Knights of Colombus

A Place Fit for a King

A Place Fit for a King

Last week I had dinner in a small Chinese restaurant.  I was alone and apparently early, since the food had yet to be set out and arranged.  The waitress was very apologetic and made a fuss over me, telling me that she would rush and asked that I just be patient.  Which I was.  I had no place to go.  I had my camera with me and asked if I could take pictures of the dining area, for the light was subdued and I thought the pictures would be nice.  She smiled and said she would arrange the tables in whatever way I liked.  I said no, everything was fine.  And so I took pictures.  And soon she brought the food I ordered, and it was good.

I never got the name of the waitress and, besides, I am not too good anymore with remembering names.  But I remember her face. She had a large growth on the right side of her face and it was discolored, the color of a plum.  Her smile and friendly demeanor diminished the outward disfigurement on her face.  But I wonder what it had cost her in life.  When I left, she called after to me to come back, come back soon.

I knew a woman in my past parish who was hesitant to meet me at first.  She said she wanted to meet me but asked that we put that off a while.  She had read something I had written and wanted to talk about it.  So, we chatted several times on the phone and one day she said she would come to the rectory.  The day came and the doorbell rang and when I opened the door I understood her hesitation.  She had tumors all over her face and they were so large that they almost grew over her eyes.  I was to find out later that she had undergone many surgeries to avoid that happening.  She asked me if I was shocked and I said no.  From then on, we went out to lunch every now and then.  At the time, she was much older than me.  She was very well read and interesting.  She had worked for years for an insurance company in Newark but was then retired.  She lived alone.  She once told me that no one had ever kissed her.  She insisted on paying for the lunches and sometimes did.  She was a beautiful woman.

Faces reveal but also hide.  They may reveal what we think to be beauty.  A pretty face can be attractive or it can be fatal.  A person lives within, a person who always struggles to live with what is seen on the outside.  We all know, if for no other reason that we have heard it so often, that beauty is only skin deep.  But we need to be reminded of that over and over again, to better learn to see beyond appearances, beyond color or race or nationality or disfigurements.

It is Christ the King Sunday.  We all want to be people who resemble the King, the image that we have of Jesus.  But Jesus is not Hollywood.  We believe that the presence of God is in everyone.  It is the presence who is disfigured, who wants to help us get the perfect picture in a Chinese restaurant and who insists on paying the bill.  God chose to be like us in all things.  He takes on our lives, including our wounds, our many inabilities, our disfigurements.  

Where is this King, asked Herod. 

He is here, in our midst, making sure things are right, just right,  hoping that we come back again and again to share his table, to take a picture, to buy him lunch. 

The Just Us Problem

The Just Us Problem

There must be something in the grand design of things that limits our horizons.  I do not know why that is.  But I know that I have fallen victim to its effects many times in my life.

Briefly put, something about us drives us to limit our range of seeing and loving to those with whom we feel at home.  We go through life making constant circles and invite into them only those who think like us, share our supposed values, like what we do and reinforce our strong and weak points.  I suppose it is comfortable there.  No one in the4 circles challenges us to see or move beyond them.  Our points of view solidify.  In short, we see life myopically. 

The monastery is an interesting place in light of the above.

The hardest thing I found when I moved here seventeen years ago was learning to live with and learn from people I normally would have avoided prior to coming here.  I simply would have chosen not to cross paths with them.  They would have had no claim on my time, my interest, my agenda.  I suppose it was a clique mentality that I bought into many years ago, as far back as grammar school.  Like attracts like, and all that.  And when I was ordained a priest, I began to see things differently through the many couples I married, most of whom started out their marriages on the “just us” float.  They clung to each other out of a need to keep secure and forever the heady throes of early love.  I began to see that if a marriage was to stay well and reasonably healthy, the little circle of two would have to break.  Marriages can deepen in love and maturity only to the extent that a couple learns that their love is for others. 

There are similar lessons for me here.  We all need special friends, and I have them here, but the call of friendship leads one outside the confines of the friendship to a larger world.  A healthy community life is a living blend of men or women who strive to embrace the whole.  All belong.  All can learn from each other.  All struggle to live their humanity in and through the others.  It is an ongoing challenge.  It is always possible to drop out, or to show up to community life and just pay lip service.  But the invitation is always there to give of oneself in the here and now.  The community takes an exacting toll on the heart of any one member.  But it is the only way that the heart can be given back, renewed and deepened with the wisdom and life that the community alone can give.

            There can never be a time or a place where the “just us” life thrives.  It may survive for a while, but the call for growth, for expansion and a life into the new, is always just beyond the confines of the secure.  Growth is inevitable.  It may take a long time to move out of one’s carefully guarded “me” confines.  But we will all come to know the joy and promise that beyond whatever home we plan for ourselves, God has another one, one that includes those we left out along the way.  It is through them that we will always learn the ways of love and of betterment. 

Our Busy Season

Our Busy Season

We are in the midst of our busiest season.  We here at the monastery are much like the rest of the world in this season when we await the feasts of Christmas and the New Year.  But we are busily waiting.  There are concerts, cards to write and send, greetings galore and, above all, the packing and shipping of our Abbey Store items.  All the baking is done, all the other preparations are made, and so the daily routine consists of taking the many orders that come in and shipping them out.  I help with that – and I like it.  A number of monks head down to the shipping area every day and put in a full day’s work.  We have a lot of fun and the job has its interesting and, at times, funny aspects.

Some years back part of my job was taking orders over the phone.  A lot of calls came in every day and there were times I needed patience.  Some people had to go look for their credit cards – I could hear the footsteps fade into the distance and had to wait until the callers came back on the line.  The receding footsteps reminded me of the end of an old movie.  There were times I wondered if they kept their card in a neighboring state. On other occasions they got the wrong card and had to go looking again.  More than a few callers wanted to know if there was alcohol in the fruit cakes.  I told them that there was but that we were told that the damaging effects of the alcohol would have been burned off during the baking process.  Right or wrong, that little bit of wisdom did not do much good.  I guess I did not sound convincing enough and a lot of the people decided to go for the fudge – until I told them that some of the fudge contained brandy.  Well, that did not go over too well.  Other people wanted to know the exact ingredients and especially if there were nuts in the cakes.  I learned that a lot of people are very allergy conscious.  We tried to make everybody happy.  But we had no nut-free cakes. There were times I would have liked to have said the same thing about some of the callers.

But the best was when a lady called from Brooklyn and wanted to know how much it cost to ship a fruit cake to India UPS Ground.  I asked her to repeat that and when I was sure as to what she said I told her, very politely and kindly, like, really,that there is no ground between here and India.  There is a lot of water.  And the cake would have to go by air, which would cost something like seventy-dollars, the cost of the cake excluded.  She huffed and said that she could buy three cakes with that same amount of money.  I corrected her, again very kindly, and told her that the amount would pay for five with some change left over.  She never did get the cake.  Maybe they sell fruit cakes in India.  I hope so.  That was an example as to how a little bit does not necessarily go a long way. 

We have long since handed over the receiving of the calls to an outside group.  They handle the callers with grace, with finesse, with holiday cheer – the kind you do not drink.

So.  The Season is here.  May it be bright for you, and busy.  May your cakes take to the skies.  May your seasonings and condiments bring only health. It is, after all, a season of miracles. 

Theology and Life

Theology and Life

It seems to be a no-brainer to assert that there is a relationship between theology and life.  But is such a relationship a given?  There are ample indications that, on several levels, theology and life are struggling at a great distance from each other.  Many people struggle to get through life without the slightest help of illumination from theology.  And many theologians ply their trade completely removed from the concerns of people.  To my way of thinking, the two worlds meet at one juncture and one juncture only.  When a man or a woman takes the time to reflect on the messiness of life and the possibility, the hope, that God is a living part of the mess; when words from that awareness come, and maybe even flow, human experience is given windows into itself.  We are helped to see, to feel, who we are, what we suffer, what we hope for, and can then live in the light of those words and in the light of each other.

Sacramental theology is a good point of departure to suggest what I mean.  The sacraments are earthy.  They are not understandable apart from flesh and blood, water and fire, birth and death, sexuality and desire.  The sacraments live in and are revealed through life experiences.  They encompass everything – food, comfort, hope, home.  They are not removed from life.  They immerse us into life, into what we are really doing when we eat, love, heal, forgive.  They serve as markers for the holiness that is life, for the sacredness that we are and move through every moment of our lives. 

Life experience invites one to theologize.  “God language” need not be rarified formulations or graduate degree tomes.  A sensitive ear or eye or heart will be able to pick up living signs of the ways of the divine in this life.  The cry of a baby, the tears of an old man, the longing for a deceased loved one; poems and songs that hope for more, want more, that transcend the boundaries of culture and time in that they lift the hearts of millions to hope for what is yet to come. 

Church leaders look about them and wonder why people are leaving their congregations, or why they are disenchanted with them, or cannot connect with its teachings.  Perhaps they would do wise to look at themselves and ask if it is they who have lost touch with people.   The various departures are telling.  People are trying to find God in this life and the quest is on – and they will find it, in art, music, photography, poetry – places that are struggling to making the right and lasting connections between heaven and earth.  These are realms in which people labor to create, to connect, to share.  They take risks and are not afraid of failure.  If their efforts somehow fail or miss the mark, they are not afraid to try again. And again.  Something about the organized churches is too satisfied, too secure within their framework of preconceived questions and answers.  But these only seem to work for those who benefit the most from the system – the institutional leaders.  Dismay and setbacks do not seem to be a part of their experience, or even their vocabulary.  And that is not human, either.

I do not have any answers.  Perhaps there aren’t any on this side of the road.  For those on the other side, those who seem to have “arrived,” they may notice too late that fewer and fewer people are following their example.  They are looking elsewhere, and they like what they are finding.  Churches will close.  Some will turn into restaurants or galleries – places where food and beauty are shared and discussed.  A change, perhaps, for the better.