As a pastor, I knew that the Christmas Eve candle-lighting service was probably the most important religious experience many congregation members would have all year. One proof was a bride who insisted she wanted a candlelighting service at her wedding. I explained to her that it would have a different impact on a July afternoon than on Christmas Eve. She insisted. I could tell by the look on her face, as the candles were barely visible in the sunlight, that I had been right.
But, on one of the longest, darkest nights of the year, lighting those candles does pack an emotional and, yes, spiritual wallop. It still moved me, as tired and frazzled as I usually was by the time the organist began to play “Silent Night” around 11:40 PM.
The symbolism is obvious: a single candle lights another candle and those two candles light two more and the four light four more, and by the time we were singing:
Radiant beams from Thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace
Jesus, Lord at they birth!
the dark sanctuary was bathed in a beautiful warm light. Yes, once again, we see that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)
I got up early this Christmas morning and reread a journal entry from a few years ago in which I recorded the words of St. Symeon the New Theologian (if you can call someone who lived 1,000 years ago “new”), who had another perspective on the lighting of one candle by another:
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive.
It caused me to look at this sad old world differently this Christmas morning, guided by St. Symeon and Fred Rogers, who told parents that when there is news of wars and disasters, they should teach children to “look for the helpers.”
Where are they?
They are the people who, Jesus says, not only do the works that he does but will “do greater things than these.” (John 14:12)
For example, the gospels tell us about the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people that Jesus healed. Every day, millions of people heal millions more in our world because the healers believe in life, which I believe is the same as believing in the One who called himself “Life” (John 14:6).
Jesus is said to have fed “five thousand, not counting women and children.” Yesterday, our pastor said that our church’s hunger program serves almost that many meals weekly, and we are just one of hundreds of programs in New York City. There must be millions around the world, from the small churches that serve a meal once a month to the UN trucks trying to get into Gaza. It is still not enough, but the number grows every year.
Jesus welcomed into his fellowship people that others rejected. I understood early that every church, no matter how small, always has at least one person whom one of my colleagues called a “humdinger” — someone who was difficult to love. Yet, the congregation did, in fact, love that person. If you go to church, you can name that humdinger. And even if you don’t, I am sure that someone in your circle of friends and family is difficult to love, but you include that person anyway. And, if you are like me, there are days when you are the humdinger. And I believe that anyone who welcomes a humdinger welcomes Christ. As Mother Teresa used to say, “Jesus wears distressing disguises.”
I know that our world is torn apart by war. Millions are being forced out of their homelands by hunger, violence, and extreme poverty only to be met by walls built by people who have not yet been forced out of their homes. I know (too well) that cancer still kills people before their time, and new diseases appear without warning. I believe my own eyes, so I see the climate changing in real time. There is so much to be discouraged about.
But, if I look for the helpers, the people who have caught fire from Jesus — or have the same fire that Jesus had whether they call themselves Christians or not, I do not despair. They are not “little Christ,” which is what the word “Christian” means. They burn with the whole flame and fill this world with a soft, warm light if only we would look for it today.
For about twenty years, I could get a congregation to nod their heads in agreement when I said, “We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been shot.”
But now, as Longfellow once wrote about another event, “Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that fateful day and year.” (There are, statisticians tell me, more women alive who remember).
I was in a 10th-grade English class. We were in the middle of reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I remember reading out loud a speech by Marc Antony encountering Caesar’s body after he had been assassinated:
O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.—
[ Act 1:Scene 1)
There was a knock on our classroom door. Our teacher, who would unexpectedly die in a car accident herself in about eighteen months, went out and then returned a couple of minutes later to tell us that the President had been shot.
That moment taught me that even the most important people are mortal and how quickly and unexpectedly life and even history can change — the same thing Shakespeare was trying to say.
Shakespeare also says that the assassination of Caesar had consequences that Brutus and Cassius never intended when they drove their knives into Caesar’s heart.
I grew up in a family and a community that preferred the upright and honest Richard Nixon to the spoiled Democrat (said with distaste) John Kennedy. And many of us believed that Nixon would have been president if Richard Daley had not been able to dig up a lot of Democrats from Chicago’s graveyards. Kennedy won by only five electoral votes and a little over 100,000 popular votes (cp. Joe Biden’s 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes in 2020.)
But, we (following Nixon’s example) accepted the official results when Kennedy was elected and mourned along with the rest of the country when he was killed. And we wished the new President well.
That taught me what it means to be an American.
I don’t know how the world would be different if Kennedy had not been shot that day. Historians I respect doubt that JFK could have gotten the Civil Rights Act through Congress the way LBJ did. Some of them also wonder if he would have escalated our involvement in Vietnam the way LBJ did. Both of those events have shaped much of our history since.
I’d be interested in your answers to at least one of these questions:
Where were you, and what were you doing on November 22, 1963?
Do great people make history, or does history make great people?
What event or experience taught you what it means to be an American?
What event taught you that life can be unpredictable?
Even in the flat gray of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. Not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot over the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, is an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.
Lehane, Dennis. Small Mercies (pp. 1-2). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 2023
As I come up on my 75th birthday, I can identify with Mary Pat, the main character in Dennis Lahane’s new novel, even though varicose veins are one of the few signs of aging that I don’t have. But, that other thing — the feeling that the person I was at all those different ages is still there someplace inside of me — I get that. And, I’ve been thinking about those moments a lot recently.
When you get to be my age, you realize that nothing is permanent. I have a vivid memory of standing at the foot of one of the world’s tallest buildings and thinking about the effort it took to build something that massive. I wondered what could possibly bring down something that big? It was the night before our son, Jim, and his wife, Rachel, would be married in the chapel of Hebrew Union College, a few blocks away. The building was the World Trade Center and almost everyone in my family was staying at the Marriott in the lower floors that night, August 11,2001.
Nothing lasts forever. It’s not just big buildings that come down, but giant corporations (Pontiac, A & P), venerable institutions (your church may be one of them), and social norms (a marijuana store just opened five blocks from where I’m sitting.)
Most of the time, the changes are so gradual that we hardly notice. But then, it hits us. On their 50th anniversary I looked through my parents’ wedding guest register. I had known most of the people who signed, and I realized, with a start, that the majority of them: my grandparents, their brothers and sisters, and close friends, were all gone — as were several members of Mom’s and Dad’s generation. That was twenty-six years ago. Now my parents’ generation is all gone, too.
It feels like my life and the lives of everyone I know and love are like leaves in the Niagara River. We float along together for awhile and pick up speed as we get closer to the falls. That truth can be terrifying.
But, there is another way to look at life. Instead of a river, the times of our lives can look like a layer cake, or like an archaeological site:
Like Mary Pat, I have caught my reflection and seen, not just my balding head, but myself as a 55-year-old senior pastor, a young husband and father, a teen-ager whose pants’ inseams were longer than my waist size, even the pre-schooler blowing dandelions on a summer’s day.
In some meaningful way, the person I was, and the people I knew, and even the things I did all seem to be preserved in those layers of time.
And maybe they are. I was recently introduced to the Buddha’s Five Remembrances:
I am subject to aging. There is no way to avoid aging.
I am subject to ill health. There is no way to avoid illness.
I am going to die. There is no way to avoid death.
Everyone and everything that I love will change, and I will be separated from them.
My only true possessions are my actions, and I cannot escape their consequences.
Yes, four of those remembrances are about change. I can’t hang on to my youth, my health, my life, or my loved ones, but my past experiences and actions are different. They continue to be a part of my life.
I miss our son, Matt, who died last summer. I can’t call him on the phone. He won’t be around to celebrate my 75th birthday. But, in the layers of my life, he is still the tiny infant we brought home from the hospital, the toddler learning to walk, the teenager whose comments made his younger brother laugh, the young man introducing us to the woman he married, the father with two delightful teens of his own.
These memories don’t tempt me to live in the past. They remind me that the past lives in me.
As I look back, my life looks like a layer cake. The more layers, the richer my life is. Every decade, year, day, hour, moment, is a layer. I am learning late that what I decide to do with this day and hour makes a permanent difference.
As one of the wisest survivors of the Holocaust said:
Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.
Victor Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything
In 1996, Bob Dole was running for President against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. It was, like all presidential campaigns, hard fought and, at times, nasty. I mentioned in a sermon that both attended the same church in Washington, D.C. — Foundry United Methodist. I said I thought that was remarkable until I realized that our own congregation included both Frank, whose liberal views were well-known, and Roy, who everyone knew was pretty conservative. That got a big laugh from the congregation, especially from Frank and Roy, who embraced each other and joked about it for years afterward.
This kind of connection across a lot of social, political, and economic barriers was something that made me proud of the church that formed my faith and that I served as a pastor for forty-five years.
But, something has changed. In the past three years, the United Methodist Church, once the largest Protestant denomination in America, has been shrinking like Greenland’s glaciers as congregations break off and, in many cases, join newly-forming Methodist denominations.
The presenting issue is the church’s stance on homosexuality.
As a world-wide denomination, our official rules prohibit ordaining “practicing” homosexuals and marrying same-sex couples. An increasing number of clergy and congregations in the U.S. are critical of, and even defying, these regulations. They argue for an open and affirming acceptance of people in the LGBTQ+ spectrum. This has, of course, led the other side to demand compliance.
Both sides accuse the other of being captured by the culture:
Conservatives see Liberals are replacing scripture with "Woke" ideology.
Liberals say conservatives are ignoring the core command to love God and to love our neighbor by joining in the political Right's scapegoating of LGBTQ+ folks.
Both sides are right, but not for the reasons they think.
The culture we have been captured by is the Culture of the False Binary. It is the culture that believes:
“If I am right. You must be wrong.”
”If I am right about one thing, I must be right about everything.
And, if you are wrong about one thing, you must be wrong about everything.”
This is not a new phenomenon. The world in which Jesus lived was split between Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and other religious-political groups that believed they were right and everyone else was wrong. They sorted the world into “good people” and “bad people,” Jews and Gentiles, clean and unclean.
The dominant culture has almost always encouraged people to split into these kinds of binaries: heretics and believers, solid citizens and welfare cheats, native born and immigrants, white and not-white, traditionalists and progressives, “Men” and “Women.” It is always easier to win an election or get people to fall in line by pitting “us” against “them.”
In contrast, Jesus gathered people from all those groups into his band of followers. Two of them, Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector, would have made Joe Biden and Donald Trump look like best friends.
The church, at its best, is Roy’s and Frank’s church. It counters fearful division by creating a community that brings “us” and “them” together at the communion table and in service to the world. Now, however, “Traditionalists” want to create a “pure” church and “Progressives” want to be free to welcome everyone.
The split has become personal for me as the first church I was appointed to after I graduated from seminary is going through a process to discern whether they want to stay in the denomination or leave it.
Even after almost fifty years, I still know members of that church. A couple of them have asked if I would write about it. I haven’t wanted to. It breaks my heart. And, I have nothing new to say about the issues that divide us than has already been said.
But, I guess I could share the most important lesson that church taught me in those early years of ministry:
I am not always right.
It was a hard lesson to learn. I had, after all, spent seven years in college and seminary learning to become a pastor by studying psychology, Hebrew, Greek, theology and other subjects that I thought would help. Furthermore, the church I served part-time when I was in seminary had grown big enough to support the full-time pastor that followed me. I was hot stuff.
When I arrived, I could see the things that needed to change, and I began to institute them. Some of them worked. But, to my surprise, not everyone agreed with everything I said or did.
At first, I took this personally. But, over time (perhaps longer than it should have taken) I began to understand that none of us is as wise as all of us. My beautiful ideas got mashed up in Administrative Board meetings and produced solutions that weren’t as elegant, but worked in the real world.
This did not mean that I gave up producing ideas and proposals that I really believed in. It did not mean that I had no convictions. It meant that I learned to hold them with the kind of humility that John Wesley exhibited when he prefaced many of the things he said with the words, “Until I am better instructed, I will believe . . .” These are not words we hear when Republicans and Democrats debate each other, but they are words that I think Methodists should use when we make our assertions.
Back then, I had many of the same convictions about human sexuality that the most conservative Methodists hold today. But, in that church and the five that followed, I met people who did not fit my theological cookie cutter. Their experiences, their love for Jesus, the faithfulness of their commitments, and their spiritual maturity convinced me to reread my Bible and change my mind. That is why I am on the “progressive” side in this argument.
However, I have friends on the other side who have parishioners who were chewed up by a permissive and promiscuous culture. These people found healing in churches that gave them structure and guidelines for their lives.
I do not think my friends have to be wrong for me to be right.
I think it would be more helpful for all of us to first of all ask:
How well do I understand my own sexuality?
How well do I understand my partner’s sexuality?
. . . before we make dogmatic pronouncements about the sexuality of people we have never even met.
We would be much more helpful to each other and to the world around us if we approached this particular subject with humility and compassion instead of self-righteousness.
Right now, that kind of respectful dialogue may be beyond the capabilities of a small-town congregation. It is certainly beyond the capabilities of the larger denomination. So, ultimately it will come down to a vote: “Yes?” Or “No?”
That reminds me of the another lesson I learned in that particular church.
When I was there, the congregation made a huge decision that involved a large amount of money and some big changes. One of the “pillars” of the church was particularly opposed to it. I was firmly on the other side. When the vote came, most people voted for the proposal.
Afterward, that man came to me and said, “You know that I was against this. But, I believe that the majority should rule. My wife and I will support the decision and give to it.” And, they did.
In the next four decades, I lost a lot of votes in the churches I served and on the floor of my denomination’s ruling bodies. Sometimes, those loses were pretty tough, but I remembered his words and I moved on.
I suspect that, in the end, that little church will not go the way I want it to go. But, whatever it decides, I will love it and pray for it.
In the late 90’s, I visited our son, Matt, in Poland where he was working on a short-term mission for the World Student Christian Federation. During those ten days, we ate gelato in Warsaw’s Old Town, visited Białowieża National Park where the last of Europe’s elk and bison still play, and went to Auschwitz. When I returned, I had lunch with my friend, Ken. I described what a wrenching experience it was to see Auschwitz — especially to walk into the ovens.
Ken then said that he and his wife had a similar experience visiting Buchenwald. He said as they were leaving, feeling emotionally drained, he heard a man behind him speaking English with an American accent saying, “I thought it would be better than that.”
I often think about this story when I ask myself what kind of traveler I want to be — and don’t want to be. It’s a question I’ve had time to think about as Jacquie and I are stuck in a motel in Abilene, TX on our way to Tucson, AZ.
Modern spiritual writers tend to make a sharp distinction between tourists and pilgrims.
The stereotypical tourist is like the guy who thought a death camp tour should have been “better.” The tourist sees London on Monday, Paris on Tuesday, Rome on Wednesday. He checks Big Ben, the Eiffel tower, and St. Peter’s Basilica off his list — taking a selfie in front of each one. He goes home with T-shirts that say, “Been there. Done that.” But he is unchanged by the journey.
The pilgrim is someone seeking something (like a holy grail) or looking for a place (like Jerusalem) where, in some mysterious way, their love of God will meet the God of love. They may not put the journey in exactly those terms. I know people who have walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. They were not devout Catholics who would thrill at finally arriving at the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela where the Apostle James is said to be buried. But, they were spiritual seekers looking for something beyond themselves. Pilgrims come home changed.
During this three-day ice storm, I have concluded that I am a combination of the shallow tourist and the devoted pilgrim.
Driving a Prius from New York City across the mid-South and Southwest to finally arrive at Tucson, AZ is closer to a whirlwind tour — six states in one day! Tucson is not exactly Jerusalem. Ostensibly, we are going there to spend February in sunshine — like all those folks I used to call “snowbirds.” I don’t think the grail is located in Tucson.
But, as I ponder this, I remember a story Milton Erickson tells in the book, My Voice Will Go With You. Erickson was an unconventional psychotherapist who often used hypnotism in his work. He said that when a patient was “stuck,” he often recommended a kind of pilgrimage. He told them to take the highway to a specific side road. After that, they should turn left and follow a dirt road the end and see if they can’t see something that tells them how to move on. The place he directed them to was an old gravel pit. There was nothing there but a pile of stones and a leaking, rusted water pipe. Yet, he said, clients almost always came back having found an answer that helped them change their lives.
The pilgrim is open to being changed by the unexpected. The tourist goes with an agenda, a checklist of sights to see and wines to taste. If the experience doesn’t meet his expectations, he judges that “it could have been better.”
A tour can sometimes become a pilgrimage in retrospect. As I look back on that trip to Poland, my most important memories are of Matt. One morning he bought a toothbrush and a mailer. We went to a post office. He paid hundreds of zlotys (the price of a loaf of bread) to have the toothbrush mailed to a young man in Romania who had helped him during the months he spent there. Matt had asked his benefactor if there was anything Matt could do for him in return. The friend asked if Matt would send him a toothbrush — unavailable in Romania at the time. Matt was keeping his promise. Since Matt died last summer, that part of my journey to Poland matters far more than having heard the bugler of Krakow end in mid-tune.
T. S. Eliot summarized what it means to be a pilgrim best in the poem he wrote about his own pilgrimage to a tiny village in England called Little Gidding:
“You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity, Or carry report. You are here to kneel . . .’
In Tucson, I may take a selfie in front of a saguaro cactus. I will try to keep from judging whether it is a “good” saguaro cactus. Instead, I hope I’ll feel some awe before a plant tough enough to live a hundred years in the desert. I hope I will come home changed.
My most recent post received some comments that helped me rethink what I wrote. I see now that I fell into the preacher’s besetting sin of alliteration. Trying to help us to not despair about the diminishment that takes place in aging, I urged us to discern what we can change and what we can’t. To do that, we need to resist denial.
That last word, denial, is not helpful. I wish I had not used it.
Denial is a guilt word. If you are in denial, you are bad. Even therapists pronounce the word “denial” with disapproval.
I fear that my post added more shame and guilt on to people who are already beating themselves up. We can’t beat ourselves into facing the truth. We can’t beat ourselves into discernment.
I learned this a little over a year ago. I consulted a therapist who has developed an expertise in neuroscience.
My issue was how I could take more responsibility for my health. I always seemed to sleepwalk through doctors’ appointments. I wouldn’t think about them beforehand. I wouldn’t ask questions during the visit. I wouldn’t remember what the doctor said after I left.
Jacquie is understandably annoyed when she remembers things about my health history that I have completely forgotten.
When I explained this problem to the therapist, she asked me how I felt about telling her that.
I said that I was ashamed. I felt like I was being childish.
She shook her head. She said:
“No, there is a breakdown between your lizard brain and your wizard brain.”
“You have two brains,” she said. “A Lizard brain and a Wizard brain.”
The concept of Lizard brain was not new to me. I had majored in Psychology in college. I knew that, at the base of the brain, there is an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala. The amygdala senses changes in our environment and tells us to flee, fight, or freeze. Even lizards have a brain like that.
My therapist explained that the amygdala works 50 times faster than the prefrontal cortex. That’s why you jump when a snake darts across your path before you even register that it is a little green garden snake — not a cobra.
The part that distinguishes between garden snakes and cobras is the prefrontal cortex in green below.
Only humans have a highly-developed prefrontal cortex. It is where we concoct the magic that writes symphonies, builds skyscrapers, and sends people to the moon. The prefrontal cortex is the “wizard brain.” The rest of the brain may store our past memories of encounters with snakes or pictures of snakes. The prefrontal cortex sorts all those snakes into “poisonous” and or “harmless” categories and can decide what to do on the basis of that taxonomy.
The amygdala also stores memories — especially those associated with pain. These memories may go back to birth. We may not be able to access them the way we remember learning the multiplication tables. But these memories do not fade with time. The amydala may also store our fundamental fears of falling or of death.
I suspect, for example, that as a child, I came to associate any trip to the doctor meant that I felt miserably sick. It also involved getting a needle jabbed into my little rear end. So, when I see the word “doctor” on my calendar, my amygdala immediately says: “Doctor = Sick + Pain in the . . .”
This happens so fast that I am not consciously aware of it.
The therapist asked me to close my eyes and relax. She called up the image of the doctor’s office and asked me what I felt — not what I should feel. What did the little boy in me feel?
Then she had me open my eyes. She placed an empty chair in front of me and said that my wizard brain was sitting in that chair. She told me to explain to the wizard brain how I feel when I am in the doctor’s office.
I did that, describing how I felt as a child: sick, bewildered, and hurt.
Then the therapist asked me to move to the wizard brain chair. She asked my wizard to respond to this bewildered, hurt, frightened child inside my lizard brain.
In the wizard chair, I told the lizard brain that I understood his fears and I cared and I would take care of him.
I then went back to the lizard brain chair and questioned those nice words. How would the wizard take care of me?
Back in the wizard chair and with the help of the therapist, I formulated a plan.
I would make a list of the questions I wanted to ask the doctor and read them over. I would listen for the Lizard brain’s response.
I also agreed to consult with the lizard brain about his concerns about my health. That part of the brain is more in touch with changes in my body than my wizard brain. My wizard brain is too busy writing blog posts to notice the pain in my left side.
This conversation didn’t take very long, but when I was done, I was no longer ashamed of my “denial” about my health. I had created alliance within me between the lizard and the wizard. I could combine intuition with reason. In this past year, that has helped me deal with doctors and take more personal responsibility for my health.
So don’t feel guilty about being in “denial.” Instead, create a relationship between the “Wizard” and the “Lizard” in your brain. The Lizard responds well to understanding and compassion. It runs away from — or fights — guilt and shame. Let them work together. Your lizard can detect how you are feeling. Your Wizard can respond with wisdom.
Together, you can become more discerning about how to face any problem including the problem of diminishment with age. Your lizard brain notices the changes in your body, mind, and relationships. Your wizard brain can find things that you can change. Working together, these two parts of your brain can give you the courage to change the things you can change and the serenity to accept what you can’t.
The shortest description of marital conflict that I ever heard came from a man who said,
“First, you have to understand that my wife is Nordstrom’s and I am WalMart.”
It’s amazing how much we can tell about people by where they shop, the logo on their shirt, what kind of car they drive, even where they choose to live and what organizations they belong to.
For example, if I tell you that we own a Prius, that I love living in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City (and the world), and that I belong to a church that has a huge ministry to homeless and LGBTQ+ people, you probably can guess how I vote.
My brands say:
I care about the environment.
I believe in diversity.
I am a compassionate human being.
The problem is:
My carbon footprint is still Sasquatch-sized.
My closest friends look like me, talk like me, vote like me.
I care a lot more about MY physical and financial security than I care about YOUR physical and financial security.
My brands are. . . . shall we say . . . “aspirational.”
My brands are a mask I wear on life’s stage to win the applause of the audience.
The Greek theater mask gives us the word “hypocrite.” You already know enough Greek to understand that “hypo” means “below” and “crit” is the root of “critic.” It comes from the Greek word “judge” or “discern”. Thus, hypocrites have not risen to the level required to make discerning judgments. They literally, “know not what they do.”
Jesus called out hypocrisy, because it was what got him killed.
My brands are my way to unconsciously pretend to be someone else, which is a very human thing to do.
The French philosopher, Rene Girard, called this tendency “mimesis.” It is the reason why, if you put two three-year-olds in a room full of toys, the only toy one of them wants to play with is in the other kid’s hands.
Marketers understand that very well.
When JoJo Siwa wears a new hair bow, thousands of “tween” girls want the same hair bow because they identify with JoJo. They, too, are positive, talented, and they stand up to bullies, just like JoJo.
I have zero interest in luxury watches, but I read a whole full-page ad that said that Daniel Craig wore a Rolex while playing James Bond. Since I, too, am ruggedly handsome, resourceful, witty — like Bond — I wondered if I should wear a Rolex.
Our brands give us our identity. They tell us — and others — who we are.
Perhaps this is necessary in the first half of life. We all start out identifying with Mom and Dad — our family is our “brand.” Then we individuate by identifying with peers: jocks, band kids, nerds, losers. Young adults may emulate mentors or personal heroes.
The Tantric religions like Buddhism and Hinduism call our brands “attachments.” The Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, call them “idols.” Both traditions tell me that
I will never find God or my True Self (which is either God or the Image of God), without letting go of my brands.
If only it were as easy as giving my shirt with the polo pony logo to Goodwill.
The truth is that giving up the “brands” that matter most to me, feels like this:
Banks, Thomas; Anatomical Crucifixion (James Legg); https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/O1350
Credit line: (c) (c) Royal Academy of Arts /
Jesus’ words: “Whoever would follow me must take up the cross daily,” mean different things to different people in different circumstances. That is the beauty of them. To me, in this Third Half of Life, it means letting go of my “brands.” My understanding of my “self” has to die so that something new and more real can take its place.
Sounds nice, but it feels like being crucified — slowly and painfully. We can do this intentionally through practices like mindfulness or letting go of our things, or we can just wait for life to nail us.
Anyone who practices mindfulness encounters stuff that contradicts the image that we like to present to the world — our personal “brand.” And that hurts. I know I am really meditating when, like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, I run into things that I don’t want to see:
The wrong turns I took in the past.
The needs of the world that I ignore.
The fact that I will die and all that I have will not matter at all.
It’s not fun. It feels like dying. I only do it because I keep finding something truer and less superficial underneath my “brand.”
Of course, you don’t have to meditate. Life itself will rip the brands off you, sooner or later.
When loved ones die, it can feel like a part of you has died. You lose one of your most important “brands”: “son” or “daughter,” “brother” or “sister,” “husband” or “wife.” Getting used to thinking of ourselves without those “brands” is not the only component of grief, but it is an important one.
One way we do grief work is that we often dream about the deceased in the first few weeks and months. Then, when we wake up, we realize they are really gone. It is one way our souls come to terms with the loss of that person and our “brand” in relation to that person.
When I retired four years ago, I dreamed every Saturday night that I had to preach the next morning. Unlike my dreams of lost loved ones, these were seldom pleasant dreams. They were filled with anxiety. When I awoke, the anxiety continued. Who am I now?
I am happy to say that those dreams are much less frequent and I am beginning to like No-Longer-Reverend Roger.
It takes a long time for an identity to die. Just as it takes a long time for someone to die on a cross.
This pandemic has stripped brands from a lot of people. The “stylish” were reduced to sweat pants and undershirts. “Gourmands” had to eat their home cooking or take-out. That is nothing compared to what was taken from people who lost their homes and incomes, their life-line visits from friends and relatives, and places where they gathered with their community: their bar, their bowling alley, or their house of worship.
Most of all, there were those who lost their health or their loved ones. I’ve written before about how COVID-19 took my “brand” as a strong, vital man (see Daniel Craig, above). Yet, I am also discovering a person underneath who is:
more open to the flow of life.
more accepting of change.
perhaps even a tad more ready for the loss of my most fundamental “brand,” my body.
I wonder what you lost? How hard was it? What did you find underneath your “brand?”
You may have read about how I built myself up so that I could run 3 miles without stopping, and said, “How nice for you. Not everyone gets to have a healthy old age.”
Frankly, I’m not sure I will have one either.
I did the running to recover from a strange illness. In December 2019, I had fever, cough, congestion, fatigue, and brain fog. Sounds a lot like COVID-19. But, I had it a month before the WHO even knew there was an outbreak in Wuhan. I was tested for antibodies six months after I had it. None showed up. Not unusual for COVID patients, but it means I can’t prove that I had it.
In January 2019, I was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder. Life-long smokers get COPD. Now it is showing up in people who had COVID 19. I never smoked.
That is why I began walking and running last spring — to build lung capacity.
But, beginning in late November and continuing right up to today, I have spent most of my waking hours lying in bed with fatigue and brain fog. The brain fog has lifted, or I would not be writing this. But the fatigue continues.
My “push the broom” solution isn’t working either. I’ve done enough exercising to know what being tired feels like. It is not the same as feeling nauseous, having a headache, and wanting to fall asleep after walking around the block.
The Cleveland Clinic calls this “reduced exercise tolerance.”
This, too, is a symptom of “Long Covid,” officially: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC). (I have a theory that Medicine creates the most highbrow names for the stuff it knows the least about.) No one knows how long the disease lasts. Will it get better? Or worse? How will it affect my COPD and a couple of other things that I have wrong with me that require lots of exercise? Will I die of this?
All this uncertainty makes me remember my other grandfather — Grandpa Flint.
When he was in his 50’s, he had a stroke.
In his 60’s, he went blind.
In his 70’s, he spent years battling cancer, and ultimately lost the battle.
This is what I remember:
When he had the stroke, he did the hard work of learning to speak and walk again. He had to quit his job, but he started a business. He stocked a small lake he owned with trout, then charged a dollar for each one that fishermen caught. He was able to continue that business even after he could no longer see to drive or read.
Because he was legally blind he was able to get books and magazines recorded on phonograph records. He used to say that he read more after going blind than he did when he could see. He also bought a juicer. He made carrot juice everyday because he heard it was good for the eyes. When he mentioned it to his ophthalmologist, the doctor said, “Well, I never saw a rabbit wearing glasses.”
One day, he asked a fisherman, a doctor, to look at a mole on the back of his neck. The doctor told him it was cancer. That was the beginning of an almost two-decade up-and-down experience of dealing with cancer in different organs. At the end, it invaded his bones.
He decided against chemotherapy. I thought he was crazy. Looking back, I can see that, in the 70’s, chemotherapy was both agonizing and not very effective. He might have lived a few more weeks or months, but his quality of life would have been worse.
As it was, he was in a lot of pain. There was no such thing as hospice or palliative medicine in those days. Politicians believed they had to limit pain-killers to protect dying people from becoming drug addicts.
I used to visit him in his last months. I was struck by the change in his personality.
All his life, he was a big personality who liked being the center of attention. His stories always sounded better than the actual experiences probably were. His marriage to my grandmother was sometimes tense. He was an extrovert married to an introvert. He was the guy with big ideas married to someone who, my mother said, “could always see the hole in the donut.” They were opposites: just like every other couple I know.
In the end, he bore his pain with grace. He told me that he had never loved or appreciated my grandmother more. His faith in God was his source of strength when his body failed him. In the midst of his pain, he saw goodness all around him.
My cousin, Dawn, who grew up within walking distance of our grandparents knew them far better than I did. She suggests that those good qualities were there all along. They were covered up by the boasting, gregarious personality that he presented to the world.
But, isn’t that true of all of us? Isn’t our basic goodness encased in a shell of bad habits, defensiveness, and need for approval? And doesn’t it usually take suffering in some form to crack that shell?
As my teacher and friend, Laura Atmadarshan Santoro says:
“No one ever said at the end of a good meal surrounded by loving friends, ‘I need to make changes. My life needs to take a new direction!’ It is only when we are hurting that we change.”
I hope I will start feeling better as Spring arrives and the pandemic restrictions finally lift as we all get vaccinated. I want to get back to walking and running and working out again. I’d like to go on to a healthy old age, like my Grandfather Talbott. I like the slogan: “Live long and die short.”
But, this period of repetitive, long-term illness has caused me to look at my Grandfather Flint for guidance, too. I can learn to:
Listen to my body and support my health with nutritious food and as much exercise as my body will bear.
Learn to make plans with the proviso that I might not be able to carry them out.
Love everyone around me.
Write some things that I hope other people will read.
Pray for the world, especially for those who suffer.
Appreciate and enjoy every day as much as I can.
When I compare this time in my life with my Grandfather’s last few months, I would hardly call my experience “suffering.” In fact, my life is so leisurely and stress-free that I fear I will become like one of Jacquie’s great-aunts. My mother-in-law always described her as “someone who enjoyed poor health.”
Nevertheless, I understand better something the Bible says:
We also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance, character, and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
We all know intuitively that the essence of the art of living is knowing when to let go. This is longer than usual, so I’ll begin with a summary:
It’s not wise to let go too soon.
It’s costs a lot when we don’t know when to let go.
If we let go at the right time, we get out of jail and find joy.
The good news is that we have practiced letting go all our lives. You took your first step when you let go of a parent’s fingers. You can’t take a breath without letting go of the one you took before.
We stumble in life when we don’t let go. My college roommate began Freshman year wearing his high school varsity jacket around campus. He was proud of it because his basketball team had won the division championship. But, after a couple of weeks, he realized that upperclassmen were laughing at him. He had to let go of that jacket or look foolish.
On the other hand, it took me almost a year of getting C’s to let go of my high school self-image as “the smart boy” to whom A’s came easy.
Letting go isn’t that hard in the first half of life. Like the toddler taking that first step, we are reaching out for freedom when we:
Let go of the home we may have lived in for decades.
I bet you know people who didn’t let go of those things soon enough. Do you think you will know when to let go?
Pharaoh can teach us about letting go.
Pharaoh? You mean the Egyptian king?
Yep. Pharaoh
.
I ran into Pharaoh a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to lead a Torah study for the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparents Network. How did a retired Methodist preacher find himself doing that? Because I let go. I’ll get to that below.
The Torah portion began at Exodus 3:17. Jews name their weekly Torah portions using the first word or two in the first verse. But the first word in this verse, in Hebrew, is “Pharaoh.” They didn’t want a Torah portion named after the Hitler of the 13th century B.C.E, so they used the second word, b”Shalach. The root, Shalach, means “to let go” — an action.The prefix “b’” turns it into a time. B’Shalach means “letting-go-time.”
So we translate it: “WHEN Pharaoh LET the people GO.”
This Third Half of Life is b’Shalach, “letting-go-time.” Time to let go of:
A job. A blessed relief for some. For others (OK, for me,) it means letting go of our identity.
The house we needed to raise a family.
Habits that our younger bodies could sustain (or survive) but are damaging our aging bodies.
Our role (and status) within our communities or in our family.
Communities in which which we have lived most of our lives.
Beliefs and prejudices that we grew up with that we have never examined.
What can Pharaoh teach us about when and how to let go?
Something will tell us when it is time
Pharaoh had Moses — a voice that kept coming to him to say, “Let my people go.”
You and I will hear a voice. It may be a doctor’s voice, a spouse’s voice, a child’s voice, a friend’s voice, or that voice inside our heads. It will say, “Time to let go.”
For many years, I was part of a committee that interviewed and guided people who felt “called” to become ordained clergy in my denomination. That may sound like religious mumbo-jumbo to you, but bear with me.
Most of these folks were going to have to let go of good jobs in order to go back to school to prepare for a profession that is usually underpaid and overworked and that carries a psychic load that few others in our society have to bear. That is a big jump. The only thing that sustains people through that change and in the practice of pastoral ministry is a deep inner conviction that this is what they are meant to do.
We asked if they were hearing that inner voice?
We got all kinds of answers. Some people had visions rivaling the Prophet Ezekiel. Others heard a still, small voice.
We also asked if anyone on the outside was saying the same thing?
Some people only heard the outside voice — a parent or spouse telling them they should become a minister. Others only heard the inside voice. No one else thought they would make a good pastor. We were most sure of the people who heard both voices.
We were even surer if they had a history of resisting those voices.
If we are smart, we will ignore the voice at first, like Pharaoh did.
Pharaoh didn’t rule Egypt by obeying every crackpot carrying a staff who criticized his policies.
You didn’t get to where you are by stopping every time the going got tough, leaving a relationship at the first argument, or changing your mind every time someone told you that you were wrong.
Most of the pastoral candidates we interviewed confessed that they kept thinking they were mistaken — or God was. They were there because they couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what they were supposed to be doing.
If we are stupid, we will continue to ignore the voice even after it starts to cost us, like Pharaoh did.
Pharaoh, famously, suffered — and Egypt suffered — through nine plagues, including the death of the first-born in every household, before he let the Israelites go. Pharaoh illustrates this truth:
“There is that law of life, so cruel and so just, that says that we must change or else pay more for staying the same.”
Norman Mailer, The Deer Park
One day I stepped on the scales at the doctor’s office and the nurse said cheerfully, “198. First one under 200 today.”
I was there because my acid reflux was so bad I began worrying about getting esophageal cancer. I had been ignoring my body, my doctor, the scales, the mirror, and reality itself. It was costing me too much to stay the same. I was as dumb as Pharaoh.
I weigh 148 this morning because I let go of eating meat, dairy, eggs, salt, oil, and sugar. It wasn’t easy, but I also didn’t do it all at once. In fact, it has taken me twenty years to make these changes. Ninety percent of the credit for that is that I eat every day with someone who has made getting healthy her life’s mission.
Letting-go-time is when we move from jail to joy.
Your first act of letting go — birth — happened because you could not grow anymore in your mother’s womb. It was a good place for you, until it wasn’t. When b’Shalach came, you and your mother both let go and you were free to grow into the mature adult you are now.
We have to leave Pharaoh behind here. He did not see letting go of his slaves as a growth experience, although it could have been.
Every time I have let go of something in my life, I have grown. That’s how I wound up on the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparenting Network. It is both a great honor and a source of much amusement when I think about where I came from.
I grew up as a conservative evangelical Methodist. I still think I’m a conservative evangelical Methodist, although many of my conservative evangelical friends would disagree so much that they want to start a new denomination that will keep out people like me. They think I am “tossed about by every wind of doctrine”.
Instead, I kept running into people of faith that led me to realize:
God is not a Methodist.
God is not a Protestant.
God is not a Christian.
God is not a White heterosexual male.
I didn’t even know that I believed some of those things until I let go of them. But, every time I let go, my heart grew, and my God got bigger.
When our son, Jim, decided to convert to Judaism and marry, Rachel, a Reform Rabbi, it was b’Shalach, letting-go-time, once again. We don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter with our grandchildren, but that’s OK. We get to celebrate Passover and Yom Kippur. Our lives are larger because we have Jewish grandchildren, which makes us Jew-ish grandparents. It was only a few more steps to doing the Torah study that night.
One final story. Four years ago, Jacquie and I started talking about the possibility of moving to New York City to be closer to those grandchildren and . . . to be in New York City. One more adventure. But, that meant letting go of a house that we had spent years (and thousand$) to make our own. It meant letting go of a neighborhood and city we loved. I, newly retired, and still reeling from having let go of a job I loved, was resistant.
Jacquie said, “Today’s joy is tomorrow’s jail.”
What time is it in your life?
In some ways, it is always b’Shalach, letting-go-time. We let go of every breath. We let go of every day when we go to sleep. It may have been a good day, but we have to let go.
Indeed. Life is like the monkey bars on the playground. If you don’t let go and reach out, you just stop and swing there. You have to keep letting go in order to reach the next one.
That’s the secret of life. The day will come to each of us when we will let go of our last breath and reach out for whatever joy lies beyond. That will be easy or difficult depending on how much we have practiced letting go.
There is no good verb for what clergy do in a wedding ceremony.
We don’t “marry” the couple. They marry each other. “Preside” implies that you are in charge of the wedding. I know that some clergy insist upon this role. They lock themselves into a battle of wills with the bride’s mother, the hotel/restaurant events manager, or the bride herself. Worst case scenario, the photographer wants to preside. In 45 years, I can only remember two weddings in which the groom took charge. Not a good sign, either time. On some simple, lovely occasions, I did “preside.” I would count the one couple who asked if they could be married in our living room with Jacquie as their witness as one of those. But presiding at most weddings means you are in charge of the choreography, the placement of the flowers, rolling out the white carpet, training the ushers, making sure the bridesmaids are zipped. That is beyond my competence.
The verb that works best, I think, is “solemnize.”
It’s harder work than you may think to solemnize a wedding. Weddings are, by definition, joyous. They symbolize peace and love and good will. They should be celebrated with good food and drink and music and dancing — and they usually are, after the ceremony. Weddings lead (snicker) to wedding nights and all that implies. It’s tough to be the one who tamps down that hilarity for an hour.
Yet, I always thought it was necessary. It is necessary for the community, represented by family and friends — or the pastor’s wife, to witness the couple making their solemn vows to each other. It is necessary for the couple to feel the enormity of the promises they are making. (Although only the widowed and the more-than-once divorced ever come close to understanding.)
It is necessary to place this very human and natural event into a larger context. The very fact that this couple has come together and chosen each other is a kind of miracle. Their love and faithfulness to each other, especially over the long haul, will be a sign and symbol of the Love that is at the heart of the universe. That demands solemnity. It requires seriousness.
But, it can take a toll on the person who has to do the solemnizing.
Do you remember, when you were a little kid and made a face, your mother would tell you to be careful because your face might get stuck in that position?
She was right.
It has taken almost five years for my face to come unstuck. Like a lot of things in this Third Half of Life, I am reassessing what used to seem so important. I am not knocking ritual and tradition. I am not minimizing the enormity of the wedding vows. I am reassessing how and why it seemed so necessary for me to be so serious so often. Maybe it was necessary. Carl Jung believed that the clergy carry a necessary psychic burden within the community that no one else carries. He often treated clergy for free.
But I wonder if it would have helped if I had trusted Life provide the solemnity? After all, every couple faces days ahead where the vows they make on their wedding day will take on real seriousness. They will need to choose to love each other for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Why not let them have one happy, light-hearted day to love each other and laugh with their friends and bask in their families’ pride?
Days like that are few and short. Why rob them of even one hour?
I have seen clergy, not in my tradition, I’m afraid, who seem to know how to put the joy and the seriousness together. I’m formulating a theory about why that is not common in mainline Protestant churches, but it’s not completely clear, yet.
All I know is that, as a Christian, I’m supposed to look to Jesus as my example. I see him at only one wedding. And for that, he brought the wine.
