It occurs to me…

Photo taken in Hawaii a few years back.

More from Uncommon Gratitude – on faith:

“The truth is that faith requires the awareness that God is and that God is holding all of us responsible for the other. Being a card-carrying member of a religious tradition does not give us the right to consume the world for our own ends and in the name of God. We do not have the right to loose havoc on the rest of the world in the name of the God we have made in our own image. It is not getting the rest of the world to think and worship as we do that qualifies as real religion. It is giving ourselves for the welfare of the rest of the world to which we are called….

Faith is belief that God is leading us to become in tune with the universe, however different we see ourselves to be.

Faith is trust in the unknown goodness of life without demand for certainty in the science of it.

Faith is belief that the God we call “our God” is either the God of all or cannot possibly be God at all.

Faith is confidence in darkness, for the willingness to trust in the deep-down humanity of others as well as in our own may be the deepest act of faith we can possibly devise.

Faith is the willingness to see God at work in others​—in their needs and ideas, their hopes and plans—as well as in ourselves.

Faith is the certainty that God is working through others just as certainly as God is working through us for the good of all humankind. For those things we sing alleluia. Those are surely the only things that can possibly save the globe from our own unmaking of it.

Faith, real faith, real willingness to forgo our own need to either understand God’s ways with humankind or control them ourselves, is real reason for alleluia.”

In this sense it occurs to me that faith holds both certainty and doubt, both knowing and not knowing.  Perhaps stated another way, faith is not the certainty that I am right, but the certainty that God is right.  Which makes me think of one of my favorite Anne Lamott quotes: “You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Yesterday, in the church library, a book grabbed my attention – Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All There Is by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams.  Thumbing through it before a meeting I read this:

“To deal with the meaning of alleluia in life means to deal with moments that do not feel like alleluia moments at all.  But how is it possible to say alleluia to the parts of life that weigh us down, that drain our spirits dry, that seem to deserve anything but praise?”

Later on, it is noted that “every segment of life is both a gift and challenge, both endowment and responsibility,” and that in the Christian tradition, “alleluia” “calls us to see all of life as life-giving, somehow, in some way, whether its present gifting is apparent or not.

Okay, I’m in!  I took the book home.

From Max Ehermann’s Desiderata, which sets on my desk:

“If you compare yourself with others, you will become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

The subtlety I had not previously noted in this is the juxtaposition of “vain and bitter.”  It would seem that in comparing myself to others I should become vain OR bitter.  I am either the lead dog in the pack, or not.  If I compare, I (as the lead dog) am at risk for becoming vain, if I am not the lead dog, I am at risk for becoming bitter.  But it occurs to me that Ehrmann has it correct.  In life, the lead changes often, and ultimately, even the lead dog realizes that there is another pack in front of his/hers.

Photo taken near Puerto Vallarta late last year

“Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.”  Tehyi Hsieh

I ran across this quote today.  It occurs to me that much time in life is spend wondering, even when the answer can be known fairly easily, and at minimal risk/cost – but it requires action.  What comes to mind here is the dilemma I had recently when a smoke alarm in the house was chirping, telling me it needed a new battery.  I had one replacement 9 volt battery (those rectangular ones with two posts at the top) in my box-o-batteries, but it was out of the package so I didn’t know if it was any good. – so I wondered.  I had nothing else to stick it in other than said smoke alarm mounted on the ceiling.  I tried to remember when I might have bought the battery, why it was not in the package, and what implication that had.  I looked for dates on the battery itself and found none.  Ultimately, I just decided to use my education as a child.  I put my tongue on the two battery posts.  It gave me a good jolt – thus validating the quote: “Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.”

I got the ladder and replaced the old battery with that one.

“Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”  Justice Felix Frankfurter

I ran across this quote again today.  It always seems to show up at an opportune time, a time when I am rethinking or reassessing something.  But it occurs to me that perhaps that rethinking and reassessing is (or should be) a perpetual state.  There are, of course, some absolutes in life, but many thoughts and beliefs I have today I will not have (or will have the counter of) tomorrow, next year, or three, eight, thirteen, or twenty-one years from now.  I know that to be true because it has been true in history and in my life.  The world is not flat.  Men can fly with the aid of machinery.  Images and sound can be transmitted through air…..

The difficulty with tardy wisdom is not simply the tardiness.  There is other fallout associated with the tardiness, with changing one’s mind (in modern political parlance, “flip-flopping”).  And then, of course, pride is at play here.  Wisdom often carries with it the duty to reject previously held ways of thinking and take back previous expressions offered as absolute truths.

For whatever reason, or combination of reasons, I know the urge, my urge, is almost always to resist that wisdom Frankfurter speaks of.  Rarely, if ever, does someone present to me a new way of doing/seeing things and I just slap my forehead, wonder how I could have been so stupid not to have seen it before, and embrace the new thought.  That is probably too much to hope for.  Perhaps I can just stick with Frankfurter’s suggestion and consider that wisdom keeps no time and has no calendar.

My first memory of watching Astros baseball goes back to a trip to the Astrodome with my cousin and my uncle Dick sometime around 1965, perhaps 1966, which would have been the year or year after it was built.  Since them I have ridden the roller coaster that was/is Astros baseball.  I have seen them suck, I mean really suck.  I have seen them be really good.  I have seen them through multiple 100 game loss seasons, and seen them get close to, but not get in to, the World Series, until 2005.  I saw, as in I was there, when they lost Game 4 in 2005, being swept by the White Sox.  And then, there was this year.  After all the disappointment, it was hard to believe – it IS hard to believe.

As I look back at my half a century run with the Astros, it is, in many ways, difficult to even understand what has occurred, particularly after being sleep deprived for the past couple of weeks from watching games.  But what I understand a little better now is that time is the answer to lots of questions, and that time is set to a clock that is not necessarily my own.  I’ve known (but not liked) that all along, of course – but I must be reminded of it on a regular basis.