Two Christian Men That Helped Me Get Through the Holidays

Though I did not plan it this way, this year it came to be that the words of two Christian men helped me to get through the holidays.

I’ve written here before that I am not a holiday person and I am also not a Christian.

And yet, this year, it was the words of an Austrian Benedictine Monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, and an Italian Catholic Saint , Francis of Assisi, that I used as my guiding light when intense emotions began to blur my vision during Christmas Eve and Christmas.

Brother David Steindl-Rast is a 91 year-old monastic who is the founder and senior advisor for A Network for Grateful Living. He is also an author, a veteran, an advocate for inter-faith dialogue, and he has a TED talk called “Want to Be Happy? Be Grateful.”

Saint Francis of Assisi was a Roman Catholic friar, deacon and preacher who lived from 1181 to 1226 and founded several orders of monastics.  He was canonized as a saint in 1228 by Pope Gregory IX.

I heard Brother David Steindl-Rast’s words in an interview on my favorite podcast On Being.

The interview took place on January 21, 2016, and in it, the elder monk said this about gratitude:

I don’t speak of the gift, because not for everything that’s given to you can you really be grateful.

You can’t be grateful for war in a given situation, or violence, or sickness, things like that.

So the key when people ask, can you be grateful for everything? No, not for everything.

But in every moment, [yes.]

This idea to make space for the gratitude that is already here in every moment really resonated deeply this past weekend.

To consider the presence of gratitude during: moments of frustration, moments of despair, and in the depths of a low-down sulk was a notion that was very appealing to me.

The idea that, if I allowed it, if I turned my mind, gratitude could share in this moment too.

This concept reminds me of something I read a while ago by Positive Psychologist, lecturer and author Maria Sirois:

Suffering does not negate what is good and rich in our world...Both are real. Both are valid. To find that which brings about a life worth living, even with its despairs, is to keep our minds open to the possibility of and.

Here’s the key though: it cannot be by force, aggression, or even by tremendous effort.

No, it is with sheer willingness alone. 

Willingness to perceive my own sincere gratefulness even if it may cloud, confuse, or complicate the pain and suffering that is equally present.

The second set of words, by Saint Francis of Assisi, is actually a well-known prayer that for me, until this past weekend, was never able to fully penetrate my many layers of armor before.

The prayer is as follows:

[god], make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine [god], grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

I have to admit though, of the 15 lines above, as with many prayers, sometimes I never get passed the first line:

Make me an instrument of your peace.

In fact, I could repeat that one line all day, every day, and never be done with it- or it done with me perhaps.

Jay M. Hammond, a professor of historical theology, director of The Center for Franciscan Thought, and contributing author for America: The Jesuit Review wrote the following in his 2002 article: “Francis of Assisi: A Symbol of Peace:”

Francis’ practice of prayer invites everyone to discern God’s initiative, presence and action in every authentic struggle for peace, reconciliation and solidarity within the human family…Francis’ prayer did not allow him to escape the world; rather, it compelled him to embrace and engage it.

I ask you, aren’t those exactly the kinds of words that we need when we are facing life’s challenges head-on?

Words that help us to embrace and engage life, rather than escape it?

I invite you to consider what timeless words might help you to navigate the exterior and interior terrain of living as we approach the New Year because as I learned from this last holiday: words can heal, or at a minimum, help a little.

May it be so.

Forgiving Our Ancestors Part VI: With Science?

It is early in the morning, the day before Christmas Eve, and at this very moment I have an 8 year-old friend of my son's sleeping on my living room floor who's father died one week after Kindergarten Graduation.

I remember seeing his mom about 6 months after her husband's death at flag football practice.

She looked miserable and exhausted, standing on the sidelines with her eyes fixed somewhere off in the distance.

I asked her how she was holding up, and with her son having developed a severe separation anxiety disorder that he had not had prior to the very sudden death of his father from an unknown-origin heart failure, she slowly enunciated to me in the most raw and honest way without even turning her head to make eye contact, "every day is awful."

Fast forward 3 years, and my son's friend's separation anxiety is gone. His mother, working and dating someone new, no longer looks miserable and exhausted, and in fact, looks happy.

I think about them sometimes, especially those first months right after the most central figure in both their lives was taken from them completely unexpectedly so early on in the lifecycle of their small family, and I wonder: how did they find reconciliation?

I have sometimes used the words forgiveness and reconciliation interchangeably.

Because for me, forgiveness is not an inter-personal process.  For me, forgiveness is an intra-personal process- me with me.

Google defines reconciliation in two ways:

1. the restoration of friendly relations

2. the action of making one view or belief compatible with another.

And it gives these synonyms: agreement, compromise, understanding, peace, formal accord, harmonizing, squaring, balancing.

And I know this may sound strange, but sometimes, I find that turning to science for help with forgiveness, or reconciliation, can help.

Because science can help me "square" or "harmonize" or "understand" enough, so that I might make my internal struggle more "compatible" with reality.

Take for example alcoholism.

This disease has had enormous impact on the lives of multiple generations of family members up to and including today with the recent news that one family member now has diabetes.

Well, from a science perspective, that makes sense.

According to mayoclinic.org, excessive alcohol use causes the pancreas to become chronically inflamed. When the pancreas is inflamed, it cannot produce insulin as efficiently. If insulin is not being produced as it should, the human body can develop diabetes.

And there we are.

I know for some people this approach of applying science for the basis of reconciliation or forgiveness may sound a bit aloof, or maybe even cold.

I don't disagree. It may be.

Yet, I still find it helpful sometimes as I try to wrap my heart around something as huge as forgiveness.

A couple of years ago I was first introduced to the scientific work of a neuroscientist named Rachel Yehuda who has looked at the role of genetics and epigenetics in cross-generational trauma.

Specifically, she has studied the biology, the DNA, of the children of Holocaust Survivors and the off-spring of women who were pregnant and working in the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11.

Now, I want to say here in full disclosure, my comparatively teeny tiny brain does not even begin to fully grasp Dr. Yehuda's scientific research. 

And yet, almost mysteriously, I also find great solace in her work.

I find a sense of "peace" (another Google synonym for reconciliation) in the fact that there are and were larger scientific, biological, forces going on in the life of my ancestors and in my own life when traumatic events happened.

According to an NPR interview with Dr.Yehuda in 2015:

There are two ways to influence the next generation at least. One way is to directly transmit something that you have and you transmit it in the form that you have it. So let’s say a change has been made onto your DNA, an epigenetic mark now sits on a promoter region of your gene, for example. And through the magic of myosis that mark gets transmitted through the act of reproduction. The cell divides, there’s reproduction, and the change sticks. And it’s present in the next generation. That’s one thing. That’s a transmitted change...

There’s another kind of change that involves giving your child — either at conception, or in utero, or post conception a set of circumstances — and the child is forced to make an adaptation to those circumstances.

Personally, I think about Dr. Yehuda's research in terms of someone like my great-grandmother who immigrated from Ukraine in the early 20th century.

As I understand it, she was living in terror with an extremely abusive husband when she first arrived in the United States with 2 of her young children which included my grandfather. 

However, not long after their arrival, and my great-grandmother took steps to divorce her abuser, she engaged in her own act of violence toward one  of her daughters that led to all 3 of her children being removed  from her  care for several years and going into the early incarnation  of our present day foster care system.

This is a tough story to hold- especially when I know the  more recent effects in the generations closer to me.  But when I contemplate this cross-generational family trauma in the framework provided by Dr. Yehuda, it helps me to hold the story with more compassion and understanding, which for me are two essential components of forgiveness.

Science also give me hope, because Dr. Yehuda also says:

...We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes. That changes can be made to how those genes function that can help.

Another aspect of science that I've let marinate in this process of forgiveness that feels at times more  like alchemy than algorithm, is the notion in physics that free-will does not exist.

Free will is the sensation of making the choice. Even though, behind the scenes, the laws of physics were pulling the strings.

I heard these words three years ago in an interview with Columbia University physicist and mathematician Brian Green on NPR's podcast On Being.

The laws of physics were pulling the strings.

Is that really true? And if it is, what does that mean in terms of reconciliation and forgiveness?

Dr. Green goes on to say,

...You need to redefine the meaning of the word choose. Choose is the sensation of choosing. Now it is the fact that the laws of physics were just playing themselves out, and that is fundamentally why you did what you did. But to choose is to have the sensation of making that choice. And we all have that sensation.

The "sensation" of choice.

I'll confess that I am not sure how this all fits together, and that I still feel this interior resistance or agnosticism toward this scientific principal, but I don't  know that it's not because the paradigm shift that it would require would just be too great for my ridiculously human heart shape.

I think that is okay though.

Because now 91 year-old Buddhist teacher, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his 1988 book (one of my favorites) The Sun My Heart,

Understanding is not an accumulation of knowledge. To the contrary, it is the result of the struggle to become free of knowledge. Understanding shatters old knowledge to make room for the new that accords better with reality. When Copernicus discovered that the Earth goes around the sun, most of the astronomical knowledge of the time had to be discarded, including the ideas of above and below. Today, physics is struggling valiantly to free itself from the ideas of identity and cause/effect that underlie classical science. Science, lie the  Tao (Way), urges us to get rid of all preconceived notions.

So, like alchemy, I let these ideas just rest there quietly inside of me; like a large soup pot on the back of the stove, simmering, for as long as need be, until forgiveness, reconciliation, or maybe even transcendence, becomes possible.

May it be so.

[Be on the look out for Forgiving Our Ancestors Part VII coming soon...]

Forgiving Our Ancestors Part V: How Poetry Helps

My father did not meet his own father for the first time until he was a toddler.

It was the time of World War II and my grandfather was active in the Army, fighting as a solider in Europe when my father was born.

I’ve always wondered how this early first meeting, or there lack of perhaps, impacted their relationship until the time of my grandfather’s death in his mid-60’s.

(Or maybe it still does now, who knows?)

Because even after they did meet, my grandfather now a war veteran who proceeded to have 5 more children after my father, it seemed, from the outside, that they were never able to find their balance as father-son.

It probably didn’t help that my grandfather was never able to find his footing as a “provider” either, which, as we know,  was the quintessential masculine role for a man in American life in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s- the same time my father was coming of age.

And I don’t know if my grandfather would have been able to full-fill his role as “provider” even if he had not been a war veteran, because he also did not have a male role model for a “provider” in his own family life with my great-grandmother being a working woman herself, and my grandfather and his younger brother (who also never found his way to being a “provider”) having a series of questionable (to say the least) step-fathers in and out of their lives.

With so many nuances, and so many layers, I will never know.

It reminds me that sometimes we cannot face forgiveness head-on. 

Either because a.) with so few answers, it just won’t help , or b.) sometimes it is just to painful to look directly at the sun.

This is where a buffer, or as Rumi says, an “intermediary” may be of help.

Poetry is one such buffer.

I recently came upon a Rumi poem that I had never read before called "Story Water."

For those of you who are not familiar with Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī , he was a 13th century Sufi mystic who was an Islamic scholar, theologian, and poet. He was born in present day Afghanistan, wrote in Persian, and lived for most of his life in what is now present day Turkey.

"Story Water," goes like this:

A story is like water
That you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself,
like a salamander, or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

[My underlining.]

Reading this poem (again and again) reminded me how much I need those "mediums" or "intermediaries" to help my human heart and mind to grapple with concepts and processes as complicated and difficult as forgiveness.

So with that, I will leave you with a few poems (and one Rumi poem is also part parable) that can act as a “mediums.”  

These poems have been meaningful for me on these themes of ancestors, grandfathers and fathers, and forgiveness- which carries with it what I think of as an algorithm of forgiveness including:

Suffering + Radical Acknowledgement + Grief + Wisdom + Compassion.

The poetry I've included belongs to: Sherman Alexie, Mary Oliver, Rumi, and Dick Lourie.

Some of their poems are more subtle and others are right between the eyes; take what is most useful to you, and leave the rest.

Some of my favorite poetry lines from each poet respectively include:

1.) Those angels burden and unbalance us. / Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

2.) And so, for a long time, / I did not answer, / but slept fitfully / between his hours of rapping.
3.) Muhammad thanked the eagle, /and said, “What I thought was rudeness / was really love. You took away my grief, / and I was grieved! God has shown me everything, / but at that moment I was preoccupied within myself.”

4.) If we forgive our Fathers what is left?

I’d also love to know what poems (or parables) have been helpful or meaningful for you as you work with your own journey of forgiveness, and look out for Forgiving Our Ancestors Part VI coming soon…

 Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Sherman Alexie

The eyes open to a blue telephone

In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

 

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,

Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

 

Who is blessed among us and most deserves

The first call? I choose my father because

 

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.

I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,”

 

I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,

And then I remember that my father

 

Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”

I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

 

How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.

“I made him a cup of instant coffee

 

This morning and left it on the table—

Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

 

And I didn’t realize my mistake

Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs

 

At the angels who wait for us to pause

During the most ordinary of days

 

And sing our praise to forgetfulness

Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

 

Those angels burden and unbalance us.

Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

 

Those angels, forever falling, snare us

And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

 

A Visitor
by Mary Oliver

My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

 

Joy at Sudden Disappointment 

by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

Whatever comes, comes from a need,

a sore distress, a hurting want.

Mary’s pain made the baby Jesus.

Her womb opened its lips

and spoke the Word.

Every part of you has a secret language.

Your hands and your feet say what you’ve done.

And every need brings in what’s needed.

Pain bears its cure like a child.

Having nothing produces provisions.

Ask a difficult question,

and the marvelous answer appears.

Build a ship, and there’ll be water

to float it. The tender-throated

infant cries and milk drips

from the mother’s breast.

Be thirsty for the ultimate water,

and then be ready for what will

come pouring from the spring.

A village woman once was walking by Muhammad.

She thought he was just an ordinary illiterate.

She didn’t believe that he was a prophet.

She was carrying a two-month-old baby.

As she came near Muhammad, the baby turned

and said, “Peace be with you, Messenger of God.”

The mother cried out, surprised and angry,

“What are you saying,

and how can you suddenly talk!”

The child replied, “God taught me first,

and then Gabriel.”

“Who is this Gabriel?

I don’t see anyone.”

“He is above your head,

Mother. Turn around. He has been telling me many things.”

“Do you really see him?”

“Yes.

He is continually delivering me from this degraded state into sublimity.”

Muhammad then asked the child,

“What is your name?”

“Abdul Aziz, the servant of God, but this family

thinks I am concerned with world-energies.

I am as free of that as the truth of your prophecy is.”

 

So the little one spoke, and the mother

took in a fragrance that let her surrender

to that state.

When God gives this knowing,

inanimate stones, plants, animals, everything,

fills with unfolding significance.

The fish and the birds become protectors.

Remember the incident of Muhammad and the eagle.

It happened that as he was listening

to this inspired baby, he heard a voice

calling him to prayer. He asked for water

to perform ablutions. He washed his hands

and feet, and just as he reached for his boot,

 

an eagle snatched it away! The boot turned upside down

as it lifted, and a poisonous snake dropped out.

The eagle circled and brought the boot back,

saying, “My helpless reverence for you

made this necessary. Anyone who acts

this presumptuously for a legalistic reason

should be punished!”

Muhammad thanked the eagle,

and said, “What I thought was rudeness

was really love. You took away my grief,

and I was grieved! God has shown me everything,

but at that moment I was preoccupied within myself.”

The eagle,

“But chosen one, any clarity I have

comes from you!

This spreading radiance

of a True Human Being has great importance.

Look carefully around you and recognize

the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those

who draw you to that.

Learn from this eagle story

that when misfortune comes, you must quickly praise.

Others may be saying, Oh no, but you

will be opening out like a rose losing itself petal by petal.

Someone once asked a great sheikh

what sufism was.

“The feeling of joy when sudden disappointment comes.”

The eagle carries off Muhammad’s boot

and saves him from snakebite.

 

Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come.

Some things that don’t happen

keep disasters from happening.

 

How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?

by Dick Lourie

How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.

Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?

Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?

If we forgive our Fathers what is left?

The Choice to Place My Attention

Since my interest in mindfulness began over 13 years ago, I have come across this quote by 19th century American philosopher, psychologist, physician, and author William James many times over when reading books or watching interviews with prominent mindfulness experts:

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items I notice shape my mind.


This week, while trying to keep up with my renewed commitment to work out at the gym 3-4 mornings per week, I was reminded of this sentiment when watching the cable channel, Fox News.


For the purposes of full disclosure, I must admit, Fox News is not my preferred source for current events. 


However, among the dozens of televisions that fill my gym at 5:30 a.m., for some reason Fox News is on about a third of them. So regardless of where I am working out, it is impossible to not have a full screen in front of me with closed captioning and all.


It started off as a news morning like any other in 2017- stories about presidential tweets, sexual abuse allegations, Republican bills that hang in the balance, and international upset in the Middle East and North Korea.


But this week, in consideration of the wisdom of Mr. William James, rather than just getting worked up into frustration, I decided to begin to watch for themes in the news stories; like threads that seem to weave in and out of each individual news clip.


Of course it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what themes would emerge from a morning of Fox News.  But all the same, I will tell you anyway...Anecdotally, these were the Top 5:


1.) Stories of Police Officers and Veterans Either Being Awarded or Persecuted,
2.) Stories of Attacks on the Christmas Holiday and Christianity in General,
3.) Stories of the Danger of Global Terrorism,
4.) Past Negative Actions of Secretary Hillary Clinton, and
5.) Coverage of President Donald Trump's Tweets on Twitter.


My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items I notice shape my mind.


Noting the repetition of the same themes over and over from one news story to another, I was reminded again how easy it really is to shape a mind, and in turn a community.


Not that this is unique to Fox News.


In the late 90's when I was an undergraduate at Simmons College, I did a mini-study as part of my Senior Thesis Project in the Sociology Department in which I reviewed a year of journalistic reporting on Mexico to find out how the country of Mexico was being represented in the print media.


I picked 3 newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. 


I won't go in to the results (again, I know this isn't rocket science) because they were just as you might suspect; a cliché of Mexican stereotypes. 


But as a young person, having just done study abroad in central Mexico, it was incredibly disappointing to me that the rich history and culture that I had come to know was all but invisible in the popular media outlets.


I had had a similar experience several years earlier when I was a sophomore in high school traveling to Russia.


It was 1992, just one year after the official fall of The Soviet Union when my high school was still trying to figure out what to rename the social studies class that they used to call "The Communist World," and I was fortunate to find myself living in a teeny tiny apartment with a small family in urban Moscow.


Though it was very brief, a visit really, my time and personal experiences in Russia were enough to break through (and break up) the narratives and perspectives that had long been shaped in my young American mind.


Experiences like having the entire Russian host-family sit quietly in their small living room and pray for me the morning I was to fly home so that God would protect me in my travels. 


Or the night I sat down to dinner with the family only to realize that my plate was the one and only with a piece of meat on it.


Or the story my host-sister told me about the money that was being raised by all of the neighbors in the apartment building in order to help a family get a heart transplant for their daughter.


I still hold these pivotal experiences close to my heart today, and I intentionally set them against the backdrop of the one and only news story that is told these days about Russia: Vladimir Putin.


[Such an incomplete narrative.  Such a narrow scope of attention.]


Which reminds me, there is another famous quote that invokes this principal of attention, but it is in a much more hopeful sense.


It is a quote by the 20th century pioneering American author and environmentalist (before that was even a word) Rachel Carson.

It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.


We can focus our attention...


Or in other words, where we place our attention matters.


Here's the good news though: we can choose where we place our attention because modern neuroscientists like Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin assure us, through the magic of neuroplasticity, we can train our attention.


Even William James knew it all those years ago when he wrote in his book The Principles of Psychology:


Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought, localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter brained state which in French is called distraction, and zerstreutheit in German.


Withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.


Making the choice, based on our own values, wisdom, intellect, and intuition, to turn the mind toward one object while simultaneously releasing another is a powerful, and I would argue moral, decision.


Or as 20th century English-American Pulitzer Prize winning poet W.H. Auden wrote:

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.


I will try to remember these important sentiments the next time I sit down on my blue cushion to meditate. 


Because according to another Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Mary Oliver:

Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.


Therefore, each time I notice my attention has wandered away from my breath during mindfulness meditation, I have the incredible opportunity to make the courageous and purposeful decision to place my attention in a way that will bring greater well-being to myself and possibly (hopefully) to others as well.


May it be so.