Mourning With Bumps and Band-Aids

 I was in a hurry. Bending to pick up a shoe, I banged my head on the sharp corner of a shelf. A huge bump — my nurse friend called it a ”hematoma” — immediately rose on my forehead bringing pain to me and horror to my children. No serious injury occurred but the wound remained visible for days. I covered it with a band-aid - more to spare others its unsightliness than to protect my head. I soon discovered that the band-aid and the bump served a purpose I had not anticipated. They signaled to the world that I was hurting and vulnerable.

My mother died a week earlier after a long and painful disability. Her death left a deep psychic wound. There was a rawness about my pain. Sometimes I needed to talk about it. Sometimes I couldn’t. Meanwhile, the business of my life continued relentlessly. Healing had to be squeezed in between the carpool and the church meeting.

However, this band-aid stopped people. “What happened to you?” they asked. Sometimes I responded, “I bumped my head.” Sometimes I said, “My mother died.”

I wanted the world to know of my loss but I didn’t always want to talk about it. The bump and bandaid were my psyche’s way of declaring my need for special consideration.

Grieving is neither well understood nor accepted in our culture. We seek to tame its wildness by describing a predictable “process” with inevitable “stages”. We are told to “work through” our grief as we “let go” of our loved ones. There is, it seems, a “right way” to grieve.

I long for the days when grieving was more mysterious and we who grieve were given time and space to allow the inevitable transformations to happen within us. To burn a candle, to gather after a month or forty days, to ritually observe the loosening of the bonds — these make sense to me. They are public ways of honoring private grief without dictating the form or content one’s healing should take.

Black armbands or head coverings, crepe hanging over doors — these were the bumps and band-aids of past generations. They discreetly informed the public that here were individuals in a special condition of vulnerability. Here were people adjusting to a world that had been made unacceptable by their loss. Here were individuals, they signaled, who bore within them a need for special care.

Alas! Crepe no longer hangs over our doors. Armbands and head coverings no longer protect us. We are left to heal as best we can in the spaces we create. Bumps and band-aids will have to do.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, Faith in A Minor Key.

Play

Our verb “to play” gets a lot of work. It comes from a very old Dutch word that means to “dance, leap for joy, and rejoice”. The dictionary tells us that a person is playing when they “move about in a lively, irregular, or capricious motion”.

We like the word “play”. We use it for lots of reasons. We have playmates and playgrounds, and we attend plays in theaters. We play chess, music, ball, cards, and so many other activities. We play musical instruments. If we can’t instruments, we play radios, records or a tape.

Sometimes we use the word to describe a mechanical defect. We say there’s too much “play” in the steering wheel. Sometimes we just play “at” something rather than seriously pursue it.

It’s not always pleasant. No one likes to play second fiddle, and certainly no one wants to be played.

In the 18th century, there was a proverb that went “the wise child handles father and mother by playing one against the other”.

Some players are “professional" - as in baseball, blackjack, or bassoons. But amateurs play these things too. The difference is in the money. 

Animals play. Even machines play. For example, until very recently everyone had either a record or CD play-ers

Savvy scientists are developing sophisticated robots that seem to “dance, leap for joy, and rejoice”. They certainly move about with “lively, irregular, and capricious motions”. But as Mr. Shakespeare would say, “there’s the rub”. There is nothing spontaneous about robotic play. The playfulness of robots, if such there be, resides in their human creators. 

In an extraordinary book written in the 1930s, Johan Huizinga demonstrated that nearly everything we do is an expression of our innate playfulness. Playfulness is the fecund fountain of all human invention.

A new recipe? Play. A new mobile phone? Play. A new go-cart for a Sunday drive on the Martian surface? Play. A world war? Play. A treaty to end the war? That's play too. Seriously!

Even the most somber religions embody a deeply playful impulse. Their adherents may not know it, but a gloomy countenance may be their way of playing. Why are there so many theologies, liturgies, and practices? Because without these playful inventions, religion grows stale. Without an awareness of its playful, inventive core, religion becomes oppressive and fuels our worst impulses.

It matters a great deal what we play and how we play. Too often the joyful and life-affirming spirit of playfulness is perverted. Too many people today play only sinister and violent games.

Every day our elected officials play. But what games do they choose to play? “Sim City”? Or “Mortal Kombat”? “Coop-etition” or “Game of Thrones”?

Intentional play is humanizing, empowering, and life-affirming. It expands our capacity to interact joyfully with the world. It is the defining characteristic of all life on this planet. Play is a sacred gift to be cherished and developed for as long as we live.

Silent Places of the Past

Ask the Horse

Zen in Black and White Art Watercolor

(Pinterest.com 570 x 814) 

Hans Küng, a great 20th Century theologian, passed away last month in Tübingen. I remember a moving speech he gave at Riverside Church years ago. He described the spiritual desolation he has known after the Shoah. Someone asked him how anyone can believe in anything after the Holocaust. How can we believe in a higher vision, a nobler calling or a greater purpose for our lives?

He paused and breathed deeply. "I can understand those who turn away after this. But as for me, I can only go on because I believe in God. Belief in God helps me overcome such catastrophic events."

About the same time, I heard Dainin Katagiri, a Zen Roshi, speak about our situation. Contemporary civilization is like a rider who storms through a village on a runaway horse. People shout, "Where are you going?" He yells back, "Ask the horse!"

Once we were confident of our purposes and destiny. We trusted the advances won by education, the inventions spawned by technology and the idealism generated by liberal faith. For lots of reasons, this confidence has been shaken. The vast gains of knowledge, our technological strides, and the rich accumulations of centuries of cultural development — these only render more tragic our present disarray.

Ask the horse! We find ourselves in a world we can neither fully understand nor can reject as unintelligible. We are driven by goals we cannot hope to reach yet cannot accept as unreachable. We teeter between belief and unbelief, between an almost limitless faith in our own abilities and a disgust at the pettiness, stupidity and cruelty of a race bent on conflict and destruction. Hatred - and fear - in countless variations perpetuate human degradation.

Ask the horse! Shall we agree with Thomas Hobbes that human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? Or reconcile ourselves to what Sigmund Freud called the “normal unhappiness” of human existence?

For Küng, “No!” “Belief” means we may expect to know someday the answer to the question first posed by Leibniz: “Why is there something and not nothing?” For Katagiri, “No!” as well. “Liberation” comes in realizing that “something” and “nothing” are the same. For both Küng and Katagiri, the suffering of this world can awaken deep compassion in us. Compassion is the bridle that controls the horse. For both savants, all striving for justice is absolutely justified. For each of them, in vastly different ways, truth will be known and divisions will be overcome.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

A Doll for Mom

My mother came to me in a dream, but she had something real to say. Both she and my father had passed away a few years earlier. Apparently, in my conversations, I would talk forever about my Dad - a firefighter, my scoutmaster, my sister's Sunday School teacher, etc.

"Buddy," she said in this dream, "all I hear is 'my father this' and 'my father that'. Well, I had a hand in raising you too! Who sat with you when you had all those broken bones? Who helped you with your homework? Who was your Cub Scout den mother? Who got you dressed for church on Sunday mornings and school days the rest of the week? Didn't I play a role in your upbringing?" Well, she was right. I was embarrassed and apologetic. She had done all that while working a difficult nursing career and helping lots of others in the family, church and neighborhood. At only 4'6" at her tallest, nevertheless she was a powerhouse. I wouldn't have had as satisfying a life had it not been for my mother's tireless care.

 
Years later I bought her a porcelain flamenco doll while in Spain. (She had a large doll collection.) My friends laughed at me because she was, well, no longer living. "Just because she's dead doesn't mean I can't buy her a doll," I said defensively. Mom came to me in another dream that night too. She wanted to thank me for the doll, tell me she loved it, and reassure me that the journey home would go smoothly. It did.

 
We never outgrow our parents; they leave us all too soon. Sometimes memories are all we have. I have many wonderful memories, but we (mom and I) also have that doll!

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

Ancestors

Camp Ihduhopi, Loretto, MN

It rained all weekend. We gathered in the lodge for our annual retreat. A large fire crackled in the massive fireplace. We had been instructed to bring photographs or other objects from at least one of our ancestors, people who had gone before us and helped shape who we are. 

Our leader met us at the door. Lakota by birth, for years she helped deepen our understanding of our place in the universe. Now she asked us to put our chairs in a circle and place the photographs and memorabilia of our ancestors behind us around the circle. We never formally introduced these ancestors, yet they became a real presence through the weekend. We came to realize that we live always in their presence; they are with us even now.

While we were conducting the business of the church, a large spider lowered herself from the ceiling. “Ah!” Wilma said. “One of our relatives has come to visit.” With that, she began to help us understand how we exist in a living biosphere of interdependent life forms. Two-legged, four-legged, eight-legged, no-legged, thousand-legged - each has a niche, a sacred place. Trees too, and birds and fish. share this web of life. The massive outcroppings of rock rising from deep within the earth have stories to tell. We are relatives. We must live and make decisions that are respectful of all these relatives.

This was a planning retreat. She wanted us to see that every decision affects our children and their children, but also the progeny of all our planetary relatives. She encouraged us to consult our ancestors when we were uncertain.

She talked of spirit guides and the Great Spirit - whom she called Grandfather and, sometimes, Wakan Tanka. She spoke of the Medicine Wheel and gifts that proceed from its sacred directions.

That was many years ago. But as we move through Covid, police violence, and our polarized political landscape, as we witness now and anticipate more devastation wrought by climate change, I often return to that rainy weekend and roaring fire, that descending spider and sacred circle. We were friends and ancestors sitting together. We were not alone. We never are. I want to live in such a way that I honor our ancestors, care for our relatives, and prepare a brighter future for our children.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

From: Faith in a Minor Key

Homily or Sermon?

In recent months I have found myself wanting to substitute the word “homily” for “sermon” in our Sunday orders of worship. “This is curious,” I said to myself. “What is this about?”

At first, I suspected my desire to appear more southern than I have a right to claim to be. Homily. Hominy. Homily. Hominy. Homily.  Hominy. This word association evokes all things truly southern. The very sound of it suggests a languid, non-pretentious, warm morning, southern repast. Perhaps I will even develop a drawl.

“Hominy” derives from the Algonquin term for grain; it never occurs alone. What is its partner? “Grits.” True grits. Real Southerners spot us interlopers a mile away: 

"Sir, what would you like for breakfast?" 

“I’ll have a grit.”

“A grit? I’m sorry, sir. They never come alone.”

I think a good sermon ought to be a little “gritty”, don’t you? Grits on your plate keep you humble. The best upscale sermons ever savored still have some down-home common sense about them.

But I don’t think this is it. My Catholic friends point out that they “do” homilies while Protestants “do” sermons. So maybe there’s a wannabe priest lurking in my robe. But while I confess to being an ecu-maniac, and believe with every fiber of my being that we should work that “all may be one”, I have no desire to exchange the riotous freedoms of my tradition for the particular restrictions of another.

I asked my erudite colleagues to tell me the difference between a homily and a sermon. No one seems to know. I asked you who sit through them. “Homilies are shorter,” you say. With all due respect, I think you beg the question. Certainly my homilies are not shorter. (“Pastor,” pleaded one member, “your words don’t have to be eternal in order for them to be immortal.”)

Finally I looked in the dictionary. Homily is rooted in the Greek homi-letikos, meaning "conversation." Sermon comes directly from medieval Latin for "speech", and that probably derives from serere, “to link together or string together” like beads on a necklace. While both words carry the meaning of “a religious discourse before a congregation,” the nuance of homily is “an informal exposition usually of Scripture.” Sermon carries the additional shade of “an annoying harangue”.

I am allergic by temperament to harangues. I cherish dialogue. I like the thought that what I say from the pulpit is one piece of a much longer conversation that has been going on for centuries.

So as I prepare for our worship, perhaps I  am asking myself this question: “What shall it be this Sunday? An informal exposition, or an annoying harangue? A speech, or a searching  conversation?”

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, in Faith in a Minor Key.