2015.12.13 Guns and Hope—Unlikely Peace Duo?

I had a stunning thought just two days ago: I wonder if we should get a gun? I scared myself. My very next thought was something like: But if someone armed and with intent to kill harm or terrorize into submission broke into my house, how likely would it be that I’d be sitting there with a handgun in my pocket, or next to me on my computer desk, or on my bedside table— ready and loaded? Really! Or maybe my husband should wear a holster like a cowboy? Okay, I was humoring my fear, but honestly being armed seemed a little silly. It was the very thought of it, however, that alarmed me to chills. No, I don’t want a gun in my house. EVER!

In the 1970s, my dad bought a gun. He’d never had one before. After the Truman Capote book, In Cold Blood, came out Dad immediately went out and bought a huge shotgun. The idea that strangers could break into one’s sacred home and brutally murder all its occupants was beyond my father’s capacity to imagine, even though he knew this story to be true. His fear got the better of him. He kept the gun under his bed, at the ready. But who knew if he took instructions to operate it?

  

Dad was a city-bred “Mad man” just retired. I suppose the move to a semi-rural country setting with lots of land and no urban or suburban surroundings, like people and buildings, made him feel naked. I was a young mother of four living close by. But my sister was living with my parents at the time, and she was afraid of the gun. One night she wanted to go into my parents’ bathroom to get a Tylenol, or some such, and was terrified to do so for fear of being shot. My dad’s gun made us more afraid of him than of any stray killers, the likes of Leopold and Loeb. That gun changed the tenor of the house just by its presence.

I nevertheless remember that, as a child and true girl, I had a brief pre-estrogen phase of fascination with guns. My favorite show (yes, on the radio!) was the Lone Ranger. I was in love with all the cowboy heroes, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. I wanted to be one of them, not one of their girlfriends.  I had a horse on a stick I used to mount and gallop around our NYC apartment with my cap gun, shouting Hi Ho Silver away!! I loved the loud bang of my weapon and the smoke and the smell that came from the fired pistol. Honestly, I felt very powerful and fierce.

But a gun? Now? Cowboys aside, and despite the current cultural idolatry of guns and the security they represent to so many people, having a gun would not make me feel safe. I do not believe that having a gun would protect me from anything or anyone; nor do I think it is my civil right to purchase a gun. Having a gun in my home would symbolize everything I despise—yes, even organized military or religious violence. It would signal an abandonment of my spirituality, my trust in Godde, whose divinity, I believe, is implanted within all human flesh as the healing and saving power of Compassion and Hope and Peace. These were Jesus’s “weapons" and they’re good enough for me.

I want our government, specifically our paralyzed Congress, to get its act together, cross the aisles, establish a bipartisan approach again, have clear-headed conversations, and draft some reasonable legislation to regulate guns and who gets to purchase them. I don’t care if the time-bound second amendment is either radically amended or eliminated. 

Sometimes when I hope and pray for peace, odd, ironic ideas slip into my mind—ideas that confuse me, amuse me—and help me practice what I preach.

Heck, I thought, Congress, and religions, have been “shooting” smoking cap guns across aisles for years. And now they argue over the control of real guns with real bullets? But what if guns can force the issues of peace onto the table, make us disarm, verbally and literally? God knows they're loud enough! 

Bang bang! You’re dead?
       OR
Bang, bang! Let’s go! 

2015.12.06 Where Is Compassion?

On one cloudy cold morning I awakened feeling grumpily ungrateful. It would be easy to blame the equally gloomy weather for my mood, of course, but my agitation went beyond the personal.

Thanks to the Internet, my mindset is getting global—such brain strain. Now my heart is, too. Creeping mental global awareness hurts, and spiritual globalization nearly kills the soul. There’s bad news everywhere. And it’s Advent, the lost season, sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Advent warns : BE AWAKE, ALERT, WATCH. Good Godde, I feel like Chicken Little—so in need of heart-sheltering.

When we celebrate again the birth of Christ, will it make a difference? Will that seasonal spirit we call Christmas bring compassion into the world? Can it save?

Where is compassion? It seems almost a perverse virtue in the face of the world’s travail: shaken by apocalyptic terrors, violence, little children mutilated, daily/hourly murder of innocents, institutional abuse, parents capsized with grief, opioid deaths mounting. Good god, there is even a program of cathartic boxing for women —not for sport, but to vent their rage and grief. The tenor and energy of violence spread with the news, as if the strategy of terrorist groups had become our own, posing as mere retaliation of course.

Compassion. Is it dead? Is there such a thing as radical compassion, and had I felt a snatch of that—a compassion seizure, the kind that can grip your gut and wrench it free of sweet sentiments, recited prayers, empathic sighs, rote prayers, the kind that can make you feel a little sick. I suddenly thought: I bet compassion can spread like violence, maybe faster. Can it?

 Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

Yes!  This Greek word, limply translated “moved with pity” in the New Testament. I learned it in a course called Compassion with a capital C, taught by Henri Nouwen. We flocked to it. Okay it hadn’t much of a reading list, and Nouwen was a guru, but in truth all hundred or more of us seminarians were tired of hearing about compassion. We wanted it. We salivated for it. We wanted to be  Compassion. Oh, we knew only God had flesh-rending Compassion— but oh, we wanted it, too!

Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

The guttural sound repeated over and over. Splawch! Ach!  The word is the strongest possible word the New Testament could use to describe what Jesus felt when confronted with the overwhelming needs of his world. “Listen,” Nouwen said the word over and over, jumping up and down, near-hysterical himself. “It’s the same root as the word for womb, your bowels!”

Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

I was getting aroused, my belly tightened. I couldn’t take notes to calm myself. I couldn’t spell it!  Instead I distracted myself to recall the feel of a baby doing what felt like calisthenics in my womb. Was that the kick of divine compassion trying to get out?  But Jesus was a man. Never mind. Nouwen was near-apoplectic, and we all were right there with him, giving birth. He shouted. “You are pregnant with Christ. Can you hear all the loudly begging people? Let your gut be wrenched like Jesus’s.”   (Godde, it’s awful to be asked to be like Jesus, really!)

Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

I wanted this scphlank-word. I also wanted this lecture to be over. It wasn’t soothing. I wanted compassion like this to go away. Others must have felt the same, because after the lecture  we sought relief in gallows humor, one way to cope with a power too great to manage: “Bowels of mercy gently pressing.” “Jesus shit.” 

My own compassion seizure, if that’s what it was, passed—and will recur. Compassion has rage and roar in it. It is not sugar-coated. It is a potent life-force. Compassion created the cosmos—splawch like that. Compassion evokes Magnificats, grand biblical hymns in the mouths of women whose wombs had been instruments of compassion. Compassion leaps alive in every willing—and unwilling—heart.

Beggars in the city are polite and ingratiating. They even bless my meager offerings. Sometimes I stop to chat. Susan’s husband had a work-related accident. They have two young children.  It’s not about drugs and alcohol, like everyone thinks. The family applied for housing, which will be effective this month. In the meantime, Susan sits on the sidewalk with her cup, wrapped in a warm blanket, to beg. Marcus is older and out in the rain with his handwritten cardboard sign. I know what it says without reading it: out of work. I ask, like a mother, if he wants my umbrella. All I have on me is a dollar. I apologize, then silently wonder if these folks should get the little machines that swipe credit cards. Marcus tells me there’s a laundromat down the street where he can dry his jacket. He’s taking care of me! So I give money and get a blessing.

“My son died, and I don’t know why,” sobbed a father. I read it on Nov. 28, 2015 in the Boston Globe. (The son was a bystander shot dead outside a bar in Boston.) His son died. He didn’t know why.  Don’t bury me under politically correct theology, please. A son of God died, and God didn’t know why either.

There’s not enough compassion in the world, or the gospel, to go around for these people—or is there? I’ve come to believe that what I periodically feel is a compassion that is buried in human flesh, planted there in the beginning. We might call it the image of God. Thomas Merton, monk theologian, called it “hidden wholeness.” Everyone has it; in fact, it is what humanity has in common—seldom tapped and never trapped, yet available when we dig deep to our inner core: salvific Compassion.

There is no original sin. There is original compassion.

2015.11.29 What Moms Are For—Sometimes

Mom, how in hell do you do this?

Do what?  (A million anxious possibilities flooded my mind)

This wedding stuff. They don't want anything about God, or any of that stuff.

Well, you can pray without mentioning God. (A loosey goosey Anglican response if I ever heard one!) 
Check in with your Higher Power.

I’m calling you, Mom!  I looked at the profile of the two of us he'd put on my cell phone and laughed.

My son, Rob, had obtained his short-term, priest-for-a-day license to officiate at his wife’s brother’s wedding in California. He was legally all set, and suddenly that didn’t seem enough. I have to admit I grinned. What Mom "does" is not disrespected, though not easily grasped, by her four children, who are all smart enough to tell me that they only like church the way “you and Sim (their stepfather, my second husband and brother priest) do it.” But now Rob was faced with doing something churchy himself.

I listened, decided that, bidden or not, God would be there, gave him a few ideas he didn’t need, and invoked the contemporary credo: you can be spiritual and not religious.

Within a few days he sent me a text with his proposed service.  “Mom, Please review and pray for your son that he doesn’t flub this or fall off the cliff.”

(So now I could envision the romantic cliff-hanger wedding setting and my son on a windy bluff feeling nervous/shaky—a mother's dream!)

I’m proud to share the marriage liturgy he put togeher: the idea to call it a marriage liturgy came from me, adding an official-sounding descriptor.
                                                     * * * * * * *

Mark Twain said: “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover”

A lasting marriage will be one where you Explore, Dream and discover together!  My wife and I believe that a lasting marriage is also about laughter and friendship. Laugh at yourselves and each other often.

Be friends. Nietzsche said: "It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

This is just a short poem I wrote for you about friendship, love and marriage.
                                   
You

You
who is always there
next to me in my
breathing space
gentle like precious and pure diaphanous lace.
    You
who holds me when I’m weakest
who congratulates me when
I’m strongest
You raise me up
and let the world know
I’m in the star you think is brightest
It is you I yearn to laugh with
to sit by the fire with
on those cool San Francisco nights
It is your profile I want to see
through the gap
in the kitchen door
in the twilight of evening
as you prepare supper
    You
It is you who will adventure with
me near and far
running the coast down beach
by beach
spending the day in wet swim suits
forgetting where our shoes are
    This is love.
    This is friendship
You who calls me randomly to
say hi, to say hello
I will forever be there to make you laugh
to make you smile as best I can
to quietly listen
when you vent or cry
to say thank you
    You
My dearest friend
                          
         © June, 2015, Rob Brakeman (robbrakemanpoetry.com)


"Pastor" Rob called after it was over, also sent a photo on iPhone of the happy couple, and himself looking appropriately pious, bowed head—and with a triumphant Rob grin: "I did it!"

I texted back: I love you. He replied: Thanks, Mom.

Is there a better mutual blessing than that to be thankful for?