Measured by the number of times I have seen and referred to it, Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. I can’t help thinking about it on February 2nd. (Spoilers ahead).
Bill Murray plays Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors. He and his producer, played by Andie McDowell, and his cameraman, played by Chris Elliott, check into an inn in Punxsutawney, PA, on February 1 because the following day they have to report the annual ceremony in which a groundhog (also named Phil) will see his shadow at sunrise and predict six more weeks of winter — not a stretch because February 2nd is smack-dab between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
Phil gives a lackluster description of the meaningless event and is eager to return to Pittsburgh. However, a blizzard forces him and his crew to stay an extra night. The following day, he is awakened by Sonny and Cher singing, “I’ve got you, Babe!” — the same song that woke him up the day before, and the announcer says that it is February 2nd. Phil lives Groundhog Day over and over again, and then again, and again.
I’m reminded of the movie, not just because today is February 2nd, but because, like Phil, I keep repeating something over and over again.
I am trying to write a book about the Beatitudes of Jesus — nine sayings that each begin with the word “Blessed.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
These first three, especially, make no sense. What is blessed about poverty, spiritual or otherwise?
Mourning isn’t exactly “happy” (another possible translation of the word “Blessed.”)
And who wants to be meek?
So, I sit down every morning and write a few hundred words. The next day, I write a few hundred more without making any discernible progress toward writing a book.
I’m taking today off to think about Bill Murray’s Phil and what happens to him in the movie.
When the movie begins, Phil is an unlikable, arrogant bastard. He dislikes and looks down on his producer, cameraman, and all the people in Punxsutawney.
What makes repeating Groundhog Day hell for him is that he is stuck in this hick town with these dumb people, repeatedly reporting on a meaningless event.
However, over time, Phil begins to see how spiritually impoverished his life is. He has no friends. He loves no one. No one loves him. He isn’t doing anything that matters to him. This depresses him. Slowly, he starts to make some changes in his daily routine. For example, he takes a piano lesson every afternoon from a teacher who thinks he is her new student each time he comes to her door. The daily routine doesn’t change, but Phil learns to play the piano.
By the end, Phil begins to appreciate Larry, the cameraman and falls in love with his producer. He starts living a meaningful life, not by spending hours meditating or studying any religion’s scriptures, but by simply facing the fact that his life isn’t worth living and meekly (the word in the Greek New Testament means “teachable”) learning how to live a better life step-by-step.
The working title for my book about the Beatitudes is A Life Worth Living Forever.
I think that is what the gospels mean by the phrase “eternal life.”
Jesus transitions from the Beatitudes to the rest of the Sermon on the Mount by declaring, “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” He says keeping the light under a bushel basket or for salt to lose its flavor isn’t right.
In the movie, Phil eventually gets out of his own way. He creates a community of friends that resembles the Kingdom of Heaven on a small scale. He accepts and makes amends for how he has treated his co-workers and television audience. He eventually becomes the richest man in town, measured by how much he is loved. His light shines.
I can’t seem to explain the Beatitudes, but I can point to Bill Murray’s Phil and say, “That’s what they look like.”
Like Phil, we all have a light inside of us, and Life will teach us how to let it shine if we will let it.
And thank you, friends, for reading this. I’m trying to learn to write like Phil learned to play the piano.
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.
“You know how people say ‘passed away’ when they mean ‘died’?” our friend, Jim, said recently. “Well, there’s another ‘D’ word, ‘Diminishment,’ and the euphemism for that is ‘Aging’.”
Both Jim and I know what he is talking about. I used to have to walk right along to keep up with him. Now he pushes a rollator.
I started wearing hearing aids when I was 35. Almost 30 years later, my hearing got so bad that I underwent surgery for cochlear implants. I also have gone from running 5K’s three times a week, to barely being able to walk a mile. I struggle with chronic fatigue and brain fog due to Long COVID.
On top of that, I joke that my job was a post-graduate course in aging. During my career as a pastor from 1971 to 2016, the average life expectancy in the U.S. rose from 71 to 78.5. What that meant was that on Mother’s Day in the 70’s, I would see kids, parents, and grandparents sitting together. In the 2010’s, I would see kids, parents, grandparents, and great-grandmother all in the same pew. Since great-grandmother was probably the only person who still attended on a regular basis, I spent a lot of my time with people in their 80’s and 90’s.
I learned that “diminishment” means two things:
– Not being able to do what we used to do.
– Not being able to be who we used to be.
Sometimes, just turning a page on the calendar will change who we are. A colleague said that his father complained, “Yesterday, I was the boss of the biggest construction project in the state. Today, I was issued a card that lets me go bowling for half-price.”
That’s why Supreme Court Justices and Senators and our President still hang on to their jobs into their 80’s. I can’t say that I blame them. It’s taken me six years to quit dreaming every Saturday night about preparing (or not preparing) to lead worship on Sunday.
The other form of diminishment is when physical and mental limitations keep us from doing what we used to do.
In those post-graduate studies I mentioned earlier I saw people handling diminishment with three other “D’s”: Denial, Despair, and Discernment.
I work as a volunteer with people who have hearing loss. The first barrier to overcome is denial. People wait an average of seven years between the time they notice they aren’t hearing as well as they used to and when they start looking into getting a hearing aid.
What are they doing in those seven years?
– Driving family crazy when they turn up the TV too loud.
– Losing their own ability to speak clearly – as they unconsciously mimic the way they are hearing words pronounced.
– Mishearing what was said and being embarrassed so that they learn to pretend to hear when they don’t or they withdraw from conversations entirely. (The last one is why hearing loss is highly correlated with cognitive decline).
So, why do we live in denial?
To save ourselves from the despair we will feel if we face the truth. Jesus may have said, “The Truth will set you free,” but we don’t really believe it. And, yes, I’ve talked to way too many people who faced the truth of their diminishment and despaired. On some days, I have been one of them.
However, I have seen others take a different road and I am trying follow it myself. It is the Way of Discernment.
Most of us are familiar with this famous proyer:
Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can change. The serenity to accept the accept the things I can’t change. And the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The trick is finding the wisdom to know the difference. I think James Baldwin shows us the way:
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Yes, I said above that facing diminishment can lead us into despair, but that is because we jump too soon to the conclusion that our life is essentially over. “Facing” really means looking at the problem and asking, “Is there anything I can do about this?”
Take hearing loss as an example. We are fortunate to live in an era in which technology can help us overcome a lot of the limitations imposed by hearing loss. However, sticking a hearing aid in your ear is not the same as putting on eyeglasses. We are required to work at learning to use the aid correctly and to be proactive about asking people to speak more clearly. (And to sometimes explain why, as the writer, Katherine Bouton says, Shouting Won’t Help)
But, not everything can be overcome. I am still trying to discern if there are answers to Long COVID. I’m convinced that I can’t take a pill that will cure me. I am discovering that fasting has made a difference, as well as patient, disciplined forms of exertion. But, I’m still not running any races.
But, I also am discovering something deeper. The psychoanalyst, Ernest Becker, wrote in his book, The Denial of Death , that aging requires “terror management.” For Becker, I think (I don’t pretend that I’ve read his book carefully enough to understand it fully), the trouble with being human is that we can anticipate death and knowing we will die threatens us with meaninglessness.
In contrast, the Christian tradition describes a scene shortly after Jesus has died his terrible death and then reappeared to his disciples. In this scene, Jesus says to his disciple, Peter,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” — John 21:18
Christians read that as a prediction of Peter’s eventual death by crucifixion, and Jesus is reassuring Peter that even that will have a purpose in his life. But, those words also describe what will happen to a lot of us, if we live long enough.
As things fall away in my life; as people I love more than life itself die; as I look at a picture taken 50 years ago and barely recognize the young man I was then; as my vibrant wife, three months younger than me by the calendar and fifteen years younger by any other measure, goes off to the theater while I go to bed, I still sense that there is something that I call “me” that I am just discovering.
William Stafford has expressed how I feel as well as anyone can:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
The Way It Is, by William Stafford.
I think Jesus was saying to Peter that even at the end, when he is helpless, he will still be following the thread of his life.
Whatever happens, beloved, your life isn’t over until it is over (and maybe not then). Hang on to your thread.
Many years ago, I committed the 23rd Psalm to memory. I repeat it to myself almost every day. Like any work of great art, its meaning deepens the more I look at it.
Recently, Life with a capital “L” has taught me the meaning of the first word in the Psalm.
Most of the old farmers in the rural neighborhood where I lived did not go to church like my family did. They did not talk about God like my family did. But, sometimes they would, with a kind of hush in their voices, say something about “the Man Upstairs.”
Back then, I thought that it was too bad people didn’t know God like I did.
In my old age, I am less comfortable slinging the word “God” around. It should be said, if it is said at all, with a hush in the voice. Even a circumlocution like “the Man Upstairs,” should be said like those old farmers said it — like you don’t quite know what you are dealing with when you refer to You-know-Who.
In Hebrew,The 23rd Psalm begins with a hush. It begins with YHWH — the name of God that Orthodox Jews never pronounce. Indeed, they will write the English translation, “G_d,” as way to create a hush on paper.
Another way to do that is use the word we translate as “Lord.” In Hebrew, “Lord” is “Adonai,” which is what pious Jews say when they read the letters YHWH aloud. If you take the vowels of Adonai and put them with the consonants, YHWH, and make the “Y” a “J” and the “W” a “V”, you get “Jehovah.” Not the word “YHWH” but a word that refers to YHWH because YHWH is too holy to say.
In a previous post, I wrote disparagingly about “spiritual speakeasies” — people who know all about heaven and the afterlife. But, as one of the pastors of my youth used to say, “When you point your finger at someone else, three are pointing back at you.”
No one talks about G_d and makes more pronouncements about G_d than a preacher. I cringe to remember all the things I used to “know” about G_d that I felt free to yammer about in front of a congregation.
This sad summer taught me to be a lot less certain about those pronouncements I made. Those old farmers knew more about G_d than I did because they knew that they knew a whole lot less than I thought I did.
My Dad sold our farm the year I graduated from high school and went off to college. I did a lot of farm work before that: milking cows, feeding chickens, tossing bales of hay on to a wagon, cleaning calf pens, tossing frozen chopped corn out of a silo at 5:30 AM on a January morning. But, that’s only half the job. The other half was worry. I heard my Dad, my grandfather, my uncle, older cousins, all talking about it. Spring came too soon this year, or too late. There was too much rain in May and June, or not enough. Something was eating the corn. That hailstorm flattened the oats. The price of milk is falling.
They weren’t superstitious. Some of them had ideas about phases of the moon that were good for plowing – stuff like that. We are learning that some of that folk wisdom is not completely crazy. Most of them were like my Dad. They read Successful Farming magazine. They talked to the county extension agent about how to rotate their crops. They weren’t stupid, by any means.
Like all of us, those guys were hard-wired to see trouble coming before it arrived. That’s how they and our ancestors survived the randomness of life’s threats. Your tractor could roll over or your barn could catch fire — death or bankruptcy could arrive any day. They certainly didn’t control the wind and the rain.
When these guys talked about “the Man Upstairs” they kept their voices hushed partly because . . . well, you weren’t sure, exactly, what was next.
Obviously, they didn’t think life was all random. They sowed oats and corn in the spring because the summer sun and rains would produce a harvest in the fall. How big a harvest depended partly on them and a lot on . . . You-Know-Who. When the harvest came, they knew it was a gift as well as the result of hard work.
The 23rd Psalm is attributed to King David, who famously started out as a shepherd boy. He knew what those old farmers knew about the mystery represented by those letters, YHWH.
In its first sentence, the Psalm makes an assertion about this mystery. It asserts that those four letters point to a mysterious reality that cares about us and cares for us — like a shepherd.
Maybe.
I hope so. But, right now, I’m still standing in front of that first word. I don’t want to limit it, trivialize it, or pretend that I can define it. To do any of those things is to break the second commandment: “You shall not take my name lightly.”
Two of the churches I served hosted 12-Step groups: AA, NA, and OA.
Sometimes, I would run into stranger in the community who would say, “Oh, I go to your church!”
When I looked puzzled, he would say, “I go on Wednesday nights.” The guy might have been wearing a suit and tie, but the lines on his face told me that he had walked some hard roads. And the tone of his voice told me that “going to my church” had saved his life.
I sometimes wondered if anyone who came to church on Sunday mornings would feel that “going to my church” had saved their life? It recalled something I had heard more than once at their meetings:
“Religion is for people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there.”
I sometimes came to work the on Thursday morning after one of their meetings and, although they were good at cleaning up, they sometimes left up a sign or two. These had slogans that sound like cliches, until you need them to save your life.
Let go and let God.
Nothing changes if nothing changes.
One day at a time.
Easy does it.
Sometimes they left a sign hanging on the inside of the front door. It would be the last thing the members saw when they left the meeting.
“Keep coming back.”
The older I get, the more I think that this is THE fundamental spiritual practice: keep coming back.
Like in meditation, for example.
Many people say they can’t meditate. “My mind wanders.”
I meditate almost every day. My mind wanders. I need something for my mind to come back to when it wanders: counting my breaths or a mental image of a candle flame, for example.
The Bible I read suggests many objects to focus on in meditation: new born babies and the stars above (Psalm 8), or anything good, beautiful, and true (Phil. 4:8), to name just a few.
Whatever you choose will be something you can come back to when your mind wanders.
“Wander” is not quite the right word. When my mind “wanders” it gets trapped in addictive thoughts: my worries, my fears, my resentments, my to-do list.
I think I am meditating when I am watching my breath or focusing on a Bible verse. But, I’m not meditating when my mind is captured by one of my addictive thoughts. The first is a “spiritual practice.” The second means I’m not “spiritual” enough.
In fact, the real spiritual practice is when I recognize that my mind has wandered into addiction and I bring myself back to my focus. “Coming back” is the center of the practice.
Coming back is the fundamental practice of a life worth living.
It is no accident that the first word Jesus says in the gospels is “T’shuvah.” It is usually translated as “repent,” a word that is covered with almost as many barnacles as the word “God.” At heart, T’shuvah means “turn around.”
A young man can’t wait for his father to die. So he demands his share of the inheritance and gets as far away from home as he can. He spends all his money. He winds up living in a pigpen. It is there that he, first of all, “comes to himself.” Second, he decides to return to his father’s house.
Just as my mind wanders when I am meditating, so my life wanders away from its true center.
This “true center” is where we can be our truest selves: Home.
We may run as far away from home as we can — and stay there for years. Some of us have never felt at home, anywhere. But, sooner or later, most of us will feel so uncomfortable in the place we are in or the skin we are in, that we will long to find that place that feels like Home. We may remember it — or not. But we will know it when we arrive.
In his story, Jesus doesn’t tell us how the Prodigal got home. I think the road is different for everyone. Finding that road is where Jesus’ advice to “ask, seek, and knock” comes in. You can try this door or that road. Keep looking until you find it.
You could do worse than just turn around. After all, if the road you are on carried you away from Home, why wouldn’t turning around take you back?
Or, you could ask for directions. AA began when one drunk asked another if he knew how to get sober.
Maybe the best road Home is to treat someone else the way you need and want to be treated. (Note that the “Ask, Seek, Knock” passage ends with the Golden Rule.)
You may not be as far away from Home as you think. That is what a lot of people find when they pray or meditate. When we quit running away into our addictive thoughts and actions and just watch the miracle of our next breath, or call out the name of Someone we believe will save us, we often find that our True Self was right there waiting for us all along.
Wandering — even getting lost — is a big part of life. Everybody does it again and again.
I suspect that this is not the first time you have seen this picture. What do you see?
Do you see a beautiful young woman? April Fool! It’s really an old lady.
Do you see an old lady? April Fool! It’s really a beautiful young woman.
What I see depends on the day. I’ve seen an old lady quite often. But today, for the life of me, I can only see the young woman.
Did you know that there is a Bible verse that works like this? It is not just any Bible verse. It is the last and longest of the nine Beatitudes:
“Blessed are you, when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.”
Matthew 5:11-12 KJV
I know, the language is a bit archaic. My 4th grade Sunday School teacher made us commit the Beatitudes to memory. Back in those days, everything was in the King James Version.
I got a glow-in-the-dark cross as a reward for getting them right!
About 10 years ago, I decided to recommit the Beatitudes to memory. I have repeated them to myself almost every day since. For some reason, I still do it in the King James Version.
It’s a little hard to see the joke in something so serious. After all, this verse calls up images of Christians being thrown to the lions in the arena, saints being burned at the stake, Coptic Christians being beheaded by ISIS — to say nothing of Jesus on the cross.
This Beatitude gives American Christians the courage to say “Merry CHRISTMAS” to the check-out lady at Walmart in response to her “Happy Holidays.” It prompts them to repost a Christian meme on Facebook that says, “Most people won’t share this, but remember that Jesus said:
For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.
Luke 9:26 ESV
If the check-out lady rolls her eyes or you lose Facebook “friends” for Jesus’ sake, you can console yourself with the promise that you will have a great reward in heaven.
But, depending on the day, when I repeat these words to myself: “Blessed are you, when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”
Depending on the day, I might lose the comma.
Do you miss the comma?
Jesus spoke these words in Aramaic. Matthew wrote them down in Greek. There are no commas in Greek or Aramaic. You just kind of have to know how to say it.
Yes, Matthew probably understood Jesus the way King James’ translators did when they inserted that comma into their English translation. Men persecute you, for Jesus sake.
If you are a Christian, it’s hard to see it any other way.
But, Christians have had a way of making this verse work like that picture above. Christians have a long history of persecuting people — for Jesus’ sake.
Good Friday is an example.
Our son, Jim, is married to a Rabbi. Jim and their two children are also Jewish. That makes me aware that for centuries, and in some places even today, Good Friday was one of the most dangerous times to be Jewish. Christians would hear the story of Jesus’ arrest, torture and crucifixion. In John’s gospel, especially, the “Jews” are named over and over again as the perpetrators. *
These Christians would often emerge from their churches ready to do to the “Christ-killers” what their ancestors did to Jesus. Beating up Jews, burning their homes, and even killing Jewish children was as much a part of Easter as coloring eggs.
Of course, these Christians persecuted them for Jesus’ sake.
Today, I run into Christians who believe it is their duty revile and persecute and say all manner of evil against Muslims, homosexuals, and transexual people falsely for Jesus sake. As a recent Tweet said, “More U.S. Congressmen have been convicted of sexual assault in a public restroom than transexuals.” But, good Christians insist that you show your birth certificate before you enter the Ladies room.
So, who is the “you” that Jesus is blessing here? The April Fool Beatitude is always about “you,” not me.
It undermines the self-righteousness that underlies all our blaming, shaming, and maiming of people who don’t look like us, believe like us, pray like us, or love like us.
I just realized that I just reviled, persecuted, and said all manner of evil against my fellow Christians falsely (in the sense of overstating my case to make my point). Of course, I did it for Jesus sake.
That’s why I keep repeating the Beatitudes every day. Just when I get to be such a good person that I can persecute bad people. Jesus says, “April Fool!” and blesses those I persecute. He reminds me just how poor in spirit I really am. I have to start again.
* This is a bit of a puzzle, because John, Jesus, all the disciples and followers of Jesus were Jews, too. Also, most of them were also Galileans. That is, they came from “Upstate” or whatever people in your nearest metropolitan area call the nearest rural area. The Galileans were the rubes, the apple-knockers, the rednecks. You could pick them out of a crowd. One of the most intriguing theories is that the Galileans called people from Jerusalem and its surrounding area, Judea, “Jews.” Jews from Ju-dea, get it? They were the slickers, the snooty city people who always thought they were better.
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.
I’ve got another post in my series on “How to Time Travel Safely” in the works, but this happened and I want to get it down and get it out.
Yesterday, Jacquie and I caught the express train into Manhattan to see Tom Hiddleston, AKA Loki, in Betrayal. My birthday present.
It is long enough to the next stop that a busker can perform a set. If you are lucky, the busker will be good.
We were lucky. A tall thin man set up a couple of African drums, like big bongos. I can’t hear a lot of music very well. My Cochlear implants process speech a lot better than pitch and timbre. But they process rhythm perfectly. I love drums. And, this guy was good.
As usual, when we leave Roosevelt station, most of the people in the car weren’t the same color as Jacquie and I are. People from almost every continent on earth were in that car. But we were all smiling, beating time to the music, and in the end, gave the guy a big hand. A lot of us had fished out a buck or two to give him before we got to Queens Plaza.
As he was taking up the collection. A young woman who had been sitting on the floor next to the door got up. She was barefoot. Her face was scarred in what may have been a ritualistic pattern. She was wearing a black plastic garbage bag against the day’s rain. She wore it with holes for her arms and head more fashionably than I can find words to describe. It did not disguise the thinness of her body. I figured she was going to horn in on the musician’s moment to take a collection of her own. It happens on the subway.
But, she came across the floor toward the musician with a five-dollar bill in her hand. She held it out to him. I saw him hesitate, his eyes soft. She clearly needed it more than he did. Although he needed it. He took it. Not out of greed, so much as to let her have the dignity of giving. You could see the complexity of the decision on his face. After he got out at Queens Plaza, I bet he spent the rest of the day and half the night questioning it.
She went back and sat on the floor. The guy across from me was the kind of guy I would hesitate to meet in a dark alley. But he had tears in his eyes. We both kind of shook our heads. What had we just seen?
As the train rolled toward Court Square, I decided I couldn’t stand it. I fished out a five and walked over and gave it to the young woman. I won’t tell you what we paid for the theater tickets, but it was a helluva lot more than five bucks. I handed it to her with my left hand, although my right knew what I was doing. She accepted it and thanked me.
I sat back down. The guy across from me nodded his approval. I fought back tears. But, it was the best I’ve felt in a long time.
As we crossed under the East River to Manhattan, a man came through the doors connecting our car to the one in front of it. There are signs all over the subway telling us that seven people died last year doing that. He had a sign hanging from his neck and was carrying a big plastic cup.
When he got close enough for me to read the sign, it said he was completely deaf. The cup had “Hearing Aid Fund” scrawled on it. OK. A huckster? I didn’t know. I do know hearing aids are expensive. They are seldom covered by insurance. If you can’t hear, you are unemployable, especially in this economy. When I take my processors off, I am completely deaf. I am terrified of going out into the world without them.
I had given the busker a dollar. I had given the young woman five. Against my better judgment, I would have given him something. But all I had left was a twenty.
I saw a couple of kids who had given the busker money, hold out a dollar to the guy. He came over and collected it and bowed to them. He pointed to the words “thank you” on his sign. He turned around to show them a picture of Jesus on his back.
Then I saw the young woman get up and walk on her bare feet toward the guy. She reached out and gave him the five that I had given her. Then she motioned for him to wait a moment. She counted out some change, and gave it to him. He then moved on to the next car.
She got off at Times Square, as we did. As we were going up the stairs, I looked back and saw her glance up at me.
Jacquie said to me, “She is mentally ill.” Stating the obvious.
New York City actually has some pretty good ways to help people like that. The police and the MTA will respond if you call. I didn’t call. She wasn’t my responsibility.
But, I can’t escape hearing words like:
“Give to everyone who asks”
“Give, and it will be given to you. A good portion—packed down, firmly shaken, and overflowing—will fall into your lap. The portion you give will determine the portion you receive in return.”
I keep thinking about a story about a widow who put two pennies in the offering plate. The same guy said her gift was more than the ten-dollar bills thrown in by rich people.
I remember other crazy stuff about God feeding the birds and clothing the flowers. So, God will take care of you, too.
Nobody but crazy people believe that enough to actually live it. To live in our world, you have to take care of yourself. You need to hang on to your money. Never be a sucker.
Yet, I can’t get this poem out of my mind:
When Jesus Came to Birmingham
When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do, ‘
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary.
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