Gotta Laugh!

OK, so this is later in the day than most of the times I blog, and I'm having some glitchy things go on with my computer, which seems to be the name for the day: dealing with the challenges of technology! Of all things, my "bluetooth" (hands-free link) in my car froze on "in use" even when the car AND the cell phone were turned off... The only consolation of the moment was when I took the car into the dealer for "huh? what's up with this?," the young mechanics were as baffled as I! It is nice to know when technology confounds the young... Then I don't feel so old! And not feeling "older" when one is now a "grandfather" is a bit of a trick.

So I called my mother, and she was no help. She said, "It's nice to have another grandfather in the family!" And I would have thought that her focus would have been on The Little Princess, Elizabeth... Oh, well...

Anyway, somebody once said that "perspective is everything"-- at least I'm pretty sure some one must have said that at some point-- and so I am going to offer the following one:

You who know me know that I read the comics daily. If I'd read Scripture with as much faithfulness, I'd have been a better man today! Anyway, I am sorry to report that I have realized that my life has reached yet another new low. I'm sure of this because my life has begun to parallel that of Ted Forth, husband of Sally, father of Hilary, and co-star in the strip with his wife's name.

Here's the thing: some weeks, perhaps months ago now, Ted was "laid off." "Laid off" is like being terminated, in the same way that "put to rest" is like being "buried." Either way, one does not have a job. At the time Ted was laid off/terminated, I thought: WoW! What a bold plot for a comic strip. I mean, even Dagwood Bumstead is employed! Even Ralph Drabble is employed! Even the pale Robert (I think his name is) in "Get Fuzzy," who takes endless abuse from his cat, Bucky, is employed. I tried to think of another comic strip character who was "between jobs," and none came to mind. I wondered: What a strange phenomenon in comic-strip-land, to have a laid off person? The only other one I think I've ever seen was Sally's boss, Ralph, and he was obnoxious by nature, so the writers sent him packing to a fast food joint before they deemed him redeemed and sent him back to work at his old company, so he could be an even bigger thorn in Sally's side.

But I'm losing my point here, which is my life has become comparable to a comic strip character's! The character I pitied and wondered about, is now in the same state as I am.

Thus naturally, I find myself comparing myself to Ted. How are each of us handling our forced idle? (Oh yeah, now I remember: Andy Capp was unemployed, but he was English, so it was OK to be "on the dole." Besides, he shot billiards, which is almost like pool, and drank something that was almost like beer, and thus had that reprobate aura about him that both Ted and I lack...) Anyway, at the beginnning, Ted was quite industrious. He'd lost a job he'd never liked, so he rejoiced in being let go, convinced that he could easily find a more satisfying position if he just searched the Internet enough. When this enthusiasm played out after a short period of time, he divided his days in terms of the TV shows he watched, shaved seldom if ever, and gradually sank into the kind of torpor that surrounds almost anyone who watches too much daytime TV.

For her part, Sally nagged and moaned and worried-- but made the anti-cultural decision not to send Ted to the MD for anti-depressants! Instead, she gave him a vote of confidence-- a strip I held up to our ber vols at what has turned out to be our last meeting, as an example of excellence in family emotional process.

Besides, I figured that on the heels of such comic-strip-insight there was surely a job to come for Ted. I was wrong. This week finds Ted still on the couch. Sally has gone back to being concerned: "You're wallowing in misery, Ted. It's like you don't have interest in anything anymore." "That's not true," protests Ted, weakly. "OK, what did you do today?" asks Sally. "Ohhh, what didn't I do!" Ted offers. "Okay, what didn't you do?" bites Sally. Ted looks down and says, "Leave the house."

Recognizing that this is supposed to be humor, I thought to myself: Well, at least I left the house today! And of course, I am still in the industrious, the-whole-world-is-my-oyster stage of unemployment... But I'm trying to learn what might be to come...

So in tonight's strip, Ted goes to coach his dtr's Little League softball team, an activity Sally tells her friends brings Ted "some sense of joy...". Only Ted screams at the girls, "WHY MUST YOU GUYS FAIL AT EVERYTHING?!" And we see his inner voice writ large onto his players...

Again, someone is finding this funny... But I find myself saying to myself: Ted does not have my friends. In fact, I've not seen Ted have any friends since he left work, nor has he received any encouragement from neighbors or others he might have known somehow, that I can remember. He is stewing in his own juices, and most of the mix is not very healthy.

So how sad has MY life become that I am comparing myself positively to a comic strip character? I don't really want to think about that! Instead, I want to focus not on the differences between our fates, attitudes or families, but instead on the differences between our Creators. Ted's authors are Marciulano & MacIntosh. Mine? Well, mine goes by many Names...

When my life is feeling like a tragedy, I am comforted to know that God likes to laugh! Pretty soon, then, my human tragedy becomes divine comedy-- and we'll all find reason to smile.

Blessings!

Unseen Things Below

I got one of the two phone calls I was expecting, this AM: My dtr, Rachel, called to say that her dtr, Elizabeth, had arrived at 5:40 this morning, after a night of labor made more difficult by the fact that Elizabeth's hand was over her head through the process! This might have mattered less had Elizabeth been smaller, but at 8 lbs, 1 oz, and 19 inches, coming through my tiny daughter--well, if I don't have a mother's empathy, I can at least have a father's! Ouch!

More, I know that the alterations in my dtr's life have only begun with this one of her body. For Elizabeth is to be a Leo, not unlike me; my dtr hoped for a Cancer, like herself. Oh, boy! I told Rachel that Elizabeth is bound to be a very inqusitive and likely talkative person: Entering life with her hand raised, her questions just waiting to be asked!

Rachel was a little too tired and sore for my philosophy...

But here Elizabeth is, starting life, as it were, without baggage, but having already made an impression and had an impact. And here I am, re-starting life-- ah, but with the baggage of my years, and having made an impression and had an impact that might lead me to be hopeful...

Of course, when a child is born, there is Hope all around. We proclaim this at Christmas, but we also often experience at any time of year, in the event of birth itself. It can be an easy thing to affirm the presence of Hope, in the abstract. It is more difficult to hope, to be hope-full, and to know what to do with one's hopefulness..

Most of the time, I think we tend to want to be active with our hope. For one thing, we tend to think concretely about it. I mean, we want to know what to hope for... In this way we direct our hoping at some thing: a goal, an outcome, even an object, as in, I hope I get a car like that! But something happens to our hoping the more specific we get with it. Hope easily changes into expectation the more we direct our hoping toward something specific.

That is not necessarily bad. Many of our hospice patients, for example, would find themselves hoping to do something "one more time," like go to Vegas or even outside, to the beach. As their hoping became an expectation of themselves, they found motivation, and often accomplished what they hoped to do.

But something happened to the nature of Hope in themselves. Once hoping became directed, and transformed to expectation, curiously, they lost a sense of how merely to be hope-full. Having accomplished their goal, they came to think they had to set more goals in order to be hopeful, when actually, they could have simply been hopeful, quite without any expectations or aims.

Being hopeful is hard, though. Among other things, as a state of being, like a state of grace, being hopeful involves trusting, in a deep way, and in a way, against a lot of evidence to the contrary. People who survive life-threatening situations do so because they are able to maintiain a sense of hopefulness in themselves which is beyond setting specific goals and which is based on a kind of inner confidence that, at one level, "everything will work our all right" or "as it should."

What makes Hope so important to our spiritual well-being is this willingness to have our lives shaped by what we do NOT see. Often there is no empirical basis of being hopeful. But when we are hopeful anyway... well, then something in our core remains unshaken and is confirmed, even in the face of trauma and adversity. We experience ourselves being carried through...

In one of my favorite books in the Bible, Romans, and one of my favorite chapters, 8, Paul speaks about hope in "birthing" terms (v22), so you might know that he speaks to me today! And he says: "For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (vv24,25)."

Ah, I think right away: the lesson of patience again! But more: the activity that comes with being hopeful is: waiting... Ummm, waiting sounds very passive to me! I mean, I tend to want to do something, to put my hope into gear, as it were! But I notice this about myself: The more I put my hope in my own activity, the more anxious I become. The more I put my hope it God's activity-- and wait for it!-- the more peaceful I can be.

Thus I endeavor to live in the Truth of this passage. I do not yet see where God is leading me-- I just trust that God is. If I based my hoping on the evidence around me, all I would see is devastation, what Paul might call "bondage and decay." But in truth, I am Hope-filled. I trust that God is already "at work" in ways not yet visibile to me. As it see it, my hopefulness is the upwelling in my personal life of God's Hope in creation.

On this day of the birth of my first grandchild, how can I not dwell in Hope?

And as a friend of mine wrote me this morning: "And where the God of our understanding is leading us is still to be seen." And so it is... Hopefully, "more will be revealed!"

Blessings, one and all.

Tares and Tears

I have been finding myself in the midst of one of my favorite parables of Jesus, the one Matthew tells about "the wheat and the tares" (13:24f). I'm finding it helpful to me on a number of different levels.

First, it has been helpful for me to be able to say, "An enemy has done this." It is more than true to say that my termination was a very intended consequence of the actions of a person whom I thought was a friend, but who made herself my enemy. She acted in a way that brought calamity upon me--like the enemy who comes in the night when everyone is asleep and sows weeds among the wheat-- and then goes away! This is not the action of an adversary, where there can be conversation, perhaps mediation, and another level of understanding reached. This was the action of an enemy, acting under the cover of darkness, in a manner destructive to myself and others.

To say this is a step forward for me. I am not one to think of myself as someone who has, or makes, enemies. I like to think of myself as someone who trusts and who inspires trust, and with whom disagreements and hurts can be worked out, without malice and hate. My present experience is a helpful reminder that one can have enemies in this world, and that I certainly have at least one!

But we also live in the age of psychology, so we may be more aware of our internal enemies than our external ones. And certainly we do not live reflectively in this world without at some point or another realizing that all of us have the capacity to be our own worst enemy! I know I do, especially at this point! So I go through my life thinking that I am sowing only good seed, and then it comes to light that as my own worst enemy I have indeed sown among the good, some weeds.

In some respects, this realization is even more dismaying than the first one. For we might find ways to protect ourselves from external enemies when they present themselves, but how do we protect ourselves from the worst in ourselves? I mean, there are ways (awareness, mindfulness, conscience), but too many of my life lessons have been learned after the fact, after I've faultered, and then have been faulted. In my anguish I wonder whether I am always to be learning things the hard way?!

There are two other lessons for this parable to teach me, and if I didn't learn how to protect the good I would do from my enemies, then at least I can learn these lessons now that it is clear to everyone that I have many weeds among my wheat.

The first lesson surely has to do with the gift of patience. The farmer comes to the realization that his wheat and his enemy's weeds are growing together. If he panics and rips out the weeds, the wheat will be destroyed as well. So he waits. He does nothing. He neither reacts to the enemy's efforts by going after the enemy... Nor does he attempt to weed things out from his own fields, from himself. He simply waits until the harvest, that is, until the right time when wheat and weed can be separated, and the good preserved and the useless destroyed.

Now like the song goes, "waiting is the hardest part!" It is difficult not to be reactive when we see the effects of ugliness and malevolence in our lives. It is difficult to live with the pain and disappointment, the puzzlement, the asking "why did this happen to me?"-- the agony of self-blame and the anger of blaming the other. I mean, I have this "conversation" that spools over and over in my mind! Why did I do what I did? Why did my enemy do what she did? It is very difficult to come to a place where I can accept what is, and live with it, as a "what's done is done." I keep wanting to undo somehow! But that, of course, cannot be. Maybe it goes without saying that painful realities are very difficult to live with...

But if I can, at all, live with what has happened, as I must, and have that not mean a further condemnation of dwelling in pain and stewing in shame, then it is because of the very first line of the parable. Jesus says, "The kingdom of heaven is like..."

Now I ask myself: Do I feel like I am living in the midst of the "kingdom of heaven"? Far from it! Most of my days feel more like exercises in not losing more than I already have, and most nights I wake in sweat and terror for what has happened and dread of what lies ahead. So what is so "heavenly" about this experience, anyway?

Well, here's where I have to remind myself that when Jesus spoke of the "kingdom of heaven," he didn't have in mind our "three story universe" with heaven above and hell below and us living on the middle plane of earth, preparing to go up or down! Rather, what Jesus meant by the "kingdom of heaven" was more like opportunities for us to experience the Presence of God. One way to understand what he is saying here is that: When we can be patient in the midst of hostility and adversity, and live with what is, trusting that, at the right time, things will sort themselves out appropriately, then, in that interim time, we can experience God-with-us.

So I am trying to experience my life at this time as a moment of the "in-breaking" of God's Kingdom. My aim is to live with that assurance, that calm, that perspective, that peace.

An enemy has done this to me. Now I am resolved to "let both grow together, until the harvest," in order that I might not come apart! God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...

Blessings!

Cain's Company

From a "family systems" perspective, the First Family was really something! Cain is the first born. We always say these words, "first born," portentiously, when it comes to family systems. I, for instance, am a "first born." Are my present troubles related to my being "first born"? Were Cain's? I don't know... Troubles seem to afflict us all, don't you think?

In any case, of course, Cain becomes the one afflicting troubles on Abel, and in consequence God brings about another ending, telling Cain he will be "a fugitive and a wanderer upon the earth." Being unemployed, I have sense of how Cain feels-- there is this quality of exile that hangs about me, a mantle of melancholy.

Cain is concerned that someone will meet out to him the fate he imparted to his brother-- if anyone knows how hostile the world can be, it is Cain. And we would be right to wonder whether the "mark" God puts on him is one of mercy (a divine statement against capital punishment) or a kind of "birth mark," for Cain being sent out less from a place than from "the Presence of the Lord." Cain is being exiled from God... Talk about estrangement!

Even so, and this is the fascinating part of the story for me, Cain finds company, a wife, and a son, "in the land of Nod, east of Eden." More, somehow Cain manages to raise a family with its own rather succssful lineage--at least until that strain of murder and vengenge rises up again!

For me, in my exile, I take comfort from knowing that even Cain found company, that even he started again. Whatever else I have done to deserve my present condition, I have not murdered anyone, nor have I been exiled from the Presence of God. And I have been comforted by finding company! These friends and well-wishers are truly God's grace and mercy to me, for if I feel at times singled-out, at least I do not feel alone.

I guess I'm saying: If Cain can make it, so can I...

Thank you for being there...

Before the Fall

I want to be clear that I loved working where I worked: I loved the people, and the patients and their families. I had always felt that serving as an end of life care chaplain was what God called me to do, and serving out that call through that particular place was, well, maybe as close to vocational paradice as I was going to get in this life!

So now that I've been sent out, I'm having Paradise-related reflections upon my experience. And I'm finding some parallels.

After the First Couple-- and I think that I have renewed appreciation for the trouble people can get into together, much more really than when we are left to our own devices!-- after the First Couple ate, there was this sort of lull. Nothing happened to them right away.

And then, I think it is good to note: God came looking for them! He missed them, maybe, when He was out on His usual evening walk, maybe enjoying the sunset. I mean, sunsets shared are always a lot nicer than sunsets witnessed alone!

But here's what I take from this: Last week, when I was put on suspension before I was finally terminated, it was like the Lull after the First Couple ate. And I realized that, over the course of those days, God came looking for me. I needed God to seek me out. I needed to know that I was not abandoned by God simply because my employer was preparing to let me go...

And I felt found... I probably felt more comforted than the First Couple did, I might say! But I also felt that, in being found, I was also being prepared for the consequences that were going to come. "This is how it is going to be..." That sort of thing.

And truth be told, I was already feeling a little "naked" to the world-- vulnerable. The familiar world takes on a different aspect once there's been a death, or even when there is about to be. Part of what makes us secure in this world, able to live in it as it is and as we are, has to do with our work and our working. I've been unemployed before, and I dreaded being so again. The whole world seems foreign, distant and unavailable. No purchase, not for any commodity, is made lightly. There is a tentative character to existence itself, an uncertainty, a wariness, a wondering what is next-- and a heightened sense that things may only get worse before they get better, whatever "better" might be.

Even during the suspension I was being held in suspense! But I mean that part about "being held," for God went looking for me, and God found me.

And while God did not keep me from the consequences that were to come, just as he did with the First Couple, God "clothed" me... with "skins"... I needed this. I needed to feel some additional "skin" to my own. I needed to feel "clothed" more than I was, and thus comforted and readied to face what was almost certainly coming...

This is my experience of God: just when I am feeling most ashamed of myself, God seeks me out, and comforts, and covers me as only God can.

And here's what I mean by that, by how that happens: I learned a long time ago, and relearned earlier this year, about Immanuel Kant's distinction of two kinds of dignity. On the one hand, there is "inherent" dignity, the dignity that is "in" us, "of" us, simply because we exist, or as I like to say, because we are Creatures of God.

On the other hand, there is what Kant called "attributed" dignity, the dignity and respect accorded to us by those around us. Sometimes this comes because of position or title, and lots of times it comes as a gift from those who love us.

In end of life care, we learn that, as we die, our inherent dignity often takes a beating, because so much of the process of dying entails regressing to earlier states of being, and it is very hard to maintain a sense of one's dignity when one is feeling ever-more helpless. Thus it is important to gather around oneself those who care enough to attribute to one enough dignity to make up for whatever losses of dignity one is experiencing.

And I would say, it is important to find oneself gathered 'round by God's embrace, in order to be reminded, in a way only God can, that one's inherent dignity is being maintained and reinforced, even when one cannot do this for oneself.

So it was for me that even during my own "lull," during my suspension, before the axe fell, I could feel God's Presence, God's embrace, God's preserving my inherent dignity, even as I felt it was being more threatened than maybe it ever had before.

At times like I am going through, when I am feeling naked to the world, only God's "skins" are enough to keep me from coming out of my own.

Blessings...

Endings-- and Beginnings

Genesis is, of course, the first book in the Bible, but it is interesting that the title puts the emphasis where it ought to be-- on the beginnings of things. The truth is that there are many "beginnings" in Genesis, and "beginnings-again"-- because there are many endings in Genesis! Yet after each ending, there comes another beginning-- and so it is that God continues to work.

I've had an ending this week. A couple of days ago, I was terminated by my employer. I like that word, "terminated." It felt like a death, like a way of living or even a Life I had known and enjoyed was being ended, killed.

As an end-of-life-care chaplain, I am familiar with endings-- most of those, other people's! Dying certainly precipitates one sort of loss, but being terminated precipitates another. And we ask the same question: Is the Life after death? Believe me, after this "death" of mine, I want to know!

And truly, this is something for me to find out, something for me to discover. If "Life is what you make it," then I have an opportunity to "make" my life in a new way. But we in the bereavement field also often say: "Life is loss." True enough, since as we live, we do seem to suffer more losses, and experience more endings. But equally true must be the Genesis-based premise, along the lines that "Life is also beginnings again."

I am staking my living at this moment on that premise, the part about "beginning again." And I'm beginning again with a faith-sense that I've occasionally lost in the course of previous endings, namely that God is Always Present, as much in the Ending as in the Beginning Again.

I know that I have not utilized this blog as well as I might have in the past. I had intended it to be a place for me to go and muse. And when I didn't, I told myself it was because I didn't have enough time! Well, I have "enough time" now! So let's see whether this space may not become a place of consolation and sharing.

Dear Reader, would you walk this "winding path" with me? I look forward to sharing this part of my journey with you... Thank you for the companionship of your attention...

Blessings!