October 28: Very Cold, Halloween Snow, Aubri

Five figures wandered slowly over the blighted land.  Bits of it were dullish gray, bits of it dullish brown, the rest of it rather less interesting to look at.  It was like a dried-out marsh, now barren of all vegetation and covered with a layer of dust about an inch thick.  It was very cold.

That is a description of the surface of the planet of Magrathea from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  It could also be a description of what I will wake up to tomorrow.  There is a winter weather advisory in effect for my little corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for this evening.  Two to four inches of the white stuff.  Now, having lived in the U. P. for most of my life, except for a brief stint in Kalamazoo, I shouldn't be surprised by this forecast.  In fact, I should expect it.

However, just as I was unwilling to let go of summer a little while ago, I'm finding it very difficult to relinquish my grip on autumn, especially right before Halloween.  In my youth, Halloweens were generally warm.  I recall very few All Hallow's Eves where I was bundled up in my winter coat to go trick-or-treating.  The last warm Halloween I can recall occurred about 11 years ago, when my son was newly born.  That year, I wore a full gorilla costume to go trick-or-treating with him, and I nearly died of heat stroke.  It was a very warm night.  Ever since then, Halloween has been the unofficial start of winter.

Of course, I have no control over the weather, just as I have no control over a lot of things in my life.  God has been very diligent in reminding of this fact.  Frequently.  I like to think that I run my own life, that I can decide whether I'm happy or sad, successful or a failure.  In short, I've been trying to play God for quite a long time.  I believed that I controlled the weather in my life, from Halloween to Christmas to Independence Day.

This morning, my niece, Aubri, got on an airplane and flew off to San Francisco to start a new job and a new life.  Aubri is one of my favorite people in the whole world.  She's funny and smart, and she shares my sense of humor.  At family gatherings, we frequently found ourselves seated beside each other, sharing inside jokes and mean girl comments.  Aubri can always make me laugh, even on the darkest of days.

Saying goodbye to Aubri this weekend was like accepting a forecast of snow for Halloween.  I knew it was coming.  I was expecting it.  Yet, when it finally happened, I found myself saying, "It's too soon.  Too soon."  This is one of those life things that I have no control over.  Snow is inevitable.  Young people growing up and leaving is inevitable.  Goodbyes are inevitable.

Join me in wishing my niece, Aubri Cheryl--beautiful girl, ray of sunlight, fellow mean girl--Godspeed.  When I wake up to snow on my car tomorrow morning, I will think of her and all the joy she has brought into my house.  And I will smile, knowing that God has bigger plans for her than I can even imagine.

This Saint Marty knows for sure.

October 26: Resistance is Useless, Playing God, Haunted Escape Room

"Resistance is useless!" shouted the Vogon guard back at him.  It was the first phrase he'd learned when he joined the Vogon Guard Corps.

This is a good reminder.  Resistance against a lot of things that happen in life IS useless, because, usually, the worst--serious illnesses, car accidents, natural disasters, the Trump presidency--seem wildly out of our hands.  Of course, we can do things to avoid these circumstance.  Eat healthy and exercise.  Drive safely.  Live in Iceland (statistically, the safest country in the world).  Impeach.

However, there is always the chance of bad medical diagnoses, even if you eat kale for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  You can drive ten miles below the speed limit, but that doesn't stop somebody else from stumbling out of a bar, getting behind the wheel, and causing major damage/heartbreak.  Blizzards and hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen, all over the world.  Middle-aged, white male Republicans storm into closed-door sessions in Congress, trying to disrupt the legal process of investigating possible unconstitutional actions by the President of the United States.  Shit just happens.  Resistance is useless.

Or is it?

I guess it depends on how you define "resistance."  Fighting events over which you have no power is like running head-first into a brick wall to get into another room.  You will cause lasting damage to yourself, and never break through to the other side.  Ultimately, it changes nothing for the good.  However, if your resistance entails being kind to others, taking care of yourself, participating in civic affairs, protecting the environment, and, basically, being a Jimmy Carter instead of a Donald Trump (a saying I wish I'd coined), then you are on the right track.  That's good resistance that can make a difference.

I feel as though I've been running head-first into brick walls recently.  Trying to force my square peg to fit into the round hole God has given me.  It hasn't worked.  All I've accomplished is giving myself both nightmares and insomnia.  So today, I'm going to try to let that go.  I can't force my day to go well, no matter how many lists I make or how many times I say to people, "Well, if you do what I tell you to do . . ."  I have been spending far too much time playing God, and I've learned something very valuable.  Are you ready for it?  It's a pretty earth-shattering revelation.  Here it comes:

I am not God.

I may think that I have all the answers.  That my way is the best way.  That the whole world would be better if I was calling the shots.  But I don't.  It isn't.  And it wouldn't be.

It's all about surrendering for me today.  I give up any control, which I never had in the first place.  And, in celebration of my powerlessness, I am going to a haunted escape room tonight with some friends and my daughter.  It will be, for me, an exercise in surrender.  I will be trapped somewhere that frightens me a great deal, and I will have to depend on other people to help me get out, because I will probably be curled up in a fetal position, crying beyond rational thought.

At the moment, I am panicking.  I don't deal well with not feeling the illusion of control.  I have told my friends that I may have a few drinks before I show up.  I don't endorse alcohol as a coping mechanism, but, sometimes, it can take the edge off complete and total hysterical submission.

If you happen to hear screaming and wild lamentation around 9 p.m. EST, don't worry.  It isn't the tormented spirit of a jilted bride who committed suicide. 

It's simply Saint Marty realizing that resistance is useless.

July 28: Tough Assignment, Curve Balls, Playing God

After learning the answer to the Big Question of life, the universe, and everything . . .

It was a long long time before anyone spoke.

Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside.

"We're going to get lynched, aren't we?" he whispered.

"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly.

Sometimes life doesn't always turn out the way you want or expect.  After seven and a half million years, Phouchg has been given the answer to the Big Question by the stupendous super computer Deep Thought.  That answer is 42.  Hardly mind-blowing or mind-expanding.

Like I said, life has a way of throwing you curve balls.  Sort of like prayer.  People pray to God for a lot of things.  Cure my mother of cancer.  Let me win the lottery.  Help me to pay my bills.  Make my wife's mental illness go away.  The list goes on and on, a different need for every person on the planet. 

In our society of instant gratification, we expect God to answer those prayers immediately, and exactly the way we want them answered.  In essence, most people, in their prayer lives, play God.  They think they know what's best, and they tell God exactly what He should do.

That's a control thing.  I'm guilty of it frequently.  I write a script for my life, and I expect everybody to follow that script.  When someone doesn't follow that script, I get angry, frustrated, afraid.  Of course, nobody knows the lines and stage directions in the script I've written. 

When I tell my son that it's time for bed, his lines should be:  "Yes, father.  Thank you for reminding me."  And his stage direction should be:  Gets up from chair, goes to bathroom, brushes his teeth, then immediately crosses to bed and falls asleep.

The answer I received tonight:  "Just a second!"  The actual stage directions tonight:  Gets up from his chair after another ten minutes, goes directly to bed without brushing his teeth, and then screams at the top of his lungs "Get your butt in here!!!"

People rarely follow my script.  That's because they don't know anything about my script.  I'm playing God, just like when I tell God how to answer my prayers.  God simply doesn't work that way.  He's in control, and I have to understand and accept that.   Prayers always get answered, but not always in the time-frame or way I expect/demand.

It's exhausting playing God, because I set myself up for constant frustration.  I can barely handle it some days.  No wonder God is continually disappointed in the human race in the Bible.  We break His heart on a daily basis.

Saint Marty needs to stop casting himself as God because God always reminds Saint Marty that he's not in charge.

October 3: Closer to God, Brokenness, Lisa Russ Spaar, "Rapunzel's Braid," Confessions of Saint Marty

Then, and this perked Ives' interest:  "The question we must ask of ourselves is how we can learn to see that which will allow us entry.  That state of mind, closer to God, becomes us.  That is all."

Ives attends a lecture given by a mystic named A. I. Explixa.  Ives has attended dozens of similar talks, searching for an explanation for a vision he had following a near-death experience.  He doesn't find a whole lot of answers to his questions at these presentations.  Yet, when Explixa makes the above comment, Ives somehow senses a connection with Explixa's words.  Ives comes to believe that he was granted a glimpse of the world as seen through God's eyes.

I don't understand God's mind.  On a superficial level, I get the whole idea of loving your enemies, helping the outcasts, praying all the time, laying down your life for somebody.  I was raised on all of those maxims, and I try to follow them.

But there's a whole lot that escapes me.  Like war and terrorism and genocide.  Or breast cancer and world hunger and lymphoma of the brain.  Don't get me started on Donald Trump.  I just don't understand why God allows the world to be afflicted by these terrible things.  What does humankind gain from events like the 9-11 attacks or the Holocaust?

Generally, I try to stay away from posing questions in this blog.  I'm a firm believer that, if a writer asks a question. he or she better damn well know the answer.  Tonight, however, I have no answer to that question.

Theologians would say that God didn't create or foster the brokenness of the world.  The human race is responsible for creating the mess.  Conflict in the Middle East, that's us.  Ditto the Rwandan genocide and George W. Bush presidency.  We did all of that.  It's in how we respond to these things that God comes into play.

For example, just two days ago, there was another school shooting in the United States.  A terrible loss of life.  Now, God didn't put the guns in Chris Harper-Mercer's hands.  God didn't tell him to go to that college campus and kill people.  So, where is God in this tragedy?

I don't know.  Perhaps there will be some political miracle in Washington, D. C.  Republicans and Democrats will stop pointing fingers and debating the meaning of the Second Amendment.  They will come together, say "enough is enough," and enact sensible legislation that will keep guns away from people like Chris Harper-Mercer.   They will place greater value on human life rather than political agenda.  That would be a God thing, I think.

I want to believe that, deep down, people are really good.  I want to see the Christ (or Buddha or Muhammad) in everybody.  God is unknowable, and tragedy exists everywhere.  Yet, there is also grace available.  God answers prayers.  We're just too damn impatient and strong-willed to accept His answers most of the time.  Human beings want to play God, not listen to Him.

Lisa Russ Spaar's poem for today is about a kind of grace, I think.  How an act of destruction can search for meaning, become a bird's nest.  How an old song can disappear, and a new poem emerge.  It's all in how you look at it.

Saint Marty doesn't understand God, but Saint Marty trusts Him.  That's half the battle.

Rapunzel's Braid

by:  Lisa Russ Spaar

Long after it lost its girl,
the wind kept heaving its gifts
of fragrance and leaves
and gritty drifts of snow into the tower;
the tower itself roared like an empty shell.
The birds she'd tamed returned
and returned to the sill, the room,
picking each abandoned thing
to palest hull and meal.
At first, the severed braid
writhed on the cold flags.
Like all dying things, it burned
as fiercely as possible
for attention among the torn leaves,
the rain pooled on the floor
in mirrors of the sky's taunting anarchy.
By the time the mice and squirrels and birds
began to pull it apart, its burnished river
had faded into dull snakeskin,
a slipped noose.  Still, for years afterwards,
it sought her out, strands helplessly
carried into the uplifted arms
and empty trunks of trees, into nests,
into pastures studded with animal droppings,
its song as thin as a line of ink,
its penned name fading, fading, then gone.

 Confessions of Saint Marty