What Memories Are Made Of

We have rounded the turn now of this year and are heading for the finish line (if not for home), down the stretch. The remaining weeks of this year are a gauntlet for many, beginning with the consuming craziness of Black Friday and continuing in Dickensian fashion with the inner dialogues with Ghosts of holidays past that haunt holidays present and are measured against invisible images of what holidays "should be..."

Folks who say they know something about "surviving the holidays" tell us that we should be about making "new" memories. What exactly do they mean by that? And how would it help us?

Last night I went to a tree-trimming at the hospital where I work. We trimmed it in memory of one of the nurses who'd died the year before. We trimmed the tree, and kept her memory alive...

[I apologize for not completing this entry at the time... I will want to return to it later... Keep you posted! HA!]

Heartburn

We speak often and well about our hearts as the central seat of our loving, but I often wonder whether the stomach is not our affection's footstool. For we have, if we believe our words, relatively wide capacities for whom our hearts would embrace. Yet relatively fewer for what and whom our stomachs can stand.

I wish the world's religions had devoted more reflection to matters of the stomach, bowels and guts. For my money, they speak entirely too well to what goes on in our hearts and entirely to little to what trashes about in our guts.

The first thing we tend to think of when it comes to our stomachs is food, and of course this is not a bad place to begin. And when Jesus says, in this regard, that what matters is not what "goes into" a person but "what comes out"-- well, gastrointestinally, this is simply not a beatific vision we want to ponder!

But in fact our bowels are more vulnerable in more ways to illness and distress, and I believe that only in the most simplistic ways do these maladies have anything to do with food. I think it is entirely more likely that what we are "taking into" ourselves and what is getting to us is the "stuff" of our relationships: the stresses, the demands, the emotional adjustments that all of us have to make in being in this world with one another, but especially with people that we find ourselves caring something about. Meaning: the heart opens, and then the stomach has to digest what the heart has allowed in! No easy task for us, evidently!

I don't mean to suggest that the heart is not itself a vulnerable organ, in reality and in metaphor. But most of the illnesses to which the heart is prone have to do with its rigidities (coronary artery disease) or its weakenss or its getting too small to sustain our lives. In other words, its decreasing ability to stay open and strong.

But to what and whom the heart closes is seldom the problem for the stomach. Our guts find themselves faced with predicaments not of the heart's closedness but of its openness: Here I am now; you love me-- now digest me!

For instance, the Times runs a series on the front page about two gay men trying to have a baby. OK, so obviously they are not going to be able to procreate themselves, and their efforts to have a child involve someone female eventually (and another male, as it turns out, a "sperm donor"). I looked at this "news" story and I wondered for how many of us did our hearts go out to this loving and well-meaning (not to say, naive!) couple. And yet, also, for how many did their stomachs churn, trying to digest this social phenomenon. An accompanying story that addressed the question of whether children raised by gay or lesbian couples turned out "normal" (HA! what a concept THAT is!), spoke to me of the rumblings in our social stomachs.

But those same rumblings can be found in our stomachs from what happens in our families, from stuff less exotic than two gay men trying to have a baby. Our parents, our children, our spouses, our lovers, our friends-- I mean, people we either really care about or else tell ourselves we should-- can cause great gastric distress in ourselves by what they do or say, or even hope or dream! What the heart takes in, the stomach has to digest. Often not easy for the stomach to do!

So I am going to suggest that we begin to rethink this "loving" that our heart does, or at least allow our stomachs a place in the process. Maybe instead of making the stomach have to put up with what the heart invites, we should make the stomach the "gatekeeper" for the heart.

Sort of like, "I would love you, but my stomach can't stand you. So sorry..." I am wondering whether both our stomachs and our hearts would be better off...