Something Other than a Pencil

At four o'clock this morning I woke up with a pencil, a very well sharpened pencil stuck in my right eye.  Actually it just felt like that.  I've had this feeling before and I've tried to figure out exactly what it feels like.  I settled for the pencil.  I use pencils.  The big yellow ones with the erasers on one end.  I sharpen them with my pocket knife.  They're sharp.  That's what it feels like.

It's called Iritis.  It's an inflammation of the iris of the eye.  It's nothing you want to have or have long enough to figure out exactly what the pain feels like.  I wandered around the cabin.  Being on study leave, I'm in a cabin in the woods on the Connecticut River.  So I wandered.  The pencil went deeper.  It usually does.   So, I walked outside, trying to figure out what to do.

I drove to the hospital.  Dumb.  But in the long run it kind of made sense.  I found a mental institution.  Lots of bricks and a pleasant lady who wanted to know if I needed help.  With her and a great amount of grace I wandered into the emergency room.  The security lady asked me "How are you today?"  I took a moment, hand over my eye, spasms shooting into my head as some giggling demon jammed the pencil in and rotated it, just a moment to tell her that I've trained people who visit suffering souls in the hospital to never ask, 'How are you?'  They're in a hospital.  How do you think they are?  Teaching moments abound.

 They were nice to me.  I tried to be pleasant.  The doctor dropped this stuff into my eye that hurt like hell and then took all the pain away.  Wow!  He used a portable version of the thing my eye guy uses to inform me that I had some sort of mark on my eye.  It looked like a twisted knot imprinted on the cornea.  No Iritis.  Good news.  But somehow the druids reached me, in Connecticut.  Go figure.

I have little perspective on this whole thing.  Gratitude per usual.  But who gets a symbol of the eternal connectedness of all things etched onto his eye?  I guess it's better than a pencil.  But sometimes things are too strange to shrug off. 

I apologized to the guard lady.  She told me nobody had ever told her that before, but it made a lot of sense.  She told me it was good advice.  She hoped I felt better.  All that to teach a guard lady?

Luke 17:11-19 You Can’t Go Back

 

I’ve often wondered if I could go back in time, what would I be able to change without altering the future in some unspeakable way?  I’ve heard it called the butterfly effect.  If on our jaunt into the past we smush one butterfly, change something infinitesimal, as days and weeks and years pass, that tiny change would alter the future radically. 

But I’ve known people, myself included, who try to live in the now acting as if parts of our past didn’t happen.  We try to forget that moment of weakness or arrogance or foolishness.  Some of those moments are so powerful that we wince or worry or dream about them.  They may be buried by the monster dandruff of time and new acquaintances, logistical alterations, behavioral switches, new habits, new jobs, but those moments, those pot holes, those choices, those lapses, those horrors are still there.

Whether we like it or not, now is an amalgam of then’s that are the raw material for now.  No matter how we’d like to make them go away, they are part of the bed rock that our center hall colonial of now is built on. 

When I went to a reunion of my graduating class from High School, it was one of those moments of embarrassment and gratitude all stirred into the same pot.  They all knew me, geek, fencer, football team mascot (a great way to meet girls), singer, proto hippie, etc.  High School was a time of devastating awkwardness and loneliness.  It was full of those moments I would have gladly altered, removed from my time stream like teeth crooked and painful.  But the reunion revealed less pain than nostalgia and an amazing sense of gratitude.  Gratitude for what that time taught me, gave me as tools for the future and in retrospect laughter at our mutual silliness and audacity.  It was an amazing experience, especially since I had a lot more hair than most of the guys.

In my first book I recounted this story from Luke’s gospel about the ten lepers from the point of view of one of the lepers who didn’t go back to thank Jesus.  He couldn’t because he wanted to leave the horror of that part of his life behind him.  But no matter how he tried, it was there, following him, polluting him, holding him back. 

I do PTSD therapy for people who have been through horror and find themselves caught in those moments when the world stopped making sense and caved in on them.  The chief therapy is to get them to walk through the moment again and again until they can allow it to become a memory not a living nightmare.  They have to go back, they have to remember it to allow themselves to face the now.  A now that includes that moment in the past.

We are Christians.  At the center of our faith is the cross, a traumatic horror.  Our job is to embrace that event and accept our culpability in it.  Then we can move on to the Resurrection and transformed life. They are all a part of who and what we are.  They all make the bedrock of our faith upon which we build our hope and our abundant life.  Not only can we go back, we have to if we are to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves and others, and accept the miracle of life and life abundant that blooms before us every day.

At the reunion some of the same tormentors that used to make me sweat tried to pick on me again.  I laughed with them.  There we stood laughing.  But I noticed they were wondering what the heck happened to the geek.  I guess I grew up.

 

The Plague

 

 

Our struggle for survival has been an up and down affair since we dropped from the trees and shambled out into the grass lands.  It’s been a tale of ups and downs in our journey through history, periodically bringing us close to the endangered species list, if there had been one.  Now our numbers seem to pad such edges.  Thousands, even millions might die, but we make so many more, so fast that there seems no end in sight. 

Disease is frightening.  Contagious bugs that move from one to the other touch a cord, if not in our conscious minds then somewhere in memories passed down from ancestors who watched their families and even towns die from the Black Death, or Small pox, or Cholera.  Such specters have haunted us since we stood up.  They sneak into our fortresses, under our gates, past our privilege and bring us down, peasant and king alike. 

Are they punishments for neglecting our God?  Are they cruel tricks of some demonic spoiler?  Are they merely evidence of the vulnerability of all life?  Whatever they may be, they remind us of our fragility and demand that we climb down from our high and mighty attitudes and adopt humility not as a virtue, but as a way of life. 

But far beneath the discussion of cosmic perpetrators lies a more basic issue.  The plagues we fear are dwarfed by our own success at survival.  It has become a plague in itself.  The sixth great extinction that is shutting down polar bears and frogs and corals, bats and bees and bluebirds is not the result of some massive asteroid or even some silent virus, it is the result of the relentless pressure of our infestation of every nook and cranny of our planet, including its seas and atmosphere.  Our light, our heat, our noise, our lack of restraint have created a place where life is struggling to survive. 

It is hard to see ourselves and our off spring as a plague.  But what else can we call it?  Such dark thoughts trouble our dreams and darken our days. 

There is a Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’  Surely that we do.  The challenges of this day seem daunting to a species so young and too powerful for its small measure of wisdom.  Perhaps the impractical lessons that call us beyond our roots of dominance and self-importance, the ones that we are left with when we face Ebola, the ones that are the only options to fear could apply here as well.   We do have options, we always have options.  They may not be easy.  They may demand that we grow beyond the laws of tooth and claw.  They demand that we become more than the ultimate survivors.  They demand that we become truly human, even in these interesting times.

I’m pulling for us.  After all, we invented the cello and pecan pie.