Tag Archives: change

Ash Wednesday

Posted on February 15, 2015 | 1 comment

Ash WednesdayMy computer crashed during the week so I’m climbing the mountain called Steep Learning Curve. I’ve been introduced to Windows 8.1 and need say no more.

It was time for a new laptop anyway I told myself as I listened to the young man explain all the wonderful features on the one he was recommending, features that I would surely need and want. I tried to sort out what was true, exaggerated, and simply unnecessary. I prayed my angels were helping me along and I think they did and I’m so very grateful.

How did the crash happen, some have asked, their eyes wide. (Could it happen to them?) I was foolish, I said. As I was reading an online magazine article (John Yoo, National Review,  highly recommended), industriously researching a project for my bishop, I succumbed to a pop-up that insisted, in a seemingly sane manner, that I needed what they were offering in order to view the page I was reading. A few minutes after I downloaded it, I sensed something wasn’t right and exited. It wasn’t until the following morning when I turned on my computer that I realized what had happened. A blank blue Windows screen greeted me.

I’ll find out later if my files are salvageable, and a lovely lady at church this morning who knows something about all these mysteries said they usually are. We’ll see tomorrow. Fortunately, I had saved key files onto discs. But it’s all a distraction and hugely time consuming.

The deception of the hacker and the resulting theft of my time reminded me of the darkness of the human heart. Timely, I considered this Quinquagesima Sunday morning, to be so reminded as we near Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. For Lent is a time when we look into our own hearts and consider our own dark corners, where we have grown inward and not outward, where we have not loved enough, been self-less enough. For self-ishness prevents God entering.

Christianity, and Judaism as well, tell us to be good. They give us ideals and laws, churches and synagogues, to help us and say it is better to fail at trying to be good than not to try, not to have the ideals. But that makes us hypocrites, some say, so let’s not have ideals at all. We’ll be honest and throw them out. There is nothing worse than hypocrisy, they judge. Christians reply that in addition to the ideals,  we offer a way forward, an escape from the ashen heap of failure (and hypocrisy charges) and a way toward redemption. Christianity offers confession and repentance, ongoing change, again and again, turning toward the light, banishing the dark.

Sacramental Christianity, liturgical Christianity, offers certain seasons when these cleansings are highlighted in case we forget to confess and repent again and again, in case we think we are just fine as we are and draw into our selves away from love. So as we approach Lent we consider what we should be sorry for, measuring our lives against the Ten Commandments, the Cardinal Sins and Virtues, the many gentle promptings of our consciences.

Christianity, the child of Judaism, is radically different than other religions in this sense. For God is teaching us to love one another by loving us enough to walk among us two thousand years ago. To be sure, there were times when Christians failed to live up to the ideals God revealed in Christ, but there is no comparison between these times (i.e., the Crusades, the Inquisition) and Islamic terrorism, as President Obama stunningly stated at the recent National Prayer Breakfast. There is no comparison either, it should be added, between these dark “hypocritical” times and the secular horrors of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. A secular world without Judaic-Christian foundations, without Western ideals of tolerance and liberty and law, is just as dangerous as a world of terrorism.

Michael J. Ortiz writes recently in the Wall Street Journal:

“While we celebrate our freedoms, such freedoms also give us rampant abortion, commercialized eroticism and laws that make marriage anything one wishes it to mean. If we want the Muslim world to emulate our institutions of democracy, perhaps we should give them reasons for believing that democracy doesn’t automatically have to jettison publicly held moralities that actually ensure those freedoms in the first place.” (emphasis mine)

Indeed. Publicly held moralities. One such ideal we recently celebrated, the romantic love of Saint Valentine’s Day. Amidst the carnage of marriage, deep within, we know we can be better, can love better, that ideals are important even if we can’t attain them. We yearn to truly love and be truly loved so we look to Saint Valentine, a third-century Christian martyr.

Saint Valentine was a bishop. Fifth-century accounts as well as a history compiled by the Diocese of Terni, Italy claim that Bishop Valentine was born in Interamna (today Terni) and imprisoned and tortured in Rome on February 14, 273, beheaded for refusing to deny Christ. He was buried on the Via Flaminia. Over time February 14 became associated with romantic love as well (early spring pairings in nature) and colored the original history.

True love, sacrificial love, is one of the many Christian contributions to the West. Such ideals ensure our freedoms. We must not forget these pillars, and it is good to recall them as a hard-drive becomes corrupted and crashes. I do not want to become corrupted, for I do not want to crash. Just so, I do not want my country to be corrupted, for it will surely crash.

It is good to remember we are creatures of Adam, that we are but dust, and it is good to have an ashen cross drawn upon our foreheads this coming Wednesday. It is good to say, I’m sorry, I repent. I will try and be better. I will repent and be forgiven. For only then will my dust one day rise from the ashes, from death to life eternal.

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A Woods of Words, a Forest of Phrases

Posted on February 8, 2015 | 4 comments

FT YelpMy novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, has left home for a few weeks. I finished up the first draft and sent it out into the great wide world to see how it would fare. But I miss the characters. Zachary left his music and poetry with me, so I have that. I go to Anna’s exercise class on a regular basis and often think of her. Jessica introduced me to the history of Berkeley, coloring my weekly visit to my Berkeley office. And Father Nate left me his old prayer book to thumb through.

The Fire Trail first flew away to my local editor. Another copy has nested with the Sisters of the Presentation in San Francisco, and a third manuscript found a home with my bishop who understands people and thus character. Later, when the manuscripts come home, I shall incorporate their suggestions and shall send it out once again, a final draft, to visit proofreaders familiar with Berkeley and the University of California.

It is a miraculous thing, how a story can grow like a living creature.

I read recently that our brains are always changing, constantly being remolded by experience and use. Tissue is repaired, damaged cells healed. I marveled at this vision of life itself, the changing nature of our cells, our bodies, our minds, as we age and interact with our world. Nothing stays the same. We are ever-moving, ever-growing, ever-dying, amorphous.

And so I considered the power of choice, of free will, of my own ability to govern that moving, growing, and dying so that instead of drunkenly swerving down the road of life, my span of time might take on a certain shape, might follow a rational, reasonable course. As I pass each crossroads, I must choose. I can stop, turn around, and go back. I can turn; I can go forward, crossing the road. I can repent; I can deny there is a choice. I must choose, again and again, for there are many, many crossroads.

But all of these choices are informed by knowledge. I must know where I am going, and perhaps more importantly, where I have come from. The ability to choose wisely assumes also that I live in a culture of freedom, either in the West or in a place imbued with Western ideals of freedom and democracy. Choosing the right road  assumes I was raised to choose and cherish liberty and justice. It assumes I have been taught self-control and responsibility, the pillars of freedom. It assumes I have been taught the history of Western culture, from Abraham to Greece to Europe to America and the West’s many flowerings worldwide.

I was fortunate to receive my public school education in the fifties and early sixties, just in time. I don’t recall feeling unsafe. There were no bullies or knives or guns. Teachers were allowed to discipline, for self-esteem was achieved through hard work. America-bashing was not yet fashionable, but would be soon. The flag flew high and proud. It was neither worn as clothing, nor burned in hatred. I was taught symbols matter, language matters, and all lives matter, not just some. Our political leaders spoke of America as precious and exceptional, necessary to world peace. I was also blessed with growing up in the beating heart of the Church, so that where I came from and where I was going was clear and comforting and inspiring, all three. I strayed for a time, but, to paraphrase Waugh and Chesterton, God pulled me back with a “twitch upon the thread” and help from C. S. Lewis. The twitch would have been more difficult without the thread already in place. It appeared God had pulled Lewis back in a similar way.

And so as I witness the foundations of Western culture crumble, that is, the education of the next generation through social ideals as well as classroom texts, I take some comfort in my little novel of ideals and text, The Fire Trail. I pray that I make the right choices in the next few months with regard to the novel’s sculpting and firing, so that the pages glow like amber embers. My attempt may be too little too late, but I’m glad, as I traveled my my own trail, that I chose to write these words, to breathe life into Jessica and Zachary, Anna and Nate, so that they could turn their own pages, make their own choices as they journey on the trail through my woods of words, my forest of phrases.

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Transfiguration

Posted on August 11, 2013 | Leave a comment

Summer seems to end early these days, with schools starting mid-August. Gone are the Labor Day weekends devoted to shopping for school supplies and school shoes. Gone, too, are the last few weeks of August when our sleepy, lazy days stretched on forever. 

This ending of summer, coupled with a chilly few weeks in the Bay Area, pushes me to think of fall and going back to school, of endings and beginnings. Trained as a child that when summer ended school began, I still think in these terms, although my school days are long past. My children’s school days are long past as well (except for the fourth-grade teacher, I suppose), but my grandchildren certainly are ending their summer days and beginning their school days this month. 

For many years the scents of the season, the chilly mornings and hot afternoons, triggered within me anxious dreams bordering on fears – being on time for class, finding my locker, and the worst of all, arriving in my pajamas.  I haven’t had such dreams that I recall in a long time, which shows time does heal and repair. But I recall vividly the anticipation of that first school day, waiting for the school bus with my books cradled in my arm (no backpacks then), balancing a bag lunch somewhere, not sure where. Did I remember my dime for the orange-aid machine? (no cafeterias, no sodas)

I remember the sound of the school bells ringing, not really sounding like bells, but more like staccato notes strung tightly together, shrilly stinging through the air, slicing, horizontal. They were a happy sound for the most part, an it’s-time-to-come-on-in sound, but they also carried a warning note so that the fear of being marked tardy added wings to my feet. Was that the five minute bell? Or the final bell?

I slid into the desk, arranged my things, watched the teacher and the broad blackboard (really dark green). I prepared my attention for what was to come. Oral reports? Pop quiz? Did I complete the homework in time? Did I remember to bring it? I recall the smell of the metal-and-wood desks with their attached seats and their sloping surface that opened to a compartment in which to place things. I don’t recall what I put in there (eraser? pencil? ruler?) or if I always had the same desk… it surely varied from year to year, grade to grade. We all faced the same direction – toward the front and the board and the teacher and the teacher’s huge desk, heavy and sturdy like a barge and command center rolled into one – and perhaps this arrangement instilled a reverence for authority. 

I liked the way the room was arranged. It provided security. I liked that the teacher could give me knowledge, as though on a platter, and I could receive it, feed on it. And I could trust the person who served me. She or he was, after all, a Teacher. She would change my thought processes, rearrange my words and ideas, she would fill me with images and solutions to so many problems. Reading, writing, arithmetic. California history, U.S. History, World History. Civics – the three branches of government and who we are as Americans. What freedom meant and why we fought wars to protect our freedom. She would explain my world, give me the tools to cast my vote one day. She would transfigure my thought processes, the workings of my mind. 

Transfiguration. Change of a miraculous and mysterious nature. We celebrated the Transfiguration this week in our Church Kalendar, a stunning moment in the life of Christ on earth. Peter and James and John go with Jesus to a mountain to pray. As Jesus prays, they see his “countenance altered, and his raiment white and glistering”. Elijah and Moses appear and they speak of what was to come in Jerusalem. When the two ancient prophets leave, Peter doesn’t really understand – he wants to build altars to the three of them as though they were equals. It is then that a cloud covers the apostles and they are afraid. They hear God speak to them through the cloud, “This is my beloved son: hear him.” Jesus is not merely another prophet.

Christ’s transfiguration occurred as he prayed. He opened the door to heaven, he broke the chains of time. He was in both worlds. Just so, when we pray, we open the door to another dimension. And when we think and learn and allow words and phrases to re-figure our minds and hearts we open doors to change, to a kind of transfiguration. What we do matters. What we think matters. Who we pray to matters. Who we listen to matters. For we will be transfigured. Nothing is lost, not one second, not one minute is lost in eternity.

So we choose our teachers wisely. We choose our reading wisely. We even choose our entertainment – media and games and events – with the thought to how they will reshape us. We join in weekly worship, so that we will be transfigured rightly and not wrongly. We listen to Scripture and sermon with the knowledge that the changes made inside us will be good ones, Godly ones. We are transfigured, changed, by the holy.

And so, on this edge of seasons, I wait with anticipation to see what shall enter my hearing, my sight, my heart and mind. A new season is near, approaching steadily, I can see it coming, it is in my view. I watch and wait, just as I did for the yellow school bus so many years ago. Where will God lead me? What are his plans? How will I be transfigured in the days to come?

I am certain that, as a part of the Body of Christ, the Church, I will continue on this marvel-ous adventure, in an ongoing transfiguration, and of this I am glad.

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