God Grant Us the Wisdom to Learn How to Fall

Fall (verb) 1. to drop or descend under the force of gravity; (noun) the season of the year that comes after summer and before winter        --Random House Dictionary

First is the realization that you are no longer fully upright and standing, that gravity has somehow conspired to hurtle you bodily towards the ground.  Then there’s the surprise and split-second preparation. Now that I am tumbling downward, what can I do?  Then the response: a hand thrust out, a shoulder prepared for impact on the earth. Then the thud as our body makes impact.  All when we fall.  Go from upright to down low.  From vertical to horizontal.  One moment looking up at the sky the next looking down at the floor.

I go through periods where I seem to fall more often.  Like the summer I spent getting used to using pedal clips on my bicycle. Clipped bike shoes are great because they tightly secure your feet to the pedals and make for a better stroke.  Clipped bike shoes are awful because when you stop, if you forget to quickly disconnect feet from pedals, you fall right over, bike and biker in a big heap on the ground.  In those first months I got used to using clips, I raised falling to an art form.  I fell over on a city sidewalk in the midst of traffic, spilled and splayed on a gravelly road shoulder and rolled over on a rural grassy knoll.  Falling is never fun of course.  It hurts both the dignity and the body. 

But to fall is the most human of actions.  Toddlers fall as they learn to walk.  Teens tumble when they rush too fast.  Adults do it when they forget they aren’t quite as lithe as they used to be. Seniors dread a fall: it can mean an injury and the end of independence.  In the end we humans all fall.  The verb “fall” first appears in language around the 1650s and means to fail, decay or die.  At about the same time the noun “fall”, connoting the season between summer and winter appears, shortened from “fall as a leaf”.

We all fall.

The question isn’t “if” but “when” and maybe even more important, just how to fall? Fall the right way and we avoid injury. Fall the wrong way and “ouch!”  That’s true for our bodies and for this life too, in our daily journey. How will we fall?  A relationship ends and we fall.  A heart is broken and we fall.  Our bodies get older and we realize the risk of falling.

That’s the physical and spiritual struggle a man named Philip Simmons faced, when as a 34-year-old, he was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, an affliction marked by deteriorating muscle function. Simmons learned early on that ALS inevitably leads to many falls but he also discovered if he fell the right way he didn’t get hurt.  For Simmons this act of falling was about so much more than a little tumble: to fall was actually a powerful metaphor for all the struggles we humans go through as we bang up against our mortality, our frailty as human beings, the finitude of life.

As he wrote in his beautiful 2000 memoir, “Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life”, “We have all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls. The fall from youthful ideals, the waning of physical strength, the failure of a cherished hope, the loss of our near and dear, the fall into injury or sickness, and late or soon, the fall to our certain ends. We have no choice but to fall, and little say as to the time or the means….We are all, now, this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water’s surface shimmer. And so, let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death, let us also fall toward life.”

Fall as a season is a great time to reflect upon this question of whether or not to fall with courage and acceptance or to fall with fear and struggle. All around us nature is now falling: from abundance to scarcity, from green to brown, and from full to fallow fields.  Animals hunker down and prep for chilly times. Temperatures plummet. Mornings turn chilly. Earth falls.  The gift of faith reminds us that although we are all made by God as “good” we are also made imperfect and so falls are just a given. That’s the rhythm of life.

Fall is right here and right now. This week we are smack dab in the middle of the third season. Light falls away as we spend more time in the dark and less time in the sun. But fall is always here too, 365 days a year: fall as the bittersweet and profound truth that we all fall.  The challenge then is to figure out just how we will fall.

So, I know for me, as the last birthday of my fifth decade approaches in less than a month, as I fall away from mid-life and fall towards my third act…I wonder. Can I accept that fall?  Maybe even embrace it with joy, anticipation, as a gift? What are you falling into or towards right now?  Another birthday like me?  The end of a relationship?  A body slowly changing? Kids leaving the house? Or maybe a big fall like a new baby in the family or retirement?  

We all fall and it is fall.

May we remember that the One who made us is in the fall too, not so much to catch us, as to give us the grace to fall and fall very well. See you on the way down.

Happy autumn.

Our Just So Curated Online Life: Can We Instead Just Get Real?

“The lives we share [on social media] are, in many ways, not our lives at all. They’re curated content.”  --Katy Huie Harrison, blogger

I must tell the truth. 

The life that I live on Facebook, the life I show to all the world when I post, the life I share with the 1,398 “friends” who follow me...well: it’s not really my real life. My whole life. My complete life.   

My unedited life.

Yes, my posts and photos show what I do. Portray how I live on some of my days in this life. These highlights highlight me: the 90-mile charity bike ride I finished this summer, the beautiful family wedding I did in a Boston park on a gorgeous September afternoon, the cute little baby I held in my arms just before I dipped her into the waters of baptism.

But I forgot to post some other pictures. Sorry. Like the photo of me lying flat on the ground next to my bike, twenty miles from the finish of that epic ride. At that point, after a long and hot and frustrating day, my neck and shoulders were killing me and so the only way I could carry on was to rest this 58-year old body, beaten up after all those pedal strokes.

I forgot to post the shot of me at the wedding too, of the socks I wore that were mismatched, one black and one blue; of the mustard stain on my tie I think I hid well from the rest of the guests. No shot either, of me running to the car parked on the Jamaica Way, to retrieve my sermon, just minutes before the service began.

I forgot to post the photos of just after I baptized that squirmy little baby too; how she howled when the cold water hit her forehead and then she passed gas in that cute way only a kid can and then when I handed her back to her parents, she spit up all over her Mom, and didn’t stop crying until the close of worship.

But, of course, I did not post those images. Who wants to hear about or even worse, see my un-curated life? My messy life. My ragged and always just on the edge of falling apart life?

That’s the odd thing about social media: Facebook and Instagram and the like.  At their best these apps allow us to connect with friends and family, to share information, to find long lost relationships, to post about our politics, to declare what matters most to us, to connect human lives in ways never before possible.  These platforms work: that’s why 2.1 billion folks each day use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. 

Yet, at their worst, these cyber-places can give a warped view of human life, and for the more vulnerable among us, can tempt them to conclude that their lives don’t matter. That they are in fact “less than”….when compared to the Mom who looks svelte and trim even though she just gave birth two days ago. When you read a post about a party and find out that you were the one not invited. When you scroll through all of the perfect and pristine pictures and updates about other people and all the ways they are “just so” and you worry your life doesn’t quite stack up.  There’s even a phrase for this phenomenon: FOMO—fear of missing out. Fear of not measuring up. Fear of always falling short.

If you’ve got a middle school youth or high schooler in your house, if you are in college, if you, like me, sometimes scroll through Facebook and I wistfully wish that I was like all these other happy folks--you know of what I speak. 

It doesn’t just happen on the internet. Such life curation and FOMO happen in real life too.  And so, we see a family all dressed up at church and conclude that clearly, they have it much better together than your family, who bickered over breakfast on the way to the car and worship. You see a beautiful house on your street, with a shiny new car parked in the driveway, and decide they must have a much better life than your own, and they are clearly more successful too, right?  Youth see a peer with a toned and taut body and so they are tempted to eat too much and binge and purge because when they look in the mirror, they hate what they see.

Status update: all humans live flawed and stumbling lives. Sometimes we soar and sometimes we stumble and always, all those externals have absolutely nothing to do with our essential worth as children of God. All humans are made beautiful and broken. All of your neighbors are just as happy as you sometimes and just as miserable as you sometimes too.  So that cute baby posted by your friend on their page? She can be a tiny tyrant too. That furry little kitten? He pooped on the bed when no one was looking.  And the absolutely scrumptious home cooked meal practically jumping off the page? That only came to be on the fifth try at the recipe.

There’s real life. There’s curated life. May God help us to remember the difference between the two, for when it comes to our innate goodness, it’s already there. No update needed.

Now where did I leave that other sock?

           

      

            

Damn This Traffic Jam. Welcome to Boston.

“Damn this traffic jam,

How I hate to be late,

It hurts my motor to go so slow.

Damn this traffic jam,

Time I get home my supper'll be cold, Damn this traffic jam.”

--James Taylor, 1977

So, what’s everybody complaining about in the Boston area these days?

What’s the common lament, the most spoken grievance, the ubiquitous topic of critical conversation around the water cooler, at the dinner table, over a beer at the sports bar, or in between the local gossip at church coffee hour? We Massachusetts’ folks, especially those of us who live within the Route 495 belt; like our Puritan forebears we can be a dour lot. We can always find something, anything to kvetch about, if only given time and opportunity. 

We can be cranky Yankees with the best of our New England neighbors, right up there with crusty Maineiacs, and vexatious Vermonters, and negative New Hampshirites, and crabby Connneticutters, and irascible Rhode Islanders. The weather? Too hot, too cold, too wet, too whatever, though these past few weeks have been an exception to our weather whining.  Sports? What’s with the Sawx?! They were wicked bad this year.  And the Yankees? They will always be the Evil Empire.

But here’s the best trigger to get a fellow Bay Stater going, a sure-fire way to watch veins pop out and faces redden and blood pressures rise and the spittle fly. Ask them about the traffic. The %$#@ TRAFFIC!!!! The God-awful traffic. The epic traffic. The endless traffic.

The miles long back-ups on the Mass Pike. The bottleneck on the way to the Cape even though you left for your weekend away at 2 a.m. Wednesday morning.  The gridlock in downtown Boston, passing just four blocks in forty minutes. The jam on 128 at 1 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. WHERE ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE GOING!!!!! Heck, even a long line of cars backed up as they wait to get a parking space in the mall on a Thursday morning. DOESN’T ANYONE WORK ANYMORE!?

And the traffic, the increasingly worse traffic, the traffic that now seems to be around not just in rush hour but in all hours, in any hours: it’s not just our imagination that it is so, so horrible and unrelenting. Traffic in Boston is the absolute worst it has ever been.  According to a 2018 nationwide traffic report and scorecard, created by INRIX, the world’s foremost traffic research company, the greater Boston area now ranks number one in the United States for gridlock.

We’re number 1!!

If you drive to work or drive to a game or drive to your relative’s or drive to the doctor’s office chances are better than average that you will sit in a long line of cars.  Over the course of a year, the average driver in these parts loses 164 hours sitting in traffic.  That’s about ten full waking days of having your fanny planted in the car seat while folks all around lean on their horns and chain smoke angrily and fiddle with the radio and check their phones and gulp their extra-large DD’s coffee while not moving one inch on the pavement. For vehicular verities, we outrank, in descending order, Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles, for the worst traffic in the nation.

Thank goodness we can leave our cars home and just take the most modern and efficient subways and commuter rail trains in the country, huh? HA, HA, HA! I rode on a Red Line car the other day and realized, by the ancient look of it, that it might have actually been in service when the line first began operation in 1968. I probably rode that very same car as a seven-year old with my Mom, on my way to Jordan Marsh for school shopping, then on to Brigham’s for an ice cream cone. The “T” is, truth be told, often terrible: in its service, in its dependability, in its cleanliness, in its propensity to transport one long suffering downtown employee to her workplace, and just in time for lunch.           

We can complain and even laugh about the traffic and the “T” and the trains but this is serious stuff.  Traffic is making me and many other lifelong lovers of the Boston area, this beautiful place we all call home, ask some hard questions. Is the increasing hassle of living here finally worth it? How much longer can we put up with 24/7 traffic, unchecked development, sky high housing prices, and the neglect of our government leaders to actually do anything, something, to address these issues? Will our beloved Boston become just another northeastern, overpriced, congested, economically out of reach, cramped and crowded city?

Governor Baker? Senate President Karen Spilka? House Speaker DeLeo? Mayor Walsh? Are you there? Or maybe just stuck in traffic like the rest of us?  We’ve reached a tipping point: that’s no joke.

Perhaps Massachusetts’ own singer songwriter James Taylor, sums it up best: “Now when I die, I don't want no coffin, I thought about it, All too often. Just strap me in, Behind the wheel, and bury me with, My automobile.”  

Damn this traffic jam.