Month: December 2020

“What have you been promised?”

That was the question posed in my morning meditation. After a few minutes of reflection, I didn’t have an answer. Which was not necessarily a negative result – just an honest appraisal of my general awareness.

What have I ever been promised?

Over thirty years ago, my wife and I shared vows before both a judge and a priest. Those count, for sure. Others?I’d like to think that my children will never disconnect from my best attempts at love but there is no guarantee of that, especially given the experience that I have seen other parents encounter.

Shortly after my birth, an aunt and uncle stood before my parents, a priest, and the Almighty and promised to complete my religious training should anything happen to my parents. I don’t recall the event of course but, having served a similar role for a nephew and niece of my own, the oath, while important, is a blend of ceremony and cautious commitment.

Other examples? Upon completion of medical school, I swore an oath related to my new profession – but that was a promise I made to a set of principles, not an assurance extended me on behalf of or by those principles.

Has the universe ever offered me any clear and credible pledges?

I cannot recall any, at least none that I have understood as absolute guarantees. There have been plenty of explanations and relativistic arguments, most based on a Judeo-Christian ethos and western moral tradition. I don’t begrudge or belittle those perspectives: they sustain me, to be honest. They offer me respite from the anarchy of a restless mind. They provide ballast in the sometimes stormy seas of uncertainty, disappointment, and despair. However, none would qualify as something that I could proclaim as an unequivocal promise. Never has a voice audibly spoken to me from outside the bounds of expected sensory experience. At no time has a representative of this world, the next, or any existence enfolded between the two tapped me physically on the shoulder, looked me directly in the eye, or taken me actually by the hand and offered me a promise that my actions today are directly correlated with something later, that everything and everyone I care about will be “ok”, that my time here, now, with you, is meaningful.

I am embarrassed by that statement, not because isn’t true but rather because it somehow doesn’t seem like the full truth. I feel exposed. I am sure that I am wrong. It’s just that I cannot be certain about my error. What am I missing?

If your answer is faith, I must object: faith is from me, not the Godforce. While enormously comforting, and often inspiring, my belief in a spiritual power greater than myself seems best construed as an oath made be me – not the other way around. The Creator is under no obligation to heed my prayers. And heaven knows that I have, in the course of my decades, offered my fair share of them. Many for others, plenty for me, a smattering for general precepts such as peace and common decency – I have dropped ample wishes into the well of unspoken offerings. Although a goodly number have seemed to reach a kindly cosmic ear, I should not interpret that apparent success with any assurance of future results. My vision into how the world works is miniscule. My gathering trust in the grace of God and the hands of their mercy cannot be confused with any sort of assurance extended to me. A cell on a finger typing these words can sense that something grand and marvelous exists outside its walls. That cell cannot possibly understand its role except by being that role.

Enter a memory. The writer and theologian C.S. Lewis once offered perspective on prayer in a beautiful four stanza poem. The essence of Lewis’s perspective on prayer is that God does not engage us in dialogue when we pray. There is no you, hey there, God and me, over here, human. Because, as Lewis explains, “while we seem/ two talking, thou art one forever, and I/ no dreamer but thy dream”.

Lewis’s poem on prayer speaks to me now. Am I, when I open myself to the divine, the expression of that divine? I honestly do not know the source of my ideas. Long ago, I stopped trying to explain where a thought might arise, especially if that thought was of someone or some thing that just appeared within me and, when noticed and acted upon, such as a phone call or text to a friend, encountered the response of “I was just thinking about you!”. That example seems trivial, I realize. Yet it is part of my everyday experience to ask for help on some issue and, usually, at some point in the not-too-distant future, to receive that help. The assistance often comes in unexpected forms, some of which are not without discomfort and pain. But the ask-and-receive pattern is noticeable. I may not like the medicine I receive when I ask for help. I do, however, receive it – especially when I ask without a specific outcome in mind.

So what have I been promised?

My fingers hesitate over the keys. There is a sense within me, somewhere, without place, of what I want to – what I need to – type. It is just this: promises offered are promises made. If I can make a promise to open to the Godliness within and behind and suffused through our world, I am, somehow, the recipient of that promise. My witness to the beatific is an audience with the holiest of vows. My oath to the divine is, somehow, inextricably, the divine’s promise to me.

You and I – we may be bound by, released to, and cradled within our pledges to the sacred gifts of kindness, forgiveness, and love.

It seems, after all, that I have been promised much.

Our Creator moves through us.

Or so it is said. I read and pray and listen and believe that the immutable force we call God, Allah, or Yahweh, the pulse of being behind and within both the everyday and the extraordinary, the energy flow for good, for betterment, for being, the guiding influence that binds and unites, that this presence and power for tomorrow moves through me today, like it moved through you yesterday, and I am humbled, amazed, and sometimes, regretfully, resistant. Because I am a poor conduit for the Almighty, an unreliable channel for universal love. Pettiness and internal conflict, disapproval and external judgement, doubt and easily fatigued faith – these things course through my veins and neural junctions with more frequency than I would like to acknowledge. My penchant for selfishness, for viewing the world through the lens of my own needs and experience, seems unbounded. Glimmers of something greater than my own ego occasionally shine through, yes. But these rays of release are too easily enshrouded by the clouds of self-consciousness. If the Creator needs me to do her work, if God depends on me for reliable daily performance of his holiness, than our collective purpose seems in peril. For despite the occasional best of intentions, I am a flawed and inconsistent contributor to the common good.

Last spring, I sent a message to an elderly Catholic priest who befriended and supported my father during his last years of life. A monsignor by rank, this gentle soul has an Irish wit and a calming wisdom. He also has the same last name as I do. We are common descendants from the same brick makers who helped build sections of west Philadelphia. And we possess similar flawed pride in the knowledge that, one hundred years ago, bricks were occasionally made with the outline of the family name on the front of some bricks. In fact, just prior to my father’s death, the Monsignor had told me that he had one.

“Please tell the Monsignor that I am waiting to see that brick,” I texted another of my dad’s friends, someone who spends regular time with the semi-retired priest. It was one Irishman’s way of teasing another, an only slightly serious probe enwrapped within a deliberate twinkle of uncertainty. Did he really have one of this rare bricks? I had never seen one. And I frankly did not much care whether any bricks existed or he had one. I simply wanted to say hello and perhaps receive some sort of riposte to my thinly veiled disbelief in his claim.

Weeks passed, as did the memory of that text. And then, in the first week of May, the universe sent me its reply. A letter arrived from the Monsignor one day following a well-wrapped box. No – the Monsignor had not sent me a brick. Instead, his hand-written note mentioned the presumed loss of the brick, as it had been lent to someone who was, it seemed, unlikely to return it. More importantly, the letter extended me warm wishes and a kind outreach that my baiting message sent through an intermediary may not have deserved. Deeply enmeshed in the regional response to COVID19, and awaiting word on whether anyone would make an offer on the house my wife and I had just put on the market for sale, I was a bit distracted; I read the Monsignor’s letter but forgot, for a few days, to open the box.

My uncle, another Irishman with a penchant for humor, has the same name as the Monsignor. I say “has” because, despite his death three years ago, I like to imagine my uncle staying busy in the events of our world. It appears he does. “I sent you something you should have,” his widow, my aunt, texted me that week. It was nice of her to think of me but, really, I didn’t need anything – except perhaps to sell the house and avoid getting the coronavirus. And so Tuesday turned to Wednesday, and Wednesday slid through Thursday to Friday. I was warmed by the Monsignor’s letter, appreciative of my aunt’s outreach, and wondering if we had made a mistake trying to sell our house during a pandemic. I completely forgot about the box on the front porch.

Then I opened it. Yes – indeed – enfolded in a sea of bubble wrap I found a named brick from my ancestor’s Philadelphia brick yard.

“Where did you find it?” I asked my aunt on the phone. “You know your uncle,” she replied. “Who knows where he got it.” But – no – she did not know the Monsignor, nor was she aware of the running communication I had with him, nor knew of my gentle probing with the Monsignor about our common ancestors and the evidence of their constructive contribution to west Philadelphia. She had just found the brick in her yard the week before and decided that my uncle would have wanted me to have it.

Huh. Wow. I smiled and set the brick on the mantle. And, within twenty-four hours, we received an offer for our house.

This is a season when we celebrate deliveries: the renewal of daylight, the release from a rather terrible year, the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem, the birth of Christ. If you are like me, you may long for rescue, for a guarantee that somewhere, somehow life is more than “this”, that I am more than “me”, that you and I can be more than who, where, and what we’ve been. As I write this, I look at the brick sitting on the hearth of our new home. My heart glows under the evidence that the universe and all its mysteries are not to be bounded by the uncertainty of one single traveler in human time. And I sense that renewal, restoration, and renascence are always within our collective reach.

The Grinch had a problem: his heart was too small. And so, the story goes, he couldn’t experience joy. Worse than that, the Grinch could not tolerate it. It grated on the Grinch like nails against a chalkboard when the Whos in Whosville displayed public signs of wonder, peace, and forgiveness. Because like all the scrooges and humbugs of oral and written traditions, the Grinch was mean-spirited. Selfish. Close-hearted.

It is easy to feel a certain Grinch-ness in 2020. We all have ample reasons to gripe. The whole world is semi-justified to wallow in some self-pity, annoyance, and smallness of being.

And yet yesterday I heard the birds singing. While their song may have been more instructional or perhaps motivational (See it there, that twig? That’s the one! Please bring it here. Yes!), it was definitely comforting, reassuring. Nature and its cycles still encircle us. Trees in the northern hemisphere gird for winter. Sap that will rise in the spring feels assured. On the solstice, the sun and its daylight will once again begin their slow return.

Last month, on Thanksgiving, a few family members and friends tested a new tradition: a poetry yam. Not being prepared for a proper poetry slam, we punned on the seasonal food and gathered via zoom to read or recite from memory a small slice of truth oft nestled within the arms of verse. Today, on the eve of potential calamity from pandemic and social discord, my wife’s selection, The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, resonates. When I read the words of its remembrances, I can feel myself settle.

“when despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Still water often surrounds us. We have only to seek it out, to listen for its inaudible pulse, to feel its presence with our spiritual beings.

Have you heard about Hands across the hills, a dialogue about understanding and peace created by two communities in Kentucky and Massachusetts (https://www.handsacrossthehills.org)? Organizers from both communities were interviewed this past Wednesday by Don Berwick from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) during his annual keynote address (virtually-delivered) of the IHI Forum. The interview, and their story, is magical. People from vastly different communities, traditions, and political views crafted a conversation that has helped bridge divides. Even more impressive, people who might otherwise stereotype, avoid, and perhaps vilify each other have learned that they like, respect, and can learn to love one another – as human beings, as fellow travelers of this thing we call a lifetime, as people who sometimes “wake in the night at the least sound” and tax our lives with “forethought of grief”.

I feel great solace in the discovery of this inspiring project. I find sincere comfort in knowing that Wendell Berry – and perhaps you too – awake in the night at the least sound. I cherish the release available to us all, the rest and grace that is still ours to share, if we can only relearn and believe in the power of joy.

There is no shame for compassion shrunken from sadness, despair, and anxiety. From the soundless ripple of still water, however, it is time we collectively refind and refresh our common humanity, purpose, and spiritual poise. This December, yes especially this December and this year, let us feel the song of life singing all around us. Let us forget our reasons to be angry, hurtful, and small.

Let our hearts swell.