Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving now rivals Christmas as my favorite day. Another of the many regrets emerging with advancing years is that I did not have at a younger age the depth of gratitude I now have for the wealth of blessings with which God equipped me for life and which I recognize now as present moment-to-moment.

For most of my life I took it as a badge of honor, and as the only responsible way to live, to put upon myself the harshest interpretation of whatever situation I was in. To me, to do so was smart, because if I could figure out a way to cope with the worst that could happen, then I could survive. This was not simply "glass half-empty" psychology, because more often than not what I reckoned as worst-case scenario is usually what happened : life has been one continuous "how do I get across the kitchen, how do I get to where Louis is standing over there" challenge, the whole way. By and large, this approach has served me well, because I have overcome the challenges, for the most part, and that's because I have seen things accurately, harsh and difficult though they may be. Indeed, it's been when I've expected more, when I've expected life to be easier, when I've made the big mistakes. So time and again, it's been back to the bunker whenever I've been stricken after venturing too far away from it, having thought "the war is over and I can come out now".

But living life and surviving life are different. Proceeding with a survival mentality produces only survival, not life. The cost of that mentality is to see the goal of life as staying at "zero", not rising above it. Of course, I've known these platitudes for years, but I did not know how to transcend what I've satisfied myself is indeed a realistic perception of the world and my place in it. I tried "glass half-full", I even tried throwing off concern for survival (with disastrous results, naturally). It's only now that I am coming to realize that it's not my view of reality that's been wrong, or my psychology for being in the world, that needed to change. Rather, it's the objects of perception, even the objects of my psychology, which should have been and is now different : instead of seeing life subjectively as it affects me, I should have been seeing life and what's important in it, as both subject and object. I.E., I am slowly learning that seeing life as it is, not only as it effects me or my welfare, is the necessary predicate to becoming aware of deep value of what is good in life - people, things, that are not me, and which have the capacity to bring joy to life in themselves, independent of and without the filter of me as subject.

Thusly presented, I see that I am surrounded by blessed people who bring joy to my life to a degree I have not always appreciated; I see that my life is good; I see that I have been given, now, the grace of God to realize my good fortune before it's too late or not at all. And what that means is that I am glad to be me, glad to see things the way I do, content. Thanksgiving, indeed.

the sound of humanity

If the sound of Mozart's music is "a parable of the realm of God's free grace" as Karl Barth thought, maybe even with a touch of the angelic to it, then Beethoven's is the sound of the response of humanity to the reality of God.

Irvin, R.I.P.

Johnny's dad, Irvin, died today. He was a fighter who enjoyed his life and got every drop of life out of it, long after many of us would have given up. He knew he was lucky to have married a woman as close to angelic as humanly possible, and to have spawned a large and utterly happy family. Indeed, his children are living testaments to his worth as a father; Johnny, for one, is one of the smartest, most honest, generous, well-adjusted and happy people I've ever known or will know. And, of course, Irv was a war hero. See http://carol_fus.tripod.com/wwii_gunners_reminisce.html Well done, Irvin, R.I.P. and my sincerest hearfelt sympathy to his family, his greatest accomplishment.

Lowell, R.I.P.

I remember thinking in 1977 how relieved I was that my mother was to be remarried, after the chaos of 4 years (1973-1977) of solo stewardship of 3 wild teenaged sons. When she married Lowell and went to Scotland that year, she was happy and she had a renewed sense of enthusiasm for life. And she's had that since then. Lowell did that for her. He was a good man and he was good to her. Rest In Peace, Lowell, you earned and deserve our respect and God's.

one year...

Today is a big anniversary for me, marking a big year. The year God showed up on the River Road in Baton Rouge, when, one year ago today, my son walked away from a collision that even now I cannot understand how he survived. That it's also the year the Saints won the Super Bowl (it's still hard to believe that's a fact), makes 2/15/09 to 2/15/10 all the easier to describe as "The Year God Showed Up". Showed up to me, and to my son. I've spent most of my free time over the past year reading about Christianity - its history, its stated theological precepts, biblical criticism, the Bible itself, various systematic studies, and I've learned alot. Most importantly, that : 1) Christianity is a difficult faith to profess, to oneself and to others; 2) faith cannot be learned in books; 3) however it can be rationalized, and for me it is helpful to understand at least some aspects of one's faith in understandable terms; 4) there's a lifetime of reading which awaits me; 5) at the end of the day, Christianity is a "physical" faith - its central premise is that God became material in the form of Jesus, its doctrines insist upon the continued physical presence of God among us, it affects each believer physically during those moments of joy which every now and then occur to let you know he's there. At least now I know it. And it's changed me, changed how I think and how I live. Big year indeed.

We Dat

Sure, it's just a football team, just a game. But there is nothing in life quite like the feeling a loser has when he wins. It's the sort of thing that can change a life, by going all the way down to where identity is formed. Right now, it feels like the sort of thing that can change the course of history for a whole people. Failure as an identity is the severest handicap of all. To get a glimpse of what life is like as a winner after a lifetime of failure (real or, sometimes even more difficult, imagined) can be transformative. Not as inspiration, but as identity. That what the Saints win means for all of us Who Dats - the intoxicating feeling of success is a good in itself but it also brings a sense of hope that we can change for the better. As a community act, the city's celebration of itself last night and now has maybe already changed us by giving us a sense that in our individual and collective identity we're not failures after all, we're just us, and that's feels pretty good just now.

a big week for "I"

A Supreme Court decision eviscerating Congress's now-failed attempt to limit the effect of corporate money on elections; an electoral rejection of a Massachusetts Democrat on grounds that health care for all will cause an incremental increase in taxes : it's been a tough week for those of us who persist in the belief that our society moves over time towards an ever more rational, ever more ethically-minded sensibility about how best to configure ourselves relative to each other as a society. Maybe the U.S. is too far down the path of the glory of self-interest to realize that there is no virtue in equating the interests of corporations - groups of people organized for the sole purpose of earning profit - with our society's best interests. True, the creation of wealth is a 'good' and necessary aspect of life. But accepting that wealth creation is the solution to all societal problems is just wish fulfillment, and an easy convenient answer for us, a way to avoid facing real problems. Allowing an insurance industry whose sole purpose is to extract profits from health care transactions between providers and consumers to regulate and increasingly define those transactions in ways best configured to produce profit is to do one thing only - produce insurance industry profits. Providing health care for poor people is simply not profitable, so it is not provided. We are now coming to see that providing health care to really sick people is not profitable, either, so slowly the industry is finding ways to avoid providing it (preexisting conditions, etc.). But under the mantra of freedom (the freedom to produce wealth), we seem to be reluctant to do anything to redirect the system to more efficiently define the provider-consumer transaction. And the same political system which is in the process of refusing reform is also telling us that we cannot do anything about it : we cannot even, thorough Congress, regulate the control corporations have over the political process. So, it appears that we are headed irreturnably down the rabbit hole of self-interest with nothing more than the unfounded belief that producing wealth is more than enough of a societal benefit to offset the consequences of ignoring the inefficiencies of a profit-driven system rather than a needs-driven system. And nobody, it seems, cares. Everybody is too busy either making money or spending it. Everybody, that is, except the people who have needs left unaddressed by profit-makers. Is this really what we want for ourselves, as a society ? Do we really want, "Every man for themselves" ? I don't think we do. I still trust that people in this country are going to wake up one day and realize how far removed we've allowed ourselves to get from the notion that we are our best when we see life as "we", not as "I".

we want the good times, not the money

There is a distinctly Catholic aspect which contributes to the character of the New Orleans citizenry. A judgmentalism founded in the ethos of a uniquely personal responsibility to God and self prevails in most of the U.S., the result of a Protestantism in which each individual's relationship to God is self-determined. Inevitably this has produced a society of individuals who each consider themselves exalted to one degree or another, informed only by their own notions of themselves and encouraged by the world's reward system to think that advancement of their own material interests is not only their loftiest goal but also their ethical responsibility. New Orleans, however, is different, in that (among many other things) its people seem not to care so much for personal advancement as they do for enriching experiences. Experiences, though, by definition, are contingent, and this to me may be key to understanding what makes us different. There is a strong component of contingency in the Catholic faith : salvation is temporary and redeemable in that we acknowledge our failings through confession, so the "what's here today may be gone tomorrow so why bother" ethic seems to me to be ingrained in how we think about ourselves. A result of understanding and accepting our failings (instead of denying them or correcting them) is that we as a community are more indulgent of others' failings, and indeed more accepting of material circumstances which would be deemed unacceptable anywhere else in the U.S. So maybe almost 300 years of the principles of sacramental confession have helped shape our community personality to produce the laissez-faire ethos which still defines us.