WHY EVERYONE DOESN’T AGREE WITH ME

While I am serving as Priest-in-Charge in Kittanning, I spend two nights a week at the Quality Inn. It’s no 4-Star motel by any means, but it is fine for me: decent breakfast, small exercise room where I can spend some time on the elliptical to burn some calories, good bed. Nothing fancy. Many of the men working the gas fields stay there as well. But since they work twelve-hour shifts, I usually see them coming or going. No conversations but only a nod of recognition or a “good morning”.

The only person I have any semblance of a conversation with is the manager, Michael, who works the day shift, seven-to-three.  But we don’t talk much anymore, not in depth anyway. Michael has FOX news on all the time, which drives a liberal like me up the wall. A while back I said something about how I had lost all respect for the Republican Party back in 2008 when they nominated a totally unprepared person (in my humble opinion) to be Vice-President. His first response was, “Look what we got” (meaning President Obama) and then, “Let’s not talk politics.” We no longer do.

Nevertheless, I still wonder why Michael can’t see what I see, why he doesn’t agree with me about politics. To me what I see is perfectly clear and obvious. Can’t he see that? Of course, on the other hand, internally he is probably asking me those same questions. We both look at the same situation and see things almost the polar opposite. I wonder how this can be. Why can two people see the same thing and yet not agree on what they are seeing or certainly, when I am one of those two, not see what I see?

The world would be so much better, again in my humble opinion, if everyone saw what I see. There would be less fights, if any, no disagreements. Life would be pleasant and we could get on with solving the world’s problems because we would all be on the same page. What a wonderful would that would be!

 

But that would be a fairytale world simply because no two people have the same experiences. And it is those life experiences that color how we view the world and thus what we believe and how we should act. Michael obviously believes what he believes to be true based on his experiences: single, Navy veteran, under VA care because of an injury suffered when he was on active duty: his list is long. I would find myself nowhere on that list just as he would find himself nowhere on my list.

It is that list of personal experiences that make each of us so different and why we can find ourselves in total disagreement about the same issue. I know that. We all know that. We also know that, when we are open to hear what another has experienced and why that person sees what he sees, we can at least agree to disagree in peace. Unfortunately, tragically, as the mess in the Middle East exemplifies, that does not always happen. Fortunately for Michael and me, agreeing to not talk politics makes our conversations peaceful if not, at times, inane. But I still wish he would agree with me politically.

NOBODY KNOWS….

Remember the old spiritual that begins “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows my sorrow”? On the one hand, that is true. On the other, it is not. We’ve all seen and experienced trouble and sorrow in our lives. There are no exceptions. And we will continue to experience them till the day we die. Thankfully, most of the troubles and sorrows that come our way are minor, mere blips on the road from birth through life till we die.

Yes, even those blips, as short as they are, can be quite painful and the memory of them quite lasting. We do our best to avoid them; and when we cannot, we do our best to cope with them. That is all we can do and that is all we are expected to do, no more and no less. It, again, is all part of life, part of living in this sinful and broken world in which we do and which we cannot avoid or escape.

Back to the spiritual: it is correct to say that nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen. Nobody knows the sorrows we have experienced. Those troubles and those sorrows are our own and no one else’s. Others may have had similar experiences, but they have not had our experiences. Two people may have both lost a spouse through, for instance, cancer. Both had similar experiences but not the same experience. How each dealt with that experience was unique. No one else has dealt with it in the exact same way or had the exact same experiences and no one else ever will.

All that is why we can and never should say to another, “I know what you are going through.” No, we do not. We may have been there, as they say; but we have not been exactly where that person is now. All we can do is be there with that person as he or she suffers and is in pain. Words, any and all words, words of consolation, understanding, comfort, will all fall short.

But the reason that we are there with the one in pain is that we have been there ourselves. We do know trouble and sorrow. We have not been immune. We have not escaped what happens to every human being. We are not an exception. And so we do know, in a very real way, something of what that person we love and care about is going through at that moment in his or her life.

The danger, of course, when we believe that no one knows our pain, our sorrows, our troubles; when we think we must be being punished because we hurt so much – the danger is that we will push everyone away and allow ourselves to wallow in our sorrow. This is not to denigrate the pain we are in. It is simply to say that the reason why there are those who want to be with us is that they have been through something similar to what we are going through. They cannot undo what was done nor can they take away our pain. But they do know pain and sorrow and they are there to help us get through it as others, who also knew pain and sorrow, helped us. We are never alone unless we choose to be.

SELECTIVE MEMORY

My mother-in-law, who is 92, has a very selective memory. As with each one of us as we grow older, there are times, which frustratingly get more frequent the older we get, when we have great difficulty remembering something or someone we think we would or should never forget. But we do. The memory is somewhere back there in our brain; but at the moment we want to recall that piece of information, it takes too long to come front and center. That’s not selective memory. It is simply a momentary loss of memory.

Selective memory is when we choose to remember what we choose to remember and forget what we choose to forget. My mother-in-law’s selective memory is fascinating. She has been married twice and buried both spouses. To be honest, neither was a marriage made in heaven. At times it seemed like a marriage, well, let’s not go there. On second thought, let’s, because it makes my point.

Both husbands were WWII sailors in the South Pacific and both came home, although she did not know it at the time, with what we now know as PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both were shell-shocked by what they experienced and that shock stayed with them the rest of their lives and, in the process, made my mother-in-law’s life at times a pure hell. The fact that it was only in their deaths and her reflection back on their lives together does she now understand what was going on all those years.

Nevertheless, today, when she reflects back on those years, and talks about both spouses with Arlena and me, all we hear are the good times. The pain, the suffering, the hurt that was so much a part of the after effects of the War seem to have faded from her memory and, I believe, selectively so. But that is not easy to do so because it must be a choice. She has made that choice. For her and for us, that is a blessing.

One of the perverse joys Arlena and I have is when we talk with our daughters who are now raising their own children. Our grandchildren are now doing to our daughters what they did to us. The very same actions that drove us up the wall are now driving them crazy. They don’t remember their misdeeds, of course. Selective memory. But then we selectively choose to remember our daughters’ misdeeds and misadventures only when history is repeating itself in and through our grandchildren. That is also called “Parents’ revenge” and it is, again, perversely pleasurable.

We all have those painful memories stored somewhere in our brain. We can keep them up front and personal, allowing them to control our lives and our relationships or we can push them to the back and remember the good, as my mother-in-law has done with her husbands and as we are doing with our daughters. That is not to downplay the pain. It is simply to say that we have a choice with what we do with that remembered pain: we can continue to dwell on it and make the present even more painful or we can selectively remember the good so to enjoy life in the present. The choice is ours.

I NEVER WENT TO A PROM

Whenever I look back on my life, I find that there many things I never did that my peers did. I never went to a prom. I never joined a fraternity. I never got drunk with my buddies after our football team won the conference championship. I never went on a spring break. I also never worked a day in my life. All this is true because of the choices I made in my life and especially the one I made in 1957 when I went off to seminary as a high school freshman. As an aside and result, when what I do becomes work, I will retire for good.

When I do look back and reflect on what I missed, I do not do so with any regrets. The choices I made were the ones I made and not forced on me. Every choice we make has consequences. If we choose to do this, we will not be able to do that. For instance, there was no prom scheduled or even considered for those who were in training to become celibate priests. Why should there be?

Of course, most of those young men, my classmates, were never ordained. Do they rue the choice they made that denied them the opportunity to take a young lady to the prom? I doubt it; but even if they do, it’s all water over the dam. Besides, even if they missed all that I did, their lives were not irreparably scarred by the loss of such experiences. No one can experience it all nor should we want to. Life itself has its limitations and we are all subject to those limitations.

We know this to be true even though there are indeed times when we bemoan our fate because we never did something we think we would have liked to do back when we were willing and able to do it. Indeed there are those “For once in my life I would have liked to” moments. – going to a prom and the like. We all have them. But are we any worse or maybe even better because we did or did not experience them?

That may be a good question to ponder, but we will never really know. Sometimes we learn from our experiences and sometimes we do not. Of course the real issue when we are reminiscing about the past is that regretting the past, deeds done and left undone, experiences had and not had, often hinders us from living in the present and enjoying the present for exactly what it is: a present, a gift.

I have been blessed to be able to look back on my life, especially those formative years in seminary when all those “fun” and “normal” experiences my former grade school classmates were experiencing were forbidden to me, and know that I would not only not trade what I missed for what I learned and experienced and always be thankful. It was my choice as their life’s decisions were their choices.

The choices I have made, good and bad, have brought me to today. I rejoice in both, ruing neither the good experiences I missed not the mistakes I made. If I had made other choices, my life would not be what it is. I am thankful for what it is: no regrets.

WHOSE STUFF IS IT, ANYWAY?

Every so often the National Church puts on seminars on Planned Giving to which clergy are invited. The plan and the hope is that we clergy will understand the importance of planned giving and that we can convey that message to the people we serve so that when they make out their wills, they plan on leaving some of their legacy to the parish. The seminars address the broader issue of that dreaded word stewardship.

At one of these seminars when we were talking about stewardship, one of my colleagues pointed out that the new translation of the Bible replaces the word steward with the word manager. He likes manager better. When most of us hear the word stewardship, we immediately think of the word money. That's probably because we almost always, at least in church circles, use the word in conjunction with annual every member canvasses. We have a stewardship campaigns. And stewardship campaigns tend to be all about money: how much money parishioners will donate/pledge toward the next year’s budget.

My colleague’s point was that a steward, in the original understanding of the word, was a manager of "someone else's stuff", not just his own money. Thus, today we can hire money managers to help manage all our stuff and not just our money.

Stuff. I like that word. I am intrigued by the word. I looked it up.  It meant originally materials or supplies. The verb also meant "to stop up." When something is stopped up, it means that there is more there than can be handled at the moment.

I suspect we need money managers, we need stewards, when we are all stopped up, when we have more than we can handle at the moment. In the old days there were not too many people in such condition: having too much. That is why stewards were probably rare.

There are not too many people today who have money managers, at least in comparison. But we all have too much stuff, as is evident by the vast number of yard sales that take place this time of year. We all would be better off with less and we could manage our stuff better. No, let me restate that: we could manage the stuff we have been entrusted with better. You see, it is never our stuff, my stuff, your stuff, that we manage or mismanage. It's all God's.

All the stuff we have has been given to us by God to use for a while and then to leave behind once we die – or to sell at or give to yard sales. We don't and can't take it with us. Our responsibility is to manage all this stuff as best we can for the betterment of all of us, ourselves included, but not just ourselves. The word we use, steward or manager, is beside the point. What we do with what we have been blessed is the point.

If we are to be good stewards/managers, and that is what we are called to be in and through our baptism, we have to pause on occasion and reflect about how we are using all the stuff we have, all the stuff God has entrusted us with. Yard sales and stewardship campaigns are such times. That said, might this not be a very good time to spend some time thinking about how we are managing/stewarding God's gifts to us?

WE’RE ALL WIMPS

Years ago when we were living in Spokane, Washington, for our vacation Arlena and I drove back to Pennsylvania and West Virginia-Ohio to visit our families. They were glad to see us even if they could tell us why they thought the way west was much longer than the way east which is why we had to make the trips. Not a complaint, especially now that we are back home; but, back then…. Part of the agenda was to pick up two pieces of furniture Arlena's late grandmother had left to her. They fit nicely in the back of our pickup.

The trip was long, three miles short of 6,000 miles. And it, was, as I noted, in a truck. Of course, the truck had air conditioning, cruise control, and all other kinds of bells and whistles. It was a great trip. We stayed at comfortable motels when we were not staying with family. Meals were hot, daily showers welcome, and the swimming pools were wonderful and welcome especially while we were on the road. To put it succinctly, we’re spoiled.

As we drove across the wide expanses of Montana and South Dakota on the way east and the similar expanses of Kansas and Wyoming and Idaho – among others – on the way back, it was impossible to miss how big this country is, how wide open, how one can drives miles and miles and not see a house or even a barn.

But we weren't worried. We had our new, handy-dandy cell phone with us in case the girls needed to get in touch. When the phone rang in the middle of nowhere (actually Wyoming), Autumn's voice came loud and clear, as if she were just around the corner (or at least at the top of that hill that we could see fifty miles off in the distance. Back then hearing the phone ring while driving down the road seemed like a miracle. In a way it still does. And no matter how dull the drive, we always looked forward to the pool at the end of the day.

As we visited Little Big Horn in Montana and Fort Hays in Kansas (from which Custer and his troops had their headquarters), it was impossible to not be impressed about the fact that not too very long ago our forefathers in this land rode and walked those vast distances. There were no cell phones to call in the cavalry when the Indians attacked. There were no motels to stop in for the night where beds were soft and showers hot. There were no McDonald's or Arby's where one could get a cold Diet Pepsi, no air-conditioned stage coaches to beat the heat.

I remain in awe of all those people. I am humbled when I think about the hardships they endured, especially when I remember my complaints because the bed in the motel was too lumpy or the buffet at the diner was too greasy or that one of the motels did not have a swimming pool.

The fact that I am not alone in these feelings is no comfort. We're all wimps in comparison. We are so blessed, you and I, so graced by God. Let us never forget that the next time we want to complain because the motel is only a two-star.

IS HITLER IN HELL?

If the above question were asked, most people would respond, “Of course!” Then they would ask, “Why do you ask? Isn’t it obvious?” My reply would be, “No, it is not. Besides, how do you know Hitler is in hell, or for that matter, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin and all others of their ilk: mass murders one and all? We only assume they are burning in hell or whatever punishment we deem appropriate for such sinners. But we certainly do not know and will not know until we are like them: dead and buried.

The issue at hand is God’s infinite love and forgiveness. For those who believe Jesus died on the cross for our sins, he thus died for the sins of Hitler and Stalin and the rest, including you and me. Yes, we want to object that we certainly are not as great a sinner as these men. The truth is that we certainly are not. But we are just like them in that we are indeed sinners; and if our sins are forgiven, then so are theirs. Thus, if heaven is open to us because of Jesus’ death on the cross, so it is for them.

That just doesn’t sit well, does it? No, it does not and it should not, but not for the reason we think it does not. It doesn’t sit well because it is so difficult to believe that mass murderers, for instance, who knew full well what they were doing and did it any way without any seeming compunction, should be given a free pass to heaven in spite of their horrendous sins.

The real reason it doesn’t sit well is that we believe no one should be given a free pass and that includes you and me. We should have to earn our way into heaven. And if we have not done anything to do so; and, even more, if we have done much to negate any good that we do, we do not deserve heaven when we die. We should get what is coming to us, what we have earned and what we deserve, like Hitler: hell.

The problem is that we can’t earn our way into heaven. We can never claim we deserve it either. The greatest saints would be appalled if anyone told them that they were a lock for heaven because of their saintliness. They would have quickly reminded the one praising them that they were no saint but rather a great sinner. And they would be right. They were sinners, even if not great sinners. Heaven would be theirs, they would say, only because of the grace and love and forgiveness of God and not because they had lived such a saintly life and thus deserved that eternal reward.

Nevertheless, none of us likes the thought of Hitler, for instance, being in heaven. It just grates at everything we consider right and just and even fair. And as much as we believe Hitler and some other rotten so-and-so we personally despise think even hell is too god for such as they, we waste our time and our energy mulling the issue. It’s none of our business and is out of our hands.

What is our business and what is in our hands is our own life. While there is nothing we can do to merit heaven when we die, getting to heaven or avoiding hell when we die should not be the reason why we do what we do. We do what is good and right and loving because that is what we are called to do and because that is what we want to do.