Dear old and new friends,

    With only three days left until the end of August many are anxiously recalculating their checkbook balance to see if it can cover the mortgage, credit cards and other bills due at the end of this month. This common situation today is the source of us and our family or friends being anxious about “making ends meet.” No one ever asks what these ends are that we are supposed to meet, for as we know that saying is about having sufficient cash to cover all your debts.  “Making ends meet” is an abbreviation of a quotation from a 1748 novel, “To make both ends of the year meet.” The meaning of the original version was that by the year’s end to have lived within your income and have settled all your financial obligations.

     Making ends meet isn’t a new anxiety—it’s an ancient one. It is implied in that most revered of prayers, the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father (Matthew 6:9), where we petition God to “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The word for debts was translated into English as trespasses or sins. Those who originally heard that expression about debts were Palestinian peasants, all of whom were heavily indebted. To hear that their debts could be forgiven was a priceless gift beyond our comprehension. Those impoverished peasants were encumbered by endless indebtedness from landlords, paying tithes, Roman tribute and taxes along with various tolls. It is estimated that 35-40 percent of their agricultural harvest was extracted just to pay tax debts. Usually farmer peasants unable to repay loans from buying seed frequently became sharecroppers on their own land, and some along with their families were sold off into slavery.

    If today the Lord’s Prayer used the original term “debts” we surely would ponder what our personal Divine indebtedness is. First would come to mind our past sins/mistakes that we’ve swept under the carpet and forgotten. Next would be our immeasurable failures to express gratitude for all our countless gifts from God we’ve taken for granted. In order to make “ends meet” for our incalculable debts, we enter into a contractual agreement with God: According to the amount we pardon of those indebted to us, our debt balance will be removed.

    Pause, and ask who is indebted to you? Take time to travel on the wings of memory back to your school days, and recall if you have pardoned those who were mean, teased or shamed you in front of others? Then move forward into your adult yeas, asking if you have forgiven those who betrayed your love, slandered you, publicly embarrassed you or caused you agonizing pain? Now to the best of your ability strive to forgive all these indebted to you.

    Never forget when “making your ends meet” that the Divine Loan Office has no clocks nor calendars…and is open 24/7.

Dear old and new friends,

    The great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach attended school at Lüneburg. More than once he was known to have walked fifty kilometers (about 31 miles) to Hamburg to listen to the renowned organist J.A. Riencken play at the Katharinen Church there. Returning on his way to Lüneburg penniless and famished he sat down to rest against the back of a roadside inn. Someone inside threw two herring fish heads out on to the rubbish heap next to where he sat. Bach picked up the fish heads to see if he could find any part of them edible, and to his surprise found a coin in each head! With his discovery he had more than enough for a good meal and to make another, more comfortable, pilgrimage to hear again the great master Riencken on the organ.

    This is a true story, although it sounds like a fairy tale, about the power of hunger to find a hidden treasure. More than for food, we have a craving that must be embedded in our DNA to also concretely experience the Divine Mystery of Mysteries. It is this aching, ancient appetite that is the reason we go to church or the synagogue where their sacred environments, the religious music and age old worship services, satisfy our yearning hunger. Upon departing these holy sites, however, that hauntingly holy hunger returns. Since no other establishments in our society claim to feed that unique hunger, many just cease going to them. They then seek to quench that appetite elsewhere amidst the community of cheering crowds in giant sports stadiums, attending the theater or by the arts. While these actually provide sustenance they cannot completely satisfy this deep longing.

    Do not despair! Only open our eyes! That itinerant Galilean Teacher did not initiate the Kingdom of God! He rather proclaimed, “Open your eyes for the Kingdom of God—the enduring Presence of the Divine One—is right here in your midst.” Obviously for him this enduring earthly Godly Presence had been existent since the moment of the Love-saturated Big Bang. He sought by his parables to flip upside down people’s thinking and perception of reality so they could see that the invisible God in their lives and the Divine’s Dwelling wasn’t restricted to Jerusalem’s Temple, but was vividly alive in their daily lives.

    Our eyes are no longer opened by Jesus’ parables. We are now required to perform that task ourselves by prayerfully prying wide our eyes to see with faith our Divine Beloved within everything we encounter. Then like Johann Sebastian Bach we can find surprise divine gifts even in the garbage. Since the Kingdom—God’s Abiding Presence—is here wherever we are, whatever we judge as secular is actually only the unseen sacred. So to all that seems contrary to what is sacred, open your eyes to find the All Hidden Divine One…and then feast upon it to your heart-soul’s content. 

    Perpetually pray, “Open my eyes, Lord!” Then seek to satisfy your holy hungry in the good, the unpleasant, the beautiful, and the ugly…even in the garbage.

Dear old and new friends,

    Native American Indians typically are a people of few words and simply nod or shake their heads to express what the rest of us try to put into words. This respect for words by American Indians is also very Jewish since their spirituality treated words as the spoken breath of God! Their respect of the spoken word is shown when the Torah was translated from Hebrew into Aramaic. In the Genesis story, after God breathed into the first man’s nostrils, “Adam became a living soul,” was translated as, “Adam became a speaking spirit.”

    I recall being told the Cheyenne Indians believed that at birth the Great Spirit (God) gave each infant a certain number of words, and later as an adult when the allotted number of words was used up they died! This seed of wisdom could wisely be planted by each of us who tend to talk too much and listen too little, lest while still breathing we talk ourselves to death. Spoken words are more powerful entities than we think, and when thoughtlessly used they easily become dead words. Zombie speech is the dialect used by advertisers, politicians and those neighbors who rattle off endless strings of unconscious words. Wrongly we judge the degree of intelligence of others by how quickly they answer questions. This may be a kickback to our grade school days where the “smart” kids always instantaneously gave the correct answer to teacher’s question.

    President Calvin Coolidge, while no Native American Indian, was famous for his use of only a few words. At dinner once a lady sitting next to the President tried to coax him into talking with her. She said, “Mr. President, I have made a bet that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge replied, “You lose!”

    Let Calvin Coolidge, our patron un-saint of speaking, inspire us to speak less and listen more…to not let our speech be like long freight trains of half-empty boxcar words. Instead of words, let our eyes, face and hands speak for us. May old tight-lipped Coolidge assist us when relating a personal exciting or sad event to use a poverty of details, for an excess of them can be boring. Use silence instead of words to fill awkward empty moments in conversations or embarrassing situations. Finally, do not be so foolish as to attempt to express in words your profound love for another, since love and sorrow have deficient vocabularies.

    I end with another story about Calvin Coolidge to inspire us to use brevity of speech: Upon returning from church a white house aide asked him about the topic on which the minister had preached. Coolidge paused and then replied, “Sin!” “Well, Mr. President,” inquired the aide, “what did the preacher have to say of sin?” Coolidge replied, “He was against it.”

Dear old and new friends,

    As you read this reflection our world suffers from raging bloody conflicts in the Middle East, Israel, Ukraine, Russia and Africa that cry out for peace on earth. We pray for peace, yet our prayers seem impotent since perhaps God wants more from us than lip prayer. What can we who are helpless spectators watching the killing and bloodshed on television do while globe traveling diplomats and the United Nations work to resolve these bloody local wars. We are spectators because we feel impotent to change these global realities or the horrible gun violence in our own cities and country. But we are not powerless—only dreamless! So let us dream of being ‘empowered’ peacemakers inspired by the verse from the popular song of the 1960’s, Let there be Peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

    Mahatma Gandhi reiterated the challenging lyrics of that song saying, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Whatever changes you want to see in the world you must first make them within yourself. Those who desire to be peacemakers should develop the forgotten virtue of equanimity, the ability to be even-tempered and at peace in the midst of life’s turbulent chaos. Being so composed is the living prayer of being acrobatically balanced while being buffeted by the strong winds of change, failures, mistakes, injustices and disappointments.

    If you desire that peace flows out of you into the earth, how does one do that? Begin with the greatest intensity of heart to be at peace with yourself, with all of you, including your mistakes, faults, virtues and often turbulent emotions. Secondly pledge to strive to live as a poised person who is unaffected by outside influences. The poised or balanced person is able to remain calm when their plans blow up or things go haywire. This state of equilibrium is only acquired by failures followed by the discipline of returning to the practice of living in peace.

    Contrary to common thought, such people are not indifferent to what is happening to them; they are not “sang-froid” (unperturbed) since literately in French that means, “Cold blooded!” They are the opposite…hot blooded, passionately dedicated to peacefulness and can feel intensely their pains or disappointments. Still anchored by their inner-peace they remain calm amidst the raging storms swirling around them. Their calmness isn’t being level-headed; it’s being level-hearted as the nucleus core of their heart-soul is peace.

    To be inspired to be a peacemaker, reflect that this August 6th is haunted with the memories of the first atomic bomb dropped in 1945 by America on Hiroshima, Japan, leveling 90% of that city and killing 130,000 Japanese! While atomic and nuclear weapons were thought to bring to an end all war, they have not, nor have they produced world peace. And on this August 6th Harold Brown’s invention of the electric-chair in 1890 was welcomed as the greatest deterrent to murder and capital crimes. Over a hundred years later our cities aren’t any safer or more peaceful as we continue to violently take the lives of those guilty of capital crimes.