Georgiaphotos

2011-10-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

A Memory

It was a typical morning. Maybe too typical. I was determined to get some things done thatseemed at the time important to me. Isat here at the computer and reached for a few letters on my desk. One letter was from Gaetan, a monk and friendof mine. He lives in Gethsemani, ourmonastery in Kentucky. I met him many years ago and we exchangeletters. He is a wonderful writer. He writes beautifully of simple things,things available to any one of us who takes the time or, better, the effort tolook at the events of daily life.

I read his letter and want to sharesome of it with you. Gaetan once livedin our monastery in Lantau, China. The monastery is on an island and not farfrom Hong Kong. He was on a boat between Hong Kong and another island, Peng Chau. The boat was making its way to themonastery. Gaetan writes that it was avery old boat and that he was delighted, for it was, as he puts it, “like beingout of time.” The middle of the boat wasopen, and there was seating along the side. A young woman was sitting with her little boy, who was about three yearsold. “A beautiful, typical Chinese kidwith his hair all sticking up.” Gaetanwas gazing at the river and when he looked again at the little boy, things hadchanged. The boy was standing in theopen space. Suddenly, he wet his pantsand started to cry out loud. His armshung to his sides as the urine stained his pants and formed a small puddle athis feet. Gaetan writes that he felt dobadly for him, he felt like crying himself. He writes:

“I felt so badfor him that I could have cried with him. I understood him completely. I donot know why he did not ask his mother but there is a world of mystery going oninside a little child. It was like he knew he was wrong but at the same time hecould not control it and so there was no alternative for him. Se he peed and cried. His mother was a nice woman. She immediately got up and kissed him whilehe finished what he could not hold anymore. The she took him aside and held him,speaking lovingly to him – it was all in Chinese – but the love and gesturesaid it all.”

The storystunned me. I put the letter down andthought about all the supposed big and important things I had to do. I thought of the littleness of that boy, notjust in terms of his size, but his helplessness and his utter dependence on hismother.

We like to think we grow. We like to think that there is a way torealize, once and for all, independence. We make our plans, arrange our schedules, make all the lists of what wedo or think we should do. And then, theday comes when we can no longer control our lives and have to let go. We feel a pressure and then the warmthrunning down our legs. Things fallapart. We need help. And we realize that we were always like that– our independence was illusory. Thefirst and last word of human existence is more like a cry, a plea for some goodand loving other.

Gaetan writes that the memory is ofa ride on a boat that sailed a river twenty years ago. And it has stayed with him all theseyears. He learned wisdom, the ways ofGod, from a mother and her son. He didnot understand a word that was shared between them. He could only see and understand a cry, and aloving response. The truth of salvation,on a small boat in between islands.

2011-10-11T13:12:00.002-04:00

A Matter of Attitude, of Refining One’s Sight

I am aware that there are a lot of things written these days about change in the church. It is very hard to step out of the chorus of wails – be they wails for or against change. I admit that I do feel pressured to respond, sit down and gather my thoughts so as to marshal strong and convincing reasons for the institutional church to change, to adapt to the times. Yet something makes me refrain from getting on that particular bad wagon, the one that rolls headlong into the promising fields of hoped for change.

I do not think change happens that way. I live in a monastery where I find that I wish a lot of things could be different. We monks embody all sorts of personality traits, personal habits, personal hygiene and the lack thereof. We take our stands along conservative, liberal and indifferent lines. And we are capable of switching hats when the need arises. There are jealousies, fits of temper, resentments, worries about lust, anger, addictive behaviors, and stupid behaviors. When I look at it all, as lived here by us, it makes me wonder. We are, allegedly and I suppose really, a powerhouse of prayer. We pray for all kinds of things, every day and several times a day. We pray for the living and the dead. We pray for people near and far, people who were and people yet to be. We pray for good weather and ask that bad weather hurt no one. We pray for an end to wars and violence. We pray for the well being of all people, for a change of heart in men and women. I suppose you might say that we pray for everything possible. If words can form a prayer, we have formed it.

I do not know if it all works. I confess that I do think about that a lot. So many words seem to go nowhere or seem to backfire. Yet we persist in our prayer. I am a believer, whatever that may mean. But I guess that the best I can come up with is that God lives in everything and everyone. And every whisper and groan that comes from the human heart is of God. God is articulate in many ways, as he goes about his business.

Yet, I feel the need to say who I am and what I want to see. I try and discipline my eyes to see beauty. It is there, it is everywhere. I cannot change big things like the church or the monk next to me. And in my better moments, I will not to want to change them. Let them be. Let them grow in ways that growth happens – through time, through success and failure, through however grace or providence slips through the doors of time and places unnoticed, unbidden. But always welcomed.

I love Manhattan. It has changed a lot over the years. It has, I recently noticed, somehow cleaned up its act. Now I could wish for the past, when things were grimier, more visibly human, and more fraught with the tensions of life. But it is what it is. And so I walked around, looking carefully for beauty. And of course I found it, wherever it walked on the street, played in a playground, walked the dog or rode a bike. It soars high in that city, and sinks low. I saw more of it than I could capture with my lens. I found that I did not wish for change, for difference, for something better. I just wanted to see something good, something beautiful, and photograph it. And maybe share it.

In that way, as I described Manhattan, it is the same with the church. The institution will always be made up of the good and the bad, saints and sinners, frauds and honest people. It is a real mixed bag that cannot and will not ever change. All I want to do is write what I love about it – which is its people – and, maybe, take a few good pictures. I will leave the hoped for dismantling to others. Maybe I will be around to take that picture, too.

2011-10-10T19:07:00.000-04:00

The Stubborn Lock

The lock on the door to this room where I write has been problematic for a long time. When I stick the key into the lock, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. On good days, it works smoothly. On bad days, I have to wrestle with the key, turning it and jiggling it until it turns and then it is very difficult to remove. But it always works, give or take a few extra seconds. I do not mind. It gets the job done.

Augustine told me recently that he wanted to make extra copies of the key and that Alphonse would be coming by to check the lock and the key. He was here a little while ago. He could not open the door. Well, he finally did, with no small amount of difficulty. He told me that something was wrong with the lock. I told him I knew that. Then he said he would send Alex up here to put a new lock on the door and that Alex would then make extra keys and give several to me.

Then Alphonse started talking about the lock and what might be the matter with it. Some words I knew. Most words I never ever ever heard of. Well, let me qualify that. I heard of most of the words but what they mean in the lock and key context is beyond me. And two words baffled me. A tang? A cam? And the rest – a dead bolt, inner and outer panels, pins, a spring – they were somewhat familiar to me in that at least I had heard them before. Interesting. But way beyond me, as to how they fit together and work so as to secure a no-entry or easy-entry door.

You do not know, I realize, Alex, Alphonse and Augustine. They are great men, very handy with tools and machines and getting big and little jobs done. They have been a wonderful help to me. Like I said, I would have continued to spend years rattling that key in the door until it turned correctly and the door opened. I think it drove Alphonse crazy this morning when he could not get the key to function. I would have told him that all it takes is a sense of, a “feel,” for the right way to twist and pull. But it was better that I kept silent.

I was writing something about God when Alphonse came in. Putting words together on this computer, big words and little words, a twist here and a jangle there, all in the hope of writing something nice about a being I have never met and whose existence is behind the door that leads to the next life.

I have no key to that.

I admire Augustine, Alphonse and Alex. I think they like my writing. They have told me as much. But something tells me that they are onto something that I tend to ignore. There are all sorts of doors and keys, locks and cams and tangs in this life. We are very adept at making them, and keeping things secure. We make sure that some come in and others stay out.

But A, A and A know how to get in and out of all kinds of places. I believe Paradise has a lockless and Pearly Gate. And, if Hell has a lock, A, A and A will find a way to open it. I think that is what angels are about. And I think that is what God is about, training us to do what we can to open doors, turn keys, turn hearts. I hope I do that with my words. I know three men who do that with a smile, a kind word, and maybe a jiggle.

2011-10-07T15:35:00.001-04:00

Belmar

Summer is upon us and the warmer weather has a way of enticing my memories of long gone summers. When I was younger I used to spend many summer days down in Belmar, New Jersey. It is a small town on the Jersey shore. It has long had a reputation as a summer haven for high school and college kids. I am sure it still enjoys that reputation. I would go to a small bungalow on 15^th Avenue, which was owned by close friends of mine. We would spend hours on the front porch, which had a hammock and chairs. At night, we could see the passing cars and passersby. People walking their dogs, or young couples walking along and holding hands. Older people, too, would walk by, taking in the cool of the evening as they headed in the direction of the boardwalk.

There was an enormous nightclub several blocks away which catered to the young crowd. The place was always packed and from the porch we could hear the howls and the laughter as the crowd there moved into full swing. The name of the club was Bar Anticipation. It was and still is the place “to be” in Belmar on a hot summer’s night.

I was there in the winter a few years back. The town was deserted, since most of the houses were summer rentals and were closed up. The boardwalk was closed for the winter months. Main Street had a some places open, since there is a resident winter population in the area. But the streets near the beach were practically deserted. I stayed a few nights in the bungalow on 15^th Avenue with Bill, friend of mine. His family owns the bungalow. We had a heater and some blankets, so the nights were fine. In the evenings, we sat on the porch with the TV on in the room behind us, the volume turned low. A bottle of wine was opened and we toasted each other and talked about old times, all the summers we enjoyed in that house, the memories flowing as easily and as readily as the wine.

The little bungalow is the kind of place that we know well at a particular time in our lives, and then we move on and leave it behind. Yet its simplicity and its comfort is something we look for again and again all during our lives. Many new places are silently compared to the elegant charm of a modest beach bungalow in Belmar. It is as if it was a place that good memories were born, and it would be something of a miracle to reduplicate that process in all the later places of our lives. But memories that glow are born from special times, special places. I am fortunate that I can go back and savor the times that were, in the very place those memories came from.

When I was last there, Bill and I sat on the porch late into the night. Bill wanted to go out, but I talked him into just hanging out there and chatting. He asked me several times if things were okay, if I was sure I did not want to go out. I told him no, that it was good to be there, to be at peace. I could hear the ocean, its waves rhythmic, even, marking time with each roll on the beach. Like days and years, as they come and then go. But that night, all seemed still, and good. Time rolling on, the taste of wine, a good friend, a return to what is beautiful and good in this life.

2011-10-07T12:03:00.003-04:00

The Receipt

I have taken pictures all through the years. I have my slides, prints and negatives. I have been scanning them so that I can share them with my family and friends. It is taking a long time, but it is worth it. I am glad I kept everything – there must be something good said for the pack rat side of me.
Every so often, I come across something that more than sparks an interest. It can, if I let it linger, light a bonfire of memories. This morning I came across one such thing. It is a photo envelope from Plains Pharmacy, in Fairfield, New Jersey. I was a priest in the parish there at the time, which, according to the date on the envelope, was August 10, 1977. A roll of film cost $8.62 cents to be developed and printed. It was Kodacolor film and there may have been two rolls, since there are two sleeves in the envelope that held two separate strips of negatives. I scanned the negatives, which held memories galore. There I am, hosting a car wash given by the youth group of the parish. We had the wash behind the church. I recognize the kids – now grown with families of their own. I am still in touch with almost all of them. Looking at their faces, one by one, I can see now what they could not have seen. Good times and bad. Healthy and hurtful relationships and marriages. Sickness and, in some cases, way too early a departure from this life.
There are pictures of the church as it was decorated for Advent. Big colorful banners hang from the walls of the church. I recently saw the woman who made them and asked her about them. She said they were long gone. Her name is Mary Anne and she looks well. I will send her pictures of the banners.
And New Orleans. I went with a couple at about that time. It was a convention of sorts and I tagged along. I visited family while I was there. There is a nice shot of the couple standing next to a street car.
There are a few pictures of friends I sailed with on the Queen Elizabeth II. We sailed from England to New York. What a great trip that was. Some of the people in the photo have left this life. Some are still here. It was good to share a voyage with them across the sea.
There is the receipt. Receipts have not changed that much. There is a date and charge number, my name and address and the name and address of the pharmacy. Charlie ran the pharmacy and Claire worked the register. Charlie had a good sense of humor. When he saw me, he used to say “Someday your prints will come in,” – a play on the similar phrase from Cinderella. I got to know Claire’s family very well. I am still in touch with them.
Some years later, Charlie lost the store and struggled a bit till he found another line of work. I think he hoped to keep the store but could not keep pace with the deals being offered by the then up and coming big discount drug stores. I still hear from him at Christmas.
There is a lottery ticket in the photo envelope from the store. A “snap and win” lottery ticket. I scraped off the gold on top of the numbers but in the process scraped off the numbers as well. Maybe I won, maybe I lost. But it makes no difference since in the small print on the back of the card, it reads that all prizes had to be claimed by December 15th, 1977.
Maybe I could have been a rich man.
But maybe I already am.
I need be still, and look at the pictures, and realize with some humility and gratitude how many people have befriended me. I hope I have been as good and as friendly to them. All kinds of people – photos do not differentiate between religions, creeds, beliefs, color or nationality. Everyone has a beauty and a magic. We each hold the charm of life and hopefully learn to share it, and, with a photo, keep it to remember. While I have some life, some years left to me, I will take pictures, and keep the negatives, and pass them on. They really do have something of a life, even after I am gone.

Charlie

2011-10-07T12:03:00.000-04:00

WARNING: As Hurricane Irene batters the East Coast, federal disaster officials warned that Internet outages could force people to interact with other people for the first time in years. Residents braced themselves for the horror of awkward silences and unwanted eye contact. FEMA advised: “Be prepared. Write down possible topics to talk about in advance. Sports...the weather. Remember, a conversation is basically a series of Facebook updates strung together.”

The above was written by a Charlie, who is a friend of mine on, uh, Facebook. Actually, I knew Charlie when he was a little kid. I was his parish priest in Fairfield, New Jersey. His mom and dad were great people – they worked for the parish for many years. Charlie would often come with his dad, who ran the parish bingo operations. As I remember him, Charlie had a wonderful smile and was as friendly as a kid can be. His dad worked hard, as did his mom. I think they had trouble making ends meet, but managed through the years to raise a fine family.
I found Charlie on the Facebook site shortly after I signed on. I looked at his pictures. He had been a Marine and is now married and has a beautiful wife and kids. He works in construction and the above was posted on his “wall” a few days ago. I think it is funny. It is typical Charlie – I do not know if he wrote it but it sure is “him.”
There are times I miss the interaction I enjoyed with people when I served them as a parish priest. Charlie and his family were and still are a gift to me. I can see his mom and dad in my mind’s eye – how proud they were of their kids, and how very proud they must have been of Charlie. He has lived a good life. He is a good and giving man.
Say what you will about the pros and cons of Facebook. It has enabled me to touch base with a lot of people I knew over the years. Being in touch with them now reassures me that the only reason we are born to this life is to know each other, love each other and help each other. Maybe some day, I can return the kindnesses given me by Charlie and his family.
The world is shrinking, due to marvels like Facebook. We really are in the process of becoming a global village. People reach out all the time via social networks. We might tend to over do it a bit, so the above quote might be for some close to their experience. But the human heart calls us back again and again to what is good and real in life. To flesh and blood people, their smiles, their hopes and dreams, their need for human contact.
Facebook links people in Cyberspace. I have a feeling that someday, I will see Charlie and his family again. The internet offers a way to really connect. It offers a way to embrace those we love and somehow lost touch with along the way. It brings back good memories, good times, good people.

2011-10-07T12:02:00.002-04:00

Some Religious Thoughts about Subway Riders

On my last trip up north, I rode the New York subways a lot. My aunt was in a Brooklyn hospital and the easiest way to get there was by taking the train from New Jersey and then walking a few blocks from Penn Station to catch the N or the R subway to Brooklyn. All in all, it took about an hour and a half to get from New Jersey to Brooklyn.
I like the subways.
I was thinking about the people I saw on them as I was falling off to sleep last night. Maybe that is a kind of prayer for them. I hope so. I realize prayer is supposed to go directly to God with no stops or detours. But the subway train and its riders were on my mind last night. The people almost swayed in my thoughts as I pictured them riding the rails beneath Manhattan. So I caught another ride with them, and I think that is close to God, too. For he must have been in the subway, too.
There was a Chinese man whose little daughter squeezed in between his legs. He sat next to me, by the door. His daughter looked up at him and pointed to a plastic bottle he held in his hands. She wanted a drink and he would smile and slip the straw in her mouth. She would finish drinking and then rest her head in his lap. She looked at me and smiled.
A young Latino mother sat across from me. Her little boy, who looked to be about five, couldn’t stay still. He would run from her, and then turn and laugh, and then run back. She would try to grab him but he was quick. He’s be off again before she could get her hands on him. I had the feeling that the boy would have been in big trouble had not the others on the car been looking on. The mother was careful to keep her cool. And the little boy knew it. And loved it. And exploited it.
A young black couple were holding hands and kissing.
A lot of people had iPods, iPads, Kindles, MP3 players and other devices that had games on them. In fact, I would say most people were absorbed in those things.
One lady sat across from me and when I looked at her I had to look away because I could not tell if she was a man or a woman. There was something about her or him that was vaguely undefined. Hard to tell, these days.
And old Chinese man was reading his paper. The paper was in Chinese and I could see a page from how he held the paper. I think it takes a near genius to read Chinese. He smiled as he was reading. And I wondered what made him smile.
A young guy got on with a CD player and his buddy was right behind him. When the train started to move, the guy turned on the music and the buddy started to dance and twist, and then got onto the floor and spun around and around. The music was good – I think it was something about sex by James Brown. It was a fast, popping kind of song that made me want to move, to dance. But as it was, I sat there.
The more I write this, the more I remember. All the people, so handsome and beautiful, living life as best they can and moving beneath one of the greatest cities in the world. All of it made by God, though God is always discrete, hidden, living as he does in all living things. In the dance, in little thirsty babies, in kids running up and down the aisles, in the smile of an old man and the kiss of the young. It is there every second of every day. They say Manhattan is a city that never sleeps. God doesn’t sleep, either. He rides.

2011-10-07T12:01:00.002-04:00

Goodness as Revelatory

I have known Donnie all my life. We were friends through school and then I moved away from town and did not see him as frequently. I did see him recently. I went back home and made it a point to get in touch with him. He is a retired fireman. I did not spend much time with Donnie during his working years. We were both absorbed by our life callings. I was a priest in the same town where Donnie was a fireman.
When I saw him this last trip, we covered a lot of ground in our conversations. One night, we sat beneath an awning in a church parking lot. It was raining, but we did not mind. We drank red wine until the wee hours of the morning, and talked and talked. He loves many of the same things I do – black and white photography, street scenes, the works of Diane Arbus, Vivien Meier, Cartier-Bresson. I told him about other photographers I thought he might enjoy, like Milton Rogovin, Helen Stummer and Helen Leavitt. Donnie absorbed everything I said. He goes to Manhattan a lot. From what I gathered, he heads into the city on a weekly basis, taking in all kinds of scenes – music, museums, book stores, art galleries, photo exhibitions. He is a walking encyclopedia of Manhattan culture – high, low, and in between. He loves Italy and has gone back many times over the last twelve or so years, making contacts with relatives and friends over there. He hosts parties for his family and friends that number in the hundreds – just from the immediate area of our home town. He cooks – I see his delicacies on Facebook. He never married – he lives in a big house that sounded like an open house to me. Friends come and go and stay if need be. Donnie has offered his home, his meals, his warmth to many a man or woman in need.
I remember Donnie as a gifted athlete and outstanding student. He was an only child and I remember, too, how proud his parents were of him, and rightfully so. He was always eager to do good and be good, and to share whatever he could with others. I do not know it all came easily to him. All I know is that he made it look effortless.
At one point in our conversations, he must have felt he made a lapse in something that he said. He looked at me and said, “I have never been religious…I do not go to church. When I was a kid, it all seemed so narrow to me, I needed some space, some way out of that l box.” I said I understood and refrained from trying to encourage him to see himself in a different light – the light with which I saw and see him.
But now I can take a stab at it.
Donnie told me that he likes my writing. It comes naturally to me. I do not make a big deal out of it.
I like what he does not make a big deal of. I like his naturalness, his goodness, his willingness to go out of his way to help others. And think nothing of it.
One day while I was in Manhattan, it poured rain. It really came down. I was soaked. And on top of that, the trains to New Jersey were cancelled. Something about a derailment on the Jersey side. I finally made it home by bus. My cell phone rang the next day and it was Donnie. He said he had tried to call me to see if I needed a ride from Manhattan – he had heard about the derailments and wanted to come in and get me. I got the message but did not play it back until he told me that.
I am in my monastery now, a place where we ponder spirituality and the place of God in this life. I suppose that a church secures for some a sense of God. But for me, a phone call like Donnie’s assures me that I am in the right place. And I am glad that Donnie moved along in life along the lines he loved – I sense he finds God there, too. And gives him away, through a call, through his love of beauty, through his open house and great food. It all somehow fits, even though we cannot always see it. A bit of rain helps, along with a good friend and some red wine.

2011-10-07T12:00:00.001-04:00

The Late Night Show in the Cheap Motel

I like cheap motels. And I recently stayed in one. The name or the place does not matter. It was between Georgia and New York City. There is a certain charm to a cheap motel. For one thing, such a place does not glare glitz. The place where I stayed was reasonably clean. The lady at the reception desk was friendly. She took my information and my money and then gave me the little plastic card for the door and pointed me in the direction of my room.
It was a one floor motel. As I went to my room, I passed some people partying it up outside and inside their room. They sat on lawn chairs and seemed friendly and were definitely having a good time. They were drinking beer and had a bunch of little kids. They said hello to me as I passed and I wondered if they would ask me to join them later on.
The door card worked. There was a big screen TV with a remote in my room, a little coffee machine, shampoo, soap, conditioner, a little coffee machine with four packets of coffee and a bunch of Styrofoam cups. The lady at the desk told me that there would be a continental breakfast available in the morning.
It was a bit stuffy so I turned on the air conditioner and got ready for bed. It was late, and I was tired.
I got into bed, kicked off the covers, bundled up all the pillows so I could lean on them, and turned on the TV. With the proper aim of the remote, going from channel to channel was easy.
I settled on a show that was on the Science Channel. It was all about the beginning and the end of things, of everything. The commentator was a young British guy and he was pleasant enough to listen to and to watch. He offered all kinds of interesting examples of what he called “entropy.” That word means, basically, that everything in a closed system goes from order to disorder. Disorder is the more operative of the two. It has the upper hand. It is inevitable. The British guy showed a castle made of sand that eventually was washed away. He had other examples too. Melting ice cubes. He spoke of one of the qualities of time as being a process. History moves forward. The universe moves. One thing happens after another. There are sequences, developments, chapters, evolutions and revolutions.
So things get better for a while. Then they corrode. And rot or die.
I began to feel ill at ease.
I could hear the party outside. They had not asked me to join them. Now I was wishing they had.
It got worse.
The British man said that the end will come. In a few billion years, our sun will run out of whatever makes it a big hot source of light and energy and will became a dwarf star. A puny little thing. And then it will, finally, become a dark star and everything will be sucked into it, never to return. Gone for good. Into the dark hole.
Te British guy said that there would be nothing left. And to top it off, he said that every star in the universe, every single one, is doomed to the same fate. In other words, the entire cosmos is destined to be the same that it was before it was. Nothing. No matter, no rain or sunshine or earth, wind and fire or Tina Turner.
I cannot remember the end of the show. Maybe the British guy said something along the lines of enjoying ourselves while we can. In fact, I think he did say something like that.
Maybe I should have crashed the party that was still going on outside.
Instead, I started to watch the next show.
It was some special with Stephen Hawking, the world famous physicist who has charmed millions and enraged millions. He has a disease that has left him physically impaired – he has to communicate through a machine – but his mind is incredibly active.
He warmed up to his topic – explaining how the idea of God is just that – an idea – and how science can explain all that people have used God to explain.
It was getting very late. I was still thinking about the first show and how everything was going to end and vanish and never come back. Including Stephen Hawking.
Then I thought of something. Actually, I thought of two things.
As far as the first show, the word that came to me was “push.” This whole thing is being pushed. Just like when a woman has to push to give birth, God pushed this Cosmos into being from the womb of the void and he is still pushing.
With a flick of the Divine Wrist, everything came into being and is growing, decaying, coming to life again, decaying. Yin and Yang.
Secondly, I had just seen a friend of mine that morning who is a philosopher. A professional philosopher. He wrote a letter to the New York Times and it was published. He wrote to suggest that someone should not criticize the work of another if one does not have sympathy for it – it one does not share a sense of the world under critique. He was, specifically, complaining about a writer who wrote about religion in a negative way and did not or could not share the vision of that religion. In short, my friend suggested that he is an outsider. Not in the game. I thought that was a fair criticism.
So, maybe Stephen Hawking should stick to his figurings about the universe without crossing the yard to his religiously inspired neighbors and trashing their party.
A flick of the wrist. Magic. Creation. Something out of nothing.
The party outside had quieted down. I heard a bit of laughter. Then it was quiet.
I turned off the TV with a flick of the button. The screen went blank.
A flick of the wrist, yes.
Goodness, mercy, hope, love, redemptive suffering, going an extra mile, giving from one’s want to those who have little. Wondrous things that are of as wondrous an origin. When it all ends, may there be another slight of hand, another flick of the wrist, a new card thrown into the void that then magically comes to life – bringing into being all that was and is, seen and unseen, pushing, pushing, pushing.

2011-10-07T11:59:00.002-04:00

Brooklyn

My Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jim lived in Brooklyn. Dad used to drive the seven of us kids and Mom over to see them when we were little kids. God knows how we all fit in the old Packard. We must have sat on each other’s laps in the back seat and two little siblings sat in the front. The car was green, and then painted maroon. I cannot remember the order of the colors. It of course had no air-conditioning. We lived in Hempstead then, which was on the eastern end of Long Island. I suppose it was about an hour’s drive from Hempstead to Brooklyn. Margaret and Jim had very little money. They lived on the third floor – a walk-up – of an old brownstone. As I remember it, the apartment was really nice. A long wooden staircase wound its way to the third floor. The banisters were of highly polished wood. There was a skylight in the bathroom and the toilet had a pull chain which was connected to a water tank above the toilet. The kitchen was small, and all the appliances were old, even back then. In the sitting room, which served as a living room and was the front room of the apartment, there was a beautiful breakfront made of wood. It was beautifully carved, with a mirror in the middle and little shelves up and down the sides. Uncle Jim was a poet – he used to write for the Brooklyn Irish paper called the “Irish Echo.” They never had children, and when we visited them, they lavished us kids with Cokes and cakes – chocolate cakes from Entenman’s Bakery, and ice cream and other goodies that we rarely got when we were home. I did not realize until many years later how much it must have cost them to give us so much. They just did not have it to spare. In later years, I used to hear Aunt Margaret say that when she needed money, it always had a way of coming along. I do know that even though they had little in terms of things, of wealth, they sure were happy. Whatever they needed came along. I would guess that Uncle Jim made a little money from the paper.
I can still remember the view from their rear window, which looked out from the dining room onto the back yard. The yard was small and filled with vegetation and little paths. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary, which stood in the middle of a bird bath. Apartment houses filled the landscape for as far as one could see.
They lived there rent free since they cleaned the office of the dentist who owned the building and whose office was on the ground floor.
After dinner, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jim sat in the living room on big soft chairs and told us stories of Ireland, from where they had come. Uncle Jim smoked a pipe and I still remember the aroma of his tobacco. On a hot summer’s day, the heat in the apartment was intense. There was an overhead fan, and an occasional breeze from the open and screened windows. But we did not mind. I do not think anyone had air-conditioners back then.
The years passed. Uncle Jim developed what was, looking back, Alzheimer’s disease and would leave the apartment and wander. On one trip, which turned out to be his last, he was mugged and was found by the police. He was placed in a nursing home not far from where they had lived. Aunt Margaret was to follow him there a short while later. They lived there for several years and died days apart from each other. They were apart from each other and reality at that point. But it was not to be a parting of the ways. It was as if one knew the other had left this life and wanted to follow.
All that was a long time ago. I am getting on in years, and when I go, a lot of old memories will go with me. Maybe my nieces and nephews will hear snippets of conversation, but they, too, will lose their moorings to this life and will fade into history.
Like Aunt Margaret used to say, they were given what they needed. And, more importantly, they shared from their very modest means.
And we, too, are given what we need. There is nothing we can hold on to forever. There comes a time when we have to move on. We can be a blessing to those we love, by sharing what we have. We will get by. And learn something about God from such fleetingly rich memories of Cokes and cakes on hot summer days, all gone, but somehow still alive, still whispering to me.

2011-10-07T11:50:00.001-04:00

The Day my GPS Died

The GPS came with the rental car. I had trouble booting it up and had to call the GPS people. A live one answered the phone and she said that I had to use the access number that was provided with the rental paperwork. I told her I could not find it. She then asked for some proofs of ID, to ascertain that I was who I said I was, and when that was done she gave me the code. I keyed in the numbers and was up and running – or at least on the ground and moving. I really liked it. A woman’s voice told me when to turn, how to stay on the right or left, when to drive straight ahead and for how long. I got used to her voice and liked it. It sort of kept me company. The GPS is amazing, I thought to myself. It brought me right to any place I needed to go and its last words on any given routing were “You have reached your destination.”

Then it died. I do not know what happened. I was driving along, and the screen was lit and the voice as reassuring as ever. Then suddenly the screen went blank, the voice stopped, and no matter what I did, I could not bring it back to life. I jiggled the wires. Made sure there was power from the power jack in the car. There was – a little light told me as much. I tapped the screen. Then tapped it again, harder. Nothing twinkled. Nothing came to life. I knew that it was okay since from that point on, I knew where I was going. I was in familiar territory. But I missed the voice, looking at the passing miles on the little screen, missed knowing when I had erred in my following directions.

It was very sad.

I thought of something my brother Johnny had recently told me. He said that he was concerned that there would come a time when everything would be in the sky and available. At first I did not know what he meant. But I got it when he elaborated a bit. Someday, he said, everything will be in the sky. There will be books, messages, photographs, movies, directions, banking, reservations, antiques, puppies, condolence cards, divorces, food deliveries, restaurant and concert seating, traffic warnings – all these and more, up there floating around and available – yes, YOURS, for a fee and the press of a few buttons.

At first I felt bereft when the woman’s voice was no longer mine, no longer with me.

I was alone.

But in my heart of hearts, I knew she was not real and could not possibly care about anything. She was as dead as the GPS and had always been as lifeless as a corpse.

But something in me needed her for the ride.

But then…

With all that stuff swinging through the cosmos, I hope we do not lose our need for each other. We are, after all, inter-dependent creatures. We need the sun and rain and each other in equal measure. We need to ask directions to get through this life.

We need the joy of listening to music together, of waiting for the delivery of tangible goods. It is not good when virtually everything comes to us virtually. We need to ask, to stretch, to wait, to screw up, wait out turn on lines, learn patience when things take time.

Maybe the sky will buckle because of all the stuff, it will collapse in on us. We may well lose the sky and everything in it. Flattened by our needs. Laid low because we lost the way to each other.

2011-10-07T11:49:00.001-04:00

The Chelsea Hotel

I was recently in New York City. It had been a while since I was there, and one of the places I wanted to see is the Chelsea Hotel. It is place of legends – successive and dramatic stories that played out in many of its rooms. Dylan Thomas over imbibed and died there. Pattie Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe lived there, beginning a life long love affair that lasted for decades. Bob Dylan lived there and wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in room 211. Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in room 100. He later died of a heroin overdose. Leonard Cohen lived there and wrote a song about the place, in which he sang about his room and a dalliance with Janis Joplin that he later regretted. Jack Kerouac wrote his infamous “On the Road” while on a three week drug fueled trip. Arthur Miller suffered through his break-up from Marilyn Monroe while staying at the Chelsea. Arthur C. Clarke found the inspiration to write “2001: A Space Odyssey” while living there. Madonna called the place her home in the 1980’s. The lobby saw the likes of Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground and an ongoing cast of characters from the free-spirited and bohemian era that was then and now, but, for then, found its nesting place in the many rooms of the Chelsea Hotel. The era still lives, but not at the Chelsea. It has long since moved on.

Sadly, the Chelsea was recently sold. The hundred or so residents still living there will have to soon relocate. They will be bought off. The Chelsea is to be remodeled along the lines of, according to the news, a “Holiday Inn-ish”style of structure. A modestly priced motel. A come and go kind of place. A far cry from what the Chelsea once was and can never be again.

I understand that change is the name of the game. Nothing stays the same forever.

But I regret not visiting the Chelsea Hotel when I recently had the chance. I asked where it was and was told that it was a good walk from where I presently was. I should have followed my better instincts and hoofed on over there, just to take a look and maybe sit in the lobby and touch things, knowing that everything in the place is a second or third class relic.

But I had things to do, places to go.

People to see.

And I missed out.

Well. There will be other times, other places that attract and breed the strange and mystifying world of art.

I read that the Chelsea lost its allure a while back. So say the newspaper stories about it.

So maybe I really did not miss anything. But I wonder. It is a great thing that is passing, soon to be a flashy motel. I should have sat in the place, and said a prayer of gratitude.

And then got up and looked for something just like it.

Labor Day

2011-10-07T11:48:00.000-04:00

Father Matt gave a homily on this past Labor Day about creation and the labor of God. It was a beautiful homily in which he mentioned the six days of labor when God created the universe and all that is in it, and then how he rested on the seventh day.

My thoughts took off in several directions as he was speaking. I mused over the word “labor” and I thought of the stories my mom used to tell me about her giving birth. She gave birth to seven babies. And over the years, I have heard my sisters tell of their ordeals with bringing their babies into the world. For my mom and my sisters, it was a time of great joy and expectation – as it was for my dad and my sisters’ husbands. But for a woman, the delivery of a baby is intimately personal, unique and profoundly beautiful. It can also be painful, and a time filled with anxiety.

It is said that we are made in God’s image. And I cannot think of any activity closer to the creative genius of God than the gestation of and giving birth to a baby (or babies). Giving birth is a share in the very life and identity of the Divine. Even the labor intensive activity that brings forth life is of God – God struggles and cries as life comes into this world. God lives in all creatures – God is the source of life as well as its every manifestation. AN infant’s first vague sense of tenderness is his or her first feeding. It is the first sense that all of this is gift – the fruit of the labors of others. We come from the labor of God and are sustained by it all through our lives. And we are at our best when we labor to give life and well-being to others – especially to those who are born into circumstances of hardship, or deprivation.

There are times when we are most God-like when we are least conscious of it. It may be good to bear that in mind when so much of our ideas about God have to do with chasing him with thoughts, theories, mental gymnastics of one type or another. We assume that if we have the right thinking about God, we have him in our grasp. But all the while, God has us in his – in the palm of his hand.

I was a twin and when we were born, I arrived first. My mom used to tell me that she had no idea that she was carrying twins. After I arrived, the doctor knew that my brother was not far behind. He told mom that there was another baby and that he needed her help. When she heard that there was another baby, she passed out. And my brother arrived from her body into this world with a wail and the helping hands of the doctor. Mom eventually awoke with two baby boys at her breasts. And God was awake all the time, in her and in us and in the doctor - who all did the divine thing bringing God to life and bringing life to God. It is all a mystery, rich and ongoing with wails and cries of joy. How wondrous, this God who lives within us.

2011-10-07T11:45:00.001-04:00

Amy Winehouse

When someone dies young, the loss of youth adds to the grief felt by those who knew and loved the one who has died. This was true of Amy Winehouse, the British singer who died over this past weekend. I liked her music. She was a gifted, sensitive person who sang in the traditions of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. She was haunted by demons that would be hard to call “personal.” Her struggles with drugs and alcohol were the fodder of the media the world over and many of her songs dealt with the themes of substance abuse. I watched her singing “Rehab” on the internet and watched it over and over. It is a catchy tune. It is sad to believe that she was singing about her own hard, and eventually lost, life.

I was astounded when I read the comments posted on several websites. Many were written from a sense of love, of sadness, of pain. But there were too many written from a depraved sense of vindictiveness and meanness. There were comments that were cruel, crude and grossly insensitive. And these were from people who well knew of the struggle Ms. Winehouse had with abuse. It is a tragedy that some people chose to continue the abuse, even after her death.

I liked to watch her sing. She had a nice smile and a way of looking at the audience as she sang one hit after another. I winced when I saw a video of her recent appearance in Serbia. She was out of control and was apparently booed off the stage. It was a scene that begged for compassion, not judgment or ridicule.

People turn to gifted artists because they are capable of putting into artistic forms deep and beautiful things we all feel but cannot express. Good things – and sad things. Artists are at their best when we feel with them, and can laugh or hope or cry from a place in our hearts that we know is there but cannot normally reach without the aid of an artist’s gift. An artist shares his or her life with us. It can be a raw, vulnerable kind of sharing. Amy Winehouse had that gift and she deserved more than the scorn and ridicule evidenced by the web site comments. She was not able to find a way out of the labyrinth of the alcohol and drug fueled corridors that lead nowhere except dead ends. And that was tragic. It could happen to any one of us.

I look at the photos on the Internet of the flowers, notes, letters and mementos that are piling up outside of her London house. There are also pictures of Vodka bottles, which was her favorite drink. But even these were left by those who loved her, but may not have known what else to leave. I can understand that.

What I do not understand are the comments I read on the Internet. If those who wrote them ever heard her words and music, what they wrote does not show it. What they wrote only shows how narrow and self-centered they are, people who watched the suffering of another human being and laughed, and when she died, wrote what they thought was smart or cool. It wasn’t. It was frightening, something ignorant and akin to something out of hell. Amy Winehouse lived better than their words. And she also wrote better, much better. She left sadness and beauty behind. She left something real, something that we all hope to cope with in this life.

I hope she found the peace that was, in this life, beyond her grasp. But in her reach for it, she touched the stars.

2011-10-07T11:40:00.001-04:00

Amie’s Card

I was recently to Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York and I took a lot of pictures. I made note cards out of some of the pictures and sent one to Amie, a long time friend of mine who lives in Staten Island – right across the Narrows from Brooklyn and, therefore, not all that far from Coney Island. We have corresponded for as long as I can remember.

Amie wrote back to me and did so on a card that she made. She wrote how much she liked my card. It brought back a lot of memories for her, for she used to go to Coney Island as a teenager and how she loved the fireworks that were set off every Tuesday night.

She said my card is beautiful. And so is hers. It is card she made by hand. She wrote all over the inside and back. She could not write on the front, for that is adorned with little plastic colored beads on a background of deep blue. The beads are glued on in a fan like shape – not unlike the majestic tail of a peacock. But they are more like a burst of fireworks on a long gone Tuesday night, on Coney Island. It is a special card, one that I know was made with love and especially for me.

I know that my card brought back good and warm memories for her. I cannot remember exactly what photograph I used for the card – for I made a bunch of them. Yet I like Amie’s better. It brings back other memories to me, memories of all the times we have written to each other and how the letters and cards have carried so well the ups and downs of the human heart in its search for beauty, for goodness, for God. Amie is an artist and has used her gift to bring the mystery of God to view – through pastels, slides, and, in the case of the card sitting here on my desk, little dazzling plastic orbs of color and arrangement.

She lets go her of art very easily. She gives away a lot of it – and somehow it seems to move her to create more, to give away more.

She recently told me that she will soon be heading to a Benedictine monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania for a stay. I know some of the women there – and I know that Amie will be welcomed and loved. The community there thrives on art and any artist is welcome.

There are times I wonder if we have reached a point where words need a rest. Have we exhausted them? Maybe. Words that try to seize mystery are woefully overburdened. And so it is that art then takes the stage and has its “say.” It communicates beauty in color, form, wonder – and it satisfies our restless need to create something near divine with whatever we have at our disposal. And then some of us, like Amie, give it away. I cannot express in words how much her friendship means to me. I have learned so much from her – she is a traveler who is seeking the divine because somehow she has already found it. And she won’t let it go. She can do that – and still give it away.

2011-10-07T11:39:00.001-04:00

The Man from Mid-City

Many years ago I met a man in a New Orleans restaurant. The name of the restaurant was Mike’s Mid-City Café. The name of the man I have long forgotten, though I am pretty sure I have it here, in this room, on an old address list. I have not lost the list. It is, I like to think, just temporarily misplaced. I had gone there that night to meet my cousin Steve and when I walked in, Steve was sitting at the bar. I sat next to him and after we had a drink he told me he wanted me to meet a friend of his. I said sure and asked where he was and Steve nodded toward a booth. Sitting at the booth was a little man, very nicely dressed, reading from a book. A beer sat in front of him on the table. We walked over and Steve introduced me to him. He invited us to sit. I asked him what he was reading and he smiled and said, “You may have never heard of it. It is a book called On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. It is in Latin.” I thought a bit and told him that I had heard of it. In fact, I had read it and even translated it in college. I did not tell him that. As we chatted, he told me that he was a Latin teacher in the same school where Steve then taught. We spoke a bit more, then thanked him for his conversation and headed back to the bar. That was twenty years ago. I never saw the man again, though I did write to him and we may have exchanged a few letters.

I had a course on The Nature of Things while in college. Back then, I was not overly impressed. It was a mandatory course and I did not have the fervent love for the book that our teacher, Father O’Sullivan, had. I remember him as very kind and very scholarly. He later fell in love with a lady and shifted his sense of grammar from Latin to his love for her. I thought that was pretty nice.

I remember that there was a final exam. It was to be a translation of Lucretius. We were told that it would be a passage in Latin and we had to correctly translate it into near perfect English. Jack Christell picked me up at my house at five in the morning and we drove over to Seton Hall. The Student Center was not yet open, so we parked in the near empty and enormous lot. We both smoked back then. Jack smoked Raleigh cigarettes because his dad collected and then redeemed the coupons. I smoked either Parliaments or Marlboros. There were no coupons. I liked the taste. So we sat there in the car with a flashlight and clouds of smoke and memorized, word for word, the sections we were hoping would appear on the exam sheet. I remember that it was cold and we had the car heater on full blast. The heater was not that good. We were still cold.

I do not remember what the text was. I do remember that me and Jack guessed the right translation. We both passed and even though I think Father O’Sullivan suspected that we memorized it, he never said anything. We purposefully made a few minor mistakes to give the impression that we struggled through the test. Maybe that worked.

Years passed. Jack and I entered the seminary. Roughly two years after we entered, Jack began to show signs of depression. He went for therapy, then began a regimen of drugs, but his condition worsened and he had to leave the seminary. He returned home and took what began to be a string of low-income jobs. We exchanged letters but he eventually stopped writing. One morning I found a fax at my table here at the monastery. Jack had taken his own life – he hung himself in the house where he grew up and where, by that time, he lived alone. I felt terrible that I had not kept up with him.

I would see Steve every time I went to New Orleans, which was often in those days. And he would make it a point to see me in my various locales. He visited me in every place I lived over the years, including here, at the monastery. I loved him like a brother. He was so easy to be with, though his three wives may not agree with me. But he weathered all that well. We would sit and chat for hours about the nature of the church, war and politics, love and loss, the past and the future….well, the nature of things.

He passed away a few months ago. He had a severe diabetic condition and succumbed to the gradual weakening of his body. I could not go to the funeral – we are limited to such things – but I know he would have understood that. I like to think we were there for each other when it mattered. He was a good and faithful friend. He shared friendship with such a seeming ease and joy.

I think I found the man’s name. The man in the booth from a long time ago. I found the list. Actually, it was right next to me in a pile of papers. I had a hunch it was there. His name was Lane Zellerman. It was obvious that he loved books, loved the past, loved history. I liked him. Looking back, I am glad he found his passion. Steve told me that he never married. His first love was the written word and all that he could give to it and it to him.

In this morning’s New York Times there is a review of a book that brought all this to mind. The name of the book is Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Steve Greenblatt. On the Nature of Things and old Lucretius figure prominently in the mapping of the book. Among other things, Greenblatt is indebted to the ancient text of Lucretius as well as its history. Looks to be a good read. I am not sure I will get to it – I may have already benefitted from it. But, I may get it. One never knows.

Memories came back to me as I read the review. Some good and some sad ones.

We all struggle with this life, with the nature of life as it blesses us, wounds us, casts us aside. There are moments when hope seems as close as breathing and other times when it seems gone, never again to come back. It always does, if we wait for it.

Lucretius dispensed with the need for a God to give all this plausibility. And for him it worked.

And that is good.

For me, life has been a series of hits and misses. Some days I get it, other days I don’t. The best I can figure, even Jesus relied on the common grace of friendship to get him through tough times. No big answers, just friends.

Friends you meet other friends with. Friends who share a drink or two in a bar. Friends who share a cold morning, memorizing some old words that may still ring true. I think of the nature of things all the time. And discuss it with my friends. And share what I can with you.

Slab City

2011-10-07T11:38:00.002-04:00

His name is Dave and he is ninety-years old. I recently read an interview with him that appeared in The Sun Magazine. He lives in a place called Slab City, a squatter’s community located on a desolate swath of South California desert. Cement slabs are all that remain of a former military base. They serve as foundations for the tents, old buses, vans and other makeshift dwellings. Nearby, there is a bombing range. Military aircraft fly overhead every day to practice military maneuvers, including dropping bombs.

In the interview, he said “I have not done a damn thing with my life except staying alive.” After living at the slabs for ten years, he felt he needed more solitude and moved his camp a mile farther out into the desert. He has a commanding view of the bombing range.

Attached to the walls of the near wreck of a motor home he calls his house are prints of Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles and the Potato Eaters. Stacks of books are everywhere: Thomas Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy, Truman Capote. He recently started writing and is always striving for perfection in his work. “Oh, it can never be achieved, he said, “but it must be the goal.”

That is pretty much all I know about Dave. But I like what little I know. He may have been down and out for most of his life, but he persists in something. He strives to write well. I hope he succeeds. I hope he finds peace in the crafting of words on paper, words about his life, his hopes, his failures, his efforts to do well. Writing necessarily entices one to search for meaning. Dave is at work on the most important and rewarding search in life. He is doing more than merely staying alive.

None of us do much in this life, though most of us live with the burden or the illusion of making a big dent in life, far more than the small indent of a word or two on paper.

The woman in the gospel is persistent. She has nothing but her need to press Jesus again and again for help. He gradually listens to her, and responds with care.

A miracle happens.

We can do nothing more effective than prayer. It may seem at times futile, but something strange and ultimately good comes from it. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, and the response may differ radically from what we asked for. But even the lowly among us know how small are our efforts but how necessary our willingness to have a goal, to try and give something of ourselves to the God who will someday lift us from the slabs of life to something lasting, an eternal home.

2011-10-07T11:37:00.001-04:00

Cities

I suppose the typical American dream is to own a big house in a real nice area, what one might call an “upscale” area. Huge homes with gatehouses, pools, plenty of acreage. Maybe I am wrong. But it seems that the media holds up such places as the most desirable.

When I was in the northeast not too long ago, I traveled to Brooklyn almost every day for the two weeks I was there. I took the train and subway and one day went as far as Coney Island. But most days I went to the Lutheran Medical Center to see my aunt, who was hospitalized there. She spent several weeks there and then moved on to a rehabilitation facility. She is doing better these days.

The Lutheran Medical Center is the place where I was born. It is located on 2^nd Avenue and 56^th Street, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. My aunt tells me that years ago, the area was heavily Swedish. Then, as time passed, other ethnic groups moved in – mostly Irish and Italians. They eventually moved on and now, from what I was able to see, the area is heavily Latino. In the hospital, there are directional signs in several languages – English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. There is also a sign directing people to the Chinese section of the hospital.

I would walk the several blocks from the subway to the hospital and loved what I saw. There were kids playing in the streets and sidewalks. There is a park near the hospital and kids were there, too, in abundance. Their mothers sat and watched them, chatting with each other as the kids had all kinds of fun, spraying each other from a fountain, skipping rope, playing ball. An ice cream and hot dog van was parked right outside the gate and did a brisk business.

The area is very residential. There are mainly row houses. There were little gardens in front of many of them, with statues of the Virgin Mary and flowers in some of the gardens. People sat on the steps, chatting away the morning. There were stores, too, up on the main avenue. All kinds of stores. Small grocery stores and coffee shops with counters. There were flower shops and hair salons, store-front churches and newspaper stores. Liquor stores and cleaners, clothing shops and vegetable stands. All of these had windows that were wonderfully decorated. I took some pictures of them. The streets were teeming with life. I felt safe walking around. One day, there was a large crowd – there was a ball game and just outside the small field was a food bazaar. Vendors were there, seemingly representing every nationality and food. I walked through the area slowly and was amazed at the variety of languages and dress. Yet everyone got along – it actually had a natural feel to it, all the differences being gathered on a street in Brooklyn. It was beautiful.

There is such richness to Brooklyn. My thoughts have returned there often since I returned here, to Georgia. Admittedly, I have a bias. I think of those kids on the Brooklyn streets who are learning so much from each other – they are picking up their “street smarts.” May what they learn serve them, and us, well.

The big churches up there are not doing well. People cannot relate to the old, established style of religion. Life goes on – they are finding their own, the best they can. God comes through for them and in them. He lives in the untypical, the places we somehow have forgotten and moved away from. He is here, too, in the homes that have big pools. But something tells me he is harder to find there.

2011-10-07T11:36:00.003-04:00

The Magic Coins

I had just missed my train. I stood on the platform watching the rear car as it slowly moved away. I was the only person there – everyone else had been on time and was on the train.

I stood there. The next train would be coming soon. So I sat down and waited. Suddenly I heard a high whine sound, like the kind of noise you hear coming from an electronic device, and then I heard the clanging of what sounded like coins hitting the tray in a Las Vegas slot machine. I turned and located the source of the noise. For some reason, one of the ticket machines was disgorging a bunch of coins. I got up and went over and looked in amazement as the coins kept coming. Then the jingle jangle clinky clink stopped. I looked around. No one was there. The best I could figure was that a person had that money coming to them but had to board the last train, and could not wait for the machine to cough up. So, I reached in and gathered the coins, which amounted to about fifteen dollars. I did not know that there were dollar coins. But there are and I had them. So, I made out good that day. The Lord giveth, and then the Lord giveth again. The Lord took my train but then the coins came. I was delayed, but happy. Happily delayed.

Some people think that God sends such things our way. So it is that some people think that the Lord sent the coins and that the Lord somehow made me late for the train. Frankly, I get confused when I try and line things up along such providential lines. It seems to me that God does not bother himself with whatever comes down the chute of a ticket machine or what comes and goes on the track.

But I do think that God is in everything, is everywhere, is early and late, and jingles and jangles all that the same time. He is with the winner and the loser, all at once and forever. He is the penny in your pocket and the millions in the bank. He is every container imaginable and the best thing we can learn to do is empty ourselves and fill whatever empty space we find in life with love, with attentiveness, with hope.

The universe was once a void.

God made a hole in it, and filled it with life, with us, with ticket machines and late trains.

At least I like to think that way.

Now I know someone is out fifteen bucks. The best I can figure, that person slid a twenty-dollar bill into the machine for a five dollar ticket and the machine stalled and the train came and the person got on and probably cursed the machine when it seemingly ate the change.

But then I came along and so did the coins.

Our paths will surely never cross again, me and that on-time rider.

I feel I owe something to him or her.

I believe God lives in everyone. Maybe in a roundabout way, I can give fifteen dollars to a needy person. I often see them in big cities. And maybe with that money he or she will buy a ticket to a favorite destination, and be late for that train, and will hear the same jingle jangle clinky clink and take the money and feel they owe somebody.

Maybe that is the way salvation works. Give away the excess in the hope that others catch a ride. It may work, all the way to heaven. Maybe that is how we all get to heaven, win or lose, early or late.

2011-10-07T11:36:00.001-04:00

On Being a Disciple of Street Photographers

I arrived rather late on the scene of street photography. I have taken pictures for years, but it is only in the last few years that I have discovered the joys of street photography and street photographers. There are many of the latter. There are books and lectures, websites and seminars, college courses and gallery exhibits all on the techniques and art work of street photography. I am slowly being drawn to a gathering of my favorites – Vivian Meier, Milton Rogovin, Helen Leavitt. Those are the well known ones. Among the lesser known are Kenny Vena, Salvatore Coppola, Louise Fryer, Thomas Leuthard, Dirk Vogel. They are easily found on the major social networking sites. Their photographs are posted there – and they embody photos from all over the world. The streets of Russia, Poland, Ireland and Italy pour forth in wondrous image after image on my computer screen. I think their photos are just as enticing as the better known figures. And I sense that they are just as happy to be out on the streets shooting away to their heart’s desire, as opposed to dealing with agents and gallery openings. Not infrequently, they have said on their websites that fame is fine as long as others push it for them. They would rather be giving a gentle push to the shutter release on their cameras.

I am amazed as to how generous street photographers are. They are generous with their praise of the work of their colleagues. They are all too willing to share some hard won techniques, newly found places for their work, contacts to help each other get here or there, places where cameras can be repaired or bought cheaply. I suppose that is why the word “disciple” strikes me as apropos. I follow them, learn from them, am open to trying to learn their craft and absorb whatever enthusiasm I can from them. They offer me a real gift – a way of seeing the beauty of every day life, on every day streets, with every day people.

I came across a new friend yesterday. His name is John Mack and he has done a lot of work in Mexico. He was interviewed on the Internet about his work. He was raised in this country and when he went to Mexico, he went with a lot of cultural bias that he had picked up here. He expected all the problems associated with poor countries. He gradually fell in love with Mexico – with the people, the culture, the vibrancy and the color. Admittedly, he said, they have little in terms of material things but they know how to live, and to share from their want. By comparison, Mack began to see how the excess of our country has dulled our appreciation for beauty in places like Mexico. We just do not “see” it because it is not like our expectations of the good, the beautiful. He showed a picture of a kid playing before a wall and the simplicity, even the barrenness, if the scene highlighted its beauty. We have to relearn how to play like that, how to see it and perhaps photograph it.

I have long spent time reading religious books and listening to religious words, lectures and the like. I am often aware that so much is left unsaid, perhaps purposefully so, “in between the lines.”

Well, I know where to go to fill in some of the gaps. To read what is in between the lines – I take my camera and go to the streets and watch what or who is at play on those lines of life. Books are good – they write of life. Streets are better. They hold it, and for some, hold it for view.

2011-10-07T11:35:00.001-04:00

Morning Walk

My doctor told me that I should walk every day. In the heat of the summer, I could have done better. When I was in Manhattan recently, maybe I made up for it. I must have walked miles every day. I love everything about Manhattan. You cannot walk five feet without seeing something interesting.

So, this morning I gathered the few things I need for my walk. I took my camera, some film, my glasses and hat. And off I went. Walking usually gives rise to thinking. But not a worrisome kind of thinking. It is the kind of thinking that touches on thoughts and then lets them go. Thoughts seem to fade into one another as I move along.

I headed out one of the back doors of the monastery and headed in the direction of the retreat house. It is a sunny day, and the light and shadows were beautiful earlier this morning as they played off each other on the sandy white walls of the retreat house. I stopped and took some pictures, trying to be conscious of the interplay of the shadows, the light and the beauty in between. I finished up there and then walked down the path to the heavy equipment area, where we keep the tractors and other heavy equipment. As I approached the large garage, I heard noise. Someone was fixing a tire. So I walked into the barn and saw Pee Wee and Oscar, two men who have worked for us for years, fixing a wheel on the tractor. We chatted a bit. I looked about and immediately thought of Damian. His handiwork was everywhere – on the walls, the doors, the floor, in cabinets and on shelves. Damian was a monk and a good friend of mine. He died a few years ago. Looking about the large area in the garage, I had the feeling that he might walk around the corner any moment. His memory is still vivid to me. I can easily see his face, hear his voice, remember his comments, his joy and sense of humor. I told Pee Wee and Oscar how the place so brought him to my mind and they nodded in unison. “Damian was a good man. A good man. Smart, too. He could fix anything,” Pee Wee said.

I asked if I could take their pictures. I did not use a flash, and relied upon the available light. I hope I got the settings right on the camera. I snapped away as Oscar and Pee Wee went about their work. I feel much at ease with them, much at home with them.

Pee Wee offered to drive me back to the main building. I should have walked, but felt lazy. It was starting to get hot and I did not refuse the ride.

Pee Wee got behind the wheel and I climbed in next to him. I noticed his graying hair. He talked of some aches and pains as we drove back. He said he gets shots for the pain. I told him I hoped whatever shots he was being given for the pain work.

I thanked him for the ride.

So many people to thank. For such simple, but wondrous things. A ride back. A pose for a picture. The remembrance of Damian. All he was, all he did. Many and simple things, for others.

I caught it all, in the light I had available.

I know more will come. More light. More beauty.

2011-10-07T11:34:00.001-04:00

Bernard of Clairvaux

Many years ago, I met C. Michael Curtis, who was and is the fiction editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He was a kind man, an Atticus Finch kind of person. He was intimately familiar with all the fictional currents of that time. He was also an avid reader of theology. He asked me what I thought had happened to the theological scene, in that the great giants who loomed over the landscape of the previous decades were gone, and no one replaced them. He was a reader of Lonergan, Barthe, Bultmann and Rahner. I cannot remember my reply to him. A question of that scope took me by surprise, not to mention his deep knowledge of and obvious hunger for God.

Today we remember with gratitude a giant from the early days of our Order. We still live in the shadow of Bernard.

Each age brings forth its own giants who stand tall on the horizon of religious thought and activity and influence many succeeding generations. Bernard of Clairvaux was one such figure. They seem to inherit a right place and a right time. They rise with the winds of change, transformation and need and are gifted enough to fit the bill. Bernard was a gifted writer, orator, leader and aristocrat. He was at the forefront of the main cross currents of his day.

Such people seem to arise when the need calls for them. The spirit inspires them and moves them forward and we follow, and benefit from their gifts, their labors. The genius of Bernard was the ability to blend God and life in prose. His words wedded heaven to the things of this earth. His legacy lives and towers above and around us in this magnificent church. When the monks labored to build it, they were doing the very work of God here in Conyers. As the walls rose, and the windows let in the light with their beauty, God found a home made by the Cistercian monks who reflected the wisdom of Bernard.

Here are some of his quotes.

You will find something far greater in the woods than you will find in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters

It is a misery to be born, a pain to live, a trouble to die. (Reads a bit like Bob Dylan.)

He who prays and labours lifts his heart to God with his hands.

Who loves me will love my dog also.

Bernard left something good for almost everybody – the poet, the artist, the balladeer, the seeker of God, no matter if sought in books or the woods. He wrote for those in the pews (if they had them way back then), those in the cloister, and those on the streets.

2011-10-07T11:33:00.001-04:00

Changes

I recently was back to my hometown for a family visit. In between the social gatherings, I had time to drive around and check out the old town, the places where I grew up and, for better or worse, started learning the first of many lessons about life and getting by in this world.

Our old house is still standing and occupied. I do not know who lives there. Some years back, my sisters rang the doorbell, introduced themselves and were invited in. They told me that there were a lot of changes. I guess I like to remember things as they were. I got out of the car and took a few pictures and let it go at that. No one still lives on our street from the old days. Over the years, everyone has moved on. I could not help but look at the houses that lined the street, remembering who lived there, what they looked like, and the various styles of life each family embodied. It was a “mixed” street ethnically and religiously. A real mixed bag. But when we were kids that did not amount to anything. We all got along, played with each other and in each other’s homes.

I noticed a lot of changes about town. A train now can take you from the Bay Street Station right to New York’s Penn Station. The area around that station has drastically improved, due to the new rail connection. When I lived there, there were a lot of run down houses and shabby apartments. All that has given way to new townhouses and condominiums. Everything looks clean and new. Men and women, smartly dressed for a day’s work in Manhattan, stood at the platform in the mornings, waiting for the train to New York.

The church I attended, Immaculate Conception, looked to be in good shape but I was told that the congregation has shrunk. When we were kids, it was not uncommon for families of seven or more kids to move to the town. These days, families are much smaller and the town is not as affordable as it was in the “old” days. The same is true of the parish where I was last assigned, which is in the same town. Mount Carmel Parish is near the train station and even though more young people have moved to that area, church attendance has declined greatly, due to the passing of the older people and the lack of interest on the part of the young when it comes to institutionalized religion.

I had dinner one night with three guys with whom I went to grammar school. It was a wonderful evening – I felt my past alive in them, as we talked over old times. They shared with me the ups and downs of family life and I told them as much as I could about the monastery. When I returned here, I found myself looking back gratefully to that evening, to the goodness of my three friends. I feel they are a living part of me. Speaking with them helped me recover something from the past, something that cannot be had through a photograph or a daydream.

When I returned here, I thought of Luke, who recently celebrated his 100^th birthday. There was a big party and I heard all about it, how good it was and how people came from all over the place to share with him his big day. Luke has seen changes beyond measure in this life but I sense he takes it all in stride, now. He is much at peace and seemingly lets things come and go in life. I guess he has reached a point where he knows that we cannot ever hold on to anything for keeps. It all goes. But we stay, helping each other through the changes, through the cycles of change that are life itself.

A belated happy birthday, Luke. I look at you and see the marvels of transformation, change, and openness to the future. And I thank you, my friends back home. There have been many changes there, too. But we can and will get together again, and let the changes take what they must, and yet we shall laugh and reminisce, and ride the days yet to come.

2011-10-07T11:31:00.002-04:00

The Mystery Writer

A legal size envelope arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. I looked at the return address label and it was from a woman I met in the retreat house a month or so ago. Her name is Barbara and she told me when she was here that she was writing a novel, and would I take the time to read it? I told her sure, just send it to the monastery. She sent me the first and second chapters. I set aside some time and started reading and was fascinated with what she wrote. It is a “page turner” and I was captivated. When I finished reading the section of the novel, I wanted to know more, to find out where it was going. I could ask her for the rest of the manuscript, or I could wait till it comes out in book form.

She was hesitant to send it to me. Of her work, she said, “It is nothing great. Just a murder mystery.” Well, I am not a professional editor or reader. But I think the writing is great shows a lot of promise. It amazes me, how writers can take characters and develop them, give them life and credibility, and then place them on a page. And with each turn of the page, a story develops. There has to be sequence, continuity, “real” dialogue, fine-tuned plotting and exciting action. I am in awe as to how writers do that. Barbara is a medical examiner, and she has taken her experience and woven it into the fabric of the novel. It is good. It is real.

And it brings to mind something.

It seems that we were born from a story. And our lives, how they spin and turn through the years, do so while continuously weaving a story. It is always there. We tell stories about our lives. Others look at us, and come up with their own stories as to who we are and where we “come from.” And when we die, even more stories will be told. It seems that we are born into an eternal story, a story with a beginning, but no end.

And this leads me to wonder what God is like. It is said that we are made in the divine image, made in the very likeness of God. We are his story, a long narrative in the making, complete with a growing cast of characters, successive chapters, scenery that abounds in beauty and scope, and at its heart is a tantalizing mystery. We do not know the end, much less the beginning. And we are at the very center of the drama. We are not only caught up in it. We make it happen – we are the action as well as the page turners. We are aware of our involvement and our inescapable responsibility to create something with the gifts of time, history, experience and fate. There is no getting around it. We are, for better or worse, big time “stars” in this ongoing drama of God’s story.

We are in it but cannot redeem it. We do not have the power to provide a satisfying conclusion to the drifting nature of the work in progress. There are so many loose ends, terrifying possibilities, horrible consequences of what seems to be a flawed, deranged humanity.

And so it is we need a Divine Writer. One who will realize the redemptive finale to what he has written. And end that will tie all the loose ends together, wrap them up and bring them home.

I am sure Barbara will send me the rest of her book. And then I will know how at least good read ended. But the both of us will have to wait out God’s revelation. Looking around, I can tell that he is a fine writer. Something tells me that with all the crazy turns in life, beauty will have the last and closing word.

The Turtle Warrior

2011-10-07T11:30:00.002-04:00

I recently finished reading a book by Mary Relindes Ellis called “The Turtle Warrior.” (Penguin Books, 2004). She is a good writer. It is her first novel. And it is marvelous. It is the kind of book I pass to my friends in the hope that they will like it, too. It is about a little boy named Billy and his early youth, growing up on a farm in Wisconsin. Ellis is a warm and powerful writer. As I follow her writing on young Billy, her words bring back memories of my growing up, of so many ordinary events that took place on hot summer days a long time ago. They are like memories that were sleeping and that have awakened through her writing. Memories of playing in the streets with my friends, of being called home by my mom for dinner. She writes of scenes that are so similar to what I knew – warm afternoons sitting at my wooden desk in school, looking out the window wishing that the arrival of summer would come, and come fast. I closed the book, trying to remember more, and felt warm by what I could remember. Ms. Ellis’s words were working their magic, like slowly developing photographs arising through the solution of mind, heart, memory and the past.

I asked myself how does she do that? How does she create such real characters, who speak like people do in real life? How can she weave a complicated but credible plot, a plot that maintains a voice, a continuity, a rich pattern for hundreds of pages? I asked my sister Mary how a person can write so wondrously and Mary replied that she has often wondered the same about me. So I guess we never see our own writing for what it is. We have to learn to trust ourselves, to trust others, to work hard on what we write and then to let the words go into the world and take root and grow, grow in the hearts of others.

If you trust people, they will help you. They may not be writers but they are readers. They will refine your words, pull your vision into a place where it is clearer, sharper, more beautiful.

Many years ago, I went to a writers conference at Simmons College in Boston. It was really good. We each wrote a story and had it critiqued by an expert in the craft of fiction. My teacher was C. Michael Curtis, the fiction editor of the Atlantic Monthly. One morning, he read aloud to the class a story written by a woman who was sitting near me. I cannot remember the story but remember her writing about a vase that cost a nickel. Someone picked up on that, raised her hand, and said that she highly doubted that a vase could be bought for a nickel. A nerve was exposed in the heart of the writer and she got very upset, to the point of tears. She could not hear what the other lady was saying and Curtis had to intervene and take the woman outside the room to calm her down. All that, over a five-cent vase.

She should have listened to the well meant advice – and grown a bit, moved on with the story she had written as well as the story of her own life. The best stuff we can write about is always out there in the world, on the street, in houses and great cities. These places offer all that they have and place them in our hearts. If we want to write, the words come. And there are times we need help. I am sure that Mary Relindes Ellis looked for help and got it. And so will you.

Mount Carmel

2011-10-07T11:29:00.002-04:00

We celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and Augustine was the celebrant of the Mass. The feast was July 16^th. He gave a good homily, starting off by telling us how he grew up in the Southside of Chicago and was baptized in Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish. He remembered the feasts, and spoke about the processions on the streets of his neighborhood, tying it in with a link to the Vatican Council document on the liturgy, which stated that the liturgy should reflect, be in conversation with, human life. I liked what he said – the phrase “street liturgy” appealed to me. I suppose I experienced a lot of that myself in the last parish to which I was assigned, prior to my entering the monastery. The name of that parish was also Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the parish celebrated accordingly on its feast day. As I remember, there were several other feasts. There was the feast of Saint Sebastian and Saint Vito. More recently, friends from the parish have told be that there has been inaugurated a feast of Saint Donato. Different societies in the parish were responsible for the parades and the food booths on the respective feast days. I used to enjoy watching the statue of Our Lady being slowly carried by the men of the society. It moved slowly up the street and it was the custom to pin money on the statue. People lined the streets and looked out the windows. Kids ran up to the statue and walked along side it. On the feast of Saint Sebastian, the celebratory Mass was always said by a much loved Sicilian priest who came in from a parish from a considerable distance away. His name was Sylvester Livolsi. When he preached, he did so in Italian and had a way of stirring the waters among the faithful. I could not understand a word of what he said, but it must have been powerful. There were tears, looks of awe, bowed heads. After the sermon, he continued with the Mass and at the consecration, a man at the door of the church gave a signal and fireworks were set off in the street. I suppose it was a sign of the arrival of the real presence, not unlike the function of the ancient custom of ringing the altar bells at that time.

Times may have changed. A lot of the old Italians have died off and not many have picked up where they left off. I think there are still feasts, but the numbers have dwindled. People these days are used to other forms of devotion, other ways of walking with God.

One thing, though, has remained.

Food.

People like to eat. And you cannot beat good Italian food. I cannot spell most of the Italian delicacies, but when I was in Mt. Carmel I understood how good cooking was pretty close to something divine. If Jesus gave himself as food in the best of earthly and divine repasts, I am sure he wouldn’t mind if a bit of garlic and pasta are also on the menu.

These days, you need permits for so many things. Parades, parking, fireworks, public gatherings, on and on. ]

Liturgies are permit-free.

Liturgy should reflect life. Indeed, I think it always does reflect life in its most earthy manifestations. The Italians in my home town and in the Southside of Chicago knew how to celebrate God’s presence through food, a parade, wine and generosity. I felt good listening to Augustine this morning as I thought back on some good memories. His words helped me make some connections with my past. Good liturgy does that, too. It is all about making connections.

Customs change and parades may come to a rest. But share food we must, and along with it the loving presence of God. So….Salute. Salute to the good old days, and the feasts yet to come.

2011-10-07T11:26:00.002-04:00

Frank Korp

It was a lazy afternoon. We had a good lunch and I headed back upstairs, took off my habit and crawled into bed. I had been up since four in the morning and the lack of sleep was catching up to me. It was not long before I fell asleep. I do not remember dreaming, but I do remember being suddenly awakened by a loud crack of thunder. It was really loud, and it reverberated for what seemed like several minutes, its low rumbles rolling into the distance. I do not know why thunder and lightning does that. How it is a flash of light that makes a roar, and then reechoes over and over again, seemingly looking for another place to hit.

When I awoke from the blast of lightning, I fumbled for a while in my thoughts, and then clarity came to me with Frank Korp. I do not know why. He was as clear to me as running water. As fresh as if I was with him yesterday. Yet I have not seen him in over thirty-five years.

He was the janitor in a parish I was assigned to a long time ago.

I really liked him. He was a friendly man, always had a smile on his face, and how can I put it? He was as giving as can be. He loved the kids in the school. He saw me as a kid, as a new priest who was as young as his son. He made me laugh. He would come out with the funniest things, about people he knew, about places he went, about things that happened to him in his life.

He was neat. His shirts were always pressed real nice. He was always clean shaven, and looked wide awake, never tired from a lack of sleep or over work. He was proud of what he did. The school and church were immaculate. He loved showing me the boiler room. It was a large room, in the center part of the school, and he had it so clean that you could eat off the floor. I swear, the floor was as clean as a freshly washed dish. It shined. And in the corner of the boiler room was a juke box that I had managed to get from a man in the parish. I do no thing that Frank liked it there, but since I was a priest in the parish he went along with it. It vanished a few months later, after he showed it so me. I think that it was stolen but I never found out what happened to it.

He had a van back then. One day, he wanted to show it to me. He opened the rear door and there was a bed and a carpet. He said it was where he lived. I looked, smiled, and did not say anything. I knew that he was married but that things were not going well.

I did meet his wife, just once. She lived up the street from me and I heard that she was very sick. She had cancer. One day she was standing in front of her house and I walked over to meet her. She shook my hand and said that she had heard of me. I said that was nice, and that was the extent of my chat with her. She said she did not feel that good and turned and walked back into the house.

When she died, I heard that she and Frank had reconciled. There was a huge spread of flowers at her wake, a blanket of flowers with a card signed, with love, from Frank. I thought that was beautiful.

Love is a strange thing. We sometimes marry it, and it causes trouble if the circuitry is not right. But, hey. It causes trouble even when the circuitry is made in heaven. It may take time and years for the wires to align, to get just right and have the current flow. I think we all try to do that.

And it may take a bolt of lightning to make me realize that I really loved Frank Korp and never told him that. He is long gone now, but as real to me as if he was right here with me. Kind of like the light that shines, even though I have no idea where it comes from. Like something from heaven.

2011-06-30T15:04:00.003-04:00

Sacred Heart

I know that there is a Sacred Heart parish in the Vailsburg section of Newark, New Jersey. It was once a large parish, with a cathedral sized church. The area fell on hard times and the church was closed a few years ago. In its day, not that many years ago, it was a thriving parish of mostly blue-collar families. The Vailsburg section was home to a lot of fireman and policeman. After the Newark riots in the 1960’s, the area changed drastically and the church struggled for years until it was closed.

There was also an Academy of the Sacred Heart and I think it is in New Orleans. The last I heard, the school is still open and thriving. There are also religious orders named after the Sacred Heart. Most of them are not doing well, from what I have read. Vocations are dwindling to the point that the orders may soon be phased out. There may be Sacred Heart universities and hospitals, as well as places for the homeless and even some orphanages. But I would guess that their numbers are diminishing as well, in this age in which we live. For it is an age that has little need to shelter its institutions and life-choices under a sacred name, like the Sacred Heart. Times change and needs change, and so it is with the ways of being human and living in a time and place. But I wonder if the ways of God need diminish when we seemingly outgrow our need for the use and alleged strength of his name, his heart.

I do not think so. God is alive and well amidst the ongoing changes of time, place and custom.

I have just started reading a book by Mary Relindes Ellis called “The Turtle Warrior.” (Penguin Books, 2004). I am just getting into it, not much beyond the opening pages of the book. It is about a little boy named Billy and his early youth, growing up on a farm in Wisconsin. Ellis is a warm and powerful writer. As I follow her writing on young Billy, her words bring back memories of my growing up, of so many ordinary events that took place on hot summer days a long time ago. They are like memories that were sleeping and that have awakened through her writing. Memories of playing in the streets with my friends, of being called home by my mom for dinner. She writes of scenes that are so similar to what I knew – warm afternoons sitting at my wooden desk in school, looking out the window wishing that the arrival of summer would come, and come fast. I closed the book, trying to remember more, and felt warm by what I could remember. Ms. Ellis’s words were working their magic, like slowly developing photographs.

I do not think I ever thought of the Sacred Heart back then. Yet it was there, I know. Not in the big Newark church, or school, or hospital or religious name. It was all throughout my life, wherever there was a hunger for love, for the promise of summer, for all that made life rich and mysterious for me as a kid. The heart of Jesus beat through everything, pumping grace and life into every wondrous moment of life. Of course, I never thought about it. I just lived it, ran to it when it called, and sat in it when the time came. Our cathedral was called the Sacred Heart, too. Named after a mystery that was best know outside its doors, on the streets and in homes, by as many names as there are loves and desires. All coming from and hoping for the Sacred Heart, without even having to know the name or keep the name. God cannot lose his heart. He gives it away, over and over again, naming it as he will, using every language ever spoken.

Just Kids

2011-06-24T10:37:00.001-04:00

I recently read Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids (Ecco Press, 2010, New York). It is a wonderful book in which she writes of the love she shared with the legendary photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. They were young and barely getting by in Greeenwich Village. They moved in together, shortly after they met, and the relationship would have a lasting effect on their lives. Even though they would eventually go their separate ways, a deep love and respect endured through all the changes that life was to bring. Mapplethorpe would go on to become a world famous photographer and would mingle with the heady in-crowd of the art and fashion world of New York. Patti Smith would follow her muse into the realms of rock music, poetry, art and photography. “Just Kids” won the National Book Award last year. It is a delightful read, the story of a young woman’s deep and strong first love. Mapplethorpe would die at a young age, at the height of his fame. Patti kept in touch with him and promised him she would write the book of their time together and the gift that he was to her. Her prose is heightened by a memory warmed by love, the love she innocently found and kept for many years. It was a love that stayed with her long after she and Mapplethorpe parted ways. It was as if the best of their relationship survived and even grew through the separation caused by miles and even other loves.

She kept a diary from her years with Mapplethorpe, and was able to build a narrative based on the small and seemingly unimportant things of day to day life – cutting Mapplethorpe’s hair, what she bought at the store, what was in the paper on any given day. Who she met, where they went.

Reading her words, I was struck as to how Patti Smith took risks. She left home at a young age and headed straight for New York City. She loved the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and his words inspired her to roam into the different and enticing realms of dreams and spirits and excitement. She writes beautifully, with a healthy sense of life’s highs and lows and her need to savor them all and live, write, sing and photograph from them.

I was in college, and then in the seminary, when Patti Smith was seeking out her path in life, a path that led her to New York and then to the Chelsea Hotel and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. In many ways, some might look upon her whole adventure as highly unorthodox and far, far off the tried and true paths laid down for us by religious institutions and cultural mores. I certainly followed the lights I was given and ended up studying theology and being ordained a priest. But with those lights, I have come to see other lights, on different but no less wondrous roads. I have come to believe that they are on the road of every life, given us that we might see what is of value along the way. Patti Smith has taken trinkets she has found all along her road and made of them bracelets, songs, poems, pictures, and a beautiful book. She has written a richly beautiful book in which these living trinkets are rediscovered by her and shared. She writes with a respect for life and a love of its mysteries. I think many of us have struggled and somehow suffered to find the same wondrous things in life. I was once just a kid, too. There are days when that time seems so long ago. But Patti Smith’s book makes me wonder if we really never lose what we thought was given us only once, in our teens – the capacity to wonder, to take risks, to love in crazy and breathtaking ways. Love is the always open door to life. And we never need pass it by for good. It opens again and again, and all we have to do is enter. Just like kids always do.

On the Gift of the Spirit

2011-06-11T11:42:00.000-04:00

I have a small collection of books that can be summed up under the title “Street Photography.” They are books of photographs, mostly black and white. Helen Stummer, Helen Leavitt, Milton Rogovin, Vivian Maier, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau. Most of the pictures are of ordinary scenes taken on city streets. Places like Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York. Tiny slices of life taken from the billions of scenes that make up life every day.

I have my favorites.

A little girl proudly carrying two bottles of milk down a city sidewalk. The bottles are nearly half her size.

Two kids in their first communion clothes, a boy and a girl, dressed in a white suit and white dress, standing in front of the tenement where they live.

A black man, dancing in front of a juke box in a bar in Buffalo, New York, swaying just right to whatever was playing on the jukebox.

A little boy in a tattered coat and pants, crying and wiping tears from his eyes as his friends stand at a distance, laughing at him.

Two little black kids, two boys, on sitting on a curb. One is crying. The other has his arms around him, trying to comfort him.

A group of kids, staring at a dead cat on a city street.

Two old people, a man and a woman, sitting on folding chairs in front of their apartment, watching the world on their street go by.

Pentecost moves one to wonder about God, about the gift of the Spirit, about the gifts that came with wind, with fire and the shape of tongues, when for a miraculous moment, men and women understood with clarity what was being said in the babble of many languages. A gift, it was, of seeing clearly and deeply into life, into the human heart.

And so it moves one to try and frame this fire with words, to contemporize it, to say yes, we still can say we live from the spirit, for we are church and we believe.

All my pictures are silent. But there were voices when the photographer framed the picture and pressed the shutter release. There were voices, and the sounds of cars and busses and trolleys. There were birds, and the sound of the wind as it moved through the trees. There were tears, cries and laughter. All silent now. At least in the photographs. But the sound is not necessary to see the beauty, the aching beauty in each of them. How much of the world’s sounds is made of words? Very little, I would guess. Meaning comes through to us in more than language. It is all around us, all the time. In a hug, a dance, a face full of tears, a little girl proudly carrying two bottles of milk.

Photos always say more than words can say.

And I think Pentecost does, too. It is a gift of the Spirit, who opens our eyes to what we cannot say with words, cannot see with our eyes, cannot know with our minds, but can surely take in with our hearts. We experience something, someone, wondrous and we cry because we cannot have it all or even say it all. It is a gift larger than our hearts, but of our hearts. A gift, more than we can say. A photo, taken at just the right moment, can be like stealing fire, allowing us to see what we always seem to miss, right in our midst. A world aflame, and someone saw it, and took a picture.

Photography as Prayer

2011-06-01T11:19:00.002-04:00

Photography as Prayer

What is that phrase? “To sing is to pray twice.” Or something close to it. There are other sayings, to. I have heard a few monks say, by way of encouragement to some out-of-tune monks that singing well is giving praise to God. Which, I gather, means that singing is praying. I would venture to add something more. That any beautiful, heart felt, heart rending piece of music is a delight to the ears of both God and the human. Beautiful music comes from God and is returned to him with all that we can put into it. A gift with no ribbons save those of the beautifully crafted hi’s and low’s of notes.

We recently had a photography retreat here and the name of the retreat was “Faith, Image and Photography.” During the retreat, a phrase came to me and kept returning to me – photography as prayer. Just like music, or words, or any form that expresses something deep in us and finds its way out on canvas or marble – photography is prayer. I watched the people on the retreat as they sighed and gasped when a photo of great beauty appeared on the screen. I looked at them as they turned pages of the photo books we made available on retreat. They lingered over the pages, smiling as they looked at pictures of children; looking sad as they saw the pictures of poor miners and their families; looking wondrously at photographs of simple, every day things – taken at a moment when they revealed something glorious and near divine, precisely because that is where these actually live – in the sublimity of the mundane.

We showed several DVD’s of several photographers – James Nachtway and Milton Rogovin. And two friends of the monastery, John Spink and Matthew Jeffres, shared their photographs of nature, people – people big and small, rich and poor – but all looking beautiful, looking just like they came from God. Which of course they did.

I am sure that there are very few photographers who, when they frame that special shot in their view finder and stay as still as possible when they press the shutter button, feel as if they are communicating with God. Trying to make beauty with the means that we have takes discipline, an eye for beauty, and the willingness to learn from others. That to me is religious activity. And that is what we try to give each other on the retreat.

I believe that God is all over and all through this earth. There is no getting away from God, despite all the ant-God rhetoric of the atheists. I respect their right to move God and God language out of the picture. But that is not so easy, especially if they have a camera and look to take some of life’s beauty in a photograph. I am sure God dies not mind. In fact, he may appreciate a photo of great depth and majesty coming from “the other side.” He is there, too, hidden as it were, behind the camera, clicking away, sharing something good with those who want to take a look.

If you have trouble praying this day, take a picture of someone or something that you love. Or write a poem, or paint a picture. Make some pasta. Play the light fantastic. Do the Fandango. Have a good one. God moves the heart in many ways, all coming from and going back to him.

Touching the Eternal

2011-05-26T10:55:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine was here this morning. His name is Paco and we have a shared interest in photography. His work is beautiful – he has a good eye. He can raise the ordinary to its proper, and often overlooked, place in the realms of mystery, beauty, wonder. He takes everyday scenes and these are kept in his albums, pictures through which grace is captured.

He sent me an email not too long ago about how photography captures the eternal in the split second of a moment. A beautiful image is like a window through which the eternal can be seen. I liked what he wrote. I can see it in what he photographs. An old ship off the coast of Argentina. A path through a wooded area. Pictures of his grandchildren. Waves stilled by his camera, as they rose against the shore of Argentina.

We spoke of many things this morning. We chatted about our families, our current hopes, some disappointments. The photographs called to mind our losses – he had a photo of his mother, a beautiful woman. It was taken in 1936. She is smiling, wise, her life ahead of her. I thought of my mom, who is gone three years today. I told Paco that. She, too, was beautiful and I must find a picture I have of her that was taken about the same time as Paco’s photo of his mom.

Paco spoke of eternity and how it is that God lives in the eternal. He is not bound by the constraints of time – though I suppose that at one time he was. And how is it that we know the eternal? That we intuit something that is so mysterious and that cannot be defined via the categories of time? Maybe we are somehow made from the eternal. It lives in us but we lack the language to capture it. And so it is that the lens of a camera steals something from the passage of time, and enshrines it in beauty. We cannot speak the eternal. But a photograph is a near approach, a touching of the eternal. We know what we cannot speak. So we take a picture. We treasure something that was and yet still is, in the picture.

The taking of a picture pulls one into the present moment. The present moment demands all the attention, the care, the observation that one can give with the timely press of a shutter. Life moves on, but a choice was made to suspend worries about the past, worries about the future, and to give the present its claim. It is quite Zen-like. In fact, there are books that suggest the relatedness between a Zen mind and a photographer’s eye. Abandoned ships and rising waves say something, once stilled.

While in New Jersey not long ago, I drove down to the old Essex Catholic High School building in Newark. I went to high school there, from 1962-1966. I did not go alone. My twin Jimmy was alive then, and we traveled to school every day. We took a bus from our home town and got of the bus at Branch Brook Park. I do not remember as much as I would like about him. A psychologist said that his death was so painful for me that I suppressed many memories of him. It has taken me a long time to deal with that. I do not understand it, but it is true. But bit by bit, I try and remember him, how he walked, what we spoke about, the sound of his voice, his likes, dislikes, sense of humor, hopes. I drove around a bit that day, down Second Avenue, then on to Summer Avenue and along Mt. Prospect. Driving down Second Avenue, the building looks enormous. I guess that is because that area is higher, looking down on the building. I can remember walking down that hill, to the school, early in the morning with Jimmy. That memory is as fresh as if we walked yesterday. It is one of the clearest I have of him. He walked just ahead of me, on a spring morning. The air was cool and his jacket fluttered as he walked. He held his books close to his chest. And he was walking briskly.

I should have parked the car and taken some pictures from that vantage point. He would not be in the picture, but I would like to have it. He walked there once. I remember it. He walks in another place now, out of time, in the eternal. I like to think he still walks with me, some time. But maybe he has always been just ahead. I will be sixty-three in a few days. Maybe he will turn and look behind, from wherever he is, and wait for me. I hope so. I would like to touch him, touch what is eternal.

I want the picture. Well, next time. I will be there again, trying to capture something of the eternal, of the stillness that is born through every second of time, a stillness that was once walking just ahead of me on a long ago spring day.

Memory Days

2011-05-25T10:08:00.002-04:00

These closing days of May are filled with memories for me, for my family. On the sunny side, there are my ordination anniversary, my sister’s wedding anniversary and the anniversary of my solemn profession as a monk here at the monastery. On the not-so-sunny side, it is the week of the death of my twin brother, and also our birthday, and the anniversary of my mom’s death. I tend to keep a low profile and thank people when they wish me all the best on the good days. The memories of sad times I keep to myself. I guess that is okay. My mom was fond of saying that no body wants to listen to bad tidings.

Anyway, I was thinking a little while ago about being here, being a Catholic, a priest, a Trappist monk, a soon to be sixty-three old man who dabbles in religious currents and yet at times feel as if I am treading water. I have not moved all that far all these years. I have read a lot, traveled a lot, met a lot of people, seen a lot of things. All of that is pleasant to look back on, really. I can get quiet and remember such warm experiences I had in London, in Beijing, in Irish villages, in big cities like Manhattan and Los Angeles. How much do I know of God? I really do not know. We live in such a verbose culture, a culture that thrives on words and images, enticements and upgrades, new things galore – I do not know how God is or what God is amidst all these accoutrements of culture. God is easy to package. We do it every day here at the monastery. We pray – but do we pray? What is prayer? Sometimes I think the whole created universe is a living prayer to God, a wondrous response to God, an alive and thriving need for God to be near, to come back, to perfect what is so in need of a miracle.

God seems far away to me. God is either that, or God is very close, so close that he is in the very living heart of all that is. In all things – and in all memories, anniversaries, birthdays, good times and bad times. In tears and in laughter, in being born and in dying. The way I see it, there is no getting away from God. It is like you cannot get out of your own skin. God covers us, is in us, makes us burn with desire, makes us angry when we cannot know about him for sure.

So I move on to a new year, a new gift of life, of being here. I might have one wish, and that would be that those I loved and who have died could still be here. But we all must move on, some earlier than others. I never minded that, at least not consciously. I always figured that Jesus died young, and tragically. And so did my twin. So I have long been at peace with untimely death. I think I learned that from my mom and dad.

So, here I am. I have very little figured out on the religious map, other than I am on it and heading somewhere. The details are at times confusing to me. There are times I have run out of gas. Or felt so tired and discouraged I wanted to pull off the road. And there were times when the going was great, and all seemed well with the world and with those whom I traveled.

The church is in troubling seas these days. Maybe it always was. Like everything and everybody else. But we are here, and I am glad to be moving. I have no idea about the finer points of the big picture. But I am grateful to be on it, grateful to be on God’s map. And I am glad you are here, too, with me, near or far.

The Toy Box

2011-05-24T16:25:00.002-04:00

Not very far from here, in a house on the north side of Atlanta, there is a wooden box. On the side of the box is a faded and chipped painting of a bear with a hat and a bow and a big smile on his face. The box is in my sister Mary’s house and it was out toy box when we were small children. She has kept it all these years and now it holds other toys for her own grandchildren.

I remember the toys that used to fill the box. Model airplanes – especially a shiny metal one. The wings folded over the top, just like they do in “real life” in the old war movies, and it was one of my favorite toys. There were wooden boats that came from Norway. And hundreds of small soldiers from all kinds of eras – knights and damsels, gladiators and senators, Indians and cowboys, military men, pioneers and space travelers, aliens and animals. There were covered wagons and little horses. Plastic caves and palatial towers and turrets, drawbridges and plastic moats. Stuffed animals, big and small, ferocious and cuddly. Wind-up dolls that walked when wound and laughed when squeezed. All kinds of cards were there, too, the kind that came with bubble gum. Baseball and football cards, cards with aliens and cards with cartoon characters. There were plastic rocket ships that had a metal top into which we used to slip caps. We would toss them into the air and when the thing landed on its head, the cap would explode. I can still remember the smell. I can also remember the smell of the toy box, a dusty wooden smell, and the sound the toys made when we would go through layer after layer, looking for something special that we wanted and would not give up till we found it. And on rainy days, we drove mom crazy when we emptied the entire box on the floor and spread its contents for what we thought was the biggest war in history. Tanks and dinosaurs and knights and spacemen all sharing the same floor. And we seven kids all shared the same toys, with all the variations that made them up.

I cannot remember the time of life when I moved beyond needing the contents of that box. Was it sudden or gradual? I do not know. But I do know that there came a time when I no longer looked inside to see what was there. Life beckoned me elsewhere, to places made available through bikes and longer walks, new friends and different needs. I do remember one time in my adult life when the going got rough, telling Mary that there must be a way to crawl back inside the box and come out the other side to a land of youth, of a kind of Never Never Land where things never die and are always, well, fun.

At times I wonder if what we really do is graduate from one set of toys to another, to more sophisticated play things. Like computers, telephones, cars, jet planes, hi-techi things. But maybe such things are given us when we are young until we are ready to move beyond them. They are like stepping stones to new years, new challenges. So, maybe the toys I have now as an adult are best used when used for others. But that takes time to understand, time to discern, time to know the importance of giving away what we are and have and learning from what was given to us as children.

There is no going back to what once was. There is no door in the toy box. Its contents filled my days long ago and I grew into new places, new people. I cannot ever go back to what was. But I can move ahead, hoping to share who I am, and what I have, and in that way keep the best that was in the little wooden toy box. Life needs to be shared, again and again.

Judgment Day

2011-05-24T09:44:00.000-04:00

Today is supposed to be Judgment Day. I have not followed the news carefully, so I am not sure what is supposed to take place. I also hear that the end of the world is to follow, on a specific date in October. It is early morning. There are no dark clouds on the horizon. I do not hear any trumpets. The sky is clear – no legions of angels. Maybe it will be a quiet judgment. Or maybe it will come in the mail.

I had a revelatory experience a few days ago. I have several film cameras and am always taking pictures – a LOT of pictures. I tend to let the rolls finished rolls accumulate. So, I brought seventeen rolls to a big store in the mall to be developed. I went back to pick them up a few days ago and the woman behind the desk found all the envelopes but was dismayed because whoever processed the film did not place the prices on any of the envelopes. She started to get frantic. I told her not to worry. She had to open each envelope and count every print. She was almost finished – it took about twenty minutes – and then she smiled and heaved a sigh of relief. She then pressed some button on the cash register, and inadvertently deleted all the accounting she had done. She got very upset, very embarrassed, and said she would have to start over. I did not mind, but I told her I had to go and would come back in a day or two. So, I went back later in the week, and she was all smiles. Everything was ready – it only cost thirty-dollars, which is incredibly cheap. Then I noticed that she added a lot of extra savings coupons. I did not really deserve them. But she smiled and said it was “okay.” We chatted for a bit. She is from India and told me that she is from Mumbai and her husband is from farther north in the country. She also said she was Catholic, when she found out I was from the monastery. Anyway, she was so friendly. I am glad that there were no people on line when she pressed the wrong button. That may have titled things in a very wrong and nasty direction.

So that little mishap had a happy ending.

Now as all that was going on, there were a lot of people who were taking in the Judgment Day news with no small measure of fear. I read stories about the supposedly coming Judgment causing division in families. Believers arguing with non-believers to the point where people took sides and now they are no longer speaking with each other. So much for the unifying grace of religious aspirations.

Well, I confess I did not take it seriously. I have a feeling that some of the monks looked to have some sweat on their brows. But we are all still talking with each other, though the day has a ways to go. Maybe the trumpets will blare after lunch.

I have some more film to be developed. I told the Indian lady I would be back during the week. I do not care if she presses the wrong button again. It will give us time to talk. I want to ask her about India. I do not think they have a Judgment Day, at least not one that is akin to ours.

Well, if we get past this day, I will head down to the store soon and bring my film. I have a feeling she will avoid the delete button. Perhaps she has discussed the mishap with the worker who originally ran the bar code tickets.

Maybe God forgot about Judgment Day. Or is giving us all a reprieve. Well, we have several months till October. Big Delete Day.

God is good. Maybe he has coupons to give. A lease on life, a discount on everything. A new beginning. For everybody. Everywhere.

Belmar

2011-05-24T09:39:00.002-04:00

The Big Feast

2011-05-19T11:59:00.002-04:00

I remember the metal box my mom used to store her recipes. It was small, the kind you use for placing index cards. In fact many of her recipes she wrote on those cards and there were little tabs, well worn from her fingers, that separated meals into different categories. And the box had decorations on it – pieces of celery, bright red tomatoes, and sprigs of parsley. The little box contained a world of delicacies, from soups to desserts. I can still remember the taste of mom’s spaghetti sauce, or her vegetable soup, or a dish she called chicken roge (I can remember the taste of that, too, but am not as sure about the spelling).

She never varied that much from her recipes. She may have added to them, but did not alter them when she cooked. I suppose it was easy for her to follow the laid out directions. In the back of the box were recipes cut from newspapers and magazines. These were folded neatly, filed away I guess for a future meal.

Maybe there is something to learn from her recipes and what she did with them.

A few days ago I was riding with Brother Mark and we chatted as he drove. We were talking about the seemingly infinite array of opinions and interpretations that flood the airwaves and other media day in and day out. In the more abstract realms of thought – like theology, spirituality and, yes, politics, arguments and discussions are endless and can get quite heated. Nothing is ever settled for good and as time passes the opinions and angles proliferate and these in turn redefine previous positions and the like. It is hard to get a firm handle on anything. It is as hard to get down to concrete data, to keep one’s feet on the ground. It is hard to see straight, to know what is right or wrong or even in the middle.

Mark said that maybe we are not meant to know the inner workings of things. The essence of life teases our imagination but we can never find it, never coax it out of its shell. And all about us and within us are shells, delicate coverings for what lies beneath. But the inside is not ours to know. Is the inside God? Who knows? The debates rage on, never arriving at an answer.

That little recipe box contained a limited set of directives that, if followed step by step, provided culinary delights. I grew up on these, quite literally. I suppose that mom wavered from time to time, maybe blending in a seasoning or two, or allowing the pot to simmer longer than suggested by the recipe. But basically she was happy to work within limits, limits that gave forth wondrous results.

We are bounded by limits. We live through the eternal, but with a finite way of seeing it all. We try and catch a taste of the eternal with our recipes of religious certitude and longing, even though these can never be adequate. But we must live, and think, and celebrate our lives. God knows we must have sustenance, and he provides.

God is the Grand Chef. The universe is his recipe box, filled with all kinds of surprises, mixtures, simmering times, cooling times. And all the peoples of the earth, of time itself, are invited to share the preparation of the feast. We do so in different ways, and at different times. We all live by a promise and a hope that God is preparing something wondrous, something good, and we are asked by him to have patience until the time it is ready to be served to all the peoples of the earth.

The Pin Cushion

2011-05-19T11:57:00.000-04:00

Father Luke was the monastery tailor here for a long, long time. It is more than “as far back as I can remember.” He may well have been at it before I was born. He has a fantastic memory. I will ask him. I do know that up until recently, he made every piece of monastic clothing here. If it was white and black and had a belt and moved, Luke made it.

He has settled into a different routine these days. He is still active, moving about the monastery, going to the offices, interested in everyone and everything. But he has eased out of the tailor shop. Brother Roger has picked up the reins, or, as the case may be, the threads.

I was in the tailor shop not too long ago and on one of the large tables there lay an assortment of outfitting necessities. There was a scissors, several bolts of material, strips of cloth, a measuring tape, and what looked like a tomato. But it really wasn’t a tomato. It was a pin cushion. A bright red pin cushion with little felt green leaves, and light green stripes down the side, and a lot of pins sticking out of it.

My mom had one just like it. I stared at it for a while. I did not pick it up, for as I looked at it, just the looking was enough for it to work its magic.

It brought me back. Brought me back many years. Mom used to keep it in her sewing box, along with a lot of other sewing stuff. Spools of colored thread, scissors, hundreds of buttons, strips of ribbon – some which had the names of us seven kids on it. She used to sew the names on the inside of our shirt colors. It was by no means a fancy box. In fact it was a shoebox, which was of just the right size. Everything fit, and it was always easy enough to find. When she wasn’t darning a sock or sewing on a label, I remember that the box was kept up in mom and dad’s bedroom, on her dresser top. Sometimes she would ask me to go upstairs and get it, and I can to this day remember what else she had on her dresser, surrounding the box with the little red tomato cushion. There was a porcelain ballerina whose delicate dress was broken, and mom’s silver handled brush and mirror, and a picture of dad, and her jewelry box. As I looked at the red tomato pin cushion in our tailor shop here, these things from way back gradually took shape in my mind.

I do not know whatever happened to mom’s pin cushion. So many things have a fitting role to play in life, and then as we move on, they vanish, or get lost or discarded. They don’t seem to find a neat fit into a changed world, and we leave them behind. I guess that is inevitable. But it is something how the sight of something so simple as a pin cushion can evoke in my heart days and memories that were, and somehow still are, a living part of me.

My sister Mary has a lot of mom’s stuff at her house. I do not know – maybe she even has the pin cushion. But I know it best to let it be. If it is there, fine. If not, well, that is okay too. Everything has a life, for a while. And then they and we all move on.

Yet I know that all those things at Mary’s were vehicles of love, real tender, human love. The sewing box held simple but necessary things – things that kept us together, looking fit, patched, named, darned. The work of God through a mom’s hands, eyes, and the careful threading of just the right colored thread through an eye of a needle.

Luke seems to have let go real well. He did his thing for years, and is now about other things, other tasks. I wear his love, as I once wore my mom’s.

Pin cushions seem to hold more than pins, don’t they? Memories have a point, too, and they stick just as well and stay for a long, long time, in the soft red cotton or the human heart.

Telling The Christmas Story

2010-12-24T16:33:00.000-05:00

Telling The Christmas Story

http://www.rockdalecitizen.com/religion/headlines/BEHRENS_Remember_family_at_Christmas_112394614.html

2010-12-24T16:25:00.000-05:00

http://www.rockdalecitizen.com/religion/headlines/BEHRENS_Remember_family_at_Christmas_112394614.html

2010-11-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

2010-11-19T10:34:00.000-05:00

2010-11-19T10:04:00.001-05:00

The Galloway School

We often get groups of high school kids here. They come from all over the Atlanta area and usually stay for the day. Since I work in the guest house, I spend as much time as I can with each group and always enjoy having them here. Last week we had a group from the Galloway School in Atlanta. There were about thirty students. They had never been here before. When I walked into the parlor to greet them, I noticed a box near the door. I looked down and in the box were cell phones in various sizes, colors and functions. The kids must have been told to deposit their cell phones for the duration of their stay. They sat before me in the parlor, looking comfortable in the chairs and on the floor. I chatted with them a bit and they soon commenced with all kinds of questions. They were so friendly and eager to learn about monks, monasteries, our tradition and the like. I later found out that the week had been a busy one for them. They had also visited several religious sites in the Atlanta area – a mosque, a Hindu temple, a Protestant church and a synagogue. Their heads must have been filled with memories of all those places and I thought how difficult it may have been for them to wrap all that together into one neat package. But after a while I sensed that they delighted in the differences they had experienced during the week.
As I looked at them, something looked familiar. Then it struck me that they were of all sizes, colors and personalities, kind of like the cell phones. The box sat nearby on the floor, and all the phones were turned off. And right in front of me the kids smiled as I talked and then came up with one question after another. They were like living cell phones – turned on and communicating with gusto. They did not seem to mind that their little communicative devices were set aside.
One of the kids asked a question about different beliefs, as to how one might be able to shift truth from what is false. That led me to talk a bit about religious pluralism. We are living in a time when the great religious traditions are encountering each other. And it has gone beyond encountering – there are many instances where the encounter has led to friendship, or marriage, or friendly cooperation and mutual respect. A lot of walls are coming down. Something as ordinary as a ride on a subway in Manhattan can easily situate one in a small and moving mystery of different cultures, colors, ways of being in this ever shrinking world. Everyone moving along – many of them with their cell phones.
I am sure that the kids embodied different traditions. They all seemed to get along and I noticed how willing they were to learn from each other. A lot of credit is to be given to their parents and teachers for encouraging them to grow with each other.
Later in the morning we walked over to our “green cemetery” where the students were to help clear some branches and leaves from the area. A group of them decided to move a big tree trunk out of harm’s way – it had fallen and needed to be moved. It was very heavy, way too heavy for one or two people to move. The kids positioned themselves and with a concerted effort managed to lift the trunk and get it where they wanted it to go. I watched and felt a hope rise within me. There are times when the burdens of this world seem impossible. But when a cooperative effort is marshaled, all of existence seems lighter and becomes more manageable, more bearable. The world that awaits the kids from Galloway is as beautiful as it ever was, and will even be more so when they enter it as adults and learn to carry it together.

'Smokestack lightning' | National Catholic Reporter

2010-06-25T09:25:00.000-04:00

'Smokestack lightning' | National Catholic Reporter

The Wind That Roars Into History

2010-06-24T17:31:00.000-04:00

The Wind That Roars Into History

Today's Construction

2010-06-18T19:13:00.000-04:00

2010-06-18T19:11:00.000-04:00

2010-06-18T19:08:00.000-04:00

2010-06-18T19:04:00.000-04:00

Monastery of the Holy Spirit • Conyers, Georgia

2010-06-18T09:58:00.000-04:00

Monastery of the Holy Spirit • Conyers, Georgia

Author David Adams Richards chides 'intellectually lazy' atheists

2010-06-15T16:27:00.000-04:00

Author David Adams Richards chides 'intellectually lazy' atheists

David Adams Richards

2010-06-15T16:06:00.000-04:00

I read this essay this morning and am hoping to read more about the Canadian author David Adams Richards. He looks to be a powerful writer, a very truthful one.

Our Night Chanting

2010-06-15T11:55:00.000-04:00

I found this site earlier today. It has a nice picture and a recording of us as we chant compline.

Thoughts On The Sacred Heart Of Jesus

2010-06-12T16:47:00.000-04:00

Thoughts On The Sacred Heart Of Jesus

Marathon2010

2010-06-12T16:10:00.000-04:00

Korean Parish Kids

2010-06-11T16:22:00.000-04:00

2010-06-10T11:59:00.000-04:00

Refuge in the Heart of God

If the heart’s deepest desire is found and lived through one’s passion, I cannot think of any more meaningful way to live. The desire for an intimate, lasting and loving relationship burns in the heart of every person born into this world. Needless to say, happiness is born from such a life. But it is not the kind of happiness that is easily lost through a rainy day, a broken relationship or painful disappointment. It is the kind of happiness that matures one through both joy and sorrow. It is the kind of happiness you know you have, even when you are crying. It is the kind of happiness that gives you a deep sense of home in this life, even if you must move from place to place against your will.
I once read that the word “blessed” as found in the Beatitudes carries the meaning of being in the right place. To be blessed by God is to be at home in him. It is to know the kind of happiness that flows from finding the right place in and through God.
It is the kind of happiness that learns from the inevitable wounds carried in a heart that knows suffering. To be blessed is take to heart the joys and pains of this life because you experience them as a necessary part of that place you belong in life.
There is a woman in New York who lost her only son. He was her life. She lost him when he was stabbed to death on a street in the city. His killer was never found. Her son was a living part of her heart and he is still there. When she sleeps at night, she wears the clothes he wore and holds the fabric as close to her as she can. There are nights that she will sleep in his bed in the hope that she will dream of him, that he will come to her the only way he can.
I do not know if the woman prays, if she has turned to the heart of Jesus for comfort, for a warm place of understanding, for perhaps an answer to why her son died. But if she has thought of holding a lasting love and then losing it, having it bleed to death on a street, her thoughts cannot be far from God. It may be a different name, one we are not familiar with, or a different way of prayer – a way that uses different words and different ways of communicating – like sobs, tears, holding close a shirt that still has a familiar and heartbreaking scent.
A long tradition of piety would encourage her to seek refuge in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to turn to Jesus with her sorrows.
But Jesus has already come. He holds her at night, and perhaps comes to her in her dreams. He knows her suffering because he is a living part of it. It is through Jesus that we are all held close by a God who suffers with us, cries with us, and promises something that we know within us – that anguish and pain shall not be the last, the final and definitive words of life. The heart of Jesus draws us in, and it is where we are at home. It is in that heart that we may toss and turn on a sleepless night and reach out to touch someone who no longer seems near.
It is early morning. It is said that time heals all wounds, or, perhaps helps us better live with them. A woman in Manhattan may be rising from her own bed. She has lovingly placed her son’s clothes in a place for safekeeping. She has let him go to his new life.
All things come from God, without exception. Jesus knew pain, knew loss. He knew the taste of tears, his own tears. He shared in the undivided heart of God and sorrow was a necessary part of that.
The heart will of Jesus lives forever. We live from and in that heart, for our very life is of God. There is a saying, too, that the flow of tears can heal. A woman cried herself to sleep in the bed and clothing of her dead son. Someday, she will see him again in a place where every tear will be wiped away. May she then know the healing grace of her own tears and how her broken heart was given her because she loved so much. She will look back, with her arms around her son, and know that God wept with her, too, until it was time to weep no more. For a time came, called eternity, a time to live in the love she thought she had lost. .

2010-06-09T11:21:00.002-04:00

Thoughts on the Sacred Heart of Jesus 2010

One can easily wonder about what kind of compass should be used that would truthfully guide one across the seas of life. The most obvious, and perhaps easiest to find in terms of availability, is one’s religious tradition. If faithfully followed, a religious tradition can safely bring one to the far shore of existence. A religious tradition can discern the stars of a night sky. It can brave the winds of storms and the rising swells of any number of tides. Come home to religion and the promise is that it will bring you home.
We live in a time that offers a plurality of traditions. The religious traditions of the world, once easily discernible as separate, as truthful or not, as guaranteed or as bogus compasses pointing the way to salvation are now not only pressing upon each other. To a measurable degree, they are learning from each other and mingling with each other, even to the point that once clear distinctions are not only blurred but impossible to recover. A new spirituality is being born, one that is a living hybrid of religious truths. For those in need of a sure direction in such times of transformation, their Catholic or Jewish or Islamic compass may be grasped all the more tightly in the hands of those who fear being thrown far off course. But for others, there is the seizing of an opportunity to look at other traditions, learn from them, share meals with them, ride with them on subways and busses, and marry into them, raise children from such unions and in the process find that the compass needle is still pointing in a truthful direction.
I think that the great challenge of this age is to find – with the help of each other, a compass that remains true to one’s tradition and, at the same time, draws us closer to those who are different from us but who are also seeking a way to be at home with us.
I know of no better feast than today from which to draw upon in terms of a contemplative meditation on who we are, what we have within us, where we are going and how God wants us to get there.
The heart is one of the few universal symbols that bridge the many differences of time, peoples and cultures. You can find its expression in poetry from all over the world and from all the ages humanity has known. You will find the symbol of the heart etched on the trunks of trees, on the ancient stones of the Great Wall of China, on the walls of dusty catacombs, on lockets that rest on the hearts of lovers all over the world.
People of all time have known through experience that love entails sacrifice. To be possessed by love is to lose possession of oneself. When a person truly lives for another or others, life is enhanced, is matured through self-denial. To know this for what it is, all one need to do is to look back and ponder those who gave us life, brought us into being, raised us, taught us the good, hoped for us and even may have died for us. The wisest would have known that it all came as a gift, this yearning to love through sacrifice, through the denial of self.
We may understandably find the future worrisome since the way is obscured with clouds of religious uncertainty and dogmatic doubts. We are encouraged today to look back and remember how we got here. The heart of God has been given to us, and has brought us to this place. And in the decades ahead, that heart will guide us still. We will look to each other to find the sacred in life and to live from it. And the compass that will guide us will be that of the heart of Jesus – divine in its origin and deeply human in its expression.

2010-06-09T11:20:00.000-04:00

On Movement

A handwritten letter came in the mail a few days ago from a friend of mine who lives in Chicago. She is a member of a religious community of sisters and has been retired for many years. She has remained healthy and active throughout all her years as a professed religious. About a year ago, her community decided it was time to relocate. They will soon be moving to Iowa to a larger retirement facility. It is a beautiful place – I visited there a few years ago. It is a lovely spot, high on a hill with a clear view of the Mississippi River.
My friend is very upset and anxious about the move. I can understand that. For years, she felt at ease with the sense of stable familiarity that her home offered in Chicago. I think her love for the place deepened as the years passed. Being an outgoing and giving person, her life expanded through the growing family of people who befriended her all through the years. Chicago offered her a rich life. I can sense in her recent letters a deep sense of sadness and a gnawing anxiety. But she knows that in the overall picture, the move is a necessary one for her community. But that knowledge does not assuage her apprehensions and her dread of going through the process of relocating.
So I wrote to her and tried to find words that might ease her situation. I had to dig a bit into my own past to find them.
I well remember many moves I made in my life. In my younger years, I moved from rectory to rectory as parish assignments changed. It was hard to say good-bye to friends and to allow time to sink roots in a new place with new people. I bounced around quite a lot. My family moved, too, from one state to another. My brothers and sisters gradually moved to different states. Our mom and dad retired in Louisiana, the place where they grew up. They raised us in New York, New Jersey and, lastly, Connecticut. Looking back, it isn’t too difficult to recall the discomfort of all that movement. But once I arrived in a new place, there were people who went out of their way to make me feel at home, to settle me down and draw me into their lives. Friendship has been an abiding gift to me, offered all along these meandering corridors of life.
There are not many of us who can escape some serious movement in life. Even if we stay still in a place for a long time, we can get knocked off our feet by the changes brought on through the ravages of loss or illness and other unexpected wallops that can destabilize our comfort zones.
Iowa is a beautiful place. As I write this, there are people there who are preparing all kinds of welcomes for a newcomer who is coming from Chicago. They will go out of their way to find out about her likes, her favorite things and will offer these and more to her. They will make a home for her through the wondrously woven tapestries of friendship. She will receive what she has so freely given her life.
And then the move will soon lose its sting.
When the Big Move comes from this life to the next, it is common place for us to wish Eternal Rest to the blessed departed.
Yet I wonder if that is such a good or even real thing.
Growth entails movement. There is nothing in the universe that is not moving. Even God moved from somewhere to here. And there are the mysteries of movements within the Trinity itself. An eternal give and take of love – which is shared with us, which is why we are here and why we are going to the Ultimate “there” of eternity.
Jesus said that there are many mansions in the Kingdom of his Father. There might be moving vans too. Someday, there will come a young woman wanting to find a nice big house, high on a hill, a lovely spot from where can be seen the moving waters of the River of Life. She will want a big home, large enough for her to welcome friends who will come from Chicago. But there will be others. Friends will visit her from a place she grew to love most of all in the late afternoon of her life, a place called Iowa.

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2010-06-09T11:16:00.000-04:00

Conyers Video

2010-05-28T09:05:00.000-04:00

CNN posted a video of our monastery and it is accompanied by an informative article. Here is the link.

Monastery Hosts First 5K Run

2010-05-27T10:21:00.000-04:00

Monastery Hosts First 5K Run

Trappists Break Ground For Monastic Heritage Center

2010-05-27T10:19:00.000-04:00

Trappists Break Ground For Monastic Heritage Center

The Ascension: Moving More Fully Into God

2010-05-27T10:18:00.000-04:00

The Ascension: Moving More Fully Into God

Blowing Bubbles

2010-05-26T06:32:00.002-04:00

I watched as my little niece Emily and her brother Pierce blew bubbles. They are two and four years old, respectively. Each kept an eye on the other as they dipped their plastic bubble-makers into the sudsy water and laughed with glee as the bubbles grew and then floated in the air and then down to the ground, where they burst. Pierce tried to catch the big bubbles that he made. He chased the larger ones and sometimes succeeded in catching one, holding it delicately on the circle end of the plastic stick. Emily looked at him, and tried to do the same, but all of her bubbles broke before she could catch them. She did not seem to mind, for there were endlessly more bubbles to make and she was quite happy to be a little bubble machine. Pierce was more interested in size and seizure and was obviously more frustrated when his bubble burst.
I watched them, and took pictures of them. I was hoping to catch a good picture of the bubbles in progress, as they grew out of the stem and then floated through the air. And I did get some good shots of that.
And I thought about God and bubbles and kids and grown-ups.
The search for God can be so cerebral, or at least it seems that way to me. Words and ritual, words spoken and written, suggest the possibility that something of God can be known and brought close to our understanding, maybe even our sight. Maybe there is more to God than what can be seen with the eye, or held onto with words, ritual and the like. Things that rise before us and that we can hold, for a little while.
Pierce and Emily were delighted and fascinated with the bubbles that they made. I could sense that they experienced a sense of accomplishment in making the bubbles and, at least in Pierce’s case, catching an occasional big one. They were completely absorbed in what they were doing and, in fact, had to concentrate as best they could to make the bubbles and hopefully catch them. The rest of the world dropped out of sight and the bubbles grew and then took to the air.
Emily and Pierce are little children and have yet to grow in knowledge of who we are as family, and how we love them, and how we hope for them. They do not know of the losses we have known through death. They are way too young to wonder about suffering, through they experience it when it comes their way, when things do not go the way they would like, when they feel pain. Those who love them will shelter them as best they can from all that might hurt them. But things happen, things that hurt. Emily rubbed her eye, her fingers wet from the soapy liquid. She seemed startled when she felt the sting in her eye, and then started to cry, and her dad came and picked her up and washed her eye with a kiss and a wet napkin. And then the world was better, the way it always should be, but simply isn’t. The pain was soon forgotten and the bubbles rose again.
It is a true wish, a hope that can be found in the longings of parents all over the .world, that their children be happy, be loved; to be spared the hurts and troubles of this life. There is this truth to us, that we want to protect each other from the pain that life – that we – can and do inflict. Love somehow tries to shield us from what we can do to each other.
Kids only know that love is good. It kisses what hurts. It holds them when there is that sleepy feeling. There is food when hungry, warmth when cold. These good things and more come as gifts.
I recently read a poem, or perhaps some lines of an essay, by Margaret Hawkins. I think the words are beautiful – they are the words of a mother to and for her newborn baby:

Before you were conceived I wanted you
Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of life

~ Maureen Hawkins

Such beautiful words, words that give life, breathed into us by God. Words that expand the heart, make it grow; enable us to give it away.

I watched the bubbles rise, then burst. I watched Pierce as he laughed with delight when he caught a bubble and held it. And I watched Emily’s eyes widen with awe as she made her own bubbles and watched them rise.

Making, holding, losing and keeping – all these will move through their lives and the cycles will embrace everything from birth to life, from death and on through the mysteries of the eternal.

We are wanted by God, for we are here, and have been desired. And we are loved, and we were made by a God who came here, lived among us, and died for us.

This is the miracle of life. On a warm afternoon, I watched the bubbles rise. Children were happy, and I like to think God was, too. The God who made children and bubbles. The God who breathed life into us, and who catches us when we fall, and who will never lose us. All he asks is that we learn to keep each other, to allow no one’s life to burst from loneliness or loss or heartache. We have hearts to catch each other, and to make us rise a bit here on earth, rise until the day time ends, when God breathes again, and we are born into eternal life.

2010-05-26T06:27:00.000-04:00

Pentecost

2010-05-19T16:16:00.000-04:00

The Gift of Tongues and Fire

There are people who sift the sediments of the earth seeking tell-tale clues to shed light on the origins of mostly everything. Fossils, DNA codes, ancient seeds, fibers, bone fragments – these and more yield their secrets about what things once were and what they can tell us about who we were, where we came from. A small spade can unearth a fragment of bone and the information gleaned from something so tiny can shift tables of understanding by millions of years or thousands of miles. For archaeologists, paleontologists, biologists and their scientific kin, reading the past can be a long, painstaking process. If discoveries constantly alter the present understanding of things, those who probe the secrets of the stars of the heavens and the sands of earth realize that understanding is always partial, a piece of a living puzzle that has a fleeting life, a life that always gives way to further and at times deeply unsettling discoveries.
In a sense, we are all amateur sleuths when it comes to understanding ourselves by means of unearthing our pasts. A very popular activity these days involves the researching of family roots through the tools offered by Internet search engines and sites. Something as simple as an old photograph can fill in a lot of blanks as to where an individual comes from. And old diaries are treasure troves in their offering windows to the long gone past.
These days, physicists are watching the tiniest pieces of matter as these are forced through long tunnels at incredibly high rates of speed. It is hoped that when these tiny fragments of matter collide, the resultant collision will mimic the earliest seconds of the birth of the universe. Millions of dollars are being spent to reach back many more millions of years – and, to my way of thinking, the most telling discovery will elude the efforts of wealth, speed, high technology and the best interests of science. Science seeks factual data. Origins are sought through the refined glass of a lens, or a careful turn of a spade. These offer the possibilities of mute discoveries. There will be no voice. There will be no meaning. There will be no narrative, no deeply satisfying response to our yearning and gnawing ache to ask the heavens above – and the earth beneath our feet – where we come from, why are we here, and what are we to do with this strange and wondrous gift of life?
When people hunger for meaning in life – when they seek words to express what they feel – and overwhelmingly feel – when they fall in love; when one’s heart is broken by the death of a spouse, parent, child; when seeking the needed words to get through a painfully trying time. These are experiences which move one to seek the comfort – might I say truth – of the poet, of the wise man or woman, of the deeply spiritual, of the quiet soul who can speak words that seem to penetrate the heavens and the earth by their eternal wisdom. Words can see much farther than a galactic telescope. A gaze of love sees more truth than can be revealed by every genetic coding that might ever be discovered. Going out of your way to help someone in need hints at the seemingly elusive meaning of the universe. It is a meaning we live by giving. It cannot be discovered – it can only be lived in the doing, the gift of selfless, disinterested love.
It is Pentecost. It is, seemingly, a long ago feast when tongues of fire came down from heaven and enabled a people to understand each other, to love each other, in spite of differences, separations, prejudices and biases. A startling event, for sure – the first flames of meaning that ignited a fire among men and women – and then seemingly soothed through time to a slow, steady flame.
There is a heat to the ordinariness of things. God is in time and he is a slow burner. It is a feast to take to heart the warmth of things, the embers of God given us in all who live. God cannot be discovered. God is the fire of love that burns in us even before we know the word God. It seems that God gives the best he can, the best he is. Then we seek a name for what we are. Everybody knows what love is, what it can do. It arrived as flame among us and it will always burn. It is alive, it is fire, it is eternal, and it has a Voice.

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Photography Retreat

2010-05-17T10:23:00.000-04:00

Over this past weekend we offered a retreat called “Faith, Image and Photography.” It is always a very popular retreat. People who make the retreat bring along their cameras and are encouraged to take advantage of the beautiful settings that abound here at the monastery.

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Groundbreaking Day

2010-05-13T11:43:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we had a groundbreaking ceremony for the buildings that will make up our Monastic Heritage Center. Plans call for it to be open early next year. I took the following photos - it was a wonderful day in every way.

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The Ascension

It has been a week filled with events that have deeply changed the lives of many in Conyers. Just a week ago, Deputy Brian Lamar Mahaffey lost his life while doing his job, a job that entailed the risk of such a loss. We have been praying for him and his family and hope that his wife and children, his family and friends get all the love and support they need and deserve. We also hope that the same comfort is given to the family of the man who fired the bullets. The tragedy of that day of loss leaves no one untouched.
On Monday morning, we lost a well loved monk, Brother Tom Nabity. He died in our infirmary. His room was filled with bits and pieces of Rosaries in-in-the making. Tom loved making Rosaries. He was confined to bed for the last decade or so, and except for occasional trips in his wheelchair to Sunday Mass and visits to our retreat house, his world was no bigger than his room in our infirmary. But he learned from the daily immobility of his life to move far and wide within a confining space. He touched a lot of people because he simply and deeply loved people. There are many thousands of people, including my own family and friends, who carry Tom’s Rosaries with them wherever they go. As all those fingers move from bead to bead, they truly touch the life, the hands and the love that crafted them with such care. If prayers carried a manufacturing tag, there are millions that would read “prayed by me but made by Tom.”
On Tuesday, we gathered as a community to celebrate with friends and benefactors the groundbreaking ceremony for the buildings that will house our monastic heritage center. This paper ran a nice article on the ceremony a few days ago. It was a wonderful experience, knowing that our monastic hopes and our very lives are shared among so many wonderful people. I am sure I can write on behalf of our Abbot Francis Michael that we all felt a deep pride to be a growing part of the life of Conyers.
From where I sat on the day of the groundbreaking, I could see just twenty or so feet past the line of shovels an old well. It was constructed by monks way back in the late 1940’s and there are initials and a date embedded in the concrete on the side of the well. A monk wanted to let us know that he was once here, and felt a need to leave his initials and date in the wet concrete of a new well.
The well no longer has water. And I do not know if what remains of it will survive the new construction. But if the monks who made it were true to their calling, they would have known that all places on this earth are temporary – our wells, our buildings, our very bodies and the years that carry and ages them.
Tomorrow is the Feast of the Ascension, the day we commemorate the departure of Jesus from his earthly mode of life to his heavenly and proper one. Yet the gospel writers and subsequent commentaries are careful to point out that it was necessary for Jesus to be absent so that he could be more fully present. He had to vacate one mode of being so as to enter a way of life that promises to fill all absences in heaven and on earth. He left in order to arrive.
It has been a week of deeply broken hearts, of prayers gone heavenward from one town, prayers uttered in tears and anguish, prayers spoken in hope and confidence, prayers said in gratitude. Our town lost two great men who are rising with the Lord and who are as present to us as they were week before last, but present in a way that only comes from moving on, moving more fully into God.
We may lose a well on our property that once held water and perhaps hope. Something new will rise on that spot. And there may be new initials, a new date. And time will pass, and we will pass, and there will be those who follow us and whose lives will hopefully be good because we were once gathered here. I think that is something good to pray for – something to hope for, as many of us gently finger the beads made by a man who moved so little yet so far.

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