Month: July 2022

I don’t really understand spirituality. So I’ve taken to asking others how they define it. The answers are interesting. During a recent discussion, a colleague described it as the commitment to people, to others, and to connection. I like that: a commitment to connection. It allows the individual to decide what types of connection are most meaningful, for them. It gives space for exploration.

The recent days have had plenty of opportunity for spiritual exploring. My sole remaining uncle passed away this week, not unexpectedly but not fully scheduled either. He wasn’t much for schedules though. Sure, he kept them but Uncle H also seemed to follow a rhythm in life that was uniquely his own. His stories were the same way. He would start not at point A but instead at place K or L, and then proceed to make a tour of the alphabet in an order usually only he understood. We never knew where the story was going or when it was finished, if it did. The uncertainty added anticipation and charm to the telling.

It was not really a surprise then, at least to me, when my plans to travel to his funeral service bumped into a series of shifts and adjustments. Not blessed with my uncle’s gift for desultory gab, I will only note that I spent the hour of that service in another state and time zone – my own state and time zone. Unfortunately, physical frailty and a sleepless night prior to my planned cross-country travel contributed to last minute decision to mourn in place. A physical journey was not to be. I would seek to connect through an alternative channel.

During the pandemic, many churches and spiritual congregations learned how to use online tools for remote participation in services. Although no information about this option for attending the funeral was available, I decided I would try anyway, just in case the recently organized service in a small parish church for a pleasantly memorable man was perhaps live-streamed. I went online, early enough, then remembered a text I had received the previous day from my aunt. “The priest says he knows you,” she said. That seemed odd because I’ve never lived near that church’s community. But then she mentioned, in her text, that the connection was from grade school, a school I’d attended in another state. I recognized the name of the priest, vaguely at first, yet no image of face or childhood tale surfaced from the tattered mental flip charts and fragmented internal photo albums that make up my memory store.

It’s sad to forget so much. The thought took me, quickly, onto the various bicycles and school buses of my youth, speeding through old neighborhoods, school yards, and classrooms. He was there, I could sense him, just out of focus. But I couldn’t see him, not distinctly, not in a rickety parochial school desk, or a basketball game bench, or the line to get a pretzel after recess. Thinking of those pretzels reminded me how, after tearing around for thirty minutes atop a half-paved, half-grass-and-dirt patch of recess we would return to the classroom, slump atop sticky wooden desks, and wonder how we were going to explain the latest tear or stain in the gray pants that were standard school uniform. Lunch was over, our energies were spent, and there were still three hours of school left. Some older kids, boys who somehow were chosen to work for the school cafeteria, would appear at the back door of our classroom, yell “extra milk!”, and anyone with a dime for a milk or juice carton, or a nickel for a pretzel, would race to the back of the room, straining to see what was left, hoping that the kids whose seats were closest to the back door didn’t have any money or hunger that day. Boys sat on one side of the classroom, girls on the other. Because my name was toward the top of the alphabet, I always sat toward the front of class, and so had a longer way to go. It didn’t matter much though because I almost never had any money or, if I did, I often lost it somewhere out “there”, out beyond the fogged windows of the classroom, playing a frenzied game of “jail jail”. If you’ve never played “jail jail”, you probably won’t understand why white shirts and grey pants can get tears in them so often. You also may not get why, no matter how much lunch had been stuffed into the metal lunch box I brought to school, I could be really hungry or thirsty so soon after eating it. It bears noting that, despite my small frame, I used to eat a lot as a kid. We went through loafs of white Wonder bread in our house like they grew on trees. Obviously things that grow on trees are in abundance because all sorts of comparisons and references were made to such trees during my youth. Bread, money, new grey pants – none of them grew on trees, as my brother and I were reminded frequently by our mother when she was either making a pile of bologna sandwiches, searching for nickels and dimes in her purse, or trying to sew another hole in the knees of a grey pair of pants.

Isn’t it odd how we called pants a pair? Two legs sure. Two pockets that often sprang holes. But there was only one waist. You pulled the pants on through the same waist band. One zipper and one clasp. Language is strange that way, I guess.

The orange juice boxes were rare. If you were first to the back of the class room, and you were quick of eye and reach, you had a chance at grabbing the last one, assuming there were any left by the time the “extra milk” container was brought to the back door of the class room. Those of us with dimes would slip our heads into the crook of our arms, pretending to be deep in thought about the class lesson, one eye and ear cocked toward the back door and hallway. If it was hot outside, the door was usually open so that a breeze could waft through the room. That was nice, in the spring and end of summer, because classrooms without air conditioning could get really hot, especially after one or more students had made a heroic final dash through the crowded school yard, dodging and weaving students of all the years, hiding behind this group and that, trying to sneak and squirt through the scattered defense of the enemy team and tag the stretched fingers at end of the line of kids who were stuck in jail and needed to be -“RELEASE!”.

Some schools may have called the game “Caughty, Caught, Caught”, I’m not sure.

Extra milk, even chocolate, from a small wax carton was never the best, in my view, because it had been out of the refrigerator over the lunch period and didn’t have that crisp clean edge to it when you gulped it down. Even if a had a dime, and even if I made it to the back door of the classroom in time to have a chance at a choice, I could never bring myself to waste a whole dime on a soggy carton of whole milk with beads on moisture running down its sides, if all the orange juice was gone or what remained looked like it was seeping out of the seals of the waxed cardboard containers. If that happened, I would just sulk my way back to my desk, stuff my shirt back into my pants, and try not to listen to the sighs of satisfaction from other kids who had gotten extra juice or liked extra milk.

You may wonder how this relates to the church, its website, and Uncle H’s funeral service? Well the priest for the service was to be a former elementary school classmate, as I’ve said. He would then remember the cry of “extra milk!”, the noise of the school yard and the clanging bell ending recess, the game of “Jail Jail”, and the plight of the overheated student who desperately wanted a coolish carton of orange juice. Besides, viewed online, the priest’s contemporary parish seems similar to ours from over fifty years ago, long before we knew anything about “online”, as much in the parish’s humble attitude if not its physical form. The website announces summer work that is underway on clean-up, renovations, and various activities to ready the church and school for the new academic year. The parish also needs funds to help with that work. It seems little has changed over the decades.

The name of the parish led me on a series of internet learnings regarding a miraculous image of Mary and the Christ child. The priest’s story seemed equally magical. Only during his mid-life, following the sad death of his wife, did he decide to become a priest. His children had supported this decision. Now that news stopped me; I didn’t know that people who had been married were permitted to become ordained. I should say men, and not people, because women are still not able to become priests, another example of how some things remain the same in the Catholic Church. This priest’s story is fascinating. I tracked it across a series of websites once I put his full name into the search bar. They say we still look like ourselves, years later. I could maybe make out the face of a ten year-old classmate inside the photos I found of the priest following his ordination, his family surrounding him. That classmate still fell into the nebulous cloud of something labelled grade school, however, in the jumbled visual files of my mental past. Could he have been my brother’s classmate and not mine?

I think married men and women should be able to be ordained. I doubt I will live long enough to see this occur. Sooner or later though, Catholicism is going to have to face this reality.

Alas, my journey into this church and its priest, while interesting, had passed most of the time of my uncle’s service. I was not there, which saddened me. And nowhere in all of the webpage clicks and views had I seen a link for a livestream to Uncle H’s funeral. Resigned to the reality that the service was happening without me, I turned to my daily spiritual reflection, a series of internet-based readings and brief meditative inquiries, complete with gentle background music. That’s when I noticed a short email from my aunt, sent just hours earlier, telling me that the service for my uncle was available via livestream. What? I tried a new series of searches, with different keywords. This time I found it. Quickly, I joined the livestream, only to see the priest tidying up the altar and hear the echoing sounds of people leaving the church. In minutes, the livestream showed an empty church and altar. Then the stream ended.

“Has anything disturbed you today, even slightly?” That was the question I was asked to contemplate during the seven minute examen that I listened to immediately following my dismayed realization that I might have joined the service online after all. “Be with that”, I was gently advised. “Share with God what you are noticing.” “What do you need to help you live well?”

Words failed me. Nonetheless, I reached for some. It is said that spirit is what you feel when you aren’t trying to impress yourself with your own sense of spirit. Who said that I don’t know. Perhaps it was me, just now. Regardless, I felt sad and more than a little guilty. I felt I had let my uncle down, failed to represent my uncle’s pre-deceased brothers (my father and other uncle), and simply not shown sufficient fortitude in attending Uncle H’s service, in person or online. What did I need to help me live well? As I started into a spiral of self-doubt, my eye caught sight of a seated Buddha, positioned above a wardrobe in the bedroom. Usually facing directly outward, this morning the Buddha was turned slightly, seemingly angled specifically at me. “Too much ego,” my mom used to say about humans. The seated Buddha held a posture and poise which seemed completely at one with my mom and her observation. Too much ego. Optional worry and suffering. Unhealthy attachment.

My uncle always had a smile on his face. In photo after photo, he sports a host of grins and expressions. However, he almost always looked in a direction different than the lens of the camera, as if he saw something that inevitably grabbed his attention just as the photographer captured the image. It makes a person holding or considering one of his pictures wonder what was happening off-screen. All that off-screen activity seemed, as remarkable as this may sound, to be suddenly alive in the twelve feet of open air connecting the quiet Buddha atop the bedroom wardrobe and my request for help to live well.

“Extra milk!” I had made it to the back of the class room in time, could see a single tear-dripped carton of cool orange juice balanced atop a jumble of milk cartons. A dime from my mother turned in my fingers, connected to a yearning in my core for understanding, acceptance. Maybe I had attended the right service this morning after all.

It was the perfect nap.

A weekday. Late morning. Vacation. I was pretending to read while nestled in a lounge chair, enjoying a soft breeze beneath a large umbrella. A large body of water was visible but I was not seaside, stationed instead on the balcony of an airBnB facing south. My family had gone exploring the locale; I had conjured some excuse to remain immobile. The air was thick with summer humidity. Reclining to a near horizontal attitude, pillows beneath head, back, and knees, I set the book on the ground and let myself sink into the chair’s plastic arms and the layers of structure and strata separating my form from the gravitational center of our planet.

There are rests we take during our daily routine, most, such as sleep, done with scheduled regularity. There are also breaks imposed by situation or circumstances, often a result of sickness or injury. And then there is the occasional, unplanned, spontaneous siesta. The snooze. We don’t need to be anywhere or do anything. We aren’t worried about missing meetings or moments of waking consciousness. We relax into emptiness, an experience enveloped by the fullness of simply being. Time stops. We hover within that pause, empty of thought or intention or guilt or memory or remorse or joy.

When my father was twenty-three, he didn’t know where his life was going. Fresh from military service, he was searching for work, hoping to support his pregnant wife and their young son. College was a dream, or perhaps more a general consideration; his father had enrolled in university only to leave as a result of the Great Depression. But the year was now 1958, the city of Philadelphia was growing, and possibilities were different. Optimism hung in the air like morning dew. A bright person with ambition could accomplish things. A family without means or inheritance could advance. Employment, education, happiness, and self-sufficiency seemed ripe for the taking. Then a stranger sneezed in Dad’s face.

“I was waiting to use a phone booth,” he once told me. “A guy was in the booth. He hung up the phone, opened the door to leave, and sneezed. I didn’t have time to react.”

The 1950s had benefited from science. New gadgets were possible for the home. Government agencies were building rockets for space. Medical researchers had even developed a vaccine against the scourge of polio. Dad had tried to get that shot, only to be told by three doctor offices that they were either out of vaccine or were prioritizing what they had for children.

“Who knows if that was how I got it – polio. It’s something I remember though. Just like it was yesterday. A direct hit.”

A week or so after the phone booth encounter, my father lay in a hospital, struggling to breath, unable to move his legs, desperate to stay off a respirator. “I thought that if I got put on that iron lung I would never get off it. So I just decided I wasn’t going to let them put me on it. That was a long couple of days. One night seemed endless. Each breath felt like it required every ounce of my strength.”

It’s strange what we remember in life, what we forget, how some things happen, how other things never come to pass. We carry our pasts like packs stuffed with unique assortments of experiences, fears, insecurities, and memories. Those packs are attached to us, welded, it seems, to the frames of our years. When do we ever take them off? How?

“I remember you trying to walk,” I told Dad years later, shortly before he died. “You had those old steel arm braces. You used to lean forward on them and rise up from your wheel chair, your legs dangling beneath your waist. Or at least you did it once, while I watched.”

Dad just looked at me, the decades of our days stretching limply behind the gentle hold of his sky blue eyes.

“That’s interesting,” he exhaled, pursing his lips.

“Why?”

“Well – ” he gulped a series of shallow breaths, working air into his lungs through chest and neck muscles weakened by a condition known as post-polio syndrome, “I – never – was able to – uh, do that.”

I held my own breath. “You never stood up using braces?”

Slowly, his gaze never leaving mine, Dad shook his head. His Irish heritage danced playfully across his brow. “I like – that you remember – it though.”

No remembrances of times past clouded my nap one June day this summer. The universe cupped me silently in its gentle hands, asking nothing, offering everything. I felt accepted by the rhythm of life’s unlabored respirations. All ego, all worry, all sense of identity were suspended within the tidal flow of my own shallow breathing. The fullness of here balanced effortlessly on the tip of time’s scales. I might have been a cloud, or a blade of grass, or a dust mote floating in a beam of sunlight. I could have been a paralyzed father leaning against rickety arm braces or a son watching something that same paralyzed father never did. I could have been any or all such moments of cosmic reflection. I could have been none of them.

It didn’t matter. My lack of measurable matter was meaningless. Because the buoyancy of life’s bounty is boundless. Moments of pure being are perfection embodied. And perfection, once embodied, always loses its form.

When swimming in the waters of history, it is good to understand the currents.

Recent problems with my joints began on St Patty’s Day. As if some switch had been thrown in my internal system control room, pain and swelling suddenly appeared in my feet, followed by pain in my ankles, knees, and elbows. I dutifully documented in photographs what I could, all the while scouring the recent medical literature on adult onset inflammatory arthritis, gout, and related conditions. Specialists were consulted. Various tests were ordered, of both the radiographic and laboratory variety. My clinical picture did not precisely fit a single diagnosis. Results from testing failed to confirm a specific condition responsible for my discomfort, fatigue, and tenderness at diverse tendo insertion points. “The edges of these bones are different,” I complained. A few eyebrows lifted. Full facial reactions from physicians were hidden behind their masks.

“It’s something,” my primary care doctor told me. We sighed together, knowingly. Something is a very unsatisfying diagnosis.

“You may not want to set your expectations too high.” That advice came from my youngest daughter, the day before I was to see the subspecialty expert at a medical mecca. I was convinced that a highly tuned clinician with decades of experience could listen to my story, manipulate an extremity or two, and confidently render an opinion. Impressively, my daughter (who herself has inflammatory arthritis) was right: the master clinician gave me an official diagnosis of “arthralgia” (or joint pain), bringing me no closer to a complete identification of my circumstance.

My wife (C) has decades of her own experience. “You should start an anti-inflammatory diet,” she counseled. She shared information with me about herbs and natural remedies that have been shown to improve symptoms of people with rheumatoid arthritis. I told her that I needed to wait.

“I don’t have a diagnosis,” I explained. “I can do all that when I know what my diagnosis is.”

“You’re limping all around,” she replied. “What more of a diagnosis do you want?”

She was right, of course. But I was not to be swayed from my purist course of investigation. Besides, some part of me needed vindication, validation. My joints hurt more than they swelled. The ridges that I felt as new did not seem to impress the physicians to whom I reported the change. I had pain out of proportion to findings.

“I’m not making this up,” I grumbled.

“No one is saying you are,” C answered.

They are, I thought, not so much in words as in attitude. Why couldn’t I have something that clearly fit a pattern so I could just move on with treatment and with my life?

Alas, my health path is not one paved with predictability. Just as things worsened, right as I was prescribed a medication known for its general immune system suppressing power, I accompanied C for a booster COVID vaccine. The first three vaccines had left me with two days of fever and aching; I expected more of the same, layered atop a progression of arthralgia that now included my sacroiliac spine. What the heck, I reasoned. I might as well get maximum immune protection from COVID before starting the new immune suppressing medication. So I rolled up my sleeve to a second booster injection, resigning myself to a week of post-vaccine symptoms prior to a possible longer period of side effects from medical treatment for a still uncertain form of arthritis.

“How do you feel?”

Two days after the booster shot, my response was “pretty good, actually”. Four days after the shot I observed that my joint symptoms seemed to be much improved. A week after the injection I felt the best I’d been in months.

“Maybe I should get one of these boosters every month,” I quipped.

Today, some six weeks after the vaccine booster, the ridges on my joints remain, as do some joint and tendon insertion point discomforts. Overall, however, things are better. I never did start the new medication. And I have decided to take C’s advice of following an anti-inflammatory diet, despite not having a clear diagnosis. My goal, it is clear, is not to demonstrate to a medical professional, or a family member, that I have “something”. It’s to feel better, to live better. My search for a specific diagnosis – a name – had blinded me to the real purpose of seeking evaluation and care: improvement.

We live in turbulent times. Political borders have been breached, internationally. Personal boundaries are violated, domestically. Bullets fly, bodies and precedents fall, and we watch, seemingly paralyzed, as seas rise, rivers run dry, and temperatures flare. Acrimony rains upon global civilizations like a monsoon of unrepentant barbs flung from unseen mountain tops. We entrench ourselves in the language of opposition, of certainty. We empower pundits to prognosticate the odds of our survival.

But we forget that the tidal charts of history have recorded such chaotic discord before. For millions of millennia, the earth and its galaxy have rolled through spacetime, sustained, it would seem, by the momentum of the infinite rather than the constrained myopia of the individual life forms. Only recently have the waves of change been influenced by human behavior. And yet what an impact has that behavior had on the planet and its ecosystems! In a relative sliver of time’s totality, we have emerged, stood upright, and developed capability commensurate with localized consciousness heretofore not embodied as it now resides within the form of homo sapiens. We have recorded and charted, memorialized our observations and the effects of our actions. What came before us and why? We make estimates. We lies ahead and for whom? We act as if we have no control. Visitors within our own awareness, we await some type of external guidance – a celestial diagnosis, so to speak, of our condition – before we are willing to assume responsibility and accountability, before we are properly confident of our ability to act, to make change, to serve as stewards of life in the Milky Way.

All the while, the answers are right there – in the history we have recorded over the past few thousand years. Like a tidal chart, we can predict how the gravitational push and pull of unchecked force will swell and recede over the shorelines of our governments and their borders, of our social structures and their tolerances. We don’t need to wait for some external expert opinion; it is possible for us to move with the currents and tides of our latest turbulent time through humble learning from our past, innovative responses for our future. We need not succumb through inaction to the horrors of ego, power, and greed. We can paddle, we can proactively propel ourselves, into the slipstream of a more positive current if we but choose to do so, guided by the charts and oars in hands.

And who knows what surprises may await us? Just when we think we may most need some panacea, some rescue, some new social formulation to blunt the uncontrolled power of our auto-destructive tendencies, we may discover that a simple action, such as a routine boost of purposeful insight, will bring unexpected benefit. Just when we think we are lost, we may realize we still have a chance to be found.

Our contemporary condition need not be definitively labelled for it to be dramatically helped, if we might only release our energies to an alternate current of our future.