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.