Category: Mystery and Wonder

Last time I wrote it was advent, and I was waiting for the light to come.

Tonight I’m outside in the front yard, coaxing the light in. Fred is spacing the paper bags evenly along the sidewalk and driveway. I’m setting the candles upright, grounding them in the sand, making sure the wicks are ready to catch a flame. Neighbors who walk and drive by silently most nights are stopping to shout “Merry Christmas!” as their curious dogs look on. There’s something old fashioned and magical about these little bags of sand and light.

They make me think of Pittsburgh. In  the neighborhood in the South Hills where I grew up, every house lined the road on Christmas Eve. The Shamrock Manor Women’s Club took orders every fall and dropped off sand and bags and candles as the holiday approached. On cold Christmas Eves, after we’d opened the gifts from the siblings, my father and brothers would put on heavy coats and strike their flimsy matches against the wind and dark.

Later, as we drove to my grandmother’s house and then to midnight mass, the world would be transformed. Luminaria decorated the hills like chains of earthbound stars. We’d sing Christmas carols in the car and go silent as we entered the darkened chuch.

That church is a gym now. My parents are gone. All of my aunts and uncles, two of my siblings, and a few of my cousins have passed beyond this earthly light as well. I’m thinking about them tonight,  dipping my hand into each bag, holding the flame at the end of my lighter against the wick until I see it swell.

I’m remembering one especially sad lunch with my parents. My father was already ill with cancer; my mother was overwhelmed by the thought of that loss, beginning her long slide into dementia. Soup and breadsticks were one of the few foods they could both still enjoy, so we had come to Olive Garden for lunch. The light was gray outside the windows and the trees were bare.

“What if none of it is true?” my mother wondered.

She was thinking about another life, a life they might share after they shed their aging bodies and met again in some promised, airy beyond.

I was thinking about how true it had all been already, how the spring had returned and refilled the branches every year, how the luminaria had stayed lit in the snow, how my parents’ love, swelling like two flames into one, had lit my childhood.

This year it hit sixty degrees on Christmas Eve in Albuquerque and the luminaria burned all night.  Christmas afternoon, a column of  sun poured through our dining room window like the beam from a light saber. All afternoon, this wide cone of light traced a path through the blinds, across the orchid on the table, past the Christmas tree, and into the hall.

Rusty felt it first, and went to lie in the glow.

I saw it while I was on the phone with my sister, miles away in Ohio.  It outshone the lights on the Christmas tree, which shrank back into the branches, recognizing that this wasn’t their time to glow.

A little while later, Fred came in.

“Look at that light,” he said, walking into the family room from his office. “I’ve never seen it quite like that before.”

I have been thinking about light a lot this Christmas season. Ever since Thanksgiving,  I’ve been enjoying the lights on my neighbors’ houses. The neighborhood is aglow with snowflakes, twinkling laser shows, a Santa Claus pig, and simple strings of colored bulbs hanging from the eaves. I like these little stands against the darkness; these tiny blinking beacons shouting into the night.

Recently as I was thinking about how hard churchgoers have worked to turn a religion born out of love and an explicit rejection of power into a hierarchical system hungry for power at any cost, I read an article that mentioned that Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a practice. It made me think about the weeks I used to spend with students at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in the Jemez mountains. Once a year for a bunch of years I’d travel to the center with a group of eager teenagers.

We’d rise at dawn, don our robes, and sit zazen in the zendo. We’d breathe in and out until we’d pulled the light over the edge of the mountains. After breakfast on those cold mornings I’d take my coffee and stand by the river, imagining what it would be like to let the cycle of light sculpt my days. I’m wondering what the world would be like if more people treated Christianity as a practice, as a simple way of being light in the world.

On nights like tonight when the moon is small, I carry a flashlight when I walk Rusty in the evening. There’s a dark patch where the road loops behind my house, a wild space where the street dead ends into the mesa. If I’m carrying a tiny circle of light,  I move through it without looking over my shoulder, without listening for footsteps in the rustling  leaves.

Sometimes I think it is all real. Sometimes I think that the birds are the heavenly hosts, swooping in to warn us, singing to bring us joy, dancing on the wind to outline the breath of a holy spirit.

Sometimes on a quiet Christmas afternoon when the planet tilts just right, I walk into my living room and see a solid column of light.

Sometimes when I strike a match and light a candle I am certain that light has an edge; that fire will always find a way to outshine the darkness.

Sometimes when the  year has been full of aggressive shadows, when it has seemed like the darkness is swelling, I can toss a candle into a paper bag of sand.  I can strike a match, touch it to the wick, and watch the flame swell, as it passes from one torch to another.

Sometimes in Pittsburgh, rays of winter light would catch in the bare branches outside my parents’ kitchen window.

I can see it now, that light that stretches across time and distance. See how it chases away the darkness; see how it warms me still.

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This post is a little different. I was invited to preach a sermon at my incredible church. What follows is the full text I spoke this morning. 

When Father Joe first asked me if I would ever like to preach a sermon, I thought we were speaking hypothetically. Then I got an email that said, “How about November 19^th?”

I was thrilled. You see, when I was a good, young Catholic girl studying theology at Notre Dame in the 80s, my classmates were mostly men who were preparing for seminary. That wasn’t a path that was open to me. Even as a kid in Catholic grade school, I knew that. Every year some visiting priest would come and hand out pink and blue plastic rosaries and tell us to pray for vocations (pink nun vocations for the girls, blue priestly vocations for the boys.)  Even then I thought that being a priest and having one of those blue vocations might be pretty cool, but I had no interest in spending my life living in a convent with a bunch of women wearing the same boring clothes and sensible shoes every day. (I like shoes.) I had nothing against the nuns who were my teachers, but I prayed every single year not to have a vocation.

God heard my prayer, so I’ve spent my church life sitting in a pew or singing in a choir. Which is all to say I am grateful for and humbled by this opportunity.

Then I read the scriptures for today. I wondered if the 26th Sunday after Pentecost is one of those Sundays that seasoned priests know to give away.

Think about it. The first words we heard today were “Be silent before the Lord God.”  You can see my dilemma. I decided to ignore the warning of the prophet and speak anyway, and we all know how that usually turns out. You can decide in a few moments if I should have just taken Zephaniah’s advice.

From that point, things only got worse. Zephaniah warns us that the day of the Lord is coming, and it’s not going to be pretty. It will be a time of “ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had over the past year, over the past few months, that began with one person saying something like, “It’s all too much,” or “I just can’t take any more.”

Of course, I don’t have to tell you how many of those conversations I’ve had. We have all been having them. The daily litany of suffering and sadness has been overwhelming. White supremacists are marching in the streets and getting jobs in the White House. Hurricanes are drowning cities. Earthquakes are toppling buildings and burying people alive. Madmen are murdering men and women and children while they pray or make music or ride their bicycles. Surely we are right now living in Zephaniah’s time of “ruin and devastation.” Surely these are “day[s] of darkness and gloom.”

Who wants to preach about that?

I turned my attention to the gospel, to the good old parable of the talents. I was thinking, “Ok, I’ve got this. Don’t hide your light under a bushel”, “be a good steward,“ and all that, but then I read the story. Then I read it a few more times. Then I read the chapters before and after it.

I can’t stand this story.

We all just heard it. The master goes away, having entrusted three slaves with some “talents” [read money]. The “good” slaves go off and, being fine, upstanding capitalists double their master’s money. On his return, the master is delighted with their work. Let’s look at what he says. “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.”

This might be a good time to pause for a moment and figure out whose side we’re on.

I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to think the master is the good guy. The problem is, I don’t.

Let’s imagine the scene from the perspective of the slaves who please him. In the “long time” the master has been away, you’ve doubled his money. You are feeling pretty pleased with yourself. You’ve had a chance to imagine what he’ll do with all that money when he returns. Think about it for a second.

I bet at least some of us were thinking that the master would give us some of that money. Maybe toss us a shekel or two for our efforts. But that’s not what happens. The master says, “You have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.” In other words, you’ve done good work, so I’m going to give you—wait for it–more work. Most of us have probably experienced this same phenomenon at some point in our own careers. As a teacher, it happens to me all the time. I think waiters refer to it as the “verbal tip.”

But, let’s get back to the story. Perhaps the master sees the fallen faces of the slaves when they realize he isn’t planning to share, so he magnanimously invites them to “enter into his joy.” They don’t even get to have their own joy.

To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have had that reaction to the master if it weren’t for the way he treats the final “wicked and lazy slave.” This character comes on the scene and speaks truth to power. “Master,” he says, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.”

And that moment is when I really started regretting saying that I’d like to preach a sermon. Why should I take the master’s word that this slave is “lazy and wicked”?

Let’s start with the fact that he’s a slave. By definition, the evidence that the master “reaps where he did not sow” is pretty compelling. Isn’t that slavery’s whole gig? Add in the fact that the master condemns this honest, frightened man to “the outer darkness” and a lifetime of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” not for losing his money, not for squandering it on wild living and sports car camels, but for keeping the money safe and returning it in full– the prosecution rests.

I can’t help but admire the third slave. Knowing he works for a “harsh man,” he refuses to benefit from that man’s ill-gotten gains. Granted, he was a lousy capitalist, but in my book, he’s the hero of the story.

I was still reeling from my discovery that I wasn’t routing for the “master” in the Kingdom of God when Matthew drops the moral of the story on us. In the kingdom of God, he says, “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

So let me get this straight. In the kingdom of God, the rich get more and the poor get, well, “thrown into the outer darkness”? That sounds a lot like a world I know. It sounds like a world in which the purchasing power of the Federal minimum wage peaked in 1968 and has been losing ground ever since. It sounds like a world in which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, many CEOs make more than 250 times what a typical worker earns. It sounds like a world where the richest country on the planet builds walls around its treasure shouting, “Me first! Me first!” It sounds like tax reform.

Did I mention that I don’t like this story?

At this point, I told my husband I wasn’t going to be able to preach a sermon. What can it mean if the kingdom of god is just like the messed up world we live in?  What happened to the harps and angels and halos? You can’t preach a sermon that says things are bad and they aren’t going to get any better.

But that is exactly how it feels lately, isn’t it? We can’t catch our breath from one atrocity before the next one hits. I was reminded of a time when I was in my late twenties; my sister died unexpectedly, a phone call in the middle of the night. At her funeral, while I was praying for perpetual light to shine upon her, I realized that in my gut, I didn’t believe any of it. There was absolutely no comfort for me in imagining my sister floating around in some ethereal heaven while her son, just four years old, lay curled up on less than one sofa cushion in my mother’s living room. My faith had always been important to me, so I was surprised to realize I hadn’t actually meant it.

Of course, I didn’t stay there. The day after I went to bed muttering that “the Kingdom of God is just like this world,” the cranes came. I could hear them gathering overhead as I drove across the Montano Bridge, through a corridor of cottonwoods so golden that they were shouting “glory!” That same day, a teenager at my school stood up in our morning meeting to ask if we could all pause for a moment and remember all the people who are suffering. Two hundred some teenagers bowed their heads and went silent.

What comfort I found after my sister’s death didn’t come from imagining her in some other, better world. How could there be a better world for a mother than the one in which she can hold and touch her son, who is alive and playing? What comfort I found came from my cousin, who put her hand on my shoulder and kept it there. It came from the old friends who showed up at the funeral home. It came from being a part of a community who made a decision to stand together to stare down sadness.

That’s how I learned to believe again in the resurrection. That’s how I learned to believe again that love, that life endures beyond dying.

And that’s exactly what we do here every single time we come together. I don’t know how people who don’t have a St. Michael’s keep going. What I do know is that it’s no coincidence that the kingdom of God Matthew and Zephaniah describe is just like the world we live in. This is, indeed, the kingdom of God.  We are the kingdom of God. We are the hands, the feet, the breath, even the laughter of the resurrected Christ in the world.

At the risk of talking back to a prophet, these are not times to be silent before the Lord God. In the day of the Lord, Matthew assures us, even the most lowly will be emboldened to speak truth to power.

I am so grateful to be a part of this community that stands together to create the kingdom, to stare down sadness. Thank you for letting me speak in this beautiful and holy place this morning. As Paul advises the Thessalonians, let’s keep building each other up, as indeed we are doing.

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The cool thing about having a chronic illness, I’m learning, is that when you feel good, you feel really, really good. When rheumatoid arthritis snuck up on me a few years ago, I had some pretty bad months. Pre-RA, my joints and muscles have carried me through a couple of (very slow) marathons and even a few triathlons (ditto the very slow), but when inflammatory arthritis first struck, I couldn’t walk up the stairs without feeling like I needed to rest. My hands were used to doing things like playing  the piano and knitting crooked scarves, and for a while, I couldn’t reliably tie a shoe or open a drawer. I remember one morning when my school was about to have a lock-down drill and I had to ask our head of school, who was the only person nearby, to help me close the blinds in my classroom.

I was lucky, though. These sorts of diseases run rampant in my family, and when my nephew was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis as a toddler some thirty-odd years ago, my sister Judy decided to become a rheumatologist. (Note to any teenagers reading: you don’t have to figure it all out in high school. The path appears. Life emerges as you say yes and no.)  Long before I ever made it to a doctor, Judy had diagnosed my stiff, swollen hands over the phone. I didn’t have to go through years of wondering what was wrong as so many people do before getting started on a treatment plan that works.

The other thing that was cool about getting inflammatory arthritis when I did is that it’s what my brother Paul had. For about a year before he died, we bonded over my painful joints. He called whenever I had a doctor’s appointment, he told me what to expect, he told me I was normal when I talked about being tired. And I started to understand what he’d experienced, not always having good care, cringing when well-meaning strangers pumped his hand. I think about Paul every time someone gives my hand a particularly aggressive shake.

I wasn’t planning to wander down memory lane thinking about my siblings today. I was just going to talk about gratitude, like everyone does as Thanksgiving approaches. This was going to be a totally cliche post–life is good, give thanks!–which I might just still be able to pull off if I work at it.

Here’s the point. Yesterday I went to a “barre-fit” class at my gym. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it. I used to do yoga, and I haven’t been able to keep that up. The few times I’ve tried, I’ve been frustrated at my inability to put much weight on my hands and wrists in downward dog, or to transition from a pose on the mat to standing without lumbering up like a stale marshmallow version of my former self.

So I went to “barre-fit” yesterday with some trepidation. (And yes, I know exactly what that word sounds like if you say it quickly! Not for nothing I teach teenagers.) I also went with some hope.

True confession. When I watch Dancing with the Stars (and no, the fact that I watch Dancing with the Stars is not the confession–I think I’ve admitted that here before), I imagine the season when they invite ordinary people to apply for a “normal person” slot.  And yeah, judge me if you want, but I want that slot.

Every year when they announce the stars, Fred jokes that he’s never heard of any of them. He calls them has-beens. I don’t care who they are. They agree to get vulnerable and to learn to feel things with their bodies in public, and I’m hooked.  I’m a “never has been” and I want to have to learn to dance a pasa doble before millions of cheering and jeering fans. I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I’m just telling you what’s true.

So, the sister who I admire for going to medical school when she was forty is the same sister who kept me from becoming the dancer I’m sure I was meant to become. “You don’t need to take ballet lessons,” I distinctly remember my mother saying. “You’ll just quit like your sisters did.” Perhaps Meg and Clare are also to blame here, but Judy is the one who ditched her ballet slippers under a tree in Elm Leaf park and pretended she’d lost them. (A pretense she maintained until my father’s liver cancer was well underway. When she finally came clean, it was too late for my career as an untrained ballerina to take off.)

Anyway, I’m just delusional enough to believe that there is still a path. Someday, Dancing with the Stars is going to call me, and God damn, I plan to be ready.

So. Barre-fit, or barf-it, or whatever you want to call it. I plie-d, I dipped, I put my feet in first position and held my arms out to my sides with intention, and holy Batman, what do you know, today I feel good. Sure, tiny muscles buried in the flab in my thighs hurt, but my feet, that have been screaming at me for about two years, feel like living things again, not clunky two by fours with nails in them. I’m hooked. I am getting my body ready for the day when Dancing with the Stars announces their “Every-woman” season. You heard it here first.

Now, back to that gratitude thing. Right now, as we speak, my church is welcoming a family from Angola to live in the rooms at the end of the hall. They are seeking asylum, and I’m a part of a community that believes we should welcome the stranger for real, not just metaphorically.

I’m grateful for that. I’m also grateful for Judy who hated dancing and still blames her bunions on her toe-shoes, and for Saint Clare, the peacemaker, and for Pat, who kept his compass pointed home. And for Meg and Paul who left too soon. And for a lazy Sunday afternoon when Fred’s in Lubbock, and I’m cooking soup (again) and listening to the folk station on Amazon prime. Oh, and for Aurora and Cali, the granddaughters who just last weekend said, we’re choreographing Cali’s contemporary solo, will you help us? And for Luke, the grandson who in sixth grade can get through a Monday NYT crossword puzzle and likes doing them with me, and for Noah and Marissa who are making music in the youth symphony in Lubbock right now while I’m writing, and for Freddy and Cherisse who created all these grandkids, and for Fred, who opted in and has kept standing here next to me for some twenty-five plus years.

I didn’t even mention the friends, or the extended family, or the fact that my body feels flexible and energetic right now, or that the world’s most ridiculous dog is waking from his deep nap on the couch, shaking his head, nudging my knee with his nose. Let’s go for a walk, he’s saying, let’s prance, let’s throw a ball.

In her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here“, Joy Harjo writes, “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” Every now and then, I think, it really is that simple.

Rusty doesn’t have time for poetry. He’s tapping my leg with his paw, losing patience. I close my laptop, dance up to meet him. It’s a good day to wag our tails. It’s a good day to go for a walk and kick up golden leaves. It’s a good day to give thanks for breathing in and out, for living in a body that can play.

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I started this post a few weeks ago, when the places on my mind were Houston, Florida, North Korea, Mexico City, and Puerta Rico.  I wrote, “It’s Monday night and as far as I can tell, the world is a mess.” Now it’s Monday night again, and I’m adding Las Vegas to the list. As I write, CNN is reporting that they’ve recovered forty-two guns from the hotel and the shooter’s home, and they are replaying for at least the thousandth time the sad staccato sounds of the gunshots.

I feel like I should post something, but I can’t write about guns again. Read this old post if you want anger about guns. I posted it after Sandy Hook. Then I posted it after Orlando.

On nights like tonight, when I can’t keep up with the hurricanes and earthquakes, the shootings, the news of human suffering on scales I can’t begin to imagine, I page through the books of poems on my shelves. Usually I find something there that keeps me going; Ruth Stone or Robert Hass comes through with some poem with a long view that helps me look through the immediate suffering and remember beauty.

Tonight I strike out.

I turn to the internet, google “poems about hope.” I pass over the ubiquitous “thing with feathers” and stop at this one, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” by a Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski. It’s a beautiful poem, and you should stop now and read it. I’m not going to say anything here that is more poignant or beautiful or helpful than what you will read in that poem.

I know better than to turn on CNN when something bad is happening in the world, the same way I know that I should eat less sugar and make it to the pool more often. But it’s there, and Fred keeps flipping to it when Monday night football goes to a commercial. All evening I hear tiny snippets of sadness, stories of loss or survival.

Fred flips back to the game and I look back at my laptop. I love how the title of the poem draws you in. “Just try,” the poem says. I’m picturing the poet standing in my family room tonight, looking over my shoulder to the tv, reading the skepticism in my eyes.  “I know the world is all fucked up,” I imagine him telling me, “but try to love it anyway.”

A little later in the poem, he’s not so gentle. “You must praise the mutilated world,” he argues. He says this after the memories he’s sharing have gotten a little darker, and it’s like one of those moments when you’re at your worst in the classroom and you’re trying to dodge a question before a student even asks it. There’s a “because I said so” quality to the line that I find poignant. The imaginary Adam Zagajewski in my family room sees the images on my tv, looks at the shooter’s sight line from the thirty-second floor. He knows I’m not buying it.

He backs off. “You should praise the mutilated world,” he tries. I can’t tell if he’s losing confidence or just trying to read me, trying every construction he can to win this argument.

I remember years ago I had a statistics teacher I loved (pause here for a moment–that may be the first time anyone has ever put those words together in a sentence). Whenever he introduced a new concept, he’d give a long, convoluted explanation of how we could tackle the problem. Then he’d say, “But that would be…too hard!” Over the semester, we learned to shout “too hard” whenever he began the sentence. Then, he’d show us what we needed to learn, and it would seem easy.

I want to yell, “too hard,” at Adam Zagajewski, but honestly, my heart’s not in it. I’m remembering how the hawks came back to their nest at the end of my street last summer. I’m thinking about how the adults guarded the fledglings, carried lizards to them, soared overhead in watchful joy. I’m thinking about how the moonlight iced the branches of the sycamore across the street tonight when I walked Rusty, about the urgent rustling we heard above us in the leaves.

It’s been a long day. It’s getting late, and the game just ended. The poem is coming to a quiet end, too, and I’m thinking I should head up to bed. It occurs to me, as the line changes one more time, that maybe Adam Zagajewski isn’t trying to tell me anything at all.

He’s turned his back to me now; he’s headed out the door. “Praise the mutilated world,” he says one last time, glancing over his shoulder, putting on his coat. It’s loud enough to drown out the staccato sound of the shots coming again from the tv. I repeat it to myself after he closes the door.

It’s as simple as a breath, I think, as urgent as a prayer.

 

There we were, reaching what was supposed to be the easy part of a meandering drive from Denver to Lubbock. Late July, and we are on our way to reclaim our faithful golden retriever from sleep-away-camp at my step-daughter’s house. He’s spent the last three weeks playing with her black lab and entertaining her family by barking at the animals on tv.

I call the drive meandering because, when our son-in-law told us where to turn to take the direct route, neither of us was paying much attention. Instead, we woke up in Denver, plugged “Lubbock” into my phone, and followed the google over the river and along Ranch to Market Roads and through the woods until at last we found ourselves skirting the southern edge of Amarillo.

A straight shot down I-27 would get us to Lubbock any time now. I put my phone away, try to find a radio station that isn’t telling me to turn my life and money over to Jesus, and look up at the sky.

I wish I hadn’t. It’s that purpley-black color that always makes you think you’re about to see Aunty Em and a mooing cow fly by. We’ve been playing keep away with these clouds all through Texas, and now it looks like the clouds are going to win. Sure enough, we’ve barely merged on to the interstate when rain comes bucketing down. Even before anything goes wrong, Fred is straining to see the car in front of us, and the clouds are so thick that I wonder how we’ll ever fit two of each kind of animal into the Subaru.

Let’s stop here for a thought experiment. Pretend Mary Anderson had never invented windshield wipers. When it rains, you have to catch a crow and use your shoelaces to tie him to the windshield. Then, you roll down your window and toss handfuls of grubs or worms or kernels of corn to entice the pissed off crow to hop back and forth across your windshield, dragging his wings to clear the water.

I don’t expect I’ll win a design award, but that’s exactly what I think when the windshield wiper on my side breaks and starts flapping around like a broken wing. The near-zero visibility we’ve had since the rain started drops even further.

Now, this essay isn’t about how differently my husband and I see the world when we can’t actually see the world, or I’d explain that his response to our life and death crisis was to turn the windshield wipers off so the wiper that was flopping around like a pissed off crow wouldn’t scratch the windshield. At the time, this strikes me as a remarkably bad idea. I start praying the Memorare, certain our flimsy ark is about to go down.

In everyday situations, I wouldn’t describe Fred as calm. In a crisis, though, he’s a rock. He’s driving the car through the blinding deluge as though he’s the only one wearing swim goggles. “Ask Google to find the closest O’Reilly Auto Parts,” he says. I take a break from reminding the blessed virgin Mary that she’s never left anyone who implored her help unaided to ask Google to find me an O’Reilly’s.

Google and Mary both come through, and we finally drive out of the storm into Plainview, Texas, an aptly named town. Young Frank steps away from his computer to verify that our windshield wiper is indeed as useless as a dead crow and snaps on a replacement. $7.00 and five minutes later we’re back on the road, ready to brave the next storm.

“You can always count on O’Reilly’s,” Fred says. He sounds like a radio ad at the end of a Garrison Keillor broadcast. His words feel loaded, like one of those ordinary sentences that ends up meaning more than it meant to. I’m strangely reassured.

I have one of those moments when you realize that even after twenty-five years of living with someone, you can still learn something new, and the rest of the summer passes uneventfully, with lots of live/love and no other close encounters with leave.

Last night I read this essay out loud to Fred as I often do before I post them. “You’ve got too many different stories,” he said. “You should just let it be about the drive.”

He has saved you all from some rambling diversions in the past, so I tried to listen to his advice. I cut the part about Jerry Lewis dying and the memory about the neighborhood carnival where I dressed up as clown and sold popcorn for Jerry’s Kids. Maybe I’ll put that in some other essay. But I keep feeling like this next part belongs here, even if I can’t quite put my finger on why. (If you can’t get past it, write the problem into your work, I tell my students.)

So, summer passed and I’m back at school. The theme for our opening faculty and staff meetings this year is play. Thursday morning while people with very different jobs than mine are performing knee surgery or nailing two-by-fours together, I’m in our black box theater playing rock paper scissors with seventy other adults.

By the time the champions are crowned, the rest of us are lined up in two long chains behind them, our hands resting on each other’s shoulders, chanting the names of the last two people standing. It was another one of those accidentally meaningful/O’Reilly Auto Parts moments.

But that’s not why I don’t want to cut this part of my essay. In the next game, we’re given a notecard. We close our eyes, and the facilitator’s voice guides us on a long, long walk through a beautiful forest. At certain points she tells us to write things on our card: a favorite animal (Rusty, of course), a favorite color (that morning, it feels like yellow).

Then she tells us that we have reached an immense wall. It’s so big there is no way around or over or through it, and we’re too tired to walk back. “What do you do?” she asks. I write my answer on my card, and before long we’ve moved on to the next game. My small group has already started planning how we are going to turn our bodies into three still photos that tell a story when she interrupts us.

“By the way,” she says, “here’s what those things you wrote down mean.” It turns out it was one of those games like the ones you play at bridal showers–someone writes down people’s random comments and later reads them back to the bride as things she’ll say on her wedding night. The animal and the color we chose had something to do with how we see ourselves and how we want the world to see us. But it’s the last phrase, the one about the wall, that I can’t stop thinking about.

“That’s how you feel about dying,” she says.

If this isn’t the first time you’ve read one of my essays, you know I think a lot about that “leave” part. Usually I’m writing about death from a place of grief, or anger, or fear. At best, it feels like a design flaw. “Let’s give them unbearable beauty and the capacity for love,” a generous creator says. “Yes,”a trusted assistant chimes in, laughing, “and expiration dates!” You have to wonder how the idea even made it out of committee.

One time years ago I was telling Sr. Therapist about a dream I’d had. (“You’re still adding stories,” I can imagine Fred saying. He’s in bed, though, so I’m not listening this time.) It was terrifying. I was lying in the grass on a tiny raft when a huge storm came. The raft was tossing in wind and waves, and I was certain it was going to overturn. When drowning seemed imminent, a voice in my dream spoke, calming my fear. “It’s not a raft, it’s an island,” the voice said.

By the time I’d finished explaining the dream, Sister Therapist was beaming. “That’s your subconscious,” she told me. “It’s telling you that you are going to be ok.”

When I unfolded my card to learn what I really think about dying, I felt that same relief I felt in my dream, that same relief I felt when we pulled into the parking lot of O’Reilly’s. When I reach that insurmountable wall, the wrinkled notecard of my subconscious tells me, I’ll “rest against it, letting it support me.”

Sometimes the insight you need is right there waiting for you, in plain view.

 

 

Late one evening in Cocoa Beach I was having a glass of wine with my friend and her sister after Fred had gone to bed. Somehow the conversation drifted to the idea of friends or family members who have become estranged. It’s not a word I’ve ever given much thought to.

Most of the old friends I’ve lost have been through carelessness. You mean to call, of course, but there’s all that life stuff going on, and before you know it years have passed. We didn’t have Facebook when I graduated from high school or college to make it so easy to retain at least an illusion of connection. That’s an excuse, of course, but it’s one of those excuses that works a little bit because it’s true. I’ve squandered more good people than I like to admit.

That night we were talking about how silly it was to let one or two stray comments end a long friendship. We were talking about a relationship that ended because someone said something that rubbed the other person the wrong way, and it burrowed in like a tick and festered. How easy it would have been to have a different ending, we told each other. We ended the evening laughing, declaring we were all now estranged and making plans for the next day.

I went to bed and didn’t give the conversation any more thought. The next afternoon, my friend of over thirty years and I were sitting way out on the end of the pier at the Tiki Bar, watching pelicans dive for fish and surfers paddle out to catch waves. “Whatever happened to your old friend [who I’ll call] Amanda?” Kathy asked me.

I told her I had no idea. Come to think of it, we were estranged. We had been close, things had happened, and we had both felt the need to close the door on the friendship. At least, that’s how I remember it. In retrospect, I am not sure how mutual the decision was. Nevertheless, the door closed more than a decade ago, and over the years neither of us ever knocked on it.

It was a lazy afternoon at the beach. Kathy had known Amanda too, so she said, “I’ll just look her up on Facebook and see what she’s up to.”

Sometimes that’s a good thing to do. We’ve probably all looked up an old friend from our childhoods just to see how things turned out. I’ve reconnected with a number of people I’m happy to have back in my life. Many of my old students have found me online, and I love to see who they’ve become as adults.

That afternoon on the pier, though, Kathy got quiet. “You’re not going to like this,” she said. And if you are reading this post, you’ve probably read enough of my other essays to know that what we found was Amanda’s obituary. She died two years ago, apparently from some sort of cancer.

So there’s that. I still haven’t figured out how it makes me feel. I’m sad, of course. A vibrant, joyful life was cut short. I don’t think I feel regret, but maybe that’s just bluster. I feel tender toward that thirty-something-year-old me, doing the best that she could. And yet, it turns out it is different to be estranged from an old friend who is going about her life in the world and an old friend who has died without your ever knowing she was dying.

Kathy and I sat there quietly on the pier, watching the waves wash in and out. Then we paid the bill and headed off down the beach, two old friends, as the late afternoon sun sank inexorably toward the water, and the waves erased our footprints as we walked on.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If you called an old friend after reading this, tell us all about it in the comments!

"Mercy as it is here contemplated is said to be a virtue influencing one's will to have compassion for, and, if possible, to alleviate another's misfortune. It is the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that although mercy is as it were the spontaneous product of charity, yet it is to be reckoned a special virtue adequately distinguishable from this latter. In fact the Scholastics in cataloguing it consider it to be referable to the quality of justice mainly because, like justice, it controls relations between distinct persons." The Catholic Encyclopedia

It’s mid-May. The rose bushes are blooming and I’m thinking about the school year ending, and about the fact that I never posted in April, and about the things I should be grading tonight. But mostly I’m thinking about mercy.

It’s my Uncle Larry’s fault. Easter morning found me flying out of Albuquerque into the sunrise. I was on my way to Pittsburgh to get home for his funeral. Having held on deep into Holy Week, Uncle Larry had died on Wednesday, and we had to wait for Jesus to rise from the dead on Sunday to bury my uncle. He’s a Catholic priest. Something about flying into the light on Easter morning felt right.

By 1:00 Monday afternoon the family had gathered, filling the 18th-century sitting rooms at Beinhauer’s on West Liberty Avenue in Dormont. My sisters and I were sharing a room at what Judy calls Bereavement Hotel. (People who stay there for other reasons know it as the Crowne Plaza across the street from South Hills Village.) My brother Pat and his wife Pat were standing near a fringed lampshade when we got there, and the rooms were filling quickly with my cousins, their kids, and their kids’ kids. These cousins are the people, my generation, about whom Uncle Larry said last year, “There were twenty-two of you. Five are gone.”

That was at my brother’s funeral, and my uncle’s pain was palpable. “It’s too much,” his body seemed to be saying, while his mouth said “Our Father, who art in heaven” and “When I say ‘Lord have mercy, you say Lord have mercy.'” Today Uncle Larry looks like he is at peace, flanked by the flowers surrounding his open casket.

All day long we meander through these rooms like disorganized extras on a film set. Along with the four sitting rooms, there’s a kitchen stocked with coffee, tea, and, for some reason, cherry slushies. The kitchen opens into a playroom. “That’s where they have the birthday parties!” one of the cousins’ kids’ kids explains.

In Catholic tradition, the corporal works of mercy include such things, among others, as feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, and “harboring the harborless.” All day long, my uncle’s former parishioners and friends merry-go-round through the funeral home, sharing stories about the times my uncle did these things for them. “Your uncle came to the hospital every day while my wife was dying,” one man says. “Your uncle got me into AA,” a woman whose kids I used to babysit for tells me. “Your uncle opened the rectory on Christmas Eve and made a great Manhattan,” says a man with twinkly eyes. I can vouch for that one.

At some point after we’d been there a little while, Uncle Larry put his glasses on. I didn’t see him do it, but there they were, where they hadn’t been just a few moments before. I don’t question things like this at funeral homes. I know there are funeral directors who take care of these sorts of things, just as I know there is a moment when a doctor can declare a person dead. But I’ve also been there for that last breath, and in those days just before that last breath. I’ve walked through that shimmery space, that opening between what we know and what we can’t imagine.

So I’m glad Uncle Larry put his glasses on to see the room fill with his old friends and parishioners, all those people who called my Uncle Larry Father John. My cousin Tommy, the oldest cousin/acting patriarch, greeted every single person who came through the door.

On our way to St. Bernards that morning, one of those fancy osprey helicopter/jet hybrid thingies flew right over my sisters and me as we drove down Fort Couch Road. It turns out President Obama was in Pittsburgh for a funeral, too. Dan Rooney, long time Steelers patriarch, was put to rest about an hour before my uncle. The Bishop of the Pittsburgh Diocese sent a letter to my family explaining that he had to be at the Rooney funeral instead of Uncle Larry’s. My uncle would have said something funny about this situation, but I don’t know what it would have been. That’s the thing about people dying.

Even though Bishop Zubik wasn’t there, St. Bernard’s in Mt. Lebanon was full of priests that morning. Thirty or forty of them in solemn robes billowed into the first five pews across the aisle from my family. The priest who gave the sermon was the same priest who had been smiling from the altar since the mass began.

He talked about my uncle’s faith. “We’re sad,” he said, “but don’t begrudge your uncle his joy on this day.” I thought about Uncle Larry’s words at everyone else’s funerals: my sister’s, my brother’s, my father’s, my mother’s. “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” he would say. And I thought about his wry smile in the coffin after he put his glasses on.

The smiling priest reminded us that when Uncle Larry/Father John wanted to get people’s attention, he would say, “This is important–this is big potatoes.” I remembered how Uncle Larry would come up to me, the “caboose” as he once described our shared position among our siblings, at other funerals, and say, “You’re going to say something, aren’t you?”

The first time this happened my sister Meg had died. It was 1990 and I was twenty-six. I don’t remember everything I said, but I remember quoting Dostoevsky from the Brothers Karamozov. “…let us remember how good it was here, when we were all together, united by a good and gentle feeling, which made us all, perhaps, better than we are.”

To bury the dead is another of the corporal works of mercy. On Tuesday, Tommy (who would later snag some yellow roses from a bouquet outside the mausoleum saying “The O’Shea girls should have roses”) said a few serious, gracious words, and the funeral drew to its end. The closed coffin perched beneath the altar, the holy water was sprinkled, and the pall-bearers stood in position. All that was left was to sing one more hymn, process out of the church, stick a black flag on our car, and fall in line behind the hearse on the way to Queen of Heaven cemetery.

And then Bishop Winter went off script. “I want to say one more thing,” he said. “There was a huge snowstorm in Pittsburgh one night.” He paused and looked away for a minute, the way you do when you feel like you might cry but would rather wait until later. “If you had made it home, you were happy,” he said,  “and you stayed home.” He paused.  “I stayed home.” He paused again, and I thought of the way my father couldn’t speak the only time I heard him mention the baby who would have been my fourth sister.  “Not Uncle Larry,” he said,  “I mean Father John.”  We laughed as the man we knew as our uncle merged with the man the Bishop knew as a priest.

The cloistered Passionist nuns, he told us, had quietly tucked in that cold evening when they heard a knock on the door. It was Father John, the Bishop said, braving the blizzard, checking to see that the sisters had everything they needed to weather the storm.  “That’s what I remember,” the Bishop said. Then the organ clanged a chord and they rolled the coffin down the aisle.

We filed out, pew by pew. The church was packed, and the person standing at the end of each row was holding a lit candle.  Tuesday afternoon we followed Uncle Larry, one more time, through the light, into the light.

One of my favorite memories came years ago when my brother Pat had my last two uncles use Skype for the first time. Self-conscious on camera they joked, and then, somehow, my mother’s sister’s husband and my father’s brother decided to sing “As Time Goes By.” Just for fun just now, I looked up the lyrics. Reel Classics begins with these lines I’ve never paid attention to before:

This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like fourth dimension…

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.

In my uncle’s last Christmas card, he wrote, “I don’t like Skype.” He also said, “I love the old phones that had mouthpieces that you spoke into,” but not the distance that had flung my sisters and me across the country. “O well,” he concluded, “times are changing, I’m not. I don’t understand.”

The simple facts of life that cannot be removed are these: Easter morning I flew home to Pittsburgh and Wednesday afternoon I flew back home to Albuquerque. Sunday afternoon at five to twelve I opened Skype, right on schedule, to join my niece’s online baby shower. We broke bread and drank wine and I can’t stop thinking about mercy, about my big and scattered family, how strong the bonds are, how fragile the strands that bind us to this world.

It’s big potatoes.

I vaguely remember one New Year’s Eve–call it early high school in Bethel Park, PA. I don’t know whose basement we’re in, but there’s a tv up on the wall in the corner and we’re waiting for the ball to drop. Barry Manilow is singing “It’s just another New Year’s Eve,” and my friends and I are throwing things at the tv. “Good riddance,” we are yelling at 1970-something. The details are sketchy from this distance, but I’m thinking our bad year had to do with boys, maybe even one specific boy. Maybe it was one boy who several of us had been in love with. Maybe some of those loves had overlapped, and maybe that boy who might have been tall and lanky had been careless with our eager hearts. Maybe that Barry Manilow song would become an anthem of sorts, pulling us back together. Maybe when Barry Manilow sang, “We’ve made mistakes, but we’ve made good friends too,” my friends and I looked at each other and knew our friendships would outlast all those high school boys who might have tossed their heads to push long straight hair out of their eyes while they played tone poems on the piano and sang soulfully to each one of us as if we were the only one who mattered. Like I said, it’s all blurry from this distance.

This New Year’s Eve, I haven’t been able to get a purchase on my feelings. My life with a small l is as peaceful and rich as it’s ever been. After trying without success to sell our house for the past few years, we finally decided just to stay. I love my house. The ceiling in the family room soars to three high windows, way up on the wall. Sometimes when I am sitting on the couch, I see a plane fly by. Sometimes when I am standing at the kitchen sink, I see a friendly moon rising over the deck. Sometimes when I sit in the loft at night, all of Albuquerque twinkles below me, and I remember how the snow crunched in Pittsburgh, how the whole city glittered beneath Mt. Washington at night. During the day, the Sandias put on a cloud-show, playing games with the light from the moment the first red glow appears before dawn.

Since we’re staying, we’re doing the things you do when you love something. We’re fixing up, polishing, tending to, shining. Everything old is feeling new. It’s not the same anticipation I had been feeling about building a new house; but it feels good. It feels solid. It feels like home.

Last Christmas, not long before he died, my brother bought a tree and a nativity set. He was newly excited about living, even as his health was getting worse. I put up his nativity set this year, and I think about him when I walk into the living room. Maybe that’s how I feel about 2016. It was sad and hard and beautiful and joyful, and we’re still here. Last night just before midnight I asked Fred what he thought was the best thing about 2016. He thought for a while, and then he said, “I’m still alive.”

I thought about what he said in church this morning. I started singing in church choirs in middle school. With the exception of a few years when I was too angry to be a Catholic and too Catholic to be anything else, I’ve sung in church choirs my whole life. I need it: the camaraderie, the ritual, the faith act of opening your mouth and turning air and flesh and bone into music. All of it feeds me in a way I’ve finally learned not to try to understand with my head.

This morning we were singing “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.” The story goes like this: Once upon a time, a bunch of angels dipped close to earth, playing golden harps and singing about peace. The earth just lay there listening (“in solemn stillness” to be precise), but didn’t really get it. I’m picturing a polite clap from a few cold, bored shepherds leaning on crooked staffs on a rocky hillside before they turned back toward the fire. Fast forward through the centuries into verse two and the angels keep coming. They float around singing elevator music about peace on earth while the “weary world,” now filled with “sad and lowly plains,” keeps ignoring them.

By verse three, we’re getting more explicit, and strangely, this morning I find the words deeply comforting. The angels have been singing for “two thousand years of wrong” while “warring humankind hears not.” The lyricist even gets a little testy: “hush your noise” and listen to the damn angels, he says. I’m not sure I should be feeling better about 2016 and life with a capital L in 2017 because the world has been messed up for millennia, but somehow I am.

Neither Barry Manilow nor the carol writer can resist sappy optimism in the final verse. Barry tells us bloodlessly that we’re going to be “just fine,” but not even I can look around the world heading into 2017 and believe it’s going to be that simple. (Besides, it’s obvious Barry just needed to rhyme with Auld Lang Syne. He could just as easily have said, “the cancer is benign,” or “now go out and dine.”)

I’ll get to the angels’ happy/sappy ending in a minute, but first I need to tell you about something that happens every now and then when I’m singing. Once in a while, my body disappears. That’s not exactly what I mean, but I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s as though I’m not the one making the music; rather, I’m as much an instrument as Justin’s recorder or Rachel’s viola or Ken’s violin. In those moments, instead of singing, I’m being sung.

That happened to me this morning during the angel song. In the fourth verse, the angels stop flying around and the writer imagines a better time, a time he believes is coming, maybe even immanently. In this new era, the angels give up on floating around strumming cheery Muzak on their shiny harps. In this new era, an impatient peace takes over and”flings” it’s “ancient splendors” over the earth.

Imagine that! I spend a lot of time talking to students about using strong verbs, and I’ve never noticed that one before. I want to be alive when peace starts flinging itself over this weary world.

I’m left with contradictions as this new year begins. We’re all still alive. My life in this house I’ve lived in since 1998 feels whole and rich and grounded.  And yet, I know it’s probably not just another New Year’s eve. The world beyond my house feels jarring and chaotic, violent and confused.  It seems unlikely that peace will pick 2017 to start flinging itself at this weary world.

I was talking to a friend after church on New Year’s day. “I’m ok today,” he said, and I think there’s wisdom in his words. All sorts of things we can’t foresee will surely be demanded of us tomorrow. I’m going to try to meet them with love. I’m going to try to notice when peace comes flinging my way. It’s been a long time since anyone accused me of being an angel, but for what it’s worth, I’m going to keep on singing.

 

 

Right now–Cubs up 5-1 with two outs in the  bottom of the fifth in game seven–while the Cubs still might win the World Series for the first time since 1908, and right now, while the U.S. might still elect our first woman president since, well, ever, right now, I want to write about road rage.

A few weeks ago as Fred and I pulled into BJ’s on a Tuesday night for half-price wine, we watched a Yukon-sized car careen through the mall parking lot, pull in front of us as we turned into the restaurant, then come to a dead stop in front of the entrance to unload a clown car’s worth of passengers. I’d be lying if I said we waited calmly and patiently while people climbed out of the car, but we did wait. That was our only option, as the car was stopped in the middle of the road, blocking our only path to a parking space. (For the record, I’ll add that it was a hale and hearty bunch who climbed out; no little old ladies or little kids with broken legs in sight.)

Things took a turn for the worse when the backup lights came on and it seemed likely that the car was about to ram into us. That’s when Fred hit the horn. It wasn’t one of those cute little tap-tap honks that says, “Excuse me, I just wanted to make sure you knew I was here.” It was a long honk, the kind that calls the other driver names, the kind that continued beyond the point when the other driver saw us and decided not to back up.

The big, empty car realized we were there, pulled forward, and we all parked. As we headed into the restaurant, while I tried to avoid eye contact, the driver came toward us angrily and said, “I was going to stop!” There was some arm waving and head shaking, and somehow Fred managed not to respond in kind, and we all ended up in the restaurant. Fred and I hustled off to a table in the bar while our new friends waited to be seated.

(Right now, the team that needs to find a new name just scored two runs on a wild pitch, so I need to write more quickly. The Cubs are up 5-3, still two outs.)

I ordered an expensive glass of La Crema Pinot Noir since it was Tuesday and I was having the cherry chipotle salmon, and Fred and I were talking and having a nice evening. At some point after our drinks were served and before dinner came, the man from the parking lot appeared at our table.

“I was out of line,” he said. “I would have reacted exactly like you did.” (I’m going to bet you didn’t see that coming, either.) Of course, that led to a pleasant exchange, we admitted our honking had been a little excessive, and the evening became brighter and warmer than it had been.

A little while later I was eating my salmon when our waiter came by with another glass of Pinot Noir. “This is from the folks at table 22,” he said. I went to the hostess stand to make sure I had the the right table, and then went over to talk to them.

The thing is, I had had a pretty hard day. Sometimes I struggle to leave my students’ problems at school. Sometimes the helplessness I feel about not being able to make someone’s life different than it is threatens to engulf me. I worry about the unknown, the news that might come in the next phone call.

That’s what I said to my new road rage friends at table 22.  “That was so unnecessary,” I told them, “and so incredibly kind.” I told them it had been a hard day. I thanked them for reminding me that bad things can lead to good.

It was only later that I realized they had also reminded me that grace is real, that I’m not completely crazy for believing that good has an edge.

Right now (6-3 in the top of the seventh, less than a week out from the election), when everything is possible and everything could still go either way, that’s what I wanted to say.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to wake up and either be the same Cubs fan I’ve been since those wonderful summers right after college when I lived a quick train ride from Wrigley and rooted for the perpetual underdogs, or I’ll be some new kind of Cubs fan who cheers for a team that can actually win.

November 9th we’ll all wake up in a different world than the one we live in today. My road rage buddy made me a little more hopeful that, whatever world it is, we’ll figure out how to live in it.