Thanksgiving

This is Thanksgiving week, but we're already living it, thanks to my daughter and son-in-law, Brenda and Idal.

Their generosity in deed and spirit made it possible for us to visit them in Maryland; it is the finest gift we could ever have received.

Seeing how they have created a strong, faithful family with perseverance, hard work and love makes Barbara and me proud, humbled, and truly thankful.

Sharing time with our granddaughter and two grandsons, while they are still young children, has been a treat. The years ahead are anticipated as rich ones because of them.

Seeing my daughter always brings a flash of memory -- a little girl, her eyes peeking out from a cloud of windblown auburn hair, marveling over a plucked dandelion.

Now, she is a grown woman and mother.
A good one. A very good one.

My son-in-law works long and hard for his family, too. No complaints about that, but joy when he comes home to hug the kids and help his spouse with dinner, or chores that may have remained from a hectic day of chasing a toddler and caring for an infant, all while helping an 8-year-old girl with homework.

How rare is all this, in this time of absent fatherless and broken families? Rare.

Thankful?

Oh, yes.

This Pilgrim's progress, and yours

Saturday morning, I took the dogs for a walk along the Jordan River's back trails. 

Once I got past the abandoned shopping carts, one homeless man's well-established and, uncharacteristically clean campsite (and a few impromptu refuse dumps, it was beautiful. 

The trek was a John Bunyanesque metaphor AND, to a point a metaphor, for a spiritual journey. I walked into areas where the well-worn foot trails became hints in the brush and through the limbs of trees, raining down gold and red foliage with each sigh of breeze; into sunlight filtered through the canopy and reflected in the frost on a downed cottonwood, and glistening from the moss on rocks. Beyond, power-blue skies, and clouds of fluff.

I stepped out of the pain, the detritus of human shortcomings, the bitterness of some lives expressed with disdain for themselves, and nature, the cast off wreckage of dreams, even, and into beauty.
It was like going to a cathedral, quiet but for the sighs and whispered prayers of the private penitent, looking up and finding myself walking inside the sunlight of stained glass with saints and sinners, all of us forgiven.

It was, for a blessed, crystal clear moment, being caressed and absorbed in that deep, abiding Love. . . and being reminded, again, that He is with me, and with all who just pause to let go the offense, to forgive, and be aware, to be present.

This, my Lord, transcends mere human doctrines, buildings and their grasp at the out-of-context pieces of scriptures while willfully ignoring the whole.

And, finally, here is a truth I've discovered. If you say you are a Christian that "whole" calls upon us to judge OURSELVES. We, and often poorly and with failures too numerous to count, "sin" -- fall short of the mark, from the word's Latin roots.

Paul put it this way in 1st Corinthians 5:12-13: "For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges."

And from what I believe, that latter part is in Love and compassion beyond our imagining.

Thus ends the sermon. smile emoticon


If all, some or part of it resonates, I didn't waste my time, or yours.

Be blessed. It's up to you.

Happy 42nd anniversary, sweetheart

Faith, and marriage.

 For me, the former has remained strong at its ancient roots through my River of Life sojourn.

It has ebbed and flowed, trickled through droughts, sustained under a glaring sun, refreshed in torrents and lulled to peace in the rare, precious stretches reflection and, yes, blessings.

Ah, but the latter, too, has been my companion, my warm human touch, the sustainer of love in a touch, a smile, a kiss, a prolonged embrace.

My lover and friend, my life's diamond, my priceless gift from the author of Love, who is that friend who sticks closer than a brother.

When I look in Barbara's eyes, I glimpse eternity. Faith and Love come full circle.

Happy 42nd anniversary, sweetheart.

His Love Wins. Always.

"Love Wins."

See a lot of that since the Supreme Court's decision to expand the constitutional definition of "marriage" to include same-sex couples.

I understand the honest sentiments of those expressing it. And, I will not judge the genuine-ness of their love for each other.

That, my friends, is not my job -- nor your's. There is but one judge, and I do no presume to know the mind of God.

But the truth is, more than 50 percent of people who marry, however they define it, will fall out of "love" and divorce,

But yes, Love Wins.

Greater love has no man, than he lay down his life for another.

Love won 2,000 years ago, it wins today, and it will win in eternal ages to come, because of a unique, selfless act of ultimate love.

Divine dichotomy: Of pain, suffering and a benevolent God

This past week has me, again, reflecting on the perceived dichotomy of suffering and a benevolent, loving God.

Particularly, the fundamentalist, evangelical Christian God who rewards the righteous in this life; the God the fringe of the Charismatic Movement — “Positive Confession,” “Name It, Claim It,” etc. — interprets those rewards as health and wealth and little or no suffering.

I understand, and this week even weep with those who have reached their limits of pain vs. faith, because they expected something else of life from what they were taught. Finally, they chose to cauterize the pain by simply declaring there is not, cannot possibly be, a benevolent loving God who cares about each of us, especially his children who obey, sacrifice and try to emulate Christ’s teachings.

For them, it has become a case of psychic, spiritual pain management: If God is benevolent and loving, they finally ask in their suffering, the perceived lack of that divine care amid the crucibles of life is a kind of open-ended pain that can, finally, become unbearable.

A trapped animal will chew off its own paw to be free of pain and hopelessness. A human being can be understood, empathized with, yes, forgiven for lopping off the extremity of faith in his or her most desperate times.

My week is nothing akin to the suffering others have endured, both those who hang on to faith and those who run from it. I have not reached the point of amputating my faith, and in some ways it is even stronger; but that all has come with more depth, and more pain.

Yesterday, I called my sister — in a group home in Washington state, crippled by cerebral palsy and intellectually a 5-year-old — to wish her a Happy 65th Birthday. Understand, she is my “big” little sister, being three years older, and a lifetime younger, at the same time.

“Hi Mom!” she said, answering the phone, and my heart sank. My mother, in the end stages of Alzheimer’s, is in a nursing home a few miles away from my sister, no longer able to talk, care for herself or remember any of her children, her husband, brothers, sisters.

Mom would not be calling. Her world has imploded to one of sleep, food, playing with dolls. Her body lives; her spirit has all but departed.

“It’s your brother, sis,” I said. The disappointment in her stuttering voice was tangible, and my eyes welled up.

I tried to keep it upbeat. Sang to her. Happy birthday. I could hear her, in that peculiar moaning stutter of her’s, upset. Mom’s denouement has been particularly hard on her; how do you explain memory loss to a childlike mind that only knows her mother, her bedrock in life, doesn’t know who she is?

Abruptly, she said, “Bye,” and the phone disconnected.

Last night, my Dad called, fear and despair in his raspy, almost 93-year-old voice. “Bob! I can hardly see anything anymore!” His macular degeneration has suddenly accelerated. I promised to call the medical staff for him, something he could have done . . . but in his terror forgot, reaching out to his son for help.

His maddeningly helpless son, 800 miles away. I called, asking for an expedited exam by the eye specialist to determine what, if anything, can be done.

It all felt like a massive, growing mountain before me: The mother who was a constant source of prayerful support and stubborn faith, gone; the father who spent his life preaching the gospel, sacrificing to do so in one tiny parish after another, in the twilight of life without his wife, stroke damage limiting his mobility, and now going blind, fearing the darkness to come; a sister who needed her mother, not her brother, on her special day.

So, I begin to understand how some people of faith can finally stumble under skies that seem to have turned brass to their prayers. And, I find myself amazed, and not a little humbled, and yet remain faithful.

It is the perspective of eternity, of knowing there will be plenty of pain in this life — but we are not alone in it. It is believing that like a morning fog, that pain will, someday soon, give way to immersion in the Love that is beyond this veil of tears.

Angel Vasko wrote about that a few years ago for CBN, after dealing with her mother’s prolonged, painful illness and death. (To read the whole article, visit http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/prayerandcounseling/Vasko_Trust_in_Tragedy.aspx)

“What is the lesson here God?!”  she said.  “Do you want me to know that life is hard and that people suffer and then die!!!? I get it!”

Vast concluded that, “I still have so many questions and I have so much to learn.  But in my heart of hearts, I just want to run into daddy’s arms and have Him hold me.  I want to have a pure heart.  I want to have a simplistic faith again.  Most of all, I want my first love, Christ, to know that I still love Him wholeheartedly."

In our finite existence, happiness and sadness, blessing and loss, joy and pain come, and not always in equal portions. But life is, perhaps thankfully so, brief as it is changing.

On the wild, wonderful, scary ride that life is, it is good to have, as Solomon once wrote, “Eternity in our hearts.”

Nothing new under the sun? Time to look above it

Ancient Israel’s King Solomon, reputed to be the wisest monarch of his time, once lamented that there was “Nothing new under the sun,” and “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

That’s the familiar literary recitation from Ecclesiastes I, anyway. The Message paraphrase might make a bit more sense in the 21st Century: “There’s nothing to anything — it’s all smoke . . . the sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again — the same old round.”

Live long enough, and it is inevitable to nod and sigh in agreement with the jaded king of old.

Still, I turn back to that initial King James Version phrase, “Nothing new UNDER the sun.”

I believe your perspective must take flight, ABOVE the sun, to grasp truth, and hope.

Keep your gaze in front of you, or more likely, at your feet, despairing at the path your are on, and like Henry David Thoreau, you will find yourself one of those characters who live their lives in ‘quiet desperation.”

In his work, “Walden,” Thoreau — though of an existential, not religious worldview — urges looking above the sun, too, in the sense of climbing beyond the mundane to the true treasures of living.

Rather than being resigned to our “present low and primitive condition,” he writes about the almost metaphysical ecstasy of “the spring of springs arousing them” and the yearning to “rise to a higher and more ethereal life.”

I am reminded, anew, that it is time again to look above the sun.

Time to see, taste, touch and hear beauty, to cherish and embrace family and friends, and to let my faith in God carry me beyond mere sunrises and sunsets to other, eternal realms — whether experienced within the next breath or heartbeat, or in the passage of eons to come.

And, it's a journey best experienced hand-in-hand. Don't be afraid to reach out.

Mother's Day: Of generations fading, generations rising -- and tiny miracles

Mother's Day 2015 was sweet and melancholy, affirming even as it brought the aching of, and blessings of memories.

 Barbara received lovely cards, flowers and heartfelt calls from the kids (and me), and we reached out to our daughter and daughter-in-law with what we hope were the same levels of love. That was the sweet.

But it also was a melancholy day, with some tears. Barb's and my memories of her mom, who also was one of my best friends, are fresh and a little less painful years after her passing.

And there's my mother, in the final stages of Alzheimer's, no longer knowing or remembering me or my sister, or my dad. When I check on her, though, there's this: the nursing home staff says her loving, if now nonsensical attempts at speech are for her two baby dolls.

Sad, but I also smile at this: both her dolls are babies of color. So are her two most recently born grandsons.

Somewhere in her shredded memories, is there an inkling of this next generation? I don't know.

But the nursing home staff says she specifically chose, and constantly holds those two specific dolls out of the assortment of mostly white babies.

I always smile when my daughter sends me the most recent video of newborn Nate and toddler Gabe. This Mother's Day, I was able to smile a bit broader.

In so many ways, I have lost my mother as much as Barbara has lost her's. The mourning is different, but feels very much the same . . . and yet, there was this "miracle of the dolls."

I'll take it.

Life: Is it what happens to us, our how we happen to live?

A friend and longtime journalistic colleague of mine asked the other day why I hadn't blogged recently.

My answer was that life had been too complicated of late, that I had been reticent to write more about the downward spiral of Alzheimer's and dementia with my parents, the disappointments of work, loss of perceived purpose, etc.

In short, I have been waiting for something more positive, uplifting to write about.

The arrival of my second grandson was, without a doubt, the best of a trying beginning to a new year. My daughter and son-in-law send pictures, and we video chat (Skype) frequently, to see little Nate, his big brother Gabe, and our only granddaughter, Lela.

Another: This past week, after six years of hard work, my wife, Barbara, earned her B.S. in Accounting from Western Governors University. Her joy and glow of success has been a treasure, and for her an indescribable mix of elevated self-worth, victory over the odds, and meaning.

Those are the brightest moments these days. Those are the sailboats we choose to crawl aboard -- yes, choosing to sail toward the sun rather than sink deeper into the darkness of choppy seas.

Life goes on, in all its exhilaration, the laughter and tears of a new generation, and unavoidably, the sorrow and ongoing losses of the last generation.

It  dawned on me, then, that if I waited for some dramatic turn in fortune to blog again, I would be doing Life a disservice. And, I would be waiting a very long time.

We humans like to divide what happens to us into "good" or "bad." We are blessed, or cursed; loved or hated; appreciated or dismissed; relevant or discarded, relegated to less-ambitious roles by younger superiors, etc.

If you maintain the usual human linear assumptions -- our finite, fail-safe manner of thinking and experiencing life -- all of that seems true.

But nothing truly is linear. Matter, energy and our souls are alike indestructible. Mountains erode into sand; sunlight is absorbed by plants to feed and, when they flower, amaze us higher life forms; and corporeal bodies are born, age, break down and eventually decompose to their base elements, only to return as the elements of new life.

The "Breath of Life," that profound, ethereal and yet reassuring expression of creation and existence and rebirth into an infinite existence, exposes as woefully inadequate that linear view of Time, or Being, or Purpose.

We are in error if we do not realize that Reality, according to physicists and theologians alike, extends far beyond the meager dimensions in which we live and perceive.

We attempt to grasp at an understanding of the Creative Intelligence, visualizing human-like super beings holding sway over our lives. But in our hearts, we know that "God" is a Presence both horrifying in its difference from us, and in its iinfinite nature, and as wonderful, and awe-inspiring in its limitless embodiment of what we call "Love.”

And when it comes to Love, we perceive even that with only a microscopic, fragmentary understanding.

We see beginning, middle and end, and think we understand the nature of things. He sees all Time, all its permutations, alternate outcomes – and Space, what we perceive and the wilderness of endless stars, planets, life forms beyond -- as One.

Ultimately, we have two choices. 

 

We can, in our human arrogance, close the inquiries of our finite minds to the Infinite, to Love, Creation and Purpose beyond grasping; we can conclude that what WE cannot understand cannot exist.

Or, we can accept, embrace and trust the Creator and creative process that led to what we are -- as a species, as well as individual souls.

When intellect reaches its limits, there is nothing more than to surrender to the limits, and thus errors of our knowledge.

And, always, the proper response to Love is to live in it, allowing it to flow through us to others.

Choices in entertainment: Moral equivalent of garbage in, garbage out?

OK, just in case you forgot, let's quickly review the Ten Commandments:

1. You shall have no other gods before Me.
2. You shall not make idols.
3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet.
    

There. Now we have context.

My wife and I have a few favorite television shows we regularly watch. The NCIS family of shows are at the top of the list, along with "Blue Bloods,"  “Person of Interest,” “The Black List,” “Forever,” and “Elementary.”

We trimmed the list of situation comedies, which increasingly seem thinly-veiled means to propagandize particular political, social and cultural causes. 

If you made a steady diet of such shows, you'd likely come to think there's not a single functional family existing that is made up of a happily married mother and father; respectful, focused children; and certainly not one with a meaningful (i.e., reflected in actions) faith in God – unless the latter is portrayed as something to scorn or dismiss as delusional at best, or bigotry worth a trip to re-education camps at worst.

But before we congratulate ourselves on that revelation, I've come to wonder what is, afterall, truly consistent for our Christian beliefs within the worldview of an increasingly radicalized secular society.

I'm talking about the one that ignores the erosion of moral standard;, expanding, greed- and corruption-driven gaps between rich and poor; and growth of violence fed by an epidemic lack of accepting personal responsibility for our actions. Screw up, and it's someone else's, or society's fault.

So, do our choices in entertainment, in form of 42 minutes (plus ads) of dramatic storytelling, underscore the value of moral standards – or work to relegate them to mere situational ethics and self-serving relativism?

The same can be said of our choices in music, reading material, etc. But let's stick with the TV, or universal escape from reality.

One recent episode of one our remaining favorites portrayed people violating eight of those Ten Commandments listed above. Another one, nine – leaving only the fourth, keeping the Sabbath holy, unsullied.

So, there's that. But one could argue that scorecard is, after all, an accurate reflection of what our society has become.

And, to be fair, most of those shows we watch do have some moral components, with the protagonists seeking to protect the innocent, fight evil schemes, sustain friendships, making sacrifices, etc.

TV dramas, like human beings, can reflect a battlefield of the soul. That can be instructive. It may even indicate that despite all the degradation, hopelessness, violence, corruption around us, there still is that flicker of desire for “good” that transcends the individual and reaches the Other.

But it is, too often, merely a flicker. 

That's hopeful, certainly, but still not the kind of raging, love-driven inferno we need to turn things around.

Yet.

Human history is replete with eras of reform, revival and restored hope, usually driven by the purer facets of faith.

Oh, how we need that.