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Memories of One Unfinished Much Loved Child of God
Chapter One
New Orleans, the French quarter, born in the heart of Dixie Land Music. Want to have “When the Saints Go Marching In” played as people leave my funeral. Shrimp Creole, French baguettes, and Eggs Benedict still on my favorites list.
Memories, when still in a crib around the age of three, looking out the window of the Pontalba Apartments on Jackson Square and seeing my parents walking away under the street lights. Feeling terrified, not knowing the doors between the next apartment were open so they could listen if I cried.
Early criminal instinct killed when Mom found a toy watch I stole from my friend’s house. The spanking wasn’t so bad but returning it along with my favorite doll did the trick.
Still remember the music and excitement of sitting on my dad’s shoulders catching beads thrown from the Mardi Gras floats.
Happy times sailing my sailboat on a long narrow pond. It always capsized before reaching the end. But I could not be consoled at five when we were moving to St. Louis on a train, so we sailed it out into the dark waters of Lake Pontchartrain. I didn’t care if it would make some other child happy when they found it.
But I have good memories of return trips to visit dad’s family and as an adult revisiting the Quarter including Pat O’Brien’s Bar and going to the large cathedral looking Catholic Church near Tulane that my grandfather built.
On one return trip as an adult, I was standing on Bourbon Street in the Quarter at night. This was some years after my conversion to a relationship with Jesus as the expression of God’s unconditional love, rather than a particular religion. I stood there enjoying watching very varied people and places. On the corner was a crowded bar open to the street with loud jazz flooding the area. Next to it were some transvestites in beautiful gowns on a balcony inviting people in for a show. In front of that building there was a preacher giving out religious tracts and urging people to repent. Next to him were some small black boys dancing for coins. On the opposite corner at a safe distance was a group of tourists sort of glued to each other for safety, suggesting maybe a group of Baptist Sunday school teachers in New Orleans for a convention. A steady mix of very varied people poured down the middle of the street. There were solid looking tourists in Bermuda shorts with cameras hanging around their necks, college students carrying Pat O‘Brien’s Hurricane glasses. and even a couple of priests coming through from St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. I experienced a strong and wonderful sense of being part of God’s motley crew; all of us loved just as we were.
THE JOURNEY THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S: MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN
I’ve had a hard time forgiving God for my mother’s fourteen years of dying by inches with Alzheimer’s. I could not see any good coming from it.
It hit me today, that my walking with her through that gives me a heads up on my journey with it. And since I am aware of my losses partly through seeing hers, I can share the journey and the grace I am finding in it. Not sure how this can help others, but hoping it can somehow.
TO BEGIN WITH A WARNING: I did fine on the verbal tests the doctors give. I took them in the morning when I am usually at my best. I had to fight to get the Nuclear MRI test that shows the damage to the brain. It showed a definite area of my brain that is no longer getting oxygen through a blockage to blood flow.
But the classic symptom I myself had missed recognizing was forgetting what I did and becoming paranoid and blaming others. Often people with Alzheimer’s misplace things and think caregivers or others are stealing them.
In my case, driving back from Nashville after not sleeping on the plane trip from Portugal, I was so tired that I was afraid I’d fall asleep on the way to Dickson. I decided that a milkshake would keep me awake long enough to get home, instead of coffee which might keep me from much needed sleep. So, I stopped at a Sonic that didn’t have a drive through window. On the back side there were open slots, but pulling into them showed a sign that they were out of order. I pulled into two and finally on the third, I was trying to see if the sign was on its menu without pulling all the way in. Focused to the left I heard a “Klunk” to my right. I thought my right mirror had hit the right side menu but backed out without any change on the mirror. Since that one was out of order too, I gave up.
The next two days I didn’t leave the house between jet lag sleep and unpacking. On the third day I went to the grocery, not noticing a large dent and a long streak of yellow paint down the passenger side of my car’s hood! Sometimes I’m too focused and oblivious to the obvious!! In my defense, I’m very short also!
On the fourth day I noticed the damage and forgetting the “Klunk” decided that there was no way a truck or car could have done this because of where the car had been parked ever since I came home and even at Walmart. I had a Democrat candidate’s hat on my dash board facing front and I decided that someone in my neighborhood had made a political response!!!
I reported this to our wonderful apartment manager and he didn’t think any of my neighbors would have done this, but said I should report it to the police. Well, two child police came and were obviously convinced I had done this and was lying. I was furious that just because I am old, they treated me like I was senile or lying. My insurance people were great, but did want the police report.
In the middle of the night, I woke up with the horrible memory of the “Klunk” at the drive-in!
Early the next morning a police detective called. And I confessed the whole scenario to him, complete with apologies to the child police persons. Since my altercation with a menu was not in Dickson he closed the file. I confessed to the insurer and they still paid for the repair.
I was pretty sure the damage to the car was worse than to the menu and didn’t feel any responsibility for it, but I did pray that God would let me know if I should quit driving.
Two weeks later in a parking lot downtown, I backed into a pole. There was no damage to car or pole, but I decided this was God’s way of getting me off the roads.
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Our Time of Exile
Richard Rohr
Beside the streams of Babylon, we sat and wept.
—Psalm 137:1
Father Richard Rohr reflects on the fear, violence, and oppression that empires and nation-states continue to create, challenging us to respond:
Few would deny that there’s a palpable and growing fear and anger in our country. This fear is felt deeply by those who are most vulnerable. As a follower of both Jesus and Saint Francis of Assisi, my primary moral viewpoint is not centered on the wellbeing of those who are on top, but first in those who are at the bottom. For the vulnerable who have now been rendered more vulnerable, I lament and pray and promise to stand with you.
A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands.
I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see. That is what the Hebrew prophets told Israel both before and during their painful and long exile (596–538 BCE).
Yet the Exile was the very time when the ancient Jewish people went deep and discovered their prophetic voices—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—speaking truth to power, calling for justice from their own political and religious leaders. Their experience laid the solid foundation for Jesus’s teaching and his solidarity with the poor and the outcast.
Maybe some of us have naively thought that we could or should place our loyalty in one political agenda or party. Remember, Yahweh told the people of Israel that they should never put their trust in “princes, horses, or chariots” (Psalms 20:7, 33:16–17), but only in the love of God. We must not imagine that political changes of themselves will ever bring about the goodness, charity, or transformation that the gospel offers the world.
We must not be afraid to allow conventional wisdom to fail and disappoint us. This is often the only path to wisdom. Imperial thinking focuses on judging who is worthy and who is unworthy, who is in and who is out. We who know about universal belonging and identity in God have a different form of power: Love (even of enemies) is our habitat, not the “powers and principalities,” the kingdoms of this world.
The present disorder is our time of exile and has solidified in us an urgent commitment to our work of action and contemplation. It seems needed more than ever before! Grounding social action in contemplative consciousness is not a luxury for a few, but surely a cultural necessity. Both the Christian religion and the American psyche need deep healing, and I do not say that lightly.
Only a contemplative mind can hold our fear, confusion, vulnerability, and anger and guide us toward love. Those who allow themselves to be challenged and changed will be the new cultural creative voices of the next period of history after this purifying exile.
Exile from the Country We Love Can Happen While We Are Still Living in It
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes how praying with the Psalms can be an act of solidarity with our universal humanity:
The Psalms, with few exceptions, are not the voice of God addressing us. They are rather the voice of our own common humanity—gathered over a long period of time, but a voice that continues to have amazing authenticity and contemporaneity. It speaks about life the way it really is, for in those deeply human dimensions the same issues and possibilities persist. And so when we turn to the Psalms it means we enter into the midst of that voice of humanity and decide to take our stand with that voice. We are prepared to speak among them and with them and for them, to express our solidarity with this anguished, joyous human pilgrimage. We add a voice to the common elation, shared grief, and communal rage that besets uss. us all…. When we do, we shall find that the words of Scripture bring power, shape, and authority to what we know about ourselves. [1]
Exiled from Cuba, theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1943–2012) found solace in Psalm 137:
When I first read Psalm 137, I remember resonating with most of what the psalm says; I remember feeling it could appropriately voice the pain I was experiencing being away from my country against my will. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 I realized that my absence from Cuba was to a be a long one. Shortly after there came a day when my visa status changed from “tourist”: I became a refugee. Psalm 137 became my refuge: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept when we remembered Jerusalem” (137:1).
I recall vividly the day I dared to mention to a friend how much I identified with Psalm 137. Jokingly she answered me, “Are you going to hang your guitar from a tree?”… They were incapable of understanding the sorrow of being away from la tierra que mi vió nacer (the land that witnessed my birth). At times, my friends would ask me to talk about Cuba. Those around me could not figure out why I, who love to sing, always seemed reticent about singing “Guantamanera,” the song that uses for its verses poems from the father of my country, José Martí. One of them says,
Yo quiero cuando me muera
Sin patria pero sin amo
Tener en mi tumba
Un ramo de flores
Y una bandera.
I want when I die
without country but without master,
to have on my tomb
a bouquet of flowers
and a flag.
So I kept saying to myself, “How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” (137:4) [2]
Brueggemann concludes:
The psalms are not used in a vacuum, but in a history where we are dying and rising, and in a history where God is at work, ending our lives and making gracious new beginnings for us. The Psalms move with our experience. They may also take us beyond our own guarded experience into the more poignant pilgrimages of our sisters and brothers. [3]
An Illusion of Separateness
Father Richard Rohr explores a broad definition of the word “sin”:
The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It’s almost the only task of religion—to communicate not worthiness, but union; to reconnect us to our original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls that state of separateness “sin,” and its total undoing is stated frequently as God’s clear job description: “My dear people, we are already the children of God; it is only what is in the future that has not yet been revealed, and then all we know is that we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).
The word sin has so many unhelpful connotations in most of our minds that it’s very problematic today. For most of us, it does not connote a state of alienation or separateness. Instead, it connotes naughty behavior and personal moral unworthiness. But these are merely symptoms and not the state itself! Disconnected people will do stupid and harmful things. Instead, the core and foundational meaning of sin is any life lived autonomous and outside “the garden of Eden.” We cannot ever become perfect or “worthy,” but we can become reconnected to our Source.
Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God. That “who” is nothing we can earn or obtain. It’s nothing we can accomplish or work up to. Why? Because we already have it.
The biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. It’s about realization and not performance principles. We cannot get there; we can only be there, but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us.
The ego, however, makes it all about achievement and attainment. At that point, religion becomes a worthiness contest in which everybody loses—which they realize, if they’re honest. Many people give up on the whole spiritual journey when they see that they can’t live up to the performance principle. They don’t want to live as hypocrites.
Yet union with God is really about awareness and realignment, a Copernican revolution of the mind and heart that is sometimes called conversion. (Copernicus, of course, was the first to claim that the world revolves around the sun, not vice versa—a truly shocking revelation in the 16th century!) Following conversion, that deep and wondrous inner knowing, a whole new set of behaviors and lifestyle will surely emerge. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love and then I will—almost naturally—be moral.
Seeing the Oneness of Everything and Everyone
Christ in All Things by Richard Rohr and others.
Sunday
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.
—John 1:1, 3
Monday
Discovering Christ as the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe can transform the way we perceive and the way we live in our everyday world.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
God’s word to humanity is not primarily the word spoken in a book, in sacred literature, but it is a word that is incarnate, not only as a human being, but present as an element in all beings, in all created reality.
—Ursula King
Wednesday
On Christmas Eve, we celebrate a new beginning. We welcome the dawning of a new light.
—Brian McLaren
Thursday
Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it!
—Richard RohrFriday
Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality.
—Ilia Delio
Through Memories
I remember you in memories of running in the rain, of funny children’s stories, and haunted Halloweens. Of how you learned to hold me and simply let me cry, listening to my many fears to heal me of my fright. Of you overcoming phobias so I wouldn’t be alone while camping in the woods or giving talks on Type. Nightmare trips in broken cars and cabins full of scouts, houses filled with strangers and jeep rides in the night. Letters shared in parking lots and rooms filled with flowers, the kaleidoscope of memories that keeps our love alive.
Eileen 2000
Thomas our Twin
Welcome, children of God. And that is what every single soul that ever was or will be is…a beloved child of God.
Welcome, Doubting Thomases, whose logic troubles our faith. And that is also every single one of us.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
Did you ever notice that the apostle Thomas is called Thomas the twin. But his twin is never mentioned or named. That’s because his twin is in us, whether he is in our conscious or unconscious and whether we admit it or not.
Actually, this is good news, because that logical twin can help us keep from turning faith into superstition. And also, when we do experience or witness miracles, it helps us avoid the delusion that this life is supposed to be heaven and miracles will save us from all suffering.
The apostle Thomas’s logical mind not only paid attention to the miracles he witnessed, but unlike Peter, Thomas also accepted what Jesus said about the suffering ahead. So, when Jesus announced that he was going to Jerusalem, Thomas realized that this was not going to end well. But, Thomas responded, “Jesus, if you are going, I am coming with you.”
That, brothers and sisters, is love.
There are faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 