My New Year's Slogan

This year I wasn’t planning to make any New Year’s resolutions. What I really wanted was a New Year’s slogan. I wanted a phrase or a saying to echo like a guiding refrain throughout 2018.

I hoped the fortune cookie following my New Year’s Eve meal of Chinese dumplings might provide the wisdom I was seeking. After all, I’ve had some pretty awesome fortunes in my day. Unfortunately, I didn’t even understand it. (This was not the first time one of my kids had to explain the meaning of a fortune to me.)

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

My daughter Siobhan can explain this to you, if you’re interested. All I knew was that this was not my New Year’s slogan.

A few days later, I was reading through my students’ homework assignments. They were responding to a series of questions about 1 Corinthians 12-14. In 1 Corinthians, Paul was addressing a community of eager but immature Christians. They wanted to follow Christ, but they were still learning. Among other issues, they seemed to be in constant competition with one another. They even bragged about their own spiritual gifts! One Christian might flaunt that she could speak in tongues, another might boast that he had more knowledge, and so on.

How did Paul communicate to the Corinthians that this behavior, this attitude, had to stop? He wrote to them about the value of their spiritual gifts, and how wonderful it was that they were all unique parts of a functioning whole. And then he offered them one guiding criterion for determining how their gifts were to be understood and used. One by one, my students noted Paul’s simple guiding rule, echoing like a refrain: “Does it build up the Church?”

And here was my slogan. Here was a simple question to ask myself in many situations, in many decisions: “If I do this...does it build up the Church? If I think this way...does it build up the Church?” To build up is to provide support, to bolster, to help, to heal. This is why St. Paul brilliantly concluded that love is the greatest spiritual gift – better by far than teaching or leading or speaking in tongues or prophecy. Love never divides as these other gifts sometimes do – when they are used to exclude, to compete, to denigrate or to build up oneself at the expense of the community. But love? Love only serves. It is patient and kind. It is not inflated. It does not brood. Love never fails.

I thought you might be looking for a slogan too, so I’m sharing. Here’s to 2018!

“Everything should be done for building up” (1 Cor. 14:26).

Too complicated for me.

Too complicated for me.

Being Right and the End of Wisdom

Happy New Year, all! The reflection below came straight from my heart in 2017, and it found a home in Little Rock Scripture Study's monthly newsletter Little Rock Connections. It is republished here with permission. I hope you will recognize within it your own wisdom, earned by years or given by grace, and that you will enjoy its fruits in 2018!

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Bell bottoms, encyclopedias, cursive, dinosaurs. Things that aren’t around much anymore. 

Will we soon add “wisdom” to this nostalgic list?

Wisdom is the fruitful combination of experience, knowledge and good judgment. It is a dynamic thing; wise people are dynamic. They learn, grow, adapt, change their minds, take forward and backward steps. Wise people are interesting. They have something valuable. It is sometimes a gift but more often hard-earned.

Emerging from experience and learning, wisdom is an inherently slow-growing thing. But have we lost patience for its cultivation? Has our tolerance for the fluidity of wisdom dried up in hopes of something solid and firmly defined? Has it become more admirable to be right than to be wise? Is it better to “come on strong” than to come on…thoughtful?  Is it more admirable to “stick to your guns” than to muddle your way through that cloudy, sticky, murky, stubborn, ever-present but oft-denied gray area? That gray area is life.

We like black and white; we crave clarity; we devour rules. We want to be right, and we like people who are right. Increasingly, we like people who are right quickly. Slow and deliberate seems out of pace. Changing one’s mind is weakness.

But what did the ancients think? Biblical wisdom is not first and foremost about being right. It is an approach to life – how to navigate the intersection of spiritual and secular, how to get along with people, how to make decisions, how to respond to the problems we encounter every day. Wisdom values work, relationships and dialogue. It points one toward the fruitful paths of life. Wisdom includes knowledge, and a wise person is often “right,” but wisdom is much more. 

The wisdom tradition endorses a viewpoint found throughout all of scripture: human beings are not perfect, but they are remarkable. Where they are lacking, they can change and be better. They are not often “one or the other.” They are more often “both and.” Human beings – and their endeavors – are redeemable.

Wisdom, then, is not cut-and-dried, right or wrong. It is not simple and one-note. It seeks a “breadth of understanding” (1 Kgs. 4:29) and acknowledges that human understanding is a process, and often a slow one (even Jesus, we are told, grew in wisdom). A major contribution of the wisdom book of Proverbs is the assertion that wisdom is learned, and learning requires guidance, and guidance requires humility. This natural humility of the learner, the disciple, is a fading virtue in a world that increasingly heaps skepticism on the possibility that “the other” may have something to teach us. When this humility is absent, very little real learning takes place – even less understanding, and certainly no wisdom. Proverbs offered this warning centuries ago: the one who refuses counsel, guidance and instruction will face the consequences of a simple, static, stagnant life.

There is an ebb and flow to wisdom that mirrors the natural flux of life and relationships. Indeed, the ancients believed that we are supposed to learn and grow and change. The only thing we were meant to be entrenched in is the natural human rhythm of transformation fueled by dynamic concepts like searching, repenting, returning, proclaiming, trusting and abiding. 

A lovely passage from the deuterocanonical book of Wisdom declares that wisdom “renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (7:27). Friends of God and prophets.  Surely we could use more of these. Then we must choose a slower, more thoughtful, more receptive, more conversant, humbler, subtler, more nuanced way. Yes, this way of wisdom offers a gentle antidote to our excesses of speed, activity, polarization and bluster, in a human community at risk of losing its grip on intimacy, reflection, quiet, intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal relationships. If wisdom was the architect of creation (Prov. 8:30), might we benefit from utilizing her blueprint? 

Our world does not have a King Solomon, or a King Arthur, or a single person of legendary wisdom. We only have each other, and the biblical promise that those who seek wisdom can find her, and that those who have found her have found a treasure. Being right can be helpful, but being wise is life-giving. It heals and begets in a way that being right never could. An echo of the iconic Tree of Life, whose roots run from front to back of our ancient books, wisdom bears many kinds of fruit, and her leaves are for the healing of the nations (Prov. 3:18; Rev. 22:2).

tree of life.jpg

God & Storms: Does God protect us?

This blog post was originally published in October 2014. It seemed appropriate to repost it in the midst of this historic hurricane season, as we continue to pray for all those facing storms.

How would you answer the question, "Does God protect us?"

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Do you ever pray about the weather?  “Pray for good weather this Sunday for the church picnic.”  While there’s certainly nothing wrong with praying for this sort of thing, it may create legitimate questions in our minds:  If God would arrange good weather for our church picnic, why wouldn’t he arrange for hurricanes to avoid heavily populated areas, or for monsoons to stop before they become devastating floods, or for rain to fall on drought-stricken farms? Why not redirect a polar vortex or subdue a tsunami?

Can God control the weather?  Of course.  But does he?

In this way, earth’s storms are not unlike the storms of life.  We can and we should pray about the difficulties and devastations we face.  We must always communicate with, and lean on and believe in, our loving and powerful God.  But we are well aware that he does not always intervene when it comes to “bad weather.”  Could God control every aspect of our lives, create a wall around us, protecting us from every bad thing?  Perhaps.  But does he?  He most certainly does not.

Perhaps it comes down to a question of how God protects us.  There are times in life when we feel miraculously protected – walking away from a car accident, being thrown from a horse and standing up good as new.  But for the most part, we get tossed around by life with scars to show for it – there are injuries, illnesses, heartbreaks, sleeplessness, stress and death – for all of God’s children.  The rain falls on everyone, and some even seem to get more than their fair share.  God does not always shield us from these things.  And yet he remains our powerful protector.  He protects not with a power that interferes with each event, but a power that gathers us in, and pulls us near, and makes and keeps promises about being with us.  It is a power that may strike us as a bit too subtle at times, and yet as time passes, we recognize how awesome, and how essential, and how real it actually is.

As a parent, I do not want my children to suffer, and I am naturally tempted to smooth their paths in whatever way I can.  But even more than I may want an easy life for them, I want a great life for them.  I want them to be great.  And the fact is that great people have suffered. They have experienced the storms of life without always bailing out into the nearest shelter. They have learned the most important things by being brought down low.  Storms transformed them and made them strong, wise, clearheaded and serene.  Wounded?  Yes, that too.  But we can be wounded and still be great.  It is much harder to be utterly unscathed and be anything more than mediocre.

God allows bad weather – really bad weather – and he allows life’s storms.  Sometimes the storms are so bad that our wounds don’t heal.  For those times we may simply have to surrender:  “Lord, I know you may not change this storm, but you are always willing to change me.  So if you must, make me great!”

Hurricane Harvey makes destructive landfall on the coast of Texas on Aug. 25, 2017. Image credit NOAA/RAMMB.

Hurricane Harvey makes destructive landfall on the coast of Texas on Aug. 25, 2017. Image credit NOAA/RAMMB.

Some Lenten Levity, Courtesy Dorothy Day

In honor of Laetare Sunday (“Rejoice Sunday,” marking roughly our halfway mark through Lent), I thought I’d share a story with quasi-Lenten undertones (that’s a stretch) that made me laugh out loud.

It’s from a wonderful book put together by Rosalie G. Riegle entitled Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her.  The book is full of impressions, stories and memories about the real Dorothy Day from a wide survey of people who knew her in all sorts of capacities throughout her life.  

A little background on this particular story – apparently Dorothy was known for disliking contemporary music!  Rosalie narrates with the help of longtime Catholic Worker Brian Terrell:

“Often the young [Catholic] Workers would ‘have a hard time understanding the grumbling of their elder leader as an expression of love,’ as Brian Terrell says. ‘For all its craziness, the Worker is a family, and in families it often happens that the elders complain about…the younger generation.’ Brian tells a generational story about Dorothy coming upon some young people at work in Maryhouse and listening to the Carly Simon song ‘I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain.’ Dorothy shook her cane at them and said, ‘You’ve always got to have time for the pain.’”

Dorothy Day! When I'm old enough to shake my cane at people, may God grant me your panache!

I doubt Dorothy ever shook her cane at these four whipper-snappers: Ralph DiGia, Dan Berrigan, Chris Kearns, and Tom Cornell. Photo courtesy of Jim Forest’s online photo album.  Click on the picture to visit Jim’s “Dorothy Day” album.

I doubt Dorothy ever shook her cane at these four whipper-snappers: Ralph DiGia, Dan Berrigan, Chris Kearns, and Tom Cornell. Photo courtesy of Jim Forest’s online photo album.  Click on the picture to visit Jim’s “Dorothy Day” album.

Your Paper-Thin Wings

At Saturday’s retreat on prayer, my retreatants and I reflected on how we are made for prayer. We are human; we are free; we are made for relationships. Prayer is our relationship with God. God is not “up there” while we are “down here.” Rather, God is with us, and he desires intimacy with us. Although prayer is indisputably challenging, we were made for it. It was meant to be.

To illustrate this point, I shared something I recently heard on a Radiolab podcast (with four kids in four schools this year, I do a lot of driving and a lot of podcasting!). Radiolab was investigating how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Do you know how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly?

A caterpillar does not simply grow wings inside its chrysalis. No, first the caterpillar dissolves into a goop. That’s right, goop. If you cut open a chrysalis during this stage, goop spills out! Somehow that goop becomes a butterfly.

But where do the wings come from?

As it turns out, the wings are already formed inside the caterpillar. Careful dissection of a prepupal caterpillar reveals paper-thin, transparent wings, tiny antennae and even legs! The structures of “butterfly-ness” exist just below the caterpillar's outer skin, waiting for transformation.

We were made for prayer, friends. The wings are already there, paper-thin, transparent, and a bit pent up. With God’s help, we can stretch out and fly.

I hope you will enjoy this Radiolab broadcast:  “Goo and You.”

"Life history of the silk moth (Bombyx mori). A, caterpillar; B, pupa; C, imago; the cocoon is cut open to show the pupa lying within." Source: J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., LL.D. Outlines of Zoology (New York, NY: D. Appleton & Company, 1916).

"Life history of the silk moth (Bombyx mori). A, caterpillar; B, pupa; C, imago; the cocoon is cut open to show the pupa lying within." Source: J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., LL.D. Outlines of Zoology (New York, NY: D. Appleton & Company, 1916).