Coming Out of the Closet

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Coming “Out of the Closet” Not Just for Gays

It’s not only the gays who struggle to come out of the closet. Many of us are in closets of our own making, closets that have nothing to do with sexual orientation but everything to do with owning our real self.

We are afraid to be real, not so much that we have secret faults to hide, but because down deep we know that we are more than the persona we show the world. All too glibly, we mouthed the words we heard in catechism class or Sunday school, the ones that said, “We are created in the image and likeness of God,” but we didn’t take them seriously. That was a leap of faith that was too scary.

We accepted instead an image of ourselves based on our success in a professional career or on the money we made or the model car we drove or on the recognition we received from others. That’s who we are; the way other people see us. Right? Wrong!

We know better. We really do. In the 6o’s a group called “The Seekers” came out with a song called “Georgy Girl.” Remember? The lyrics speak to a girl who is afraid to be herself. In part they say:

“Hey there Georgy girl
There’s another Georgy deep inside
Bring out all the love you hide and oh, what a change there’d be
The world would see a new Georgy girl.”

We’re a piece of work aren’t we? Born to scan the heavens, we muddle through life with our eyes cast down on the ground beneath us, The gifts within us atrophy because we would rather tamp down the fire that burns in our soul lest we accept the greatness to which we are called. Whoa! Quick, turn on the mindless TV sit-com or do something that that takes our minds off this pesky call to be something more. Nobody is better at dumbing us down than the person we see in the mirror every morning.

We let ourselves get overwhelmed by the photos of poor emaciated children in Biafra, or the Sudan, throw up our hands and act as though we are helpless, forgetting that making a difference in even one life has its importance.

What’s the Jewish saying, “By saving one life, you are saving the world. ?” Wow! That’s powerful stuff. I get goose bumps, too, whenever I think of the butterfly effect, the fact that even the tiny butterfly flapping its wings makes its presence felt all over the world.

We are connected, mates. Our smiles count, so does our acts of compassion and our forgiveness. But first we have to get out of our closets of fear and timidity and be the lover, the friend, the parent, the kid we were made to be. Don’t you think?

A Young Boy, a Dying Old Woman and a Moment in Time

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The Gift

A Young Boy, a Dying Old Woman and a Moment in Time

I wanted so badly to connect with my sister-in-law who was very close to death, but her once bright alert eyes were unresponsive. The nurse, who had seen the last days of many nursing home patients, told me that Phyllis had decided to let go. She had lived a full life but now, it was her time.

I tried again to rouse her as she sat, slumped in the wheel chair. . “Phyllis! Phyllis.” Her head remained down. No contact. Nothing. Then, I had an idea. If I could bring Mac to see her, I had a hunch that she would respond.

Mac is a twelve year-old boy who I know from my years at the Children’s Village. I had taken him along to see my sister-in-law in happier times. The two of them always hit it off famously. Maybe a visit from Mac might help.

A bright extroverted kid, Mac is irrepressibly chatty. No doubt about it. This kid likes to talk. Fortunately, he speaks with a volume that would make any hearing aid superfluous. There is something about his child-like chatter that strikes a chord in my sister-in-law. Beyond that, the kid has a compassion for people that way beyond his chronological age. I call him an “old soul.”

So, the very next day, I took Mac with me on my visit to the convalescent hospital. I was a little concerned that it would be too hard for the kid to see how Phyllis had slipped, both physically and mentally. Before I took him to her room, I asked the nurse how Phyllis was doing. “About the same,” she said. Then in a sad voice, “I wish you luck; she hasn’t been talking to anyone.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t luck we needed. We had an angel in the form of a 12 year-old kid. Her head was still down when we entered the room. I said, “Look who I brought you, your friend Mac.” The boy immediately chirps up. “Hi Phyllis, it’s me, Mac.” Magically, her head came up and a smile of recognition suffused her face. Phyl’s little friend had arrived and boy, did she know it. .

Their conversation was mostly one-sided: Phyl still could not speak very
well but she followed the boy with her eyes, almost as though she was trying to memorize the bright youthful face of the boy. The two of them connected seamlessly, as though the age difference of almost seven decades was completely irrelevant.

The visit was short because Phyl no longer has the stamina for a long conversation but something beautiful, even sacred, had happened in their
time together. The innocence of a child had connected with dying old age and left his gift at her feet.

The Hunger games, a parable for our times

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Hunger Games is a parable for our times

In the “Hunger Games” children are selected to kill other children in a gruesome real-life survivor games spectacle. The annual televised “entertainment” is intended to keep the citizens from any thoughts of protesting their impoverished existence under a despotic government.

It is not by chance that the evil empire should choose youth 18-24 years old as the sacrificial victims of their games. Young people are the energy that drives a nation. They are our hope, our passion, our future. Kill off the youth and you have killed any chance to bring about change in society.

Is it farfetched to see a hidden, albeit softened version of the “Hunger Games” being played out in our midst? Isn’t there an eerie similarity in the way we send hundreds of thousands of our youth to places like Iraq and Afghanistan to be killed or disabled for life?

Isn’t it awkward, at the very least, that, in California, we spend more money to build prisons to warehouse young offenders, (most of whom are being imprisoned for victimless crimes,) than we do to build more colleges and universities?

Given our massive drug problem in this country, why can we never seem to find enough money to fund drug rehabilitation services for our youth and follow-up programs for those leaving prison? Maybe we are not directly killing off our youth but we sure are wasting any potential they may have to turn their lives around. Aren’t we?

Did you notice that we hardly ever speak of “broken families” anymore? We don’t want to face the fact that our easy road to divorce is deeply affecting the lives of our children. Couples split, rationalizing that they don’t love one another anymore. Nobody is hurt, right? Nobody but the kids they left behind.

Too often children from dysfunctional families find themselves being sent to a foster care system on overwhelm. Siblings are separated from one another; kids are bounced from one foster placement to another. Woefully underpaid child-care staff are left without adequate resources to care for the victims of abuse and neglect. With as many as 70% of prison inmates having spent time in foster care, is it any wonder that the system is often referred to as a “pipeline” to prison.

If the national character is judged by the way it treats its children, we aren’t doing very well. Our youth need us to raise a little hell on their behalf. They deserve better health care (40 million uninsured children is not acceptable.) They have a right to the opportunity for a good education; for the chance to grow up in an intact family and to be valued as the future of our country.

Unlike the Hunger Games, we have not planned this giant conspiracy to diss our children. Most of us love our children and are willing to sacrifice for them. But folks, we have to do better.

The Not So Hidden God

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The Not So Hidden God

Remember when you were a little kid and your mom or maybe a nun at school told you that God is EVERYWHERE. I recall being sort of freaked out. You know what I mean? It made me nervous to know that God could see me, even when I was trying to light up one of my dad’s cigs in the bathroom.

In my grown-up way of envisioning God, I still see God as everywhere but it’s not the stern overseer of all my shortcomings that I see but a God of love. He (She) is not up in the clouds somewhere counting our failings. God is not “up there” at all but in me and in all of creation.

God is not a hidden God at all. He is easy to discover anywhere we look.
Want to see God? Look for Him in a young couple saying their “I do’s” to one another on their wedding day, or a soldier putting his life on the line for the country he loves, or parents working two jobs for their family, or entertainers volunteering their talents for starving children they will never see.

The God who is everywhere is in us. He is our better nature, the part of us that yearns for peace in the world and hope for our children. God lives in our longing for a just world where every kid has parents, who tuck him in at night, put away money for his education and show up for every school play.

The presence of God is not limited to our species. Who among us cannot see the hand of God in the way elephants will mourn the death of one of their own, or in the loyalty of dogs to their owners or the fierce protectiveness of a mother lioness towards her cubs? Call it “instinct” if you must but I see in that instinct an expression of love.

Ah! But you say, if God is everywhere, where is he when children in Somalia starve to death or when warlords recruit children to kill or when politicians act out of greed instead of following the conscience? How do we explain the seeming absence of God in the killing fields of Cambodia or the Holocaust? The French philosopher, Camus, put it powerfully. “Explain to me how God allows the suffering of children in our world and I will believe in Him.”

I don’t pretend to have an answer for Camus. Much greater intellects than mine have grappled with the mystery of evil in our midst. What helps me to reach even a glimmer of understanding of something so beyond me, is to acknowledge the awesome power in each of us to choose evil over good. It is not that God is absent but that we have the freedom to blind ourselves to His presence.

The yearning for power or greed has shut our eyes to that better nature for which we were created. God is still here but we look past Him. And, in doing so, we render Him, who is the source of love, invisible for us. The hidden God is not in hiding at all if we have eyes to see.

The New Narcissists

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The New Narcissists

Did you happen to catch the article entitled “Living Alone is the New Norm.” in the March 12, issue of Time Magazine? The article written by Professor Klinenberg, a Professor of Sociology at New York University, is like a peon of praise for living the single life.

Says the professor, “Living alone allows us to do what we want, when we want, on our own terms. It liberates us from the constraints of domestic partner’s needs and demands and permits us to focus on ourselves.”

To the harried mom trying to do a shopping trip with two little guys in tow, or the dad working a second job to support a family, or any post honeymoon young couple struggling with their relationship, this vision of living alone sounds pretty seductive doesn’t it? Yes! That’s for me. Doing what I want when I want to do it, untouched by the “constraints” of other people’s needs.

But you know something? It’s those “constraints” that help us grow as human beings. We grow as persons by the give and take involved in relationships with others, by putting aside our own interests so that we can be present for our children. We are created social beings, responsible for one another, both in our own families and in the wider community. It’s the push and pull of living in relationships with others that stretch us and mold us into
complete persons.

Profess Klineberg, in his article, claims, “Living alone helps us pursue the sacred modern values-individual freedom, personal control and self-realization.”

What a load of manure. I submit that too many of us are already “pursuing our sacred modern values” with the predictable result of widespread poverty, abandoned children and darn near perpetual warfare among nations. We want our individual freedom; no matter if our choices hurt the freedom of others, We don’t want to be responsible for others. It’s all about seeking self-fulfillment without the messiness of including others in our quest.

I suggest that we are much better off both as individuals and as a society by renewing our commitment to some of the Judeo-Christian values enshrined in the Golden Rule and leading us to stand for values like
brotherly love, making a difference in the world and serving others.

Whether you live alone or with others, these are the values that will turn you away from narrow self-focus and put you on the road towards being a whole person. Don’t you think?

Song of Our Lives

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The Song of Our Lives
Today, Tomorrow and Forever

TODAY

I cry for humanity
For little children dying in the streets
For old people who no longer hope
For babies who will never be born
For inmates languishing in their cells
For soldiers who no longer know why they kill

I cry for those who die alone
For the poor of Calcutta
For the wealthy who live without meaning
For woman who have no voice
For the greedy who never have enough
For parents who abuse their kids

TOMORROW

I sing a joyful song
I sing for the wonder in a child’s eyes
For early morning coffee and family dinners
For the passion for justice that lives in young people
For the kiss of the sun on your back
For the daffodils in spring, and laughter and dancing

I sing with joy for the hope that lives in our souls
For that universal, unquenchable yearning for peace
For the hero who lays down his life for a friend
For the cry of compassion that never dies
For the overwhelming beauty of our universe
For kindness and gentleness that will not be quenched

FOREVER

And the tears and the laughter are the sinews of our lives
The weddings and the funerals
The births and the deaths
The bliss and the loneliness
And the loving God who made us
“Saw that it was good”

Funny Hats and Cardinals

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Funny hats, Royal Robes, Good Grief Charley Brown!

WHO ARE THESE GUYS AND WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?

Am I the only Catholic totally embarrassed by the recent “coronation” of new bishops into the ranks of cardinals in Rome? The miters on their heads, the flowery red robes, their funny little slippers on their feet, the opulence of the setting made me think of a Cecil B Demille movie about the Holy Roman Empire.

C’mon guys, who in the name of heaven is your PR Manager? Is this foppery the message you want to convey to the world? “Here we are in all our finery, the Church Triumphant.” Funny. I thought we were founded by a poor carpenter in Nazareth.”

Is this who we are, this assembly of silk robed old bucks parading down the aisles of St.Peters in medieval costumes? As a Catholic, I say, “Shame on you, Holy Father and your entourage of cardinals. You all look pretty silly.

Don’t tell me it is tradition. That kind of tradition didn’t start until Charlemagne declared the Church to be the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire, three centuries after Christ. The Holy Roman Empire is long gone? May it rest in peace.

I submit that the traditions we want to follow are rooted in the life of a poor carpenter, whose followers were chosen from the ranks of fishermen and ordinary working stiffs. I dare say there wasn’t a red robe to be found in their ranks.

If we are serious about honoring tradition, how do we explain the awkward fact that our first Pope had a mother-in-law? And what about the presence of all those women who followed Jesus so loyally? Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see even one woman in the Papal entourage.

Jesus chose his followers from ordinary folks. As far as I know he didn’t say “Okay, if you want to join me on my mission, you have to be male and celibate. No one else need apply.” I don’t think so.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am a Catholic and proud of it. My church has served the poor and the marginalized of the world. It has built schools and hospitals and been in the forefront for social justice, the rights of workers, the dignity of humankind.

I stand for this church, pray with its members and love what it stands for. The Church I identify with gives a preference for the poor and works for world peace and calls on people to love one another. That’s the Church I belong to.

As for your royal regalia, surely you can find a place for it in the Vatican Museum.l

What if there is No God?

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What If There is No God?

Leaving my apartment this morning to spend my half-hour of prayer and meditation at St.Eugene’s chapel, the thought struck me, “Could I be wasting my time? What if my prayers are no more useful than the wishes we make before blowing out the candles on a birthday cake? What if my prayers are addressed to a delusion, a made-up God who exists only in our minds?

Years ago, I would not have put my own doubts out there so bluntly. I would have been afraid to do so. I dared not express my doubts, even to myself. To doubt the very existence of God was unthinkable.

Through the years I have learned that I can’t make doubts go away by stuffing them. I like Thoreau’s perspective; He said ““Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.”

Besides, Christianity has had a long tradition of doubters starting soon after the Resurrection of Jesus with one of Jesus’s chosen disciples, that old skeptic Thomas. He wasn’t about to take the words of the other disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead. “Oh yea? Prove it,” was Thomas’s response. I suspect many of us, even those of us who fill the pews at Sunday services, have at times shared Thomas’s reservations.

Dostoyevsky, one of a long line of Christians who had his own struggles with faith, once said, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born in the furnace of doubt.” There was a man who took his religion seriously.

Like the iconic Russian writer, many of us continue to struggle with our faith. Others, perhaps unaware, or in denial of the commitment that the Christian faith implies, are more inclined to shrug their shoulders, saying in so many words, “Whatever.”

They get on with our lives as though it doesn’t make any difference whether they believe or not. After all, they rationalize, God’s existence can hardly be proven or, for that matter, disproved so, why bother our heads over something we can’t know?

William Sloane Coffin, a man who grasped the implications of what it means to be a Christian, said that for him, faith is much more than believing in a slew of dogmas. According to Coffin, “Faith isn’t believing without proof. It’s trusting without reservation.”

Faith in God, in that sense, is more like you say to your son or daughter, “Honey, I believe in you. I know you can do it.” That kind of belief is based more on trust than on logic. That kind of faith can energize us and cast out doubts.

If I believe in God in that way, any hesitation vanishes. God is as real as life and love and the air we breathe and the trust we have in our best friend. Far from wondering if I am wasting a half-hour of my time in prayer, I should be on my knees 24/7 for I tread on sacred ground. If God is truly the source of all that is good and holy and beautiful, being in his presence is exactly where I should be.

Welcoming “Monsters” into Your Life

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Coping With our Monsters

Not all monsters are the furry, scary kind that inhabits the nightmares of little children. According to Peter Skaife, a Northern California spiritual counselor, who has written a fascinating book on the subject, monsters are a part of all of our lives. Skaife defines a monster as “anything, that at this moment, bothers me, irritates me or interferes with my life.”

I have to admit that it took me some time for my mind to get around this definition of a monster. Wait a minute. Say that again. A monster is what?

As I understand it, monsters are sort of like the “good angels” that the nuns told us about in religion class, the spirits that perch on our shoulders counseling us to do the right thing. We don’t always welcome their presence because, frankly, monsters are so damn honest. Most of us don’t appreciate being reminded of the dumb things we have done or the good things we didn’t do. That’s why they irritate us.

On the other hand, monsters are loyal friends because they won’t let us down. They represent our better selves to ourselves. They are our healers, our spiritual directors, and our conscience.

In his book, Skaife reveals his own personal monsters who “notice when I crowd my life and fill my schedule with activities, to avoid paying attention to the things that bother me,” and the monsters who “teach me that every day of my life is a lifetime and who “want me to live each day as fully as I can.” His monsters also “see when I do things to impress myself and other people. They want me to know they are not impressed.”

Monsters see through us and won’t take our b.s. “Hey,” they prod us, “You’re better than that. You know that you were created in the image and likeness of God. You can change the world if you believe in yourself; let’s get cracking.”

The deal is, our monsters are right (damn them); we do yearn to be that person, making our world a better place. When we follow that voice within, we know we are tooling down the freeway clicking on all our cylinders. Doing the right thing is its own reward, baby.

But, being human, sometimes we screw up. We cheat on our spouse, or goof off at work, or copy a term paper that someone did for us on the internet, or pretend to be knowledgeable about something we know nothing about, “faking it” in a thousand different ways so that we can impress people.

Our monsters remind us of our foibles. That’s why they bother us. We don’t like to be nagged by monsters that know that we are capable of doing, way better, who know our dignity and potential..

Like our very best of friends, the monsters continue to call us to be the best we can be. They remind us when we slough off our responsibilities to our kids or to our spouse or to our community. Loving us dearly, they forgive us but want us to know, they are not going away. They will continue to bother us and interfere with our life. That’s what monsters do.

Are monsters real? You betcha! They are as real as Santa and the man on the moon and the play of children. But, like so many of our myths, they express profound truths about ourselves. We all need to be reminded of our uniqueness as human beings, of our potential for good, of our connectedness with the universe.

If letting monsters into our lives help us to realize all that we are and all that we can be, I say, “Monsters, Welcome aboard!”

“We’re All Just Walking Each Other Home”

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“We’re all just walking each other home.”

Ram Dass

In the early days of the Children’s Village. many of the kids used to attend a public school in our neighborhood. From time to time, I would take my dog, Sammy, and walk to school to meet them. Then, Sammy and I would walk the kids home. I found that our kids would really prefer walking to getting a ride home in the village van.

I enjoyed it, too. Walking along with the kids, I would be the first to hear their stories.
“Mrs. Holiday is so cool. She told us about the time she almost ran over a cat.”
“Grandpa Hank, I got an ‘A’ on my spelling test.”
“Sean’s my best friend.”
“Mr. Norton made us do push-ups”

There was something comfortable about just walking along with the kids. It felt so normal somehow, like this is the way it’s supposed to be. You could picture it on an old Normal Rockwell painting, the old grandpa and his dog walking the kids home from school.

Well, times change. Most of the village kids have moved on to junior high or high school and have to be driven to school now. But the memory of our walks to school remains in the nostalgia file of my brain.

Coming across the quote from Ram Dass yesterday (“We’re all just walking each other home”) made me think beyond the context of school kids, to our larger life as human beings on our life journeys.

Caught up in our own little worlds, it is easy to forget that all of us are, in a sense, walking each other home. Born into the same world, breathing the same air and belonging to the same human species, “We are,” says Maya Angelou, “more alike than un-alike.”

My child-like fantasy is a larger-than-life Norman Rockwell painting depicting the human race walking hand-in-hand, going home at the end of our journey. We are kids again, holding hands, just walking one another home. We have so much in common, you and I. There’s lots to talk about and share and it’s such a beautiful day.

What’s that you say? “Sure, Hank, and life is like a big, fluffy cone of cotton candy.” Yea, maybe you’re right. But the dream remains and the reality is that we really ARE, all of us, on a journey home. The trouble is we are fighting with each other on the way, spoiling what could be a lovely walk.