Gift

A couple of years ago, I was walked from the Marriott Marquis  in Atlanta to Georgia State University to attend stations of the cross during Lent.  My walk earned me some chastisement from the good Father in charge of the college chaplaincy, as doing so requires transiting a slightly sketchy part of town.  Perhaps he is right, as on my way, a scruffy fellow—tattered clothes, long and unkempt beard, odiferous, and a little wild-eyed but with a broad smile-- approached me, grabbed my arm and pressed a scrap of paper in my hand. 

“Gift,”  he said and hurried on before I could become alarmed by his familiarity, let alone respond to it.

It was the bottom half of an old flyer on which he had written in blue ballpoint, legible and surprisingly neat, a series of pithy little thoughts.  I read them right there on the sidewalk.  Somehow I have managed to keep track of that bit of paper for more than two years.   It’s Lent again and I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about God and how I encounter Him. 

How too often I miss Him because He surprises me, showing up, like Alan Funt, where and when I least expect Him.  But isn’t that His way?  A God who acts through history is a God who continues to do so and a God who turns expectations upside down in the beginning will upset the applecart still.  The King is still found in the manger and on the cross, not in the palace.

And this surprising God speaks to me in my own history through those to whom I am related, however briefly.  I am made different by every relationship; my life, the one God is making for me whether I acknowledge it or not, whether I particularly like it or not, is both changed and created by those with whom I am in relationship.  I cannot even exist without relationship, creature that I am; and I cannot know who I am except against the mirror of others.  Relationship is of God, whose very life is relationship in the mystery of the Trinity.

This business of relationship is something quite different than mere interaction.  Interaction is a sterile, impersonal term, transactional and commercial.  Relating, on the other hand, implies that the encounter leaves something of me with the other and something of the other with me.  It is certainly, true for this evanescent and random encounter: I’ve picked up that paper over and over in the past two years and when I do, the moment comes back and I smile.  Surely, that man left more with me than a bit of paper with a few lines written on it. 

In this case, I am related by a that walk, that street, that day, that time, to a perfect stranger on a sunny street in Atlanta in almost springtime.   I’ve come to think of that little encounter as something of a living fortune cookie, with that scrap the paper filling that God sent playfully my way that morning.  Here’s what He said to me  on that particular day; tiny thoughts that make me smile and make me think…

A hero is a man who does what he can.

Rule your desires lest your desires rule you.

Any song that moves you to joy or tears has greatness.

The most difficult meal for a wife to get is breakfast in bed.

The more laws the less justice.

Jealousy is the fear we have no value.

Beauty is a lover’s gift.  Exuberance is beauty.

And the best of all:

Freedom is a universal license to be good.

Except for the comment about breakfast in bed (which I can no longer endorse, given that my groom brings me coffee every morning), that list contains a pretty good summary of the things I—maybe most of us- struggle with most.

And what strikes me is that it was pressed in my hand with the assurance that the paper, the thoughts, the realities that underlie them, the relationship that reminded me of them, even the struggles I have with them--are gift.   

Tied up in Nots....

For your penance, I want you to tell God who you are.  Not because He needs to know—He already does—but you need to say it.”

My regular confessor is not of the “say three Hail Marys” variety. 

“OK, Father—that may take a while.”

“Maybe.  Depends on how open you are to letting grace in.  Could be real short.  Now say an act of contrition….”

It’s not like I haven’t thought about that concept—who am I?--rather a lot over the past months and years as I have drawn deeper into the Catholic faith.  Regular examination of conscience will do that to a person.  After all, looking at one’s faults in light of the sacrament has a way of bringing the whole person into some sort of focus one way or another.  Something of a perpetual identity crisis, only deeper and more productive.  The trick for someone of my personality is not to focus totally on the negatives.

In some ways,  defining ourselves is almost as hard as defining God.  Most of what I know about God can only be clearly articulated in what He is not.  That which He is tends to be fuzzier, harder to grasp.  God is not an angry judge with a long white beard playing a game of “gotcha!” with mankind.  He is Love (as though I have a grasp on that concept…).  He is not a being.  He is The Very Act of Being, He Is Who Is.  See my point?  Easy to point out the nots, but I can get lost in those positive statements for a long, long time and never come to the end.

So it is, I think, with myself.  It’s easy for me to see the things I am not: not kind enough, not patient enough, not charitable enough…but over the past few years, I have decided I am not just what I do, good or bad.  I am not just a pathologist for example—that is what I do.  But I am a physician who is called on to use her expertise in caring for sick people by helping make a diagnosis of illness in what even the law defines as a doctor-patient relationship.  I am not just a person who commits this, that or the other sin—I am a sinner, broken and in need of grace but more than just the sins I commit, in relationship with God.

I am not just a mother—I am mother to two particular children with whom I share life.  I am not just wife, I am my own husband’s bride with whom we have made a life far different than either of our lives apart would have been. 

All of those self-definitions are loaded with indefinable.  How to define the knot in the gut I got when they called from the ER my son’s freshman year in college, telling me he had a broken jaw and was missing two teeth?  How to explain my fear in sending my daughter off to New York City on a one way ticket a month after graduating from college?  How to explain that if you cut my husband, I bleed? How to explain that, even as I pour out my heart in confession, I know in the very deepest part of me that there is more than just those acts needing contrition?  How to explain that who I am is in some way related to a mass of connections to those I love?

What makes me me is more than grey hair, a few excess pounds, various pecadillos, and six decades.  It is more than college and professional school, more than a job, different, somehow in its essence from what I  have achieved or acquired or failed to do.  It seems that my life—the real life inside me, the one that plays itself out in endless ways,  is a combination of what I am, what I do, what I am not and how I play off those around me.  It is, in short, defined by relationship.

It makes sense.  Part of development of the human person is establishing an identity separate from the world around us.  Babies learn how to distinguish themselves from their mothers, an art teenagers hone to elegance as they prepare to go out and face life alone.  Part of that comes from being loved and wanted and reassured.  Babies learn something of who they are by the way their parents hold them, cuddle them feed them.  They grow and flourish when they are connected to their parents, and if that—or some reasonable facsimile--is absent in the earliest years of life, children can emerge so crippled from that they never learn to relate to others at all.  So, it seems, in the arms of others we learn who we are—and what we are not.

It has certainly been true in my life,  I learned from my husband that I might not be the world’s biggest misanthrope.  I learned from my children that all parents really get to do is supply what amounts to a nice finish coat to the personality of a child; I am definitely not in control of my child’s personality, gifts and destiny. 

And I’ve begun to learn—really learn-- from my confessor that I really don’t have to be perfect for God to love me.  A fairly significant discovery for a perfectionist who wants 105% on every test and who has made a comfortable career out of doing so.  A very significant discovery in a word where human value too often equates with productivity, a world where others are all too eager to  tell us that we are not good enough, wanted, cared for because there’s something we cannot—or will not—do.  A world in which the externals matter far too much.  A world in which human dignity gets caught up in the nots…

It’s begun to come home to me that this business of being Christian—inward and outward, outward and upward, is all about finding ourselves the only way we can. In the mirror of relationship.  Every relationship shows a different facet of ourselves and a different aspect of God and the process of discovery never ends as long as we are willing to risk the connection and look in the mirror. As long as we are in relationship with God who is Relationhship Itself—a communion of persons.  If we wish to enter the life of God, or to find our very selves, there’s no other path. Only relationship.

But I didn’t really think of any of this as I walked up the aisle of the church to kneel in front of the crucifix and do my penance and prepare for mass.  

All I found myself saying in awe and wonder was this:  I am Your daughter, God.  And You love me. 

In the Garden

The rest of the world has waltzed its way into Easter and last Sunday celebrated Divine Mercy Sunday.  Except for the brief and beautiful time of the Vigil and a concentrated effort of will to keep the Octave as a feast, I have found myself, for many reasons, stuck in the garden.  Not the garden of our fall or the garden of our redemption—for Joseph’s newly hewn tomb was in a garden—but the garden in which Jesus agonized.  Not my will but Thine be done.  Not always an easy prayer to pray, especially when it hurts.

That garden provides, I think, a good perspective to meditate on God’s mercy.

Mercy, like love, is a word we often use and do not so often think about and the two are intimately connected.  It took me a long time to figure out that love was not just an emotion—though it can come clad in one.  It’s not, in its purest form, reciprocal—because too often love for the sake of being loved is not really an encounter in the other person, it is an encounter with self.  I will love you in order that you will love me in return.  That’s a commercial arrangement, not love as God expends it. 

Love is—to use the best definition I’ve encountered—willing the good of the other as other, without thought to oneself.  It’s a high standard and not much of what passes for love in this world meets it.  And even that tidy definition leaves out a few important details—like defining the good and the other.  Meditating on what it means to love God and love others could be an occupation for a lifetime.

But love isn’t meant to be a meditation.  It’s meant to be an action and an act of the will, a purposeful entering into the life of God, however imperfectly we do it and however poorly we understand it.  The biggest daily acts of our love may not always be the sweeping, grand gestures for those we cherish and who love us back in the more conventional sense.  Love often lives, instead in tiny things we do for those we don’t even know. Love surfaces in a smile at the unbalanced homeless man at the corner, for instance, the one whose eyes no one meets, the one most of us avoid, the man whose name no one knows:  a moment in which for the tiniest flicker of an instant, we encounter him not as a smelly inconvenience but as  a man  and a gift from God in whom a bit of Jesus lives.  All in the momentary meeting of eyes.  Love.

Mercy is likewise.  Too often when I think of mercy, what I want is for God not to give me what I have earned or what I deserve but what I want even out of my brokenness.  I don’t want to be sick, God, it’s too much pain and trouble and it interferes with what I had planned to do and besides, it hurts.  Please heal me God.  Have mercy.

But God’s mercy, like His love, operates on a different level.  Like love, mercy is willing the good of another as other—for the other’s own sake.  And the best definition of God’s mercy I’ve yet encountered is this:  Mercy is the act of entering into the suffering of another to assume the burden and share the suffering.  God’s greatest single act of mercy was on the cross—where He assumed the burden of that sin which causes our suffering and relieved us of it.  It reminds me that what I see as my burden and what God sees may be very different indeed. 

Taken from that perspective, God’s mercy can look both severe and peculiar indeed.  On Divine Mercy Sunday, we pray: Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.

It’s more a statement of faith in my life than a petition.  At any given moment, I’m not even sure what my will intends, let alone God’s so I have no idea what I am really asking for.  The best I can do is to affirm that God, in His mercy, will provide what I need, even if I do not recognize it at the time--and  I promise to look with eyes and clear and wide-open as I can.  I promise to try to be present and attentive even when I do not understand.  Even when it hurts.

Looking at the cross, I know with the heart of faith that no matter what my circumstance, God’s mercy is active in it.  Always. Perhaps not in creating or adjusting  the situation I find myself in, which is always an intricate dance of my will and His and others’.  But always, always, there is mercy in His  taking me through it.  For mercy serves to bring me closer to God and conform me more to His life.  Mercy is the road I travel in seeking companionship with God, for the roads of love and mercy are intertwined and there are no others.  And as there is no limit to God’s mercy, there is no circumstance in which I may not find it.  None.

There is mercy in Peter’s affirmation of Christ.  And  mercy in his denial of Him.

There is mercy in Paul’s martyrdom and John’s peaceful death.

There is mercy in success.  And mercy in failure.

There is mercy in healing.  And mercy in sickness.

There is mercy in riches.  And mercy in poverty.

For mercy is not a commodity to be sought, or a situation to be achieved, it is, like love, a relationship.  It is, like love, an entry into the life of God, whether we give it or receive it, for only God, who needs nothing and still chooses us can truly enter into our suffering and help to lift it with no regard for Himself.  And only through Him can we do this for others.

Mercy isn’t always the absence of suffering.  Mercy is God’s presence as we go through suffering, just as it is as we rejoice.  If we look for mercy to be the elimination of suffering, we will be disappointed; even a child will tell you life embraces suffering.  As Christians, all of our faith points to the cross, and it is there we find perfect mercy—not in the absence of suffering, the avoidance or the remedying of it  of it but in the transformation of it—and thereby, the transformation of all of life.  The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the roses and the thorns.

There is Mercy after Easter, unlimited, unfathomable, glorious mercy.  And  because of that, there is mercy in the Garden.  Wherever.  Whenever.  Always.

Insult to Injury

For your penance, I want you to pray for the intentions of one person who has hurt you and one person you have hurt, and make your communion at mass with that in mind.

My morning Lenten devotion had suggested confession as penance that Friday morning.  Having been relatively recently, I quickly talked myself out of following through despite my personal promise of obedience to the program I had set out for myself.  Still, I found myself engaging in a reluctant but insistent examination of conscience in the down moments of that day, spent at a  meeting where I was literally surrounded by Roman collars.  I had determined not to ask a sacramental favor of any of the priests there out of utter shyness and fear of imposition, but God, having other plans, put a joking invitation in the mouth of one of them when I dropped by to talk about another matter.  One of these days I am going to learn  (1) that bringing the sacraments is never an imposition to a priest and (2) trying to outrun God doesn’t work very well.  If He has something to say, best stay put and listen.  And where does He speak more directly and personally than in the sacrament of penance?

As  I sat waiting for mass to begin the next morning, I cast my mind back over those two possibilities in my assigned penance  Someone who has injured me….no name came to mind.  For a brief and shining second I patted myself on the back.  For a woman of Irish-German heritage for whom the family sport is bearing grudges while nursing spite, the fact that no villain immediately surfaced seemed something of a minor conquest, gaining at least a little ground in the battle to loosen my death-grip on pride and self importance.  The slightest growth in learning the lessons of charity, perhaps? 

My confidence lasted only as long as it took for me to reflect on those I had hurt, for no names came to mind there either.  It’s true enough that I don’t go about seeking opportunity for gratuitous meanness, but the utter inability to name anyone whom I have injured bespeaks a pronounced inclination to bury my faults which probably meant I was burying my resentments as well.  I gave up for the moment and made my intentions for the ever popular Ida Know—on both sides of the penance.

Over the next few days I chewed on that uncomfortable fact in my quiet moments and kept coming back to two ridiculously minor annoyances, so trivial that to characterize them as personal hurts required the elasticity of an emotional Gumby: the first, a religious sister who complained that I misspelled her (difficult, foreign) name on a birthday card one year and the next, when I redoubled my efforts to be correct , wrote again to complain that the card had arrived a few days early.  (The expression in the South is she’d complain if they hung her with a new rope).  The second a man whom I see regularly in daily mass who visited injury on a friend of mine, made worse by the fact that this man brushed the whole matter off as nothing personal, you know, just business.

I have developed a rule that, if I encounter something three times in a short span of time, it’s probably worth paying attention to.  When this odd couple of folk overtook my mind for the third time in as many days, unbidden, I decided to dust off the half-done penance and do a little soul searching.   Imagine my surprise to finally realize that these were not just people who had injured me—they were people I had injured as well.  Ida Know on both sides of the penance, indeed.

Not more than a few days ago, I had stood, huddled in the privacy of a corner of a hotel meeting room, talking to Jesus, stuttering out an (always) imperfect confession and asking Him not to judge me on the basis of my lapses, seeking the assurance of His love in spite of them.  More than anything, I wanted Him to see me not as the sum total of my stupid, selfish mistakes but as the reflection of His love. 

Like the ungrateful and forgiven servant of the parable, I then found myself unwilling to extend the same grace to those who in my narrow vision had wronged me, and so failed to see that I had compounded injury with insult.  Desperate not to be defined by my worst moments, I still held others bound by theirs, long, long after the fact.  I went from not having a clear fix on those I have injured to not having enough fingers and toes to count them all. 

Those two.  The partner who refused to take call for me because his golf game was more important than visiting my father on Fathers’ Day.  The guy in the big, black truck who cut me off in traffic this morning.  The roommate who never cleaned up her messes.  The child I accused of “always” or “never” when the truth of the matter was “just now…”  The colleague whose fastidiousness drives the rest of us crazy.  The smelly, muttering man with dreadlocks who stands on the corner at the post office and shouts at passersby. It seems that part and parcel of being broken in a broken world is the great tendency to hold people fast in whatever limited dimensions in which I see them, forgetting that there is much more to them than either fault or virtue; there is the love of our mutual Father and that is the greatest commonality of all. 

To fail to recognize that reality is to deny a person his dignity in the moment.  To do it over and over again so that a moment becomes hardened into an opinion, or worse yet, a bias,  is to do real injury, not just to the other, but to myself.  For sin, I have begun to realize, is not about breaking rules so much as it is about breaking relationships.  If I cannot see God in His image and likeness before me, and respond accordingly, how can I hold Him in my heart?  How will I hear His voice if not through the mouths of others?  My priest, my neighbor...

Still considering the magnitude and pervasiveness of this newfound sin of mine, I happened to pay closer attention to a hymn by John Donne, which plays daily on my Lenten playlist.  Donne says it better than I—there need be no other commentary except that of thanksgiving for graces received, which far exceed my simple, awkward attempts to ask for them and far outweigh the frustrating and wonderful knowledge that I’ll always need them again, and again…and again.  And that grace will always be there and He who gives it will always be ready to make whole my broken relationships once again in His good way and in His good time.   Even when I have no clue what those broken pieces really are.

Wilt thou forgive the sin where I begun,

Which is my sin though it was done before?

Wilt thou forgive that sin, the sin through which I run

And do run still, though still I do deplore?

When Thou has done, Thou hast not done

For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin through which I have won

Others to sin and made my sin their door?

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year or two and wallowed in a score?

When thou hast done, Thou hast not done

For I have more.

I have a sin of fear that when I have spun

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore

But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son

Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore

And having done that, Thou hast done

I fear no more.