A Good Read

I love to read. I guess that’s not much of a surprise since I also love to write. I can’t remember NOT knowing how to read. Some of my earliest memories are sitting on my daddy’s lap when he’d come in at the end of his workday. We’d read the newspaper together. When I started school, I remember my first grade teacher announcing that we were going to learn to read. I walked to her desk, convinced there’d been some kind of grave mistake and I asked if I could go on home, since I already knew how to read. That didn’t quite work out as I’d hoped. Thankfully the world of books has never let me down. And the more I read, the more I know what I like.

Two of my favorite authors reward me with characters and stories that engage me on many levels, challenge what I think and believe and make me take a new look at myself. Dean Koontz is known as a writer of suspense thrillers. I love his stories because he’s so adept at describing our suffering in this broken world and the grace that we’re offered to get us through and transcend it. His characters are sometimes weird and strange but then, so am I. There’s always hope and redemption in a Koontz book. Plus, he creates great dog characters which is always the mark of a good writer, in my opinion. I mean if you can understand dogs, you must have a great world-view.

My other favorite writer is Flannery O’Connor. As far as I’m concerned, she’s in a class of her own. So much has been written already about the characters and themes in her stories. I relate to her on a very personal level. She’s a fellow Georgian, a fellow Catholic (as is Dean Koontz) and a fellow odd-duck. Or maybe I should say “peacock” since she raised those birds on her family farm in Milledgeville. She suffered from lupus for many years before eventually dying from it. I watched my own mother battle the same disease for the last decade of her life. So Flannery and I share some things in common.

Every time I read her stories or letters she surprises me. She never fails to make me laugh, too. I love her understanding of human nature and how even in our most sinful moments, the possibility of supernatural grace never leaves us. The presence of Christ permeates us and the world and nothing can separate us from that. And there’s the real rub, isn’t it? If Christ really is the Son of God and He really did die on the Cross and rise from the dead to save us, then EVERYTHING is changed by Him. O’Connor seizes on that “supposition” and shocks us with her crazy Southern (is that redundant?) characters. No sinner is beyond God’s redemptive love, not even the most lost of us. And if Christ isn’t God and He didn’t suffer and die to save us from getting what we all deserve—-then nothing matters. Go and do what you want and live as hard and as fast as you can because your only goal is pleasure before it’s lights out.

Koontz and O’Connor are just two examples of Catholic writers who reveal God to me. Through using their gifts and talents, I can see the actions of grace in unexpected people and situations. Both writers use the grotesque and bizarre, the misbegotten and the twisted to shock us out of our everydayness. They don’t tapdance around sin or redemption: they shout it out loud and point with grand gestures just to make sure we don’t miss it. They highlight the worst in us so that the Light of Christ shines all the brighter. And that’s what we’re all called to do in our lives. We can’t all be gifted writers like these two, but we can use our own talents and vocations to let Christ shine through us.

“If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw everything away and follow Him.”
–from “A Good Man Is Hard To
Find” by Flannery O’Connor

“Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood. Evil has a wholesome, hometown face with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.”
–from “The Mask” by Dean
Koontz

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
–from “A Temple of the Holy
Spirit” by Flannery O’Connor

The Darkness Around Us

The mother slaps her child in anger. She locks him in his room at night and lets him cry, unfed and unloved. The mother sees the child as a problem, perhaps even as a punishment. She feels trapped and she takes her anger and fear and sadness out on the boy. He is a reminder to her of all she has lost and all she will never have. We see her and her child. She is accused and despised. The system we have built rescues the child from her. He is the victim and we use the system to try and make him whole. His future is now our future.  

Another mother also feels trapped. She sees the child within her as a problem, perhaps even as a punishment. She is sad and fearful. She goes to her room at night and cries, unfed and unloved. She thinks of a solution to her problem and goes to a clinic, which is not a clinic at all but a slaughterhouse. Inside the clinic, and inside the woman, the child’s head is crushed with forceps. What was once a baby is now sold for parts in the marketplace the system props up. We see the woman but do not want to know her. We do not want to know what happens inside the “clinic” or inside the woman. It is, after all, her choice. Her choice is our choice and that choice is our future.  

We like to believe that our lives are our own. We like to believe that because the alternative to believing is too horrible to bear. What if my choices ripple out to affect the world? What if we really are part of the family of man, living here for a time, and bound to one another in ways beyond our knowing? That binding together makes us responsible for one another. What I choose to do isn’t merely my choice because every action creates the world in which we live today.

The world. Created in the beginning in love and perfection, it was our first parents whose actions brought death into being. Death, and decay, and pain, and sin. What they did, in that garden long ago, is with us every moment. The ripples of that sin infect every living soul on earth today. We carry within our hearts the seed of that turning away from Love. And sin begat sin, from Adam and Eve down to you and me.  

And so it goes. The mother kills the child in her womb. The baby is sold for scrap. Home invaders kill a sleeping couple in Seattle. A teenaged girl is beaten to death by a mob in Kansas City. In Chicago, a young man shoots a gun from his car, killing a toddler playing in her front yard. A couple in Delaware electrocutes the handicapped man for whom they’re paid to care. A boy in Boston sets fire to a dog. A woman in Miami poisons her grandmother. In Chattanooga, a terrorist guns down 5 military men at a service center. In Louisiana, a man shoots two innocent people in a movie theater before killing himself. Is all this violence connected? Does violence breed more violence? Or does living in a violent world make us so numb to murder that taking an innocent life no longer seems unusual? In the end, it doesn’t matter which is true.  

What remains true is that we have no right to be outraged by the violence. We forfeited that self-righteousness when we embraced and funded the killing of babies in the womb. Since Roe vs. Wade in 1973, we have killed more than 50 million children. The killing fields are not in some far-off land, but in our neighborhoods, in our homes. In our hearts. Every day that this murder of innocents continues, is another day of our accountability. And another day of our building a more violent world. Until we protect and defend human life from conception until natural death, we lose any credibility as a culture. We can’t fund abortions and at the same time be appalled and outraged by the violence around us. If we continue to believe that the murder and violence in our world isn’t connected to the murder of abortion, we’re lying to ourselves. We’re lying in the Face of the very Truth Who created the world and sustains our every breath. He offers us His life that ours might be saved for eternity. We can accept that grace and create a more peaceful world, or we can continue on the murderous path we’ve chosen into the wilderness, in the valley of the shadow of death.

“Beneath the bleeding Hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the 

  Healer’s art.”

           —T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” 

Kindness

She’s out there almost every day of the year. Now in her nineties, sometimes the weather keeps her inside, but even that is rare. When the tide goes out on the beach near her home, she goes walking. You’ll see her with her head bent searching the rocks, bundled against the constant wind, carefully stepping down along the way in her rubber boots. She’s looking for starfish. In this part of Ireland, the tides are quick and extreme, by our standards. And when the waters pull back out to sea, they strand starfish on the rocks. Unable to swim, they’re stuck there until the next tide comes in, many hours later. If the sun is out, they can dry up and die. My sweet old friend can’t bear that, so she patrols her stretch of beach and when she finds a stranded starfish, she picks it up and drops it in the basket she carries. She says when she was younger she’d throw each one back into the water as soon as she’d find it, but that doing that now is hard on her shoulder. She waits til she’s done and then empties her basket into the sea when she’s finished with her walk. You see, she’s been doing this for more than sixty years. How many starfish do you think you’ve returned to the water in all those years, I ask her. Oh, a lot, I imagine, she says. I do a little math and calculate that her efforts have easily helped more than a hundred thousand starfish over the decades.

My friend doesn’t know the Loren Eisley story about the man who saves starfish, like she does. In the story when he’s confronted about the futility of his mission, it doesn’t faze him. “You can’t save them all. What you’re doing doesn’t make a difference.” The old man picks up another starfish and throws it back into the water. “It makes a difference to this one,” he replies.

You could certainly argue that the limited efforts of one old lady on a tiny stretch of beach aren’t going to effect starfish populations worldwide. True. I even wonder how many of those starfish get picked up and “saved” again after the next low tide. But that misses the point, I think, just as the often-told Eisley story misses the point. For me, it’s not about the starfish, but it’s about how acts of kindness change our own hearts. And the world.

I believe that kindness is its own reward. You never know the effects of an act of kindness, nor is that even a consideration for us. As Christians, we’re called to charity and sacrifice. That’s how we follow Jesus. We give because He gives. We love because He loves. We bend over and pick up the fallen and the stranded because that’s what He does for us. We don’t stop to consider the cost of our kindness or even the “good” that it accomplishes. We just do it. We reflect Christ’s charity, which is freely given to everyone, whether they treasure it or not. The act of loving and caring for others is transformational in and of itself. Kindness exercises the muscles of our hearts just as a workout at the gym exercises the muscles of our arms, our legs, and our core.

Over the decades, my friend has enjoyed her walks on the beach every day and she’s doubtless helped thousands of starfish in the process. But what she’s really done is to live a life caring for the least of God’s creations. Everyone who sees her is reminded that we can all make a difference in the world, and that no act of charity is ever lost. God sees even our smallest kindnesses: a smile, a hug, a word of encouragement. Or one little starfish given another chance to live another day.

“The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.”
—-Victor Hugo

Love Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated

We can take something as simple as “love your neighbor” and make it incredibly complicated. Those of us who follow Jesus Christ know that love is the heart of His message and He went about showing us how to live that love during His ministry here. We see Him healing sick people, bringing dead people back to life, comforting folks who are grieving and befriending folks most people avoided, like tax collectors and lepers and adulterers. And He ate and drank a lot, with anyone He could find. Loving others like Jesus loves seems pretty simple when we read the Gospels, but when we look around today, sometimes it feels like Christianity is more of a business than a love affair.  

And that’s understandable since any time a group of people come together for a common purpose, an organization will grow up to provide oversight. Girl Scouts have troops, baseball players have teams, churches have pastors and bishops. But I’m not talking about churches or denominations. This is about how we Christians, as individuals, have made our faith overly-complex. I’m pretty sure none of the twelve Apostles had advanced degrees in theology. And yet they took what Jesus had taught them and the grace He shared with them—-and changed the world.  

Love your neighbor. That’s what Jesus did. His neighbors were the people He came across in His daily life. They were His family, the folks at the synagogue, the fishermen and farmers and shepherds that He encountered each day. They were the sick people who came to Him to be cured and the Pharisees who came to Him to condemn Him. He met them in the moment, where they were, with an openness of heart. He listened to what they had to say. When they were in the wrong, He corrected them. Remember, “go and sin no more”(John 8:11). How about “you serpents, generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell?”(Matthew 22:33). He cut through all pretense and social convention to meet their needs.  

How do we love like He loves? This is one of the great questions we should be asking ourselves every day. It never gets old to ask it. And it never feels as if we know the full answer. Maybe the answer is one of the things St. Paul was writing about when he said, “For now, we see through a glass darkly…”(I Corinthians 13:12). While that may be true, right now, we’re here on earth, trying to love, trying to get it right. So I have a challenge for all of us this week. This week, we’re going to love like Jesus.  

Let’s talk less and listen more. When we’re tempted to judge, let’s remember our own sins and lay that rock back down. When we see a problem that we can solve, let’s solve it. Pick up the trash, hold open the door, meet up for lunch, and make that overdue phone call. Connect with the friends and family and neighbors that we’ve been neglecting. Mend the fence. Right the wrong. Forgive the slight. Help someone else when it isn’t convenient or easy. And then keep that helping to yourself. Be a pushover this week and see how it makes you feel. As St. Ignatius prays, “Lord, teach me to give and not to count the cost.” Just for this week, let’s try not counting the cost of our love—either in time or in energy or effort. Just for this week, let God keep score of how well we’re doing.  

“I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, He will NOT ask, “How many good things have you done in your life?” Rather, he will ask, “How much LOVE did you put into what you did?”

       —-St. Teresa of Calcutta