Reflection for March 25, 2012

Reflections on Jenny

I especially remember two things about Jenny. At the literature sessions I conduct in the Spring Lake retirement community’s music room she would always placidly glide into her front row seat five minutes after the hour. Jenny did not seem to live in clock time but in what the mystics might call real time. Somewhere in the course of her life she had acquired the pace of Paradise itself - which is perhaps what made her seem so ethereal to me – airy - afloat as it were - not as much subject to the grip of gravity as we are.

Nor was it only her late arrival that impressed me but the blithe way she paraded in! For Jenny was an individual parade - a pageant of simply one person - as she passed delicately through our lives always wearing a beribboned straw hat and wreathed with diaphanous shawls; clad in pastels of lavender or combinations of pink and purple, iris or rose right down to her ankles - as colorful as a rainbow - more like a child or an angel than an elderly widow. And all of this seemed quite deliberate to me, as if she were determined to live in one season only: Spring - determined to allow Death to have no dominion. As a nurse and spouse of a doctor, she knew human frailty well - had seen the shadow of Death fall upon young and old. And I think somewhere along the way she decided to confront that shadow with lavender and thereby hold it at bay while she gracefully went about her business exploring the Garden of Eden all around her. But Jenny’s pastel spirit was housed within a fragile body. One day my phone rang and a voice said, “Jenny is dying.” It was early evening when I arrived at Warrack Hospital’s intensive care unit. How stunned I was to see her so colorless, her breathing short, her eyes so vacant. And I thought, “So this is what happens to Jenny and someday to me. And what’s the use of all the lavender and lace we contrive to forestall Death.”

But what I didn’t reckon upon as I left her bedside (just moments before her death) was Nature’s imminent intention to strike up the band! To spoil Death’s intent to abort Jenny’s parade! For as I drove down Highway 12 toward Sonoma at sunset a glare in my rear view mirror caught my eye. There and in my side view mirror the whole sky had become an incandescent orange across which there stretched clouds ranging from pink to rose and , yes, to lavender. Then, looking to my left and right and directly through my windshield there were enough wisps of cloud and high mist reflecting the setting sun to make the whole valley before me - in the direction of oncoming night - glow with deeper shades of purple and violet. I mean, the whole sky in every direction was full of the colors of Jenny, as if, even as her soul took flight from that frail body, she had left her whole wardrobe behind, shawls, scarves, ribbons, skirts - scattered here, there and everywhere across the heavens in a final gesture of departure. Or could it be that God himself was laying out by way of all those splendid clouds a whole new, celestial wardrobe for Jenny composed of all the colors of the rainbow out of deference to Jenny’s taste.

I experienced my faith revived. The whole panorama seemed to be a message from Jenny herself saying, “Don’t let appearances get you down. See how gloriously amid my pastels I have survived the ravages of Death.” And I could imagine her already somewhere on the other side of that setting sun, arrived at last in that realm of real time (beyond clock time) of which she already seemed so familiar. Jenny’s son later told me that she died at 8:19 PM, precisely the moment when I beheld that sunset. Of course, then I began to think, if Jenny died at 8:19, could it be that God expected her at 8:14? It would be quite consistent with Jenny’s blithe tendency to arrive anywhere - five minutes late.

Reflection for March 18, 2012

“Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: The God of heaven has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem . . .” First Reading Cycle B

Someone has said we walk through life backwards. We see the past and the immediate present – to some degree – but tomorrow is a different matter. We’re never sure about tomorrow until it happens. Who could guess on September 10^th, 2001 that the Twin Towers would collapse into a pile of rubble on September 11^th? How could I have known in 1950 as I brooded over my studies that a confrere in Rome would have a breakdown which would lead to my taking his place and travelling down a path of studies that would change my life far beyond my imagining?

Back in the 500’s BC a Jewish poet composed Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion / . . . our captors asked us for songs . . . “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” / How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, . . . / May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you. This fellow’s face is toward the past, the homeland he knew, the Temple of Solomon, David and the Hebrew heroes of biblical history. He is confined among the Jewish exiles in Babylon (modern Iraq). Back in 587 BC the Babylonian armies crushed the kingdom of Judah, put an end to the dynasty of David, reduced Solomon’s Temple to rubble, deported the psalmist and his compatriots to a ghetto far away. His face was fixated on the past; his heart was broken.

But then came news reports out of tomorrow – rumors that a new Persian king named Cyrus was swallowing up one kingdom after another right up to the frontiers of Greece – and about to swoop upon the psalmist’s Babylonian captors. An unexpected tomorrow was becoming today. And what’s more, this Cyrus was not a monarch like the ruthless oppressors of the past (the Assyrians and Babylonians with names that were enough to scare anybody: Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon, Nabopolassar). No, this Cyrus believed in the diversity of peoples. He favored returning the prisoners of former empires to their homelands where they might rebuild their temples, revive their worship, cultivate their land, all at Persian expense! They would not be allowed to become political powers again; but they could have Persian governors of their own ethnicity!

Who could have predicted this – a savior who was not a Hebrew, unfamiliar with Hebrew history, a worshipper of the sun god Marduk – a total alien, the kind condemned by the prophets - used by God to propel the Jewish people into an expanding tomorrow? Judah (as a political entity) would be transformed into Judaism – the former state would become a Church – guided by priests instead of corrupt royal families, focused on a new Temple and on a fresh collection of old religious traditions known as the Bible.

No longer would political boundaries be a problem. Jews could go anywhere in the world (which they did) bearing their Book, making pilgrimages to Jerusalem’s new Temple, held together not by politics but by a creed, their contemplation of true God and true behavior. Initially their defeat by the Babylonians, the destruction of their homeland and almost of their faith was something for this psalmist to lament – but now as he turned away from yesterday, surprised by how God was rearranging his tomorrow, he had reason to step into that future full of expectancy.

God works in strange ways – and as far as we are concerned in even stranger ways when the next stage of human liberation will be achieved by a nobody out of Nazareth who turns out to be the Grace of God made flesh.

Reflection for March 11, 2012

Campfire Girl

Among Eudora Welty’s stories is one called “A Visit of Charity”. It’s about a fourteen year old Campfire Girl named Marian who, dressed in a red coat and white cap and bearing a potted plant, pays a visit to an Old Ladies Home upon a wintry day. The place itself, made of whitewashed brick and reflecting “the winter sunlight like a block of ice” must have added to the chill. The nurse who opened the door was also dressed in white. “I’m a Campfire Girl,” said Marian. “I have to pay a visit to some old lady.” The visit was worth three points (toward a merit badge?), which will prove to have been the only motivation Marian had to visit the place. The nurse asked if she were acquainted with any specific residents. “With any old ladies?” stammered Marian. “No – that is, any of them will do.” The nurse took her down a corridor to one of the rooms and knocked, saying, “There are two in each room.” “Two what?” asked Marian as the nurse pushed her through the open door. Suddenly Marian was alone with two old women.

One was feeble but up and about. She wore “a terrible, square smile . . . on her bony face.” With a claw like hand she plucked off Marian’s hat. “Did you come to be our little girl for awhile?” she asked - and then snatched the potted plant. The other woman was lying flat in bed, irritable. “Stinkweeds,” she said, referring to the plant. And so it went, with the one being cloyingly sweet and the other increasingly cranky over every remark her roommate made. The tension in the room made Marian go rigid.

The irritable bed-ridden women summoned Marian to her side. “Come here!” Marian trembled. (The other woman explained: “She’s mad because it’s her birthday.”) “It’s not my birthday,” screamed the woman in bed, “ . . . no one knows when that is but myself and will you please be quiet . . . or I’ll go straight out of my mind!” Marian “wondered about her . . . for a moment as though there was nothing else in the world to wonder about.” It was the first time she had ever experienced anything like this. Then the old face in the pillow slowly collapsed. “Soft whimpers came out of the small open mouth . . . she sounded like -- a little lamb.” Surprised and embarrassed, Marian turned to the other woman and said, “She’s crying!”

And with that she jumped up, grabbed her cap and, eluding the other lady’s grasp, ran from the room, down the hall, past the nurse and out into the cold air. “Wait for me!” she shouted to a passing bus and jumped on; then sat down and took a bite of an apple she had hidden for herself.

Even back in the early Church some Christians preferred the company of pleasant folk over the apparently shabby ones. I myself once visited a nursing home almost every day where I had an aged relative and I must admit, I sometimes bridled at the thought because of the condition of so many of its residents – and the forecast it gave me of my own inevitable physical and mental deterioration. The New Testament Letter of James tells us to get over that; that a treasure awaits us at the margins of polite society – a treasure Marian almost acquired when she said, “She’s crying.”

And what is that treasure? An awakening of our closed minds, of our muted senses and consequently of our hearts, of a sense of solidarity with people in pain, indeed an awareness of our own pain, the loss of that numbness we characterize as equilibrium. In other words, an awakening of our humanity! Marian didn’t stay long enough to fully experience such an awakening but hopefully one day she’ll return to that Old Ladies Home with something more than a merit badge in mind.

Reflection for March 4, 2012

Despite the Transfiguration they saw no one but Jesus.

Today’s Gospel about the Transfiguration of Jesus offers us an insight into what happens when faith is awakened and later subsides, when what is a profound understanding of our Catholic tradition becomes shallow due to routine, familiarity. Peter, James and John are lifted to a vision of Jesus in all his significance – resplendent with meaning, set against the rich background of the Old Testament in the persons of Moses and Elijah. And then, when they come off that high, what happens? The radiance is gone; they no longer see anyone but Jesus – un-transfigured, the too, too familiar figure of routine piety, a plaster saint.

Beware of spiritual, mental shallowness. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby, which tells of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age - the Lost Generation of the 1920’s - shallow characters abound. There’s the description of parties at Gatsby’s mansion that last from 9 in the morning to well past midnight, hundreds of guests coming and going – who don’t even know Gatsby. It’s a generation adrift from old traditions, excited about easy money, booze, good times – shallow. People become ecstatic over someone they have never met before and then pass on to some other novel experience. Phony.

In one scene Nick, the narrator of the story, walks into the mansion’s grand library, there to find a solitary fellow, a bit loaded, excited about something. Nick inquires and the fellow says, “What do you think?” “About what?” replies Nick. “About that . . . They’re real.” Nick again replies, “The books?” The fellow nods. “Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and – Here! Lemme show you . . . See! It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter . . . What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But . . . What do you expect?”

I once knew a man who worked in a bookstore in Manhattan who told me wealthy people would come in and ask for four yards of red, six yards of blue . . . meaning yards of books of the same color for decorative reasons. Not to be read but only seen as symbols not sources of wisdom. How many Christians have a similar decorative interest in the Gospels and the deeper regions of our Christian tradition – pages uncut?

Shallowness. A dangerous thing. There is another character in The Great Gatsby named Tom Buchanan – a wealthy jock, star football player in his Harvard days, has a string of polo ponies, bored stiff with his wife and with his girlfriends, nostalgic for his playing days. Dangerous. An empty mind, starved for intellectual exercise, is susceptible to the first book one reads – and in Tom’s case it’s a diatribe about “The Rise of the Colored Empires”. Now at last he has something to think about – a threat to civilization, to his wealth, to occupy his vacant mind. A single issue takes over – he is obsessed with this one book – and moreover now thinks he is smart, possessed of an “intellectual” vantage point from which to judge society as a whole.

Lent is a season when the Church encourages us to deepen our understanding of Scripture, of the Eucharist, of the profound meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, of the relevance of all this to the deepening of our understanding of who and where and why we are in this world. Don’t let the opportunity pass without cutting a few pages of the sacred heritage you hold in your hands.