THINKING ALLOWED: God as Mother

A child wakes in pitch dark, terrified over a dream. If involves a monster hiding in her bedroom closet. She screams!

The child ’s mother rushes into the bedroom, turns on the light, scoops her child up into her arms and they rock together. She wipes her forehead, wet from fear, and holds her like they're laminated. Then, she whispers the words that a billion mothers have whispered to their children since the beginning of time:

‘'Shhh, it's okay. I'm here.There's nothing to be afraid of. I'll get up in a minute and look in the closet.”

+ + + + + + + + + +

Now imagine yourself as a child startled in the dark, terrified at some dream, scared to death. Same closet, same closet.

Suddenly your Mother rushes into the room. She is the Holy Spirit of God. (All the words in Greek and Hebrew about ''the Holy Spirit of God" are feminine ['pneuma' and 'ruach']. She scoops you up into Her arms and sways back and forth. She wipes away your tears, holds you like the two of you are laminated. She rocks you gently Home. Then, she whispers:

“Shhh, there's nothing to be afraid of. ''I Am'' (here). Everything is going to be alright. Every big and little thing will be well.”

Have you felt God, your Mother, come to you in your fear, and tell you, “Do not be afraid—I will save you. I have called you by name—you are mine.''

I love you tonight, and every night.

kenny

THINKING ALLOWED: God as Mother

A child wakes in pitch dark, terrified over a dream. If involves a monster hiding in her bedroom closet. She screams!

The child ’s mother rushes into the bedroom, turns on the light, scoops her child up into her arms and they rock together. She wipes her forehead, wet from fear, and holds her like they're laminated. Then, she whispers the words that a billion mothers have whispered to their children since the beginning of time:

‘'Shhh, it's okay. I'm here.There's nothing to be afraid of. I'll get up in a minute and look in the closet.”

+ + + + + + + + + +

Now imagine yourself as a child startled in the dark, terrified at some dream, scared to death. Same closet, same monster.

Suddenly your Mother rushes into the room. She is the Holy Spirit of God. (All the words in Greek and Hebrew about ''the Holy Spirit of God" are feminine ['pneuma' and 'ruach']. She scoops you up into Her arms and sways back and forth. She wipes away your tears, holds you like the two of you are laminated. She rocks you gently Home. Then, she whispers:

“Shhh, there's nothing to be afraid of. ''I Am'' (here). Everything is going to be alright. Every big and little thing will be well.”

Have you felt God, your Mother, come to you in your fear, and tell you, “Do not be afraid—I will save you. I have called you by name—you are mine" (Isaiah43.1).

I love you tonight, and every night.

kenny

THINKING ALLOWED: a pure, unscientific miracle over dinner in the desert

Remember the two dinner parties reviewed in the Society section  ''Matthew’s Story of Jesus'' (chapter 14)?

Forget the first one. The one where Herod's hairy-knuckl'd wait staff brought in the final course on a gold platter: John the Baptist's head.

It's the second dinner Party I'm interested in. The one where Jesus served 5,000 men, not counting women and children. The menu was bread and fish. They counted five loaves of bread and two fish.

But somehow it was enough, more than enough. It was a dinner party of joy, welcome, and WHOA! plenty. The whole evening was pure miracle. The underachieving, overwhelmed Twelve couldn't believe their eyes! Because when they counted up what they had on-hand that day 2,000 years ago, they counted:

one,
two,
three,
four,
five loaves of bread, and
one,
two little fish.

But they should've kept counting.

They forgot to count Jesus.

And Jesus means anything is possible.

All that is left is Adoration!

I love you.

kenny

THINKING ALLOWED

The Wreck

I had a wreck a few days ago. A bad one. I am lucky to be alive, since my car isn’t. It was a big, blue, gas-guzzling, steel reinforced “clunker.” But it was my clunker.

My arm, my good arm, was sliced and diced. My head and jaw hurt like I’d been through another series of electro-shock treatments. (Different story for a different day). I shake. My concentration is shot. I am more paranoid than usual. I ache all over. And if that’s not enough, for the next few weeks I am driving a Kia.

I’ll give you the bare facts, then I’m going to bed. I don’t know if I will write tomorrow.

I was on my way to the Mental Health/Mental Retardation (MH/MR) clinic for my monthly “visit” with my psychiatrist and to pick up ‘scripts (7) for another month of meds.

I was driving 30 through a residential area when out of nowhere a white blur going 35 slammed into my driver’s door. I was thrown over the curb, across the lawn and up against the house on the corner. Since I was conscious through it all I assumed I wasn’t hurt. Then, I saw blood running down my arm, onto my shirt, my pants and the passenger seat. Glass, I guess.

The front of her ’98 Lexus folded up like an aluminum can.

The neighbors came running and wouldn’t let me out of my car until the ambulance arrived. They brought me glasses of water and told me hair-raising stories of neck and back injuries, most of which resulted in some form of paralysis.

The police came first. Two cars, three officers. One talked with the woman in the Lexus, one gathered witnesses and the other talked with me.

I thought I was making sense until he told me I wasn’t.

“You’re in shock,” he said. “Don’t worry about anything. We’ll get your statement in the ambulance when you pull yourself together.”

Two ambulances arrived. His and hers. When they removed her from the Lexus they slapped a neck brace and a back brace on her and laid her out on one of those hard, plastic stretchers.

They pulled me out and helped me lie back on a stretcher with wheels. Mine had padding.

The woman asked them to bring her over to me. Regret came pouring out.

“I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t see the stop sign. Forgive me.” She was sobbing. She repeated it three times.

I don’t know her name. All they told me was that she is insured by Allstate.

I’m not, but there is no doubt I was in good hands.

My Mother's Secret

I missed one day of school in junior high and it turned out to be the day I discovered my mother’s secret.

I spent the morning reading the comic books I had borrowed from Benji when I knew I was getting a fever.

I heard the front door open and close around noon. I got up and looked out the kitchen window. My mother was standing on the curb next to the mailbox. The mailman was next door. He had no white truck. The only thing he was driving was his hush puppies.

He reached into his worn-out, over the shoulder leather letter holder and handed her the mail. With her back to the house, she sorted through the letters one-by-one. She looked both ways, tucked a letter in her apron pocket, turned, smiling like the cat that ate the canary, and started up the sidewalk. I beat it for the bedroom.

Three hours later she went to pick up my sister and brother. I went straight for the kitchen. The letter was still there. It was a bill from a fancy department store. The bill was in her name and it wasn’t small. The thing about my dad was that he never allowed charge accounts. He was real strict on that. Everything was cash except for the house and the bills that went with it. Money was tight. I wondered how she would pay it.

I went through the bill. It was clothes for us kids. She knew everyone was wearing corduroy jeans, button-down, half-sleeve shirts and weejuns. They were on the bill; along with two blouses for my sister, and a shirt and jeans for my brother. Nothing for herself.

We would just find the clothes hanging in our closet, or folded in the dresser like they belonged there. Like the Clothes Fairy delivered them.

Maybe she went shopping for herself sometimes, but my guess is she never made it out of the children’s department.

Here's to the moms who went without so we could go in style.

The God Box

A small man with big hair blew through Hazelden Alcoholic Treatment Center to speak to us. He was an addict-turned-preacher-turned-addict (x 3). He was 68 by the time he got to us. Sober for 15 years.

He brought a psychedelic box with him. He held it under his arm, like a teddy bear, when he spoke. He’d decorated it with paisley wallpaper, red hearts, crosses and comic strips.

He told us his “God Box” kept him sober.

We were skeptical, of course.

He told us that whenever he is tempted to get into trouble (alcohol, money, pills, sex, pride, manipulation, worry) he writes the problem on a small piece of paper and drops it into the Box.

“I give it to God ASAP,” he told us. “I let it go. I give it up. And whenever I find myself taking the problem back and handling it myself, I open the God Box, pull out that piece of paper and tell God, ‘I think I can handle this better than you can’.”

Some of us tried it. We’d find a Kleenex box, or a box from the kitchen. We’d decorate it a little, put our name on it and carry it to meals, to group meetings and to bed. You’d see guys writing, stuffing and unstuffing the Box. I did it for ten days, and I ran pretty clean those days.

One downside to being an alcoholic/addict is believing you can handle everything yourself. But who doesn’t like being in control? The Lone Ranger rides again (and again).

I’m back at it. The God Box. I don’t carry it into restaurants, or everywhere I go. I leave it in the car, or at home. Fifty times a day I’ll let a problem go to God, then take it back. And somewhere in the middle of this endless cycle I pray, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I have a long way to go, but as my brothers and sisters in Alcoholics Anonymous keep reminding me, “It’s progress, not perfection.”

A Hard Lesson

"Never play cards with a man named Doc.
Never eat at a place called Mom’s.
Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are greater than yours. "

Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side, part 3 (1956)

A Father's Love

I have this recurring dream. I am in the park at Barton Springs in Austin. The place is dead except for one man sitting on a bench about 100 trees away. I don’t think he sees me so I serpentine to within three trees.

He is a man in a dark suit, white shirt, black thin tie and sunglasses. He looks like Ackroyd of the Blues Brothers.

Without looking up, he motions me over. He pats the bench twice with his ring hand.

It is my Uncle David. My dad’s younger brother. The so-called black sheep of the family. The alcoholic. I move toward him cautiously. He has been dead for many years, but I don’t know it in the dream.

I could let you in on the whole conversation---how long he’s been on the bench waiting, why he chose Austin instead of San Antonio where I lived, and a bunch of other stuff, but that gets us nowhere.

So I’ll start where he asks, “How are you doing these days, KP? You look a little sad to me.”

I tell him I’m not sad.

“You’re thinking about your dad, aren’t you?”

I say yes, because I have been thinking about him and whenever I think of him I am either sad, or mad.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “Who taught you to tie your shoes?”

“You.”

He sits there waiting for it to sink in. It doesn’t.

“Look,” he says. “I was your father. Look at me. I am your father. No kid has just one father. One man can’t do it all. You think it was luck that I was always around? I was there for you then, and I am here for you now. I am your father, too. Ask your mother.”

Like I say, I have dreamed this dream many times, and always when I needed a father’s love.

Her Fever has Broken!

Woody Allen said that the most beautiful words in the English language are not, “I love you,” but “It’s benign.”

I was at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas visiting a friend. We talked for 10 minutes, prayed together and I left. I passed the nurse’s station on my way to the elevator, pressed the button and waited.

Suddenly, a door down the hall opened and a man came bursting out. He looked both ways, saw me and started running toward me waving a piece of paper.

“Her fever has broken! Her fever has broken!”

He grabbed me around the chest, whirled me around and said breathlessly in my ear, “Her fever has broken!”

The elevator opened, he let me go, and I went down to the lobby.

I am thinking about that man again tonight who had such good news that he had to stop the first stranger he saw to tell him.

God's Native Language

My neighbor lost his dog. Peaches ran away. He looked everywhere from his house to the highway. He finally went home. He was sick.

He found his wife putting on lipstick. How could he tell her? Peaches was his wedding gift to her a year earlier. She was the child of a couple who would be childless.

He stood behind her in the bathroom frozen in grief. He saw himself in the mirror with his mouth open trying to speak, but only a sound came out---a tiny cry of a sound. A sound anyone would miss. A sound only a dog might hear.

When she heard it she turned and said, “What?”

She put her hand to the side of his face, and said, “What is it, baby?”

Things happen that push us back to a place before vowels and consonants. Back behind where words come from. We are speechless. Literally.

In 1982, I stumbled onto something by accident that shattered everything. The noise that came out of me was prehistoric. The next day, and for several weeks, there were no words. The men in white coats came and took me where I did not want to go.

St. Paul writes that there is a language understood only to God---groanings too deep for words.

It is God’s native language.

Life in Three Acts

I. Move into a new neighborhood. Walk down Main Street. Fall into a deep hole. File suit?

II. Walk down Main Street. Fall into a deep hole. I deserve to be here. I must adjust my life to failure. Pour me a drink. Find me a woman. Leave me alone.

III. Walk down a different street.

(Repeat)

Margaritaville

(A Weekend in Three Acts)

I. It’s Nobody’s Fault.
II. Hell, It Could Be My Fault.
III. It’s My Own Damn Fault.


“Margaritaville”
Jimmy Buffet (1977)

Livin’ on sponge cake
Watchin’ the sun bake
All of those tourists covered with oil
Strummin’ my six-string
On my front porch swing
Smell those shrimp they're beginnin’ to boil.

Chorus:
Wastin’ away in Margaritaville
Searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know it’s nobody’s fault.

I don’t know the reason
I stayed here all season
Nothin’ to show but this brand new tattoo
But it’s a real beauty
A Mexican cutie
How it got here I haven’t a clue.

Chorus:
Wastin’ away in Margaritaville
Searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
Now I think
Hell, it could be my fault.

I blew out my flip-flop
Stepped on a pop-top
Cut my heel had to cruise on back home
But there’s booze in the blender
And soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.

Chorus:
Wastin’ away in Margaritaville
Searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt
Some people claim there’s a woman to blame
But I know it’s my own damn fault.
Yes and some people claim there’s a woman to blame
And I know it’s my own damn fault.

Layers of Grace

A pearl doesn’t start out as a pearl. It starts out as a mistake inside an oyster. Something that doesn’t belong. An irritation the size of a grain of sand. Who would think something that small could make any difference?

Oysters deal with an invasion of a foreign object by covering it with the same stuff that coats the inside of the shell. You’d think that a couple of layers around a grain of sand would be enough to take the edge off (like a couple of drinks at the end of the day) but the oyster is still irritated and the object is still foreign. A million layers later there’s a smooth shell around the intruder.

Pearls become pearls one layer at a time, and each is different in size, shape, surface and color.

Salvation happens gradually like the formation of a pearl. It starts with something wrong. Something that doesn’t belong, like a thorn. We would pick it out ourselves, but it’s impossible. Perhaps we pray, but God doesn’t touch it with a ten-foot pair of tweezers. It is not removed. We live with it.

So much for instant salvation.

It’s more like frustration (“coming up empty”).

I don’t offer a solution, but I have had decades of experience with foreign invasion.

I’ve found that with the right amount of Steadfast Love and Compassion---one layer at a time---the wrong is covered by grace. What is unacceptable is accepted. What is unlovable is embraced; even transformed into something priceless.

The Art and the Craft

The light seldom comes on all at once. We usually “get it” gradually. We expect to go from dark to light immediately, but it’s more like sunrise.

Healing is gradual. We don’t get well overnight. Change is gradual. We don’t break self-destructive habits overnight. As Chicago sang: “Good things in life take a long time.”

There are seasons in our life however hard we fight against them. Seasons of joy and sadness. Seasons of realism and denial. Seasons of intimacy and loneliness. Seasons of hope and despair.

Winter finally gives way to spring; and spring surrenders to summer. It can’t be rushed no matter what or who you know.

In Jerzy Kosinski’s book Being There, Chance the Gardener is on a talk show and says to the host: “In a garden things grow…but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don’t mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish” (page 67).

This is the art of letting things happen. This is the craft of making things work.

Static

I bought my first CD player in 1983. I was in California. I had enough cash left over to buy “Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits”. I loaded the disc, pushed “play” and ran to the couch (no remote). “Love is a Rose” began to play. I listened to the first half-minute and thought: “Hey, wait a second! The first part of the song is missing.”

I got up and started it over. I was right. They cut part of the intro. I called my neighbor David Wettstein to come over.

“Listen to this, Dave, and tell me if something is missing.”

Dave listened to it twice, and smiled. “Something’s missing all right, but it’s not part of the song. The song’s all there. You’re missing the surface noise---the pops and crackles the needle makes during the first two revolutions of the record before the music starts. What you’re missing is the static.”

Static. One of my dad’s favorite words. As in, “Don’t give me any…”

When I went into alcohol rehab they asked us to identify the static in our lives; the unnecessary noise.

For me it was anger. It didn’t take long to identify it. Most of the time, I could feel it brewing like the strange silence before a storm. Still can.

I never figured out where it came from, even though I underwrote several lengthy archaeological digs.

Every counselor tried to get me down to the root of it. Not possible. For one thing, I was holding onto it so tight for fear of what else I would lose if I let the anger go. Would I lose my link with my dad? Would I lose the raw fuel to my creativity?

So what am I doing these days? Still trying, one day at a time, to separate (not eliminate) the static from the music of my life.

Priorities

Every time we meet for lunch he sits with his back against the wall facing the crowd. He must’ve been ambushed when he was a younger man. I’m late and he’s early. He carries an internal clock like the crock from Peter Pan.

It’s Monday and I’m breaking bread with the blue-eyed Cherokee.

There’s no telling where the conversation will wander off to. One week we’re Don Quixote and Sancho Panza slaying windmills and dreaming impossible dreams. The next, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The next, two old cats stuck in the 60’s. He’s already ordered my diet Coke and I sit down where it’s sweating. He asks how I’m doing and I tell him things are going pretty well, but that I’m having some trouble juggling things. Keeping them in the right order.

Ever read your own writings, Doc?” he asks me. “You wrote something about priorities a while back.”

“What did I say?”

“Not enough,” he says. “You didn’t go far enough.”

“Life is a box,” he says, “with all different size holes in the top and a peg that fits every hole. The trick is getting the right peg in the right hole. The trouble starts when you try to put small pegs in the big holes.” (I’m trying to listen but one thought keeps going through my mind: “I didn’t go far enough?!”)

“So what do you do,” he asks, “when your little box gets a hard shaking and all the pegs fall out?”

“I put them all back in.”

“No,” he says. “You find the biggest peg and put it in the biggest hole. That’s the first thing you do. Then, find the next biggest peg and put it in the next biggest hole.”

“That’s it?” I ask

“That’s it,” he says.

“What’s the biggest peg,” I ask.

“That’s what you left out,” he tells me.

“God?”

“The biggest peg in the biggest hole,” he says. “Whatever that is for you. That’s where you start.”

Light in the Darkness

There is a story about a buck who loved his horns and hated his feet. But when the hunter came his feet saved him until his horns, caught in a thicket, destroyed him. The story is from Emerson who said, “We’ve all been hurt by a point of pride in our life, while at the same time, we’ve been helped by our weakness, even our character defects.”

I saw Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, ten years ago at Cambridge University in England. He was in the teacher’s lounge between classes. Lou Gehrig’s disease had incapacitated him, but his mind and his wheelchair were state of the art. His assistant tied a bib around his neck for afternoon tea and poured nine cups down him, one after the other. The bib was wide with a deep pocket that caught the tea as in ran down his chin.

He was being interviewed by a reporter from the Manchester Guardian newspaper. He communicated with the help of a machine attached to his keyboard. He didn’t speak in sentences, or even in words. He built the conversation letter-by-letter, like he was laying brick.

I could hear pieces of the interview from where I was sitting. I heard him tell the reporter that he was scatter-brained, undisciplined and at loose-ends before his disease, but as his body grew weaker his focus grew stronger. Once he faced his powerlessness over his disease his hidden resources grew. As if the disease opened a door for him.

This is how it is with my periodic battles with depression. If I don’t fight against it, but, instead, listen to it---even befriend it---I am surprised to find a light in the darkness. It’s not like the searchlights car lots use to lead you into the parking lot. It is more like a candle, or a porch light.

The light is always on, but when we are unraveling we tend to see only darkness. But the light is there. In the darkness.

And sometimes, like with Dr. Hawking, the thing we thought would ruin us turns out to be the very thing that opens the door to a new life.

Secrets

There is always one guy in the neighborhood that is so good at hide-and-seek that you’d swear the guy can disappear. The crazy thing is that he was always hiding close enough to home base that he could see who had been found and who hadn’t.

I learned to hide in the third grade after I got into big trouble with my dad and I promised myself I would never be found again. By anybody.

Hiding takes a lot out of you. It is hard on you to swallow a big secret and keep it down. Some of us have been hiding so long we can’t remember the reason we’re hiding. Whatever the reason, it usually goes back to something that hurt and we want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So we become a turtle with head, legs and tail pulled in under the shell.

Some of us are not much more than a shell.

There is a scene in the movie Absence of Malice where a young woman’s uncle (Paul Newman) is accused of racketeering. She knows he is innocent because they were together at the time of the crime (out of town for her abortion). She doesn’t dare confess it to the newspaper reporter who is covering the story (Sally Field) because she was in Catholic school at the time and it would hurt her family and the sisters.

She ends up telling her story to help her uncle. The next day it was on the front page.

Before sunrise she is sitting on the front porch waiting for the paper. She hasn’t slept. She is in her robe.

When the paper is thrown in the yard you can feel her fear. She scans the story. Then, she goes from house to house in the neighborhood picking up every newspaper. Later that day she commits suicide.

Everyone is carrying something that is heavy and difficult to bear. Some secret. A reason for hiding.

There must be a way we can help each other hear some of the best words any child of any age can hear: “Come out, come out wherever you are;” and then, “All-ee, All-ee in free!”

Wherever you are, whatever your secret fears, you are closer to home than you know.