The Dream that Doesn't Die

 

I'm going to see Bob Dylan live in concert for the first time on March 30. In preparation for that, I've been listening to what I hope will be, before then, all of his music, knowing that I'd missed so much of it after the early 70s. I want to hear all his music in order before then and now that I'm pretty far into it, am finding him sunk in some places deep into what sounds like a real life exposure to Desolation Row.

Listening to the music and how it changed along the way, I'm trying to figure out what happened. He got lost somehow. Something vital drained away. He deflated away into a memory of the inspired genius that had made him someone we looked toward for a glimpse of what we might be - outraged at the venality and mediocrity of a world we knew could be better - a constant prodding toward beauty and the glory of humankind - a voice that said not 'get more' but 'be better', 'think', 'act'. A command to not only 'love' (if loving could ever be an only) but 'Be love'. 'Be real.' 

And then it all stopped. Or more like it, braked to a gradual, deflating stop. It took years for him but it happened, I'm thinking, to the rest of us, too.

That's why the 60s were special. That time has been called a brief, shining moment for some of us. There were real palpable dreams for the possibility of what we might be. And what we might be had faces - Jack. Bobby. Martin.  

In the end, they had to die, of course. Mediocrity is jealous. It does not harbor excellence or dreams of egalitarian glory.  Glory, because it reminds us of what we cannot hold in our hands or even easily imagine, has to die, too. Jesus should have helped us remember that but although his name is often evoked, what he taught never quite caught on in spite of the crowds still in churches every week. 

Glory necessitates reaching beyond flesh and blood - not only beyond our own grasp but beyond our comprehension, forced to be content with desiring most what we can only approach but never attain. 

Dylan wasn't the only one who lost it. We all did, but some of us never stopped looking for it again - the beauty that just seeped away. Everyone looked in different places and some got lost in drugs or in corporate striving. Me, as it turned out - I went to Italy. I remembered the beauty of the Renaissance and recognized it as what we'd grabbed by the tail once long ago. There, I could literally reach out and touch genius, the kind of genius that is supernatural or metaphysical. More than flesh and blood. More even than mind.

Once that kind of genius is actually touched, even for a little while, everything else looks small and insufficient, because it is. I am still disappointed in the everyday that does not aspire to lift human souls to what can only be termed a kind of heaven. And that's what I saw in Italy. In the Farnese Hercules, I saw the disillusionment of doing what we think will make things right and finding that it doesn't:

In Michaelangelo's David and the ceiling of the Sistine, I saw physical representations of the discovery of human glory:

In Donatello's Magdalen, I see how these glorious discoveries can ruin flesh, can throw what we are and what we could be into a conflagration that cannot be resolved:

And this is where we are left today. The beauty of what we are made to be still calls. It's harder to get near now because we have no one alive who knows how to lead there, but the yearning still lives, and not just in this old hippy's heart, but in so many people who have been born to ask questions and wonder why the world is the way it is. I still believe that the dream of glory never dies. 

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.: - Bob Dylan said that.

First Image: Stereo Times

Old Lady Racing: How to get out of a Speeding Ticket

 

Back in the 80s, I used to drive a race car. Of course, that was then. These days, I don't have nearly as heavy a foot as I used to, although ironically, my street cars are more powerful. That's just the way cars (not trucks or SUVs - those don't count in my world) are made these days. 350HP and doubly aspirated, but with a two-body trunk and a back seat that easily accepts a car seat. Go figure. 

Driving is a weird thing. For some, it's independence. For some, it's just a way to get somewhere. For others, like me, it's like holding onto a hurricane. When I press the ignition button in my cockpit, feeling again the push of pistons against the fire that moves them and hearing the low growl of heat and air moving through the system, I smile. Something will happen when I step on the accelerator. Yes.

Then there are those days, of course, when a little too much happens. That's another thing about my car. It has plenty of power, but wears it secretly, hiding behind efficient mufflers and noise dampeners. Sneaky. And just a little dangerous. 

Like when I pull up alongside 4 16-year-olds in a convertible 5L Mustang on a sunny summer day. Grandma in her sedan. Ha. I've had two of them. Sneaky sportscars. The first was an SHO. Yowser, it was fun. Pure muscle and guile:

Until a truck nosed its way into somewhere he didn't belong and power couldn't get me out of:

That was a sad day. So I got a hot rod Lincoln. Ahh....

So when the light turned green for me and the Mustang, I'm a quarter mile down the road before they've left the light. Oh my, that feels good.

Not so good, though, when there's a patrol car up ahead with a not-so-friendly county sheriff in it. It's happened more than once, and I don't like that part one bit. These days, however, I have a secret weapon. 

My granddaughter, Autumn. 

She's gotten me out of two tickets. She didn't mean to, of course, but she sure did it.

The first time, she was in her car seat in the back. I'd just pulled out on the highway on the first leg of what was to be our first road trip together and just before engaging the cruise control, he caught me. Way too fast, like 20 miles or so too fast. 

"Why is the policeman coming here, Grandma?"

"To keep us safe, honey."  Yeah, right. 

I rolled down the window, smiled, and handed him my license. Then he saw Autumn in the back seat. 

"I want to be a policeman!" she told him. That's all it took. He scolded me and let me go. Well done, girl.

It happened last Friday, too, and this time Autumn wasn't even in the car. Going only 12 miles over on a minor highway in a small Wisconsin town was enough to trigger the blue lights, though. 

"Where are you going?" 

"To my granddaughter's choir concert."

"Where is it?"

"Salem School." He knew the school was just down the street. It was a test. And again, he sent me on my way. 

Score. Not so bad for a grandma driving a sneaky sportscar. It's been more than 5 years since I've gotten a speeding ticket. I don't look too dangerous, after all. And Autumn surely doesn't. Good thing they can't read my mind. 

Please excuse me while I do a few donuts. 

It's Ash Wednesday - So What's Burning?

 

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday.
“Remember that you are but dust and unto dust you shall return.”

The celebrant rubs ashes on our forehead and we are supposed to be reminded of our sins and that we will, like it or not, eventually die. With that in mind, we then enter into six weeks of reflection that’s often marked by giving something up, or sometimes taking up a new practice intended to bring us closer to God, and these are good things. Often, however, if we’re honest, it’s just another season in the church marked by different colors, different customs, different routines and not much else.

The dust thing is interesting, though. In this context, dust means two things. The first is the dirt that God took up to make the first human being. So dust means dirt, but here it also means ashes, the grit and fluff that's left over when something is burned. Here, what's burned is supposed to be us and the dust referred to is connected with feelings of disappointment or disillusionment and with the ancient practice of visible humility. Job threw ashes on himself when his family had all been struck down. It is a symbol of great mourning, often intensified by the wearing of sackcloth, an intentionally uncomfortable, scratchy garment made of goat’s hair supposed to remind the wearer of their sins. It was painful on purpose. Sackcloth and ashes. 

But there is another recurring theme in the Bible connected with this practice, the idea of dying, specifically dying to self. Burning is a particularly final way of ending something. What is burned is pretty much completely destroyed and along with our former sinful ways, we are encouraged to not only get rid of our wrongful deeds, we are supposed to get rid of everything - EVERYTHING - that separates us from God and, contrary to what some say, it's not only sin that does this. 

In addition to what we do that we know is wrong when we do it, although this is a big obvious roadblock to a life with God, we also have to understand what we did in ignorance that we should not have done. If I think the speed limit is 50 but it's 35, the policeman still gets to give me a ticket for going too fast. Ignorance is not an excuse. Not really a sin, but still not OK. The attachments we form with other people that loom larger than God. A degree of busyness that gets in the way of our devotional life. Desire and addiction of almost any kind. We lose our focus and as a consequence, we lose God. 

So, what's burning is us? Our ego.  Whatever part of our humanity that interferes with the narrow way. That's why it's narrow. Not because it's exclusive, but because it's hard and takes work. However, we are a New Testament people, forgiven in Christ. We don’t put on sackcloth and ashes anymore, but there is symbolism here that can be useful to us, too. Rather than concentrating on our sins, we look to our transformation in Christ. The dust and ashes, the knowledge of all the times we have fallen short and need forgiveness is still important, but not for its sense of loss or hopelessness. We bury our old lives, yes, but as we do so we look to the new one. We die to something we thought we loved for the sake of something better so that we can embrace a newer life, a more perfect life in God. There is Lent, but there is also Easter. 

image: Vecteezy

The Arrow vs. the Circle - The Shape of the World

 One of the most enduring ideas I learned in college is that not everyone thinks like I do. 

It's true. And in all likelihood, they don't think like you do, either. This goes way past contemporary journalistic and talk show fodder about a divided country or prevailing politics. It goes all the way down to the how we think the world is made and the way it works beyond physics and biochemistry. It's about the nature of living things and, adjunctly, what we can expect or not expect in the process of living. Overall, there are two basic ideologies that not only dictate how we live, but they also dictate how we think.

The Arrow

The first way of looking at the world is as a straight line. Having a specific beginning and a specific ending, this view is most common in Western cultures (eg: ours) and most often coupled with a world governed by duality. That is, this world knows two opposing forces, each one working against the other to cause tension in our everyday lives. Right and wrong, good and evil, constantly at war with each other to the point that  determining one from the other and choosing rightly so as to live as decent a life as we can muster occupies a great deal of our time. 

In this scheme, whatever we consider bad is to be avoided at almost all costs. Poverty, illness, danger. We assume that it's possible to live a life with less bad and more good, not only through what we do ourselves, but overall  - as a group or society - and part of our job as humans is to tip the balance toward the good whenever we have a chance. Whether or not we think that goodness will alter a fate that extends beyond our physical life or not, this trend toward goodness is something to be desired and if our beliefs tend in the direction of a heaven, well then, there is an opportunity for all goodness to be realized.

The Circle 

Known as yin-yang, this is an Eastern or Asian view of the world in which all things in the universe consist of complementary, opposing forces in constant flux. These forces are unavoidable and interdependent, that is, one cannot exist without the other so that good and evil operate together necessarily and are not usually associated with  the same intensity of value judgement as they do in the Arrow model. 

This model also does not have any definite beginning or end. There is no Garden of Eden here, no Second Coming. The cycle, samsara, simply repeats until the individual gradually navigates their way into perfect communion with an awareness free from all suffering. That communion, that place of liberation, is called Nirvana and is reached in much the same way as is heaven: ethical living, mindfulness, and the wisdom gained by them. What this view does avoid is the struggle to right wrongs since what we might often call wrongs are a necessary and functional part of living that we have to learn to navigate to get where we want to go. 

Not the Same, But Not Completely Different

We're pretty much born into one of these worldviews. It's pretty hard for someone born in the U.S., like me, to think about things the way a Buddhist or a Taoist would. Most of us grew up balancing the voices between the bickering angel on our right shoulder and the nasty little devil on our left. The idea that those two rascals don't exist, that my ideas of good and evil are pretty much irrelevant, that there is no heaven or hell, well, that's a reach. But it also makes sense in a way because we know from experience that suffering can hone us to sharpness and difficulty can breed a kind of wisdom that ease never does. That they should need each other to make us the best we can be may not be so crazy after all. 

As for me, I like the idea of working to make this world a better place but at the same time the thought of floating off into an egoless Nirvana where good and evil don't matter anymore sounds pretty appealing, too. Maybe like you, I don't exactly know what will happen when I shrug off my physical body, but until then, Donkey has some good advice:

Images: ergo blog, jade dragon school

No Clocks in Eden

 

Sommarøy, a small Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway, decided in 2019 to get rid of all of its clocks. Anyone traveling there will find a land whose summer sun shines all day long and whose 300+ inhabitants are free to swim Caribbean blue waters or laze on sand beaches in the middle of the night because, well, nobody there cares what time it is. 

Just Imagine

Look around. Right now. How many devices do you use to tell you the time? I have two in the room I'm in and another in the room next door. I look at them constantly, even when the time doesn't matter. Like now. It's a kind of reflex, a way of grounding myself. If I know the time, I've got a handle on the world. 

But that's not true.

Of all of the constructs of man, time is one of the most insidious. We're either early or behind. We're constantly being measured by it. We worry about how much time something takes, or whether we have time to do this or that. We hurry through nearly everything to make sure we can fit it all in. If we didn't care about time, we would never have to be busy in the same way. We wouldn't constantly be rushing past people or things of ordinary beauty. We might finally be able to stop and SEE.

Time and the Spirit

It's not just the clock that's the problem. The clock is just a natural extension of the idea of time in the macro. It's looking at life in terms of what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. It's the concepts of past and future. That's time, too. 

We often talk about the importance of living in the NOW, being present for life's events as they occur as if that's all we have because, well, it IS all we have. The concept of time, the idea that we can in some way hold on to or influence what has already happened or what has not yet happened hogties our life. It is the origin of both regret and fear. Without time, we wouldn't give yesterday or tomorrow a second thought and they don't deserve it.

Time and Eternity

God, who made us, lives beyond time. Everything in His consciousness is happening right now, to everyone everywhere. Every person who lived, every person who will ever live, you and me, are equally present to Him every second. Time, the hours of it and the passage of it, are an entirely human concept and the more we tie ourselves to the idea that time is real (it isn't), the farther we put ourselves away from God. 

Do you really think God put clocks in Eden? Of course He didn't. Nobody needed them. Those walks He took with Adam in the cool of the day had no limit, no recorded beginning or end. Their union was without any kind of limit, time or otherwise. 

Hmmm...  I stopped setting my alarm clock about 40 years ago, but darn. Looks like I didn't go far enough. Those folks on Sommarøy might be on to something. 

Image: Islands

Suffering, Self, and What to Do With Them

 

Who was the Buddha?

The person we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, summed up his teaching in a simple sentence: "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". I doubt there is anyone to whom that doesn't sound good. No one wants to suffer and the Buddha maintained that there was a way out of it, a way out of Samsara, the unending cycle of suffering that humans endure. This is what he taught, and this only. 

The way to do that, he said, was to undo our humanity completely, to dismantle all the pieces that make us discrete human beings, to define all the parts of our actions, thoughts, and personality that comprise our Self and to jettison them into the aether, leaving spirit unencumbered and absorbed into the stream that is life itself. There are no desires, no evils, no joys, no sorrows. We are completely and perfectly free forever. Nirvana. 

He said this was possible for anyone and his followers say he achieved such a state, but returned to teach others how to do it. He became bodhisattva, an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana out of compassion and helps all willing sentient beings to achieve awakening as well. He became a teacher and is said to have passed down (verbally - Gautama never wrote anything down) the way to do what he did and many have followed him. 

Sounds Pretty Good to Me

I can't blame them. Who doesn't want to leave suffering by the wayside and live in perfect happiness? Pretty much everything we do in life is geared toward making either ourselves (primarily ourselves, if we're honest) or someone else happy. It rarely works the way we think it does, of course, because generally what we think will make us happy is more life, not less. More love, more money, more health, more ease...more, more, more...and what it usually gets us is more complications and often more trouble. 

It's possible that the Buddha was on to something by telling us we are better off with less of ourselves rather than more. Desire is thrilling and can make us feel ecstatic and alive but it is not always our friend, often leading to bad decisions, waste, and misery. I wonder, however, whether he took his idea of achieving happiness a few steps too far and for those who think their humanity is not a misshapen impediment, it might be worth looking at an alternative.

Die to Self

The Buddha wasn't the only one who thought we needed to rid ourselves of too much Self, but it's a matter of degree. Jesus did it, too. But Jesus' dying always carried with it a resurrection. In other words, Buddha undressed us and escorted us into a different kind of existence stripped of flesh, bone, blood, and intellect, but Jesus did something different. Jesus changed the clothes of humanity. He taught a way to remove the cloak of pride and selfishness and destructive desire and put on a new one, removing a forbidding, fortified heart of stone and replacing it with a vulnerable heart of flesh, open to hurt and death but somehow enlarged by them. 

In short, Jesus taught us how to remain human, suffer constructively, and still find happiness. 

How to Be Human and Happy

There are some Christian sects that treat our bodies like a red-headed stepchild, of course, who say that we are unavoidably and irredeemably corrupt by physical nature, and in that, they have philosophical agreement with the Buddha. But Jesus was a man. A man who never apologized for being a man or tried to undo his humanity. A man who lived fully and died fully, too. A man who knew that complete divorce from suffering was not the way we were meant to live and demonstrated it by suffering with intent right before our eyes. 

Rather than undoing his humanity, He detached his humanity and his suffering from their catastrophic nonessentials, the desires and decisions that augment our sense of self but lead to nothing but the loss of the love, peace, and happiness we think we're working toward. He did leave a couple of pretty plain roadmaps for how to do this: his own life and the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon gives practical examples of which desires we should keep and which we should work to abandon. It tells us what we will look like while this is being accomplished - we will look like Jesus. 

I admit I'm tempted to say Duh here because that is his aim all along - to make us like him. He said to "follow me" more than 20 recorded times and in that, please note, that He did not live any nirvana. He suffered and in that, I deduce that, even when we are following and doing as much of the right thing as we can muster, we will suffer too. It's part of the deal. It's part of life. It forms us. It confirms our humanity, and in case you haven't noticed, we are, at least for now, all human.

The Alternatives

It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Sort of. We have a Self and do not need to kick it to the curb to know joy and peace. With that Self and the desires that it brings, however, we will also suffer. That's the deal. It's either that or the way of the Buddha: immolation of the Self and absorption into a blessedly sense-free Nirvana. 

There is a kind of happiness in either path.

I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.-John 10:10

image: owlcation

Winter Full Moon - and Living 100 Years

 

Winter full moons. Their blue light and the way they look cast on snow. Not reflecting, but drawing out what can't normally be seen. A stark beauty only possible because it happens in harshness. Is this why we have seasons?

Living to 100

I've been reading the diary of Calvin Tomkins, a former writer for The New Yorker, and his comments regarding how he is spending his 100th year - what he's thinking and how he feels. The changes happening to him and how he assimilates them into what he's known as his life until then. It comes down to this: most of our lives (or mine, anyway) assume a level of health and lucidity. We are supple and flexible and energetic and strong. We get sick sometimes, sure, but then we get well again, as well as we were before the illness. We get used to being this way. It is our normal. 

Our Timeline of Progressive Maturation

Put in terms of a projected timeline, we reach physical maturity in the first season of our life, and that is our main concern. We, well, we grow up. Then, however, if we're paying attention, spiritual and psychological maturity start to catch up. We've reached the best our physical body will ever be and we start to build other kinds of muscles. This is middle age. Then our body begins to decline. Slowly at first, but somewhere in the 70s the disassembly begins to accelerate. By 99, Mr. Tomkins has a long list of physical  facilities that don't work anymore. Ones that just seemed to sneak up him almost overnight, one after another. 

We grow up, you see, mostly without much effort. It just happens. One's cells know what to do automatically. We become our most beautiful and vital selves so easily that we can sometimes stop other people in their tracks. We hum with electric pleasure. We are immortal and it feels so good, like the natural order of things. And it is. For awhile.

We aren't immortal, though, and sooner or later, our body begins to remind us. We learn the rest of the natural order and this, too, like our strength, is a kind of gift because while we are exulting in our vitality, our spirit is awakening and growing. What our body has long known, our spirit can also now know. We have been men and women who strode with gods in the flesh. Now we can learn to stride with God in the spirit.

This is the final and complete maturation. 

What if Feels Like to Live It

This last spiritual growth signals its arrival, like the first one, through the flesh. What was a strong, beautiful body sags and greys and begins to grow slack no matter how much we try to build it up. Skin and bones thin. Organs stutter and fail. When we sicken or fracture, we may heal, but not to prior levels of vitality. We have to get used to lower physical plateaus, new normals, reduced horizons. And it is from this place that the fruit of the spirit stands out in greater clarity. The spirit we grow during our waning days of physical strength becomes our final, sustaining strength, bearing us up not to greater physical feats but to different heights. The God who first showed himself during the noise of our vigor becomes our entire beautiful world. The voice that was still and small grows to a symphony in crescendo. 

I do not achieve much in the flesh anymore, so what I do achieve originates not from the flesh but from the spirit. I have a broken arm now and it is healing, but it will probably not heal to a level as supple and nimble as it once was. This new level will dictate my next reduced physical plateau and as such, is a gift not only to gently prepare me for my end, but to give me a chance to marvel at the grace that brought me here. 

What I Had, What I Have

I will never again be completely healthy. 

I will never again know spiritual poverty. 

The moon is full tonight while I find I am in my life's winter.  It is beautiful because what is real in me lives still unlimited, unfettered. I can still sing. 

Photo: Forbes, Sports Health

Shadows: Dust to Dust

 

It's happened twice now -  not that we remember a place but that the place remembers us. It may be only a shred, or a wisp that remains of a step we made on the grass of a song we sang while wandering there, or the contrast we made on a landscape that could be seen from far off like a flag. What might a place remember of me? 

The sidewalk on 53rd St. might remember the swift run and quick, gentle ascent of flight no one (except maybe granddaughter Autumn) believes I made. The same place might remember shadows cast under streetlights by mounded teens playing cards, pretending to be ten years older.

I'm pretty sure Oak Knoll Drive wouldn't remember much of me. I was a lodger there, not a full-fledged occupant, awkward and temporary, but after that, the farm might still fume because of what I tried to make of it. The decapitated saplings, though long ceased bleeding, may have resurrected themselves in the way of stubborn plants, knowing they always belonged even when I thought they did not, understanding the irrelevance of subduction. It may be that deer would have wandered through the back lawn, looking for me lounging in my usual chair, but the time is coming when any deer that might have thus remembered will lie blanched in a field or have been dragged home by a hunter. The dogs and the chickens I knew there were all dead before I could abandon them, but the cats might recall the winter nest I  made for them as a retreat on bitter days.

Regardless, the shadows of all these places will have changed - grown taller or shorter - and the farm's great oak and globular maple might still stand far enough to observe, but never accessible enough to be threatened except by lightning, the only thing bold enough to challenge them. I surely was not.

We are just passing through in the end. If we leave any memory at all, it is only a whisper shared in ever-deepening layers of dirt or in tree rings long secreted by newer seasons. And that is probably as it should be. We are only dust, after all, gathered by greater hands and blown into life in a way no one quite understands, only to return to the same dust after our seasons of strutting and fretting.

We won't be remembered long, but I am content with that. It no longer matters so much. There have been many good days and I am satisfied with them.

Images: Kinder Institute for Urban Research and Planting Tree

Be Careful What You Pray For

 

My husband died in 2016. Later that same year, a Christian movie called Miracles from Heaven was released. It was supposed to be an inspiring story of faith and restoration based on true events and my closest friends, thinking that seeing it would refresh my sad heart, convinced me to go. It didn't work. 

I should have known that it wouldn't when I saw the theater vestibule full of women fingering tissues, anticipating the tears they expected would come. They may have found a measure of joy in weeping, but I did not. My weeping came all too easily and from a more intimate core. But for my friends' sake, I stayed and watched the movie. It was worse than I expected.

Its centerpiece was the against-all-odds rescue of a daughter from illness and accident, a rescue that resulted in the renewal of her mother's faith in God. For almost everyone there, this was supposed to be a happy ending. Not for me. 

If there is such a thing as prayer abuse, this is it. 

First, from my point of view at the time, it was easy to see the woman's answer to prayer as a betrayal. Sure, her daughter was healed, but overwhelmingly, desperately sick people do not get healed; they die. Dead people do not rise; they stay dead. I knew this from personal experience. As these women wept for joy and hope for someone they never knew, my husband stayed dead. That, of course, is the selfish view. 

More generally, though, prayer - any prayer that asks for God to manipulate circumstances He put in motion - works against itself. If we ask God (an attitude that dares to suppose we know something is needed and He doesn't) for something in our material world to change, it might happen, but whether it does or not, all we'll get is a change in our material world. Our spiritual world will not enlarge, it will shrink.

That is why the gate to God is narrow. 

Prayer for healing, prayer for relief from suffering, prayer for happiness and ease, prayer for good fortune, prayer for safety and peace - they demonstrate lack of confidence that God knows what He is doing. Almost all prayer operates from a place of broad, shallow faith. Letting God have His way and knowing it is the best way, even when (maybe especially when) it results in something unpleasant, drives faith narrow and deep. It is the faith of the one who does not see, but still believes.

We rarely remember that this whole life adventure only ends one way. We all die sooner or later. Delaying that or assuming we know better than God when that is supposed to happen negates the faith we say we have in Him. 

I would have liked to ask the moviemakers about the nature of this mother's faith. Would she have had it if her daughter died? If her faith was based on her daughter's rescue, it is small indeed. 

The same principles apply to determining whether we have circumstance-based faith or whether our faith is based on knowing the real presence of God, the God who lives and makes His temple in our very bodies, who tells us we will never be free difficulty and suffering while we live but that He makes Himself available through it all. 

The goal is worship God because we believe no matter what, not to believe because we worship God for all the good He has brought. 

This is how we figure out who we are. Once we realize that God truly does reside in us by His own design, what happens in our lives becomes a kind of partnership. God does what He does and we trust Him to do it. God is not apart from us, changing the world around us because we plead with Him like  child next to the candy rack in the checkout line. 

There are those that say prayer changes us, but what we really want is for it to change the circumstances around us. Trust, the knowledge that the best is already happening, supersedes prayer and then we become more what we are meant to be.

One - Not the date but the world and more

 

Time and the passing of it.  Hours turning into days and years. We think it's an inevitable part of life, but it's only an idea. Time is a construct, a framework we use to order the eternity into which we were born. In fact, when we start thinking about existence more as one whole thing rather than a collection of separate pieces, a lot of interesting things happen.

One Power

Evil is not a power and therefore does not need to be overcome because it is not eternal. Nothing that is not eternal has power over that which is eternal. The only power is God and His grace. Neither good nor evil, which only exist as worldly judgements, can alter God's perfection. 

Nothing we pray for (ask for) other than God's grace is grantable. God need not give what He has already given. Our job is merely to follow in the way He has shown us, to change ourselves and thus the world around us as we yield to Him

One Consciousness

In order to achieve God's highest, we have to let go of all people and places we love more than God. In the process, harm may come to them and to us, the this harm's purpose is to make us lean into God more and more, to know the Son of God already in us and to yield to it, to let what we love in the flesh fall apart around us, even to let our own flesh fall apart while we watch, knowing that both are opportunities to sink into the Son of God in us.

One Existence

There is no hope for this world in the sensory way we've come to think about it - that of good and bad, pleasure and pain. The temporal can never be perfected. Only God is perfect and we will find no peace or health except to the extent we yield to the eternal. 

Do not pray for more of God. Do not pray for anything. Just yield to what is already there. Do what is given to us to do and keep our mind on Him. 

Time doesn't matter. We are already safe in all the things that last. He is omnipotent. 

Image from istock

Looking for Bethlehem - Why to take your shoes off

 

Bethlehem. The star, the shepherds, the cows and the manger, that whole Christmas scene. It feels good. The nativity display in front of the church with Mary and Joseph and the sweet baby laying in the hay reminds us what Christmas is all about. 

Or does it?

In reality, that's not what Bethlehem looked like - not then, not now. When Jesus was born, the barn was more likely a cave and it took months, maybe years, for the three Kings (if they were kings, and if there where three of them) to show up. Today Bethlehem is a tourist destination that is home to about 25,000 people and pilgrims come to the Church of the Nativity where Christ was not born to remember that He was. 

It all sounds a little silly, more like Disney than a holy place, but its existence reminds us that many of us are looking for a place where we can connect our lives, our human lives, with God. Someplace where we are confident that He extends his finger to meet ours like He does in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling.  And we think Bethlehem might be one of those this places where the veil between the physical and metaphysical is thin, one of those places where we can touch the finger of God.

This all reminds me of the trips I made to Italy in 2018 and 2025 and why I made them. I went to Italy thinking that Florence, seat of the Renaissance and home a prodigious collection of the Western world's most brilliant talents, might be one of those places. How could Dante, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, Galileo, and all their compatriots looking to express the glory of God have been able to do what they did if they didn't have a bead on some kind of divinity? They had to have a connection and I wanted to find our what it was. 

I was wrong, of course. 

Florence has no more connection to God than does Bethlehem. No place on Earth, no place, can help me find God. When we look to earthly places and things to find God, we don't find Him there. We just find more earthly places and things. In our rush to find easy access to Jesus, we forget what He told us. 

The kingdom of God is within you. - Luke 17:21.

Within you. We carry access to God around in us. We don't need to go looking for Him anywhere else. That's the reason He came in the first place - to show us what life in communion with God looks like. Not perfect. Not trouble-free, but always accessible if we're looking in the right place and following it.

That's why we take our shoes off when we meet God. Not because He is in the dirt or floor under our feet but because He is in the union of what He put in us and the rest of His creation. 

The Lord our God, the Lord is One - Deuteronomy 6:4

We are part of the One that is God - temple of the Holy Spirit (1Cor 3:16, 6:19), the hope of glory (Col 1:27). Bethlehem is sweet, but we don't need it anymore. We have Him. 

Photo credit: James Larkin

The Bark Before the Bite

 

Dogs are loud sometimes, and I suppose they were made that way for a reason - warning and protection - but when I'm walking in my neighborhood and a dog who I didn't see suddenly runs from the shelter of its yard right at me and starts barking, I am taken aback, startled. And the barking appears to be sinister. I am automatically afraid. I am the target and I don't like it.

Most of the time, though, the dog doesn't mean to threaten. I've run into this particular dog before and it does not appear to be mean. After all, it's often wagging its tail at the same time as it's making noise. That's what happened this morning. 

I was just walking along, minding my own business and my neighbor's dog, (unleashed) came running towards me, barking up a storm. The first thing I noticed was the noise - loud, harsh, and unrelenting. The second thing I noticed was that he was not connected to any restraint. Together, these things made me very cautious and I intentionally avoided eye contact with it because I'd heard somewhere that dogs are threatened by a human stare and I for sure did not want to do that.

The next things I noticed, surreptitiously, from the corner of my eye, was that the dog was little more than a puppy, a cute little guy, and that his tail was wagging. Hardly sinister.

That got me to thinking.

Thinking about the difference between how we say things and how others hear them. Instruction, Warning, Advice, Opinion. All of them can be shared in love and with an intent to constructive improvement, but I know without doubt that they are not always received that way. They are too often received as Judgement, Criticism, and Dismissal. The bark without any awareness of the desire to play. 

The thing with a dog is that their bark is pretty much one-dimensional. It's one bark, the only one they have. We should be able to do better. In our encounters, we have available many voices, many kinds of words. We have smiles to temper them, help to soften them, and gentle touches to emphasize them. And we don't always take the time to use them or even to take the time to think of them. We also have silence and patience, more powerful and helpful tools than we usually give them credit for.

It doesn't matter what we say if it's not heard they way it was meant. 

Like the dog this morning. I still don't know whether he wanted to play or would have bit me had I reached down to pet him. I suspect it was more the former than the latter, but I'll never know because I wasn't willing to risk the bite. The same is true, I think, of anyone I talk to. If they think I'm going to bite them, they'll turn around and keep walking. Not the result I'm looking for in any conversation I have. 

Now all I have to do when I get ready to open my mouth is remember the dog. 

Early Morning Reflection: Fragility and Reliance on the Precise Wording of Scripture

 

Early mornings have their own breath, before any birds sing or dogs bark or, in my neighborhood, before the neighbors fire up their Harleys to go to work. It's the space between the inhale of full night and the exhale of a new day. Soft and fragile, it comes when the sky turns velvet with the promise of a pink sunrise that hasn't yet come. 

Photos can't capture it because it comes only by feel, so still that its first motion comes from a mosquito that hovers near, not on, my skin. A breeze so insignificant that it gets absorbed into motion of the turning earth at any other time. 

And then it comes. The exhale. That subtle drop in temperature that starts every new day. The ambient movement that precedes first light, creating the slightest of cool breezes, the only one we will get on a day that promises to huddle with humidity and sizzle with sun. A shiver almost comes, but not quite. More a premonition that summer days aren't all beaches and state fairs, that nothing lasts forever, that footing isn't always as sure as it seems. 

And I think of Jerome. Poor, dear Jerome and his Latin Vulgate. 

It took him more than twenty years during the late fourth century and early fifth to translate both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into the learned language of his day, Latin. The result, his Latin Vulgate translation, has been considered the gold standard by many churches ever since. In many ways, Jerome's translation has become our Bible, the one we have trusted all our lives.

And then comes the day when we understand the extent to which Jerome was just a man, inspired by God and prompted by devotion, but hampered by prejudices and the potential for error from misjudgment, illness, and just plain weariness. 

Then comes the day when we come to grips with examples of what effect the fragility of his humanity has on what we are so sure of. The Bible. Our Bible. What we take for granted as true beyond any capacity for doubt. 

Then comes the day when we learn that not every word of the Bible may be what it seems. 

Take Isaiah 7:14.

You most likely know it by heart:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The Hebrew word used here is almah, a word that was commonly used for a young woman or maiden, a unmarried woman. Jerome knew, of course, that this verse is ideologically paired with Matthew 1:23 and undoubtedly wanted to make sure we made the connection, too:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.

So Jerome in his zeal to clarify doctrine, substituted almah, a word meant to describe an unmarried woman with a word meant to describe a virgin instead. Not a terrible stretch, to be sure, but a stretch nonetheless. By Jerome's deft hand, the prophecy declared in Isaiah is fulfilled precisely in Matthew in a single language we couldn't mistake. Proof of Mary's virginity. Partial proof of Christ's divinity. Perfect. 

But not quite. 

While not quite a blatant mistranslation, it is an interpretation. A well-meaning one, but an interpretation even so. 

And that's the rub.

This doesn't mean that Mary, the mother of Christ, wasn't a virgin, of course. She probably was. Otherwise, what would have been all the fuss? It only means that the Bible, while an inspired document, isn't a word-for-word perfect document, especially in the English we probably all read. Not an infallible Guide for Living but signpost pointing to the God it tries to explain, intended to grow in us a desire for God that even His words will not satisfy.

The Bible is an invaluable guide and companion to a faith based not on its specific words but on God Himself. 

The Bible is a fragile connection to God sometimes, but it is a connection. Like our image in the mirror is not our complete self but a faithful representation, it still tells me valuable information about what I look like. Like the almost indetectable breeze from a mosquito's early morning wings tells me he's there, so does the Bible hover faithfully near to remind me where to look for the breath of God so that I long to turn to Him full-face so as to behold His glory. 

The Bible showcases the way. It points to the path. 

The goal is not the Bible. The goal is God.

 

Mosquito image: Dreamstime

Horizon Image: From my window at Castello di Solfagnano, Perugia, Umbria, Italy, May, 2025

Jerome image: Ascension Press

Gateway image: Entrance from chapel courtyard to garden, Castello de Solfagnano

Ben Franklin on what happens when you sweep your doorstep

Ben Franklin is well known for his respect for the industrious. His Poor Richard alter ego is responsible for familiar advice like "No pain, no gain", "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise", and even "God helps those who help themselves" (No, it's not in the Bible). I just finished his autobiography and realized that tomorrow is the 4th of July, so I thought another of his observations and the actions it prompted might make a good subject for discussion.

When Ben lived in Philadelphia as a youngish man who had already started a flourishing printing business, it was still a very young city, just getting started on what was to become a notable future, the same as the man himself. One might say they grew up together. One might even say they helped one another along and one way they did so began pretty humbly - by Ben observing a woman sweeping the street in front of her house.

In those days, none of Philly's streets were paved and it takes little imagination to understand what happened when it rained. Carriages and horses made the dirt streets a quagmire through which not only they, but men and women, had to trudge, all dragging through clinging mud, towing it with them wherever they went. 

One day, Ben observed a woman sweeping away the loose dirt in front of her house and asked why she did that. When she told him that it kept the mud down there when it rained, he, because he was Ben Franklin, had an idea. What if they paved the streets with bricks? It sounded like a fine idea and as things turned out, Ben got it done. But the way he got it done was what impressed me. He found the bricks, and found the people to do the work, then got the immediate neighbors to pitch in a little bit, just a few pennies each, to finance the work done in front of their house. Just their house, the part from which they would directly benefit. 

And something happened.

Actually, two somethings.

First, the street got paved. The mud abated. When it rained, everybody looked at their improved circumstances and took pleasure in the results. A good thing for everyone.

Also, however, something else happened. Now, Ben didn't write about this, but I got to thinking. When Philadelphians looked at their lovely paved streets, they had to be thinking, "Look what we did." Emphasis on the WE. Everyone who benefited from the project, from the residents to the bricklayers, realized not only a practical benefit from it, but could see their own participation in it. Every day, when they swept the newly laid bricks outside of their own homes. 

And that happened, I believe, because the project was accomplished not through taxes by some amorphous THEY but by people they talked to. People who had a recognizable face and with whom they'd had conversation. Neighbors. Friends. Strangers who helped each other. They'd built something. Together. And they enjoyed the fruits of their labors together. 

And they celebrated every day by sweeping.

Don't think people sweep their sidewalks anymore? You're wrong. The first time I went to Italy, on my first morning in Rome, we were staying in an Airbnb on a quiet street and I woke to singing. When I opened the shutters, I looked down. There, in front of the shop below our apartment, the shopkeeper was sweeping the sidewalk outside of his store, singing some pleasant little ditty I couldn't understand, and happy. Happy to be sweeping. Happy to have a sidewalk to sweep. Happy. 

And he was beautiful. Like Ben. Like working together for the common good with people we can embrace when the work is done. Projects that have human faces. 

I smile to think what might still be possible. Happy Fourth.

First Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Society

Second Photo credit: Alamy

Posture

 

Stand Up Straight.

Put Your Shoulders Back.

Lift your chin.

LOOK AT ME.

All my life. The reminder to have good posture. I still think about it, looking at recent photographs of an old woman with back bent, walking with determination sometimes, but now needing to consciously adjust my spine so as to even approximate something straight. 

The years did it.

The flower is worn for sure, but the stem doesn't reach up rightly anymore, either. I look often at the ground rather than the sky. It looks likes defeat. It looks used up, and maybe it is, or nearly.

There are times when insight and adventure still reign, and the 'A' side of life still takes hold - when I buy a ticket for Italy or hop on the Queen Mary, or sign up for college - but on many days, I'd rather just take a Tylenol for the aches, lay down on the couch, and nod off, realizing that someday, sooner rather than later, I won't wake up. 

I pretty much know what it is. Something happened to the angst of living, the tortured thoughts that provided steam for my engine, the knowing that what I had was not all there was to have in this world. That there was more, and I wanted to taste it. At first it was more money or more excitement, but became later desire for more understanding, more light, more space.

And I found a lot of it. It turned out not to be too complicated. It was simple, and still is, God lays it before me every day. The wonders of clean breath. The golden light of evening. The feeling of sand on bare feet. The sound of someone calling me grandma. I remember (or think I do) an interview with Raymond Burr when he retired and was asked what he was going to do with himself, saying something like "I'm going to sit in my garden and watch my lemons grow." I didn't get it at the time. Now, I do. 

It was a shock to be done with achieving, but most days, it leaves me content. Now that my job is more giving away then grasping, I can relax a little. 

It doesn't look all that great, but it feels pretty good.

Photos by the author from her garden

Mary's Great Commission

 

I been reading a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest. He is the founder of Homeboy Industries in the Los Angeles neighborhood that is the gang capital of the world and Homeboy provides them a way back into a godly and productive life.

As a part of what he does, Greg celebrates a lot of church services in detention facilities and to do it, he had to learn a whole new language – not only Spanish, but Homie. And the Homies he tries to help have to learn a new language too because when he teaches them the Bible, he uses a lot of words they don’t know, so both sides have to do the best they can to make themselves understood and what happens is that when they engage in conversation, the homies substitute words they do know for words they don’t. The results are sad, awkward, and funny like these:

A young Homie who wants to read a Bible verse in church might say:  "This is a  reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Filipinos". Or someone who was hungry and looked for help might tell him: "I had to go eat at the Starvation army". Once one of the young men who worked in his office gave him this phone message: "Professor Davis at UC wants you to give a talk and he says to be sure to tell that you will be constipated".

 But we do the same thing. We can’t help it. We only know what we know and when we talk about what we don’t know, we have no choice but to do it in terms of what we do know. It’s the only way we can relate to something. It even happens when we read the Bible. Like this passage:

 Luke 10: 1-2,: After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.

Or this one:

Matthew 28:18-20: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you". 

The likeliest way to read these is as evangelists, that it means we are to go to work for God. It's a thing, and a familiar one. We want to be one of those to whom God says, Well done, at our life’s end. To get there, we must work. Work is what we know. Work is our language of faith.

But I keep running into a problem with this. Quietly, in the background, something else is going on.

John 12:1-8, Luke 10:38-42: Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint[a] of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.

“Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her.”

 If the highest service we can render to God is to do the work that must be done, to bring in the harvest, to spread the gospel, then where does this come from? Mary, Jesus says, has the better part. The better part of what? Of Jesus? Of obedience? Of a life of faith? I think the answer to all of these is yes, but that’s the problem. Mary’s approach is one of contemplation, not work. All she did was make a frivolous gesture of love and then sit and listen at Jesus’ feet. Nothing got done. No souls were won. No additional seats at their table were filled with converts. But this, Jesus said, was the better part. This is for us, like for the homies, the part we don’t know.

 The fields may be ripe and we may be asked to be fishers of men, but this kind of work may not be the only kind of work Jesus is talking about. After all, when you think about it, God does not need us to win souls to Him. He is perfectly capable of doing it all on His own. In fact, the little bit we can do would be useless without the part only God can do. This is what Jesus called the better part. We can’t do what He can and somehow, we have to understand that without Him, all of our outward kingdom work will fall short.

In the end, we can’t convert anyone. We can’t bestow faith. But we can do something we are repeatedly asked to do. Love. Love God and love one another. The Bible tells us to work for the kingdom a handful of times, but tells us to love more than 500 times and that love for God just because He is God is the highest love there is. Not because of something He did or because of something He gave, but just because He is God. 

 Mary and Martha did not agree about the best way to love Jesus and they’re a great example of the tug of war we still fight between the active ways to love God and the contemplative ways to love God. Contemplation – sitting and waiting at Jesus’ feet – is not productive. It is not measurable. It doesn’t get anything done but according to Jesus, it is the better way.

Ok, I know that someone needs to mow the lawn and take the garbage out to the curb on Thursday evening. And, if we are going to open our church doors for community events, someone needs to bake and grill hot dogs and do dishes. Beware, however, of patting ourselves too vigorously on the back when those things are done and we go no further. We have given our work to God and He is undoubtedly pleased with it. But unless we go to that secret place where only we two are together in mutual love, we have not given Him that one thing He wants most. We also spread the gospel by being it rather than by doing it.

The Homies used words they knew to deal with concepts they didn’t know. They were often clumsy doing it, but Greg, their spiritual advisor, loved them for the effort. Mary spilled perfume on Jesus’ feet because she didn’t know any other way to show Him how extravagantly she loved Him. It was awkward and wasteful, but Jesus loved her for it – not in spite of it, but because of it. Find a way to show your love for God that doesn’t involve a lawnmower or a kitchen or study or evangelizing, a way that doesn’t involve anyone else but you and God. An intimate act of love. Sing. Ponder. Pray. And give it all you have, because it all belongs to God, anyway.

Out of place, out of time

 There is a palm tree outside my window here in Rome - a big one reaching onto my second story and up into the third. The hard tangled knot that sprouts it's leaves is at eye level and the branches sway in tonight's wind. 

No one associates palm trees with Italy. This is hardly the tropics. It feels like they don't belong but because tonight is one of those that won't let me sleep simply for the sake of fomo, I'm watching the tree. And of course, I haven't missed it. The broad Atlantic Ocean was like that. Just there and perfectly itself. 

No one associates rain with Italy either, but we got that tonight, too. Hard short rain so bright that it fizzled from my street lamp like electric current in accompaniment to thunderclap that rattled against the coliseum stones and made it sound like God was not only bowling, but was doing it on marble.

I didn't get much sleep tonight, but in turn didn't miss any of the life that happens while we're checked out. Some nights are just magic. Oh Rome, you can be a hard-edged mistress, but tonight you danced for me, twirling your bright bangles against the dark.

Ah, the birds are singing. The world still turns and I'm still alive. Was starting to wonder if I'd run out of time. Not yet.

Perfectly Round

 

The pantheon in Rome, Italy.

It's the oldest intact house of worship on the planet. Really. Even for people who don't care about history much, and there are a lot of you, that's kind of a thing. 

Anyway, I went to church there today. And  I learned something. Not about history, but about the nature of  God. The thing is, the pantheon was first built in 600-something BC. At the time, it was dedicated to all the known gods at that time. All of them. And the Romans weren't just hedging their bets with their own gods. They had a shrine there for the Unknown God (check your Bible. It's there) just in case they'd missed anyone. Turns out that the one they  missed was the One that hadn't quite come yet.

Well, the pantheon is a church now. A Roman Catholic Christian church. And all the statues of Roman gods and goddesses inside are gone, replaced by Jesus and Peter and Mary, but it turns out that the remodelers haven't forgotten their pantheistic roots. You see, the pantheon is one of the most famous buildings in the world, even in Rome, where famous buildings literally line many streets and the rubble from them sits in piles in alleyways and out of the way corners. There is just something about this place.

Some of it has to do with the building itself - the way it's designed. There's that open oculus in the top - literally an open hole - that makes you feel like God always has a birds' eye view of what's going on inside. And then the shape of it is perfect. It's  not only a two dimensional perfect circle. It's a three dimensional one - the same size top to bottom as it is side to side.  The acoustics are beautiful and the symmetry gives an occupant a feeling of things being just right: God saying He had created it to be Very Good.

Then there are the people. Every color, every shape, every nationality. The building calls them to worship there together as one people. They may no longer be worshiping a pantheon of various gods, but they worshiip together a God who brought them all together conceptually. They are all in Him: every facet of man and life and nature. The hush there has little to do wtih priests or ritual. It has more to do with continuity in a line that extends from the first days of creation through the dawn and maturation of mankind to today. 

And it is beautiful. 

There are familiar places where we join familar faces in worship. But then there are places where we knjow no one, where nearly everyone speaks a language we don't understand, and yet that is where God drives home His point. Come to me. Everyone. Love one another. 

The family of God is bigger than we ever imagined and it takes flying to the other side of the world to begin to understand. It is possible to share the kiss of peace with people who would otherwise be foreign and strangers but, in this context, are brothers and sisters. When God says He brings all people together, He isn't kidding. He gathers people from disparate times and geographies and worldviews under one perfectly round roof and says, "Follow Me."  

I can do that.

This is what it sounded like: