December 29: "Praying," Pulpits and Pine Forests, Healing and Thanks

Mary Oliver's instructions about talking to God . . .

Praying

by:  Mary Oliver

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Prayer takes many forms--from pulpits to pine forests.  Oliver's advice on how to pray is pretty simple and beautiful:  pay attention and say "thanks."  Because, really, that's what it's all about.  Recognizing blessings, in blue irises or vacant lots.  In the darkest of moments, and in the most joyous.

This morning, I woke to a text from my wife's older sister.  Her husband had a heart attack last night and needed emergency surgery.  He's doing well.  I whispered words of thanks for that this morning.  Both my sister-in-law and her husband have helped my family and me a great deal, through some of the most difficult times of my life.  So, tonight, I asking for any of my disciples to patch together a few words for these two wonderful souls.  Words of healing and thanks.

My son went on a little trip to Mackinaw City today with my sister.  They met up with my niece and her family, and my son got to hang with one of his favorite cousins--my great niece, Abby.  He got home a little while ago, and he was actually a little talkative and--above all else--so, so happy.  Most of the time, he's a stereotypical grunting, surly, fifteen-year-old boy.  Of course, that spirit of talkativeness lasted only a few minutes.  But, I'm still cobbling together a few more words of thanks for his happiness, because he's been struggling these last few months.  (I think he, unfortunately, inherited my penchant for dark moods.)

So, I have a lot to be thankful for tonight:  my sister-in-law, her husband, my son.  For their love and healing and joy.

Saint Marty has walked through the doorway of thanks, and now he's going to stop and listen in the silence for another voice to speak.

May 2: Gurgled and Cooed, Little Maudlin, My Brother

An unseen hand turned a master valve.  Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain.  The rain was a blowtorch that did not warm.  It jazzed and jangled Billy's skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.

The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas.  Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions.  So it goes.

And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy.  He was a baby who had just been bathed by his mother.  Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosy room that was filled with sunshine.  She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel, powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly.  Her palm on his little jelly belly made potching sounds.

Billy gurgled and cooed.

A movement in time, Billy transported from a moment of naked vulnerability as an adult to a moment of naked vulnerability as a baby.  Billy is not in charge of himself.  The decision of whether he lives or dies, is happy or sad, rests in the hands of higher powers.  His German captors.  His mother.  God.  Billy is just along for the ride.

I'm going to be a little maudlin this afternoon.  This passage about birth and life and death comes on a day where my brother is in the hospital.  Last night, he was taken to the ER where he was diagnosed with sepsis.  Sometime--either before he got to the hospital or while he was there, I'm not sure--he suffered a heart attack.  This is his second heart attack.  So, they put my brother in an ambulance and brought him to the hospital here in Marquette, Michigan, where there are cardiologists on staff.  That was last night.

All day long today, I have been waiting for news about my brother's condition.  My sister just called me.  The cardiologist performed a heart catheterization on my brother.  He has lost another 27% of his heart tissue, and the cardiologist told him that he will have to go on permanent disability.  His heart won't take the strain of daily work.

This news was difficult for me to hear.  My brother is a big man--the tallest in the family--and strong.  He was always the muscle in my family's plumbing business, hauling water heaters and furnaces out of basements, digging up sewer lines, soldering pipes in crawlspaces.  He's larger than life.

Now, he's going to be greatly diminished.  Probably unable to do things that most of us take for granted, like climbing stairs or rearranging furniture or carrying groceries.  On top of that, I would imagine the length of his life will be shortened by this event, as well.  His heart is severely damaged.

So, forgive me if I have no wisdom today.  This is one of those times where I truly am at a loss.  I feel like Billy in the passage above, powerless and vulnerable.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for his brother's life.

February 27: Silver Eels, Ennui, Amy Uyematsu, "Zumba Gold at 9 AM"

The sentence in Teale is simple:  "On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water."  These are adult eels, silver eels, and this descent that slid down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago.  As one-inch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers of America and Europe, upstream always unto "the quiet upper reaches of rivers and brooks, in lakes and ponds--sometimes as high as 8,000 feet above sea level."  There they had lived without breeding "for at least eight years."  In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished.  They turned silver; now they are heading to the sea.  Down streams to rivers, down rivers to the sea, south in the North Atlantic where they meet and pass billions of northbound elvers, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their eggs, and die.  This, the whole story of eels at which I have only just hinted, is extravagant in the extreme, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures.  But it was feeling with which I was concerned under the walnut tree by the side of the Lucas cottage and dam.  My mind was on that meadow.

It's a weird sight to contemplate:  silvery white eels wriggling/slithering across land toward the gurgle and rush of stream and river, which will carry them to the roar and crash of sea and ocean.  It's not a migration I would care to witness. I am not a fan of serpents, and there's nothing Biblical behind it.  I just find the idea of eels invading land a little . . . well, creepy.  Intriguing, but creepy.

The world is full of these kinds of sargassum sights.  Creatures that have adapted to survive.  Animals of the sea becoming animals of the land.  Animals of the land taking to the water or air.  Flying squirrels.  Flying fish.  Deep-sea mammals.  My life is fairly sheltered.  I don't witness too many of these wonders.  I have seen albino deer in a blizzard.  I even saw an albino skunk once.  But wonder is something that makes me a little nervous.

Last night, I wrote about a person whose life has sort of spun out of control in unimaginable ways.  That's what happens, I guess.  Just when you have it all figured out, when life is comfortable/predictable, something happens.  Forest fire.  Heart attack.  Car accident.  Shark frenzy.  Whatever.  Suddenly, you're an eel crawling through a meadow toward the sound and smell of salt water.

It's almost fifty degrees outside right now.  The snow piles are quickly dwindling, and the streets are turning to soup.  It feels like everything is shifting from snow to mud.  Tomorrow, there will be snow again.  This whole week has felt like that to me--changeable, unstable.  I don't know why.

It may have to do with spring break at the university, which just began.  Or the fact that I have to take a four-week online class, starting tomorrow.  Or my ennui with work, in general.  There's this blossom of disquiet in my heart.  I want something, but I don't know what it is.

There is no easy way to end this post.  No piece of wisdom to reveal.  There's just a silver eel slithering through the mud, under a silver moon, toward the promise of a wider, happier Sargasso Sea.

Saint Marty has a poem for you this evening.  A poem that makes that blossom in his heart a little smaller, easier to prune.

Zumba Gold at 9 AM

by:  Amy Uyematsu (published in Rattle magazine)

We are a throng of older women--yes, we are silver- and white-haired, or in my case, color-enhanced reddish brown, some with new knees and hips, others sporting flashy neon wristbands to tally how many steps, all of us ready to rumble in our rubber-soled shoes.  Our teacher Yvonne used to weigh 300 pounds.  Now she zumbas and runs, sports a modified Mohawk, sparkly bracelets stacked from wrist to forearm, and pink, lime, or lavender tank tops and sweats.  Her constant command:  "Smile!  This is spose to be fun!"  And it is, though a few in the crowd just don't get the steps, their faces so labored and lost.  Most of us, though, are having the best time we've had in decades, feel like we did in our teens, maybe better since we don't care anymore if we look uncool--heck, no pressure anymore from ogling adolescents or lascivious men.  Now nothing matters more than the way this Latin music pulls us in--our bodies set loose to congas and timbales.  We learn salsa, very New York City smooth, while Dominican merengue is frenzied and almost too fast to keep on beat.  We all like the song where we gyrate our hips, follow Yvonne in an unhurried blend of hula and belly dance, then raise arms and hands to shoo away something toward the sky, all of us joining the chorus, "amor--amor,, amor, amor"--not sure if we're sending love out to the universe or saying goodbye to a lover, our voices rising as one.  But my favorite, as always, is the cha, cha, which we got from Cuba.  I didn't know this in the '60s, when I cha cha cha'd to Chicano and Motown discs, doing it Eastside style with a swivel and dip.  Cha cha feels like I'm coming home, so easy and free, just a zumba-crazed grandma with bad knees--that's me.

January 17: Rushing, Sedentary Spider, Busy Fairy Tale

It has been a really busy morning.  I did some shoveling for a friend.  I took my daughter to her doctor's appointment to get stitches removed from her ear.  I attended an English Department meeting at the university.

The rest of the day isn't going to be much better.  Therapy appointment with my wife this afternoon.  My daughter's ballet class this evening.  I will not be getting home until well past 8 p.m.  And then it starts up all over again tomorrow.  House cleaning for money.  More shoveling.  Church.

It seems human beings keep busy in order to feel good about themselves.  I know that, if I don't accomplish a lot of work in a day, I feel lazy, worthless even.  At around 10 p.m. each night, I do a mental inventory of all the tasks I've completed.  If that inventory comes up short, I don't sleep very well, and I vow to do better the next day.

Charlotte the spider speaks a little about this human tendency to Wilbur.  She describes the Queensborough Bridge to him, and Wilbur asks her if humans catch bugs with this "web."  Charlotte responds:

"No," said Charlotte.  "They don't catch anything.  They just keep trotting back and forth across the bridge thinking there is something better on the other side.  If they'd hang head-down at the top of the thing and wait quietly, maybe something good would come along.  But no--with men it's rush, rush, every minute.  I'm glad I'm a sedentary spider."

That's a pretty strong indictment of the human race from such a small creature.  But the human race is guilty as charged.  I'm guilty.  I rarely just sit and think, as Charlotte does.  Perhaps, if I were more like her, I'd be a little less crazy all the time.  But I was taught at a very young age the importance of hard work.  Not that it's done much good.  My grandpa dropped dead of a heart attack in his fifties.  He was a hard worker.  One of my older brothers had a major heart attack when he turned 50.  He's a hard worker.  Another of my brothers had a debilitating stroke in his early fifties.  He was a hard worker.  From that evidence alone, maybe I should make a practice of hanging upside down every day, letting the blood rush to my head, being sedentary.

Right now, I'm sitting at my desk at the university, staring out my window at snow falling.  Big, fat, fluffy flakes.  It looks like a Currier and Ives Christmas scene.  Instead of enjoying the beauty of the moment, I'm thinking about the shoveling I'm going to have to do when I get home.  I think there's something really wrong with me.  When did I become a workaholic?

Once upon a time there was an ant named Bing.  Bing worked all the time.  From dawn to dusk, he was out in the world, finding crumbs of bread, bits of bologna, scraps of chewing gum.  He'd drag each treasure to the anthill, put it in storage, and head back out to find more.

Bing was constantly worried that his ant colony wouldn't have enough food for the winter.  He dreamed of cold, icy nights and starvation.  He convinced himself that the survival of the entire anthill depended on him.

One day, when Bing was trying to drag a chicken wing back home, a little boy trapped him.

"Please, giant, let me go," Bing begged the boy.  "My whole ant colony will die this winter if you don't."

The boy said, "But I want to take you home, put you in a jar, and play with you."

Bing shook his head.  "I can't play.  If I play, I'll die."

The boy shook his head.  "Play is fun.  You should try it."

The ant shook a leg angrily at the boy.  "If you don't put me down this minute, I'll bite you so hard you'll scream."

The boy immediately put Bing back on the ground and stomped on him, killing him instantly.

Moral of the story:  all work and no play makes Bing a dead ant.

And Saint Marty lived happily every after.

Don't piss off little boys

April 21: Playing Organ, Birthday Party, New Cartoon

I like playing the pipe organ.  I like the instrument--its sounds and mechanics.  I've been playing the organ for close to 30 years at two different churches.  Recently, I have been filling in for the senior organist at the United Methodist Church.  The senior organist had a heart attack and a stroke last week; she's was sick the week before, and, the week before that, she was on a trip to Maryland or something.  That's three weeks thus far.

I never aspired to be a church organist.  It just sort of happened.  I learned on the job.  I remember the first Mass I played at Saint John's in my home tome over 27 years ago.  It was simple.  Four standard hymns, no liturgical music.  Quick and easy.  I got sick to my stomach before I sat down to play.

I don't get physically ill any more when I play the organ.  I get nervous.  I make mistakes.  But I don't vomit.  Haven't in years.  I've played for bishops and at cathedrals.  I've played funerals and weddings, first communions and Easter Vigils.  I've never played for a cardinal yet.  If I was asked to play for the pope, I'd probably blow some chunks.  Aside from that, nothing rattles me too much.

I'm going to be filling in for the senior organist for a while.  She's in physical and speech therapy now.  About the only thing that causes me stress is playing anthems for the chancel choir.  That music is complicated and requires hours of practice.  At the moment, I don't have hours to practice.  I'm going to have to find them, somehow.

Yes, playing the pipe organ is one of my favorite things, even if it causes me some anxiety. 

No more anxiety for me today, however.  It's my sister's birthday, so my wife is cooking dinner for her.  It will be a good time.  My kids will eat cake and ice cream.  They'll probably fight with each other, and my son or daughter will end up crying.  Good times will be had by all.

Saint Marty is ready for some good times.

Confessions of Saint Marty