My Beautiful Reward *

It is Good Friday.

Today is one of the two days that together with Easter are the nexus of the Christian church calendar and belief structure. On a day somewhere in history according to church doctrine a being both man and God was killed in a barbaric manner. The death was a real death according to the precepts of faith of an individual pure in heart, spirit, and soul, well pure in everyway. The act of this death of described as that of a “lamb willingly led to the slaughter” purports to have borne away the burden of all our sins, our failings, our misdeeds and those things we wish would never be examined in the light. We, as I look about this world, need to have our sins borne away. Our hands and hearts are stained with dark dark things.

In my little town I was raised a Baptist. At age 13 or so I was washed in the sanctified and holy waters by an act of full immersion by Rev. Martin. I professed the articles of faith of this sect. On a number of occasions as the years rolled on I responded to altar calls because there was a deep shade and obscurity of truth I felt within me, call these acts pleas for balm for a troubled soul. On those nights when Billy Graham preached on TV I watched voluntarily as he talked about the clash between sin and goodness and the need for spiritual cleansing. Somehow those words spoke in a stentorian tone touched me.

But it didn’t stop me. In those dark and little rooms beneath the sanctuary of that country church I do believe I may have copped a feel or two during youth group activities. And as I have said before I hope God has forgiven me for blowing that doobie with my cousin in the bathroom beneath the sanctuary. Oh how we inhaled deeply during the start of the Sunday school weekly assembly. I will forever remember the pot smoke that was streaked with the light from the stained glass windows as we got upstairs for the end of the assembly. I will also remember the distinct feeling 150 eyes were staring at me. You would have thought they would have vented that room to the outside of the building.

But I digress. I do believe there is good. I do believe there is evil. I do believe good must be brought to the point of supremacy over evil. Are the teachings of the Christian church completely correct on all points? Can we simply listen to a preacher and find our way to God? Well, no. How could a person who is as fallible a mortal as we are, lead us into holiness? We humans err in all our efforts of trying to define and refine the meaning of the divine. But we must try the darkness cannot be allowed to prevail. As Paul said in Philippians 2:12 we can’t give up for we must“…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,”

I do believe we as a species need absolution. I do believe there is a transcendent beauty in the depiction of the Easter resurrection and the promise of absolution it offers. If you find your way to holiness through this path, that is wonderful. If your route is different I do not judge you or condemn you. My only hope is that you seek holiness, that you seek redemption, and that you seek the truth. I am still looking and I doubt I will ever stop.

Bright Distractions

As I face this day my hope is that I remain diligent in the conduct of my actions, calm in my temperament and judicious in my manner. There is a Psalm that says as regards the righteous, “They will have no fear of bad news; their hearts are steadfast, trusting in the Lord.” As most know I am conflicted over matters of faith but I do struggle to be moral and virtuous. I do fight (at least internally) to do the “right” thing.

A friend provided me a book called “Jesus Calling” sometime ago when I was facing loss. I pick it up from time to time on a relatively regular basis. The volume with its daily meditations sits among my treasures, Merton, Neruda and Gordon MacKenzie. These are the guidance counselors of my life, a hermit, a hedonistic poet and an anarchic corporate denizen. Sounds like the start of a very filthy joke, eh?

Today’s mini homily in my friend’s gift says that we live in a world of brash sight and sound. However it goes on to say we are not (and must not let ourselves become) slaves to stimuli of shinning things. The text talks of taking all things to Jesus and there weighing their value.

Me, at the place where I am, I see value in the core sentiment. My thought would be to view all of the radiantly burnished things of this world through skeptical eyes taking time to balance the demanding brash urgent now against the truth, the divine. Whether a person is “of faith” or of the world we need to look at what is about us with a cautious and questioning eye. We must suss out whether the bright urgent will ultimately produce good, in us and in the world.

Peace Among the Ruins

http://youtu.be/wb75Jwil0Zg

This shot is from last night. Looking west as I was leaving the child psychologist’s office the light filled me for just a moment. Fumbling about I grabbed my camera and I captured the light’s last transit marking day’s end. Bathed in blue and gold light was a larger end. Some of my hope died last night. Right now, for the time being at least, I have to walk away from trying to push my youngest son forward. He will only be who and what he wants to be.

Before we went to the psychologist I had made the decision to end the sessions. The most important thing that we working on, but by just the tiniest of margins, was diverting my son from slipping into overwhelming depression. Right now, for this moment, that seems stable.

The other issue was trying to instill some personal accountability into his life. I have tried to give him a framework to understand the value of this by talking about why it matters to have some integrity. I have tried to talk to him about what success means and the need for both skill and for production of effort. But I am old and my ways are not in fashion. In trying to inculcate a strong work effort in him but all I have gotten are bold faced lies and passive resistance. In trying to help him clean up his screw ups I have used all my chits. I am done. He sinks or swims on his own. I spoke this out loud.

Surprisingly the psychologist agreed with me. As I understood the parting conversation it is to no productive end to keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same negative result. He laughed as he said while not clinical insanity it was a popular maxim. I hear it every day from my A.A. acquaintances.

There is so much in my world right at this very instance that can go sideways, or which has gone sideways or may tank totally right now. At this juncture I can only seek access to the divine. I hope for but don’t count on equanimity. I ask for acceptance, or peace, or God’s peace if you would. The light through the tree in the cold April air was a keyhole to that state.

Happenstance

Lives are so easily changed by a moment’s happenstance.

Reaching down to pick up a map or a cell phone and suddenly your car veers into oncoming traffic and you spend the rest of your life as felon with a limp.  And two traumatized seven year old twins who were asleep in the car you struck head on grow up living with their aunt. Throughout their lives they will tear up when they revisit those last memories of their loving parents being futilely med-evacuated to a trauma center. 

Will we all pick up maps or change radio stations?  Absolutely.  Will nothing happen 99.99% of the time? Absolutely.  Happenstance.

Or one day a teacher compliments you on a paragraph you wrote and suddenly writing becomes the be all and end all passion of your life.  You struggle with your craft and you succeed.  Maybe you end up an essayist.  Maybe you do PR but in your schilling for a potato chip, an oil additive or Doctors without Borders you write well. When you see the teacher who created that spark of inspiration again in 25 years she doesn’t really remember your transforming moment. Worse yet you aren’t quite sure that she even remembers you.

Do transformation moments happen in our lives every single day?  Absolutely. Do we recognize them?  Sometimes. What occurs in our odd and hanging moments can bring good or bad.  Sometimes the results go sideways.  But the plan you had for your life palpably changes and the trajectory you take is never the same. Happenstance.  There is both good and ill in happenstance.  Accepting this fact is the key to forward motion and spiritual growth. 

Birthday Without

In the past several days several of my friends, good friends have celebrated birthdays.  Mine is coming shortly but I am not looking at it with any kind of favor.  I am not unhappy but in my heart I know this one is different.  I have lost my birthday brother and I am at loose ends about it. 

Each year John and I would talk on set days, Christmas, our birthday and the like.  Each year we would exchange a card.  Some years there were gifts, some not.  I know I was the poorer correspondent, the negligent younger brother.  Hey you all know I am always the poorer correspondent and the most insensitive bloke in the house.  But John was always and will always be my big brother and our shared birthday mean something to us.  

Trying to fix the empty spot I am feeling regarding the upcoming day I went searching for poetry at poemhunter.com to see if there was something from a poet laureate or such ilk to capture my feelings.  I did not find it.  

Dylan Thomas as he often does caught my mind and pulled it in some directions that I wasn’t planning to go to.  His “Poem on his Birthday” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poem-on-his-birthday/ brought a variety of feelings up; mixed dark feelings. While Mr. Thomas and his poem capture some of my feelings about life and aging it did not capture the sense of loss and melancholy within my heart.

The closest thing I found was a poem written to ostensibly be given to a wife on her birthday after the passing of her husband.  But in some ways Jonathan Goldman’s poem captures it for me.

Celebrate or not
they come each year to stay
To count your years for all
To know you and your ways.

Your Birthday is here again
Alas, I cannot be
with you to celebrate
and make your day great.

To celebrate this year
is not what you can do
For memories of the past
will forever break through.

My wish for you today
Is for comfort, solace and more
To get through these times of woe
And have happiness evermore.

I am sorry that I cannot find that snarky card to send.  I grieve that he cannot send me as equally a snide aside.  (He sent me probably the most profane birthday card about 25 years ago, think Gilbert Gottfried with no filter).  I still laugh every time I think about it.  Memories will always be present when “our” birthday comes.

I guess I would tweak the above poem a little bit and in doing so it would make sense to me, this year, this month.

Celebrate or not
They come each year to stay
To count our years for all
To know us and our ways.

Our Birthday is here again
Alas, I cannot be
with you to celebrate
And make your day great.

To celebrate this year
is not what we can do
Memories of the past
Will forever break through.

My wish for all today
is for comfort, solace and more
to get through these times of woe
And have happiness evermore.

To my brother John, it is hard to imagine the cycling of the sun without you here among the living. Travel well. I will keep you in my heart. 

Post Script:

After I wrote this piece and posted it I began to mull on something. Something bothered me and I tugged at it with my mind. Rereading my post something about the tenor left me disquieted.

What I wrote was from the perspective of a much younger brother with somewhat distant sibling ties. John and I were two people tied together by parentage and a calendar date. We had times together over the years and many shared experiences but he wasn’t part of my day to day life. Some of that distance was of my own making. When I was young I ran as far and fast as I could away from my family. My choice carried with it both loss and gain, but this is not time for regret.

By creating such an egocentric piece, my feelings, my thoughts and the like I missed something huge. My feelings constitute but a small part of the loss that my brother John’s passing made in the lives of a number of people.

John’s beloved wife Gayla, his sons, his daughters and the friends that populated his world they will feel a loss when his birthday passes. While I may ache with melancholy they most likely will have a more deep pain. Their pain is the kind that each holiday, each anniversary and each recurring event they would normally share with John in the calendar’s cycle is now marked with a huge absence. My love goes out to them on this what would have been John’s 73 birthday. With time only the moments of remembered joy will remain. It is one of the good things of how our human hearts work.

Of Boobies and the Law

When I was young and trying to get laid for the first time, I followed a young lass into a college class I should never have been in as a first term freshman. Taking U.S. Constitutional History as a freshman was not the norm, in actuality it was a recipe for intellectual and GPA disaster.

U.S. Constitutional History was basically a Constitutional Law class as it would be taught at lesser law school. Does the term weeder course for the pre-law set ring a bell? The course to my surprise set the tone for my life; it sparked my passion for the Constitution that continues on today. Despite facing intellectual rigor beyond my station in life I got a B+. On the other hand I did not get laid but I did get to squeeze the young lass’s boobies. So bottom line U.S. Constitutional History was a win-win for me.

I remember two areas of study from that course in particular, the judicial slight of hand that is Marbury vs. Madison and Beard’s infamous (famous?) thesis. Marbury I have lived breathed and talked about in four different courses including my senior law school seminar in Constitutional Law. However the allegations of Beard that our governing document was simply the result of self interested men cutting deals to protect their individual interests always comes back to me. It is a disquieting concept. In the tome An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), Beard argued that the Constitution was not really the work of political ideologists but rather a construct balancing the economic interests of the drafters’ particular partisans.

Early on after the publication of An Economic Interpretation Oliver Wendell Holmes assailed Beard’s thesis, Holmes was emphatic in stating some persons have emotions not dependent on their pocketbook and that patriotism was really the source of the Constitution. Robert Brown in the early 1960s argued that the status of the free persons of America at the time the document was created was basically equivalent, mostly a middle class analog. The primacy of this class’s overall interests was clear for the Constitution was created to do many things in terms of personal rights that extended far outside the economic milieu. Our Constitution was in essence “a democratic document framed by democratic methods for a democratic society”.

Most of the above is cribbed from a section of Loose Sallies Essays by Daniel J. Kornstein but it is in accord with what I remember of the class. In some ways I think the Supreme Court in its recent rulings on campaign finance has lost sight on the idea that the Constitution and our founding principles were focused on maintaining our democracy including equality of participation in the system as opposed to championing property rights. Remember while the Declaration of Independence first stated life, liberty and property, property was excised in favor of “the pursuit of happiness”. Jefferson made this change so as to enshrine the freedom of opportunity and its corollary the duty to help those in want into this seminal work.

Ah how fondly I remember when life was so much simpler and my thoughts were focused only on the pleasures of the flesh and not the protection of our citizens’ enfranchisement in governance.

Spring Peace

In this world there is no easy path. Rich or poor, there is no way that one can follow that with absolute certainty will bring joy. Joy is probably the wrong word, maybe equanimity. I disdain joy more and more as I age. Maybe disdain is also the wrong world, it perhaps is too strong a word. I think the Eastern thinkers have it right joy and pain must both be seen as the imposters that they are.

Last night as I watched my youngest son sing, I felt a peace knowing he was feeling joy. Last night as I watched the choir work through their song I appreciated their attempt at connection that that greater common human experience that lay beyond themselves. I smiled. It was not an easy path to this point. It won’t last. But there was peace for a moment.