The Courage to Be

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Thanks to end-of-life care, Amy Culley isn’t dying — she’s living

Amy Culley has worked as a nurse at Baylor Scott & White Health for more than 10 years. More than two years ago, she received the worst news of her life. At age 38, she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Since that time, she has become a passionate advocate for supportive and palliative care and encouraged us to help her spread the word about how life-changing these services are for people like her with life-limiting or chronic illnesses.

Read more about Amy and her campaign to spread hope at Baylor Scott & White Health's Scrubbing In blog.

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Our Hearts and the Word of God

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“So it is no surprise that Jewish teaching includes frequent reminders of the importance of a broken-open heart, as in this Hasidic tale: A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”38”

― Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit

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Bidden or Unbidden . . .

“St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.” 

― Thomas Keating, Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit

Fare Forward, Voyager

Photo Credit: Blirk.net Free Wallpapers

Thanks to friend and colleague Beth, who has to be one of the great internet curators of all time. She passed on this pairing of an extraordinary wall paper photo with an equally extraordinary excerpt from T.S. Eliot's Dry Salvages from Panhala's Joe Riley. 

An electrifying inspiration.

The Dry Salvages
(excerpt)

Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past 
Into indifferent lives, or into any future; 
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of man may be intent
At the time of death" - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which will fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare Forward.

O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination."
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

~ T.S. Eliot ~

(Collected Poems)

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Joyfully Breaking the Rules

Photo Credit: Mark Grace

The poet Samuel Hazo once remarked on the instinctive ability children have to frame day-to-day life in poetic terms. He quoted one child who, after bouncing a ball, stated, “Look how I made that ball happy!” 

Another child observed the swirl of autumn leaves stirred by a passing car and exclaimed, “That car woke up all those leaves.” 

My favorite poem is by a Japanese boy fulfilling a school assignment. He wrote,

I wet my bed today.
My father is angry with me,
My sister won’t speak to me.
Everyone thinks I should be ashamed.
I’m not ashamed.
In fact, I’m happy!

These children all express ways of seeing life and of feeling about themselves that could be called wrong. We know that balls don’t feel, that leaves don’t sleep, and we may wish that all young children would approach the task of potty training with great seriousness.

I want to suggest, however, that there may be a price to pay when we too zealously pursue an “adult” way of looking at the world. Or take for granted our adult emotional responses (or lack thereof) to certain situations. While genuine faith certainly requires all of our reasoning and intelligence, it also requires a devoted imagination.

The Gospel encourages us to purposefully respond to life in ways that are often very different from what social and cultural conventions lead us to expect.

The Apostle Paul begged us to "be not conformed to this current age, but be transformed by the renewing of your understanding . . ."

Christ challenged us to become like little children, so that we might see the kingdom of heaven. We are also encouraged to respond to spiritual poverty, hunger, thirst and persecution as potential blessings, and to rejoice when we encounter difficult, character-testing circumstances in life. 

Applying the Gospel to our lives requires that we determine to lay aside our ideas and expectations of the world as we have been taught to see it. 

The Holy Spirit is even now coaxing us to trust that God might have something different and infinitely better in mind for us than the rules that we have made up in our heads. 

Photo Credit: Mark Grace

That kind of faith has the power to create prophets and apostles. 

Faith like that also sustains a legion of everyday heroes. 

Like the executive who begins to treat her job as a God-given vocation, or the father who sees parenting as more than telling and teaching but who eagerly seeks to discover the ways his children are pointing him to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Or you, sitting there as you read this essay, pondering what it is that you could possibly be happy about in a week like the one you have been experiencing.

How have you let the Spirit open your eyes and make your heart receptive to wonder and joy?  Leave a comment!

Blessings,

Mark

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Facing Domestic Violence

Facing Domestic Violence

There are images burned indelibly into my memory.

They elbow their way into consciousness at unsuspecting moments. They grip memory by the throat, throttling it until memory turns purple, until hazy black dots swim in front of its eyes and a scream tries to force its way out of the pit of my stomach, only to remain lodged there like a white-hot rock that won’t go down and cannot come up.

They are images of violence.  Click Here to Read More

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The Illusion of Faith As Certainty

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"Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this.

"Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days—until you fold up and collapse into despair. 

"Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. 

"Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone. 

"I do not mean that faith only functions when we are otherwise in a state of collapse. But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us. Only a humble (person) is able to accept faith on these terms, so completely without reservation that (s)he is glad of it in its pure state, and welcomes it happily even when nothing else comes with it, and when everything else is taken away.” ― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

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With Apologies to Dr. Tyson

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I've often wondered what it is that enthralls so many people about the prospect of finding life elsewhere in the universe. It has always struck me as a kind of sickness very much akin to that which must have gripped early settlers in the Americas. Here in North America someone even gave this sickness a name and glorified it. They called it Manifest Destiny.

I mean, what is it that would cause us to justify the expenditure of so many billions of dollars when it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that human beings are the single biggest threat to life on our own planet?

It seems to me that anyone with any sense would be attempting to curb our appetite for interplanetary exploration.  

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An Epic Worthy of Its Name: Review of Jaya, an Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata

Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata by Devdutt Pattanaik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Despite what GoodReads says, there is an audio version of Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik and it is that version of the Pattanaik's illustrated retelling of the epic of India, the Mahabharata to which I listened.

These are the bona fides that Penguin India, the publisher, offers for this work:

"Devdutt Pattanaik seamlessly weaves into a single narrative plots from the Sanskrit classic as well as its many folk and regional variants, including the Pandavani of Chattisgarh, Gondhal of Maharashtra, Terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu, and Yakshagana of Karnataka. Richly illustrated with over 250 line drawings by the author, the 108 chapters abound with little-known details such as the names of the hundred Kauravas, the worship of Draupadi as a goddess in Tamil Nadu, the stories of Astika, Madhavi, Jaimini, Aravan and Barbareek, the Mahabharata version of the Shakuntalam and the Ramayana, and the dating of the war based on astronomical data."

Pattanaik is assisted in his narration by a group of voice actors who go collectively by the name of Dramanon, "an English language theater group that operates out of three cities in India: Manipal, Bangalore and Hyderabad."  The work done by these narrators was nonpareil, if you will allow me the conceit of using a word rarely employed.  It befits the work done by these narrators.  Careful listening was called for- Indian English has a much different inflection than what I am accustomed to- but it was well worth the extra attention. In fact, I would say that the extra effort to attend to the stories only enhanced my listening experience.

Audio chapters were brief, each fitted to the particular story featured. Direct narration was interspersed with explanatory sections that offered additional commentary on historical and narrative background, the larger narrative context for each story, divergent versions of particular stories, religious implications and literary connections.  I was impressed with the deftness with which commentary was both set off from and woven into the retelling without intruding into the larger story itself.  "Masterful" is a word that comes to mind when I think of the competence manifested in this dimension.

This was my first interaction with the text of the Mahabharata, so I cannot comment on the faithfulness of this version to the original text. One reviewer on Goodreads states that Jaya did not give adequate attention and exposure to the individual tales leading up to the climactic conflict at Kurukshetra. I can say that at 11:49 hours of listening and as a beginner coming to this text for the first time, I was more than satisfied and challenged by the length and breadth of the stories.

The pace, intensity and epic vision of the narration progresses from one story to the next. Jaya begins with seemingly trivial stories that build upon one another layer by layer with a kind of symphonic effect so that when Jaya reaches its climax and begins the descent into more reflective passages, the very structure and rhythm of the tale serves to draw one into an experience of the grand doctrines and transcendant vision of time and eternity that lies at the heart of the Mahabharata.  It is a magnificent work that, at least for me, powerfully fulfilled the characteristic of all great literature- not merely to TELL the tale but to invite the listener into an experience of the timeless truths to which the story is a witness.

I was particularly moved by the Bhagavad Gita, or Krishna's song to Arjuna just before the battle of Kurukshetra, and by Yudistara's experiences at the end of the tale, when he learns one last profound lesson about himself and the nature of forgiveness.  I had read the Gita before, but out of context of the larger story and without benefit of Pattanaik's translation, the real depth and pathos of the song was lost on me.

As a Christian listening to a sacred text from another tradition, I found so much with which to identify here and from which to take encouragement for my journey with Christ.  I must say that at this age I am not inclined to quarrel with the differences that I found in this text and in my experience of Christ and the gospels.  There is plenty with which one could argue, if debate were the only purpose in reading. However, my effort in reading the sacred texts of other religious traditions was simply that of a person of faith who lives in a world that is increasingly challenging me to to adequately understand just what the experiences of so many other people of faith happen to be, if only to converse more intelligently with them.

However, what I find incredibly affirming- miraculous even- were powerfully presented themes like those of God's incarnating himself in the world to save the world and restore the balance of good; the importance of self sacrifice; the tragic consequences of sin as well as the profound power that love of others can have; the necessity of real devotion to righteousness as opposed to the destructiveness of obsessive preoccupation with rules and rituals; and the ultimate realization that one's life lies within the context of a greater wisdom that urges us toward constant self-examination and spiritual growth. 

All of these themes were highlighted with unusual force and intensity, in part perhaps because they were cradled within narrative settings that were unfamiliar to my North American Western Christian sensibilities. More to the point, though, I experienced the power of these stories because of their authentic witness to human experience and to our experiences of the divine. They testify to a phenomenon I learned in Divinity School to call by the term "general revelation," that is, the idea that God has made certain truths known to all human beings in every culture and across the span of history.  In my reading of Jaya, I found out just how powerful, insightful and deeply life-affirming general revelation can be.

I don't have any real criticisms of this book, only profound gratitude for the opportunity to have engaged and to have been engaged by its stories.

View all my reviews

The Burdens We Carry: Honoring Robin Williams

Photo Credit: Gary Kravit

I see so many people on FaceBook posting a heartfelt piece of wisdom that goes something like, "Treat everyone with kindness because you never know what burdens they are carrying." 

Today my respect and affection for Robin Williams shot way, way up. That a human being could carry the load he did for as long as he did with as much intelligence, humor and outright compassion as he managed is, at least for me, one more sign that the world is still full of miracles. It makes me regret the times when I have responded to my own troubles by looking for someone else to blame and making my world that much smaller and narrower and more tawdry. 

You never really know what burdens people are carrying but when you find out, you can stop for a moment and pay them the respect that they are due if, like Williams, they managed to share love and laughter with a world of other struggling people. Rest in Peace.

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