Deadlift

Crushed my soul today

With three-fifteen times forty.

Useless without love.

Mary, Martha, and the Primacy of Contemplation

As much as I hate to admit it, there is a certain hierarchy in the spiritual life, as in the physical world. It is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable thing about the faith, that some things are true, others are not, and there is no getting around them when they are. The second most uncomfortable thing is the knowledge that I am fallible, and therefore I never truly know when I am right, and when I am wrong. So, in yesterday's discussion of Martha and Mary, I came to the conclusion that the "one thing needful" was love and the trust that must follow it. This takes different shapes, depending on the situation, but love is always the central thing.

However, this does not fully explain the fact that Jesus did say that Mary chose the "better part." In fact, throughout the history of the Church Mary and Martha have been considered archetypes of the two broad vocational categories, if you will, the contemplative and the active lives. Mary, of course, is the proto-contemplative and Martha is the proto-active. A good deal was made out of this distinction by the Church over the ages, in holding up the celibate, contemplative life as the beau-ideal of the Christian life.

Ah, but isn't that rather an old fashioned way of thinking about it? Don't we now know that everyone Apostolic Letter "Novo Millennio Ineunte", the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, by Pope Paul VI, and Chapter V of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.) Wasn't Vatican II all about increasing the role and responsibility of the laity in the Church?

Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa 1979

is called to be a saint, and lay-people are called to the same level (although not "style" for lack of a better word) of holiness as everyone else? (For reference to recent emphasis on the "Universal call to Holiness), see Article 30 of St. John Paul II's

Heck, go back to the beginning and didn't St. Paul say, "For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose" 1 Corinthians 12:14-18.

Yes, but this does not change the fact that St. Paul was also the author of 1 Corinthians 7:32-34. And Jesus definitely did say that Mary chose the better part. Is the active life really second best?

I think the key is to be found in the two great commandments. We all know them: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength and all your soul," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." These are clearly hierarchically arranged. Love of God comes first, love of neighbor comes second. However, they are not arranged according to worth but according to primacy. First things first, if you will. Love of God comes first, love of everyone else comes second. 

For some reason, and I suspect it is diabolical in origin, almost everyone Christian I know will read that and hear, "Love of God is more important, love of neighbor is less important." The implication is that there is a competition for limited resources (love) and God has first claim so when there is not enough love to go around, well, sorry family, but God gets His first. This understanding is widespread, pervasive, but is a straight up lie. Hence my suspicion that it is diabolical in origin.  

In reality, there is not and can never be any sort of competition between creature and Creator, except in the imagination of the creature. "In Him we live, and move, and have our being!" There is no possible way in which we could ever have something that God needs, and there is no possible way God could ever not provide for His creatures what they truly need, and in any event, Love is the one thing that only multiplies the more you give it away.  The Creator vs. creature dynamic is not a valid construct. 

Competition, when it occurs, occurs in the imagination of the creature. The creature imagines that something is good for it, which God has warned is not, in fact, good for it. Promiscuous sexual activity or gossip, to pick two fairly common examples, one respectable, one slightly less so. These give pleasure, they make the creature feel good for the moment, so the creature thinks they are good. God says they are not, the creature does them anyway and reaps the consequences later on down the line. This is what we call "sin" and "punishment."

This brings me to what Fr. Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, calls "The Primacy of Contemplation." This is a concept that reconciles the two halves of the false dichotomy, admittedly by the rather mundane process of non-reinvention of the wheel. Simply put, pray first (commune with God), then go and do what He tells you (love your neighbor.) In the order of the Church as the Body of Christ we have contemplatives who listen to and commune with God, and we have actives who put that relationship into practice. This is an important area of study, but not really my topic at the moment. Right now I am concerned with the contemplative and active element in my own life.  

The Primacy of Contemplation means that my work must flow from my prayer. My relationship with people must flow from my relationship with God. This is not because God is more important than people (He is, but He doesn't insist on His importance) but because people are so important that anything but the best is not good enough for them. Therefore our service must be the highest, noblest and most loving service, which means is must be united with Christ's service (from Bethlehem to the Cross). To do this we must be united with Christ. As Vatican II proclaimed in Perfectae Caritatis, "Apostolic activity must spring from intimate union with Him."

This means that prayer, spiritual reading and the sacraments, while not the focus of our lives (for laity in general) need to be the foundation of our lives. As busy as we may become (and I have become very busy at various times in my life) we must never be too busy for dedicated time for prayer. The world attacks prayer time. It always will by design. When you make the decision to set aside time (five or ten minutes or an hour, it doesn't much matter) every day for prayer, the devil will attack that time. He will make you unusually tired in the morning, try to get you to stay up late so you will say, "Just this once I really need those extra ten minutes of sleep, so I am going to hit the snooze button. I'll make up for it tomorrow." He will wake the kids up early and send them to interrupt. He will offer distractions, diversions and downright despair of ever praying worthily. (I don't know whether all of those interferences are directly as a result of the devil or just coincidence, but I have noticed that they tend to occur with surprising regularity. I know as a matter of history that when my alarm goes off I can count on having at least one good reason not to pray every single morning.) 

The great thing is simply to keep trying, and not to be discouraged by failure. When prayer time is interrupted by tiredness, offer that as a sacrifice. When it is interrupted by other people, offer that to God. When you are secretly very glad that so-and-so came along and interrupted and got you off the prayer hook for today, and ashamed of that feeling, offer the feeling, and the shame and the interruption to God. Try again tomorrow, or later in the afternoon. 

Set an alarm on your phone for 3 PM, and when it goes off simply say the Divine Mercy prayer or a short form of it, such as, "For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us, and on the whole world." Pause, center your awareness on God (who has not ceased to be aware of you for all eternity) and look at Him with love. 

Talk to Him like Tevye. 

Talk to Him, listen to Him, then do what He tells you, and you will become an active contemplative, probably without even knowing it. 

You will also become a saint. Sweet deal!

Martha and Mary: Failure and the Five Love Languages

Jesus entered a village
where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary
who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.
Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
“Lord, do you not care
that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?
Tell her to help me.”
The Lord said to her in reply,
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.
There is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part
and it will not be taken from her.” Luke 10:38-42

The Gospel of the day: As a good friend of mine said in Bible Study last night, "I sometimes feel like this is one of those passages that has been beaten to death!" I also think, for priests and deacons, it may be the passage most likely to offend the middle-aged ladies of the parish who are probably more likely to relate to Martha than to Mary. After all, it's all well and good for Mary to choose the better part. But, as another friend commented, "Oh! That's how it is? My sister chose the better part, eh? Do you want to eat tonight, Jesus? I hear there's a kid down the street with some loaves and fishes..." Can you imagine her face after He said that to her?

(Meaning no disrespect to Martha at all. She reminds me too much of the women of my family whom I love dearly.)

One thing that a priest once pointed out in a homily, and which has stuck with me ever since, is that Jesus never rebuked Martha for serving Him, or for cooking, or for cleaning, or for any of the work she was doing. He rebuked her for being "worried and anxious." That is why I like this picture of the incident so much, because it captures something of the tenderness and playfulness of Jesus' response. He knows that she loves Him, and that she wants everything to be perfect for Him. The question is, does she know Him?

Gary Chapman in his book "The Five Love Languages" posits that human beings express and understand love in five main ways: Physical touch, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service and gift giving. Everyone has one or maybe two main languages that they naturally gravitate towards, with the others being secondary or lesser importance. For instance, when I listed them above, I listed them more-or less in order of importance to me, with physical touch and quality time a tie for most importance, and gift-giving utterly meaningless to me.

Now it is easy to go from there and posit that Jesus (in His humanity, obviously, not His Divinity) acts of service, gifts, words of affirmation, and physical touch. Jesus was a whole and complete human being and He knew how to love as the situation needed.

Jesus knew how to love as the situation required.

was a "quality time" type and Martha was an "acts of service" type. He might have been saying something like, "Martha, a really big meal is all well and good but what I really want is just to spend some time with you." The problem with that is that it sets up a sort of false dichotomy between the two and it also misses the holistic nature of Jesus. The gospel has many examples of Jesus Himself loving with

No, it was the worry that was the problem. He says the same thing to me all the time when I complain about when am I going to have time for prayer, for spiritual reading, etc. I just have so much to do! "Peace!" He says to me. "You are worried about many things. One thing only is needful. Trust me."

Worry comes when we set goals for ourselves and measure our success or failure based on whether we achieve our goals. But, as I said last week, failure is almost the point of trying in the spiritual life. Jesus wants our goal to be loving Him, not achieving anything. Indeed, achievement of any kind, a goal of any kind, material or spiritual, or "for the Kingdom" or what have you, no matter how perfect is absolutely worthless without that one thing needful. As Saint Paul put it:

Earnestly desire the higher gifts.

And I will show you a still more excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 

1 Corinthians 12:31-13:3

Love, then is the one thing needful, and trust as a consequence of that love; implicit trust, which

refuses to become distressed when our prayers are not answered, our evangelization efforts are met with indifference, and our attempts at love go unnoticed. This trust even extends to our efforts at trust, refusing to become distressed at our inability to remain trustful. In other words, even when we fall off the trust bandwagon and start worrying up a storm, we don't get worried about our worrying. We just pick ourselves back up, calm the body, then the mind, then the heart as best we can (it's a useful technique, remind me to tell you about it sometime) and leave the rest in the hands of God. This is the way to true mastery in the spiritual life, through loving, trusting acceptance of failure. Through it all we sit humbly on the ground like a little kid at story time, and look up at Jesus and wait for Him to explain the punchline. That is all that is required of us.

Isn't He great like that? :-D

Perspective

-->

It was a weekday Mass, and we were spread

Pretty thin. You know, one to a pew

Or maybe two.

The Our Father came, time to hold hands

And the elderly Korean lady in front of me reached

Out to her left to her equally ancient friend

And grasped her hand. Then reached back to the right

Towards me, and left her hand outstretched.

I took it.

We never held hands at Our Lady of Good Counsel.

Father was old school and did not approve.

But I could not help but notice that in reaching

And stretching herself for her neighbor, left and right,

She shaped herself into a cross.

Passus Est

I remember when I was a teenager, singing in the choir at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Verona, NY. We were one of the few choirs in the area that sang in Latin, thanks to Fr. Morelle's reverence for the beauty of the Latin liturgy and the old sacred music.

(Incidentally, Fr. Morelle perfectly modeled for me the proper attitude towards the Latin Mass. While he personally loved the extraordinary form, he never entertained any nonsense about the novus ordo being "invalid" or incapable of reverent, beautiful celebration. When asked about it he simply said that he obeyed his bishop, and celebrated as reverently as he could the form he was given. Perhaps this is why I have never understood the tension between the advocates of the two forms in some Catholic circles. But I digress.)

At any rate, I had enough Latin in school to have a solid grasp of the roots of the words, enough, at any rate, to be able to translate the parts of the Mass into English as we sang them. After years of singing them, eventually I no longer needed to translate them. Instead I sang them, thought, heard them, and prayed them in the Church Latin. Perhaps my love affair with words and language of all kind aided in this.

All this by way of trying to explain the impact of the phrase "passus est" from the Credo. The extended phrase was "Crucifixus etiam pro nobis, sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est." This is translated, "Crucified also for us, under Pontius Pilate, (he) suffered and buried was."

To me the impact of the word "passus" was mind blowing. Taken in the same vein as my last post, it is even heart-shattering. Passus!

We translate the word as "to suffer," but the translation loses something. Suffering tends to be an active verb, in English. "I suffer from delusions of erudition." "You suffer from boredom." "He she or it suffers me gladly to be a fool." "Passus" however, has a passive connotation. The word "passive" comes from the same root. When I hear, "passus est" I do not hear something that Christ did, but something that was done to Him.

This is phenomenal! Christ is God! I take it from basic theology 101 that God is the primum mobile, the uncaused cause, the mover of all things. He is all action, actor, doing, being. It is His nature to be. He initiates, we respond. He acts, we are acted upon. He gives, we receive. I have had this truth fixed into my brain from my youth. I almost take it for granted.

And yet, "passus est!" We do not have a direct translation, since I cannot think of an English verb which could be the passive of "to suffer". He was made to suffer. He was wounded. He was beaten. He was despised. He was rejected. All of these happened to Him. He was not acting. He was allowing His creatures to act upon Him. He let us do whatever we wanted to Him. He was passive. He allowed all these things to happen to Him.

The CREATOR BECAME A CREATURE, PEOPLE!!! How is it possible for anything to be the same ever again?

I may be going over old ground here. Very often I come upon (to me) startling new insights only to find that everyone else has been taking them for granted for a very long time. Of course, God came down to earth and suffered. It is just that the concept, the reality, of the incarnation is so truly mindblowing that whenever I am refocused on it it reshapes something in me.

Shusaku Endo got this, I think. His novel "Silence" asks hard questions about the nature of a God who is silence in the face of so much suffering. Only the cross makes sense of it. The power and silence of a God "somewhere out there" is of no help or comfort to the Catholic's being tortured in 16th century Japan. The only possible answer lies in the vulnerability of the God who became a creature, and became helpless.

Jesus on the cross. He appears so vulnerable (even the word "vulnerable" comes from the Latin "vulnerus" meaning to be wounded.) He hangs there passively allowing, suffering, His creatures to do unto Him whatever they want, whether we want to kill Him, or spit on Him, or worship Him, or love Him. Amazing! God be praised. But in the End He not only suffers the death to happen to Him, but actively embraces it and gives up His spirit.

Blessed be He!

Be Not Afraid

Today, while saying midday prayer in the Divine Office, this verse caught my attention:

Jesus was seized with fear and distress (Mark 14:33)

It was not one of the antiphons, it wasn't part of the psalms, or even part of the reading. It was one of the little "aside" verses that they put at the beginning of some of the psalms, as kind of a guide to meditation, or a suggestion. I confess I usually don't pay too much attention to them. This one, however, seemed to smack me upside the head with the image of Jesus being seized with fear and distress. 

I did not look up the context, as I already knew where it came from. This was the garden of Gethsemane. I am used to the translation, "He began to be saddened and exceedingly troubled." The unfamiliar translation is a good thing. It causes words familiar to me from literally hundreds of hearings and readings to reach me in new ways, and to say new things. 

What hit me now was an image. I cannot describe it visually. It was more of a startled realization, "Jesus? Afraid?!" It was a feeling of utter shock and dismay. I know what fear is. I have faced fear in many different shapes and forms, and in some ways I have been afraid all my life. It comes of having an overactive imagination, and a conscience. Fear is inescapable. I have learned that fear is less important than what I do with it, but I assume that I feel fear because I am imperfect. When I am perfect I will no longer feel fear. After all, "Perfect love casts out all fear." 

But here is Jesus, my hero, (I almost said, "my idol" except that that is the one thing He could not be) afraid. HE! The God/Man. The conqueror of death and sin! He cannot be afraid. I have thought of Him being saddened, in pain, in agony, but never afraid. Pain is one thing. Even the most intense pain ever is not half as bad as the fear of that pain. I don't know why I never thought of Jesus being afraid. I guess I assumed that because He knew how it was going to turn out, He already knew what He had to do, and knew that He would endure, knew that He would rise, fear would be out of the question. It is uncertainty, the weakness of the flesh that lacks trust and confidence that shrinks back in fear. That is why fear is so toxic, and so much worse than pain. Any amount of pain can be endured so long as you have hope. Fear, however, crushes the spirit because it attacks hope. I just could not conceive of Jesus being afraid. 

And my first thought was, "What would Socrates say?"

Socrates, like Jesus, was persecuted and ultimately killed for preaching a truth that those in authority did not want to hear. Like Jesus, Socrates could have escaped and chose not to. Unlike Jesus, Socrates showed no fear in the face of death. Of course his death was a lot less painful and horrific. He drank some hemlock and fell asleep, instead of being tortured to death. 

But there was more here than that. Socrates insisted that death could not be an evil to a just man, and died in a manner that proved the conviction of his words. Jesus was a perfect man, and yet He sweat blood in fear and distress, and prayed that the cup be taken away from Him.

This is important to me. Perhaps this is part of why Socrates has only ever been an inspiration to the elite few, the intellectuals with a strong sense of discipline and trust in their own natural righteousness. He appeals to the strong, old pagan sense of courage which insists that, whether or not man can achieve justice by his own efforts, he is honor bound to make the effort. 

Jesus appeals to the weak, the pathetic, the crushed, the downtrodden. He is the friend that I have turned to in all of my fears, uncertainties, and doubts, because I thought that He would be able to help me through them. After all, there is no fear in Him, right?

But if He truly was afraid, as I realize now He must have been, then I was wrong. (I wonder if maybe He truly can be an idol after all? Not Him, but my idea of Him?) It is not His fearlessness that aids me in my moments of fear, but His fearfulness. Which reveals how He chooses to help, not by removing the fear, but by joining me in the fear. He embraces it so intimately that our pain wounds Him more deeply than it wounds ourselves. No matter how deep into hopelessness we go, He has gone deeper, and He is waiting there to embrace us. He brings love into the depths of blackness, loneliness and despair, and as deep as the pit goes, His love will go deeper still.

Perfect love does cast out fear, because only perfect love is strong enough to embrace it and become one with it, and so rob it of its power.

Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me

I saw a quote today from St. John Bosco (allegedly, one can never be 100% certain with these facebook things) that said, “It is not enough to love the children, it is necessary that they are aware that they are loved.”

On the same day I read this quote from Sr. Faustina:

“God's mercy sometimes touches the sinner at the last moment in a wondrous and mysterious way. Outwardly, it seems as if everything were lost, but it is not so. The soul, illumined by a ray of God's powerful, final grace, turns to God in the last moment with such a power of love that, in an instant, it receives from God forgiveness of sins and punishment, while outwardly it shows no signs either of repentance or contrition, because souls [at that stage] no longer react to external things. Oh, how beyond comprehension is God's mercy! (Diary, 1698).”

At the same time I was reading the book, “Not For Sale,” by David Batstone on one of my lifelong obsessions, the protection and care of abused, exploited or neglected children. Many of the activists, or abolitionists as he prefers to call them, emphasized the primary need of these children being the need to be loved.

It is a pattern that I have noticed in my life, that sometimes a number of different sources will all speak to me about the same thing at the same time. I try to pay attention to such things. The skeptic in me assumes that on some subconscious level I am looking for connections, and creating significance from random events. The man of faith in there somewhere likes to think that God is trying to speak to me.

(Oh, and Matthew 18:1-14 was emailed to me by my "Gospels in a year" subscription.)

 

There is a deep connection between the three sources above, which speaks to me very deep within my heart. There is a passage from 1 John 4:20 which I am fond of “misquoting.” The verse reads “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” I often misquote it saying, “How can anyone believe in the love of the God whom they have not seen if they have never known the love of the brother they can see.”

You see, I often think about all the children who will never know love. Most of them will probably end up dead, or as petty criminals, or perhaps not so petty. One has to wonder how much love was known in the Bin Laden or Hussein households, or the Stalin or Hitler households when those infamous men were growing up. I think also of the men who are not criminals, but who nevertheless take part in the subjugation, mutilation or sexual exploitation of women out of sheer ignorance. That is what they saw their fathers doing, that is all they know about manhood.

This is not a statement or even a speculation about their subjective guilt. On this level guilt or innocence is not of very much concern to me. My cousin and I were talking about C. S. Lewis the other day and he mentioned the hope that C. S. Lewis died in perfect intellectual honesty about his faith, given that he chose not to become Catholic. I countered that whether or not his intellectual honesty was perfect he died in need of mercy as we all will. The same is true of rapists, murderers, dictators and abusers. There is no human being who does not need mercy, and there is no person to whom mercy will not be offered at the moment of death. The question is whether or not we will be able to recognize and accept it.

Love can be a frightening thing. Even those who know what love is and have experienced it can very easily come to fear love, to feel unworthy of it, to become so caught up in their unworthiness that they refuse love, run away from it, deny it when it is offered. The technical word for that state of mind is “despair,” and a little imagination reveals it as not too far removed from pride.

Now imagine a terrible sinner, a crack whore who has been selling her body for drugs, who has aborted several of her own children and witnessed others of her children spiral into the same black pit she has lived in, raped and pimped by her boyfriends, starving, addicted, despairing, worse than dead. Lest you think that I am engaging in sensationalism, I am not. I am describing women that I have seen and treated, that my fiancée has seen and treated, and if you live in any major city in America I am describing your neighbor who lives within a few miles of you. I could as easily have described Pol Pot or St. Augustine or myself for all the difference it would have made.

This woman will die someday. In the moment of her death she will see God, and be exposed to pure, unadulterated love. As much as she may have loathed herself before, she will immediately see her sinfulness in all its ugliness, and if I may trust my own inclination, she will likely be overwhelmed with sorrow. The next question will be what she does with that sorrow. Will she recognize unconditional love and accept it, allow it to wash her clean, embrace it, even rejoice in her cleansing?

Will I be able to rejoice in my own shame, simply for the sake of the glory of God, for the opportunity it provides for Him to show His mercy?

I think that transition will be easier for those who have seen love. A few days ago in prayer with my fiancée (via video chat, which is an experience in and of itself) we prayed for those children who have never known love, that they would be shown enough love in their lives so that at the very end when God shows Himself they will recognize love. It will not be a total shock.

I suppose that is the whole purpose of human love.

What I did not realize until writing this last sentence is that in doing so we accomplished on some level what we were praying for. We loved them. I doubt they know that now, or knew it at the moment of our prayer (although you never know) but someday I have faith that they will know that they were loved even when they didn’t know it.

My Sole Defense

In the end I shall be judged on love alone.

Love stands alone, my sole defense; The one

Criterion that matters, the moments in

And yet still out of time. Moments spent

In rapt awareness of the ineffable other,

In the museum, library, movies or a play;

In quiet nights wrapped up in loving arms;

In moments of extreme and total effort;

In the last expenditure of self, no longer

Able to remember that the self exists at all.

The far too rare moment of total gift

Of everything that moment has given me.

The self-forgetful, self-effacing moment,

The end and death of self. The self-intention,

Self-deceit and self-determination,

Self-absorption, attention, awareness… Slain

Swallowed up in a moment of otherly love.

Holy moments, moments scattered far

And wide across the night sky of my soul,

The general nothingness of self, gazing at self

With inward growing eyes, blackening the sky.

(Or perhaps the blackness of eyelids screwed

Tight shut against the bursting light of dawn?)

Regardless, when I stand before the Judge

Naked, with sins piled heavy on my back

In that moment I shall not plead innocence

For, of course, I have none. My sole defense

Will be the few, the few, the far too few moments

Of Love (not mine) that I was empty enough to receive.

I Will Lift Up My Eyes

I sing the God of all things green and good,

Great and grand and gorgeous, things of wood

Of living things grown close in brotherhood

Of strength and beauty, of oil, wine and food.







I sing the God of stern and solid stone
Severe, austere and snow-capped, standing alone

 Amid their lesser fellows. Of beam and bone

Of earth on which green living things have grown.

I sing the God of reading, writing; the reign
Of rhythm, rhyme, and rectitude; the wax and wane
Of times and seasons; of wisdom slowly gained
In solitude, in book, in pipe, in rain.

I sing the God of doe and deer, of dove

Direct, diverse, diffuse, below and above

And in, around and through, like hand in glove,

In sunsets, stars and blazing sun in grove

In city, in time alone, in still and move

And in all things, 

                        I sing

                                 The God of Love!

Thai Hooker

3:00 A.M.

In the lobby of the hotel

In Bangkok,

(Where, they say

What happens there must stay)

Stood a bone skinny woman in an ugly purple dress

With no back and hardly any skirt.

Dressed to flirt

Hair a mess,

Tangled, matted, she talked hurriedly,

Chattered worriedly,

Seeking reassurance from a cell phone,

A cell phone half hidden from view by tangled hair.

Tangled hair that also hid as it tumbled down,

Her skinny, angular cheek bone, no longer brown

But as purple as her dress from its encounter with the fist

Of the man with the upper body

Sculpted like an African god.

The drunk man who looks like a god

The sullen man who wonders why we’re making such a fuss

Too drunk even to see the necessity of paying her off

With 5,000 baht.

Whatever.

She was never

That hot.

A bundle of bones in a purple bag

And an ugly temper.

From a well-used position of vulnerability

Reaching out for the only strength available to her,

The strength of the cell-phone,

The strength of wheels and deals made with cops and pimps

And aggrieved solidarity from other working girls

She limps

Through the dark narrow streets of Bangkok.

Limping from one man to another,

One wallet after the other,

As they fly in and out,

In and out,

On business trips,

And pleasure trips.

Lying, standing, kneeling

No longer feeling

Their gnawing lips,

On her face,

Her neck,

Her bone skinny breasts,

And their hands only when they are fists.

Even the body sculpted like an African god turns her on

No more or less than the dirty old European retirees

With their saggy speedos on the beach.

What difference does that make to the whores?

Their money is as good as yours

And they can’t hit as hard.

And I, looking into her lean, angular face

As cunning and furtive as a fox

As she stands

In the lobby and demands

5,000 Baht,

I realize I have nothing to say.

We just need to get this taken care of and catch our flight.

I am coherent because I slept that night

A couple of hours anyway.

And I am sober. I could go get 5,000 Baht

From an ATM but I will not

Insult her like that by trying to pay

For her flesh, now purple, or covering up

For the man who should have been a god;

Who looks like an archangel and sullenly counts her price in slips of paper.

The injury is not bad

The bruise will fade

And after all she has made

A life (as much of a life as can be had)

From selling her flesh to men with the bodies of gods

And men with the bodies of slugs.

Men kind and men savage,

Drunk and sober,

Long or short

Large or small.

Purple flesh just costs more. That’s all.

She is already pained

There is nothing to be gained

In beating senseless the man sculpted like a god

For that will not

Better her life,

Erase the bruise

Or pay his dues,

Or make amends to his wife

Pregnant with their first child and home alone

Who will never know or understand

What stayed in Thailand

And what perhaps came home.

Far away

In America the next day,

In the heart of a woman who knows what love is

I tell the hooker’s story

And offer up my prayers

And tears

For they are all I have to give

And no one else lives

Who will give

Even that.

The Adventure Worth Having

In my last two posts I talked about home, and what home is to me. Home to me is people, or a Catholic Church (which is really a Person). I do not miss places. I enjoy them when I am there. No matter how long I am there I find them beautiful, and no matter how long I am in different places I don’t miss the old ones. Perhaps because there is so much to discover in any one place, and perhaps because I try to enjoy everything I am presented with, I am always too busy enjoying my current place to miss my old place.

One interesting result of this way of thinking of place is that it radically (in the old sense radix: root; from the roots up) shapes my idea of adventure. To most people going somewhere they have never been before is an adventure, in and of itself. The very idea of seeing something new is exciting to most people, or terrifying, or inconvenient as the case may be, but certainly the novelty of a place they have never seen before is one of the key features of that place. 

For me this is less true. It is true that I enjoy seeing new things, but no more than I enjoy enjoying old things. For this reason I consider it a very good thing that my job has forced me to go to new places and see new things. It has greatly broadened my mind and sharpened my mental and emotional appetite for beauty. It is a good thing, not because I would dislike the idea of traveling if I were not forced to, but because without that impetus I would probably be too busy just being wherever I was or doing whatever I was doing.

Simply going somewhere is not an adventure for me.

Neither is adrenaline. I have experienced my share of adrenaline. I have hunted IED’s with a knife and handheld mine detector. I have witnessed IED’s blowing up a mere vehicle length from me. I have been shot at with rockets. I have jumped out of airplanes. I have practiced martial arts and fought in full contact tournaments. I have blown things up, fired thousands of rounds until simply pulling the trigger was a chore, and broken into rooms with live bullets flying feet from my head. I have cross country skied into back country mountain passes and downhilled across miles of untouched powder (rather clumsily, I might add; my skiing skills are not the best. I have navigated across miles of wilderness alone with a map and compass. some of these things were fun in their own way, or terrifying, or merely a dreadful bother, depending on my mood at the time. All were thrills, at least at first.

None of them have satisfied me. Not one of them provides a strong enough reason to keep doing what I am doing, which is part of why I am getting out of the Army at the end of this enlistment. Thrill is not a reason for existing. An adventure ought to have a purpose, and only one purpose have I found that still seems meaningful to me. It is not “America’s Interests.”

It is not that I consider all of those “adventures” worthless. Each one served its purpose, although it was not necessarily the purpose I or anyone else thought it served at the time. I have grown from each one. I have succeeded where I expected only failure, and excelled when by all rights I should have flunked. I have also failed when I expected only success. I have met my limitations and surpassed them, met them again and been utterly crushed and unable to go one step further. I have cried out for help in desperation and been answered out of marvelous darkness. These are good experiences, I think, for any man to have in his younger days.

If nothing else they have given me this perspective, that I have tried them and found them wanting. At twenty-eight years old I can say confidently that love is the only adventure worthwhile. Love of God, first and foremost, and then love of everyone that He loves. Love is the only purpose that still seems meaningful to me.

But lo and behold! Love is meaningful, and for its sake and by its light every other thing is meaningful. Everything is an adventure. Everything is worthwhile and beautiful when done with that love.

That seems to me to be something worth learning.