Jan
16
By Peg
Categories: Occupy Love, Spiritual heroes, Uncategorized
Tags: big dreams, Civil disobedience, Hope, Spiritual heroes
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Oct
23
His eyes were beautiful – blue and clear, set in a sun-browned face so lined and leathered that it spoke to the state of his life – homeless – and the length of time it had been so.
But his eyes were luminous.
I know because I looked him directly in those eyes when I rolled down my window and gave him a few dollars. When I did, he gave me the gift of a smile that rose up from some sweet spot inside him and came to rest in his eyes. I’m reading a lot into those few seconds, I know. It was that kind of moment.
As I drove away, I had a pious thought that tries to pass itself off as gratitude but is actually more about keeping myself feeling secure within the confines of my safely-mortgaged lives.
“There but for the grace…”
The thought turned sour before I finished the phrase.
Oh, really? Like God’s grace doesn’t extend to that man with the smile in his eyes? Or to the frazzled woman standing at the bus stop wearing a pair of worn-to-the-pavement shoes? Or the 24 children who will die of hunger around the world in the two minutes it takes to read what I’ve written? What about the bright young people who should have brilliant futures ahead of them but will nevertheless die of cancer or addiction or suicide or texting-while-driving? God doesn’t provide grace for those people?
The God I believe in provides grace for everyone. And when I can drive away from a homeless man on the street and think somehow that God’s grace protects me from a fate like his, I wonder if I am living not in a state of grace but in a state of arrogance.
I do not believe God showers grace only on those of us who pray fervently enough or worship in the right church or read the right holy literature. I don’t know why some of us seem blessed and some of us have lives that look like a train wreck from hell. But I believe grace rains down on all of us.
Maybe some of us turn our backs on that grace.
Maybe some of us take the grace that’s available to us and use it to build walls that separate us from them.
Maybe some of us do the best we can to grow into that grace, knowing that it’s okay if we never quite get it right.
Maybe for some people, grace shows up as having the humility to ask for handouts on the street. And to do so with clear blue eyes that smile a blessing on someone with plenty, who might then be lifted out of her self-absorption long enough to remember that she does not have a corner on God’s grace.
Jun
18
My favorite father and daughter
Who can say why we fall in love?
A shrink who once helped me become a little less crazy said the attraction that we think of as love starts in a place he called our “lizard brain,” the seat of our most primitive and deeply rooted instincts and responses to life.
The last time I fell in love, here’s what my lizard brain saw and responded to: a devoted father.
Strong, admirable father figures had been in short supply in my life. I didn’t even know it mattered, didn’t know I cared. I see now that the lack stunted my life, starved me emotionally and drove behaviors that ultimately left me even more empty and even more emotionally hungry. There have been times in my life when I even railed against the idea of a Creator who seemed like little more than an absentee father to a hurting and broken world.
Then a father and his daughter came into my life. They shared their life with me and, in doing so, gave me the kind of family that had been my lifelong craving. In doing so, they made me a better person than I ever expected to be.
We are now living out our own quirky version of happily-ever-after that has even transcended our divorce eight years ago. But no matter what else has happened in our lives, he has always, always, been the kind of father I would have ordered for myself if we could build our lives from an a la carte menu. He always loved his daughter unconditionally, even when he could have been excused for wringing her neck. When she was little, he knew how to gently but firmly use the Daddy Voice to let her know beyond a doubt when she was approaching the limits of acceptable behavior. He treated her with respect in all ways, at all times. He understood that she was his to protect and to teach, but not his to control or live through. Time and time again, he tossed out everything he believed about himself in order to become a better man, a man worthy of her respect and love.
When Elisabeth was two years old, the two of them were in the car one day and he fired up one of the cigarettes he then smoked at the rate of three packs a day. She looked at him and, with all the authority a two-year-old can wield, said, “Daddy, throw that out.” He did. He quit cold turkey.
That was about the time they came into my life.
Who can say why we fall in love, except perhaps in retrospect.
Jun
17
Jim and Peg, about 1970
Jimmy is my brother. My half-brother, really. Eight years older than I am, my father’s son from his first marriage. I adored him. He is the first male I trusted and the last one I worshipped.
He taught me to make a monkey face for family photos. He told me slightly twisted fairy tales at bedtime. And I can say with confidence that Jimmy would have done anything for me – I once had the photograph to prove it: a black-and-white snapshot of 14-year-old Jimmy sitting on a coin-operated rocking horse outside a tourist stop in the Smoky Mountains. The humiliation is clear on his face. He endured it only because six-year-old Peggy begged him to do it. In the photo I’m standing on tip-toe beside him, a goofy grin on my face.
My brother didn’t live with us. When we took him back to his mother’s house on Sunday evenings, I would stare through the back window of our ‘58 Ford Fairlane until the house where he lived disappeared, stifling sobs.
Jimmy became Jim. He joined the Alabama National Guard. He became a husband and father. Somewhere along the line he became a man of faith, a man who refused to be the kind of father our father had been. Today, Jim is also a stepfather and a grandfather and, not the least, an honorable, kind and loving husband.
My brother is still my hero, the finest man I know. He turns 67 in September and one day, I suppose, he will be gone for good. When that happens, even though I’ll know he is safely home at his Father’s house, I will be as inconsolable as that little girl watching him disappear through the rear window of the car.
Jun
14
Clyde
I was over 40 when I met Clyde; he was pushing 80. He tried hard to father me in later years when I was still pushing father figures away.
Over the years, Clyde taught me the secrets of growing roses, including how to mix the perfect soil for growing them and how to prune them and when the fragrance is strongest. When my sister died, he helped plant a rose garden in her honor at the bank where she had worked. He also taught me the most important secret of all: The more you give them away, the more abundantly they grow.
Clyde also gave me bushels of homegrown tomatoes every summer and a cutting rooted from a sweet shrub bush that had been in his family for more than a hundred years. He told me his World War II stories. He modeled consistency and love in action and the humility of contentment with being a work in progress.
And when I was still a hostile spiritual novice, declaring in defeat one Sunday morning that I didn’t know a thing about God, Clyde is the one who looked across the room at me and said, ”Now you’re getting somewhere.”
That was a life-changing moment for me, a moment when God used a kind old man to nudge me gently in the direction of grace and truth.
Clyde has been gone a couple of years now. But, like all good fathers, his legacy lives on in generations of people who continue to walk his walk of patience and compassion and geniality and unconditional love. I hope sometimes I’m one of them.
Jun
12
I see them clearly, sitting on porches in rockers or straight-back chairs, straw hats pushed back from their foreheads in the summer, making small talk, sometimes ambling out to somebody’s car to fill half-empty co-cola bottles with whiskey hidden under the front seat. They were largely silent and ineffectual and they were the father figures in my young life.
While they sat and rocked and sipped, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmother bustled around in hot kitchens, getting food on the table and talking non-stop about family problems and family news and family decisions. The women were lively. They laughed, they knew what was right and they knew what mattered — each other, us kids, people long dead, good food, home. The women in my life I loved and respected.
The father figures I loved, for the most part. But I didn’t respect them. They were irrelevant to the emotional fabric of our lives. Beside the women who ran the world as I knew it, they seemed colorless and weak. So it is little wonder that I’ve been unable to sustain a healthy relationship with men. I learned early to discount men as relationship equals.
In this week leading up to Father’s Day, I’ll try to re-vision the role of men in my life by looking at the ones who broke through my resistance and became the father figures I’ve needed. Whatever my childhood perspective on the men who influenced me early in life, I was too young to understand the whole story of my family. So this week, I’m going to celebrate Father’s Week by paying my respects to the men in my life.
May
2
Osama bin Laden scripted his own violent death. That seems clear to me.
Our soldiers courageously did what they were charged with doing. That much is also clear to me.
But the spiritual leader I try to follow would not take to the streets, cheering for the death of any human being, even an enemy.
And yet, there we were, waving our flags and rejoicing in a way that I cannot reconcile with the teachings or the actions of my spiritual leader.
I remember 9-11. I remember where I was and what I was doing and the horror of realizing that we were watching intentional acts of hatred. I also remember being just contrarian enough to think: What if we refused to hate the terrorists? What if, instead of offering hatred and revenge, we offered prayers? What if we pray as mightily as we are prepared to fight? What if we believed in the power of prayer more than we believe in the power of force and vengeance?
Of course, I acknowledge that many of us might’ve ended up dying for that belief. It’s happened before.
Today, with Osama bin Laden dead, I can live with the fact that Iam not sorry he is dead. I accept the fact that, as a nation, we feel strongly about the need to seek justice. But justice does not equal hate. And patriotic pride is not the same as gloating.
I know without a doubt that I don’t have the courage to live the way I’m called to live in the face of all the world’s hatred and brutality. I feel uncomfortable saying what I’m saying here because I know that people I love and admire may disagree strongly. But this one thing I believe with all confidence: The spiritual leader I try to follow would not take to the streets, cheering for the death of any human being. That much I can do, also.
Apr
20
Cindy, about age 20, with her dog, Moses
I want to tell you all about my little sister, Cindy, because April 21, 2011, would have been her 55th birthday, if she had lived 11 more years. But she didn’t. She died in her sleep in October, 2000, and nothing since has been quite as good or mattered quite as much because she isn’t here to let me know it matters to her, too.
Cindy, about 5 years old
May
9
Do I know the greatest women in the world, or what?
I know at least one woman whose sparkling laughter could save the world, if we could get enough people to listen. I know another woman who can make me laugh until I’m reduced to tears and in danger of wetting my pants. Yet another possesses a wild, wooley spirit that makes everyone around her smile.
I know poets who take my breath away — and bring out all the petty jealousy I wish I could deny.
I know artists who have adorned my home with sacred roots and magical birds and brazen magenta magnolia pods.
I know women who make God sit up and take notice when they pray and women with the gift of powerful silence. Women whose music makes me ache and weep and throw wide my arms to let it all in. Women who are wise and women who are like children in the joy they feel and the joy they create. Women who write and teach and garden and give and polish up the world’s beauty on a daily basis.
All of them are God’s unique way of loving me by providing everything I need for joy, wisdom and unconditional love.
I spent the first 40 years of my life holding myself back from the friendship of women. I didn’t know how to be part of their tribe. I didn’t even know I wanted to be part of the family of women. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the women I was working so hard to keep out knew every secret I had ever thought was hidden from me, and were willing to share it.
Apr
13
After calling myself a frequently lapsed pray-er in my previous blog, I am encouraged by a YouTube video of Frederick Buechner (see my “Read this now” page for a quote from one of his books) in which he calls himself a part-time novelist and part-time Christian. Buechner has always struck me as a deeply humble man, which has made him a full-time hero for me.
