It occurs to me…

I read a story today about John Tumpane, a major league umpire, and his efforts to keep a woman from jumping off a bridge in Pittsburg.  Tumpane was on the bridge with other sightseers when the woman started climbing out, saying she wanted to get a better view of the Allegheny River below.  Tumpane, and others, grabbed her and held her, then eventually got her to come back onto the bridge.  The story made clear, based on later interviews of her, that her intent was to jump from the bridge.

Any time I see these stories I always scroll down to “the statement.”  It is always there.  At some point, when someone suggests that the act was heroic, “the statement” comes out.  The person involved never considers himself or herself a hero, and responds with something like this: “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  It seemed like the right thing to do.  I did what anyone else would have done in that situation.”  In this case, in this story, Tumpane gave the shorthand version – “I just happened to be there.”  Somehow, “the statement” always gives me hope, and helps me set aside my cynical pessimism and believe, if only momentarily, that the world is full of these humble, non-heros doing good things.

Reading the story this morning, I was reminded that yesterday, driving to work, I noticed four concerned looking people gathered around an apparently homeless man passed out on the sidewalk.  EMS attendants were just walking up to help him.  I assume one of the four had called 911 and waited with the man until EMS arrived.  I suppose that if anyone had walked up to one of those four who stopped to help that they would have each given some version of “the statement.”

Of course, some of these stories make the news, some I happen to see or become aware of, but it is only logical that thousands, if not millions, of these stories (some much less dramatic, others more so) play out every day that we never know about – people who “just happened to be there” doing things that “just seemed like the right thing to do.”  In fact, it occurs to me that perhaps that is the source of most goodness in the world, people who “just happened to be there” doing what “just seemed like the right thing to do.”  In this thought I am reminded of the line from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata: “With all it sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

From the This I Believe series, this excerpt from “Be Cool To The Pizza Dude.”

“In the big pizza wheel of life, sometimes you’re the hot bubbly cheese and sometimes you’re the burnt crust. It’s good to remember the fickle spinning of that wheel.”

Indeed.  And perhaps as important:

1)  My judgment as to where, at any given moment, I am located on the “big pizza wheel of life” is suspect, and in any event, “remember the fickle spinning of the wheel.”

2) Heck, just being located on the wheel is cause for celebration.

You can read or listen to the whole essay at:

http://www.npr.org/2005/05/16/4651531/be-cool-to-the-pizza-dude

From Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love

“It is quite impossible, of course, to be fully conscious of every note in life’s symphony.  But if your spirit becomes unclogged and your senses open you will begin to perceive things as they really are and to interact with reality and you will be entranced by the harmonies of the universe.  Then you will understand what God is, for you will at last know what love is….  It is only when you drop your beliefs, your fears, and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and to the world.”

There’s too much there to unpack in one sitting, but this thought occurs to me — How many notes in life’s symphony am I listening to?

I was reacquainted recently with an old song.  Made popular (sort of) by Bobby Bare in the 70’s, this ditty, while irreverent, contains some solid gold theological nuggets.  Written by Paul Craft (Broken Lady, Hank Williams You Wrote My Life, and one of my favorites, Keep Me From Blowing Away), this comes from Drop Kick Me Jesus (Through the Goalpost of Life):

Make me, oh, make me Lord, more than I am.

Make me a piece in your master game plan

Free from the earthly temptations below

I got the will Lord, if you got the toe

I just have to offer up the ball (me) and be available, but I often play the role of Lucy in Peanuts, pulling the ball away just as God’s toe is on the backswing.

And if you don’t otherwise know the song, the chorus goes:

Drop kick me Jesus, through the goalpost of life

End over end, neither left nor the right

Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights

Drop kick me Jesus, through the goalpost of life

One last Lamott-ism:

“Earth is forgiveness school.  It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table.” [forgiving family and those around you]

On this point, I am still in elementary school, at the “Dick and Jane Reader” level, but I am at least starting to grasp the concept.

More Lamott on life and writing:

Though not one of her main points, at one point Lamott notes that “everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared.”  While I think there is some hyperbole there, it is a fact that we all have issues, and also a fact that some folks hide those issues better than others.  That leads Lamott to this admonition: “try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”  When I compare, that’s of course exactly what I do – I compare what I know to be truth about me to what I BELIEVE to be truth as to others.  Putting it that way, it occurs to me that the risk in that comparison is, well, obvious.

Another of Lamott’s Twelve Truths I Have Learned From Life and Writing:

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes –including you.”

As contrary as this sounds, I know it to be true in the “reboot” computer era.  I can’t explain why powering down my computer for a few minutes (maybe even a few seconds) makes the damn thing work right again, and it frustrates me to be on a 1-800 HELL call and have the person on the other end tell me to do just that – but I’ll be damned, it usually works.  So it shouldn’t come as a surprise (or be a tactic of last resort) that taking a deep breath, closing my eyes, and opening them again somehow reprograms my internal computer, releases my anxieties, and allows me to see things in a different way, but it does.  I am convinced that Paul’s fall from his horse on the road to Damascus was nothing more than that – a reboot, or, as he describes in Romans 12:2 – a renewing of the mind.

Anne Lamott, one of my favorites, recently gave a TED talk in which she shared twelve truths she has learned in 61 years of living and writing.  She and I are about the same age, so we have, at least timewise, a similar pool from which to draw.  Some of her rules resonate with me, others not so much so, but in either event they get me to thinking – and we all know how much trouble that can start.

“Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox.  Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it’s impossible here, on the incarnational side of things….  It’s so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we’re being punked.  It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.  I don’t think it’s an ideal system.”

Yep, she’s been living in the same time, on the same planet, as I have.

Here is a Link to the talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_lamott_12_truths_i_learned_from_life_and_writing

Walking to work yesterday I was standing at the intersection across from my office, waiting for the light to change so I could cross Congress Avenue.  Across the street I spotted a one-legged man in a wheelchair, moving along on the sidewalk using is one present leg.  As he approached the intersection across from me to cross 4^th Street, it occurred to me he needed someone to help him across so as to navigate the road crown and cars.  Ener a man coming the other way across 4^th Street, a younger man, a bit shabbily dressed, with arms full of tattoos.  He meets the wheelchaired man just as the latter starts across the street, turns around, and pushes the man across the street to the safety of the sidewalk.

Webster’s defines “miracle” as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.”  I don’t know if what I saw was a miracle.  It occurs to me that one may have the same difficulty defining “miracle” as Justice Potter Stewart had defining “pornography,” and put “miracle” in the “I know it when I see it” category.  I know what I saw felt like a miracle to me, either because one human helped another unselfishly or because as I observed it I felt some bricks come tumbling down or, (in Grinch terms) my heart grow three sizes.  What I do know is that when the helping young man crossed 4^th Street again we met at the corner.  I told him “Way to go” and “high-fived” him before we both went along our ways.  And I know I walked away feeling a little better about the future of this clod of dirt and water spinning around in space.