Roger Talbott

What I have Learned from My Father Since He Died

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“When is Dad’s birthday?”
 
I’m embarrassed that I just sent a text to my brother and three sisters asking that question.
 
His birthday always fell near Father’s Day. We combined the celebrations. So, the exact date never stuck with me.
 
We celebrated Mom’s birthday in February and Mother’s Day in May. He never complained that we did not do for him what we did for Mom.
 
Why? I wondered.
 
Thinking about that question helped me learn  from my Father since he died.
 
I learned a lot from my father when he was alive, of course. I learned how to hit a nail with a hammer.  I learned to drive a tractor. I learned to work hard.
 
All of those were important. But the things I have learned from him since he died may be more important.
 
How can we learn from people after they die? What can they teach us?
 

  We learn about the art of living by reflecting on our parent’s lives.

 
You can look at your own image reflected in a mirror and ask, “who are you?”
 
 You can also see your parents’ lives reflected in the mirror of your memory and ask, “Who are you?” If you do that, you will learn more about the art of living.
 
Looking at ourselves in a mirror, we may lean in to shave or apply makeup. We may stand back to see if we are dressed properly.
 
What I learned from my father from the way he handled his birthday and Father’s Day comes from leaning in to look at that one detail. When I step back I see it as part of a pattern. It was one example of a man who accepted life as it was. He accepted the responsibility of supporting five children. He accepted the long hours of running a dairy farm. He accepted the fact that a June 18th birthday means it always lands close to Father’s Day.

I learned that being religious can be more important than being “spiritual.”

 
My Dad was religious in all the ways that people now say they are not. He went to church. He read his Bible. He wore his suit and tie to church and made sure his shoes were shined. When I was a kid, he was not tolerant of people who did not do those things.
 
Some would say that’s not very “spiritual.”
 
But he was also religious in the way Rabbi Abraham Heschel used the word. He wrote:
“A man becomes religious when he stops asking, ‘What do I want from Life?’
A man becomes religious when he starts asking, ‘What does Life want from me?'”

Seminary didn’t teach me about that kind of religion. My father taught me by milking the cows every day. I just never realized it until he had been dead for ten years.

 

I learned what to keep and what to throw away.

 
In some ways, our parents deal us the cards that we play in life’s poker game. The trick is to figure out which cards to keep and which to throw away.
 
I see now that my Dad taught me that I could throw some cards away.
 
My grandfather was a smart man and a good leader. He, too, was a dairy farmer. But, he took on leadership roles that meant days away from the farm. He did many good things for his larger community that my Dad was proud of. But my grandfather often left milking the cows to his wife and son.
 
My grandfather passed the leadership card to his son. Dad was active in his church. He served on the Town Board. But, one day the local Republican leaders walked back to where we were working in a field. They asked him to run for Supervisor. No one else would oppose him. The job was his if he wanted it.
 
He turned them down precisely because he did not want to be away from his family that much.
 
Years later, Jacquie said to me, “You are teaching your son to drive like your father taught you.”
 
“Ouch!”
 
I wish I were more like my father in some ways, but both Matt and I were happier when I decided to teach him to drive my way.
I only realize now that my Dad taught me to throw away some of the cards he dealt me.  

We can learn some things only after someone has died.

 
Neighbors paid my Dad to build kitchen cabinets and weld their broken farm implements. When I was growing up, he spent his winters remodeling our old farmhouse. I watched and later helped him with carpentry and electrical wiring.
 
You would think I would have grown up with a lot of skills.
 
When I caught on quickly, my Dad was a great teacher  My head was fast. He taught me how to use Ohm’s law long before I took Algebra.
 
But, my hands were slow. You won’t believe how long it took me to learn to hit a nail with a hammer. That tried his patience. My head and body had no connection.
 
He said, “You can remember anything you read in a book, but you can’t remember to turn a screw left to loosen it.”
 
As an adult, I felt anxious when faced with simple household repairs. I felt my father looking over my shoulder, exasperated by how long it was taking me.
 
But, after he died, I’ve been able to look at how things go together.  I can figure out how to install a ceiling fan or repair a lawnmower. I am able to relax when I ask, “How would my Dad do this?”
 

We learn things that cannot be put into words.

 
I can’t tell you everything I learn when I reflect on his life.
 
I see him in my memory’s mirror . . .
 
. . . getting up before dawn and going to the barn when I know he has the flu.
 
. . . putting my young mother and  two little kids on the back of a tractor and taking us for a ride through the woods just for fun.
 
. . . spending Saturday morning fixing the neighbors’ freezer so they don’t lose everything in it.  A loss they can’t afford. Then waving off their offer to pay.
 
I am at a loss for words when I reflect on the most important things I have learned from my father since he died.
 
The most important things we learn from our parents cannot be put into words.  Although the poet, Robert Hayden, may come close when he says his father taught him about  “love’s austere and lonely offices.”
 

I learned to honor my father and my mother.

 
There are only two of the Ten Commandments that say “Thou shalt” rather than “Thou shalt not.”
 
One is “Keep the Sabbath.”
 
The other is “Honor your mother and your father.”
 
“To honor,” does not mean “admire.”
 
It means much the same as what I mean when I say, “I’ve learned a lot from my father since he died.”
 
By reflecting on our parent’s lives, we see the cards they dealt us through their genes and their examples. We learn which cards we want to keep, and which to throw away.
 
We also see the mystery of our own existence.
That may be the primary thing I am learning from both my parents in this Third Half of Life.
 
When I was young, I needed the kinds of things that they could teach me when they were still alive. How to walk and talk. How to use a knife and fork. How to get up in the morning and when to go to bed at night.
 
Now that I am old and they are gone, I am learning wonder.
 
I remember walking with my Dad from the barn to the house on a cold winter’s night. He pointed at the stars spangled across the dark sky. Millions of them. He talked about how the light we see started hundreds, thousands of years ago. I remember the wonder in his voice.
 
This memory and so many others teaches me reverence for the Mystery behind the existence of the universe, and my own life.

What Makes An Education Worth the Investment?

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“Go to tech school,” say a new crop of Facebook memes.”Fill jobs we need. Make good money!”
 
I agree that a vocational education is right for a lot of people and they deserve our respect.
 
My Dad taught me Ohm’s law years before I studied algebra. He taught electrical code to aspiring electricians. I have a lot of respect for an electrician’s brains.
 
My mother’s brother was a mason. Not the kind who wear funny hats. The kind who build brick walls. That looks simple to someone who never tried it. It’s like Legos, right? Try digging and leveling a foundation. Then lay the bricks in a straight line without a crack between them. Oh! and make sure it lasts fifty years.
 
I respect the amount of money people with a technical education can make. My brother earned a two-year degree in Agricultural Mechanics. He is a modest guy, but I suspect that he has made more money than his four siblings put together. And they all have graduate degrees.
 
I also know that some people are a lot happier working in the trades. The best mechanic who ever touched my car was a guy who had a law degree.
 
So, I see these postings by my friends and I agree with them until I get to the line that says, “Don’t waste your money.” The implication is that going to a four-year college, particularly if you major in liberal arts, is a waste.
 
Maybe they are right. I learned to read the New Testament in Greek. But, the guy who read the blueprints for an addition to my church drove a pickup that cost more than I made in two years. Some would say my education was a waste.
 
I also know a lot of people who have advanced degrees, whose education was a waste. I’m not talking about the guy with a PhD. in Ugaritic who now drives for Uber. I mean the people whose only question was, “Will this be on the test?” They did not learn the two things that we ought to take from any educational experience.
The first thing is learning how to learn.
When I was in school, I wrote a ton of research papers. The topics would put you to sleep if I listed them. The topics were completely irrelevant to anything I did later in life. But those papers taught me three skills:
1. How to ask the right questions.
2. Where to look for answers.
3. When do you know enough to act?
 
These skills are relevant, not just to researching a paper on the ancient city of Antioch. (I told you they were boring) But in changing a light fixture, making a decision, or doing brain surgery.
 
Once, I was helping our son, Matt, put in a new overhead light in his dining room. My father had taught me how to turn off the circuit breaker first. Matt got on the step ladder and removed the screws from the old fixture and let it down. The new fixture only had two wires on it. We expected to see two wires come out of the ceiling.  But there were three dangling down. Why? (Right Question).
 
I knew where to find the answer. While I was detaching the old fixture from the wires, I asked Matt to call his grandfather. My Dad had two questions, “What do you see?” and “When was the house built?” When Matt answered those questions, my Dad knew what we were dealing with. (See note below)
 
And, when we knew what the third wire was, and what to do with it, we could act.
 
That’s the third skill, knowing that you know enough to take action. Without knowing enough, we make stupid mistakes. By trying to know everything, we get lost in the paralysis of analysis. One of my professors told me, “When the books you are reading are quoting the books you have read, you have covered the subject.”
 
Good advice for an academic. But, it also worked when making the decisions that congregations have to make. When stuff was not working, we had to ask, why? (right question). We asked what others were doing. We formulated a tentative plan. We listened to suggestions and arguments pro and con. When we stopped hearing new suggestions and arguments, we were ready to act.
 
My ENT surgeon knew when she had looked at enough X-rays and CaT scans before she inserted a cochlear implant through my skull into my inner ear. I also know that she was prepared in case something unexpected came up, because  . . .
The second thing is learning how much you do not know
It is one thing to search until you know enough to act. It is another thing to think you know it all. There is always more to know. That is the most important thing anyone can ever take away from any kind of education.
 
I met a man who taught an advanced course in Electricity at Rochester Institute of Technology. He said he always asked the students on the first day of the course to answer the question: “What is electricity.”
 
The students talked about the movement of electrons, positive and negative polarities, conduction, induction, etc.
 
After a semester of intense study, he asked the same question.
 
The students shook their heads and said, “We don’t know.”
 
I don’t care if you are working in your field five years after graduation. I don’t care if your salary is bigger than Bill Gate’s. I don’t care if you are President of the United States. If you think you know everything, your education, whatever it was, was a waste.
The most important thing an education can teach you is how much you don’t know. It costs a lot to go to Harvard. It costs even more to go to the School of Hard Knocks. Other colleges and tech schools may be more affordable. The fact that so many are so expensive that only the rich or the supersmart can attend is a problem we must solve. 
But, if you learn humility, your education will be worth everything it cost.
 
Note: My grandson, Benjamin was about three-years-old then. While Matt was on the phone with my father, Benjamin handed me a screwdriver that I had dropped. This raised another question: How many generations of Talbotts does it take to change a lightbulb?

The Edge of the Raft 1: Prayer

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The edge of a raft is fun if you are a kid playing with friends on a summer’s day. It’s scary if your ship just sank and you are being tossed by wind and waves.

Shortly after I finished my last blog post, Life pushed me out on to the edge of the raft. All of my plans for writing fell apart as my energy has gone into clinging to the raft. Perhaps the subject of that post was part of the reason.

Another reason was that my denomination decided that the stuff that divides us is more important than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that unites us.

Of course, we did it “prayerfully.” We all prayed for months before the big meeting. The meeting began with a day of prayer and worship.

That kind of praying reminds me of a story that was often told in the first church I served after graduating from seminary:

In the 1920’s, two of the most powerful laymen in the church disagreed about an important issue. The disagreement grew uglier and uglier. Finally, the pastor and other lay leaders prevailed upon the two men to kneel in prayer at the altar rail and to ask God for guidance.

After a few minutes of prayer, one of the men rose to his feet and announced:

“God has answered our prayers. We are going to do it my way.”

This is in contrast to the story we always tell about Jesus on Thursday of Holy Week. After he celebrated Passover with his disciples, he went out into the garden to pray. He knew what was coming. He asked God to somehow let it pass from him the way the Angel of Death once “passed over” the homes of the Israelites.

However, at the end of this prayer he said,

“Nevertheless, not my will, but Your will be done.”

The older I get the less I know about prayer.

But I do believe this:

  • If I get off my knees with the same conviction I had before I prayed, I did not pray.
  • If I am not more open to some other possibility, I did not pray.
  • If I do not love my adversaries, I did not pray.
  • If I do not understand them better, I did not pray.
  • If I do not find it in my heart to forgive, I did not pray.

I haven’t prayed much in my life because I’ve done most of my praying in church or during what people in my tradition like to call our “quiet time.”

  • These prayers ask God to bless the paths we have already chosen.
  • These prayers ask God to change someone else’s mind and heart.
  • These prayers thank God for the ship we are on.
  • These prayers assume that the ship is headed God’s way.

I am learning that the best place to pray is on the edge of the raft.

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It’s Good to Suck at Things 3: When We Suck at Life

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Have I lived a life worth living?
Did I always do my best with what I had?
Have I made peace with everyone I may have hurt or who has hurt me?
If your answer to all three of these questions is “yes,” don’t waste your time reading further.

This is for people who know that we have sucked at life.

A lot of us review our lives as we live into the Third Half of Life. If we are honest with ourselves, we face the fact that one or more (or all ) of the following may be true.
I sucked at being a son or daughter
I sucked at being a brother or sister
I sucked at being a friend
I sucked at being a spouse
I sucked at being a parent
I sucked at my job
I sucked at saving money
I sucked at being generous
I sucked at being honest
I sucked at taking care of myself
I sucked at being myself
I sucked at ______________

Life forces this review because in the Third Half of Life we suffer the consequences of our choices. As George Burns said as he neared his 100th birthday, “If I had known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of my teeth.”

This is what Eastern religions call “Karma.” It’s what we mean when we say, “What goes around comes around.” Now the Bible’s words come true, “We reap what we sow.” The seeds we planted earlier produce the fruits of regret, loneliness, or ill health. That is bad news.

But, it does not have to be bad news. Remember what I said about sucking at things in my first post in this series?

Try this: substitute the words “was unskillful at” for the word “sucked” in each of the sentences above. Try it on some you wrote for yourself. Does it feel different when you read them?

The New Testament Gospel of Mark says that the Good News begins with a single word from Jesus, “turn.” “Turn” is an exact translation of the Aramaic word that Jesus used. Mark, writing in Greek, used the word “metanoia.” You know that we call a caterpillar becoming a butterfly “metamorphosis.” “Metanoia” is the same radical change in your soul/mind/heart as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

When we say, “I sucked at being a friend,” we probably feel a sense of shame and failure. Life feels like a courtroom and we have been judged guilty. That is bad news. It is such bad news that we may defend ourselves or blame others for what happened.

The words, “I was unskillful at being a friend,” radically change Life into a classroom. Instead of denying our responsibility or blaming others, we can learn from our mistakes. That is good news. We no longer have to defend ourselves, or live in a prison of shame and guilt. Even if it is too late to go back and make it up to an old friend, it is not too late to practice being a better friend now. That is a small sample of what that big word “Turn” (AKA “Repent”) means.

Learning from bad choices does not only make us more skilled. Facing our unskilled choices squarely and honestly can also make us wise. Seeing life as a classroom and not a courtroom does not minimize the seriousness of our errors, nor the difficulty of changing them. There are religions that believe it takes many lifetimes for us to learn to live life well. I am agnostic about that. But that belief does point to how difficult it is to live a life, any life, including yours, well.

OK, this is a curmudgeonly aside. This is why I can’t stand “happy, chirpy Christianity” which “celebrates” rather than worships. The music is unfailingly upbeat. The sermon series promises the perfect marriage in just six weeks. My criticism is not fair, though. It’s the kind of spirituality that works in the first half of life.

I am more interested in the spiritual journey that begins after life kicks the shit out of us, to use my mother-in-law’s favorite phrase. The journey often stops at that point because we stop to judge ourselves as failures, or to lay blame others. When we don’t let go of these things, it’s like being in prison.

The journey begins when we quit seeing Life as a courtroom. When we quit denying, blaming and defending. The journey begins when Life becomes a classroom. When we see how little we know about love and life, we are precisely at the point where the Teacher begins His Sermon on the Mount.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit (without an ego to defend).

Blessed are those who mourn (who feel remorse)

Blessed are the meek (who have become teachable)

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness (want to make their relationships right).”

If you have reached that point, you may be interested in what I have to say in upcoming posts.

It’s Good to Suck at Things 2: When We Suck At What We Were Once Good At

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“We fall down and we get up.

We fall down and we get up.

We fall down . . . and we. . . . get. . . .up!”

You may remember this song, “We fall down,”* sung by Bob Carlisle,  but even if you don’t, the refrain is all you need for background music while reading  this post.

One of the realities of this Third Half of Life is that we fall down; sometimes literally.

I fell not long ago walking across a parking lot after dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. As we got to their car, I did not see that I was stepping off a curb. I went down. I didn’t hurt anything but my dignity, but my cochlear implant processor and my glasses went flying.

I have difficulty with depth perception in low-light conditions. I was a little off-balance because of a bout with vertigo a couple of weeks earlier. Probably the Guinness I drank with dinner did not help. I fell down, but I got up.

So, there you have my organ recital. I can’t see, hear, or walk as well as I used to. I suck at things I used to be good at. This happens to all of us if we live long enough.

When it happens, we have three choices:

Denial

Despair

Defiance

Denial The best way to deny that you have a problem is to blame it on someone else. Have you ever said something like this?

“Everybody just mumbles these days. Even the ones on TV.”

“They keep shrinking the print on everything.”

“Why doesn’t the city fix the sidewalks? They are a menace.”

“All these young doctors ever talk about is losing weight. I want them to give me pills, not a sermon.”

Ironically, we most likely go into denial because we are afraid that reading glasses or hearing aids will make us look like old coots. Yet, when we talk like this we sound like old coots.

Denial can be kind of funny – until it kills us or someone else. Think about Prince Philip’s recent accident. He was lucky he did not hurt anyone.

Despair

Despair is never funny.

Despair is often accompanied by depression — another thing we tend to deny.

Despair is a decision to stay down after we fall down and not get up again. When it becomes clear that what we are eating and drinking is killing us, or at least limiting our ability to tie our shoes, we choose to believe that we cannot change. Instead we put on the slip-on shoes and find pants with an elastic waist. We accept that there is a whole list of things we cannot do anymore. We spend thousands of dollars on medications. More tragically, we become more and more isolated and lonely as we lose our eyesight, our hearing, and our mobility.

Yes, we may have to learn to live with some limitations. However, most conditions can be improved with some help and some effort. Sadly, when we start to suck at things we used to be good at, too many of us just despair. We fall down and don’t get up.

Defiance

Defiance is different from denial in that it begins with admitting that we now suck at what we used to be good at. Defiance means facing what is changing in our bodies.  It is different from despair in that it means learning what our alternatives are. It means doing the hard work of getting up after we have fallen down.

One of my heroes is  a friend who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He not only goes to physical therapy, but does the exercises his PT prescribes.

Another is a physician and social activist who, in his 80’s, began to lose his ability to speak clearly. He goes to a speech therapist and then carefully speaks in a way the rest of us can understand.

Another hero is a woman who decided when she was 60 years old that if she did not lose weight, she wouldn’t make it to 70. She has lost more than 70 pounds and is still learning how to change her eating and exercise habits to get healthier. Since I’m married to her, I am much healthier, too. By the way, she just turned 70, but does not look like it.

That’s what defiance looks like from the outside looking in.

Here’s what it feels like on the inside.

Last Thanksgiving, my 13-year-old granddaughter sang a song for our family gathering. It was an Italian art song she sang to audition for a place in a performing arts high school. In the unbiased opinions of three of her grandparents, she was startlingly good.

The fourth grandparent had no idea. Through my sound processors it sounded like someone singing on a telephone. I know that some people who wear cochlear implants hear music in all of its richness. Most of them are musicians whose brains already know how to hear music. I am not a musician. I despaired that I would ever hear music again. I also denied that I wanted to. My cochlear implants helped me to hear and understand speech remarkably well. I told myself that was good enough. That day, however, I decided that I want to hear my granddaughter sing. I want to hear her brother play the viola that he is starting to learn.

I now have an app for people like me. Several times each week, I play games that reward me for choosing the lowest note from five options. It also gives me points when I determine whether a two-note sequence goes up or down. I was able to do that after “graduating” from a series of exercises that helped me hear the difference between a trumpet and a piano. Yes, my hearing was that bad.  Now I am moving on to listening to 60’s music on Spotify. It helps if the songs are already stored in my brain.

All this takes time, effort, and energy. I am often mentally exhausted afterward.  Nevertheless, I can now hear Petula Clark sing “Downtown” and Glen Campbell sing “Gentle on My Mind” at least as well as I first heard them over my tiny transistor radio. Best of all, I feel like I am getting up after being knocked down.

So, what are your stories? How have you fallen down? What are you doing to get back up again?

 

* The story of the origin of this song is worth reading.

It’s Good to Suck at Things 1: Leaving the Comfort Zone

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My son, Jim, likes to say that it’s good to suck at things because that is the first step toward getting good at things.

I am now using that proverb to overcome the great temptation of the Third Half of Life,

the temptation to never do anything I suck at.

I have a whole host of things that I do not suck at:

  • I can write a simple declarative sentence.
  • I can follow a recipe and cook stuff you would like to eat.
  • I can not only change a light bulb, but even a light fixture.
  • I can keep my computer running most of the time and stop my toilet from running all the time.

It is very easy for me to spend all of my time in my comfort zone.

But last month I passed a Help Wanted sign in a neighborhood store. They were advertising for a stock boy who could speak both English and Spanish. Neither I nor Donald Trump would qualify to stock shelves here in Jackson Heights.

So, I am trying to learn Spanish the way I once learned English. I don’t need a job, but I do want to be able to function in my neighborhood:

  • I started with “por favor” and “gracias”. My parents were right; “please” and “thank you” help you get along with everyone.
  • I practice asking for things in Spanish.
  • I pick up the free Spanish-language newspapers and try to read them.

As a speaker, I feel like I am three years old and as a reader, I feel like I am seven. I suck at Spanish

I also try to comprehend the bewildering universe of Marvel Superheroes. I want to have conversations with my twelve-year-old grandson. I admit, I am still hazy about the difference between the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers. He sometimes shakes his head at my ignorance. I suck at Superheroes.

I know people who are proud that they have not learned any new skills, or picked up any new ideas in the last 20 years. Age makes us wise enough not to jump on every bandwagon.

However, if we never leave our comfort zones, if we never do anything we suck at, we are in danger of becoming the kind of old coots who bore everyone born after 1990.

The good news is that you already know how to do this.

In the 1982 movie Diner, Shrevie tells his new young wife, Beth, to ask him what is on the flip side of his records. In high school, he prided himself on memorizing every one. But, like all of us at his age, he sucked at being a grownup, so he wanted to be the cool 16-year-old he once was. The only way he was going to get good at being an adult was to stop retreating into his comfort zone.

You and I had to do the same thing in our 20’s.

I sometimes wish people would ask me about how to lead an annual church stewardship campaign. I was good at it in 1999. Now, that skill is as irrelevant as knowing what was on the flip side of “Hey, Jude.”

Over the next two weeks I’m going to be posting some more thoughts on getting good at living into this Third Half of Life.

Tell me what you are doing to move out of your comfort zone. What are you doing now that you suck at?

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After Christmas: What to Keep or Throw Away

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What is your favorite Christmas memory?

One of mine is of my two grandfathers reminiscing about their boyhood Christmases. Each of them got an orange in his stocking, as I recall. They were in wonder about how times had changed.

My memory of their memories is how Christmas works. It is memory piled on memory leading back to a memory of a child’s birth in a stable a long time ago.

Christmas kicks up memories. You hang up the tree decorations that your kids made in third grade. You stumble onto your mother’s recipe for gingerbread. The tree in the corner of your living room reminds you of other trees in other rooms. Those memories will tell you important things about who you were and what Christmas used to be.

This Christmas, no doubt, created new memories. As you shove wrapping paper into recycling bags, you may decide to forget some of what happened this Christmas. As you put away the china, you may decide to keep other memories.

What do we save and what do we throw away?

I am now an expert on this question. Last summer we moved from a 5-bedroom house to a small apartment. The five-hundred-mile move meant that it would cost more to ship our stuff than we would pay to replace it. So we got rid of about 90 percent of what we owned. That included Christmas decorations.

I learned to distinguish between things that created nostalgia

and those that create hope.

A psychiatrist once wrote:

“Nostalgia is the enemy of hope

because it makes us believe

that our best days are behind us.”

In many ways the Bible is a book full of memories that were left when all the nostalgia was gone. The memories in the Bible are memories of what God did in the past that give us hope for the future.

The Christmas stuff was not easy to sort. But most of it  only reminded us of Christmases that won’t come again. We threw away a lot of stuff. One exception were some tree ornaments Jacquie made our first year in our first parsonage.  They were Christian symbols called “Chrismons.” We did not keep them to remember the giant tree we splurged on that year. It went in a bay window and it cut the windchill in the living room. We kept them because they give us hope that Christmas, and life, can be improvised in new times and places. They remind us that the best parts of Christmas and of life will not come from a store.

The other thing we kept was a manger scene my Aunt Joyce gave us. Joyce spent forty years as a missionary in Nigeria. A Nigerian artist had carved the figures from large thorns that grow on a tree there. The manger scene takes us back to that earliest of all Christmas memories. That memory gives us hope that, even when the world is ruled by cruelty and mean-spiritedness, even when there is no room for the poor, God will come and be with us in the darkest times — in the midnight hour.

The way Christmas comes each year, and the way it goes, reminds us that nothing will ever be the same again. But, the love that put oranges in my grandfathers’ stockings, the love that sewed homemade decorations for our tree, will come again in new ways and even to new people.

I keep my memory of my long-dead grandfathers sharing their memories. I do not do so because I long for a simpler time. But because that memory gives me hope that sharing my memories  with my grandchildren will give them hope for days long after I am gone. I hope that they will be able to share memories with their grandchildren that will give them hope, as well.

So, think about what you throw away this year and what you keep.

The Sufferings of the Jewish People

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Almost two decades ago, Jacquie and I attended the ceremony in which our son, Jim, converted to Judaism. In fact, we stood on each side of him as he spoke the words that moved him from the Christianity in which he was raised, to the Judaism to which his heart and his God had led him.

Considering the fact that I am a United Methodist minister, some people wonder how his mother and I could do that.

Jacquie puts it better than I can, “I don’t believe God would want me to stop loving my son because he converted to Judaism. Besides, She would not do that, anyway.”

That is not to say that his conversion did not affect us. There  is a moment in the ceremony in which the convert takes on the sufferings of the Jewish people. Jacquie and I gulped at that. I gulped even more on Saturday when news of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh began to come in. By evening, we would know that 11 people were murdered.  The largest single attack on Jewish people in US history.

Before the shootings happened, I had invited Jim’s family for dinner. As we sat together around the table, I felt that Jim’s decision to take on the sufferings of the Jewish people now weighs on our hearts even more, because now I care not just about him, but our beloved daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, and their extended family, including their other grandparents.

Our conversation at  the table revolved, in part, around a service that our daughter-in-law, Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg, had  hastily planned through the afternoon. She had sent out word through email and social media, but by dinner had only received one response from someone who said she planned to attend. Rachel said, that at least with the five of us, there would be a half dozen people there.

In fact, 29 people came.  Since Rachel’s congregation has no building, we met in a Sunday School classroom of Community United Methodist Church.  Rachel held back tears as she read an email from a colleague in Pittsburgh. She then gave us some time to sit and meditate in silence. Then, she and Jim led those who knew the words in singing the evening prayer for the end of the Sabbath.

I sat in the back, watching and praying, too. I prayed for a world where people were not hated because they  were different. I prayed in my own way and my own words to a God who, I believe, also had a son who took on the sufferings of the Jewish people.

Were We The Best Moment of Your Day?

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I don’t go to Starbucks often, I don’t drink coffee every day anymore. But I wanted a cup this morning. As I was leaving Starbucks, I saw a sign that asked, “Were We the Best Moment of Your Day?” It also asked me to post on Instagram if it was.

As I walked back to our apartment I thought about that question. It was not even 8:00 AM yet, and I’m afraid that Starbucks already had some pretty stiff competition for being the best moment in my day.

I woke up this morning as I have done 25,653 times before.  You would think it would get old, but the older I get, the more I appreciate it. In fact, it is starting to be a daily surprise! (Want to know how many days you have been alive? Click here.)

I put on my ears this morning. It is almost impossible to convey to anyone who does not wear a cochlear implant what this means. Imagine that your whole world is a silent movie and then, magically, someone turns on the sound. You hear the rain hitting the windows, the cars going by on the street, your own breathing.

I meditated this morning. This has become a high point partly because it takes me to the low points, the hard stuff, the parts of myself that I buried in deep graves when I was young. As Carl Jung promised, they started coming back at midlife with knife in hand. Now, I take time every morning to uncover them, greet them, ask them how they are doing. Slowly, and somewhat painfully, those parts of myself that I could not stand are becoming my friends.

I invited my son’s family to dinner tonight. Big deal for me. Jacquie is still in India. Can I handle entertaining even the most forgiving people in the world? It was a good moment when I decided to go for it. And an even better one when they accepted.

I saw a 3-year-old  girl in a yellow raincoat splashing in puddles this morning.  Sometimes a puddle is the best toy in the world.

What has been the best moment of your day, so far

 

How Heaven Holds Together

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We now live in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in the Borough of Queens, in New York City.

Our grandson just started Middle School a few blocks from our home. The students at the school speak over 60 different languages in their homes. Their parents come from over 100 different countries.

This, of course, is impossible according to some of our leaders. America cannot hold together if it becomes too diverse. Part of making America great again involves making Americans the same again.

Making all Americans the same has been tried before.

My great-grandfather always said grace in German before dinner. In 1917, when the US entered WWI, he prayed in English. He and his offspring also stopped being “Schmidts” and became Smiths. They were trying to be “American.”

It worked out. It meant that they were not suspected of spying for the Kaiser, and later, for the Nazis. My father’s generation and my own grew up speaking only English, except when someone sneezes. We do not say, “God bless you!” We say, “Gesundheit”. That startles some people, but America does not fallen apart.

Jackson Heights fascinates me because it *does* hold together. It not only holds together, it thrums with energy. There are blocks full of Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Colombians and other Latin Americans . Then there are blocks of Hindus, Punjabis, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Nepalese, and Tibetans. Our closest neighbors are Chinese, Russian, and British.

Whenever I see this panoply of human diversity, I think of John’s vision of heaven in the Book of Revelation:

*After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”*Revelation 7:9-10 New King James Version (NKJV)

Friends and family roll their eyes when I make this comparison.

Jackson Heights is not heaven, they assure me. Not everyone gets along here. Not everyone believes Jesus is the Lamb of God, Much less do they sing His praises all day long.

I know, but this place still works. I chat with people at the supermarket while we are waiting to check out. We make ourselves understood in spite of barriers of language. We laugh at the same things in spite of barriers of culture.

And I am not crazy to think that maybe the answer to diversity is singing together.

Today I read a blog post by a young woman who was riding on the subway one day when a man came on spouting all kinds of bigoted nonsense in a very loud voice. The New Yorkers ignored him expecting him to move on to another car after a few minutes, but he stayed and went on and on. People started telling him to shut up. Some tried to argue with facts, but bigots aren’t part of the reality-based community.

Finally, the young woman told the man that if he did not spouting hate, she would start to sing. The man kept talking, so she started singing, a little shakily at first, “Row, Row, Row your boat . . .”

Others quickly joined her. Soon the whole car was singing, babies were beating time with their little fists. The bigot tried to shout above them, but the voices singing together drown him out. He got off at the next stop.

That incident reveals how all kinds of people can come together. They fulfilled the prophet’s vision.
We don’t have to erase our uniqueness to live together in harmony. A solo voice can be very beautiful. But many different voices singing together create the richer sound we call “harmony.”

When we shout at each other, it is hell.

When our differences come together in song, work, and a common life, it is heaven.