Meditations 4 Misfits

“Be careful when drawing near to G-d. Seek not to sacrifice or appease; seek only to hear.” – Rami Shapiro 

“The doors of hell are locked from the inside …”  – C.S. Lewis 

In this podcast, Fred shares how he tries to hear from God. 

As I sat weeping next to Sam’s just deceased body, what I missed most was the playful glint behind those beautiful blue Irish eyes. They truly were the window to his kind and gentle soul.

He had been a strapping young lad from Wisconsin camping in the Grand Tetons when Mary and her family arrived for their vacation. Sam and Mary hit it off straight away and, in fact, Sam followed Mary’s family back to Utah. He simply showed up on her doorstep and never left. That was 76 years ago, and part of the story Alzheimer’s had erased from Sam’s memory bank.

Also gone was a lifetime of working for the forestry service, raising two loving sons, untold hours fishing, and traveling the country with Mary in their little camper. Bedbound for the last several years of his life, as his body ever-so-slowly diminished so did a lifetime of memories and even an awareness of who he was.

What did not diminish, however, was that playful kindness in those deep blue eyes. Always present to the moment, Sam loved to laugh and tease. After months of visits and simple conversations Sam could vaguely remember my face but not who I was or why I was there. Most of the time I simply told Sam his own life story. It all started naturally enough. On one of my first visits, those blue eyes looked like a deer’s caught by headlights as Sam told me he couldn’t remember who he was or why he was still here. So, I just started to remind him. As I told him his own life story, those blue eyes began to water and relax. When I told him he was a good man and had lived a good life he smiled. That mischievous Irish grin captured my heart.

Over the months Sam taught me so much about living in the present moment. That’s all we really have anyway. With him, the present was all there was. He taught me how lost we can get when we forget who we are, when we forget our story—and how important it is to have good friends and loved ones to remind us. He also taught me about emotional investing. Because of the love he had deposited into others throughout his 90-plus years of living, he earned great dividends and was able to benefit from those investments when they were needed. His memory bank may have been depleted, but his emotional and relational accounts continued to thrive.

The night before he died, Mary and their daughter-in-law Joyce were up caring for him and got no sleep. The next afternoon, Mary had just laid down to get some rest in the next room. She told me she really didn’t sleep—she called it being in a “twilight zone”—when she saw a golden luminous ball suddenly appear on the door of the bedroom. She was thinking, “Is that Sam’s spirit?” when Lynn came in to tell her that Sam had just passed away.

Was that luminous golden ball that manifested on Mary’s bedroom door Sam’s spirit as she believes? Was it the divine spark that animated the playful glint behind his beautiful blue eyes? I don’t know. But what I do know is that my own life has been incredibly enriched by simply spending hours with a good man, basking in the glow of his love with and for Mary, and having the distinct privilege of re-telling this kind man with the beautiful blue eyes the story he actually lived.

Our God Concepts greatly influence how we live our lives and relate to others. In this reflection on Jeremiah Chapter 1, Fred asks us to consider what we “see” when we think of God.  

Sitting next to Jake’s bed as he lay dying, watching his fitful sleep, I noticed the framed sign on the wall near his bed in the adult foster home. It read: “When I was a kid, I prayed every night for a bicycle, but then I found out this isn’t the way God works. So then I stole one and asked Him for forgiveness.”

A hard life of drugs, alcohol, and rock-n-roll had taken its toll on Jake’s forty-something-year-old body. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, living fast and dying young doesn’t always leave a good-looking corpse. Nearly all of Jake’s teeth had rotted out, save the bicuspid on his upper right side. His abdomen was greatly distended (bloated) from terminal liver disease. And Jake was painfully afraid of death.

Jake had some sort of a Baptist background and had loved to play the drums. Years before, as a result of his addictions, Jake had deserted his wife and daughter in pursuit of his dreams. When I first met him, he told me that all he wanted was to see them again, to be given a last chance to “make things right.” Mercifully, his ex-wife and daughter did come to see him, bringing along a newborn grandson whom Jake had never seen. It was a beautiful reunion with a lot of love and grace. Before they left, Jake’s family made a collage of family pictures and mounted it on the wall next to the framed sign. Jake was so proud of his family. He would lie for hours on his side, simply looking at the collage and delighting in the pictures of his grandson.

But now, weeks later, he was dying, and I was sitting there praying for him. Several times he woke up in pain. His care giver, Joe, and I repositioned him to ease his way. I moistened his lips and mouth with one of those pink sponge swabs soaked in water.

Looking at the pictures of his daughter and grandson, I thought of how much Jake had missed out on as he wandered the world looking for his place to fit. What if everything his thirsty soul had longed for was right there at home the whole time?

Earlier that morning, I’d read some lines from Antony the Great, the first of the desert fathers. “What must one do in order to please God? Pay attention to what I tell you. Whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes. Whatever you do, do according to the testimony of the Holy Scriptures. Wherever you live, do not easily leave it. Keep these three precepts, and you will be saved.”

We’re all looking for a place to fit. We’re all looking for a meta-narrative, a grand story that helps explain our lives, makes sense of our existence, and provides a source of meaning to our days. Often, we don’t need to travel to discover that story. I think that’s why St. Antony tells us, if we find that place, we should not easily leave it.

I was still lost in these thoughts, when Joe the care giver’s two young daughters arrived home from school and went running down the hallway outside of Jake’s door fighting about something. I said a short benediction for Jake and bade him Godspeed.

As I pulled out of the driveway, I noticed in the rearview mirror two young Mormon missionaries cresting the hill behind me. Their starched white shirts and black ties were a sharp contrast to the gray overcast November sky behind them. Two more pilgrims searching for a place to fit, I thought. Aren’t we all … aren’t we all?

In this reflection on the Gospel of John chapter 21, Fred shares how Jesus invites us to the place of hot, burning coals not to shame us but to liberate us. 

“It’s when we won’t let go of a thing that we are defeated by it. ‘Let me go…’ says the Spirit of God. And Jacob answers, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’ And therein lies the secret of winning all the struggles of our lives. We must learn to let go of them so that we can come to the blessings hidden within them.” – Joan Chittister

More wisdom from Thomas Merton …

“There has to be a real fear by which you orient your life. What you fear is an indication of what you seek. What do I fear most? Forgetting … who I am, to be lost in what I am not, to fail my own inner truth …”