spirituality | dual personalities

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.”

by chuckofish

I had a bad day on Friday and it carried into my weekend. I’m afraid I am not spiritually advanced enough to power through those bad days. I disappoint myself, but it’s the truth.

It takes some work you know. I won’t go into all the details, but I finally had a breakthrough when I watched Awakenings (1990) on Saturday night.

No, that is not Robert De Niro in the car with my brother! That's Robin WIlliams.

No, that is not my brother in the car with Robert De Niro! That’s Robin Williams.

Leonard Lowe, De Niro’s character, who has been “awakened” from a 30-year catatonic state, tells us:

Read the newspaper. What does it say? All bad. It’s all bad. People have forgotten what life is all about. They’ve forgotten what it is to be alive. They need to be reminded. They need to be reminded of what they have and what they can lose. What I feel is the joy of life, the gift of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life!

It is important to be reminded of this frequently. I highly recommend this wonderful movie, although be prepared to cry off-and-on for two hours. This also is a good thing (see here.)

I went to church on Sunday and was under-whelmed by the service and the sermon, but was gladdened by the display of new spring growth evident in the church grounds.

There was plenty of spring bounty at the grocery store as well.

Back in my yard, there is plenty of work to be done already.

But I’m feeling better already. Aren’t you?

And for you doubters out there who don’t believe that Robin Williams is my brother’s doppelganger…here’s proof!

Here he is (on the right obviously) in 1989 with his bro-in-law.

Born a few weeks apart in 1951, the only way to tell them apart is that Robin is a LOT more hairy.

Have a great week!

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As the trial of Martin Luther began its second day during the assembly of the Diet of Worms in 1521, he refused to recant his teachings despite the threat of excommunication. On April 18 he stood alone against the mighty Catholic Church and prayed one of the all-time great prayers:

Almighty and eternal God, what a strange cause this is! How it loosens people’s tongues! How small and insignificant is their trust in you! How weak and tender is the flesh, and how powerful and busy is the devil, with the help of his apostles and the worldly wise!! How quickly the world withdraws help, does an about-face, pursues the easy way, and speeds on the broad road to hell where the godless belong. It sees only the brilliant and powerful, great, mighty, and respected! If I should turn my eyes to it, I would be done for.

Oh God, Oh God, Oh my God, stand by me against all the wisdom and reason of the world. Do it. You alone must do it. It is not really my concern, it is yours. Alone I have nothing to do with these great lords of the world. I want good and quiet days, undisturbed. But it is your cause: it is righteous and eternal. Stand by me. Oh true and eternal God, I do not rely on human counsel, for it would be in vain. All that is carnal and tastes carnal fails.

O God, O God, do you not hear me, my God? Are you dead? No, you cannot die; you are only hiding. Have you called me to this place? I ask you so that I am sure. God, grant it! Never in my life had I thought to oppose such great rulers and never had I set out to do it.

O God, stand by me in the name of your dear Son Jesus Christ who shall be my Protector and Defender, even my mighty Fortress, through the power and help of your Holy Spirit.

Lord, where are you? Come, come, I am ready like a patient lamb to lay down my life for this cause. It is your cause and it is righteous. I will not separate myself from you forever. Be it resolved in your name that the world cannot force me to act against my conscience, even if I had still more devils, and if my body which is first of all your creation should have to perish. So your Word and Spirit come to my rescue even if only for the body. And my soul is yours. It belongs to you, and it remains with you forever. Amen. So help me. Amen.

Priceless. How then shall we pray? The direct approach, as always, is best. So help me. Amen.

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March 29, 2013

The heart in thee

by chuckofish

“Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”

This is a long quote, but I hope you read the whole thing and did not skim. Dear daughter #2 shared this quote with me yesterday with the suggestion that “it’s nice to fall back on the Transcendentalist ideas if the institution of the church is failing you.” I guess my recent posts had her a little worried. But fear not, my relationship with the Episcopal Church, though a love/hate one, is a long-term one. From time to time I threaten to leave, but I probably won’t. I just continue to lower my expectations!

Thanks also to daughter #2 for sending her old mama some new music!

Josh Ritter and Trampled by Turtles! Great choices for me, especially the TBT–nothing gets me going in the morning like 21st century bluegrass! Here is my favorite song, titled appropriately “Walt Whitman”:

This song gets my Barbara Stanwyck alter ego all charged up and ready to go. Sometimes I think my driving may suffer, but so far so good.

Happy Easter and have a great weekend!

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March 21, 2013

Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest

by chuckofish

On this day in 1556 Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake at Oxford. At the very end, he repudiated his final letter of submission, and announced that he died a Protestant. He said, “I have sinned, in that I signed with my hand what I did not believe with my heart. When the flames are lit, this hand shall be the first to burn.” And when the fire was lit around his feet, he leaned forward and held his right hand in the fire until it was charred to a stump. Aside from this, he did not speak or move, except that once he raised his left hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Cranmer is commemorated in the Anglican Communion as a Reformation Martyr on 21 March.

Merciful God, through the work of Thomas Cranmer you renewed the worship of your Church by restoring the language of the people, and through his death you revealed your power in human weakness: Grant that by your grace we may always worship you in spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“Cranmer said to him, when they were talking late one night, St. Augustine says we need not ask where our home is, because in the end we all come home to God.”
–Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

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March 14, 2013

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

“Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we’re in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.”
–Frederick Buechner

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March 12, 2013

Thought for the day

by chuckofish

“Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. This formulation (knowing what we know of the universe’s ghastly extent) is more incredible, to our sense of things, than the Old Testament hypothesis of a God willing to suffer, coddle, instruct, and even (in the Book of Job) to debate with men, in order to realize the meager benefit of worship, of praise for His Creation. What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here.”

–John Updike

Seek him who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth: The Lord is his name. Amos 5:8

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March 4, 2013

Bread of Heaven

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? I went home a little early on Friday and got right in my pajamas and hunkered down, as I had been fighting off some version of this winter’s flu for a few days. I went to bed and didn’t wake up ’til almost 10 o’clock the next morning which is four hours later than usual. I stayed in bed most of the day reading Willa Cather, only rousing myself to talk to loved ones on the phone.

But the next day was Sunday and I was scheduled to be a lay reader, so I got up, endeavored to make myself presentable and went to church. I read the second lesson which turned out to be some excellent fire and brimstone from Saint Paul to the Corinthians warning about sexual immorality etc.: “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.” Oh, how I do love him. And I say that without irony.

We also sang “Bread of Heaven”, one of my favorite hymns, which always conjures up images of the Reverend Jones in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain

stabbing the tires of the surveyor’s car while muttering the refrain of this hymn. The words, indeed, are all quite evocative:

When I tread the verge of Jordan
Bid my anxious fears subside
Death of death, and hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side

I left church renewed and with a light heart and feeling that a reward to myself was overdo. So I went to my neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts:

for a cup of:

and this crispy goodness:

Life is good. But lest we forget: “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” (I Cor. 10:13) Have a great week!

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February 27, 2013

A cheerful heart

by chuckofish

A while ago I posted about the positive effects of a good cry. Well today we’ll consider the importance of being cheerful.

Every day I get an email from the Anglican monks of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. Yesterday’s message from Br. Mark Brown was about “Hilarity”. You can read the whole thing here.

“Perhaps we could think of cheerfulness,” he writes, “a gentle good cheer, as a spiritual practice, or, at least, as a spiritual good—as a way of being compassionate to those we live with (as Paul’s words suggest). A way of bringing the light of Christ, the gracious light of Christ into the lives of others. Cheerfulness can’t be an all day/every day thing. But if we’re between the storms of life and in a comparatively neutral zone, we might be more intentional about returning to a kind of emotional baseline of gentle good cheer. Rather than merely neutral, perhaps a baseline of gentle good cheer.”

I like to think of cheerfulness as a spiritual practice. One of the affirmative laws of the Boy Scouts, as you know, is “A scout is cheerful”–in fact he “smiles and whistles”. As we also know, practice makes perfect. Sometimes that means smiling when we don’t feel like it. This sign in my kitchen reminds all who enter to do so.

The writer of the Book of Proverbs says, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine”, which is so true. We all know people whose cheerfulness is contagious and makes proximity to them a definite benefit. Likewise a smile from a stranger can greatly improve your day. So go ahead and smile! Think of it as your Lenten spiritual practice and do it intentionally!

If you are having a hard time smiling, it is a good spiritual practice to watch a funny movie. But why is it that I have a harder time thinking of movies that make me laugh than ones that make me cry? Anyway, here are some funny ones: Ball of Fire (1941), Best in Show (2000), Ghostbusters (1984), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Producers (1968), The Pink Panther (1963), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Annie Hall (1977), A Run for Your Money (1949), The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain (1995). What have I forgotten?

And if all else fails, try this:

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February 15, 2013

Odds and Ends

by chuckofish

It’s finally Friday. We’ve had Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, the Westminster Dog Show, the SOTU, and Valentine’s Day. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Seriously, that is too much for one week.

Not that I actually participated in most of it. Drunken mob (Mardi Gras)–certainly not my thing. Yes, our flyover town boasts the 2nd largest blow-out in the U.S. But no.

I did watch some of the Dog Show, which I used to enjoy. But it is a bit over the top these days with its freaky display of weird breeds–I mean what is an Affenpinscher anyway? (This Affenpinscher reminds me of Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf.)

Not to mention traditional breeds that look freaky because of their blow-dried locks. I mean how embarrassed was this poor sheepdog?

Remember when they looked like this?

To top things off, today is the 249th birthday of my flyover hometown. Founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, it became a major port on the Mississippi River after the Louisiana Purchase. According to Wikipedia, “its population expanded after the American Civil War, and it became the fourth-largest city in the United States in the late 19th century. It seceded from St. Louis County in March 1877, allowing it to become an independent city and limiting its political boundaries. In 1904, it hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the 1904 Summer Olympics. The city’s population peaked in 1950, then began a long decline that continues in the 21st century.” I always say, we peaked in 1904. Sigh.