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| The Waiting Room |
| 03.25.05 (8:32 am) [edit] |
The Waiting Room
“My power is made perfect through weakness,” says the Lord.
I watched as the drip went into my friend’s arm from the plastic IV bottle. He would soon “go under” and then be taken to another room for surgery. The nurse said that he would be okay and then I told him I would see him later and went upstairs to a large lounge on the street level of the hospital that served as the waiting room. There were a lot of comfortable chairs and couches and tables with newspapers and magazines. As early as it was there were people there, awaiting news from doctors concerning family members or friends who were undergoing surgery upstairs.
There was a woman and she was crying. She looked like she had been there all night. Another woman approached her and asked if she was okay. Through her tears the woman looked up and said that she would be alright, that she was tired and worn out. The woman sat down next to her and took her hand and held it.
There was a rough looking trio: a young woman with no teeth, a biker-looking guy and an old man. The young woman was dressed in jeans and a tank-top. Her arms were adorned with lot of bracelets and she had a faded green shamrock tattoo on her right arm.. The biker-looking man wore cowboy boots, a leather jacket and he had a pony-tail. The keychain had a lot of keys and I thought to myself that he had a lot of things he needed to open with so many keys. The old man was very thin and wore a Betty Boop T-shirt and black pants. He, too, had cowboy boots. They seemed to be family and did not speak much with each other. They sat close together and the woman asked the old man what time it was a lot even though there were several clocks on the walls. The thought occurred to me that maybe she did not know how to read time. The old man said several times that “he knew she was going to be alright” and the other two nodded their heads in agreement. Every fifteen minutes or so, the three of them got up and went outside to smoke cigarettes. I watched as the smoke rose and dissipated in the golden light of the early morning.
And I thought about reading things concerning God, about all the words in books we have to trace for ourselves as best we can something of what he is like and what he is about in our lives, in this world.
I thought about Jesus and the down-and out people of his time. They were people who were poor and who did not know how to read or write. Many were outcasts – the undesirables of their time. They reach out to Jesus in their desperation and in him they find hope, love and a sense of dignity. He was for them the key to life.
These were people whose Jesus may have been so different from the Jesus that we carry around in our heads; learn about in out churches, and who occasionally graces our media screens.
He was seen and taken to heart by people who lived on the fringe, beyond the border, for whom hope was a desperate need. And he fulfilled that hope. He is the Jesus of a curled wall calendar and the Jesus with a halo and rays coming out of his wounded hands. He is the plastic Jesus who has traveled many a mile on the dashboards of life. He is the Jesus who I sense is much at home with pony-tailed men and tattooed women. I do not think that he minds the smoke.
There are times I wonder about the meaning of love – what is it and what does it ask us to do? To where does it beckon? Like the cigarette smoke rising in the morning sun, beautiful in its own way, even though it was rising outside the door of a health facility and the smokers were not pretty or handsome but they did have a beauty all to themselves. The whole thing was beautiful – I do not know how to separate sin from goodness, beauty from stain, the wheat from the chaff. So many things of an immense variety of the good and the bad intertwine together and rise toward the sun, toward God. And it all comes from him, arranged in so many ways. And it was such a simple morning scene – one that involved waiting for news and smoking to pass the time.
I looked the clock. Hours had passed. The doctor came and called out my name and told me that my friend was fine and that I could see him in an hour or so. The lady with the tattoo looked at me and smiled and said, “I am sure glad your friend is okay.” The men with her smiled and nodded:; a gentle movement of the care that is God, shining through human life. Making his way through what is weak and in need of him. And so he comes and speaks and it is beautiful. It is powerful.
Driving back here, I thought about small things. There are times that life may seem futile. Well, that is the way that we are made, to take and give small things, a drop a day a moment at a time. No recovery is immediate and full. It takes time. Beautiful time, tattooed and smoky, standing in the sun, waiting for the time to say that something or someone is good, is okay.
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| Father Lawrence |
| 03.25.05 (8:29 am) [edit] |
I was in a bookstore some years back browsing through the fiction shelves. I saw a book titled “The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas.” I took the book off the shelf and saw that it was a collection of short stories. I loved the title and without hesitation bought the book on the title alone. When I read it, the stories were delightful. The author, Reginald McKnight, gives such life and love to his characters. Through his gift for story-telling, he shares the light given him by his memories of Texas. The stories glow with luminosity.
Our Father Lawrence is from Texas, too. We recently celebrated his 70th year of priesthood. He was ordained at Gethsemani, Kentucky in 1934. I remember a conversation I had with him shortly after I came here. We were standing in front of the “bonsai barn” where we store our bonsai pots and we were waiting for some gardening tools to be brought down from the main building. We had a few minutes to chat. I was a newcomer, and thought I would engage him in a topic of recent note. The much acclaimed film “Titanic” had just been released to theaters all over the country. The newspapers were filled with rave reviews. I asked Father Lawrence if he had “heard” about the movie. He looked at me and his blue eyes twinkled as a smile crossed his face. “Heard about it, you say? Well, I sure did. I remember the day it went down. I was a boy and was standing in a store in my hometown, in Texas, and the teletypes started coming in.” His face turned sad and he shook his head and said, “Oh, the tragedy of it all.
People were crying. It was just terrible, terrible.”
It astounded me that he was “there” at that time in history. And he has been “there” through the triumphs and tragedies of most of the 20th Century. Yet the “there” has been, for the most part, “here” with us in our monastic way of life. I cannot begin to imagine all that Father Lawrence has prayed for over so many years. He has taken much to heart and offered it to God: loved ones who have died, thousands who were sick. He has prayed and hoped through wars, through peace, through vast changes that fill volumes.
Father Anthony mentioned in the homily that morning that if we draw near to God, he will draw near to us. Prayer is not more complicated than that, he said. I could see Lawrence sitting across from me, nodding his head in agreement, holding the earphones close to his ears so as not to miss a word.
I see Lawrence reading every day, taking whatever he reads to heart. He holds words close. And God holds him close. At the end of Mass, Father Lawrence raised his hand and gave the final blessing. “May God be with us, until we all enter our home in Paradise.”
Until that time, we learn from the lights that shine through us. We have been blessed with a light from Texas, a light that has burned with hope, humor, warmth and faith for a long time.
Blessings and love to you, Father Lawrence. I like the kind of light that comes from Texas.
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| When Windows Fall |
| 03.25.05 (8:26 am) [edit] |
When Windows Fall
This is a piece I wrote a few years back, while away from the monastery. I decided to leave it stand as is.
When I was a teenager my family lived in a large Dutch Colonial house in Montclair, New Jersey. I loved that house - it was where I lived through the tumultuous sixties. I was too young to appreciate the ramifications of that decade. I had no idea how the world was changing right outside my window. I was more attuned to the immediate concerns of being a teenager.
My oldest brother Johnny’s bedroom was on the third floor, down the hall from the small room I shared with Jimmy, my twin brother. It was there that our record player blasted away night after night and after school. Johnny was away at Notre Dame so me and Jimmy used the room a lot. It was a small room. Just a few feet to my left was a small window overlooking our back yard and just beyond the yard I could see the roofs of the houses on Grove street. I could hear the cars passing on a summer day when the window was open, or hear the steady slap of a basketball against the tarred driveway when Jimmy was shooting baskets in front of our garage. Every so often there would be a swish as the basket sank through the hoop barely touching the chain link mesh. It was very private up there. No one hardly ever climbed those stairs.
In the distance through that small window I could see the Manhattan skyline and way off on the edge of the horizon, on a clear night, there twinkled the lights on the spires and spans of the George Washington Bridge.
In those days FM radio was becoming more popular as a medium for rock and roll. We had a big console in the living room that had an FM dial and at night I would lie on the floor, reading the now defunct Newark Evening News, and listen to the throaty and mellow voice of Allison Steel. And there was Rosco, another disc jockey whose deep, smooth voice introduced songs I never heard on AM - the songs of Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Tim Hardin. AM was still the main artery for the pumping of rock through the body of teen culture but its days were numbered. There were Cousin Brucie, Murray the K and Scott Muni on the soon to be eclipsed AM stations WMCA, WABC and WINS. I had an AM radio upstairs and sometimes I would listen to the music while writing letters or, on a more rare occasion, doing homework on a large table that had a gooseneck lamp. We left the desk up there when we moved - I wonder if it is still in that room. It was a large wooden desk, with one drawer where I kept my pens and papers. I wrote a lot of letters at that desk, especially to Johnny when he was stationed in Korea. I stacked a few books on the top of the desk - novels and mysteries.
One of the first novels I read and thoroughly enjoyed on my own was “How Green Was my Valley.” I read that through the nights of a hot summer in that room with a small fan whirring away inches away from my face. Richard Llewellyn, the author of that book, was the first author whose books I tracked down. I wanted to know more about him: Who was he and how did he come to write so beautifully? Then I discovered John Steinbeck when we had to read “The Red Pony” and “The Pearl” before entering freshman year at Essex Catholic High School in Newark. That year was 1962. I was soon to hear the first songs of the Beatles on the radio - little did I know how long lasting the richness of men like Steinbeck and Llewellyn or the magic that was the Beatles would be. A larger world was laying a claim on my insides - words and music were pouring into me and they made me feel so alive and somehow connected with places far beyond me. And I discovered much if this in that third floor room, with its little window opening to the big world outside.
Without thinking about it all that much, I was learning that words, be they written, spoken or sung, had a power. They could bring me to other places. They could open up other worlds and ways of seeing and feeling. They had the power to move me, to touch my heart.
Music had a deep claim on me. In that room on the third floor of our house on Christopher Street, I was transported many an afternoon and late evening to places far and good, places afforded me through music and words. I liked that life had a beat to it and I delighted in it.
Music made things go away and opened to me landscapes of memory. I listened to songs about train rides and lost loves, old hotels and the shores of distant seas, and as I listened and gazed out the window towards Manhattan I was really with the places I was hearing about, places brought to me through beautiful words and melodies. I remember when I first heard Carole King’s “Up on the Roof” and felt that the song captured just what I felt in that room and knew the places where I was going when I listened to my records.
When this old world is a getting me down, I climb way up to the top of the stairs...
Jimmy died in a car accident in 1966. Someone told me years later that his death was my first serious negotiation with the pain that is part of life. How true those words were.
After Jimmy died I went up to the third floor more often, putting record after record on the Victrola which sat on a flimsy green card table. I would turn up the volume loud and sing away and I know that I was wanting to sing the pain away, to go somewhere far where death had never happened and things were good. “Up on the Roof.” Yes. “Up on the Roof.”
I now live in an apartment over a garage in Covington, Louisiana. There is a window right in front of me and it is a beautiful day - I can see the street below and the house next door. The street is quiet and lined with trees and old wooden fences. The yard next door is filled with odds and ends and a lot of growing green things. I like the look of it - there is a fulness to it and despite the look of clutter and the random arrangement of everything, it suggests the richness that is life. The yard appears to be overflowing with everything. I have the radio on but am not familiar with the song that is playing, but I like it. It is a love song and has a nice beat.
Thirty-six years have passed since Jimmy died. He is buried very far from here, in a cemetery not far from the house we grew up in on Christopher Street.
It is just over six months since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, that day when much fell to the earth and brought unimaginable grief to so many innocent people. How many windows fell that day - windows through which I am sure many who were killed often gazed out with pleasure and a sense of peace - windows through which they, too, sensed a large place, a larger world. Then the windows shattered and fell and those who looked through them fell as well.
I am a Catholic priest in transition, having left a Trappist monastery after a seven year stay and looking now to other forms of ministry. I am not sure what lies down the road for me. But I gaze out my window here on this beautiful day and see something of the same peace and beauty I saw many years ago from the small third floor window of my room. It is a window of life, of some kind of beckoning and perhaps these days I can but only respond to what it is by writing about it. A woman is slowly moving through her cluttered garden. She is dressed in red, has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, and every now and then she stoops down and picks up something she apparently figures does not fit in her garden: a branch, a piece of paper. God lives in her and is it not so that it is God herself making things just so out there, right outside my window? A God who today is dressed in red, a bit on the plump side, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth? Indeed, God made a home in the flesh of each of us and I suppose must accept what goes with the territory - including the option of picking through a yard here in Covington, Louisiana.
These days, windows are falling from the edifice of the institutional church, too. A way of “seeing” is presently going through a painful and inevitable transition. Something enormous is falling to the ground. There is no shattered glass nor is there a visible Ground Zero. But there is a terrible amount of pain and a definite sense of massive loss. The loss is indeed of life. The Catholic institution as I knew it is dying. Yet we are all living, living and in need of windows through which to see something of each other and of God. And what I am thinking these days is the view is one and the same. We are here, together, of God. God is within us. God is in the green of the garden and the woman in red, fussing through her garden. She picks up something and moves on. Not exactly what might be considered a divine activity, as I see this through my window. But yet, I believe I see something of God out there, as she leans down close to the earth to pick up something on this sunny, cool morning.
God liked Gardens. God liked to stroll in the evening through the Garden of Eden. People are not yet used to seeing the same Wonder ramble her way through a unkempt garden on my - our - street.
But I am confident that it will happen as time goes by. As so many things around us fall, we will learn to pick up and move on and God will teach us how to do just that. I see her doing it right now. It is all we can do, as well as pray that we do it with love and with the best sense of the God who is within each of us - this something of God who I hope is in me as I write this day, the God who was in me as I listened to music long ago, the God who knew my tears as I ached when I left the monastery and moved here. The God who is so close to me, right out my window, lighting another cigarette and giving what I think is a biscuit to her dachshund.
This God, who is teaching us ways to see him and her through windows of glass and flesh and green things - and to trust in the windows of being human when everything through which we saw life fell and crashed to the earth.
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| Kelleytown |
| 03.25.05 (8:23 am) [edit] |
Kelleytown
At night as I fall off to sleep, I sometimes think of what transpired in the day. Last night I thought of something that my mom recently told me. She has trouble sleeping some nights. She cannot see well at all so she does not watch late night television and the radio brings her no comfort. She lies in bed and thinks about things. She avoids as best she can those troubling thoughts that can loom large in the night. She told me that she thinks of good things, warm things that make her happy. She said she thinks of days many years ago when she went to the beach. She liked the beach, she told me. And thinking about it makes her feel good.
I remember when mom and dad took us to the beach when we were little. I wrote a piece about that once. I remember mom worrying as she watched us run in the sand and down to the surf. She knew the dangers of the ocean and that we might go too far into the surf. I thought it good that the she has befriended the ocean these days, if only in her restless nights. A far away and long gone beach she can summon at night and take pleasure in it.
I thought of a place I never was last night as I fell off to sleep. The name of the place is Kelleytown, and even though there is still a place called that not far from here, the place I thought of was the Kelleytown that once was. It was the Kelleytown where PeeWee grew up.
I work with PeeWee at bonsai. He is a black man who grew up in Kelleytown and over years he has told me many things about those early years of his life. I cannot separate my image of Kelleytown from the warmth and friendliness of PeeWee.
I took a ride with him one day last week to get some special bags for bonsai soil. The store was in McDonough, which is about a half hour ride from here. On the way, we passed a street called “Kelleytown Road” and I recognized the name and asked PeeWee if that was where he grew up. He told me that it was and that on the way back we could take that road and go there.
We got to the store and purchased the bags. In the store was a big barrel with odd looking things in it. I picked one up and then read the sign on the barrel. It was a pig’s ear that I held in my hand. The ear was dried and brownish in color. PeeWee said that dogs like them. So I bought two for Damian’s dogs. The sign on the barrel said that they cost $1.19 an ear, but the lady at the register gave them to me for a dollar each. She put them in a bag. I thought for a moment as to where the rest of the pig was.
With our plastic bags, pigs’ ears and each other, we headed back to the monastery. As the car neared Kelleytown Road, PeeWee said, “Here it is, Father James. Just go left here.”
I turned and drove slowly down Kelleytown Road. PeeWee talked as we rode. He showed me where his home once was. Now there is a field in the midst of large and beautiful homes. There are many developments now in that area. I slowed as PeeWee told me about the river where he swam, the school he attended, stores he used to go to. He pointed out the still-standing Kelleytown Baptist Church. It is a small building and has been there a long time. I wondered to myself about the many people who came there to hear the Word of God preached to them when times were very hard down here. PeeWee’s family was among them. PeeWee once told me that his mom raised him to always be forgiving of those who hurt him. He has memories of the days when blacks were segregated from whites here and throughout the south. I have never heard a word of bitterness from him about those times. The words he heard on Sundays from the pulpit and the words he heard from his mom during the week hit home.
As I drove he told me about people that he knew from the old days. “Most are gone,” he said. “Many moved away. Many others died. Change, Father James. That’s the way things go, always change.” He grew quiet, looking at the big houses as we passed them by.
We are about the same age. Our pasts are very different. We do not talk about where we have been and what we have seen all that much. The things of the present absorb us here and that is good. We talk about those things – the weather and music, the latest news, things going on here at the monastery.
Yet at night, I do not think much about the present, lying in bed waiting for sleep to come. I think of things gone by and wonder about them. I do not know why I do that – it is as if by thinking about them I can experience something about them again. Every moment of life bears so much with it and then it is gone and a new moment comes. It seems to take a while to look at any one day and marvel at all that it brought. Do we only see what we have by losing it?
It is a simple left turn to go to Kelleytown. And it is as simple a turn on my side, looking out the window at night, to summon things of the past.
The beach is a kind memory for my mom. It warms her, and the waves sooth her. Then she sleeps without worries about the surf and her children. She remembers the best of what was.
Things about Kelleytown warm me, too, though I have never really been to the town that was. PeeWee tells me all about it, and when I listen to him in the day as we ride, I hear the best of what was. He remembers what was good.
Things change. We move ahead and every now and take a left turn to a place that was, and, if we are fortunate, we will be riding ride with someone who was once there and can tell how good it was.
It is a kind of forgiveness, that turn.
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| Lost in Translation |
| 03.21.05 (1:43 am) [edit] |
There was a book published a few years ago. It is Eva Hoffman’s memoir and she titled it “Lost in Translation.” She writes of being forced to leave her native Poland as a little girl and moving to Canada. She had lost everything in Poland. She is a Jewess and fled the Nazis. Canada was a new world to her in every way imaginable. She did not know a word of French. She was taken in by a family - people she had never met. You can imagine the pain she went through as she struggled to find her bearings in a new culture, a new language. All about her seemed inaccessible. She knew that in her move from one familiar world to a totally alien one, she suffered from a profound loss in the translation.
As time went on, the kindness of people - many of them strangers - helped her find words for her new life. She sensed that words meant different things in Canada. Words like love and family and hope had different nuances and it took her time to grasp the meaning of these words as they were spoken and experienced by the Canadian people she was growing to love. Her life was getting richer. As the years passed, the world she longed to know once again came nearer to her as she discovered it anew through the mastering of French. Indeed, she took to herself a new world through the goodness of other people.
She eventually mastered English as well and for many years was a senior reviewer and writer for the New York Times Review of Books. She came a long, long way.
Reading her memoir, I learned that it is not an easy process to find one’s way through the thicket of a new language, a new culture. Yet it was so beautiful that many people were sensitive to her loss and did what they could to heal her and situate her heart in a place she could once again call home.
I was away from where I grew up for almost eight years. I spent the month of June in New Jersey. It felt good to be back to a place I still sense as home.
One evening, I drove to Watchung Plaza in Montclair and sat on a bench that was very familiar to me. It was beneath a flag pole and I used to sit there a lot when I was a kid and worked in the nearby stores. Thirty years ago, there was a soda shop in the Plaza. It was the kind of shop you do not see much of these days. Jimmy, my twin, worked there and later we both worked in the supermarket that was across the street. There were a lot of small stores in that Plaza and we got to know most of the people who worked in them. I looked about me that evening and saw that almost all the stores that I knew as a kid are gone. There are new stores, new owners. Gone were the bakery and the soda shop, the drug store and the supermarket. And, of course, I recognized no one I saw in the Plaza that evening. I really did not expect to see anyone I knew. Yet I wondered about how the lives of those I once knew turned out.
I thought about the passing of things, how nothing ever remains the same for long. I felt sadness come over me, but then I thought of something. I am who I am in large part because of that place what I became and experienced when I worked and played there. Yes, it all moved on but it left something of its goodness with me. I felt a warmth in my heart as I thought about that. Ordinary people and places - all gone now - who gave me so much and who, at the time, had no idea of the gifts they were giving just by being good and ordinary - and giving. Even though I have never known the loss and anguish suffered by Eva Hoffmann, I could identify with the world she was given through the kindness of other people. And that world is still alive - I can touch its life with my words and share them with you. Yes, words can summon a world to life. Words make us love and remember. They make us hope, and feel warm. They can give us a world, a world ever new: a world that needs to be spoken from our hearts. We have the power to offer each other a world that, amidst this passing one, is a place that shall never pass away.
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| Ellisville, Mississippi |
| 03.21.05 (1:40 am) [edit] |
Ellisville, Mississippi
I drove up to Chicago from Louisiana and made stops at the Trappist monasteries in Conyers, Georgia and Gethsemani, Kentucky on the way. It was good to be in those places and it was good to be in Chicago again. I was there at this time last year and took a real liking to everything about the parish.
While driving from Louisiana, I got hungry along the way and pulled off Interstate 59 and drove into a small town called Ellisville, Mississippi. It looked to be a very old town, and a very small one, with one main street that was a row of buildings from the pre-Civil War era. There seemed to be a sleepiness to the place. People moved slowly and there did not seem to be much going on. If you are ever near there, it is right by So So, Mississippi.
I spotted a pizzeria and parked the car and walked in. I was shown a place to sit by a waitress and she soon brought me a few slices of pizza and a coke.
The place was crowded and I noticed that there were a lot of kids and most of them were severely handicapped. They had to be helped by those who were caring for them. Some were teenagers and they had to be spoon- fed. There was one little boy who could breath only through an opening in his neck. There was a young girl on a stretcher for whom movement was possible only through the efforts of those who carried her in.
I asked the waitress where the kids came from and she smiled and said that there was a special school right nearby. She called the kids and those who cared for them angels, special angels.
Three soldiers walked in, dressed in their olive green and brown camouflage uniforms. The same waitress showed them to a booth right near mine. They smiled at me and nodded their heads in a gesture of hello and then sat down. They ordered their food. When the waitress brought their plates, she placed them on the table and before the men touched a morsel of food, they bowed their heads and prayed. I watched them as they said their grace before meals and it was as if a window to some light of Revelation opened before me. I am a so-called professional religious and had not even thought of grace. I looked about me at the handicapped kids and to those who so lovingly cared for them and it struck me how many things I have been given in life and how I take it all so for granted. Something of grace filled that little place for me that day.
Jesus speaks peace to those who doubt in the gospel. He offers himself as peace, though it would take some time for his disciples to figure that out. It would take them time to know that the Gift of peace is Jesus himself. It is a living Gift that is himself and not a treaty or a calm in the storm apart from him. The disciples would experience that gift in many and different ways.
I looked at soldiers who prayed. I looked at these men who would, if asked, lay down their lives for what they believe to be a way to peace for you and for me. I looked at men and women caring for young people who will never dance, never know the freedom of movement and the pleasures of family as do so many of us here tonight. I looked a at that little boy with a hole in his throat who smiled when the woman who cared for him kissed him and spoon fed him some ice cream.
These days, words of war and peace fill the media and we can easily be overwhelmed because so many things seem beyond the control of any one of us to accomplish a sense of real and lasting peace.
But, as the disciples were soon to discover, God is driving the bus of creation and his Kingdom is being realized through time. It is a long, loving ride and we do not really understand the bends in the road. More importantly, the ride is being realized through each of us, for Jesus lives in and through us. He is the bowed head of the soldier. He is the hand that feeds a child and the kiss that brings a smile.
And he is the one in me who will try to remember to say a prayer of thanks every day at meals for the rest of my life, and remembering as I do so the soldiers who taught me something of God and peace and remembering in the seemingly insignificant place of a pizzeria in Ellisville, Mississippi – a place that had for me more revelatory power than a cathedral.
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| Forgiveness |
| 03.19.05 (7:36 am) [edit] |
Forgiveness
Ten years ago, a young man was driving on a road in Pennsylvania. He had had too much to drink and lost control of the car. He slammed into a group of Amish children who were walking on the road, instantly killing three of them. The story ran in the New York Times, not long before I came here to the monastery. I remember the reporter asking the father of one of the dead children what he wanted to see done to the driver and the father said that he forgave him. He said, “We believe that we are asked to forgive. I forgive him.”
Those words spoken through tears and anguish on a road ten years ago were few in number but eternal in their content. You won’t find many like them in today’s paper, or yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s. Words like that are rare. But when they are spoken in our midst they call us to ponder and hopefully live the truth that God asks us to live.
There is an almost unquestioned arsenal which goes into the American recipe for the good life. Eat well, be free, make enough money to pursue happiness through living wherever you like and buying whatever you need, and you will be happy. The road is all figured out by so many experts and is lined with everything that money can buy.
Yet something essential is missing. We may feast from the supermarket of life, but unless we eat the food of mercy offered by God, we will perish. Accounts of those deaths are in the newspapers every day.
Not long ago, one of the monks gave a homily in which he spoke of Jesus being like a stubborn guest at a dinner who won’t go away. He will stay until we learn to welcome him, take him to ourselves, and share him. He is still at every human table, sitting patiently but speaking every now and then. I wonder if the Times reporter pondered as to where the words of that dead child’s father came from.
There was a man named Matthew who was also on a road and was spotted by another man.
And this man Jesus called him to reconsider what one needs to know happiness, to know God. Matthew got up and followed Jesus and in doing so learned that the way to God is not through possessions, through what one can have, but through mercy, forgiveness, living for others.
An Amish father’s words came from this same Jesus he had met and followed. He may have not had much in life. He lost a life that more precious than anything he may have owned.
In knowing mercy, he had the best that God gives any one of us. And he had the wisdom to give that away to one who did not deserve it. But that is what mercy is all about. A gift reserved solely for the undeserving. Strange food, this food of God.
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| Elvira by the Sea |
| 03.19.05 (4:26 am) [edit] |
Elvira by the Sea
He spoke softly of his mother and was worried about her. Her name was Elvira. We were washing dishes together, and I watched his hands lift the large dishes in and out of the soapy water as he spoke. The prettiness of her name lingered within me as said that she was failing. I could feel the sadness in his heart. He would call her but she made little sense on the phone. He had recently arranged for a caretaker to come and live with her. She lived far away, in California. The sudsy water nearly covered his arms as he reached in and felt along the bottom for another platter. I sensed that he was also reaching for words from the bottom of his heart.
Basil and I washed dishes three nights a week, and as the weeks passed, he would tell me about Elvira, and how she was doing. He knew that she her condition was irreversible. He had flown out to the coast to see her several months earlier, and the visit had been good, but he said that he knew that it would be his last.
Over the weeks, an image of his mother began to take shape. I knew some things about her, where she was born, how difficult her life was, how she valued friendship, how she was afraid as her health began to fail. Something about Basil was growing in me, as well. He spoke of his Mom with such tenderness, and when he shared with me the details of her life, I felt as if those details were very much alive in him, that they were not of the past, but very present to him. I had the impression that by his retelling me, he was somehow trying to make them better. He was trying to soften the pain that his mother knew in life.
Elvira passed away, and Basil left the monastery to go to the wake and funeral. I did not see him before he left, since his departure was quick. He was gone for several weeks and drove his Mom's car back here to the monastery. Basil has no brothers or sisters, and has not said much, if anything, about other relatives. His Dad died some years ago.
When he returned, I was glad to see him. He had been on my mind every day and we prayed for him, and for Elvira, all the while that he was away. We always pray for each other when we are away.
Soon after he returned, Basil shared his heart with the community, and spoke so beautifully about his Mom. So many details of her life came alive again as he spoke: how she worked in a dress shop, and had a good friend who was a Jewess, and how his Mom knew several languages, and how hard it was for her to raise a son with so little money and hard times.
His voice cracked when he said that he loved her. We all felt the depth of his pain.
Her apartment was near the Pacific Ocean, and Basil said that she so loved a window that looked out onto the sea. It seemed that she at last found some peace in her life and had reconciled herself to making the passage from this life to the next. I wonder what she thought of or dreamed about as she gazed out to the ocean.
Dorothy Day once said that fleeting moments of the sacred serve as a window to the rest of our ordinary, seemingly mundane patterns of daily experience. Those moments, she said, help us to sustain all the other moments. Glimpses of the sacred are like seeing the holiness of all as if through a window from this life to the next.
A light shone through Basil as he spoke. He spoke with a love and reverence that was given to him by Elvira. All the details he spoke of became personalized through his loving them because they were of her life, her labor, her love. Basil's heart and tears were, yes, like a window through which I saw and knew a lovely woman I had never really met.
I pictured Elvira, a picture made accessible to me through the window of Basil's soul. I imagined her hearing him and wanting to touch him and wipe away his tears with her hand that trembled with joy. But that caress was not yet to be in its fulness.
Yet its beginnings were and are there, in Basil's heart. She gave him life, and he gave her all he could. He provided a window by the sea.
There are windows here that allow us a glimpse to eternal life. Such windows made not of glass, but of flesh and spirit, and of words born from love that tell of the beauty of the ordinary. Basil was so generous with his words that day, words that allowed us a glimpse to eternal life through the enchanting tale of a woman who found her window by the sea and a son whose love gave us a fleeting glimpse through the window of his heart to eternity.
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| Prayer for a Grown Man |
| 03.17.05 (2:07 pm) [edit] |
A Prayer for a Grown Man
His name I cannot remember, though his face is as vivid to me as it was when I last saw him. That was almost twenty years ago. He was nine years old back then, so he would be about twenty-nine years old now. I wonder if I would recognize him. I wonder if he is doing well. His face simply arrives to me as I walk here, or sit in church early in the morning.
He came to early Mass with his mother almost every morning. They sat in the first pew and I soon realized that she was coaching him in the routine for being an altar boy.
The morning came for the first meeting and his mother dropped him off before any of the other kids arrived. She introduced herself and then introduced her son. She told me that he was so eager to serve Mass, but that he was very nervous and she worried that he might not get along with the other kids. I asked her why, and she said that he was a loner.
He was so friendly with me and eager to please. I noticed that he did keep his distance from the other kids but at that point I thought it best not to do or say anything.
Over the months that followed, he always showed up on time and could not do enough for me. He was polite, and there was to him an eagerness to please, to do and be right, that broke my heart. I sensed that something was hurting in his young life.
I asked the pastor about him and he sighed, and told me that there were serious marriage problems at the boy’s home and he did not elaborate any further. I then understood the need of their son to find a warm spot in his life. When I heard that from the pastor, other things that I had noticed then became clearer to me. The little boy looked undernourished and sad, even though he smiled. It was the kind of smile that was asking for something, asking for help and recognition: asking for more love than his parents were then able to give him.
Several weeks ago, I thought about him. His face again simply "arrived" in my mind's eye one morning. I was before the Blessed Sacrament. I could think of nothing that would have summoned his face. And yet it was so clear to me.
I thought back on those first months after I met him. He did fine as an altar boy, and then for some reason stopped coming and I never saw him again. The pastor said that the family moved away. I remember thinking back then that there must have been financial problems and they were forced to relocate.
That little boy was for me a window through which I saw someone who exists in each of us.
It is said that human pain is an invariant. It is one of the few constants that all people of all cultures experience. There is no set "form" to it. It just is.
To suffer pain is to be human. Pain is not only some thing that happens to us, as if getting hit by it from the outside. At a more lived and fundamental level, pain is very much a part of how we simply are, how we "feel" ourselves to be.
We are estranged from God and each other and most of the times we can hide that very well, especially in our own culture. We are hit from all sides - in the media and in the taken for granted ethos of our times - with the message that pain is abnormal. We assume that when and where it exists, pain can be eradicated if we take the right medication, find the right therapist, think the right way, find the right group, read the right book, listen the right way, move to the right place. And so we smile our way from therapy to therapy, from dream to dream, all the while feeling oddly estranged from that ever present sense about ourselves that we are not quite at home here and that something hurts about that.
That little boy's face spoke volumes to me. In it I saw the hurt of his mother and the pain of his father, a man and woman whose anger and hurt scarred a young life, albeit unintentionally. I saw in his face my own pain. He was hurting and he smiled and so wanted to please, and that was what broke my heart. He was young enough to attempt to negotiate with the new and fresh experiences that were flooding into his young life. There were other places that were good and holy and not hurtful - like, he thought, church. And so he would go to church, to school, to playgrounds, to so many other places, asking for something and not understanding quite what. And asking out of hurt.
Why did his face, the memory of him, come to me? Is he well somewhere and wishing me well? Or is he hurting or am I hurting and somehow an association was made out of my own need that brought his youth and innocence to similar times of mine?
Dorothy Day believed that prayer could change even the past. I was stunned when I first read those words, but they grew on me in their generosity and refusal to let God off the hook and let bygones be bygones.
So I pray for that boy as he was, that his life be given what he deserved and so hoped for.
And I pray for the boy who is now a man, that he has forgiven those who could not love him enough and who would have if they were able. I wish him peace from this faraway place and time, and ask God to be with him. I do not know what else to ask. I just ask that God do for him what is best and good.
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| The Presentation |
| 03.17.05 (2:04 pm) [edit] |
The Presentation
It was the Feast of the Presentation and we gathered in the cloister, very early in the morning, for a procession around the cloister and into the church. It is as well a Feast of Light, and is still a major feast day in some parts of the world. I am not sure as to the symbolism of the lights but I do know that it is a long tradition.
The gospel spoke of the revelation given to two old people – Anna and Simeon. They had waited all their lives for the coming of the Messiah. The revelation comes as an Infant. They can hold in their arms and hearts the meaning of “it all.” They can caress the God who made them. They can love the very One who is the source of their joy. They love with what God has given them.
It is a feast of the importance of waiting. It is a feast of the wisdom that comes only with age, the passing of years. As human lights grow dim, the light that is God shines ever more brightly.
The monks all lit their candles and the procession began. We sang a Latin hymn called “Lumen,” which means light. It was still dark. We moved slowly, for many of the monks are old. Some used walkers, some used canes, a few were in wheelchairs and there were one or two motorized vehicles. The old monk next to me had a hard time walking since he held the candle in one hand with the other hand he was guiding his metal walker. There was a strong wind that morning and his candle blew out. I gave him another light from mine. I looked ahead of me and there were other candles going out but they, too, were relit with the help of those monks whose candles still burned.
The Latin chant was Gregorian and it was beautiful.
All history moves toward its fulfillment in God. It is of course a vast movement, an immense thing to try and understand. Perhaps it is best approached through faith.
We moved along, toward the church. We entered the church and began Mass.
I do not remember much Latin but liked the chant.
I do not understand the scientific intricacies of light – but know that it is something we can share with tallow and wick. Keep a watchful eye for those near you who need our light as it yet burns – through your words, your time, your kindness. For these, too, are light.
It is good to receive light from others when we are buffeted by an unexpected wind and the little light we have is extinguished.
How little I really understand. Mystery that this life is, this small place we have in the universe. But move through it we must, through the darkness, sharing what lights we have and one day entering a place of holiness and eternal light.
It is a place best known, perhaps, by the old. They have longed for it so long and yet have shared something of it their whole lives by how they loved and waited. The Light draws them ever nearer to a Place no wind can extinguish, nor darkness dim.
It was so dark that morning but the light of the stars and moon were high above. And the lights held by young and old were below, inching along, burning with hope. It was beautiful. It was truthful. It was worth waiting for, as is all of history.
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| Summer Night |
| 03.17.05 (2:02 pm) [edit] |
Summer Night
The memory is simple and returns to me so often and unbidden. It is a delight when it comes and lingers for a while. It seems to like, as I do, the quiet of the woods here at the monastery, for that is where it comes to me with such ease.
The memory is of my Mom and Dad, sitting in their bedroom before going to bed on a warm summer’s night. We had a large old home in Montclair, New Jersey, a Dutch colonial, and their bedroom was on the second floor. The rest of us, five sons and two daughters, and my Grandmother - Dad’s Mom - were scattered comfortably throughout the rest of the house. Jimmy, my twin, and I slept in a small room on the third floor, which had two closets as if it was made just for twins. We had our own bathroom at the end of a long hall, and there was a large porcelain tub in there with legs shaped like lions’ feet. Before going to bed, each of us would stop in and say a goodnight to Mom and Dad and would sit on their bed and chat for a little while. Gram used to stick her head in the door and say a soft goodnight. My Dad sat in a large maroon colored chair by the front window and Mom sat on the other side of the same window, at Dad’s desk. They wore pajamas and if the night was chilly they wore robes. Mom wore a simple blue robe. Dad’s was maroon, the same color as his chair. They smoked back then, though I do not remember the room smelling all that strongly of cigarette smoke. There was a stronger smell of sweet talc or perfume. They always had a “nightcap” before going to bed, a light scotch with water.
On summer nights, the window was open unless there was a heavy rain. I could hear cars passing by as we spoke, as well as the occasional soft tread or slap of someone’s feet as they passed in front of the house, walking their dog or just going for a walk. Air conditioning was not as common back then, and on a hot summer’s night people would take walks in the evening to cool off a bit.
I can see the above perfectly, and with a little effort, I can hear their voices, see their younger faces. I see the desk and the ashtray, the pens and the yellow legal pads, an old adding machine. There are a few magazines on the cream colored radiator cover in front of the window. I see Mom and Dad’s slippers. The lace curtain moves just a bit, toyed with by a light summer breeze. There are lights on in the houses across the street, lights partially obscured by the large trees that were and still are one of the real treasures of Christopher Street. There is a street lamp, burning bright and around which hundreds of moths swirl and swirl.
Dad sits with his leg’s crossed - “man style” - and Mom sits in her chair which is pulled away from the desk and facing me. Her legs are crossed, too, - “ladylike.” Her hair is dark, though there are wisps of gray. She keeps it in place with bobby pins.
There are separate bureaus, on either side of the door. My brothers Robert and Peter are long asleep in a room to my left, across from the bureaus. I can almost touch and feel the things I see: Mom’s silver plated hair brush and mirror set, her jewelry, the little statue of a woman with a fine china dress, stacks of letters and coupons, a few broken rosaries. On Dad’s bureau are some papers, a pair of black socks, a shoe horn, his wallet, an open pack of cigarettes and his Zippo lighter.
They smoked non-filtered Pall Malls. Mom would always get a tiny bit of tobacco on her lip when she would take a drag on her cigarette. I can see the exact way her hand would go to her lips and gently remove the little piece.
The image remains and I picture myself in that room, watching them, listening to them, saying a goodnight and kissing them and then heading on upstairs to bed. I can remember the soft cheek of my Mom and the sweet smell of Pond’s cold cream as I kissed her. I remember the stubble of my Dad’s cheek as I kissed him and the faded but still unmistakable smell of the Mennen Skin Bracer that he had splashed on his freshly shaven face that morning.
What did we speak of those many nights? I cannot recall a single conversation in detail. I am sure that the words covered the typical things of family life: school work, borrowing the car, high grades and low grades, friends, joys, sorrows, plans. The words escape me. But the sensual memory is so strong...the smells, the sight, the colors, the breeze, the distant sound of footsteps of a long gone night walker. The memory has lasted and seems to grow stronger.
And what of the words? How important they were. One evening’s worth would have touched on one passing thing or another. But no such catch of a summer night’s words would exist as somehow apart from all the words of so many other nights. It is all of a living whole. I can take any evening, any movement of Mom’s hand to her lips, any kiss and sweet fragrance and savor the mystery that they are somehow really and truly of me now. When I sit in the woods, wondering where I come from and where I am going, I have been kissed and worded all the way.
Strange, even wondrous, when you think about it. We wonder what God is “like” - is the Divinity male or female, near or far, all knowing, all powerful and the like. The Great Unmoved Mover. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps learning about God is coextensive with learning about ourselves, learning how we become who we are, how we grow and remember, and what it is that we remember.
How the sweetest of our memories cause us to ache.
We think of God as some sort of grandiose finished “being” and yet our lives, if they are truly human lives at all, become such through so many words, conversations, kisses, memories that come scented with Mennen Skin Bracer and Pond’s Cold Cream, all in a slightly smokey haze that smells pretty good. All of this is born from incarnate love, love that I remember coming to me, carried by the still warm breezes of past summer nights, nights when Mom and Dad mysteriously did the “God thing” by living their vows and letting the awesome power of love seep into and lay claim to the ordinariness of their lives. Any of those nights were like so much leaven, working its magic over the years, stubbornly refusing to be taken from the daily and seemingly “inconsequential.” The words took root in the very heart of nights and days and bred memories and longings of such beauty. Something like magic, this grace that is your life and mine.
It is late. The monastery is peaceful. The monks are retiring for the night.
I can hear the wind blowing through the trees in the cloister.
A few years ago I passed those lovely trees on Christopher Street, and envied them for remaining there all these years. They have seen and heard so much but, like the best of friends, keep such things to themselves. Perhaps, though, there are trees here who whisper what they know, and who may have picked up words carried by summer winds from the north, words that will always have the life and love with which they were first spoken.
Tomorrow I will go again to the woods and just wonder about such things, and fancy just a bit that when the memories come, they are awakened in me by the trees that took to themselves the words of love spoken long ago. And when the wind rises and the branches sway, the trees may bow just a bit and share what they know. They will send a memory, and I will once again savor their wondrous gift with joy.
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| When She Calls |
| 03.17.05 (1:40 am) [edit] |
When She Calls
One of my jobs this week is reading the prayer at the end of the offices. We use the prayer of the preceding Sunday on the “ordinary” weekdays.
One line in this morning’s prayer had the line “may we hear your voice in every sound.”
Just one line. But what a line.
When I was in parish life, there was a woman who used to call with terrible headaches. She would call early in the morning, sometimes long before dawn. I was usually awake, for that was a good time for me to write. I could never call her. From where I sat I could see the blink on the phone before the ring.
She never told me who she was. I do not know why she wanted to remain unknown. She would cry and tell me that the pain was unbearable and could she just talk for a while. “Just listen to me, Father, all I need is to talk,” she would say. So I listened, spoke with her a little, and after a while she would say that she felt better and asked me to pray for her. She promised she would pray for me, too.
Those calls came fifteen years ago and I can hear her voice as I write this.
I wonder if she is still alive. I hope she is and I hope that her headaches are long gone.
A friend of mine tells me he is an atheist. We banter back and forth about whether and how God exists. My friend goes out of his way to help people. He is an artist, too, and a very good one. He has, I think, a keen eye for beauty.
I know we will never settle the “God thing” through language. I do not know if I even care to. Yet, we get drawn into the conversation.
Might I say he hears a voice in ways I do not? And so he speaks of beauty and gives it color and form and that speaks to me. There is no divine label to it, though.
Language is, I suppose, one variation of expression on a vast palate. It is a particular “color” of refinement.
There are other choices on that palate. There are sounds and color, memory and beauty, sadness and hope, yearning and wonder – these and more, which are the textures of everyday life.
We all look for God.
It is early in the morning, before dawn. There will be no calls from Bloomfield. Yet, a light is blinking all about me and in me. One does not have to go looking for God.
Her calls begin early, every morning. She is persistent.
Life, all of life, is blinking.
There are myriad responses.
She will call today. My friend may paint, or he may listen.
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| The Lady at the Printing Shop |
| 03.17.05 (1:37 am) [edit] |
Brother Callistus called and I drove him to the printer, where he wanted to drop off our newsletter. It was raining and warm.
The newsletter is all about life here at the monastery. There are stories about what is new, and what is yet to be, what is hoped for and what makes us happy.
A woman was at the printer’s, behind the counter. She and Callistus sat down and chatted about the newsletter.
She was very nice. I sat for a while and listened as Callistus explained to the woman some last minute additions and corrections to the newsletter. “Brown or blue?” Callistus asked me. I liked the blue. I went outside to get my notebook out of the car. There was a lady waiting for a furniture store to open. Cars moved along Route 20, driving toward Atlanta in the rain.
I heard the rattle of a door behind me. I turned and saw the lady trying to open the door of the furniture store. It was locked. I walked over to her. She said that a man would be there soon and he would open the store and that there was a good sale. “I can get a lot for just three-thousand dollars,” she said. I wished her luck and went back inside the printer’s.
The lady was still talking with Callistus. She looked outside and said that it was a fine day for curling up in bed with a good book.
I asked her what she was reading.
She told me that she was reading inspirational novels, novels about faith and how people find answers to life’s problems. I could tell that she was moved by what she was saying. “The books have been a treasure for me,” she said. “A friend gives them to me when she is finished reading them. They have been an enormous help in my own life. I never had parents – me and my sister made it on our own and it was so hard. I wish I had read books like this when I was younger – it would have saved me so much trouble, so much pain.”
She got up and went into the back room and brought back a paperback book and showed it to me. She beamed as she placed it in my hands, as if she was doing what the book is about, which, come to think of it, she was. “I missed so much, not reading these before,” she said.
I felt for her as she spoke those words and told her that maybe it was not the right time to read them, when she was younger. And that she probably did much better than she thought.
I am back at the monastery now, thinking about her. She may well be curled up in bed, reading her book, taking needed comfort in words that offer her meaning as they come to her as she reads her paperback book.
It is still raining and it is warm outside.
It seems like we always have someplace to go. Many people have little time to be still these days. Our life here moves us to stillness, so that we might take to heart the first words of the Rule of Benedict: “Be still my son and listen with the ears of your heart.”
In the midst of it all, rain or shine, the words come. I felt hopeful, listening to the lady in the printer shop as she told me that she takes comfort in her book.
This monastery is place where we seek God. There are times like today when we need to for a ride and tend to business. And we find people looking for God in everyday chats. We are all looking for him. The boundaries of cloister and “outside world” dissolve and become washed away in a rainy day chat with a lady who whose job is to print words – and whose pleasure is to read them.
I did find something of God through her. I did not find God’s image, or a voice, but a hunger for him. I am glad that the lady finds him through words, words written by another and given to her in a paperback book.
And the lady waiting to buy the furniture? Well, it was raining and we did not chat too much. I hope she bought what she needed – something comfortable in which she can rest and read, or maybe dream and hope for good things.
Simple, beautiful, ordinary things. Like the rain falling outside, giving life.
Like the God who comes to us through nice people, and paperbacks, and the stillness that we find in easy chairs.
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| On The Trolley Car |
| 03.17.05 (1:26 am) [edit] |
I took a ride on the street car while in New Orleans. The Canal Street Line has been restored and there are nice red cars that ride up and down Canal Street all day and into the night.
I waited by the tracks for the car to arrive. It occurred to me that I did not know how to pay – if I needed a special ticket, or exact change, or a combination of both. Many things in life are combos these days.
There was a lady standing not far from me I asked her about the fare-taking process. She smiled and said that I needed exact change and that there was a machine right behind the trolley-man-driver that would take my money. There was, she continued, a paper taking machine and a coin taking machine. The fare was $1.25. I reached into my pocket and felt around and found two quarters and then I got out my wallet and took out a one dollar bill. She looked at me and said that I had to stand inside the yellow lines. I looked down and at my feet were big yellow lines. She approached me, gently held my shoulders and nudged me onto the yellow lines. “There. Just like that,” she said. “You gotta stand just like that or the trolley will pass you right by.” The trolley approached, stopped, and the door opened. I stepped inside, paid my fare and found a seat right behind the driver.
At the next stop a woman got on. She had a shopping bag and slipped in right behind the driver – right in front of me. She put down her bag and stood. I offered her my seat. She smiled and said no and was quiet for a few seconds. Then she looked at me and said, “And how you doin? You doin’ okay” and I smiled and told her yes.
“That’s good. Real good,” she said. She paused, gathering her thoughts. Then she said, “I hate my job. Just hate it.” She paused again. “You like your job?” I told her yes, and she said that was good, and she then told me about her work in a factory and how the heat was like something out of hell and how unfair life is and how her boss was the meanest thing in Louisiana.
And so it went. She got quiet after a while. When she got off the trolley, she looked at me and smiled and said, “I feel better. You have a good day, now.” And off she went, with her bag.
There was a lot of suffering in the world that day. It was the day of the killing of all those children in the school in Russia. It was the day people were killed in a hurricane. It was a day whose night would see four murders in New Orleans.
It was a day that people would hope for an absolute end to war. It was a day when others would hope for the absolute destruction of terrorists and all that they stand for. It was the day that some people would wish for a hell for some and paradise for others. In short, it was a day like any other day.
But I was riding a trolley that day and I remember worrying, too, about the world as the trolley moved and the buildings and people passed by the window. But my reverie was broken by the voice of that woman who asked me how I was doing. The big became the small. The immediacy of her voice made the rest of the world fall away, but brought real close another world, the world that is the beauty of human care, human interest, human language.
She was carrying more than her shopping bag. God lives in her, and when she spoke, I thought later how it was that God spoke through her as well. Of course she was not aware of that – are any of us aware of the grace that we carry as surely as that woman carried her bag?
We go through life and in its vastness the space we occupy every day of our lives is no bigger than that trolley car. A woman’s voice brought me near to a lot of beauty – her voice bridged a gap between my worries and the love of God that speaks through each of us. It is a love that comes through the small and everyday. It is a love that will lose nothing of what we know as life. It is a love that does not require exact change, save for something akin to loving each other, trying to do what we can to see that those we ride with are doing okay.
It is a matter of finding those yellow lines of life and loving from that space. We all need a nudge to find them; else the beauty of the day will pass us by. But days come again, like this one. It is how God arrives, through us, to love us into being okay by doing okay.
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| Watching Her Dance |
| 03.15.05 (9:21 am) [edit] |
Watching Her Dance
There was a small luncheonette on a small street in the town where I grew up. I used to go there with my friends when I was in high school and we would sit in a booth and have sodas and french fries. There was no menu.
There was a chalk board with the day's offerings and those few. A cake or a pie sat beneath a plastic covered plate which was on the long counter. On the wall behind the cash register were stacked rows of cigarettes - the most plentiful items in the store. The floor was red linoleum. And it was there that she danced.
I remember the day I first saw her. I was alone, sitting in a booth waiting for my friends and she was sitting on a stool at the counter. She was by herself and seemed to know the owner - an older woman - very well.
They had that way of talking and laughing. She had blond hair and it was long and hung down her back in a pony-tail. She wore tight pants and slippers and a white blouse. The shirt-tails of the blouse were tied in a knot at her waist. She was, I thought, so pretty. I watched her talk and laugh and then she took a cigarette from her large purse, lit the cigarette and inhaled and then thought of something that made her laugh. She coughed and laughed at the same time - and then took a long drag from the cigarette. She got off the stool and I then saw that one leg was shorter than the other - she had to drag her left leg behind her and her body moved up and down a bit as she made her way to the jukebox. She put a coin in and I watched the record rise amidst the colored lights beneath the plastic dome of the jukebox and then gently come to rest. The volume was turned up and I heard the "hiss" of the blank first seconds of the 45 and then on came "Let Me In." Do you remember that song? I remember the melody and the words but not who sang it.
And I remember her stepping back carefully from the jukebox and then dancing by herself. The song has a "shimmy" beat to it, and her feet slapped the floor as she moved to the music. Her bad leg dragged behind her good one and she snapped her fingers to the beat and closed her eyes and danced. The woman behind the counter looked at her and smiled. I watched and had no idea then that I would remember that woman and her song and her dance for many years. For it was just a small place, and a pretty woman, and a rock n'roll song and a kid who watched the pretty woman dance.
That was almost forty years ago. Wherever she is, I hope she still dances and laughs. And I hope there are those who watch and learn to carry as well - and with a song - the hurts in their lives. "Let Me In" was her special song. And let her in did. I have never danced as well as she. But she is still teaching me, every time I sing that song in my head and think of her, moving across a red linoleum floor and not missing a beat, somehow still asking me to follow and learn.
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| Sonia Live and the Hot Dog Man |
| 03.14.05 (4:57 pm) [edit] |
Sonya Live and the Hot Dog Man
I never found out his name.
He was short, squat, wore brown baggy shorts, long blue socks that made his legs look sort of funny, sneakers and a blue shirt. He wore suspenders, too, since he had a bit of a paunch and seemed to really need the suspenders lest his pants fall down.
Had those pants fallen, they would have softly landed on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 34th Street in Manhattan, for that is where he was and surely is right at this very minute as I write this. There are not many things in this life that I can be sure of, but that he is there and selling hot dogs is one of them. I find some sort of security in that. He has been a thirty-seven yer constant. Amidst all the changes of those years, he was there. As Sputnik soutnicked over America, he was there, slapping mustard on his doggies. The Beatles came and went, and he was there, asking thousands if they wanted saurekraut. Vietnam came and went. He asked for a five, rather than a twenty. He sells hot dogs and has been in that same spot all those years. His voice reminded me of gravel and he had a funny way of laughing, a “heh-heh-heh” that sounded like a redeemed death rattle.
We chatted for about four hours. He is married, lives in Queens, has four grown kids, one of whom is divoriced and giving him a bit of heartache since he and his wife are still shelling out money to him. The hot dog man siad that the break-up of his son's marriage broke his heart since there are three kids involved.
He said that he has encountered every type of person I could ever imagine. I sad, “Oh yeah?” and he was hoping that I would say that, for he then began to really roll. He raised his head just a bit and focused his eyes on some distant point, as if to get some sort of leverage, and came forth with the litany of all he had seen: dykes, queers, bums, famous people, derelicts, criminals, just about everything you can think of. I looked about me as he gave his roster and I easily believed him.
I asked him about his hot-dog cart. He seemed to be waiting for the question and began to tell me all about it. It was, he said, the same cart that he has had for all those years, except for a few needed repairs and additins. He pointed out a shelf that he had recently bought that was specially made for the cart. It was about the size of the bottom of a shoe box and was where he kept his mustard and ketchup. He needed it because it made it much easier to reach the stuff. It cost $83.00. He then pointed to a tire, and shook his head and grumbled something. He cleared the accumulated phlegm from his throat and, pointing to the tire, asked me to guess how much it cost. He spit on the sidewalk. I said about $50.00, since it was so small. He spat again and laughed and said that was the trouble with the world these days, and hacked out from his cleared throat “$240.00.” “That's a lot of hot dogs,” I said, feeling like an economic fool. He heh-heh-hehed and offered me a free soda. I think he knew that I was wounded and wanted to make me feel better.
Now I was not there just to buy a hot dog and chat. Two days before, I had received a call to appear on a live CNN television show, “Sonya Live.” After I received the call, I called a few friends and asked them if they thought I should go on. They all said go for it. I was nervous as hell. Live TV? ME? I cannot think all that fast and did not want to appear stupid on national television. May parents would be watching. Maybe even the Pope, too, if he watches TV during lunch time. The hot dog man's spot was righ in front of the massive skyscraper where the show was to air, twenty-two floors above where he has sold his “doggies” since before Vatican II was even a remote unheard of thing.
Most of what I think and write about are street things, really first floor or bargain basement flora and fauna stuff. I had butterflies in my stomach for two days after that call came from one of Sonya's assistants. She was so nice on the phone, really, but I was still nervous. Real nervous. All the while the hot-dog man talked I was thinking about the twenty one stories above us.
My brother Johnny and Frank, a friend of ours, came along with me for moral support. Actually, Frank paid for the hot dogs and chatted with the hot dog men as much as I did.
I kept looking at my watch and knew that it had come time for us to go. I said good-bye to the hot dog man and he heh-heh-hehed for one last time.
We entered the building and took the elevator to the studio far above.
Oh. I nearly forgot to mention. I rarely wear a Roman collar. I called home the night before to tell my Mom and Dad that I would be on television and they were at first very happy. But then I soon felt something brewing. Sure enough, my Dad called back later and asked me what I was going to wear. I had already assured him that I had gotten a hair cut, looked very neat and would do all right on the show. He was worried, he said. He was afraid that I might be caught off my guard by the media and end up like a minnow among sharks. That even made me more nervous. I told him that I would do the best I could do, and then told him that, yes, I would be dressed like a priest. I had already consulted my wise sisters about that decision.
I awoke early the next morning and got a closer trim of my hair. I called Frank and Johnny and asked them to go with me. I felt as if I was heading for some sort of sure but uncertain fate. Like something out of Dickens. But it was the better thing that I go.
They made me up, which was quite interesting. I felt like I was basking in Andy Warhol's five minute fame. Then I was ushered into the studio and there was Sonya. She was very nice and pretty and put me right at ease.
The panel was small. There was a young Gay activist whom I had read about in the National Catholic Reporter and the New Yorker. I liked him right off the bat. And there was a young woman from California who was pro everything. I liked her, too, not so much for her viewsas for that she was so sincere and friendly. And there was a writer from California. There was something about her I liked, too, though I did not get to chat with her all that much.
The show started and I took several deep breaths.
A priest sat across from me. He, too, wore a Roman collar but I sensed that we were sort of, well, different. The topic of abortion came up, and I began to sweat even more than I though possible. The priest had an answer for everything, absolutely everything. I have no answers. Sonya asked me what I would do if a woman came to me with an abortion related problem and I wanted to immediately fall twenty-one floors back to the comfort zone inhabited by the hot dog man. I cannot remember to this day what I said and never saw a replay of the show. I think that I said something about helping people.
There is a God.
Twenty-five minutes into the show, it was pre-empted by other news. We kept right on talking even though we were no longer “live.” We weren't quite dead, either, but I exhaled a sigh of relief that could have moved a schooner. Someone came up and wiped my sweaty brow. I then said something significant but it was not aired. Everyone else on the panel nodded at my wisdom. The priest huffed. He cleared his throat. I thought immediately of the hot-dog man clearing his throat. But the sounds were different. Very different.
The show was finally cut. What a relief. Sonya then chatted with us for a bit. I asked her if she would come with me to meet Johnny and Frank and she smiled and said that she would love to. We went to the room where they were and chatted together for about fifteen minutes. She mentioned during the conversation that she would like to meet us again, and I said that I would love that. She is a very intersting person.
We then left the studio and I caould feel my innards ease more and more with each descending floor.
Walking through the swinging plate glass doors and out on to the sidewalk, I looked to my right and saw the hot dog man, chatting away with another customer. I waved to him and he waved back, and we headed back home.
Later that night, I eased into a chair and called a few friends, glad that the whole thing was over with.
I thought of the media, of all those huge questions and answers, aired all over the country, leavinv people who watched it a bit abuzz and causing all sorts of grunts and satisfied nods all over television land, which these days comprises the entire planet.
And I though of my Dad and his worries and my sisters and brothers and frank and of the smallness of our lives and the enormity of our loves and worries. And I though of the hot dog man and how I knew more about his family and his wheels than anyone on that show, except for Brendan, the Gay activist, who went out with us for a few drinks after the show.. And I thought warmly of Sonya, and how kind she was to stay with us a while after the show, an act on her part which brought the twenty-thrid floor right down to the first.
I have no answers. I really don't. But if I die tonight, I do not expect that I will be asked to give any. For that is not what life is all about. And the next time, if there ever is one, that I am asked to go on national television, and if asked about such big and unanswerable things like abortion, married priests, war and peace, etc., I just may turn to the interviewer and say with a smile, “Just a bit of mustard, please, and a regular Coke. And, say, are those new wheels???”
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| Andy's Diner |
| 03.14.05 (4:51 pm) [edit] |
Andy's Diner
I used to live about a mile or so from a diner that I frequented nearly every morning. The name of the place was Andy's, named after the owner, and it was located near the entrance to a very large industrial park. Both the diner and office buildings were right off a major highway, so business was always good, as was the food. The waitresses were friendly and pretty and they knew nearly everyone who used to come in. Andy's had an attraction for all sorts of people: rich, poor and in between, neat and sloppy, loud and quiet, varied races, nationalities and religious persuasions. I used to go there alone and try and find an empty stool near the far end of the counter so as to better enjoy the parade of humanity that passed through the doors every morning. It was also easier to relax there since I was in no one's way and that seat offered a full view of the place.
Most of the people there did not know that I was a priest. Over the years that I used to go there, I gradually came to know quite well some of the people and their stories. The people embodied a richly textured history that unfolded itself bit by bit and ever so naturally over a period of five or so years. I sensed a common something beneath all the variations of difference that passed through that place, some sort of essential goodness that drew people there and that seemed waiting to be told.
Andy has since died and the diner is know boarded up. I was honored to say his funeral Mass from a church located several miles from where he lived. I feel quite sad when I drive past the closed diner these days. No one has bought it and I recently heard that it will be torn down to make way for an office building. Perhaps his passing and the closing of the diner has prompted me to write of the goodness of Andy and his diner, for they offered more than mere food.
Before I left the parish that was near the diner, I asked Andy's wife if I could have an ashtray, a small glass ashtray with the name and address of the diner. I still have it on my shelf in my bedroom and it is more valuable to me than all the Waterford in the world. I felt liked there, and in turn truly liked the people who filled the place each morning. I could always forget my worries while sitting at the counter, thinking about small and large things over a second and sometimes third cup of coffee. The conversations that I could not but help overhear were interesting and I always found myself trying to privately connect the stories of these people with their religious significance. I doubt that such things ever crossed their minds; they were unaware as to the wealth of raw and unadorned beauty that their lives and words simply were. Back then, I often wished that I had the gift of perceptive writing that so inspired great writers that I had read. I knew that there existed good volumes of interesting and absorbing tales: I heard them every single morning.
The place so fascinated and attracted me that I went through a period when I would be the first one there, as early as five in the morning. I would not have Mass until nine those days so I particularly enjoyed the extra time I had to myself in that pre-dawn hour, before the start of my "real" day. Jack, the short order cook, went through a meticulous routine of arranging his food and wares for the coming day. In all the mornings I watched him crack eggs, I never saw him once ruin a batter by spoiling it with pieces of shell. He was a friendly man, slender and so fast at whatever he had to do. He could handle cooking five or six breakfast orders at once, never losing track of their sequence. I hope that he is well these days. His health had started to fail towards the end of my stay in the area and he often spoke of retiring. He was missing from Andy's funeral several years ago.
At the time, I was pursuing graduate studies at a nearby University and would stop at the diner for lunch on the way over to class. There was a waitress who worked the lunch hour shift. She was young and attractive and one day she told me that she noticed my books and school papers. She said that she, too was going to school, trying to get her college degree by going part time. Waitressing was a way to help pay her tuition, as well as care for her baby. She was divorced and had a difficult time making ends meet. I asked her what she hoped to do later in life, after receiving her degree. She said that she loved writing and hoped to become a published writer. The next day she brought in one of her essays, a piece about her former husband who was wounded in Vietnam and had suffered flashbacks after returning to this country. I found her style of writing so moving, and wondered if her marriage had broken up because of the difficulties that were involved with handling her ex-husband's bouts with depression and, at times, violence. She never spoke as openly as did her writing. From then on, I was curious as to how she would write about the "diner" experiences that we both chatted about. Would her perspective be different from that of mine, would she sense a depth that I had not? If I could track her down, I would ask her to write about those years. The most fertile soil are our memories and our loves. Only they can make us grateful. Only they are capable of causing us to feel joy and sorrow. We only suffer from what we have known, from what has deeply touched our being, as those in the diner have touched mine.
There was a man, a professional photographer, who was there every morning. He was in his late thirties and was generally healthy looking. He was quite chatty with Jack and Andy, talking about his family and business. One Monday morning, he was missing from his usual seat. Jack kept the seat empty, not wanting to disappoint him should he arrive. By Thursday there was still no sign of him and by then his seat was almost always taken by a newcomer. The next week, the photographer's body was found in his car several miles away from the diner in a rarely used rest area. The police judged his death a suicide; he had blown his brains out with a shotgun. To the best of my knowledge, a note was never found. I managed to find an account of his death in the paper, in which his wife said that his suicide came as a devastating shock. He had left the house that morning, the last of his life, saying that he was going to stop in the diner. He never arrived. All the while that Jack was waiting for him, his body lay in a car with his head half gone. Jack was visibly upset when he was told what had happened. I could not keep my mind off that man's death and wonder if his wife ever remarried and did she ever find out why he ended his life the way that he did.
Chelsey used to open a garage across the street from the diner. He was usually the first one to arrive after Jack opened for business, shortly after five. The garage where Chelsey worked was actually a school bus depot for all the yellow buses that were used by the local school districts. He was bald, short, fat, generally grimy looking and smelled something like the garage where he worked. He was married but divorced many years ago. It was not too hard to tell that he was a difficult man to get along with.
He did not know that I was a priest and when he would walk into the diner and see me sitting at the far end of the counter, I could see him give me the once over. Jack told me later that Chelsey was curious as to who I was since he had never seen me before. Having lived in the area all his life, Chelsey prided himself on knowing nearly everyone who came into the diner on a regular basis. He also made it a point to remember any particular claim to fame that an individual's life might avail him of. In short, he was nosey. He also had a repertoire of the funniest but raunchiest jokes that I have ever heard. He did not know that I was priest, at least in the first few months. Someone must have told him, though, since one morning he acted so sheepishly when he came in. That was the first time he said hello to me through a nod extended in my direction, after which he proceeded to tell Jack about the poor condition of the buses. I felt badly about his change of demeanor, but gradually the conversation between him and Jack became so boringly conventional that he again came around to his old and perhaps better self. He died not too long ago, or so a friend from the area told me. There were no services, since he was so estranged from his family and most of his friends had died off. He died alone in his small living quarters that were attached to the garage.
Andy was a good man. He was not a church goer, but was very wise in the ways of the world and, I might add, spirit. Since the diner was on a road that led directly from the city of Newark, many poor people traveled by bus from Newark to their jobs in the many factories that are in the area of the diner. The bus stop was right in front of the diner. I would look out the window in the early hours of the morning and watch the people getting off the buses from the city. It was not unusual for some of them to stop into the diner and ask Andy for food or money. He was softhearted. After a lecture on the meagre state of his own resources, he would ask Jack to prepare a take out breakfast and would place a five dollar bill on the little tray before Jack wrapped it up. Those people really were forlorn; they were people who were truly forgotten, who were lonely and who needed some place where their lives could be given some value simply because their stories and troubles were listened to. Andy also had a verbal policy with the warden of a nearby jail. Upon the release of an inmate, Andy told the warden that he would be willing to offer a job working in the kitchen until the released person could find a better means of income.
I so miss that diner. I truly loved the people there and a generosity of spirit that was so much a part of it. Christmas had such a beautiful meaning there. Andy would decorate the diner with strings of lights and artificial snow from an aerosol can. The diner took on a magical glow and there was, during that season, a very heightened sense as to the meaning of the Incarnation. The little plastic trees and pretty glass ornaments were possessed of a unique loveliness in that their surroundings spoke so truly of the real meaning of Christmas.
It was a place in which God himself would have felt very much at home. Those who frequented the Andy's impressed me deeply with their earthiness and their gusty coping with the harsh realities of life, realities that are especially known by the down and outs of our society. I cannot help that believe that God himself had a special affection for that place. He would have enjoyed each and every tale of woe and promise and found something of himself in each and every person there. Their lives were such a pot-pourri of goodness and wisdom, tempered by the brute numbness of factory labor and the unfairness of the way things "are" when the lack of power and money afflict human life.
The above had a claim upon my reflections concerning graduate studies and the world of "higher" theory. To this day, I still find myself trying to establish and hopefully live the connections between academic theory and the protean world of the diner. The warmth and variety of that diner stemmed from its immersion in the "real" world. There was something sacramental to it all in that those people sustained qualities that were good and deep. They gave me something that made me think about and long for the truth and the experience of God. That diner never let me down, its richness never disappointed me. I cannot describe the feeling of such profound peace that I knew on those mornings when I would arrive before dawn, sit at the end of the counter and meditate. Seeing the milkman come in, then Chelsey, then a local policeman reminded me how we are all drawn to some essential goodness in life and that that place somehow had it.
Can the organized religions learn something from that little diner? Religiosity certainly was not explicit there in terms of language and ritual, but it was there. What used to so get my wheels going was the perception of institutionalized holiness that those people carried with them as a part of their "worldview". Whenever a topic came up that involved the bantering about of God or church, I could easily pick up feelings of indifference, disappointment or anger. The various constellations of institutionalized faith did not really mean that much to them and had somehow alienated them. They did have an understanding of the formal religiosity, its politics and removal from an underside of life in which they experienced themselves as living in.
In my heart, I know that their feelings were near accurate. To some extent, a significant dimension of the church had removed itself from their experience and created a world that looked "at" them, as I found myself doing morning after morning. Some of the characteristics that they sensed as belonging to the world of structured belief systems that they looked at and resented, indeed felt betrayed by, were pious attitudes, abstract or removed concerns, clericalism and at root a resistance to live in the real world, their world. They were and are the world of labor, of nonrecognition, of commuters, diners, bus stops: the world that the institutionalized religious concern attempts to convert by exhorting and sermonizing and yet a world that provides the fresh and raw life from which religious meaning must draw its sustenance for reflection. It is the world from which we all "emerge" and a world which religious specialists would do well to remember.
I felt so at home in that diner. In many ways, the friendliness of the people there enabled me to be more patient with the limitations inherent in the institutional church. From my own experience, rectories can be lonely and heartless places. In the diner I did find a sense of companionship and support that drew me there for five years. But that patience did not last.
I left the active ministry for a period of two years and since that meant relocating, I left the diner as well. I went to Europe for a while, returned to this country and found a job in Manhattan writing computer programs for a Wall Street firm. I bounced around quite a lot during that time, changing residences on least five occasions for as many reasons. My thoughts often returned to the diner and I would drive up there some weekends but felt out of touch. The lack of continuity was something that I felt happening in every area of my life and the memories of the diner as I had known it while living in the area were painful.
While working in New York, it was not too long before I found myself looking for as friendly a diner as I could find and indeed I found one. It was not really a diner but was more like a cafe, on the corner of Water and Pine Streets. Ironically, it was situated several blocks from a Catholic church. I stopped in there a few times for a visit on my way to the office. I stood in the back of the church and watched the long lines of daily communicants. The silence of the people there caused me to feel even lonelier and more estranged so I was elated when I discovered the cafe.
It did not take very long before I was repeating the same pattern as before, getting up earlier than I had to in order to spend some time sitting at the counter in the attempt to become a bit familiar with the people who frequented there. They were as pleasant and as interesting as those in Andy's, although Andy's did not have, as a rule, a counter full of secretaries, bankers and computer programmers. There was a waitress in the cafe whose name was Thelma. She exuded a sweetness and was obviously the place's favorite. I would marvel at her ability to remember names and conversations and slowly build a genuine and concerned relationship with the people there. Whereas I still ached for Andy's, I did feel that I was lucky to find a place where I was known by name and felt welcome.
After a year and a half, I felt that I had to make a decision as to whether or not to return to the "active" ministry. I really believe that my decision to return was in part a reflection of a need for a truer sense of community that I found in diners. There was hardly a morning at the counter that I did not feel a need to rethink the importance of what I needed in the diner and what the church, at its best, can offer.
I have been "back" for nearly nine years and they have not been easy. I could not really foresee, when I returned, the present malaise that has settled so firmly in seemingly every nook and cranny of American Catholicism. In short, I do not feel well these days about being a priest under the present regimes of Pope and bishops.
Not long ago, I experienced an acute pang of nostalgia and headed into New York to reclaim my seat at the cafe. When I turned onto Water from Pine Street, I saw that the cafe was all boarded up and I felt so at a loss. I wondered about Thelma and the other people I had come to know. I felt cheated out of another "base" of something good and resented the intrusion of one more rupture of a significant thread in my life..
On the way back, I thought about the church, the institutional church in particular. I really wish that the church could go through some sort of dislocation and that it could suffer whatever diners and commuters and factory workers suffer: the need to regroup and reexperience each other in a new place, a new diner. I do not mean to be insensitive to the pain of those Catholics in Detroit who are presently coping with the anguish of seeing their church buildings being closed but it may be the beginnings of a blessing in disguise, and a blessing that I hope somehow spreads.
I am convinced that as long as any institutional church has a guaranteed flow of incoming cash, the present malaise will not change very much. We will still have huge impersonal parishes where people are "fed" lifeless ritual and lousy homilies. With the increasing shortage of priests in the Catholic tradition, impersonality will flourish even more.
But there is hope, always hope. There are diners galore in Michigan and New Jersey. People are seeking cheap, good food, the intimacy of friendship, the refuge from the storm. There is an eternal need for the diner. If the church does go bankrupt in terms of personnel and cash, I would suggest that it collapses into diners all over the country. Bishops, remaining priests, gurus, ministers, rabbis and swamis could find spots at counters across the country and just listen, feel welcome and be friendly. There would be no dead rectories or manses to return to, nor would there be the need to return for ceremonies since there will be no congregation. They could go to work, to offices and factories, to schools and garages, to banks and computer terminals and discover each other in diners. And, please, do not look for sacred words or sacred rituals in such places. They are already there. No need to "point out" the religious significance of diners. That seems to function best when left unaddressed.
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| Mr. Cody |
| 03.14.05 (4:45 pm) [edit] |
There is a man named Robin Cody and he drives a special ed school bus in Portland, Oregon. He is also a writer. His essay, “Miss Ivory Broom,” is published in the 2004 edition of Best American Spiritual Writing.
Miss Ivory Broom is six years old, is confined to a wheel chair, has brain damage, and, as Mr. Cody writes, has the spirit and heart of a giant. Mr. Cody confesses that he is in love with her. He also writes of Jacoby, who arrived on the bus scene sullen, withdrawn and cantankerous. He was kicked out of his neighborhood school for defiance and for not trying. He told Mr. Cody that he hated riding with the retards. Then he sat next to Ivory Broom, and one day she dropped her tissue after blowing her nose and Jacoby picked it up and Mr. Cody saw the gesture and knew something good was afoot. As the days progressed, Jacoby began to change – he soon started to teach Ivory her numbers. Mr. Cody has watched them through his rear view mirror and is happy that he has seen a little boy’s heart grow. He was, in time, elected president of the bus by the other kids.
And there is Anthony, developmentally retarded; who was so happy when given a small dish of ice cream that he wet his pants.
And Ashley, who is brain damaged from a car accident in which her mother was killed.
Some of the kids come from achingly painful home situations. Mr. Cody knows that and realizes that the brief time he has with the kids can ease some of the pain in their lives.
Mr. Cody loves the kids and they obviously love him. And, wondrously, that love is shared among the kids.
It is a beautiful essay, about a beautiful gift – the human heart. Residing as it does in bodies that are damaged, or healthy, or young or old, it is the place that can make of a bus ride with damaged children something very close to Paradise.
We heard words about heart, about the encouragement of heart, in this morning’s first reading.
We look for heart our whole lives. We look to know it, to live from it, to receive it.
Jesus knew how important it was be of courage in matters of the heart – and so we know it is important to encourage each other to be of heart, to be of good heart.
It is interesting that Mr. Cody has won several awards for his writing, and was once director of admissions at a college and taught English at the American School in Paris. It makes me wonder why he is driving a bus of retarded children these days. I think he has found heart, and rides in it every day.
Susan Sontag once wrote that she could tell if a person was in love by the way he or she wrote. The prose, she said, was heightened by and enflamed by love.
That is beautiful.
And so is the wonder that hearts are burning with good things on a little bus in Oregon, where a man has found his treasure and children have found theirs.
It is easy to tell.
It comes through his writing. And it comes through very, very well.
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| My First Essay |
| 03.14.05 (4:41 pm) [edit] |
Some Thoughts on Blogging
I was reading a blog earlier today. It is written by a woman who is married and has two small children. She writes very well about what goes through her mind and heart. She writes about God, her neighborhood, her job, her family. She is faithful to making daily entries. It is interesting to see her thoughts move from one place to another. Her words – and the wonderful way she uses them – opens door after door to a life of a person I will never meet “in person.” But I find that I think of her, how she is doing on a given day, hoping that she is well.
She is generous with her perceptions. I like her use of detail – she has a “soft lens” she brings to bear on life. That is perhaps another way of saying she is soft hearted. She loves her husband, they have a dog, she worries about her mom, loves her children, she is anxious about the war and the deaths of so many young people. As I was reading her entries, it struck me how interested I was in an ordinary life on an ordinary street in an ordinary town. How is it that words have such a power to entice us to want to know more, to keep reading, to further explore where they lead us? I am reminded of something I read earlier today, from an entry in one of Diane Arbus’s journals, where she wrote something about Chinese wisdom – how something may at first seem very boring or even banal (like ordinary life) but stay with it a while and the mystery of the “there” begins to reveal itself. Any life is interesting. The use of words is a key to the door that opens the ordinary to the wondrous that lies just beyond its surface. A pen may scratch paper with words. And the words more than scratch the surface of the daily and repetitious – they bring out its charm, its beauty, its allure – precisely because it is ordinary.
Someone recently told me that they get bored with reading the Bible because having read it so many times, he knows what is coming. Those words have, for him, lost something of their power. I can understand that. But the power of Scripture is not in the attracting of one’s attention to what comes in the next sentence or in the next page. The Bible mirrors the ongoing narrative that is life. The Bible is a “telling” that there is a telling about everything we know and are. Words, as we use them in conversation and in writing, do not have to be charged in a special way to exert their power on a reader or a listener. It is natural for words to be at their best when telling a story that is interesting, engaging, forward moving. Life certainly is not boring – if told or spoken for what it really is. Life is not a bad story. Sure, there are people who cannot tell a good joke or a good story. But someone can come along and write a wonderful story about the most word-poor people. We are the stories. We need good story tellers. I am finding that blogs have these in abundance.
Some people return again and again to favorite books. Once riveted by their charm, the words do not fail to delight if read again.
A day is like an “again” of the day that preceded it, but with a significant difference. It is a new day. New things will happen. A new page is being added to the narrative, the “telling” that is human life. Many people will be too busy to read it very closely – which is okay, since they are a part of the very narrative that they may or may not choose to read about. But there will be people who do write – people who are fascinated enough by what is going on in their hearts and on their street to type away a paragraph or two or three and bring a slice of life to shared language.
God spoke, and there was life. He spoke again, and there was Scripture. Something of God is speaking everywhere.
A woman writes of her worries and loves and fears and something of God comes through her labors. And she shares them, which is something God has done and always will do. It is the most important part of the story – that we share in God and God shares through us. There is indeed more on any street that meets the eye. Any street, any life, any day has more than we can ever say about it. How generous words are – to let us catch a glimpse of what comes our way day in and day out. Our days pass – but we can keep the best of them through what we write and say and remember. It is a lovely way to word life. It is something that God does, too.
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