Dear old and new friends,

     Jesus never said, “When in need—beg!” He sent his disciples off to preach the Good News without a staff, second cloak or money to live in the unshakable trust of God’s loving care. As for our daily needs, he said to pray, “Give us this day’s bread”; and the apostle Paul said, “Pray always.” Now since pray sounds very much like the English word “prey,” his disciples today whose ministries are in need often “prey” upon us as if we were wild game. As Sherlock Holmes said, “Hurry, Watson the game is afoot,” you and I are the targets in this holiday season for pious beggars from a rainbow of religious affiliations, some of whom actually come to your door begging. But I know of no single scriptural justification for Christians to become beggars, regardless how worthy their cause.

     Personally, I was unaware Christmas was so near until two weeks before Thanksgiving in the front of local stores I found the holiday Salvation Army bell ringers. This is important: The Salvation Army is my favorite organization that cares for the poor; even if I detest their guilt-instilling bell ringers. God gave us eyes to see those in need and wants us to spontaneously and lovingly respond to their needs. Our generosity to them must always be a “gifting” of our love with zero guilt! Feeling guilty, that soul-needling sense that somehow we are at fault is contradictory to loving, yet guilt is often the hidden weapon of pious beggars. They prey upon us by mail, magazine ads and from the pulpit, along with encouragements to enter all kinds of marathons for various causes.

     The Salvation Army Christmas fund-raising campaign was chosen by a group of university researchers to test people’s attitudes towards charitable giving. They chose a large store with two main entrances. Salvation Army bell ringers were placed at one entrance, and they alternated simply ringing their small bell with at other times also looking directly into the eyes of the customers, saying, “Please, give today!” Soon the store’s customers began entering by the second door; then when bell ringers appeared at that entrance as well asking for money some people actually began entering by the store’s third door marked for deliveries.

     Together with this traffic flow evidence, researchers inside the store surveyed customer’s feelings about the bell ringers. Their combined research showed clearly we hate to be asked for money, though we are usually generous. People also hated feeling that their empathy was being exploited by being coerced by direct encounters to be charitable. As Christmas draws closer, in smaller communities it is common for bell ringers to be local volunteers from churches, various social and business groups. Naturally some of these folks are personally known, so now social pressure is added to insure donating. To avoid those distasteful bell ringers without guilt I send my Christmas donation directly to the Salvation Army itself.

     Once while traveling west I stopped to visit a small, old wooden country church with a sign that said it was over one hundred years old. Entering I looked around, and my eyes were drawn to the rear of the church where against the back wall were leaning two old, unique collection baskets. At the ends of their wooden poles were faded, purple velvet bags attached with a bell at the bottom of each. In such a small country church where everyone knew everyone else, I easily could envision heads turning towards the sound of the bell on a collection bag rung by an usher either to awaken—or to persuade—a reluctant parishioner to give.

     Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher known for his defense of personal freedom of the individual. While Nietzsche rejected Christianity, I wonder if Jesus of Galilee would have agreed with the truth of this quotation of his: “Beggars should be abolished entirely! It is annoying to give to them, and it is annoying not to give them.”

 
Dear old and new friends,
 
     If you believe as you pray, “Our Father who art in heaven,” then last week’s reflection regarding God and Christ making their dwelling within you won’t have created any change in how you pray or relate to God. This is an example of a central law of life:

      Unless we change the way we think, we will not change the way we act.
 
     This is a fundamental law for not only personal change but also global. Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio says we must make loving the basic element in any change. If our desire is to change anything negative about our behavior, the place to begin isn’t with our behavior but our thoughts. And our minds likely are crowded with thoughts and ways of thinking that need to change, so let’s explore a few.

     Regardless of having seen that historic NASA photo of our earth floating in space, and the intellectual knowledge we live on a round planet, we continue to think, speak and act as if we lived on a horizontal flat earth. Since we think in “flat earth” terms daily we use expressions like “sunrise” and “sunset.” In reality, of course, our daystar the sun does not set or rise. But you object; what difference does it make if we rely on some old ancient terms? First, it’s not reality; secondly, it imprisons the concept of who we are. In reality, as evident in that NASA photo of earth, we live as a global, tribal community on an earth without borders. The consequences of this are awesome.

     Let’s consider another common experience. If you easily get angry when caught in traffic delaying jams or by rude drivers who cut in front of you, re-think: “Traffic flow often does not match my desires, and the highway can be the playground of the immature. Drive with patience and constant care.”

     If you become irritated by glitches in your computer or another device, rethink: “Technology is still in its infant stage; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Be patient with it as with a child.”

     If you are frustrated that you aren’t as good at prayer as you desire, rethink: “Prayer is as easy as a conversation with a good friend; just let your heart talk and listen more than you speak.”

     Whatever you desire to change in yourself, examine what your limiting thoughts are about it…and then exchange those with loving and affirming thoughts.

     Lloyd George was British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922. He served in that critical position during the harsh difficulties of World War I and a national economic crisis, while dealing with the Irish liberation Sinn Fein movement and other problems. When he was asked how he always remained so cheerful and pleasant, he replied, “I find a change in nuisances is as good as a vacation.” Any annoyance or bother is a nuisance, so a change in how you see them liberates you like being on a vacation.

Dear old and new friends,

     It was a late season tornado that appeared out of a heavy rain and then thundered across a small Midwestern town leveling the houses and buildings to the ground; then departing as quickly as it had come. In the following eerie silence, the town’s survivors cautiously came up out of their basements, storm cellars and shattered overturned homes to behold their town resembling an atomic bomb disaster!

     George Sanders crawled out from under the tumbled-down broken wreckage of his home and stood silent, shocked at the loss of everything he owned, treasured and loved. His first thoughts were, “Thank God, Marie and the children are away today visiting her mother. But when they come home….” With the speed of a lightning bolt he realized, “But they can’t! They never can come home again—out home doesn’t exist!” As this thought touched every fiber of his body he raised his arms up to the heavens and shouted, “Why, Lord? What have we done to deserve this destruction of everything we’ve loved and labored for all these years? Why have you sent your wrath down upon us, Lord?”

     “You don’t need to shout, George,” he heard—or rather felt—a voice respond, as it continued, “and I am not wrathful! I never send pain or suffering to anyone. Storms, like cancers, are free, as you are George, to come and go wherever they wish!”

     In the distance came the sounds of wailing sirens of the first responders coming from the neighboring towns. “That’s the sound of help coming, George; be strong. Together we’ll begin again to create you a new home.”
 
                                                         ~~~~
 
     The George Sanders parable isn’t about schizophrenia, but Jesus’ mind-boggling revelation at the Last Supper, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” (John 14: 23) And “Keeping my word” involves his requirement of loving unconditionally. His words and their implications are so far-fetched, no wonder they were not drilled into us as children.
 
                         The implications if what Jesus said was true:
                                                             
               Prayer is just conversation, as easy as thinking or breathing.
               Church tabernacles are but golden symbols of you.
               Silence and meditation develop your listening to yourself.
               Entering a domestic disagreement, remember who accompanies you.
               Discuss your problems and decisions with your Inner Guests.
               Unimaginable are the gifts of frequent visits with your Inner Guests.
               Loving is the Presence of God.
               Let your Inner Selves shine outward through your actions and words.

Dear old and new friends,
 
     If a cosmic stranger from another solar system visited Planet Earth this coming weekend of October 31st, he/she or it might surmise Earth folk were celebrating some kind of a Festival of Fear. Stores and homes are decked out with a variety of scary images of death, flying witches and bats. Children and adults parade around dressed up in frightening masks and costumes. But far from being afraid, all seem to be having fun.
 
     Halloween is a fun holiday, but those fears haunting many aren’t funny! Halloween—the Eve of All Hallows, all holy ones—challenges us to live the words the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary, “Do not be afraid”; the same words often used by Jesus of Nazareth. The admonition to “fear not” appears over and over in Christian scriptures! If you repeat those affirming words aloud to yourself daily as your morning prayer, imagine the consequences!
 
     Being afraid (something adults are ashamed to admit) can be attached to a particular threat…some authoritarian person, snakes, flying, growing old, the dark, being a failure, or that most common fear of having to stand up alone and speak to a large audience. Fears can come and go as we move from one age to another, or grow into toxic worry.
 
     As a Catholic looking back at my youth, I believe I suffered from the disease of Toxic Worry. The psychiatrist Edward Hallowell (and no, that’s not a play on Halloween) describes it as a disease of the imagination that is insidious and invisible like a virus that worms its way into your consciousness where it actually dominates your life. Toxic worry shrinks your enjoyment of life, cripples your creativity and your ability to love. I picked up the virus of this disease from the Baltimore Catechism and its moral teachings. Back in those days I feared the occasions of sin, and that could include motion pictures, magazine photos, your thoughts, meat on Friday, even your friends, it seemed. Really, just about anything.
 
     The toxic (meaning poisonous) worry like all infections spreads to life itself, and while it continues to involve religion, it moves beyond it to anxiety about yourself and how you appeared to others, your popularity, your failures or successes. Marvelously miraculous is the human body in its self-healing abilities to mend wounds, and so too the mind which, with maturity, causes some fears to disappear. However, there can be those deeply embedded fears that remain. I was fortunate to find a mentor who helped me resolve my toxic worry by simply having me meditate on these liberating words: “Perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18)
 
     So if you are burdened with some fear, I suggest you slowly love and accept whatever worries you, along with all of life’s problems and threats. Strive to truly love yourself; all your body, your mind, talents and inabilities, blunders and attainments, as you daily pray with zeal, “Do not be afraid!”

Dear old and new friends,

     Humans have a marvelous built-in emotional capacity to be empathetic, to be able to share in another's emotions and sufferings, and so to take some action to help them. Empathy seems innate and not a learned behavior, and is experienced by animals as well as humans.
 
     Bullying, the humiliating done by the bigger stronger kids, male or female, over the weaker and often somehow “different” schoolmates, is an acknowledged problem. With negative empathy we identify with the victims of abuse, empathetically sharing in their desire for vengeance against their abusers. Until I came upon the idea of this negative empathy I never understood (always striving to be a man of nonviolence, peace, love and compassion) why I took such delight when, near the end of old Western movies, the “bad guy” (almost demonic in his evilness) in a fair fight was fiercely beaten up and disgraced by the good guy before whole the town.
 
     Today, we can add to the positive and negative a third form of empathy…empty empathy. From seemingly endless agencies, all wonderful and worthwhile, by mail and television come graphic photographs of cleft palate afflicted children and crippled, hungry, sick and homeless ones. The result of this continuous over-exposure is empty empathy; we see but don’t feel. Oh, there may be a flicker of sympathy but it soon is dissipated. Modern media can and does dehumanize us by taking us beyond what is humanly possible! We should strive to maintain a wholesome, holy empathy as an expression of our growth in love. A possible solution to these mass marketing solicitations is to choose one or more agency or group to support, and forget about the others.
 
                                                       WARNING
 
     An authentic threatening danger exists that can even do away with empathy! Watch your children! Watch yourself! Ceaseless, incessant use of digital technology is eating away at our humanity. Recent studies, as reported by sociologist and author Sherry Turkle, show a steep decline in empathy as measured by psychological testing among college students of the smartphone generation! For her these amazing digital technological creations are capitalism in hyper drive, pouring its logic of consumption and efficiency into our every waking moment. As more and more of the population of all ages become addicted to their smartphones, watch for a consequential communal decline in empathy in others—and in yourself.
 
     Along with smartphones we need smart people…those who schedule frequent times to be “disconnected,” and so be refreshed and rehabilitated by quiet separateness and visits to their inner-world. Mysterious, silent times in your inner-world reinforces a secure sense of self that sends you back into the greater world’s crazy hubbub renewed in peacefulness and with a Good Samaritan’s affluent empathy.

Dear old and new friends,
 
     I like Shakespeare’s epithet for envy: Green Sickness. Envy, like a cold or any sickness, can be mild; as in a desire to be like another person or the hard feelings of resentment toward an affluent neighbor with a yearly new flashy car. And Green Sickness can also be severe; like lusting, unwholesome rivalries in athletics, and old-fashioned greed. Part of our fascination with stars like Tom Cruise or Tina Turner is a secret green wish to be like them, a longing to have their physical talents. This envy towards others, be they stars, athletes or any perceived gifted person, exists because we only know the outside of their lives, not their hidden fears, phobias, physical or emotional disabilities. If we knew these we wouldn’t envy them!
 
     Mahatma Gandhi was adored by India’s poor and lower castes as a saint for his austere lifestyle and spirituality. Gandhi the political leader was acclaimed for his unyielding peaceful non-violence against militant British rule and became a heroic example to be imitated. His many disciples loved him and longed to be like him, but the non-public Gandhi was not a man of peace! He lived deeply tormented by unshakeable feelings of guilt and unworthiness. The people called him a Mahatma, a “great soul,” when a better name would have been a “tormented soul”! The next time you feel the creeping Green Sickness to be like another, remember Gandhi.
 
     Another example is Ira Hayes, a 22-year-old Pima Indian from Arizona, who was a U.S. Marine and Navy pharmacist…and how a World War II photograph ruined his life. Ira had been chosen to be one of a group of Marines to be photographed raising a large American flag on February 23, 1945, over the battle bloodied island of Iwo Jima. That classic photograph instantly became famous, making heroes out of its flag raisers. The propaganda hungry military sent these men touring the country where at each stop they were welcomed and praised as glorious heroes.
 
     The Pima Indian Ira Hayes, like Mahatma Gandhi, felt inwardly unworthy of the adulation and praise cascaded on him. Ira’s Native American spirituality stressed modesty and humility, and denounced self-glorification. He told the press he wasn’t a hero; that the real heroes were his brother marines who had died sacrificing their lives in the intense fighting on Iwo Jima. But the praise continued and he suffered the piercing pains of personal embarrassment by being elevated to a heroic pinnacle, even though this was the dream ideal of all youth, including the Pima Indian young.
 
     Embittered by his hidden inner turmoil, for relief he resorted to that ancient pain medicine…alcohol. Drifting now as an anonymous hobo from city to city he was arrested over 50 times for public drunkenness. On a bitter cold January 24th in 1955, returning to the Pima Indian reservation a drunken 32-year-old Ira Hayes stumbled into a ditch of water that served as the water supply for the reservation and froze to death.
 
     To understand and be sympathetic about the shame that ate away at Ira Hayes let us go back to 1945 and to the facts of the raising of that large American flag over Iwo Jima. The first, original raising of the United States flag on Iwo Jima was not very picturesque. Simply two marines in muddy, battle-dirty fatigues reaching a hilltop and then sticking into the earth an old, twisted piece of pipe to which was attached a small American flag!
 
     The second raising of the flag seen in that famous photograph known to all of us was spectacular but devoid of heroic action. The hilltop scene had been carefully staged with an appropriate wind to unfurl the large American flag. Those U.S. Marines positioned along the extended flag pole, including Ira Hayes, were carefully choreographed so as to appear that they were struggling to raise the victorious Stars and Stripes!
 
     Every youth dreams of being a hero on the sports field or in war. When youth ends, that powerful dream continues to live on well into old age…so beware of what you dream about. The author of The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, said, “Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.”

Dear old and new friends,

     Once upon a time, a son texted his mother, “Mom. I met a great guy this afternoon and he said he was really hungry for a home cooked meal…so I invited him to supper. Don’t do anything fancy, just your usual. Oh, his name is Tom Mapother. Love U.”

     His mother shook her head. “So typical of Jimmy, without any warning to invite someone over for supper,” she thought to herself as she took some meat out of the refrigerator. A few hours later a neighbor called her, “Margie, what do you think about those television news trucks going up and down the street; has something happened or about to happen in our quiet neighborhood?” Margaret looked through the curtains and saw a couple of TV news vans going slowly up the street. She shrugged her shoulders and returned to the kitchen. Later the sound of the garage door going up, and then down, signaled Jimmy and his new friend Mapother had arrived. She straightened her apron and walked to the garage entrance door. Jimmy came in first, and behind him a slightly shorter man wearing large sunglasses which he removed, as Jimmy said, “Mom, meet Thomas Mapother,” as she screamed, “Oh, my God. Tom Cruise!”

      The studios instantly saw a future movie star in the 19-year-old, handsome Thomas C. Mapother when he arrived in Hollywood. Only there was one big problem: his family name of Mapother. So the studio executives dropped it and chose to replace it with his middle name, Cruise. Now, in a similar story, Annie Mae Bullock had a more radical change. She was renamed Tina Turner! “Stories are designed to force us to consider possibilities,” said William Bausch. “Stories hint that our taken-for-granted daily realties may, in fact, be fraught with surprise.” Our opening story-parable of Thomas Mapother held a surprise—and so does your name. Yes, your name!

     Hollywood’s name changes imply you can’t be both mortal with a common name and also an immortal star whose name reflects the brilliance of being famous. Our Hebrew ancestors gave new names to those whose destiny had been changed by an encounter with God; Jacob after wrestling all night with God becomes Israel. Nuns and monks, like Hollywood actors and actresses, are given new names that imply new possible identities. Betty Lou Koeington entered a convent and became Sister Mary Joaquin Baptista, and Larry Schillenburg entered a monastery and became Father Thomas. Did their new names transform their personalities into those of potentially saintly stars, or did their original basic jealousies, emotional needs and anxieties, now simply wear a religious habit?

     Every name no matter how common is important. Among primitive peoples there is a reluctance to disclose their name less an enemy might learn of it and work evil magic upon them. The Greeks particularly were careful with uncomplimentary names and disguised or reversed them. When it comes to names, you and I had no voice in the ones bestowed on us at birth by our parents, and there may be some who like the Greeks wish today they could disguise their unflattering name.
 
     I want anyone presently reading this reflection to know that you don’t have to change your name or possess any particular genius to be a star, a luminary and a leading light, for you already are one! William Wordsworth captured the divine truth about each of one of us when he wrote,
 
                                    “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
                                    The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
                                    …cometh from afar…trailing clouds of glory we come
                                    from God, who is our home:
                                    Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”

      Awaken: Remember those clouds of glory that streaked behind you like a shooting star as you entered this world. That splendor of heaven that encircled you as an infant has now receded within you; pause and acknowledge its hidden presence. Artistic Love delights in creating stars, be they in the cosmos or on earth. Whatever your name, with each deed of kindness, every gift donation, each act of empathy and expression of affection, consciously let your inner radiance shine in your eyes and on your face.

     Your name will never be famous. You will never be canonized. No shining halo will appear, but you will be that unique star you were destined to be when you came from God.

Dear old and new friends,

     Your prized and richest possession isn’t in a bank vault or insured by Lloyds of London! The American philosopher psychologist William James said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” That can mean many things, but central is that your most cherished possession is your good name.

     The Zen master Hakuin was a hermit renowned by his local village as a saintly man of poverty and prayer. Villagers came up the mountain to a large rock some distance from his remote hermitage to leave gifts of food for him that often included notes asking for his prayers. One day a respected young woman in the village, being pregnant, announced loudly to everyone that Hakuin was the man responsible for her pregnancy! Shocked, she and her family, along with the village elders, angrily marched up beyond the large rock directly to his hermitage. With loud insults and shouts of hypocrisy they denounced Hakuin for being the father of her child. Standing at the door of his hut, the monk said only, “Is that so?”

     When the time came for the delivery of the child the villagers were amazed that the hermit Hakuin came down their village. Now the girl’s family wanted nothing at all to do with this shameful baby, but the old monk took the infant into his arms and lovingly carried it up to his hut. There he fed and cared for the infant and lovingly fondled it as his very own. A year and a half after the child’s birth had passed, the child’s mother became overcome with guilt. She publically announced that the child’s father wasn’t the Zen monk, but rather a local young farmer. Now overwhelmed with disgrace and humiliation, the entire village, led by the young girl and her family, climbed the mountain up to the small hut of Hakuin. They stood outside loudly proclaiming their sorrow and regrets for how they had stained with shame the holy man’s reputation. The young woman asked him to have her baby back, and told Hakuin who was the real father of the child. When she finished, the crowd surrounding his hut and waited in silence. Then handing her child back to her, Hakuin said, “Is that so?”

     Let us perform on this Zen story an autopsy so to find in it some personal applications for ourselves. We begin with the Zen monk’s poverty or simplicity that included his invisible property, his good name and reputation. When this was taken away, he didn’t loudly proclaim his innocence, nor challenge his accusers to prove his guilt. He only quietly asked, “Is that so?” Ask yourself if you were accused by your neighbors of such sexual misconduct, how would you respond? Ponder your reputation, your name or position in your community. Today, sexual accusations, true or not, become gossip and front page news. Sadly, once someone is charged with sexual misbehavior and later is found not guilty, that untrue allegation casts long indelible dark shadows over them.

     So when next you learn someone in your community or local church is accused of some shocking behavior, rather than replying with stunned condemnation, instead answer wisely as did the Zen monk Hakuin, “Hmm…is that so?”

…where we left off last week about romancing our own death will require a striptease that begins with discarding your Christian religious teaching, “At the death of the body the immoral soul leaves the body”! This Greek Aristotle-Platonic philosophical belief that the soul had a separate spiritual existence from the body was adopted by early Christianity. However, science today states that spirit and body are “Two dialectically related dimensions of one and the same physical reality”…“Neither spirit or matter can exist without the other!” So with this new knowledge what happens now at death?

     Our conventional thinking and believing was turned upside down a hundred and ten years ago in 1905 when Albert Einstein presented his theory of relativity (E = mc2) which revolutionized physics, but unfortunately not our thinking. It revealed that matter cannot be destroyed or eliminated, only transformed into energy! So our bodies, which are physical matter, can’t be destroyed; yet our common sense based on limited ordinary experiences and religious beliefs says death ends our existence. This idea of death must be abandoned unless we want to live in yesteryear when Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew a powered airplane, only two years before Einstein’s theory!

     Later, in the 1920’s, the German physicist Max Planck postulated all light and heat isn’t emitted continuously, but in energy packets that are the fundamental aspects of nature which Einstein named “quanta.” This quantum theory shockingly revealed there are no such things as inanimate objects! At the microscopic subatomic level any object typically referred to as dead, inanimate like your table or computer, isn’t dead but a living universe of invisible whirling quantum energies.

          “Stop; my head is spinning,” you want to cry out. That’s understandable
          as these new theories and discoveries are mind-boggling. We prefer the good
          old pre-Einstein days since they were simpler.

     More than ever before, today we suffer from a pandemic of necrophobia—a morbid fear of death. The once-proper English word “died” now is pornographically out of place, so we say “passed.” Family and friends don’t go in solemn procession to a cemetery to bury their beloved dead, more correctly they go to leave the beloved abandoned above ground surrounded by fake green rugs hiding the ugly dirt of the grave. When the mourners have departed, the burial of the beloved is left to strangers.

     Great spiritual masters like St. Benedict in his Rule instructed his monks to “Remember you will die.” That rule was to be a compass for how to live each day. The same compass is available to those who pray the rosary or even say a single Hail Mary that concludes, “Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.” Few consider seriously if “that” fateful hour will be one of their twenty-four hours of today, but they should.

     A basic principle of a good spirituality is be daily mindful you will die. Before we discuss how to romance your death, strive to follow another spiritual rule which is to love life and others deeply and passionately, yet never clinging to another or any possession. Non-clinging to attachments is liberation; a freedom essential for happiness in life and a happy death.

     To be continued….