Canada Saga 2011 - July 27

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean." (Dag Hammarskjold)
"By your capacity for forgiveness shall I recognize your God." (Marius Grout, French Quaker)

As the story goes, a frail elderly man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year old grandson. The old man's hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, making eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon, his milk spilled on the tablecloth, he broke a dish or two, and his place at the table was always a mess, irritating his son and wife. So they set a small table in the corner where Grandfather ate alone from a wooden bowl while the rest of the family enjoyed dinner. 

The four-year-old watched it all in silence. One evening before supper, the father noticed his son playing with wood scraps on the floor.  He asked the child sweetly, "What are you making?"  Just as sweetly, the boy responded, "Oh I am making a little bowl for you and Mama to eat your food from when I grow up."

Whether we know it or not, we are forever modeling to the children, grandchildren and the more impressionable hearts of each other how to enhance or diminish the Light in the world, by our actions and attitudes, regardless of the words we speak.  Earlier in the summer, Michael pressure-washed our patio, walkway and driveway, oblivious to the fact that he was thereby destroying and drowning the garden and plants I had laboriously spent two days putting in just after we arrived. We were both snarky with each other, each feeling under-appreciated, neither of us able or willing in the moment to acknowledge the role of ego in our stand-off.  Eknath Easwaran tells an amusing story about two people arguing, pretending to listen, when all they really needed were signs to hold up as the other spoke: "I'm right. You're wrong." The blessing of getting older is that these moments pass quickly, with grace and humor and, hopefully, lessons learned. (Note to self: do not plant garden until after the pressure-washing; also, plants are more easily replaced than husbands.)

One blessing of getting older is that we find if we wait 24 hours or so before reacting and then tell a story about what happened, the feelings are usually universally shared, and more humorous than aggravating, one story begetting another as our life dramas unfold. My niece's mother, Donna, was caring for her mother with Alzheimer's. Donna went into the garage, and her mother locked her out of the house. The mother then kept telling Donna, who was banging on the door to get back in, that she had to go find Donna to unlock the door.  After a few days, the story could be told with laughter instead of frustration, fear and irritation.

A friend, unaware that the answer machine on her neighbor's phone had not disconnected after she left her message, proceeded to complain to her husband in rather disparaging terms about the neighbor - until she heard the heart-stopping 'beep,' indicating the machine had recorded it all. When the friend called me in horror for advise, I was not much help because I couldn't stop laughing, even as we both recoiled at the thought of her innocent neighbor's eventual pain. They have since reconciled though not without difficult lessons.

The thought occurs to me now that we are sending and receiving constantly in life; with every thought and every word, we leave messages of our choosing:  joy or despair, lightness or gloom, hope or cynisicm, acceptance or rejection.  How many of these would we want to be overheard or recorded? How much forgiveness and reconciliation are we open to in the relationships offered to us as gifts in our growing?

"Engrave this upon my heart," Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, writes: "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story."  I have a friend who, a few years ago, told me sometimes she just throws her hands up in exasperation and says, "This is for EVERYONE who has EVER asked me to pray for ANYTHING."  We could say the same prayer for forgiveness, in following Rumi's advise to be like the night in concealing the faults of others. For everyone who has ever harmed us, we offer forgiveness; for anyone who has suffered from our thoughts, words or actions, we ask forgiveness. We forgive ourselves and each other, because the tender grace that comes from being in such a place brings peace and well-being, until finally we remember who we are, and our place in the world.

That act of forgiving those who trespass against us doesn't come out of fear of a higher power out there, but because we are connected to that deeper place within that tells us we are not so different from those who hurt us, reminds us that we have hurt others, and accepts that forgiveness is simply another name for Love.

We return in prayers of blessing and forgiveness, not once and for all, as the saying goes, but time and again. The Sufis say that reconciliation is simply remembering how far we've strayed from our original goodness, our feelings of remorse already a return to the Divine. I like to think that the grandfather in our story waited silently, knowing that his son would realize the goodness of his own heart and return his father to a proper place of respect, not out of guilt, but out of remembrance, in answer to the call to Love.
YAY GOD

Canada Saga 2011 - July 8

"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."(Barbara Kingsolver)                              
"Not only is the past relevant, it's not even done!"  (William Faulkner) 

When my nephew was 3 years old, he charmingly referred to umbrellas as *rain*brellas, using words as children often do, in ways that just make sense to them. Brett at that age always referred to any sort of stomach upset as a *waist* ache. For some reason, known only to her toddler mind, Grace Alivia always said *oh* when she meant 'yes.' Finding this endearing and quite mysterious, I never corrected her, and was almost sad when I returned home from Canada after a summer away to find her saying 'yes' to everything, usually with great enthusiasm. This, of course, preceded her equally enthusiastic period of saying 'no,' also to everything.
I thought of my nephew early one morning this week, when the sky once again held the precious jewel of a small rainbow on the belly of a grey cloud over the ocean. There was no rain, no storms preceding, or predicted for, the day. Sitting gently as pure gift - although there is probably some scientific mumbo/jumbo about moisture in the air and refracting light - and bringing smiles from one other early morning walker with her head in the clouds, was the faint and beautiful glow of what I immediately thought of as a *sun*bow, a puddle of rainbow that appears in soft sunlight, usually against a washed-out sky. Like other minor miracles, it doesn't come with drama; it doesn't preen for attention like it's diva cousin. If you're not paying attention, you may miss it completely. But it can still take the breath away, especially with the backdrop of the smaller mist-covered islands, the soft velvet wind, and the hum of the Eternal, echoed in the ocean.
Because of the extended periods of chilly cool wet weather thus far this year, there has been a lack of urgency in getting out and about. Michael tells me, however, that he has that same feeling of not wanting to be 'out and about' in 100 degree Louisiana. He, along with the rest of my precious family with friends, dauntlessly showed up at my now 15 year old nephew's mid-day outdoor guitar performance during the Seafood Festival in Mandeville over the hot and sweaty July 4th weekend. I'm sure many used *sun*brellas for the occasion.
It's at moments like this that I feel the distance between the two homes of my life. Our rites of passage are hopefully accompanied by the loving presence of those who have been a part of the charms of our childhood years, who have seen our inner light early on, hold the pieces of our history and tell our stories when we forget them in darker moments. In so-doing, they keep us grounded and able to open our hearts as we grow. We see through the generations the wonder of life living itself, grace unfolding, and patterns emerging that make sense of who we are. We see ourselves in the stories of our aunts, uncles, grandparents, and our step-and surrogate parents, then see our children's children's futures, too.  "I am chastened to learn over and over again," Lawrence Heschel writes of his journeys through Scripture, "that patterns recur from one generation to the next." We are a storehouse of memories for each other, in all of our relationships.  One sister listens to another's childhood stories of our growing up, and swears she must've lived in a different house. We have very distinct memories of how God was portrayed by the stern nuns who taught us, and my mother says we're wrong; that's not what she remembers of an experience that was uniquely ours. Something that was quite remarkable to me involving my siblings in our younger years draws a blank stare from them now when I repeat it.
Michael and I often remember details in very different ways, and I was always amazed that he could be so wrong so often...until I, too, was chastened enough to realize our lives and individual perspectives brought unique filters to events, and we literally saw many things differently, and always would.  The wrong and right of issues then fade into the more freeing:  "Ah. That's how he sees it. Isn't that interesting?" My sister often says that brilliant minds consider and debate the same issue, and come down on different sides. When we step back and consider other points of view, panoramas become available, and life opens up; we realize that our vision, like our opinion, comes as "relative to truth," colored by our own history, memories and agendas.
There was a plaque hanging in Brett's room throughout his early and teen years, depicting a large oak tree, and an eagle soaring through the blue skies above it. To the side of the tree were the words: "There are two things we can give children in life: one is roots, the other wings." The plaque now hangs in my nephew's room, ready to set the next generation on a flight through this complicated and marvelous life. Even from a distance, we participate in their memories through our love and support. "These people are in your soul-care," John O'Donohue writes. "In the affection of prayer, you carry the icons of their presence on the altar of your heart."
We show up to our lives, perhaps not as fragile or vulnerable as it would first appear. We come with the strength of those who lived before us. We come with our own individual journeys to take, to learn and grow and live into the memories we are creating, not only for ourselves, but for those we will never know. We come because it is the way God manifests in our world, through our voice, our eyes, our touch, our prayers, carried through generations, an unseen gift we give in response and gratitude for all that has been given to us. We pass on the *rain*brellas and *sun*bows and *oh's* of our memories because they are our truths, they are relevant, and because we're not yet done.
YAY GOD