You will never be completely prepared for the important tasks:
Living a good life
Mending a frayed or broken relationship
Building a better world for those who will come after you.
Sharing your creativity with others. That means sharing the things that come out of your heart, shape with your mind, and create with your hands and your voice and your presence, like:
A Painting or Photograph
A Song or a Story
A Frittata or a Feast.
A Quilt or a Quatrain
A Custom Car or a Community (a family, a group of friends, a cooperative, a social movement.)
Supporting a friend in trouble, in grief, or in making their own unique contribution to the world.
Dying well.
You can do your best. But nothing will ever be perfect, so:
You will be tempted to do one more thing, first.
You will be tempted to get lost in your need for safety and stability — your need not to look stupid.
Nevertheless, you are here to give the world the gift only you can give.
The stupidest thing is not to attempt any of these because you are afraid to look stupid.
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.
Jacquie and I are grateful for the cards, emails and other messages we have received in the past few weeks that acknowledge our ongoing grief.
One of the hard things about losing someone who is as much a part of you as your arms or legs — or more precisely, your heart — is that the rest of the world quickly goes on with its business. As it should. As it has to. We understand. We have done the same. However, we are comforted by those who remember that something important stopped for us this past summer.
In all honesty, our Christmas, on the surface, won’t be much different this year. Matt, and his family live(d) in Portland, OR, across the continent from us. He would call us on Christmas Day. We will miss that — that voice. (A church secretary once announced he was on the phone by saying, “it’s your son with the great voice.”) But, we won’t have the empty chair at the table like our daughter-in-law and grandchildren will. Just thinking of their table brings tears to our eyes.
I wondered if we would just try to skip Christmas this year.
However, as Advent progressed, it felt more and more like Christmas — not the way the bouncy Bing Crosby tune puts it. But, more like Christina Rossetti puts it:
“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. . . . In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.”
I am late to the Rachel Held Evans fan club, but this morning I came across something she wrote that resonates with me at a deep level:
“I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God’s story. Yet, I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation.
. . . the true miracle of the Incarnation— the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.
Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu, Wholehearted Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2021) p. 5.
I hope that, when Easter comes around next April, some power beyond my own will have rolled away the stone in my heart. But, right now, I agree with Evans. I don’t know if I believe in an empty tomb right now. I do believe in a baby in a manger.
The one thing death does for us is enable us to see our loved ones whole. Whenever I think of Matt, I see him not just as the almost skeletal, cancer-ravaged remnant of himself who looked out at us the last time we Facetimed a few days before he died. I see him as the man who came to celebrate Father’s Day 2021 with me, bringing his own grown son with him. Both his mother and I were proud of what a good father Matt was.
At the same time, I see him as the young man I visited when he was working in Poland after college. I especially remember his ardent efforts, a decade before cell phones, to place a call to a young woman whom he had met in Geneva. I was not surprised when he married her.
I can see him in adolescence and in boyhood and as the baby his Mom and I brought home from the hospital, tiny enough to cradle in one arm, nursing like every baby ever born and sleeping like . . . well, like a baby who can sleep soundly in a bassinet or a feed trough.
I used to wrap the baby Jesus in metaphysical swaddling clothes. This year, for me, he is like every baby, including Matt. Therefore, he is the Incarnation of Life. As Matt was. As you and I and everyone we love are. He came into this world, whether he knew it or not, to live and to love, which means taking on all the risks of skinned knees, viral infections, broken hearts, cancer, and crucifixions. But also to delight in sunrises and sunsets, good food, friendship, skin contact, and new babies.
Matt loved every moment of Life. Incarnation was not wasted on him.
Easter may promise something after death, but, in this bleak midwinter, all I can believe in is Christmas and the life in this world that Christmas celebrates and calls us to live generously, gratefully, . . .fully.
The first poem I ever memorized — before I could read — were the last four lines of Rossetti’s poem. It was a “piece” I said at our church’s Christmas pageant, with my parents and grandparents of blessed memory looking on:
“What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb.
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part.
What can I give him: give him my heart”.
“A Christmas Carol” by Christina Rossetti.
Seventy Christmases later, I finally understand those words. It is safer to give those other gifts: lambs, frankincense, Walmart gift cards. Giving your heart means to risk having it broken. Yet, to not give your heart would mean that you would miss Life — the real meaning of Christmas.
What I’ve Learned from My Grandfathers Since They Died: Part 1
One of the challenges of this Third Half of Life is health. Sure, that means eating right and exercise, but it begins inside of our heads.
When we get older and we get sick or injure ourselves, we are tempted to look at the calendar and say, “I’m old,” and think:
Old = sick
Old = feeble
Old = dying.
We are not necessarily helped much by the medical profession. Doctors were once taught that the paradigm of health is a man. So, they treated things that were uniquely female, like menopause or having a uterus, as pathologies that needed medication or removal.
That may have improved. However, it’s hard for lay people and professionals to get past the unconscious assumption that the paradigm of health is a 19-year-old. The more we deviate from that ideal, the more likely we are to get prescriptions and procedures to “fix” us.
As my mother used to say, “Every time I go to the doctor, I get a new pill. Then, every two years, I wind up in the hospital and they take them all away from me.”
Too many of us are conditioned to think that there is nothing we can do about our health. When I talk with friends about how a lot of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes or even heart disease can be healed with diet and exercise, a lot of them say wearily, “just give me a pill.”
I think that they lack a mental image of what a healthy old age looks like. I am grateful that my Grandfather Talbott taught me that old people can rebuild their health after it takes a nosedive.
I’ve learned a lot from my grandfathers since they died. The older I get the more I learn. It’s not that I remember stories that they told me or any advice that they gave me. But, I do remember how they lived and how they negotiated old age. I am benefitting from their examples.
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin
Grandpa Talbott was a dairy farmer. He was active in the Dairyman’s League, a cooperative of farmers who banded together to sell their milk at a fair price. As my Dad took over the farm, Grandpa took on more responsibility in the League’s organization. Before I got to high school, he was commuting 300 miles to New York City every week to work at the League headquarters as the treasurer. Then, he became president of what was then the largest dairy cooperative in the country.
It was a lot of stress and responsibility. By his mid-60’s, he was sick and worn out. He spent several weeks in the hospital before he retired.
Shortly after he retired, he drove up to our farm one morning. Dad and I had finished breakfast and we were cleaning the barn after milking. The cows had gone off to pasture. The barn floor needed cleaning. I had used a shovel to take care of the manure. Grandpa picked up the push broom and started down the barn floor, sweeping everything on his left into the gutter. He went very, very slowly.
My Dad and I watched him. It was kind of agonizing. When he got to the other end of the barn floor, he leaned on his broom to catch his breath.
My Dad said, “Go take that broom away from your grandfather.”
I walked down the floor and said, “Here, Grandpa, I can finish it.”
He said, “No, Roger, I need to do this.”
So, we watched him come back, sweeping the other side. Then he got in his car and went home.
He came back the next day. And the next. It took a few weeks, but then he was sweeping the floor as fast or faster than I could. He would stay and help my Dad with other chores. He also worked on my uncle’s much bigger farm. In fact, he was plowing my uncle’s fields into his 80’s.
I, too, pushed too hard and too long on my work for my own good. By the time I retired in 2016, I was overweight and suffering from a severe digestive disorder. I found a doctor who said she could cure me. And she did. I made a lot of life-style changes and got better and better. Then, I spent December 2019 suffering from a flu-like illness. I spent six weeks in bed with mild fever, and moderate fatigue and brain fog. Sounds like COVID-19 doesn’t it? Trouble is, doctors diagnosed the first case in New York City in March 2020.
Whatever it was, I feared I was going to spend my life as an invalid. But I started walking and working out. Then, I decided to try running. My son, Jim, who lives near us, is a runner. When my knees hurt, he taught me how to shorten my gait and land on my toes. The pain disappeared.
By the end of October, I could run 5 kilometers (3 miles). I had to thank my Grandfather Talbott.
As I tied on my running shoes every other day, I thought of him pushing that broom.
When I could only run about 20 yards, I thought about him pushing that broom.
When it rained, I thought of him pushing that broom.
He’s been dead thirty years, but I keep learning from him. Next week, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from my other grandfather since he died.
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.
Illustration by –