Things that Go Bump in the Night | |
Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, October 26, 2008 | |
At this time of year, our ancient ancestors said, the veil between the world of the living and the dead grew thin, and the world of our physical reality and the world of our spiritual reality would come together and communicate. To many ancient peoples, the day of Samhain—October 31st on our modern calendars-- marked the beginning of the new year, the start of a new cycle. Sometimes, they would light huge ritual bonfires to burn away the images of the old, and free themselves from the fears and worries of the past.
In our joy and merriment at Halloween, we celebrate these ancient ancestors. Indeed, we join with them again along the way of the spirit.
For our pagan ancestors, Halloween—“Summer’s End”, as they sometimes called it—was a big deal, one of their most important holy days; it was, perhaps, the most important milestone in the entire year.
In our own day and age, Halloween has become a big deal once again, for better or worse—mostly for the better, I think. Certainly, it has become big business: According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween is second only to Christmas in terms of the amount of money spent in its celebration. Last year at Halloween, we Americans spent $ 1.8 billion on Halloween candy, $ 1.5 billion on Halloween costumes, and an incredible $ 2.5 billion on Halloween decorations—almost $ 6 billion in all! That’s a lot of candy corn!
Like just about everything else in our society, Halloween is big business—very big business. No surprise there. It’s easy, of course, to become cynical about things that become as commercial as Halloween has; it’s easy to doubt that they might even have some deeper meaning or spiritual significance. But in spite of its enormous commercialization, I think that the deeper truths of Halloween persist and abide.
Now, it’s true that some Christians in a good number of churches don’t like Halloween one bit. I remember when we lived in
It’s an odd celebration, certainly. And without taking at least a look at the history of Halloween, we might be forgiven for wondering what we are to make of all these devils and witches running around, of all of these ghosts and ghouls and various creatures that go bump in the night? Without a deeper plumbing of the meanings at the heart of Halloween, we might well think, as many do, that it’s silliness at best, or downright sinister at worst.
But as open-minded religious men and women, as spiritual searchers that we are, and as those who seek to be true universalists, and honor all of our spiritual ancestors, I think that there are important lessons that the tradition of Halloween offers us, traditions which perhaps we need in our modern day and age, more than ever.
The first lesson of Halloween is not to be afraid of witches.
More than 2000 years ago, the festival we now celebrate as Halloween was New Year’s Eve on the Celtic calendar. As we’ve learned, it was called Samhain, and it marked the time after the harvest when the souls of the dead were thought to roam the now-barren fall landscape. Samhain marked the time when the boundary between the world of the dead and the world of the living was at its thinnest, so sometimes people wore frightening masks to try to scare the dead spirits into moving on into the afterlife.
When Christianity overtook
“Christianity is paganism reinterpreted,” as one writer has put it. Or, perhaps, it is paganism deepened and intensified in the light of a whole new salvation epic. Christianity has also gained much more vividness and color and joy in reflecting some of the practices of our pre-Christian pagan ancestors.
Halloween gives us a chance to honor these pagan ancestors, and to ponder just how deeply their earth-based traditions—their respect for the sacred circle of life and their reminder to us to live in harmony with the cycles and rhythms of nature—can enrich and empower our own personal faiths.
Halloween reminds us not to be afraid of witches, but rather to honor these ancient wise men and wise women as spiritual forbears.
The second lesson of Halloween is its reminder that we dwell in two worlds: that we are both physical and spiritual beings, and that we need to keep open the channels of communication between those two realms inside ourselves and beyond ourselves.
Our ancient ancestors knew intuitively the power of the “time between”: the critical importance of that time of year when the veil was at its thinnest, and the amazing things that can happen near boundaries and borderlands. Magic happens around thresholds, the place where inner and outer come together.
In
As the great scholar of cultures and religions Mircea Eliade wrote:
“[The threshold is] the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where the two worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred… becomes possible…”
In Mexican culture, there’s a parallel holiday around this time of year, that takes place on All Souls’ Day (November 2nd) called the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. As one Mexican writer has put it, the Day of the Dead is a way of sharing our lives with our lost ones—with those who have passed on, whom we have loved and lost. It is a declaration that they are still a part of us, that we are still joined with them in an indestructible garment of eternity. The traditional parade for the Dia de los Muertos begins with the words “Vamanos con los muertos!” (“Come, let us go with the dead.”) As go we all will—sooner or (we hope) later.
Halloween, too, reminds us that there is another realm, a spiritual realm, as much a part of our reality as our physical realm-- and that as complete beings, we need to keep communication between the two realms open.
The third lesson of Halloween is that we shouldn’t be afraid to try on different masks!
We need to break routine from time to time; we need to imagine ourselves as superheroes—as cartoon characters—as brave warriors and beautiful princes—as clowns, and angels, and court jesters—as Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or what have you. Sometimes, we need to let fantasy and imagination have free reign within us.
We wear many hats already in these lives of ours—hats as fathers and mothers; sons and daughters; hats of our various professions. But these roles we play don’t exhaust the possibilities that lie dormant in our souls.
The masks and costumers we don on Halloween—as esoteric and exotic and downright weird and scary as they are—can speak to us a word or two about those different possibilities that lie within us. We have the chance, if only for a few hours, to transform ourselves into something we might have always wanted to be. And who knows? Perhaps this simple ritual of transformation can open up new possibilities for the persons we might yet become.
Finally, the fourth lesson of Halloween (and it’s a big one) is its reminder to us to celebrate life! To en-joy life (that is, consciously to bring joy into our lives). It is a call to loosen up, to have fun, to become like children once again. It reminds us that religious ritual need not be always solemn and somber; that religion need not always be as dry as dust.
Halloween is one of the few times in the entire year when adults are allowed to play “dress up” and just act downright silly. It’s a time when we can give our imaginations full reign, and play tricks on one another, and where chocolate takes its rightful place as chief among the major food groups. The social conventions we live with every day, year in, year out, are suspended, or even reversed, at Halloween. On Halloween, we can be whoever we want to be!
Halloween is a kind of rest stop, along the way of our journeys; it can be an oasis in the desert of modern life. It is a chance to suspend narrow reason and cold logic—if only for a day or two—and let the cool winds of autumn and the changing seasons refresh our souls. It is a chance to go outside in the cool night, on the cusp of November, on the frontier of winter, and breathe in the rich aromas of turf fire and fallen leaves and the turning year.
It is a blessed time to light again the bonfires of our souls. To lift our spirits above the empty materialism that rules over us all too often. To remember those who have come before. To rejoice in another turning of the wheel of life. And to prepare ourselves for the next step of our own journeys.
Halloween reminds us that there is always one cycle ending and another coming to birth. At this point in the life of our world, especially, that is an irrefutable fact that gives me great hope. There is always one cycle ending and another coming to birth. As it is for the seed that lies dormant in the rich, dark earth, so may it be in the lives and souls of all of us, and of our world.
As our ancient pagan ancestors would say: Blessed be.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Taking Back Our Time | |
Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, October 19, 2008 | |
Chairman Mao is not generally known for his poetry. But he wrote quite a bit of it, I guess. In one of his poems, there are these lines:
So many deeds cry out to be done,
and always urgently. Time presses; the world moves on.
Ten thousand years is too long a time.
Seize the hour! Seize the day!
It’s become cliché, of course, to speak of how quickly time goes by. We see it most clearly in our children, I think. I shudder a little when I think that my youngest, Noah, will be twenty-one years old in just a couple of weeks. Twenty-one! I can remember when I was twenty-one (just barely now, if truth be told). Now, to have a child who’s 21: I shudder again to think how old that make me.
"Our lives are but a little gleam of time between two eternities," Carlyle wrote. The fact of the matter is that we are all living on borrowed time; none of us can tell how long our years will be numbered. But we know that it’s limited, severely. We know it won’t be ten thousand years-- and so, very often we seem in such a hurry to accomplish all we need to do—all those deeds that cry out to be done, and always urgently. It's like a New Yorker cartoon I saw not too long ago. An obvious Yuppie-type fellow is standing there at the counter in what must be a Starbucks, looking at his watch, and he's berating the clerk: "Hurry up, hurry up. I've only got a few more decades on this planet."
"We are prepared to be starved before we are hungry," Thoreau wrote, most perceptibly, way back in 1854. He saw our time famine coming. Even in these tough economic times, we live in a land of abundance, where most of want for very little, really. What we all seem to lack, desperately at times, is enough time; time to accomplish all the demands that day puts before us.
"Time is the great enemy," suggests Winifred Holtby.
"Time chops at us like an iron hoe," writes the poet Mary Oliver.
"Times does us violence," adds Simone Weil.
But from whence does this great time “famine” come? Why is there a perceived shortage of time at all? After all, we have as many hours in the day as our ancestors had—and we live longer, so we have more days to our lives; we live more productive years; so why is there, in our day and age, such a “famine” at all?
How odd it is that time-- this simple dimension of reality-- should be maligned so fiercely by otherwise rational voices... There are other, saner ways to look at it, of course: We can see time as a resource we have-- ours to manage as efficiently as we're able. "I must govern the clock, and not be governed by it," Golda Meir once wisely observed. A whole industry of books, tools, seminars, and other resources has grown up to help people "manage their time". The Massachusetts Council of Church has even scheduled a “Take Back Your Time” rally on the Boston Common for this Friday afternoon. I’d like to go—but I don’t have time to go on Friday!
Time does seem like a thief in the night sometimes: stealing away the few leisure or contemplative hours we thought we had safely tucked away. Faster, faster, all things seem to fly by... Within the lifetimes of any of us, the speed of the lives we lead has increased dramatically—even just within the past five or ten years or so. How do we respond to these lives that are already packed with too much to do-- that are already hurtling forward all too quickly? Usually, we try to cram more in, get more accomplished-- and especially, we try to move faster and faster. We have been taught that speed is the key we need to gain mastery over the world, mastery over our time.
As the external speed of our cultural accelerates, our internal speeds get dragged along as well. In his book Time Wars, Jeremy Rifkin wrote: "We have quickened the pace of life only to become less patient. We have become more organized but less spontaneous, less joyful. We are better prepared to act on the future but less able to enjoy the present and reflect on the past."
Or, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera put it: “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, and between speed and forgetting.”
We are time-famished. We are starved for authentic human moments; for genuine human contact; for life-enhancing, soul-shaking experiences; for conversation and intimacy with friends and lovers and family members—the kind of experience that pierces our being, plants new seeds of kinship, and gives the flower of love time to grow.
Dr. Larry Dossey, a physician, writes about a pathology-- a physical illness-- he calls "time sickness". Dr. Dossey says that people suffering from this illness believe that their "time is getting away [from them], that there isn't enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up." He continues: "The trouble is, the body has limits that it imposes upon us. And the body will not be fooled if we try to beat it into submission and ask more of it than it can deliver in a 24-hour day." Through bio-feedback, meditation, and prayer, Dossey helps people who are time-sick to slow down, and, as he says "step out of time". He tries to help them take "time exits" off of the bullet train that society has most of us on.
We have to do what we can, when we can, to get off the train. We have to try to tack back our time from that thief in the night. How do we do it?
Sometimes, we can schedule these "time exits" on our own: times of meditation and contemplation... walks in the woods... times at the gym... an hour a day put aside for reading... an afternoon nap... Any of these can slow us down, give our bodies time to replenish and reconnect, and ease us gently into the next stage of our journey. Time exits like these can pay real dividends in terms of our mental and physical health.
We need to be conscious and deliberate about taking these "time exits" for ourselves. If we aren't, then our bodies might schedule them for us, and just shut down-- with illness, disease, or accidents. "Illness is the Western world's only acceptable form of meditation," the psychologist Anne Wilson Shaef once said. The only time many of us Westerners seem willing to slow down is when the body commands us to stop.
Just as the God in Genesis worked six days on Creation-- "and on the seventh day he rested"-- so our bodies (and our psyches) need a rhythm of work and rest... tightening and loosening... work and rest...
Still, the days of our years seem to go by so fast; the circles and cycles of our lives seem to be spinning so quickly. The older we get, the faster the years go by. As Richard Saltus has written:
"Remember how, in childhood, a day or a week could be an eternity? But now that we're older, how quickly the weeks, months, even years can race by in a blur. Almost anyone in his 30s, 40s, or beyond will agree that time seems to have speeded up, or suffered inflation, so that it doesn't get you as much as it used to. 'The summer's just started, and now it's gone,' an adult will sigh. Or, seeing an 8-year old grandson after a long absence, grandma is apt to say, 'It seems only yesterday that you were a baby.'
"The 8-year old, by contrast, might think an hour with grandma an impossibly long stay.”
According to a psychologist named William Friedman (who wrote a book in 1991 called About Time), one of the reasons time passes so slowly for children is that "a child doesn't understand time patterns" like days and weeks and months and years. "He's stuck in the present, and it can seem interminable."
Can you imagine being "stuck" in the present moment? Interminable, yes-- but how rich-- how wondrous-- how life-sustaining and productive such an attitude toward life could be. Maybe this is a key to curing our own "time sickness" and taking back our time: to live in the moment; to cure our time hunger by ingesting each moment as a little pill of life-- of zest-- of wonder-- of youthful creativity and childlike joy.
Objectively, of course, time passes at the same rate, no matter what we're doing. A minute is a minute; an hour is an hour-- whether we're washing dishes or working with customers in a store or at the office, or watching a movie, or a football game, doing something really exciting like listening to a sermon!
But subjectively, inside ourselves, time seems to move differently depending if we're doing something "different"-- something interesting, something out of the ordinary, something exciting, something frightening even-- than if we're locked in the same routine, hour after hour, constantly watching the clock.
You’ve heard the saying: "Time flies when you're having fun," and to a great degree, it’s true.
But it's also true that those times that are marked by "more vivid and memorable events seem fuller than those times that are locked in the repetition of our routine."
Joy-filled, wondrous, creative, inspiring times don’t take up any more time, objectively, than the dreary, mundane, routine times do. But they seem, somehow, more "worthwhile" than lesser time do. We seem to get more “bang” for our “time bucks” from them.
One thing I've discovered in writing biographies of different people is that you just can't give equal space and attention to everything in a person's life—nor should you. Now, I absolutely love Rosalyn Carter. But I remember, some years ago, when I read her memoir, First Lady from Plains that I had a real problem getting through it. Not because of anything in particular Rosalyn said, but because of the way the book was structured, year by year, through her whole life, so that she gave equal time and pages to (say) the beautification of the Georgia state highway between Macon and Valdosta as she did to (say) the Camp David peace agreement. (I heard not too long ago about a scholar at the Hoover Institution in
When you write a biography, to keep it interesting, you have to choose, and edit, and pare down the ordinary times and give more space and time to the extraordinary, the historic, the heroic.
That’s what we’d each have to do if we were to write our memoirs: give more pages to the interesting, important events (and periods of our lives) than we would to the day in/day out stuff (even though we probably spend 150 of the 200 pages we've been allotted in the day in/day out routines we live).
Maybe that’s the way we have to live out this epic of ours on this Earth, as well: Maybe we have to try to get out of the routine as much as we can; do some different things; see some different sites; meet some different people; take more risks; watch more sunsets; pick more daisies. You know the litany as well as I do-- go out and do it! Life's too short not to.
Lend your voices only to sounds of freedom,
No longer lend your strength to that you wish to be free from. Fill your lives with love and bravery and you shall lead a life uncommon.
A life uncommon—whatever our lives look like on the outside-- is a life where our time serves us, and not we it.
A life uncommon may last 20 years or 30 or 80 or 100. I think I’ve said it three of the last four weeks, but it’s true: The worth of our lives is not best determined how long our lives happen to be chronologically. The worth of our lives is determined how well we live the span of years we have been given.
We can slow down these lives of ours, and reclaim our time.
But it won't happen by itself. It takes conscious effort, and conscious choice:
We each are called upon to grasp what is really important about our lives, and concentrate on that.
Then the hours of our days will be blessings, and not curses. Then we’ll have a better chance at discerning what it is we are here to do, and we’ll be better able to do our life’s work well, from the fullness of our beings. Then we won't be spending all our time putting out other people's fires and tilting at other people's windmills and fattening other people's bank accounts.
Instead, we will then be serving them
as we serve ourselves, genuinely, from the very core of who we are.
Time weighs heavily if we always live according to schedules, timetables, and
have-to-do lists.
But when we are in harmony with our times, at peace with the days of our living, then we skip and jump through life,
as though we were endlessly, eternally young,
and as though the weight we carry is as light as a feather, a feather borne along
on the very breath of God.
Life is a dance, and not a race.
So, as much as you're able, take it as slow as you can— Hear you life’s music before the song, all too soon, is over. | |
A Life for At-One-Ment | |
Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, October 5, 2008 | |
Yesterday, Elizabeth and I reenacted our yearly ritual of taking our two mothers (who are now 88 and 86, respectively) to pick apples. (Actually, we don’t pick anything; we go and buy apples-- and pumpkins, and cider, and mums, and sometimes a bale of hay—though not this year). We probably visit a good dozen orchards and greenhouses in the process, finding a little something at most, if not all, of them.
In so doing, our journey encompasses a good chunk of the state of
As part of our ritual, whenever we drive past
I am thinking about those days at Smithfield High today, in the context of the Jewish High Holy Days, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in particular, because, you know, every time I drive past that building, I can smell the chalk dust.
I remember, when I teaching at Smithfield High back in the 1970s, that by the end of the day, I always felt as though I was covered with chalk dust (we used to have real black boards back then, not the dry erase type they have today). You’d write the lesson on the board, and finish with it, and go on to the next… class after class…. all day… But there was always the dust, the residue of past lessons, which was always there to haunt you, and make you sneeze, and dirty up your glasses.
Haven’t you ever been in a class with a teacher who never washed the blackboard? He’d just quickly erase it, and go on to the next lesson, leaving shadows of past lessons getting thicker and thicker as the year went by—till you weren’t sure any more which lesson you were supposed to be looking at. There was just this indistinguishable gray fog of lessons past and present…
I think that’s what we all look like on the inside, too—psychologically, spiritually—if we don’t wipe the slate clean from time to time.
That’s what life would be like if we didn’t take times of atonement, times to start over, holy days like Yom Kippur, which our Jewish friends and relatives will be celebrating starting Wednesday, or Ramadan, which our Muslim neighbors celebrated from September 1st through September 30th this year.
We’ll always have the dust and residue of the past—the “baggage”, maybe even the “garbage” of the past—there for us to deal with. Sometimes, we really have to work at it, and scrub the slate clean, to have any chance at all to move forward. It’s only if we do deal with it, somehow, that we’ll have any hope of inner peace, any hope of gaining that sense of harmony or balance with life; some sense of atonement with one another and with that greater Spirit of Life in whom we live and move and have our being.
“Atonement” sounds at first like a pretty heavy theological word, and maybe one that some of us aren’t too comfortable with. It might smack too much of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and his “atonement”, his dying for the sins of all humanity. But, of course, that’s not what is meant by the Jewish “Day of Atonement”.
I think to get a better idea of what atonement means in the broader sense, we need to look at the word itself: “atonement”—at-one-ment. It’s about becoming one—reconciled—returning to being at one with our Creator, all creation, and with those with whom we share this creation.
Last Monday, September 29th, marked Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the first of High Holy Days which concludes with Yom Kippur. During this span of ten days, Jews around the world mark the beginning of the year 5769 in their calendar. During this period, according to Jewish tradition, God looks into our human hearts and examines both our deeds and our motives. During this time, too, we are asked to sit in judgment on ourselves, and compare our conduct during the past year with the hopes and resolutions that we have made. It is a time for fasting and penance, deep soul searching and contemplation.
But what use does it do, we may well ask? What good are these holy days, if after 5768 years of them-- all this introspection and penance and fasting and seeking atonement-- all this trying to put our acts together-- what good do they do, if after all this religious zeal-- this world of ours is still so darn messed up? Have we really made that much progress in these past 5768 years? Why bother with the ritual one more time? Does it do any good? Why bother wiping the slate clean, and pledging to begin again in love, if we're probably going to end up in the exact same place (or pretty close to it) a year from now?
Those are not bad questions to ask. They’re good questions, honest questions. We are a questioning, honest people, and so, I'm sure we all ask them from time to time...
Once upon a time, a rabbi and one of the members of his congregation (who happened to be a soap maker) went out for a walk. The member of the congregation was asking his rabbi very similar questions:
"Look at the world, rabbi" the man said. "Look at all the trouble and misery in the world. It's still there, after all these years of teaching and preaching about goodness and peace and atonement. What use is faith, then, rabbi?" the man asked. "What good has it done?"
The rabbi didn't say anything for a while, and the two men went on in silence, but then, as they walked, the rabbi noticed a young child, playing in the gutter by the side of the road.
"Look at that child!" said the rabbi. "You say that soap makes people clean, but look at how filthy that boy is! What good is soap? With all the soap there is the world, why are there still so many dirty people in the world? It makes me wonder, sometimes, just how effective soap really is after all."
"But rabbi," objected the soap maker, "soap doesn't do any good unless it's used!"
"Exactly," said the rabbi. "So it is with faith."
On the Day of Atonement, we are invited to build together the bridge of our shared imperfection, over which we can meet one another and strive to walk forward into a new year together. We are invited to re-weave the web of our deep and profound interconnections with one another.
It is not an easy bridge to build. It is not an easy turn to make. We are asked to weave this interconnected web with strands that have been stretched to the breaking point, and which are so delicate, and brittle, and oftentimes frayed, and which can be tangled, and twisted, and tied in such difficult knots.
Is there any human endeavor any more time consuming and frustrating than sorting through a mass of rope, or wire, or yarn, or Christmas lights (!) that have become all tangled up? It’s so hard sometimes, to undo the mess and get things sorted out and functional again.
That’s how it is with our emotional and psychological selves, as well: tied in knots; tangled up; sometimes a pretty unholy mess. They’re so hard to sort through; time consuming; frustrating; demanding. So, very often, we just toss the whole mass back into our psychological cellars, or stuff it up in our mental attics, and try to forget about it. And we leave the issues involved completely unresolved.
It’s easier not to build that difficult bridge to reconciliation if that means we have to deal with all those issues in our souls—our sins of commission and our sins of omission; the hurts others have dealt to us; the times we have let others down.
So, we back away from the precipice, and turn, not toward new life and new possibilities, but toward the same dead ends and roads to nowhere we’ve been down so many times before.
Sometimes it's hard to let go because the past is just too much with us. There are too many vestiges of the past, still present in our lives, for us even to be able to glimpse that there truly might be a different road ahead of us.
There are those old hurts that just keep coming back, again and again, as much as we might wish them out of the way... the words of criticism that someone uttered against us, that should be dead and gone (as, perhaps the people who uttered them are already) but which, somehow, carved their places in our memories and on our minds... the grievance we hold against someone that, if truth be told, we kind of enjoy nursing and rehearsing and replaying over and over again, and holding in store, just in case we need to use it against them some day... the opportunities that we had but didn't take, and the regret and the hunger that keeps coming back to haunt us...
That’s why it’s so important to take those opportunities we have to get out the erasers and scrub the blackboard clean. That’s why faith, and ritual, and days of atonement are so very important to us as spiritual men and women. That is where our hope lies. Yom Kippur gives us the chance to take out the sponge, and the soap, and wash the slate clean, so that we can at least have a prayer of learning our next lessons well.
As Rabbi Isaac Stahl has written:
“Our life is brief and finite. Why allow it to become a collection of hurt and grudges? In the very depths of your soul, dig a grave. Let it be as some forgotten spot to which no path leads. And there in the eternal silence, bury the wrongs which you have suffered. Your heart will feel as if a load has fallen from it.”
Once we have buried that load of past hurts, we are liberated, and energized, to reach out and do something about the wrongs we have done unto others.
Now, sometimes, self judgment is the worst kind, the most bitter of all-- because, after all, we know ourselves better than anyone else does, don't we? We know, better than anyone, those deep, dark recesses of our souls, where little light can penetrate at times. Sometimes, this is not a pretty picture for any of us to want to face.
If we focus only on our failures, our limitations, our spites and smallness, then we might come to the false conclusion that we, too, are "unforgiven"-- or even, that we're “unforgiveable”, that we’re not worth forgiving.
But the central affirmation of our faith declares that this is just isn’t so. Our faith tells us that while we may often be messed-up creatures at times-- capable, God knows, of great evil and selfishness, each and every one of us—that there is, shining in our souls, the light of the inherent worth and dignity of each and every person on this earth. That light shines still, though in too many lives, the darkness seems to overwhelm it.
That is the spirit that lies at the heart of Yom Kippur, it seems to me.
It is not a story of human perfection, or even human perfectibility. Nor is it a vision of humankind as impotent and weak, irrevocably tied to sin and depravity.
It is a vision of fallible human beings, like you and me, who fall short countless times, but who always have within themselves the capacity to learn, the power to change, and the ability to put one foot in front of the other and walk down a new road, one step at a time.
Walking the road of these days of ours can often be a struggle, true. But what of it? Evolution is about struggle. Being human is about struggle. We have not yet arrived. We are always on the path. That doesn't make us evil. It only makes us human.
Because we know we are called to struggle (and journey and grow and evolve) we know, too, that there is so much life in us-- and so much potential, and so many precious gifts of life that we are offered, and that we have to offer to others.
So aspire we human ones do—constantly, endless, year after year, and day after day: to do better, to be better, to learn more. On Yom Kippur, we remember that to aspire is a holy act-- indeed, perhaps the most holy act of our human be-ing (our being human) in this world.
At Yom Kippur, the voice of the Holy calls us back to our genuine humanness, and our genuine love and compassion for one another.
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The Smiling Pope | |
Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, September 28, 2008 | |
On that morning at the end of September in 1978, thirty years ago, a stunned world awoke to hear of the death of a pope. The world press announced that John Paul I had died suddenly during the night, barely a month—just 34 days—after ascending to the papal throne. At the time of his election on August 26, Cardinal Albino Luciani was little known outside of
I have long had a place in my heart for this simple, good man. He was the pope at the time of my wedding to Elizabeth, at Saint Joan of Arc’s parish in Cumberland, Rhode Island, on September 9, 1978—not even two weeks into his pontificate, and it was probably the first time I heard reference made to “John Paul, our pope” in the liturgy of the Mass. Later, as I delved a little more deeply into this short-term pope, I discovered a wealth of learning; an abundance of insight; and the amazing life story of a warm and humble man of God.
I wish that more people knew that story. However brief his micro-papacy was, I felt that Papa Luciani (as he is still known affectionately throughout
The election of the diminutive, soft-spoken Cardinal Luciani to the papacy on that late summer day thirty years ago was a surprise to almost everyone outside of the College of Cardinals. But Luciani had been chosen pope with remarkable speed, on just the fourth ballot, on the very first day of balloting.
As crowds watched the tiny chimney connected to the stove inside St. Peter’s, where the ballots of each round of voting were burned, predictions of a long, drawn-out conclave seemed to be confirmed. If no candidate had been elected, damp straw would be added to the burning ballots to make the smoke turn black; white smoke would symbolize the election of a new pope. After the fourth ballot, however, the smoke that poured forth from the chimney seemed an ambiguous gray. Many assumed it was black, and so turned to leave. But when Cardinal Pericle Felici, dean of the College of Cardinals, stepped out of the great central door of St. Peter’s onto the balcony, all those present knew that, remarkably, a new pope had already been chosen.
“Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum,” Cardinal Felice announced in Latin: “I announce to you a great joy”. “Hambemus papem.” “We have a pope.” After Luciani’s name was announced, the new pope was led out onto the balcony as well—a small man, perhaps five foot three or four inches tall; eyes twinkling behind round spectacles; his hair sticking out beneath his skullcap, slightly disheveled; and bearing already the unmistakable, slightly impish smile that would become his trademark.
Luciani had taken the first double name in the history of the papacy: John Paul, “Primus,” he said, “The First”—because, he added, “there will soon be a ‘Second’.” He had chosen the name in honor of his two immediate predecessors, John XXIII, who had first named him a bishop, and Paul VI, who had named him a cardinal. It was a sign that Luciani would continue their policies, including the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
“I have neither Pope John’s wisdom of heart nor the preparation and culture of Pope Paul,” the new pope told the crowd gathered to hear him. “But I am now in their place, and so I must seek to serve the church. I hope you will help me with your prayers.”
For his papal motto, John Paul I chose a single word: Humilitas. Humility. Not because he personally excelled in that virtue, he said; but because it was the virtue he most wanted the church to exemplify during the time of his pontificate.
Luciani moved quickly to do away with some of the pomp that had surrounded the papacy. At his coronation (which he renamed his “installation”), he refused to wear the traditional tiara, or Triple Crown, worn by popes for centuries. Instead, he put on a simple bishop’s miter. He shortened the ceremony, and moved it outside into St. Peter’s Square, so more could attend and see it. He refused to be carried in thesedia gestatoria—the portable throne of the popes, and instead walked to the ceremony himself. (Later, he would reluctantly agree to reinstating the sedia gestatoria because his short stature made it impossible for the assembled crowds to see him.)
He remained, through his tenure as pope, a simple and unassuming man, always uncomfortable with the trappings of office. He never moved too far, it seemed, from his simple origins in the mountainous region of northern
Albino Luciani was born of October 17, 1912, in the small town of
His mother, Bortola, was a nurse’s assistant; his father, Giovanni, was a bricklayer, who spent much of each year away from the family, as a migrant worker in
They went to school barefoot most of the year, and food was often scarce. But Bortola, whom the future pope described as “very sweet, but very severe,” insisted that they say their prayers—and do their homework. Early in life, young Albino became enthralled by the preaching and holy simplicity of the Capuchin friars who would visit the area, and soon had decided upon the priesthood as his calling.
At first, however, his father, good anti-clerical socialist that he was, refused to sign Albino’s application to the junior seminary at Belluno. But in time his wife’s persistence, and his son’s obvious desire, wore him down, and he relented. “We must make this sacrifice,” he agreed. But then, pointing to the crucifix on the kitchen wall of their humble abode, Giovanni told his son: “That Jesus of yours was a worker, too, you know. He remembered the workers, and died for them. When you become a priest, you must be like him.”
At the seminary in Belluno, Albino’s warmhearted personality and eager mind made a deep impression upon teachers and fellow-students alike. “He was always amiable, quiet, serene,” one of his classmates later said, “unless you said something inaccurate—then he would fly at you like a spring. In front of him, you always had to speak carefully. Any muddled thinking, and you were in trouble!”
Luciani was ordained to the priesthood in 1935, and spent two years in the parish until returning to the seminary as the vice-rector. When he was given the honorary title of monsignor, a friend suggested that he wear the customary red-trimmed cassock to which those who bore that designation were entitled. “Oh, come on!” Albino groaned, “You know I have no time for that nonsense.” (It is said, actually, that he used a somewhat more colorful descriptive for “nonsense”.)
When Mussolini and the Fascists took power in
When the war finally ended, Albino continued his work at the seminary. Placed in charge of religious education in the diocese, he authored a book for teachers, Catechetica in Briciole (Catechism in Crumbs) which came to be used throughout
During a visit to Belluno, the patriarch of
His smiling warmth and total lack of pomp soon won the hearts of the people of his diocese, priests and laity alike. To everyone, he was simply Don Albino (Father Albino), and when he visited parishes, he would dress as a simple priest, a custom he would continue throughout his career. Sometimes, he would go unrecognized because of his unassuming ways. Meeting with a group in one parish, he asked for whom they were waiting. “For the bishop,” they told him. “But it looks as though he’s late.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Albino said, finally introducing himself. “I believe I saw him arrive a little while ago.”
Driving to an early morning Mass one cold and rainy morning, he spotted a woman and her young son hurrying along, heads bent against the wind. When he asked where they were going, the woman said “To church,” where he son was scheduled to serve the Mass for the bishop; but now, she said, said she was afraid they were going to be late.
When the procession later entered the back of church with Bishop Luciani, now vested, he spotted the woman in the congregation, and whispered to her, with a smile, “You see, we all got here on time.”
But there were problems at Vittorio
Bishop Luciani called a meeting of his 400 priests, and announced that the diocese would repay every lire the priests had stolen. There also would be no civil immunity for the priests, either, he emphasized; they would be punished to the full extent of the law (and both went to jail for several years). To repay part of the debt, he would sell all objects of worth in the diocesan treasury; one of the buildings owned by the diocese would be sold, as well. “In this scandal, there is lesson for us all,” he said. “We must be a poor church.”
Concern for the poor was always at the heart of his vision of ministry. In 1966, he traveled to
After becoming patriarch of
As president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, he proposed that wealthy dioceses in the West should donate 1% of their annual income to poorer dioceses in developing countries—not as charity, he said, “but as something owed, to compensate for the injustice being committed by the consumer world against the developing world.”
Visiting hospitals around
His door was always open, and his telephone rang constantly. When a priest called him at lunchtime, and was told by the nun who answered the phone to call back later, Luciani reproved her gently. From now on, he was to be interrupted for calls, even at lunch, he said. If any Italian calls someone at midday, instead of eating lunch himself, the cardinal pointed out, it must really be an emergency!
But even with his busy schedule, Albino Luciani found time to study and to write. He wrote several books, the most famous of which was Illustrissimi, imaginary conversations with personalities from literature and history, including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and even Pinocchio. In his letter to Mark Twain, Luciani’s deep humility shines through:
“Just as there are different books, there are different bishops. Some are like eagles, who glide at great heights with magnificent documents; others are like skylarks that sing the praises of the Lord in a marvelous way; finally, others are poor wrens that, on the lowest branch of the Church tree, only squeak, trying to express some thought on the broadest themes. I, Mark Twain, belong to the last category. I am just a poor wren.”
But many of his fellow bishops felt differently. Visiting
When the 1978 conclave searched for a successor to Paul, the quiet, unassuming Luciani, a man of deep warmth, great learning, impeccable pastoral skills, and moderate theology, soon emerged as an obvious choice. He was “God’s candidate,”
In accepting election to the papacy, an overwhelmed Luciani added to his colleague cardinals, “May God forgive you for what you have done on my behalf.” He would do what was required of him, he said. But he confided to close friends that his reign would be a short come. “The foreigner will come after me,” he told one: the one who had sat across from him at the conclave would succeed him as Pope. (Later, when the seating plan for the conclave was checked, the “foreigner” turned out to be none other that Cardinal Karol Woytjyla of
A little more than a month after his election, Pope John Paul I was dead. He died in his sleep on the night of September 28, 1978, thirty years ago, this very day. The official cause of death was listed as a heart attack. But there was no autopsy, and conflicting accounts soon lead to rumors, and conspiracy theories, and persistent charges that he had been murdered. Some say he was killed by liberals because he was too conservative; others by conservatives because he was too liberal. Others say it’s because be was going to expose deep corruption in the Vatican Bank and other offices of the curia. Others say that he was just a weak, sick man whose body gave out under the pressures of an overwhelming and demanding position.
“He was shown to us, not given,” a German archbishop named Joseph Ratzinger said in a homily following the death of Pope Luciani. He was like a comet who flashed briefly across the sky, lighting up the world and the church, if only for an instant, said Cardinal Confalonieri.
On the day of John Paul’s funeral, St. Peter’s Square was all but flooded by a steady, torrential downpour that just would not let up. The assembled thousands-- world celebrities, heads of state, common men and women-- were soaked to bone by the rains of heaven. The untrammeled grief of the people of
But it’s never about how long we live, but about how well we live. Even in its mere 34 days, the papacy of John Paul I had touched the world deeply. His had been the smile of a saint. He had touched the world, and had given us just the barest glimpse of the sorriso di dio—the very smile of God.
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