The First Cup of Coffee

Ever read anything by Amor Towles?  If you haven’t, and do, expect a treat.  (A Gentleman in Moscow is a brilliant place to start.)

For me, it is like being in the presence of someone who is marvelously attentive, refreshingly insightful, and appreciative of great books.

I read his Rules of Civility about a year ago (so, the beginning of the COVID-times).  I have considered the following bit, from the mouth of the book’s narrator, since.

My father was never much for whining… He certainly didn’t complain about his health as it failed.

But one night near the end, as I was sitting by his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium.  Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.  Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane – the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath – she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.  What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the end of his own course, was that this risk should not be taken lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

Order or Control

As much as I think I would like to, I am unable to control all the circumstances of my life.  It is simply not possible.    

Same thing with the mystery of God.  Trying to control the Trinity?  That is a tough road.

But what is possible is order: to orient myself toward the stuff of my life such that I am able to react masterfully, faithfully, with love.  This may likely mean doing less things and/or, on a given day, doing the important things first. 

Close Enough to Love

The first line of Psalm 64 leads a crucial prayer:  Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.  In some translations, fear is rendered as dread.

Is this not fascinating?  In life, there is plenty of wanting to escape conflict with one’s enemies (real or imaginary) but here, we pray to deliver our lives from dread of these people and conflicts.  

Dorothy Day wrote that only when we are delivered from this fear can we get close enough to love.  Put another way, in order to love our “enemies,” we have to first pray for the grace to see our dread and to overcome it.

I don’t think that this is something we can do of our own power.  

Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.

We Only Get a Vote When We Show Up

Last year, a friend witnessed the following interaction in a Zoom meeting about how to handle her child’s school year given the reality of COVID-19.

The conversation was heated, quite divided between those who wanted in-person school and those who wanted remote learning.  A decisive policy would come down to a vote.

One parent was so furious that she said destructive things to the group and then signed off abruptly, minutes before the vote.  

The vote was taken and tallied, not in her favor.

She signed in a few minutes after the vote, and asked to be counted.  That was not what the process that group decided on, and so her vote was not registered.  

The world tends toward disorder, so there are everywhere chances to make things better.  We only get a vote about how our shared future unfolds when we show up. And our vote counts exponentially when we show up generously and with grand imagination.

Furious or Curious

The experience of anger can be quite involuntary.  Something happens, trespassing against our expectations of how things should be, leaving us furious.

Okay.  But then what happens.

Anger can quickly turn into self-righteousness, to barricading oneself on the moral high ground.  And anger can take the legs out from under our ability to listen perceptively and to relate imaginatively to people who think differently from us.  And because of this, anger can handicap any attempt to accurately perceive and productively improve the situation that made us angry in the first place.

We do not always have the choice to be furious.  But we can, afterwards and always, choose to be curious.

(Hey!  The above reminds me of the dear Fr. Michael Rossmann, SJ’s recent post on his new Substack blog.  Check it out!)

Pebble Crayons

When our first son was two, I would take him to a toddler Montessori classroom. At the art station, there were a few crayons each shaped like a large pebble.

Our son did not yet know how to hold a regular crayon, but the form of these crayons taught him to. There is just no other way to hold a pebble if you want to write with it. He had to grip it correctly, at the tips of his fingers.

Our interior lives, too, benefit from us finding and using similar tools. Take prayers of thanksgiving, for instance. In this mode of prayer, we tune to the gifts of our lives and orient toward the God who is their origin. Simply by engaging the tool, I am productively oriented toward the stuff of my life.  

This was also our hope, also, with the structure of Audacious Ignatius. We aimed to create stanzas and art that stick in the memory and then, when recalled, gracefully and productively orient the reader toward a gem of our tradition.  Take for example:

“First, know well that I’m loved even though oh so flawed.
Next, spend time with the Lord and to walk where he trod.
Offer all I possess, beg for my stony-heart thawed,
And act from a deep love, the love that is God.”

These are only three (pithy?) sentences.  But when held, they may remind the reader of the depth of their experience with the Spiritual Exercises or uncover a desire to engage with them.

Whatever the topography of our interior lives, let’s find and use the pebble crayons that orient us gracefully and productively.

Deferred Maintenance

Last summer, we bought a 2003 Honda Odyssey from another Foreign Service family who was about to move. I think that they thought they were not going to be able to sell it. They had deferred a great deal of maintenance.

We cleaned the car inside and out.  Twice.  We replaced the tires, oil, filters, windshield wipers, antifreeze, antifreeze cap, shocks, struts, brake fluid, and brake pads.  We greased one of the sliding doors and peeled all the old stickers off of the dash.

The van now runs great and facilitates our on-going family adventure.  If we had deferred its maintenance for much longer, it would not have been able to do so.

We can defer maintenance on things that are much more fundamental to our life’s adventure than a vehicle.  Our interior lives.  Our closest relationships.  Connections to the communities that formed us.  

Let’s not defer maintenance on these most important things.

Waiting for the Light to Come

For most of her early writing career, Toni Morrison had a nine-to-five job, taught university classes, and raised her two sons as a single parent.  She wrote books during this time that won her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Morrison reported that she would write in the evenings, but especially in the mornings.  She would rise as early as 4am, and “wait for the light to come.”

When we tell ourselves that we don’t have the time to do that generous thing we think about, we may, in fact, be correct, based on how we are currently choosing to spend our time.  But if we, like Morrison, make the time for the light to come, we will not be disappointed.  The world will be better for our having protected and offered that time.

The Roots of Our Stories

That story that helps you begin the day with energy, to engage the world with insight and empathy…  Where did that story come from?  Can attending to the roots of that story amplify it, or help you to grow similar stories?

And that story that closes you off, makes your thoughts spin without effect or love… Where did that story come from?  Can naming and letting these stories go then release you from their negative effects?

The stories we rehearse form us profoundly.  It is right to inspect their roots.

More Than God Requires

I once had a spiritual director tell me the following. 

“You know… It is possible to do more than God requires, and less than God desires.”

While infuriatingly vague, the maxim has stuck with me and functions to pose the following productive question.

What, in fact, does God desire?  

More than we can comprehend, surely, but perhaps essentially this: that we know how profoundly we are loved.

Truly knowing oneself as loved by God changes everything, and enables clearer vision of what, then, God requires.