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

My Christmas Wish

The birth of Jesus is really a story of being Other.  Strangers arrive in a town too full, so the God who humbled himself enough to be born a helpless infant was humbled more in being born in shelter with the animals, the dirt, the dung.  This was the plight of the Other from Nazareth in Bethlehem that night.

God humbled himself to be Other in the form of Jesus as he knows that’s where each of us feels they are.  If we’re quiet enough in our souls and we contemplate ourselves deeply, we know that loneliness that is being Other.  Separate.  Alone.  We all have one great need and one great fear.  We need to be loved wholly and perfectly.  And we fear that if you really knew us, all of us, you could never want to love us.  This is the plight that leaves us as the Other.

The good news of the birth of Jesus was that God can and does love us in a way that only One who has lived as an Other can.  He loves that God sized piece of Himself that He imprinted on your body and your soul.  And if we are audacious enough to believe Him, we can deconstruct the artifice the ego has built to protect us from our one great fear, but denies us our one great need.  Only in allowing God’s perfect love in can we see God in us and then God in Others.

As Thomas Merton writes,

 “You and I and all men were made to find our identity in the One Mystical Christ, in whom we all complete one another ‘unto a perfect man’, unto the measure  of the age of the fullness of Christ.”   

When we allow that reality to sink in and we explore the depths of our soul, our Otherness begins to melt away.  We see God’s image in Others and magically, mystically we are no longer strangers, no longer Others but different parts of one whole.  One whole God.

So as we celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth today, let us use how he was born, that we was born as fuel to look deeply inside.  Shed the façade and confront our fear head on and celebrate the love God has for us and we for each other.

The Death of the Faith of Everyday Life

“For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of spiritual ‘doubt’.  This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.”

        

                                               Thomas Merton

               New Seeds of Contemplation

I began my journey more than 40 years ago with the certainty of the naive.  I had known pain.  My own loneliness as a five-foot one-inch, 97 pound 15 year old is what lead me to religion in the first place.  A simple invitation from a cute girl in algebra and I was being picked up for mass each Sunday at 9:40 (thank you Renee Williamson). I began a “personal relationship with Christ” a year later after a week at Malibu Club in Canada.

My certainty grew with my new found “faith”, both out of my personal experience (the human mind is, after all, hard wired to find evidence to support its existing belief system) and in my understanding of the Bible as the unerring word of God as passed on to me by my Young Life leaders.  Mine was a faith that left no room for doubt.  If I had a question, the Bible had a four square answer with a roof.  Doubt was the antithesis of faith.

Which isn’t to say my journey wasn’t interrupted by a few things over the years.  College, fraternity, the discovery of beer and girls that actually paid attention to me pulled me off course for a few years.  But by junior year I was back on the straight and narrow, leading a Young Life Club of my own at Shorecrest High School, leading bible studies in my fraternity and a few others and even starting an outreach in the Greek System called UW Club.  Each and every passing experience reaffirmed to me the wisdom of my faith and cemented in me the certainty that I was on the narrow road through the eye of the camel (to mix a metaphor).

My view began to change when my friend Stu gave me a copy of “Disappointment with God” by Philip Yancey which lead me to “The Myth of Certainty” by Daniel Taylor.  Both were salves to the nagging doubts that had crept into the anteroom of my faith in the years after I married.  The peace and wholeness that was supposed to come from settling in with the one God had chosen for you never materialized in our 400 square foot apartment.  Only arguments over dirty clothes, unloaded dishwashers and what to watch on television that night followed by passionate apologies and the subtle desperation that comes with the realization that this is what you chose and it wasn’t getting magically better.

Suddenly I understood, intellectually at least, that certainty cheapens faith.  In fact, faith is impossible in the face of certainty.  Faith, by definition, is that which we believe but cannot prove.  Certainty is that which we know without doubt.  Faith says “I believe in God, but can’t prove that He exists.”  That belief is based in a trust of my personal experience.  The best I can offer in proof are anecdotes and analogies.  The ancient Hebrews had the Ark of The Covenant with them, Taylor says, physical proof of God’s existence.  And yet it did not inspire faith or love for God.

Mine was not a popular opinion in my Evangelical community.  I had many heated discussions with friends about whether the Bible was the unerring word of God or if it was merely God’s wisdom as written by holy men, fallible and true all at the same time.  Even then I was beginning to develop the muscle of resisting dualistic thinking, though I didn’t understand it as that at the time.

When Griffin was diagnosed with Spina Bifida I was rocked to my core.  My designs for a lightly blemished, model Christian life were destroyed.  God’s part in my life was similarly displaced.  I cloaked my existential doubts in pseudo-spiritual intellectualism, proclaiming that Griffin’s disability was caused by Sin (with the capital “S”) let loose in the world, like cancer or autism, a cosmic roll of the dice gone bad.  God did not cause this.  I bristled at the notion that God had given me this situation as people tritely observed, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” My trite retort was, “well if Griffin’s wheelchair is God’s gift, I’d like to regift it.  To you.”

Deep down, in the unconscious, I think I was indeed asking why God let this happen to me.  That a God in whom I believed had wounded my son was unforgivable.  I largely shelved my faith for 15 years, wandering about the wilderness, burying the wound to my soul in the seeking of happiness, the acquisition of things and of friends and the pursuit of advancement at work and socially.  In some perverse way, Griffin’s disability was my Ark of the Covenant in reverse: it was proof on wheels that the God I once believed in no longer existed.  But to admit even that was too painful.

On a rainy winter Monday night in Atlanta a voicemail appeared on my phone.  I hadn’t seen the phone ring, which wasn’t unusual as we live in an area we call the “cell hole”.  So I listened to the voicemail.  It was a male nurse at Wellstar Cobb Hospital asking me to call him back.  Griffin was obviously back in the hospital for god knew what reason.   The last time he had done an inpatient stay at Ridgeview he ended up at Wellstar with a 104 degree fever, a UTI and a severe case of diarrhea that made a return to Ridgeview a “medical impossibility” according to the Ridgeview medical director, who had assisted in cleaning the outcome.

So it was not with a small bit of frustration that I called Wellstar back.  This stay at Ridgeview was a bit of a last hope.  Griffin was severely depressed, ignoring his self-care which left us cleaning sheets and disinfecting mattresses as he slept the day away in his own waste.  And only recently had we uncovered the accelerant: Griffin was drinking any alcohol within his wheelchair bound grasp: leftover wine from dinner, errant beers left in the upstairs fridge, and only recently malt liquor he’d buy on his own on the way home from school.  We moved all of the alcohol downstairs and out of his reach, confiscated his driver’s license and insisted he begin attending AA meetings.  And yet and still…he drank the cooking wine stored in a cabinet in the garage and passed out in the kitchen with his shorts down to his knees.  It was time to give Ridgeview another try.

I went about Monday evening chores as I waited on hold on speaker.  I began to warm leftovers, emptied the dishwasher, greeted Gretchen as she arrived home.  I explained with a sigh that I was on hold with Wellstar and Griffin was likely back in the hospital.  She sighed, too, as she went to change out of her nursing scrubs.

The nurse finally answered the phone.  “This is Stephen.”

“Hi, this is Sean Shannon.  You called.”

“Uh, hang on,” Stephen said as I heard paper shuffling.  “Are you Griffin Shannon’s father?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” I replied.

“We need you to come here as soon as you can.  Do you know where we are?” he said flatly.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I asked, my heart rate quickening.  I am no wilting flower when it comes to calls from the hospital with Griffin.  By our last count Griffin was approaching 40 stays and 24 surgeries.  It takes a bit to get me anxious.  This was different.

“We just need you to get here as soon as possible.  Do you need the address?”

“No, we know where it is.”

I knew in that moment he was gone.  I told Gretchen what the nurse had said.  She knew as well.  But neither of us would say it.  In our silence he could still be alive.  In the 25 minutes it took to drive to Wellstar Cobb Hospital he could be alive.  In the walk from the emergency room to the family room, he could be alive.  Neither of us dared spoke lest the breath behind our words extinguish his.  The ER attending physician arrived.

“Your son passed away at…” His words faded into nothingness.  He spoke further about time, circumstance, I don’t really remember.  What I do remember is that my son was dead.  And so was the construct of the God I knew.

On Hope Versus Expectation

One of the things that Gretchen and I were grappling with toward the end of Griffin’s life was the question of what he was capable of.  Our expectation all along (and affirmed by our pediatrician, his teachers, his counselors) was that he would go to college, graduate, start a career and live independently.  We wrote off his lack of hygiene through junior high and high school as typical adolescent boy behavior.  What 15 year old doesn’t have dirty laundry on his floor, sporadic showers, and the smell of Axe covering a multitude of hygiene sins?

So when Griffin was accepted at several local universities and chose to attend Kennesaw State we thought “plan on track”.  What ensued was a struggle with studying independently.  Griffin had a steady flow of saintly counselors who kept him on track all through high school.  They helped map his study plan, edited his papers and checked in frequently.  College was a different story.  No team of counselors.  Just a marginal student struggling to get to class on a hilly campus with no mom or dad to make sure he was up and going in the morning.  A few C’s and a number of dropped classes made his freshman year an academic failure by any measure.

More distressingly, as we found out near the end of spring term, was the social isolation he was struggling with.  The four roommates he shared his apartment style dorm room with were all in their sophomore years, well rooted socially and disinterested at best with their wheelchair-bound new roommate.   Griffin rushed in the spring and enjoyed himself too much, got drunk and fell out of his chair.  Paramedics were called, school officials got involved and Griffin was deemed a liability risk by the one fraternity chapter that offered him a bid.  This was also our first glimpse into how deep a problem Griffin was having with alcohol.

So we moved him home for sophomore year.  Expecting a fight when we told him our thoughts, we were met with tears of relief.  He poured out how lonely he had been, how he wouldn’t leave his room for days at a time except for food and class and how isolated he felt.  We wept with him.  The move home revealed a few things:

1) How gritty Griffin was.  His classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays required him to wake up at 6am.  Gretchen and I took turns driving him to the transit center ten minutes from our house and then he was on buses for the next hour and a half.  He made a strong effort nearly every day.  Wheeling around that campus was no picnic either.  He did it without complaint.

2) How hurting he was.  Conversations about any variety of topics often ended with Griffin in tears.  Tears that revealed his pain, his disappointment in himself.  He wasn’t living up to our expectations and it was soul crushing. We tried hard to comfort him, to express our love for him just as he was but years of lectures on our belief in what he was capable of accomplishing had left our expectations imprinted on his very being.

3) How he was self-medicating.  The extent to which he was using and abusing alcohol gradually unfolded, like a multi-vehicle wreck in slow motion.  There were multiple occasions where he missed his bus because he was getting drunk in a gas station restroom.  There was a trip to the hospital on one such binger where the hospital called us at 1am (Griffin had gone to a Children’s Miracle Network function and told us he would be home at 10 and we simply went to bed as we usually do at 9).  The police had been called to the Quickie Mart because Griffin had gotten drunk in the bathroom after having lost control of his bowels at the Children’s function.  Instead of coming home, he  bought two tall boys and went in to the bathroom to clean up.  Thankfully the police called paramedics instead of arresting him for public intoxication.  I think the bowel mess may have played a part in their policing decision.

Gretchen and I were both mortified.  We felt like failures as parents.  And we braced ourselves for the fact that for the rest of our earthly lives Griffin was going to be our responsibility.  He would be in some way, shape or form in our care until we left this mortal coil.  

In those last three sentences lie the crime I am charged with: every one of those hurts, fears and disappointments were about me, not Griffin.

As I probe the shadow self, I am finding such self-centeredness, such pride and utter arrogance.  My expectations for what Griffin should be able to do were a shallow substitute for what I should have hoped he could do.  My expectations were wrapped up in my own ego, my own picture of who I needed Griffin to be so I could feel successful.  My expectations were rooted in my own need to control.  To instead have trusted in hope would have required faith; faith I did not have.  

I also find arrogance.  I allowed my own hidden envy of others “normal” lives to drive me to act as if my life were normal.  I golfed, I drank, I numbed myself to the pain that I harbored inside. It was a pain I both denied was there and nursed at the same time.  As I look back I ask myself, “how could I have been so careless with so much at stake?”

At the risk of seeming trite, I find solace in this thought: I am, we are, parts of the body of Christ.  And if I am suffering, so God is right along with me.  As I grieve my loss and my failings as a parent, God grieves and struggles along me. Because, to paraphrase Paul, “I am in Him and He is in me.”  This struggle is nowhere near over.  There is so much more to discover about my shadow self, such frightening and ugly things.  I am entering the struggle with self that John of the Cross described "The Dark Night of the Soul."

Similarly am learning that God looks at my shadow self and says, “I love that part of you, too.  Know it, embrace it so that you can ever be aware of it.”  We are not whole if we do not know, probe and accept our shadow self.  God is not whole unless He embraces both the cross and the resurrection.  Darkness and light need each other for without one there is not the other.  

Beyond all that, this week I have been reflecting on my greatest regret in losing Griffin.  It
goes beyond losing my son: his smile, his laugh, his questions and his sly wit.  I miss his presence every day.  My regret also includes what I lost in what he was going to teach me as he grew.  I feel cheated that I will not get to see his growth and his becoming, but mine as well. I am not as whole without him as I would have been with him.  

The whole of me is smaller without Griffin, but whole I am indeed.

Jack Black Face Wash And Job Chapter 37

Some mornings the grief over losing Griffin is nearly unbearable.  My first thought on waking is the sight of him laying lifeless in the ER, Gretchen holding one hand and me holding the other.  His eyes have turned opaque, as if God pulled the shades on the window to his soul because his soul wasn’t there anymore.

The grief wraps itself around me like a hot Georgia summer morning, a warm blanket of humid sadness.  Its grip is gentle but persistent.

I stand in the shower, gazing at the Jack Black face wash on the shelf.  It’s been in the shower for two months with just a tiny bit left.  Griffin loved to use whatever I used.  If I had a new bottle of cologne, he wanted to try it.  If I used a shaving brush and bowl, that’s what Griffin wanted.  And when I began using Jack Black products ages ago, Griffin wanted them, too.  The funny part was Griffin was terrible about washing his face and his special Jack Black Face Wash sat in his shower more as decoration than utility.  When we were cleaning Griffin’s room the week after his passing, I noticed the face wash in his shower.  I use a pump bottle by the sink, but I thought it would be prudent to use his as a back-up in the shower.  And as I got toward the last bits, I stopped using the back-up in the shower. Because when I use that last quarter sized dollop, that bit of Griffin will be gone.

I carried the grief to work with me.  I begin each day in the office with ten minutes of meditation and prayer.  I reminded myself that this grief is only a feeling and feelings come and they go.  That I can choose to hold this feeling in equanimity while it was with me, neither embracing it or pushing it away.

The mystery of Griffin’s death, of my whole past year, is a constant companion.  I think of Job, who spent 36 chapters arguing with his friends and railing against God, pleading for answers to the mystery of his suffering.  And God, ever faithful to Job, finally appears in a whirlwind.  Job is sated not by God’s answers as God offers no answers, only questions.  Questions that reveal who God is, why God is.  Job’s cries aren't fulfilled by answers, but simply by God’s presence.  Because answering Job’s questions would never fulfill him.  What fulfills Job is seeing God and being seen by Him.

I’m not anywhere near Chapter 37 with God.  I find myself more mornings than not wrestling with my questions more than seeking His presence.  The lessons of Job are long term learning.  As Fr. Rohr says, “My experience is that, apart from suffering, failure, humiliation, and pain, none of us will naturally let go of our self-sufficiency.”  With our autonomy we carry the burden of having to self-validate or self-criticize.  “Freedom is when  you know that neither of them matters.”