I brought four quarters to the Bring-a-buck Men’s Breakfast at Creston Church. Once the coffee was poured, Pastor Sean led us in a discussion about the account of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem according to Luke’s Gospel. The Pharisees demanded that Jesus rebuke his followers for their overt praises but he replied that the rocks would cry out in their place if the people were silent.
Our discussion swooped like a hawk from divine evidence in creation to reflecting Christ’s message in our lives each moment and then to the ‘practice’ in spiritual-practices. Together, we wondered why men fail to be involved with churches. The older gentlemen spoke warmly about why they found church so advantageous but my friend, Greg, suggested that personal advantage could not be our basis. The ‘uses and gratifications’ approach treats Church like entertainment, not community. Discipline is required or young men find reasons to be somewhere else, victims of false efficiency.
I offered the message that God has put on my heart. “Going back to the theme of spiritual ‘practice’, I find that I need a vision that goes beyond myself. I played my best, in community bands, because I focused on how much greater we could be if I were there every week.”
Scenes from my last year in high school band streamed on a loop, ghosted over houses as I walked home. I heard our first-flute chuckle at the notion that our band could get a Division I* rating at band festival. I slammed my locker door and erupted:
“Shut the fuck up!”
The evening after festival, I unsheathed my bubble-gum victory-cigar but not for the reason I had planned. Cloistered in my seat on the darkened bus, I sustained a solitary, masticatory stewing session. The judges gave us a division IV rating. I shuffled into the bathroom, once I knew, to clear my bladder and my head; a suspicious trickle of underclassmen followed.
“I sent them in there to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself or anything...”
“I don’t have anything to hurt myself about—MY performance was fine. I piss better by myself, too...”
Forgive my ragged Ojibwa but the original inhabitants of Michigan had three words for “us”. I get ‘ninwe’ and ‘ginwe’, confused; one means ‘a crowd of people, of which I am one’, and the other means ‘our group, as opposed to another’. The third word is ‘kinwe’ [keen-way], which means “all of us together”. I knew that my part was not always featured but the merits of coming together as a band were foreign ideas. To me, being a band was an outgrowth of the fact that I could not play all the parts myself. A jewel needs a crown to be a crown-jewel; I expected my high-school band to line-up behind me, supreme trumpet. The judges noted that attitude in their comments: the first trumpet part was always in the foreground, set-apart. I mean that not in the Holy sense but a disconnected one. I only had a vision for my self.
...I’ve come a long way to be here...
Moses flees Egypt as a fugitive, alone, but returns to lead Israel from bondage. Years later, God is disgusted with the Israelites and offers to make Moses a nation [Numbers 14:12&13]. According to the Old Testament, Moses insisted that God spare them. Whatever actually happened, sometimes I believe it takes a person who went solo in the wilderness to recognize the value of kinwe.
When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he was tempted with visions of mastery and supremacy. This serpent voice calls every person out of the garden with misconceptions of grandeur. It convinces us to act like third graders in line, vying for a meaningless position at the front while we pace further away from unity and understanding the only One who can lead us away from oblivion. Christians often reverence Christ as the Son of God but Jesus called himself the Son of Man. Even if they denote the same person they connote differently. The Son of God vision was going to set Jesus apart, not in the Holy sense but disconnected. The Pharisees wanted a superlative Messiah, a god to put behind the inner-curtain, who would take his position at the top and smile upon their stratification. Whether an independent force of wickedness or bad brain-waves from a long fast, Satan offered Jesus all the world’s kingdoms if he would forfeit the kingdom of his destiny.
Jesus left that vision in the desert. He traveled with lower-class mugs, talked with skanks and touched lepers. If he was ‘set-apart’, it was self-imposed quarantine. Just before his grand entrance, James and John asked to be his superlative disciples—his left and right-hand men. Instead, Jesus called the crew together and said:
“You know that the rulers of this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them but among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be the leader among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave to everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Then the armed-guards stormed the garden at Gethsemane and this band, these disciples who wanted to be the greatest, broke like a rack of billiards and rolled away. Judas sold him for chump-change; Peter was willing to slice somebody’s ear off in the dark but by the light of the fire he just wanted to save his own skin; James and John go MIA. Jesus knew all of this beforehand but he still washed their crusty feet the night before. After the Resurrection, he made them a fish breakfast; Jesus reunited with the disciples and, rather than holding them accountable as deserters, loved them and equipped them to carry-on ministry.
Jesus had a vision greater than himself. He rode into town on an ass and forcibly reset the temple [Luke 19:28 — 20:8]. The Pharisees knew what He was and that he came to tear their curtains down. By Friday, they had him under control: nailed to a cross and dying.
“He saved others, let him save himself!”
“If he is really the king of the Jews, let him come down from the cross and we will believe.”
They would have believed, too, in that sub-standard Messiah who cared more about proving his prowess than keeping the kinwe. He stayed because he knew what was required to shred the temple curtain and bring us under God together.
I wept for ten minutes, at least, when the force of this truth touched my core. The feeling was beautiful but the after-taste was scary. The connection between my thoughts about Jesus on the cross and these potent emotions felt foreign. I wondered what it was that brought my estranged parts together again and what it was that tore them apart—and how I could allow myself to be fragmented. The answer may be that when I try to be self-contained I make decay inevitable but when I allow my borders to blur, when I give-up supremacy and even individuality, my internal connections come alive again.
I still do not fully understand. At some point, I have to share these thoughts or they will never be complete.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
A Hero
I like listening to a military band play John Philip Sousa marches. At this point in history, Sousa is my only patriot. I like rock bands that pay tribute to the troops too but, no matter what genre, I have mixed feelings as long as soldiers remain in Afghanistan. I respect them for the heroism that burns in their hearts. Such disregard for personal comfort and commitment is to be admired. While I want to honor their commitment, I condemn the mission our government charges them to complete. I worry that cycles of violence will never end as long as we celebrate myths of redemptive violence. Heaven knows, the decade-long onslaught of military spending and lost lives has not brought the Middle-East or Manhattan truer healing. When I was in New York for a few days, the tragedy of September eleventh, 2001, floated back into salience. Yet one night our host managed to put even that in perspective when she began to talk about the use of ‘comfort women’, human experimentation and other atrocities sanctioned by the Japanese government during their campaign to rule the Pacific. On the other side of the globe, Nazi Germany brought destruction and holocaust to every part of Europe they touched. Not only were people tortured, sterilized, executed and otherwise treated worse than animals but this happened, every day, by the order of powerful nation-states, spilling over their borders and threatening to dominate the world. Young men rose to the challenge of thwarting that tide of evil. One of them was my grandfather, Byron Lee Rice.
Byron flew bombing missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress based in Italy. As the grandson of a veteran, I might have heard a battery of heart-throttling war stories. He told me about how miserably cold is was in Colorado when he basic-training and how happy he was to join Cadets. He did mention a night when they took some flack in combat but several more times he told me about the time that a new crew-member lost his nerve and panicked. Byron turned the plane around and landed, against regulations. “I told them ‘this guy doesn’t have the heart, he’s going to make the mission dangerous for the whole crew’”. Being such a nice guy, Byron got the private a desk job. “The next time I saw him,” said my Grand-dad with a crooked smile and a chuckle, “the kid out-ranked me! Can you believe that?” Then, Grandpa would laugh and start talking about farming or ice-fishing again. My grandfather was never shot-down and, because of that, everyone wanted to be in his crew. It seemed like my grandfather acted out of duty rather than heroism: he got-in, got-out and got-home to Grandma, giving flack and fighters a wide-berth. The other guys benefited.
Can you believe that? I did for a while.
However, my grandfather was a hero. Heroism was thrust upon him. Rice was so mechanically inclined, it was like a super-power. He started flight-training as a co-pilot, cruising over barns in Iowa by the side of his college-educated pilot. One day, the pilot was taking pass after pass, unable to land the plane, and Byron started muttering directions to him. “If its so easy,” said the pilot, “then why don’t you just do it?”. He did it on the first try; he also did not like that pilot, partly because this officer impregnated a young-woman but refused to marry her. That pilot went down on another mission a few days before my grandfather flew his own first mission. He grew into a father-figure for his nearly teenage crew members. They were pulled out of bars by their shirt-collars, countless times, before big missions: Lieutenant Rice kept high-standards. They say he never cheated on Grandma and I believe it without corroboration: even at 23 years of age, my grandfather was made of honor and family loyalty. That was the hero I needed, after my Dad left my Mom—someone who persevered until death.
I knew him for being depression-grade thrifty and tough. Past the age of eighty, he was driving tractors and climbing into the trap-door above the stair-case to put ice-cream buckets under leaks in the attic. When the curators at the Kalamazoo ‘Air Zoo’ offered to help him into the cock-pit of a B-17, he grabbed the hole with both hands and hauled himself in unaided. I watched him trim brush with chainsaws and mow-down chipmunks with a 22-caliber rifle: he could do everything on a farm that needed doing. Yet, it still surprised me when I found-out that he was an unsung hero. After he died, while we were trying to figure-out why Grandpa saved empty cans of spray-paint, Grandma finally came forward with the medal. I was wrong: he did not steer clear of trouble—he out-flew it. That night they took a shot of flack, the plane was not just a little holey. An entire engine was blown away and over 300 holes riddled the fuselage—and the crew. The condition of the craft warranted a bail-out but some of his crew were in critical condition, too. Byron used his super-powers to get them home. He flew the would-be wreck for hours, one engine short, to get his boys the help they needed. Not one was lost. The United States’ government awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross... which he never mentioned to me once.
I was honored to play taps at his grave-site.
I knew my Grandfather to be a pacifist, of a quieter variety. “They told me it was the war to end all wars, Johnny,” he once said, “but it didn’t end’m,”. In spite of World War II, I think that Vietnam made him a pacifist. My uncle Alan came home with a hole in his leg (friendly fire) and brought with him months of hellish, jungle nightmares that everyone could hear. To fight a war is one thing; to send your child to war is another. “I asked him,” said my Grandmother, “why he never talked about his medal and he said ‘I never want to glorify war, Betty—war is terrible.’” By the time the Korean war was in progress, my Grandfather had followed my Grandmother into the Friends’ (Quaker) tradition. Grandma said he spent years talking to Reverend Tone, a veteran himself, about the possibility of people being in the factories he bombed—German people like his grandparents. It cut him to pieces.
He was a greater man than he ever said, or allowed to be said, so that only death could make him shine. He was made of honor and family loyalty. My grandfather sat through virtually every band-concert my cousin, sister and I ever played-in. He would not admit that he could not hear well or that he didn’t even like music. He loved us. He could not have been happier to see me pick-up a book, not a gun, and go to college. Byron Lee Rice was a depression-grade father, too: my uncle Delbert told us that Grandpa made him apologize to a neighbor for something he had not done. “You might not have done it but she thinks you did—man-up and make it right.” This man poured himself into farming, which he loved, and into a trailer-factory job to support his four children. More than merely supply them, he set the standard for granite-hard determination. When Delbert was too sick with cancer to bring his crops in, my Grandfather donned his overalls and got the job done at age eighty-eight, just months before his own diagnosis. After dodging flack, working with heavy machinery and enduring open-heart surgery, Byron Lee Rice died of a powerful disease that could kill anybody: pancreatic cancer. He died a young-man’s death with the peace and dignity of the old.
My grandfather went to war to prevent terrible empires from over-running our planet. At the same time, boys and girls mistake our appreciation for an endorsement and that is unacceptable. My Grandfather went to war with the right heart but he would want us to learn from his lesson: war never ends. The only right way to honor my grandfather at his funeral was to tell stories about the farmer, family-man and man-of-God we loved for the better part of a century. I say, let us celebrate our veterans for what they do afterward, living lives of determination with missing limbs, rancid night-terrors or new careers—or all of the above, with courage burning in their hearts.
One of my Grandfather’s greatest acts of heroism took place in the relative peace of the eighties. Gary Wright, my Grandmother’s nephew, stood-up at Grandpa’s funeral and told us a story. When Gerald Wright died he left his sons land. Still, Gary did not have the resources to buy seed or pay for fuel to plant his share. Banks in the community turned him away, which hurt deeply because they knew him and his family. Perhaps Gary was just a risk to them but he was family to someone. Gary said, “Uncle Byron pulled me aside after church one day and he said ‘Gary, I’ve been talking with my brother Stan—we want to loan you the money to plant Gerald’s field.’” My Grandfather and his bachelor brother, a couple farmers who had genuinely sweat for every cent, were willing to take the risk the banks would not. That is heroism: they laid their hard-earned money on the line for a young man who might have gone bankrupt without them.
“—and I paid it back to the last dime,” said Gary.
Byron flew bombing missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress based in Italy. As the grandson of a veteran, I might have heard a battery of heart-throttling war stories. He told me about how miserably cold is was in Colorado when he basic-training and how happy he was to join Cadets. He did mention a night when they took some flack in combat but several more times he told me about the time that a new crew-member lost his nerve and panicked. Byron turned the plane around and landed, against regulations. “I told them ‘this guy doesn’t have the heart, he’s going to make the mission dangerous for the whole crew’”. Being such a nice guy, Byron got the private a desk job. “The next time I saw him,” said my Grand-dad with a crooked smile and a chuckle, “the kid out-ranked me! Can you believe that?” Then, Grandpa would laugh and start talking about farming or ice-fishing again. My grandfather was never shot-down and, because of that, everyone wanted to be in his crew. It seemed like my grandfather acted out of duty rather than heroism: he got-in, got-out and got-home to Grandma, giving flack and fighters a wide-berth. The other guys benefited.
Can you believe that? I did for a while.
However, my grandfather was a hero. Heroism was thrust upon him. Rice was so mechanically inclined, it was like a super-power. He started flight-training as a co-pilot, cruising over barns in Iowa by the side of his college-educated pilot. One day, the pilot was taking pass after pass, unable to land the plane, and Byron started muttering directions to him. “If its so easy,” said the pilot, “then why don’t you just do it?”. He did it on the first try; he also did not like that pilot, partly because this officer impregnated a young-woman but refused to marry her. That pilot went down on another mission a few days before my grandfather flew his own first mission. He grew into a father-figure for his nearly teenage crew members. They were pulled out of bars by their shirt-collars, countless times, before big missions: Lieutenant Rice kept high-standards. They say he never cheated on Grandma and I believe it without corroboration: even at 23 years of age, my grandfather was made of honor and family loyalty. That was the hero I needed, after my Dad left my Mom—someone who persevered until death.
I knew him for being depression-grade thrifty and tough. Past the age of eighty, he was driving tractors and climbing into the trap-door above the stair-case to put ice-cream buckets under leaks in the attic. When the curators at the Kalamazoo ‘Air Zoo’ offered to help him into the cock-pit of a B-17, he grabbed the hole with both hands and hauled himself in unaided. I watched him trim brush with chainsaws and mow-down chipmunks with a 22-caliber rifle: he could do everything on a farm that needed doing. Yet, it still surprised me when I found-out that he was an unsung hero. After he died, while we were trying to figure-out why Grandpa saved empty cans of spray-paint, Grandma finally came forward with the medal. I was wrong: he did not steer clear of trouble—he out-flew it. That night they took a shot of flack, the plane was not just a little holey. An entire engine was blown away and over 300 holes riddled the fuselage—and the crew. The condition of the craft warranted a bail-out but some of his crew were in critical condition, too. Byron used his super-powers to get them home. He flew the would-be wreck for hours, one engine short, to get his boys the help they needed. Not one was lost. The United States’ government awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross... which he never mentioned to me once.
I was honored to play taps at his grave-site.
I knew my Grandfather to be a pacifist, of a quieter variety. “They told me it was the war to end all wars, Johnny,” he once said, “but it didn’t end’m,”. In spite of World War II, I think that Vietnam made him a pacifist. My uncle Alan came home with a hole in his leg (friendly fire) and brought with him months of hellish, jungle nightmares that everyone could hear. To fight a war is one thing; to send your child to war is another. “I asked him,” said my Grandmother, “why he never talked about his medal and he said ‘I never want to glorify war, Betty—war is terrible.’” By the time the Korean war was in progress, my Grandfather had followed my Grandmother into the Friends’ (Quaker) tradition. Grandma said he spent years talking to Reverend Tone, a veteran himself, about the possibility of people being in the factories he bombed—German people like his grandparents. It cut him to pieces.
He was a greater man than he ever said, or allowed to be said, so that only death could make him shine. He was made of honor and family loyalty. My grandfather sat through virtually every band-concert my cousin, sister and I ever played-in. He would not admit that he could not hear well or that he didn’t even like music. He loved us. He could not have been happier to see me pick-up a book, not a gun, and go to college. Byron Lee Rice was a depression-grade father, too: my uncle Delbert told us that Grandpa made him apologize to a neighbor for something he had not done. “You might not have done it but she thinks you did—man-up and make it right.” This man poured himself into farming, which he loved, and into a trailer-factory job to support his four children. More than merely supply them, he set the standard for granite-hard determination. When Delbert was too sick with cancer to bring his crops in, my Grandfather donned his overalls and got the job done at age eighty-eight, just months before his own diagnosis. After dodging flack, working with heavy machinery and enduring open-heart surgery, Byron Lee Rice died of a powerful disease that could kill anybody: pancreatic cancer. He died a young-man’s death with the peace and dignity of the old.
My grandfather went to war to prevent terrible empires from over-running our planet. At the same time, boys and girls mistake our appreciation for an endorsement and that is unacceptable. My Grandfather went to war with the right heart but he would want us to learn from his lesson: war never ends. The only right way to honor my grandfather at his funeral was to tell stories about the farmer, family-man and man-of-God we loved for the better part of a century. I say, let us celebrate our veterans for what they do afterward, living lives of determination with missing limbs, rancid night-terrors or new careers—or all of the above, with courage burning in their hearts.
One of my Grandfather’s greatest acts of heroism took place in the relative peace of the eighties. Gary Wright, my Grandmother’s nephew, stood-up at Grandpa’s funeral and told us a story. When Gerald Wright died he left his sons land. Still, Gary did not have the resources to buy seed or pay for fuel to plant his share. Banks in the community turned him away, which hurt deeply because they knew him and his family. Perhaps Gary was just a risk to them but he was family to someone. Gary said, “Uncle Byron pulled me aside after church one day and he said ‘Gary, I’ve been talking with my brother Stan—we want to loan you the money to plant Gerald’s field.’” My Grandfather and his bachelor brother, a couple farmers who had genuinely sweat for every cent, were willing to take the risk the banks would not. That is heroism: they laid their hard-earned money on the line for a young man who might have gone bankrupt without them.
“—and I paid it back to the last dime,” said Gary.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Time Squared
It was just past the ides of March when I first visited Time Square. I and several other ministry candidates and I surfaced from a subway tunnel and almost immediately found the, sort of, kryptonite spire from which the New Year’s Eve ball drops. If all roads led to Rome in the first century, all fiber-optics lead to New York in the twenty-first. The brick and concrete of every edifice was a mere framework for Time Square’s splendor. There were billboards like giant wall-posters or studded with incandescent bulbs. Buildings were embroidered or even drenched with light, whether stitched with glowing cords of neon or seething with high-quality media. To say the least, Fred (my new camera) was put to work. I kept stride with my cohort, soaking my senses in the spectacle as I stepped, absently, around people of all shades. One of the others helped me get a picture of myself: in the middle of it all.
A Jewish-pride rally was breaking-out at one end of the square, at the feet of a giant staircase to nowhere. There I was too, with these people I had not known a few days before, clicking shots and posing for group-shots to be clicked, only barely noticing how wonderful it was to be there together. The ladies flashed a collective, luminous smile from a line on the crimson-lit steps. The guys clustered together for some face-time, too. “We,” I thought, “are now in photos together.”
My mind became an iridescent dragonfly, zooming through space and memory and reeking of reverie. I fussed with my camera, then glanced around for the back of a head. I saw only strangers. I listened for the familiar cadence of voices but heard only the chants of the congregants, waving the star of David. “Oh I lost them for a second...” I mumbled, scanning the crowds. I paced first around the stairs, then up them for a better vantage-point, then to a railing where I could rest. Initially, I was punch-drunkenly amused by this development. The scenario tasted like the extract of a G-rated movie-script: “Country Mouse: Lost in Time Square!” I clung to the edge of a metaphorical diving-board, waiting to jump into a quirky line when I saw a friendly face.
There is no scale to gage the magnitude of being alone nor schematics for tracing its dimensions. I plumbed a depth of alone that an autumnal beech in Oceana county* could not conjure. Lake Michigan gave me solitude that starry night, a state of being singular that becomes a spiritual practice. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the emotional state of suffering from separateness or from being separated. There is a bitter but cleansing vulnerability in being lonely, an injection of exposure and need. Darker ways to suffer alone exist, trading exposure for siege. A person can build deep trenches where no arrow can strike; yet strongholds become dungeons. Alone is the state I am in when the insidious whispers uncurl from between the iron bars of my memory.
There is something fascinating and unsettling about these reveries, like spurts of oil escaping the wrecked USS Arizona. Japan surrendered and the reefs grew in Pearl Harbor but the toxic succession of bubbles will not stop. Eighteen years of plotline melted away, leaving impressions from first and second grade. I know that I lived many recesses alone. I am uncertain why. The nose-picking would explain it at first glance but not entirely; one time, I drove away some other children because I was convinced I could become Bugs Bunny if only they would get out of my way. The more separated I became the more my parents consoled me with my own performance. The other children, they claimed, were just not as advanced as I was. So, loneliness never set-in where false-superiority already had its coils around me. As a child among children, I must have cast a chilling halo.
“Yes, but John:” said my Dad, once, “none of the friends you have made since then would recognize that description—would they?”
“I have come such a long way to be here,” I mused, drifting back to Manhattan. I wanted to keep moving, since I tend to be pacer, but the others could have gone in any direction. Reversing direction and catching a train back to Alma House was one option; second, to throw caution to the wind and have a lone-wolf excursion; the third was to keep my butt on its perch. I entertained the thought that the others were somewhere near time-square, searching. Forced to heed the advice I give to campers, I stayed and waited to be found. Each moment the cold nipped a little harder at my buttocks—and my fortitude. I turned my palms toward heaven and put a case forward. Hope wore to tatters and my crowd-scanning collapsed into darker thoughts. A game of blame-badminton erupted: someone had made a mistake. Demons came ripping out of the muck to join in the frenzy:
“John, be an adult; quit playing with your camera and pay attention. Space-cadet...”
“These people just want to enjoy the city; they don’t want to blow energy caring for you...”
“You probably did something creepy that you don’t even realize...”
“Those wankers: you could be back in Alma House studying for tomorrow’s interview...”
“This is the pattern that you fear: so close to connecting on the stairs BUT...”
“...bet they have the nerve to be pissed at you for making them turn back—if they turn-back...”
“There are probably limited spots abroad—maybe you should be relieved they aren’t very—“
But every few minutes another voice would cry out, like a canary in a mine, “LIES! LIES! These are competent, compassionate people! Push back your hurt and impatience—your fearfulness! There is no reason to believe a word of these doubts: have Faith!”
My heart was bungeed to my rib-cage by a thread of raw patience. I rose and paced. If they had gone back to the house or on to the bar I would have to take the subway by myself, anyway. I imagined myself catching the next train so I could go brood. Then, I could envenomate them with mid-western passive-aggression. There was a basement lounge to brew resentment in, alternatively, so that I could pretend I slipped-away on purpose. I recognized that there were additional options to consider. By choosing my attitude by default, I became chained to my emotions. It was crucial that I select my mindset intentionally. I actually wanted my new group to come running and give me hugs, hugs, hugs that lasted. Still, I was drawing curtains around myself to dull the pain of being lonely for them, exposed. In every hypothetical scenario, there were ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ responses. ‘Freeze’ is the third, more uncomfortable option. Staying engaged in that way exposes me to hurt and uncertainty: it requires endurance.
No matter how many times I repeated my brooding reveries, I could not get past the fact that I would be in ministry with these people. No matter what I did or how they treated me, I needed to love and forgive them so we could stay together. The circumstances of my success and my enjoyment and my being accepted and me, myself and I—none of that mattered more than us. I was not lost and they did not lose me: WE were fragmented. The Adversary, going back to the first lie, shifts focus onto our individual state—superior or out-casted (it’s all the same)— but the Holy Spirit wants all of us, together. Grace is available to me but not because I earned it or because it is given cheaply. Grace is given to me for them and their grace is really for me, in part—so WE can all be together with Christ. No curtains necessary.
I imagined them with the bright lights in their eyes, ecstatic and absent-minded for the next half-an-hour, just like I would be: role reversal. A sudden wave of panic would sweep over the group when they realized I was missing and they would search until they found me—because WE are competent, compassionate people.
As it turns out, my role-reversal rang truer than my anxieties. They ran into a cover-charge at a bar and decided to leave. A profound silence reverberated where one of my clever comments should have been. They used their digital cameras to trace the missing piece, John, back to Times Square. Their voices chimed above the din: “John! John!” James, Brinna, Wil, Rachel, Stephanie, Brittney, Debbie, Beth, Marjorie and Nick** were across the street. All of the fear, the pride and the resentment that had congealed around my heart melted away as soon as the first pair of arms came around me.
John: “I’m half sorry that I wasn’t paying attention...”
Rachel: “We’re half-sorry too...”
Brinna: “I almost had a heart-attack!”
That evening cast a new light on the ship wrecks in my past. For the first time, I went beyond the notion of forgiving my classmates for out-casting me and mourned for the WE that never happened. Bulging eyes and four beating wings, I relished every chance to be special—as evidenced by this incredibly obnoxious yearbook quote from high school:
“It is as if a halo of light illuminates and displays me. It shines according to the magnitude of the performance rendered. All ears rest on the performer’s sound and all eyes focus onto that bright spot of brass. The sound within my halo warms and empowers me, yet the brightness of the spotlight leaves me dizzy. I am barely aware of things outside of the halo at that point.”
I really had come a long way by the time we descended back into the subway. I can thank Jesus that I recognized I was only a piece of something: the Kingdom of God. The empty space in my heart, the missing synergy, is something that can only be held in common by people who value WE more than ME and LOVE more than all. When I saw that gang of missing want-to-be missionaries and community-workers appear again, I finally laid eyes on my peers. I was them and they were me and we were us again. We cannot do this without us, we know. For my part, I can hardly wait to expose my loneliness because I trust that these people are competent... and compassionate...
...and have a good sense of humor.
*one of the least populous counties in Michigan.
**Matt and Katie are also part of the collective WE; Katie’s feet were bothering her...
A Jewish-pride rally was breaking-out at one end of the square, at the feet of a giant staircase to nowhere. There I was too, with these people I had not known a few days before, clicking shots and posing for group-shots to be clicked, only barely noticing how wonderful it was to be there together. The ladies flashed a collective, luminous smile from a line on the crimson-lit steps. The guys clustered together for some face-time, too. “We,” I thought, “are now in photos together.”
My mind became an iridescent dragonfly, zooming through space and memory and reeking of reverie. I fussed with my camera, then glanced around for the back of a head. I saw only strangers. I listened for the familiar cadence of voices but heard only the chants of the congregants, waving the star of David. “Oh I lost them for a second...” I mumbled, scanning the crowds. I paced first around the stairs, then up them for a better vantage-point, then to a railing where I could rest. Initially, I was punch-drunkenly amused by this development. The scenario tasted like the extract of a G-rated movie-script: “Country Mouse: Lost in Time Square!” I clung to the edge of a metaphorical diving-board, waiting to jump into a quirky line when I saw a friendly face.
There is no scale to gage the magnitude of being alone nor schematics for tracing its dimensions. I plumbed a depth of alone that an autumnal beech in Oceana county* could not conjure. Lake Michigan gave me solitude that starry night, a state of being singular that becomes a spiritual practice. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the emotional state of suffering from separateness or from being separated. There is a bitter but cleansing vulnerability in being lonely, an injection of exposure and need. Darker ways to suffer alone exist, trading exposure for siege. A person can build deep trenches where no arrow can strike; yet strongholds become dungeons. Alone is the state I am in when the insidious whispers uncurl from between the iron bars of my memory.
There is something fascinating and unsettling about these reveries, like spurts of oil escaping the wrecked USS Arizona. Japan surrendered and the reefs grew in Pearl Harbor but the toxic succession of bubbles will not stop. Eighteen years of plotline melted away, leaving impressions from first and second grade. I know that I lived many recesses alone. I am uncertain why. The nose-picking would explain it at first glance but not entirely; one time, I drove away some other children because I was convinced I could become Bugs Bunny if only they would get out of my way. The more separated I became the more my parents consoled me with my own performance. The other children, they claimed, were just not as advanced as I was. So, loneliness never set-in where false-superiority already had its coils around me. As a child among children, I must have cast a chilling halo.
“Yes, but John:” said my Dad, once, “none of the friends you have made since then would recognize that description—would they?”
“I have come such a long way to be here,” I mused, drifting back to Manhattan. I wanted to keep moving, since I tend to be pacer, but the others could have gone in any direction. Reversing direction and catching a train back to Alma House was one option; second, to throw caution to the wind and have a lone-wolf excursion; the third was to keep my butt on its perch. I entertained the thought that the others were somewhere near time-square, searching. Forced to heed the advice I give to campers, I stayed and waited to be found. Each moment the cold nipped a little harder at my buttocks—and my fortitude. I turned my palms toward heaven and put a case forward. Hope wore to tatters and my crowd-scanning collapsed into darker thoughts. A game of blame-badminton erupted: someone had made a mistake. Demons came ripping out of the muck to join in the frenzy:
“John, be an adult; quit playing with your camera and pay attention. Space-cadet...”
“These people just want to enjoy the city; they don’t want to blow energy caring for you...”
“You probably did something creepy that you don’t even realize...”
“Those wankers: you could be back in Alma House studying for tomorrow’s interview...”
“This is the pattern that you fear: so close to connecting on the stairs BUT...”
“...bet they have the nerve to be pissed at you for making them turn back—if they turn-back...”
“There are probably limited spots abroad—maybe you should be relieved they aren’t very—“
But every few minutes another voice would cry out, like a canary in a mine, “LIES! LIES! These are competent, compassionate people! Push back your hurt and impatience—your fearfulness! There is no reason to believe a word of these doubts: have Faith!”
My heart was bungeed to my rib-cage by a thread of raw patience. I rose and paced. If they had gone back to the house or on to the bar I would have to take the subway by myself, anyway. I imagined myself catching the next train so I could go brood. Then, I could envenomate them with mid-western passive-aggression. There was a basement lounge to brew resentment in, alternatively, so that I could pretend I slipped-away on purpose. I recognized that there were additional options to consider. By choosing my attitude by default, I became chained to my emotions. It was crucial that I select my mindset intentionally. I actually wanted my new group to come running and give me hugs, hugs, hugs that lasted. Still, I was drawing curtains around myself to dull the pain of being lonely for them, exposed. In every hypothetical scenario, there were ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ responses. ‘Freeze’ is the third, more uncomfortable option. Staying engaged in that way exposes me to hurt and uncertainty: it requires endurance.
No matter how many times I repeated my brooding reveries, I could not get past the fact that I would be in ministry with these people. No matter what I did or how they treated me, I needed to love and forgive them so we could stay together. The circumstances of my success and my enjoyment and my being accepted and me, myself and I—none of that mattered more than us. I was not lost and they did not lose me: WE were fragmented. The Adversary, going back to the first lie, shifts focus onto our individual state—superior or out-casted (it’s all the same)— but the Holy Spirit wants all of us, together. Grace is available to me but not because I earned it or because it is given cheaply. Grace is given to me for them and their grace is really for me, in part—so WE can all be together with Christ. No curtains necessary.
I imagined them with the bright lights in their eyes, ecstatic and absent-minded for the next half-an-hour, just like I would be: role reversal. A sudden wave of panic would sweep over the group when they realized I was missing and they would search until they found me—because WE are competent, compassionate people.
As it turns out, my role-reversal rang truer than my anxieties. They ran into a cover-charge at a bar and decided to leave. A profound silence reverberated where one of my clever comments should have been. They used their digital cameras to trace the missing piece, John, back to Times Square. Their voices chimed above the din: “John! John!” James, Brinna, Wil, Rachel, Stephanie, Brittney, Debbie, Beth, Marjorie and Nick** were across the street. All of the fear, the pride and the resentment that had congealed around my heart melted away as soon as the first pair of arms came around me.
John: “I’m half sorry that I wasn’t paying attention...”
Rachel: “We’re half-sorry too...”
Brinna: “I almost had a heart-attack!”
That evening cast a new light on the ship wrecks in my past. For the first time, I went beyond the notion of forgiving my classmates for out-casting me and mourned for the WE that never happened. Bulging eyes and four beating wings, I relished every chance to be special—as evidenced by this incredibly obnoxious yearbook quote from high school:
“It is as if a halo of light illuminates and displays me. It shines according to the magnitude of the performance rendered. All ears rest on the performer’s sound and all eyes focus onto that bright spot of brass. The sound within my halo warms and empowers me, yet the brightness of the spotlight leaves me dizzy. I am barely aware of things outside of the halo at that point.”
I really had come a long way by the time we descended back into the subway. I can thank Jesus that I recognized I was only a piece of something: the Kingdom of God. The empty space in my heart, the missing synergy, is something that can only be held in common by people who value WE more than ME and LOVE more than all. When I saw that gang of missing want-to-be missionaries and community-workers appear again, I finally laid eyes on my peers. I was them and they were me and we were us again. We cannot do this without us, we know. For my part, I can hardly wait to expose my loneliness because I trust that these people are competent... and compassionate...
...and have a good sense of humor.
*one of the least populous counties in Michigan.
**Matt and Katie are also part of the collective WE; Katie’s feet were bothering her...
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