A great Rabbi died. He had been revered and loved by his congregation.

After his death, it was decided that the Rabbi’s son, himself a Rabbi, would take his father’s place. This pleased the congregation, for the son would be “just like his father.” But after some time, there was surprise and grumbling. The son gave himself fully, heart and soul, to the synagogue, and began to make changes that displeased some of the people.

“You are not at all like your father,” they told him, obviously disappointed.

“Oh, but I am,” he replied. “For my father was one of a kind. He imitated no one. Neither do I.”

One of a kind.
Lovingly accept the humanity entrusted to you.
This is not so easily accomplished in a world that dotes on vicarious lives, where the role of the article and the ads in the magazine I perused in the hotel lobby, is to make the me feel unhappy, inadequate and insufficient. (Whoever is responsible for this magazine must be very good at what they do, because they accomplished their goal.)

In a friend’s house in Paso Robles, I see a hand drawn crayon picture of a dragon (drawn “in the hand” of a young child). The dragon is pink and purple and lavender. I liked the dragon and mentioned it to my host.

“My daughter did that drawing when she was very young,” the friend told me. “And her teacher was not pleased, and told her that she did it all wrong. Everyone knows that dragons are not THAT color!”

It starts early.
Don’t be different.
What will people think?
What makes you think you have an opinion?
Do you really feel that way?
That person is strange, isn’t he?

Did you see the movie Benny and Joon? Johnny Deep plays Sam, a quirky and eccentric young man who spends time at the home of Benny and Joon (Benny the older brother who cares for his mentally challenged and artistically brilliant younger sister).

Sam is at home in his skin, with his “uniqueness.” In one scene, in a local park, Sam begins to entertain Benny and Joon with a Buster Keatensque routine using his hat and cane.

Soon, a crowd gathers, fully entertained and appreciative. Benny (skeptical of Sam up to this point) see’s Sam’s genius and the unique treasure within.

“That was great,” he enthused. “Did you learn that in school?”

“No,” said Sam. “I was kicked out of school for that.”

Here’s the deal: Playing to public opinion I can sacrifice…
my emotions,
my feelings,
my passion,
my gifts,
my humanity.
Because there will always be some voice telling me that whoever I am today is not enough.

Pay Attention.
Be Astonished.
Tell about it.

Why not go out on a limb? That’s where all the fruit is. Will Rogers

View Article: Purple dragon

Kathleen Norris writes about her niece (in her book Acedia and Me) . When her niece was three, Kathleen’s brother would drive her to day care in the morning, and her mother, who worked as a stock-broker and financial planner, would pick her up in the afternoon. She always brought an orange, peeled so that her daughter could eat it on the way home. One day the child was busying herself by playing “Mommy’s office” on the front porch of her aunt’s house, and Kathleen asked her what her mother did at work. Without hesitation, and with a conviction to relish, she looked up and said, “She makes oranges.”

In a world where what you do (achievement, celebrity, notoriety), makes you “somebody,” “making oranges” doesn’t compute.

Well. Maybe we need a different way to measure.

I’ve been traveling for several days now.  I returned home to piles on my desk. We all have piles on our desks. Or, maybe just in our minds. Either way, there’s something that’s tardy and requires our attention.

My trick is to move the piles around. You know, rearrange them. If it looks tidy, it makes me believe that I’m getting some work done.

And then people ask me, “Did you have a successful trip?”
“I’m certain I did,” I tell them. Although truth be told, I don’t always know. There is some kind of pegboard in our heads where we hang our worth or value. And it’s too easy to get worked up about finding the right peg.

Maybe success is about “making oranges.”
–Showing up.
–Being present.
–Connecting.

I once did a workshop where I asked the participants to describe life. One woman said, “Life is so. . .life is so. . .life is so. . .daily.”
Yes. She’s right. That is the secret.

Here’s the deal: The miracle is that there need not be a miracle–just a slow drip of experience. Being mindful of small things. If there are truly no unsacred moments, then the sacred is infused into this moment. This conversation. This person. Even the smallest or most banal thing deserves our undivided attention.

Or, in the words of William Kittredge, “Moments when nothing happened. What sweet nothing.”

In other words, we don’t run from the moment.

We don’t suffocate the moment with stuff.
We don’t sanitize the moment with platitudes.
We sit. We listen. We look.
We taste. We smell. We see.
We look for the light of God in the most ordinary,
and even the most dull, of contexts.

(I know that I preordain, when I hope or try to orchestrate, rather than just experience. I also know that whether it is experience or relationship or liturgy or prayer or meditation, if you don’t bring it with you, you’re not going to find it there.)

It is winter now and the leaves are gone. But I remember back to autumn when the changes in my garden were striking, and I spent time walking the pathways savoring the tapestry. One day, the leaves on our trees were still shades of green. Six days later, the garden is in full metamorphosis. And I am in third grade, thinking about crayons.

In the third grade, I had a Crayola Box of 12. I did not consider our family poor. But I knew that there were two classmates in my grade from “rich families.” One had the Crayola Box of 48. Another showed off her deluxe box of 64, with the built-in sharpener. We stood around her desk and marveled (our equivalent–in 1962–of a new iPhone). Do you remember the box of 64? Mercy. Did it get any better than that?

The picture in my mind is vivid, standing in K-Mart, on our family excursion to buy school supplies, late August, holding that box (knowing it was out of our family budget) and coveting. I never did own a box of 64–with the exotic shades of Mulberry, Goldenrod and Raw Sienna–and I made due with my 12, always making sure to color inside the lines. After all, I wanted to be somebody; and I knew the rules.

Thankfully, my garden has changed me. Now each autumn when I walk the pathways, I have my own box of 64. Our Vine maples look like a jellybean jar, leaves vary from milk chocolate to mustard to Marilyn-Monroe-lipstick. Nearby, the Katsura tree poses with an elegant posture, its leaves like miniature post-it notes and the color of peach-yellow. It stands out against the blood red leaves of Ninebark. And the licorice red leaves on the Sweetgum, and the scarlet Sumac. It’s an outrageous palate that calls for giddiness. Thankfully, nature does not worry about coloring outside the lines.

Instead of trying to name it, I just stand there and try to savor it, to figure out how to hold that peace in my heart and how to take it with me, if I can.
Rick Bass

View Article: Oranges

It is a New Year.

I did my best to stay home this past week, eschewing the time-honored post-Christmas ritual–the rattle and hum of commerce and swarm gift exchange.  Although I did think about New Year resolutions, because I received an email that told me to do so. I will admit that there is something visceral about resolutions, with the eternal hope for a new start. Not to mention that we’ve made an industry of it. It helps if you resolve to undertake something ambitious. As if there’s a resolution contest.
(Of course there is nothing magical about January 1. In the Middle-Ages, Christians changed New Year’s Day to December 25, the birth of Jesus. Then they changed it to March 25, a holiday called the Annunciation. In the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII revised the Julian calendar, and the celebration of the New Year was returned to January 1. As far as I know, we kept it at January 1 so that Dick Clark could have a job.)

Truth is, I’m not a resolution kind of guy. Mostly because it makes little sense to tell people I want to lose 20 pounds every year, while I’m eating chocolate cake and sipping a 20-yr-old Port Wine. Plus, I have a hard time making up my mind. Don’t get me wrong. Change is good. We are, none of us (adults), victims. We choose. And I believe in “Living with Intention.” Resolution is from the Latin resolutio, or resolvere meaning “to loosen or dissolve again,” (re- + solvere) which was the original meaning of resolve. In other words, I will “determine or decide upon a course of action.” It was first used in English around 1523.

But here’s the deal. Change is one thing. But to assume that my life only begins after I move away from who I am now means that I will never find a place of acceptance.

As I was thinking about resolutions, I realized that I actually did have one. I want to clean my garage. This is an admirable idea until I look at the thermometer, which reads 37 degrees (inside the garage). I prayed for an exemption, and changed my resolution. Now, I want to heat my garage. I went shopping for a wood stove.
What tickles me is the way we’ve turned resolutions into an industry designed to sell products we cannot live without. Sure, resolutions are fun and lighthearted, but there’s just enough of an expectation to make you think twice. On the TV (a commercial during the football game, while I’m scarfing chips and guacamole), I’m told that I will not just lose weight in the NEW YEAR. They guarantee it! (Oh yes. After you buy their product.)
I’m with Calvin on this. He is talking with Hobbes one day.
Hobbes: Whatcha doing?
Calvin: Getting rich!
Hobbes: Really?
Calvin: Yep. I’m writing a self-help book! There’s a huge market for this stuff. First, you convince people there’s something wrong with them. That’s easy because advertising has already conditioned people to feel insecure about their weight, looks, social status, sex appeal, and so on. Next, you convince them that the problem is not their fault and that they’re victims of larger forces. That’s easy, because it’s what people believe anyway. Nobody wants to be responsible for his own situation. Finally you convince them that with your expert advice and encouragement. They can conquer their problem and be happy!
Hobbes: Ingenious. What problem will you help people solve?
Calvin: Their addiction to self-help books! My book is called, “Shut up and stop whining: How to do something with your life besides think about yourself.”
Hobbes: You should probably wait for the advance before you buy anything.
Calvin: The trouble is; If my program works, I won’t be able to write a sequel.
(Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes.)

We live in a culture where we can’t get away from the notion that there’s just one piece of knowledge–or information or advice or prayer or instruction or divine intervention–between us and happiness.

The other alternative is to forget resolutions, and go with the time-honored New Year good luck rituals, from around the world. They are believed to bring good fortune and prosperity in the coming year.
Did you know that in WALES, at the first toll of midnight, the back door is opened and then shut to release the old year and lock out all of its bad luck. Then at the twelfth stroke of the clock, the front door is opened and the New Year is welcomed with all of its luck.
In CHINA, every front door is adorned with a fresh coat of red paint, red being a symbol of good luck and happiness. Although the whole family prepares a feast for the New Year, all knives are put away for 24 hours to keep anyone from cutting themselves, which is thought to “cut” the family’s good luck for the next year.
Even here in the UNITED STATES, at midnight we kiss whoever is close by, standing under a holly sprig because the legend says that a kiss is purification into the new year.

Live a balanced life–learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Robert Fulghum

2. I will give up my need to know exactly where I am going. Why not let the road of this coming year unfold in wonderful, challenging, and unexpected ways? Is control really that important?
And one more, if I have time. 3. I would like to design packaging for CDs that does not require two hours and a weapons-grade machete to open it.

Have a blessed and delight-filled and peaceful New Year.

Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. . .Having chosen this foolishness I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid? Annie Dillard

View Article: New Year

Christmas Eve, a young father watches his 3-year-old daughter do her best to wrap a present. Using a roll of expensive gold-foil wrapping paper, the girl cut and re-cuts, and uses up most of the roll. The longer the father stays the angrier he becomes, but says nothing, and watches as his daughter proudly puts the present under the tree.

Feeling embarrassed about his anger, on Christmas morning the father puts on a cheerful face, ready for the gift exchange. His daughter hands him his gift, the very present she worked so hard to cover with the expensive gold foil.

Unwrapping the gift, the father finds an ordinary cardboard box. And the box, is empty. For whatever reason, this tips something inside, and he explodes at his daughter, yelling, “Don’t you know how rude this is? When you give someone a present, there is supposed to be something inside. You never give someone an empty box.”

The little girl looks up at her father, with tears in her eyes and cries, “But it wasn’t empty when I wrapped it. I filled it full of kisses. And they were all for you.”

This story stands alone.

But the more I read it, the more it tugs at me. And it tells me that empty boxes are not always what they seem.

It is so easy to scapegoat the father in this story. We would have never been so shortsighted, we tell ourselves.
And yet. Every time I read a book about how to be more attentive or kind or loving or caring or prayerful, I do my best to follow the author’s advice hoping to avoid going through what they went through to learn their lessons. But in the end, I do, in fact, go through what they went through, so it’s all about what I take with me on the other side.

Advent is about waiting (for the arrival of something or someone very important). (This is to be differentiated from Christmas, which is about waiting in line at the mall. And don’t get me started about the parking lot, where this past week I circled five times at Bellevue Square Mall with my window rolled down, using salty language antithetical to Christmas cheer, barking to the tune of Jingle Bells.)

Here’s the conundrum: I don’t wait well. On my list of favorite things to do, it doesn’t make my top 100. And if I have to wait, I have a tendency to create expectations (too often unrealistic) and like the young father in the story–in the end, I see only empty boxes.

Here’s how it plays out: I wait and fidget and fret and do my best ADHD imitation. And because I have it all worked out in my head, I foreclose on what is about to happen. Meaning? I’m not really present for the moment when it arrives. And I miss the kisses.

Like that young father, I lost it a couple times this week. Angry. About things that weren’t all that important, and with people who had nothing to do with the problem. I know that my anger came from a place of impatience. Somehow, I felt “out of control.”

Our plans are so well intentioned.
Reminds me of the young couple (a long time ago) looking for lodging.
Their plans called for an inn, a semi-comfortable inn.
What awaited them?
An empty stable.
With not much to offer, but straw and starlight. And the songs of angels.

You never know what the empty box holds.

I can’t tell you what to do with your week, but I invite you to this:
If you receive an empty box–
Listen
Be open
Live into the moment
Receive the gift

Because of a couple disappointments early in the month, I needed some kind of tonic (and I am out of moonshine). So on a full moon night I walked our lower garden. There are parts of our garden that are now empty. Herbaceous plants, full and vigorous in the summer, die back in the cold weather, and virtually, disappear. Our lower garden wall is a three-foot-high amalgamation of odd gathered round stone, now swathed in a ground-cover plant called Baby Tears. In the summer the wall is invisible, covered, concealed by perennials. Now, in winter, the wall is a piece of art. In the moonlight I see a lime-green old-fashioned-shawl, with bit of granite peeking through. It is serene, calming and reassuring.

Just like those kisses.

View Article: Empty Boxes

Garrison Keillor tells the story about a young boy who wanted a Lionel Train Set for Christmas.

The father, of a family of seven, was in the hospital and unable to work. The mother, worried about money did her best to prepare the children, “I’m sorry, but we won’t be able to have much Christmas this year.”
This news was not easy to swallow for the eldest boy, aged ten, who had been dropping hints since September about the Lionel train set, deluxe with the livestock loader. He even mentioned it frequently to God, reminding God that the train was on display in Lundgren’s store window. On Christmas morning, the boy opened his gifts; a pocketknife, wrapped homemade candies, and new pair of winter boots. There was no train. After Christmas dinner, the boy asked if he could go outside. He needed some place to nurse his sadness. As he tromped along in his new boots, he walked out on the iced-over lake, and let the tears flow.

After enough time passed, the boy turned to head back home. As he turned, with the sun nearly set, he saw the lights of the town shimmering before him. He squinted his eyes and could pick out his own house, on the left, not far from shore. It all looked, he realized, exactly like a town in a Lionel train layout, and if he squinted just right, the smoke rising from the chimney look like a steam engine.

Then he knew; the whole world is a Lionel Train set. And he walked home with a lighter step, in his brand new Christmas boots.

“In technology you have this horizontal progress, where you must start at one point and move to another and then another,” Thomas Merton once commented. “But that is not the way to build a life of prayer. In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there. All we need is to experience what we already possess.”

That sure sounds good… until you don’t see the train set under the tree on Christmas morning.

My favorite part of the story?

The boy walked with a lighter step.
With awareness comes gratitude.
With gratitude weights are lifted, and there is a sense of peace.

For the Christian faith, it is Advent, waiting for the birth of the Prince of Peace. With its requisite spat over whether we use Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. What a worthy debate, as we jostle one another, both hands loaded with shopping bags from Macys, Nordstrom and the Gap. I can do December sales with the best of them, so it is wise not to pretend that words like Merry Christmas can be elevated to a moral concern when our primary preoccupation (or worship?) is consumerism. Say what you want, but nothing will change until we move from being a stuff-oriented society to being a relationship-oriented society.

This much is true: Long lines are perfect for eavesdropping. Where truth is always stranger than fiction. One shopper stands at the counter of Restoration Hardware, two bags on one arm, a cell phone in the opposite hand, held up to her ear. Those of us in the long line are hostage to her one-sided conversation, for which there is (unfortunately) neither volume nor mute dial on her telephone voice.

“It’s so sad,” she is telling her cell phone. “I don’t think people really see the meaning of Christmas. It feels so secular now. I don’t know what’s happening to our culture. . .I know, I know, and Gina’s school, they won’t even let her sing Away in a Manger.”

The clerk motions to the woman talking on the phone.
The woman answers the clerk in a clipped tone, “NO, put that on the Visa card too.  And I want separate bags for those.”
She continues, to the phone, as if this has all been one long sentence, “Okay. Gotta go, I’m am soooo crazy right now. So much last minute stuff to do. Let’s get together for a latte later.”
When she walks past, I think about the “hope and fears of all the years,” and I wish her a Merry Christmas.

Merton goes on to say, “If we really want prayer, we must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen. And as soon as we listen to what’s going on, things will begin to take shape by themselves. The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness.”

My friend tells me about a man who takes his son to movie matinees. That is not unusual. Except this: the boy, his son, is deaf. The man is accustomed to questioning.
“Why do you do this to your son, if he cannot hear the movie?”
Or, “If your son can’t hear, what value is there?”
The Father smiles and says, “You are right. He cannot hear. But I wonder. In the movie we watched last weekend. What color were the walls in the house? How many windows where there in the main house? What color was the heroine’s hair? And her eyes?”

Here’s the deal: The season of Advent means, literally, “to wait.” Wait implies that we are paying attention, (one would assume), to something. Specific. It’s just that modern life has rewired our expectations. Waiting is okay. However, whatever it is, we want it now. As if waiting is a test with unambiguous accurate answers.

Could it be, that (like the hearing-impaired boy), the value of waiting, depends upon what we are paying attention to?

Wait is most certainly a word we know. And loathe. And wish to eliminate. (I read that the average person will spend 5 years of his or her life waiting in line, 2 years playing telephone tag, and six months sitting at red lights. That is over 7 and half years of waiting, at best, doing nothing, or at worst experiencing great aggravation! The bottom line is that even in our fast-paced world, with postmodern conveniences, and instant gratification tools, we are all waiting for something. And it doesn’t seem to help that we can text while we wait.)

Tell me again the reason for Advent season?

There is an import, weight, value and substance in the very space that waiting allows.

What if the waiting of Advent is the story of a God who pitches his tent among us, even as we live in the midst of a culture grown weary from too much work, from too much speed, from to much fear and from too much war?

Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.  Author unknown (attributed to a 7-year-old boy)

View Article: Lionel Train Set