All of our lives are rich tapestries worthy of the most careful archival preservation. Each of our lives contains a vivid story of God’s grace and provision worth sharing with those around us and with those yet to come before us.
The stories and essays here are from a several-year season of my life in which God showed Himself richly and abundantly to me in diverse ways. These unique aspects of God’s provision and teaching in my life are provided to convince you the reader that God can and wants to do the same thing in your own life. I am an ordinary guy who has been granted unmerited favor. So may it be for you.
In the Episcopal and Catholic Churches a four-day retreat experience is offered for those seeking a deeper walk with their God. “A Quantum Journey Towards God” reveals my stunning experience with total immersion in God’s love for four days. It was epic.
“A Dog Day in March” describes the abundant joy that comes when a vanload of playful children and puppies suddenly pours out into one’s Saturday morning.
“Cathedrals and Blue Algae” contains a musing about the possible ways God built the world around us. My teacher was a metaphor inspired by the common clay brick used to build small planters or grand cathedrals.
“So Far” is an attempt to be transparent about my spiritual journeys through several dark nights of the soul and the strength to be derived from a life-long Christian faith.
“The Other Mother Church” describes a happy and expansive literal journey to the Cathedral of Canterbury, the highest place in my religious tradition. I was able to find a real sense of connection and belonging to my own church during my day there.
“Palm Sunday” describes a sublime one-day pilgrimage in London. I was part of life at its very best, watching athletes participate in the Florala Marathon, participating in a morning Eucharist in the grand St. Mary’s Chapel, gawking my way through a two-hour service under the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, then hearing sublime music at an evening organ recital in Westminster Abbey.
“Benedictine Images” describes a profoundly moving journey into friendship with a dear friend while we toured the great Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England. It is hard to decide which images are most valuable to me – those of the largest collection (267) of medieval figures in the world or the single image of my dear friend over a pint of good ale. Fortunately I don’t have to choose.
“Fast Forward Learning” was inspired by the prospect of impending death with the explosion of a jet engine six feet from my seat and with a later journey to the mother house of the Sisters of Charity near Pittsburgh.
A Quantum Journey Towards God
A hundred years into the search for the grand unified field of the universe that transcends the four known forces, quantum mechanics is able to safely say “nothing is as it seems.” Some of those few gifted individuals in the world with the capacity to understand the requisite mathematics are suggesting the only thing that makes sense is a universe with ten dimensions. The only thing that makes sense to the rest of us Newtonian types is a three-dimensional universe with perhaps time being called a forth dimension. In one of the classic early quantum physical experiments, it was proven that a single photon could go through two side-by-side apertures at the same time. This is absolutely counterintuitive to our three dimensional experience.
While physicists attempt to make sense of the universe, some of us are trying to make sense of God and His relationship to humankind. Countless spiritual traditions of every kind for some sixty centuries or more claim to have found some sort of unifying theological precept to explain the nature of God – The Way. What we are finding from both the spiritual and physical domains is a growing awareness that nothing is as it seems. There is a growing mutual respect for both domains, to the degree that I have a thousand-page mathematical text produced by a particle physicist that claims to mathematically prove the existence of God. It is a substantial number of physicists who have found God at the far end of their experiments.
The Cursillo spiritual retreat experience is an aperture through which fortunate individuals are able to pass on their search for deeper understanding. As one who has recently passed through this luminous aperture, I learned that even down here in our three simple dimensions, things are not as they seem. Like most other Cursillistas, my photons of expectation proved to be disrupted, both positively and negatively during the time/space continuum of the first three days. Fabulous elements of visual surprise cast each of us into a higher state of Numinous wonder. For some of us with critical spirits and rigid thinking, some of the structures of the Cursillo aperture were discomfiting, to say the least. Several times I was ready to abandon the experiment and go back to my old Newtonian ways of life. Just in time, the One who was really running the experiments, and is Himself outside of time, injected His Love into my tiny bit of the universe. I stayed for the duration of the experiment.
It was during the Closura ceremony at the end of the retreat that I was compelled to make the hardest journey of my life, to stand before all present and admit that things were not at all as they had seemed to me. I had been so absolutely positive about the nature of things around me. It is exceedingly difficult to admit to hundreds that one really is, in fact, clueless. The reality is that God has a better idea than I about anything, especially those things at variance with my expectations. I only wish the Cursillo experience was like the early quantum experiments in that I could go through it again for the first time, with a different attitude.
The take-home message of the Cursillo experiment is that God’s Love is indeed the unifying force of the universe. In fact, I was just given a pre-publication manuscript of a serious work called Grace: The Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature to review. We simply have to trust this Love and have faith that the Creator of the known and unknown universe has our best interests at heart, especially during those times when the star in our sky has gone super nova and collapsed into a black hole, leaving us in apparent total darkness. It is in the dark times we are at risk of forgetting His Love. It is in these times we have to fly by faith. After all, He tells us in the sacred writings that “eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, and the hearts of man have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
Here on the backside of the aperture of Cursillo, I find the universe continuously defying my expectations everyday. The folds and hairpins in daily life can be more challenging than the most extreme of amusement park rides. Since my Cursillo of only six week ago, I have stood at three open caskets, and said the final farewell to three of our fellow travellers. Since then, financial markets around the world have in some cases lost 35% of their value. Since my Cursillo, yet another war has been added to the litany of violence than spans the human experiment. Next week, I will have to trust pilots, security personnel, and hundreds of other strangers to carry me safely halfway around a world at war. What Cursillo does is remind us that there is a greater force than death, war, or even our own insecurities, expectations and critical attitudes.
It is out here in the daily world of chaos that we really do have the opportunity to demonstrate this greater force of God’s love and grace to those who are struggling to find their way home in an often very scary universe. Each day we are free to inject acts of love and kindness into the aperture of the lives around us. They really need it, almost as much as we need to give it.
Gravatt Conference Center, South Carolina
A Dog Day In March
It has been bright and clear for some days with sublime gentle spring breezes and air temperature about 72 degrees. Today it began clouding up and the sky is beginning to look much like the one I will fly into next week in England – gray and leaden. I was contemplating whether I should make a hurried journey to the local gas dispensary so that I could cut the grass before it reverted to the swamp of two weeks ago. I have deliberately delayed cutting the ‘grass’ because in reality what I have is a wildflower meadow of no less than six varieties of wild violets and several kinds of yellow botanicals, including the well-known dandelion. There are several flowering white and pink species of things as well. A botanist I am not. A hearty stand of wild onion gives the whole of it a textured look, if an unkempt one.
Context is a curious thing. If this acre of ground covering were located in an alpine meadow in the Swiss Alps or in a local park, people would flock to it and admire its beauty. Since it is in an American suburb with carefully clipped yards around it, it is viewed as a neglected weed patch. I am certain my neighbors must lie awake nights wondering if those little magical globes of dandelion seeds in my spontaneous paradise will get caught in the gentle night breezes to covertly find new life in their carefully tended turf.
A sudden pounding on the door is a context-specific thing as well, open to wide interpretation. In much of the world, a loud pounding on the door in the night has long been a rather dreaded thing, a harbinger of harsh interrogation, separation, or worse. Here in America, a loud pounding is usually much less threatening; burglars, rapists, and the like don’t often knock first. So far, American police knock gently and they do this only very rarely. Usually Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and mentally challenged kids selling light bulbs for $10 apiece are about it these days as far as door-knockers go. Yet, there are exceptions.
Last year I had a loud pounding that proved to be the messenger of death – neighbors and police interrupted the five-course dinner I was giving to tell me that a fellow who called me his “chosen father” has just used a shotgun to end his tortured twenty-one years in this troubled world. My interpretation of loud poundings on the door has been uncertain since then, especially after having just carefully installed a nice new melodious doorbell last week.
Thus it was that I was quite startled and let out a muttered expletive today when I heard a very loud pounding at 3 PM. I had been engrossed in quiet work on my computer when this sonic disruption reverberated through the house. I went to the door to find no police or messengers of doom. What I found was nine-year old Theresa standing there, very eager to show me something her family had just gotten. Theresa was, in fact, spearheading a family project to show me the newest member of the family. Once it was determined that I was home and accounted for, a significant portion of the chaos in the quantum universe poured out of that white mini-van and emptied itself onto my ‘wild-flower’ garden.
The newest member of the family proved to be a six-week old puppy that is a cross of a bloodhound and a St. Bernard. Wanna guess how big this thing is going to be? I suggested a nearby tack shop that sells fine western-style saddles. At six weeks, this puppy probably already weighs twelve pounds. One hundred fifty pounds is probably not an unreasonable end point for its accumulation of body mass. I suggested the kids would not be carrying this puppy around like a cat for but perhaps two or three more weeks.
Some things in the universe really are universal – the truly delightful inner feeling of well being that comes from puppies must be included in these. I bought one of Stephen Hawking’s physics books perhaps an hour before this disruption of my small suburban universe. I will have to look and see if he mentions puppies in his descriptions of the universe.
Unexpectedly, I found myself lying face up in my naturally occurring wildflower garden with this soon-to-be-huge canine horse in complete repose on my chest. It occurred to me that the leaden sky was actually pleasing, reminding me of my imminent embarkation to my favorite region of Earth. It also occurred to me that installing sleeping puppies on the chests of anxious people could do much for the mental health of our world. I found myself in a genuinely splendid state of complete serenity while three absolutely wild kids and their mother created chaos all about me. I was truly serene in the eye of the storm, just myself and that brown canine angel of peace. It is astounding how infectious the serenity of a sleepy puppy can be.
The puppy had been in chaos night and day with those kids and had come to the limits of its nearly boundless puppy energy. I know Hawking talks about bounded states in his mathematical essays. I wonder if this has anything to do with tired dogs. Anyway, this grand one found refuge on my chest a splendid alternative to the kinetic storms of special needs children. I was happy to accommodate his search for equanimity in the chaos. In the process, I basked in peace myself in my wildflower meadow.
In a time of truly frightening geo-political disintegration where small nations are trying to be like the big dogs and come off the front porch with nuclear bombs and where others proclaim they will be masters of the universe, it would do well for us to offer peaceful refuge to the refugees of our human challenges. Listen to puppies. We just might find peace ourselves.
“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.”
Anderson, South Carolina
Cathedrals and Blue Algae
Bricks are a useful metaphor for a life of faith. Bricks are perfectly dumb and have little to say for themselves. Yet, one can find entire castles built of them, magnificent terra cotta structures complete with towers, drawbridges, and magnificent halls for opulent dining and celebration. With very little effort one can also find spectacular cathedrals built entirely out of these innocuous non-thinking little blocks of burnt clay, grand structures that seem to reach to the sky and inspire us to transcendent thinking.
I recently built a small planter in my front yard out of these same little bits of fired earth. My project involved mortaring perhaps 120 common bricks together onto a tiny foundation of concrete. I didn’t need much of a structure, as my only objective was to prevent mulch from washing away from the bases of three modest plants. Even as minuscule as my project was, it did require a plan of some sort and a bit of preparation. It was necessary to dig a tiny trench and use a level to adjust for the slope of the ground. It was essential to be sure I had enough mortar, concrete, bricks, water to complete the project and to have the right tools to accomplish a result the neighbors would not find offensive.
Now imagine a cathedral that has ten million bricks in it, reaching heights of hundreds of feet and providing a clear pillar-free floor of 50,000 square feet that will require a century or two to complete. Plan? You better, and give it your best thinking.
It is commonly known throughout the world that bricks are made, are created, and are not accidents of nature. No one has ever refuted this because they are found in both cathedrals and microscopic projects such as my planter. This is a rational response to the widely observed phenomenon of brick making and their subsequent use in all manner of structures.
Infinitely, more complex that all the cathedrals of the world with their millions of bricks and stones is a single living cell. A single living cell is a biochemical factory that puts the entirety of our chemical industry to shame. Within a single cell are structures complex beyond imagination, endoplasmic reticulum, cellular matrix, de-oxy-ribose-nucleic acid helixes, and mitochondria. It so happens that, like bricks, these structures are combined into different forms of cells and the cells are then combined into different species of life. Like bricks, one can use them to make simple things like phytoplankton or grand inspiring things like a stargazer lily or a peregrine falcon.
During the past several decades it has become possible with the development of modern biochemistry to clearly demonstrate that the simplest single cell life forms and the highest orders of life contain many of the same building blocks. Because this is so, a lot of highly educated people believe that the higher life forms are random results generated by some very stupid non-thinking single cell blue algae. These academic scientists actually believe that random stochastic processes can take the common bricks of life and combine them into structures, orders of magnitude more complex than the cathedrals that point us to God. It is a far greater stretch scientifically to believe that primordial soup can ‘come up with’ blue algae or that blue algae can ‘come up with’ peregrine falcons.
It is more than curious that intelligent educated people are willing to acknowledge the creators of simple easily described things like red bricks but refuse to acknowledge even the existence of the Architect and Creator of things so complex that their educated brains cannot grasp them.
One has to be profoundly intelligent and well educated to do some very stupid thinking. The wisdom of man is but foolishness in the sight of God. God said one finds the Kingdom of Heaven by coming with the faith of a child.
Anderson, South Carolina
So Far
So far my life has taken me through 18,825 days, thirty-nine countries, fifty-eight places of residence, seventeen years of university, six careers, and five dark nights of the soul. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes, I am often inclined to say, “Is this it?” “This is not what I signed up for.” “Isn’t there something else?” I often feel like I got assigned to the wrong planet. This one doesn’t seem to work right.
Life is so very different from what I ever would have dreamed at age seventeen or twenty-two. I had this idea that somehow the world, my family, myself, and humanity would get better, more humane, gentler, enlightened, selfless. The changes we have experienced collectively and as individuals are more than our design specifications were ever meant to handle. Every time I have ever taken one of those stress surveys I have scored in a critical range suggesting I am risk for a total system failure, which I have gone through several times. Don’t wish this on your worst enemy. It is worse than hell. I see system failure in many of the lives around me and many of those that haven’t failed yet are getting close. I find myself fearful for so many of the people around me.
My history is speckled at best, probably more so than most in different ways. I have no concept of ‘home.’ It is a just a four-letter word, the real meaning of which eludes me. Several times I have thought I might be getting close to finding the definition of it – only to be corrected very strongly that I was wrong about it. I but remain clueless as to what it would feel like to be in a place called “home”. I live in a fourteen room house with Rembrandts and Van Dykes and back lit-oil paintings in every room, but it isn’t ‘home.” It’s just a collection of sheet rock, #2 yellow pine, a few thousand brick, some tile, canvas, artist pigments, and some very old expensive paper. It’s also a place where I have known many night terrors and experiences of profound loneliness.
I find great irritation when realtors call a structure a home instead of a house. I don’t think home is a widely understood concept anymore. We all want it but few of us know what it is – a lot like love or romance. And we often look for a lover to create home for us and when he or she fails to do so we head for the nearest divorce court. I think home is a place of spiritual refuge, quiet, absolute refreshment, and profound total acceptance of our beings. So far I have not found this. And I know it is not on the multiple listing service or in the nearest home improvement place.
It would be profoundly easy to spiral down into a vast vortex of depression and throw in the towel because as has been crassly said many times by others, “Life sucks, and then we die.” BUT, I am not willing to accept that what I have seen thus far is all there is. I am not willing to go where the writer of Ecclesiastes went in saying “it would have been better to have never been born”. Even quantum physics suggests we Newtonian types don’t have it right. There are some ancient writings that suggest we don’t have it right.
I do know that humans have a desperate emotional life-giving need to belong, to connect, to have significance. Their core fears derive from abandonment and rejection. Most of the hideous behavior ever seen on this planet derives from defense mechanisms to avoid being ‘put out’, conversely to be accepted, respected, wanted. We were created with high levels of socialization needs. Just watch what happens to a newborn infant that is not held and nurtured. It will physically die from what we medical types call “failure to thrive.”
I know that my core fear is of being ‘put out’. I literally was put out of the house five times by the time I was eight. I ended up in some hideous places with lots of pain and evil in them. I learned early on that being ‘put out’ was to be my lot in life and I have acted out that reality dozens of times since. As recently as yesterday I came up against this issue. I have been put out of people’s house literally within the past months; have been put out of many lives.
I know that my personality structure and my life experiences are such that many people do not really enjoy being around me for a variety of reasons. My life has been ultra intense and that has made me an intense person and in American culture intense people do not get onto short lists. It has often made me feel like ET wondering if those old phonograph parts can be made to work to tell ‘them’ to come get me and take me back “home” to a safe place.
I have found that the only chance I will ever have of belonging, connecting, finding emotional stability is at a profoundly spiritual level. I have used the word ‘spiritual’ very advisedly. I am not talking about the New Age babble of finding some sort of inner power or God within or reframing my reality with the likes of “A Course in Miracles”. I speak strictly in the orthodox Christian sense. I have an essential need to know that there is a sentient benevolent being that takes an interest in my life, someone who is bigger than me, smarter than me, faithful and reliable, and offers a chance to get home, once and for all. An amorphous universal ‘power’ or ether doesn’t cut it for me. Nothing inside of me is going to be big enough to do that.
I have taken formal study in Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and most of the ‘isms’ and been to their holy sites throughout the world. I have read all manner of New Age books. Buddhism does not even teach of the existence of deity in any form. Hinduism is littered with 300 million man-made Gods that cannot show me a true way. The blocks of poly-chromed wood and stone in hundreds of earth-based religions don’t help me find anything to hang my hat on either. The Middle Length Sayings and the Mahayana texts tell me the world is on the backs of elephants. My downloads from NASA didn’t show that to be so. The sacrifice-demanding stone gods of the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans only caused the death of millions and the extinction of several vast empires. Standing on those ruins only reminded me that stone Gods offer nothing but death.
For thirty years or more I have struggled to find a connection within the orthodox Christian pathway. Most of the journey has been littered with religiosity, hypocrisy, churchianity, and little evidence of anything more real than the cold stone Gods I photographed at length. Most of my experiences with churches, religious people, and those who call themselves Christians have been quite unfulfilling and frustrating. I have had those few rare glimpses of a reality that transcends the bleak one described in Ecclesiastes or the one I have lived nearly nineteen thousand days. I KNOW that there is something foundational underneath it all. I also know that without a stronger connection to it I am going to fall into another dark night of the soul from which there will be no exit. I KNOW that I must be as possessive of my orthodox Christian faith and belief and practice as a diabetic would be of his vial of insulin.
I am not saying that Christianity is or is not the only way to maintain emotional health or equilibrium for everyone on this planet. I am saying that for this one human it is. As the world, and especially the American culture have become more secular and cynical, Christianity is seen almost as a farcical fairy tale. For me, it is my lifeline and I am not talking about church attendance or any of that religious rubbish. It is about finding a sense of worth, purpose, being, love, and connection that cannot be provided by another human or an organization. I have longed for profound connection to other humans and this always seems to elude me yet I know that I must find the true connection deep in God (the one that sent Jesus to show Himself to us).
Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest tormented much of his life in his quest for community and connection and he also concluded that the love we truly crave can only be found in God. His last book, Many Voices of Love was published after his death and so magnificently and eloquently captures the thirst of his soul. He was widely known by millions, published forty books, and was nearly revered, yet had this vast inner void he knew could only be filled by God. I find the same void in myself, perhaps bigger than most people, because of my hellatious early years. But I am beginning to get a glimpse of that which will fill it.
Anderson, South Carolina
The Other Mother Church
It was clearly a transitional day. The climate was bright and clear and I decided to make the three-hour journey via four trains to visit Canterbury Cathedral. It proved an exceedingly good decision. The Canterbury town center is car free and the buildings are half-timbered and rather pleasing. It is the first time I have been in the Kent (southeast) region of England, other than passing through to Dover one time by train to catch the jet foil to Oostende.
The Cathedral proved to be an easy walk of a half mile from the station along the top of a 1,700-year-old town wall laid down in the Roman occupation. The Cathedral proved to be mind numbing in scale and certainly is one of the oldest by far in England, or anywhere in the world for that matter. There has been a cathedral at the present site for 1,400 years and the continual additions have resulted in a vast edifice that rivals any other for size and grandeur. Its age also gives it a darker more Romanesque feeling than some of the newer slender ‘gothic’ ones erected several centuries later, yet the bright afternoon sunlight turned the west transept and aisles into multi-colored fire.
As my time progressed in the cathedral, I felt like I was beginning to make progression from a vacation entertainment mode to the real purpose of this journey – some kind of numinous encounter. My architectural curiosity was replaced by a more ecclesiastical experience during the evensong sung by a rather fine boys choir from the adjacent Kings College. Fortunately, I showed up on a Thursday when Evensong is offered and on the one Thursday a month where an evening fellowship is presented.
Several of the docents were especially friendly and eager to tell me about the structure after learning that I give lectures on church architecture. Following the evensong there was a communion in a chapel, which proved to be a grand space with fan vaulted ceilings and ancient walls of medieval glass. Of the hundreds of people that had been in the building there were exactly six of us in this service. Alas, for most the building is but a tourist trap and a chance to hear some free music.
One of the officiants at the service was a woman. It occurred to me that she was exceedingly attractive and that much of her attractiveness came from her spiritual commitment to the life of the church. I got a sense of profound depth in her. I am certain a soul mate would have to at least measure up to this sort of standard. I have this feeling I was supposed to see this woman in this role. I am reminded of the devotion I saw in a woman in a cathedral in the south of France ten years ago.
I met an elderly church widow, Margaret, in my hours of wandering about the cathedral and she was again one of the mere six of us in the Eucharist. I bought her dinner down the street before we attended a fellowship meeting which proved to be an especially well done lecture on the early Ethiopian Christian experience. The Ethiopian orthodox Christianity is exceedingly colorful and ritualized in a way I found especially pleasing. The quality of the projections was the best I have yet seen with digital processing. Alas, I had to leave early to catch the late train back to London.
I arrived back in London before midnight and feel like this day was much more valuable to me than the one I had yesterday. I was reading last night in Henry Nouwen’s writings Many Voices of Love about how we have a choice to close off certain doors as we go into an ever-narrower funnel leading us to the fullness of God. The play “Chicago” certainly did not lead me into a greater fullness of God. The nine-hour journey to Canterbury did. I think I will need to go back there at some time. It makes me certain that I need to visit several additional cathedrals rather than hunting up more castles. I shall journey to Exeter, Gloucester, and Salisbury, all easy to reach from Peace Haven.
The numinous experiences possible in these grand structures is more important than developing further knowledge about the defensive architecture of castles. I feel quite ready and inclined to embark tomorrow on a three-week journey to a retreat center in Devon and leave tourist mode. I think I will get much more than a Kodak moment there.
Canterbury, England
Palm Sunday
For those who embrace Christianity, Holy week is regarded as beginning with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Palm Sunday is called such as it is has long been recorded that those welcoming Jesus into town threw down palm branches as he came on into the city. In reality, Jerusalem was a patch in a dusty road of about thirty thousand, and Jesus got into town on a borrowed donkey.
What I experienced of Palm Sunday today could not have been more contradictory in every respect to Jesus’ borrowing a donkey and coming into a little town and then borrowing someone else’s little upper back room for a last meal later in the week. Palm Sunday started for me in the beautiful St. Mary’s chapel next to the imposing Westminster Abbey with an Anglican service at 9:30. As is usually the case on this side of the Atlantic, the word ‘chapel’ is misleading. St. Mary’s is much older and grander than the word lets on.
With a full hour between the end of the service at St. Mary’s and the beginning of my next observation of the day, I hopped two subway trains and made it over to Christopher Wren’s ultimate building project. Christopher Wren is regarded as the greatest English architect of all time and after the great fire that wiped out much of London in the mid 17th century, Wren was commissioned to design and rebuild the vast St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was lost in the fire. St. Paul’s cathedral is a rare case of a vast ecclesiastical structure being designed, built, and completed within the lifetime of the architect. Wren actually saw this vision through to its completion.
In fourteen journeys to London, I only just today even saw it from the outside or the inside for the first time. I can’t say why it took so long to get to this umpteenth wander of the world. That it survived the 1940 fire bombing of London is even more amazing, nothing short of miraculous. To go into such a place is like going back into the peak of the opulence of massive Greek/Romanesque architecture. It simply overloaded the senses and made one numb. I had a sense that I had walked into one of the great JMW Turner’s grand epic landscape paintings in which he often depicted vast Roman edifices.
The service itself was commensurate with the building and it lasted a full two hours with a twenty-page order of service, most of it spent standing, along with several thousand other equally numb people. To go to this service alone was a bit like going on a pilgrimage of some sort, I am certain. For those who appreciate ultimate liturgical experiences, to take the wine from a gold chalice standing under the two hundred foot open dome of the cathedral was the sin quinon of Eucharistic experience.
In the evening, an organ recital was offered in the vast expanse of Westminster Abbey with its opulent organ, which probably could microwave dinner if called on to do so. The chief music director from Westminster Cathedral presented “A Symphony for Palm Sunday” and he blew that organ out. I wondered how those hundreds of thousands of bits of medieval stain glass did not come raining down to the floor.
Somewhere during the day I managed to wander three hours in the vast Natural History museum. It has hundreds of galleries and I think I did perhaps five or six of them at most. With absolute clear skies and near sixty degrees and a fine moon, I went out and did some night filming of Parliament, Big Ben, the cathedrals, and the city in general.
I’m tired, but it is the kind of tiredness that comes from stretching and reaching for things new. I never know when the bell is going to ring and my opportunities for learning and searching will cease. I would rather collapse on my bed in tiredness than uninspired indolence.
London, England
Benedictine Images
It’s is stunning just how much life can be compressed into one twenty-four hour period, more precisely about fourteen hours. I suppose my receptors and neurons would all burn out if given so much input everyday, even if it is of such a grand nature.
The day’s journey was spent with a gracious retired diplomat, Tony, and his elegant wife, Gill. You can imagine the stories to be told by an attaché who has live three years in each of India, Australia, Germany, Ecuador, Washington DC, and Africa. He also spent forty years in the Royal Air Force earning his first wings in a gypsy Moth (a small canvas covered biplane with open cockpit). He progressed to the hot shot jets as they were invented.
Besides their interesting and gracious nature, Tony and Jill are deeply committed to their spiritual journeys and this gives them a depth that far transcends their travel and diplomatic experiences. I have had the good fortune to enjoy Tony’s company for the better part of two weeks and anticipate a fine luncheon with him on Friday and what has proven to be a new family that has sprung up around me.
More immediately, our journey of the day began with a drive to the cathedral city of Wells in Somerset, a delightful region to the north of Devon where I have been hanging my hat the past weeks.
When one turns a corner and enters into the cathedral precinct of the Cathedral Church of St. Andrews in Wells and has a full-on view of the West Front with its 293 life size medieval figures, the only appropriate response is a breathless gasp. It represents the single greatest array of medieval statuary in all of Europe, carved between 1235-43. Once one has caught his breath and finished taking thirty images of this Numinous West Front and goes inside, one starts all over.
Wells Cathedral is absolutely unique in having a scissors arch at the main crossing supporting a vast tower above the crossing. It is visually stunning beyond words. This serpentine structure was actually retrofitted a hundred years later (1340) to prevent the imminent collapse of the vast central crossing tower that was sinking. It has been rock solid for the 650 years since. This cathedral has the most astounding octagonal chapter house reached via a set of vast grand spiral stairs ascending from the most ordinary of doors set in the north wall of the quire aisle. It is truly a cathedral of grand surprises.
After our breathless journey we went to a profoundly quaint tea room and had a tomato soup with rolls to tide us over until dinner time. It was quintessential British and delightful as was the walk down the narrow streets to find it. Like so many small cities this side of the Atlantic, this one is pedestrian friendly.
As we were walking back to the car park a total stranger saw me taking pictures of magnificent daffodils in a churchyard. She told me the church was unlocked and that we simply must go into the church and view the ceiling. We were compliant and the three of went in, and again were short on air. Again, the creative genius of long-deceased artisans caught us off center.
The Parish Church of Wells St. Cuthberts turns out to be the largest in all of Somerset and Somerset is known for its vast legacy of churches built in the Perpendicular Period. The present church dates from the 1200s and rather than having a stone vaulted ceiling, it has an open raftered wood ceiling that has been completely polychromed. I think reclining chairs would be better suited than pews for viewing the ceiling. Even looking down we noticed the center aisle is a most pleasing mosaic inlay, quite in contrast with the usual natural stone color found in cathedrals.
One should note that many of the grand European cathedrals do not generally have fixed pews and the center aisle is not demarcated as such. St. Cuthberts being a church, it has fixed pews with a demarcated center aisle. It is hard to put into words how profoundly different each of these grand ecclesiastical wonders can be. After having been in many dozens of them one would expect them to start looking alike – not!!
After filling up our short and long term memories with images of these two grand structures, we drove back into County Dorset, a bucolic enclave wedged between Devon and Somerset. There I enjoyed hospitality with Tony and Jill in their splendid house with its rather fine garden for several hours but not before we went to the nearby Forde Abbey and Gardens.
This former Cistercian Abbey was dissolved by Henry the 8th, along with hundreds of others. At one point it fell into ruin and was abandoned for more than a century. 350 years ago it was acquired by a family that still resides in it and has fully restored the whole of it along with the gardens of many hundreds of acres. It is a botanical wonderland graced by a fine example of a Cistercian community.
Back at Tony’s house I managed to eat the better half of a crockery pot filled with cookies and sweets, easily washing it down with orange mango tea. Tony finally put it out of reach on top of the fridge, lest I make myself ill.
Dinner was in a picture-perfect half-timbered pub with a most gracious barman and absolutely pleasing young women waiting on us at the carvery. Even very conservative Christian people here do not have hang-ups about enjoying a good pint, and I did rather enjoy a pint of Worthington’s with a fine dinner. Tony had a Guinness. Ya can’t do England right with outta good pint, mate.
County Dorset, England
Fast Forward Learning
When one is facing the prospect of violent death about ninety seconds in the future, it has a way of making one think very fast, conducting a personal assessment, and determining if one has spent his or her life well. One even finds the time to consider matters of faith, even after allowing it to lie dormant for decades. So it was on a fine spring morning in late May this year that I found myself in such a state of fast forward introspection and learning. Over the North Sea just after takeoff, the jet turbine engine six feet outside my triple-paned Lexan window blew up. One can think amazingly fast and with great clarity in suspended states of, “Is this it?”
I learned we all share an inner secret we really don’t want anyone else to know about. We dread being alone. We dread dying alone. Our culture having been built on the merits of individuality and self-sufficiency; we have been conditioned and entrained to desperately want to distinguish ourselves by being different from the masses, yet underneath all the myriad trappings, we are all just about alike and want exactly the same thing, a sense of connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of value, and ultimately purpose and significance. We don’t want to travel solo. We want to touch the soul of another, reach out, and find out we are travelling the same path. When this happens, there is that delicious sensation of discovery; finding we are reading from the same page, finishing each other’s sentences. It is the stuff of epic historical romance novels and entrancing romantic comedies. The number of marriages erupting out of such an overwhelming encounter is stunning.
More stunning is the number of divorces that arise from the same entrancing encounters that suddenly blow up, just like that turbine did outside my window. Alas, while finishing each other’s sentences and falling into exquisite romantic reverie, we forget to check in with each other on whether we routinely remember to put down the lid, roll the tooth paste from the bottom, or bother to balance the check book. Rarely do we develop the skills to negotiate the choppy challenging waters of building a lasting relationship in a complex part of human history, which is moving at nearly the speed of light. The things that worked yesterday in life just might not work today; it is changing that fast.
The glitter eventually gets washed off and we are left with unplanned children, dirty diapers, repairs to the mini-van, doctor’s bills, catastrophic illness, and difficult in-laws. Tantalizing and beautiful as it can be, glitter does not make the best of foundations for something that is meant to stand against the storms of life. Millions exit the premises every year at the first hint of foul weather, making another desperate bid to find peaceful bliss beyond another distant mountain. Those left behind become heroes living lives of quiet desperation just to maintain the infrastructure of daily life.
In a couples-oriented, experience-oriented world we have been duped into thinking that is enough: Find the glitter and head for Nirvana. Those who have heard the judge pound his or her gavel and firmly pronounce, “decree of divorce granted” learn in a fraction of a second that something doesn’t compute, that Nirvana proves to be no more real than the illusion of Shangri-La on the other side of the mountain of diapers. Ten, twenty, or thirty years of history, family relationships, and self-worth are shattered before the gavel’s impact finishes echoing off the paneling on the back wall of the courtroom. Everything is called into question. The bang of a judge’s gavel can have the same stunning impact as the bang that come from a disintegrating jet turbine.
Most of us who have, for whatever reasons, not scaled the mountain of marriage are still living in the illusion that out there somewhere is the right one who can show us how to reach Shangri-La. Lots of people are making mountains of money publishing magazines, maintaining on-line dating services, keeping clubs open until 4 AM every night, just so we can keep moving towards the mirage on the other side of the hot sands of our discontent. Most eventually find what they think they are looking for, only to find out the illusion is just that, an image with no substance.
I’ve done my share of hunting for ‘it’ in all the wrong places: online, in the next book, with the next woman, traversing the next country, spending the next million dollars. I’ve been to thirty-nine countries looking for ‘it’, signed onto half a dozen dating databases looking for ‘it’, read a couple thousand books, lived in a penthouse, and had more women than I am willing to admit here. “It” is not and was not to be found in any of those places. I can’t honestly say I even really knew what ‘it’ was. It may be just now that I am getting the barest inkling of what ‘it’ is.
Right relationships are good, profoundly essential to our well being, and provide safety to a great degree, but most of us are settling for way to little and not taking the time to get it right. We don’t do the homework or studying needed to pass the final exam. We settle for paste rather than diamonds. Yet relational richness far exceeds the value of cold hard diamonds with their deceptive glitter.
We don’t want to let on that most of us often spend big chunks of our lives wondering what the point is to all of what we do. It gets to the degree that one wonders if it is worth even going on with life. Suicide is now the number one cause of death besides accidents in the very age groups that ought to be embracing life most fully. One could call it the post-modern blahs. One could call it burnout. One can call it depression. Others call it mid-life crisis. All are correct.
We run ever faster, yet feel we are losing ground in our quest to reach the things we presently think or once thought matter. A friend of mine, a multi-millionaire, one afternoon mentioned that he had seen his son born and then suddenly watched him graduate from university. He lost his only son’s childhood because he spent six days a week for thirty-seven years in a windowless cell chasing the American Dream of more is better. This son followed the same dream and died of alcoholic poisoning at age thirty-two, having found nothing worth living for at the top. It is hard to describe the coldness that soaks through one’s soul and being on a blustery winter day when standing with a desolate father at the grave of his only son who thought he had it all only to find out he had nothing.
There is a smaller number of people that has discovered the profoundly rich journey of embracing and sharing true community, that rare abundant experience when a group of people is reading off the same page, speaking the same language, and seeking the same goals. Perhaps the most intoxicating relational experience I have known is the esprit de corps that derives from a community group joining together to do the impossible on behalf of those who cannot do for themselves. At the risk of being called relationally phobic, I have found it even more fulfilling than even the most intense of romantic ascensions. It is my guess that most of us have never really experienced this joining together of a group to do the impossible. The closest many of us get is watching our favorite football teams pull off the big come back in the fourth quarter from the La-z-Boy recliner. We were meant for far far more than that.
For reasons having nothing to do with my personal merits I have found myself experiencing esprit des corps three times in my life and three times I have experienced the great angst that comes from its tumultuous disruption. As wondrous as it is, the fragility of it is profoundly disquieting. Each time the disintegration of these experiences was not unlike the shattering of the magnificent crystal and porcelain on the pavements of Germany during the darkest hours of Krystallnacht during the Second World War. The pain can be beyond description.
Most of us have known that glorious sensation of meeting someone and finding he or she has a history and values similar to our own. The experience can be beyond intoxicating, the ‘chemistry’ electrifying. Finding a group, a community can be even more so. Yet there is an “It” far more transcendent and fulfilling to one-on-one relationship or even esprit des corps. It was to manifest itself to me the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
It is so appropriate that on this first day of Advent I would be given a gift of the highest order, a gift of grace that only confirms my budding conception of what we are all looking for – the resonance of our souls with the Heart of the One who before the foundations of time created all that is. I almost missed this incredible gift, having been thinking of a different plan for the day. My dear friend, Joanne, now confined to a wheelchair and unable to drive, wished to have a reunion with her academic mentor of more than twenty five years ago, one who has stood by her as she saw her marriage crumble, her health destroyed, all things precious taken away excepting for one – her resonance with the One that came before the advent of Time. Joanne learned decades ago what I am only just now starting to get a glimmer of.
So it was I found myself driving yet further north in winter on the first Sunday of Advent not looking for anything in particular, rather merely acting as a facilitator for this reunion that would bring a quarter century full circle in several lives. As it was, I was to be far more than a mere chauffeur. I would be a privileged observer and beneficiary of the closing of this circle. Our destination proved to be the mother house of the Sisters of Charity in North America. It was there that Joanne entered into a sacred reunion with Grace, a Sister Of Charity, one who has for more than three decades prayed her across an ocean of storms. It was there that I received another lesson in what “It” is and where to find “It”. I suddenly found myself a pilgrim and mere first-year student in a place of stunning inner and outer beauty, absolutely transfixed. I encountered the manifest love of God in His creation and in His faithful servants.
Being invited into the staggering beauty of the Chapel Caritas Christi, a shimmering cube of crystalline rainbows, I was presented with a holographic image of what “It’ is. Some ninety Sisters of Charity lifted their voices in interwoven strands of praise to the cerulean heavens, knowing the One who is ‘It’. The resonance of their voices between the inner faces of those crystalline panels reflected the resonance of their souls with the Heart of the One who had created all that is. It was with these ninety followers of the One from before time that we shared the bread and wine, those continual reminders of the ultimate gift of the One Himself, given on our behalf.
Love is overwhelming and profoundly gracious in a way I simply cannot even describe. In a world of car jackings, daily terrorist bombings, thrill seeking adolescence snipers, and narcissistic consumption of the Creation in its every form, it is hard to assimilate that one could actually reach a place by car where all other things have passed away except love. The Mother House is actually a place of waiting and preparation for selfless women who have separated their lives from the world and subordinated their own wants in order to be available to the One who could really fulfill their every desire.
For decades each of them has gone out into the world to serve, often in conditions of privation beyond our imagination. These platinum-haired angels of charity are more aptly named than they can even imagine. Collectively these messengers of love have given some 5,000 years of service to others and at the same time given up 5,000 years of frenzied searching for their own fulfillment. In this stunning place of concentrated love, these septuagenarian and octogenarian faithful wait in worshipful anticipation of that final journey to a place where there shall no longer be any night, where they shall not have need of a lamp or even the sun, because the Lord shall illumine them forever. In the meantime they keep praying for us out here, driving the wedge of love further into the growing darkness around us. Such a concentration of intercessory love is acting as a vast prism, shattering the hatred and meanness of a fallen world, reminding us that in the end the only thing that will remain is love.
As the magnificent panels in Chapel Caritas Christi fracture the brilliance of clarified winter sunshine into every conceivable color, I am renewed inside a multi-faceted metaphor of the multi-hued love of the One Who was before time. The physical and emotional feeling of this quiet refuge on a hill reminds me of the promise that one day a new city will descend on earth, the New Jerusalem, a place where there will no more tears, mourning or crying. The gavel will no longer fall. Swords will have been turned into plowshares.
In a way beyond words I felt as a small child in a place of absolute safety. The horrors of daily life and war in our world were forgotten. Love and beauty are simply incompatible with what have become the hideous distractions of desperately alone people on hapless searches for belonging and beauty in all the wrong places. I spent more than half a century not knowing this is what I was looking for – the immersion of self in the only One who can provide love and safety in a way that allows our restless nervous searching to finally cease.
"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added unto you."
The First Sunday in Advent
Greensberg, Pennsylvania
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Part 2. A Journey Through the Aperture of Death
The greatest journey to be made is one that all of us will make and it is a journey that we have little input into the circumstances of. Death is especially frightening to those of us in the Western world. Eastern peoples are more inclined to see it as part and parcel to living, not the ultimate foe that we have come to view it as here in the west.
Yet death can be a gentle experience here in the West. “Afternoon Tea” describes the most gentle of passings. An elder saint stood watch over four of her family members as they passed over to the other side. Especially poignant was her experience of quietly making tea for her son and telling him of her love for him and turning to find he had gone over; just like that. It seemed so easy.
On a clear February day over Texas seven champions of the skies were moments from reunions with their families when their chariot disintegrated at 17,000 miles an hour. In “Contrails” we are reminded of how even in the face of death we can be doing great things.
“Transformations” describes the passing of a dear friend to his eternal home after a tortured journey that included a double lung transplant. Christian novels enjoyed by Cooper, his widow, and myself became non-fiction for Cooper when he passed over.
“Input” provides a somewhat acerbic view of our frenetic world with its information-overload. Yet there is promise of a quiet journey to a new world of peace and serenity, a place of no more pain or tears.
A young man I had the good fortune to mentor for half of his life had the bad fortune of dying fifty years too soon. This gift gentle soul made the world a much better place for his brief sojourn here. “My Favorite Explorer” captures his spirit of inquiry and learning.
“Living a Lifetime Over a Long Weekend” describes my various encounters with death or tragedy in the space of several days. Even in the midst of all this evidence was forthcoming that new life is always to be found in our midst. Hope is to be found in the most subtle ways. A sparrow building its nest on a mausoleum wreath brought warmth to a cold gray day in the cemetery.
Afternoon Tea
England is a place rich in ancient castles, country manor houses, inspiring cathedrals, grand museums, and botanical delights. The climate in England is quite suited to the propagation of magnificent flower gardens – cool and very rainy with a lot of cloud cover. This tends to promote the virtual immortalization of blossoms of impossible variety and color; blooms that last six weeks in the United Kingdom might last only six hours here in the American South where intense August sunlight can wither them to brown wisps of memory in short order. It is beyond counting, the number of times I have waged war against the South Carolina sun to keep my impatiens from premature incineration. Yet, there is a down side to the British climate so well suited to long-lived floral delights. The dense cloudy skies and continuous rain tend to depress rather than delight humans.
Being an industrious lot, the British have long adopted pleasing indoor activities to take their minds off the inclement weather. One of these interior rituals is afternoon tea, a time out when hot tea and cream is served with some fine warm pastry – a scone, cobbler, or other sweet dessert. Added to these are good conversation and a nice warm fireplace. Speaking from personal experience, it is a most civilized amenity of life. The practice of taking afternoon tea never really caught on over here on the west side of the Atlantic. Americans tend to live too fast for such things and our weather does not usually keep us confined behind murky window panes.
One does find occasional exceptions on this side. Extreme old age and disability have ways of slowing one down to indulge in the small simple pleasures of life. The big grand adventures are now off limits. Phillip Simmons wrote in his poignant book, Learning to Fall, of the blessings of living an imperfect life – in his case a life being whittled away by the certain uncertainties of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He has figured out that the small simple things in life are really the ones that give life color and texture, not the big noteworthy exploits. Fortunately, he was a professor of English and writing and he has left to the public domain a fine collection of essays about his lessons in what matters most in life. I think his essays should be required reading for the majority of us who miss out on true living because we are so intent on climbing the ladder of success, not realizing it has been leaning against the wrong wall all along. The whole American consumer culture is hanging on a ladder leaning against a wall of uncertain strength at best.
Last Sunday afternoon about 3 PM a dear friend, Elva M Rice, who has long called me “my second boy,” was making tea for her quadriplegic son, Ron. Ninety-one years and the pitfalls of aging have conspired to keep her in a wheelchair and making tea is a major effort for her. If the truth be known, everything except prayer is a major effort for her. Being a quadriplegic for thirty-seven years means much of life is lived in an air bed. In this case, these two experts on the simple things had long adapted to living out their lives in a single large room that functioned as bedroom, living room, and kitchen. From his nearby bed, Ron told his mother that he loved her very much and that is was time for him to go. No big deal for most of us fast-moving Americans, but these two had long since stopped going places, except for expeditions to the hospital during medical crises. Saying “It’s time for me to go” was a big deal. It proved a much bigger deal when Ron’s dear mother turned away from the stove after having also just spoken aloud of her love for him. She saw that he had, in fact - gone. Just like that. He had made that infinite journey to the place from which no one sends e-mail or postcards.
What happened was perhaps the most civilized enactment of a tea ceremony that ever took place on earth - a frail ancient mother telling her son of her love for him, while making a bit of tea in the aureate sunlight of an early March afternoon, his having permission to take quiet leave of a tortured life. Tea ceremonies in Japan are a legendary part of the culture; even more so than in Britain, yet none compared to this one acted out in a battered old kitchen where the only ritual implements used were a burned pot, a rough old mug and a flexible plastic straw. Even the rodents living in the ceiling probably took pause.
This house has seen at least four quiet passings to that far place. Ron’s mother lavished love on her invalid preacher husband for eight years before he slipped over. Before that, she loved his brother to safety on the other shore. Before that, she loved her daughter Mary, of a mere thirty-one years, over to infinity. This decaying old house has proven to be a gracious way station for four very tired souls ready for the rest of a lifetime.
What made this tea ceremony a quiet civilized event, rather than a great tragedy was the long-standing faith of several generations. I have always been astounded at how Mrs. Rice always says, “The Lord has been so very good to me.” She obviously knows something most of us don’t know. She lives in a disintegrating house in a disintegrating neighborhood, gets a pension of $54.10 from the textile mill, has seen the passage of four in her immediate family and most of her twelve siblings. She has been years in a wheelchair, doesn’t have any of what the American culture says we need for full successful lives, yet she knows and declares the Lord has been good to her. Her ladder is obviously leaning against a wall most of us don’t even know about. And she is quite able to climb it despite being bound to a wheelchair by an exquisitely frail body that has long betrayed her.
Unlike flowers that can be incinerated by the torrid heat of the summer sun, Ron, his sister, his father, and his uncle have all found eternal life in a land where the climate is perfect, where nothing withers and nothing dies. The faith of this faithful mother has seen them all safely through the hardest voyage of life. This same faith will see this trusting saint through herself. At nine-one she knows it will not be long until it’s time for her to go. She is not afraid; in fact, she is eager with anticipation to make the journey. I only hope she doesn’t do it just yet. There are still some of us who need to sit at her feet and get some lessons on the things that matter in life.
"Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.”
March 20
Anderson, South Carolina
Contrails
It is the 2nd of February with grand cerulean skies and 67 degrees. I have all the doors open with a fine breeze blowing out the stagnance of winter that has accreted in the house during the past three months of seasonal darkness. The sky is crisscrossed with contrails, which have always inspired and enthralled me, giving me the inspiration for some of my best poems. I derive grand pleasures from ruminating what dreams people were being carried to on them, especially the vermillion ones at sunset. Because I live one hundred thirty miles east of the busiest airport in the world, most twilights afford a view of as many as a dozen of these at a time since that hundred and thirty miles gives jets time to climb seven miles or more above me into the last gleaming remains of the day.
As of yesterday morning, however contrails just aren’t the same anymore. We all watched one as it pulsated in the cobalt Texas sky and split into multiple streams at Mach 18 yesterday - another one of those seminal images has been etched into our memories, only too soon. It proved to be a harbinger of doom as America and Israel lost seven of their best, just sixteen minutes before a happy reunion with family and those that dreamed and dared to do big things, impossible things.
Tragically, both of our countries are becoming expert at suffering hideous losses. One can only hope that one day we will all be able to simply picnic on warm fields of spring grass rather than search out our fallen comrades and the detritus of their once gleaming chariots and towers.
February 2
Anderson, South Carolina
Transformations
For some eleven years now, I have been part of a tiny informal book club, consisting only of myself, Lynda, and her husband Cooper. Fortunately for me, Lynda was and continues to be a voracious reader. For some years Lynda and I were the only two members of the club. We both worked in the same hospital for a decade, and one of my favorite things to do was disappear from my office and wander to her warren of rooms in the Radiation Oncology department.
As you might imagine, Radiation Oncology is serious business with high stakes, and often the stories did not have happy endings for the patients who experienced the raw power of decaying atoms flung at them from an assortment of accelerators. Time-outs to swap books were a grand relief from the heady business of isotopes and tumors. I usually came out the winner on these rendezvous in that Lynda was probably the best customer of the three local Christian bookstores and I was usually the sole beneficiary of her acquisitions after she read these.
After some years, one day Cooper decided to try reading one of our favorite authors, this after having boasted proudly of not having read any kind of book in decades. I couldn’t recall which book it was that got his attention but he was instantly hooked on Christian fiction in its several forms. Lynda immediately recalled which one it was, Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind. From then on he left us in the dust, reading several books a week. Absolutely amazing was his ability to read an eight-hundred page paperback book without leaving the slightest mark on the covers or the slightest crease in the binding. We never did quite figure out how he did this. The transformation that resulted in his life was even more impressive. It seems that a lot of the creases and wrinkles that had been torn into Cooper’s spirit by the knocks of life were ironed out and healed by the stories we all shared in these mountains of books.
For the next six or seven years we watched this transformation prove permanent, even when it was tested by the severest of challenges, idiopathic interstitial lung disease, a long high falutin’ name for lung failure for which the docs are clueless as to the cause. This disorder sets one up for a very long, slow downward journey into suffocation. One’s consciousness shrinks down to nothing but the next breath. One’s world becomes very tiny, crowded with concentrators, oxygen bottles, and assorted polyethylene tubing. Fortunately, Cooper had an angel living in that tiny world with him who went the thousandth mile to make life bearable for him.
Because of the efforts of Lynda and a cast of hundreds, Cooper experienced the miracle of a double lung transplant this past September, and he was able to return home and bask in the wonderment of life beyond the next breath. Just a couple of days ago, Cooper experienced an even greater transformation. He got a whole new body.
Death is an absolutely universal phenomenon yet it remains a frightening veil to most of us. Last night I watched the film “Star Gate,” a science fiction piece about an ancient gateway found buried in Egypt that allowed one in but a few seconds to transit a million light years of time/space to arrive on another world in another galaxy. What is not science fiction is that those who embrace faith and belief in the redemptive power of the Son of God get to go through a Son Gate rather than a Star Gate. Instead of ending up on a barren desert world with three moons, where every one is a slave in a mining colony, those of faith find themselves sons and daughters of the King of Kings in a place where there is no night, no tears, and the streets made of gold so pure as to be transparent.
When Lynda called to tell me of Cooper’s latest transformation, I told Lynda that for us, the books would still be Christian fiction but for Cooper they were now all non-fiction, a profound new reality no longer bound in the imagination of writers. He no longer needs to worry about creases on the spine, or marks on the covers. His name is written in the Lamb’s book of Life and he has given up the need for mass paperbacks and trade hardbound fiction. Lynda and I will keep reading, knowing that one day we too will graduate to non-fiction. For those of us with faith it does not have to be a scary transition. We won’t be left behind. Cooper wasn’t.
In the best selling non-fiction work ever written, we are told,
“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of man have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you … If you just believe, then all things are possible.”
February 8
Anderson, South Carolina
Input
The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urban mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.
I recall being in the position six years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.
It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week and we were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.
As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Alas, all I found were twelve group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under the siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
While connected to the planet, I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that most world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis, I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, has just stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency four years ago. He says it is yet to occur.
We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives, and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. The Air Force dropped a 21,000-pound bomb on Florida yesterday and celebrated. I saw the crater on my screen minutes ago.
For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.
Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior.
Being outside the bounds of linear time, He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and must face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.
On that fateful Friday centuries ago, the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The real Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.
“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
March 12
Seaton Devon
My Favorite Explorer
If I were eight years old and standing in front of my third grade class I would start out my speech with a nervous voice “My Favorite Explorer.” Alas, we are far beyond the third grade in every conceivable way and are gathered here to share in the heaviness of the greatest journey we are ever called to make in life.
Daniel Boorstin is the best-selling author who has written two dozen vast epics of exploration. Perhaps his best-known one is The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself. Daniel Boorstin should have come here to our little town in the northwest corner of South Carolina and he would have found one of the world’s truly great explorers. Unfortunately, when Boorstin was writing the manuscript for this vast epic, Harold was but one year old.
I have done a bit of exploration myself, which has taken me to thirty-nine countries and through five careers and seven universities, but I never became what one could rightly call an explorer. At fifty-one I still am not an explorer. Harold was truly an explorer by the time he was ten, even though he had barely been beyond the city limits of Anderson by then.
Ten years ago I was out in March trimming the holly bushes of the house that I had bought perhaps two weeks before. My house happened to be next door to an explorer. At the time the two houses now between us were still merely concepts in a developer’s mind. I remember standing up on my aluminum ladder muttering unrepeatables as I tried to reach the top of those prickly bushes, which grow faster than Chinese bamboo.
A slight ten-year old boy with vibrant red hair came up to the bottom of my ladder and asked if he could help me with the thorny trimmings that were accreting on the ground around me. That was the kind of gentle spirit Harold was. As we were trimming and hauling, with absolute sincerity, he asked me if I could tell him about the nature of the universe. He pressed really hard, wanting to know about the evolution of stars, the formation of planets, the compression of time. I knew I had a live one of the highest order. Fortunately, I had studied astronomy and was able to avoid humiliation during our first meeting. During the next ten years, he would never take a simplistic answer for any question about anything from me or anyone else. That is the nature of explorers.
In the next ten years, Harold and I shared countless explorations. We walked assorted dogs, read a million books and argued about conclusions, did a bit of dumpster diving, carpentry in my shop, even some expansive climbing and hiking in the mountains. Our last physical adventure was merely to the Winn-Dixie on a Friday night where he assisted me in buying the food for a five-course retirement dinner planned for the next night. Harold was to be at that dinner, as he so enjoyed heated conversation with my retiring friend over happy meals at what came to be called the Three Bears House. I remember how pleasing it was having him with me in the grocery pushing the cart for me. It seemed luxurious to have him pushing. I have always had to push my own cart up until now. He even made a long catch as I threw a garlic clove across the produce section to him. Crème of pumpkin soup calls for fresh garlic.
I taught him how to really play chess. I thought I was hot stuff, beating a little kid. I should have been paying better attention. For a good long time I always won. The last time we played chess, he took his queen and two other major pieces from the board before we started the game, and yet he pounded me into check mate in a matter of minutes. Harold told me that there are 10 to the 120th power possible moves in chess. He was well on his way to exploring which of those would humble the likes of me. His last night with us, Harold was at my house on the Internet, showing me end-game variations of the grand masters. I was not real excited about being mated in four brisk moves.
It took eighteen months, but I finally finished building Harold the ultimate chessboard. Explorers need sea-worthy ships to find the edge of the world. Harold needed something more than a 12-inch cardboard playing surface with small plastic pieces to continue his exploration of those 10 to the 120th possibilities in chess. I found perhaps ten books on chess variations as I quietly looked through his room that first awful day after he left our dock.
Harold journeyed to places of which I have no knowledge. One day he decided to explore Johann Sebastian Bach. He simply sat himself down at the piano and over time made Bach’s Goldberg Variations part of his being, part of his essence. Harold had gone with me over to Boulevard Baptist just after 9-11 for a community meeting where there happened to be a magnificent grand piano. After the meeting, he sat down at that piano and in stunned awe we watched as he took us to parts unknown.
Harold had a way with paintbrushes and pastels, but put a pencil in his hand and give him a good piece of water-marked paper - stand back. I consider myself a decent novice painter, but with a pencil and paper Harold was in the deep end of the pool. My visual explorations are still on the steps in the baby pool by comparison. Yet, Harold never failed to, with all sincerity, compliment me in very specific detail about how my own fledgling efforts at painting were progressing. The last time he did so was on his last Friday night about 10 PM after we had unloaded the groceries and were on the Internet. The fact that I am painting now is due primarily to Harold’s encouragement over our years of exploration.
Harold took me to other places unknown to me, ones you cannot reach by car, piano, or paint brush. He took me into the inner thought of the Vietnamese Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh. My now very worn copy of the little book, Peace in Every Step, was a gift from Harold three years ago. He read it six times. I have read parts of it dozens of times. I told Harold many times this book has been one of the most important books I have ever read. Despite my own conservative Christian orientation, there have been times when I have had massive struggles on my journey and Harold understood these struggles better than most therapists. Harold knew the great pearls in Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings would help me. They still do in a profound way. Harold could always see the good in people and in their own unique ways of seeking spiritual enlightenment.
A year ago in February I was out in the front yard trimming two very large crepe myrtle trees when Harold came up and asked me if he could help move the massive pile of cuttings to my compost pit. Harold always took great delight in helping me while I was in the yard. On that cold gray winter morning he took me to a place that only parents can really know. I, having never married, would have never known anything whatever of the joy of parenting if it had not been for Harold. I was again up on the same ladder of nine years earlier when Harold simply told me that he considered me his “chosen father.” I nearly fell off the ladder as I teared up and choked up. I suddenly had an inkling of the great joy parents experience when they see their children achieve important milestones. Harold took me to a place I would have never dreamed of getting to go. If it ever happens that I become a parent, I will owe it to Harold.
Every true explorer has to have a benefactor. Columbus would never have made it to America without the financial and moral support of the Queen back in the Old World. The same could be said of all the ancient mariners who sailed the unknown seas. Harold and his sisters had the vast fortune of having not one, but two great benefactors. His dear mother has gone to Wal-Mart every night for far more than a decade in order to allow her three magnificent children to make their own explorations in life. Let it be recorded that our dear Anita loved and loves her children with every part of her being. Let no one doubt that she has done this faithfully without ever wavering, even when life circumstances cast her into class five rapids. I bear ten years of personal testimony to this - exactly half of Harold’s lifetime.
Harold, Rebecca, and Diana have all basked in the ultimate loving benevolence of their dear Aunt Kitty. I have had the great fortune to meet this gentle selfless soul a number of times and the investment she has made in these lives will pay dividends for time beyond measure. I can assure you that these dividends are even accruing in my life through what she has done for these fine children and their dear mother. Harold was Aunt Kitty’s special courier of benevolence into my own life.
Exploration is a team effort. The greatest sea-faring explorers need able loyal crews to hoist the sails and weather the storms. Harold was a great explorer who has taken me to grand places beyond the reach of jet turbines or ocean-going ships. He was able to do so with the incredible crew he had in his mother and dear aunt and many of those in the small church where he found safe harbor when the seas became stormy.
May the life of this gentle young explorer challenge each of us to think about where we are headed in life, to take the time to think about how we can make a better more loving gentle world. Harold wanted that more than anything, even life itself. And so he willingly paid the ultimate price.
April 27
Anderson, South Carolina
Living a Lifetime Over a Long Weekend
Statistics indicate that the most dangerous part of a commercial jet flight is the landing phase. It seems that it is easier and safer to make it up into the sky than it is to come down out of it. In February the world saw the tragic reality of what happens when an attempt to return safely to earth goes awry. Columbia was immolated by the blistering heat of reentry, yet some twenty years earlier Challenger was lost when it attempted to make it up into the heavens. So far, the statistics don’t yield a clear conclusion about the most dangerous aspects of space flight. What we can be certain of is that life in space is a risky business.
I have just had several of my own experiences that indicate life is plenty risky even for those of us that don’t take a seat on top of a solid-fuel rocket. On Thursday, my own attempt to get a mere eight miles up into the sky proved nearly fatal. A large seabird attempting to get about one mile up found its attempt fatal when it made the mistake of getting sucked into the jet turbine just outside my triple-paned Lexan window. Jet turbines are fragile and finicky, and don’t like having six pound objects thrown into them at four hundred miles an hour. They tend to be reactive and disintegrate, sometimes taking the plane attached to them to eternity. Depending on your religious persuasion, I was either rather lucky or rather blessed. The housing of the engine kept the disintegrating turbine from coming through the fuselage like a giant chain saw.
After spending the warmest spring on record on the continent, basking in the best that Europe has to offer, one does not expect on the journey home to be immediately faced with things like mortality, death, and multiple homicide. I sure didn’t expect it when I got on that jet Thursday. I sure didn’t expect to face it again on Friday within hours of my arrival, and yet again on Saturday.
I was advised that a bank robbery had taken place here Thursday, the day I nearly touched eternity myself. Three people were killed and embraced eternity. A professor and his wife visiting the bank and a bank employee were shot dead by the robber. A friend of mine worked for that professor and will have to go into the office the day after tomorrow and tell his colleagues and students about the sudden rupture of their comfortable academic world; one that had seemed so safe and secure. It will be a very long Monday for many on that campus.
Friday, I found myself standing in the exact same parlor of the local funeral home at an open casket placed on the same stand that I had stood in front of three times in the weeks before I left North America. Was this really possible? My circle of friends has been depopulated this year.
Life is a clear window of opportunity framed by mysterious opaque realities – the wonder of birth and the unknown curtain of death. How can it be that things that have happened billions of times have revealed so little of their nature to us? How can it be that on Thursday I was basking in the spectral wonders of Holland’s tulip gardens, and later that day nearly died in the skies above those gardens, yet survived, only to learn that others did not survive a simple journey into the local bank?
I am now here sitting on a cold folding metal chair in a frigid mausoleum with a strong wind blowing through openings in the speckled granite slabs surrounding us. It is one of those harsh gray May days that was supposed to have been spent sometime back in January or February, not here in late May when we are craving a chance to thaw out from winter. This isn’t what I had in mind for a Saturday in the prime of spring, spending a cold leaden day in a cemetery listening to a distraught daughter delivering her own mother’s eulogy.
People facing catastrophic illness develop some special abilities to compensate for functional and emotional losses. Blind people develop enhanced hearing, the ability to get the most out of life in a different way. Sitting on my right side is a dear friend who has been fighting cancer and several other physiologic nightmares for much of her adult life. On the other side of me sits a dear friend who is nine years into bonus time after a brain stem tumor nearly took her out of the seen world and into that opaque region we know nothing about. Both have developed the ability to find the smallest bit of color and wonder in the midst of even the harshest circumstances.
Both noticed that which I did not notice, that life really is more powerful and tenacious than death. I was caught up in blown jet engines, near misses on the interstate, a triple homicide, and now this cold windy farewell. On one of the marble slabs in front of us is a silk flower wreath. Both of my friends observed and eventually pointed out to me the frequent flights of a small sparrow to and from that wreath. In this stone shrine to death, this sparrow was building a nest in those silk flowers and establishing a beachhead for life. Even here in this place, new life would come forth on a warm day in early June.
The flights of this small bird proved a stunning metaphor and reminder of the most cherished promises and proclamations in the Christian scriptures. What did or did not happen inside of that jet engine, what happened inside of that bank, what happened in that mausoleum only confirms what my friends already know deep down in their souls. True security and eternal life are ultimate gifts from God, just for the asking.
“Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Late May, Forest Lawn, South Carolina
Yet death can be a gentle experience here in the West. “Afternoon Tea” describes the most gentle of passings. An elder saint stood watch over four of her family members as they passed over to the other side. Especially poignant was her experience of quietly making tea for her son and telling him of her love for him and turning to find he had gone over; just like that. It seemed so easy.
On a clear February day over Texas seven champions of the skies were moments from reunions with their families when their chariot disintegrated at 17,000 miles an hour. In “Contrails” we are reminded of how even in the face of death we can be doing great things.
“Transformations” describes the passing of a dear friend to his eternal home after a tortured journey that included a double lung transplant. Christian novels enjoyed by Cooper, his widow, and myself became non-fiction for Cooper when he passed over.
“Input” provides a somewhat acerbic view of our frenetic world with its information-overload. Yet there is promise of a quiet journey to a new world of peace and serenity, a place of no more pain or tears.
A young man I had the good fortune to mentor for half of his life had the bad fortune of dying fifty years too soon. This gift gentle soul made the world a much better place for his brief sojourn here. “My Favorite Explorer” captures his spirit of inquiry and learning.
“Living a Lifetime Over a Long Weekend” describes my various encounters with death or tragedy in the space of several days. Even in the midst of all this evidence was forthcoming that new life is always to be found in our midst. Hope is to be found in the most subtle ways. A sparrow building its nest on a mausoleum wreath brought warmth to a cold gray day in the cemetery.
Afternoon Tea
England is a place rich in ancient castles, country manor houses, inspiring cathedrals, grand museums, and botanical delights. The climate in England is quite suited to the propagation of magnificent flower gardens – cool and very rainy with a lot of cloud cover. This tends to promote the virtual immortalization of blossoms of impossible variety and color; blooms that last six weeks in the United Kingdom might last only six hours here in the American South where intense August sunlight can wither them to brown wisps of memory in short order. It is beyond counting, the number of times I have waged war against the South Carolina sun to keep my impatiens from premature incineration. Yet, there is a down side to the British climate so well suited to long-lived floral delights. The dense cloudy skies and continuous rain tend to depress rather than delight humans.
Being an industrious lot, the British have long adopted pleasing indoor activities to take their minds off the inclement weather. One of these interior rituals is afternoon tea, a time out when hot tea and cream is served with some fine warm pastry – a scone, cobbler, or other sweet dessert. Added to these are good conversation and a nice warm fireplace. Speaking from personal experience, it is a most civilized amenity of life. The practice of taking afternoon tea never really caught on over here on the west side of the Atlantic. Americans tend to live too fast for such things and our weather does not usually keep us confined behind murky window panes.
One does find occasional exceptions on this side. Extreme old age and disability have ways of slowing one down to indulge in the small simple pleasures of life. The big grand adventures are now off limits. Phillip Simmons wrote in his poignant book, Learning to Fall, of the blessings of living an imperfect life – in his case a life being whittled away by the certain uncertainties of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He has figured out that the small simple things in life are really the ones that give life color and texture, not the big noteworthy exploits. Fortunately, he was a professor of English and writing and he has left to the public domain a fine collection of essays about his lessons in what matters most in life. I think his essays should be required reading for the majority of us who miss out on true living because we are so intent on climbing the ladder of success, not realizing it has been leaning against the wrong wall all along. The whole American consumer culture is hanging on a ladder leaning against a wall of uncertain strength at best.
Last Sunday afternoon about 3 PM a dear friend, Elva M Rice, who has long called me “my second boy,” was making tea for her quadriplegic son, Ron. Ninety-one years and the pitfalls of aging have conspired to keep her in a wheelchair and making tea is a major effort for her. If the truth be known, everything except prayer is a major effort for her. Being a quadriplegic for thirty-seven years means much of life is lived in an air bed. In this case, these two experts on the simple things had long adapted to living out their lives in a single large room that functioned as bedroom, living room, and kitchen. From his nearby bed, Ron told his mother that he loved her very much and that is was time for him to go. No big deal for most of us fast-moving Americans, but these two had long since stopped going places, except for expeditions to the hospital during medical crises. Saying “It’s time for me to go” was a big deal. It proved a much bigger deal when Ron’s dear mother turned away from the stove after having also just spoken aloud of her love for him. She saw that he had, in fact - gone. Just like that. He had made that infinite journey to the place from which no one sends e-mail or postcards.
What happened was perhaps the most civilized enactment of a tea ceremony that ever took place on earth - a frail ancient mother telling her son of her love for him, while making a bit of tea in the aureate sunlight of an early March afternoon, his having permission to take quiet leave of a tortured life. Tea ceremonies in Japan are a legendary part of the culture; even more so than in Britain, yet none compared to this one acted out in a battered old kitchen where the only ritual implements used were a burned pot, a rough old mug and a flexible plastic straw. Even the rodents living in the ceiling probably took pause.
This house has seen at least four quiet passings to that far place. Ron’s mother lavished love on her invalid preacher husband for eight years before he slipped over. Before that, she loved his brother to safety on the other shore. Before that, she loved her daughter Mary, of a mere thirty-one years, over to infinity. This decaying old house has proven to be a gracious way station for four very tired souls ready for the rest of a lifetime.
What made this tea ceremony a quiet civilized event, rather than a great tragedy was the long-standing faith of several generations. I have always been astounded at how Mrs. Rice always says, “The Lord has been so very good to me.” She obviously knows something most of us don’t know. She lives in a disintegrating house in a disintegrating neighborhood, gets a pension of $54.10 from the textile mill, has seen the passage of four in her immediate family and most of her twelve siblings. She has been years in a wheelchair, doesn’t have any of what the American culture says we need for full successful lives, yet she knows and declares the Lord has been good to her. Her ladder is obviously leaning against a wall most of us don’t even know about. And she is quite able to climb it despite being bound to a wheelchair by an exquisitely frail body that has long betrayed her.
Unlike flowers that can be incinerated by the torrid heat of the summer sun, Ron, his sister, his father, and his uncle have all found eternal life in a land where the climate is perfect, where nothing withers and nothing dies. The faith of this faithful mother has seen them all safely through the hardest voyage of life. This same faith will see this trusting saint through herself. At nine-one she knows it will not be long until it’s time for her to go. She is not afraid; in fact, she is eager with anticipation to make the journey. I only hope she doesn’t do it just yet. There are still some of us who need to sit at her feet and get some lessons on the things that matter in life.
"Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.”
March 20
Anderson, South Carolina
Contrails
It is the 2nd of February with grand cerulean skies and 67 degrees. I have all the doors open with a fine breeze blowing out the stagnance of winter that has accreted in the house during the past three months of seasonal darkness. The sky is crisscrossed with contrails, which have always inspired and enthralled me, giving me the inspiration for some of my best poems. I derive grand pleasures from ruminating what dreams people were being carried to on them, especially the vermillion ones at sunset. Because I live one hundred thirty miles east of the busiest airport in the world, most twilights afford a view of as many as a dozen of these at a time since that hundred and thirty miles gives jets time to climb seven miles or more above me into the last gleaming remains of the day.
As of yesterday morning, however contrails just aren’t the same anymore. We all watched one as it pulsated in the cobalt Texas sky and split into multiple streams at Mach 18 yesterday - another one of those seminal images has been etched into our memories, only too soon. It proved to be a harbinger of doom as America and Israel lost seven of their best, just sixteen minutes before a happy reunion with family and those that dreamed and dared to do big things, impossible things.
Tragically, both of our countries are becoming expert at suffering hideous losses. One can only hope that one day we will all be able to simply picnic on warm fields of spring grass rather than search out our fallen comrades and the detritus of their once gleaming chariots and towers.
February 2
Anderson, South Carolina
Transformations
For some eleven years now, I have been part of a tiny informal book club, consisting only of myself, Lynda, and her husband Cooper. Fortunately for me, Lynda was and continues to be a voracious reader. For some years Lynda and I were the only two members of the club. We both worked in the same hospital for a decade, and one of my favorite things to do was disappear from my office and wander to her warren of rooms in the Radiation Oncology department.
As you might imagine, Radiation Oncology is serious business with high stakes, and often the stories did not have happy endings for the patients who experienced the raw power of decaying atoms flung at them from an assortment of accelerators. Time-outs to swap books were a grand relief from the heady business of isotopes and tumors. I usually came out the winner on these rendezvous in that Lynda was probably the best customer of the three local Christian bookstores and I was usually the sole beneficiary of her acquisitions after she read these.
After some years, one day Cooper decided to try reading one of our favorite authors, this after having boasted proudly of not having read any kind of book in decades. I couldn’t recall which book it was that got his attention but he was instantly hooked on Christian fiction in its several forms. Lynda immediately recalled which one it was, Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind. From then on he left us in the dust, reading several books a week. Absolutely amazing was his ability to read an eight-hundred page paperback book without leaving the slightest mark on the covers or the slightest crease in the binding. We never did quite figure out how he did this. The transformation that resulted in his life was even more impressive. It seems that a lot of the creases and wrinkles that had been torn into Cooper’s spirit by the knocks of life were ironed out and healed by the stories we all shared in these mountains of books.
For the next six or seven years we watched this transformation prove permanent, even when it was tested by the severest of challenges, idiopathic interstitial lung disease, a long high falutin’ name for lung failure for which the docs are clueless as to the cause. This disorder sets one up for a very long, slow downward journey into suffocation. One’s consciousness shrinks down to nothing but the next breath. One’s world becomes very tiny, crowded with concentrators, oxygen bottles, and assorted polyethylene tubing. Fortunately, Cooper had an angel living in that tiny world with him who went the thousandth mile to make life bearable for him.
Because of the efforts of Lynda and a cast of hundreds, Cooper experienced the miracle of a double lung transplant this past September, and he was able to return home and bask in the wonderment of life beyond the next breath. Just a couple of days ago, Cooper experienced an even greater transformation. He got a whole new body.
Death is an absolutely universal phenomenon yet it remains a frightening veil to most of us. Last night I watched the film “Star Gate,” a science fiction piece about an ancient gateway found buried in Egypt that allowed one in but a few seconds to transit a million light years of time/space to arrive on another world in another galaxy. What is not science fiction is that those who embrace faith and belief in the redemptive power of the Son of God get to go through a Son Gate rather than a Star Gate. Instead of ending up on a barren desert world with three moons, where every one is a slave in a mining colony, those of faith find themselves sons and daughters of the King of Kings in a place where there is no night, no tears, and the streets made of gold so pure as to be transparent.
When Lynda called to tell me of Cooper’s latest transformation, I told Lynda that for us, the books would still be Christian fiction but for Cooper they were now all non-fiction, a profound new reality no longer bound in the imagination of writers. He no longer needs to worry about creases on the spine, or marks on the covers. His name is written in the Lamb’s book of Life and he has given up the need for mass paperbacks and trade hardbound fiction. Lynda and I will keep reading, knowing that one day we too will graduate to non-fiction. For those of us with faith it does not have to be a scary transition. We won’t be left behind. Cooper wasn’t.
In the best selling non-fiction work ever written, we are told,
“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of man have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you … If you just believe, then all things are possible.”
February 8
Anderson, South Carolina
Input
The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urban mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.
I recall being in the position six years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.
It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week and we were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.
As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Alas, all I found were twelve group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under the siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
While connected to the planet, I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that most world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis, I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, has just stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency four years ago. He says it is yet to occur.
We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives, and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. The Air Force dropped a 21,000-pound bomb on Florida yesterday and celebrated. I saw the crater on my screen minutes ago.
For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.
Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior.
Being outside the bounds of linear time, He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and must face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.
On that fateful Friday centuries ago, the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The real Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.
“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
March 12
Seaton Devon
My Favorite Explorer
If I were eight years old and standing in front of my third grade class I would start out my speech with a nervous voice “My Favorite Explorer.” Alas, we are far beyond the third grade in every conceivable way and are gathered here to share in the heaviness of the greatest journey we are ever called to make in life.
Daniel Boorstin is the best-selling author who has written two dozen vast epics of exploration. Perhaps his best-known one is The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself. Daniel Boorstin should have come here to our little town in the northwest corner of South Carolina and he would have found one of the world’s truly great explorers. Unfortunately, when Boorstin was writing the manuscript for this vast epic, Harold was but one year old.
I have done a bit of exploration myself, which has taken me to thirty-nine countries and through five careers and seven universities, but I never became what one could rightly call an explorer. At fifty-one I still am not an explorer. Harold was truly an explorer by the time he was ten, even though he had barely been beyond the city limits of Anderson by then.
Ten years ago I was out in March trimming the holly bushes of the house that I had bought perhaps two weeks before. My house happened to be next door to an explorer. At the time the two houses now between us were still merely concepts in a developer’s mind. I remember standing up on my aluminum ladder muttering unrepeatables as I tried to reach the top of those prickly bushes, which grow faster than Chinese bamboo.
A slight ten-year old boy with vibrant red hair came up to the bottom of my ladder and asked if he could help me with the thorny trimmings that were accreting on the ground around me. That was the kind of gentle spirit Harold was. As we were trimming and hauling, with absolute sincerity, he asked me if I could tell him about the nature of the universe. He pressed really hard, wanting to know about the evolution of stars, the formation of planets, the compression of time. I knew I had a live one of the highest order. Fortunately, I had studied astronomy and was able to avoid humiliation during our first meeting. During the next ten years, he would never take a simplistic answer for any question about anything from me or anyone else. That is the nature of explorers.
In the next ten years, Harold and I shared countless explorations. We walked assorted dogs, read a million books and argued about conclusions, did a bit of dumpster diving, carpentry in my shop, even some expansive climbing and hiking in the mountains. Our last physical adventure was merely to the Winn-Dixie on a Friday night where he assisted me in buying the food for a five-course retirement dinner planned for the next night. Harold was to be at that dinner, as he so enjoyed heated conversation with my retiring friend over happy meals at what came to be called the Three Bears House. I remember how pleasing it was having him with me in the grocery pushing the cart for me. It seemed luxurious to have him pushing. I have always had to push my own cart up until now. He even made a long catch as I threw a garlic clove across the produce section to him. Crème of pumpkin soup calls for fresh garlic.
I taught him how to really play chess. I thought I was hot stuff, beating a little kid. I should have been paying better attention. For a good long time I always won. The last time we played chess, he took his queen and two other major pieces from the board before we started the game, and yet he pounded me into check mate in a matter of minutes. Harold told me that there are 10 to the 120th power possible moves in chess. He was well on his way to exploring which of those would humble the likes of me. His last night with us, Harold was at my house on the Internet, showing me end-game variations of the grand masters. I was not real excited about being mated in four brisk moves.
It took eighteen months, but I finally finished building Harold the ultimate chessboard. Explorers need sea-worthy ships to find the edge of the world. Harold needed something more than a 12-inch cardboard playing surface with small plastic pieces to continue his exploration of those 10 to the 120th possibilities in chess. I found perhaps ten books on chess variations as I quietly looked through his room that first awful day after he left our dock.
Harold journeyed to places of which I have no knowledge. One day he decided to explore Johann Sebastian Bach. He simply sat himself down at the piano and over time made Bach’s Goldberg Variations part of his being, part of his essence. Harold had gone with me over to Boulevard Baptist just after 9-11 for a community meeting where there happened to be a magnificent grand piano. After the meeting, he sat down at that piano and in stunned awe we watched as he took us to parts unknown.
Harold had a way with paintbrushes and pastels, but put a pencil in his hand and give him a good piece of water-marked paper - stand back. I consider myself a decent novice painter, but with a pencil and paper Harold was in the deep end of the pool. My visual explorations are still on the steps in the baby pool by comparison. Yet, Harold never failed to, with all sincerity, compliment me in very specific detail about how my own fledgling efforts at painting were progressing. The last time he did so was on his last Friday night about 10 PM after we had unloaded the groceries and were on the Internet. The fact that I am painting now is due primarily to Harold’s encouragement over our years of exploration.
Harold took me to other places unknown to me, ones you cannot reach by car, piano, or paint brush. He took me into the inner thought of the Vietnamese Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh. My now very worn copy of the little book, Peace in Every Step, was a gift from Harold three years ago. He read it six times. I have read parts of it dozens of times. I told Harold many times this book has been one of the most important books I have ever read. Despite my own conservative Christian orientation, there have been times when I have had massive struggles on my journey and Harold understood these struggles better than most therapists. Harold knew the great pearls in Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings would help me. They still do in a profound way. Harold could always see the good in people and in their own unique ways of seeking spiritual enlightenment.
A year ago in February I was out in the front yard trimming two very large crepe myrtle trees when Harold came up and asked me if he could help move the massive pile of cuttings to my compost pit. Harold always took great delight in helping me while I was in the yard. On that cold gray winter morning he took me to a place that only parents can really know. I, having never married, would have never known anything whatever of the joy of parenting if it had not been for Harold. I was again up on the same ladder of nine years earlier when Harold simply told me that he considered me his “chosen father.” I nearly fell off the ladder as I teared up and choked up. I suddenly had an inkling of the great joy parents experience when they see their children achieve important milestones. Harold took me to a place I would have never dreamed of getting to go. If it ever happens that I become a parent, I will owe it to Harold.
Every true explorer has to have a benefactor. Columbus would never have made it to America without the financial and moral support of the Queen back in the Old World. The same could be said of all the ancient mariners who sailed the unknown seas. Harold and his sisters had the vast fortune of having not one, but two great benefactors. His dear mother has gone to Wal-Mart every night for far more than a decade in order to allow her three magnificent children to make their own explorations in life. Let it be recorded that our dear Anita loved and loves her children with every part of her being. Let no one doubt that she has done this faithfully without ever wavering, even when life circumstances cast her into class five rapids. I bear ten years of personal testimony to this - exactly half of Harold’s lifetime.
Harold, Rebecca, and Diana have all basked in the ultimate loving benevolence of their dear Aunt Kitty. I have had the great fortune to meet this gentle selfless soul a number of times and the investment she has made in these lives will pay dividends for time beyond measure. I can assure you that these dividends are even accruing in my life through what she has done for these fine children and their dear mother. Harold was Aunt Kitty’s special courier of benevolence into my own life.
Exploration is a team effort. The greatest sea-faring explorers need able loyal crews to hoist the sails and weather the storms. Harold was a great explorer who has taken me to grand places beyond the reach of jet turbines or ocean-going ships. He was able to do so with the incredible crew he had in his mother and dear aunt and many of those in the small church where he found safe harbor when the seas became stormy.
May the life of this gentle young explorer challenge each of us to think about where we are headed in life, to take the time to think about how we can make a better more loving gentle world. Harold wanted that more than anything, even life itself. And so he willingly paid the ultimate price.
April 27
Anderson, South Carolina
Living a Lifetime Over a Long Weekend
Statistics indicate that the most dangerous part of a commercial jet flight is the landing phase. It seems that it is easier and safer to make it up into the sky than it is to come down out of it. In February the world saw the tragic reality of what happens when an attempt to return safely to earth goes awry. Columbia was immolated by the blistering heat of reentry, yet some twenty years earlier Challenger was lost when it attempted to make it up into the heavens. So far, the statistics don’t yield a clear conclusion about the most dangerous aspects of space flight. What we can be certain of is that life in space is a risky business.
I have just had several of my own experiences that indicate life is plenty risky even for those of us that don’t take a seat on top of a solid-fuel rocket. On Thursday, my own attempt to get a mere eight miles up into the sky proved nearly fatal. A large seabird attempting to get about one mile up found its attempt fatal when it made the mistake of getting sucked into the jet turbine just outside my triple-paned Lexan window. Jet turbines are fragile and finicky, and don’t like having six pound objects thrown into them at four hundred miles an hour. They tend to be reactive and disintegrate, sometimes taking the plane attached to them to eternity. Depending on your religious persuasion, I was either rather lucky or rather blessed. The housing of the engine kept the disintegrating turbine from coming through the fuselage like a giant chain saw.
After spending the warmest spring on record on the continent, basking in the best that Europe has to offer, one does not expect on the journey home to be immediately faced with things like mortality, death, and multiple homicide. I sure didn’t expect it when I got on that jet Thursday. I sure didn’t expect to face it again on Friday within hours of my arrival, and yet again on Saturday.
I was advised that a bank robbery had taken place here Thursday, the day I nearly touched eternity myself. Three people were killed and embraced eternity. A professor and his wife visiting the bank and a bank employee were shot dead by the robber. A friend of mine worked for that professor and will have to go into the office the day after tomorrow and tell his colleagues and students about the sudden rupture of their comfortable academic world; one that had seemed so safe and secure. It will be a very long Monday for many on that campus.
Friday, I found myself standing in the exact same parlor of the local funeral home at an open casket placed on the same stand that I had stood in front of three times in the weeks before I left North America. Was this really possible? My circle of friends has been depopulated this year.
Life is a clear window of opportunity framed by mysterious opaque realities – the wonder of birth and the unknown curtain of death. How can it be that things that have happened billions of times have revealed so little of their nature to us? How can it be that on Thursday I was basking in the spectral wonders of Holland’s tulip gardens, and later that day nearly died in the skies above those gardens, yet survived, only to learn that others did not survive a simple journey into the local bank?
I am now here sitting on a cold folding metal chair in a frigid mausoleum with a strong wind blowing through openings in the speckled granite slabs surrounding us. It is one of those harsh gray May days that was supposed to have been spent sometime back in January or February, not here in late May when we are craving a chance to thaw out from winter. This isn’t what I had in mind for a Saturday in the prime of spring, spending a cold leaden day in a cemetery listening to a distraught daughter delivering her own mother’s eulogy.
People facing catastrophic illness develop some special abilities to compensate for functional and emotional losses. Blind people develop enhanced hearing, the ability to get the most out of life in a different way. Sitting on my right side is a dear friend who has been fighting cancer and several other physiologic nightmares for much of her adult life. On the other side of me sits a dear friend who is nine years into bonus time after a brain stem tumor nearly took her out of the seen world and into that opaque region we know nothing about. Both have developed the ability to find the smallest bit of color and wonder in the midst of even the harshest circumstances.
Both noticed that which I did not notice, that life really is more powerful and tenacious than death. I was caught up in blown jet engines, near misses on the interstate, a triple homicide, and now this cold windy farewell. On one of the marble slabs in front of us is a silk flower wreath. Both of my friends observed and eventually pointed out to me the frequent flights of a small sparrow to and from that wreath. In this stone shrine to death, this sparrow was building a nest in those silk flowers and establishing a beachhead for life. Even here in this place, new life would come forth on a warm day in early June.
The flights of this small bird proved a stunning metaphor and reminder of the most cherished promises and proclamations in the Christian scriptures. What did or did not happen inside of that jet engine, what happened inside of that bank, what happened in that mausoleum only confirms what my friends already know deep down in their souls. True security and eternal life are ultimate gifts from God, just for the asking.
“Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Late May, Forest Lawn, South Carolina
Part 3. A Journey to Rich Living
In reviewing these travel stories written over a several-year period I am stunned with how incredibly rich my years have been. God has been exceedingly gracious to me beyond measure. I have been granted far more than my share of far-flung adventures, good friendships, world class-entertainment, and a powerful sense of living well and deeply. May these travel essays about rich living so inspire you to live more fully and deeply.
“Nowhere and Everywhere” is an essay describing a heady return journey from Europe to Atlanta. I arrived to find a magnificent reception party of one at the airport who then took me to experience the richest of southern cuisine.
There is nothing in the world like being on the darkened bow of a cruise ship under the stars as one is steaming far south into the tropics. “Maritime Nights” describes the incredible magic of this experience I have been allowed to enjoy many times.
Sometimes the most incredible gifts simply drop into the ordinariness of our lives. So it was when I was offered the gift of a free ride in a hot air balloon as I was out riding my bike. There is nothing like the experience of watching the earth quietly drop away from one’s feet. “Magic Ascension” describes this gift.
“The Eden Project” describes what can happen when a person with vision marshals others to help create something beautiful out of an abandoned clay quarry in an economically depressed region of England. Two million visitors came to this Garden of Eden its first year. I was one of them, along with four grateful friends.
Traveling by ship is very different than any other form of travel. It is slow and the journey itself is every bit as important as the destination. “Three Days at Sea” describes the rich experience of watching sunrise from the bridge with the gracious captain of a cruise ship.
Sometimes one ends up unexpectedly in a stunning environment, almost as it having been transported there by Scotty from the transporter deck of the USS Enterprise. So it was when nine of us found ourselves on a black sand beach in Panama. Cahuitla National Park is one of those incredible destinations that would make a grand calendar photo and even grander memories.
Even when travelling by sea one can be reminded that there are those people with less than honorable agendas. “Find It” demonstrates that the dark underside of life and the bright sunny joys of maritime holidays are very close together. Yet, one must believe that the darkness will be dispelled by even the smallest glimmer of light.
For those that want truly rich entertainment experiences, there is nothing like spending a day in the West End of London. In the span of twelve hours I experienced three grand shows and met a lot of wonderful people. “Stair Work in The West End” describes how it is possible to get a lot of aerobic exercise even while sitting through several long musicals.
One of the grand delights of overnight flights is the emergence of sunrise at 36,000 feet. With the glorious pronouncement of a new day there is the expectation of new experiences and friends to be had upon descent to a new world. “Overnight” describes how even in the post 9/11 era, it is possible for jet travel to catapult one into truly rich experiences of living.
Journeys in life often include transit through temporary community. These can be exhilarating experiences. As described in “None of Us is Traveling Through the Universe Alone” describes a temporary community of four lasting less than an hour that produced a transcendent experience for all involved.
Nowhere and Everywhere
I awoke at 6 AM London time, and after an assortment of trains I arrived at the Gatwick airport the mandated three hours in advance. I made the rather grand discovery that I could check my suitcases in at Victoria Station and not be bothered with them until I showed up in the Atlanta terminal about eighteen hours later. As it was, checking in at Gatwick and going through security took about five minutes. Getting out at the other end in Atlanta was another story. Like much of the world, most localities have been transformed into full service shopping malls and this certainly applies to an airport patronized by 35 million international passengers, most of them carrying multiple credit cards. I roamed about for three hours, during which time, I repented of the excessive flapjack and cake I consumed in the past month, and managed to buy nothing except a small meal. There are actually decent pubs in the Gatwick airport and the Wetherspoon Pub provided me with breakfast, as my hotel didn’t want to do so.
Flying east always seems more normal, even if the night is shortened by five hours because one gains a 212 MPH jet stream tail wind. Long distance west-bound flight is another story. Alas, it was payback time. We had a 50-80 MPH head wind the entirety of the trip; the six-and-a-half hour eastbound journey took ten hours going in the other direction and it seemed as if the sun barely moved. And as usual, the turbulence is greater going west.
At 39,000 feet, one has a chance to see the world from a different perspective. The planet we live on is so very fragile and the regions we are able to live in are so limited. Pristine clear air revealed that much of the northern world is locked up in ice. The north Atlantic was speckled with icebergs, easily visible from nearly eight miles up. Iceland, Greenland, and the Maritimes were encased in slabs of ice and snow. The series of Lucite panes that form aircraft cabin windows are about an eighth of an inch thick. On one side of these panes it was a comfortable 73 degrees. On the other side it was –82. It’s hard to imagine that in such a short distance one can travel 155 degrees towards frozen oblivion. I am reminded of the Eden Project, where life thrives in a small artificial oasis, in that case in an abandoned clay pit, in this case a pressurized aluminum cylinder moving across a mile in 7 seconds.
Life used to be more elegant and community-oriented. Until recently, an international flight got you a meal served on real dishes with real cutlery. Now the meals are served on plastic throwaway dishes, and one uses those plastic knives and forks that demand one not press too hard, lest they break. China dishes can be broken and used as a weapon. A steel knife can be used as a weapon, even a plastic one if it is one of those better made ones. 9-11 changed the world for us in ways beyond counting.
Watching a film used to be a shared experience. Now everyone has their eyes glued to a 6x9 LCD panel in the seat back eight inches away. Watching movies in air is now a solitary experience.
It used to be that getting out of airports was easy; grab your bag and go. I can remember once showing up at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport fifteen minutes ahead of time and still getting onboard. Coming back out was even easier. No longer. Gone are those pioneering days of aviation when you walked out on the runway with your friends at the nearby fence to cheer you “bon voyage”, as you climbed a portable stair. No one gets to the gate anymore, coming or going, unless he is a paying customer. Going through three layers of security, and a body search, having everything in my wallet looked at, getting my feet sprayed for foot-and-mouth disease, and collecting and turning my cases back in twice took an hour and a half.
Still, life is good. I wondered if my friends Pat and Bob would ever find me in this new vortex of security. As it was, I went outside the terminal an hour-and-a-half after the wheels touched down before I saw Pat walking towards me. I had visions of putting a mortgage on my house to hire a cab to take me to the other side of Atlanta if I could not find her.
I was elated to find that Bob had been released from the hospital and was in a much improved condition, looking far better that when I last saw him. It’s a good thing that I did bring back four dance tapes for them! I am anticipating them being in tails and sequins soon doing rumbas and tangos. Both enjoy ballroom dancing so much. I watched them get married on the dance floor of an elegant old world cruise ship. I could be so lucky.
Life’s good. I get to be on that dance floor in three days, headed for the Panama Canal. Bob is going to dance and travel again with his elegant wife. I’m not sure what he did to get such a fine wife. As soon as we got back across Atlanta, she bought me a meal of real down-home properly prepared southern-style vegetables. It’s grand seeing cathedrals, castles, and epic musicals, but it is far better seeing good friends, and even more so seeing them come back from the edge of medical uncertainty.
Every day counts more than you can imagine.
March 26
Atlanta Georgia
Maritime Nights
The day has been anything but foolish. This day started with gentle bird song at 6 AM in Gainesville, Florida, where we had enjoyed the fine overnight hospitality of Maggie. Maggie even provided the grand surprise of an Easter ham dinner upon our arrival Easter evening. By noon today, we were six hundred miles from home, ready to travel via a gracious old ship of iron instead of a turbine driven aircraft traveling at 800 MPH. Instead of covering a mile in less than five seconds at 39,000 feet, I am traversing the world at fifteen miles an hour at sea level, covering a mile in four minutes, about the same as a very fast runner. There is something human to this scale of speed. It allows one to assimilate a sense of distance and place in a way not possible by jets doing Mach I.
It is one of those exceedingly calm early spring nights at sea when water and night sky merge into a single indigo sphere and the diamonds shimmer above. The constellation Orion shows clearly that we are headed south towards the Southern Cross. Perhaps a week or more from now, we will be able to see the Southern Cross. Off to the east one can see the faint orange horizon of the myriad sodium electric suns that light up the coastal cities of southern Florida at night. Out here on the water world, it is uncrowded, peaceful, warm, and gentle. Certainly, it is not always that way, but for the present it is. It was only five days ago that the water world for me was covered with ice and fierce winds. Three days from now the water will be aquamarine with a spectral explosion of life forms on reefs of brain coral. It is a wondrous world we live in.
Life is that way. Some days we have brilliant sunshine and dogwood blossoms. Other days we never see the sun and wonder how we will get through the next moment, tormented by unspeakable challenges. Today marks the end of the first year of the second half century of my life. I feel that it is a great fortune to be into the second half century by a year, to be on a gentle warm sea with good friends, good health, on a gentle old ship that has herself plied the seas for fifty years. So many times I almost lost my hold on life.
The dining room staff brought me a birthday cake with a single candle on it, a reminder that I have but a single shot at life – I must make it count for something that will last. I cut up my small cake into tiny pieces and shared with friends at several tables. I found it easy to listen to “Happy Birthday” for a change. A couple of my friends have been told they will never hear it again. It’s hard to let go of dear souls.
Travel has been a rather prominent part of my life, forever it seems. Last month I was in the bucolic emerald realms of England photographing the magnificent gothic cathedrals that have pointed toward the promise of Easter for nearly a thousand years. I made friends to last an eternity on that journey. This month I will photograph other emerald realms that tell of a Creator who knows about the journeys we all are called to make. The cloud forests of Costa Rica give a holographic definition to the beauty to be found around us and to the hope that is within us. In a world of instant communication, the hideous acts of violence in recent days make us wonder if there is peace anywhere. It helps to know that there are places like this gentle tropical sea where the trade winds bring refreshment and the star-studded firmament promises sure guidance, that for now the cloud forests are still there in their incredible splendor.
I trust Easter was a day of renewal for you.
April 1
The Florida Straits
Magic Ascension
Sometimes transcendent peak experiences just show up by surprise. Such was the case for me today. After a very good sleep, I awoke and at 5:45 AM went out to do a pre-sunrise bike ride. Sunday is by far the best day of the week, since it has no traffic. A fine nearly full moon danced in clouds in the still-dark indigo western sky and a vermilion rim formed on the eastern horizon.
I did my fifteen miles, and as I finished up my ride, a pick-up truck pulled up with a balloon gondola in back and four people in the cab. I asked them if they were about to launch. They said if the wind currents were right they planned to do so. A test balloon indicated that they would come down far north of their intended destination. I suggested a field two miles south that would put them in the right place if the currents held stable. They took off in their truck and I rode home two miles, going by the very field I suggested. I saw them put up a test balloon which indicated an ideal track.
I decided to get my camera and go back and film the inflation process. Balloonists tend to be very social people, and these were no exception. I asked them if they minded my photographing the inflation and launch process. I told them of my having filmed three balloon festivals and having never been up in one and wanting to do this sometime so that I could put together an inspirational program to use with support groups. The pilot asked me if I wanted to go up. I said “It would be grand if I could do it sometime.” He said. “You want to go right now?” “Really?” “Get in.” He didn’t have to ask twice. I was like a five-year old with his first shiny new bike, one without training wheels. I hopped into the gondola with the pilot and entered into a transcendent experience. I could hardly believe this was happening. I never in a million years would have expected to get off my bike today or any other day and continue my journey across town by balloon.
It was hard to know what to expect. Having been in jet planes hundreds of times, I am used to the process of becoming airborne being almost a brutal experience, one that includes intense noise, vibration, being slammed backed into a seat by 100,000 pounds of thrust - being able to see nothing of where one is going and then hitting the surface thermal turbulence. This ascension into the sky was so utterly different. Silent. Gentle. Smooth. No vibration. No one telling me to sit down and put my seatback and tray table in their upright positions. Nothing - simply the world quietly dropping away and starting a slow quiet spin underneath our wicker basket. The sensation is so magical. I was overwhelmed with how gentle is the experience of riding on wind, suspended beneath an orb of every possible color in the world
Surprisingly, there was no sensation of being on a high place with that sometimes scary magnetic sense of being sucked into a chasm – none of that at all. The three chase-crew members simply let go of the gondola, and the world softly slipped away. Somehow, it seemed so profoundly civilized to travel this way. The pilot said something about having little control of where one is going. I said that was the main point of this kind of ascension. The journey itself was the destination. It didn’t matter to me where we came down, and when we did come down there was only the barest bump on the parking lot we selected - far smoother than any landing I ever had in a jet.
We had thought the pitcher’s mound on one of the baseball fields would be appropriate somehow, until we realized they were completely closed in with a seven-foot fence and all the gates locked up, which would have made deflation and recovery impossible. We fired the burner just in time to avoid getting penned in for the first inning.
As it was, we crossed town, and I was able to fully film the journey. Our flight path was directly above my house. It is a very different perspective seeing one’s house and neighborhood from 600 feet up. I was amazed at how much more attractive the town seemed from the sky. There were many more trees than I’d expected. In the car I am on main roads where trees are cut down and retail commercial ghettoes are built. I was so pleased to find that but the shortest distance from the road there were many large tracts of trees. Even with a fifth year of drought, I was amazed at how green the world seemed.
I have known for years that I could always pay out a few hundred dollars and get a commercial balloon operator to take me up some place. This experience at sunrise was a profound gift and to have the gentle winds carry me directly over my house seemed almost numinous. The fact that it was given to me completely altered the experience and made it a hundred times more meaningful. That a magnificent balloon would simply appear in my morning routine was beyond chance. It was truly a peak experience of the highest order. I can’t but think that God was telling me that the greatest experiences are to be found where you are and that one does not have to expend vast amounts of energy and wandering to find them in far away places. A lifetime dream was fulfilled three-tenths of a mile from my house. I went off to church in a happy daze.
Look up, you just might find your dream there.
August 25
Anderson, South Carolina
The Eden Project
A couple weeks back I was having a delightful conversation with the elegant keeper of a fine small bookshop in Seaton. During the course of conversation, she told me about something called the Eden Project and proceeded to show me a $40 dollar book describing the project. I knew I absolutely had to go and see what this project was about. From what I could tell it would be much like the pods depicted in the sci-fi film “Silent Running” that was shown some thirty years ago. In the film, the ecology of earth has been essentially destroyed and the only remaining trees and plants are preserved on orbiting platforms covered with geodesic domes. The sense of the Eden project proved to be exactly as that of the film. The artificial context of this vast project added a certain poignancy to the experience of this man-made Eden.
The Eden project consists of two complexes of geodesic domes built as vast greenhouses, along with myriad other structures. These $117 million greenhouses, by far the largest in the world, are intended as a demonstration project for the reclamation of industrial wasteland and to create the feeling in people “that we all could make a very real difference to the world we live in if we could work together.” It is reported that the physical challenges of reclaiming this wasteland were nothing short of daunting, and that a number of times it appeared that the project was destined for failure.
The greenhouses are built in an abandoned china clay pit that is described as once looking like the remains of a dead star. The site is clearly intended to be an educational resource rather than a theme park. As the guiding visionary of the park stated “If this place becomes no more than an up-market theme park it will all have been the most gigantic waste of money. We have intended to create something that not only encourages us to understand and to celebrate the world we live in, but also inspires us to action. Eden isn’t so much a destination as a place in the heart.”
The complex containing the tropical forests is astounding in scale, complete with full-size waterfalls, lagoons, and full-size specimen trees of many sorts. The main dome is 750 feet long, 350 feet deep and about 180 feet high. The domes are the largest of their type in the world and cost about $117 million to construct including site acquisition and preparation. It is said that the domes themselves weigh little more than the air they contain. The material used to make up the panels has only 1% of the weight of glass. The site has been open little more than a year and already the tropical displays have a surprising amount of maturity. The domes are large enough to allow even a mahogany tree to grow to full height under the clear hexagonal panels. For one that is in tropical rain forests several times a year, the forest under the transparent foil sky of ethylenetetrafluoroethylene was surprisingly familiar and realistic. A major problem is keeping all of the native English birds out of that nice inviting warm tropical habitat.
I was amazed at how densely crowded the place was. It was nearly impossible to move about inside the tropical dome. The trust that developed the site was hopeful of 500,000 visitors the first year. After dropping $117 million on the investment, one had better hope and pray people show up in large numbers and quickly. In fact, more than two million showed up in the first year. It would appear that this single project will be the salvation of the economy of Cornwall, which is in dire shape. It was clear that the developers of the project are frantically working to deal with the crowds of people. Armies of tradesmen of every kind were building walks, walls, gardens, reception halls, and new educational facilities. There were all types of heavy construction equipment moving all over the site. It will be interesting to revisit this hexagonal wonderland every year or so to see how it progresses.
One could only hope that outside these domes mankind in general could progress as well. With vision all things are possible.
March 21
St. Austells, Cornwall
Three Days at Sea
I was up at 5:30 AM today. It’s easy to be up at 5:30 AM at sea with the bright tropical sunrise blasting away the ebony of tropical night. It also helps to still be five hours out of synch with local time after a month in England. I went topside, planning on taking a fast long walk on deck before the equatorial sun became incendiary. Barely remembered were the wind driven specks of sleet on my English window panes two weeks ago.
As it turned out, I met a woman on the bow with a very expensive digital camera who knew nothing about its use after a year of ownership. I gave her some pointers on the bow about its use. The ship’s captain, a gracious fellow with fifty-two years at sea happened along and invited us up onto the bridge where he was happy to entertain us for perhaps thirty minutes, even inviting us into his personal quarters. We ended up doing sunrise from the wheel house.
Captain Rolf proved to be the ultimate diplomat and seems to have the ability to make even the lowest crew member feel significant. I have sailed with him in the past and am amazed at how he spends much of his time making crew and passengers alike feel most important to him. I joked with him and asked who was driving the boat while he was out wandering. “Little green men,” he said. He has a most able staff that has been with him twenty-six years, so he can easily take the time to go make the deck sweeper feel that he is contributing to the success of the journey. I took a picture of the captain at his desk, and loaded it into his computer so he could e-mail it to his wife in Atlanta. He said to make sure that the picture of his wife on the wall was visible in the picture. I asked if this was so she would know he hadn’t taken it down and put up someone else’s picture. He laughed and concurred.
We have been almost three days at sea headed south, making an end around the western point of Cuba – so far, yet so close. A dozen times, I have seen Cuba from three miles out, wondering if I would ever actually walk on its beaches. The three days have seemed rather short with the presence of a grand sixteen-piece Glenn Miller orchestra I have enjoyed in years past. I have been enjoying pleasant conversation with the guys in the band and their wives.
Three days of steaming across calm warm waters brought us to the emerald island of San Andres, a remote political territory of Colombia. San Andres is perhaps twelve miles long and half a mile wide. Amazingly, at one end of it is a clean city of 100,000. Sadly, Colombia is in a fast descent into total social disruption and violence and San Andres represents about the only bit of the country that retains social order and a decent infrastructure, yet I could tell that there was some subliminal sense of decay from my last visit a year ago. Sometimes returning to places after a year, for several years in a row, gives one a time-lapse view that is not totally optimistic.
Two of the trombone players from the band and their wives rented a taxi and I joined them for a journey to the far end of the island to make a quick view of the city and visit a Centro market. If you have ever wondered what happens to all of the old four-door Chevy Caprices and Impalas – they’re all here living second lives as taxis with long dead air conditioners and darkly tinted windows that don’t roll down.
The greatest curiosity here is a wooden Baptist church that had been built in South Alabama, dismantled, and then moved here from Alabama in the 1840s. I was able to climb up its belfry via a combination of stairs, ladders, and spiral wedges in the tower. I was most pleased to pass this ultimate physical test of my recovery from a broken leg. The climb afforded a view of the entire twelve-mile island and the best coolest seat on the whole of the island.
This church was as different from St. Paul’s in London as indigo night is from equatorial heat but perhaps it is differences that make life, travel, and remote places worth the journey.
April 4
San Andres, Colombia, South America
CAHUITLA NATIONAL PARK
Going topside about 6 AM revealed that the climate would be very good today. The last two years in Costa Rica were rather heavy on rain. Costa Rica has long been known for its incredible ecological diversity and beauty and the most stable political climate in all of Central and South America. It has long been a mecca for retirees, where one can still buy a quarter mile of pristine beach front with a good house for $70,000. A decent house can be had for $8,000.
Ship’s tours are rather expensive and I opted out of taking any of them. As it was, a group of nine of us was able to rent a van and driver for $20 apiece. So we were able to see far more and at a leisurely pace, and to save about $70 each. We had an amazing driver who drove about 45-50 MPH the entire time. It is amazing what a difference there is to one’s anxiety level when driving slowly and leisurely instead of at warp 9.6. Lloyd stopped whenever I asked so I could hop out and take photos of the rivers and coastal areas we passed.
There were national elections here in Costa Rica today, actually a run-off because last month’s election produced no one candidate with the minimum 40% vote needed to take office. It made for a different experience to see all the polling places being heavily canvases by reps of both parties. In the United States it is forbidden to have any kinds of signs or politicking near a polling place. The polling places in Costa Rica all seemed like festive parties with hundreds of signs and banners in the party colors. Costa Rica is about the last bastion of stability and sanity in the Latin world, yet one can sense this tropical jewel is at high risk from some very unsavory neighbors. Drugs are beginning to erode this country as well. I saw several outbursts of anger today, very different from the past couple of visits.
The group of nine of us were able to drive back nearly to the Panama border and visit what has to be the finest beach I have yet seen in my planetary wanderings. A crescent several miles long and the adjacent rain forest make up a national park. Most unusual about this beach was the proximity of the tropical forest canopy to the water. One could lie on the pristine sand in the shade under the trees at midday and have the wavelets and foam cascade over one’s feet. The proximity of the trees made this beach seem very cozy. So usual is the wide-open exposed sensibility of coastal areas. Also, for unknown reasons this beach draws the most beautiful women I have ever seen, often wandering alone. I have several images that “Sports Illustrated” would very much like to have for its annual swimsuit calendar. There were a number of families enjoying picnics along the edge of the forest. I had a sense of the tranquil energy that Costa Rica has long been known for.
Lloyd took us back along a slightly different route on tiny dirt tracks and showed us an unusual beach consisting of black volcanic sand. This was a rather curious experience, and for sure if one walks barefoot on this tropical beach at midday, one had better keep both feet in the water. Lloyd took us to a high overlook where we were able to get a grand view of Port Limon and the harbor.
We got back to the dock several hours before departure, so I was able to wander among the vast mountains of containers and lifting cranes and take a series of interesting industrial photographs. The scale of industrialization that is overwhelming every part of the planet that is above water is truly ominous. I found an Internet café of sorts and was able to look at some of the 56 e-mails I had received in the past couple of days. Some of us can’t but help reaching out and clicking someone.
We have absolutely calm waters with 82-degree air and cottony clouds. Life at sea can be so life giving. Just don’t do the North Atlantic in March. It isn’t the same!
April 7
Port Limon, Costa Rica
Find It
It seems to be the fiendish nature of human experience that time experienced in a pleasurable fashion is gone in a flash, while time spent in misery stands still. Alas, the past six weeks seem to contain ten lifetimes, yet it seems I just left here. It’s hard to imagine that it was a cold and barren winter landscape of seventeen degrees when I left. Upon my return today, I found spring fully sprung with spectral delights. Even the alligators in Lake Alice were enjoying the warming spring as well.
The past couple of days proved rather interesting in an unsettling way. I am reminded that appearances are deceiving, and that darkness is never that far away. The day after we left Colombia, a bomb was detonated and twelve people died and hundreds more were injured. Every day the satellite marine telex printout at the concierge’s desk told of the daily atrocities in Israel.
What we did not know at the time is that we were unwittingly being drawn into the vortex of cocaine trafficking. On Wednesday, the cruise director made some odd public comments to the assembled passengers regarding the fact that the Justice Department could seize our ship and take it apart if it felt so inclined, but that this was very rarely done. He also mentioned that there were three dogs at the terminal buildings and all of them were named “Find It.” It would seem we were being gently prepared for something big about to go down. Sea captains are like jet pilots in having been trained to be gently vague.
A couple of days ago, a nearby ship was found to have 3,000 pounds of cocaine hidden away in the lower decks. Yesterday I was giving a lecture in the ship’s theater when suddenly two handlers brought in the biggest German shepherd I have ever seen. This giant dog was sniffing for you know what. Over the PA I asked if anyone in the audience had a doggie treat we might give to Find It. It would seem my humor was lost on the handlers, who fairly quickly evacuated the region to the laughter of the audience.
As it turns out there was a fleet of law enforcement vehicles, six dogs, and a squad of frogmen waiting on the edge of the pier as we glided into position to be berthed. Before the lines were even cast to the docks, the frogmen were in the water. The grapevine had mysteriously revealed to the authorities that packets of cocaine had been attached to the outside of our steel hull plates with large magnets. Somehow it became known that clandestine divers had made plans to meet us and go under our hull and pick off those packets. How this information came to light is a mystery none of us passengers will ever know about.
It seems the frogmen got there first and collected the goods, and also found more of the same in some of the luggage. It was a sobering experience. What was even more mystifying was that despite our rather spectacular arrival and the events of two days (I am intentionally leaving out a lot of details) was my being able to drag a heavy large wheeled dolly full of my audio/visual crates and boxes off the ship and through customs and all of those armed police and security people without ever being asked to reveal what was in them. I am talking about a big pile of boxes and cases. Even “Find It” did not come to give me or my mountain of boxes a sniff. I am not sure whether to feel insulted or complemented. Do I look that harmless and wimpy?
The journey to South America and back proved splendid in that the climate could not have been better, with perhaps total rainfall consisting of five minutes of sprinkles and lower-than-normal temperatures. Even the usual Dante’s Inferno of Panama was quite comfortable with low humidity. The water was gentle for the whole of our journey, and every night the clear sky was studded with cosmic diamonds. I renewed friendships and made some fine new ones. The whole of the journey, I was able to bask in the grand sound of a fine big band orchestra that played all the great standards. Every time I return to this grand old ship built in Scotland when I was two years old, I feel like I am coming home.
Fortunately, I like dogs. I think of happy dogs on hearths as good companions, sharing warmth, silence, while we enjoy good books and a fine glass of sherry. I don’t tend to think of dogs as sniffing out the evil of the world. Fortunately, most are not called to do this.
April 11
An Undisclosed location in South Florida
Stair Work in the West End
I slept better last night than I have in some days. I walked about eight miles yesterday, and it is a hundred stairs up to my room and it is 225 steps down to some of the subways at ‘my’ tube stop. I am making up for all the exercise I lost the past six months with a broken leg. The jet lag does not seem to be an issue to me. I did barely make it to breakfast after sleeping over the wake-up call because I stayed up until 2 AM.
After eating, I took the tube to the West End to be sure I could find the Drury Theater and collected my ticket for “My Fair Lady.” It proved within easy walking distance of the National Gallery so went there and soaked in the images of Rubens, Durer, Turner, and the like for a couple of hours. This place is so vast and wondrous. I did not even attempt to enter most of the galleries, lest my head turn to mush from overload. I found the enthusiastic uniformed school children and their attentive teachers a pleasing thing to see. There were many older students sketching and painting the art works. The visual arts are alive and well on this side of the Atlantic
I have always noticed over the years a lot of people on the subways reading “real” books as well. I wonder why the British read fine books with orange edge bindings from Penguin Books while we read the “National Enquirer” and “Midnight Star.” Generalizations can be dangerous, but I don’t have many recollections of seeing America’s Generation X or its baby boomers with their heads stuck in the literary classics. Maybe that is why I keep coming back here – it’s different.
I am certain that I had the most intense day of entertainment in my life. While walking back over to the Drury Theater, gawking at all the visual distractions of Covent Gardens, I could hear magnificent operatic arias being sung. Here in the street? Detouring I found a man and woman singing fabulous street opera with really fine musical accompaniment. The whole market venue where they were plying their craft was spellbound. Buskers are a London tradition and one can get in on some magnificent musicianship at no cost. A hundred people cheered every song and I did drop ten pounds for a CD.
The next market place had a string quartet doing romantic folk songs from Italy. These buskers were deserving of a much better venue than the street. I hate to use the word, as it is somewhat pejorative and the making of fine music is very honest and enriching work. My timing was perfect, as I had an hour of free time before needing to be at the Drury, and could stand in amazement at what the creative side of humanity can do to enrich our collective lives.
I started off the ‘formal’ part of my entertainment with a three-hour plus run of “My Fair Lady” in the afternoon which proved magnificent. The Drury Theater is a spectacular venue for plays. The moment one passes through the oak doors under the grand marquee, one enters a vermillion and crystal world from another time and space. It was not unlike the experience Richard had when he went back to the Victorian version of the Grand Hotel in the classic tragic romance film, “Somewhere in Time.” Because I was given permission to photograph the public spaces, I have been able to retain a small visual memory of what is one of the grandest of Old World theater lobbies. The place is opulent beyond our concepts of theater interiors.
Everything about the show was exceptionally well done. I have a hard time getting used to the opulence of the stagecraft here in London. I could sure enjoy building sets a lot more if I had the space and money these theaters have. The craft budget for the last show I just built (“Chicago”) was $500. These London shows have a bigger budget for Cadbury’s hot chocolate in the Underground. I even had pleasing snippets of conversation with a family sitting next to me during “My Fair Lady,” which was truly a fair and heart-lifting experience.
My interval, as they call intermissions in England, consisted of a brief Lebanese dinner before walking to the nearby Adelphi Theater for an evening performance of “Chicago.” Having just spent some weeks building the show at our own community theater, I wanted to see the differences between a community playhouse version and a big budget London west end show, and especially the stagecraft differences. I actually liked our concepts for the staging much better. It only reinforced to me that creativity can often make up for a lack of finance and our little shoestring budget theater can keep up with the best of ‘em. For certain, you economist types will understand that the marginal utility value of our craft budget was much higher than any of those in London’s West End. Still, it is stunning to sit back and watch the Klieg lights come up on world-class performers on a million dollar set.
During “Chicago’s” interval I met a man and his wife from Atlanta plus three girls from Cornerbrook in Newfoundland. They were amazed that I knew of their town and had been in the Canadian Maritimes. The three girls are theater majors here for two months with a course requirement to see twenty West End shows. Life must be very hard for them. I had pleasant chatter with them about technical theater. It is these chance encounters with civilized friendly adventurers that make long journeys so rewarding.
Tomorrow is a “work day” in that I plan to carefully photograph two major cathedrals for additions to my church architecture workshop. Life is good, and there is no rain here. It is warmer than when I left Atlanta.
I walked forever again today, and did the 250 steps from the subway trains to the street level about five times today rather than using the elevator. I am having no residual from my fracture and feel most privileged to be whole of body and able to walk the streets of London. It wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t do this. Each time I climbed one of those stairs I was reminded consciously of the miracle of regeneration of bone that takes place in the unseen inner parts of our being. I will never again lament climbing stairs. Many people will never have the option to do so. I am grateful for the ability and it is only made more heartening in a world-class city that often feels like a second home.
March 6
West End, London
Overnight
Monday proved clear and I found the bright clear weather so settling to my demeanor that I did not spend the day paranoid about getting in a plane for a long journey. After all, this is the first time I have planned to fly in a jet since that fateful Tuesday when four plane loads of dreamers perished in their glimmering jets on a fine September morning in New England.
I arrived at the airport three-and-a-half hours early because the airlines said it would take that long to get processed, and a good friend did not want to get caught in the afternoon buildup of Atlanta traffic. As it was, check-in and security collectively took about twenty minutes on the outside. The airport did not seem overly crowded, and I was rather pleased to find that it has been made into a virtual art museum. Several of the local large museums have put together some really grand exhibits in the mile-long underground passageways. A rather breathtaking collection of very fine huge stone sculptures from Zimbabwe easily consumed thirty or forty minutes of my time. The time in the airport did not drag, and the overnight flight left on time in a fine sunset and we were soon in total darkness as we flew east at 800 miles an hour. I found the dinner and free wine a perfectly satisfying way to spend a Monday evening made rather shorter by a 200 plus tail wind.
The plane journey was made most pleasant with the single empty seat in the cabin being next to me. On the other side was a woman who told me about growing up in Innsbruck, Austria. She speaks several languages and has a clear trans-material view of the world that is environmentally sensitive with which I rather resonate. Eva-Maria found the materialism and superficiality of the US difficult to deal with. She also described the importance of observing religious holidays. Alas, she is happily married.
We had an uneventful 5,000-mile ride across the Atlantic, nearly setting a ground speed record. At one point we were doing 800 miles an hour ground speed, benefiting from a 212 mile per hour tail wind. We arrived more than an hour early, despite throttling back for a good part of the journey. Airport gate assignments in busy airports dictate that you don’t show up too early.
I learned a bit more about turbulence. It is still most unsettling to me, but I learned that the center of a jet stream is quite stable and gives a very smooth ride with a free 200 MPH boost. It is in coming and going from the core of a jet stream that one encounters turbulence. The total journey took barely six-and-a-half hours. At the end of the journey we had a rather intensely spectacular sunrise, just before settling down into some low broken clouds. I did find that at the end of the journey I was less tired overall than I normally am from such a long journey. I did not release a big sigh of relief once on the ground, vowing never to fly again, as I have done in the past. Maybe I am making a bit of progress. I never gave a second thought to terrorist activities, and never heard any other passenger mention such either.
I took a two-hour walk in Hyde Park in the late afternoon, and had the grand benefit of late golden sunlight lasting for more than an hour. The sunsets are so long lasting here in the far north. It made for some really grand photos. I took perhaps a hundred or more. Digital allows one to be frivolous and voluminous.
I had a rather entrancing experience with a total stranger who could barely speak a word of English. A beautiful woman saw me taking detailed photos of birds, squirrels, dogs, and flowers. Without saying anything she came up to me and pressed some whole shelled walnuts into my hand to feed the squirrels in order to get better images of them. The beautiful dark-haired woman wandered a bit further down the trail as I was doing macros of camellia blooms. I later showed her the squirrel images. I did learn with a few words that she is the wife of a diplomat from Azerbaijan. She left with a smile and I went on to find other botanical delights lit up in last light. It stuns me the small lasting gifts a stranger can give to us that we will never forget.
These Hyde Park squirrels are profoundly tame, and quite happily got up on my hand to take the nut fragments I presented to them. I am reminded of the time I was in this same park ten years ago and had birds land on my hands on this exact same walkway. Today all the birds were over on the Crescent, a fine lake in the interior of the park. I still find it absolutely amazing that a city of eight million has a park of four square miles in the center of it. In the interior realms of this park, the city is easily forgotten as one watches dogs frolic as other people feed flocks of geese, ducks, gulls, and pigeons.
I made it to the Victoria Palace in time for a full production of “Kiss Me Kate.” I was absolutely amazed and delighted with the production values of the whole show. As a set builder I was especially pleased with the stagecraft and lighting. Huge multi-level sets were transformed instantly. Lots of money and eighty foot galleries and wings will allow all sorts of wonders to take place on stage. I was pleased to be sitting here in a West End show knowing that our little production of “Chicago” in Anderson had just closed a sell-out run on Sunday.
It is amazing to be in a city that is always open. I took the subway back to my hotel about 11 PM, and everything was still open and the sidewalks teeming. I had a hundred ethnic restaurants to choose from in my own neighborhood, and ended up having a Lebanese meal again. I was easily filled for $3.40. London can be very inexpensive if one pays attention. Dinner, this first-rate show, and transportation cost me less than $15. It seems as if I have been here for days already, yet it is but eighteen hours.
It’s amazing what can happen overnight.
March 5
Knightsbridge, London
None of Us is Travelling Through the Universe Alone
It was but two days ago I returned from a retreat for single Christian adults. The essential message was that it is more than OK to be a single adult in an obsessively couples oriented culture. We were encouraged to view singleness as a singularity, a very special state, even one with special privileges. In the sacramental Christian paradigm, both of the rather empowering speakers reminded us that birth, baptism, taking of the Holy Eucharist, and dying are landmark places on our journeys to be taken alone. This was how God designed our earthly journeys to be.
The mass culture, including the lyrics of nearly every love song, tells us that we are somehow incomplete until we find that perfect person capable of fulfilling our every dream. Alas, there is no such person, as so many tragically learn when their overburdened marriages collapse under the weight of these unrealistic expectations. Those of us who have known nothing but singleness, seek that special other as devoutly as those of centuries past sought the Holy Grail. Many of us travelling solo struggle to realize that we are complete individuals, as created by our Creator.
Paradoxically, both the Old and New Testaments contain profoundly compelling exhortations as to the necessity and beauty of community. Even when we are reminded that the major events of life must be experienced alone, God started out His message to us “It is not good that man be alone.” The wisdom writer of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes tells us that safety, warmth, pleasure, and even increased return on our labor derive from being with another. The great Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthian church that Christian community can only exist when we each recognize our own special personal gifts and freely share them with it. The implication is that being out of community will cause unnecessary losses and vulnerability and that being in community is a catalyst for abundant living. Some ten years later an uncertain author, perhaps the apostle Paul, wrote to the Hebrews an admonition to not forsake the fellowship of the saints. We are again reminded of this essential imperative for the need of community in our lives.
So it would seem that the challenge is seeing ourselves as complete whole individuals, coupled or not, yet in need of linkage to those about us, a difficult balance in an unbalanced culture. My experiences with facilitating depression support and therapy groups reveal that people suffer far more than they need to because they lack the safety and strength that derive from community in its many forms. As an active member of a sacramental church, participation in the community life of my church is an obvious form of community. Yet, it shows up often in some astounding ways that have little to do with the church structure.
I do show up nearly every time the door is open and even some times when it is not, but I have found some other important forms of community to complement my sacramental center. For some ten years I have been involved in a local community playhouse and have delighted in the creation of oases of laughter and magic for people, many pressured by present-day complex lives that don’t get any easier.
It was in this small community theater about a year ago that I met one of our volunteers, MQ. Most people know her as Joanne; I call her MQ for Magic Queen. She is a full-time volunteer in an elementary school, coordinating a tutoring program for 769 young children trying to figure out how this world works. Some need a bit more help with this than others, and MQ knows how to do this very well. MQ paid the tuition for a special kind of learning nearly ten years ago when a brain stem tumor took away her ability to walk or work at her profession of teaching. She knows about special needs and how to relate to those with them.
Every child that enters her Magic Room for tutoring is awarded a paper heart in the color of his or her choice at the end of the lesson. They write their names on their hearts and can attach them to any surface in the room, except the big metallic red hearts hanging from the ceiling. Over the academic year, it is entrancing to watch this putty gray cinder block room in an ordinary school building transform into a spectral wonderland as these hearts accrete on every possible surface within reach of a young child. Some of these kids can reach pretty high, and that is the whole point of the Magic Room.
Having at one time been in a wheelchair myself I learned the hard way the realities of disability and accessibility. It is sometimes very hard to reach high. I have for several years now been quite functional and have resumed my habits of climbing on very high things including Mt Mitchell in North Carolina. This mountain is 6,684 feet high and the tallest thing in Eastern North America. For nearly a year, I have been threatening Joanne that I was going to somehow get her to the top of that mountain. I did get her into a hot air balloon in May, and she found it a transcendent experience. Being on top of Mt. Mitchell, despite being wheelchair bound, struck me as a powerful visual metaphor of one rising above her physical challenges and limits. I wanted to make this happen.
Well, today was the day to make good on my threat. As it turns out, Mt Mitchell is only five miles from the route I had selected to get us from South Carolina to Pennsylvania for one of those epic Italian Thanksgiving dinners that lasts for three days. I don’t select the shortest way to get to places, lest I miss something important. This late November day turned out to be extraordinarily clear and perfect for a major ascension to a very high place. And so it was that I was to gain an impromptu lesson in the importance of community, even a temporary community that lasts perhaps a mere hour. Much can be done in the space of an hour or the two days of a retreat community.
I have a bad habit of over-estimating my abilities and I figured getting Joanne up the tallest thing on this part of the planet would be a piece of cake. Not! I have told her in the past she is probably too trusting. She might have found that out today the hard way, excepting for Divine intervention. Having previously been up this mountain myself on two good legs, I really had not paid attention to those hundreds of very irregular steps made of rocks and logs and tree roots or the loose soft gravel preceding the final ascension. I got her and the chair across that soft loose gravel at nearly 7,000 feet and immediately knew I was in trouble. There is noticeably less oxygen at this elevation for wannabee hulks like me who think they can do anything.
I managed to pop her chair up the first of several widely spaced stone ledges with her trusting me to not drop her into the abyss head first. I managed the first few steps but knew that what I thought was going to be a virtuous demonstration of my virile sympathetic concerns for her transcendent experience was going to be defeated by the realities of gravity and an infinite number of logs, roots and rocks. I was going to have to eventually concede defeat, which males can’t stand doing, especially in front of women. Our ego structures are dependent on being all-powerful facilitators of the impossible.
As I was nearing the realization of this transcendent metaphor crashing down on my wounded ego, two angels appeared to save me from a high-altitude humiliation and to teach me about the increased return on shared labors via shared community effort. Most angels are named Gabriel, Michael or the like. These two were Jason and Shane. They didn’t show up in the standard white robe garb and wings, rather green sweatshirts and camouflage pants. I think God wants to get us past some of this stereotypical stuff we fall into.
These two young healthy men/angels offered their services to make that, which I could not do alone, possible as a shared effort. That infinity of logs, rocks, and roots was reduced to a manageable obstacle. Exercising major fortitude of trust, Joanne allowed the three of us to lift her chair and carry it up to the highest place within thousands of miles. We arrived on top of this great mountain rather winded, but aware that a cord of three was not broken and we had ascended safely. Joanne arose in her sedan chair with a smile, greeting a lot of bewildered hikers. I am certain most of these sane people wondered about the mental stability of one who would drag a wheelchair bound friend to the top of the planet.
Without these two angels showing up I would have had my ego destroyed and probably killed Joanne in the process and been committed to the nearest psychiatric unit for evaluation for psychotic behavior that endangered the life of a crippled person. I would have then probably gotten free room and board, courtesy of the Department of Corrections for voluntary manslaughter.
I was spared this dire scenario because a community of four formed for the space of an hour. I was able to get Joanne up the 80 stairs in the observation tower myself where she emerged on top to a view that took her breath away. She was basking in this vast vista of a thousand peaks while I was secretly wondering about a thousand stones, rocks, and logs I was going to have to get her back down. I figured our angels had gone on to other realms and were going to leave me to deal with gravity and the rough terrain on my own during the descent. I learned angels and those in community finish what they start. We returned to the bottom of the observation tower and those two camouflaged angels were waiting, knowing I wasn’t going to pull off the descent without killing MQ.
We safely traversed that infinity of rock and root and descended to level solid terrain. I would not be eating hospital food after all, by the grace of God.
As it happened, on the drive up to Mt Mitchell from the Blue Ridge Parkway, we were listening to a Barbara Streisand tape and the lyrics from the song “Higher Ground” caught our attention. “Hold me safe, take my heart to higher ground. I have walked too long in darkness. I have walked too long alone. I would trade the wealth of ages for a warm hand to hold.” These words resonated with us as we anticipated literally climbing to the highest ground around. What I had not quite caught yet was that it was only in community all things are possible. We had reached higher ground because four of us shared the space of an hour. As it turns out, angels have e-mail.
We stopped at the ranger station to use the facilities and while there fell into conversation with two older women who were out roaming around on this fine cerulean day in the mountains. They made it clear they had no intention of climbing up on top of that big rock we had just come down from.
These women told of us of an experience they had in the Grand Canyon with their husbands watching a sunset that left them absolutely stunned. The only problem was that normally it is dark when a sunset finishes its flamboyant outburst of color. The rim of the Grand Canyon is not a place one wants to be walking around at night in total darkness unless one is interested in a single last opportunity for free flight into a six thousand foot abyss. The freefall flight might be grand but the landing would ruin the overall experience.
As it turned out, the group had not thought of the mundane things of life – like a flashlight. As it happened, four other nearby people were also gawking at this spectral outburst and as frequently occurs, God protected the foolish and ill-prepared. One of the group of eight happened to have a tiny key chain penlight, and with this tiny speck of illumination this small community was able to safely back away from the edge of the vast darkness and live to tell about it. For but a few minutes, a tiny community of eight found life instead of death on the rocks because they shared what little they had and trusted and depended on each other.
As Barbara Streisand so aptly sings in the song “I believe” we heard going down the road from Mt Mitchell, “I believe some where in the darkest night a candle glows. I believe for every one who goes astray, someone will come to show the way.” And so it was with a community of eight in the Grand Canyon and a community of four on Mt Mitchell.
“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania
“Nowhere and Everywhere” is an essay describing a heady return journey from Europe to Atlanta. I arrived to find a magnificent reception party of one at the airport who then took me to experience the richest of southern cuisine.
There is nothing in the world like being on the darkened bow of a cruise ship under the stars as one is steaming far south into the tropics. “Maritime Nights” describes the incredible magic of this experience I have been allowed to enjoy many times.
Sometimes the most incredible gifts simply drop into the ordinariness of our lives. So it was when I was offered the gift of a free ride in a hot air balloon as I was out riding my bike. There is nothing like the experience of watching the earth quietly drop away from one’s feet. “Magic Ascension” describes this gift.
“The Eden Project” describes what can happen when a person with vision marshals others to help create something beautiful out of an abandoned clay quarry in an economically depressed region of England. Two million visitors came to this Garden of Eden its first year. I was one of them, along with four grateful friends.
Traveling by ship is very different than any other form of travel. It is slow and the journey itself is every bit as important as the destination. “Three Days at Sea” describes the rich experience of watching sunrise from the bridge with the gracious captain of a cruise ship.
Sometimes one ends up unexpectedly in a stunning environment, almost as it having been transported there by Scotty from the transporter deck of the USS Enterprise. So it was when nine of us found ourselves on a black sand beach in Panama. Cahuitla National Park is one of those incredible destinations that would make a grand calendar photo and even grander memories.
Even when travelling by sea one can be reminded that there are those people with less than honorable agendas. “Find It” demonstrates that the dark underside of life and the bright sunny joys of maritime holidays are very close together. Yet, one must believe that the darkness will be dispelled by even the smallest glimmer of light.
For those that want truly rich entertainment experiences, there is nothing like spending a day in the West End of London. In the span of twelve hours I experienced three grand shows and met a lot of wonderful people. “Stair Work in The West End” describes how it is possible to get a lot of aerobic exercise even while sitting through several long musicals.
One of the grand delights of overnight flights is the emergence of sunrise at 36,000 feet. With the glorious pronouncement of a new day there is the expectation of new experiences and friends to be had upon descent to a new world. “Overnight” describes how even in the post 9/11 era, it is possible for jet travel to catapult one into truly rich experiences of living.
Journeys in life often include transit through temporary community. These can be exhilarating experiences. As described in “None of Us is Traveling Through the Universe Alone” describes a temporary community of four lasting less than an hour that produced a transcendent experience for all involved.
Nowhere and Everywhere
I awoke at 6 AM London time, and after an assortment of trains I arrived at the Gatwick airport the mandated three hours in advance. I made the rather grand discovery that I could check my suitcases in at Victoria Station and not be bothered with them until I showed up in the Atlanta terminal about eighteen hours later. As it was, checking in at Gatwick and going through security took about five minutes. Getting out at the other end in Atlanta was another story. Like much of the world, most localities have been transformed into full service shopping malls and this certainly applies to an airport patronized by 35 million international passengers, most of them carrying multiple credit cards. I roamed about for three hours, during which time, I repented of the excessive flapjack and cake I consumed in the past month, and managed to buy nothing except a small meal. There are actually decent pubs in the Gatwick airport and the Wetherspoon Pub provided me with breakfast, as my hotel didn’t want to do so.
Flying east always seems more normal, even if the night is shortened by five hours because one gains a 212 MPH jet stream tail wind. Long distance west-bound flight is another story. Alas, it was payback time. We had a 50-80 MPH head wind the entirety of the trip; the six-and-a-half hour eastbound journey took ten hours going in the other direction and it seemed as if the sun barely moved. And as usual, the turbulence is greater going west.
At 39,000 feet, one has a chance to see the world from a different perspective. The planet we live on is so very fragile and the regions we are able to live in are so limited. Pristine clear air revealed that much of the northern world is locked up in ice. The north Atlantic was speckled with icebergs, easily visible from nearly eight miles up. Iceland, Greenland, and the Maritimes were encased in slabs of ice and snow. The series of Lucite panes that form aircraft cabin windows are about an eighth of an inch thick. On one side of these panes it was a comfortable 73 degrees. On the other side it was –82. It’s hard to imagine that in such a short distance one can travel 155 degrees towards frozen oblivion. I am reminded of the Eden Project, where life thrives in a small artificial oasis, in that case in an abandoned clay pit, in this case a pressurized aluminum cylinder moving across a mile in 7 seconds.
Life used to be more elegant and community-oriented. Until recently, an international flight got you a meal served on real dishes with real cutlery. Now the meals are served on plastic throwaway dishes, and one uses those plastic knives and forks that demand one not press too hard, lest they break. China dishes can be broken and used as a weapon. A steel knife can be used as a weapon, even a plastic one if it is one of those better made ones. 9-11 changed the world for us in ways beyond counting.
Watching a film used to be a shared experience. Now everyone has their eyes glued to a 6x9 LCD panel in the seat back eight inches away. Watching movies in air is now a solitary experience.
It used to be that getting out of airports was easy; grab your bag and go. I can remember once showing up at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport fifteen minutes ahead of time and still getting onboard. Coming back out was even easier. No longer. Gone are those pioneering days of aviation when you walked out on the runway with your friends at the nearby fence to cheer you “bon voyage”, as you climbed a portable stair. No one gets to the gate anymore, coming or going, unless he is a paying customer. Going through three layers of security, and a body search, having everything in my wallet looked at, getting my feet sprayed for foot-and-mouth disease, and collecting and turning my cases back in twice took an hour and a half.
Still, life is good. I wondered if my friends Pat and Bob would ever find me in this new vortex of security. As it was, I went outside the terminal an hour-and-a-half after the wheels touched down before I saw Pat walking towards me. I had visions of putting a mortgage on my house to hire a cab to take me to the other side of Atlanta if I could not find her.
I was elated to find that Bob had been released from the hospital and was in a much improved condition, looking far better that when I last saw him. It’s a good thing that I did bring back four dance tapes for them! I am anticipating them being in tails and sequins soon doing rumbas and tangos. Both enjoy ballroom dancing so much. I watched them get married on the dance floor of an elegant old world cruise ship. I could be so lucky.
Life’s good. I get to be on that dance floor in three days, headed for the Panama Canal. Bob is going to dance and travel again with his elegant wife. I’m not sure what he did to get such a fine wife. As soon as we got back across Atlanta, she bought me a meal of real down-home properly prepared southern-style vegetables. It’s grand seeing cathedrals, castles, and epic musicals, but it is far better seeing good friends, and even more so seeing them come back from the edge of medical uncertainty.
Every day counts more than you can imagine.
March 26
Atlanta Georgia
Maritime Nights
The day has been anything but foolish. This day started with gentle bird song at 6 AM in Gainesville, Florida, where we had enjoyed the fine overnight hospitality of Maggie. Maggie even provided the grand surprise of an Easter ham dinner upon our arrival Easter evening. By noon today, we were six hundred miles from home, ready to travel via a gracious old ship of iron instead of a turbine driven aircraft traveling at 800 MPH. Instead of covering a mile in less than five seconds at 39,000 feet, I am traversing the world at fifteen miles an hour at sea level, covering a mile in four minutes, about the same as a very fast runner. There is something human to this scale of speed. It allows one to assimilate a sense of distance and place in a way not possible by jets doing Mach I.
It is one of those exceedingly calm early spring nights at sea when water and night sky merge into a single indigo sphere and the diamonds shimmer above. The constellation Orion shows clearly that we are headed south towards the Southern Cross. Perhaps a week or more from now, we will be able to see the Southern Cross. Off to the east one can see the faint orange horizon of the myriad sodium electric suns that light up the coastal cities of southern Florida at night. Out here on the water world, it is uncrowded, peaceful, warm, and gentle. Certainly, it is not always that way, but for the present it is. It was only five days ago that the water world for me was covered with ice and fierce winds. Three days from now the water will be aquamarine with a spectral explosion of life forms on reefs of brain coral. It is a wondrous world we live in.
Life is that way. Some days we have brilliant sunshine and dogwood blossoms. Other days we never see the sun and wonder how we will get through the next moment, tormented by unspeakable challenges. Today marks the end of the first year of the second half century of my life. I feel that it is a great fortune to be into the second half century by a year, to be on a gentle warm sea with good friends, good health, on a gentle old ship that has herself plied the seas for fifty years. So many times I almost lost my hold on life.
The dining room staff brought me a birthday cake with a single candle on it, a reminder that I have but a single shot at life – I must make it count for something that will last. I cut up my small cake into tiny pieces and shared with friends at several tables. I found it easy to listen to “Happy Birthday” for a change. A couple of my friends have been told they will never hear it again. It’s hard to let go of dear souls.
Travel has been a rather prominent part of my life, forever it seems. Last month I was in the bucolic emerald realms of England photographing the magnificent gothic cathedrals that have pointed toward the promise of Easter for nearly a thousand years. I made friends to last an eternity on that journey. This month I will photograph other emerald realms that tell of a Creator who knows about the journeys we all are called to make. The cloud forests of Costa Rica give a holographic definition to the beauty to be found around us and to the hope that is within us. In a world of instant communication, the hideous acts of violence in recent days make us wonder if there is peace anywhere. It helps to know that there are places like this gentle tropical sea where the trade winds bring refreshment and the star-studded firmament promises sure guidance, that for now the cloud forests are still there in their incredible splendor.
I trust Easter was a day of renewal for you.
April 1
The Florida Straits
Magic Ascension
Sometimes transcendent peak experiences just show up by surprise. Such was the case for me today. After a very good sleep, I awoke and at 5:45 AM went out to do a pre-sunrise bike ride. Sunday is by far the best day of the week, since it has no traffic. A fine nearly full moon danced in clouds in the still-dark indigo western sky and a vermilion rim formed on the eastern horizon.
I did my fifteen miles, and as I finished up my ride, a pick-up truck pulled up with a balloon gondola in back and four people in the cab. I asked them if they were about to launch. They said if the wind currents were right they planned to do so. A test balloon indicated that they would come down far north of their intended destination. I suggested a field two miles south that would put them in the right place if the currents held stable. They took off in their truck and I rode home two miles, going by the very field I suggested. I saw them put up a test balloon which indicated an ideal track.
I decided to get my camera and go back and film the inflation process. Balloonists tend to be very social people, and these were no exception. I asked them if they minded my photographing the inflation and launch process. I told them of my having filmed three balloon festivals and having never been up in one and wanting to do this sometime so that I could put together an inspirational program to use with support groups. The pilot asked me if I wanted to go up. I said “It would be grand if I could do it sometime.” He said. “You want to go right now?” “Really?” “Get in.” He didn’t have to ask twice. I was like a five-year old with his first shiny new bike, one without training wheels. I hopped into the gondola with the pilot and entered into a transcendent experience. I could hardly believe this was happening. I never in a million years would have expected to get off my bike today or any other day and continue my journey across town by balloon.
It was hard to know what to expect. Having been in jet planes hundreds of times, I am used to the process of becoming airborne being almost a brutal experience, one that includes intense noise, vibration, being slammed backed into a seat by 100,000 pounds of thrust - being able to see nothing of where one is going and then hitting the surface thermal turbulence. This ascension into the sky was so utterly different. Silent. Gentle. Smooth. No vibration. No one telling me to sit down and put my seatback and tray table in their upright positions. Nothing - simply the world quietly dropping away and starting a slow quiet spin underneath our wicker basket. The sensation is so magical. I was overwhelmed with how gentle is the experience of riding on wind, suspended beneath an orb of every possible color in the world
Surprisingly, there was no sensation of being on a high place with that sometimes scary magnetic sense of being sucked into a chasm – none of that at all. The three chase-crew members simply let go of the gondola, and the world softly slipped away. Somehow, it seemed so profoundly civilized to travel this way. The pilot said something about having little control of where one is going. I said that was the main point of this kind of ascension. The journey itself was the destination. It didn’t matter to me where we came down, and when we did come down there was only the barest bump on the parking lot we selected - far smoother than any landing I ever had in a jet.
We had thought the pitcher’s mound on one of the baseball fields would be appropriate somehow, until we realized they were completely closed in with a seven-foot fence and all the gates locked up, which would have made deflation and recovery impossible. We fired the burner just in time to avoid getting penned in for the first inning.
As it was, we crossed town, and I was able to fully film the journey. Our flight path was directly above my house. It is a very different perspective seeing one’s house and neighborhood from 600 feet up. I was amazed at how much more attractive the town seemed from the sky. There were many more trees than I’d expected. In the car I am on main roads where trees are cut down and retail commercial ghettoes are built. I was so pleased to find that but the shortest distance from the road there were many large tracts of trees. Even with a fifth year of drought, I was amazed at how green the world seemed.
I have known for years that I could always pay out a few hundred dollars and get a commercial balloon operator to take me up some place. This experience at sunrise was a profound gift and to have the gentle winds carry me directly over my house seemed almost numinous. The fact that it was given to me completely altered the experience and made it a hundred times more meaningful. That a magnificent balloon would simply appear in my morning routine was beyond chance. It was truly a peak experience of the highest order. I can’t but think that God was telling me that the greatest experiences are to be found where you are and that one does not have to expend vast amounts of energy and wandering to find them in far away places. A lifetime dream was fulfilled three-tenths of a mile from my house. I went off to church in a happy daze.
Look up, you just might find your dream there.
August 25
Anderson, South Carolina
The Eden Project
A couple weeks back I was having a delightful conversation with the elegant keeper of a fine small bookshop in Seaton. During the course of conversation, she told me about something called the Eden Project and proceeded to show me a $40 dollar book describing the project. I knew I absolutely had to go and see what this project was about. From what I could tell it would be much like the pods depicted in the sci-fi film “Silent Running” that was shown some thirty years ago. In the film, the ecology of earth has been essentially destroyed and the only remaining trees and plants are preserved on orbiting platforms covered with geodesic domes. The sense of the Eden project proved to be exactly as that of the film. The artificial context of this vast project added a certain poignancy to the experience of this man-made Eden.
The Eden project consists of two complexes of geodesic domes built as vast greenhouses, along with myriad other structures. These $117 million greenhouses, by far the largest in the world, are intended as a demonstration project for the reclamation of industrial wasteland and to create the feeling in people “that we all could make a very real difference to the world we live in if we could work together.” It is reported that the physical challenges of reclaiming this wasteland were nothing short of daunting, and that a number of times it appeared that the project was destined for failure.
The greenhouses are built in an abandoned china clay pit that is described as once looking like the remains of a dead star. The site is clearly intended to be an educational resource rather than a theme park. As the guiding visionary of the park stated “If this place becomes no more than an up-market theme park it will all have been the most gigantic waste of money. We have intended to create something that not only encourages us to understand and to celebrate the world we live in, but also inspires us to action. Eden isn’t so much a destination as a place in the heart.”
The complex containing the tropical forests is astounding in scale, complete with full-size waterfalls, lagoons, and full-size specimen trees of many sorts. The main dome is 750 feet long, 350 feet deep and about 180 feet high. The domes are the largest of their type in the world and cost about $117 million to construct including site acquisition and preparation. It is said that the domes themselves weigh little more than the air they contain. The material used to make up the panels has only 1% of the weight of glass. The site has been open little more than a year and already the tropical displays have a surprising amount of maturity. The domes are large enough to allow even a mahogany tree to grow to full height under the clear hexagonal panels. For one that is in tropical rain forests several times a year, the forest under the transparent foil sky of ethylenetetrafluoroethylene was surprisingly familiar and realistic. A major problem is keeping all of the native English birds out of that nice inviting warm tropical habitat.
I was amazed at how densely crowded the place was. It was nearly impossible to move about inside the tropical dome. The trust that developed the site was hopeful of 500,000 visitors the first year. After dropping $117 million on the investment, one had better hope and pray people show up in large numbers and quickly. In fact, more than two million showed up in the first year. It would appear that this single project will be the salvation of the economy of Cornwall, which is in dire shape. It was clear that the developers of the project are frantically working to deal with the crowds of people. Armies of tradesmen of every kind were building walks, walls, gardens, reception halls, and new educational facilities. There were all types of heavy construction equipment moving all over the site. It will be interesting to revisit this hexagonal wonderland every year or so to see how it progresses.
One could only hope that outside these domes mankind in general could progress as well. With vision all things are possible.
March 21
St. Austells, Cornwall
Three Days at Sea
I was up at 5:30 AM today. It’s easy to be up at 5:30 AM at sea with the bright tropical sunrise blasting away the ebony of tropical night. It also helps to still be five hours out of synch with local time after a month in England. I went topside, planning on taking a fast long walk on deck before the equatorial sun became incendiary. Barely remembered were the wind driven specks of sleet on my English window panes two weeks ago.
As it turned out, I met a woman on the bow with a very expensive digital camera who knew nothing about its use after a year of ownership. I gave her some pointers on the bow about its use. The ship’s captain, a gracious fellow with fifty-two years at sea happened along and invited us up onto the bridge where he was happy to entertain us for perhaps thirty minutes, even inviting us into his personal quarters. We ended up doing sunrise from the wheel house.
Captain Rolf proved to be the ultimate diplomat and seems to have the ability to make even the lowest crew member feel significant. I have sailed with him in the past and am amazed at how he spends much of his time making crew and passengers alike feel most important to him. I joked with him and asked who was driving the boat while he was out wandering. “Little green men,” he said. He has a most able staff that has been with him twenty-six years, so he can easily take the time to go make the deck sweeper feel that he is contributing to the success of the journey. I took a picture of the captain at his desk, and loaded it into his computer so he could e-mail it to his wife in Atlanta. He said to make sure that the picture of his wife on the wall was visible in the picture. I asked if this was so she would know he hadn’t taken it down and put up someone else’s picture. He laughed and concurred.
We have been almost three days at sea headed south, making an end around the western point of Cuba – so far, yet so close. A dozen times, I have seen Cuba from three miles out, wondering if I would ever actually walk on its beaches. The three days have seemed rather short with the presence of a grand sixteen-piece Glenn Miller orchestra I have enjoyed in years past. I have been enjoying pleasant conversation with the guys in the band and their wives.
Three days of steaming across calm warm waters brought us to the emerald island of San Andres, a remote political territory of Colombia. San Andres is perhaps twelve miles long and half a mile wide. Amazingly, at one end of it is a clean city of 100,000. Sadly, Colombia is in a fast descent into total social disruption and violence and San Andres represents about the only bit of the country that retains social order and a decent infrastructure, yet I could tell that there was some subliminal sense of decay from my last visit a year ago. Sometimes returning to places after a year, for several years in a row, gives one a time-lapse view that is not totally optimistic.
Two of the trombone players from the band and their wives rented a taxi and I joined them for a journey to the far end of the island to make a quick view of the city and visit a Centro market. If you have ever wondered what happens to all of the old four-door Chevy Caprices and Impalas – they’re all here living second lives as taxis with long dead air conditioners and darkly tinted windows that don’t roll down.
The greatest curiosity here is a wooden Baptist church that had been built in South Alabama, dismantled, and then moved here from Alabama in the 1840s. I was able to climb up its belfry via a combination of stairs, ladders, and spiral wedges in the tower. I was most pleased to pass this ultimate physical test of my recovery from a broken leg. The climb afforded a view of the entire twelve-mile island and the best coolest seat on the whole of the island.
This church was as different from St. Paul’s in London as indigo night is from equatorial heat but perhaps it is differences that make life, travel, and remote places worth the journey.
April 4
San Andres, Colombia, South America
CAHUITLA NATIONAL PARK
Going topside about 6 AM revealed that the climate would be very good today. The last two years in Costa Rica were rather heavy on rain. Costa Rica has long been known for its incredible ecological diversity and beauty and the most stable political climate in all of Central and South America. It has long been a mecca for retirees, where one can still buy a quarter mile of pristine beach front with a good house for $70,000. A decent house can be had for $8,000.
Ship’s tours are rather expensive and I opted out of taking any of them. As it was, a group of nine of us was able to rent a van and driver for $20 apiece. So we were able to see far more and at a leisurely pace, and to save about $70 each. We had an amazing driver who drove about 45-50 MPH the entire time. It is amazing what a difference there is to one’s anxiety level when driving slowly and leisurely instead of at warp 9.6. Lloyd stopped whenever I asked so I could hop out and take photos of the rivers and coastal areas we passed.
There were national elections here in Costa Rica today, actually a run-off because last month’s election produced no one candidate with the minimum 40% vote needed to take office. It made for a different experience to see all the polling places being heavily canvases by reps of both parties. In the United States it is forbidden to have any kinds of signs or politicking near a polling place. The polling places in Costa Rica all seemed like festive parties with hundreds of signs and banners in the party colors. Costa Rica is about the last bastion of stability and sanity in the Latin world, yet one can sense this tropical jewel is at high risk from some very unsavory neighbors. Drugs are beginning to erode this country as well. I saw several outbursts of anger today, very different from the past couple of visits.
The group of nine of us were able to drive back nearly to the Panama border and visit what has to be the finest beach I have yet seen in my planetary wanderings. A crescent several miles long and the adjacent rain forest make up a national park. Most unusual about this beach was the proximity of the tropical forest canopy to the water. One could lie on the pristine sand in the shade under the trees at midday and have the wavelets and foam cascade over one’s feet. The proximity of the trees made this beach seem very cozy. So usual is the wide-open exposed sensibility of coastal areas. Also, for unknown reasons this beach draws the most beautiful women I have ever seen, often wandering alone. I have several images that “Sports Illustrated” would very much like to have for its annual swimsuit calendar. There were a number of families enjoying picnics along the edge of the forest. I had a sense of the tranquil energy that Costa Rica has long been known for.
Lloyd took us back along a slightly different route on tiny dirt tracks and showed us an unusual beach consisting of black volcanic sand. This was a rather curious experience, and for sure if one walks barefoot on this tropical beach at midday, one had better keep both feet in the water. Lloyd took us to a high overlook where we were able to get a grand view of Port Limon and the harbor.
We got back to the dock several hours before departure, so I was able to wander among the vast mountains of containers and lifting cranes and take a series of interesting industrial photographs. The scale of industrialization that is overwhelming every part of the planet that is above water is truly ominous. I found an Internet café of sorts and was able to look at some of the 56 e-mails I had received in the past couple of days. Some of us can’t but help reaching out and clicking someone.
We have absolutely calm waters with 82-degree air and cottony clouds. Life at sea can be so life giving. Just don’t do the North Atlantic in March. It isn’t the same!
April 7
Port Limon, Costa Rica
Find It
It seems to be the fiendish nature of human experience that time experienced in a pleasurable fashion is gone in a flash, while time spent in misery stands still. Alas, the past six weeks seem to contain ten lifetimes, yet it seems I just left here. It’s hard to imagine that it was a cold and barren winter landscape of seventeen degrees when I left. Upon my return today, I found spring fully sprung with spectral delights. Even the alligators in Lake Alice were enjoying the warming spring as well.
The past couple of days proved rather interesting in an unsettling way. I am reminded that appearances are deceiving, and that darkness is never that far away. The day after we left Colombia, a bomb was detonated and twelve people died and hundreds more were injured. Every day the satellite marine telex printout at the concierge’s desk told of the daily atrocities in Israel.
What we did not know at the time is that we were unwittingly being drawn into the vortex of cocaine trafficking. On Wednesday, the cruise director made some odd public comments to the assembled passengers regarding the fact that the Justice Department could seize our ship and take it apart if it felt so inclined, but that this was very rarely done. He also mentioned that there were three dogs at the terminal buildings and all of them were named “Find It.” It would seem we were being gently prepared for something big about to go down. Sea captains are like jet pilots in having been trained to be gently vague.
A couple of days ago, a nearby ship was found to have 3,000 pounds of cocaine hidden away in the lower decks. Yesterday I was giving a lecture in the ship’s theater when suddenly two handlers brought in the biggest German shepherd I have ever seen. This giant dog was sniffing for you know what. Over the PA I asked if anyone in the audience had a doggie treat we might give to Find It. It would seem my humor was lost on the handlers, who fairly quickly evacuated the region to the laughter of the audience.
As it turns out there was a fleet of law enforcement vehicles, six dogs, and a squad of frogmen waiting on the edge of the pier as we glided into position to be berthed. Before the lines were even cast to the docks, the frogmen were in the water. The grapevine had mysteriously revealed to the authorities that packets of cocaine had been attached to the outside of our steel hull plates with large magnets. Somehow it became known that clandestine divers had made plans to meet us and go under our hull and pick off those packets. How this information came to light is a mystery none of us passengers will ever know about.
It seems the frogmen got there first and collected the goods, and also found more of the same in some of the luggage. It was a sobering experience. What was even more mystifying was that despite our rather spectacular arrival and the events of two days (I am intentionally leaving out a lot of details) was my being able to drag a heavy large wheeled dolly full of my audio/visual crates and boxes off the ship and through customs and all of those armed police and security people without ever being asked to reveal what was in them. I am talking about a big pile of boxes and cases. Even “Find It” did not come to give me or my mountain of boxes a sniff. I am not sure whether to feel insulted or complemented. Do I look that harmless and wimpy?
The journey to South America and back proved splendid in that the climate could not have been better, with perhaps total rainfall consisting of five minutes of sprinkles and lower-than-normal temperatures. Even the usual Dante’s Inferno of Panama was quite comfortable with low humidity. The water was gentle for the whole of our journey, and every night the clear sky was studded with cosmic diamonds. I renewed friendships and made some fine new ones. The whole of the journey, I was able to bask in the grand sound of a fine big band orchestra that played all the great standards. Every time I return to this grand old ship built in Scotland when I was two years old, I feel like I am coming home.
Fortunately, I like dogs. I think of happy dogs on hearths as good companions, sharing warmth, silence, while we enjoy good books and a fine glass of sherry. I don’t tend to think of dogs as sniffing out the evil of the world. Fortunately, most are not called to do this.
April 11
An Undisclosed location in South Florida
Stair Work in the West End
I slept better last night than I have in some days. I walked about eight miles yesterday, and it is a hundred stairs up to my room and it is 225 steps down to some of the subways at ‘my’ tube stop. I am making up for all the exercise I lost the past six months with a broken leg. The jet lag does not seem to be an issue to me. I did barely make it to breakfast after sleeping over the wake-up call because I stayed up until 2 AM.
After eating, I took the tube to the West End to be sure I could find the Drury Theater and collected my ticket for “My Fair Lady.” It proved within easy walking distance of the National Gallery so went there and soaked in the images of Rubens, Durer, Turner, and the like for a couple of hours. This place is so vast and wondrous. I did not even attempt to enter most of the galleries, lest my head turn to mush from overload. I found the enthusiastic uniformed school children and their attentive teachers a pleasing thing to see. There were many older students sketching and painting the art works. The visual arts are alive and well on this side of the Atlantic
I have always noticed over the years a lot of people on the subways reading “real” books as well. I wonder why the British read fine books with orange edge bindings from Penguin Books while we read the “National Enquirer” and “Midnight Star.” Generalizations can be dangerous, but I don’t have many recollections of seeing America’s Generation X or its baby boomers with their heads stuck in the literary classics. Maybe that is why I keep coming back here – it’s different.
I am certain that I had the most intense day of entertainment in my life. While walking back over to the Drury Theater, gawking at all the visual distractions of Covent Gardens, I could hear magnificent operatic arias being sung. Here in the street? Detouring I found a man and woman singing fabulous street opera with really fine musical accompaniment. The whole market venue where they were plying their craft was spellbound. Buskers are a London tradition and one can get in on some magnificent musicianship at no cost. A hundred people cheered every song and I did drop ten pounds for a CD.
The next market place had a string quartet doing romantic folk songs from Italy. These buskers were deserving of a much better venue than the street. I hate to use the word, as it is somewhat pejorative and the making of fine music is very honest and enriching work. My timing was perfect, as I had an hour of free time before needing to be at the Drury, and could stand in amazement at what the creative side of humanity can do to enrich our collective lives.
I started off the ‘formal’ part of my entertainment with a three-hour plus run of “My Fair Lady” in the afternoon which proved magnificent. The Drury Theater is a spectacular venue for plays. The moment one passes through the oak doors under the grand marquee, one enters a vermillion and crystal world from another time and space. It was not unlike the experience Richard had when he went back to the Victorian version of the Grand Hotel in the classic tragic romance film, “Somewhere in Time.” Because I was given permission to photograph the public spaces, I have been able to retain a small visual memory of what is one of the grandest of Old World theater lobbies. The place is opulent beyond our concepts of theater interiors.
Everything about the show was exceptionally well done. I have a hard time getting used to the opulence of the stagecraft here in London. I could sure enjoy building sets a lot more if I had the space and money these theaters have. The craft budget for the last show I just built (“Chicago”) was $500. These London shows have a bigger budget for Cadbury’s hot chocolate in the Underground. I even had pleasing snippets of conversation with a family sitting next to me during “My Fair Lady,” which was truly a fair and heart-lifting experience.
My interval, as they call intermissions in England, consisted of a brief Lebanese dinner before walking to the nearby Adelphi Theater for an evening performance of “Chicago.” Having just spent some weeks building the show at our own community theater, I wanted to see the differences between a community playhouse version and a big budget London west end show, and especially the stagecraft differences. I actually liked our concepts for the staging much better. It only reinforced to me that creativity can often make up for a lack of finance and our little shoestring budget theater can keep up with the best of ‘em. For certain, you economist types will understand that the marginal utility value of our craft budget was much higher than any of those in London’s West End. Still, it is stunning to sit back and watch the Klieg lights come up on world-class performers on a million dollar set.
During “Chicago’s” interval I met a man and his wife from Atlanta plus three girls from Cornerbrook in Newfoundland. They were amazed that I knew of their town and had been in the Canadian Maritimes. The three girls are theater majors here for two months with a course requirement to see twenty West End shows. Life must be very hard for them. I had pleasant chatter with them about technical theater. It is these chance encounters with civilized friendly adventurers that make long journeys so rewarding.
Tomorrow is a “work day” in that I plan to carefully photograph two major cathedrals for additions to my church architecture workshop. Life is good, and there is no rain here. It is warmer than when I left Atlanta.
I walked forever again today, and did the 250 steps from the subway trains to the street level about five times today rather than using the elevator. I am having no residual from my fracture and feel most privileged to be whole of body and able to walk the streets of London. It wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t do this. Each time I climbed one of those stairs I was reminded consciously of the miracle of regeneration of bone that takes place in the unseen inner parts of our being. I will never again lament climbing stairs. Many people will never have the option to do so. I am grateful for the ability and it is only made more heartening in a world-class city that often feels like a second home.
March 6
West End, London
Overnight
Monday proved clear and I found the bright clear weather so settling to my demeanor that I did not spend the day paranoid about getting in a plane for a long journey. After all, this is the first time I have planned to fly in a jet since that fateful Tuesday when four plane loads of dreamers perished in their glimmering jets on a fine September morning in New England.
I arrived at the airport three-and-a-half hours early because the airlines said it would take that long to get processed, and a good friend did not want to get caught in the afternoon buildup of Atlanta traffic. As it was, check-in and security collectively took about twenty minutes on the outside. The airport did not seem overly crowded, and I was rather pleased to find that it has been made into a virtual art museum. Several of the local large museums have put together some really grand exhibits in the mile-long underground passageways. A rather breathtaking collection of very fine huge stone sculptures from Zimbabwe easily consumed thirty or forty minutes of my time. The time in the airport did not drag, and the overnight flight left on time in a fine sunset and we were soon in total darkness as we flew east at 800 miles an hour. I found the dinner and free wine a perfectly satisfying way to spend a Monday evening made rather shorter by a 200 plus tail wind.
The plane journey was made most pleasant with the single empty seat in the cabin being next to me. On the other side was a woman who told me about growing up in Innsbruck, Austria. She speaks several languages and has a clear trans-material view of the world that is environmentally sensitive with which I rather resonate. Eva-Maria found the materialism and superficiality of the US difficult to deal with. She also described the importance of observing religious holidays. Alas, she is happily married.
We had an uneventful 5,000-mile ride across the Atlantic, nearly setting a ground speed record. At one point we were doing 800 miles an hour ground speed, benefiting from a 212 mile per hour tail wind. We arrived more than an hour early, despite throttling back for a good part of the journey. Airport gate assignments in busy airports dictate that you don’t show up too early.
I learned a bit more about turbulence. It is still most unsettling to me, but I learned that the center of a jet stream is quite stable and gives a very smooth ride with a free 200 MPH boost. It is in coming and going from the core of a jet stream that one encounters turbulence. The total journey took barely six-and-a-half hours. At the end of the journey we had a rather intensely spectacular sunrise, just before settling down into some low broken clouds. I did find that at the end of the journey I was less tired overall than I normally am from such a long journey. I did not release a big sigh of relief once on the ground, vowing never to fly again, as I have done in the past. Maybe I am making a bit of progress. I never gave a second thought to terrorist activities, and never heard any other passenger mention such either.
I took a two-hour walk in Hyde Park in the late afternoon, and had the grand benefit of late golden sunlight lasting for more than an hour. The sunsets are so long lasting here in the far north. It made for some really grand photos. I took perhaps a hundred or more. Digital allows one to be frivolous and voluminous.
I had a rather entrancing experience with a total stranger who could barely speak a word of English. A beautiful woman saw me taking detailed photos of birds, squirrels, dogs, and flowers. Without saying anything she came up to me and pressed some whole shelled walnuts into my hand to feed the squirrels in order to get better images of them. The beautiful dark-haired woman wandered a bit further down the trail as I was doing macros of camellia blooms. I later showed her the squirrel images. I did learn with a few words that she is the wife of a diplomat from Azerbaijan. She left with a smile and I went on to find other botanical delights lit up in last light. It stuns me the small lasting gifts a stranger can give to us that we will never forget.
These Hyde Park squirrels are profoundly tame, and quite happily got up on my hand to take the nut fragments I presented to them. I am reminded of the time I was in this same park ten years ago and had birds land on my hands on this exact same walkway. Today all the birds were over on the Crescent, a fine lake in the interior of the park. I still find it absolutely amazing that a city of eight million has a park of four square miles in the center of it. In the interior realms of this park, the city is easily forgotten as one watches dogs frolic as other people feed flocks of geese, ducks, gulls, and pigeons.
I made it to the Victoria Palace in time for a full production of “Kiss Me Kate.” I was absolutely amazed and delighted with the production values of the whole show. As a set builder I was especially pleased with the stagecraft and lighting. Huge multi-level sets were transformed instantly. Lots of money and eighty foot galleries and wings will allow all sorts of wonders to take place on stage. I was pleased to be sitting here in a West End show knowing that our little production of “Chicago” in Anderson had just closed a sell-out run on Sunday.
It is amazing to be in a city that is always open. I took the subway back to my hotel about 11 PM, and everything was still open and the sidewalks teeming. I had a hundred ethnic restaurants to choose from in my own neighborhood, and ended up having a Lebanese meal again. I was easily filled for $3.40. London can be very inexpensive if one pays attention. Dinner, this first-rate show, and transportation cost me less than $15. It seems as if I have been here for days already, yet it is but eighteen hours.
It’s amazing what can happen overnight.
March 5
Knightsbridge, London
None of Us is Travelling Through the Universe Alone
It was but two days ago I returned from a retreat for single Christian adults. The essential message was that it is more than OK to be a single adult in an obsessively couples oriented culture. We were encouraged to view singleness as a singularity, a very special state, even one with special privileges. In the sacramental Christian paradigm, both of the rather empowering speakers reminded us that birth, baptism, taking of the Holy Eucharist, and dying are landmark places on our journeys to be taken alone. This was how God designed our earthly journeys to be.
The mass culture, including the lyrics of nearly every love song, tells us that we are somehow incomplete until we find that perfect person capable of fulfilling our every dream. Alas, there is no such person, as so many tragically learn when their overburdened marriages collapse under the weight of these unrealistic expectations. Those of us who have known nothing but singleness, seek that special other as devoutly as those of centuries past sought the Holy Grail. Many of us travelling solo struggle to realize that we are complete individuals, as created by our Creator.
Paradoxically, both the Old and New Testaments contain profoundly compelling exhortations as to the necessity and beauty of community. Even when we are reminded that the major events of life must be experienced alone, God started out His message to us “It is not good that man be alone.” The wisdom writer of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes tells us that safety, warmth, pleasure, and even increased return on our labor derive from being with another. The great Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthian church that Christian community can only exist when we each recognize our own special personal gifts and freely share them with it. The implication is that being out of community will cause unnecessary losses and vulnerability and that being in community is a catalyst for abundant living. Some ten years later an uncertain author, perhaps the apostle Paul, wrote to the Hebrews an admonition to not forsake the fellowship of the saints. We are again reminded of this essential imperative for the need of community in our lives.
So it would seem that the challenge is seeing ourselves as complete whole individuals, coupled or not, yet in need of linkage to those about us, a difficult balance in an unbalanced culture. My experiences with facilitating depression support and therapy groups reveal that people suffer far more than they need to because they lack the safety and strength that derive from community in its many forms. As an active member of a sacramental church, participation in the community life of my church is an obvious form of community. Yet, it shows up often in some astounding ways that have little to do with the church structure.
I do show up nearly every time the door is open and even some times when it is not, but I have found some other important forms of community to complement my sacramental center. For some ten years I have been involved in a local community playhouse and have delighted in the creation of oases of laughter and magic for people, many pressured by present-day complex lives that don’t get any easier.
It was in this small community theater about a year ago that I met one of our volunteers, MQ. Most people know her as Joanne; I call her MQ for Magic Queen. She is a full-time volunteer in an elementary school, coordinating a tutoring program for 769 young children trying to figure out how this world works. Some need a bit more help with this than others, and MQ knows how to do this very well. MQ paid the tuition for a special kind of learning nearly ten years ago when a brain stem tumor took away her ability to walk or work at her profession of teaching. She knows about special needs and how to relate to those with them.
Every child that enters her Magic Room for tutoring is awarded a paper heart in the color of his or her choice at the end of the lesson. They write their names on their hearts and can attach them to any surface in the room, except the big metallic red hearts hanging from the ceiling. Over the academic year, it is entrancing to watch this putty gray cinder block room in an ordinary school building transform into a spectral wonderland as these hearts accrete on every possible surface within reach of a young child. Some of these kids can reach pretty high, and that is the whole point of the Magic Room.
Having at one time been in a wheelchair myself I learned the hard way the realities of disability and accessibility. It is sometimes very hard to reach high. I have for several years now been quite functional and have resumed my habits of climbing on very high things including Mt Mitchell in North Carolina. This mountain is 6,684 feet high and the tallest thing in Eastern North America. For nearly a year, I have been threatening Joanne that I was going to somehow get her to the top of that mountain. I did get her into a hot air balloon in May, and she found it a transcendent experience. Being on top of Mt. Mitchell, despite being wheelchair bound, struck me as a powerful visual metaphor of one rising above her physical challenges and limits. I wanted to make this happen.
Well, today was the day to make good on my threat. As it turns out, Mt Mitchell is only five miles from the route I had selected to get us from South Carolina to Pennsylvania for one of those epic Italian Thanksgiving dinners that lasts for three days. I don’t select the shortest way to get to places, lest I miss something important. This late November day turned out to be extraordinarily clear and perfect for a major ascension to a very high place. And so it was that I was to gain an impromptu lesson in the importance of community, even a temporary community that lasts perhaps a mere hour. Much can be done in the space of an hour or the two days of a retreat community.
I have a bad habit of over-estimating my abilities and I figured getting Joanne up the tallest thing on this part of the planet would be a piece of cake. Not! I have told her in the past she is probably too trusting. She might have found that out today the hard way, excepting for Divine intervention. Having previously been up this mountain myself on two good legs, I really had not paid attention to those hundreds of very irregular steps made of rocks and logs and tree roots or the loose soft gravel preceding the final ascension. I got her and the chair across that soft loose gravel at nearly 7,000 feet and immediately knew I was in trouble. There is noticeably less oxygen at this elevation for wannabee hulks like me who think they can do anything.
I managed to pop her chair up the first of several widely spaced stone ledges with her trusting me to not drop her into the abyss head first. I managed the first few steps but knew that what I thought was going to be a virtuous demonstration of my virile sympathetic concerns for her transcendent experience was going to be defeated by the realities of gravity and an infinite number of logs, roots and rocks. I was going to have to eventually concede defeat, which males can’t stand doing, especially in front of women. Our ego structures are dependent on being all-powerful facilitators of the impossible.
As I was nearing the realization of this transcendent metaphor crashing down on my wounded ego, two angels appeared to save me from a high-altitude humiliation and to teach me about the increased return on shared labors via shared community effort. Most angels are named Gabriel, Michael or the like. These two were Jason and Shane. They didn’t show up in the standard white robe garb and wings, rather green sweatshirts and camouflage pants. I think God wants to get us past some of this stereotypical stuff we fall into.
These two young healthy men/angels offered their services to make that, which I could not do alone, possible as a shared effort. That infinity of logs, rocks, and roots was reduced to a manageable obstacle. Exercising major fortitude of trust, Joanne allowed the three of us to lift her chair and carry it up to the highest place within thousands of miles. We arrived on top of this great mountain rather winded, but aware that a cord of three was not broken and we had ascended safely. Joanne arose in her sedan chair with a smile, greeting a lot of bewildered hikers. I am certain most of these sane people wondered about the mental stability of one who would drag a wheelchair bound friend to the top of the planet.
Without these two angels showing up I would have had my ego destroyed and probably killed Joanne in the process and been committed to the nearest psychiatric unit for evaluation for psychotic behavior that endangered the life of a crippled person. I would have then probably gotten free room and board, courtesy of the Department of Corrections for voluntary manslaughter.
I was spared this dire scenario because a community of four formed for the space of an hour. I was able to get Joanne up the 80 stairs in the observation tower myself where she emerged on top to a view that took her breath away. She was basking in this vast vista of a thousand peaks while I was secretly wondering about a thousand stones, rocks, and logs I was going to have to get her back down. I figured our angels had gone on to other realms and were going to leave me to deal with gravity and the rough terrain on my own during the descent. I learned angels and those in community finish what they start. We returned to the bottom of the observation tower and those two camouflaged angels were waiting, knowing I wasn’t going to pull off the descent without killing MQ.
We safely traversed that infinity of rock and root and descended to level solid terrain. I would not be eating hospital food after all, by the grace of God.
As it happened, on the drive up to Mt Mitchell from the Blue Ridge Parkway, we were listening to a Barbara Streisand tape and the lyrics from the song “Higher Ground” caught our attention. “Hold me safe, take my heart to higher ground. I have walked too long in darkness. I have walked too long alone. I would trade the wealth of ages for a warm hand to hold.” These words resonated with us as we anticipated literally climbing to the highest ground around. What I had not quite caught yet was that it was only in community all things are possible. We had reached higher ground because four of us shared the space of an hour. As it turns out, angels have e-mail.
We stopped at the ranger station to use the facilities and while there fell into conversation with two older women who were out roaming around on this fine cerulean day in the mountains. They made it clear they had no intention of climbing up on top of that big rock we had just come down from.
These women told of us of an experience they had in the Grand Canyon with their husbands watching a sunset that left them absolutely stunned. The only problem was that normally it is dark when a sunset finishes its flamboyant outburst of color. The rim of the Grand Canyon is not a place one wants to be walking around at night in total darkness unless one is interested in a single last opportunity for free flight into a six thousand foot abyss. The freefall flight might be grand but the landing would ruin the overall experience.
As it turned out, the group had not thought of the mundane things of life – like a flashlight. As it happened, four other nearby people were also gawking at this spectral outburst and as frequently occurs, God protected the foolish and ill-prepared. One of the group of eight happened to have a tiny key chain penlight, and with this tiny speck of illumination this small community was able to safely back away from the edge of the vast darkness and live to tell about it. For but a few minutes, a tiny community of eight found life instead of death on the rocks because they shared what little they had and trusted and depended on each other.
As Barbara Streisand so aptly sings in the song “I believe” we heard going down the road from Mt Mitchell, “I believe some where in the darkest night a candle glows. I believe for every one who goes astray, someone will come to show the way.” And so it was with a community of eight in the Grand Canyon and a community of four on Mt Mitchell.
“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”
Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania
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