The Response

Beginnings are not easy.  For God.  For anyone.  Picasso was quoted to have said something along the lines that with every act of creation is an inherent act of destruction. 

 

Toastmasters in Fargo.  A new member arrived from St. Louis.  He spoke from the heart.  He was about 40.  And I wanted to speak like him.  By the time he arrived, I might have been 24 at the oldest.  I just didn’t have it within me at the time, to speak as he did.    

 

Larry Gillick.  He had been over to dinner a few times.  Okay, twice.  My mother heard him talk for the first time as a retreat master while driving back from a graduation.  He has a website which featured a retreat he gave, perhaps in 2006, in St. Paul a few weeks earlier.  It was about Advent.  And about the sacramentals.  Three years later, my mother still doesn’t get it.  Libraries.  My father’s.   She sold his books about 8 years ago.  Last night she now was discussing giving the ornaments away.  The signs of love.  To a charity.  Giving the ornaments and their meaning away.  To strangers.  The sacramentals.  The signs of love.  The years.  Some of them gifts.  Meaningless to others.  My mother doesn’t get it.  The significance of life.  In the ornaments. 

 

My favorite novel written in the last 30 years is Sophie’s Choice.  It seems a bit autobiographical.  William Styron seems to throw himself in a voice in the 1^st person, living as a southerner in New York after World War II.  The main character was working as an editor, trying to write on his own.  At a very young age.  But he never quite had anything yet to say.  About life.  Yet.  He had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour. 

 

To find something to say.  And then how to say it.  It did not happen just by graduating.  Poet Mary Oliver asks the question in her poem, “A Summer’s Day:” “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  It takes a while to make the discovery. 

 

I had given a book to a 40-year-old brother-in-law who no longer reads for pleasure, I heard before the gift openings began.  It takes a while to make the discovery, for the news to spread. 

 

On Christmas Eve, my mother got a calendar from 2 of her grandkids last night.  Her youngest grandkids.  The 2009 calendar included photos of a 2 year-old and 4-year-old.  In the calendar, their paternal grandmother is Miss Ocotber in 2009.  And Miss October might not make it.  In the last 30 days she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.  She might have known when she was here last fall.  It takes a while to make the discovery, for the news to spread.  She had driven more than one thousand miles, by herself.  In each direction.

 

It takes a while to make a discovery.  And then know how to respond appropriately.  I thought of that during midnight Mass.  A woman has 8 months to think of her response to a pregnancy.  The first pregnancy must present the most concern.  My sister gave me a gift within the last 2 years of Your Labor of Love, a spiritual companion for expectant mothers written by Agnes Penny.  I have no idea why.  Maybe she thought I was going to become a counselor.  I looked at one chapter.  “Toward the end of a pregnancy, most of the excitement has vanished.”  At some point a sense of panic sweeps in.      

 

To find something to say.  And then how to say it.  Stage fright.  Panic.  A response.  Stage 3 breast cancer.  I asked someone how many stages there were.  The answer was 4. 

 

Looking for a point to view.  The Old Testament.  Ten million years of creation.  Still the sense of being alone.  To have the syrup but it just wouldn’t pour.  The years.  The significance of each year.  The meaning in the stories of the Torah.  The New Testament.  The significance of the insignificant.  People with shared ideas.  People with a common past to begin with.  Family.  The sense of being alone.  One thousand miles, by herself.  In each direction.  Thinking of something to say. 

 

The language in the liturgy.  “Behold!”  Touch this sentiment.  Behold.  Because suddenly God was putting the care of His son to humanity.   He alerted the shepherds that one of their own had come.  What was David?  Behold the sentiment.  But you had to know the family, their story.  The suffering.  The suffering was the mortar. 

 

A question of voice.  In memory.  In memoirs.  That jump up and grabs you. The response.  The fear that the future was left in my hands. 

 

Behold the Lamb of God.  Come and behold Him.  In awe.  Be touched.  In the present.  In search for something to say.  And then how to say it.  To give thanks and praise for everything.  For everyone.  Loved ones.  The reality of it all.  Now.  Christmas.  Of life.  Of death. 

 

Endings are not easy for anyone.  For God.  For his son.  For this family one thousand miles away.  How to respond. 

 

Every act of creation involved an inherent act of destruction.  Unless you believed in the Resurrection.

Glorious Morning Muffins

 
It was the start of a new day. With a cup of the best tea in the world, Taylor and Harrogate. All week long I had been eating “glorious morning” muffins. From Jerry’s Super Market.

I had chosen this day a mug I was given from the Jesuit Retreat House at DeMontreville. The mug was stained by the tea inside. Not badly. But often I had to work at it to remove the tea stain. It reminded me a bit of myself over the year. DeMontreville was the place I had spent one weekend over the past 14 years, on retreat. A lot of stuff happened there. Quietly. And I ended up there by accident. I never knew that I was in for 4 days of silence.

The word “accident” is both statutorily and judicially defined. The word ‘accident’ is construed to mean an unexpected or unforeseen identifiable event or series of events happening suddenly, with or without human fault, and producing at the time objective symptoms of injury. For the purposes of this case study, the statutory definition is appropriate.

An accident? The synopsis was, based on credible testimony, something like he slipped from grace, fell in the mud or in some horrible pit, and felt a pull. In his groin, in this case, and the human race and humanity had been trying to recover ever since. Such is a sudden, unforeseen incident with objective signs of injury. The accident caused the pre-existing defect on the right side of the claimant’s groin to become symptomatic, requiring some kind of repair. And because of the surgical repair, the supplicant is limited in lifting and bending and has lost some ability to achieve all possible human potential.

In 1989 I had to spend some vacation days or lose them. I flew to London to Christmas shop. At this time of year I often recall the Saturday night I had dinner alone in a London restaurant. A couple was out dining at the next table. And a woman of about 30 was telling her significant other how much she hated Christmas. Hers had been a secular life. The UK was just slightly ahead of the United States as to where the world was moving. There was stress in her family. I now know a lot more people like her than I had at the time. But for her the holidays were painful. Stress was not wanting to be in the place she would be spending time.

For me Christmas was an exciting time. It was an accident for the most part. The original Christmas. Certainly this was an unexpected or unforeseen identifiable event, except to a handful of people. And my beliefs also were an unexpected or unforeseen identifiable event or series of events happening, based upon the environment where I grew up. I had no real choice. I have kept following what I was born in to. Other people get knocked off horses. Every baby was born suddenly, with or without human fault. Without any belief. I actually barely made it through that first day. Life was like that.

When it came to belief in God, there were different degrees of witnesses, bystanders, participants. And I have come to hear of the pain in life, of those with doubts. Whether there is a God. Those with doubts about people. Those with doubts about themselves. When I returned from the UK I spent the Friday night before Christmas in a Chicago pub. Either Red Kerr’s or Jameson’s at the corner of Clinton and Adams. Only this time I was with 3 coworkers, approaching the pain of Christmas. One was an agnostic from Omaha. Another a graduate of a Catholic high school and Northwestern. And the third an Irish Catholic from Detroit, with a Jesuit education. But the latter friend, the oldest guy present, had lost his faith. And there was voiced pain in his struggle as he approached his mid-thirties. And he wanted to discuss his own wrestling match with God. Maybe because his struggle ostracized him from people he loved.

I have a long time friend from high school who is going through the same struggle. But his faith struggle is accompanied by clinical depression. He has dropped out of the social circles we had shared. And in his case it was sad to see the affect on relationships he had had since the age of 14.

Last night was the last curling match for 10 days. And last year’s skip came to substitute. He is a retired school teacher. With a parochial school education. He said as the evening wore on that he wished he had had a public school education. And it turned out that he was one of many at war with a God they once had believed in. And his battle had started over the last 12 months. The other Irish Catholic at the table, from the other team, was frightened by the discussion, departing the discussion expressing his fear to extend a Merry Christmas. The skip wanted to talk about it. He said he goes to Mass with his wife. But he has started to watch at the communion. The skip, this friend, with great doubt, but who loves the church he still attends across the river. This friend with great belief in a political party, in social justice, and with great hope in the next president. But without really offering an answer “why.”

Why social justice, without belief? Social justice without belief seemed to me superficial, like going through the motion. Fleeting. A lot like wealth. A lot like beauty. It seemed good at the time and then one day it was gone. Like good health. Like life. I asked about the issue of evil in the world, about trust, about people like Mr. Maddoff, when you had no belief system to substitute what had been there.

It was inevitable. Endings, that is. The world had awakened in 2008. What had we done with wealth? The wealth that had all suddenly vanished? Ended. And now, what would we do with social justice? And could we afford social justice in difficult times if we could not afford it over the last 20 years? This was earth and, it seemed to me, no one could believe in perfection.

At the only time that the world pauses to celebrate God’s arrival, his was a struggle this year. With doubt. Men and their need for answers. Sensitive men. Was it anger over endings. The end at retirement age was visible and it came so fast?

Of evil. Of goodness. Of music. The mystery in people. My skip had given up curling this season for singing in a choir. He was still wrestling. I was not sure how often he spoke about it to people. He seemed to like the chance to talk. He chose the topic.

Men and their need. To know the relationship between matter and gravity. In sport. Chasing the wisps of smoke. In music. Wanting to hold onto a note. Wanting pure air. As in days gone by. When there was, in days of youth, belief. Something solid. Before residual soreness had set in.

So who was this God that my friends were looking for? Who got this single girl pregnant? Her name was Mary. And only Mary really knew who was responsible. Who could believe her? The divine? Who could believe in His silent presence? She needed a husband or she likely would have been stoned to death in those times. What a lover! Most girls would have left him right then. The divine. Almost silently, God had visited. And as I recall only in her sixth month. What a guy. And then! And then in her 41st week of gestation, He forced her to make a trip to Bethlehem. The divine. Always and everywhere.

This to a woman God had professed love. Who was looking for a God like this? For someone who had believed, looked what happened! Then almost silently to the world, the Messiah had come. A God who seemed to be Father, treating his own beloved during the pregnancy, in violation of the letter of the Hippocratic Oath where physicians do not deliver their own babies or treat family members. Not even in a decent room, for God’s sake! When induction of labor occured, naturally. In damn Bethlehem. Not with any kind of warmth. In the dark. Joseph’s hands had to be cold, if he could see anything at all. (Because God had just really never made an appearence, until now?) In damn Bethlehem. Mary had to be thinking that. You did not hear many homilies criticizing God. That was why I loved Judaism. And Mary was a Jew.

And it got worse. Like Passover. Almost silently, the Messiah had come. And almost silently the Chosen People had better fly out of there. Like Passover. And those damn plagues. Mary and her new family had better take flight before the Messiah got too comfortable. It was as bad as getting kicked out of a hospital these days after any illness. Always. Everywhere. Unconditionally. To go about your routine was to too often ignore the prevalence of love in the course of the day.

No wonder these guys I knew had doubts in God. Like the struggle of every young guy, trying to communicate something. God seemed to have His with a girl. Or the struggle every person has with belief in each other. Have you ever had to tell a girl you loved her? And in most cases, there was a damn good chance she did not believe you. And to tell a lover like God that you love Him? I always expected the same response. From God. From the girl. And if by some miracle you feel like you have developed some knowledge of this God, or the girl, well I still did not feel real confident in my profession of love. I somehow always feel like I have fallen short. In what I have done and what I should have done. That was the human condition. That was the male condition in any relationship. To feel you have come up short. And say some pretty dumb things.

It reminded me when I used this DeMontreville mug with the coat of arms of Ignatius of Loyola, that I needed space like a cave to go into, in retreat from the world. To think of some kind of an action plan. Just like when I went Christmas shopping. To think about what to buy. To think about what to say. Because I should have done more. But who would not have doubts? After what He asked of, what he did to Mary.

It was not so much a season of hope as much as it actually was a season of true love. I was at another place, another location. To tell a lover that you love him/her. With gifts that actually meant something. About the present times. About the lover. The one that you had come to KNOW. Even though the human condition was to feel like you have fallen short. Maybe because 10 million years after creation, after dealing with people all this time, even God had come to have doubts. But as in any relationship, an everlasting one, you kept celebrating. A true love. And you kept trying. With this tea and the “glorious morning” muffins. And with a desire for more. The human desire, a divine desire, for more.

Merry Christmas.

Names

 
Bringing people together. Names. Politics. Religion.
Whom you were related to: For the Irish, it still seemed all about relationships.

The dialect was always heard from those far away. Family and friends never heard it. Unless you moved to a place far away. But others heard the dialect. Every day.

Faith, belief, religion was some kind of inner voice, unnoticed in daily life, silent to me, like some kind dialect. But apparent to others.

Religion.

Ireland was one of the first European countries in which a system of fixed hereditary surnames developed. Up to the tenth century, surnames in Ireland were not hereditary. Or so I read over the weekend. The church was the origin of a lot of those names. If you ever studied Gaelic, the influence of the church can still be seen in many common modern Irish family names, dating from the eleventh century. In the Irish language, the morning greeting, “Dia duit ar maidin,” is literally “God be with you.”

Brian Boru, possessing no surname at the start of the eleventh century, was simply “Brian, High-King of the Irish.” His grandson Teigue called himself Ua Briain in memory of his illustrious grandfather. And so the name became hereditary thereafter. The church is the origin of all of those names starting with “Mul–” a version of the Irish Maol, meaning bald (applied to the monks because of their distinctive tonsure). Thus Mulrennan (Ó Maoilbhreanainn) means “descendant of a follower of St. Brendan.” Names beginning with “Gil–” or “Kil–” (the anglicized version of the Irish Giolla) mean follower or devotee, and thus Kilkenny means “son of a follower of Cainneach (Saint Kenny).” Though common in English, place names among Irish names, in the toponymic category of a name derived from a locality name, are extremely rare. For the Gaels, whom you were related to has always been much more important than the place from where you came. Such was life on an island. The island.

Cainneach. Kilkenny, the capital of the Irish Confederacy. The Irish Confederate Wars. The conflict in Ireland which essentially pitted the native Irish Roman Catholics against the Protestant British settlers and their supporters in England and Scotland, over who would govern Ireland.

Pilgrimage. Looking for roots. Connected to the past. The descendants. In cemeteries. At Ellis Island. In Irish churchyards. Connected to a family. Connected to a city. Connected to an institution.

In 1994, I visited Rathdowney. In southwest County Laois. It is near Kilkenny. It was quite small. To get out of town I needed to catch a morning bus. I found myself on a Saturday killing an hour at a pub. Mrs. O’Malley’s. With Irish coffee. But no booze. There were 3 area farmers in the pub. And in came a 40-year-old man from Philadelphia. He had been in here before, he said. He asked the barkeep if Mrs. O’Malley was around. She came out. She had no recollection of the Yank who had been here once before. His family once lived around these parts. Those American dialects all sounded a like. The Yank brought in his mother from the car. And then they were gone. The Irish farmers then reacted. “Ah, Mrs. O’Malley! It is great to see you again!” It was about feigned friendship. “Ah! Looking for roots.” Doing the mock-erania. Then they realized I was there.

It was the end of the season. Ireland becomes like Disneyland all summer long. It was October. And these guys were happy the never-ending tourists were gone, and the season was at an end. O’Malley’s Pub was once again theirs. So many long-lost cousins. Too many.

Names. It is interesting to note that with the use of names since the 11th century in Ireland, only women were not for life tagged, in memory of an illustrious grandfather or grandmother. So while men vied for power based upon names, women seemed to concentrate on religion. They married and got new names. Throughout the world. Until the present age.

Now we live in the first era of western civilization where women were keeping their names. It was a sign of power. The governor of New York announced yesterday that Caroline Kennedy was willing to enter public life and public service, to vie for power.

Tonight there was a show on PBS about archaeology. Archaeologists were always looking. In excavation. Looking always for the past. In this case in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a city defined by the power of religion. The digging. In excavation, archaeologists looking for the historic Jesus.

Historic Jesus. It sounded like going through just another museum. Like a remnant from the dinosaur. For me anyway, those dinosaurs seemed so hard to believe in.

Never was there mention of the mundane. Just another museum. After a while, if you have seen one, you have seen them all. Oh, the sweat involved in the digging! For the past. In the real meaning from the past.

In the search for the answers, there seemed something missing. Sterile. With gloves on. Maybe the realness of the times, the stress, the conflict, the worry, the excitement, was missing in their search. Or the fear. They were looking to find a miracle. And there was something painful in the search. As painful to see as in the search I witnessed in the guy from Philadelphia, looking for something in O’Malley’s. As much as I enjoy history, places like Constitution Hall in Philadelphia leave me cold, unless I had read something and knew something about the place. I was not attracted long to this PBS show.

Historic Jesus. In Bethlehem? Hot in the desert. Cold in the night. How was the study by secular historians of Historic Jesus relevant? To the real Jesus. Human. Divine. Sharing and overcoming human suffering. His human relationships with other humans. How was he relevant to my life? Museums, artifacts, and European cathedrals. There was an mostly emptiness in the latter. Too many empty European cathedrals.

To find a place. Archaeology was looking for a place that people might be moved by their discovery. Looking for something missing? Looking in layers below, if not within, to be changed by their work place. Looking for the historic Jesus, to help find a modern miracle, for those who had missed the story, or missed a true relationship?

In the historic. To find a miracle? The annual revolutions always found me in a very different place. Searching for God. Now. This year. Listening for an inner voice. In search to whom you were related. Christian heritage. In Judaism. In Ireland. Or here. The constant digging. Or at O’Malley’s Pub.

It was the season about connections. Connections to family and friends. To come back each year. Like the seasons revolve. Changed by the mundane, in the annual revolutions of the sun. Of the food that was grown with sunlight. Sold in the food markets. By the power of the sun? The annual revolutions.

It was the season about connections. On December 24th, the reading which comes from Matthew, Chapter 1, is about the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. And so it goes…..Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah became the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Perez became the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab. Amminadab became the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Boaz became the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth. Obed became the father of Jesse, Jesse the father of David the king.

The Christmas lights. The mystery behind Christmas. This focus on the House of David. Keeping a name, taking a name, as a sign of power. The connection of the past to the present. The genealogy of.

Yet it was the humanity not of the male, but of Mary where God suddenly focused. God was like a guy falling in love. Suddenly. And changing all of His plans.

Wrestling

 

Most of the Catholic world, much less the remainder, is unaware of Mother Theresa’s every day grappling with her God.  She seemed to resolve the issue by activity, as a hurricane does, only doing mass reconstruction to the lattitudes and longtitudes where she struck.   

  

I attended a party Thursday evening with maybe 80 people where I did not know more than one or two people.  But in the course of the time I spent I met a classmate of one of my uncle’s.  Most of the crowd seemed well over 70-years-old.  There were at least 3 priests in attendence, at an age of 75-years.  I saw name tags of at least 3 others who did not show.

     

I met one guy who left the seminary the night before his ordination.  I spoke to a married priest whose public ministry was over after the age of 70.  And I spoke to one active  priest who made a comment about his own classmates, or people who he knew quite well from the seminary who had married. 

      

In 1960 ther were 53,796 priests who served 42 million Catholics.  Today the 66 million Catholics have 43,000 priests.   And most of them seem well over 60-years-old.  And you thought you were overworked when the company cut back and the work load remained the same.  The average priest at well over 60-years-old had ten times as many parishioners as the average Protestant pastor.  It was a lot harder to rescue that one lost sheep as the flock increased.  There were a lot of Catholic who discuss the issue of diminshing priests as if this was just another matter for talk radio, like public policy, bailouts, TARP, budget cuts.  If you knew any priests, you knew it was not just another issue.  The average priest in the U .S. was close to 65 years old.  When the  work load got too heavy, the normal response was to retire gracefully.  The greater response in love was service.  These older priest had served. 

 

The issue, the crisis, was about real people.  The central meaning of what human life was about was not the body but the soul.    

   

Since 1960, twenty thousand priests have left the active priesthood.  A priest I met yesterday said that the numbers reflect the challenge every young person of that age has in relationships.  “Just look at the statistics on divorce.”  What he knew from being in the seminary was that most priest were normal.  That was the beauty.  The story of priesthood in the last decade, in his case the last 2 generations, was not about sexual abuse.  It really was about how faithful the majority had always been.  To the rules.  The beauty had been in the humility to the rules.  Or you left. 

 

For the people who felt this was the most important aspect of their lives, the prohibition on all forms of sexual activity for single people, in all the lattitudes and longtitudes where the Roman Catholic Church struck, in mandated singleness for priests, was the challenge.  What does a 26-year-old really know, on the eve of ordination, on the eve of a wedding, about life or himself?  In a world where there were hurricanes each year?  At some point, a man realizes the basic human condition was loneliness.  A woman seems to discover that much sooner in life.   Why would God add this burden of loneliness as mandatory to any career?  That burden had never been mandatory in the first millennium. 

         

I knew one former priest quite well.  And since he left, he has done so many great things.  He told me last year of his own struggles.  He still believes in God.  He was just having trouble in his own life believing in Jesus.  That a human could come to earth and do all that was mentioned in the stories.  Or so he said.  I just listened.  I thought as he told his stories, if he really analyzed his life, he was angry at his God who had not allowed him to continue to do what he had loved to do all along.  If left on his own, he told me in confidence, he would not attend Mass.  He went because his wife did and she loved to go.  What I really heard him say was that being in church for him was like being a tycoon in a poor farm.  Since he told other stories about preaching once in a synogogue before Vatican II, it seemed to sound like a punishment to someone who had his fortune stolen by the rules which seemed so unfair.   He had been more than good at what he did. 

         

A man with a fire.  Just struggling himself these days where to share the warmth.  There were a lot of people at war with a God they believed in.  What to do with belief?  To give life meaning, a purpose beyond the mundane?  Meant to do great things.  Born with a personality that attracted a crowd.  A golden voice.  And a vision to go with it.  What these guys had done in their lifetime to spread the faith.  To create something here.  It is said that the religious do not burn out like health care professional, based on surveys.  At least it had been true in the past. 

          

Low morale is a major concern in the restructuring of an organization.  When workers, great workers, were asked to do more work.  With no increased pay.  A lot of people have heart attacks from stress, from being asked to more than the human body can manage.  As parishes have shrunk in numbers, the number of parishioners has grown.  Maybe in Rome the growing Catholic population is taken as a human sign of good management.   Ah, this business side of religion

            

To discuss a declining numbers of priests is to consider Detroit to be a thriving metropolitan area, even when population has fallen something like 50 percent in the last 50 years.  There is no decline in priests.  Recently.  The world had changed.  And there is a drought.  A long ongoing drought.  In the political world, leaders were expected to address hunger.  Does anyone ever judge the management of the institution church?  In the world of Wall Street, when numbers grew, you opened new stores.  You did not consolidate churches except in bad times.  These were bad times?  Ask the overworked priest.  Less and less priest ministered to individual real people.  When was the last priest invited over for dinner?  Don’t ask.  Most did not have time.   What they really needed was a union.  But compared to Europe, with their stable or really flat Catholic population, there was no priest shortage in North America.

   

While the Vatican was on a witch hunt for homosexual priests, the pool continued to be drained as to who was eligible in the first place.  Because the archbishops could not police their own force?  Most bishops had come from afar and did not know the local priests.  There were no real relationships.  Collegiality was never a reality.   And the pope had appointed the board of directors.  Who was gonna criticize him.  It was not Pope Benedict.  It was what just had happened in ivy towers.  But has he been away from Germany too long to see the real world?  In a sense, maybe the current pope, his predecessor, did not just recognize the nature of evil.

         

Why was celibacy not optional?  Was it really for a boss to tell his employee if he could be married?  No where else on earth did this happen.  Do only local priests see the need for reform?  Read the stories from Milwukee.  The Sunday Catholic sure did not have a vote on the matter.  (See http://www.milwalliance.org/pdf/NFPCThisWeek.pdf)

 

Where the greatest sin of the management of the church of John Paul II was the failure to respond to sexual abuse by priest, at a humonguous financial cost to funds which should have gone to corporal works of mercy, or to educate the next generation in what is a very academic religion, little attention week in and week out is addressed to this priesthood issue in the changing world.  Dysfunctional organizations that do not engage in open discussion with its own family, which work from positions of power and authority, rupture.  And the local parish priest can gain nothing by talking about this priesthood issue to lay people.   There was a pain in the eye of the man I recently mentioned this too, with nothing to gain to discuss it.  This priesthood issue.  There was a lot more to a fulfilling life than to complain, even when your entire life was about ministry and action about things that did not look right.   

       

The beauty was in the humility of these guys who were 75.  Their response.  To the world.  They grew up in the Great Depression.  They never expected another one.  A lot like the War to End All War.  It was never called World War I until sometime after 1940.  Now another generation was growing up as Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation had.  Neither generation ever knew the effect a great depression would have at the time.  Economic downturns had a way of teaching humility. 

         

I have one friend with two sons who grew up in the storm in the news from Boston, from Philadelphia, about abuse within the church.  He said his sons want absolutely nothing to do with the church.  This friend sent both sons to the Catholic high school that we attended.  For people who felt Catholicism was the most important aspect of their lives, the response of his sons in this case was more than disheartening.   I doubt they have heard these individual stories in the Curia.  The SNAP people seemed to have the enmity that is found in war.  But the Curia has focused on other issues, like changing the language of the Mass in the near future, ignorant of what has transpired in individual families in the United States, in Canada, in Ireland, in the English speaking Catholic world among young people about 20.  Maybe they should instal turnstiles and count the numbers who are attending Mass. 

    

Families that do not engage in true discussion are dysfunctional.  Each member goes its own way.  And so it goes with institutions.  Fewer people see the humanity of the priest personally.  And many times their humanity is what had inspired others.  It was why people joined Mother Theresa’s order in great number.  

 

With all the focus on right to life issues, no one dares ask about the right to spiritual life of the next generation.  It was the “why” question.  And either in ignorance or indifference, to see the world spiritual hunger, Catholic or non-Catholic, church leadership did not seem to care to address the “why” question.  The popes in the past never had to.  And the numbers kept increasing.  And either in ignorance or indifference, to see the world spiritual hunger, with temporal restraints on ministry as to who can minister, is to see a failure in leadership which will contine to affect the spiritual growth of the Roman Catholic Church.   Humans break down where over loaded.  And the church had lost some of its agility as a result of its aging priesthood.     

 

The pastor at the cathedral down the street sure is not going to address the “why” question.  Nor is going to mention this problem to his boss.  Like so many in positions of power, he went to the right schools.  Spend some time at Gregorian University, the pontifical university, and your future looked as secure as an investment banker on Wall Street.  Or did.  Look at those Curricula Vitae of the latest archbishop.   When you go to school in Rome, you tend to lose contact  with families back home, with the real English-speaking Catholic world. 

 

Obviously there is a struggle of those bishops, all bishop,  when they returned from Rome to teach moral issues to Catholics, much less to the rest of the world caught up in moral relativism.  With all the focus on right to life issues, no one dares ask about the right to spiritual life of the next generation.  

 

I was at this party because I knew one man who had helped to found a college in another land.  What would happen when the Greatest Generation was gone?  Who would continue to maintain what he and a woman and one other classmate had started?  At Jesuit universities the discussion was about maintaing a Jesuit identity which included every aspect of what it meant to be Roman Catholic.  The religious world is cognizant of what has happened over 200 years to Ivy League schools, to hospitals with religious affiliation.  There once was a Jewish hospital in my city because Jewish physicians could not get credentials to operate at other hospitals in town.  Certainly the last 7 years have taught that man’s inhumanity to man was an ongoing never ending struggle.  There had been a reason that a religious identity was found in institutions.  Care-giving institutions.  The places that motivated men and women, beyond money.  The struggle now was to find leaders who care about the care-givers. 

   

One of the bigger changes in the world of media, in elections, was the need for money.  A lot of people have been educated on how to raise money.  People in development and institutional advancement now made big money themselves.  Yet in the ever changing world, the leaders of institutions have never had less human contact.  Religious institutions too.  Along the way, the people who promoted themselves as leaders seemed to be a less affable.  The current president has lost all signs of humanity.  In a bipartisan way, let me say that this was why I could not for vote for Hillary Clinton.  It was as if leaders could be as mechanical as the CEOs that funded these campaigns and they did not have to be liked.  And it was as if local bishops, in their quest for power, were indifferent to the increase stress in the life of a priest.     

  

Did we have to wait for leaders who grew up in a church after Vatican II to come to grips with real time?  In a continent beyond Rome?  Where the issue was not perfect grammar of English to match the Latin, the Italian.  Did we have to wait for an overworked priest to be elected pope?

 

The beauty of John Paul II was that he had not spent a career in the Curia.  He should have been in touch with the real world beyond kairos time.  By distancing itself from the real world, the hierarchy has abandoned the hungry.  Or the message was “we will show you what spiritual hunger really is.”  Until your kids start doing what I did.  Unitl present day suffering reached a level of previous suffering. 

 

These days the pope seems a lot like Mother Theresa or a lot like Jacob in his struggle in the night with God.  Dealing with the spiritual direction, but not just his own.  Leaders have to deal with the spiritual direction of their followers.  Where are we being led?  How many are in fact leaders who plan for the number of followers behind? 

 

Pope Benedict eventually will have to wrestle with this issue and find the papal wrestling trunks.  Soon.  Or we would all have an affliction for the remainder of time.  For the time being, he had not appeared in public to show his wrestling skills.  People who knew him in Germany suggest he will surprise a few people.  He just never liked to make the spectacular entrance. 

The Morning Show

         

The morning was about endings.  I was trying to find 2 names in the obits, in the local news, to know more about a death.  The bad thing about obits was they never always told you how the death happened.  I was wanting to know more.  About the end.  Over what was sacred.  Newspapers.  Sports.  Music.  News.  It was about the common bond.  Cheering for the home team.  The news thereof. 

 

Mortar.  As found in brick.  The Morning Show.  Neal and Leandra.  “I am rich. You’ve given me your name.  You call my name.  More than my wildest dreams.  This wasn’t what I expected.  I always wanted more….let the world go on believing….the world can dry up all my dreams.  Your love is the water…I waded into….the holiest of streams.  More than my wildest dreams.  Rich beyond…my dreams.  I am rich. I am rich.” 

 

“The Morning Show” on Minnesota Public Radio.  A newspaper near you.  The end was coming of insititutions that I had loved as part of the routine.      

   

Peace in my life.  Worry how long there will be peace.  The birds never worried.  The dog doesn’t worry.  You only had to read the news about Somalia and the pirates there, to know that peace was owed to something.  Law that for the most part that was honored.  Law was supposed to be moral.  Thus the fight over Roe v. Wade.  Over gay marriage.  Over what was moral.  Over what was sacred.  There were armies that fought for belief in moral law.  There was a police force here to maintain the order.  In Greece, there seemed to be a question about how moral every day life has been. 

 

Newspapers read on-line.  It was a lot like hearing Neal and Leandra, those local performers.  People were looking for a free lunch even in the days before unemployment.  Like in 2004 when the financial industry was said to have made 30% of all profits on Wall Street, when nothing was broke.  As Leandra wrote about performing at Lake Harriet in Minneapolis this year: 

 

“Financial reality. The Minneapolis Park & Rec Department stopped paying performers over 10 years ago. We continued doing the concerts because we knew our audience loved the venue and the Park & Rec helped us pay for the mailing we would send. They stopped doing that a couple of years ago, so the past few years we have been paying to play at the bandshell hoping to offset the expense with CD sales. Last year with the rain, we got soaked. Literally, too!”   

 

Mortar.  As found in brick.  When it is gone.  “The Morning Show” was a show that started 40 years ago.  This was where Garrison Keillor got his start and moved on.  When I tuned in by chance at 7 am there was Greg Brown who, with his own special lyrics seems to have redone the Crosby, Stills & Nash  “Long Time Gone” song, asking the question “What good is the radio without you?” Baseball scores.  Wanting more.  When it poured. It was the end.  I had first tuned in by chance in the mid-1990s.  It was now the end.  Unless you had high definition radio.  Whatever that was.  This was hearing Etta James 15 years ago.  Irish music before the Celtic tiger.  Neal and Leandra, of “Old Love” fame.  Where the song was first played. 

 

The kindness.  Dale Connelly and Tom Keith (with a stage name of Jim Ed Poole) had brought a unique blend of music and personality and kindness to “The Morning Show.”  Minnesota Public Radio had canceled the show with Tom Keith’s retirement from “The Morning Show.”   He will keep working as the sound-effects guy for “A Prairie Home Companion.”  Connelly will continue with an online version.  This was not a rainout. 

 

Peter Mayer:  “Everything Is Holy Now.”  A musician looking for the perfect piece to play.  When someone writes a song about your show’s end.  That was humbling to listen to.  It was love.  Endings.  For long-time entertainment, endings were bittersweet.  Contraction.  Loss.  Of what seemed mundane.  There was an insignificance of the significant.  Until it was over.  The audience.  The human animal not knowing how to react.  To the bittersweet.  Laughter like always.  

 

Neal and Leandra, and their lyrics this morning at 8 am:  “You brighten up everything I do.  Walk out that door….whatever you do.  The joy that is you.  My world is still up.  ‘The Morning Show.’  From all I’ve been through….the joy that is you.  ‘The Morning Show.’  I feel joy…all that I see.  The stream….the beautiful stream.  The joy…the dream…that was you. They’re smiling too…for the joy that is you.”  

            

(http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kumd/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&pid=392&sid=14&id=1174184)  

         

Songs without lyrics.  Where the strings did the talking.  Of the sorrow.  Of the joy.  And the audience sat dumbfounded by the subtleness of the chords. 

         

“You are my sunshine…..”  The thought that went into the final song.  The thank you’s.  The music.  The audience.  The bond.   We are out of time.  …don’t take my sunshine away.” 

 

The sadness of endings:  Why does the sun go on shining?  Why does the sea rush the shore?  Why do the birds go on singing?  What do the stars glow above?  Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?  I wake up in the morning wondering.  Why —everything was the same it was.  I can’t understand.  No I can’t understand, how life goes on the way it was. 

 

A song about endings…. The way life goes on the way it does.  Why does my heart go on beating….it ended when you said ….good bye.  Everything is the same it was.  Don’t they know it is the end of the world? 

Burial places.  Endings.  Rembrances.  A real weeper, at the end.

Dealing with change.  A bit of mortar in the Minnesota day, as found in the brick, had become loose.   At the foundation called morning. 

Great Expectations

I went to bed last night amidst a discussion of Nixon, on release of a movie about the David Frost interviews.  The discussion by the author who played Nixon in what first must have been the Broadway play:  Nixon and his immortal leanings, his desire for greatness……and the loneliness.  The vast loneliness.

God in his vastness. I had struggled yesterday with a liturgy at a cathedral in the neighborhood.   I always struggled at this place of worship, in its vastness, in its darkness, with its emptiness visible.  There must have been a message left by the architecture.  It was the empty tomb effect.  The same message left throughout Europe in their vast cathedrals. 

God  who in His subtle ways appeared every day, however fleeting. God, in the darkness.  God, visble at dawn and again in the sunset.  God in the night, before the days of electricity.  It was the time of year, in darkness that we decided to let God come closer and closer. In need of me and you to fill the emptiness. 

God, in his subtle mundane ways, was in the food.  The food that I had had each day of my life.  There was an intimacy to the food.  To eat is to intimately trust.  Trust that the food was not tainted.  There was care-giving in food preparation.  I heard on Sunday a radio show where an author of a bookd spoke of teh aftermath of melamine-tainted baby formula.  The same things had happened here in the middle of the 19th Century in North America, with swill milk.  

Food.  Grown.  Distributed.  Purchased.  Prepared.  And shared.  It will nourish and ideally do no harm.  Even to a human who did the cooking, there was a mystery beyond the ingredients that went into the food, of the things we put in our mouths.  There was a trust every day, and that food determined for a large part our health.  That was the intimacy of food.  Of health. 

    

Within my own home, there was a realness of food in the struggle amidst all His mystery, to know God.  Whether in this cathedral, his home, or even my home.  In His vastness, with my emptiness.  To feel the hunger.  Babies cried over the lack of food.  I think that humans did the same, over issues of spiritual hunger in their lives.  From those who have never heard that God is love.  Those without hope.  In tough time, the seriousness of all varieties of hunger was better understood.  The lack of understanding was the cause of conflict.  The secular versus the religious.  The Crusades and the crusaders.  There was not much generosity in war.  Sharing food, real food, involved a grace that comes from food.  Generosity.  From where ever it had come.  Humans had little control.  Mostly food came from the earth and favorable climate conditions. 

   

Last week I watched a movie on the Turner Classic Movie channel.  I have never read Great Expectations, so I watched the movie.  In one scene, in attempting to become a gentleman, the main Charles Dickens’ character, poor as a peasant, asked a sponsor who sent him to London, “Why have you done so much for me?”  And after he was recognized in his adulthood to be a gentleman, he felt like too many gentlemen of his age, that he had become a snob.

   

It made me reflect on the strangers along the way that had helped to try to form me into a gentleman.  When I was very young for most of those years it had been by nuns.  In my experience, these nuns had welcomed the stranger, given their gifts, shared their lives, so that a bunch of kids could be educated as gentlemen and ladies to learn the same generosity.  It seemed pretty mundane to teach kids each day, year in and year out.  Too many of us with our desire for greatness had become snobs along the way, blind to the splendor of their generosity, blind to their vastness, with our own emptiness too often filled with materialism.

         

It was a week that the church used to ask for support for the retired nuns who in their old age did not have much.  And they have been on my mind each day.  By 2023, religious orders may face more than $20 billion in unfunded retirement liabilities.  There had been no special collection this year.   The sadness was that too many of us had become snobs along the way.  And there no longer were many nuns.

(http://www.retiredreligious.org/you/index.html)

 

The Human Condition

 

T’is the season of gifts.  To be successful in giving was to present a sentiment behind a gift:  the totality of the gift was in the sentiment.  That was the sacramental.  The significant was more than the material thing.  The outward sign. 

At a young age, I spent a fair amount of time dealing with folks at times of loss.  There had been people crying about losing a ring, however the circumstances.  Weeping.  Somehow in comparison to the magnitude of real loss after an experience, I never could quite appreciate the loss of just sentiment.  Not after what I had witnessed in a community somewhere near Devils Lake, North Dakota.  The worst loss I ever had to attend to was a man who lost his home and 5 sons in a fire about 4 days before Christmas about 20-some years ago.  I don’t recall ever seeing his wife.  That day was heart breaking.  I have thought of that event each December ever since. 

People pray a lot for “blessings.”  God is asked day in and day out to “bless us.”  The request is nothing but for a share.  To have a share, of Him and His goodness.  To be a shareholder in this planet was to be invested in what happens.  To read a quote from Father Karl Golser in the National Catholic Reporter from December 5, 2008 from John Allen, Jr.:

 

“All of creation must be reborn and presented anew to the Father through Christ.  In their cosmic dimension of the faith, the Eucharist is about offering the earth itself back to God, in the consecration of bread and wine.  Sunday is the day we live the joy of redemption.  Sunday is the day we also express a new relationship with space and time.  It’s about the return to God.  It is about the return to Christ, the parousia.”  

God was, as always, just waiting.  It was the Advent season.  In the cosmic dimension of things, the nights were long in real life.  When did God mostly meet people in real life?  In critical times:  in birth, in death, on a wedding day.  But in the stories of the New Testament, Jesus mostly met people in conditions that people wished they did not have.  Sick.  In sacramental encounters.  In conditions of sin—when most people wished they were different.  With a bit of shame.  In real life.  Seldom did Jesus meet people in the temple.  That bit of shame was why half the world did not worship much.  I had my own sense of shame about the past.  How could I have missed so much?  Wrestling with the question, Who am I?  Am I good enough?  And coming to realize that it was I that needed a savior.  Yeah.  Even me. 

 

This time of year was one about sentiment.  In the reality of things, sentimental gifts took some thought to touch the heart of someone of significance.  It was not until the days just before Christmas when we trimmed the tree on Grandma’s birthday, celebrating people in the past, in an ornament from a year remembered, that the sentiment hit home.  I did not care to do Christmas things too early.  It was hard to remember the sacredness of each ornament, the stories behind how they got here.  Those symbols of Christmas for adults only worked with sentiment.  People whose lives I had had a share.  And true sentiment could not be lost. 

There was way too much to take in, with imagination, with this Incarnation.  I seldom think of it until the horns blare on Christmas Eve in church at “Oh Come All Thee Faithful.”  And then my heart leaps.  Each year. 

Larry Gillick, S.J., describes Advent as “when we were waiting for His taking birth in our stables, taking flesh in our persons.” God in human form.  Visible.    Approachable.  In real life.  

She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

When I was in the 4^th grade, we had neighbors named Ringo.  A guy one year older who seemed pretty normal until the Beattles came to New York in 1965.  Then suddenly, Jim started just using his last name and he was a superstar.  His name got pronounced differently.  With a lot more screaming.  Ringo went to Fuller School.  I just never knew Catholics went to Fuller.  I thought they all went to school with me.  1965 was the year I learned that not all the kids in public school were non-Catholics. 

That same year I had my first lay teacher.  Up until then, it had been all nuns.  My experience with nuns was the same one my parents had before me.  I am not sure if my grandparents all had nuns.  Three of them were Catholic.  My paternal grandmother was non-Catholic as a youth, in an age when she practically had to petition the Vatican to get married in the Catholic Church, as I understood it.  She eventually converted.  Her ancestors had come from the North of Ireland and somehow, for reasons I never quite understood, she did not consider herself Irish but Scotch Irish.  And she never drank Scotch that I could tell.  But I think that might have been why she was the only Catholic in Minnesota who had voted for Nixon in 1960.  Her father was the fire chief here 100 years ago when I imagine the fire department still used horses, when she was a child.    

Belief was always personal.  A possession like your own body.  Only it was in your mind.  Or maybe deeper.  I owed a lot of my belief to nuns. 

 

A lot of people throughout the times were born without belief in God.  At birth there was no real belief.  So belief had to be   either discovered, as Abraham discovered it, or it had to be taught.  In my case it was taught.  At home.  In parochial schools.  At a Jesuit university.  And my own curiosity then pursued it.  Belief is an interesting thing.  The measurement of belief, how much you had, really was a lot like family medical history.  It was based upon not genes. Seemingly, it was not in the chromosomes.  But I had owed it to someone.  Belief was formed by the degree of time that I went in search of my own curiosity, a lot like those nuns had in their lives. 

 

Concerning the amount of time spent, in challenging times in pursuit of that curiosity, I went about at this time of year to hear one priest I had heard about on retreat on a Saturday morning ten years ago.  I eventually had that priest on retreat.  His morning was spent talking about the Examen which he had learned of through the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola.  It was a prayer that was based upon the day.  My day.  So it was a personal prayer.  In a sense, this Jesuit spoke about prayer which was found in just thinking about the wakening hours.  

 

Today I awoke to the thought how God’s appearances in a day seem mostly fleeting.  Last night I found myself home alone, cooking a hamburger for dinner, using an electric fry pan.  A pretty mundane moment in the week.  But it caused me to think about my grandmother both at the end of the night and the start of today.  That electric fry pan had come from her home.  She gave it to me when I took my first job.  I had not used this frying pan in more than 15 years.  She had died in 1988.  In April 1987 I had moved to Chicago.  And almost at the time of my move she had had a severe stroke where she never was able to talk again.  That frying pan made me think of how I had failed her in the time of need.  In the period between April 1987 and July 1988.  The failure was not so much in not being there.  But when I came home to visit.  Oh I always stopped in.  But she couldn’t talk.  And it was difficult for this young man to say anything in a one way discussion.  Young men mostly always had answered questions, at least at that point in life.  And I did not know what to say in just a monologue.   True conversation, like true prayer, took a while to learn. 

 

I wasn’t much good in those days talking about what stirred my soul.  It took a while to find out.  Her eyes moved indicating full knowledge of anything I said.  But as she was every day, she was trapped in her bed, unable to say anything.  This was a woman who had never questioned me like a mother.  This was the woman whose unconditional love I had felt each time I had seen her.  Every time.  I see a couple grandkids who have that kind of relationship with my own mother.  In the old world when a mother’s job was at home, there was little need for the conflict that developed between mother and a male child when it came to a grandmother.  This was the woman who also was my godmother.  One thing I had learned about mostly all the Irish, Irish don’t like verbal expressions of love as much as those shown in action.  I never really expressed what this lady always had meant to me. 

 

That Examen taught me a lot about myself and my life and the authentic way to pray.  In a lesson which only had been on my mind for 20 years, that Examen yesterday had ended with me thinking about an electric fry pan when the broiler did not work, and giving thanks for a hamburger.  That electric fry pan was also an outward sign of the past, which had lain dormant around here for more than 15 years, a sacrament a lot like Wonder bread, which helped build bodies 12 ways.

 

In a subtle way, God appeared every day, however fleeting.  With love like that, you know you should be glad. 

Maintenance

 

What is spiritual direction?  In any life?  We all had a spiritual direction, though few talk about it.  Maybe that was why people went on pilgrimage.  Mostly, alone.  To find a direction.  God is constantly making approaches to our defenses.  I had read an article about a pilgrimage in Spain.  Every day you met people from all over the world in a quest, along the path of St. James, at El Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  In A Vanished World, Chris Lowney questions why three religions that worship the same God and deeply respect human dignity have so often turned on each other, as he travels across Spain.  It was on my books to acquire list. 

 

It was a bad week for books, in a bad year for sales in bookstores.  People were not buying newspapers or books.  Me either.  I probably owned 100 great ones that were still waiting for me to get to.  A library says a lot about a person.  Speaking of spiritual direction. 

 

My sister was back from Israel and Egypt.  The burning bush was still in Egypt.  Moses’.  I saw the pictures. I could not believe it was still in Egypt.  The Catholics had possession of the bush.  I think Coptic Catholics.  It could not be transplanted.  It had been tried.  Over and over.  I missed the subtleness of those who had tried to transplant it.  Because Jews never had been much welcomed much in Egypt since the time of slavery, and of Moses?   But the place of revelation to Moses, why Y*w*h’s name is spelled as it is in Judaic tradition, all started at the burning bush.  Speaking of spiritual direction? 

 

My sister was back from Israel and Egypt, where she was assaulted in the night by bed bugs.  Apparently bed bugs are an old problem that Minnesotans are awakening to after about 100 year period of dormancy.  I did not read the article in the Star Tribune last Sunday as to where they having been sleeping in the interim.   My friend the exterminator just took out $160,000 loan to store his company equipment, and those bed bugs will be helping him make payment.  God is constantly making approaches to our defenses, as my favorite Jesuit in Omaha wrote this week.  My sister kept any bedbugs that returned with her in her suitcase in sub freezing temperatures for a week, expecting that would kill the Egyptian parasites.  The quality of life is often determined by temperature.  In Canada, in Minnesota those temperatures can protect us in ways I never had contemplated.   

 

Speaking of spiritual direction.  Moving forward.  Expanding.  Why would economies expand in parts of the world with diminishing populations?  The irony was people in Western Europe quit having children for economic reasons.  Like in Spain.  These were the people who dreamed of population control, to have more material wealth.  Riches.  Wall Street.  There was a mystery in all of this direction.  Wall Street was fighting the invisible spirit of the market.  It is said that the ticker does not lie.  There was something holy about the market. 

 

Maintenance.  It was the week I had snow tires put on.  If I wanted movement and traction this winter.  This meant walking through downtown after dropping off my car.  As I passed a lady with a seeing-eye dog, I thought of the training that went into that dog leading the blind.  When that dog woke, up, it really had a purpose in the morning.  The formation and training of that dog was not that much different than the effort put into a kid like me, I thought, as I walked by the corporation that had first hired me out of college. Training. 

 

What is spiritual direction?  In the real world where people have to eat each day, who has time?  In the real world when people have to work.  Or get their snow tires on. 

 

It was another Advent season.  Why?  Why in the Christian world is there another season of Advent.  In a world of commercial celebration of the birth of Christ in the world before Christmas Day, was not a part of the world saying, “Forget the waiting”?  Put up the tree now.  Go to the parties now.  Turn on the house lights for the neighbors now.   Why would anyone wait?  So was there still an Advent?

 

What was the dynamics of spiritual direction?  Of this redemption?  Did Jesus of Nazareth have to find out the subtleness of God for himself?  The kid lost in the temple at 12, ready to engage the elders.  Why did this redemption have to wait?  Why did it have to wait 10 million years from the time of creation?  And who could wait?  Who could look at the hunger in the world?  The refugees from war?  The refugees from unemployment?  The immigrant moving in a direction?  Who could look the news stories each day of a world in tough times?  Did it seem like a time for action?  Now?    

 

Spiritual direction.  From age to age.  In your kids.  It was just so slow to watch develop.  Painfully slow. A lot like this creation.  Or a lot like making a pilgrimage. 

 

Speaking of spiritual direction, there was African proverb about a journey:  If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together. 

 

This God who is constantly making approaches to our defenses, sending a son to learn some of those defenses, understanding the world.  Jesus learning the human struggle with spiritual direction.  Jesus born in the cold.  Coming to grips with what he saw on this earth.  Jesus growing up, and coming to ask why.  Why?  Why in the Christian world, with a savior did he have to learn how to use his own creativeness, like any other kid?  And then how. 

 

How in a world of hunger each day, to grab people’s attention.  How in the name of God?  How in the name of God to act, like any human who had a life to live?  Spiritual direction was deciding the how.  In a world with such an urgent need, why did it have to wait?  

 

It was a car maintenance morning with a spiritual direction. My mind was on maintenance, in a down market. The theme of the day, maintaining what I had.  In an all too vanished world. Maintaining a purpose. 

 

In a spiritual direction. A lot of us were blind, and in need of a well trained dog leading in a spiritual direction.  Toward God.  Almost silently.  

Care in Health Care

 

A doctor did not cry, not if he/she was a real professional.  Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, was on the radio over the weekend.  When she studied medicine, physicians were taught not to respond emotionally to the suffering around them.  Physicians as scientists pay a terrible price for their objectivity.  Some of the highest rates of depression in America are among physicians.  

Dr. Remen said that physicians’ objectivity is an appliance that separates them from life around them and within.  Too often physicians  are wounded by their scientific objectivity.  Cognitive objectivity was the price of another dimension, and keeping a mental distance, for objectivity sakes.

There is a lot of burnout among oncologists, a profession that treats cancers day in and day out.  I could never do it.  Dr. Remen said burnout among physicians was due to the objectivity, from not immersing themselves in the grieving process.  Residency was an ongoing process that changes the vision of a young person and the way the resident thinks.  Over time, some thing fade, others are over-developed in medicine “until I forgot a lot of important things.”

The first response of a physician is to try to fix the broken, the ill.  When a doctor is immensed in suffering, he/she has a small strategy—to fix the broken.  I have a one friend who is a physician. He went through chemical dependency treatment about 8 to 10 years ago.  His problem was drinking.  I would see him weekly in the winter, but for 4 weeks he was gone.  He never really talked about his absence but in my case he knew that I knew.  Over the years, he has joked about the change where he no longer drinks, but other than a few people outside his family, few seem to know about those 4 weeks of his life.   From hearing Dr. Remen on the radio, I understand a bit more the struggles in his life.  Physicians seldom talk about their own problems, their pressures, outside their fraternity.  They pay a terrible price for their objectivity. 

A couple years ago I gave a book to my own doctor written by a Hinsdale, Illinois physician about his years as a resident at the Mayo Clinic in orthopedics.  After both he and his wife read the book, he passed it on to his daughter who is going though a residency in orthopedics.  Those residency programs are a lot more humane than they were 30 years ago.  But the real change deals with doctors who are immensed each day in suffering. 

There is a lot of burnout especially among oncologists.  It comes from a sense of failure over the inability to cure.  Medical schools have always been for the best and the brightest.  Many of these physcians have been good athletes, great competitors who are not used to failure.  And theirs is the disappointment on having a person die.  A patient who looked to them to be cured.  There is a tremendous validation for a physician each week to cure the sick.  These days people like Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, are offering grief theory to medical students.  Often in the past, when a doctor was immensed in suffering, he/she was left with his/her objectivity, with the restraints of time, to not really share in the grief of the patient’s family, to continue about his/her rounds, with a denial of his/her own loss with a patient’s death.  A doctor too often was filled with loss, with no room to care. 

The spiritual dimension of grief theory is now taught to medical students to remind them of their own power, and the human connection of medicine.   There was always a destructive dimension of science, in just the facts, without a purpose.  There was always a destructive dimension of medicine, of learning how to cure.  It was that dimension that seems to have accounted for the need for 4 weeks in the life of my friend to recognizing the limitations in science as well as him own.  There was learning that comes from suffering.  The power to be present in difficult times did have to be learned in order to be passed on to the young. 

(www.commonweal.org/ishi/programs/healers_art.html) The Healer’s Art is a medical school curriculum which has been taught annually at UCSF since 1993 as a 15-hour quarter-long elective, designed by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal at UCSF School of Medicine Professor of Family and Community Medicine.