Ground Shifts

How can anyone miss the tension of the times?

Shoes. Movement. Places. Location. Parishes. Looking for a point of view.

A local church. A funeral. The Hughes. Five daughters. A burial plot.

Location. Ground shifts. Water level. Flooding. Minnesota. Where I walked.

Locations. Rome. Going to the seat of political power. To change public policy. To affect the leaders there.

The Roman Catholic Church. To miss the tension of the times. The brutality of the Roman Empire. There was a reason Peter had gone there to Rome.

Looking for a point to view. To find something to say. And then how to say it. Without stage fright.

A ‘moment of silence.’ Grieving and all of its wake was nothing but the giving of thanks and praise for a life. I had been stunned at what had happened and at what was here. And at what had always been here and now was gone. Kaddish. The mystery was in the questions.

Where does your identity come from? What gives you identity? A group? Your family? Your parish? Your political affiliation? Your fraternal organization? What gives you identity? Your beliefs? What is your identity? Who are you? What do you do? Now? In the past?

Looking for a point to view. Going to the seat of political power. To affect the real world and its people. To affect the leaders there. There was a reason Peter had gone there to Rome.

The tension between a people who felt the way toward Rome as Poles and Czechs had toward the Russians, too easily forgotten over time. The tension in the old Austrian-Hungary Empire, if you did not happen to be an Austrian. It was an unremembered cause of World War I. The stories of the capo in concentration camps in Dachau. One of their own, working in the system, for personal benefit. The Sandhedrin and Pilate. When you had been colonized, the culture of the domination of the conquering one is affirmed all the time. Or there is an under current from the tension. Ask a soldier back from Iraq.

There had been a reason to a Roman Catholic Church.

Hoping to find a human answer to all of this. God asking: “What am I going to do? With you? In a world with 6 billion others. What are you gonna do? Now? What am I gonna do now? Because I am done making personal appearances. For the cameras.”

Hoping to find a human answer to all of this. As a reaction to the world and its poverty. Its illiteracy. All of the unfairness. Amidst all the denial. The anger. The bargaining. The grief.

Acceptance and growth. “On Death and Dying.” There had been a reason for a Catholic Church in Rome.

Places. Location. Looking for a new point of view.

http://www.homeboy-industries.org/donate.php

Attention

Lent was the mid term. Lent was the time for letting God get our attention. My brother-in-law was giving up chocolates. I could not fathom how that would grab someone’s attention. It seemed to be some kind of childhood fast. What about the entire appetite?

Getting our attention with those mid term tests. When was it time to buckle down in life? To put beliefs into practice? And how? How would prayer, fasting or alms-giving affect others? Was Lent about improved outcomes?

“I asked him about what it is exactly that he came to this place to find.” Mid terms was the time to ask why you were not studying. Is there transformation on the other side of distance?

To be Catholic student meant an exposure to real demands and being held accountable. To those 10 Commandments. It could work because of an exposure to caring mentors, in parents, in teachers, and in priests. Those mentors make up the institution. Those mentors value the students, knowing that they were the world of tomorrow.

Lent was about those personal relationships which are integral to improved health outcomes. At a private school those personal relationships must remain the priority. Lent was the time for letting God get our attention back.

Life’s Stories

In the beginning of God’s creating the skies and the heaven – when the skies had been shapeless and formless, and darkness had been on the face of the deep, the earth was a formless wasteland. And darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.

A formless wasteland. That well could be the first line in a story about any human’s faith struggle. Like most people, I struggle to grow in my faith. Being part of the real community here on earth has helped me tremendously.

I was picking out a book for a 3-year old. I considered buying a book about the stories of the Bible. I found myself wondering about the author who was a complete stranger, interpreting the stories. Somewhere in the formation process you entrusted to a stranger the passing on the meaning of these stories.

We have lived through an age when video has replaced the written word as a media of significant communicating. Movies. Video stores. Academy Awards.

It was Academy Awards month. And an audience was essential. An essential necessary part, if an actor, was to have some kind of following. Press releases. Interested people. Some kind of an audience was essential if life was to have meaning.

Academy Awards. The movies of 2008. Stories with relevance. Stories with relevance, or just false substitutes in the modern age? Where Broadway was slowly dying due to the cost, what was the Academy doing to preserve the story-telling role? And what would the economic downturn do to the movie industry?

Passing along the stories. For all of the 3-year-olds of the world.

Evening came, and morning followed—that first day. And then the day after.

POST SCRIPT

It is language and story that connect us through the language arts, in the beginning. With all the light that you cannot see, in the beginning, God’s Spirit was hovering?

Compare. Contrast. Tell a story, from the beginning. “In the beginning of God’s creating, when darkness had been on the face of the deep, when the skies had been shapeless and formless,” does a blind woman/man have five senses? How do I know what you can see? How do I know what you can hear? As a child?

Do as I say and live! How do you sense that God‘s spirit was hovering, in the beginning of God’s creating, as I cannot see without light? In the beginning of God’s creating the skies and the heaven, as darkness had been on the face of the deep, God‘s spirit was hovering. But what of the other senses – touch, sound, smell, in the ordering? Fully formed, without gradually coming to know the unknown? In the story of Firsts, compare Eve and Adam to me – only created, without progressive growth. So This One Law.

“Trust me, as your Creator. Ask Adam. He knows me!”

To know someone look, at where they go! Given everything at once, including the one commandment. If the audio-visual senses did not come before taste, how is taste connected to hunger and thirst? Did you ever note when you were born perfect, the missing pain . . . or the missing sacrifice, without a need for God?

And what of their art of language, without any stories of their own, without any body, except Adam’s story about the Tree of Knowledge? How had Adam and Eve ever learned to pray, when they had it all? When I seem so perfect, why do I need to abide by the Command. The conflict over the one Law and the fairness of the Law? And though all of Creation had been described as good – mostly separated – what of Evil? Who even comprehended Evil. In the world?

With a desire to see her own Creator, Eve ate the apple? In that there had been no direct contact with God and Eve until after, God did not even know Eve’s name? Until now. Yes, to know someone, in the ordering, look at where they go!

After! Given life by Someone! So how does a Creator ever know what the created can see? In the story of Firsts, theirs is the first of many stories about refugees, as Civil War follows Independence, with no right to be there! Land transfers? In a tradition of revolt, stand up to own this place, or LEAVE! Liberation from the Law of their Land, but not in the end from their God. Fancy ideas, with vitality drained, about living above the law, on the Earth, when you thought God knew you …and would remember you.

The Conflict

 

Time.

What were you doing when your life had urgency? When life seemed exciting? In the morning. When there was real traffic flow, outside of the rush hours?

Urgency.

In the morning. Of light and movement. Of climate change. Global warming. Global dimming.

Ugency upon waking to get to work. But first the news. The urgency of ….The urgency of Henry Paulson for the last 4 months. The urgency of Christopher Cox at the SEC.

Global warming: Was it the result of avoiding suffering? The result of air conditioning? The result of cars and trucks? The result of heating spaces. Global dimming. Was its result on sunlight one affect of all these airplanes? And this affect on water evaporation?

Global dimming was as big a threat as global warming. They both are now affecting everyone. There was urgency. Like an urgency of hunger. Or of love.

Global warming: A lot of the world, the emancipated world, does not think it is wrong to turn up the air conditioner. To get drunk and drive. To do drugs. To stay warm. To avoid suffering. Or to avoid another child.

“Give me chastity. But just not right now.” That was the prayer of St. Augustine. He had a wild youth. Which was why his mother, Monica, was later canonized.

Trying to convince a kid it is wrong to have sex. To advise a son, a daughter. To stay away from someone who appeared to be evil. A lot of the world, the emancipated world, does not think sex, free sex, is wrong. Either in or outside of a relationship. So there is the conflict. Whether government belongs in the debate? Whether a religious body does? When there is national health insurance. When there is welfare. When the community was fitting the bill? With group insurance. With tax money. With the law.

“Give me chastity. Right now!” That was the prayer of the popes for the last thousand years. To all the clergy. Male and female. The real story of late was gender wars in all the secular world over the last 100 years, and humankind’s struggle with their own independence. The struggle with sex. As an adult men and women. With relationships, with each other, with your God, how to convey to the next generation the seriousness of life, the seriousness of sex and passion, and the seriousness of fertility? After the gender wars? Why should the church be immune? Intermixing the struggle on gender roles in the Church of Rome, the same gender wars in all the secular world was found in church, in discussion with living females on church issues of the day. In the mix of innocence, or purity, of sacrifice, amidst the green house gasses. Note the difficulty for guys with miters, ruling in an institution never particularly inclusive in leadership decisions for either women or married men.

“Conflict is in fact the basic law of life in all social organisms, as it is of all biological ones; societies are formed, gain strength, and move forwards through conflict; the healthiest and most vital of them assert themselves against the weakest and less well adapted through conflict; the natural evolution of nations and races takes place through conflict.” -Alfredo Rocco-

The realness … of God. The realness … of global dimming. The realness … of institutional sexism. Father Ray Bourgois was just excommunicated over the issue of urgency, over real prejudices which, he believed, were just as evil as racial prejudice. Ray Bourgois knew canon law. He knew, as well as Martin Luther knew, that his action would result in excommunication. He saw a kind of religious bigotry. The realness of life.

I was going to be in the most important church I ever prayed at in my life. On Sunday. On the college campus where I had spent 4 years. When the music of the St. Louis Jesuits had been new and heard for the first time by their companions a few hundred miles away. With readings about callings, where disciples were not asked to abandon their wives and families. Rather, Jesus settled down with his followers, and made Capernaum his home. Capernaum was in the territory of Herod Antipas which apparently was much more friendly to fishermen, than Herod Phillip. Working people, pragmatic young people, were all looking for places a little more friendly to the problems of the times. Normal people. His followers became his family.

In the end, what were you doing when your life had urgency? When life seemed exciting? When there was a realness of urgency?

So your sense of urgency. But in your hopes to move with great speed, did you know of the increased traffic in the world over the last 15 years asthe world population of cars since 1994 has grown from 550 million to about 880 million? In the internet age, you could not go so fast?

And why should the church be immune? With old vehicles and old priests? Who would replace them? In the slowdown, for those with expiration dates?

Bishops having to convince an adult he was recruiting that it was wrong to marry in his life. That there was a need for suffering, in a form of celibacy. Avoid the easy way. Find the mystery in this small sense of suffering. When your job was offering care to people. Spiritual care. With physcial exercise, you sweated but you felt good. No short cuts. Just do it. Then see what you think. When all of this was voluntary. The draft. The all volunteer spiritual army. For national service. So exactly how generous were you? With your money? With your life? But you could not have a spouse.

The readings this Sunday were about urgency. The urgency of callings … to change the world.

The difficulty to ask a young man to work for this institution with such apparent prejudices, however he felt called to serve His God. In a world that happened so fast, when not many popes lately had setttled in with his own followers and their problems, running a church 2000 years old, even when you were infallible, there was a still sense of urgency.

This was the real world. Where life seemed exciting. The urgency to communicate again, in the real world, about this God. The married and the unmarried. Men and women. But for those with real institutional prejudice.

Before the people here were allowed to lose a sense of excitement about God that the people of Europe seem to have lost over the past generation. For people who lost a sense of excitement. When religion became too much of a job. Too unreal with the everyday world. When the urgency was lost.

And when no one talked about it?

In a world where no one talked much about God. And His suddenness. And the “now what” question for Him. About all of this?

Global dimming was as big a threat as global warming. But it was the suddenness of all of this that was the crisis.

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 – before the partition – 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. 

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, pphysicians 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 immersed 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 immersed 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 physicians 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 immersed 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.

https://carmenpampafund.org/one-time-donation/

On Passing the Turkey

 

Passing it on.  Thanksgiving was about passing it on.  In one country in North America.  Passing it on.  Inheritence, in the days of vanishing wealth, in the days of vast materialism. 

 

My dining room table was passed along to me by my grandparents.  I think it had belonged to my grandfather’s father.  I was named after him.  He was born in the decade after the Civil War.  I think there was a time years ago where the family celebrated Thanksgiving at this table.  Soon thereafter my parents were hosting most every holiday dinner.

 

Turkey.  We had always had turkey on Thanksgiving.  One Thanksgiving when I was about 6-years old, the family photograph appeared on the front page of one section of the newspaper, with my father cutting the turkey.  I discovered once I graduated college that not every family did have turkey.  I think my dad felt like he had worn his religion on his shirtsleeves with that photo, and that his family would always have turkey.  Turkey was always the meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas at the home where I grew up.  But my dad never carved another turkey after the photo was taken.  Maybe he heard from the local PETA group.   

 

Ties.  Hats.  The generations before mine had men who wore ties and hats.  Maybe it was the influence of John F. Kennedy but I always avoid hats.  Even when the temperature is minus 20 degrees.  Fahrenheit.  But I have been pretty traditional in wearing ties.  On Christmas Eve, until the past few years.  Now I keep the tie in the pocket.  A lot of the rituals that I grew up with are being discarded.  The torch has been passed to a new generation. 

 

Ties. Hats.  Turkey.  Rituals.  I have been living in the shadows of a Catholic church, since 1987.  A lot like my grandmother.  Since 1991 my view mirrored that of my grandmother’s, when I knew her, with a view of the Catholic church across the street.  She worked for the priests in the rectory, and she lived across the street.  The pastor at the church where I worship had come from that parish was he was a young man.  He wrote one Sunday in his parish bulletin that he was looking for a woman to iron the altar cloth, and all the other things that were ironed, like when he was a young priest.  He referred to my grandmother by name, about 20 years after her death.             

 

Deoxyribonucleic acid had not been discovered for most of my grandmother’s life.  Or at least what to call it.  Somewhere along the line physicians discovered that family medical history was important.  Genetics can determine life and death.  For cancer.  For arteriosclerotic coronary artery disease.  At the time of Darwin’s writing, nothing was known of this theory of inheritance called genetics.  Her genes could determine my longetivity, and she probably never even heard the terminology. 

 

The passion.  DNA.  Passing it on.  When that moment of love, when the DNA was formed.  In one moment.  Who would have thought?  The inward and outward signs of DNA. 

 

Over the river and through the woods.  To grandmother’s house.  The horse knows the way.  The moon revolves around the earth, the earth around the sun as one but many planets.  It took a few generations to discover all of this out.  But the horse knew the way.  The predictability of the solar system.  There was an animal sense about it.  

 

Rituals.  Rituals were a part of history.  There was a mystery in the rituals.  History seldom has a prominent place in the life of a young person, and because history never had a prominent place at the table, rituals, family medical history, and the meaning were often forgotten, or not passed along.  The family dog often sensed things that your teen-ager never seemed to grasp.  If the world was 10 million years old, the location of the revolution of the earth was known only over the last 500 years, in black and white.   

 

Thanksgiving was a day that was all about relationships.  And people brought together.  In good times and bad.  It was a day to stop and give thanks and praise.  For the revolutions of another year.  For those of us who are alive.  Together.   Few people ever really talk about passing on ritual along with its meaning.  Few people ever really talk of the mystery in relationships.  Without its meaning, relationships and ritual would just be another motion, in a world still spinning on its regular axis, at its regular speed, in the solar system.  When it came to passing on traditions, real life examples were more affective.  Dining room tables.  Turkey.  Darwin.  The fittest who survive.  Passing on ritual, from loved ones who have passed. 

 

DNA.  Passing it on.  Seeing it in the kids.  Where the invisible became visble.  That invisible that was felt all along.  The mystery in the ritual.  Was it why I got that table which was now to me an outward signs of mystery.  A Sacrament?  The “seen” in the years before I had figured out the mystery, of the “unseen.”

 

Tonight an Italian-American brother-in-law and his wife are hosting Thanksgiving for the first time.  Everyone is waiting to see if he and his wife prepare turkey.

Intimacy

In a show today about fidelity and infidelity on Minnesota Public Radio, I heard the guest speak of the desires of everyone for an intimate relationship.  The show just as well could have been about a relationship between God and the individual.   

• It is a dangerous process opening to someone.  There is a need to risk in a relationship before you can be comfortable, have efficient sex, and before you can be truly intimate. 
• Most guys have unbelievable ignorance about their lover.  Women use conversation to get close.  Men do not. 
• Part of the learning process of marriage is to face the truth that all people are imperfect, all people face one day a disappointment in themselves or in a part of that love.  A relationship was learning how to deal with those imperfections and life’s problem.  This process is present in all marriages.   And that was where the theme of forgiveness comes in. 
• Coming slowly to the revelation…of my imperfections.  Of the partner’s imperfections.  And talking about them.  Trying to do better. 
• There is magic revealing yourself to someone else.  A therapist role, as an interpreter when a marriage becomes stressed, is to make it safe to communicate about everything, including sexual fantasy, emotions….What is it that you talk to this person about? 
• There is always a need for a closeness ritual, or you are having trouble getting attention from your lover.
• A man has a need for sexual interaction, revealing embarrassing things, how foolish he is.  These are the endearing things for a woman to hear.  When the foolish no longer is revealed, ways to stay close are lost. 
• The crisis in a marriage IS part of the process of becoming a human being.  It develops character.  Ideas as to what is appropriate in a marriage come from families that we have lived in, and are distorted by movies and TV.  
• Problems in marriage do not make people have affairs.  The lies and dishonesty in an affair do more damage than the sex in an affair. 
• People who get out of the habit of talking to their spouse are vulnerable to infidelity.
• Women desire more, who are lonely inside their marriage
• Infidelity: the looking, the touching, the lying, but the desire to meet that person when intimacy, when the dearth of the soul was again revealed, to fill a void. 
• Touched.  To be truly touched, and its affect on the heart. 
• People trained for honesty and fidelity need to be shown how to communicate efficiently.  Too often an answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop talking, to stop wondering about the mysery of your lover.  The mystery was in the ongoing questions.    

 

Intimacy.  It was waking up in the morning realizing how lucky you were in this life.  Realizing how lucky you were, to have that person next to you.  Especially in modern times, in a pop culture of meaningless junk. 

  

Intimacy.  It involved giving thanks and praise.  At last once a week.  If not every day.  And meaning it.  In good times, and in bad.  It often was harder to stop in good times and pass on a compliment.  There was a daily numbness that set in, when a lot of us just quit seeing all the things close by.   The things that were always there.

   

It could become the normal human experience to quit expressing thanks.  It happened when a certain sense of humility was lost.  And humility was harder to hold on in the modern world than your 401K. 

 

Intimacy.  Learning monogamy.  Prayer and sex were a lot alike.  Monogamy.  Montheism.  Revelation.  Of my imperfections.  And of hers.  Slowly over time.  No marriage was perfect.  Because the 2 people are imperfect.  That was also the revelation that most people came to in their relationship with God.

 

http://

<a href="http://www.blogsurfer.us/?

The Interrogatories

 

Whereas the morning yesterday had started with shattered glass and a mug from a Russian art exhibit, the evening had ended watching the movie, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.”  Speaking of mystery. 

 

Shattered glass:  It was 24 hours ago that a framed print fell, shattering glass.  This morning, in an unrelated note, there was shattered glass all around the garage that I park my car in along with about 50 other cars.  The glass all around the garage, different I had hoped, had also been there last Sunday.  In some cultures the people do not ask questions like why.  Why the glass is here?  Why did the frame fall yesterday?  There was nothing that had happened in the time surrounding the incident that I could see that caused this occurrence.  The frame had been in its place for perhaps ten years.  On the Richter scale, even though I do not think any kind of earthquake had happened, even though the Richter scale was not being used much any more, this was an insignificant event. 

 

If this had been a traumatic event, with loss of life, a real earthquake, I had come to know places on earth that the “why” question was never asked.  I had learned through a trip two years ago of the Filipino culture that never seemed to ask the “why” question.  I suspect throughout Asia, fate was accepted a lot better, without question than it was in the western culture.  I attribute the questioning to the Judaic culture, the search for answers, the conversation back and forth, the questioning of God in prayer.  Other cultures seemed afraid to ask.  Christians and Jews, the Chosen People, had come to expect more.

 

Women…Mystery …The why question.  I mentioned the conclusion of law that women were really mysterious, based upon the facts presented over time by my attorney.  He only understands his wife 35% of the time.  He has been married close to 20 years.  In the modern age, women had been taught along with men how to be independent, to fend for themselves, in a harsh world where Darwin concluded survival was for the fit.  Independent until they needed no one.  Was there a sense of suffering with the onset of menstruation into the female body?  Why is the lining of the endometrium shed regularly?  In Asia, this fate was accepted unquestioned.  But is that why women seemed so mysterious, even to each other?  Always changing, at least physically?

 

I went to bed watching this movie of an American age that did have a fear of the Russians.  I had traveled to the former Eastern bloc, saw the Slavic women, and wondered about that mystery of the Russia soul.  I thought of other fears of that post war age.  Civil rights marches and voter registration.  Americans then identified a fear of race, whites of blacks. African-Americans of whites.  In a large sense, this was the fear of the unknown.  Russian history had held much of the same brutality that the African-American had suffered here, but not on skin color.  Anger resulted.  Violence.  Based upon wrongs. Crime and punishment.  When tough guys liked to intimidate and not explain.  Many a Caucasian never suffered this institutional fear of authority spoken of felt in the African-American community until having to deal with the Internal Revenue Service. A fear because no one ever had listened.  Fears always seemed to have some historical base of injustice. And people who did not want to take time to examine the injustice.       

 

In the world of ruptured relationships, was there a fear of a day of not being needed.  Was there a fear present of being cut by what was shattered yesterday?  How many divorces were based upon the missing questions from the husband?  How many divorces were based upon a missing feeling of need? 

 

Journalists , interpreters, and spouses did ask questions about significant events.  To ask the questions to significant people was what it was all about.  So wasn’t it ironic that faith was something you didn’t talk about.   For most Americans, it is just not something that you do… until maybe you lost something, because you tried to keep it a separate part of your life.   Faith was mostly for me, if you came from the public school system?   To be like some kind of bath with candles was not understanding an intention from where faith came.   And it might explain a lot of problems around here.   So less and less people dug deep.   And more and more I try to assimilate into the secular world?  But feeling insecure, living without the deepness of knowing someone?   Depressed.   Over not belonging?        

 

I had come to expect more in a relationship, based upon the answers.  Most of us absolutely desired relationships that stirred something from within.  Journalists , interpreters, and spouses did ask questions to figure out the mystery. And so did lawyers.  Ultimately, interpreters, journalists, lawyers and spouses kept questioning, because the answers in the conversation back and forth seemed holy.   It was all part of the search for the Truth.

Needing a Kick

 

Chandeliers.  I have a chandelier that I never really liked until I installed some really bright small halogen lights.  Now the dining room is the brightest in my home which I particularly note on the dark mornings of November.   

Chandeliers.  Kristallnacht.  It was 70 years ago yesterday, this night of the broken glass.  The night was symbolic of the darkness about to descend on what seemed to have been the civilized world.  In Israel yesterday, residents were asking to turn on all of their lights to remember the past.  This Jewish identity from one horrible night was from a historic past of nation which would never be forgot, would never leave them.  It had not been a historic accident.     

I went to bed last night reading the introduction to Vanishing Ireland.  One man’s grandfather knew someone who was a participant in the 1798 revolt, another whose family had perished in the Great Famine.  History was real.  The suffering had been there for people whose ages seemed all over 90.  People with high ideals whose suffering was finally replaced by affluence, at least for their grandkids.  Until the recent economic downturn.  And the old-timers said that would give up nothing that they had had. 

Skin tests.  My fair skin was one sign of my connection to generation of the past, generations from the Emerald Isle.  Because I was Irish, I was fair of skin.  It was why I had an annual skin test, to look for skin cancer.  The connection of generation to generation was in the skin.  My view of moral relevancy was the connection to the past.  And the past, no matter how far away, was real. 

Curling.  This week I was asked to move up from what is called the lead to the skip (the clean-up hitter).  And I did not think I was good enough.  Until I saw the performance of my team mates in the third week of the season.  We were not winning in a contest when winning was the purpose.  Today I thought I might finally be ready to assume a role of leadership, as the team was playing to win. 

Twice in a week my mother has made reference to my need at birth to get a kick from an aggressive twin sister to survive.  A lot of kicks actually.  I am not sure if my mother is cognizant that it was at a time in my life when I now seemed to need a kick.  I was born 6 weeks premature in a day when neonatal care and perinatology were in their infancy.  Her point was there are some things about a baby, as her own pediatrician who became my pediatrician, told her that never changed.  Some things were innate.  Her point of this discussion centered around the turbulence in the life of a cousin who had been adopted, turbulent in her relationship with her parents.  I had inquired on the marital status of the cousin, as she had been married what I though was at least twice.  The cousin was in a motorcycle accident last Sunday, had two broken legs and was scheduled for her 3^rd surgery on November 10^th.  The cousin was seeing somone, the driver of the motorcycle, who has been in a coma ever since.  His ex-wife and 14-year-old son had been over to see her, which was more than I had done.  It was a tough week for that 14-year-old. 

It had been a month where I have been doing my own questioning about a present day need to be kicked.  Nudged towards a new job.  I thought I might finally be ready to assume a role of leadership, to something relevant to my talent. 

God was real.  In this day.  In all of us.  In the past. In the present.  A lot of life was just getting comfortable in what was relevant.  In good times and in bad.  And life eventually was a response, with the confidence to do something about it.