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.

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.   

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.

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

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

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. 

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.

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

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

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.