How will You Keep Them Down in the Pews after They have Prayed Online?

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It usually takes me weeks to produce a blog post.  I write and rewrite and send it around to other people to catch the typos and tell me where I lose them. I knocked this one out in a couple of hours. It probably will read like it. But I hope it will help, anyway.

Many churches are canceling their services for a few weeks. (We hope it’s only for a few weeks.) Some churches, like the one Jacquie and I attend, have the resources to telecast the service online. They can also assume that most, if not all their members, have the devices needed to watch the service.

Those who are doing this or are thinking about doing it next week may be wondering:

Will people actually join us on Sunday?

If they do, will they ever come back to church?

Won’t they prefer to keep attending in their jammies with a cup of tea? Will they switch to something more congenial if the preacher starts meddling in their personal sins?

If they do it, will we lose out to churches that can put on a better “show?”

This is an unprecedented situation. No one has a crystal ball to see how it will turn out. However, I have an unusual pastoral experience with broadcasting a worship service that might point to some answers to these questions.

The last eleven of my 45 years of ministry were in an old downtown First Church in a city of 50,000 in Northeast Ohio. For over 50 years that church had been broadcasting its main Sunday service over the local radio station. The signal did not carry far, but it covered all our resident members. The station began live-streaming over the internet while I was there. One of our members serving in Iraq used to listen whenever he could.

This was a live broadcast. When I listened to a recording, I thought, who would waste an hour listening to the rustling and dead air while the kids came down for the children’s sermon? Or the teenager rushing through the reading from Ezekiel — and mispronouncing “Ezekiel?” Or, for that matter, the congregation singing a hymn that their pastor thought they knew, but they didn’t.

It turned out that a lot of people listened.

I would always be surprised when people who had not been in church made a comment about something they had heard.

When I would visit a member in the hospital who was just a name without a face since he or she had never come to church. I was even more surprised that, as soon as I introduced myself, they would recognize my voice from their weekly radio listening. I learned to ask if I was as good looking in person as I was on the radio?

I appreciated their gracious, if dishonest, answers.

Here is what I learned.

  1.  People who attended weekly but were unable to come because of illness or for any other reason, felt connected to their church. They came back without feeling like they had been away.
  2.  There were people who did prefer to go to church in their jammies. Even so, they felt connected and they supported their church. Our giving and our program were one-third larger than our average attendance indicated.
  3. We had a lot of members who were homebound or were caregivers for whom the broadcast was a weekly lifeline. We distributed little kits with a communion wafer and cup of juice to them a week before our monthly communion service. They patiently listened as our ushers distributed the elements to the congregation and then took communion with their friends over the air.
  4. We broadcast at the same hour as Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen. But people listened to our ragged, low-tech, old-fashioned, live broadcast instead, because they were listening to their church.
  5. However, if a mic was not working or if the service ran over the radio station’s one hour limit, the church staff and I would hear about it all week. I try not to remember that terrible Sunday when communion took so long that the poor folks at home were left holding their cups when we went off the air.

So, just a word of encouragement:

1. If you can find a way to broadcast something that feels like your regular service, do it.

2. You don’t have to be flashy. Just make sure it is competent enough so that people can see and hear clearly.

3. You may be surprised at how much this ministry will mean in the weeks ahead. No one knows what’s coming. But, as our pastor said last Sunday, getting people through wars, famines, and epidemics is what the Church has done for 2,000. In some ways, it is our job.

Be safe and may God be with you.

The Year of the Rat

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Year of the Rat 2020

I like Chinese food. I hate the placemats in Chinese restaurants. No matter how many times I study them, they always tell me that I am a rat.

The placemats show the 12 years of the Chinese Zodiac.

I look at all the other years and wish I could be a Tiger or a Rabbit.

Dragon would be cool!

I’d settle for Pig.

Snake is a toss-up with Rat. Although I can think of more positive things about snakes.

No matter how many times I eat Chinese, the news is always the same. I am a Rat. To me the Rat represents all that is unlovely, unloving and unlovable in me.

Astrology may be bunk, but it points to the truth that life has certain “givens.” The Native American poet, Joy Harjo, now the U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote, “Remember the sky that you were born under.” People who live close to nature notice the way the stars shine the night a baby is born. Two billion Christians remember a star shining over Bethlehem one night long ago.

If I count the year I was born, the Year of the Rat has come around for the seventh time. If I look at myself at 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, and now, I see so many changes in those 12 year cycles, for example:

  • At 12, I was a farm boy.
  • At 24, I was young man with a wife, a baby, and a church.
  • In the past 12 years, both my parents died. For the first time, I left a church smaller than it was when I arrived. I retired. We moved to New York City.

I look in the mirror and compare what I see with snapshots taken from those other cycles of the Zodiac. Where did the hair go? How did what hair I have left turn so white when it started so black? Where did the wrinkles come from?

In some ways, what remains the same is more mysterious than what has changed.

How can I be the same person now that I was at 12? What is this mystery that I call my “self?”

I still read and then pontificate about what I’ve learned. I still laugh out loud at jokes other people don’t seem to get. But there are other things that also persist. All of them are part of the rat.

The Rat represents all those parts of me that I have tried to shut out, poison, or trap. I can’t kill it. Most of the time the Rat just hides in the shadows. But he is there. He is always there.

In this 7th Year of the Rat, I look back and see that there is not much I can do about my past failures and limitations. The rat-like genes that gnawed away the cilia inside my cochlea now may be gnawing at my bones and my lungs.

My life is my life. It is a combination of the choices I made and things that were built in to my life from conception. But oddly, that empowers me to make the best of what my life is, Rat and all.

Accepting the unlovely Rat in me also helps me see that the Rat can be “quick-witted, resourceful, and versatile” at times.

Maybe that’s why the Chinese astrologers also say that the Rat is kind. Once a Rat accepts and feels compassion for himself, he can care for other fallible human beings.

After all, if you can love a Rat, you can love anybody.

Becoming a Jew-ish Grandparent

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It has been some time since I last posted in this blog.

OK, it has been a LONG time.

I have a couple of excellent excuses.

I was sick for several weeks. Nothing serious, just persistent, and very fatiguing. My doctor has been trying to figure it out.

The other is that my daughter-in-law, Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg, had a conversation, with David Raphael. David and Lee Handler have founded the Jewish Grandparenting Network.

Rachel told David about our unusual family. Perhaps there are other Methodist ministers who have a Rabbi daughter-in-law, but I don’t know any personally.  Or any other Christian clergy that fit that description.

David got in touch with me through her. We talked. He asked me if I would write about our experience as the Christian grandparents in an interfaith family. I agreed.

I plan three posts on their website. It’s harder than it looks. In a sense, I am speaking for a number of people, Jacquie not least of all. I want it to be right.

This is the first one. It explains the dash in the next-to-last word in the title. Click here to read it.

Getting Our Hopes Up

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“Don’t get your hopes up.”

I wonder how many times I’ve said those words to my kids, parishioners, maybe most of all, to myself.

“Will she get here soon?”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“It won’t cost much will it?”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Will I be over this illness before Christmas?”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

I just had that last conversation with myself a few minutes ago.

I’ve had some kind of bug since the weekend before Thanksgiving. It feels like a mild case of the flu. I’m not really sick. I’m just SO tired all the time. Saw my doctor. Getting tested. Keep thinking I’m getting better. Even this morning, I feel pretty good. Maybe I’ll be over this in a day or two. But, I’ve said that so many times in the past month that a little voice inside is saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

It’s a funny voice for me to be hearing this time of the year. After all, for Christians, this is Advent. It is precisely the time we set aside for getting our hopes up.

It’s a strange time to be doing it, of course. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may have noticed the nights are longer and the days are either so gloomy you wonder if the sun forgot to rise, or they are so bright and cold that tears come to your eyes. It does not encourage optimism the way the days in May do.

But then, hope isn’t optimistic. It isn’t realistic, either.

The Bible tells a story about a childless couple who should have been heading for assisted living. They set out instead for a new land because they hoped that they would have more babies than you can count. Can you imagine?

Hope sees swords being beaten into plowshares and the billions we spend on “defense” being used to feed the hungry. Can you imagine?

Hope sees a world where the lion and the lamb lie down together, and human beings live in peace with their environment instead of destroying it. Can you imagine?

Hope sees peace on earth and goodwill toward all people. Can you imagine?

Yes, we can, for some reason. Human beings keep hoping. One measure of how powerful this hope is the amount of time, effort, and money that goes into telling us not to get our hopes up.

Pay attention to how many times you are told every day that the world is a dangerous place. No wonder we need to spend more and more on new ways to kill each other.

Right now I am being bombarded with messages about how corrupt my government is and always has been and always will be. Who am I to hope for a day when justice will roll down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream?

I am told over and over again that rich people need tax breaks so that they can create jobs. Poor people, on the other hand, are a drain on the public treasury and if they don’t have homes and food and health care that is their problem. Who am I to hope for a day when the poor will be fed and the rich will be sent away hungry?

I am told over and over that it will ruin our economy to reduce carbon emissions and besides, the climate isn’t changing. Who am I hope for a day when the desert will bloom and earth will rejoice and sing?

It takes a lot of effort to tell us not to get our hopes up

But, it works, kind of. There are a lot of people who are frightened of their neighbors, to say nothing of strangers. There are people who are completely cynical about the possibility of justice. There are those so caught up in the rat race to become one of those billionaires who don’t pay taxes, that they no longer have much hope, except that they hope they are dead before the world becomes unlivable.

But, hope has a way of staying alive. Or, maybe more precisely. It keeps coming back after we kill it. In a way, the whole Bible is a story about hope dying and being . . . reborn, like a new baby.

As I finish writing this, I’m running out of energy, again. Looks like today won’t be the day I get better. I should not have gotten my hopes up.

But, I hope that, even if I never get better, I learn something from this illness. I have not felt so useless since I was a little kid. Maybe I will learn something I knew back then that I forgot. My worth as a human being does not come from what I can do, but who I am. And maybe, even if my hopes are dashed every day, I will learn how to keep on hoping.

Without A Care In the World

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Retirement is great. Like the bumper sticker says:

Not My Job.
Not My Responsibility.
Not My Problem.

I’m Retired.

My life is care-free.
But, I’ve discovered that being care-free is a problem.
When I was a young pastor, I preached a series of sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins:

• Pride
• Envy
• Anger
• Acedia
• Greed
• Gluttony
• Lust

Smack dab in the middle of the Seven Deadly Sins is acedia. What the hell is that? I knew all too well what pride is, and envy, and anger, and greed, gluttony and lust, but what is acedia?

It is usually translated as “sloth,” being lazy. As a good Protestant minister, I preached a sermon on the sin of being lazy.

I missed the point.

When you add an “a” to a word like “moral” it negates it. “Amoral,” for example, means “not moral” or “without morality.” Acedia does that to the Greek word kedos. Kedos means, “care/anxiety.” So acedia means “no care,” It is less “care-free” and more, “I couldn’t care less.”

One of the great things about being retired is supposed to be that you are without cares. It’s true. Those of us who have the good luck to have saved some money and dodged the bullet of ill-health can live without a care.

That is a change. All my life I had something to care about; something to worry about.

During my school years I had to worry about the next test.

Then, I had a young family to support and raise.

I had churches that needed a pastor. I had to get to the hospital to see someone who was dying. I had to get to the church on time for the wedding. I had to write that sermon because Sunday was coming.
I always had something to care about.

But now, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t need to be anywhere. Jacquie is not a dependent, but a partner and friend. That may not last. The reality of “until we are parted by death,” is that one spouse almost always becomes the other one’s caregiver. Marriage also conveys responsibilities to help each other along our spiritual paths, but writing about that would take me off in a new direction. Right now, in a superficial sense, I am free. Free of care. Care-free.

That freedom means that I can fall into the living death called acedia.

It may not feel like death. At first, it may feel like heaven. It felt like that to me — a perpetual vacation. But after a few months, doing whatever I want when I want has worn thin. How many times a day can I check my Facebook feed? What is trending on YouTube? What did President Trump tweet this morning?
Like I said, living death.

The reason acedia is one of the Seven Deadly Sins is because the list was put together by monks. In the Middle Ages, monks were the most care-free people in that world. They lived in a community that provided their food and shelter. They had no personal dependents. They all had responsibilities. But many of those jobs did not require them to lie awake at night thinking about them. They could fall into what we might call “laziness.”

The monks recognized that the problem was not laziness. It was a spiritual problem; not giving a damn about anyone or anything.

When you have nothing and no one to care about, your life is without purpose or meaning.

It can lead to the three deadly sins that follow acedia in the traditional list: Greed, Gluttony, and Lust.
Or, as it so often plays out in retirement, a preoccupation with three questions:
“How much money do I have?”
“Where will we go to eat tonight?”
“What’s on TV? Or, what “bucket list” item can I check off next?”

There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but if that is all there is, we are in the living death of acedia.

However, acedia is also a spiritual opportunity. It means that the first three Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, and Anger, aren’t motivating us anymore.

In the Third Half of Life, most of us are no longer trying to make a name for ourselves. The people we used to envy are just old crocks like us. We no longer even have to prove that we were right.

It’s true that without those motivators, many of us are in danger of not caring about anything.

It’s also true that when we strip those things away, we find the best motivator of all, love.

It’s taken me three years of retirement to see this truth. I started this blog out of the sheer momentum of having written a sermon almost every week for 45 years. I couldn’t stop it on a dime.

I’m embarrassed how often the first three deadly sins got mixed in to my sermon-writing. Pride wanted  people to admire what I had to say. Envy wanted to compete with preachers who were better than me. Anger sometimes motivated me to sound off on things that I should have left unsaid.

Over the past three years, those things are becoming less relevant. I am learning to write because I love to write. I am hoping that what I have to say matters to someone else.

Love manifests in so many different ways in the Third Half of Life.

We may care for family and friends. As a pastor, I was often amazed at the friendships widows in my church formed with each other. They didn’t just socialize together They called each other every day. They stepped in to help when illness struck. They called the children, or the pastor or the doctor, when they were worried about their friend. They knew it was a living death to only care about themselves.
Even caring for a pet can help. When my grandfather died, my grandmother was at a loss until a cat named “Timmy” came into her life.

We may care about brightening a little corner of the world. A couple of days ago, I passed a man who was knee deep in a patch of ground not big enough to bury him. It’s what we call a “garden” here in Jackson Heights. I knew he was a volunteer for the JH Beautification Group, preparing that opening in the sidewalk for next spring’s flowering.

We may even care about the survival of the world. When he was 92, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was arrested for chaining himself to a fence at 10 Downing Street. He was protesting nuclear weapons.

A reporter asked him, “Lord Russell, why would you do this since it is unlikely that you will live to see a nuclear war?”

Russell replied, “It is necessary to care deeply about things that will happen after we are gone.”

I wonder what you care about?

What motivates you?

How do you overcome acedia?

How To Time Travel Safely 2: Into the Future

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When I was a pastor, I watched parishioners who, as they got older, seemed to be paralyzed.

  • They hung on to jobs that were too much for them.
  • They hung on to their big houses, when they couldn’t take care of them.
  • They hung on to their cars when driving was no longer safe for them — or anyone else.

These were often people who had made good decisions all their lives.

I used to think that they refused to look at the future.

Now, as I face aging myself, I see that the real problem is getting stuck in the future. They had looked ahead and saw nothing but decline and death. They believed that there was nothing they could do to make it better. So, they did not come back to the present to take action.

That is the problem with Mental Time Travel. We feel the impact of past or future events with the same intensity as if we were there.

James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”

We can’t change the fact that we will decline and die.

We do not have control over when we will die.

We do not control how we will die.

However, when we time travel to our last day, we can ask, “What can I change now that will make a difference on that day?”

I have seen people make significant changes in the last years, months, even days of their lives that made a difference in the end.

Here are some examples:

My mother loved her house, her garden, her community. On the night my father died, she said to me, “I’m going to move into a retirement community.” She faced the fact that she was declining. She would not be able to live alone much longer.

With the help of her children, she cleaned out her house and sold it. She, had never lived more than 15 miles from her birthplace. Even so, she moved across three states to a retirement community near one of my sisters.

There, she moved from independent living to assisted living to the memory unit. Each time she moved, she divested herself of what little she had left. When she died, she left behind a chair, a dresser, and two shelves of books.

I remember her as someone who calmly and courageously faced the fact of aging. She was a model for all of us.

I knew a man, who hid his vulnerabilities under bluster and bragging. Yet, as he was laid low with cancer, he opened up his heart to his wife, his children, and others. It softened their memories of him. For me, he is an example of how it is never too late to change.

There was a woman who spent much of her life in bitterness. She had no friends and she often alienated the relatives who tried to love her. Having to live in a nursing facility did not help.

One day, this woman changed. She was warm, grateful for a visit, interested in her visitors, and she had dropped her usual complaints about the world. She remained that way for the rest of her life. It changed the way everyone remembers her.

My mother’s Alzheimer’s disease used to make me despair about my future. Then, I started working with a doctor who recommended, The End of Alzheimer’s, by Dr. Dale Bredeson. That led to The Alzheimer’s Solution, by Drs. Dean and Ayesha Sherzai.

I am convinced that, even if I can’t completely prevent cognitive decline, I can make changes in my life that will slow it down. I’ve gone from despair to a feeling that I can do something. Plus, I feel better and sharper than I have felt in years.

If we don’t face the fact that we will decline and die straight on, we will be stuck there in despair.

If we do face the fact of decline and death, we can make changes now.

It is never too late to change things, even if it is just our attitude.

I’d like to hear from you.

Who are good examples for you?

What decisions have you made because you have faced your future?

What if We Were All This Crazy?

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https://i0.wp.com/pixabay.com/get/52e1d34a4e50ab14f6d1867dda6d49214b6ac3e4565776497d2679d594/homeless-4169427_1920.jpg?resize=825%2C532&ssl=1Illustration by – Mohamed Hassan

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.

– G. A. Studdert-Kennedy

Time Travel Safety Tips: 1 The Past

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I recently discovered that Time Travel is a thing. I mean a thing that scientists study; Mental Time Travel, that is.

It’s kind of a big deal. Scientists study our ability:

To go back in time and learn from experience.

The ability to go ahead in time and plan for the future. 

These scientists look to St. Augustine (354-480 CE) as their precursor. He said:

The past is present as memory.

The future is present as expectation.

What is happening now is also present.

In this post, I want to write about how to go back to the past. Soon, I will post about how to go to the future. And then, how to stay in the present.*

How to Go Back to the Past

Yes, traveling back in time means remembering.

But, it’s different from the way you remember your mother’s maiden name or the value of pi. Those memories seem to be stuffed inside some neurons in your brain.

If you close your eyes and remember:

  • What it was like to sit down at the family table
  • What your mother’s pie looked like, what it smelled like, and how it tasted
  • Then add guests from her side of the family

The visual, hearing, olfactory, and emotional parts of your brain light up the way they would if you were there eating that pie at that table with those people.

In a very real sense, you are traveling back in time.

I have been doing a lot of time traveling lately.

It’s what people do in the Third Half of Life.

I found there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. I’ve been doing it wrong. I am learning to do it right. 

You may have tips of your own. I’d like to hear them.

The wrong way to do it.

If you have read stories or seen movies about people traveling back to the past, you know the danger of getting stuck there. That can happen to us.

The two great dangers of Time Traveling in the past are nostalgia and resentment or regret.

Nostalgia holds us in an idealized past. Nothing in the present or the future will ever measure up to our glowing memories of things like: 

  • A happy childhood.
  • The year you were captain of the high school basketball team.
  • Back when anything was possible, and you dreamed about backpacking in Europe, or starting your own business, or becoming an artist. 

 

Resentment holds us in the grip of past times when people wronged us:

  • When mother forgot your birthday.
  • When the coach took you out right before you could have won the championship.
  • When someone else’s decision narrowed your choices.


Regret holds us in the grip of times past when we did wrong:

  • That first lie you told your parents.
  • Missing the basket that could have won the championship.
  • Not spending enough time with loved ones who are now gone.

We all know that the cure for resentment is to forgive others The cure for regret is to forgive yourself. But how? 

I am not much given to nostalgia. But the way I am learning to travel in the past strikes me as a good way to overcome nostalgia and it helps with forgiveness, too.

The Right Way to Travel in the Past

I got these ideas from the wonderful book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as Spiritual Practice, by Pat Schneider.

Close your eyes and see a door. It is a door you know. Some examples:

  • The door to the first house you remember.
     • The door to your elementary school.
     • The door to a friend’s house.
     • The door to a house of worship.
     • The door to a bedroom.

Close your eyes and see the first door that comes up for you.

Now, open that door, and step inside. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? Whom do you meet? 

You can also close your eyes and look into a deep well, and see a face reflected in the water. Whose face do you see? What do you remember about that person?

Practice this kind of remembering. You could write down what is on the other side of the door, or what you remember about the face in the well. Do it deliberately for a while and, soon, the past will arise unbidden.

When I do this kind of time traveling, there are certain images and times that keep coming up. They are almost always on the farm where I grew up. They are not idealized. They always have manure or mud in them. I remember my mother scolding me. I also remember her pie.

I open the back door to our farmhouse and see my mother in the kitchen stirring something on the stove with one hand while trying to read a book with the other. That’s definitely her.

I look into a deep well and see my maternal grandfather’s face staring back at me. It looks a lot like the face I see in the mirror.

I open the door to the bedroom I shared with my brother and remember hearing the distant train whistle blowing in the middle of the night.

Each of these are like  threads that, if I pull on them, will release moments, days, and years with all their drama and feelings. The memories seem to unfold like a movie of my own life.

The more I go back to these places and people, the more I see them without anger or shame or longing. I just look. I see myself and others as if I were in an audience watching a play on stage. I might be caught up in the story, but I never confuse my observing self with what is taking place on my mental stage. I can watch without nostalgia, resentment, or regret. I can just let these moments be. I can learn from them. I can also let them go. 

One of the most famous books of the 20th Century was, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. He says that his several-volume work all flooded back to him when he broke open a warm pastry one morning. The aroma reminded him of visiting an aunt when he was a small boy. She always served the same pastry.

I am not as good as Proust at traveling in the past, but I am slowly learning. By using these two practices, I travel back through the years. I learn from the past without getting stuck in nostalgia, resentment, and regret.

How do you safely travel backward in time? What do you remember?

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What I have Learned from My Father Since He Died

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

I learned what to keep and what to throw away.

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

We can learn some things only after someone has died.

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

We learn things that cannot be put into words.

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

I learned to honor my father and my mother.

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