Author: letters2florence

Fifth Sunday of Lent – Lent (Change) is Very Hard

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They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.  John 8:6

Lent is meant to be a time of repentance, which is a very churchy word that means change.  Our regular practice is to perhaps give up this or that, not eat meat on Fridays, fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, maybe give a bit more charitably.  None of these are objectionable. On the contrary, they are ways to express our faith in a manner that is intentional and real. 

But I wonder if we’ve thought about what Lent might be more fundamentally about.  What if we thought of Lent as an invitation rise to, or at the very least start to understand, Jesus’ level of consciousness.  Today’s Gospel illustrates both the invitation and the very real challenge. 

You almost surely know the story of the woman allegedly “caught” in sin, or at the very least, its most famous line: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7).  It is certainly one of the most disarming responses I have ever read anywhere.  But I want to dwell here today on what Jesus was doing before this extraordinary reply: writing in the ground with his finger, so much so that he has to be nagged a few times for a reply.

You might ask…really?  A woman is about to be stoned.  She is saved by Jesus’ reply.  And we are going to talk about doodling in the dirt?

Hang with me, if you would. I read this part of the story as Jesus realizing the sheer enormity of his task at hand.  Maybe it was even despair.  He looks to the ground and for a few long moments has no words at all.  Why?

Judgment, exclusion, scapegoating, creating outcasts, and ridding ourselves of those outcasts – it is engrained in us.  In the Gospel we have a bunch of guys ready to stone a woman, which they’ve justified to themselves with technical legal arguments. Before we dismiss that as ancient barbarism, I urge us all to think about the stones we cast: those we cast on the homeless, on immigrants, on people who take wrong turns in life, and the justifications we use in the casting of those stones.  The scribes and Pharisees had their laws to back them up; we, of course, have ours.  More broadly, we can’t disagree anymore without cancelling the people we disagree with, or cancelling millions of dollars of previously available funding.  It seems we live in a state of perpetual judgment and condemnation. 

What the Pharisees miss – and what to their credit they realize they miss, when they eventually back off – is that the law was not and is not an end in itself, that no law of God has as its purpose condemnation.  No reasonable conception of the Christian faith can ground itself in condemnation and exclusion.  Sadly, its historical alignment with prevailing power structures have made this far less than obvious.  

What would the world look like if we kept front and center Jesus’ famous response?  What if we remembered that exactly none of us is without error, fault, and blame?  That the success we may experience is as much due to circumstance as whatever merit we’ve told ourselves we’ve earned? That we all have huge blind spots (see Matthew 7:3-5), that we all need healing? 

Lest we think that no one is publicly advocating in this spirit today, Pope Francis’ commentary on our immigration policy reflects, in part, the fundamental proposition that we are called to lead with mercy, not judgment, with love and not with condemnation.  Yes, the laws are there and yes they need to be followed.  But – also yes – we are talking about people and families and children, people we are loudly and clearly called in our faith to love.  Our discussions and policies ought to be informed as much by compassion as by security. Hard?  For sure. Required?  I think the Gospel is pretty clear. 

Midweek Reflection – Prodigal Love – Part II

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But the son answered his father and exclaimed, “WTF!!!” Luke 15:29 (my translation)

This midweek post tacks on to my previous post about the Prodigal Son. There, we talked about the father’s reckless love for his son and how this resembles God’s reckless love for us. Today we’ll reflect on the brother’s reaction to all this, which I think is actually our reaction to this…which can be summarized in the intentionally extreme interpretation of verse 29 offered above.

God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, our Faith – are all deeply countercultural. We live today in a world dominated by – perhaps even obsessed with – merit. We reward hard work. We celebrate success.  We love triumph.  We talked on Sunday about how this is reflected in parenting. Think about parenting today for a minute.  How much are we pushing for success?  How deeply do we want our kids to go to great colleges?  Think about youth sports, which in years past were largely limited to playgrounds during free time.  They are now full-on, year-round commitments.   

Rarely do we question any of this. After all, what is there to question about getting good grades, or maybe swimming a great butterfly?  What could be wrong with hustling for great results?

Nothing, in and of itself, except when, in doing all this hustling, we lose track of a crucial fact that the Prodigal Son story reminds us of: that God actually, and always, celebrates us.  He specifically celebrates us in our lacking of achievement. He delights in us even when we screw up. He embraces us not in our return from Harvard, or from getting an Olympic Gold medal, but simply in our return, and specifically in our return from failure and wretchedness and disgrace, even if those things are supposedly self-inflicted. 

Almost scandalously, God does not compare.  He doesn’t look at the people who worked hard and did all the right things more favorably that those who went astray.  He simply loves.

Well, this all gets the Prodigal Son’s brother super bent. You are celebrating that fool while I’ve been working away all these years? You’re gonna go on and roast the fattened calf I raised for him? The same guy who asked for your inheritance and then spent it all? We are throwing a party for that guy?

Is this not us? What would we say if at the high school graduation we let the kids who barely got over the proverbial line do the commencement address? What if the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to survivors of drug addiction?  How do we look at the dutiful children when compared to the no-so-dutiful ones?  The high achievers versus the low achievers?  What do we think we deserve relative to what others deserve? 

God doesn’t want us to fail our classes or stop doing things like sports. God doesn’t want us to not throw graduation parties or not compete or not achieve. But what the Gospel reminds us of is that these things cannot be conditions to love; they are certainly not conditions to God’s love.  As the father says to the brother, “everything I have is already yours.” 

We don’t earn God’s love.  We already have it and it is universal.  It extends to the marginalized, the friendless, those without any followers on Instagram or whatever the medium is, and those who have completely screwed up.  That could be others or that could be us.  In all our busy schedules and various stressors, I think this is Good News we might hold on to and find grounding in. 

Fourth Sunday of Lent – The Prodigal Parent

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But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Luke 15: 20

So, so much can be said, has been said and will continue to be said about the story of the Prodigal Son. This brief story says in a paragraph or two what volumes and volumes of texts and hours and hours of sermons throughout centuries have tried say about God. What more can a small blog like this contribute?

I will offer an interpretation given by the late Tim Keller. The word “prodigal” means reckless. Of course, the Prodigal Son was about as reckless one can be. He essentially asks that his father to get on and die already so that he can obtain his inheritance. He then goes off into the world, self-assured and confident, maybe well-educated and certainly well-funded, ready to take it all on. He quickly gets into all kinds of trouble and loses everything. With just a little imagination we can fill in the details of his disastrous journey, one that lands him envying pigs and their pods, in a wretched state of painful regret.

So the son was clearly prodigal. Tim, however, finds the father to be just as prodigal, and perhaps more so. When the son realizes he needs to go back and beg his father’s forgiveness, before he can take a few steps, the father sees him from afar and beats him to it. He runs to his son and embraces and kisses him. His son tries to apologize; the father is already planning the Homecoming Party. (The second part of this story – the part about the brother’s reaction to this – will be reflected on in a separate post.)

The father loves his son truly recklessly – without planning, without conditions, without care or calculation. This illustrates God’s love for us, which is part of Jesus’ point. In the face of inevitable disappointment and heartbreak, in spite of the sometimes seemingly small “return on investment,” regardless of its risk or cost or whether it is returned, God pursues us patiently and persistently and without hesitation, even when we don’t love him back, indeed even when we reject him. Hence the title of Tim’s book, The Prodigal God.

The image we have of God as Father – as Parent – is so powerful because it hits home so deeply, especially for parents who, in our own admittedly imperfect ways, pursue our children in love. They grow and they change and they become too cool for us and they discover things about the world and they move away and think we don’t know this or that. And yet we persist in our love of them, even past their dependent childhoods, long after they can stand on their own. Parents can perhaps reflect on this.

I have heard it said that God is more of a verb than a noun. God’s love – or maybe it is simply God or love – continually flows, and we are invited into that flow, to both receive and give it. Parenting embodies this flow and there are of course many other such embodiments. We should try to hold this in our hearts in our journeys.

Follow Him – A New Creed?

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And as Jesus passed from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” And he got up and followed him. Matthew 9:9

Nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus tell folks to worship him. He does however repeatedly tell folks to follow him. In all of our church-going habits, all of our sacrament receiving and professions of faith, I wonder if we have given this enough reflection.

It’s dangerous territory, actually. Jesus led a radical life, one that is indeed difficult to follow. He did not achieve much as achievements are conventionally understood. He didn’t write a book or play a sport in a Division One college. He wasn’t chasing merit or climbing any kind of ladder. He never actively sought recognition.

In short, he didn’t do anything that we spend most of our time doing. He spent his time with outcasts, the poor, those on the skids. He didn’t talk about the problems of poverty. He lived with it, all of it. If conservative politics can be criticized as being unconcerned with the poor, liberal politics can be criticized as happy to talk but not so keen to act.

I wonder what a Creed based on Jesus’ invitation to follow him would sound like? Every week we in many Christian denominations say the Nicene Creed – statements that we affirm as true (I am afraid to say, quite mechanically and without much thought). But what if we affirmed a commitment to follow Jesus? What if we affirmed our commitment to step back, think outside of our big goals, and think about why Jesus, Son of God as we affirm in the Nicene Creed, came and dwelled in such a lowly place? What if we committed to join him, in our own ways, ourselves?

Third Sunday of Lent – Radical Inclusivity

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But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in sprit and truth. John 4: 20-24

I am going a bit off the official Lectionary path this Sunday – I think – by looking at this reading from John’s Gospel, which is assigned to “Scrutiny Year A” for those who are preparing to receive the Rite of Christian Initiation at Easter. We are officially in Year C and the Year C readings are here.

The reading is the perhaps familiar but perhaps not well understood story of the woman at the well. Some historical notes may perhaps shed some light on the radical nature of the story. Two things right off the bat: (a) the woman is, well, a woman, and women were not regarded well or highly or at all at this time, and (b) she is Samaritan, and Samaritans were looked upon with extreme suspicion by the Jewish people. In addition, we soon learn that this woman has a tumultuous past of the kind that would surely have led to extreme, Scarlett Letter-type social shaming, and perhaps worse.

And yet Jesus engages her – as we will see, very deeply and seriously – pushing aside all prevailing social norms. By the time we get toward the end of the story, the horrified disciples are basically saying something like We Don’t Talk About That.

Right from the start this context and setting should cause us to reflect. Who do we not talk to? Who have we convinced ourselves we need not talk to? Here is Jesus, encountering someone he could very safely have ignored, or looked the other way from, the way we might, for example, look the other way when someone is asking for money on the street corner or subway car. Or maybe the way we might treat a co-worker who is having issues at work, or a fellow student not getting a particular concept. Or maybe a family member we have had issues with that has caused a still-unaddressed rift? Their problems are not our problems, right? We have bills to pay too, right? I figured all this stuff out, right? Why can’t he? She hasn’t called me…why do I need to call her? We can’t possibly engage and help everyone…can we?

Yet that is not how Jesus leads, here or pretty much anywhere else in the Gospels. He not only treats the Samaritan woman as a full human being, but he engages her, substantively, in dialogue at the deepest level. He is not reserving his theology for the priests or the disciples or the men. No, he takes the message right to her, without judgement or filter, who all those men would have readily ignored and excluded from the conversation entirely. We find later that she picks it up quicker than many of them did.

The extraordinary conversation begins. Jesus asks for water; she is startled by his breaking of the social barrier. Jesus then starts talking about “living water” that she should be asking of him. Stumped, she asks him where his bucket is for all this water. [Note of pause – the author loves this part, as this is exactly how he thinks he would respond].

Like all great teachers Jesus is patient. He’s not talking about actual H20. Of course, water is good. But our faith is more than that. He’s actually talking about spiritual discovery and liberation, liberation from the constraints that can make our faith so small and parochial. When our faith is confined to what this or that group does, or by solely to going to Mass on Sundays, or to our Bible-study groups, when our kindness is limited to those in our community or those who look like us, our faith and spirituality shrinks. It is confined – the exact opposite of what we see in the Gospel.

The “living water” Jesus refers to is the recognition that we can find and honor God nearly everywhere, and particularly in places we don’t often go (see Matthew 25: 31-20). He continues: the time is coming “when you will worship…neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem”, when we will “worship the Father in spirit and truth.” Back then the Jewish people were doing this, the Samaritans that, the Gentiles something else. That’s all well and good. Jesus is not proposing to dispense with all custom and tradition. It is well known that he was quite observant of Jewish tradition. But our specific traditions and practices are only part of the story and not the whole story. If they are exclusionary or discriminatory in any sense, if they cause us to be judgmental, they contradict God’s purpose for us, and likely their own original purpose. And if they do not cause us to lead our lives with love and care and grace, one can reasonably question why they are adhered to at all. We Church-goers should be honest about our contribution to precipitously declining religious participation rates, particularly among younger age groups.

A lot of times Christians focus on Jesus’ later statement “I am he” in response to the woman’s wondering about the coming of the Messiah, as a way to direct people to a narrow Christian dogma where only formal confessions of faith or other ritual practices will suffice for salvation. But it is important to note what Jesus does not say here. He does not say she or anyone should worship him (in fact he never says this in the Gospels – more on this in a later post). Combined with his radical actions in this story and elsewhere, I think he is saying that what is Messianic is the inclusion of everyone in God’s love and presence, that everyone belongs.

Jesus embodies this. Indeed, he “dwelled among us” (John 1:14), but not just some of us. As this and the Gospel more broadly shows, he made a big point of dwelling among all of us. And he continues to dwell in each of us, if we believe we are members of the body of Christ (see, e.g. 1 Corinthians 12).

This all leads to the conclusion of the story – the part about sowers and reapers. Once the disciples get past the scandalous nature of Jesus’ conduct, they go back to the everyday concerns (Jesus, you must be hungry!). Of course Jesus from time to time was hungry. Of course, we are hungry from time to time. Of course, we need to pay our bills and attend to the day-to-day. No one would deny that. But the truly Good News is that there is a “harvest” already here. We are already accepted and loved. We do not have to earn that invitation, or have a certain grade point average, or live here or there or earn this or that. We can have a whole bunch credentials or we can have none at all. God welcomes all of us to this harvest, and we, following Jesus, are called to do the same. Jesus did not impose prerequisites to love and grace. Neither should we.

Forgiveness

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For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Matthew 6: 14-15

Sometimes when I read these kinds of passages I think of a simple quid pro quo – if I forgive others then God will forgive me. A similar statement is in the Lord’s Prayer. Therefore, I better start forgiving if I want forgiveness myself.

I wonder if there is another way to read this. I wonder if what Jesus is saying is that unless you forgive others you cannot truly be forgiven.

Perhaps Jesus is saying that forgiveness is not a kind of transaction, but rather a state of heart, or maybe a continual flow. In that flow forgiveness is not allocated or distributed upon the doing of certain things, but is simply and always there to participate in. As God does not ration forgiveness, neither should we. If we do, we limit our own capacity to truly receive it. Our hearts remain apart from this flow; they are still hard, too hard to receive it. To receive forgiveness requires being forgiving. Being forgiving naturally follows the receipt of forgiveness.

I think our lives show this. When one truly experiences forgiveness and realizes how much that forgiveness was needed, she is ready to provide it to others. He knows the state of things, our common human state of imperfection and our deep need for grace. Only when we extend forgiveness to others – and indeed even to ourselves – are we really ready to receive it. Our hearts have changed; we are in the flow.

God can and does forgive us by inviting us always into this flow.

Second Sunday of Lent – Presence in Uncertainty

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Luke 9:28-36 – The Transfiguration

This Sunday’s reading is about the Transfiguration. There is so much about the Transfiguration that is very deep theologically, but I want to focus on the experience of Peter, James and John because I think their experience most resembles ours.

The disciples have been following Jesus for some time when Jesus leads them up Mount Tabor to pray. The disciples fall asleep, which is so familiar: there are so many things I’d rather do than pray, and sleep is definitely one of them. As Jesus prays his face and clothes suddenly change and become bright and dazzling and he’s joined by none other than Moses and Elijah. Their conversation wakes up the startled disciples who at this point are probably wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into following this Jesus guy.

They seem to begin to understand that something special – like double O-C special – is happening right in front of them. As Moses and Elijah are about to depart, they try to hold on. There is a realization of the power of prayer, their faith realized in an incredible way, maybe an ecstasy. Who wouldn’t want to keep that going? Peter offers to pitch three tents and basically suggests they all stay for a while, and that’s when things change.

Storm clouds roll in and the conditions deteriorate and the disciples are terrified. Then they hear the voice of God which probably terrifies them more. And then they are alone, with only Jesus, and they descend the mountain and keep it all to themselves.

What are we to make of all of this? In our lives we can be enticed by the “high” experiences. Think of the great accomplishments we strive for, or which we’ve achieved in the past. Think of how much we celebrate success in our world. Think of how much we do for our kids to foster their success. And think of the feeling of that success and how much we want to hold on, to take it further, to continue to strive and get more of it. My children in varying ways have experienced really big highs in their sports and schooling and man is all of that satisfying as a parent to see! I feel like Peter, and they do too – let’s hang here for a while!

And yet we cannot only hold on to the highs, the celebrations, the wins. They inevitably pass; the next experience begins, and one way or another, the clouds will roll in. My kids have had their own share of cloudy experiences. I know I have. We all do. We are justifiably fearful of them. We are confused by them. We indeed wish they would never come at all.

But what happens when the clouds roll in for Peter, James and John? They hear nothing less than the voice of God. God is present in the high and the low, in the consoling and validating and in the scary and uncertain, and probably more so in the latter circumstances. Exactly nowhere in Jesus’ life is he particularly high – he spends nearly all of his ministry in the low and with all the lows – the sick, the sinners, the suffering, the excluded, and the poor – except here at the Transfiguration. And yet even that high is super brief. Even the chat he has with Moses and Elijah has to do with his eventual crucifixion.

We can maybe see all of this in our prayer life. There are (admittedly very few) times when I can really stay in prayer for a while. There are times when a sermon or a bible passage can feel as though it is speaking literally right to me. Those moments are so validating and affirming. But there are so many other times when my experience looks nothing like that, when it’s a chore, when it is dry and totally distracted, often when my own clouds roll in, and maybe that’s the case for you too.

We are invited today to continue to listen for God even in those not sublime times, when we are uncertain and when we feel lost and maybe even scared. We are challenged by the Gospel, I think, to not be so attracted to the feeling of spiritual fulfillment, affirmation and consolation – the high- that when we do not feel it, we give it up and maybe run to the next “big thing.” I think the same can be said for our real-world strivings. If what we are after is only the win, we won’t be after it for long.

We should not abandon our strivings or our celebrations of our accomplishments. We should not ignore those moments in prayer when we really feeling like we are doing it right. Those are all good things and God I think wants those for us. But we should also recognize that in the totality of our journey we will find God’s presence in all kinds of places, and often where we least expect it.

First Sunday of Lent – How Satan Hides in Our Strivings

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Luke 4: 1-13 – The Temptation of Jesus 

What are we up to during Lent?  I was listening to a homily before Ash Wednesday in which the priest warned us not to let Lent take us by surprise.  But what is this thing called Lent that would be taking us by surprise?  The popular conception involves a period of giving up this or that, or making scheduled visits to food pantries, or praying with some degree of regularity that is more than we currently pray.  That is all well and good, but it still begs the question: why? 

The Gospel today I think puts this question squarely in front of us.  It is the familiar story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan in the desert.  Jesus is there for 40 days and Satan tempts him with power, prestige, and wealth, among other things.  Jesus denies these temptations, in each instance citing Scripture in his defense.  In the course of our tradition, we honor Jesus’ denial and from this has emerged our various Lenten practices.  

I wonder if we’ve deeply reflected on this.  What was so wrong, we might ask, about what Satan was offering Jesus?  Would it have been wrong to turn a stone into bread?  Don’t we ask God in our prayers to make things useful for us?  What is so wrong about the offer of power and glory – don’t we seek similar things in our educations and jobs and lives?  What would be so controversial about Jesus saving himself from falling off a cliff – wouldn’t we want our God to be able to do this, and perhaps do the same for us?  

What Satan is offering Jesus is hard to resist precisely because it is actually kind of good.  In our world today we are offered all kinds of similarly good things, things that will give us power and wealth and respect and immunity, or at the very least marginally better lives. New houses and cars, ways to get kids into college, gym and health club memberships, smart devices…the list goes on.  And who would argue with a parent taking his or her children to soccer practices as a means to further their goals, or getting those children tutoring so they can do well on an admissions test?  Who would argue with a gym membership that promises better health and fitness? Who would quibble with the climb up the corporate ladder by a hard-working person with a family, and moving her family to a house in the suburbs in a good school district?  

Few, I would guess, probably because none of the above is bad or controversial in and of itself.  What is challenging – and I think what Jesus cautions us about – is when these things become the only things.  When our careers, our health, our and our children’s advancement, or our various other strivings take up either all of our time, or so much of our time that all other concerns (and specifically the concerns Jesus took up) get sidelined, that is when the seemingly good become a dangerous temptation.  I know that this happens to me all the time.  I am particularly prone to getting very intense and worried about helping my children “advance” in the world.  I think a cursory look at parental anxiety in the world today would suggest that I am not the only one.  

The warning – and the opportunity – the Gospel presents today is that Satan does indeed lurk in the world, not in the form of a cartoonish red devil with a pitchfork, but more subtly in the guise of the seemingly good.  For every move to the suburbs and the good school district, another more challenged school district gets left behind.  With every gentrifying city neighborhood comes rises in rents and displacements of existing residents.  Compare the time and attention we spend on sports with the concern we have for the poor and the homeless, those segments of society where Jesus spent nearly all of his time (the Bible citations are too numerous to list here). 

Satan – a manifestation of cynicism and lack of trust in God and love – tempts us to spend all of our time with our own concerns, “doing us”, as it were.  One need not have an actual belief in or conception of Satan at all to understand the temptation we have to concern ourselves only with our own good fortune.    

I think that is what Jesus resists in today’s Gospel, and I think he asks us to consider the same resistance. It is not a call to asceticism or total self-denial.  I do not think Jesus is asking us to sell our homes or our other things, or not be concerned with our kids’ educations or athletics or whatever the concern of the day is.  But I think he does ask us to evaluate how much this is preoccupying us, how much power we are giving it, indeed how much we may be worshipping it.  Satan tempted Jesus in the desert to worship – that is, be wholly concerned with – power over love and trust.  Jesus offers us both the challenge and the opportunity to resist those temptations, to resist all the pressing and anxiety and competition that pervades our world, even if only for a little while, and center ourselves on God and love (more to come on what this may mean, practically).  Our Lenten practices, whatever they may be, ought to be oriented toward addressing that challenge and pursuing that opportunity. 

Merry Christmas

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December 25, 2024

Merry Christmas Everyone,

I hope this message finds you well, warm, safe, and happy, that your children are enjoying their Christmas gifts, that you are savoring their happy faces and moments of joy, and that, as time inevitably marches on, you can, today, slow it down, if only just a little bit, and maybe look out the window or sit for a few moments and simply reflect on where you are now.

This time of year is filled with lots of busyness – school, work, kids’ sports, doctor’s appointments, and the like. Layering in all the various Christmas preparations makes things even more hectic.  It is understandably challenging for Christians to remember what we are supposed to be celebrating. Perhaps that is worth a quick try.

In his Gospel, John tells us that, at Christmas, “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:9; John largely equates the Word with God earlier in the passage).  What could this mean?  I think it means that God, as Christians understand God, rather than staying far away in a far-off place (heaven? a distant kingdom?) chose, instead, to join us fully in our world.  This is, I think, a natural extension of God’s creation of the world to begin with – after all, one would think that God could have done an infinite number of other things, choosing instead to create us through Christ (see, e.g., John 1:1-4).  Then, years and years later, he joins us on Earth through Jesus.  He creates the world and he is in the world, experiencing fully all of our joys and sufferings. 

Joy is a primary message of Christmas.  That God joined us is nothing less than truly amazing.  And yet, coupled with this amazingness, there is also a challenge to us.  Mary and Joseph, poor refugees in an occupied and often violent society, had no place to go with Jesus, using a manger (a pig-trough) as a crib.  The shepherds who saw Jesus were viewed as castaways; Herod murdered the Holy Innocents in a fit of envious political rage; all the “lepers” Jesus healed were poorer than poor, the lowest of the low, people who were swept away and cast off from society (think of homeless encampments in major cities today).  Jesus challenged all of our conventional ways of thinking, through the Sermon on the Mount and his various parables and most powerfully in the way he lived, which was not with the rich or educated or highly accomplished or busiest, but among people who struggled simply to survive.  

In short, God got involved by coming and living with and challenging us.  He advocated for the bringing of the Kingdom right here, on earth, to all people regardless of status or race or yes, even religious creed. 

Jesus’ challenge does not mean we shouldn’t be joyful or even give each other Christmas gifts – quite the contrary, I think.  Jesus doesn’t present us with “either/or” thinking that leads to division and acrimony and false controversy and stress.   Rather, Jesus invites us to the far more inclusive “both/and” thinking.  Be joyful, yes, but also be aware of injustice.  Go to church services, yes, but bring your faith to your world in the form of actions and self-sacrifice.  Recite the creeds and receive the sacraments, for sure, but also live those sacraments out in the world.  I think you’ll find that rather than being in conflict, one goes hand-in-hand with the other. 

So let us indeed rejoice in the grace that God gives us through Jesus, and let us find our own ways to join him in making this world the good world it is supposed to be.   

Wishing you peace and joy always,

Greg

Letters to Florence: West Coast Edition

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I have taken a bit of a Hiatus from this blog due to what some readers already know, which is, in short, that we have moved across the Country.  And I suppose that, before School starts (which is…yikes…this week!), it’s time to reflect a bit on that.

And so without further preliminaries that is what I’ll do.

Moving with young children is really tricky business.   To begin with, there is the logistical trickiness of having to box-up all your stuff while at the same time continuing to need that same stuff, all while doing things like wiping Butts and wondering why you are still Wiping Butts and settling Sibling Disputes and shuffling kids to school and sports and the like.  Then there are the various decisions that need to be made such as when is the Best Time to move?  Is it during the Summer, so the kids get a good clean ending to the local school year and a good clean start to the new one?  Or does a long, presumably activity-lite summer hinder the progress of developing new friendships and the breaking-in process generally?

As in many cases regarding Parenting, the Experts will tell you there’s a Way to do things like this, just like there’s a Way to get Reluctant Readers to learn how to love to read, or how to progress in subjects such as Common Core Math, or how to play more nicely with others, or how to become All-Around Well-Adjusted Human Beings, all with supporting Data and Peer-Reviewed Research Methods.

And that is about all I can report on my research on topics like these: that someone out there knows the Right Way to do these things, but we never figured out which way that was, and we just picked Move During Summer because that’s what we picked.

Then there’s the question of how you actually get from where you are to where you are going, which, given the distance of our move, became a topic of extensive discussion.  Our initial plan was to drive across our great country, an idea we were all super excited about, though we did frame this for the children with almost exclusively leading questions (“This will be really fun, won’t it?!”, to which they obligingly nodded their little heads.  I am so proud of them.).  What better way, after all, to bond as a Family than getting in the car and driving from Sea to Shining Sea, and seeing the Heartland and the Mountains, and doing Wholesome Things like collecting rocks from each State and taking pictures in front of each State’s Welcome To Our Really Great State Sign?

(Yes, all of this detail was part of The Plan).

After further reflection, however, we ended up leaving all this Wholesomeness to our collective Family Imagination, which is probably the best place for it, because the reality likely would not have been very Wholesome at all.  The reality of the trip – that is, the part involving the actual driving for hours on end, the need to stop to find a Potty, the need to stop to find another Potty right after we got back in the car because one child insisted he or she didn’t have to go on the previous visit and we for some reason took his or her word for it, the sleepless nights in unfamiliar hotel rooms – all would have been great up until about, say, Pittsburgh, at which point Crankiness and Boredom would have likely have set in, and when the children asked if we were in California yet, we really wouldn’t have anything helpful to say other than we are not even out of [_____] Pennsylvania yet and why did we ever think this was a good idea?

We ended up deciding to fly; and that portion of the move, as well as the many, many others, will be the subject of other Blog Posts.

Aside from the logistical issues, there are the emotional and psychological issues involved that require extensive Parental Attention and Care.  All in all, I think we’ve had a relatively easy go of this, which is likely due to our kids’ relatively young ages.  J, our oldest, initially had some hesitation about the whole thing, but fairly quickly adopted a mostly Go With The Flow attitude, which is kind of his attitude on Life generally, whether appropriate or not appropriate, and there will be more on this later.

After initially seeming pretty good with the move, G, our Middle Child, went through a period of somewhat intense anxiety.  One night he was feeling quite upset and scared about everything, and we were having trouble figuring out the best way to help.  We tried consoling him by telling him the things you are supposed to tell children when you are moving, but none of that seemed to work, and maybe we weren’t getting it right, but this was all kind of inconvenient since we were convinced the Leading Questions had taken care of this.

What happened next will be forever enshrined in our Family History.

In walked E, our youngest, and she was determined to help.

First, she brought over G’s trophies from his various sporting events and said, “Look, see, we will bring all your trophies with us!”

But that didn’t help.

Next, she thought she would read him a story. She brought over Frog and Toad and read her own version of the story and encouraged him to look at the pictures.

That didn’t work either.

Finally, she took a different approach. She put back the trophies and the book and walked over to G and said this:

“Hey, I am sad about moving too. But I am not crying about it. SO STOP CRYING!”

And then she walked away and started mumbling to herself about how she was not crying and why was he crying, in the manner, perhaps, of a frustrated shopper who could swear the deli ham was on sale for a lower price-per-pound but doesn’t want to get back on the way-too-long checkout line to sort the matter out.

Yes, this actually happened, and we will never forget that it did.

Thankfully, G did come around.  Our pediatrician once told us that Middle Children are typically the best adjusted, and whether that’s generally true or not we can’t really say, but we wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be the case for us.  On observation, he at first glance appears to be our Quiet One, but that’s only in contrast to his fast-talking, Coastal siblings, who can sometimes make him seem like a lost Midwesterner on a crowded New York street.  But like most Midwesterners, he’s rarely lost.  He observes things and processes things and when he says things they are usually much more deliberate and precise, and when something big like moving is happening he feels the predictable emotion and expresses the feeling and doesn’t hide it, and then he is ready to move on.  At the end of the day, those are all probably Very Good Things, and I am pretty sure he is going to do great out here.

E was always game for the move, but not in the Go With The Flow way of J.  In fact, I don’t think there ever will be a Flow that E will just Go With.  E is The Flow.   This is so much the case that it’s almost like she’s not actually a real Person but a Fictional Character in our lives who we are watching and trying to interpret the Real Meaning of.  In her very first trip to our new neighborhood playground, she kept riding her bike around way too fast, periodically passing in front of an older couple sitting on one of the park benches.  They were marveling at her, because that’s kind of what people do when they see a Three-Year Old Girl riding a bike really fast and shouting “You Can’t Catch Me!” to her older brothers, all while wearing a full-on Storm Trooper costume.

Predictably, though, she took a pretty good Fall right in front of them, and they got up right away and made to come to her aid.

There was little need for that.  She got up and brushed herself off and immediately declared “I’m okay! That didn’t hurt!” and kept on doing what she was doing, and the couple commented on how tough she is, and we shook our heads at her and gave the Five Minute Warning, which predictably turned into Fifteen and then into Thirty, because the evenings here are really quite nice, even when your daughter is riding a bike around in a Storm Trooper costume being very Loud and Reckless.

Which brings me to the question:  what’s Life like in California?  For starters, I can confirm that the general description of Californians being more laid back than East Coasters is definitely true.   For example, I have gone into Peet’s Coffee not less than five (5) times since moving here, wanting a simple cup of brewed coffee, and each time the very nice and polite and evidently unconcerned Barista indicated that it would be ready in about a minute or two.

A bit of background, just to frame out why I found this so strange.  When I was sixteen I worked at a 7-Eleven, and the owner of the 7-Eleven was a very burly guy with a thick mustache and magnifying-glass thick aviator-style gold-framed glasses, and one time he came into the store during my shift and all of the coffee had run out because I got caught up dealing with a very long check-out line.  He was the kind of guy that wasn’t above just getting the coffee going himself, so he did that, but then he ominously pulled me aside – with people still waiting in line –  and quietly but very firmly and possibly threateningly told me that a 7-Eleven without coffee was like a McDonald’s without French Fries and how that could never happen in his store.

Unsurprisingly, (a) it never did, at least not while I was working the shift, and (b) I still get a pit-in-the-stomach feeling whenever I pass a 7-Eleven, and I usually opt for an alternative Convenient Store even if I have to drive a little farther.

Fast forward 20+ years, it took a lot for me to not tell my very unstressed barista that Peet’s not having the coffee ready is like McDonald’s not having French Fries and how he really should feel pretty bad about himself.  But I resisted, and I waited the minute or two, and you know what?  It worked out just fine.  I didn’t have to get the coffee the instant I asked for it, and it wasn’t bad having to wait a bit, and where was I rushing off to anyway?  Maybe these Californians are onto something, though after 35+ years of living in the Northeast, I don’t know if this sort of thing will ever seem quite normal.

All this laid-backness I think will suit my son J very well.  As in Pennsylvania, he is on a swim team here in California, and one morning at one of his practices his coach, a towering man with a very throaty voice and a slight hobble to his step commented on how he is really pretty good, and specifically on how comfortable he is in the water, and how he always says you have to be comfortable before you can be fast, and how he wishes his older swimmers should watch less professional swimming and get down to the Basics like getting comfortable, and whole bunch of other stuff relating to Swimming Development.  He made this comment while watching J do the Backstroke, which he has an uncanny ability to perform while looking as though he is on vacation, relaxing and gliding through the water and looking up at the clouds in the blue sky seemingly without a care in the world, including with regard to how fast he is or isn’t going, because he’s just Going With The Flow.

In contrast, whenever J did the backstroke in Pennsylvania, his coach there, Coach B____, who, strangely enough, has nearly the same slight hobble to her step as the guy here in California, would scream, over the splashing of water and the various other sounds echoing through the pool-house, “J, YOU HAVE TO KICK, THIS IS A RACE!!”, and I am pretty sure the only thing that prevented her from adding, “THIS IS NOT THE [______] BAHAMAS!”, and/or “CAN I GET YOU A [______] PINA COLADA OUT THERE?!?” was the fact that he’s only seven.

(Ah, B____.  We really, really did love her.)

And, just like that, J has gone from Aquatically Challenged to Michael Phelps-like Prodigy.  I am really hoping that we can keep this kind of Progress going.   Maybe when he daydreams through his Math Worksheets his teacher will say he is really processing Higher Order Mathematical Concepts, which she wishes the other students would start doing.

I suppose I am happy to conclude that, at least of this writing, So Far So Good, even if we haven’t gotten very Far (it’s only been a bit over a month) and Good is a relative concept (see, essentially, all of the above).  As I mentioned, School started this week, so we’ll see how all that goes, and will keep you posted on this peculiar journey of ours.