In recent years, after feeling strong and healthy for much of my life, I find myself beset with daily head and neck pains (arthritic) as well as the new and unwelcome thing called vertigo, which I hope will pass. It is very easy for me to worry about these ailments, to dread a future that limits me in various ways, and to feel sorry for myself.
Of course, I know others, both young and old, have greater physical burdens, but it's easy to feel uniquely singled out for suffering and want to cry out, "Why me, O God?" In being angry and irritable, I become emotionally like a child and mentally convinced that no one can understand, or care about, how I feel--not even my dear, devoted wife and my many friends.
As I think about the old saying, "pain is inevitable, suffering optional," I find myself with the daily challenge not to feel isolated with my problems. I think of a line from a Rilke poem, "no feeling is final; just keep going." To be aware of others I know with similar issues and to keep them mentally in mind, in prayer, helps me feel less alone and thus able to keep suffering at bay. I also make an effort to be grateful for the good things I find in each day: the blue skies, the flowering trees, the music I hear, the voices that comfort or amuse or inform me. And I look for creative ways to distract myself from self-pity and loneliness.
I will continue to have pain, but I don't need to suffer, which has to do with feeling alone, abandoned. Even Jesus on the cross cried out, "Father, why have you abandoned me?" This is a universal cry of a heart that feels unloved. The challenge for a person of faith is to be mindful of connectedness. Faith is essentially a matter of the heart, of feelings, which always trump theology and rational thought.
Richard Rohr, in his Daily Meditations, is my chief spiritual guide, reminding me that we are never truly alone but connected to the Great Vine (Christ): we are the branches (John 15:1-5). In his book THINGS HIDDEN, he goes so far as to say, "Your life is not about you; you are about Life!" He means we are not isolated individuals but part of creation, with its dark and light aspects, and we are linked both to the natural world and to the human community. "Someone else is living in and through us. We are part of a much Bigger Mystery." This someone else is the Christ mystery, the presence of God in all of creation, a reality, he says, that's not limited to Christians.
We are never truly alone, except in our minds. Negative thoughts can destroy us, as we see in the rise in depression and suicide. Too many young people feel disconnected from their families, isolated, unloved.
Echoing what Tolstoi says in his great novella, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Rohr says suffering comes from our denial of and resistance to pain, our sense that it is unjust and wrong. We have to see our physical problems as part of the great cycle of life and death and rebirth. We have to see pain as natural, as inevitable, as something that might lead to healing or transformation, the kind Ivan experiences in the final moments of his life. What redeems pain and suffering, we see in that story, is being loved.
I find the sharing with my friends who are undergoing various health challenges a comfort akin to love. In talking about our mutual problems, we are aware of being linked in a loving understanding, and we feel less alone.
To my agnostic/atheistic friends, who approach life through reason and say that life makes no sense, I want to scream, "It's all about feelings!" Faith comes from within the heart, not the head.
Rabbi Harold Kushner has written, "Suffering in itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way we respond to it." The great spiritual challenge of my life is to respond to pain and suffering with courage, with patience, always aware that I am not alone. I imagine myself falling back into the arms of a loving God; in this way, I feel that, even amid pain, I am not choosing to suffer.
Friday, March 1, 2019
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Getting it Right: Catholic Sexuality
I don't expect a major breakthrough from the upcoming Vatican summit on sexual abuse. The issues are too serious and complex, the time too short, the expectations too high.
Clearly, major changes in the priesthood and its culture are needed to prevent the recurring scandals of priests raping women and boys, of fathering children, of hiding their gay lives, of covering up abuses under the convenient cloak of clerical secrecy. It's impossible to read about the private lives of clergy without feeling great sadness for the loneliness many experience.
If married priests were allowed to serve, if men were ordained with an option for the celibate life, if women were ordained as deacons and given more authority in decision making at every level, if more decisions were made by locally elected bishops, if gay people and couples in the church were welcomed openly, if seminaries were longer hothouses of emotionally immature and sexually inexperienced young men, then real change might happen.
But this is asking a whole lot. It assumes an openness to sexuality that often eludes people in many areas of life. It assumes tackling the rigid doctrines defended by the Vatican hierarchy. It assumes a strength and wisdom to reform the church at its core that few people, not even Francis for all his strengths, can muster.
The late Gary Gutting, in a 2013 article on being a Catholic, while noting that Catholicism has been a great source of good and love in the world, writes: "I do not see how the hierarchy's rigid strictures on sex and marriage follow from the ethics of love." As to how traditional doctrine can change, I am reminded of what Richard Rohr often says: Jesus did not teach doctrine but practice; love is not about belief but practice.
A total revolution is needed to reform what Pope Francis has often criticized: the clerical culture with its hypocrisies daily apparent in the media. I pray that, very soon, meaningful changes in keeping with the spirit of Vatican II will finally prevail.
Clearly, major changes in the priesthood and its culture are needed to prevent the recurring scandals of priests raping women and boys, of fathering children, of hiding their gay lives, of covering up abuses under the convenient cloak of clerical secrecy. It's impossible to read about the private lives of clergy without feeling great sadness for the loneliness many experience.
If married priests were allowed to serve, if men were ordained with an option for the celibate life, if women were ordained as deacons and given more authority in decision making at every level, if more decisions were made by locally elected bishops, if gay people and couples in the church were welcomed openly, if seminaries were longer hothouses of emotionally immature and sexually inexperienced young men, then real change might happen.
But this is asking a whole lot. It assumes an openness to sexuality that often eludes people in many areas of life. It assumes tackling the rigid doctrines defended by the Vatican hierarchy. It assumes a strength and wisdom to reform the church at its core that few people, not even Francis for all his strengths, can muster.
The late Gary Gutting, in a 2013 article on being a Catholic, while noting that Catholicism has been a great source of good and love in the world, writes: "I do not see how the hierarchy's rigid strictures on sex and marriage follow from the ethics of love." As to how traditional doctrine can change, I am reminded of what Richard Rohr often says: Jesus did not teach doctrine but practice; love is not about belief but practice.
A total revolution is needed to reform what Pope Francis has often criticized: the clerical culture with its hypocrisies daily apparent in the media. I pray that, very soon, meaningful changes in keeping with the spirit of Vatican II will finally prevail.
Saturday, February 9, 2019
Looking at little things
My reading, mostly online, recently turned up some revealing, often highly amusing examples of the dictum that truth is often found buried in details, that little things reveal a lot.
1. In today's New York Times, the Opinion writer Gail Collins, who is gifted at finding an amusing perspective on the daily news, writes about guns and gun control. At one point, she wonders why people "leave [guns] laying around the house." The use of laying instead of lying here seems to reflect either the fact that the editor of the Times was careless, or, more likely, that the accepted standard for this often confused word has shifted: "to lay" used to mean "to put something down" (it was followed by an object) whereas to lie meant to recline, to rest (oneself). Standards are set mainly by writers and editors of major publications like the Times, not by grammarians.
I often used to say to my doctor when he told me to "lay down" to be examined, that I will "lie down, thank you," and thereby lighten the mood with a distracting bit of English professorism. I've now abandoned noting this distinction; even the most educated people seem to ignore the difference between lie and lay; I often find people laying down on the sofa in books and articles, especially when the tone is conversational, indicating a grammatical change akin to the shift from shall (still used in England) to will or to the rare use of whom, which now sounds very formal. All of this shows, of course, that language is constantly in flux, that there are no fixed rules, only conventional standards.
2. Who knew that George Washington, father of our country, was an early cultivator of hemp (cannabis) who advised farmers in 1794 (long before it was outlawed), "make the most you can of the hemp and sow it everywhere." This comes courtesy of Jeff Kacirk's "Forgotten English," a daily compilation of arcane historical lore. His source is an 1844 Farmer's Encyclopedia, which recommends that the "fine oil" from hemp seeds is effective in expelling vermin from cabbage patches and discouraging caterpillars. I'm glad that cannabis is now legal, more or less, and that its uses are so many and varied.
1. In today's New York Times, the Opinion writer Gail Collins, who is gifted at finding an amusing perspective on the daily news, writes about guns and gun control. At one point, she wonders why people "leave [guns] laying around the house." The use of laying instead of lying here seems to reflect either the fact that the editor of the Times was careless, or, more likely, that the accepted standard for this often confused word has shifted: "to lay" used to mean "to put something down" (it was followed by an object) whereas to lie meant to recline, to rest (oneself). Standards are set mainly by writers and editors of major publications like the Times, not by grammarians.
I often used to say to my doctor when he told me to "lay down" to be examined, that I will "lie down, thank you," and thereby lighten the mood with a distracting bit of English professorism. I've now abandoned noting this distinction; even the most educated people seem to ignore the difference between lie and lay; I often find people laying down on the sofa in books and articles, especially when the tone is conversational, indicating a grammatical change akin to the shift from shall (still used in England) to will or to the rare use of whom, which now sounds very formal. All of this shows, of course, that language is constantly in flux, that there are no fixed rules, only conventional standards.
2. Who knew that George Washington, father of our country, was an early cultivator of hemp (cannabis) who advised farmers in 1794 (long before it was outlawed), "make the most you can of the hemp and sow it everywhere." This comes courtesy of Jeff Kacirk's "Forgotten English," a daily compilation of arcane historical lore. His source is an 1844 Farmer's Encyclopedia, which recommends that the "fine oil" from hemp seeds is effective in expelling vermin from cabbage patches and discouraging caterpillars. I'm glad that cannabis is now legal, more or less, and that its uses are so many and varied.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Not the Best of the Best, but....
At the end of a calendar year, many writers make their predictable lists of the top ten whatever that impressed them in the past twelve months. What follows is not such a list, not the best of the best; it is instead a sampling of a few articles that struck me as important and worth remembering amid all the stuff I've read during the year.
I read a lot--articles on everything from Trump's lies to the Catholic Church's failings along with fiction and film reviews--and by recording the following pieces I save them from being lost to myself, and maybe to you. Isn't writing chiefly an act of remembering?
1. This brings me, first, to an article by Lizette Borreli on the Medical Daily website. The topic involves handwriting and memory, specifically the use of notetaking by students vs. the common practice of laptop notetaking. I have commented before on the sad neglect in our schools of cursive writing in favor of printing and computers.
I was pleased to learn from this source and several others that typing is less advantageous for learning and retention. W. R. Klemm wrote in Psychology Today that cursive writing produces activity in various areas of the brain because writers have to pay attention to what and how they are recording. The fact that writing cursively takes longer is itself beneficial to learning; it involves thinking and summarizing skills that keyboard work does not. Typing can be done without understanding, these psychologists report. I am fascinated by memory and cognition as related to the writing process and maybe one day I'll understand this mysterious connection better.
2. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece in June, Frank Bruni weighed in on an issue in higher education: the abolition of major fields of study (English, philosophy, etc.) in favor of vocational subjects. This raises many familiar questions about the purpose of a college question, which he is able to avoid by stating simply that majoring in something--focusing in depth on one subject--is a valuable corrective to the short attention spans, distractions, and overall speed of the smartphone era. "Perhaps now, more than ever," he says, "young people need to be shown the rewards of sustained attention and taught how to hold a thought." Amen to that, I say.
3. More recently, Maria Popova in her Brainpickings newsletter, commented on a recent book by Jason Farman on waiting, a topic I had never considered. The book is Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting, a reflection on the positive aspects of waiting.
Popova quotes Farman as contending that waiting isn't an in-between time, a hurdle that keeps us from intimacy. "Instead, waiting is essential to how we connect as humans through the messages we send." He sees it as essential to learning and being: "In waiting, we become who we are" because the hope that occurs while waiting is essential to the meaning of life.
It's not clear from these excerpts whether Farman discusses patience or mindfulness, but it seems he goes beyond those predictable topics into new areas. I want to know more.
I hope the year about to begin gives us access to more lively ideas and above all inner peace amid the noise around us.
I read a lot--articles on everything from Trump's lies to the Catholic Church's failings along with fiction and film reviews--and by recording the following pieces I save them from being lost to myself, and maybe to you. Isn't writing chiefly an act of remembering?
1. This brings me, first, to an article by Lizette Borreli on the Medical Daily website. The topic involves handwriting and memory, specifically the use of notetaking by students vs. the common practice of laptop notetaking. I have commented before on the sad neglect in our schools of cursive writing in favor of printing and computers.
I was pleased to learn from this source and several others that typing is less advantageous for learning and retention. W. R. Klemm wrote in Psychology Today that cursive writing produces activity in various areas of the brain because writers have to pay attention to what and how they are recording. The fact that writing cursively takes longer is itself beneficial to learning; it involves thinking and summarizing skills that keyboard work does not. Typing can be done without understanding, these psychologists report. I am fascinated by memory and cognition as related to the writing process and maybe one day I'll understand this mysterious connection better.
2. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece in June, Frank Bruni weighed in on an issue in higher education: the abolition of major fields of study (English, philosophy, etc.) in favor of vocational subjects. This raises many familiar questions about the purpose of a college question, which he is able to avoid by stating simply that majoring in something--focusing in depth on one subject--is a valuable corrective to the short attention spans, distractions, and overall speed of the smartphone era. "Perhaps now, more than ever," he says, "young people need to be shown the rewards of sustained attention and taught how to hold a thought." Amen to that, I say.
3. More recently, Maria Popova in her Brainpickings newsletter, commented on a recent book by Jason Farman on waiting, a topic I had never considered. The book is Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting, a reflection on the positive aspects of waiting.
Popova quotes Farman as contending that waiting isn't an in-between time, a hurdle that keeps us from intimacy. "Instead, waiting is essential to how we connect as humans through the messages we send." He sees it as essential to learning and being: "In waiting, we become who we are" because the hope that occurs while waiting is essential to the meaning of life.
It's not clear from these excerpts whether Farman discusses patience or mindfulness, but it seems he goes beyond those predictable topics into new areas. I want to know more.
I hope the year about to begin gives us access to more lively ideas and above all inner peace amid the noise around us.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Prize-Winning Poem for Halloween
In the spirit of Halloween--which should, ideally, take a light-hearted look at dark and scary things--ide, I'm happy and proud to include here the poem by my wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, which won First Place in the humor category recently at the Florida State Poets Association.
Lynn Schiffhorst
ALL HALLOWS EVENING
When rain is falling in chilly wet sheets
And no one’s around in the town,
I pedal my bike to the churchyard and yell,
“All of you – out of the ground!”
As the bones in the clay start to whistle and hum,
They twitch and they stretch and they spring
From the flat horizontal in which they were laid
To a sitting and strutting and leaping parade.
As dancers they’re stiff, and they trample my toes,
But their smiles have a useful white glow
That light up like lanterns the dark sodden grave
Where they drop me as hopelessly slow.
How they caper and curtsey and blow the man down,
Dashing and flashing around and around,
Till I have to bellow, “Enough! Underground!”
They go, but they go with a sneer and a frown!
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Twin Scandals: the Kavanaugh case
As the summer ended, I was obsessed with and concerned about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, wondering if I would ever live to see significant change and reform in the clerical culture of power and entitlement that enables such abuse.
Then I was rudely interrupted by the hearing on Judge Kavanaugh and again I was reminded of the often unspoken power of the all-male closed society ("What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep," Brett Kavanaugh said three years ago) in which I too, the product of a Jesuit prep school, was educated. And I saw that the two crises have some disturbing parallels.
I was glad to hear Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark state: "We have to smash the structures and culture that make abuse in the church possible." But how? And who will change the political culture in which hatred, corruption, and self-interest impede the common good?
Any real church reform, such as including women in the hierarchy, would so alienate the conservative wing that schism might occur. Maybe that would be a good thing: the Old Catholic Church could go on as an unchanging relic of the Tridentine era, with or without a pope, while the rest of the more progressive, Vatican II church would reform the all-male, celibate culture in which sexual predators lurk. The papacy of Francis is in peril over this issue and may fail.
There are no apparent answers in either the current church or government scandal. Both require patience, cooperation and respect for one another, especially women. Twenty-seven years after the Anita Hill controversy, not much has changed in Washington, it seems: women are still viewed as objects of pleasure, and drinking dims men's consciences. Sixteen years after what seemed like the worst revelations of clerical abuse and cover-up in the American church, more bishops are being exposed. Words of contrition are abundant rather than any meaningful action.
In the embarrassing Senate testimony of Kavanaugh on Sept. 27, everything about his wild, raging speech and demeanor had the hallmarks of an angry drinker who is used to covering up his problems and denying anything that might sully his resume. He came across as a man who has always been interested in only one thing: his own career. He is the product of privilege who has not learned much about serving others from his Jesuit education. Like so many men in the church, he has apparently fallen into a pattern of behavior in which lies, secrecy, and sexual misdeeds are part of what is expected in an all-male world.
Is there no escaping hypocrisy? Americans, and Catholics, deserve better.
Then I was rudely interrupted by the hearing on Judge Kavanaugh and again I was reminded of the often unspoken power of the all-male closed society ("What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep," Brett Kavanaugh said three years ago) in which I too, the product of a Jesuit prep school, was educated. And I saw that the two crises have some disturbing parallels.
I was glad to hear Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark state: "We have to smash the structures and culture that make abuse in the church possible." But how? And who will change the political culture in which hatred, corruption, and self-interest impede the common good?
Any real church reform, such as including women in the hierarchy, would so alienate the conservative wing that schism might occur. Maybe that would be a good thing: the Old Catholic Church could go on as an unchanging relic of the Tridentine era, with or without a pope, while the rest of the more progressive, Vatican II church would reform the all-male, celibate culture in which sexual predators lurk. The papacy of Francis is in peril over this issue and may fail.
There are no apparent answers in either the current church or government scandal. Both require patience, cooperation and respect for one another, especially women. Twenty-seven years after the Anita Hill controversy, not much has changed in Washington, it seems: women are still viewed as objects of pleasure, and drinking dims men's consciences. Sixteen years after what seemed like the worst revelations of clerical abuse and cover-up in the American church, more bishops are being exposed. Words of contrition are abundant rather than any meaningful action.
In the embarrassing Senate testimony of Kavanaugh on Sept. 27, everything about his wild, raging speech and demeanor had the hallmarks of an angry drinker who is used to covering up his problems and denying anything that might sully his resume. He came across as a man who has always been interested in only one thing: his own career. He is the product of privilege who has not learned much about serving others from his Jesuit education. Like so many men in the church, he has apparently fallen into a pattern of behavior in which lies, secrecy, and sexual misdeeds are part of what is expected in an all-male world.
Is there no escaping hypocrisy? Americans, and Catholics, deserve better.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Michael Harrington's America
My high school in St. Louis had humble beginnings 200 years ago but has produced many remarkable graduates, other than myself!
The "St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen" was founded in 1818 and soon became St. Louis College, then in 1832, St. Louis University, the first university west of the Mississippi, with the first medical school and law school in the area. I spent eight years at the university in various capacities as well as four years at the affiliated Jesuit preparatory school. What I learned there has been the foundation of my personal and professional life.
I was reminded of the outstanding record of achievement at St. Louis U. High this week in a New Yorker article by David Remnick, "Left Wing of the Possible," a quote from Michael Harrington, class of '44. Harrington, who became a leading socialist, author, professor and public intellectual, wrote "The Other America." Remnick shows how this best-selling study of poverty in America caught the attention of President Kennedy in 1963 and led him to begin what would be completed by his successor: the war on poverty, including Medicare, Medicaid, and expanded social security benefits. As a result of this action by the Democratic leadership, poverty declined from 22% in 1959 to 11% in 1973.
Although Harrington, who moved on from St. Louis to the University of Chicago and the Yale Law School, drifted from his Catholic faith, he remained, like many others, a Catholic in spirit. He was inspired by his Jesuit schooling to be concerned with the common good, with social justice--in marked contrast to the prevailing political climate of recent years, where even most liberal-moderates are indebted to corporations, big money, and self-interest.
Despite his radical allegiances, Harrington was valued by the Kennedys and deserves to be remembered for having had an impact on liberal public policy. I can easily imagine what he might say about today's polarized political arena, which marginalizes the poor and needy, ignores the common good, and seems determined to undo all of the social progress made prior to January, 2017.
I am proud to be a graduate of the same distinguished school that produced Michael Harrington
The "St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen" was founded in 1818 and soon became St. Louis College, then in 1832, St. Louis University, the first university west of the Mississippi, with the first medical school and law school in the area. I spent eight years at the university in various capacities as well as four years at the affiliated Jesuit preparatory school. What I learned there has been the foundation of my personal and professional life.
I was reminded of the outstanding record of achievement at St. Louis U. High this week in a New Yorker article by David Remnick, "Left Wing of the Possible," a quote from Michael Harrington, class of '44. Harrington, who became a leading socialist, author, professor and public intellectual, wrote "The Other America." Remnick shows how this best-selling study of poverty in America caught the attention of President Kennedy in 1963 and led him to begin what would be completed by his successor: the war on poverty, including Medicare, Medicaid, and expanded social security benefits. As a result of this action by the Democratic leadership, poverty declined from 22% in 1959 to 11% in 1973.
Although Harrington, who moved on from St. Louis to the University of Chicago and the Yale Law School, drifted from his Catholic faith, he remained, like many others, a Catholic in spirit. He was inspired by his Jesuit schooling to be concerned with the common good, with social justice--in marked contrast to the prevailing political climate of recent years, where even most liberal-moderates are indebted to corporations, big money, and self-interest.
Despite his radical allegiances, Harrington was valued by the Kennedys and deserves to be remembered for having had an impact on liberal public policy. I can easily imagine what he might say about today's polarized political arena, which marginalizes the poor and needy, ignores the common good, and seems determined to undo all of the social progress made prior to January, 2017.
I am proud to be a graduate of the same distinguished school that produced Michael Harrington
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