Oh My…
Category: Personal
He was an older man…
slim in build with a kind face. I had never met him before, perhaps I will some day, but his face was on a picture in front of the cross and between the candied wheat and sweet breads on the table.
He was gone from us for now and we were praying for him 40 days after his death. We Orthodox pray even for those who are departed because in a very special way they’re still with us and we are with them. The Church, the life of Christ, it’s all bigger than even a cemetery. And as I was praying I was thinking.
This is the kind of person my government and culture tells me I need to be careful for, the kind of person who, with his rumpled suit and head gear, would be stared at in the airport. Amazing how the forces around us help us decide who people may be.
Yet in truth he was just a grandpa, a father, and man who lived in the area of Nazareth. He was a soul, too, a being made in the image of God. A person with children and a house and friends and maybe some kind of hobby when the work was done. His family was just a few rows back from where we were praying, the kind of folks you’d like to have next door.
Jesus tells us to “judge not lest we be judged…” and more than a few people trying to justify their own behavior fling that verse (perhaps the only one they know from the Scriptures) into Christian faces. There’s more to it, though, than that.
I think it’s about having wisdom, the kind of wisdom that looks below the surface and tries to make sense of the other not just from the superficial but from the true heart and soul. It’s also about withholding a final opinion on anyone based solely on how they immediately present themselves to us. It’s the knowledge that we are all fallible humans in a process called life.
The image may say “Man from Palestine wearing Arab clothing” with all that my culture tells me about what that means. The truth is he’s grandpa Shafik from Nazareth and one day I hope to meet him in heaven.
Lord always give me the eyes to see things this way.
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It's Been Grey and Raining…
here in Minnesota the past week. The clouds have prevailed this week and there’s even a bit of fog floating down the street in front of my house.
Around here whenever it rains or snows, even when its a deluge, we always seem to say “We could use the moisture.” Part of it, I think, is that Scandinavian stoicism that has bled into the larger culture. Part of it, too, is that many of us are one, maybe two, generations off the farm. We still thinking like farmers even when we live in the suburbs. We must have space. We must have green living things around us. We still look to the sky with knowing eyes to determine the weather.
It’s the price we pay, I suppose, for living on this land. There is a harshness to it, extremes of one sort or another. Yet there is a life to be made if you know how to do it and have the will to flow with the changes. The whole world around you is always vivid with color. White as white can be in winter. Green that Saint Patrick would envy in spring and summer. Fall is when everything explodes in colors from yellow to brown. If you learn how to live in this place you can be alive in ways that are never possible stacked on top of each other in a far away eastern big city.
So for now we wait. We could use some sun. We would prefer it if you actually got our honest response. Until it comes, though, we can still use the moisture.
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War is Unnatural…
a situation where human beings are put in the context of perpetual real or anticipated violence. It is an atmosphere ripe with the potential for trauma. Perhaps the urge to war is routine for a fallen humanity but the actual war is nothing but routine.
In my service as a health care chaplain and completing Clinical Pastoral Education I did a study on post traumatic stress and medical and social disruption in the lives of men who had served in combat in WW2. The results were startling. There was not a single man who served in combat and was unaffected, many for decades.
Witness a story from that study. In the days just after D-Day a young soldier had fought his way into France and was critically wounded. As he lay on the ground another soldier found him and began to dig a hole in the ground so his comrade would be protected until help arrived. As the hole was completed he, too, was wounded and died, falling into the hole on top of the soldier he came to rescue. For many hours the two laid together in the hole, the wounded living man covered by his fallen comrade.
I cared for that man decades later. German metal was still in his leg and the memory of those days still creased his face with pain. He shook his head and said “I was never really able to be a civilian again when I came home…” Like many of his cohorts he used alcohol to medicate his struggles. This was the “good” war and the trauma never left.
Why should we be shocked, then, when a soldier in Afghanistan, after multiple tours in a very hostile environment bathed in violence, loses his bearings and goes on a murderous rampage? I’m not excusing the action but imagine the scars already on the soul of this man identified by his fellows as an ‘ideal soldier”.
Most of us sit at home a million miles away from all of this and have no idea. It’s like a movie to us but everyone actually in that movie is experiencing a reality we only touch on when someone breaks their silence and tells the real story or something, like what happened in Afghanistan, goes terribly wrong.
We don’t really know what we’re asking when we send our fellow citizens off to war so we should be very careful about doing it. We should think a second time, even a third time or more before we make that decision because once its made there’s no going back and we better be prepared to fix the wounded bodies and souls that return.
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I Burned my Letterjacket…
today. In fact its still burning as I write. Nothing to do with hate, revenge, fear, or shame, it just seemed time to offer it as a sacrifice and with it any remaining pain or hurt from those long ago days.
There is nothing to go back to, all that was done was done and all that was forgiven was forgiven. There is nothing I need from that time and nothing to cling to. I found that symbol hanging in my closet, a symbol of everything good and bad. heights and depths, nothing more, nothing less, and it was time for it to go. Why cling to that which cannot be changed? Why seek redemption in a past when there is so much good in the present?
I am not the person I was in high school. I have played music before hundreds. I have preached before Bishops. I have given my life to one woman. I have been at the bedsides of the dying and I have brought people into life through baptism. I have written poems. I have faced danger and demons. I have talked to lost teenagers in the middle of the night. I make people laugh and I do my best to love freely. Whatever I was I try to be better. I choose to forgive and forgive myself. I pray for my classmates. I’m Ithankful for all that went before because it helped shape me and looking forward to what lies ahead.
The jacket was in the way, it was a reminder of days past, a memory of harder times. I couldn’t go on with it dragging me to a distant past so remote from who, by the grace of God, I have become. Those days are gone. This day is good. The fire was the way to offer it all up to the God who loved me then and loves me now. He is my purpose. And it didn’t fit anyway.
No more regrets. No more need to look to that time to redeem me. If my stay there wasn’t always exemplary my life after would certainly do credit to Mahtomedi High School yet it was not me, but Grace that has brought me safe thus far.
Come to think of it, though, I do have one regret. Years after graduation I found out that Chris Mauricio was interested in me. I like where I am now, and deeply love who I am with, but had I known back then I would have asked her out in half a heartbeat.
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On Instinct and Life…
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war…. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest….
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It's Lent…
and I found a person from my past on Facebook, a person who I had hurt and I thought again to make amends. Its been a few days now and I was hoping to hear something back because some of the things I did to the person were really nasty and I hoped my apology would make some kind of difference even years later.
Its been silence so far and I understand. People move on. This was decades ago. Maybe this person wants to avoid the whole thing. I get it. I’ll just keep remembering this person in my prayers and hope they’ve moved on. But this is the last time for me as well.
I can’t change what happened back then and I can’t change the person it happened to. I was young, dumb, self-centered and sinful but several times over the years I tried to find a way and nothing came of it. Again I understand. People make their choices and I choose to stop apologizing.
I’ve done my part. I’ve tried to say what needed to be said. I wish I could live it all over again so it would be different but if there is no response I choose to move on as well having done all I could do.
There’s a relationship in forgiveness. Apologies need to be offered, and I certainly I needed to do this in this case. Yet there has to be a response as well and if none is given then the offender has done their part and can do no more. I simply can’t be held captive by this anymore. I’ve opened my door and it will stay open but I’m also moving on.
Yet I still understand. Some hurts can’t be settled with words and the silence is probably to be expected. God bless this person, give them all good things, grant them mercies greater than the hurts I’ve caused.
But now its time to move on down the road.
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We Need to Remember…
that our sins, our struggles, our weaknesses, are not the definition of who we are unless we choose to make them so. This is not to say they are not real, or that we are somehow above their effects and consequences. Rather, mercy, grace, salvation, and hope, gifts of God to humanity in Jesus Christ are what our creator wishes for us and because of this they, too, can be the definition of who we are if we so choose. Illnesses, sins, struggles, challenges, all of them are not the measure of who we are, what ultimately defines us is Christ.
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Voices of Wisdom…
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Kooky Stuff…
happens during Lent, Expect it.
I remember listening a Priest who said “Every Lent I get a craving for McDonald’s Hamburgers and I don’t even like them.” And the stories could go on about weird cravings, coincidences, unexpected changes, fatigues, the whole run of things that somehow manage to pop up at Lent.
If you’re really making some kind of effort to grow as a Christian, to face your deficiencies and seek healing and forgiveness just expect this kind of thing. There’s a world out there that really doesn’t get it. There is, as well, another team on the field defending itself against any increase in goodness. When you try to get out of the larger culture’s rat race and live by higher rules you’re swimming upstream, against the current, and yes there’s even bears, as it were, trying to take you out with one swipe of their paw.
Just know this stuff is going to happen. If you fall back, get up again. If the pressure gets to be too much rest a bit and then start up again. Run the gauntlet knowing that God is with you and willing to help every step along the way.
And laugh at the kooky stuff because you know its coming.
The Beautiful Path 