most eventually find what they think they are looking for, only to find out the illusion is just that, an image with no substance.
I’ve done my share of hunting for ‘it’ in all the wrong places: online, in the next book, with the next woman, traversing the next country, spending the next million dollars. I’ve been to fifty countries looking for ‘it’, signed onto half a dozen dating databases looking for ‘it’, read a couple thousand books, lived in a penthouse, and had more women than I am willing to admit here. “It” is not and was not to be found in any of those places. I can’t honestly say I even really knew what ‘it’ was. It may be just now that I am getting the barest inkling of what ‘it’ is.
Right relationships are good, profoundly essential to our well being, and provide safety to a great degree, but most of us are settling for way too little and not taking the time to get it right. We don’t do the homework or studying needed to pass the final exam. We settle for paste rather than diamonds. Yet relational richness far exceeds the value of cold hard diamonds with their deceptive glitter.
We don’t want to let on that most of us often spend big chunks of our lives wondering what the point is to all of what we do. It gets to the degree that one wonders if it is worth even going on with life. Suicide is now the number one cause of death besides accidents in the very age groups that ought to be embracing life most fully. One could call it the post-modern blahs. One could call it burnout. One can call it depression. Others call it mid-life crisis. All are correct.
We run ever faster, yet feel we are losing ground in our quest to reach the things we presently think or once thought matter. A friend of mine, a multi-millionaire, one afternoon mentioned that he had seen his son born and then suddenly watched him graduate from university. He lost his only son’s childhood because he spent six days a week for thirty-seven years in a windowless cell chasing the American Dream of more is better. This son followed the same dream and died of alcoholic poisoning at age thirty-two, having found nothing worth living for at the top. It is hard to describe the coldness that soaks through one’s soul and being on a blustery winter day when standing with a desolate father at the grave of his only son who thought he had it all only to find out he had nothing.
There is a smaller number of people that has discovered the profoundly rich journey of embracing and sharing true community, that rare abundant experience when a group of people is reading off the same page, speaking the same language, and seeking the same goals. Perhaps the most intoxicating relational experience I have known is the esprit de corps that derives from a community group joining together to do the impossible on behalf of those who cannot do for themselves. At the risk of being called relationally phobic, I have found it even more fulfilling than even the most intense of romantic ascensions. It is my guess that most of us have never really experienced this joining together of a group to do the impossible. The closest many of us get is watching our favorite football teams pull off the big come back in the fourth quarter from the La-z-Boy recliner. We were meant for far far more than that.
For reasons having nothing to do with my personal merits I have found myself experiencing esprit des corps three times in my life and three times I have experienced the great angst that comes from its tumultuous disruption. As wondrous as it is, the fragility of it is profoundly disquieting. Each time the disintegration of these experiences was not unlike the shattering of the magnificent crystal and porcelain on the pavements of Germany during the darkest hours of Krystallnacht during the Second World War. The pain can be beyond description.
Most of us have known that glorious sensation of meeting someone and finding he or she has a history and values similar to our own. The experience can be beyond intoxicating, the ‘chemistry’ electrifying. Finding a group, a community can be even more so. Yet there is an “It” far more transcendent and fulfilling to one-on-one relationship or even esprit des corps. It was to manifest itself to me the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
It is so appropriate that on this first day of Advent I would be given a gift of the highest order, a gift of grace that only confirms my budding conception of what we are all looking for – the resonance of our souls with the Heart of the One who before the foundations of time created all that is. I almost missed this incredible gift, having been thinking of a different plan for the day. My dear friend, Joanne, now confined to a wheelchair and unable to drive, wished to have a reunion with her academic mentor of more than twenty five years ago, one who has stood by her as she saw her marriage crumble, her health destroyed, all things precious taken away excepting for one – her resonance with the One that came before the advent of Time. Joanne learned decades ago what I am only just now starting to get a glimmer of.
So it was I found myself driving yet further north in winter on the first Sunday of Advent not looking for anything in particular, rather merely acting as a facilitator for this reunion that would bring a quarter century full circle in several lives. As it was, I was to be far more than a mere chauffeur. I would be a privileged observer and beneficiary of the closing of this circle. Our destination proved to be the mother house of the Sisters of Charity in North America. It was there that Joanne entered into a sacred reunion with Grace, a Sister Of Charity, one who has for more than three decades prayed her across an ocean of storms. It was there that I received another lesson in what “It” is and where to find “It”. I suddenly found myself a pilgrim and mere first-year student in a place of stunning inner and outer beauty, absolutely transfixed. I encountered the manifest love of God in His creation and in His faithful servants.
Being invited into the staggering beauty of the Chapel Caritas Christi, a shimmering cube of crystalline rainbows, I was presented with a holographic image of what “It’ is. Some ninety Sisters of Charity lifted their voices in interwoven strands of praise to the cerulean heavens, knowing the One who is ‘It’. The resonance of their voices between the inner faces of those crystalline panels reflected the resonance of their souls with the Heart of the One who had created all that is. It was with these ninety followers of the One from before time that we shared the bread and wine, those continual reminders of the ultimate gift of the One Himself, given on our behalf.
Love is overwhelming and profoundly gracious in a way I simply cannot even describe. In a world of car jackings, daily terrorist bombings, thrill seeking adolescent snipers, and narcissistic consumption of the Creation in its every form, it is hard to assimilate that one could actually reach a place by car where all other things have passed away except love. The Mother House is actually a place of waiting and preparation for selfless women who have separated their lives from the world and subordinated their own wants in order to be available to the One who could really fulfill their every desire.
For decades each of them has gone out into the world to serve, often in conditions of privation beyond our imagination. These platinum-haired angels of charity are more aptly named than they can even imagine. Collectively these messengers of love have given some 5,000 years of service to others and at the same time given up 5,000 years of frenzied searching for their own fulfillment. In this stunning place of concentrated love, these septuagenarian and octogenarian faithful wait in worshipful anticipation of that final journey to a place where there shall no longer be any night, where they shall not have need of a lamp or even the sun, because the Lord shall illumine them forever. In the meantime they keep praying for us out here, driving the wedge of love further into the growing darkness around us. Such a concentration of intercessory love is acting as a vast prism, shattering the hatred and meanness of a fallen world, reminding us that in the end the only thing that will remain is love.
As the magnificent panels in Chapel Caritas Christi fracture the brilliance of clarified winter sunshine into every conceivable color, I am renewed inside a multi-faceted metaphor of the multi-hued love of the One Who was before time. The physical and emotional feeling of this quiet refuge on a hill reminds me of the promise that one day a new city will descend on earth, the New Jerusalem, a place where there will no more tears, mourning or crying. The gavel will no longer fall. Swords will have been turned into plowshares.
In a way beyond words I felt as a small child in a place of absolute safety. The horrors of daily life and war in our world were forgotten. Love and beauty are simply incompatible with what have become the hideous distractions of desperately alone people on hapless searches for belonging and beauty in all the wrong places. I spent more than half a century not knowing this is what I was looking for – the immersion of self in the only One who can provide love and safety in a way that allows our restless nervous searching to finally cease.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added unto you.
When one is facing the prospect of violent death about ninety seconds in the future, it has a way of making one think very fast, conducting a personal assessment, and determining if one has spent his or her life well. One even finds the time to consider matters of faith, even after allowing it to lie dormant for decades. So it was on a fine spring morning in late May one year that I found myself in such a state of fast forward introspection and learning. Over the North Sea just after takeoff, the jet turbine engine six feet outside my triple-paned Lexan window blew up. One can think amazingly fast and with great clarity in suspended states of, “Is this it?”
I learned we all share an inner secret we really don’t want anyone else to know about. We dread being alone. We dread dying alone. Our culture having been built on the merits of individuality and self-sufficiency; we have been conditioned and entrained to desperately want to distinguish ourselves by being different from the masses, yet underneath all the myriad trappings, we are all just about alike and want exactly the same thing, a sense of connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of value, and ultimately purpose and significance. We don’t want to travel solo. We want to touch the soul of another, reach out, and find out we are travelling the same path. When this happens, there is that delicious sensation of discovery; finding we are reading from the same page, finishing each other’s sentences. It is the stuff of epic historical romance novels and entrancing romantic comedies. The number of marriages erupting out of such an overwhelming encounter is stunning.
More stunning is the number of divorces that arise from the same entrancing encounters that suddenly blow up, just like that turbine did outside my window. Alas, while finishing each other’s sentences and falling into exquisite romantic reverie, we forget to check in with each other on whether we routinely remember to put down the lid, roll the tooth paste from the bottom, or bother to balance the check book. Rarely do we develop the skills to negotiate the choppy challenging waters of building a lasting relationship in a complex part of human history, which is moving at nearly the speed of light. The things that worked yesterday in life just might not work today; it is changing that fast.
The glitter eventually gets washed off and we are left with unplanned children, dirty diapers, repairs to the mini-van, doctor’s bills, catastrophic illness, and difficult in-laws. Tantalizing and beautiful as it can be, glitter does not make the best of foundations for something that is meant to stand against the storms of life. Millions exit the premises every year at the first hint of foul weather, making another desperate bid to find peaceful bliss beyond another distant mountain. Those left behind become heroes living lives of quiet desperation just to maintain the infrastructure of daily life.
In a couples-oriented, experience-oriented world we have been duped into thinking that is enough: Find the glitter and head for Nirvana. Those who have heard the judge pound his or her gavel and firmly pronounce, “decree of divorce granted” learn in a fraction of a second that something doesn’t compute, that Nirvana proves to be no more real than the illusion of Shangri-La on the other side of the mountain of diapers. Ten, twenty, or thirty years of history, family relationships, and self-worth are shattered before the gavel’s impact finishes echoing off the paneling on the back wall of the courtroom. Everything is called into question. The bang of a judge’s gavel can have the same stunning impact as the bang that come from a disintegrating jet turbine.
Most of us who have, for whatever reasons, not scaled the mountain of marriage are still living in the illusion that out there somewhere is the right one who can show us how to reach Shangri-La. Lots of people are making mountains of money publishing magazines, maintaining on-line dating services, keeping clubs open until 4 AM every night, just so we can keep moving towards the mirage on the other side of the hot sands of our discontent. Most eventually find what they think they are looking for, only to find out the illusion is just that, an image with no substance.
I’ve done my share of hunting for ‘it’ in all the wrong places: online, in the next book, with the next woman, traversing the next country, spending the next million dollars. I’ve been to fifty countries looking for ‘it’, signed onto half a dozen dating databases looking for ‘it’, read a couple thousand books, lived in a penthouse, and had more women than I am willing to admit here. “It” is not and was not to be found in any of those places. I can’t honestly say I even really knew what ‘it’ was. It may be just now that I am getting the barest inkling of what ‘it’ is.
Right relationships are good, profoundly essential to our well being, and provide safety to a great degree, but most of us are settling for way too little and not taking the time to get it right. We don’t do the homework or studying needed to pass the final exam. We settle for paste rather than diamonds. Yet relational richness far exceeds the value of cold hard diamonds with their deceptive glitter.
We don’t want to let on that most of us often spend big chunks of our lives wondering what the point is to all of what we do. It gets to the degree that one wonders if it is worth even going on with life. Suicide is now the number one cause of death besides accidents in the very age groups that ought to be embracing life most fully. One could call it the post-modern blahs. One could call it burnout. One can call it depression. Others call it mid-life crisis. All are correct.
We run ever faster, yet feel we are losing ground in our quest to reach the things we presently think or once thought matter. A friend of mine, a multi-millionaire, one afternoon mentioned that he had seen his son born and then suddenly watched him graduate from university. He lost his only son’s childhood because he spent six days a week for thirty-seven years in a windowless cell chasing the American Dream of more is better. This son followed the same dream and died of alcoholic poisoning at age thirty-two, having found nothing worth living for at the top. It is hard to describe the coldness that soaks through one’s soul and being on a blustery winter day when standing with a desolate father at the grave of his only son who thought he had it all only to find out he had nothing.
There is a smaller number of people that has discovered the profoundly rich journey of embracing and sharing true community, that rare abundant experience when a group of people is reading off the same page, speaking the same language, and seeking the same goals. Perhaps the most intoxicating relational experience I have known is the esprit de corps that derives from a community group joining together to do the impossible on behalf of those who cannot do for themselves. At the risk of being called relationally phobic, I have found it even more fulfilling than even the most intense of romantic ascensions. It is my guess that most of us have never really experienced this joining together of a group to do the impossible. The closest many of us get is watching our favorite football teams pull off the big come back in the fourth quarter from the La-z-Boy recliner. We were meant for far far more than that.
For reasons having nothing to do with my personal merits I have found myself experiencing esprit des corps three times in my life and three times I have experienced the great angst that comes from its tumultuous disruption. As wondrous as it is, the fragility of it is profoundly disquieting. Each time the disintegration of these experiences was not unlike the shattering of the magnificent crystal and porcelain on the pavements of Germany during the darkest hours of Krystallnacht during the Second World War. The pain can be beyond description.
Most of us have known that glorious sensation of meeting someone and finding he or she has a history and values similar to our own. The experience can be beyond intoxicating, the ‘chemistry’ electrifying. Finding a group, a community can be even more so. Yet there is an “It” far more transcendent and fulfilling to one-on-one relationship or even esprit des corps. It was to manifest itself to me the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
It is so appropriate that on this first day of Advent I would be given a gift of the highest order, a gift of grace that only confirms my budding conception of what we are all looking for – the resonance of our souls with the Heart of the One who before the foundations of time created all that is. I almost missed this incredible gift, having been thinking of a different plan for the day. My dear friend, Joanne, now confined to a wheelchair and unable to drive, wished to have a reunion with her academic mentor of more than twenty five years ago, one who has stood by her as she saw her marriage crumble, her health destroyed, all things precious taken away excepting for one – her resonance with the One that came before the advent of Time. Joanne learned decades ago what I am only just now starting to get a glimmer of.
So it was I found myself driving yet further north in winter on the first Sunday of Advent not looking for anything in particular, rather merely acting as a facilitator for this reunion that would bring a quarter century full circle in several lives. As it was, I was to be far more than a mere chauffeur. I would be a privileged observer and beneficiary of the closing of this circle. Our destination proved to be the mother house of the Sisters of Charity in North America. It was there that Joanne entered into a sacred reunion with Grace, a Sister Of Charity, one who has for more than three decades prayed her across an ocean of storms. It was there that I received another lesson in what “It” is and where to find “It”. I suddenly found myself a pilgrim and mere first-year student in a place of stunning inner and outer beauty, absolutely transfixed. I encountered the manifest love of God in His creation and in His faithful servants.
Being invited into the staggering beauty of the Chapel Caritas Christi, a shimmering cube of crystalline rainbows, I was presented with a holographic image of what “It’ is. Some ninety Sisters of Charity lifted their voices in interwoven strands of praise to the cerulean heavens, knowing the One who is ‘It’. The resonance of their voices between the inner faces of those crystalline panels reflected the resonance of their souls with the Heart of the One who had created all that is. It was with these ninety followers of the One from before time that we shared the bread and wine, those continual reminders of the ultimate gift of the One Himself, given on our behalf.
Love is overwhelming and profoundly gracious in a way I simply cannot even describe. In a world of car jackings, daily terrorist bombings, thrill seeking adolescent snipers, and narcissistic consumption of the Creation in its every form, it is hard to assimilate that one could actually reach a place by car where all other things have passed away except love. The Mother House is actually a place of waiting and preparation for selfless women who have separated their lives from the world and subordinated their own wants in order to be available to the One who could really fulfill their every desire.
For decades each of them has gone out into the world to serve, often in conditions of privation beyond our imagination. These platinum-haired angels of charity are more aptly named than they can even imagine. Collectively these messengers of love have given some 5,000 years of service to others and at the same time given up 5,000 years of frenzied searching for their own fulfillment. In this stunning place of concentrated love, these septuagenarian and octogenarian faithful wait in worshipful anticipation of that final journey to a place where there shall no longer be any night, where they shall not have need of a lamp or even the sun, because the Lord shall illumine them forever. In the meantime they keep praying for us out here, driving the wedge of love further into the growing darkness around us. Such a concentration of intercessory love is acting as a vast prism, shattering the hatred and meanness of a fallen world, reminding us that in the end the only thing that will remain is love.
As the magnificent panels in Chapel Caritas Christi fracture the brilliance of clarified winter sunshine into every conceivable color, I am renewed inside a multi-faceted metaphor of the multi-hued love of the One Who was before time. The physical and emotional feeling of this quiet refuge on a hill reminds me of the promise that one day a new city will descend on earth, the New Jerusalem, a place where there will no more tears, mourning or crying. The gavel will no longer fall. Swords will have been turned into plowshares.
In a way beyond words I felt as a small child in a place of absolute safety. The horrors of daily life and war in our world were forgotten. Love and beauty are simply incompatible with what have become the hideous distractions of desperately alone people on hapless searches for belonging and beauty in all the wrong places. I spent more than half a century not knowing this is what I was looking for – the immersion of self in the only One who can provide love and safety in a way that allows our restless nervous searching to finally cease.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added unto you.
On Orbit 12-27-9
Anderson, South Carolina
If you have had the rare and singularly spectacular experience of orbiting the earth in a space craft, you will quickly agree there is almost no experience that compares to it. Seeing the corona of the rising sun as one careens along at seventeen thousand miles an hour is inspiring beyond imagination. In mere moments, one is blasted from inky cosmic darkness into blinding solar brilliance. Black shadows transform into magnificent swirls of cerulean and platinum as morning spreads across Heaven.
A most tantalizing aspect of orbiting earth is the apparent horizontal flatness of land surfaces. One can look down through a porthole at vast mountain ranges and only distinguish them by virtue of small tufts of white on their peaks and hints of shadow cast by them early and late in the day.
If I am down on earth climbing mountains, I have an acute awareness of variations in elevation and inclinations. "Verticalness" can be a dizzying, overwhelming experience when roped to the side of a ten-thousand foot wall of granite for three weeks. One longs for, almost craves, anything horizontal. A ten-inch ledge can seem like a king-size bed. Yet, from three hundred miles up the overpowering "verticalness" is completely lost in a transcendent view of the world. Nothing has changed in the mountains, only my perspective has been altered.
Many others and I cared for a fellow who was confined to an air-driven wheel chair for thirty-seven years after having been paralyzed from the chin down in an auto accident. He was quite unable to attend to any of his personal needs whatever. He was absolutely one hundred percent dependent on others.
I was visiting with Ron some years ago when we found ourselves musing about the paths we have each taken through life. Ron made the observation that I have had a life that would easily be in the top one percent of lives lived because of my opportunity to travel the world, study in six American universities, work in five different careers, live in a castle in Europe, make good on many of my dreams. I have known but little suffering. Ron went on quickly to tell me that his life represented the bottom one percent of lives because of his vast unrelenting suffering and dependency. There was no argument from me. I assured him he was absolutely correct on both points.
At that moment years ago it occurred to me that we both had taken radically different paths to get to the same place. We were both sitting in the same room, looking at the same computer screen, wanting to do the same things, and we were both drinking from the same bottle of soda, even if I had to hold the bottle and give him his through a straw.
I said "Ron, what matters now is that we share the most important thing in common, a saving faith in the Son of God. One day you and I will both be very far from here. For unnumbered tomorrows we will walk in the New Jerusalem. You will have forgotten that you ever lived in a wheel chair or that you couldn't even wipe away your own tears, which you've had plenty of. You will be too busy dashing about, exploring the place He has prepared for you. I will have forgotten that I was able to study in six universities and travel by jet plane all over the world. I will be too busy learning the real answers to the questions that matter most. Hardly will it matter that I had a fine home and more than enough money in the bank. I will be walking on those streets of transparent gold, trying to find you."
Heaven will be like an orbiting space shuttle in some respects. From that vantage we will no longer find ourselves in dark shadows between mountain peaks. From the great height of Heaven it is unlikely we will even be able to see the shadows below. We will simply find ourselves in eternal brilliance that never ceases. Buddy is already there. We will one day see him there for ourselves.
“But for a season of darkness do we see dimly. One day the Son will rise above the horizon of Heaven.”
“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
If you have had the rare and singularly spectacular experience of orbiting the earth in a space craft, you will quickly agree there is almost no experience that compares to it. Seeing the corona of the rising sun as one careens along at seventeen thousand miles an hour is inspiring beyond imagination. In mere moments, one is blasted from inky cosmic darkness into blinding solar brilliance. Black shadows transform into magnificent swirls of cerulean and platinum as morning spreads across Heaven.
A most tantalizing aspect of orbiting earth is the apparent horizontal flatness of land surfaces. One can look down through a porthole at vast mountain ranges and only distinguish them by virtue of small tufts of white on their peaks and hints of shadow cast by them early and late in the day.
If I am down on earth climbing mountains, I have an acute awareness of variations in elevation and inclinations. "Verticalness" can be a dizzying, overwhelming experience when roped to the side of a ten-thousand foot wall of granite for three weeks. One longs for, almost craves, anything horizontal. A ten-inch ledge can seem like a king-size bed. Yet, from three hundred miles up the overpowering "verticalness" is completely lost in a transcendent view of the world. Nothing has changed in the mountains, only my perspective has been altered.
Many others and I cared for a fellow who was confined to an air-driven wheel chair for thirty-seven years after having been paralyzed from the chin down in an auto accident. He was quite unable to attend to any of his personal needs whatever. He was absolutely one hundred percent dependent on others.
I was visiting with Ron some years ago when we found ourselves musing about the paths we have each taken through life. Ron made the observation that I have had a life that would easily be in the top one percent of lives lived because of my opportunity to travel the world, study in six American universities, work in five different careers, live in a castle in Europe, make good on many of my dreams. I have known but little suffering. Ron went on quickly to tell me that his life represented the bottom one percent of lives because of his vast unrelenting suffering and dependency. There was no argument from me. I assured him he was absolutely correct on both points.
At that moment years ago it occurred to me that we both had taken radically different paths to get to the same place. We were both sitting in the same room, looking at the same computer screen, wanting to do the same things, and we were both drinking from the same bottle of soda, even if I had to hold the bottle and give him his through a straw.
I said "Ron, what matters now is that we share the most important thing in common, a saving faith in the Son of God. One day you and I will both be very far from here. For unnumbered tomorrows we will walk in the New Jerusalem. You will have forgotten that you ever lived in a wheel chair or that you couldn't even wipe away your own tears, which you've had plenty of. You will be too busy dashing about, exploring the place He has prepared for you. I will have forgotten that I was able to study in six universities and travel by jet plane all over the world. I will be too busy learning the real answers to the questions that matter most. Hardly will it matter that I had a fine home and more than enough money in the bank. I will be walking on those streets of transparent gold, trying to find you."
Heaven will be like an orbiting space shuttle in some respects. From that vantage we will no longer find ourselves in dark shadows between mountain peaks. From the great height of Heaven it is unlikely we will even be able to see the shadows below. We will simply find ourselves in eternal brilliance that never ceases. Buddy is already there. We will one day see him there for ourselves.
“But for a season of darkness do we see dimly. One day the Son will rise above the horizon of Heaven.”
“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
Community - None of Us is Travelling Through the Universe Alone 12-26-9
Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina
It was but two days ago I returned from a retreat for single Christian adults. The essential message was that it is more than OK to be a single adult in an obsessively couples oriented culture. We were encouraged to view singleness as a singularity, a very special state, even one with special privileges. In the sacramental Christian paradigm, both of the rather empowering speakers reminded us that birth, baptism, taking of the Holy Eucharist, and dying are landmark places on our journeys to be taken alone. This was how God designed our earthly journeys to be.
The mass culture, including the lyrics of nearly every love song, tells us that we are somehow incomplete until we find that perfect person capable of fulfilling our every dream. Alas, there is no such person, as so many tragically learn when their overburdened marriages collapse under the weight of these unrealistic expectations. Those of us who have known nothing but singleness, seek that special other as devoutly as those of centuries past sought the Holy Grail. Many of us travelling solo struggle to realize that we are complete individuals, as created by our Creator.
Paradoxically, both the Old and New Testaments contain profoundly compelling exhortations as to the necessity and beauty of community. Even when we are reminded that the major events of life must be experienced alone, God started out His message to us “It is not good that man be alone”. The wisdom writer of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes tells us that safety, warmth, pleasure, and even increased return on our labor derive from being with another. The great Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthian church that Christian community can only exist when we each recognize our own special personal gifts and freely share them with it. The implication is that being out of community will cause unnecessary losses and vulnerability and that being in community is a catalyst for abundant living. Some ten years later an uncertain author, perhaps the apostle Paul, wrote to the Hebrews an admonition to not forsake the fellowship of the saints. We are again reminded of this essential imperative for the need of community in our lives.
So it would seem that the challenge is seeing ourselves as complete whole individuals, coupled or not, yet in need of linkage to those about us, a difficult balance in an unbalanced culture. My experiences with facilitating depression support and therapy groups reveal that people suffer far more than they need to because they lack the safety and strength that derive from community in its many forms. As an active member of a sacramental church, participation in the community life of my church is an obvious form of community. Yet, it shows up often in some astounding ways that have little to do with the church structure.
I do show up nearly every time the door is open and even times when it is not, but I have found some other important forms of community to complement my sacramental center. For some fifteen years I have been involved in a local community playhouse and have delighted in the creation of oases of laughter and magic for people, many pressured by present-day complex lives that don’t get any easier.
It was in this small community theater about six years ago that I met one of our volunteers, MQ. Most people know her as Joanne; I call her MQ for Magic Queen. She is a full-time volunteer in an elementary school, coordinating a tutoring program for 769 young children trying to figure out how this world works. Some need a bit more help with this than others, and MQ knows how to do this very well. MQ paid the tuition for a special kind of learning nearly fifteen years ago when a brain stem tumor took away her ability to walk or work at her profession of teaching. She knows about special needs and how to relate to those with them.
Every child that enters her Magic Room for tutoring is awarded a paper heart in the color of his or her choice at the end of the lesson. They write their names on their hearts and can attach them to any surface in the room, except the big metallic red hearts hanging from the ceiling. Over the academic year, it is entrancing to watch this putty gray cinder block room in an ordinary school building transform into a spectral wonderland as these hearts accrete on every possible surface within reach of a young child. Some of these kids can reach pretty high, and that is the whole point of the Magic Room.
Having at one time been in a wheelchair myself I learned the hard way the realities of disability and accessibility. It is sometimes very hard to reach high. I have for several years now been quite functional and have resumed my habits of climbing on very high things including Mt Mitchell in North Carolina. This mountain is 6,684 feet high and the tallest thing in Eastern North America. For nearly a year I have been threatening Joanne that I was going to somehow get her to the top of that mountain. I did get her into a hot air balloon in May and she found it a transcendent experience. Being on top of Mt. Mitchell, despite being wheelchair bound, struck me as a powerful visual metaphor of one rising above her physical challenges and limits. I wanted to make this happen.
Well, today was the day to make good on my threat. As it turns out, Mt Mitchell is only five miles from the route I had selected to get us from South Carolina to Pennsylvania for one of those epic Italian Thanksgiving dinners that lasts for three days. I don’t select the shortest way to get to places, lest I miss something important. This late November day turned out to be extraordinarily clear and perfect for a major ascension of a very high place. And so it was that I was to gain an impromptu lesson in the importance of community, even a temporary community that lasts perhaps a mere hour. Much can be done in the space of an hour or the two days of a retreat community
I have a bad habit of over-estimating my abilities and I figured getting Joanne up the tallest thing on this part of the planet would be a piece of cake. Not! I have told her in the past she is probably too trusting. She might have found that out today the hard way, excepting for Divine intervention. Having previously been up this mountain myself on two good legs, I really had not paid attention to those hundreds of very irregular steps made of rocks and logs and tree roots or the loose soft gravel preceding the final ascension. I got her and the chair across that soft loose gravel at nearly 7,000 feet and immediately knew I was in trouble. There is noticeably less oxygen at this elevation for wannabee hulks like me who think they can do anything.
I managed to pop her chair up the first of several widely spaced stone ledges with her trusting me to not drop her into the abyss head first. I managed the first few steps but knew that what I thought was going to be a virtuous demonstration of my virile sympathetic concerns for her transcendent experience was going to be defeated by the realities of gravity and an infinite number of logs, roots and rocks. I was going to have to eventually concede defeat, which males can’t stand doing, especially in front of women. Our ego structures are dependent on being all-powerful facilitators of the impossible.
As I was nearing the realization of this transcendent metaphor crashing down on my wounded ego, two angels appeared to save me from a high-altitude humiliation and to teach me about the increased return on shared labors via shared community effort. Most angels are named Gabriel, Michael or the like. These two were Jason and Shane. They didn’t show up in the standard white robe garb and wings, rather green sweatshirts and camouflage pants. I think God wants to get us past some of this stereotypical stuff we fall into.
These two young healthy men/angels offered their services to make that, which I could not do alone, possible as a shared effort. That infinity of logs, rocks, and roots was reduced to a manageable obstacle. Joanne exercising major fortitude of trust allowed the three of us to lift her chair and carry it up to the highest place within thousands of miles. We arrived on top of this great mountain rather winded, but aware that a cord of three was not broken and we had ascended safely. Joanne ascended in her sedan chair with a smile, greeting a lot of bewildered hikers. I am certain most of these sane people wondered about the mental stability of one who would drag a wheelchair bound friend to the top of the planet.
Without these two angels showing up I would have had my ego destroyed and probably killed Joanne in the process and been committed to the nearest psychiatric unit for evaluation for anti-social behavior that endangered the life of a crippled person. I would have then probably gotten free room and board, courtesy of the Department of Corrections for voluntary manslaughter.
I was spared this dire scenario because a community of four formed for the space of an hour. I was able to get Joanne up the 80 stairs in the observation tower myself where she emerged on top to a view that took her breath away. She was basking in this vast vista of a thousand peaks while I was secretly wondering about a thousand stones, rocks, and logs I was going to have to get her back down. I figured our angels had gone on to other realms and were going to leave me to deal with gravity and the rough terrain on my own during the descent. I learned angels and those in community finish what they start. We returned to the bottom of the observation tower and those two camouflaged angels were waiting, knowing I wasn’t going to pull off the descent without killing MQ.
We safely traversed that infinity of rock and root and descended to level solid terrain. I would not be eating hospital food after all, by the grace of God.
As it happened, on the drive up to Mt Mitchell from the Blue Ridge Parkway, we were listening to a Barbara Streisand tape and the lyrics from the song “Higher Ground” caught our attention. “Hold me safe, take my heart to higher ground. I have walked too long in darkness. I have walked too long alone. I would trade the wealth of ages for a warm hand to hold.” These words resonated with us as we anticipated literally climbing to the highest ground around. What I had not quite caught yet was that it was only in community all things are possible. We reached higher ground because four of us shared the space of an hour. As it turns out angels have e-mail.
We stopped at the ranger station to use the facilities and while there fell into conversation with two older women who were out roaming around on this fine cerulean day in the mountains. They made it clear they had no intention of climbing up on top of that big rock we had just come down from.
These women told of us of an experience they had in the Grand Canyon with their husbands watching a sunset that left them absolutely stunned. The only problem was that normally it is dark when a sunset finishes its flamboyant outburst of color. The rim of the Grand Canyon is not a place one wants to be walking around at night in total darkness unless one is interested in a single last opportunity for free flight into a six thousand foot abyss. The freefall flight might be grand but the landing would ruin the overall experience.
As it turns out the group had not thought of the mundane things of life – like a flashlight. As it happened, four other nearby people were also gawking at this spectral outburst and as frequently occurs, God protected the foolish and ill prepared. One of the group of eight happened to have a tiny key chain penlight and with this tiny speck of illumination this small community was able to safely back away from the edge of the vast darkness and live to tell about it. For but a few minutes a tiny community of eight found life instead of death on the rocks because they shared what little they had and trusted and depended on each other.
As Barbara Streisand so aptly sings in the song “I believe” we heard going down the road from Mt Mitchell, “I believe some where in the darkest night a candle glows. I believe for every one who goes astray, someone will come to show the way.” And so it was with a community of eight in the Grand Canyon and a community of four on Mt Mitchell.
It was but two days ago I returned from a retreat for single Christian adults. The essential message was that it is more than OK to be a single adult in an obsessively couples oriented culture. We were encouraged to view singleness as a singularity, a very special state, even one with special privileges. In the sacramental Christian paradigm, both of the rather empowering speakers reminded us that birth, baptism, taking of the Holy Eucharist, and dying are landmark places on our journeys to be taken alone. This was how God designed our earthly journeys to be.
The mass culture, including the lyrics of nearly every love song, tells us that we are somehow incomplete until we find that perfect person capable of fulfilling our every dream. Alas, there is no such person, as so many tragically learn when their overburdened marriages collapse under the weight of these unrealistic expectations. Those of us who have known nothing but singleness, seek that special other as devoutly as those of centuries past sought the Holy Grail. Many of us travelling solo struggle to realize that we are complete individuals, as created by our Creator.
Paradoxically, both the Old and New Testaments contain profoundly compelling exhortations as to the necessity and beauty of community. Even when we are reminded that the major events of life must be experienced alone, God started out His message to us “It is not good that man be alone”. The wisdom writer of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes tells us that safety, warmth, pleasure, and even increased return on our labor derive from being with another. The great Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthian church that Christian community can only exist when we each recognize our own special personal gifts and freely share them with it. The implication is that being out of community will cause unnecessary losses and vulnerability and that being in community is a catalyst for abundant living. Some ten years later an uncertain author, perhaps the apostle Paul, wrote to the Hebrews an admonition to not forsake the fellowship of the saints. We are again reminded of this essential imperative for the need of community in our lives.
So it would seem that the challenge is seeing ourselves as complete whole individuals, coupled or not, yet in need of linkage to those about us, a difficult balance in an unbalanced culture. My experiences with facilitating depression support and therapy groups reveal that people suffer far more than they need to because they lack the safety and strength that derive from community in its many forms. As an active member of a sacramental church, participation in the community life of my church is an obvious form of community. Yet, it shows up often in some astounding ways that have little to do with the church structure.
I do show up nearly every time the door is open and even times when it is not, but I have found some other important forms of community to complement my sacramental center. For some fifteen years I have been involved in a local community playhouse and have delighted in the creation of oases of laughter and magic for people, many pressured by present-day complex lives that don’t get any easier.
It was in this small community theater about six years ago that I met one of our volunteers, MQ. Most people know her as Joanne; I call her MQ for Magic Queen. She is a full-time volunteer in an elementary school, coordinating a tutoring program for 769 young children trying to figure out how this world works. Some need a bit more help with this than others, and MQ knows how to do this very well. MQ paid the tuition for a special kind of learning nearly fifteen years ago when a brain stem tumor took away her ability to walk or work at her profession of teaching. She knows about special needs and how to relate to those with them.
Every child that enters her Magic Room for tutoring is awarded a paper heart in the color of his or her choice at the end of the lesson. They write their names on their hearts and can attach them to any surface in the room, except the big metallic red hearts hanging from the ceiling. Over the academic year, it is entrancing to watch this putty gray cinder block room in an ordinary school building transform into a spectral wonderland as these hearts accrete on every possible surface within reach of a young child. Some of these kids can reach pretty high, and that is the whole point of the Magic Room.
Having at one time been in a wheelchair myself I learned the hard way the realities of disability and accessibility. It is sometimes very hard to reach high. I have for several years now been quite functional and have resumed my habits of climbing on very high things including Mt Mitchell in North Carolina. This mountain is 6,684 feet high and the tallest thing in Eastern North America. For nearly a year I have been threatening Joanne that I was going to somehow get her to the top of that mountain. I did get her into a hot air balloon in May and she found it a transcendent experience. Being on top of Mt. Mitchell, despite being wheelchair bound, struck me as a powerful visual metaphor of one rising above her physical challenges and limits. I wanted to make this happen.
Well, today was the day to make good on my threat. As it turns out, Mt Mitchell is only five miles from the route I had selected to get us from South Carolina to Pennsylvania for one of those epic Italian Thanksgiving dinners that lasts for three days. I don’t select the shortest way to get to places, lest I miss something important. This late November day turned out to be extraordinarily clear and perfect for a major ascension of a very high place. And so it was that I was to gain an impromptu lesson in the importance of community, even a temporary community that lasts perhaps a mere hour. Much can be done in the space of an hour or the two days of a retreat community
I have a bad habit of over-estimating my abilities and I figured getting Joanne up the tallest thing on this part of the planet would be a piece of cake. Not! I have told her in the past she is probably too trusting. She might have found that out today the hard way, excepting for Divine intervention. Having previously been up this mountain myself on two good legs, I really had not paid attention to those hundreds of very irregular steps made of rocks and logs and tree roots or the loose soft gravel preceding the final ascension. I got her and the chair across that soft loose gravel at nearly 7,000 feet and immediately knew I was in trouble. There is noticeably less oxygen at this elevation for wannabee hulks like me who think they can do anything.
I managed to pop her chair up the first of several widely spaced stone ledges with her trusting me to not drop her into the abyss head first. I managed the first few steps but knew that what I thought was going to be a virtuous demonstration of my virile sympathetic concerns for her transcendent experience was going to be defeated by the realities of gravity and an infinite number of logs, roots and rocks. I was going to have to eventually concede defeat, which males can’t stand doing, especially in front of women. Our ego structures are dependent on being all-powerful facilitators of the impossible.
As I was nearing the realization of this transcendent metaphor crashing down on my wounded ego, two angels appeared to save me from a high-altitude humiliation and to teach me about the increased return on shared labors via shared community effort. Most angels are named Gabriel, Michael or the like. These two were Jason and Shane. They didn’t show up in the standard white robe garb and wings, rather green sweatshirts and camouflage pants. I think God wants to get us past some of this stereotypical stuff we fall into.
These two young healthy men/angels offered their services to make that, which I could not do alone, possible as a shared effort. That infinity of logs, rocks, and roots was reduced to a manageable obstacle. Joanne exercising major fortitude of trust allowed the three of us to lift her chair and carry it up to the highest place within thousands of miles. We arrived on top of this great mountain rather winded, but aware that a cord of three was not broken and we had ascended safely. Joanne ascended in her sedan chair with a smile, greeting a lot of bewildered hikers. I am certain most of these sane people wondered about the mental stability of one who would drag a wheelchair bound friend to the top of the planet.
Without these two angels showing up I would have had my ego destroyed and probably killed Joanne in the process and been committed to the nearest psychiatric unit for evaluation for anti-social behavior that endangered the life of a crippled person. I would have then probably gotten free room and board, courtesy of the Department of Corrections for voluntary manslaughter.
I was spared this dire scenario because a community of four formed for the space of an hour. I was able to get Joanne up the 80 stairs in the observation tower myself where she emerged on top to a view that took her breath away. She was basking in this vast vista of a thousand peaks while I was secretly wondering about a thousand stones, rocks, and logs I was going to have to get her back down. I figured our angels had gone on to other realms and were going to leave me to deal with gravity and the rough terrain on my own during the descent. I learned angels and those in community finish what they start. We returned to the bottom of the observation tower and those two camouflaged angels were waiting, knowing I wasn’t going to pull off the descent without killing MQ.
We safely traversed that infinity of rock and root and descended to level solid terrain. I would not be eating hospital food after all, by the grace of God.
As it happened, on the drive up to Mt Mitchell from the Blue Ridge Parkway, we were listening to a Barbara Streisand tape and the lyrics from the song “Higher Ground” caught our attention. “Hold me safe, take my heart to higher ground. I have walked too long in darkness. I have walked too long alone. I would trade the wealth of ages for a warm hand to hold.” These words resonated with us as we anticipated literally climbing to the highest ground around. What I had not quite caught yet was that it was only in community all things are possible. We reached higher ground because four of us shared the space of an hour. As it turns out angels have e-mail.
We stopped at the ranger station to use the facilities and while there fell into conversation with two older women who were out roaming around on this fine cerulean day in the mountains. They made it clear they had no intention of climbing up on top of that big rock we had just come down from.
These women told of us of an experience they had in the Grand Canyon with their husbands watching a sunset that left them absolutely stunned. The only problem was that normally it is dark when a sunset finishes its flamboyant outburst of color. The rim of the Grand Canyon is not a place one wants to be walking around at night in total darkness unless one is interested in a single last opportunity for free flight into a six thousand foot abyss. The freefall flight might be grand but the landing would ruin the overall experience.
As it turns out the group had not thought of the mundane things of life – like a flashlight. As it happened, four other nearby people were also gawking at this spectral outburst and as frequently occurs, God protected the foolish and ill prepared. One of the group of eight happened to have a tiny key chain penlight and with this tiny speck of illumination this small community was able to safely back away from the edge of the vast darkness and live to tell about it. For but a few minutes a tiny community of eight found life instead of death on the rocks because they shared what little they had and trusted and depended on each other.
As Barbara Streisand so aptly sings in the song “I believe” we heard going down the road from Mt Mitchell, “I believe some where in the darkest night a candle glows. I believe for every one who goes astray, someone will come to show the way.” And so it was with a community of eight in the Grand Canyon and a community of four on Mt Mitchell.
Cracks in the Lead 12-25-9
Anderson, South Carolina
Yesterday was a dark dull day with a bleak leaden sky. Even so in this kind of day radiant possibilities can colorize the moment.
While out walking in the morning and the temperature being about 49 degrees I saw a large viceroy butterfly in the road, struggling to gain lift. It could not get off the cold asphalt. I reached down and as I reached for it, it found enough lift to flutter up onto my upper thigh. I put my hands down and it immediately was drawn to what little warmth was in them, a bit more than the asphalt I suppose. I carried this magnificent creation for about fifteen minutes in cupped hands. I probably looked like a Buddhist monk carrying an alms bowl. I am sure the fellow walking with me was in wonderment about this. His dog did not seem a bit interested.
After about nine hundred seconds had elapsed, a brilliant orange, black, yellow, and white butterfly had gained enough warmth to make a take off and it flew steadily and surely to the top of a pine tree two hundred feet away. I wondered how it was that such a magnificent creature had once been a crawling worm and only moments before looked like it was in its last moments of life. Amazingly, these beautiful fragile creatures can fly six hundred miles without taking a rest.
At 5:50 PM, I was on the phone when I noticed the lead colored sky suddenly turned the color of ruby. I told my neighbor to look out her window. She did and exclaimed that there was a complete rainbow visible from her vantage. I instantly hung up and went out with a digital camera. How there could be a rainbow with a solid pink cloud cover, no direct sunlight, and virtually no light left to the day was beyond me.
Wonders do still happen when least expected – like worms turning into delta winged rainbows that can fly six hundred miles non-stop.
Yesterday was a dark dull day with a bleak leaden sky. Even so in this kind of day radiant possibilities can colorize the moment.
While out walking in the morning and the temperature being about 49 degrees I saw a large viceroy butterfly in the road, struggling to gain lift. It could not get off the cold asphalt. I reached down and as I reached for it, it found enough lift to flutter up onto my upper thigh. I put my hands down and it immediately was drawn to what little warmth was in them, a bit more than the asphalt I suppose. I carried this magnificent creation for about fifteen minutes in cupped hands. I probably looked like a Buddhist monk carrying an alms bowl. I am sure the fellow walking with me was in wonderment about this. His dog did not seem a bit interested.
After about nine hundred seconds had elapsed, a brilliant orange, black, yellow, and white butterfly had gained enough warmth to make a take off and it flew steadily and surely to the top of a pine tree two hundred feet away. I wondered how it was that such a magnificent creature had once been a crawling worm and only moments before looked like it was in its last moments of life. Amazingly, these beautiful fragile creatures can fly six hundred miles without taking a rest.
At 5:50 PM, I was on the phone when I noticed the lead colored sky suddenly turned the color of ruby. I told my neighbor to look out her window. She did and exclaimed that there was a complete rainbow visible from her vantage. I instantly hung up and went out with a digital camera. How there could be a rainbow with a solid pink cloud cover, no direct sunlight, and virtually no light left to the day was beyond me.
Wonders do still happen when least expected – like worms turning into delta winged rainbows that can fly six hundred miles non-stop.
Community - A day in Broadband 12-24-9
Anderson, South Carolina
I once strutted around with a strange kind of arrogance, saying I would never lower myself to acquiring and using a cell phone. There simply could be no merit to having this disrupting and expensive little toy in my life. There simply could not be anything so important that it could not wait until one eventually got within range of a conventional land phone. Experience has proven this to be dead wrong. There are plenty of wondrous opportunities in life that present themselves, if we can be found in time.
It proved to be an amazingly complex day containing a week’s worth of chapters. This given Saturday started out with my calling Don, wanting to borrow his truck to haul a dozen of my recycled ‘green’ book cabinets over to church for an alternative Christmas fund raising sale. It was grand to get the den cleared of all these book cabinets that have been accumulating there all year. I can only hope these will sell and the disenfranchised and marginalized in Haiti will not have to keep walking miles to get safe water.
Far more important than hauling furniture was an opportunity to listen to Don as he described a life of challenge that is inconceivable to me. This dear gentle man has already had a heart attack because of severe life stresses, yet he found the strength to help me haul cabinets. My sanity would last about five minutes with the stressors he has been called on to endure. It seems his capacity for love and forbearance exceeds the inconceivable demands made on him on a daily basis. It was a sacred privilege to listen to his story and to make small attempts to commiserate with him. We sat in his truck and I listened. It felt sacred, much like a confessional booth, yet he was merely unloading mountains of personal struggles he needed to share with someone. My concept of intimacy took on a greatly expanded understanding.
Don’s wife, Mable, invited me to join them at a nearby church for a fund raising soup luncheon. This proved rather pleasing in that I knew a lot of people in the dining hall and had affirming hugs and snippets of conversation with many of those present, despite not having been in this church but a couple times in twenty years. There is quite a sense of community deriving from this sprinkle of encounters.
A group of women was in one corner knitting warm fuzzy colorful things for resale; the money being used for local charities. When certain phone numbers show up on my cell phone, it means that one of these women has just cooked up a reminder that the universe really is a friendly place. If I am fast enough, I can make it to one of their kitchens before the plate gets cold. These women can create warm colorful things on their stoves that will warm me from the inside out. Sometimes they warm me up from the outside in with their fluffy scarves and blankets.
While dining on delectable soups, a phone call from Martha revealed her to be frantic and frustrated with some computer issues. After lunch I went to her house and was able to easily help her get a book manuscript into printable form. A journey with her husband to a local office supply shop to get materials and computer parts enabled her to soon begin printing copies of this book for binding to give as Christmas gifts. She acted as though she had won the power ball lottery or if I had saved the life of one of her seventeen grand children. She was elated. Going to this particular house is most gratifying - a powerful sense of connection is always present. The dynamics that exist in Martha’s family and in Don’s family could not be more opposite in every respect. Martha’s family is an exceedingly rare example of a family that works well at every level across four generations. Yet, both houses operate on the premise that God’s promise is true. “I know the thought I have for you, thoughts for good, not for evil, plans that will give you home and a future.”
While in Martha’s house, another call came from a new friend seeking to start a new life in a new house in a new state after her marriage collapsed, her husband having just been sent off to federal prison. While making the journey across town in late afternoon to unload the furnishings of a new life in a new house, I was reminded of the many times I moved to a new house in a new state to begin a new chapter, always with a grand sense of expectation. My friend will persevere and those crusty boxes of uncertain content will somehow be transformed into a new beginning for her. My friend found her way ahead to make a first meal, served at sunset on a table and chairs that had come into her life via the benevolence of strangers who do not even know her name. The universe has a certain sense of order to it that is re-assuring. It is friendly.
Daniel called from India to tell me that he had used the money to buy new stainless steel plates and cups for the street orphans. Each of the leprous widows received a bolt of beautiful cloth to make new dresses. I am always amazed this tiny little piece of plastic in my pocket is somehow connected to a little cement block orphanage on the east coast of India
Dusk was one of those magical times demanding to be remembered for posterity with photos. Taking a camera and tripod downtown, I ‘collected’ the newly installed Christmas decorations on the courthouse square and assorted nearby storefronts. The cozy holiday ambience was akin to that found in a Thomas Kincaide painting. One does not have to go overseas to find magic in the night. It is right here in our hometown square. Shivering in the crispness of very late autumn I was soon looking forward to some ‘inside’ work. While downtown an inbound phone call sought assurance that I was going to make a cameo appearance and do some inside work.
Leadership at the local playhouse likes it when I show up to conduct a fifty-fifty raffle each performance night as a fund raiser; wandering around with an old aluminum champagne bucket, shamelessly extracting money from the patrons, giving them my diatribe about community building and supporting the local cultural arts. It works every time. Tonight I had the bonus of warmth of several kinds as I sought refuge from the front edge of winter. I even got down on my knees to facilitate the extraction of a twenty dollar bill from a patron. What we will do in the name of charity. Imagine the delight of an old lady with a man on both knees in front of her, begging. She had a grand time at the theater, laughing about it with her friends. I got hugs and kisses from most of the women in the building. I got the money.
After finishing my revenue enhancement gimmick at intermission, a call from a friend in another state gave me a chance to commiserate with someone shivering in an RV in 25 degree weather. One of the glories of technology has been the advent of ubiquitous cell phones, allowing me to keep up with people, irrespective of what state or country they might be in at any given moment. Reaching out and touching someone has never been easier. While talking to my wandering friend as I was driving from the theater to my house, another call came in. It is a good thing I have figured out how to handle a second call without losing the first. Caller ID told me I was going to have an instantaneous change of destination. I signed off with Ruth and headed east instead of north.
In a mere five minutes I was in a different galaxy, leaving a place of grand frivolity and good fun and crossing over into a place of great sacredness and privilege. Entering Room 13 of the Hospice, I was admitted into the most intimate space in the universe, that private interior of a family’s grief, when a husband and his children say farewell to a dear wife and mother of fifty-four years. It is stunning to me that an adult son from another state would get a hold of his father’s cell phone and call me in the night and invite me into an ultimate place of honor. Little did he know how important it is for me to properly say my own farewell to one who committed a powerful act of community and love towards me years ago when I was in the midst of a severe journey through my own ebony darkness.
Answer your phone. It just might make all the difference in the world.
I once strutted around with a strange kind of arrogance, saying I would never lower myself to acquiring and using a cell phone. There simply could be no merit to having this disrupting and expensive little toy in my life. There simply could not be anything so important that it could not wait until one eventually got within range of a conventional land phone. Experience has proven this to be dead wrong. There are plenty of wondrous opportunities in life that present themselves, if we can be found in time.
It proved to be an amazingly complex day containing a week’s worth of chapters. This given Saturday started out with my calling Don, wanting to borrow his truck to haul a dozen of my recycled ‘green’ book cabinets over to church for an alternative Christmas fund raising sale. It was grand to get the den cleared of all these book cabinets that have been accumulating there all year. I can only hope these will sell and the disenfranchised and marginalized in Haiti will not have to keep walking miles to get safe water.
Far more important than hauling furniture was an opportunity to listen to Don as he described a life of challenge that is inconceivable to me. This dear gentle man has already had a heart attack because of severe life stresses, yet he found the strength to help me haul cabinets. My sanity would last about five minutes with the stressors he has been called on to endure. It seems his capacity for love and forbearance exceeds the inconceivable demands made on him on a daily basis. It was a sacred privilege to listen to his story and to make small attempts to commiserate with him. We sat in his truck and I listened. It felt sacred, much like a confessional booth, yet he was merely unloading mountains of personal struggles he needed to share with someone. My concept of intimacy took on a greatly expanded understanding.
Don’s wife, Mable, invited me to join them at a nearby church for a fund raising soup luncheon. This proved rather pleasing in that I knew a lot of people in the dining hall and had affirming hugs and snippets of conversation with many of those present, despite not having been in this church but a couple times in twenty years. There is quite a sense of community deriving from this sprinkle of encounters.
A group of women was in one corner knitting warm fuzzy colorful things for resale; the money being used for local charities. When certain phone numbers show up on my cell phone, it means that one of these women has just cooked up a reminder that the universe really is a friendly place. If I am fast enough, I can make it to one of their kitchens before the plate gets cold. These women can create warm colorful things on their stoves that will warm me from the inside out. Sometimes they warm me up from the outside in with their fluffy scarves and blankets.
While dining on delectable soups, a phone call from Martha revealed her to be frantic and frustrated with some computer issues. After lunch I went to her house and was able to easily help her get a book manuscript into printable form. A journey with her husband to a local office supply shop to get materials and computer parts enabled her to soon begin printing copies of this book for binding to give as Christmas gifts. She acted as though she had won the power ball lottery or if I had saved the life of one of her seventeen grand children. She was elated. Going to this particular house is most gratifying - a powerful sense of connection is always present. The dynamics that exist in Martha’s family and in Don’s family could not be more opposite in every respect. Martha’s family is an exceedingly rare example of a family that works well at every level across four generations. Yet, both houses operate on the premise that God’s promise is true. “I know the thought I have for you, thoughts for good, not for evil, plans that will give you home and a future.”
While in Martha’s house, another call came from a new friend seeking to start a new life in a new house in a new state after her marriage collapsed, her husband having just been sent off to federal prison. While making the journey across town in late afternoon to unload the furnishings of a new life in a new house, I was reminded of the many times I moved to a new house in a new state to begin a new chapter, always with a grand sense of expectation. My friend will persevere and those crusty boxes of uncertain content will somehow be transformed into a new beginning for her. My friend found her way ahead to make a first meal, served at sunset on a table and chairs that had come into her life via the benevolence of strangers who do not even know her name. The universe has a certain sense of order to it that is re-assuring. It is friendly.
Daniel called from India to tell me that he had used the money to buy new stainless steel plates and cups for the street orphans. Each of the leprous widows received a bolt of beautiful cloth to make new dresses. I am always amazed this tiny little piece of plastic in my pocket is somehow connected to a little cement block orphanage on the east coast of India
Dusk was one of those magical times demanding to be remembered for posterity with photos. Taking a camera and tripod downtown, I ‘collected’ the newly installed Christmas decorations on the courthouse square and assorted nearby storefronts. The cozy holiday ambience was akin to that found in a Thomas Kincaide painting. One does not have to go overseas to find magic in the night. It is right here in our hometown square. Shivering in the crispness of very late autumn I was soon looking forward to some ‘inside’ work. While downtown an inbound phone call sought assurance that I was going to make a cameo appearance and do some inside work.
Leadership at the local playhouse likes it when I show up to conduct a fifty-fifty raffle each performance night as a fund raiser; wandering around with an old aluminum champagne bucket, shamelessly extracting money from the patrons, giving them my diatribe about community building and supporting the local cultural arts. It works every time. Tonight I had the bonus of warmth of several kinds as I sought refuge from the front edge of winter. I even got down on my knees to facilitate the extraction of a twenty dollar bill from a patron. What we will do in the name of charity. Imagine the delight of an old lady with a man on both knees in front of her, begging. She had a grand time at the theater, laughing about it with her friends. I got hugs and kisses from most of the women in the building. I got the money.
After finishing my revenue enhancement gimmick at intermission, a call from a friend in another state gave me a chance to commiserate with someone shivering in an RV in 25 degree weather. One of the glories of technology has been the advent of ubiquitous cell phones, allowing me to keep up with people, irrespective of what state or country they might be in at any given moment. Reaching out and touching someone has never been easier. While talking to my wandering friend as I was driving from the theater to my house, another call came in. It is a good thing I have figured out how to handle a second call without losing the first. Caller ID told me I was going to have an instantaneous change of destination. I signed off with Ruth and headed east instead of north.
In a mere five minutes I was in a different galaxy, leaving a place of grand frivolity and good fun and crossing over into a place of great sacredness and privilege. Entering Room 13 of the Hospice, I was admitted into the most intimate space in the universe, that private interior of a family’s grief, when a husband and his children say farewell to a dear wife and mother of fifty-four years. It is stunning to me that an adult son from another state would get a hold of his father’s cell phone and call me in the night and invite me into an ultimate place of honor. Little did he know how important it is for me to properly say my own farewell to one who committed a powerful act of community and love towards me years ago when I was in the midst of a severe journey through my own ebony darkness.
Answer your phone. It just might make all the difference in the world.
Cathedrals and Blue Algae 12-23-9
Anderson, South Carolina
Bricks are a useful metaphor for a life of faith. Bricks are perfectly dumb and have little to say for themselves. Yet, one can find entire castles built of them, magnificent terra cotta structures complete with towers, drawbridges, and magnificent halls for opulent dining and celebration. With very little effort one can also find spectacular cathedrals built entirely out of these innocuous non-thinking little blocks of burnt clay, grand structures that seem to reach to the sky and inspire us to transcendent thinking.
I recently built a small planter in my front yard out of these same little bits of fired earth. My project involved mortaring perhaps 120 common bricks together onto a tiny foundation of concrete. I didn’t need much of a structure, as my only objective was to prevent mulch from washing away from the bases of three modest plants. Even as minuscule as my project was, it did require a plan of some sort and a bit of preparation. It was necessary to dig a tiny trench and use a level to adjust for the slope of the ground. It was essential to be sure I had enough mortar, concrete, bricks, water to complete the project and to have the right tools to accomplish a result the neighbors would not find offensive.
Now imagine a cathedral that has ten million bricks in it, reaching heights of hundreds of feet and providing a clear pillar-free floor of 50,000 square feet that will require a century or two to complete. Plan? You better, and give it your best thinking.
It is commonly known throughout the world that bricks are made, are created, and are not accidents of nature. No one has ever refuted this because they are found in both cathedrals and microscopic projects such as my planter. This is a rational response to the widely observed phenomenon of brick making and their subsequent use in all manner of structures.
Infinitely, more complex that all the cathedrals of the world with their millions of bricks and stones is a single living cell. A single living cell is a biochemical factory that puts the entirety of our chemical industry to shame. Within a single cell are structures complex beyond imagination, endoplasmic reticulum, cellular matrix, de-oxy-ribose-nucleic acid helixes, and mitochondria. It so happens that, like bricks, these structures are combined into different forms of cells and the cells are then combined into different species of life. Like bricks, one can use them to make simple things like phytoplankton or grand inspiring things like a stargazer lily or a peregrine falcon.
During the past several decades it has become possible with the development of modern biochemistry to clearly demonstrate that the simplest single cell life forms and the highest orders of life contain many of the same building blocks. Because this is so, a lot of highly educated people believe that the higher life forms are random results generated by some very stupid non-thinking single cell blue algae. These academic scientists actually believe that random stochastic processes can take the common bricks of life and combine them into structures, orders of magnitude more complex than the cathedrals that point us to God. It is a far greater stretch scientifically to believe that primordial soup can ‘come up with’ blue algae or that blue algae can ‘come up with’ peregrine falcons.
It is more than curious that intelligent educated people are willing to acknowledge the creators of simple easily described things like red bricks but refuse to acknowledge even the existence of the Architect and Creator of things so complex that their educated brains cannot grasp them.
One has to be profoundly intelligent and well educated to do some very dense thinking. The wisdom of man is but foolishness in the sight of God. God said one finds the Kingdom of Heaven by coming with the faith of a child.
Bricks are a useful metaphor for a life of faith. Bricks are perfectly dumb and have little to say for themselves. Yet, one can find entire castles built of them, magnificent terra cotta structures complete with towers, drawbridges, and magnificent halls for opulent dining and celebration. With very little effort one can also find spectacular cathedrals built entirely out of these innocuous non-thinking little blocks of burnt clay, grand structures that seem to reach to the sky and inspire us to transcendent thinking.
I recently built a small planter in my front yard out of these same little bits of fired earth. My project involved mortaring perhaps 120 common bricks together onto a tiny foundation of concrete. I didn’t need much of a structure, as my only objective was to prevent mulch from washing away from the bases of three modest plants. Even as minuscule as my project was, it did require a plan of some sort and a bit of preparation. It was necessary to dig a tiny trench and use a level to adjust for the slope of the ground. It was essential to be sure I had enough mortar, concrete, bricks, water to complete the project and to have the right tools to accomplish a result the neighbors would not find offensive.
Now imagine a cathedral that has ten million bricks in it, reaching heights of hundreds of feet and providing a clear pillar-free floor of 50,000 square feet that will require a century or two to complete. Plan? You better, and give it your best thinking.
It is commonly known throughout the world that bricks are made, are created, and are not accidents of nature. No one has ever refuted this because they are found in both cathedrals and microscopic projects such as my planter. This is a rational response to the widely observed phenomenon of brick making and their subsequent use in all manner of structures.
Infinitely, more complex that all the cathedrals of the world with their millions of bricks and stones is a single living cell. A single living cell is a biochemical factory that puts the entirety of our chemical industry to shame. Within a single cell are structures complex beyond imagination, endoplasmic reticulum, cellular matrix, de-oxy-ribose-nucleic acid helixes, and mitochondria. It so happens that, like bricks, these structures are combined into different forms of cells and the cells are then combined into different species of life. Like bricks, one can use them to make simple things like phytoplankton or grand inspiring things like a stargazer lily or a peregrine falcon.
During the past several decades it has become possible with the development of modern biochemistry to clearly demonstrate that the simplest single cell life forms and the highest orders of life contain many of the same building blocks. Because this is so, a lot of highly educated people believe that the higher life forms are random results generated by some very stupid non-thinking single cell blue algae. These academic scientists actually believe that random stochastic processes can take the common bricks of life and combine them into structures, orders of magnitude more complex than the cathedrals that point us to God. It is a far greater stretch scientifically to believe that primordial soup can ‘come up with’ blue algae or that blue algae can ‘come up with’ peregrine falcons.
It is more than curious that intelligent educated people are willing to acknowledge the creators of simple easily described things like red bricks but refuse to acknowledge even the existence of the Architect and Creator of things so complex that their educated brains cannot grasp them.
One has to be profoundly intelligent and well educated to do some very dense thinking. The wisdom of man is but foolishness in the sight of God. God said one finds the Kingdom of Heaven by coming with the faith of a child.
A Quantum Journey Towards God 12-22-9
Gravatt Conference Center, South Carolina
A hundred years into the search for the grand unified field of the universe that transcends the four known forces, quantum mechanics is able to safely say “nothing is as it seems.” A few of those gifted individuals in the world with the capacity to understand the requisite mathematics are suggesting the only thing that makes sense is a universe with ten dimensions. The only thing that makes sense to the rest of us Newtonian types is a three-dimensional universe, perhaps with time being called a forth dimension. In one of the classic early quantum physical experiments, it was proven that a single photon could go through two side-by-side apertures at the same time. This is absolutely counterintuitive to our three dimensional experience.
While physicists attempt to make sense of the universe, some of us are trying to make sense of God and His relationship to humankind. Countless spiritual traditions of every kind for some sixty centuries or more claim to have found some sort of unifying theological precept to explain the nature of God – The Way. What we are finding from both the spiritual and physical domains is a growing awareness that nothing is as it seems. There is a growing mutual respect for both domains, to the degree that I have a thousand-page mathematical text produced by a particle physicist that claims to mathematically prove the existence of God. It is now a substantial number of physicists who claim to have found God at the far end of their experiments.
The Cursillo spiritual retreat experience is an aperture through which fortunate individuals are able to pass while on their search for deeper understanding. As one who has had the good fortune to pass through this luminous aperture, I learned that even down here in our three simple dimensions, things are not as they seem. Like most other Cursillistas, my photons of expectation proved to be disrupted, both positively and negatively during the time/space continuum of the first three days of spiritual exploration. Fabulous elements of visual surprise cast each of us into a higher state of Numinous wonder. For some of us with critical spirits and rigid thinking, some of the structures of the Cursillo aperture were discomfiting, to say the least. Several times I was ready to abandon the experiment and go back to my old Newtonian ways of life. Just in time, the One who was really running the experiments, and is Himself outside of time, injected His Love into my tiny bit of the universe. I stayed for the duration of the experiment.
It was during the Closura ceremony at the end of the retreat that I was compelled to make the hardest journey of my life, to stand before all present and admit that things were not at all as they had seemed to me. I had been so absolutely positive about the nature of things around me. It is exceedingly difficult to admit to hundreds that one really is, in fact, clueless. The reality is that God has a better idea than I about anything, especially those things at variance with my expectations. I only wish the Cursillo experience was like the early quantum experiments in that I could go through it again for the first time, with a different attitude.
The take-home message of the Cursillo experiment is that God’s Love is indeed the unifying force of the universe. In fact, I was just given a pre-publication manuscript of a serious work called Grace: The Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature to review. We simply have to trust this Love and have faith that the Creator of the known and unknown universe has our best interests at heart, especially during those times when the star in our sky has gone super nova and collapsed into a black hole, leaving us in apparent total darkness. It is in the dark times we are at risk of forgetting His Love. It is in these times we have to fly by faith. After all, He tells us in the sacred writings that “eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, and the hearts of man have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
Here on the backside of the aperture of Cursillo, I find the universe continuously defying my expectations everyday. The folds and hairpins in daily life can be more challenging than the most extreme of amusement park rides. Since my recent Cursillo, I have stood at three open caskets, and said the final farewell to three of our fellow travellers. Since then, financial markets around the world have in some cases lost 75% of their value. Since my Cursillo, yet another war has been added to the litany of violence than spans the human experiment. In a few weeks, I will have to trust pilots, security personnel, and hundreds of other strangers to carry me safely halfway around a world at war. What Cursillo does is remind us that there is a greater force than death, war, or even our own insecurities, expectations and critical attitudes.
It is out here in the daily world of chaos that we really do have the opportunity to demonstrate this greater force of God’s love and grace to those who are struggling to find their way home in an often very scary universe. Each day we are free to inject acts of love and kindness into the aperture of the lives around us. They really need it, almost as much as we need to give it.
A hundred years into the search for the grand unified field of the universe that transcends the four known forces, quantum mechanics is able to safely say “nothing is as it seems.” A few of those gifted individuals in the world with the capacity to understand the requisite mathematics are suggesting the only thing that makes sense is a universe with ten dimensions. The only thing that makes sense to the rest of us Newtonian types is a three-dimensional universe, perhaps with time being called a forth dimension. In one of the classic early quantum physical experiments, it was proven that a single photon could go through two side-by-side apertures at the same time. This is absolutely counterintuitive to our three dimensional experience.
While physicists attempt to make sense of the universe, some of us are trying to make sense of God and His relationship to humankind. Countless spiritual traditions of every kind for some sixty centuries or more claim to have found some sort of unifying theological precept to explain the nature of God – The Way. What we are finding from both the spiritual and physical domains is a growing awareness that nothing is as it seems. There is a growing mutual respect for both domains, to the degree that I have a thousand-page mathematical text produced by a particle physicist that claims to mathematically prove the existence of God. It is now a substantial number of physicists who claim to have found God at the far end of their experiments.
The Cursillo spiritual retreat experience is an aperture through which fortunate individuals are able to pass while on their search for deeper understanding. As one who has had the good fortune to pass through this luminous aperture, I learned that even down here in our three simple dimensions, things are not as they seem. Like most other Cursillistas, my photons of expectation proved to be disrupted, both positively and negatively during the time/space continuum of the first three days of spiritual exploration. Fabulous elements of visual surprise cast each of us into a higher state of Numinous wonder. For some of us with critical spirits and rigid thinking, some of the structures of the Cursillo aperture were discomfiting, to say the least. Several times I was ready to abandon the experiment and go back to my old Newtonian ways of life. Just in time, the One who was really running the experiments, and is Himself outside of time, injected His Love into my tiny bit of the universe. I stayed for the duration of the experiment.
It was during the Closura ceremony at the end of the retreat that I was compelled to make the hardest journey of my life, to stand before all present and admit that things were not at all as they had seemed to me. I had been so absolutely positive about the nature of things around me. It is exceedingly difficult to admit to hundreds that one really is, in fact, clueless. The reality is that God has a better idea than I about anything, especially those things at variance with my expectations. I only wish the Cursillo experience was like the early quantum experiments in that I could go through it again for the first time, with a different attitude.
The take-home message of the Cursillo experiment is that God’s Love is indeed the unifying force of the universe. In fact, I was just given a pre-publication manuscript of a serious work called Grace: The Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature to review. We simply have to trust this Love and have faith that the Creator of the known and unknown universe has our best interests at heart, especially during those times when the star in our sky has gone super nova and collapsed into a black hole, leaving us in apparent total darkness. It is in the dark times we are at risk of forgetting His Love. It is in these times we have to fly by faith. After all, He tells us in the sacred writings that “eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, and the hearts of man have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
Here on the backside of the aperture of Cursillo, I find the universe continuously defying my expectations everyday. The folds and hairpins in daily life can be more challenging than the most extreme of amusement park rides. Since my recent Cursillo, I have stood at three open caskets, and said the final farewell to three of our fellow travellers. Since then, financial markets around the world have in some cases lost 75% of their value. Since my Cursillo, yet another war has been added to the litany of violence than spans the human experiment. In a few weeks, I will have to trust pilots, security personnel, and hundreds of other strangers to carry me safely halfway around a world at war. What Cursillo does is remind us that there is a greater force than death, war, or even our own insecurities, expectations and critical attitudes.
It is out here in the daily world of chaos that we really do have the opportunity to demonstrate this greater force of God’s love and grace to those who are struggling to find their way home in an often very scary universe. Each day we are free to inject acts of love and kindness into the aperture of the lives around us. They really need it, almost as much as we need to give it.
The Physics of Grace 12-21-9
Anderson, South Carolina
I have had the great fortune of having received a fine education that has allowed me to paper my office walls with diplomas, degrees, and certificates from seven fine universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. This is no small grace in a world where less than 1% of the population will ever even see the inside of a university or college. Some of the things I was privileged to study were physical chemistry, physics, and mathematics at Northwestern University. I learned that there are many laws of the universe that are immutable – always dependable. Knowing the behavior of various substances is profoundly important if you are sitting in a spacecraft on top of a solid rocket booster bound for the stars. Predictability is absolutely essential if you are designing a powerful life-saving drug that is going to have minimal side effects.
Even before getting this wondrous education I learned something back in Boy Scouts, even earlier if the truth be known, when playing with matches and electricity while Mom was at work. Wood and electricity do not like each other, or perhaps in a unilateral way, electrons like wood too much. Put them near each other, and wood becomes an incendiary testimonial of the electron’s power. This is a consistent predictable reality. Countless nocturnal house fires cause the death of thousands every year when electrons in old frayed wiring comes in contact with ancient wood, burning up the dreams of those sleeping within.
I just received a refresher course in the yet greater power of another unseen force I was never told about in any of those hallowed halls of higher learning. None of my Newtonian physics texts mention this power but I have found it to be as real as any of the four fundamental forces of the universe, so well described by quantum physicists.
I went by a dear friend’s house to put up a coat rack and a clothes rod. It was no big deal to put up these two items. I enjoy good physical health and was a building contractor before going to medical school. It took me perhaps ten minutes with a power screw driver using those predictable electrons and some of those fine non-stripping square-drive screws. My friend thought she had won the Powerball. Debra struggles with catastrophic illness, as do her children. Home repairs just aren’t on her agenda. Doing ‘the next thing’ is all that matters.
While I was doing these tiny home improvements, my friend left to go collect her three special needs kids from the nearby elementary school. While she was gone I went down the hall to the bathroom and when I came out I noticed that the WOOD lamp on her night table was listing about 30 degrees. When she got home moments later I asked her about it. She said it had fallen over and broken some weeks earlier. With the intent of repairing it, we unplugged it with some considerable effort from a mass entanglement of plugs and cords under her big bed, the very one where her three children often come in the night for safety.
I looked at the lamp and was astounded to see that the insulation inside the lamp on both wires was completely missing and both copper wires were touching each other and the soft dry wood of the lamp base. I asked her when she last used it. “Last night.” I know enough physics to know that there is no way short of a miracle that this wood lamp had not exploded and set the house on fire and taken her and the three kids. This entire family is on heavy medication and would never have awakened. The newspaper missed out on a spectacular fire story because I needed to go to the smallest room in the house and noticed this lamp on my way back down the hall. A force far more powerful than the four fundamental ones described by the physicists has been operating in this small rental house, where a struggling family learned of this greater force long ago – the Grace of God.
With a chill I realized I had witnessed a quiet tiny miracle that had saved four lives and spared this safe little house from an incendiary disaster. What it also did was warm my heart greatly to this great power which is available to all, not just those fortunate ones of us with access to prestigious labs and universities.
It was with some awe and reverence that I took that little wood lamp home with me, intent on making it like new, and making certain that the wood and electrons never saw each other again. I stopped at the hardware store and bought the necessary parts to rewire and rebuild this lamp.
The lamp itself is another story. I called back in the evening after working on it to ask about it. Made entirely of wood by an immigrant Hispanic woman, the shade is twelve sided with hundreds of small holes cut through thin sheets of plywood to look like stain glass windows, each hole covered with a different bit of colored fabric. My guess is this lamp would have taken 100-200 hours of tedious labor to make. This woman makes these lamps to pay the hospital bills of a three-year-old boy in Mexico in renal failure. This particular one was an important gift to my friend. It was with even greater reverence that I took this lamp apart to rewire it and to repair the broken wood parts. I knew that I was working on the most sacred wood project I had encountered yet. I thought of the One Who was Himself a carpenter and made everything sacred. It seems my drills, sanders, and table saw have become my instruments of worship the past few days.
I had that sacred gift back in that little home within a day. Some things get priority in life. My friend needs the spectral glow of that beautiful lamp to remind her that the Greater Force is always predictable and sustaining. It’s hard to remember sometimes when the struggle is too big.
“Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? …Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? … “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
I have had the great fortune of having received a fine education that has allowed me to paper my office walls with diplomas, degrees, and certificates from seven fine universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. This is no small grace in a world where less than 1% of the population will ever even see the inside of a university or college. Some of the things I was privileged to study were physical chemistry, physics, and mathematics at Northwestern University. I learned that there are many laws of the universe that are immutable – always dependable. Knowing the behavior of various substances is profoundly important if you are sitting in a spacecraft on top of a solid rocket booster bound for the stars. Predictability is absolutely essential if you are designing a powerful life-saving drug that is going to have minimal side effects.
Even before getting this wondrous education I learned something back in Boy Scouts, even earlier if the truth be known, when playing with matches and electricity while Mom was at work. Wood and electricity do not like each other, or perhaps in a unilateral way, electrons like wood too much. Put them near each other, and wood becomes an incendiary testimonial of the electron’s power. This is a consistent predictable reality. Countless nocturnal house fires cause the death of thousands every year when electrons in old frayed wiring comes in contact with ancient wood, burning up the dreams of those sleeping within.
I just received a refresher course in the yet greater power of another unseen force I was never told about in any of those hallowed halls of higher learning. None of my Newtonian physics texts mention this power but I have found it to be as real as any of the four fundamental forces of the universe, so well described by quantum physicists.
I went by a dear friend’s house to put up a coat rack and a clothes rod. It was no big deal to put up these two items. I enjoy good physical health and was a building contractor before going to medical school. It took me perhaps ten minutes with a power screw driver using those predictable electrons and some of those fine non-stripping square-drive screws. My friend thought she had won the Powerball. Debra struggles with catastrophic illness, as do her children. Home repairs just aren’t on her agenda. Doing ‘the next thing’ is all that matters.
While I was doing these tiny home improvements, my friend left to go collect her three special needs kids from the nearby elementary school. While she was gone I went down the hall to the bathroom and when I came out I noticed that the WOOD lamp on her night table was listing about 30 degrees. When she got home moments later I asked her about it. She said it had fallen over and broken some weeks earlier. With the intent of repairing it, we unplugged it with some considerable effort from a mass entanglement of plugs and cords under her big bed, the very one where her three children often come in the night for safety.
I looked at the lamp and was astounded to see that the insulation inside the lamp on both wires was completely missing and both copper wires were touching each other and the soft dry wood of the lamp base. I asked her when she last used it. “Last night.” I know enough physics to know that there is no way short of a miracle that this wood lamp had not exploded and set the house on fire and taken her and the three kids. This entire family is on heavy medication and would never have awakened. The newspaper missed out on a spectacular fire story because I needed to go to the smallest room in the house and noticed this lamp on my way back down the hall. A force far more powerful than the four fundamental ones described by the physicists has been operating in this small rental house, where a struggling family learned of this greater force long ago – the Grace of God.
With a chill I realized I had witnessed a quiet tiny miracle that had saved four lives and spared this safe little house from an incendiary disaster. What it also did was warm my heart greatly to this great power which is available to all, not just those fortunate ones of us with access to prestigious labs and universities.
It was with some awe and reverence that I took that little wood lamp home with me, intent on making it like new, and making certain that the wood and electrons never saw each other again. I stopped at the hardware store and bought the necessary parts to rewire and rebuild this lamp.
The lamp itself is another story. I called back in the evening after working on it to ask about it. Made entirely of wood by an immigrant Hispanic woman, the shade is twelve sided with hundreds of small holes cut through thin sheets of plywood to look like stain glass windows, each hole covered with a different bit of colored fabric. My guess is this lamp would have taken 100-200 hours of tedious labor to make. This woman makes these lamps to pay the hospital bills of a three-year-old boy in Mexico in renal failure. This particular one was an important gift to my friend. It was with even greater reverence that I took this lamp apart to rewire it and to repair the broken wood parts. I knew that I was working on the most sacred wood project I had encountered yet. I thought of the One Who was Himself a carpenter and made everything sacred. It seems my drills, sanders, and table saw have become my instruments of worship the past few days.
I had that sacred gift back in that little home within a day. Some things get priority in life. My friend needs the spectral glow of that beautiful lamp to remind her that the Greater Force is always predictable and sustaining. It’s hard to remember sometimes when the struggle is too big.
“Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? …Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? … “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Fine Dining - Getting the Seasoning Right 12-12-9
My Kitchen Counter, South Carolina
Not long ago I had an astounding dialogue with a professor in my church. Somehow we got onto a conversational thread about fine dining. In the course of an hour an amazing world was revealed to me, one previously unknown to me that requires an astonishing amount of wherewithal to participate in. The substance of our exchange was inspired on the part of my conversant by my quip that I could not conceive of spending a hundred dollars to eat a meal; there just is not a meal on earth worth this kind of money to me.
Recent economic reverses in America have taken a huge toll on the retail restaurant trade. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market has choked the life out of many fine restaurants, including the best ones in our town. People simply cannot afford to drop $30-50 for a plate of food that is going to last about thirty minutes. While lamenting the economic realities of recession and what makes it real at the local level, I mentioned the simultaneous closure of three of our nicest dining venues. My discussant immediate chimed in with a declaration that these places served ‘pig slop’ and deserved their fiscal fate. I was astounded. These destinations have for some years been fundamental anchors in the nascent renewal of our long-neglected downtown and well regarded for their culinary and communitarian offerings. My many experiences in all three of them were uniformly delightful. I have heard consistently positive reviews from countless other diners over the years.
Wondering what could possibly be out there that was so much better, I begged for an education. I got one. My new acquaintance proceeded to wax expansive about $600 lunches he had purchased for his girlfriend in London, the $2,400 dropped on dinner at Monaco for his wife. What could possibly make a tiny plate of fish eggs worth $825? Obviously, I am rather plebian in my culinary acumen. Having always thought myself fairly astute at figuring out if something was pig slop or gourmet nirvana, I was suddenly feeling more than a bit tentative in the presence of my teacher. I had no urge to invite him to my house to eat leftovers from the church social last week. For sure, I don’t want to fetch up with a girl friend or wife that needs daily supplements of $825 fish eggs. $12 bottles of omega 3 from Walgreens suit me fine.
In our broadband cyber age it was easy to launch into some proactive research when I got back to my house filled with its Tupperware containers. What had been described to me as the finest restaurant in the world maintains a web site. I explored this site and the rather small menu. Incredulous, I discerned that a meal for two, not including a jug of wine, would set me back $3200. This is more than I spend to keep thirty five children on the sub continent of India in eats all year.
A small lettuce salad with oil and vinegar and a bit of salt to give it some taste, with a dollop of black truffle is $120 as of this writing. A small bowl of what is essentially chicken noodle soup is $105. Two ounces of caviar with blini is $825, not including service or tax. The fish eggs net out at $1000 per person. What is described on the menu as a ‘piece of beef on the wood fire’ is a mere $132. If one is not into dead cow, the tails of non-swimming Canadian crustaceans can be had for $165, including the dipping sauce. A small platter of cheese blocks as a chaser is a more modest $33. The $36 ice cream is not on this week’s menu but one can ask for it. If one opts for the heart healthy crustacean, the tab for one comes to $1,284. Service and tax brings the total for one up to $1,605. For two diners, without wine, plan on tapping the line of equity on your house for $3210. Recent reviewers mention a paucity of bargains on the wine list. I recommend adding $500 for a jug if you need to pre-medicate before getting your tab after dessert. And I don’t believe doggie bags would be considered de rigueur.
Yes the place is elegant, over the top elaboration inspired by Versailles. The tools are sterling. The glasses 24% lead crystal with the correct pedigree. The table cloth is high count Egyptian linen, ad infinitum. The cut flowers are real. The ceiling has a nicely done fresco by Felix Lucas. Tiny silver birds are on each table, collecting imaginary crumbs.
One of my great joys over the years has been preparing multi-course meals. A very long time ago I figured out that if one provides a very leisurely unhurried dining experience for friends and is totally mindful and present to their pleasure, it almost does not matter what is put on the plates. I can be absolutely certain that I am able to invoke every bit as much pleasure from my guests with my split pea soup as culinary entrepreneurs ever get with their $105 chicken noodle soup. Mine is seasoned with ham bones from the Meals on Wheels kitchen. When serving a multi-course experience, I am always certain to not allow anyone to help. I want them to feel waited upon.
It has been great fun over the years to simply focus on creating a context in which people can have easy comfortable conversation with each other. The magic ingredients for a fine dining experience really are the seasonings of mindfulness, attentiveness, and good conversation. If I get the seasonings right, I can generally figure on people staying at my table for about four hours. A high end restaurant is going to turn tables every two hours.
No one has ever asked me if I am using sterling or silver plate cutlery. Most people actually like my plated stuff better. I skip the linen because it is pain to iron and expensive to clean. Colored top sheets are cheap, easily ironed, and can be tossed in the washer after someone daftly spills salad dressing on them.
In the distant past I used to babysit the four children of two good friends. I was often compensated for by an invite to pull up to their beat up kitchen table to eat with them. The dining room long before was converted to a music room for the kids. At that kitchen table I was always served on a large red plate that was inscribed with “You are special today”. I can see that plate in my mind’s eye twenty years later. I can’t remember any of the plates I ate on in Paris. The magic ingredients do not come from the kitchen. They come from the heart of the host.
Because I live really right and have the pantheon of gods smiling on me continually, it happens that a couple of times a month my cell phone rings with a special message. The caller ID tells me that I am about to come into good fortune. A disabled daughter and her mother live together in a tiny rented place and both have made it a mission to see that I do not starve. Dropping what I am up to, I get in my car and drive over and harvest onto a plastic plate some of the grandest examples of southern cooking in the world, made with extra portions of love. These treasure troves sustain me for days. No lead crystal, no sterling, no linen, no frescoes on the ceiling, but the dining is truly sumptuous. These cooks know how to season their fare. These two women have become genuinely dear to me. If anything ever happens to these women, they will have a place to live and a table to eat on.
I am a participant in a monthly circle dinner group in my church. These dinners are served in fine houses with grand tables, sterling, 24% lead crystal, ad infinitum. The groceries are splendid, yet I leave feeling anything but special. A month ago I was in attendance at one of these when one of the guests launched into a tirade about ‘damn’ Yankees who are ruining Southern culture. She declared if it was in her power she would pack them all up and ship them back. As a Yankee, I simply asked her if she was willing to help me pack up. Silence. Two months ago at table, a fellow new to me, inquired if I was a regular attendee at these culinary enclaves. He made it clear, despite the protestations of his wife, that if I was going to attend, then he wasn’t sure he wanted to. It simply didn’t matter any more what was on those fine dishes or whether I was using sterling or cheap plate. In neither case did the host attempt to referee their ill-mannered guests. I felt a bit like a participant in group therapy in which the moderator had let the group run amok. It might be time for me to find other places to dine.
What could make an underpaid professor in a micro-college in rural South Carolina willing to drop a veritable fortune on lettuce and fish eggs? Perhaps when giving a king’s ransom to eat, one can have an expectation that everything will be done right, really right. Certainly the giving of offense will not encourage repeated taps to one’s equity line. One will not be offered assistance moving out of state or the option of dropping out of the group. Yet, paying princely sums for a dining experience reduces it to a transaction; it is not a gift of hospitality.
One of the most endearing images in Christendom is that of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The Revelation of John is interpreted by many to include a promise that those who are in Christ will be admitted to an epic dining experience of immense grandeur and duration. The imagery is seasoned with the flavors of loving community and fellowship with one another and the King of Kings as host. Perhaps the tableware will be upscale, it might be plastic plates, but we won’t care. The seasonings will be exactly right. Even the largest line of credit will not get one into this venue.
When the 17th century Dutch tulip mania nearly ruined the economies of the western world, someone finally said, “It’s just a tulip bulb, Stupid.” The euphoric bidders, reality check in place, all stayed home. The markets collapsed. Tulip bulbs fetching the equivalent of a million dollars at auction sold for pennies within weeks. We need to remember, it’s just lettuce and fish eggs. Make sure they are served with love instead of hostility. Without the right seasoning they are inedible, at any price. We might have nothing but pig slop to offer, but with the right seasoning it can be Heavenly.
Not long ago I had an astounding dialogue with a professor in my church. Somehow we got onto a conversational thread about fine dining. In the course of an hour an amazing world was revealed to me, one previously unknown to me that requires an astonishing amount of wherewithal to participate in. The substance of our exchange was inspired on the part of my conversant by my quip that I could not conceive of spending a hundred dollars to eat a meal; there just is not a meal on earth worth this kind of money to me.
Recent economic reverses in America have taken a huge toll on the retail restaurant trade. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market has choked the life out of many fine restaurants, including the best ones in our town. People simply cannot afford to drop $30-50 for a plate of food that is going to last about thirty minutes. While lamenting the economic realities of recession and what makes it real at the local level, I mentioned the simultaneous closure of three of our nicest dining venues. My discussant immediate chimed in with a declaration that these places served ‘pig slop’ and deserved their fiscal fate. I was astounded. These destinations have for some years been fundamental anchors in the nascent renewal of our long-neglected downtown and well regarded for their culinary and communitarian offerings. My many experiences in all three of them were uniformly delightful. I have heard consistently positive reviews from countless other diners over the years.
Wondering what could possibly be out there that was so much better, I begged for an education. I got one. My new acquaintance proceeded to wax expansive about $600 lunches he had purchased for his girlfriend in London, the $2,400 dropped on dinner at Monaco for his wife. What could possibly make a tiny plate of fish eggs worth $825? Obviously, I am rather plebian in my culinary acumen. Having always thought myself fairly astute at figuring out if something was pig slop or gourmet nirvana, I was suddenly feeling more than a bit tentative in the presence of my teacher. I had no urge to invite him to my house to eat leftovers from the church social last week. For sure, I don’t want to fetch up with a girl friend or wife that needs daily supplements of $825 fish eggs. $12 bottles of omega 3 from Walgreens suit me fine.
In our broadband cyber age it was easy to launch into some proactive research when I got back to my house filled with its Tupperware containers. What had been described to me as the finest restaurant in the world maintains a web site. I explored this site and the rather small menu. Incredulous, I discerned that a meal for two, not including a jug of wine, would set me back $3200. This is more than I spend to keep thirty five children on the sub continent of India in eats all year.
A small lettuce salad with oil and vinegar and a bit of salt to give it some taste, with a dollop of black truffle is $120 as of this writing. A small bowl of what is essentially chicken noodle soup is $105. Two ounces of caviar with blini is $825, not including service or tax. The fish eggs net out at $1000 per person. What is described on the menu as a ‘piece of beef on the wood fire’ is a mere $132. If one is not into dead cow, the tails of non-swimming Canadian crustaceans can be had for $165, including the dipping sauce. A small platter of cheese blocks as a chaser is a more modest $33. The $36 ice cream is not on this week’s menu but one can ask for it. If one opts for the heart healthy crustacean, the tab for one comes to $1,284. Service and tax brings the total for one up to $1,605. For two diners, without wine, plan on tapping the line of equity on your house for $3210. Recent reviewers mention a paucity of bargains on the wine list. I recommend adding $500 for a jug if you need to pre-medicate before getting your tab after dessert. And I don’t believe doggie bags would be considered de rigueur.
Yes the place is elegant, over the top elaboration inspired by Versailles. The tools are sterling. The glasses 24% lead crystal with the correct pedigree. The table cloth is high count Egyptian linen, ad infinitum. The cut flowers are real. The ceiling has a nicely done fresco by Felix Lucas. Tiny silver birds are on each table, collecting imaginary crumbs.
One of my great joys over the years has been preparing multi-course meals. A very long time ago I figured out that if one provides a very leisurely unhurried dining experience for friends and is totally mindful and present to their pleasure, it almost does not matter what is put on the plates. I can be absolutely certain that I am able to invoke every bit as much pleasure from my guests with my split pea soup as culinary entrepreneurs ever get with their $105 chicken noodle soup. Mine is seasoned with ham bones from the Meals on Wheels kitchen. When serving a multi-course experience, I am always certain to not allow anyone to help. I want them to feel waited upon.
It has been great fun over the years to simply focus on creating a context in which people can have easy comfortable conversation with each other. The magic ingredients for a fine dining experience really are the seasonings of mindfulness, attentiveness, and good conversation. If I get the seasonings right, I can generally figure on people staying at my table for about four hours. A high end restaurant is going to turn tables every two hours.
No one has ever asked me if I am using sterling or silver plate cutlery. Most people actually like my plated stuff better. I skip the linen because it is pain to iron and expensive to clean. Colored top sheets are cheap, easily ironed, and can be tossed in the washer after someone daftly spills salad dressing on them.
In the distant past I used to babysit the four children of two good friends. I was often compensated for by an invite to pull up to their beat up kitchen table to eat with them. The dining room long before was converted to a music room for the kids. At that kitchen table I was always served on a large red plate that was inscribed with “You are special today”. I can see that plate in my mind’s eye twenty years later. I can’t remember any of the plates I ate on in Paris. The magic ingredients do not come from the kitchen. They come from the heart of the host.
Because I live really right and have the pantheon of gods smiling on me continually, it happens that a couple of times a month my cell phone rings with a special message. The caller ID tells me that I am about to come into good fortune. A disabled daughter and her mother live together in a tiny rented place and both have made it a mission to see that I do not starve. Dropping what I am up to, I get in my car and drive over and harvest onto a plastic plate some of the grandest examples of southern cooking in the world, made with extra portions of love. These treasure troves sustain me for days. No lead crystal, no sterling, no linen, no frescoes on the ceiling, but the dining is truly sumptuous. These cooks know how to season their fare. These two women have become genuinely dear to me. If anything ever happens to these women, they will have a place to live and a table to eat on.
I am a participant in a monthly circle dinner group in my church. These dinners are served in fine houses with grand tables, sterling, 24% lead crystal, ad infinitum. The groceries are splendid, yet I leave feeling anything but special. A month ago I was in attendance at one of these when one of the guests launched into a tirade about ‘damn’ Yankees who are ruining Southern culture. She declared if it was in her power she would pack them all up and ship them back. As a Yankee, I simply asked her if she was willing to help me pack up. Silence. Two months ago at table, a fellow new to me, inquired if I was a regular attendee at these culinary enclaves. He made it clear, despite the protestations of his wife, that if I was going to attend, then he wasn’t sure he wanted to. It simply didn’t matter any more what was on those fine dishes or whether I was using sterling or cheap plate. In neither case did the host attempt to referee their ill-mannered guests. I felt a bit like a participant in group therapy in which the moderator had let the group run amok. It might be time for me to find other places to dine.
What could make an underpaid professor in a micro-college in rural South Carolina willing to drop a veritable fortune on lettuce and fish eggs? Perhaps when giving a king’s ransom to eat, one can have an expectation that everything will be done right, really right. Certainly the giving of offense will not encourage repeated taps to one’s equity line. One will not be offered assistance moving out of state or the option of dropping out of the group. Yet, paying princely sums for a dining experience reduces it to a transaction; it is not a gift of hospitality.
One of the most endearing images in Christendom is that of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The Revelation of John is interpreted by many to include a promise that those who are in Christ will be admitted to an epic dining experience of immense grandeur and duration. The imagery is seasoned with the flavors of loving community and fellowship with one another and the King of Kings as host. Perhaps the tableware will be upscale, it might be plastic plates, but we won’t care. The seasonings will be exactly right. Even the largest line of credit will not get one into this venue.
When the 17th century Dutch tulip mania nearly ruined the economies of the western world, someone finally said, “It’s just a tulip bulb, Stupid.” The euphoric bidders, reality check in place, all stayed home. The markets collapsed. Tulip bulbs fetching the equivalent of a million dollars at auction sold for pennies within weeks. We need to remember, it’s just lettuce and fish eggs. Make sure they are served with love instead of hostility. Without the right seasoning they are inedible, at any price. We might have nothing but pig slop to offer, but with the right seasoning it can be Heavenly.
Community - To the End and Beyond 12-11-9
Anderson, South Carolina
Perhaps the greatest fear we have in life is of dying alone, being soon forgotten by those still embracing the breath of life. In individualistic societies, especially the American one, dying alone in an institution is the norm for most of us; eighty percent of us go this way. Death is something not to be embraced, talked about, or witnessed. We frantically cling to evanescent youth and vitality with our bottles of Oil of Olay, liposuction, Botox, and catastrophically expensive ‘plastic’ surgeries.
Our heroes are young over-energized athletes and entertainers. Where else but in America could a young athlete amass a billion dollar fortune just because he can consistently pound little white balls into tiny tin metal cups set into the ground? Our heroes are there for the good times of youth, but what happens when our good times are all gone away? When the wrinkles on our faces are looking like the San Andreas Fault?
Eight years ago we received a costly lesson in who the true heroes in America are - blue collar guys that haul hoses up into burning buildings, without return tickets; cops who set aside personal interests and put their lives on the line that day, and still do. Even recently, four underpaid officers died, merely doing their paperwork in each other’s company in a small Washington diner. An angry malcontent didn’t know who the real heroes were in life. Many of the rest of us don’t either. The heroic lessons of 9/11 were long forgotten as we frantically flipped houses, swapped wives, traded cars, changed jobs, rooted for our favorite teams, and leveraged the financial future of generations, trying to find a short cut to the good life.
For thirty years it has been an important part of my journey to travel with those who are preparing for their departures from this life. On any given day thousands of people say their final farewells to life. I seem to have been with dozens of them over the years. At one time I even bought an airline ticket for a young girl so she could see the castles of Europe before her number was called. She never made it to the castles. Some processes are far more efficient than we would like. She was but 23 at the end.
In intensive care units, hospices, and darkened back rooms in houses, amazing things happen, magical things, authentic things. One can find people who are living fully, completely in the moment, mindfully and present. Cell phones are turned off. TVs on the wall are muted, if not turned off. Pools of warm, even visceral hot community erupts between cold walls of institutional indifference. Hugging, holding, shedding searing tears, wailing, laughing, telling jokes, we ride the roller coaster of emotional tsunami to the very end. Masks left at the door, we dare to bare our authentic selves to each other. Transparency allows us to see clearly what matters in this short brief journey through life. We realize we take nothing with us but each other. Petty differences are cast aside, similarities embraced. We experience the distilled essence of community at its best, tribal, primitive, unpredictable, intense, so real.
The past year has included way too many visits to intensive care cubicles, mortuaries, churches, cemeteries, and darkened houses. What I don’t remember from any of those experiences whatever are the brands of clothing people were wearing. I never saw what anybody was driving. No one asked me what I was driving. We were quite happy to eat dried out sandwiches from a nearby fast food joint. At times a Styrofoam cup of water was like an elixir. I don’t remember much professional and social posturing going on either. It seems we just stood around and relished each other’s presence, often wishing we would get together more often, wondering why we only get together for weddings and funerals. What remains of my family has not been together since Mom’s funeral thirteen years ago. Money and time are not issues. It just isn’t a priority; a reality that has rubbed my soul raw for more than a decade.
A very dear friend of mine for twenty years has just admitted her mother to hospice care after a violent stroke robbed her of her vitality. Suddenly demanding academic and committee schedules just don’t matter much. Power wars in faculty senate are now lame. There is time for out of town journeys, lengthy phone calls, even generously worded e-mails. Terms of endearment are suddenly part of shared vocabularies. It’s permissible to call at weird times of day and night. We don’t sweat the minutes used on the cell phone during daytime hours. Suddenly, it’s imperative to reach out and touch someone. We have entered into that space where community is everything. A popular sound byte in the land since the Clinton era has been, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It also takes a village to die well. The intense community that sprouts in the warrens of hospital waiting rooms makes hard farewells much easier. A problem shared is a problem half solved. Letting our loved ones cross the street into the unknown is a hard thing, made easier by holding hands and looking both ways.
Saturday night after completing my responsibilities in the community playhouse, I was traveling back to my house when the phone rang. It was time to attend the departure of another dear friend. Shirley’s grown children from other states had already gathered. Going from the magic and illusion of theater to the holographic reality of Hospice, I found myself in the midst of others where silence was comfortable, not disquieting. Mindfulness and presence proved easy; there was really nothing else that mattered. Two days ago we celebrated this gracious mother’s departure with a burial mass and then set her in gentle repose in a mausoleum colorfully decorated for the holidays. The enduring and powerful message of the Christmas Child reached across the abyss into the scree of our collective grief.
The next several days revealed who the unsung heroes of our lives really are. Hospice workers were busy cleaning the house, removing all the durable detritus of long-term care, adjustable bed, wheelchairs, bed tables, oxygen concentrators, bags of mattress pads and medical supplies. A nurse peeled the Do Not Resuscitate Order off the wall in the front hall. The husband of another care giver was cleaning up the yard after a heavy storm had passed through. Yet another unseen hero was cleaning kitchen cabinets. These gentle loving souls were acting as community to the very end and beyond. They personified the concept of walking the second mile, doing far beyond what was required. A week out these nurses and caregivers are bringing a newly unmarried man a hot meal each day. After fifty-four years of teamwork, it is a major challenge to negotiate life without team mates and unsung heroes.
Is your favorite sports hero going to sit with you all night for months or years? Come visit you at the end? You might want to think about spending times with your kids and spouse instead of ESPN. It might make all the difference in the world … in the end. Just ask Shirley when you next see her.
Perhaps the greatest fear we have in life is of dying alone, being soon forgotten by those still embracing the breath of life. In individualistic societies, especially the American one, dying alone in an institution is the norm for most of us; eighty percent of us go this way. Death is something not to be embraced, talked about, or witnessed. We frantically cling to evanescent youth and vitality with our bottles of Oil of Olay, liposuction, Botox, and catastrophically expensive ‘plastic’ surgeries.
Our heroes are young over-energized athletes and entertainers. Where else but in America could a young athlete amass a billion dollar fortune just because he can consistently pound little white balls into tiny tin metal cups set into the ground? Our heroes are there for the good times of youth, but what happens when our good times are all gone away? When the wrinkles on our faces are looking like the San Andreas Fault?
Eight years ago we received a costly lesson in who the true heroes in America are - blue collar guys that haul hoses up into burning buildings, without return tickets; cops who set aside personal interests and put their lives on the line that day, and still do. Even recently, four underpaid officers died, merely doing their paperwork in each other’s company in a small Washington diner. An angry malcontent didn’t know who the real heroes were in life. Many of the rest of us don’t either. The heroic lessons of 9/11 were long forgotten as we frantically flipped houses, swapped wives, traded cars, changed jobs, rooted for our favorite teams, and leveraged the financial future of generations, trying to find a short cut to the good life.
For thirty years it has been an important part of my journey to travel with those who are preparing for their departures from this life. On any given day thousands of people say their final farewells to life. I seem to have been with dozens of them over the years. At one time I even bought an airline ticket for a young girl so she could see the castles of Europe before her number was called. She never made it to the castles. Some processes are far more efficient than we would like. She was but 23 at the end.
In intensive care units, hospices, and darkened back rooms in houses, amazing things happen, magical things, authentic things. One can find people who are living fully, completely in the moment, mindfully and present. Cell phones are turned off. TVs on the wall are muted, if not turned off. Pools of warm, even visceral hot community erupts between cold walls of institutional indifference. Hugging, holding, shedding searing tears, wailing, laughing, telling jokes, we ride the roller coaster of emotional tsunami to the very end. Masks left at the door, we dare to bare our authentic selves to each other. Transparency allows us to see clearly what matters in this short brief journey through life. We realize we take nothing with us but each other. Petty differences are cast aside, similarities embraced. We experience the distilled essence of community at its best, tribal, primitive, unpredictable, intense, so real.
The past year has included way too many visits to intensive care cubicles, mortuaries, churches, cemeteries, and darkened houses. What I don’t remember from any of those experiences whatever are the brands of clothing people were wearing. I never saw what anybody was driving. No one asked me what I was driving. We were quite happy to eat dried out sandwiches from a nearby fast food joint. At times a Styrofoam cup of water was like an elixir. I don’t remember much professional and social posturing going on either. It seems we just stood around and relished each other’s presence, often wishing we would get together more often, wondering why we only get together for weddings and funerals. What remains of my family has not been together since Mom’s funeral thirteen years ago. Money and time are not issues. It just isn’t a priority; a reality that has rubbed my soul raw for more than a decade.
A very dear friend of mine for twenty years has just admitted her mother to hospice care after a violent stroke robbed her of her vitality. Suddenly demanding academic and committee schedules just don’t matter much. Power wars in faculty senate are now lame. There is time for out of town journeys, lengthy phone calls, even generously worded e-mails. Terms of endearment are suddenly part of shared vocabularies. It’s permissible to call at weird times of day and night. We don’t sweat the minutes used on the cell phone during daytime hours. Suddenly, it’s imperative to reach out and touch someone. We have entered into that space where community is everything. A popular sound byte in the land since the Clinton era has been, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It also takes a village to die well. The intense community that sprouts in the warrens of hospital waiting rooms makes hard farewells much easier. A problem shared is a problem half solved. Letting our loved ones cross the street into the unknown is a hard thing, made easier by holding hands and looking both ways.
Saturday night after completing my responsibilities in the community playhouse, I was traveling back to my house when the phone rang. It was time to attend the departure of another dear friend. Shirley’s grown children from other states had already gathered. Going from the magic and illusion of theater to the holographic reality of Hospice, I found myself in the midst of others where silence was comfortable, not disquieting. Mindfulness and presence proved easy; there was really nothing else that mattered. Two days ago we celebrated this gracious mother’s departure with a burial mass and then set her in gentle repose in a mausoleum colorfully decorated for the holidays. The enduring and powerful message of the Christmas Child reached across the abyss into the scree of our collective grief.
The next several days revealed who the unsung heroes of our lives really are. Hospice workers were busy cleaning the house, removing all the durable detritus of long-term care, adjustable bed, wheelchairs, bed tables, oxygen concentrators, bags of mattress pads and medical supplies. A nurse peeled the Do Not Resuscitate Order off the wall in the front hall. The husband of another care giver was cleaning up the yard after a heavy storm had passed through. Yet another unseen hero was cleaning kitchen cabinets. These gentle loving souls were acting as community to the very end and beyond. They personified the concept of walking the second mile, doing far beyond what was required. A week out these nurses and caregivers are bringing a newly unmarried man a hot meal each day. After fifty-four years of teamwork, it is a major challenge to negotiate life without team mates and unsung heroes.
Is your favorite sports hero going to sit with you all night for months or years? Come visit you at the end? You might want to think about spending times with your kids and spouse instead of ESPN. It might make all the difference in the world … in the end. Just ask Shirley when you next see her.
Address Book 12-9-9
Anderson, South Carolina
Some kinds of cleaning can be really sobering. I think specifically of going back through an address book or church directory and deleting entries for those people that have moved out of our world and have since fallen below the sweep of our radar screens. Even various Internet search programs fail to find them. I wonder how it is that I could have gone so long without even thinking of these people. Even more compelling are those people who are no longer in any world - those who became deceased since the last time we went through our books.
In the past eight weeks I have been to the funerals of three good friends. The weeks before found me at several other funerals of acquaintances. It is disquieting to recognize all the employees at a large funeral home and to have them all identify me. I must attend their activities entirely too often. There is some kind of teachable moment emerging in my consciousness at this point. It is certain I am going to one day be one of their customers and not just a visitor to the festivities. I am going to get to ride in the big car up front of the procession. Fifteen minutes in the limelight and then eternity in the dark.
It is so easy to get caught up in the urgent but unimportant things of our lives. One day we find ourselves wondering why we are suddenly foundering and having great difficulty with making decisions or getting anything of consequence completed. We wonder why we no longer hear from long-time friends. Our mutual busyness and shared tyranny of the urgent assures the destruction of once-precious relationships. We wonder how it is that once-vibrant daily friendships devolve into ever rarer phone calls, then the occasional e-mail, and then horror of horrors, nothing more than a random group-forwarded e-mail. A man and his wife I once saw every day and who considered me the second father to their four children now make no contact with me other than an inane forwarded group e-mail about every six months. My real letters go unanswered. I have no idea who all those dozens of people are listed in the header. They were never part of my world. My dear friends are no longer part of my world either.
Recently at a church dinner, I was speaking with a woman who has awakened some enthusiasm on my part over the past months for conversation and perhaps undistracted time to grow a friendship. After a year of random distracted encounters, she appeared quite enthusiastic about this also. After the evening activities were finished I asked her for a phone number. She told me I could find it in the phone book. Immediately thereafter she launched into a litany of all the religious activity she was doing that would make this undistracted time really not feasible. Alas, I don’t think there is going to be a new entry in my address book.
In the gospels a wake up call is offered about losing track of important relationships, perhaps on missing out on even matriculating into ones that might really matter. In one scenario, a group of religious people are expounding to Jesus about all the great things they were doing for Him in His name when He stops them in their tracks and says He has no idea who they are, that He doesn’t even know them. He then charged them to be gone. None such as these will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We are told that Jesus cares only about our successes in building and maintaining relationships with each other and with God. Our frantic religious and material activities don’t count in the final accounting by which our lives will be measured. I have often lamented how religious activity on Sundays suffocates most meaningful encounters in church.
There are untold millions of Americans who are finding out very painfully that McMansions and Beemers do not assure one’s long-term inclusion in the address books that matter. Millions of times now the lenders have told them to take a hike - often to homelessness. Many of these people will have to file change-of-address address cards at the post office. Many don’t even have a forwarding address. People who have made the pursuit of materialism and status into a personal religious quest so often find themselves without friends, a house, or even a car. More tragically they often have failed to make sure their names are included in the ultimate address book - The Lamb’s Book of Life.
The Revelation of John makes it clear there is a simple procedure whereby the book is opened up and if our names are found therein we are invited to enter into that place where things are found “which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and the heart of men have not even imagined.” We are told if our names are not found there we are to be sent out into a place of darkness where there is much pain, gnashing of teeth, and shedding of tears.
Even those of us who think we have right priorities are finding out how temporal things are in this life. My once iron-clad blue chip portfolio imploded and I watched my mother lode lose 95% of its value, forcing me to look for another place to really find my security and to put my trust. I have seen many people around me lamenting of similar misfortunes.
It would seem that the best thing any of us could do now is to keep our address books current, being careful to maintain the relationships that matter and to be sure our name is written into the Lamb’s Book of Life. Seeking a true personal relationship with God, to gain conscious contact with Him is the only thing that is rock solid and triple A rated.
As helpful as the staff are here at the funeral home, they are quite unable to make address changes in our address books or to send a correction to the Lamb’s Book of Life. That is something we have to do for ourselves. Now! Timing may not be a successful investment strategy but it is critical to one’s return on life.
“For a little while longer the light is among you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. While you have the light,, believe in the light, in order that you may become sons of light.”
Some kinds of cleaning can be really sobering. I think specifically of going back through an address book or church directory and deleting entries for those people that have moved out of our world and have since fallen below the sweep of our radar screens. Even various Internet search programs fail to find them. I wonder how it is that I could have gone so long without even thinking of these people. Even more compelling are those people who are no longer in any world - those who became deceased since the last time we went through our books.
In the past eight weeks I have been to the funerals of three good friends. The weeks before found me at several other funerals of acquaintances. It is disquieting to recognize all the employees at a large funeral home and to have them all identify me. I must attend their activities entirely too often. There is some kind of teachable moment emerging in my consciousness at this point. It is certain I am going to one day be one of their customers and not just a visitor to the festivities. I am going to get to ride in the big car up front of the procession. Fifteen minutes in the limelight and then eternity in the dark.
It is so easy to get caught up in the urgent but unimportant things of our lives. One day we find ourselves wondering why we are suddenly foundering and having great difficulty with making decisions or getting anything of consequence completed. We wonder why we no longer hear from long-time friends. Our mutual busyness and shared tyranny of the urgent assures the destruction of once-precious relationships. We wonder how it is that once-vibrant daily friendships devolve into ever rarer phone calls, then the occasional e-mail, and then horror of horrors, nothing more than a random group-forwarded e-mail. A man and his wife I once saw every day and who considered me the second father to their four children now make no contact with me other than an inane forwarded group e-mail about every six months. My real letters go unanswered. I have no idea who all those dozens of people are listed in the header. They were never part of my world. My dear friends are no longer part of my world either.
Recently at a church dinner, I was speaking with a woman who has awakened some enthusiasm on my part over the past months for conversation and perhaps undistracted time to grow a friendship. After a year of random distracted encounters, she appeared quite enthusiastic about this also. After the evening activities were finished I asked her for a phone number. She told me I could find it in the phone book. Immediately thereafter she launched into a litany of all the religious activity she was doing that would make this undistracted time really not feasible. Alas, I don’t think there is going to be a new entry in my address book.
In the gospels a wake up call is offered about losing track of important relationships, perhaps on missing out on even matriculating into ones that might really matter. In one scenario, a group of religious people are expounding to Jesus about all the great things they were doing for Him in His name when He stops them in their tracks and says He has no idea who they are, that He doesn’t even know them. He then charged them to be gone. None such as these will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We are told that Jesus cares only about our successes in building and maintaining relationships with each other and with God. Our frantic religious and material activities don’t count in the final accounting by which our lives will be measured. I have often lamented how religious activity on Sundays suffocates most meaningful encounters in church.
There are untold millions of Americans who are finding out very painfully that McMansions and Beemers do not assure one’s long-term inclusion in the address books that matter. Millions of times now the lenders have told them to take a hike - often to homelessness. Many of these people will have to file change-of-address address cards at the post office. Many don’t even have a forwarding address. People who have made the pursuit of materialism and status into a personal religious quest so often find themselves without friends, a house, or even a car. More tragically they often have failed to make sure their names are included in the ultimate address book - The Lamb’s Book of Life.
The Revelation of John makes it clear there is a simple procedure whereby the book is opened up and if our names are found therein we are invited to enter into that place where things are found “which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and the heart of men have not even imagined.” We are told if our names are not found there we are to be sent out into a place of darkness where there is much pain, gnashing of teeth, and shedding of tears.
Even those of us who think we have right priorities are finding out how temporal things are in this life. My once iron-clad blue chip portfolio imploded and I watched my mother lode lose 95% of its value, forcing me to look for another place to really find my security and to put my trust. I have seen many people around me lamenting of similar misfortunes.
It would seem that the best thing any of us could do now is to keep our address books current, being careful to maintain the relationships that matter and to be sure our name is written into the Lamb’s Book of Life. Seeking a true personal relationship with God, to gain conscious contact with Him is the only thing that is rock solid and triple A rated.
As helpful as the staff are here at the funeral home, they are quite unable to make address changes in our address books or to send a correction to the Lamb’s Book of Life. That is something we have to do for ourselves. Now! Timing may not be a successful investment strategy but it is critical to one’s return on life.
“For a little while longer the light is among you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. While you have the light,, believe in the light, in order that you may become sons of light.”
Community - Sharing the #6 Combination Plate 12-8-9
Highway 81, Anderson
When one grows up in an alcoholic family there are not many happy memories. Siblings become strangers to each other in their own struggles to survive. Addictions steal the gift of emotional presence and life; instead leaving behind the acrid residue of burnt dreams. One’s energies and aspirations are often reduced to merely making it into the next moment. The experience of safe family, of childhood, becomes little more than a wispy concept that other people always seem to know more about.
So it was that rare journeys to Acapulco, a nearby 1-star Mexican eatery, were to me as treasured and relished as my recent epic grand prize journey around the world. The combination plate and a can of orange soda served with a glass of ice was the best of many worlds. For a few minutes life seemed normal, even safe. Raymond’s enchiladas, rice, refried beans, and chips offered me sustenance that far exceeded even that which I received from canapés and caviar at 39,000 feet.
So it is that when a dear friend calls me up on the cell phone and tells me he is in route to the nearby 1-star Mexican place to get the #6 combination plate, I generally drop what I am doing and show up. For a few minutes life seems normal, even safe. We both have survived the horrors and carnage of alcoholic addiction. Life has gone forward for us. We have learned that when we let God do the choosing, we get His best. We have actually now ordered the beef fajitas during the dinner hour, feeling prosperous enough in our recovery to occasionally pay evening prices for a fine meal consisting of three sizzling plates of culinary wonders. Last week it was my turn to buy. The tab set me back about $12. Prosperity seems to be at hand.
Another fine friend has been through severe challenges of his own. As a minister, perhaps the greatest trauma he could experience is that of enduring a politically motivated no-confidence vote and being thrown out of his own pulpit. So it was. A few months ago he was thrown out. His unwavering faith tells him to fly by the instruments and trust God knows how to do the choosing, despite the ill-intent of those who no longer care for him.
I was invited by this impeccable reverend and his wife to join them for the combination dinner at the Grand China restaurant after attending a Christmas program at his new church home. I hesitated a bit, figuring I had a lot of things to be working on. I smartened up very fast, remembering there was a lot more at stake here than a very good meal. I allowed myself to be driven to the restaurant at the other end of town where I proceeded to see up close that the experience of safe family, of childhood, becomes a profoundly empowering holographic reality that some other people seem to know a lot about. This minister and his faithful wife have spent decades showing their fine grown children that when we let God do the choosing we get His best. They have just shown me the same thing. This preacher is probably the richest man on earth. For a few minutes life seems normal, even safe.
A couple of weeks ago when clumps of cars accreted at houses across the land for the ultimate culinary spectacle of the year and millions of turkeys made the ultimate sacrifice, I found myself admitted into the interior of another family, a community of people who know about empowering their kids with good nutrition and emotional presence. A grand feast of bronzed turkey with all the accoutrements was laid out. Chess pie, pecan pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie. They were all there, freshly made a few hours earlier. The real prize was hidden with the Coke, Seven Up and Mountain Dew. A bottle of orange soda was present. I remembered. For a few minutes life seemed normal, even safe.
Following dinner I was admitted into the other room where we all packed in to watch a film, one of my choosing actually. I had arrived. I departed with boxes of culinary wonders. Life seems normal, even safe.
It is a very long ways from the alcoholic jungles of Los Angeles to a bucolic country place in South Carolina, with intermediate stops at the Mexican place on Highway 81 and the Grand China at the north end of town. There has been no shortage of turbulence and wind shear on this journey that has traversed more than four decades, yet I am promised a safe landing in the end. At times the ride has even been smooth and gentle; my journey kept on track by a montage of benevolent individuals who have invited me to share their tables countless times.
It is no accident that the writings comprising the New Testament are full of images and metaphors relating to fine dining. The central sacrament of the church is the Eucharist or Communion. In the Protestant West we often refer to it as the Lord’s Supper. The last thing Jesus did before making his journey from here back to His Father’s house via Calvary was to have a dinner party; a dinner party that would create the most powerful image of intimacy our world has ever known. He actually invited us to partake of his bread and cup, to visualize ourselves as becoming one with him. “That you may be in Me and Me in you.” He paid the ultimate price so we could all pull up to his table in fellowship with Him and each other.
It is a long journey from Earth to Heaven. If you are offered a chance to have fellowship and a good meal with a friend, make time for it. Even better, get on the phone and invite someone to go to a 1-star Mexican eatery and get a combination plate and glass of orange soda. If you are feeling especially generous, order the beef fajita plate. You will be a 5-star winner. You just might make life seem normal and safe for someone, especially if you have invited them to the Father’s house after dinner.
“Be sure to welcome strangers into your home. By doing this, some people have welcomed angels as guests, without even knowing it.”
When one grows up in an alcoholic family there are not many happy memories. Siblings become strangers to each other in their own struggles to survive. Addictions steal the gift of emotional presence and life; instead leaving behind the acrid residue of burnt dreams. One’s energies and aspirations are often reduced to merely making it into the next moment. The experience of safe family, of childhood, becomes little more than a wispy concept that other people always seem to know more about.
So it was that rare journeys to Acapulco, a nearby 1-star Mexican eatery, were to me as treasured and relished as my recent epic grand prize journey around the world. The combination plate and a can of orange soda served with a glass of ice was the best of many worlds. For a few minutes life seemed normal, even safe. Raymond’s enchiladas, rice, refried beans, and chips offered me sustenance that far exceeded even that which I received from canapés and caviar at 39,000 feet.
So it is that when a dear friend calls me up on the cell phone and tells me he is in route to the nearby 1-star Mexican place to get the #6 combination plate, I generally drop what I am doing and show up. For a few minutes life seems normal, even safe. We both have survived the horrors and carnage of alcoholic addiction. Life has gone forward for us. We have learned that when we let God do the choosing, we get His best. We have actually now ordered the beef fajitas during the dinner hour, feeling prosperous enough in our recovery to occasionally pay evening prices for a fine meal consisting of three sizzling plates of culinary wonders. Last week it was my turn to buy. The tab set me back about $12. Prosperity seems to be at hand.
Another fine friend has been through severe challenges of his own. As a minister, perhaps the greatest trauma he could experience is that of enduring a politically motivated no-confidence vote and being thrown out of his own pulpit. So it was. A few months ago he was thrown out. His unwavering faith tells him to fly by the instruments and trust God knows how to do the choosing, despite the ill-intent of those who no longer care for him.
I was invited by this impeccable reverend and his wife to join them for the combination dinner at the Grand China restaurant after attending a Christmas program at his new church home. I hesitated a bit, figuring I had a lot of things to be working on. I smartened up very fast, remembering there was a lot more at stake here than a very good meal. I allowed myself to be driven to the restaurant at the other end of town where I proceeded to see up close that the experience of safe family, of childhood, becomes a profoundly empowering holographic reality that some other people seem to know a lot about. This minister and his faithful wife have spent decades showing their fine grown children that when we let God do the choosing we get His best. They have just shown me the same thing. This preacher is probably the richest man on earth. For a few minutes life seems normal, even safe.
A couple of weeks ago when clumps of cars accreted at houses across the land for the ultimate culinary spectacle of the year and millions of turkeys made the ultimate sacrifice, I found myself admitted into the interior of another family, a community of people who know about empowering their kids with good nutrition and emotional presence. A grand feast of bronzed turkey with all the accoutrements was laid out. Chess pie, pecan pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie. They were all there, freshly made a few hours earlier. The real prize was hidden with the Coke, Seven Up and Mountain Dew. A bottle of orange soda was present. I remembered. For a few minutes life seemed normal, even safe.
Following dinner I was admitted into the other room where we all packed in to watch a film, one of my choosing actually. I had arrived. I departed with boxes of culinary wonders. Life seems normal, even safe.
It is a very long ways from the alcoholic jungles of Los Angeles to a bucolic country place in South Carolina, with intermediate stops at the Mexican place on Highway 81 and the Grand China at the north end of town. There has been no shortage of turbulence and wind shear on this journey that has traversed more than four decades, yet I am promised a safe landing in the end. At times the ride has even been smooth and gentle; my journey kept on track by a montage of benevolent individuals who have invited me to share their tables countless times.
It is no accident that the writings comprising the New Testament are full of images and metaphors relating to fine dining. The central sacrament of the church is the Eucharist or Communion. In the Protestant West we often refer to it as the Lord’s Supper. The last thing Jesus did before making his journey from here back to His Father’s house via Calvary was to have a dinner party; a dinner party that would create the most powerful image of intimacy our world has ever known. He actually invited us to partake of his bread and cup, to visualize ourselves as becoming one with him. “That you may be in Me and Me in you.” He paid the ultimate price so we could all pull up to his table in fellowship with Him and each other.
It is a long journey from Earth to Heaven. If you are offered a chance to have fellowship and a good meal with a friend, make time for it. Even better, get on the phone and invite someone to go to a 1-star Mexican eatery and get a combination plate and glass of orange soda. If you are feeling especially generous, order the beef fajita plate. You will be a 5-star winner. You just might make life seem normal and safe for someone, especially if you have invited them to the Father’s house after dinner.
“Be sure to welcome strangers into your home. By doing this, some people have welcomed angels as guests, without even knowing it.”
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