There be dogs

There’s a house on my regular walking route with a chain-link fence that contains several dogs whose sole purpose in life seems to be to alert the world to the existence of any passersby. I have long since given up being annoyed at them. They’re just dogs, after all.

Their owner, on the other hand, I find to be unbearably annoying. An otherwise nice old lady, albeit a bit eccentric with her dozen animals and cluttered yard and eagerness to chat your ear off about as much as you’re willing to listen to, she has a frustrating impression that she can get her dogs to stop barking by yelling at them. Were this true, I might not mind so much. Yet as it is, with her dogs to alert her of my presence, she comes running to the sidewalk to chat with me whenever I pass by, yelling at her dogs to shut up every couple seconds while she has me stuck there, even telling me to wait there while she goes to the fence to yell at them from at a closer distance. The dogs, of course, never respond.

There be dogs inside my head, as impossible to silence as these lady’s backyard barkers. I never noticed how incessant they are until a friend started a weekly contemplative prayer group in one of the chapels on campus.

“This is not a time to articulate prayers or come to deeper understandings,” he explained. “The monastic tradition holds that God is beyond understanding, and we find him past ‘the cloud of unknowing.’ This is a time to learn the posture of waiting before him, listening, receiving.”

As an academic who spends my day accumulating and interpreting information, I find silence to be a harder a discipline than any I have tried.

“Inevitably, you’ll find yourself thinking,” my friend went on. “Don’t be upset at yourself for doing so; just gently push the thoughts away and return to silence. Sometimes it helps to have a particular word like ‘love’ or ‘Jesus’ to say to push the thoughts away, but don’t meditate on those words; try to quiet yourself before the Lord.”

In these weekly gatherings, I find my attempts to silence my mind to be about as fruitless as the lady’s attempts to silence her dogs, my silencing words about as ineffective as her yells.

The contemplatives call us to let “your thought of self be as naked and simple as your thought of God, so that you may be with God in spirit without fragmentation and scattering of your mind.” My mind is fragmented and scattered indeed, but there is a longing in me to be whole, to be unfragmented, to be listening, to be in his presence without the constraints of my own understanding. One day, I might learn to be silent long enough to begin that journey.

However long it takes

Over the summer, the small African-American parish I attend near my home had their annual youth vs. adults Father’s Day flag football game. The event was a fundraiser for the youth group and a generally fun time for all.

They had been preparing for months and, when the day came, it was cloudy and drizzly. As one would expect, the priest prayed in mass that morning that the rain would stop for the game, and I returned home rather dubious.

Yet in an hour when I drove to campus for the game, the sun was out, the grass was nearly dry, and the temperature had gone up to the upper 80s.

“We couldn’t have asked for better weather,” I commented to Deacon Alvin.

“Well, of course,” he said with a joyful laugh. “We did pray about it, after all!”

I was startled for a couple seconds, remembering how I had brushed the prayers off earlier that morning. “Funny how we prayer for things and are surprised when they actually happen,” I mused mostly to myself.

Deacon Alvin stopped in his tracks. “Oh, don’t be surprised,” he insisted. “You gotta believe that God is listening to our prayers.”

But truth be told I was surprised, and more inclined to interpret our amazing Father’s Day weather to Mother Nature’s finicky Midwestern temperament than to the intervention of God in response to the prayers of a little urban parish. I had lived in too many farming communities that had prayed for rain in times of drought to imagine that controlling the weather was as easy as asking God, even in times when people’s livelihoods were on the line. I had prayed for homeless friends or urban teenagers who later ended up in prison or back on the streets. If we want to insist that prayers are efficacious, I’d have to do some mental gymnastics to come up with how they could be.

So months later when it was not for good Sunday afternoon weather but for a friend’s safety from a murderous ex-boyfriend that I was praying for, I found myself with as little faith that my prayers were being heard than I had had back in June.

“We pray for so many things that don’t happen,” I cried to Deacon Alvin. “I feel like when I pray, ‘God, please may my friend not get murdered,’ I need those to be the prayers he hears.”

“He will,” Deacon Alvin assured me, with the same confidence that he had about the weather back in June. “You gotta have faith that the God who is hearing your prayers is a loving God who cares about your friend.”

Flashbacks of seemingly unanswered prayers crowded into my memory. “What if I can’t make myself believe that?” I asked with trembling voice.

“Then pray. Keep praying until you do believe, however long it takes.”

I wish I could end this post with a strong note of confidence in a God who is lovingly hearing and acting upon our prayers, especially the seemingly unanswered ones. I have to admit I still struggle to imagine God is acting in the places I have seen raw evil more obviously at work. In the mean time, all I can do is continue to pray “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” until the first part is true, to prepare the places for faith and entreat God to enter. As Deacon Alvin told me, all I can do is to keep praying until I do believe.

However long it takes...

Prayer of Padre Pio

Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have You present so that I do not forget You. You know how easily I abandon You.

Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not fall so often.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life and without You I am without fervor.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light and without You I am in darkness.

Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.

Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Your voice and follow You.

Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You very much and alway be in Your company.

Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be faithful to You.

Stay with me, Lord, as poor as my soul is I want it to be a place of consolation for You, a nest of Love.

Denominational lenses

Since I seem to be doing a bad job contributing to the blogosphere this semester, I thought I'd at least pass along a delightful chart that I have seen circulating it. As someone who has walked among people in each of these camps, I find it delightfully accurate.



Almighty and merciful God, you willed that the different nations should become one people through your Son. Grant in your kindness that those, who glory in being known as Christians, may put aside their differences and become one in truth and charity, and that all men, enlightened by the true faith, may be united in fraternal communion in the one Church. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I had a dream

A little over ten years ago, as I was preparing to go to college, I had a dream. In this dream I was given an unjust traffic ticket (by an officer who was played by David Spade, for some reason), and managed to go to court and get it thrown out. Officer Spade, who had never lost a case before, was quite enraged because the whole situation made him look bad and made him lose his perfect record, but justice was served.

Then in this dream, I was visiting local churches in my beginning weeks of college, trying to find a community of believers where I could be at home. I settled on a vibrant little church with an active college group, but soon ran into a serious problem: Officer Spade was also an active member of the group, and he refused so much as to look at me.

Apparently, in my dream, this went on for some time, and it soon became clear that the tension was getting unbearable for me. I would never be at home in the church if there was no peace. Finally, perhaps during a Sunday school discussion when we were all sitting in a circle, I got out of my chair and got down on my knees before Officer Spade, who kept his face turned away from me.

“David,” I said, “I know you’re hurt, and I’m sorry. I wish there was anything I could do to make it up to you, but I know I can’t. All I can do is beg you to forgive me. I was wrong [a lie, interestingly], and I am greatly sorry.”

From where I knelt in tears, I heard Officer Spade say my name, and I looked up to see him standing up and extending his arm out to me. I stood up and met his embrace, and the hug that the dream ended with made me feel happy for hours the next morning when I awoke.

Justice was not served in the dream, but peace was. As a young, idealistic eighteen-year-old, I decided peace was enough. God was in the justice department; he had called us to be a people of peace.

A month later, of course, “justice” and “peace” became rival buzz-words in the political chaos that erupted three weeks into my freshman year of college, ten years ago today. The world seemed to go mad in these first ten years of my adult life (maybe it always was), and I found myself unable to think clearly in the no-man’s-land between all the entrenched armies I was fluttering between: the small Southern town where I was from and Paris, France where my family moved, the evangelical Christian organization I was a part of and the African American political organization I joined, the intelligentsia in my classes and the homeless folks I met on the street. Justice and peace became equally unreachable ideals.

But today, ten years later, I remembered that dream this morning. There’s still a young idealist buried in me somewhere who wants to believe that it is still possible to be a people of peace, even when justice is unclear.

Oilithreachta

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my first sestina. My apologies if it's a bit abstruse... the form took over, and I could only try to keep up with it.

The Summer breathes in rain and limestone crumbs
And nestles in the nettles for a rest
Beneath wool blankets of her heavy peace.
I sought her once, but found my eyes were blind
And feet too young to tread her ancient stones,
The incarnations of the stuff of Time.

But Summer’s chief possession is her time,
The time it takes for sprouts to grow from crumbs
Or walls to churn the weight of their own stones.
So in the pilgrimage that she calls “rest”
I rubbed my muddy eyes that lingered blind
And let her redefine the Irish “peace.”

And on the way I met a man, a piece
Of tender paper passing like the time
Between his brittle fingers with his blind
Routine of ritual tobacco crumbs.
He grinned a “Tóg go bóg é”—take a rest—
And perched to smoke his sculpture on the stones.

And as a child I might have cast some stones
Or at the least recited off a piece
Of dime-store jargon hoarded with the rest
Of my resourcefulness I lost in time.
Yet now I sat a spell to cull his crumbs,
Just old enough at least to know I’m blind.

For if there’s grace enough to heal the blind,
It tumbles down like execution stones
Beneath the slab where dogs can gather crumbs.
And on the coast of Inis Oírr there’s Peace
That soaks the rain of Irish summer-time
And trembles in the wind just like the rest

Of us. And we who take the yoke of rest
And find that mud and spittle leave us blind
May learn to see trees walking over time
(If trees could grow in Cheathrú Rua stones),
Or pass the sacramental sign of Peace
As if the dust were Eucharistic crumbs.

For here time passes like the pilgrim’s rest
And falls like sandwich crumbs that tumble blind
On stones that catch as many grains of peace.

Caoineadh Phádraig Shéamais

The story is told of a father and son in a small village outside of Galway who were crossing a channel late at night to get barley to make poitín, Irish moonshine. When they loaded the small boat and prepared to return home, a storm started to gather and they decided that the boat, laden with the barley, would not make it to the other side with both passengers. The father told the son to cross in the boat and walked several miles alone to a place he could walk across. When he reached the place the boat would have landed, he saw neither son or boat. The next day they found the shattered pieces of the boat and the dead body of his son.

For the next week as his wife and daughter sang keenings over the body of the young man, the father was entirely silent, eating nothing and talking to no one. His friends and family worried that he would follow his son to the grave in sorrow, but they could do nothing to ease his pain. Then one day as the daughter was walking by the river, she heard her father singing this song:

An chéad Mháirt de fhomhar ba bhrónach turseach mo scéal.
Lámh thapa a bhí cróga ag gabháil romham ar leaba na n-éag.
Ar charraig na nDeor is dó gur chaill mé mo radharc
Is go dté mé faoi fhód is ní thógfad m’aigne i do dhéidh.

Tá do mháthair is Niall faoi chian ‘s is fada leo an lá.
D’fhág tú osna ina gcliabh nach leigheasann dochtúir nó lia.
Ar sholáthair mé riamh is bíodh sé ‘lig cruinn i mo láimh,
go dtabharfainn é uaim ach fuascledh—Paidí bheith slán.

The first Tuesday of September sad and sorrowful was my plight:
The brave able hand going before me to the bed of death
On the Rock of Tears I lost my sight.
Till I go to my grave I’ll not lift my spirit after you.

Your mother and Niall are sorrowing and the day is long for them.
You left them a heavy heart that no doctor or physician can cure.
All that I ever earned, were it all gathered in my hand,
I would give it in ransom—that Paddy be safe.*

Never having heard her father sing before, the girl worried that his grief was driving him further from his sanity. She went to a friend of his and related the tale.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” the old man assured the girl. “If he’s singing, he’ll get better.” The father’s song, painful and agonizing though it might have been, was a sign of life in him, evidence of healing.

“When I heard that story,” the Irishman told me, “the pain of the father was so fresh in the words that I assumed it was a recent incident. I asked the storyteller if he had known Pádraig Shéamais or his father. The man shook his head, and I later learned that the incident had happened in 1811.”



*Text and translation by Breandán Ó Madagáin, author of Caointe agus Seancheolta Eile: Keening and other Old Irish Musics

Notes from the Gaeltacht

If anyone has been wondering about the recent lack of posts, be aware that I’ve been in the middle of another summer language course, again in Ireland, this time for a living language that actually makes sense to study here: Irish. Oh yeah.

When my brain settles down a bit I might write something more interesting. For now I’ll just throw out some brief anecdotes from the Gaeltacht:

The Irish for “I’m sorry” is Tá brón orm, which literally translates as “There is sadness upon me.” I find it a lovely image.

The Irish for “Hello” is Dia dhuit, which means “God be with you.” As the Irish never like to be shown up in anything, even a greeting, the proper response is Dia ‘s Muire dhuit, “God and Mary be with you.” If more greetings are required afterwards, it continues Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig, Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig is Bríd, and Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig is Bríd is Colmcille. I’m not sure what you do after using up the major Irish saints.

As the weather is generally terrible (a dhiabhail! – “Oh the devil!), one cannot comment on the rare beautiful day without inserting a buíochas le Dia! (“Thanks be to God!”) for good measure to avoid jinxing it. I imagine this involves a good healthy combination of devotion, superstition, and thoughtless convention, but it’s fun for a stranger to the language for sure.

A person with dark hair (like me) is called a dubh (“black”) person. To describe a person of African ancestry, on the other hand, they would use the word gorm (“blue”). Having always found the terms “black,” “white,” “red,” and “yellow” to describe skin color to be a bit ludicrous, I find this extremity almost delightful.

And, most illuminating for my fourth summer in Ireland, the Irish language does not have the words “yes” or “no.” The general rule seems to be: Ask a simple question, get a long-winded response. This also seems to explain the almost universal difficulty the Irish seem to have for committing to or refusing anything.

That’s all for tonight, but until next time always remember, Is minic a gheibhean beal oscailt diog dunta! (“An open mouth often catches a closed fist!”), a good reminder for people of any culture!

Eyes of Redemption

Right before I went out of town last week, a year into home-ownership, I got a hefty check in the mail from my mortgage company, along with an explanation that my mortgage was going down a considerable amount due to a correction in their prior over-estimation of my property value. According to the state, it seems, I live in a rather worthless area of a rather worthless city. It was a striking assessment because, a year into home-ownership, I still find myself quite charmed with the neighborhood.

“I think you have a rather idealized image of the neighborhood,” one of my more disillusioned friends once suggested. I didn’t argue. All is reasons for disillusionment (e.g. here and here) seemed equally valid as mine for fondness (e.g. here and here), and I didn’t feel that I had the right to assert my optimism over his pessimism.

I also didn’t argue because I’ve been told that with regard to another little city in Ireland many times before by various less enchanted friends. Three years after my first visit to Cork, I returned this past weekend for my fourth summer visit, and the residents cannot believe I would willingly spend so many vacations here. I seem to have a history of falling in love with odd places.

I don’t want to discredit the suggestion that I may over-idealize certain places, but it may be that (ideally, at least) the Christian does so in general, not because he is delusional but because he sees the world through eyes of redemption. Perhaps there is a way that my neighborhood can be seen in the light of the original goodness of creation and the hope of the New Creation that has begun already and will be completed in the future Resurrection. Perhaps in that light the robberies and drugs and even the gunshots cannot dampen its beauty.

Either way, I returned to Cork last week with a smile on my face, and I’m sure I’ll return to my neighborhood in five weeks time similarly smiling. If these be eyes of redemption, the world sure looks lovely through them.

Stones

Flow gently, stream where heroes gathered stones
And I a rock or two to throw; for there
Be giants in my soul, and I have thrown
The first of many stones and stumbled where
The saints once fell as Saul looked on and smiled.
For waters cure the cripple, spittle eyes,
Yet I have stumbled on the very wild
Stones I threw, blind after seven tries.

So flow from hidden springs I cannot see
And wash the mud or scales that still remain,
And if I don't have faith enough to part the sea
With budding rods, then be at least my cane.
For you provided blindness to the ones
Who otherwise would cast a thousand stones.