Faith, Grief – Page 18 – The Geriatric Pilgrim: Traveling the Landscape of Faith and Grief

Gifts

Published on December 28, 2015December 29, 2015 by geriatric pilgrim1 Comment

For Christians at least, the Magi—those “wise men from the East”—made the first pilgrimage, journeying to Bethlehem some 2000 years ago. They bore with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and ever since, giving gifts has been an indelible part of the Christmas season.

I hate getting gifts.

Okay, that may be a tad melodramatic, but there have been many times in my life when I’ve felt I owe the giver something I’m not rich enough or clever enough or loving enough to repay, which, instead of making me grateful, makes me feel second-rate, resentful.

I expect my problems with receiving gifts go back to my alcohol-fumed childhood. When he’d had enough to drink, my grandfather would try to give me one of his rifles or a hunting knife. Usually, my mother would head him off at the pass, but I remember when he talked her into letting him give me a 7mm Mauser and then showed up the next week to take it back, only to give it to me again a year later.

Grampy’s ex-wife, who unfortunately never heard of Al Anon, the 12-step program for families of alcoholics (and wouldn’t have gone if she had), was apparently convinced that her grandchildren could never love her unless she brought us a gift when she visited. Sometimes, it was cheap, like the model airplane that broke the first time I flew it. Other times, she’d spend money she couldn’t afford on presents such as a Hopalong Cassidy cap pistol in a genuine leather holster. Either way—if the wing fell off the plane or Nanny couldn’t pay her phone bill—I felt I was to blame. And no matter what the gift, I could never act happy enough. “Mmph. He must not like it,” Nanny would say to Mom, as if I wasn’t standing between them. “I don’t know why I bother.”

Which probably explains why, of all the teachings of my faith, the one I struggle the hardest with is grace: that God’s gifts come to us with no strings attached. At Christmas, I’m expected to believe that God became human solely out of love, not because of anything we’ve done to earn that love. I’d rather believe “God helps those who help themselves.” I’d rather be the transformed Scrooge, buying the biggest turkey in the market to give to Tiny Tim, than I would Joseph, standing off to one side of the manger, welcoming a baby he hadn’t fathered.

Ironically, it’s been the death of my daughter that has helped me see—although as “through a glass, darkly”—how grace works. Like every parent who’s ever lost a child I suppose, I kept asking “Why?” Why did my previously healthy daughter, who didn’t drink or smoke, didn’t even eat meat for God’s sake, die from this rare cancer?

Then, maybe ten years after Laurie died, I had coffee with a woman who’d recently watched her son die in a fire. The first thing she said to me was, “How have you survived?” I thought her question was extreme, until I recalled Stan, whom I’d gotten to know a little when we were in grief counseling together (he’d also lost a daughter), who had committed suicide. Recently, I’d read about another grieving father who hung himself in his garage.

How had I survived?

I recalled all the clergy, spiritual directors, and mentors who appeared unannounced in my life just when I needed them most. The way my wife, whom I’d barely known when we decided to leave our spouses and live together, and who by all logic, should have left me years earlier, stayed by me. Why had these people appeared when they did? Why did Mary Lee remain? I had no more answers than I did for why Laurie died.

Thus, I took my first steps in trying to live, in the words of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, “without why,” which, even if we’re not mystics, is what I expect all of us who’ve lost children learn to do.

Since then I’ve been better about being open to grace. Pilgrimages have helped. I think of Paul, a young priest in Jerusalem, who gave Mary Lee and me a personal tour of the Old City the first night we arrived; of an Agape service on the island of Iona in Scotland, where we shared raisins and water while a young man standing in an alcove in the ancient abbey played “Round Midnight” on a saxophone; the large gray fox that visited us every night under a full moon at the Desert House of Prayer in Arizona.

Still, it’s hard not to want to be more active, set things right, help those I see as having less than I do. What’s even more difficult is to ask for something specific for myself. Unless I ask for the impossible, like having a healthy daughter back, or the generic, like world peace, or try to be funny by asking for broader shoulders, I feel selfish, sinful, not to mention dependent and needy.

But Jesus often asked people some form of “What is it that you want?”

How would I answer him?

The best I can do is to fall back on the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

And, I might add, the eyes to see the grace that surrounds me.

The Circular Pilgrimage

Published on December 13, 2015December 19, 2015 by geriatric pilgrimLeave a comment

Alcyon Center Seal Cove, Maine — Alcyon Center
Seal Cove, Maine

The summer after graduating from high school, I worked for the Maine State Forest Service, wandering around wood lots looking for the gooseberry bushes that cause white pine blister rust. I can’t tell you the number of times I’d start out planning to walk in a straight line from one end of the lot to the other, only to find an hour later that I’d made some kind of lopsided circle and was back to where I’d begun.

I didn’t realize at the time (God, how many times have I said that?) that this was going to be the pattern of my life.

So many memoirs I’ve read detail the author’s linear journey from a youth mired in a swamp of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to a mountaintop of serenity, compassion, and enlightenment. Much as I’d like to see my life that way, beginning in ignorance and leading step-by-step to wisdom, my journey seems to have been more labyrinthine.

Which makes me wonder if the reason you see more and more labyrinths on church grounds or at retreat houses is that other people also see the labyrinth as a more appropriate symbol of their spiritual or psychological (Jung has a lot to say about labyrinths) journeys, too.

Labyrinths have been around since antiquity in every culture and just about every spiritual tradition. They come in a number of styles, but the one most popular today is based on the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France, built around 1200, apparently as a substitute for the pilgrimages people were making to Jerusalem. If you were too poor, too infirm, too sick, or too old to journey that far, you could go to Chartres and walk the labyrinth.

While most people I know who regularly walk a labyrinth do so to meditate, pray, or find serenity, I find the experience frustrating. I get impatient with all those damn loops and turns.

Which is what the labyrinth has to teach me, I guess.

Redemptorist Center Tucson, Arizona — Redemptorist Center
Tucson, Arizona

If you’ve never walked a labyrinth, know that your goal is follow the circuitous path from the outside to the center, which, symbolically, can represent wholeness and authenticity, the so called “true self,” enlightenment, repentance, healing, whatever your interior goal might be.

What’s frustrating is that as you start out, the center is immediately in front of you. If you walked a straight line, you’d get there in seconds. Then, you swing to the left, but that’s okay, because soon you loop around and now the center is even closer to you. You walk toward it until, just before you get to the center, the path veers and you find yourself circling the center without being able to enter it. From there, it’s one goddamned loop after another, taking you further and further from where you want to be, every now and then moving towards the center again so that you think, “Ah, now I’m going to get there,” before taking you to the outer edges, as far away from your goal as possible. Until eventually, finally, and at the same time suddenly, you loop back and you’re standing at the entrance to the center.

And this has been the template of my life, whether it’s playing basketball or the banjo, writing a novel, or stumbling through grief. There’s that initial “Oh, this isn’t going to be too bad, there’s my goal right ahead of me,” followed by anger and frustration as I get further and further away from where I want to be.

After my daughter died, for example, I could see what happiness looked like—hell, most of the people I knew were happy, happier than I was anyway—but grief’s path turned away: into my den with a box of cigars and a bottle of scotch. Six months or so after Laurie died, however, my wife and I took a trip to visit some of her friends and family in Colorado. We stayed in a motel that looked out over the Rockies, and I bought a cowboy hat and a western belt buckle, drank margaritas, and pretended I was Tommy Lee Jones in Lonesome Dove.

“There. I’m over it,” I thought.

And the next few months were okay, until I went to a school band concert and saw a girl with hair the color of Laurie’s leaning forward at the piano, eyes intent on the sheet music. I recalled my daughter’s practicing scales in the living room over and over until I thought I’d scream, my nervousness as I sat in the audience at her recitals, the way my heart kicked when she hit a wrong note.

Then I saw Laurie not at the piano but in a hospital bed. No hair. Eyes deep and recessed like sunken marbles. Drugged voice: “Whazz up, Dad?” And I began the long, winding trek through grief, one that has taken years to walk.

Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust, Brunswick, Maine — Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust,
Brunswick, Maine

The good news is that a labyrinth is not a maze. You can’t get lost. There is only one path to the center, and what you have to do is to trust that no matter how far away from your goal you seem to be, you’ll get there. I look back and see that no matter how lost I felt, I wasn’t. The work has been to have the faith (in myself? in God? probably some combination thereof) and the patience to believe that the path, the one C.S. Lewis in his book A Grief Observed, said often feels like “a circular trench,” leads to the center: to wholeness, to healing.

And it has. Eventually, finally, and at the same time suddenly, I found myself less self-absorbed, laughing more easily, singing more often.

But as for walking in the woods, I still need to bring a compass.

The Geriatric Pilgrim: Traveling the Landscape of Faith and Grief

Published on November 30, 2015November 30, 2015 by geriatric pilgrim4 Comments

November 30, 2015

RETREATING

Going on a pilgrimage and going on retreat are for me interlaced, like one of those Celtic knots. Both have a spiritual component, both involve both external and interior journeys, and both carry the risks and rewards of renewal.

My first retreat came 25 years ago this December, on the second anniversary of my daughter’s death from cancer: at a time when I was angry with myself for somehow causing Laurie’s death, angry with the world for ignoring my grief, and angry with God for being a Super Saddist getting kicks torturing innocent eighteen-year-olds.

But the previous fall, I’d attended a program on “Meditation as Part of the Christian Tradition,” led by the Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault, now a nationally recognized retreat leader and author of a number of neat books on the spiritual life, who that evening introduced my wife and me to Centering Prayer, a form of Christian meditation. While I wasn’t sure how I felt about Centering Prayer—part of me thought it was absurd, while another part wondered if, after swearing at God for two years, I at least ought to shut up and listen to what God had to say—I grew interested when Cynthia said she was going to lead a retreat in December on Swan’s Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. The idea of spending the anniversary of Laurie’s death on an island made a hell of lot more sense to me than what I’d done on the first anniversary: namely, drink myself into oblivion.

I thought a “retreat” would mean withdrawing from the world to a sanctuary, a safe place. That weekend was anything but. As I got out of the car to catch the ferry, my back felt as if someone had suddenly shoved a hot iron into my spine. The fog shut in for two days, so as far as scenic views were concerned, the farmhouse in which we met might as well have been encased in garbage bags. My meditations were filled with surrealistic, frightening images: huge teeth which turned into tentacles that I could feel squeezing me until I couldn’t breathe, a vision of climbing into a biplane piloted by your quintessential WWI flying ace, another image of someone who may or may not have been Jesus in a trench coat and fedora, vivid memories of Laurie’s last tortured breaths. The sound of a teakettle softly steaming on the woodstove became a deafening wind. Sitting in the softest chair in the room felt like sitting on broken glass.

Saturday afternoon, during our free time, my small 3^rd floor bedroom turned into an asylum for the insane (which, I’ve since learned, is one of the definitions of the word “retreat”). Instead of the nap I’d planned on, the grief—the sorrow and the anger and the pain and the guilt and the shame—which I’d suppressed (usually with booze) for the past two years erupted in molten spasms. I remember doubling over, as racking sobs tore into my stomach. Of sliding or falling off the bed on to the floor. Of holding on to the iron bedpost with one hand and punching the bed with my other hand, driving my fist into the mattress. Then I grabbed the bed with both hands, raised myself onto my knees and slammed my head into the mattress. I drew back and slammed my head into the mattress again. Again. All the while making yelping noises and kicking the floor until, exhausted, I fell asleep.

The next day, however, I left the retreat feeling less angry, less guilty, and more serene than I had since Laurie died. The feeling didn’t last of course, but it was never as bad as it had been. Looking back, I see myself broken open, which, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, was how the light got in. Even before Laurie’s death, good New England male that I am, I’d always keep my feelings hidden, even from myself. Feeling grief—really down and dirty and covered with shit grief—would ironically make it possible for me later to feel joy.

My wife and I attended more of Cynthia’s retreats on various Maine Islands. Later, after becoming Members of the Fellowship of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, we started going to their monastery in Cambridge and their retreat house in West Newbury, Massachusetts. These days, we also try to travel at least once a year to somewhere we’ve never been before, such as the Desert House of Prayer outside Tucson, the New Camaldoli Heritage at Big Sur in California, the Norbertine Retreat Hermitage in New Mexico, the islands of Iona and Lindisfarne in Great Britain.

I’ve often asked myself—usually after seeing my American Express bill—if I need to go so far away for these retreats. Can’t I just put my phone on airplane mode, lock the door, and walk in the woods behind my house?

I do and it’s helpful, but the only way to completely pull the plug on all those radio stations playing in my head is to get out of Dodge. Physical and spiritual withdrawal are as entwined for me as pilgrimage and retreat.

And learning to see the world as interwoven has been one of the greatest gifts of going on retreat. Like most Westerners, I tend toward a dualistic view of the world. I grew up learning to distinguish between “us” and “them”: white hats and black hats, Commies and Red Blooded Americans, Maine residents and flatlanders, good and bad, smart and stupid, strong and weak. “You can’t have it both ways,” my mother would tell me. It’s taken me over 70 years to learn that most things are not “either …or” but “both … and.” Such as when I’m on retreat: both “withdrawing” and “confronting,” both in solitude and in community, both in continued grief over Laurie’s death and in gratitude for the gifts that continually grace me.

November 16, 2015

WHEN PILGRIMAGE FEELS LIKE EXILE

I think the first time I ever thought about the word “pilgrimage” was just before the trip my wife and I took to Israel. Before we left, I happened to read a magazine article in which the author distinguished between pilgrims and tourists. Tourists, she wrote, go out from the center of their worlds, their homes, in order to vacation; pilgrims, on the other hand, seek to travel from the edges of their lives to their center, their homes. Well, that sounded like a pretty good distinction to me. Faithful Christians that we are, ML and I were, I thought, going “home” to the origin of our faith.

However, while ML had a great time, my trip felt like being exiled to the furnace of fire Jesus talks about in the Gospel of Matthew, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” Or in my case, the gnashing of bowels.

Every day the temperature soared to well over 90°. Within two days I picked up an intestinal bug and was popping Lomotil like sunflower seeds. From the moment we arrived, we were lost. The first day we wandered for three hours through the labyrinth of streets and alleyways of the old city looking for a way back to St. George’s Cathedral Guest House and its friendly hollyhocks and familiar Evensong. The next day we found ourselves locked in the Garden of Gethsemane and wandering blindly on the backside of the Mount of Olives.

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On Friday, we joined the Franciscan Friars on their Walk of Devotion up the Via Dolorosa to The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built where tradition says Jesus was crucified and buried. Walk of Agony was more like it. If you’ve never been to the old city of Jerusalem, know that every one of those damned cobblestone streets rises at least 45°. Every twenty steps my stomach felt as if one of the ubiquitous Israeli soldiers had kicked it with a combat boot. Swarms of young boys tried to pull us into booths featuring five-foot posters of baby Jesus and the Virgin, baskets of wooden rosaries, and passages of scripture woven on dishtowels.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was a sauna. My intestines twisted as ML and I were funneled into a room where Jesus hung on a cross, wearing what looked like a tin diaper, his head covered from ear to ear with a semi-circle of silver. Cameras flashed. Voices babbled. Smells of incense, body odor, and stale cigarettes.

Downstairs, the Holy Sepulchre looked like a block of dirty cement. Some kind of priest in a tall black hat berated a woman for having bare shoulders. More cramps as people pushed me through a doorway into damp sour air, candles, aluminum icons and Jesus wearing another tin hat.

The place felt about as holy as a sardine factory.

The_Garden_Tomb_2008

And then three days later, I sat in the Garden Tomb, the alternative site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Yellow and red roses covered the stones and cool, shaded paths wound under cypress, palm, and pine trees to a large platform with wooden benches looking out over “Skull Hill,” whose crumbling stones and small caves make a face in the side of a cliff. Earlier, our guide told us that in 1882, General Charles Gordon, Bible student and British soldier, decided this was the true Golgotha, or Place of the Skull.

Our guide also showed us a burial spot in the side of an adjacent hill. Inside, the rock was smooth and looked as if you could lie down on it and get a good night’s sleep. He pointed to a hole cut above the entrance through which light shone into the cave. “The first spot light of the world,” he said in his charming British voice.

I inhaled the fragrance of the flowers and the trees, watched swallows swoop through the leaves. Now I was home.

And that’s why I knew this was the wrong place for Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. If your message is that love of God and love of your neighbor are the greatest of all the commandments, the only way to prove it is by seeing this teaching tested in the worst possible conditions: heat and crowds of conflicting nationalities, soldiers and souvenir sellers, physical pain and taunting ridicule. I thought of ten years earlier, when each day I walked what I realized was my own Via Dolorosa from the Ronald McDonald House to the Eastern Maine Medical Center, where my daughter lay dying from a rare cancer diagnosed only months earlier. I’d felt exiled from my wife and stepson to a living hell of doctors and CT scans and catheters and—most of all—hopelessness. During those endless frustrating days, I needed to know that someone had cried out as I did, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and yet had overcome death. I needed to believe that Laurie would enter into eternal life.

And I think it was at that point, sitting under the trees in the Garden Tomb, that my exile became pilgrimage, not in the sense of experiencing the beauty of the sun rising through the fog over Maine waters, but of having an emotional and physical encounter that deepened my understanding of what holy means.

Even if it did take two more weeks before I could eat solid food.

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