2014 - The Year of Being Peaceful

I started making New Year’s Resolutions a couple of years ago.  For a long time I didn’t bother because nobody I knew ever kept them and it just seemed like a lost cause before it even started.  But a couple of years ago I decided that I needed to laugh more and that became a New Year’s Resolution.  If you’re going to start something new it’s pretty easy if you make it something fun.  And it worked!  Every time I noticed myself laughing I mentally patted myself on the back; “Good job, Jane!  You’re laughing more.”  That alone made me laugh even more.

So the following year I decided resolutions just might work.  For 2012 I resolved to speak less and listen more.  That one was a real challenge.  I always have something to say and it’s always something smart and witty that will enrich everyone’s lives.  You can imagine what a challenge it was to keep all my wit and wisdom to myself.

Around January 3^rd I knew I would need help. I needed something to remind me to shut up.  Constantly.  I needed a memory aid.

 I’m not a big jewelry person.   For the last several years I haven’t worn much more than my wedding ring.  So in 2012 I got an old ring out of the dusty jewelry box and wore it on my right hand. It was a constant reminder that something was different and reminded me to try to keep my mouth shut.   I doubt anyone noticed I talked less.  If anything, it would have been the way any conversation with me should always go.  It was a new experience  for my friends  to be able to get a word in edgewise whenever I was around. I think the world appreciated my effort.  However, in terms of real change I doubt anyone really noticed except me.  I’m not sure I was that much better a listener that year as I was more aware of what a Narcissist I am.

Still, I was getting into this resolutions thing.

For 2013 I vowed to mind my own business.  I had just finished reading Anne Lamott’s book about her son first year of fatherhood,  Some Assembly Required.   Trying to mind her own business was as much a challenge for her as it was for me.  She was brimming over with unwanted advice for her son and learning to live with new family dynamics.  I copied her words and taped them to my bathroom mirror: 

“There is a zero-percent chance you will change them.  So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed.  We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers.  We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes.  We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world.”

Then I went out a bought all new underwear.  People don’t usually talk about their underwear.  When was the last time you read about my underwear here on this blog?   But underwear is part of your daily life.  Could there be a better memory device?   And I like to think it helped me do a better job of minding my own business in 2013. 

 And, voila!-- my children and grandchildren survived.  Even Beaven managed to limp through the year without as much advice from me.

For 2014 I think I will try to become more peaceful.  As my body ages and slows I will need to find a way for my mind to likewise take it down a notch.  Otherwise I’m going to have to up my meds.   

 I’m going to be peaceful if it hare-lips Hades.  I will be peaceful if it kills me. I will be so peaceful that friends will think I am asleep.  Hopefully, they might even wonder where I am even when I’m already in the room. I will put so much energy into becoming peaceful that I will be worn out by the end of the day

 I can see this will be a challenge.  I will need more than taping quotes to the bathroom mirror to help me. I found an app for my phone called GPS for the Soul.  It’s designed to alert you to just this activity.  What I like about it is that once a day at a totally random time it will send me a message.  The message says, “Time to check in with yourself.”  The message isn’t disruptive.  The phone just send out a discrete blip and the message shows up on the screen.  I take a minute to take a deep breath and evaluate things:  “Am I safe?  Am I comfortable?  Am I happy in this moment? Am I at peace?”

A couple of months ago I got a book called, Aging as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond.  I’m really enjoying it and I recommend it to anyone with a similar inclination.

Ever the overachiever, I began my 2014 peaceful efforts a bit ahead of schedule.  I didn’t do much for Christmas.  I didn’t send Christmas cards until a few days after Christmas, and, even then, only to old friends who might be tempted to think I had died.  I didn’t get out even one of the four boxes of Christmas decorations.  To the outside world we looked like either the world’s biggest scrooges,  totally lazy or maybe even a different religion.  But we were peaceful, dammit.

Let’s see how the year goes.

Merry Christmas from Paul Crume

The pace is picking up and I can’t promise I’ll be this still for another couple of days.  So, I’m posting early. Even though it’s a re-print of a re-run I offer it here today with my best wishes for a wonderful Christmas.

As my Christmas gift to you I like to post a copy of an essay, first published on Christmas morning 1967 in the Dallas Morning News. It was written by Paul Crume, one of Dallas' finest columnists. It's considered a classic in Dallas and they always have it on the front page Christmas morning. It was a joy to get the paper off the doorstep every frosty Christmas morning knowing there would be words of poetry and calm waiting for me. I gained a new appreciation of it when we moved out to the country and couldn't get the paper delivered to our door every morning. It just wouldn't be Christmas for any Dallasite without it. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way so here it is for old friends relocated to new places and new friends who've never seen it.

He speaks of the magic of Christmas--the indescribable feeling of a visit with your childhood self. If your inner child needs a dose of magic and awe I invited you to a Christmas Eve service at any church, anywhere tonight.  Place yourself somewhere with people expecting miracles, filled with awe, waiting for God to make the next move. Close your mouth, bow your head, still your heart, open your soul.

On this Day, Angels Linger Close at Hand
By Paul Crume

A man wrote me not long ago and asked me what I thought of the theory of angels. I immediately told him that I am highly in favor of angels. As a matter of fact, I am scared to death of them.

Any adult human being with half sense, and some with more, knows that there are angels. If he has ever spent any period in loneliness, when the senses are forced in upon themselves, he has felt the wind from their beating wings and been overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the endless and gigantic dark that exists outside the little candle flame of human knowledge. He has prayed, not in the sense that he asked for something, but that he yielded himself.

Angels live daily at our very elbows, and so do demons, and most men at one time or another in their lives have yielded themselves to both and have lived to rejoice and rue their impulses. But the man who has once felt the beat of an angel's wing finds it easy to rejoice at the universe and at his fellow man.
It does not happen to any man often, and too many of us dismiss it when it happens. I remember a time in my final days in college when the chinaberry trees were abloom and the air was sweet with spring blossoms and I stood still on the street, suddenly struck with the feeling of something that was an enormous promise and yet was no tangible promise at all.

And there was another night in a small boat when the moon was full and the distant headlands were dark but beautiful and we were lonely. The pull of a nameless emotion was so strong that it filled the atmosphere. The small boy within me cried. Psychiatrists will say that the angel in all this was really within me, not outside, but it makes no difference.

There are angels inside us and angels outside, and the one inside is usually the quickest choked. Francis Thompson said it better. He was a late 19th-century English poet who would put the current crop of hippies to shame. He was on pot all his life. His pad was always mean and was sometimes a park bench. He was a mental case and tubercular besides. He carried a fishing creel into which he dropped the poetry that was later to become immortal. He was lonely enough to be the constant associate of angels.

"The angels keep their ancient places," wrote Francis Thompson in protest. "Turn but a stone, and start a wing."

There is an angel close to you this day. Merry Christmas, and I wish you well

Subversive Prayers

I know that from time to time y’all think I’m just nuts.  Today’s blog just might prove it.  But I have a great defense:  I’m not alone.  Here’s the latest.

Our town voted in beer and wine sales a couple of months ago. I really don’t have any problem with folks drinking.  Not everyone is an alcoholic like me.  Some people never have any problem with it and it really enhances their lives. My 19 years of sobriety have thankfully brought me to a place that wine has become no more than a condiment for me.  I have it in the house and add the red to stews and the sherry to cream sauces.  I have come to this place totally through the grace of God.  I am profoundly grateful because I know it’s not this easy for others.

The Mansion drug and alcohol rehab center for women has a great location here in Winnsboro.  It’s across the street from the Presbyterian Church so they just walk over for bible study every Monday.  Better yet, it’s within walking distance of a few stores.  This is major because a lot of the graduates don’t have a car.  They move into Hall C, which is their transitional living, where they live and can walk to work. There’s a Brookshire’s grocery store within walking distance and Brookshire’s has been great about hiring the graduates. They live in transitional housing, walk to work, save for a car and eventually move out to live on their own. 

Right now we have three graduates from the program working at Brookshire’s.  They are wonderful employers and we’re all grateful they are so willing to hire graduates.  But eventually even the best Christian businesses yield to economics.

So no one was very surprised when Brookshire's geared up to sell beer and wine. One of the grads posted to facebook that she was watching them move in the huge pallets of beer and wine.  She works in the deli and wherever her gaze lands it’s on beer.  She sees it all day long.

You couldn’t ask for temptation to arrive in a more powerful package.

Last Thursday at our weekly prayer group someone brought this up.  It was easy enough to add a prayer for the graduates working at Brookshire’s.  But Leeann went a step further.   

“You know what would be cool would be to get stickers with a picture of Jesus on it and stick them to the beer and wine displays.  That way whenever Brandi looked at the beer she would also see a picture of Jesus.”  Leeann is one of my new friends whose imagination never fails to find a friend in me. The third leader of our weekly prayer, Peggy, cheered us on as we explored and expanded the idea. 

We didn’t have any stickers of Jesus.  But we did have Post-it notes.  The three of us headed out to Brookshire’s after prayer was over.  I am always reminded of the three witches in Macbeth when  Peggy, LeeAnn and I get together with an idea.  You can just hear “Double, double, toil and trouble” in the background.  And the theme music from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

The first thing we did at Brookshire’s was quietly approach the graduates while they worked and tell them what we intended to do.  I went around and surreptitiously stuck Post-its to all the price cards on the shelves.  I personally think the Post-its were a better option than pictures of Jesus.  No one but us would know their significance and they’re generic enough that neither the store nor the suppliers would think them intrusive enough to remove them.  The main thing was for the graduates to know whenever they saw the stickers that we were praying for them.  We will pray for them to have the strength to resist whatever temptation the sight of the beer offered them. It’s a two-pronged approach:  I pray for them on my end.  They see the Post-its on their end and know someone is praying for them.

You can do this yourself.  And you don’t even have to use a Post-it.  I have another underground prayer activity that you can use. In fact, it’s so underground that no one but you will know what’s going on.

A couple of years ago on Christmas Eve,  Emily and I realized that we had finished all our Christmas shopping.  It was done.  There was nothing left to do.  OK, we got a little bored.

I suggested we go to Walmart to gloat.  Yes, we started out with just about the least noble of reasons.  Just to gloat. To bathe ourselves in self-satisfaction.  To remind ourselves that we were better than the other poor souls in the store who didn’t manage their lives as well as we did.  But somewhere in the parking lot everything changed. 

 Emily gets overwhelmed by crowds, especially the kind you see on Christmas Eve or the day before school starts.  So whenever she is about to enter a busy store she usually runs through a couple of serenity prayers and a St Francis (“Make me an instrument of your peace….”) before she even gets out of the car.  This gave me an idea.  

 We decided to take her St Francis prayer and actually become “Instruments of Peace”.   Now, lest you picture us in long denim skirts with bibles in our fists, let me assure you this technique is so subversive, so underground, that you could never know what we are doing just by looking at us.  Nobody has a clue that we are praying while we walk through the store.  It felt a lot like being a spy.  We had so much fun that we’ve done it occasionally ever since.

I take the beer aisle and the infants department on Christmas Eve.  She takes the shoe department the night before school.  (Let me tell you, there is no scarier sight on the planet than the shoe department at Target the night before the first day of school.)  We pray that everyone we see will have a peace-filled day, we pray for the folks who think they don’t have enough of whatever it is they think they should have. We pray for the families who might argue in front of their children or stab each other behind their backs. We pray for the people who don’t have money or jobs.  We pray for the unemployed, the overworked and the underpaid. 

The absolute beauty of prayer is that you can do it any way you want.  And praying silently in a busy store isn’t going to hurt anyone.  And it might even work. We will never know if it does.  We trust and we pray.

You can do this yourself.  And not even I will know.  Only God.  Prayer is sneaky that way.

Commentary

One of my favorite authors, Karen Armstrong, likes to tell the story of when Rabbi Hillel was asked by a Gentile to explain the entirety of the Torah while standing on one foot. The rabbi told him, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is just commentary. Now go and learn."

The Golden Rule.  It’s common to every religion on the planet, in whatever language they use. And all the other “rules” are commentary.  Jesus pronounces it in Matthew 7:12.

A while back I was elected to serve as an elder on our new church's session.  But first I had to be examined by their current session. And who should be on that session, but Chris Holloman. I’ve known Chris since he was in the second grade in Garland.  The awesomeness of this experience was that I had taught his confirmation class. I had sat on the session to examine Chris to become a member of the congregation.  And now he was examining me.  I love it when life comes full circle.  Thankfully, he didn’t ask me any hard questions. 

But one of the other elders did have a fairly complicated question.  And I’m not sure I understood even the question, much less the answer, well enough to explain it here.  It was something about Jesus’ dual nature as being both fully human and fully divine.  The answer I gave startled even myself. Here's basically what I said:

The more I study religion I have noticed the more simple my faith becomes.  And I’ve decided my beliefs can be found in two scriptures:  John 3:16 and Matthew 7:12.  Everyone knows John 3:16 but I only recently dusted off the Matthew scripture and found the Golden Rule.

I have come to the conclusion that everything else in the bible goes right back to those two scriptures. Everything else is commentary.

We can get bogged down in the nuances of our faith and miss the forest for the trees.

I spent many years in the forest of the finer details of faith:  Most of my friends came from my church congregation so there are very few things we don’t automatically agree on no matter how deeply we delved into scripture.  About the only differences between us was whether we should serve bacon or sausage at the Community Breakfast.

But I’ve been going to a multi-denominational bible study for a few years now and it’s fascinating to study the bible with people of different methods and understandings of how to worship God.  We’ve got women from every branch of the church—Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, Roman Catholic and a healthy dose of the local Pentecostal congregation.  We study together with the ladies from the drug and alcohol rehab--women who sometimes have had no background in church, women who have never picked up a bible, who think God hates them and who have never prayed before.  All the while in the background, music of love and compassion plays at a soft volume. We fall in love with each other and all the differences fall away.

One time the group discussed the concept of Dispensationalism. First, we had to figure out what it meant.  I was washing dishes in the church kitchen and turned  to Marabeth Russell, one of my mentors, and told her I wasn’t sure I understood the concept but I was pretty sure I didn’t believe in it.  She answered immediately, “No dear, you don’t.” And the matter was closed. The group agreed to disagree and we moved on.

One of the most interesting and honest conversations we had was the time we asked the Pentecostal women to explain the “speaking in tongues” thing.  They were startled that we asked them about it, that we listened to them and we were startled by their simple and gentle explanation. For this life-long Presbyterian it was a moment when I realized that all the differences between us are ancillary; nothing more than commentary.

Thomas Jefferson once took a bible and cut out all the things he considered to be what Christianity was all about then pasted them into what he considered the REAL gospel.  It’s called the Jefferson Bible.  Only Jefferson could think himself qualified to edit God.  It’s a great example of how even the best of us pick and choose what we take from the scripture.

 

I have come to this conclusion about religion:  We tend to over-think it.  We love God so much, we are so in awe of God’s power that we fall into the idea that “it can’t be that simple.” 

Considering that most of the foul conflicts in the history of humanity have been over religion and faith, maybe we need to tone it down a bit.  Christians can argue between themselves over the details:  intricate concepts we can barely pronounce, how we baptize people, who we should ordain as ministers, even the ownership of our buildings and how to hire a preacher.  But those details lay on the gravel frontage road of the faith highway. They are not the smooth surface that will get you where you want to go.

So I’ve decided my faith boils down to two scripture verses:  John 3:16 and Matthew 7:12.  No more.  No less. And if you think having only two scripture verses might lead to laziness you haven’t really read them.  The first verse calls us to an understanding of grace and the second verse tells us what to do with that understanding. They do not duplicate each other.  But, together they form the whole of Christian thought.  Love God.  Love your neighbor. All the rest is commentary.

Four Different Reasons for the Season

I hate to cause waves.  And I’m sure you already know this deep in your heart:  Jesus is NOT the only reason for the Season. Please do not throw bricks through my windows.  Let me explain.

Christmas is a hodge-podge of about four celebrations.  And I think we do Jesus a disservice if we try to claim otherwise.  Let’s tease the strands apart and examine them.

Long before Jesus arrived on earth the ancient Celts celebrated the change of the year.  The winter solstice was when the planet aligned with the sun in such a way that days were the shortest they would get. It’s usually either the 20^th or 21^st.  This year the solstice is December 21.The day after the solstice meant that the sun was returning after a long winter.  The days would get longer and the air warmer.  They would be able to plant crops and have food to eat. It was a last gasp celebration until work in the fields must begin.  The Winter Solstice was a time for debauchery and merry making.  Kind of a precursor to the office party.

Then the Christians arrived and the party was over.  They were upset at all the merry making and debauchery.  They might have been a bit jealous, too.  Either way, they wanted to put a stop to it.  So they invented Christmas to celebrate the birth of our Savior.  No one had ever celebrated the Christ’s birth before.  No one even knew when he was born.  The Christians, ever the damper of any good spirits, attached the birth of Christ to the Solstice and insisted the merrymaking stop.This was not the rounding success the church fathers expected.  We just invented the Office Christmas Party and resumed merry making but in the name of Jesus this time.

In truth, no one actually knows when Jesus was born.  Certainly not in December when it was cold and rainy in Judea.  All those shepherds watching their flocks by night would not have been there watching outdoors in the bad weather.  Some people say Jesus was born in the fall.  Some say in the spring. There's also a calculation that dates the birth of Jesus based on the conception of John the Baptist. I know Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and I say that aloud every Sunday in church but I'm a little hesitant to get into Elizabeth and Zechariah's personal business so I haven't followed up on that theory.  

So now we have two separate events for different reasons but celebrating at the same time. Let’s factor in the economy and the fact that December 25 comes at the very end of the fiscal cycle.  Christmas has become an annual Festival of Purchasing, a celebration of the American Economy.

What better time to get inventory off your books than the end of the year just as your financial statements would get evaluated?  It’s a common trick of companies to get their inventory out of the building on the last day of the month so they could count it as a sale and prop up their income. Most months they send it out the doors to drive around on the freeways in an 18-wheeler until the new month when it can be unloaded on another company’s books as a purchase. For Christmas they send it into your home while you pat yourself on the back over what a great deal you got.

Then there is the Annual Family Reunion when you get everyone together whether they want to be there or not.  You might have extra vacation time you need to burn off or maybe you just really do want to go see Grandma.  You consume massive amounts of food and drink to numb yourself out of the memory of the time your brother-in-law didn’t return the tools he borrowed. And he’s off in a corner drinking, too, except he’s only more obnoxious than you are. And if you think Grandma doesn’t notice you’re crazy.  She’s muttering under her breath that it’s just not worth it.

What are our options?  Move Christmas to another date?  Lift it up out of the end of the fiscial year, out of the solstice?  Maybe we could name a new National Family Reunion Day and make it in better weather when air travel is easier, when you can celebrate outdoors and give yourself a little breathing room? June already has Fathers Day, July already has Independence Day. Maybe we could put it in Spring and let those shepherds go back to keeping their flocks by night in comfort. 

We would certainly have a better atmosphere for celebrating Peace on Earth Good Will to Man.