Jun
28
Elisabeth and her Dad
I’ve always had this love affair with my stepdaughter’s beauty. Over the years I’ve taken many hundreds of photos of her; her amazing spirit calls to me, shining through her eyes and her smile. Now photographs from her wedding are going up on Facebook. Sometimes I just sit and stare at this radiantly beautiful bride with her adoring and adorable husband at her side.
Watching her at the wedding, I experienced the pang of loss that I’m sure many parents experience. As much as I love the poised and confident woman she has become, sometimes I miss the little girl who’ll never again need to sit in my lap or hold my hand.
But some of what I felt was a bittersweet awareness that by the time I was her age, I had already left behind a lot of wreckage. I had already made mistakes I couldn’t take back, mistakes that clouded my life and the lives of others. At her age, I still wasn’t fully aware that life wasn’t just happening to me, that I was creating my life with my choices. The sweetness came in recognizing that all my mistakes and missteps have been woven into the wisdom and promise that mark her life. Nothing I did was wasted because my hard-won lessons have contributed, in some small way, to making her life into something finer and brighter than my own life.
As I approach the age of my own mother when she died, I feel my mortality and already mourn the ways parts of my life have played out and cannot be changed. But looking at the beautiful young bride who is my daughter I also know that it is, indeed, a wonderful life.
Jun
20
Walked a labyrinth this afternoon, a beautifully crafted labyrinth made of stone nestled into a quiet courtyard. Labyrinths have appealed to me for years, although in practice I often walk away feeling I must be missing the full complement of spiritual genes.
While I’m sure everyone else is approaching nirvana, here’s what walking a labyrinth feels like to me:
- Getting in a rhythm is hard. I tend to speed up. Then remind myself to slow down. But at least I’m consistent; from start to finish, I’m speeding up, slowing down, never satisfied with how I’m performing.
- I forget my purpose. It’s a spiritual experience, not a competition to see how spiritual I can be.
- My head won’t stay where my feet are. I glance around again and again to see how far I’ve come and how far I have left to go.
- I’m never as close to the center as I think I am. A couple of twists and turns can take me right back to the outer edge again.
- Stepping out of the labyrinth has great appeal. Who’ll know? Who’ll care? Why am I doing this anyway? Is this really better use of a Sunday afternoon than going to the movies?
- When I reach the center, I think I’ve “arrived.” Then I remember the center is only a rest stop and the next right thing is simply to take one more step.
The point here is so obvious I’m afraid I risk sounding flippant, or as if I’m trying to make forced, not-so-cute correlations between life and labyrinth. I’m not. I’m always simply struck that the intricacy and beauty of the labyrinth’s pattern feels, when I’m in the middle of it, so much like the ordinary chaos of being human.
Jun
20
Happy Father’s Day.
The bullet points of my personal life can look pretty dismal. Relationship breakage and all that. I’m not going to point fingers — at this stage of my life, all the fingers point back at me. But I do want to say that it’s only in the last half-dozen of my 57-and-counting-really-fast years that I’ve begun to catch a glimpse of the gaping hole left by a father who wasn’t and never will be the man I admire most in the world.
He wasn’t a bad man. Just a seriously broken man. The problem is, to a girl who is 5 or 7 or 10 or 14, “seriously broken” can look a lot like “bad” when trying to look up to the man called father. I’m grateful now to understand his brokenness and to have sympathy and sorrow for him.
But I still wish I could look back and see signs that he was the leader of our family. That he was a kind man. An admirable man. A man of integrity or courage or strength. I wish I could look back and see that I’d learned what to expect of and believe about men from someone else. I wish I could look back with gratitude for a different kind of role model. Instead, I spent a good bit of my childhood hating myself for believing I was so much like him. I dragged those beliefs with me for a long time and let them drive a lot of my behavior.
So for all of you men who are making a real effort to lead and love and leave a legacy for sons or daughters, nieces or nephews, your best friends’ kids, even the young people you mentor at work, thank you for everything you do. You don’t have to do it perfectly. Just do it from a place of love and integrity. Happy Father’s Day.
Jun
4
Let me say it outright: I don’t have a prayer discipline any more.
For years, I did. Prayer was as much a part of my daily routine as brushing my teeth after breakfast. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I got bored. Maybe I outgrew what I was doing. Maybe I figured out I was getting cavities anyway, so what was the point?
Realizing I wasn’t praying scared me. So I did what any good recovering intellectual does when something troubling happens: I read up on it. I learned about a lot of cool ways that people experience prayer. I also learned that as a struggling pray-er I was in pretty good company. Priests and monks and saints have written about dry spells when prayer wouldn’t come. Most of them came to believe, from the other side of their dry spells, that this was a growth spurt in their relationship with God. I read that, over time, our relationship with God may change and the ways we communicate in that relationship may change, as well.
One day I heard something that changed not just my intellectual understanding of what was going on, but changed the way I actually experienced that period of distance from God. Someone said, “My life is a prayer.”
That meant, to me, that everything I did could be prayer, if I chose to see it that way. When I heard that, it gave me permission to let go of what I thought prayer ought to be so it could become a unique expression of a real relationship with God. For the first time, I really “got” the idea of praying without ceasing.
Prayer may be the silence that is pure contentment or the dark days when all I feel is the absence of God. Prayer may be a yearning so deep it can’t be expressed in words. It may express itself through service. It may be a song I can’t not sing or a poem that flows through me from nowhere. Maybe if I give up trying to control my prayer time, it leaves space for God to pray through me and express Divine desire for us and our world. Maybe prayer can become less about what I’m saying to God and more about what God is saying to me.
