(I wrote thi piece about a month or so ago and then, not liking it, putting it to one side. Here, anyway, it is. D)

New Home and Grief

Many of you know that we moved a few weeks ago. Our new house is beautiful, on the far south of Ypsilanti (a little north of the famous apple orchard). The neighborhood is very well cared for, carved out twenty odd years ago from Michigan farmland, which still surrounds the homes and golf course that define our neighborhood.

Our home became ours in we finding ourselves on the flip side of the collapse of the housing market. We discovered that we could buy a house far more cheaply than was conceivable three or four years ago (I think our new house lost about $150000 in value over that time so it came to be that a retired parson and the nurse he loves could not only think about buying it but did so.) We live on Pine View Road, Ypsilanti Township carried off from our years in Dexter, and are very grateful for this lovely, odd, gift in our lives. You are, of course, welcome to come by and see us. It’s the taupe brick place with the weeping trees in front and also some several flowering crabs packed with tiny fruit. We would like your coming to see us a lot. Driving down the half-mile down our street you might admire the lovely landscaping on all sides.

One new and odd feature of our life here is that there is a gun range only a few hundred feet from our home The sound of rifle fire is commonplace and we are aware of the American love of guns. I am sure the firing is both for the sheer sport of gunplay and target practice and as Michiganders get ready for deer season. We already barely notice it and find it pretty harmless.

In the meantime life embraces us. I celebrate my retirement and Emmy has hopes of reducing her professional hours to something nearing halftime. Yet and still I take a pain killer (my miserable pain is the ongoing effect of the shingles I contracted six months or so ago) which causes me to twitch and jerk some and making typing difficult. Shingles is a lousy thing, not to be wished on anyone and a constant plague in our lives and especially mine. It has made the writing of these essays very difficult. Nevertheless I will keep it up, waiting to do so on those days when I am not so jerky.

The dialysis goes on, pretty well under control and these days mostly just part of what is. What, I muse, reflecting on the reality that the medical profession can and does save the lives daily of thousands of those of us who suffer from end stage renal failure. Yet the same profession cannot set me free from the pain of a nerve which is afflicted with a virus. Of course I long ago learned that that stuff is just true and after a time we learn how to accept life going on as, mostly, it should. What gives me comfort and hope is the company of the love that has so long surrounded me. Nevertheless I do look pretty funny with a plastic tube sticking out of my belly and am attached by it through the night to the machine that purifies my blood as I sleep (or wander around in the dark). I cannot go far, maybe twenty feet, so the wandering is mighty modest. We are always in the midst of our own comedy.

We have had a lot of family since we moved, and the numbers increase. We are scheduled to have a grand total of ten grand children during the coming winter. Em’s daughter Sarah and her husband Jake are due for a boy child to show up in February and we will the more profoundly rejoice in the unlimited joy grandkids bring. They are a bastion against the rotten news so common to our lives and a reminder that hope and joy are real possibilities and not just silly optimism. We have a photo of one of them nine or so, gap toothed, with a grin as wide as the baseball stadium he was standing in on his first trip ever for a major league baseball game. Simon is his name and he is like all these kids of ours, just plain ace. It is my great delight that he is a baseball fan, rooting home the Cardinals, his favorite team in the recent World Series. His Michigan grandparents were thrilled by the our own favorite Tigers, but his team won the series and ours gave us a huge thrill but did not.

As is so common and true in our lives my laughter and joy in him (and all of them) in him emerges out of the tears that still rise up as I think nearly hourly on the death of my brother Dave. My profession brought me very often into the company of death and grief, and I am old enough to have lived through the death of my parents and Emily’s and Debbie’s. But there seemed to me to be a kind of rule that ones siblings were supposed to be some kind of immortal. Reality has been hard, despite the great admiration I had for him and the 70 odd years of love we shared. Willy nilly the good go down and we are sometimes helpless in the face of it.

Dave loved sports (Dave loved just about everything except certain Republicans and the Yankees). He was especially devoted to baseball, first the Tigers in his boyhood, then for many years the Cleveland Indians (who we all hated in the 50’s) and then having moved to Boston with Marianne his wife, the Red Sox. His death came as the pennant was being fought over and especially with the Sox and Tigers right in the middle of it. As we moved into the peculiar joys and agony of post season play, the great Verlander manning the mound for us I will be thinking of him and wishing we might have one of those phone calls or e-mails which were pretty common place and now are gone into memory and sadness.

An old friend (all the way back from college) wrote me the other day about the problem of evil. He has, of a sudden, been caught up in the monstrous paradox of Adolph Hitler and the idea of a loving, all-powerful God. What did I have to say about it? Not much, of course, as it is intractable and mysterious and awful. All I can think of is that in the face of the murder of Jesus the disciples found hope, possibility, courage and great laughter. We will not be done down.

My brother’s death is not about evil any more than his life was. But he was deeply in the company of those who embraced life with courage and grace and he was as well a great talker and writer, lover of the good and his own wonderful family and with them and the rest of us a great laugher.

I will do my best to hold on to that as my heart breaks. My love to you all, doug

July 2011

July 2011 A Letter

My many and dear friends and family,

I’m deeply sorry that you have, some of you at least, waited so long to hear from me. The quickest and shortest answer is that several weeks ago I began to take an additional drug to help control the unceasing pain of my shingles. It did help some, but at the cost of an increasing struggle with tics and jerks throughout my body, hands and legs. As a result I have not been able these past several days to type. A few days ago I declared, with Emily’s support, that I would no longer take the pain helper, or if, I did, in a much reduced dosage. We have done that and the struggle with my pain has at least held and as you can perhaps see I am typing once again (just as badly but delighted to be, at the very least, with it).

In the meantime many of you know that our family has been deeply saddened by the news of the death of my brother Dave about a month again at his home in Arlington, Massachusetts. Though, like Geri Chapault, he did not ever truly smoke he was stricken a few years ago with lung cancer and after months of struggle and great determination his body failed him one evening after he had joined with his family following dinner, and he quietly slipped away. He was an Episcopalian, good manners, to the very end.

We were all shattered by this news, though in reality, it was inevitable. His great energy and heart and brilliance was not enough to win against this ugly and evil thing. That his death was with great dignity and surrounded by love, that death especially surrounded by his children and grandchildren and Marianne his remarkable and love-filled wife was no surprise at all.

We got ourselves to Boston for his memorial service (his ashes later were interred in Mt.Auburn Cemetery, surrounded by those very many heroes of his and all of New England and where we all know he most would have wanted to lie. To know better about Mt. Auburn I would commend to you Gerry Wills wonderful book about Lincoln at Gettysburg and the birth of the American garden cemetery). The service at their church in Boston was a great tribute to them all. The music was beautiful, the liturgy that one we all know so well, the eloquence of his family in recalling him and their life-long love affair was profoundly touching. His son, Charlie, was a profound expression of just how a thing is to be well and truly well done. His other children, Ben and Sophie, were equally full of grace, strength and a great comfort. Marianne held us in the wide expanse of her arms, both family and friends and we all knew the divine truth of great love. Jesus was deeply in that company.

In the meantime our lives here have moved in a new and different way. As of the middle of next week we are moving from our home In Dexter to a wonderfully handsome and striking house in Ypsilanti Township, south of that city and near the homes, I recall, of some numbers of St. Clarians. I hope you will all call and come by to see our lovely new digs and wonder at the good hopes fulfilled in them. We will live at 5439 Pine View St., our ZIP 48197 and, I believe, our phone numbers the same. You are truly welcome to drop in.

Dave, my brother, knew me longer than any other person in my life. He was two when I was born and I spent a great part of my life both under his wings and in his great shadow. He was a devout Episcopal Christian (in his case and mine you have to have the one to have the other-Episcopal and then Christian.) He loved the church, undamaged by it in the ways so costly to me and was with his wife and his son Charlie deeply embraced by its arms. It was the very way it ought to be for all of us. He was a gifted scholar and teacher, author and thinker. As I said his shadow was long, his company an honor.

I loved him profoundly and admired him as well. I think of him daily, along with my brother Stu and sister Paula and the every happy family we were.

Dave was plenty smart enough to love baseball and especially the Cleveland Indians and less satisfactorily the well hated Red Sox. We talked much of that in our years together, all in some sense out of the profound memory of our father and his quiet devotion to the Tigers, our lives being shaped and improved by the gift of sport and faith.

In the meantime besides death and moving and the hopeful soon appearance of a lot of our own family, we get on. I continue to come to terms with the dialysis following the failure of my kidneys after that lost struggle with my heart and I try my best to make my peace with that.

This comes with my love and that, I know, of our hero and friend and companion, Jesus of Nazareth. Doug

What’s Up, Doc?

What’s Up Doc?

To get there, sat least physically, it is necessary to get first on the south side of Ann Arbor, Michigan at an intersection of Stadium Drive and South Industrial Road.  South Industrial is a north south feeder street that connects Stadium Drive (a prime east-west connector in town), south to Eisenhower Drive another primary east-wet connector across the south side of Ann Arbor.

Turning on South Industrial we know it is home to a raft of small companies, a bowling alley, a car wash, bump shop, lamp store, and a recycle store and a Coney diner, and as well to an Army reserve unit.  It is profoundly non-descript, lacking any real architectural esthetic, a place for doing rather than being.  It is hard, driving up and down it, to see it as a place centered in our nation’s higher values, but at the same time perfectly ordinarily, no doubt necessary in some community way and home to a lot of people who work there and, in that sense, serve us.

Far down at its very southern end there sits the main offices and other structures housing the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority office and the bulk of its busses.  Pretty much right next to that, on the same west side of the street, sits another brick structure, one story high, glass windows on the front, a modest modern building which it turns out holds a clinic of the University of Michigan’s hemodialysis program.  The odds are that unless you knew it was there you would not notice it driving by, it being a modest place.

We go there, these days, three afternoons a week late in the day. Our schedule takes us there about 3 PM on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  We stay, taking our appointed turn, for about three and a half hours each visit, and head off toward home somewhere between 7 and 8 PM.  I had no real idea the place was there and so coming to it was something of a surprise.  For some reason, not known to me, great medical centers do not tout their dialysis clinics but rather tuck them into odd spots here and there, unattached often to any other part of the medical center almost as if they are either a kind of after thought or a place we would just as soon have situated where it can be ignored.

I suspect, in fact, that since what goes on there has to do with one of the two most human activities about which we nearly all feel deeply modest and private, a business acted on and done nearly always behind some kind of closed doors preferably alone, we don’t make much of dealing with it in an open and public way.  Excepting the famous “stream” running through the men’s room of Michigan Stadium. (One of the wry observations of living now in a world in which I have largely lost the protection of my privacy is that growth can come as modesty is lost.)  Our kidney doctor tells us that nearly all clinics such as ours are as equally off on their own and as obscure. Peeing is not glamorous, trendy or in.  Neither, we have learned, are the people needing the help nor the helper themselves.  This is not glamour medicine.  I’d be dead without it.

If you came some afternoon to visit us you would discover that the clinic is nevertheless deeply concerned about the privacy of its patients and learn that to get to those of us inside you have to first get through a locked door.  A simple consent is all that is required.  I suspect as there is a strong need to keep small children away  infection is a profound concern, especially for the staff.  They though though, let folk in freely and will find a chair to sit in and professional assistance in helping to all who keep company.  (While there, for example Emmy mostly works, and engages the staff in useful and lively conversation, not to mention helping me in any way she can.)

Once in the door it turns out we are in a large room, fully open.  Around its perimeter are, spaced equally apart against the walls, fifteen or so largish, oddly clumsy blue easy chairs.  Next to each sits a machine, about five feet or so high, and eighteen or so inches wide on a side.  The machine are blue with a screen on the face, tubes hanging to this side or that, and other necessary stuff.

The staff awaits.  It is a modest crew by numbers, very highly professional, mostly medical technicians, with supervisory nurses, and the support of a highly skilled Physician’s Assistant, social worker, and dietitian.  The resident doctor visits when on his office hours and is always available but we do not see him too often.  He deeply knows his job as do they all there and is like all of the staff kind and generous and truly good at his work.  He and they have been a great comfort to us.

We arrive with our huge Ikea bag and a computer satchel and whatever other stuff we have brought (Emmy, of course, lugs this, assisting the feeble and lame one. Who, I might add is quite a lot less feeble than he was a couple of weeks ago.  I appear to be on the mend.).  Our company of patients is modest in number usually, six or eight assigned to this chair or that.  Each is under the direct care of a member of the staff, who keep watch and assisting during our entire time present.

Being one under such care on arriving I get weighed (the dialysis process is determined by how much fluid is to be removed during the procedure.  I have to monitor and managed how much I drink each day, or at least try to.  I may not be the best at this.)  Then we go off to my then assigned seat, generally in the front of the room near its front side windows, and I sit.  The tech attaches a blood pressure cuff to my arm (my blood pressure will be taken every fifteen minutes or so through out the time present.  It is for my protection as the process can be wearing, cramps and shortness of breath may occur, though not very often.  The warning will be falling BP).

Several weeks ago at the hospital I had a double-ended port attached to my right shoulder just at the top of my chest.  It consists of two short plastic tubes inserted inside of my body and hooked up one side to my arterial blood supply and the other to my veins on their return.  This then is hooked up two plastic tubes that run across my body and into the machine sitting next to me.  It is, of course, a pump which also filters and drains and when on it takes the blood from my body (there is no sensation whatsoever), runs it through the filters to get out the several days’ collection of toxins and take off at the same time the excess fluid I am carrying.   They drain me pretty good, it not being uncommon to have nearly a gallon of water taken off in a sitting.

Mostly during this time I am watching a movie on my computer and Em, as I noted, is working on her computer and doing other useful stuff. Without the distraction boredom would be nearly terminal.

We learned the other day that hemodialysis is mandated care, by Congress, for everyone, so none of us sitting there is at the mercy of an insurance company or some kind of medical selective process which might define one of us more worthy to have our lives saved in this way than another.  This was apparently not unheard of in the early days of the procedure when there were many fewer machines and a much smaller trained staff.  This forced the doctors caring to decide who got what and that was not good.  We are much blessed to have our government so protect us.

But we believe that for us the necessity for doing things this way is about to come to an end.  A long week ago I had anther tube attached to me.  This one in the lower quadrant of my belly down on the left side.  (I’m quite the ridiculous sight these days without my shirt on.)  This to get ready for another form of dialysis known in our circle as PD or peritoneal dialysis which works in another way.  (My renal failure is, by the way, permanent. It cannot get better with time, rest, or anything else.)  The details are simple but, to me at least, somewhat mysterious.

On a daily basis, beginning we think in fairly early April, I will no longer need the machine, nor the obligation to go so often to the clinic.  Rather through this tube, once it if fully healed and firmly in place, we will at a pretty fast clip, drip 2000 ccs or so of a sterile concoction directly into my innards.  There it will sit for a time, an hour or so, and then in the ways of osmosis the lining of my peritoneum will cleanse the toxins out of my body, following which the fluid will be drained from my body (it will take over night to do that) and with it the excess water, etc in me and I will be ready to go the next day.  This will give us far more freedom to come and go as we desire as this procedure can be done anywhere, your house for example given a little time to get ready, or on a cruise ship, somewhere in London, or somewhere outside of Washington DC in company with our grandchildren there.

This all sounded a little daunting to me when first described but Em hearing the folks describe it simply said “This will be a piece of cake.”  So that is where we are.  We will surely manage it, and I will by it be freed from the acute fluid intake rules which so order my life these days (one liter of water a day.  Try it.  You won’t like it.)

I believe that this method will return me largely to my old self, and after this long three-year struggle and life threatening reality this is good news.  I have no illusions about any of this as assuredly one day, I hope well off, some part of this, my bad heart, these lousy kidneys or who knows what will claim me and I will go down.  But hard and sad and difficult as this has been and sometimes painful and scary and me feeling perfectly awful and sick and fragile I know that I have kept remarkable company and been steadfastly in the presence of the kind of love I talked about for so many years.  I insist that such Good News is true and our right and gift.  So I am unabashed about telling you that I love you as I have known your love and all those who have watched over and cared for me.  Doug

JUNCO

JUNCO’S

I’m not remotely a birder (a kind of wonderful obsession and un-paid profession for all sorts and conditions of people who just have this THING about birds) but I surely do like birds.  They have, this winter, during the hard times of my illness and the fact that I am house bound except when Em or someone carries me out the birds feeding away on our deck have given me great comfort and pleasure.

We have quite a lot of them and they are here on a pretty daily basis.  Most of them are small birds, finches and chickadees, titmouse and the occasional and unloved sparrows, cardinals and now and again mourning doves and at the suet several types of woodpeckers.  But in the hard of winter I have a special place in me for juncos.

These birds do not live here but in the very hardest time of winter they move down to be near us.  Normally they live to our North, but when it gets truly hard up there they come to find something to eat in very slightly easier climate.  If you do not know them, juncos are small birds about the size and general shape of a house sparrow.  You see them suddenly on the lawn or deck floor and they are, it turns out extremely handsome and very lively and a pleasure to the eye.

With a pleasing shape, round and full, the birds are a rich dark charcoal over the most of their bodies, with a yellow beak and then a bright white belly wrapping them up so they make me think of a gent out in his tuxedo.  Unlike most of the birds that come to feed at our place juncos do not perch on the feeders but eat on the ground or some kind of platform.  They keep company in small flocks so when they show up there are nearly always a small bunch of them and they feed industrially on the seeds we have pitched out over the floor of the deck, in the snow, or whatever.  Like all small birds they are quick and fast to spin this way and that, fly off and come back.  (Our cats just ignore the birds all around, having given that part of the lives into a quiet retirement).  The juncos will arrive, hopping and feeding and then suddenly wheeling away and gone and then just as suddenly they are back.

They are also unusual in that they like a different feed mix than the sunflowers we mostly hang out in our feeders.  They are fond of the grain Red Milo and cracked corn and will mostly ignore the sunflowers.  There are other often on the ground birds around like cardinals and mourning doves and later on a bit robins will be showing up and some of them will pick up and feed on the more common stuff and are often in and among the juncos.

They will only be around us a short time now since it is deep into February.  As we get into the real hints of winter loosing its iron grip on our lives the juncos will one day flock up and begin the run back to the North there to nest and breed and keep that tiny part of the great circle going.  I will miss them for they are a comfort to me, their beauty and grace a reminder that our world is not simply an ugly mess of violence and war and stupidity and dumbness.

Birders know much about this as they are among the most gentle and calm and decent folk in our world.  They are in their lovely way seized by birds and the idea of birds and the fact of birds.  It turns out that even in North America there are a very large number of bird species and so birders find a unique joy in finding this one or that one and counting them and worrying over them (plagued as they are by all the terrible forces against whole life in our world).  They go on in the face of it all.

I’ve known two great birders in my life and a couple of others not far from it.  Both of them now and again would scoop me up and take me to some place rich in these species (a couple of times in their company I have been present to see and count upwards of sixty or seventy different types in a long afternoon).  I have never seen as many as have my companions since, for example, they can count a bird if they can identity its call and I certainly cannot do that.  But to see twenty or so different warblers on their way to cross Lake Erie in the spring is a satisfying and gentle thrill.  While the juncos will long be gone North  when the warblers show up from their migration they all remind us of  the astonishing diversity and richness of life.  And, of course, they are beautiful, a joy to see and marvel at.

It is a gently hard truth that the richness of the stuff of life goes around us all the time and we mostly do not notice or barely.  There is this tiny company of our companions who are looking around and keeping records but most of us are just dim or such is not our thing or there are other realities holding onto our attention.  Yet the mystery (one might say “Thank God”) goes on whether we are looking on or not.  This comforts me a great deal, not the least about myself.

 

I have been borne down hard and tested in unexpected and sometimes cruel ways recently.  Part of me is pretty fragile, and so I read the front page of the newspaper and nearly always in some way my stomach clenches and I wonder at what absurdity or cruelty will next hurt and tear at us.  Yet between the love so steadfastly given me by so many and that great mystery of the great turn of life and the small and beautiful hint of the divine imagination in our world one does not and cannot live without hope and its great lift to the possibility of joy.  In that flock of juncos is the sacred.  Doug

Frail

 

Frail

 

Like most of us I have lived my life at fairly high levels of energy.  This is not a statement of an athlete or exercise buff but your average kind of American guy who moves with some speed through the day.  Work, fishing, gardening, types of play, games with family and friends, and things like that.  Some things I had given up, like shoveling snow on advice of MD, and as well shoving the mower hither and thither.  But I always just took it for granted that I would be up and moving pretty much most of the time.

 

Now over these past recent months that is largely gone.  I am badly de-conditioned and frankly pretty darn feeble.  I have not driven for several months, and have not been able to grocery shop, or walk the dog, or even cook.  I sleep quite a lot, and do simple exercises to try to regain some of my strength.  If you come see I do not want you surprised that I am walking  aided by a walker as my sense of balance is pretty much shot and I really truly do not want to fall.  Small insults have kept me company, a couple of painful bed sores, and a run in with gout (mostly in my hands) and a bum knee which I smacked getting into the shower.  Gout hurts as do bum knees.

 

This, in some sense, is just the way it is for me.  I do not feel unmanned by it, or foolish in a male kind of way as it is a given, the current truth about my health and the general failure of some of it.  I have also discovered that having your blood cleaned three times a week, even will sitting very quietly, is exhausting.

 

Vigor is a high value for nearly all of us and its absence a shock and surprise, but that is just where it is for me right now.  So it goes. Mostly my brain is functioning okay (I was pretty dim there for time in the hospital) and I can think and write and talk not unlike the man you might remember.  I hope that I will begin soon to recover much of my strength and finally return to an active life once again, but it will take time.

 

It is not all bad.  A few evenings ago we were with friends who are  known to most of you being entertained by the Super Bowl.  I was plopped down in deep comfort on a sofa and kept company on all sides.  By the time the game was over I had been down for some hours and it coming time to get on home with the others we moved to rise up and find the way to our car.  It became apparent pretty quickly that I was going to have trouble getting up and though I did not say a word (that I remember) there were suddenly around me strong arms and backs lifting me not unlike a child in the most loving and caring way.  I realized that my weakness provided an opportunity, a kind of odd gift, for others to tell me without a word that they loved me.  There I was, this child lifted by strong arms and embraced.  I also did not say much, maybe a mumbled “thanks” but I felt a great rush of joy and pleasure.  We are not alone.

 

I have always thought that this strength in weakness is of the profound truth of Jesus.  He was, even with what little we know of him, enormously strong and when he chose to reveal it powerful.  No doubt he was deeply fit and highly energetic, but we all have a sense that within that power was a true embrace of the frail.  That he lived not only in the acceptance of the brokenness and illness and weakness in us, but also which he found in himself.  His capacity to love and open himself is to be found in his deeply gentle spirit (at times) and finally in his surrender to those who could not tolerate his life.

 

PS I love company.  doug

Slow Recovery

 

Slow Recovery

 

I want to begin this by making sure you know that I am deeply sorry these essays have been so much amount me and my health than the kind of things I usually have written about and thought over.  But here I sit in a room with tanks of oxygen littered around it and a machine for taking oxygen from the air and sending to me which I actually have to use rarely but a remainder of my own frailty and I suppose finally that of all of us.

 

Now three times a week we (Emily and me or another) get off to a medical center and I have my blood cleaned.  Since my body will no longer do this on its own (though that part of me does still work some) we have to turn for the larger resource.  It is not quick, taking several hours, during which it is required to sit pretty still and try to pass the time.  I have discovered the blessing of the movie on laptop, and the quiet company of those around me, especially the nurse who manages the machine which whirs very quietly next to me.  At the end I always feel exhausted, as if I had done something greater than sit and be quiet.  One might think that being cleansed from our sin is hard work.

 

As far as I can tell this all came about in the struggle to get my heart better which deeply stressed my renal system. It was already compromised, perhaps for many years and finally under all the pressure just gave up.

 

So I am pretty much home bound for the time trying to pay attention to family and friends and the larger world and simply trusting that I will adjust to all of this and return to something like a normal existence. As I know you can imagine I have been blessed by wonderful medical professionals who have treated me with great care and respect, and the gift of my family beyond my best words.

 

We had Sarah and Anne her and their boys, (a total of four kids) for most of a long week and it was wonderful.  Hard to be pulled into your self when there is a riot of boy play on all sides.  In the meantime our mail and e-mail has been full of expressions of care and memory and old times and these new ones.  There can never be too many.  It was a special gift when of a sudden a significant number of St. Clarians suddenly began to show up at the hospital and I realized I had finally been freed from the dark limbo I had been confined in these past tem years.  Seeing those faces and hearing their expressions of affection and having all those years remembered was healing in the extreme.  My gratitude and thanks to James Rhodenheiser who made this possible is boundless.  I want you to know you are always welcome to spend time with us and me.  Those years were brutal and deeply cruel and wounded me and mine beyond expression.  But they are over, or so it seems and I can embrace life again in ways I could not for that long decade.

 

In the midst of this Emily and family went out and bought a magnificent huge TV to go in our house.  The thing is mighty big (52x inches) and one can watch a game or a movie up close and present.  It is a bright spot in the long and cruel winter that has such hold on us this year.  As most of you know I have increasingly come to despair over winter in Michigan and can easily understand those among us who flee its embrace for places warmer.  But it is our life and I suppose in that old line I recalled last time a place to embrace the truth that these are the days the Lord hath made and we will, darn it all, rejoice in them all.  Love to all, doug

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ths Is The Day

 

 

This Is The Day

When I was a very young man, maybe 15 or 17 or so I had cause one Sunday to be at St John’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Pleasant, MI where I was growing up.  I remember almost nothing of this particular service yet it made an indelible mark on me.

 

The bishop of that diocese (Western Michigan) was for some reason present.  I’m not sure why, maybe it was no more than his annual visit to the parish or perhaps it had to do with the struggle experienced there between the local priest and the leadership of the parish.  I’m not at all sure, but something had gone wrong and the place was in someway or other suffering.  Folk felt low, so did I.

 

The bishop came in, in the way of bishop’s coming in, and took his place and the liturgy began, choir singing and folk attentive and aware.  That particular bishop was a very nice man, but star-crossed, and he was soon embroiled in his own personal tragedy which cost him not only his job but much of his self-respect.  None of us knew it but rumor soon flew that he was in deep trouble with alcohol.

 

In the 1950’s this was simply unacceptable, especially for the clergy.  The issue was sin and surely that, no talk of illness, support systems, AA maybe just about then founded, and folk were stern faced and unforgiving.  Rumor flew and I remember sometime later that amid much cynical snickering it was held that he was daily into the communion wine at the cathedral.  Suddenly, in disgrace, he was gone, banished, and sent away from our company.  I never knew where he went or what became of him, but that he was gone.

 

Yet none of this was known at the time he showed up at my family’s parish church on a day where that congregation was hurting.  It was, of course, his job to preach to us, and though I think he had no great following attached to his words, he was the bishop and that was there and in many places a big thing indeed.  He stood, we sat and listened.

 

This what of all of that I actually remember.  He faced up to us in that small apace, looking down from the pulpit, and began, “This is the day the Lord hath made.  We will rejoice and be glad in it.”  I felt a huge jolt, a literal shift in who I was and what I thought.  I had thought this was a day of sorrow and grief, boy that I was, but here was some simple, pure, clear call of hope and faith in the face of hard times.  Good news among us.

 

I do not remember another word he said or how long the sermon took or even what it was about.  Yet I got a lesson that day, which took me years to fit fully into my life but was a giant step in whatever chance I had to become a mature man and Christian person.  We can be overcome, but we cannot be, finally, done down.  That, of course, is the point of the Cross, its insistent determination to fly the good in the face of the very do downers and life wreckers who have had such remarkable say in our world.

 

Life is hard and often deeply unfair.  Every grown person knows that not just in his or her intellect but also out of our experiences.  We have all been heartbroken, cheated, lied to, insulted, at the mercy of the cruel and merciless.  Our fortunes have failed, our bodies unruly and broken, our trust violated.  Yet what remains?  This above all things: “ This is the day the Lord hath made.  We will rejoice and be glad in it.” You cannot convince me I am only the sum of my brokenness.

 

I have had a hard time these recent months.  Very hard.  I have suffered in my own life and watched it in the lives of some of those I most deeply love.  I am weak and feeble and have experienced the failure of the best of American medicine to heal me.  Others close to me are suffering in similar ways.  My future is cloudy right now.  I’ve had days of near despair and profound discouragement.

 

Yet as I turn my face daily to pictures of our grandchildren (one right here on my computer) I know a leap of joy and hope.  Some old friend calls and asks after me and some part of me is restored.  And I have this wife who I assure you is both an angel and a miracle.  People send me notes of affection and memory and love and I am always reminded that how ever alone I may feel I am actually not.  Not at all.  I cannot always remember this but I know it is always true.  My children are to me a beacon of hope and possibility.

 

We are immortal. Not, I think, in some idea of a place of eternity where all is well and good.  I am not nearly smart enough to know about that but because though we may be done in we can never be done down.  The spark in us, the goodness that is actually ours, the capacity to love and be compassionate, the company of love we have created out of our very own stuff is, in the deepest sense, forever.

 

I believe this.  This is how I have lived my own life as I see it repeatedly in the lives of others who have walked with me whether they knew it or not.  I learned this from everywhere, from my mother and father, my sister and brothers, my children and grandchildren and from my companions and friends those who worshipped with me and fished with me and partied with me.

 

I learned it from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and his brothers, from the hundreds of authors and poets who enlightened me. I learn it today from our President and those rare and unique public servants who give us reason to hope.  I learned it from my teachers and some who preached to me and held up Holy Truth for me to see and unveil.  I learned it from great soldiers and sailors and from the unique courage and grace of the survivors of the Holocaust who out of their overwhelming tragedy built a new world.  I learned it from the African Americans of my life who in our own time freed themselves to a great degree from oppression and brutality.  This is the larger reality of my own life and I know of yours as well. I learned it from the omen who brought us to our senses in the long last years of the 20^th Century, and those who know hold up the hope for us that we will not be demonized by our struggle with human sexuality.

 

Those teachings cannot tell me of the future. So at the moment I do not know what the future holds for me, but we will never be alone.  The reality of love bears all things.

 

We can be done in.  We cannot be done down.

 

 

Fall 2010

 

FALL 2110

I came into the kitchen this morning sometime around ten or so.  Today is one of those beautiful fall days when the sky is so blue that one almost feels we are living in the West as the trees around us are just moving into their full color.  Out the window it is yellow and red and green and brown, with the poor walnut leaves lying dead on the ground and our driveway.  The contrast of the colors, blue and red and green and yellows, and that near purple of some of the oaks and our beeches is to the eyes a wonderful riot.

 

As I got further into the kitchen I noticed that the front of our refrigerator seem suffused with a luscious pink glow, a contrast to its normal kitchen white.  It baffled me for a minute until I realized that what I was seeing was the reflection of a big, double trunked very tall sugar maple which sits a backyard or two away from us (we look out the window to the west) and onto its leaves the morning sun fell bringing them alive and rich and amazing.  The color from that tree actually bounced through the kitchen window and onto the fridge door and it was so pretty I felt moved and happy.

 

There are some pure blessings to living in the north and this is one of them.  So fall is a place not only of beauty but equally of memory.  As kids we raked and burned those same leaves and the whole town and the kids smelled of smoke, before someone came to realize it was not so hot for those having trouble breathing and we had to stop.  I remember the college homecoming parade coming down our street on College Ave in Mt. Pleasant, MI maples in full and glorious color as the band swept past and little boys were enchanted and the floats with the pretty girls passed by.  Several years ago I was, with friends, at the Bowen cottage in west Michigan fishing for steelhead trout on the Pere Marquette River.  There was a morning then just like this one today and the river ran through it like quicksilver, glittering and shining.  In that lush scene, where some time later another bunch of us gathered to spread Phil’s ashes on the river and bid him our heartbroken goodbye, an amazing thing happened.  The water became alive with great big trout leaping out of the water and falling back, and some of them (I had never seen this) were the brightest astonishing red I had ever known a fish to be.  The reproductive riot was on, the dash to spawn and fertilize before winter, driving them up the river and those few precious moments clear up toward the sky.  We caught some fish that day, bringing them to us our hearts racing, and then turning them loose to get back to the main thing. Fall on a Michigan trout stream is just wonderful.

 

There is something magic about this, known so well to those of us who visit or live here.  But it is as well a sober time for we know of the dark days and long nights and the deep chill that will hold us soon in the grip of a northern winter.  So there is a price to pay for these few precious days and it will be steep.  But so it is.  It reminds us of who we are and where we were and where we will go.

 

We all are, after all, inconsequential, a tiny reality on the face of earth.  My heart has held me up to the truth of my mortality as few things have ever done before.  As I brood on it I am aware that going down finally, of the all of us in the world, only the tiniest number of us will grieve my death and in only a few years memory of me will be forever lost.  We are finally in the end anonymous.

Yet and of course we live not in the despair of that hard truth but in hope and in some real sense in peace.  Life goes on, willy nilly, mindless, determined, and always.  Something in us cannot be brought down.  Not now, not ever.

 

In a month those maples, those beeches in the front yard, will look as dead as the walnuts look this morning but we know that come spring they will leaf out once again, vibrant and green and rich, and get about their own stately business.  Unaware of me and unable to be aware of me they insist on their own vitality and go on, living creatures, a sure sign of some truth greater than I can fathom or know except in the dimmest sort of way.  There is something immortal about all of us from the least to the greatest.  There is what has been called the spark of the divine in the face of all our hard truths.  And, perhaps, finally, meaning as well.

 

In a few days we are off to see five of our grandchildren and their parents.  Four of the five are boys, and they are of the same general age as were those boys and girls standing and jumping and running along the streets of that modest Midwest town in central Michigan while that band went down and the leaves were gold and red and green and yellow.  That time was sixty or more years ago, and the maple in my current backyard was no doubt not greatly more then than a sapling.  The years have turned, death claiming one after another of us, and yet new life leaping from us, and we know that it all turns and turns and begins anew.  The sage tells us that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn, and a time for great things.  We nearly all laugh more than we weep, but we all weep.  That is just the way that is.

 

The Book says Jesus wept and that reality lies central to the better sense the Book makes.  (Some of the Book is just plain stupid, idiotic rules on the right kind of clothes, or attacks on some soul’s sexuality, or the nonsense that one person has the right to own another.)  Jesus laughed as well, though it is not so transparently recorded, because being one of us he was just as we are.  He wept because of the anguish surrounding him and the blindness of those who had eyes to see and saw not, ears to hear and heard not.  He wept for the poor and the weak, the sick and lame, the widow and orphan, the arrogant and self-righteous because with in him was the truth that he loved us all.  To know it is a great comfort especially as we face into this ugly election and the brutal truths it reveals about us and our society.

 

So Fall. It comes and holds up for us hard and happy and brokenhearted truth.  It is okay.  Doug

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Village Were We Think Of Jesus

A Village Where Thinking of Jesus Goes On

We live in a village.  It, like most towns in Southeastern Michigan, has been around since the 3^rd or 4^th decade of the 19^th century.  I’m not sure just why it is here, though certainly the river on its border is a primary reason.  There has long been a history of cottage industry in the area and to this day there are small industrial companies in and around the village.  But, no doubt, this was primarily a place gathered around to meet the needs of the local farming community.

Those roots led to conservative conviction and so it seems to me to be a place where memory and tradition have been important and no doubt also the Republican Party.  We moved here after years of living in the University city, which is 5 or 6 miles to our east.  That is a community much larger, open and dedicated to the future, with mostly more liberal values and historically greater parity politically.  We noticed when we got here that our village had a distinct small-town quality to it, though we can see stresses in its life as the city has sprawled this way.  The 21^st century shoulders its way and the new threatens in some ways those older convictions.  In the 2008 election, much to their surprise, Democrats won a number of local elections and had to be taught how to govern having no living experience with its responsibilities.

There is an Episcopal church in town.  It has been around a good long time as well, much longer than the church I worked at for such an extended spell.  Like the village it is a small religious community, with maybe between fifty and one hundred going to church on a Sunday at its 2 services.  We had been going to church there recently after a couple of false starts earlier.

Then the parish was visited by a tragedy.  A conflict erupted between the Rector (pastor) and a large number of the parishioners.  The Rector was forced to leave and the parish collapsed.  Now it seems to be struggling back to some kind of normalcy but it has had a hard time.  My wife, Emily, and I already had enough grief with the church over the past 10 years to bear the pain of the collapse so we stopped going on Sundays.  I knew that the troubles had not needed to occur, that effective leadership would have solved the anguish, yet I was helpless to help or so it felt.  This kind of story is repeated time and again in our church.  I lay much of the diocesan and congregational trouble on professional leaders who often simply do not get it.  The cynic wonders why.

So I am pretty chary of the institutional church these days.  Somewhere in the middle of something, it came to me that the church was far more interested in itself as institution than it was about itself as, in the old language, the body of Christ.  I do not mean this in either a pious or even religious way but, to use secular language, as a question of values.  I knew, years ago, when my priestly colleagues began to refer to themselves as the CEOs of their congregations that we were in for a bad spell.  As the years passed and congregational life began to look very much like the rest of suburban life – with business being a central value, with religious values determined by busy programs and success determined by the same kind of success General Motors seeks to recover, I began to fade away.  I remain fixed in an old and longstanding conviction that Christianity is about being and not about doing.  Being busy is not being faithful; it is institutional, secular and often selfish.

Yet I remain drawn to the faith of my childhood and profession.  I understand that the Church has always been broken and broken seriously.  Even the most cursory study of its history fills one with dismay and disgust.  The oldest institution in the world, it is marked at least as much by its secularity and failed humanity as it is by its spiritual gifts and love for neighbor and self.

It is also true that the very idea of a loving God has become difficult for me in the face of the mindless horror and heedless cruelty experienced by so many innocent millions of humans. The idea that this suffering is to be blown off as something called the Will of God seems theological madness. At some very deep level, I simply do not get it.  Suffering for what appears to be only for the sake of suffering cannot, I think, make sense.   And the way in which historic Christian theology is currently twisted for ideological and political reason appalls and infuriates me.  Those loudest announcing how Christian they are in our society are as far as I can tell hardly Christian at all.   Yet they dominate the media having made victim of its ignorance, foolishness and shallowness.

Nevertheless I still find my heart tugged by the faith and my mind enriched by its story and drama.  I turn sidewise but not away, even though we hardly ever go to church these days. I know I am in a great company of those in the same place. It is just too hard for me to get there yet the faith remains embedded within me.

What holds me are three things:  The family I grew up in, live in and worship to this day, the enormously loving church I worked in for many years which got it right, and the astonishing thought and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

I would speak of Jesus.  Two of my favorite and best teachers, thoughtful preachers, profound thinkers and friends, both priests, came in the later years of their lives to the conclusion they no longer could describe themselves as believing Christians or even as religious.  One of them, an impeccable scholar, writer and thinker, has concluded out of his years of brooding that finally there can be no such thing as an historical man named Jesus.  For him the historic Jesus is a pious fiction.  I am sure the other, my ethics professor in seminary, felt at the end of his own dance something very like the same.  I absolutely respect them both for their integrity and courage.  My own scholarship pales in comparison with theirs.  But my mind simply does not read the land that way.  Neither does my heart.

I can never truly know who Jesus was or what he thought; the biblical record is too scrambled and short-handed for that.  What we have in it are clues to who he was and how he was, enough to make a faith, but not enough to give us a fully realized life.  Those who wrote the books (gospels) regarding him did not know him personally and did not have the libraries and newspapers and other conforming documents which any decent historian writing today would insist on.  There is no evidence that any one of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John knew him nor even perhaps his original followers, though some of those foll owers may have lived long after Jesus’ murder.  We believe likely that the earliest of the gospels was written somewhere around 70 AD, 40 years after the experience the Church called Easter.   The gospel of John is from the 2^nd century, perhaps nearly 100 years after the cross.

So the books in which we find ourselves grounded cannot be described as historical.  Yet it seems equally clear to me that they are also not myth or fable.  They are, I believe, about a history, one surrounded by myth (the very best kind which is story telling seeking the Truth) but a history nonetheless.

I feel this for a number of reasons, some of which, of course, I am not aware.  But let me try one or two:

In the first place, there is no reason for anyone to have invented Jesus.  What cabal dreamed up the greatest lie in human history and got away with it Scot-free?  That does not seem a reasonable explanation emerging out of the lives of a small, tiny group of ill-educated and apolitical fishermen and tax collectors.  And why would they do it?  For what good reason would they engage in this and then sell it around the world, finally suckering in thousands and finally millions and billions of human beings?  I believe there must therefore stand at the center of the stories of Jesus something else, a someone who was real and individual.  Otherwise, those stories make no sense, and have a lie, however innocent, as their purpose.

Of course it may not make sense.  In our culture, bombarded by information, shared by nearly all of us we yet continue to be hoodwinked and have the wool pulled over our eyes as a common definition of who we are.  A significant portion of the American population believes that our President is not a citizen of the United States, nor a Christian, that evolution is not descriptive of the creation of the heavens and earth, that global warming is some kind of intellectual trick and that faith is largely a matter of political ideology.  Our nation went to war in Iraq having been hoodwinked by our own government to believe in lies which though finally proven to be lies survived far too long to have been acted on responsibly by us.  Thousands have, as a result, died to defend the indefensible.  President Lincoln said it best that you can fool some of the people all of the time.  So perhaps we live in a faith structure that is a hoax.  It is just that I don’t see how.

I think no group could have dreamed up the unity which exists in the teaching of the gospels and especially in the parables accredited to Jesus.  Without a doubt some of them have been edited and nearly ruined by the editing but many of them, most, are the work of a remarkable and unique mind.  A mind that in a few words telling a tiny story could lay down and open the largest imaginable truths.  The words of Jesus are it turns out forever new.

I come from a largely urban technological era and the New Testament is mostly about a rural non-technological era, yet the ideas at the center of that document remain today as clear and valid as they ever did when first heard.  There is in them a perpetual daily newness that cannot be dimmed by time.  They are, I believe, largely the work of one amazing mind.

For many years I worked on a daily and weekly basis on those words and especially those stories.  Called to speak and write publicly about them, I lived my professional and personal life in their company.  Each year Sunday after Sunday we were called to read them aloud, over and over and over, and each week I sat down, took in the text and wrote what I called either a sermon or essay about first this one and then that.   At the end I had read them all dozens of times and was called to think and say out of them something particular for those who heard or read me at my work.

I never, to the tragic end of my professional life, tired of the task.  There was always, in every one, something new to glimpse, touch, laugh over, weep with, celebrate.  I came to admire the heart and mind of Jesus above all.  I still do, despite our empty seats on Sunday morning.  I came to believe in them and in him, not as some great God but as this child of our wildest dreams of hope and promise who was touched by the divine in nearly unspeakable ways.  I still see him today not so much as Lord above all, but as this man, drawing stick in hand, around a fire with a circle of trusted friends and, perhaps, family, showing them the Truth in the stories he told – there was a man with two sons, there was a woman who lost something precious, there was a child who was hungry, there was a man who was full of evil forces, there was a farmer who seeded his farm, there was a rich man who looked down on others not like him.  One after another the stories came out and are for me and us forever alive.

Someone reads them to us and tells us of them and if, if, the thing is got right we laugh or weep or celebrate or fall on our knees.  We know we have been touched by the love which is our deepest dream and wildest hope.  This truth cannot, I feel, be the work of a committee or a plot.

The stories have, or course, been manipulated, edited and sometimes nearly ruined by well-intentioned followers and believers and some of the stories have been made up by someone else and slipped in.  The Bible has been laid hands on by those who would have better left it alone.  It cannot be whatever is meant by the word infallible but it remains sacred; the right place to place to put ones bets as our best hope.

So I come to this:  There was a man who had hold of the main thing.  About him we know very little, less than we would like.  He lived like nearly every other man or woman, happy and sad, healed and broken, poor yet deeply wise and rich in that wisdom, who carried with him a kind of wondrous magic.  He shared it with anyone who would reach for it and out of that came a Word which transformed reality.  He was, it appears, finally broken by those who could not bear the truth he confronted them with, yet somehow, whoever and whatever he was could not and would not die.

Some few of those who heard him and observed his loving acts did not forget them in the face of his murder.  About him they would not and could not keep silent.  In their ones and twos they told his story out of their memory of how and who he was.  The story, the words, were enchanting and compelling and the word of them grew and flourished.  Out of the magic of that came today finally this man writing this little essay who with his wonderful wife who lives in the middle of our nowhere village, oldish, limited, foolish, broken and broken-hearted but full of love and laughter and passion.  He is no longer good at going to church but he loves his Lord.

Douglas Evett

Dexter, Michigan

AD 2110

Summer 2110 Family

Summer 2110

We’ve put in a full summer despite my being laid up for a lot of it.  I’ve mostly recovered as I mentioned last time, but still suffer from a terrific lack of stamina. Walking is a large pain.  Cardiac rehab looms.

In the meantime we have celebrated the visit of all eight of our grandchildren.  Five came for longer stays.  Nora came with her parents from Virginia, via Mississippi and Chicago.  She is a charmer, 16 months old or so, walking and talking and terrifically sweet and pretty.  Four of them came from northern Virginia, Eli, Sam, Simon and Jake with their moms.  They stayed most of a week and our house was full of laughter and energy.  Our local kids, Lizzie, Paul and Clare came to have dinner with us and hug us.  Lizzie is also 16 months old, and taller than Nora but she looks like a shrimp next to Paul who is, at 15, six feet four inches long.  He pretty much towers over everyone especially me who has shrunk in the way of the more deeply aged.

At the same time my older brother Dave and his wife Marianne celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary.  They had a big do on an island in the Saint Lawrence Seaway, with most all of their children and grandchildren present and I know had a swell time. Dave has had some tough sledding with his own health recently so it was particularly good that they could all be with one another.  It is hard to believe their being married 50 years and the world and US so much different than they were in 1960.  That was the year I graduated from college (The University of the South) and had the great pleasure to make my first vote one for John F. Kennedy. I was also married that year, though it had a sadder ending. many years later.

Emily, the second child of her own family of six turned six that year.  She had more significant fish to fry than worry about American politics and the spouting of recent college boys graduating.  Her family is deeply rooted in both the Midwest (mother) and the experience of Italian immigrants (father) and they are clearly part of the great American melting pot.  At the time it would not have occurred that she and I could find us together fifty years later in a village in southern Michigan.  Such is the mystery of our lives.

Her larger family was very large, especially the many siblings of her father.  Most of them are gone now, but the grandchildren flourish, Emily being one. Between the four children in her family there are now, can I count right, eleven grandchildren.  Her brother has five children, which puts him in first place.

The point is that all of us come out of family.  Some of us have large families, some small, some tiny.  Some were happy and wonderful, some were deeply sad and broken, some very involved, some distant and remote, but we are all out of one or the other, or even several kinds.  My own family is terrifically important to me and I think without it I might well not be alive.  When up against my mortality in such a profound way the sure and steady love and gifts from my family surely saved my life.

Oddly we know virtually nothing about Jesus’ family.  It seems to me to be a kind of non-topic for the Church. For Rome family and virginity simply do not mix, yet the Bible too is nearly silent about Jesus and his family. We know so little of him historically that the subject has never gathered very much heat.  (One of my close friends in the ministry is quite certain Jesus himself did not exist).  Whatever we believe about the biblical record it seems clear enough that Jesus abandoned his family, or, at least, exchanged it for another and far larger one.  He was in that sense perfect proof that some of the best and truest of us live alone, their family some larger and a less legal thing.  We are infinite in our variety.

What the thought and life of Jesus did do, out of the mystery of the genius of his followers, was give us this far larger family or community we know as the Church.  Despite its flaws, which are huge and a deep shame, it holds somehow a vast body convinced that at its center there is the chance for life, which gives hope and love and care the strength and courage to insist on our carrying on.

Few of us is as sharp a critic of the Church than am I, most of the time just embarrassed by it (one need only think of RC bishops and right-wing evangelists to get the point, not to mention our own deep foolishness in the Episcopal Church) yet I am aware that it stands as a great bulwark for many millions and even billions of us.

It has shaped our language and literature, art and imagination, passion and love for centuries.  So too has my own family which has largely led me to where, today, I am.  For it I am grateful and for the promise seen in those eight grandchildren of ours I stand transfixed with love and hope and dreams.  The world is such a terrible mess I worry deeply about them and their future but I believe we always find the will to do the right and to love the truth.  So may it be for them.

In the meantime the tomatoes in their pots on our deck have flowered and fruited and grace our table.  There is there a red miniature rose which is massed with flowers and the ever present Morning Glory showing its beautiful colors each day at dawn.  There are vines hanging gracefully and a stunning box of New Guinea impatiens.  Petunias in red white and blue come on each and every day, and there has been even a sport sunflower a gift from one of my bird feeders, which has been in full color and brave in its straight way.  Step out there and it is hard not to feel better about self and things.

Doug