Solstice

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It’s black everywhere when I wake up this morning, and while I don’t mind winter’s early evenings, I heartily dislike getting up in the dark. But I have an idea to write about “my Hillary problem,” to explain that I have never been a fan – that the emails and the foundation shakedowns are part of an ugly sense of entitlement the Clintons have acquired over the years – but also that she seems now the one candidate for whom the world is a complex place. The desk at which I sit faces east, and when I turn on the light, the window reflects my face looking out at the spreading dawn and simultaneously looking back at me. I am part of what I see. It’s the shortest day of the year; the winter solstice will arrive 12 minutes before midnight. I sit, with my coffee growing cooler, watching the sky turn from black to light blue (which the dictionary says is also called sky blue or angel blue) to gray and then to pink. The light frost lifts from the ground. There is no sound, not even the noisy geese who winter here now are up.

I glance at the morning’s news, but the world outside the window seems immune to the atrocities it reports, just as the press seems too often oblivious to the beauty of the dawn and the resilience of goodness.

I’d like to dwell on that thought. The days are growing longer again. My children are coming home.

The Pope of Hope

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The United States restored diplomatic relations with Cuba on Pope Francis’ 78th birthday, a day of celebration in Rome that featured a mass tango and the gift of eight sunflowers from the homeless whose cause he champions. A full day for the first Latin American pope, who played a critical and patient role in the secret U.S.-Cuban negotiations. Although the Catholic Church has been one of communism's most implacable foes – even as communist regimes have tried to crush the church – it has stayed engaged, in Cuba, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, keeping alive for Catholics not only their faith but their hope.

Francis named himself for Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), whom historian Lynn White called “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, [who] tried to substitute the idea of equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.”

“He failed,” White concluded in The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis. His “prime miracle [was] that he did not end at the stake.”

White argues that Saint Francis offered the church a radically different path, which it rejected and rooted out. Even as it canonized Francis, the church was already instituting the terrors of the Inquisition, and no pope subsequently dared to take his name.

I like to think that Francis I seeks to reclaim that alternative vision of the church, one grounded in humility, dedicated to humanity, and committed to inclusiveness – a spiritual voice we desperately need to hear in this world.

Autumn Evening

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“I only know two things,” Vladimir Nabokov is reputed to have said (although I have never been able to find where), “that life is beautiful and that life is sad.” Walking yesterday evening in Acadia National Park, amid firs and spruce and pines, and hardwood trees whose multi-colored leaves sparkled in the muted light, it dawned on me that Nabokov was describing, not a contradiction but a connection. Fall is northern New England’s special season, and people travel great distances to experience it. It’s more than the foliage. The light is different now, the way it plays across the land and water, not overwhelming them with its summer intensity but drawing out the intrinsic beauty of the natural world. I walk on a path filled with fallen needles and dead leaves, as the earth prepares for its winter and I prepare for mine.

As I walk, I think that original sin is the evolution of a consciousness that set one species – ours – not just above all the others but separated from the rest of creation. It takes the passing beauty of an autumn evening to remind me that, despite all I have lost by this, I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I think of Thoreau at Walden, writing: “I went to the woods . . . to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The Pagan Saint

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It’s a small, plain church with whitewashed walls, a table for an altar and a blue shag carpet, wall-to-wall. There are seven or eight rows of comfortable wooden chairs, and were it not for the crucifix hanging behind the altar, you might think you were in a Congregational chapel. Labor Day was the Catholic feast of Saint Giles, who was born in 7th-century Athens but spent most of his life deep in a Provencal forest, the patron saint of childhood fears, mental illness and cripples. Father Sean’s Irish lilt gave the gospel’s language an unexpected grittiness, and his message spoke of humanity and the uncertainty, the fragility of life. “I don’t know if I shall be back,” he said, citing Robert Frost. “None of us know.”

How do I square this with an Irish church convulsed in crisis, still coping with its long history of priests abusing boys, now facing new revelations of unspeakable treatment of young women and their children in Catholic homes for unwed mothers?

I can’t.

But when Father Sean sang, "I danced in the morning when the world begun, and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun," I thought of St. Giles, a hermit whose only companion was a red deer, and I knew I stood in a different church, where it’s not about being godly, it’s about being human.

And when he said, “I urge you to take communion. I think it’s important. All are welcome here,” I walked forward.

The Big Bang

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Worshippers at a small church in coastal Maine will be treated to a science lesson during next Sunday’s sermon: “The Big Bang: God Spoke and ‘Bang’ It Happened”

Even Genesis allowed Him six days.

I’m not sure why that churchyard billboard jumped out at me. I don’t consider other people’s religious beliefs, however ludicrous, to be my business. But in a world in which centuries-old doctrinal differences still cause genocidal massacres and thousands of violent deaths – and where one sect’s holy shrine is another’s military target – religious activity can no longer get a free pass.

In America, 46 percent of the people believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, while only one in seven accepts evolutionary theory. These numbers haven’t changed in 40 years. What has changed is the context in which those beliefs are practiced. The free exercise of religion has jumped out of the church and into the political arena, where it challenges science as simply another, often blasphemous, set of beliefs, and where religious groups make ever-more muscular demands to insert their private theologies into the public discourse.

I don’t think that’s what the founding fathers had in mind. They had seen, in Europe and America, among Protestants and Catholics, the toxic mixture of religion and government – not to mention the experiences of African slaves and Native Americans, for whom the combination meant permanent bondage and annihilation.

Religious freedom and political democracy depend on the wisdom to keep them separate.

“All they will call you will be deportees”

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“In this country immigrants are still treated like victims. . . .If you can help them tell their stories, you will have done a lot.” I am reading Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s The Shadow Girls, recommended by a friend, about the thousands of people – from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere – who wash up daily on Europe’s southern shores. It is a reminder that America isn’t the only country with an immigrant issue, that all those children at our southern border are not just problems but people, and that most of them are not so much coming for America’s freebies as fleeing for their lives. Don’t misunderstand me, this is a huge problem, but it is a human one and it is global in scope. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that the world’s refugee population now exceeds 50 million for the first time since World War II.

Last Friday, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ordered every Christian still living in the city of Mosul to leave, convert or be killed. In images chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, ISIS appropriated the gold, confiscated the houses and destroyed the icons of the Chaldean Christian community that had lived in Mosul for 1,700 years. Many “expressed a sense of utter abandonment and isolation,” The New York Times reported. They fled with nothing but the clothes they wore, bringing the number of Iraq’s internal refugees to 1.2 million.

Seventeen hundred years of history. Gone forever. “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Levels of Intolerance

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I was driving in rural Maine, channel surfing on my car radio, when the dial paused on an evangelical preacher (of which Maine radio has many). “I know some non-Christians who are nicer than some Christians,” he was saying, some who are kinder and friendlier. But they aren’t going to heaven, he continued. You don’t get there by being a nice person. There is only one way to heaven, and they aren’t on it. My takeaway: Enjoy these charming people while you can because you will never see them again. From my perspective this seems progress, if not exactly toleration, for at least the preacher is giving me a chance to get out of this world unrepentant. Of the next world he has no doubt, and I think of his heaven as a place where he can say “I told you so” for eternity.

For now, though, there exists the possibility of friendship between the saved and the damned, although marriage still seems off-limits.

For Zakia and Mohammad Ali, the young Afghan couple – Zakia a Sunni, he a Shiite – who fell in love and eloped, marriage isn’t just off-limits. In their families’ eyes, it's a capital offense. They have been in hiding, in jail and live in fear for their lives.

“After I get released,” Zakia told a Times reporter, “I hope we can have a happy life again and go and live in a place that is safe for us. If my family catches us, they won’t leave us alive.”

A Pope and a Saint

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“Maybe it is because he is from Argentina,” wrote my son Daniel, who spent a semester in Buenos Aires, “but I love Francis. The guy is also a skilled politician.” His note accompanied a news article about the pope’s visit to the Middle East, where Francis presented an image that was at once diplomatic and genuine. I haven’t had much nice to say of late about the Catholic Church, whose record of abuse and concealment is one of the most chilling stories of modern history. And while his public persona is necessarily ahead of substantive changes in the church, Francis offers a hopeful new direction. On his trip to Israel and Palestine he paid homage at two powerful walls – the Western Wall, holiest of Jewish sites, and the West Bank barrier some call the “apartheid wall.” He had travelled a long way not only from Rome but from his predecessor, Pius X (a man also known for his “simple origins”), who in 1903 rebuffed Theodor Herzl’s request for help in establishing a Jewish state, telling the founder of Zionism that all his followers should instead convert to Catholicism. That kind of dogmatic sectarianism remains a discordant force in a world in which people continue to slaughter each other over religious beliefs. Francis intentionally took the name of a saint who offered the church a truly revolutionary path, which it rejected. Eight centuries later a pope’s embrace of openness, tolerance and humility are a measure of his courage and our hope.

Seeing Delight

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A few years ago I organized a 3-week trek on which six high-school students from the inner city and six from an upstate region of woods and dairy farms hiked and rowed the 125-mile length of New York City’s water-supply system, from Mountaintop to Tap. We gave the students cameras and journals to record their experiences, and after our first night in the open, Sean, a 14-year-old Puerto Rican, wrote: “When I woke up this morning I kept thinking about the stars that I saw last night. I live in Brooklyn and at night you don’t really see stars. I mean you’ll probably see a couple here and there but last night I was like WOW! In Brooklyn we have street lights lighting up our streets while over here you have these beautiful stars lighting up your environment.” I don’t know where Sean is now. I have heard he joined the marines. I thought of him this week as I scanned endlessly depressing news headlines: 300 miners killed in Turkey; murder indictments for the drowned children in one Korea, nukes in the other; melting ice in Antarctica; 275 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria; fires and drought in California. In the relentless roll of heartbreak it's easy to see a frightening, joyless world, without optimism or wonder. For most of Sean's 14 years, the borders of Brooklyn had been the contours of his existence. Then one night, lying in a sleeping bag in a wilderness a hundred miles from home, he looked up and he saw delight.

January Morning

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Like many other places across America, the coast of Maine has had some freaky weather of late. Last week’s frigid temperatures, which turned waterfalls here into ice sculptures, made global warming doubters positively giddy (although I was heartened to read that the Obama administration is, however quietly, pushing climate initiatives behind the scenes). Then came the pouring rains and yesterday morning’s welcome sunrise, which brought with it a soft blue sky and warmed my aging body as only sunshine can. A southwest breeze carried the resonant sound of waves breaking on the rocks, and the few birds still here woke up singing. It was a day to be outside. The water that had been pent up in ice was suddenly released into mountain streams, and its exuberance brought the mountain itself to life. Even for simpletons like me (are those prints of a deer heading north or a rabbit going south?), there is so much to learn here, things that the computer-simulated models  favored in science classes cannot teach. None is more important than that we are part of something astounding, a world we seek to manipulate but do not fully understand.

I remember at times like these the words of my friend Charity, who has lived most of her life in Detroit’s ravaged neighborhoods, and who was asked why she cared about saving Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which she would probably never see. “My work,” she said, “is in the city, but my heart is in the wild.”

Let’s Take the Christ out of Christmas

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I like to think of myself as a spiritual person, especially at this time of year when conspicuous consumption is in the air and pandemonium rules the malls. Others suggest that I am just cheap. In any event, I side with those who think it’s time to take the $ out of Chri$tmas. But why stop there? Let’s go all the way and take the Christ out of Christmas. Does this make me a warrior in the “war on Christmas” that Bill O’Reilly sees all across America, that has led Glenn Beck’s Nativity Defense Force to counterattack against liberals, atheists and Satanists? No. I love the story of Christmas: a young girl, about 14, rides into Bethlehem on the longest night of the year, accompanied by her companion, a carpenter. They go to an inn but are told there is no room. What were they thinking – a destitute couple, dirty from the road, the girl nine months pregnant? Of course there was no room for them. There still isn’t. So they go to a stable where the girl gives birth to a child, who will later rebel against the narrowness of his tribe and the oppression of the state – which will join together to silence him. This story is not a weapon in the culture wars or any other war. It is no more about sectarian exclusion than it is about material gluttony. It is a universal story of courage and hope and inclusion, of birth and rebirth.

Merry Christmas.

"Because We Care"

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Lost among the avalanche of headlines on the government crisis last week was the heartbreaking story of Anjelica Castillo. For 22 years she was known only as “Baby Hope”, and the New York City Police Department continues to piece together the details of her short life and violent death. It’s a story that probes the depths of the human capacity for evil and our equally strong capacity for love – even the love of an unidentified four-year-old child whose decomposed body was found in a blue picnic cooler just below the Henry Hudson Parkway on a sweltering July day in 1991. Two years later, after an investigation in which every lead hit a dead end, the officers of the 34th precinct buried Baby Hope in a Bronx cemetery. “We are her family,” said Jerry Giorgio, the detective leading the investigation. “We are burying our baby.” But they never forgot her. They kept watch over her grave, which had a toll-free number for tips. They kept the investigation open. And this weekend they charged her cousin with rape and murder. No one ever reported Anjelica missing. No one who had seen anything came forward to report it. Even Anjelica’s body revealed no clue of her identity. I don’t think any other species treats its own kind with the malevolent cruelty that marked her life. But I also don’t think any other species has the devotion that drove Giorgio, now 79, and his colleagues all those years. Who else would have named such a child “Hope”?

Beacon of Hope

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There is much to abhor about the Catholic Church, from laundering money to repressing women to abusing young boys. Not to mention the Inquisition. The new pope brings hope of change. The first sign was his name: of the 266 popes, he is the first to choose Francis, the gentle 12th- century monk who was canonized but never ordained. St. Francis didn’t just preach to birds. In the view of some historians, he represented an alternative path – ministering to the dispossessed and advocating the equality of all things before God, rather than their subjugation by man – which the church systematically stamped out. Pope Francis’s first official trip was to the island of Lampedusa, the destination of millions of African migrants seeking a better life in Europe. Thousands never make it, drowning at sea in smugglers’ boats. It is a place much like the American southwest, but the pope’s plea that Lampedusa be “a lighthouse in all the world” is rarely heard in Arizona. “How many times,” Francis asked, “do those who seek this not find understanding, reception or solidarity?” Last week, he linked the horrific shipwreck off Lampedusa to the “inhuman global economic crisis, a serious symptom of a lack of respect for the human person.”

“Today is a day of tears,” he said. “Such things go against the spirit of the world.”

Remember our own better self? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses learning to breathe free . . . I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

A Love Story

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We don’t know why we’re here. We don’t know where we’re going. And we don’t control what will happen to us along the way, much as we like to think we do. When John Vigiano, a retired New York City firefighter, woke up 12 years ago this morning, he had no idea that his only two sons would be dead before noon. John Jr., 36, was a firefighter and his brother Joe, 34, was a police detective, and both men lost their lives at the World Trade Center. Their father recorded his memories of that day in a four-minute video, animated by StoryCorps, which my daughter Annie sent me. Watching it, listening to the father’s voice, is how I imagine a religious experience – a four-minute moment of awe, without any false emotion. John and Joe each called their father as they were heading to work. The calls ended with the words, I love you. “We had the boys – John for 36 years and Joe for 34 years,” said Vigiano. “I wouldn’t have changed anything. There’s not many people that the last words they said to their son or daughter was ‘I love you’ and the last words they heard was ‘I love you.’ So, that makes me sleep at night.”

There is no mention of heaven or hell, of Christians or Muslims, of vengeance or the American flag. This is the ultimate resurrection story, the triumph of love over the tragedy of life.

Annie’s message with the link said simply, “I love you.”

Boston

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I have no insights into Boston’s tragedy, but it brought to mind something my son Jake said to me on Saturday: “Sometimes I think we are running our evolutionary course, just like all other species do.” We were talking about environmental issues – global warming, massive extraction of resources, poisoning the air and water, 7 billion people increasing exponentially – but how we treat the earth is inextricably tied to how we treat each other. Yesterday brought a horrific reminder that some people treat humans as callously as nature, and when the terror strikes so close, we must realize that we can no longer try only to insulate ourselves from it. The world seems a bleaker place this morning. Three people dead, including an eight-year-old boy, others suddenly without legs, a day of celebration defiled. And yet for the rest of us, “life goes on,” a phrase that evokes the resilience of the human race. But it can’t go on like this forever, and we are the only ones who can change it. And if we do not, if we run our evolutionary course and vanish from the earth, who will care? Certainly the earth won’t. It will miss us no more than it misses the dinosaurs, and undoubtedly less since we do so much more damage to it. This is not about saving the earth. It is about saving ourselves. On the day after three tragic deaths, we need to affirm life.

Now and Then

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I was walking yesterday on a trail called “Main Road,” which is a good indication of its degree of difficulty, when I tripped on a small root and fell on my face. I got up, cursed myself for being old and clumsy, and walked on. I realized that I walk inside my head, lost in my thoughts and unaware of my surroundings and the dangers they hold. So I made a Zen-like effort to pay attention to the world around me. It was a cold and beautiful day, more like fall than spring. The trees were still bare, and little was blooming except skunk cabbage along the stream. About 15 minutes later, absorbed now in the nature's beauty, I went down again. Lying there, I wondered, “How do you fully experience the place you are in and still keep moving?” This is an especially poignant question for the elderly, who are in no particular hurry to get where we know we are going, even as time speeds us along the way. Perhaps this is what drove Albert Einstein to his ideas of relativity, in which space and time fuse into one. In a letter to the family of a friend who had died, Einstein wrote, “for us physicists (sic) believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." If only he’d left out the last phrase.

Good Grief

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I have never really understood Good Friday, beginning with what’s so good about it. Today is the lowest point on the Christian calendar, the day a charismatic young man, recently come back from the wilderness where he had turned down Satan’s transparently better offers, was nailed to a cross. Over the intervening 2,000 years Christians have killed a great many Jews in retribution, so it obviously hasn’t been a good day for everyone. Crucifixion was a not uncommon and excruciatingly slow way to die (remember the scene with the crucified slaves from Spartacus?), and it has both horrified and baffled me since I was a child. I spent five years in a church school, where these were not incidental questions, and I have listened since to ministers and radio preachers say that Christ died for me, for us, for our sins. This doesn’t get me very far, and when I press for more, I'm told that the crucifixion is the sign of God’s love for mankind. I remember that sacrificing your child had also come up with Abraham and Isaac, and as the father of four, it never sat very well with me.

As I grow older I am learning, slowly, to take responsibility for my own sins, which isn’t nearly as easy as blaming someone else. But it seems so indispensable to my self-understanding that I’m reluctant to farm it out. Perhaps, Jesus is the image of each of us accepting ourselves and our lives, as painful as that can be. Just no nails, please.

Connections

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It was dark when I got up this morning, and the ground outside was frozen. Death is much on my mind. The sadness of it. And the wonder of it. As we plan for our mother’s service and burial, I remember our second child, who was born 34 years ago today and lived only three days. My mother, who was not born to grow old, lived for 90 years, almost all of them filled with a zest for living. I have never known life without her. My daughter I barely knew. She lies in a Quaker graveyard overlooking the peaceful hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a plot she shares with her maternal grandmother, who died too young at 62, and grandfather, who lived fully for two more decades; her cousin Dallas, who died suddenly at three months and whose parents I first met at her graveside service; and, in unmarked graves, Leonid Berman, the painter who fled the Russian Revolution and survived the Holocaust in rural France, and his wife, the harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe.

It’s an eclectic community, so resonant of life’s caprices. For reasons I don’t really understand, I feel connected to all of them, as much now as when they were alive. I wonder where they have gone and why some of their lives were cut so short, while others survived wars and shipwrecks.

The daylight has come, and the ground will thaw. But I still wonder why, with all the sadness death brings, we inflict it so wantonly.

Keep the Faith

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“I think part of what we're seeing,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an NRA board member, “sadly is again Rahm Emanuel's comment never let a good crisis go to waste. And the gun control advocates for a long time have jumped on every tragedy and tried to exploit it in unhelpful ways.” “People where I live,” said Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina – “I’ve been Christmas shopping all weekend – have come up to me: ‘Please don’t let the government take my guns away.’”

First, I do not ever want to go Christmas shopping with Lindsay Graham. Second, it is the gun lobby that is demagoguing the Newtown shooting –  NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre’s response last week was nothing but a panegyric to guns and those who shoot them, which seems kind of tasteless, to say the least.

But the issue goes way beyond bad taste. A rabid, unelected and well-funded cabal has decided it can override the popular will through fear mongering and money, and it seems eager to bring down the government over a millionaire’s tax and a rational gun law. We have seen such disdain for flabby democracy before. It brought Hitler to the Reichstag in 1933.

This is my only post of Christmas week, and I don’t want to dwell on the lunatic fringe at a time when all our children are briefly home together, and our goal is to celebrate life and rebirth, family and friends. That is all. In light of what is happening in the world, that is a lot, and we are thankful to have it.

Keep the faith. Happy Hannukwanzmas!