The Holy Is Everywhere. We Just Have to Look for It.

"I believe God is everything....Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It."     

 --Shug, The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

If you are one of billions of Christians or millions of Jews around the globe this week, these days are holy days, an entire holy week in fact. Holy: a sacred time set aside from "normal" time for God; for falling back into ancient religious tradition and ritual. For returning to church or synagogue, maybe for the first time in a week, or maybe for the first time in a very long time.  Gathering around a common table for a family meal, familial reconnection.

At their core all these celebrations, all these religious observances, all these traditions, come down to the holy. Searching for the holy.  Maybe even finding the holy, God, in this life, sometimes.  If we are blessed.  If we look.

So beginning Thursday night and stretching into Sunday morning, many Christians will attend holy services that tell the story of the farewell, trial, death and resurrection of their teacher, Jesus Christ, some 2,000 years ago. On Friday night and for the next seven days, many Jews will mark Passover, with holy rituals and a sacred meal, that tell their story of being liberated by God 3,500 years ago, from slavery into freedom.

There's only one problem with such "holy" things.

That's the tempting cliché to imagine these "holy" times are only reserved for the especially pious, for the select and devoted few, for the particularly, obviously "religious" folks.  In this limited definition to be holy and know the holy, is rare, unique, and mostly unattainable.  So "holy" is the black clad nun on bended knee reciting rosaries for hours on end. An Orthodox Jew bowing again and again as ancient Hebrew prayers waft up to heaven.  An orange robed Buddhist monk sitting lotus style, meditating in perfect stillness. 

All holy, absolutely, close to God and yet....

Linguistically, the word "holy" is actually rooted in a much older Indo-European word,  "kailo", meaning whole, as in complete. What if we humans saw holiness not as the province of the few but instead the search, the deep desire, we all have as human beings, as fellow children of God, for connection to something bigger and greater than us? Maybe all humans, regardless of faith or tradition, we are all holy.  

All seeking holiness and wholeness: whenever we look for meaning and purpose in life beyond the immediate, the now. Whenever we look up into the stars at night and wonder just who or what brought everything into being.  Perhaps we are holy when we feel love and give love and this action stirs a spirit so deep within us, something so much more than mere instinct or appetite. Maybe all things in this world are holy: not only set aside holidays or special seasons, not only ancient texts or centuries old sacred spaces, not only prescribed religions or systems of thought.

I like what the character of Shug, a jazz age blues singer in Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer prize winning novel "The Color Purple" says of her search for the holy and God: "Here's the thing....I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for."

So may this be a holy week for all.  Holy: for folks of faith who embrace again the God story given to them by their parents and grandparents and forebears.  Holy: for all who seek wholeness and answers in the quest to figure out just what this life is all about, and just whom our Creator is calling us to be. 

On this one day. This one holy day.

   

Can We Please, PLEASE Just Be Kind to Each Other?!

"If you want to be a rebel, be kind."    --Pancho Ramos Stierle, activist and humanitarian

Sometimes its hard to tell apart the mature grown ups from the immature toddlers, in the current climate of divisiveness and division America lives within. 

So last week an "adult" named Leslie Gibson, a Republican candidate for a seat in the Maine State House, publicly mocked and disparaged two "kids", Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, survivors of the massacre at the high school in Parkland, Florida. Hogg and Gonzalez' very public activism in the days since the shootings--advocating for gun control, demanding that politicians make schools safe for children and youth--this was apparently too much for Gibson.  And so he took to Twitter and called Gonzalez a "skinhead lesbian" and Hogg a "moron" and a "baldfaced liar".

To their credit neither of the young people shot back with a Twitter tirade of their own, a tit for tat unkind tweet. Hogg did respond, in part, in an interview: "We need good people in office--people who are actually human and have an ounce of empathy."  And I might add, we also need people in public office who are, simply, kind. 

Kindness: the human virtue whereby we actually treat each other with decency. Agree to disagree yet always see the "other" as a fellow human being, a fellow citizen, a fellow child of God, worthy as much as ourselves of dignity, respect and care. In faith traditions we look to the Golden Rule for guidance on how to be kind: do unto others as we would ask that others would do unto us.

We all know such human kindness when we experience it.  When as a stranger we are welcomed in. When as a stumbler or mistake maker we are helped back up and gracefully forgiven.  When as a vulnerable person--poor or sick or young or powerless--someone watches out for us.  When kindness happens, it is such a gift, so beautiful.

We also know human cruelty when we experience it. When those with much give little or nothing to those with little. When lawmaker adults just cannot seem to understand the frightened and angry cries of children and youth they are called to protect. When to win at all costs--an election, a debate--trumps doing the right thing, the just thing, the honorable thing. When cruelty happens, it is such a tragedy, so ugly.

Ugly enough to want to publicly shame two teenagers, I suppose, two young adults who witnessed the murder of their friends and thus just want to change things for the better. And this is why Gibson was so nasty, so unkind?

Maybe I am naive or softhearted but I just don't get such hardness of heart, such bare knuckled mean-spiritedness.  And I'm also unsure of why our common civic life is so sharp and savage these days.  Politicians furiously fulminating in daily tweet storms that eviscerate and insult anyone whom they perceive as a threat to their power. Media filled with people who spend most of the time yelling at each other. Social media, with anonymity and speed, empowering us to be cruel in a split second, as thousands of folks join in with glee.

It doesn't have to be so.  The great thing about kindness is that to make it happen, to see its amazing, miraculous effect upon relationships, communities, a nation--all we have to do is....be kind. That's it. 

Offer kindness both to the folks we see eye to eye with and to the ones we disagree with too. If we are to ever find common ground for the common good we must begin with respect for our opponent.  Follow the teaching of our parents, our elders: if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything. More often than not it is wiser to just keep our mouths shut. To not send a text in anger. Not re-tweet an awful story or share a terrible news item on Facebook. Instead use technology to spread love, to lift up others, to share good news about people and the world we live in. If Gibson had followed this advice he'd still be running for office.  Or be kind where you are right now: in your family, at your workplace, in your faith community, in your town or city, in your neighborhood. We may not be able to stem the tide of unkindness in politics and popular culture but we can sow seeds of love on the ground, where we live. Kindness always begins with you, with me, with one person deciding to just be kind.   

So be a rebel.  Buck the trends.  Push back against the temptation to join in our culture wide scrum and instead make this one choice today. 

Be kind.

When a Tree Falls, Can It Teach Us Something About Life?

"If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees."  --Hal Borland

It is called the quercus alba, or the white oak tree.  

Quite common in New England, chances are good that there is at least one of these trees growing in your yard or neighborhood. It is known by its gray gnarled bark ands its oversized green leaves with rounded edges, almost shaped like human hands. The white oak's most distinctive trait is the elegant upward arch of trunk and branches that reach to the sky, almost as if it is lifting hands up in prayer to its Creator. 

At my home five white oaks, each more than 100 feet high, have stood sentry like in the front yard, shielding me from the world beyond my cozy abode. In summer the trees' green canopies give shade and a place to sit and read in my Adirondack chair.  In fall oversized brown leaves carpet the yard in a lush brown overlay. Come winter the trees are stark, bare, resting, as snow piles up. In sweet spring I know new life is on the way as green buds appear on branches, signaling earth has woken up again.

Trees are amazing life forms, about the most plentiful, ubiquitous species on the earth. One recent study by British zoologists estimates that earth contains some 3 trillion trees: that's 450 trees for every single man, woman and child alive. Especially in this part of the world, trees surround us. Trees hug the land, mark this place, provide natural boundaries and thoroughfares as we travel from here to there. Fly into New England and its breathtaking to see just how tree covered, how green and lush and overstocked even, we are, with trees.

And yet, when we lose a tree, especially one we've come to know and even trust in a way, it can be a jolt, dislocating. That's what I felt last week when, upon awakening, the morning after our latest n'oreaster, and looking out the window, I saw that sometime during the night one of my great white oaks had crashed to the earth. Covered in a thick blanket of snow, it lay horizontal across the yard and driveway, felled by the weight of heavy snow or wind or age or disease or just exhaustion, I suppose.

I know, its just a tree.  I know, that given how many trees knocked down power lines or came down on cars or houses in the past few weeks, many of us would be more than happy to be rid of lots more trees. 

Yet losing that one tree reminded me of all the great trees that have been a witness to my one life. The tree in my childhood backyard I scrambled up into as an energetic little boy. The tree I leaned back against on the lawn facing the Charles River in Boston, at graduate school, my sacred place to study. The trees that grace the garden at the church I serve, especially the delicate red Japanese maple that always keeps me company as I write and think and pray.

Trees are mystical, magical, and mysterious somehow, perhaps more so than any other non-human species on the earth. I think it is because they live so long: the oldest white oak ever recorded was six hundred years old. The oldest living tree ever is a spruce in Norway, that is 9,550 years old and still going strong.

Trees stay. Trees stand and remain while human generations come and generations go.  Trees remind us that we are a part of a much larger cycle of life and death and creation and extinction, of beginnings and endings, a God authored story that stretches out far beyond our little lifetimes or stretch of minds.

Trees have been. Trees are. Trees will be, long after we are gone.

The poet Joyce Kilmer was right. "I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree....a tree that looks at God all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray....poems are made by fools like me but only God can make a tree."

So thank you God, this day, for trees. 

Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? Unplugged and NOT Lovin' It!

"Where were you when the lights went out?"  --conversation starter after the blackout

The lights flicker.  Then dim.  Then suddenly the bulbs all go dark and the appliances cease humming and the screens blink out and the house is silent, all the noise of electrified modern life now stilled.

Blackout. 

This past Saturday night in the small town I call home it was a chilled March evening, oh so windy, made all that much colder by the fact many of my neighbors were without power after the wicked northeaster that hit New England like a bomb. They and more than 300,000 other Bay Staters, more than a million folks on the east coast, were powerless, lacking electricity, the invisible current upon which modern life depends. And when the juice doesn't flow: no lights. No cable TV or internet service either.  For many no landline telephone. Or water, if you need a pump for H2O, which I do.  Or heat,  if you don't have a fireplace or wood stove or generator.

For hours, or a day, or even days, we were in the dark, without the basics of modern civilization that we all so easily take for granted. It really does seems like magic: to flick a light switch and a room is instantly illuminated. Open a tap and water runs freely. Click a remote or mouse and connect to everything, anything. Pick up the phone and the buzz of dial tone assures.  Open the fridge and the food is ice cold. Turn a thermostat. "Tic, tic, tic", the heat rising to warm winter worn bodies.

Until none of that happens. Until the lights go out.

I'm old enough to have fuzzy memories of the big blackout of 1965. On that Tuesday evening, the 9th of November, thirty million people in the northeast United States and Canada, lost power due to a glitch in the electrical grid.  For 13 hours one of the most densely populated parts of mother Earth was pitch black. Unlike a 1977 blackout in New York city, when wide spread looting and crime broke out, in 1965 the lowest level of crime ever recorded, marked that full moon illuminated night. There was even a spike in births nine months later. You've got find something to do when the power goes out!

It is humbling, scary even, to consider just how fully and completely dependent we are in 2018, upon the power that powers almost every device and convenience that marks life for us moderns.  I didn't lose electricity but as I write this, I am still without phone, internet or TV service. I'd like to report I'm reveling in this technology Sabbath, quietly sitting cardigan clad in a comfy chair, reading an actual book, scribbling away with pencil on a yellow legal pad. 

To be thus released was novel at first.  No annoying sales calls.  No wasting so much time getting sucked into the black hole of web surfing. No flicking through the channels on the TV to pass the time. Save for the one week a year when I travel to a corner of New England that still lacks a strong cell signal, I've been plugged in for more than twenty years.  So unplugged is kind of fun. 

Until it is not.   

After 48 hours I confess I'm "jonesing" for my screens.  Suffering a bit of withdrawal. No Netflix or surfing the news or Facebook. No television shows to soothe my distracted brain after a long day at work. No emails to answer or ringing house phone to pick up.  Now I wait for the technician from Verizon to arrive, pray and hope that this latter day magician will work her mystical spells, re-animate my comatose technology. 

A guy can dream, right? 

But until then I'm off the grid, blank, back to analog. I'm newly aware of how grateful I am for all my technology, for the miraculous and even magical ways our devices connect us, one to another, and out into the world. How much we can actually do with these machines!  Yet God willing, if I am wise, perhaps I can learn to have a bit more technology balance when I'm back on.  To maybe not be so ruled by my screens. Sound familiar? So too I am just thankful for electricity, for the wire that snakes into my home, that works without fail 99.9 percent of the time. Thank you Thomas Edison.  Amazing.  Or maybe God is just trying to teach me that I need to depend more on a real higher power and less on human created forms of power and technology.  And so given I still have no technology to interrupt my thinking, I'm wondering....

Where were you when the lights went out?  

    

Spring Is Coming and HOPE Is What Gets Us There

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blessed..."

--Alexander Pope, 1733

Got hope?

I got a little shot of hope yesterday, on a grey and rainy and "chilled to the bone" kind of late February afternoon, when I turned on my car radio, for then, at exactly 2:48 p.m., I heard the distant calls of a baseball game from Florida, the Boston Red versus the Baltimore Orioles. Coming to me all the way from the warm climes of the Sunshine State, where it was 86 degrees and sunny, that little shot of spring gave me hope.  Reminded me that hope springs eternal. Spring is coming!

Hope: the spiritual quality of looking for the good in the midst of the bad, of imagining and praying and working for the positive that lies just ahead, even if the current times are a challenge, hard, bleak even. Like millions of Americans I'm still processing the recent deaths in Parkland, Florida, that loss of life, so sad, so terrible.  Still wading through the cultural response to it as well: politicians who pretend to "listen" but still do nothing. Adults who seem to care more about their guns than our children, who are unable to lay aside conviction for compromise and the common good. Yet still I have hope as I watch the brave and articulate young people who survived, who have spoken out and stood up, spoken truth to power with such grace and such fire. Who demand change, NOW. Amazing. Such courage.

Hope: a saint in my tradition defines it as having faith in things not seen.  Meaning hope is not really hope unless we dare to believe in the better and the best yet to come, yet to be. In humanity. In the world. In ourselves.  It may be cold today but by the witness of tiny buds on the trees and little green shoots pushing up through the earth, we know spring is going to come.  ABSOLUTELY!  So where is spring coming into your one life, your world? Where is your hope? In children or youth who inspire you by their energy?  In folks around you who live lives of love and care but never make the news?  In faith that sustains you, gives you strength to carry on, especially on the chilly days and nights of winter?  Hope always takes commitment. To look for it.  Anticipate it.  Trust it. Embody it.

Hope looks beyond the incessant downbeat chatter of the media and the news.  If the world were actually as bad as journalists and politicians tell us to believe, need us to believe, we'd all be in deep doo-doo. Yes, life in 2018 is a challenge but so too it is full of so much hope.  Did you know that according to the United Nations, the world's poverty rate has been cut in half --HALF--in just the last twenty years? That according to F.B.I. statistics, the violent crime rate in the United States fell by 48 percent from 1996 to 2016? That the unemployment rate in the U.S. is at its lowest point in 17 years; and the current economic recovery and expansion will soon become the second longest in the United States since 1854? But fear mongering politicians don't get votes and cynical media outlets don't get readers and viewers by heralding such hopeful news.

Yes, it's February and it will probably snow and be messy at least one more time. Yes, spring is still many days away. Yes, we can all too easily look out at the world and find something to complain about, to be hopeless about.  But so too, we can look at the world and find plenty to be hopeful about too; to thank our God for; to see as a gift and a blessing.  We can listen for the song birds that are already singing.  Maybe they know something that we don't: that hope always spring eternal. 

Got hope? Get hope.

        

         

                 

What If It Was My Child at Parkland? Dear God, What If...?

Empathy (noun,) from the German einfühlung, meaning "feeling into"; to enter into the feelings of another person; from the Greek pathos, "to suffer"; to enter into the suffering of another person     --etymonline.com et al

What if?

What if it was my child, my son or my daughter, who was killed February 14th, Ash Wednesday, in the hallways of a suburban Florida high school? What if I was the one who got the phone call from a first responder or school counselor, giving me that awful, world shattering news, that broke my heart wide open? What if one of the 17 beautiful and innocent kids lost was my little brother or my big sister, my teammate or the friend I went to church youth group with, the kind neighborhood kid who lives next door, who I'd never, ever see again? 

What if?

What if the precious lives lost in America's latest mass shooting were not the stuff of sensational newspaper headlines we read and then turn away from, or breathless TV reports we watch and then quickly turn off, but are instead somehow real to us? Closer. So close that these deaths move us to in fact change our hearts and change our minds so that we actually do something, do anything, work, to make sure a similar cataclysm and tragedy does not happen again.  Ever.

What if?

What if the women and men in Congress and the President, actually showed moral imagination and empathy, that rare human ability and gift to enter into the suffering and the pain of a fellow human being?  What if, after this latest mass shooting, which came after the last mass shooting and the one before that and the one before that, instead of acting with spiritually vapid "thoughts and prayers" these pols did more?  What if they decided it was more important to protect school children than get re-elected? What if they actually reached across the aisle and worked for compromise on gun control, background checks, sharing mental health information, and making sure the mentally ill cannot, will not ever have access to firearms?

What if?

What if the majority of law abiding everyday gun owners tore up their National Rifle Association(NRA) membership cards and demanded a sane and merciful balance between legitimate second amendment rights and simple public safety, the notion that our kids must be free to go to school without fear?

What if?

What if we imagined the very heart of God breaking apart, shattering into a million pieces, in response to the death of the innocent, these children of God, who were made by God to live long and substantial lives? The young people of Parkland were supposed to grow up and fall in love and have children of their own and realize their dreams but now they will never know this.  What if God offers comfort in the midst of our national grief, but anger too? What if God demands that we the living actually do something, and not just wait until the next tragic news breaks again?  What if we as a nation are somehow collectively culpable until together, we finally, find a way out of this national nightmare?

What if?  

What if that was my child? I can't imagine that, but perhaps, I should. I must. I will.

 

   

   

         

The Lesson of the Olympics? Find Your Life's Joy. Then DO IT!!

"Even now I want to keep my amateur spirit, to spend my time, to be in the sport with all my heart."            
--Sergei Bubka, Olympic pole vaulter, former Soviet Union.

My friend Jimmy raises tiny baby sting ray sharks in thousand gallon salt water tanks in his suburban basement. My colleague Barb spends her free time on the frigid slopes of a Vermont cross country skiing course, shushing away in a silent winter wonderland.  My brother Ed straps on a backpack and hikes tens of miles up and down the hills and crags of the northern Appalachian trail.  My fellow choir member Jackie practices her solo in the car, on the way to work, while other commuters look on with astonishment.

And me? I sit down in a chair, stare at a blank computer screen or an empty legal pad, and try and create from thoughts and ideas and words, a coherent and, hopefully enlightening, piece of writing.

And we're all just amateurs. 

Folks who embrace individual passions and pursuits, not for pay or prestige, not because we have to, but because we want to, because we have found some "thing" that we absolutely love doing and thus we do it, with joy, with enthusiasm, and most important, with love.  "For the love of": this is what amateur means--to undertake a sport or a hobby, an art or a craft, a calling or an avocation, because when we do this ONE THING, it makes us happy.  It thrills our hearts.

Which is the main reason I'm watching the Winter Olympics, as 2,925 athletes from 92 countries compete against each other in the chilly mountains of South Korea.  Yes, its awe inspiring to see ski jumpers hurl through the air at sixty miles per hour and figure skaters jump with such grace, to witness the geeky precision of curling and the herculean stamina needed for cross country ski racing. 

But what I really enjoy is seeing how much these athletes so love to do what they are doing. How wide their smiles are; how sincere and authentic their efforts are; how committed and even brave they are, as they do their best, give their all, and not because of a paycheck, not most of the time.  A myth of the modern Olympic movement is that these once "amateur athletes" are now paid for their "work".  The truth is, that save for a few high profile athletes who secure multi-million dollar endorsements, the overwhelming number of Olympians have minimal financial support for their efforts.  Most make great life sacrifices to pursue their dreams of gold.  And most will go home without a medal, but with one truth to warm their hearts, to hold on to as a sparkling memory.

They are doing what they love.  They are still amateurs.  They have discovered what makes their souls soar and their hearts sing, this gift that God gave them, for the love of.

Every human being needs to be an amateur, to discover and then embrace some "thing" that captures the heart and thrills the spirit.  Connects us somehow to the deepest part of the soul. I think of folks who spend hours in the garden and find their place in the world among the flowers and the vegetables and even the weeds. An amateur carpenter who takes a piece of wood and then lovingly shapes it into a family heirloom, a gift someone will cherish forever.  The weekend artist who feels so free when she parks herself with an easel next to the waterfall and then just paints. A cyclist who loses himself in the thousands of circles that he turns on the pedals, with the pumping of his legs, as the world in beauty glides by.

It is the rare person whose full time work is also their full time bliss.  No, most of us find our liberation, our happiness, in some "thing" else.  Volunteering.  Creating.  Sporting.  Playing.  So here's to the amateur in all of us.  What do you really love to do? 

Find that out, discover what God made you to do, to love, and then you will win the gold medal!  Of that I am sure.