Mind, Body, Soul…and Eggs

I went for a 7am breakfast at the Eggs Up restaurant the other day. Half-way through the meal a  young couple took an adjacent booth. As they were ordering, the man said, “I don’t like eggs, what do you recommend?” I guess he didn’t see the restaurant sign…but as it turns out, they have really good pancakes and waffles so the waitress had no problem. When I looked over, I noticed a large crucifix tattoo on his outer leg.
Then I picked up some of conversation in the back corner; a bunch of 30-something guys. I heard “truck” references as well as “christian and God” interspersed  with the slurping of coffee.
I was boxed in, I felt like I was at church.
So I started thinking. My prayer hasn’t been on full potential lately, and I’ve learned that when I need to try and fix something, the on/off switch needs to be toggled so I can go back to some basics - like a mathematician going back to the multiplication tables. Lately, when I pray on my back deck, all I seem to hear is road construction, a passing car, and jets 20,000 feet up leaving vapor trails, and not the whisperings of God wafting through the high pines. I need God in the rhythm of my life.
Do I believe in God - check. What does God want me to do? I’m not smart enough to answer that, but I have references. (Matthew 22:37-39, “Love the Lord your God will all your heart, soul, and mind…Love your neighbor as yourself.”)
How do I do that? I guess that’s up to each person, grounded in humility but with guidance from their church. I’m Catholic so I have the magisterium of the Church.
My life is now on the other side of the 7th inning stretch. I can write a check, but can’t lift a shovel for even half a day. I can help others in various ways, but my mission trips are over….but… I like my eggs scrambled, over easy, over medium, well done, and hard-boiled. There are plenty of things still to do. I’ve been lucky to have a caring wife, wonderful parents, and a big sister. If I need inspiration, I’ve looked to them and their lives.
And I can pray - and submit to the mystery of the prayer process. God wants to hear from all of us, anyway we choose. Catholics have many platforms of prayer; the rosary, meditation, novenas, the Hours, and so on. We have long prayers and short ones, Veni Sancte Spiritu (Enter,Holy Spirit), all types of conversations with God. You may be with another church, no matter, if you believe in God you want to talk to Him in a way you find meaningful and humble - and He wants to talk to you.
 Nota Bela: I’ve always admired our Protestant brothers and sisters ability for spontaneous corporate prayer, but if you don’t want the food to get cold, don’t let them say the blessing…(;-).  
As a goal, I try to meet God in conversation with my head bowed in supplication, but my heart open, honest, and wanting. I know He knows my heart and during that time I need to open up myself, and let Him know of my gratitude, my fears, and my intentions. My failing is that too many times, I am impatient and the words from me are  spoken half-heartedly and come out of me as if on a spool of barbed wire. And although the traditional ways of prayer are very important, sometimes, more than I care to remember, they become stated tasks of the day. I’m realizing now that I was pushing the words, moving faster than grace allows.  And I haven’t even gotten to my excuses and vacillation; life gets hectic, I don’t feel worthy, I’ll get to it later, I want to stop and birth my own perfect prayer, all excuses so I don’t have to meet God half-way…no, half-way is wrong. God wants to meet any way.- and too often I’ve put God on a clock and failed to hear God’s whispers and treated prayer like a vending machine, insert a prayer and pull the knob.
So without realizing it, I’ve had it backwards. I thought I was waiting on God, but He was waiting on me.
I think I’ll sit on the back deck awhile, be humble and still. See what happens.
One of the lessons learned from The Great Divorce, a novel about people that went heaven and found it lacking, CS Lewis wrote, “Overcome us that, so overcome, we may be ourselves: we desire the beginning of your ring as we desire dawn and dew, wetness at the birth of light…
I’m glad I went to breakfast. I’m grateful to God for the man with the tattoo and the group of men in the corner.

Days of Rage, Days of Confusion

 


                                                     "The more I read the papers,
                                                      The less I comprehend..."
                                                      -George Gershwin lyrics
                                                            

Back in 1968 when I had a summer job during college, I worked at the Quincy Shipyard in Massachusetts as an insulator on submarines. It was hot and dirty work, and if I remember correctly, I made $2.44 an hour. I used 2 hours of that work to purchase my first hardback book, The Second Civil War by Garry Wills. The author spent 2 months in 9 cities that had burned in the urban riots of 1967. Many folks think the inner-city riots occurred because of the MLK assassination in 1968, but actually, they happened a year before.
Will’s book could never be written today. He interviewed all sides; from police, govt. planners, black leaders, and ministers - he did so without bias - and let the reader absorb his words and come to their own conclusions.
Protesters today complain about the militarization of the police, but in 1967, 7,000 national guardsman and 9 tanks were deployed in Detroit alone. The official report stated that 43 people died and 1400 buildings were destroyed by fire. One black businessman saw the burning decimated frame of his motel, then committed suicide. A young US Representative from inner-city Detroit, John Conyers, said the death count was under-reported and believed the deaths to be in the hundreds.
Reading Will’s book is like watching burning boats flow down a river of violence. We readers probably thought at the time this urban conflagration was a once-in-a-lifetime event. We were wrong.
In 1967, Rev. Albert Cleage of Detroit said, “The white man has to give us control of the cities. If he doesn’t, he leaves no alternative but violence.” A few days ago on Fox News, Hawk Newsome of Black Lives Matter-NY said, “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn it down.” All this in a span of 57 years. Social cohesion moves at the speed of a glacier.
Back in 1967 Detroit, the minority unemployment rate was 9%, today it is 16%. All this after one of the greatest transfer of government spending in US history - The Great Society programs of the 60s/70s. In my opinion, the government does have a role in tackling trenchant, measurable problems, but not large scale, cultural ones. We just can’t throw money at big problems and expect success.
Our cities are troubled, but they continue to be the main arteries of our country. The prologue of Will’s book involves the problem of the individual policeman. A Community Relations officer in the book stated, “Police are constantly exposed to the seamiest side of life in the ghetto. Besides, a cop has to be suspicious if he is any good. And our men are scared. They take their lives in their hands every day they go to work. The last three policemen to be killed here were surprised before they could get at their weapons…” Yes, there are bad police just as there are bad doctors, teachers, and managers. Remove them and if necessary, punish them for the individual offenders they are.
I think when you throw the super-human demands of police enforcement against a large-scale and unpredictable protest that can sometimes morph into violence, the fabric of the country can become endangered, but that is the time, the very time, more enforcement is needed, not less. Peaceful protest is part of our republic, but when you keep pulling a loose thread on a sweater and keep pulling, you don’t end up with a better sweater, you end up with no sweater.
And yes, this social cohesion is difficult to balance. One the one hand, control of the streets is necessary if these problems are to be tackled and addressed. On the other hand, I’ve known enough minority co-workers and neighbors in North Carolina that view a traffic stop much differently than I do - even when there’s an even chance the police officer is a minority. These situations need to be talked about and addressed.
This is all that much more difficult because we seem to exist in a nadir of leadership, from top to bottom. We have a President Trump who will not encourage masks during an epidemic(He changed that yesterday - yea!) and his possible replacement, VP Biden if elected, may require adult day care while in the White House. What a choice!
Sadly, this lack of leadership reaches into some local police chiefs. The new Raleigh Police Chief, after a night of rioting, held a press conference to bemoan the damage but then stated her officers are too valuable to protect downtown property in the future. What?? And a few days later, during a prayer parade in a neighboring town, police officers (at the behest of their chiefs), washed the feet of protest ministers in an awkward display of public supplication. IMHO, a complete misreading of John 13. It's not often that municipal public relations and the Bible can be offended at the same time.
Perhaps there are many answers to these many problems, though, measured in inches and not miles. Last year I attended a boisterous meeting full of community disagreement and complaints that were moderated by our town’s police sergeant. With patience and grace, he listened then answered the concerns of the group. Everyone went home feeling better.
And just this. Several years ago my niece, a mother with young children, was in terror at the wailing sounds of sirens bracketing her Somerville neighborhood as police cars patrolled and searched for the Boston Bomber.
That activity would not be in a social worker’s job description.

Unremembered Veteran?

They say that war is never over until the last veteran dies. But what if a veteran’s death has no one to remember him?

For the last few weeks Donna and I have been cleaning out Donna’s 96-year-old stepmother’s apartment. She recently fell and is now in a total care facility. We found a Purple Heart Medal that my wife thought was her father’s since he served as a Marine during WWII, but the back of the medal has the name of his brother, Richard S. Greene.

We know nothing about him. There is no one left to ask.

 All of Richard’s brothers and sisters in the Greene family have passed away, and Donna’s stepmother’s memory has tapered to a slender thread. However, through the tenacity of our friends Larry and Maryann Williams and Larry’s sister, Angele, some things came together from documents and articles found by them on Ancestry.com.

Richard died on November 9th, 1944 in Northern France. He graduated from high school in 1943 and one month later joined the US Army. He must have scored well on his army tests because after basic training he was sent to Northeastern University in Boston for 4 months under a program that developed junior officers and soldiers that required special technical skills. But manpower needs must have trumped manpower planning. He was assigned to the 26th Infantry Division, 101st Regiment (The Yankee Division), and shipped out to Europe as a qualified machine gunner in September 1944.

According to records, he died from a fatal shoulder wound caused by artillery fire. From what we can speculate, his unit was working around Dieuze or Moncourt Woods in northern France. His lifespan did not extend to the Battle of The Bulge that started a month later. As part of Patton’s Third Army, his regiment distinguished itself in hard fighting and had a part in helping end the war in Europe. The Division’s last event was liberating a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, an action that presented hard witness for the soldiers’ sacrifice.

Richard was 19 years old and had a fiancé.

The news must have been tragic for his 5 brothers and sisters and in particular for my wife’s father, Donald, who was serving in the Marine Corps at the time. Richard’s obituary’s title in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle states, “Richard S. Greene, Machine Gunner”.

I am sure he was more than that in life. Even a 19-year old’s life creates widening ripples before and after the date of the obituary.

There are voluminous books about WWII and a cursory reading will teach a reader that one person alone did not affect the war’s outcome. But each soldier, taking small steps, taking even an inch of ground, gains progress toward the end of the conflict. Any US combat veteran will tell you that his friends didn’t die with thoughts of the  Constitution, our democracy, or the security of the country… but by their actions, nourished its continued heartbeat.

And even though they didn’t know him, I’ll bet some of those concentration camp inmates appreciate him and his Purple Heart. God Bless Richard, RIP…

Spring Training

                                                        

                                           

 A good thing about being in my 70s is that life slows down. When I was younger, I figuratively had a lot of fastballs throw at me; some belt-high, some at my head. But now I see mostly off-speed stuff which allows me to enjoy the ball’s symmetry and its gravitational arc as it crosses the plate.

Yup, things have definitely slowed down. These days I seem to do more seeing than doing these days, not a bad development when you think about it. It can be difficult to concomitantly do and appreciate, but one can see and appreciate something at the same time. I don’t know why that is, but there is a richness in life now that wasn’t there before.

Tomorrow we enter the season of Lent, and not to overstate the baseball analogy, we can enter our own spring training and place ourselves before God. We don’t have to sequester in the desert and be tempted for 40 days. Christ did that for us. But starting tomorrow, we are called to look within ourselves -not in a forbidding way, getting fitted for that hair shirt and beating ourselves up -but thinking about our shortcomings with an eye toward improvement, gaining more purpose in our lives.

Much earlier in life, for me as a Catholic, I gave up things during Lent. Purportedly to honor God, but many times it became a bargaining tool, to petition for something I wanted. But in Lent, I now realize it’s thinking and talking to God for help. I need more God in my life…and less Jim.

I hope, by turning inward this year, Lent will lead me outward. To bring purchase to the heartbeat of God, and secure in a humble way, God’s love. And give me the ability to realize the good in others and will it for them.

Simple stuff really.

And the good news? No matter what, God will keep throwing those off-speed pitches as we get older. He has an eternal supply.




(hat courtesy of google images)

A Good 16 Minutes

I can’t stand to watch the morning news with my coffee anymore, and there are only 200 or so Law and Order episodes, so I like to sample Youtube and found Anne Lamont’s TED talk on 12 truths she came up with as she approached her 61^st birthday. She can be acerbic at times, but always interesting and humorous. I know your time is valuable, so I’ve listed just a few of her insights, but you owe it to yourself to go on Youtube and listen to her. The talk lasts 16 minutes. Most are direct quotations mingled with some paraphrasing.

Anne Lamont: The 12 Truths I Learned from Writing and Life – TED talk

“I’m not 47, the age I like to feel but I’m not. I’m every age I’ve ever been and so are you.”

1.     “All truth is a paradox. Life is a precious, unfathomable, and a beautiful thing.”

2.     “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.”

3.     Almost nothing outside of you will help you in a lasting way unless you’re waiting for an organ. You can’t buy or achieve or date serenity or peace of mind. I so resent that, but improvement is an inside job.

4.      Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. We’re all broken at times. No one could help me get sober except me. I had to reach out to my higher power that I call God. An acronym for God can be “gift of desperation.”  

5.     Chocolate is not actually a food.

6.     “Grace is spiritual WD40. The mystery is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as he loves my grandchild. Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us. Grace finds you exactly where you are but doesn’t leave you where it found you.”

7.     “Laughter is carbonated holiness that lets us breathe.”

8.     “God means goodness. A good name for God is not me.”

9.     “Food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.”

10.  Death – “We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but the person that died will live again fully in your heart if you don’t seal it off.” Leonard Cohen said, “There are cracks in everyone. That’s how the light gets in.”