RIGHTSIZING

We are in the process of moving these days. There are boxes everywhere. What’s worse is that we cannot use our front door when we get the mail or the paper or take stuff out that we are giving to the Vietnam Veterans. While we were away on our trip to California, a mother robin decided that the wreath on our front door would make a good nest for her to-be youngsters. Now anyone who comes to the door or goes out gets dive-bombed. She has about a week before some movers come and have to open the door to get her newborns on their way. We shall see.

At any rate, while I was out getting boxes from the local state liquor store, Arlena was having her teeth cleaned. She told the hygienist that we were moving because we were downsizing. The hygienist told her the new term for that is “rightsizing”. She was correct. The young couple who are buying our home are rightsizing as well. They need more space for their growing family.

We’ve all been there and will probably be there for the rest of our lives. In fact, all of life is about rightsizing. We buy the right size of the clothes and the shoes we wear. If we are smart, we purchase the car that is right for our family: a larger one as the family grows and a smaller one as the kids move out of the nest.

Sometimes we go too far as Arlena and I have discovered over and over again. That is the reason for our calling the Vets. We have too much: too many clothes, too many shoes. (Okay, too many shoes for me. Arlena, and no woman I know, has too many shoes. Her Mom at 97 still buys shoes!) Most of us have too much stuff and it is usually only when we deem it’s time to really right size that we do something about it, like now for us.

Unfortunately, perhaps even sadly, it is often only when we are in the process of rightsizing that we realize just how blessed we are: blessed that we have been able to accumulate so much; blessed that we are able to right size whatever that size is; even blessed that we can share our overabundance with those who have no abundance at all, who truly appreciate what we are willing and able to share.

Why we are so blessed is simply beyond my understanding. We have done nothing  to deserve what we have, all those blessing, especially when we know people who are more deserving than we are who seem to get the short end of the stick time after time. The only response I can make, perhaps that anyone of us can make who are so blessed, is to be open to the invitations that God somehow sends our way to use our gifts – material, spiritual, physical – to help those who are less blessed.

My daily prayer is to ask God to use me as God so chooses as that is the only way that I can even conceivably begin to give some semblance of thanks for all the blessings that I have, in my mind, undeservedly received. It took rightsizing to open my eyes.

YOU HAVE TO WONDER

Over my 50 years as a priest I have visited with and tried to attend to the very real spiritual issues of parishioners. There were those who were suffering from some kind of malady or another, in real physical pain and wondering what they had dome that God was punishing them so. They looked to me, the man of God, for some answer, any answer, if only so that they could make some sense out of all this physical pain.

They were not the only ones, those in physical pain. There were those who were dealing with tragedies of one kind or another in their lives, usually with family members: the death of a child, the devastating illness of a loved one, you name it. The pain was not physical. It was spiritual, mental. They, too, wondered why God, all-loving, all-powerful, could allow this to happen. They looked to be for some semblance of an answer even if, deep in their hearts, I could not give them one.

If there was any solace on my part when confronted with these questions, it was and is that I was and still am not alone. Those same questions have been asked from the time humanity began to believe in a God who could prevent such suffering from ever happening. Even pagans asked these questions from their gods. I was not alone and have never been alone in struggling to explain, let alone, understand unjust suffering.

St. Theresa of Avila once observed in a personal prayer to God, “Lord, if this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few.” She may have prayed that tongue-in-cheek but she was right on. Millions of people refuse to believe in a loving God, one who allows those who believe to suffer so much. Life, to them, is akin to a crapshoot: you get what you get. Roll the dice, and if you are lucky, you’ll be spared the pain or a reasonable amount of it. If not, so be it. In this life there are winners and there are losers. Just hope for the best.

But that doesn’t work for those who believe and was never, and never is, an answer for someone who has to try to explain to those who are suffering why they are. The truth is, there is no answer, at least not one that will allow the sufferer to feel less pain. Personally, I don’t know what I have done to deserve to be so blessed, perhaps even spared, while so many are in so much underserved pain. I am only thankful. But that does not stop me from wondering about all this.

So how do I, how do we, answer the question that will never go away, the truly unanswerable question for those of us who believe, because it really is? Saying “I don’t know” does not get me off the hook. Saying “God has God’s reasons” makes one wonder what these reasons are knowing full well God will not give us a direct answer even if that were possible. The only answer I can give is “I don’t know why you are suffering, why what has happened happened. There is no satisfactory answer. All I can promise and all I can do is walk with you as best I can.”

EMBRACING THE COMMA

Punctuation marks are important for coherent and cohesive written communication. That is why I have always been in a sort of awe ever since I learned back in scripture class in seminary that the Greek New Testament was written without any punctuation whatsoever. How did the scholars know where one sentence ended and another began? Should a comma or a question mark be inserted? Maybe they had no problems. Good for them.

Sometimes I think my life is like the Greek New Testament: no punctuation. It is one long sentence. Then I have to then figure out where the commas are for me to slow down and where the periods should be inserted for me to stop what I am doing and take a break. But there are times when commas are hard to come by, let alone periods. Life forces us to keep going when a comma would work very well, thank you. But no comma is to be had. Those are truly the times when we need to stop, take a breath, insert a comma, and then, if you will, embrace it.

Those commas come in many shapes and forms. They are as simple as getting up from

the desk and grabbing a cup of coffee to taking a day off just to relax and maybe do

absolutely nothing at all. Granted, for some of us, doing nothing at all is worse than not

even stopping for a cup of Joe.

The sad reality is that often the quick commas are all we sometimes get given that our life

seems to be so much out of our hands. We’re part of a team or a process that must keep

going. And it is often only when someone yells “Time Out!” that we take time out and

take a breath. And often that is all we need. It may not seem like much and if sometimes

is not, but it is enough. That is good.

I was reflecting on this in the middle of a five-hour flight from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles.

We were taking a week off scheduled months ago to visit the Nixon and Reagan Libraries

among other sights along the coast. We’ve been taking bus trips the past few years

visiting the presidential homes and libraries on the east coast and will visit the ones in

Ohio in June.

In many ways that was not a good time for us to be away. We had decided to downsize as

the yard work and the landscaping were beginning to be overwhelming. With that in

mind we contacted a young couple whose older daughter I had baptized and whom we

knew needed to upsize to see if they might be interested in our home. They came to look,

asked our price and bought the home. In a sense, on the way to California we were

homeless. Such is life!

We were away when we should have been out looking for our new home. No comma

here. Not even a period. We are into a new paragraph in our lives!

WHY DO WE SAY “WE” AND “OUR”?

Whenever we pray either alone or in church, we say “We believe” as we recite the Creed and “Our Father” when we say the Lord’s Prayer. Should we not say “I believe” and “My Father”? After all, how can I know that those praying with me believe as I believe and acknowledge God as their Father in the same way as I do? I suspect that this sounds like a silly and foolish question, but there is a reason behind my insanity.

Yes, when we gather in prayer as a church family, we pray together and say together that we believe what the Creed says we believe and that we together acknowledge God to be our Father (God being genderless notwithstanding). If we individually or others praying with us individually do not believe the words of the Creed or do not acknowledge God to be Father, we and they would not be in church in the first place.

More importantly, what we are acknowledging is not only our unified beliefs but also the fact that we need one another to live out those beliefs. That is one of the reasons we gather in prayer and praise in the first place. We need one another to live out in our daily lives what we are professing in those prayers. We cannot do it alone. That is the main reason why we say “we” and “our”.

That is true even more so when we pray alone. Yes, we can honestly pray “I believe” and “My Father”. And maybe sometimes we do and perhaps we on occasion should. In that way we are professing a deeply personal belief. And if we think about what we are saying, think deeply and seriously, it gives us pause to reflect whether we are truly living out those beliefs in our daily lives. If you are like me, we don’t do that deep thinking often enough.

If and when we do such reflecting, what we discover is that in living out our faith we have needed the love and support of others. We haven’t done it alone to date and we will not be able to do it alone in the days and years to come. That brings us back to our need to gather in community with those who are helping us live out what we say we believe, to live our lives as a child of our Father in heaven.

The church, for better and for worse, is what it is because of how we have lived out what we say we believe both individually and collectively. And it will be what it will be, in spite of what we say we believe, because of how we live out those beliefs, again, both individually and collectively. None of us is off the hook for when the church is taken to task for not living out what it says it believes just as we all are able to accept some of the praise when we do.

My point, if only to myself, is to be reminded that the words I use when I pray are to be taken seriously and to be reflected deeply and to be lived out as best I can with the help of those who say “we” and “our” with me, alone or together.