On The Naked Now. A Thought For A Good Friend

 

Being present to the naked now is as difficult and painful as balancing on the sharp point of a needle.  The concentration necessary to balance on that point is impossible so it is only through grace that we find that balance.  We wander away into thoughts and as we become aware of our wandering we judgelessly return to the present.  And through grace, begin again.

It is also painful.  Placing the full weight of our presence on the sharpness of the naked now pierces the soul.  Nobody ever died from a pin prick, but it can feel as if we might.  Our awareness brings to light pains repressed, regrets unresolved, relationships unhealed.  And, then, again, we return to the breath and the naked now resolved to live into the truth that Fr. Rohr expressed: “God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.”

Blessings this day, my friend.  God loves you and so do I.

The Invisible Man

As I prayed this morning, I asked the question, “What are we working on, Father?  Where are You trying to lead me.?”  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my ego and my attachments and the need to let both of them go.  But then I heard a whisper.  

“Enter into the pain.”  

It may have been God or maybe it was just my subconscious.  Either way it was a reminder of what Richard Rohr has said and written: “That which you do not transform you will transmit.”  It is still raw to think of Griffin’s passing, to imagine him struggling for breath alone amidst a dozen or more people.  He died in some fashion the way he lived when he was outside the environs of his family: invisible and alone.

How does one transform that reality into something good?  Where is the relief from that painful memory?  Where was God in that moment in time?

“I AM WHO I AM,” Yahweh told Moses.  Is it mine to ask where God was when Griffin struggled to draw his last breath?  Was I there when God breathed into Adam his first breath?  These questions are in so many ways just a way out of dealing with the pain of this loss.  Grief is so much more manageable in the head than in the heart.

The purpose of grief isn’t to manage it.  It is to walk with it, into it and maybe finally through it.  It is primarily a journey of the heart.  To willingly allow one’s heart to be broken a thousand times over only to be healed a thousand times more.  Grief is the place where we reconcile the unholiness of our loss with the holiness of Griffin’s gain.  Reconcile all the ways we failed him with all the ways we were uniquely equipped to be his parents.  Reconcile the bright, shining light Griffin could be with the dark, stormy interior life that was his prison.  Reconcile a world that was at once full of the most generous human beings that surrounded and celebrated Griffin with the cold world he entered when he left our home, a world where he was invisible enough to die choking in the corner of a room full of people.

This is my pain that needs transforming, lest I continue to transmit it.  

Pray for me.

 

My So-Called Superpower

I used to believe that the fact that my mind was in constant motion was a superpower.  Thinking about problems at work while mowing and trimming my near perfect lawn helped me “see around corners” and anticipate problems and dangers.  I would put my anxious mind at ease by devising solutions and crafting conversations that  would get me out of any bind I was in.

I can see now that that superpower was really a sickness.  A cancer of control that was poisoning professional relationships on multiple fronts.  My superpower allowed me to bend facts with words that planted seeds of ideas I could sow when it suited me.  And while that worked at times, the end result was relationships where trust was in short supply or about to be in short supply.  I was, unawaredly, gaslighting those around me.

The cancer metastasized in other ways, too.  One was the simple fact that a mind that cannot be calmed and quieted has an impenetrable barrier to self-awareness.  Only in the quiet of intentionally not thinking can we truly see ourselves and understand how temporal our thoughts are and that we are not what we think or feel.  I was one who overidentified with whatever I was thinking or feeling in the moment.  Happy, sad, competent, a failure: these were not simply feelings or thoughts, they were who I was and how I presented to the world.  So on any given day I might be owned by happiness and bring joy to the office.  Or I might be owned by frustration and bring disruption.  It has taken me all these years to understand just how insubstantial my thoughts are and yet how substantial I am in the eyes of God.  And what a difference that brings to how I present to the world.

The Buddhists have a concept of “not self”, the idea that all of the ways we identify ourselves as unique and separate beings from the world as a whole are an illusion.  That when we spend time examining our thoughts and the emotions they cause, there is no controlling “I” at the  center creating those thoughts.  They are like the weather.  They come and they go, conditions change and then they change again.  Perhaps this is what Jesus was describing in Matthew 10:39—That it is only in losing oneself that we can find ourselves.

And the last metastasis of my cancer is the cost to my relationships personally.  A mind in constant thought does not listen, is not present and life happens in the now.   Only now.  And only with a quiet mind can one hear what those they love need.  My busy mind robs thos I love of my presence to their pain, their joys, their sorrows and their struggles.  I want to be as Jesus was:

Open

Available

Inviting

Gravity

Our lives are bound by gravity.  In the physical sense it means our feet stay solidly attached to the ground.  Our bodies bend to that gravity, though some of us turn to advances in medical science to defy it.  At the end of the day, and of our lives, gravity ultimately wins and we return to the earth.  Most of us choose not to think of or imagine how gravity will ultimately win and that is probably good.  It’s a large, distant, difficult thought to grapple with in the midst of the daily struggle that is being alive on this earth.

There is another gravity that we are bound by.  Much more invisible, but very real just the same.  It is the gravity that we share in what we value. It is as shared belief around the value of family, of friendships, of community.  It is the belief that leads us toward the neighborhood potluck, or the Whine Down Wednesday with the ladies or the weekly foursome with the boys.  As we reach our mid-30s or so we’ve likely settled into the friends who will be the folks we sit around having coffee with when we’re 79.  There is a gravity that pulls us toward each other and just as we don’t question gravity keeping our feet on the ground, we give no thought to what is holding these friendships together.  

Throughout my life I have made cultivating friendships a priority.  I am an extrovert and for a those with a certain sensibility I have a magnetic personality.  I make it a point to ask probing questions about my friends lives, and share as deeply as they are comfortable about mine.  At one point I think I could point to more than a dozen men that I would call close friends.   And yet when the storms have come to my life the breadth of my friendships has been winnowed.  

It is a commitment to enter another’s pain.  And the gravity that bound us together, a shared value system around family, kids, and school just wasn’t enough to sustain when the F5 hit the ground and did its damage.  We are a society that runs from pain and denies grief entirely.  And for a subset of my friends this was the case.  Flowers, a card, a call and that’s as much as they can enter.  To enter that pain further would require an acknowledgment that there is pain in their own lives that they are actively wallpapering over in conversations, on Facebook and at work. 

They are taken with the wind.  The roots of the friendships were too shallow.  

And yet other friendships have been deepened.  Those friends have entered the pain because they’ve lived through their own storm and that gravity of shared values pulls us tighter.  They are the brave few willing to see the world as not a safe place, willing to not deny the pain in their lives, or minimize the challenges in their marriages and not constantly remodel their lives on Instagram by painting over the pain with pictures of perfect family vacations.  They are willing to share the messiness of their human existence and enter into the messiness of ours.  We share with each other the grief we feel when we look at our lives as they are and what they were intended to be.  And by entering that pain we actually begin the process of building the life God intended for us.

And so I look at the world and think, the gravity by which we are bound socially is weak.  Our relational gravity is far too shallow to  hold us through the storms.  Far too few friends and couples going deep enough into the pain that life brings us and sharing the knowing of the God who brings joy through that pain.  As hard as it is to live through the death of a child, it is also equally hard to simply be present to the friend who lost them.  And so it goes with every loss, be it a job, a parent, or a promotion.  Being present to another’s pain takes work and generally dredges up pain in our own lives.  That, however uncomfortable, is the only source of true joy in our lives as we drop the pretense, the façade, the construct, the ego…whatever you want to call it.  We share our story boldly and listen to others intently and we enter a joy that God has created for us when we begin to discover our true selves which can only happen in community.

This is the gravity that will hold us together.  The gravity of our true selves revealed and revealing.  Our friendships compel us ever deeper into the mystical.

And that is a gravity of an entirely different sort.

Nearly Once Round The Sun

 

Teardrops fill my pen, ink on paper remembering when.

Nearly once round the sun, since you left us life undone.

Road weary life force unwound, unbreakable bond unbound.

You unmoored from a lonely chair, yet fighting still for air.

Me unmoored from all I thought.  All I knew, I trusted, I bought.

Nearly once round the sun, ink on paper holds the one.

Teardrops fill my pen, when does now become then.

The time when again we meet, sand moving softly under feet.

Two men. One God. Fully present, heart and soul.

Two and One. Healed and bound. Fully loved, finally whole.  

The Tree Of My Life

As long as I can remember I have been a gardener with only one plant to care for, a tree in the backyard of my soul.  When I was young it was just a sapling and I spent a great deal of time caring for it, feeding it, protecting it.  It grew as I grew.  In my 20’s I spent a good deal of time studying it. I would spend hours looking at the direction of its branches reaching for the sun or observing its bark and how in some places it was thick and in others it was thin.   

In my 30’s I became less interested in it as kids entered my life: soccer games, school functions, promotions at work and dinner parties with friends.  I hardly noticed the tree, but something interesting was happening.

It grew and grew and grew.  It seemed that the busier my life became, the taller and more full that tree grew.  I wasn’t out their fertilizing it as I did as a child.  But it seemed that with each year, each child, each accomplishment it grew more.  I didn’t pay it much attention.  In fact it’s only in retrospect that I realize how much it had grown during that time.  I mean, I knew it was there and I’d give it a glance most days, but I was done studying it.  What’s the sense in understanding the branches and bark of a tree that’s been there for nearly 40 years.

As I plowed into my forties I began to notice some signs of distress.  Some of the needles were turning brown, but only on a few branches.  I pruned them, following the advice of a website I found, the thought being that by pruning the sick branches the tree would free itself to feed its healthy branches.  It seemed to work so I went on largely ignoring it.

One sunny Sunday afternoon in August we had some friends over for dinner.  We sat on our back veranda and were enjoying a glass of wine when my friend asked me about the tree.  “How old is that?” he asked.  I said, “I don’t know, probably pushing 50 years old.  Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he went on to say, "it looks like that tree has some root rot.”  As it turns out this acquaintance turned fairly close friend grew up with an arborist for a father.  “I hate to tell you this, but that tree’s probably going to need to go.” 

I was shocked at how hard it hit me.  That tree was the centerpiece of the beautiful backyard my wife and I had created over years and years of trial and error, planting and replanting, painting and building.  We had hosted dinner parties, fundraisers and birthday parties, all under the dappled sunlight that tree had provided.

“How imminent is this?”  I asked.  “It doesn’t look sick.”

“Well, the tree is still alive, that’s for sure.  But you can tell that there’s a problem with the roots by the sparsity of vegetation at the higher branches and on the lower branches near their tips.  It could be fine for another 30 years or it might blow over in the next big windstorm.” 

I thought, this can’t be true.  So a week or so later I called an arborist to come over.  “Yup,” he said, “that tree’s got root rot.”

“Well, what do I do?” I asked. 

“My advice is take it down.  If it falls on your house, now that you know its sick your homeowners insurance is not going to cover the damage.”

The arborist left and the last I thought of him was sending the check when his invoice arrived.

A few years went by.  I noticed browning parts near the top and thought, “I’ve got take that tree down.”  But I didn’t.  It was going to costs a few thousand dollars to take out, and I had no idea what I would put in it place.  It was largely the one thing that blocked us from seeing straight into our neighbor’s kitchen and them looking right out onto our veranda.  So I ignored it.  Until the night of the storm.

80 mile an hour gusts pushed through the area.  Thousands of trees went down, including ours.  It took out half the house with it.  We moved to an apartment as we sorted out next steps.  With no insurance money to rebuild we were effectively homeless, paying the mortgage on a house we could no longer inhabit.

This, dear friend, is the story of my ego.  How I nurtured it as a child, grew to know it in early adulthood and largely ignored it as I fed it into adulthood.  In my 40’s I began to see signs of rot in it, had friends notice some unhealthy bits and even sought professional advice.  Which I didn’t ignore as much as just found too painful to confront.  The loss of that tree, that ego, would leave me empty and even possibly homeless emotionally.  But not spiritually.

And then the storm came.  It was inevitable.  My choice to remove the tree was wrested from my hands.  Down went my sense of self, fallen to the ground.  So now I face a different choice.

Do I plant a new tree and gradually rebuild the home that the old one had destroyed?  That’s what many friends have advised and a good number of books point to.  “Use these tragedies as the fertilizer for the next chapter.   Lean into the new normal.”

Or do I allow that old tree to be cut apart into firewood.  Allow the Holy Spirit to dry it in a kiln.  And, as Merton says in New Seeds of Contemplation, “(allow) the mystery of Christ in the Gospel (to) concentrate the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man…as a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper.”

And this is where I sit today.  I’ve allowed the old tree to be cut into firewood.  I’ve even allowed the Holy Spirit, I think, to dry it in a kiln.  But am I willing to allow the Living Christ to set a match to it, burning it and the entire house with it.  This is the choice Merton outlines: that we set aside our ego and all of the trappings that support it and allow God’s light to be magnified and set fire to it.

I am ready to be saved, Earl Palmer used to quip, but not yet.  And that’s where I am.  I am ready for the fire.  But not yet.

Happy Birthday, Griffin

Dear Griffin,

On your 23rd birthday I wanted to tell you a few things I haven’t told you yet.  I think I’ve said most of these things, but not nearly enough.  A few of these things I don’t think I ever did, and should have.  I don’t know exactly where to start, but here goes.

 

You are a resilient man.  I stand in awe of the obstacles you face and overcome each day.  Getting out of bed takes you more effort and energy than most Americans exert in the course of an average day.  I have, while you weren’t looking, watched you wrestle your shoes on feet that wouldn’t cooperate and legs that laid there like logs.  Humbling is not a strong enough word.  And let’s not even mention the hills: superhuman feats of strength getting up the driveway and Evil Kneivel trips down it.

You are a kind and loving soul.  A world that is all too short of kindness during normal times is woefully devoid of it today.   And you are a salve on that wound.  A scroll through your texts (forgive me for snooping) shows me the dozens of hearts you held dear, the spirits you raised and the words you heard.  All with little given in return.  And I can’t say that you didn’t want a little love in return.  You did.  And yet when it didn’t materialize you didn’t stop loving.  You loved anyway.

You are insatiably curious.  You’re always wondering, always asking, always soaking the world in.  That’s why I call you Quiz Show.  Anybody who’s shared a meal with you or even just a cup of coffee knows what I mean.  Buddy, most of the world loses their curiosity somewhere around seven years old.  Don’t ever lose yours.  It’s one of your super powers.

You're courageous.  From Cub Scouts, to Camp Casey to the CMN Dance Marathon you have put yourself out in ways that amaze me.  Your sisters even see it.  You’ve jumped into things that even they’ve been shy to do.  It takes courage to risk out and try Broadway Bound when you’re bound to a wheelchair, but you did it.  I’ve got the program and the pictures to prove it.  I think you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.

You’re a force of nature.  You fill every room you enter.  You lift every spirit you encounter.  There’s not a person you’ve met that doesn’t have a Griffin story that they hold dear in their heart, that they have held onto in a difficult moment and it lightened their load.  I could tell a hundred stories, like when my MBA teammate Jamie asked you what you’d been up to and you replied, “nothing the police need to know about.”  Or when you were selling candy bars for the Jr. Sonics and one of my AEs said no thanks you said, “you know who my dad is, right?”  You bring a smile to my face, and that’s saying a lot, bud.

The thing I don’t think I’ve ever told, though, is this.   You’ve changed my life.  I’m a bit of an asshole, as you and the whole world know.  But raising you has made me just a little more compassionate, just a little more patient, just a little more humble and a lot more of who God created me.  Not from anything you did, and there’s plenty.  But just because of who you are.  Because of all the things you couldn’t help but be because God stamped one part of his Infinite Soul in the shape that is Griffin.  A shape that is fearfully and wonderfully made and perfect in all its imperfections.  And that, Griffin, has changed me forever.

I love you, buddy.  Happy Birthday.

Love,

Dad