Signs

If you've been a reader of this blog, well, thanks for coming back.  You know, and new readers will see, that I'm a fan of the penultimate prophet, John the Baptist.  You don't have to go far into the archives to see a reference to Elijah hearing God as a "small, still voice".  I am fascinated by how the prophets came to know the message they were to convey, to see the path that they were to follow.  

If God is trying to reach any of us now, he has a lot more noise to cut through to deliver a message.  Not that I'm anything like a prophet, but I surround myself in constant static to interfere with the signal.  If discernment is needed, with twitter and TV, I can drown it in a constant stream of entertainment.  The good news should be that no message has to cut through the heavy fog of constant alcohol consumption, but distraction is still way too easy. 

I was in deep state of distraction when I read a tweet in my timeline from a writer I follow.  She asked for links to blogs with fewer than 1,000 page views per day.  Since this humble and ill-tended project doesn't get that kind of action in a year, I replied.

Curious to see what she might find, I paged back through the blog.  What I found surprised me. The blog contained a lot of advice that I needed to hear.   I knew that I had become complacent, but I hadn't admitted to myself how thoroughly I had withdrawn -- from friends, from prayer, from recovery, from growing.  My writing was an implicit indictment of how I've been shrinking from so much that has been before me.

I can take some steps in the right direction.  Advent offered a little nudge: prayer is regaining a more central place in my life.  The Advent wreath is in place during the first week of Advent!  But here's the deal: I'm not fixing this by myself.  My withdrawal and my desire for easy comfort grow from the same roots that fed my addiction.  

So, it's back to work.  I need to find community, e.g., friends, meetings, involvement in my church.  I need to find someone who holds me accountable.  I need to get outside myself through service. I could stand to write a little more, too.  Finally, I could express a little gratitude that a tweet could serve as an unanticipated sign along the way.

A Poem for Easter

Descending Theology: The Resurrection

BY MARY KARR

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,

cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—

till the hung flesh was empty.

Lonely in that void even for pain,

he missed his splintered feet,

the human stare buried in his face.

He ached for two hands made of meat

he could reach to the end of.

In the corpse’s core, the stone fist

of his heart began to bang

on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled

back into that battered shape. Now

it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water

shatters at birth, rivering every way.

Psalm 136

In the liturgical calendar, Sunday was the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time.  This year, we had readings from the second Book of Kings and Paul's second letter to Timothy.  The Gospel was from Luke.

The first reading and the Gospel had a couple of common themes: the first, healing lepers.  In the first reading, Naaman follows Elisha's direction and bathes seven times in the Jordan.  Finding that "[h]is flesh became again like the flesh of a little child..." he returned to Elisha, praising God, saying "...I will no longer offer holocaust or sacrifice to any other god except to the Lord."  In the Gospel, ten lepers met Christ as he entered a village.  Jesus directed the ten to show themselves to the priests, and, as they were on their way, they had been healed.  One of them, a Samaritan, returned to Christ; "he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him."  After he noted that ten were healed, but only one returned, he turned to the Samaritan and said, "Stand up and go; your faith has saved you."

The second, as clear as the first, is thanksgiving.  While we didn't hear Sunday how Naaman's story turned out, we know how Christ reacted to the Samaritan.  Your faith has saved you.

Magnificat, an excellent monthly magazine with the Masses of the month, liturgies, and commentaries, contained a striking synopsis of the readings:

As Christ makes his way to the cross, he accedes to the pleas of ten lepers for pity.  The consummation of the Samaritan leper's healing happens when he falls at the feet of Jesus in thanksgiving.  Which makes Jesus wonder, "Where are the other nine?"  Saint Paul warns "If we deny him, he will deny us." The formerly skeptical Naaman ... resolves to live the rest of his life worshiping no other god but the Lord.  For us fervent thanksgiving prevents us from ever denying God; it keeps us strong in the faith that saves us.

There is one other thing about the readings: each of the healed men expressed their gratitude in public, and I found myself accused.  I am profoundly grateful for my sobriety, but, over the last year, I have given voice to my thanks only in the comfort of my home or silently in church.  I haven't gone to a meeting.  I haven't written anything here for 13 months.  I'm sure my prayers of thanksgiving are happily received in heaven, and my prayers asking for the Lord to help addicts are answered.  But I'm not helping.

So, it's back to meetings, and it's back here to write from time to time - more regularly than once a year.

And, it was fitting and wonderful to pray Psalm 136 during vespers tonight:

O give thanks to the Lord for he is good,

for his love endures forever.

Milosz

An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven

What kind of man I was to be you’ve known since the beginning,
since the beginning of every creature.

It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously,
of what is, what was,
and what will be.

I began my life confident and happy,
certain that the Sun rose every day for me
and that flowers opened for me every morning.
I ran all day in an enchanted garden.

Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes
for another experiment altogether.
As if there were not proof enough
that free will is useless against destiny.

Under your amused glance I suffered
like a caterpillar impaled on the spike of a blackthorn.
The terror of the world opened itself to me.

Could I have avoided escape into illusion?
Into a liquor which stopped the chattering of teeth
and melted the burning ball in my breast
and made me think I could live like others?

I realized I was wandering from hope to hope
and I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me.
Is it a trial like Job’s, so that I call faith a phantom
and say: You are not, nor do your verdicts exist,
and the earth is ruled by accident?

Who can contemplate
simultaneous, a billion-times-multiplied pain?

It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you
deserve your praise.

But perhaps because you were overwhelmed by pity,
you descended to the earth
to experience the condition of mortal creatures.

Bore the pain of crucifixion for a sin, but committed by whom?

I pray to you, for I do not know how not to pray.

Because my heart desires you,
though I do not believe you would cure me.

And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer,
praising your name.

—Czeslaw Milosz 

• 45 MINUTES AGO

Shining like the sun

My sobriety date is June 18, 2007.  Nine months later, my daughter celebrated her 14th birthday.  We went out to dinner, and I mused on what can happen in nine months:  my beautiful daughter, formed and born; a drunk's radical transformation.  It was an evening of joy and gratitude.

That night, there was another anniversary to note.  The event, 50 years earlier, was far more subtle.  I think of it every time I see my daughter.  In his journal, on March 19, 1958, Thomas Merton wrote:

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were or could be totally alien to me...  I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.  As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are.  And if only everybody could recognize this!  But it cannot be explained.  There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

I really don't have anything to add.

Except Mark Judge's video with music by my favorite band, Crowded House.  Thanks, Mark.

Another video, same music:

A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory

A couple of weeks ago, I raised an objection to a practice in AA: introducing yourself as an alcoholic.  My point was that I didn't think it was helpful to define yourself in terms of your disordered desires.  Now, a countervailing thought, brought to you by one of my favorite inhabitants of tumblr, Irregular Theology:

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

This quote is attributed to Thomas Merton, but I haven't found a source.  Reading this passage, I wondered if I had unknowingly picked a fight with the good Trappist.  Certainly, there was a time in my life when I knew that my compulsion to drink was keeping me from living for what I wanted to live for.  Thank God, that time has passed, and I know that if I do my part, my desire to drink will not again crush my mind, body, and spirit.

 Upon reflection, Merton and I don't have a quarrel.  Merton describes a method to determine who you are at a point in time.  It's who you are here and now.  I think it would be valuable to use this question as the basis for an examination of conscience - a kind of Fourth Step, for you Twelve Steppers.

But, to be a valuable exercise, I'll need to be disciplined and rigorously honest.  Every day, every week, every month, I'm sure I'd point to something new that's preventing me from from the full life I'm hoping for.   And there are other dangers here.  I need to make sure that the thing I want to live for is not what my ego wants to live for, that this exercise isn't an opportunity for my will to impose itself.

Of course, great opportunities never appear without risk.  The opportunity here is that I can explore and  understand who I truly am and who God created me to be.  The Dominican mystic, Catherine of Siena, describes what constitutes success:

"If you are what you are meant to be, you will set the whole world on fire."

Off with his head

Today is the memorial of the Passion of John the Baptist.  Some will call the day by its less euphemistic title: the Beheading of John the Baptist.  We've seen more than our share of the horrors of beheading in recent years, brought to us by the profoundly evil, the cold-blooded.  John's beheading was no less terrible, the result of evil at its most capricious.

Of course, I can't say how John reacted to being led to the executioner.  Nonetheless, John was a man who lived to disappear into his vocation, a vocation that was his from the moment of his conception.  He leapt in his mother's womb at the meeting of Mary and the miraculously pregnant Elizabeth.  He famously declared his desire to "...decrease that he might increase."  He saw his life as pointing constantly to Christ.  He baptized the Savior for whom he made ready the path.  He heard the voice of the Father, saw the Holy Spirit's descent.  It was what he was born for.  I have to believe that he saw his death the same way.

In many respects, he represents what we should strive to be: attached only to Christ.  Dedicated to Christ, we should strive to decrease so that he might increase, preparing for his return.

I look to get out of my own way, to find a calling that leads me -- no, compels me -- to how he wants me to make the path ready.  To find myself living a life that is motivated by the polar opposite of a cold-blooded idea, to know that I could do nothing else.

Thanks, Colin.