The Slaughter of the Innocents

     It's been said so often this last week, "There are no words........." The gun murder of 20 young children and some very wonderful school staff so beggars our little minds' ability to cope with the unspeakable that words can seem futile and intrusive. But we're human, and we need words to cope and connect with each other. Breaking the sacred silence of our grieving and our horror is imperative, it seems to me, if we are to draw something decent out of something so indecent.

     The president and many other citizens, famous and not so famous, have said it would dishonor those beautiful lives that were lost if we didn't do something to stem the tide of gun violence that keeps covering our shores. No citizen needs the weapons and specialized ammunition that only a soldier or a police officer should legally employ. No hunter needs to shoot thirty or fifty or a hundred hollow point bullets in a few seconds at a deer or a duck. Does a homeowner  truly need an assault or semi-automatic weapon to protect his family? We've made mass killing too easy and also made it too easy for the deranged and evil among us to access these weapons of overkill. We'll never stop all of it, but can make a big dent in slowing much of it.

     In the time of Jesus' birth, which we celebrate at Christmastime, a tradition grew up that King Herod was so threatened by the prospect of a baby born who was destined to be the "king of the Jews" that he ordered his temple police and soldiers to kill all the recently born boy children around Bethlehem. Such casual brutality was not uncommon in Roman society, especially in the occupied lands of the Empire to keep the local population docile and  properly afraid of the state. In the midrash-like (embellished for teaching purposes) story recounted in Matthew 2:1-23, Jesus escapes to Egypt  in the arms of his mother and father and later returns to the land of Israel much like Moses in the days of old. God's power is greater than any human atrocity seems to be a clear teaching point of the story. The blood of those innnocents in the ancient story was not shed in vain -- one would come after who would comfort the sorrowful and call out the wicked, turning his voluntary endurance of violence into a great sign of love... "a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends [John 15:13]"

     One ray of hope I took from this terrible week past was the great role the First Responders  played in saving numerous kids and adults, and in caring for the families of the fallen afterwards. The assigned family liaison for the Pozner family was  state trooper Sean Hickey, a beautiful bit of interreligious and culturally diverse mixing -- this is us as Americans at our best. I'm sure Trooper Hickey's good service was repeated over and over by by his fellow First Responders and so many other good people.

     Shame on us if we let this moment pass without attempting some meaningful change. Shame on us, too, if we take this spirit of this season and limit it to our own family's experience of peace and closeness. Yes, "we need a little Christmas, right this very minute, we need a little Christmas now." And we need it to be the Christmas where we not only vowed, but acted on our pledge to stop enabling the slaughter of our children all over this country and this world. It's way past time for that.

     Merciful God, give us the strength to turn things around this time.

East on Shinnecock Bay

     It's a hot, breezy day on Long Island. Partly cloudy, but  brilliantly blue skies and a challenging chop on the water made for a good workout. It's the first time this summer I've spent any time in my own boat, and it felt really good. My form is a little off, and my old instructor would have faulted me on posture and stroke, but I got into rhythm several times and hit a sweet spot a few times where everything just flowed. The Olympic athletes inspired me enough to get out and push it a little, and I'm grateful for the inspiration.

     My route today is probably my favorite paddle -- along the shore of the Shinnecock reservation. If I ignore the big mansions along one side of the bay, it's easy to imagine myself back several centuries because only a few homes on the rez show through the gorgeous shoreline of woods, marsh grasses and a waterside habitat for birds that is remarkable. I watched a pair of osprey hunt the waters of the bay to find fish for their young. I saw majestic and elegant snowy egrets wade the grasses. I disturbed a convention of 25 cormorants bobbing on the water, and they let me know their displeasure as they took off together to avoid my kayak passing nearby.

     Yesterday I visited the Shinnecock Cultural Museum, getting a guided tour of the main exhibits by a board member, Elizabeth "Princess Chee Chee" Haille. Chee Chee proudly and easily talked of the 10,000 year history of her ancestors, especially how complex and adaptive was the way of life developed by the Shinnecock, "people of the shore." It  was her ancestors who taught the Europeans such important things as the technologies needed to become whalers. David Martine, director of the museum, reminded us that the taking of whales so important to Shinnecock and later, English and American peoples was a spiritual act -- part of a vision of life wherein the creatures used by men and women were gratefully received as gifts. All the sustaining gifts of nature, meat, fish and plants, were understood to be of God and meant to be used well and thoughtfully. (Cf.www.shinnecockmuseum.com)

     I sampled some of the delicious oysters cultivated by a current Shinnecock resident, and some of the beans and corn staple, "samp" that sustained people through many hard times. The current members of the tribe are proud of their history and culture. Of special pride to Chee Chee and other leaders is a corps of young tribal members being trained in some of the ancient crafts and skills like wigwam and canoe construction, all in preparation for a demonstration Shinnecock village set to open next year. A friend,  Metauqus Tarrant, is among the teachers of these ancient skills to young people and showed me a throwing stick he crafted, used in hunting, along with some of the long arrows formerly used to bring down game to feed the people.

     All in all, it was a rich and full weekend. My body is pleasantly tired out. My mind is full of powerful and moving moments of connection with some really good people. My heart is grateful.

    

Finding Real at the Olympics

     Like a lot of people, I get Olympics fever the first several days of the sports spectacle. The wonderful mix of noble and silly, grand and petty provides me hours of watchable television that eventually will grab me less and less -- but these first few days are addicting!

     NBC has been criticized roundly for packaging the games -- they are, after all, a lucrative platform for  pricey commercials. But I have to admit, the package is compelling: athletes, mostly young, all earnest and in great shape, putting their best efforts on the line in some engaging and exciting ways -- what's not to like?

      I find myself cheering hard and exhorting this or that man or woman to stick it or dig or push just a little harder,  even though I know the event I'm getting excited about may have already finished and the arena is now actually dark! I sometimes cheat the TV illusion of live competition by going online for the scores --but I can still get caught up in the emotions of the moment whether I know the results or not. Sports can do that to us, getting us jazzed up and caring about the outcomes.

     What I care most about, I find, are the human moments. The cliches don't lose their power, like grace under pressure, courage in the dark moments, and composure in defeat. A great set of examples came in the womens' gymnastics. The "Fabulous Five" U.S. team were amazing in victory in the team competition -- but this happened after some disappointing performances a few days ago in the all-around competition. What touched me even more than the girls' comeback was the response of their Russian counterparts who had collapsed in their efforts -- wining a medal, but faltering badly doing it. The Russian girls' faces were warm and respectful, downright gracious, as they shook the hands of the American girls -- a class act. They cared about winning as much as anyone, I'm sure -- but in the end, human being to human being, warrior to warrior if you will, there's warm respect and even affection for strong, successful opponents who called out the best in them.

     I think we play and watch sports because they afford us an experience in which life gets cranked up a notch and we get to care about something as fleeting as whether a ball or a foot is inside or outside a line. The amazing shape these athletes embody remind us of the great gifts like strength, agility, speed and balance available to us as human animals. The shared experience of caring about a game's outcome or whether or not someone got a medal connects us with thousands, indeed millions of fellow human beings in something fun and decent.

     We could be doing much worse than caring about how our young Olympians are doing. Our lives get enlarged by theirs -- their sterling efforts can inspire us and hearten us. They remind us that the human family is wondrous and full of life. In the midst of how venal and violent we can be with one another, these are some good moments. And that's something.

    

    

The Great "In Spite Of" - Reflections on the Death of My Mother

     It's been over a month since we buried my mother. I'm not proud to admit it, but it's taken me all this time to even think of writing something about the experience of her dying and her funeral. In recent years especially, I've become aware of how much anger at her I've carried for most of my life. And I want to tell you what's happened to that anger and how my relationship with her has been changed.

     My mother was many things, but chief among them was the fact that she had a major problem with alcohol much of her adult life, and she regularly practiced the attitudes and behaviors that go with that problem. What her last day on earth and the experience of her wake and funeral taught me was this: however true the alcohol piece was about her life, it didn't define her and my response to it doesn't have to be the main fact of our relationship. I can't tell you how liberating it feels to say that.

    Somewhere in my young childhood, alcohol and other chemicals began to become a major way for my mother to cope with what she called her "nerves." She herself had grown up with alcohol problems being a major part of her extended family life. The social life of lower middle class Boston suburban families often revolved around occasions when alcohol was at the center of things. When we moved to Milton into our first single family home, my father re-did the basement in knotty pine, including a carefully designed home bar for parties -- and there were plenty of parties. Every day, as time went on, the excuse of a party was not needed for my mother to consume enough alcohol to pass out (or "fall asleep" as we euphemized) every night. The run ups to those moments were some of the worst hours of my life. Sarcasm. Loud fights. Outrageous demands. Habits and and occurences too embarrassing to risk friends visiting -- I learned to get out of the house as soon and as often as I could. What I carried out of the house was my own mostly buried anger and a huge chip on my shoulder I didn't even have a clue was there. 

      When I began to live more away from Boston, starting with my college years, I was unconsciously fleeing chaos, pain, rage and a boatload of sadness and grief over what had gone down in my family home that I didn't have a clue as to how to deal with or even that I needed to deal with. Not surprisingly, I developed my own disordered relationship with alcohol and cut my own swath of chaos,  internal and external. Just a few years after my mother entered an often rocky relationship with recovery, I began my own recovery journey to deal with my very own alcohol problem.

      Years of recovery, therapy and painful acceptance of my own flaws led me to a place where my anger surfaced and made me very impatient with my mother. And then something shifted. On the last day of her life, my mother was aware and troubled enough to ask my sister and I, "Was I a good mother?" with such genuine and sincere regret that we could only answer, "Yes, you were." She smiled hesitantly, and visibly relaxed. That moment opened me to be able to hear the wonderful things my children and others said about my mother as the wake and funeral unfolded. Her gifts of warmth, humor, hospitality and fierce loyalty to her own became crystal clear.

     Dr. Ira Byock, end of life specialist, quotes theologian Paul Tillich:
             "Forgiveness presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting, not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily."
          (THE FOUR THINGS THAT MATTER MOST: A Book About Living)

     Thanks be to God for Margaret Agnes Lawless. Her legacy lives on in the lives of the people she shaped and touched, especially her children, grandchildren and friends. We remember. And we forget. Go with God, Mother.


    

Signs and Metaphors II

     A lot of people my age take health issues more seriously than the bigger moral, political and religious issues. The prospect of mortality will do that. When I or someone I love gets a serious diagnosis, I typically go into survival mode and try to soldier on regardless -- but that's followed sooner or later by cold fear and deep anxiety, and it takes a lot to shift out of those places. What helps? In my experience, three things help: information, time, and perspective. The more information I have, the more powerful I feel, especially if the knowledge comes with options. As to time, even bad news loses some of its punch as time passes. Perspective? Viewpoint can be everything sometimes; the day before my 82 year-old Irish grandmother died, my mother told her to hurry up and get well, "so we can take a trip to Paris." Not missing a beat, my grandmother replied, "Sure, and I can buy a bikini!" Her wit and attitude seriously helped us cope with our grief and sadness.

     Does faith help? I think so. Experience suggests to many of us that bad things pass. Good may come out of bad. And, sadness diminishes (even if only bit by bit). Is there good reason for our faith and hope that losses aren't the last word? In the late 1990's and early 2000's, I taught a class at Fordham entitled, "Faith and Critical Reason." I used to tell each new group of students that my personal governing asumption for the course was, "faith is not non-sense." Together we read Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Nietszche and Bertrand Russell and The Humanist Manifesto -- that latter document a powerful and creditable path of belief although it unecessarily caricatured "the supernatural" in an effort to promote a vigorous appreciation of the natural world. In the course, I didn't grade for opinions, but for intellectual honesty and courage in tackling the Big Questions. Tackling the conversation at all without caricaturing people of different views seems a rare commodity in this age of instant messaging and debate by sound bite. And I wanted the students to consider giving theism as much weight as atheism and agnosticism as intellectual choices.

     A college course is a bit of a hot house environment, rareified in atmosphere and tone, not quite like the booming, buzzy stuff of everyday life. I think we can get closer to our daily experience to look at faith and belief as viable options. Here's one of my favorite stories:

          An exhausted father is awakened in the wee hours of the morning by his crying and frantic 5 year-old son coming out of a kiddie nightmare."Everything's going to be all right," the father says soothingly as he hugs the distraught child and rubs his back gently. After a few minutes, the father, desperate to return to bed, says, "OK, now, son... time to go back to sleep. I'm going to tuck you in, turn out the light, and go back to bed." The boy immediately bursts back into tears and says, "No! No! Don't shut off the light -- I'm afraid of the dark! I don't want to be alone!" Near the end of his patience and definitely on his last nerve, the father pulls out one of the Big Guns of parental rhetoric: "You're not alone son... God is with you." The little boy looks up at his father and says, "Where's God? I don't see God!" Praying for patience and hoping against hope, the father says. "Of course you can't see God, son... He's invisible." The boy looks skeptically up at his Dad and says, "I want a God with skin on!"

     To be continued.

Signs and Metaphors I

     It's been a very strange winter, oddly mild and lacking the snow and ice whose bite I seem to feel more acutely the older I get. I don't know about you, but even the mild version of the winter we've enjoyed can still get me yearning for warm beaches and warm water to swim in. My version of heaven includes water I can walk into without shivering!
    
     The days are getting longer, even warmer, without doubt. But there are still enough gray, cold days and nights left that feel oppressive in the anticipation -- and that get me to muse on the sadder or more difficult sides of life. The dean of my theological graduate school once remarked that climates like the northeast were the most conducive to theological thinking. He thought that because we were located in California, our thinking might be watered down because we had it too easy! His point was sort of made that Christmas when I stepped outside my Berkeley apartment to toss a Frisbee. When you're that comfortable, John Calvin or Soren Kierkegaard lack some of their characteristic heaviness. If cloudy, cool days helped produce more than a few solid spiritual thinkers, perhaps these same days have some gifts for us, especially in the areas of meaning and symbol.

     The gardeners and landscapers among us know that this is a season of hidden energy and of expectant waiting. Several months ago, trees and shrubs pushed forward buds that "wintered over," and in the coming spring those buds will become the blossoms and fruit of the high season. Bulbs in the ground need the long, cold and dark "burial" of winter time to become the tulips, daffodils, gladioli and irises we love so much. And the seeds released by so many plants last summer "died" in the soil they landed in to resurrect later this year as the children and grandchildren of those original plants.

     In the Gospel of John, the writer portrays Jesus using a similar metaphor about himself and the death he volunteers to undergo:
        
         "... unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains
         only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest... " (John 12:24)

Written several decades after the events the gospel describes, these words form part of a tradition of important sayings attributed to Jesus. But they are also meant to comfort and inspire the generation of listeners who first heard them -- that community of believers then facing likely persecution by the Roman authorities and denunciation to those authorities by religious adversaries. Roman arrests, trials, and executions were purposely very brutal and very public as a means of controlling conquered peoples and the general citizenry. The metaphor of the seed of grain that dies to bring forth greater yield would have helped those early Christians cope with what must have been hardly bearable. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of faith," the saying went.

     As helpful as that metaphor may have been, I imagine it would still have been terrifying to those early Christians to face possible arrest, torture and execution as religious outlaws. Bringing it to our time, how do we make sense of the horrors done to others throughout the world or that we could see ourselves facing? How do we deal generally with the wounds to psyche and spirit that life inflicts?  How can we rebound from the worst life can throw at us?

     We'll start to try to answer those questions in the next entry. Peace.

    



    

    

        
       

Radical Acceptance

     I was talking with a client the other day who suffered the grevious loss of a loved one some while back. There was and is no way to sugar coat something that hard and mean feeling. Sometimes things happen that just suck. How we handle things like that is one of the great issues of living.

     The client struck me as a person of generous heart who was open with himself and me,  so he didn't pretend that he wasn't hurting in that moment. In response, I couldn't pretend I had some great over-arching Big Thought that would change his feeling or make the situation all better. Cheap grace nostrums ("it's all for the best!" or "God wanted him so he called him home")  strike me as obscene responses to the toughest moments we face as human beings. We all deserve better.

     The one thing I believe we deserve is fellow feeling. Perhaps the biggest gift we give each other is real compassion, which literally means feeling what the other is feeling or feeling something close to that. Maybe not exactly the same pain, but something like it. I can look you in the eye and can let you know by my words, my body-language, my bearing and my reactions that I have some idea of what you're experiencing; and that is an amazing human moment. Suddenly, you and I are not so alone.

     Right in that moment of shared compassion, a possibility opens up that dashes past the temptation of hurtful cliches and empty slogans. In that connecting moment we each accept the reality of the loss and the reality of the shared experience. To radically (meaning "at root") accept  life as it is in that moment, even an awful moment, unites us at a time when part of me just wants to scream or collapse. "To bear the unbearable sorrow," goes the lyric in Man of La Mancha. We can do it together. We can accept the worst life throws at us. We're not alone.