another day in paradise

So, here I am on Oak Island, North Carolina. It is a south facing beach and staring out at the Atlantic, the sun is setting brilliantly on my right. It is high tide and the beach is only about 10 yards wide. At low tide it is about 40 yards and you can walk about another 100 yards and not be in water higher than your waist.

The wind is blowing hard off the water. I'm in a house with some of the people I love most in the world. What could be the problem?

Nothing really.

Yesterday was our 40th Anniversary--Bern and me--and we went to a great restaurant in Southport--Mr B's Bistro. Astonishingly good sea food. Mimi and Tim and Sherrie paid. John drove. It is a wonderful quartet for us to share that round number anniversary with.

We eat like fools. Drink a bit. Sit on the breeze way, out of the sun, or on the deck or on the rooftop deck and read and read and read. Consuming syllables like nectar of the gods....which words are.

Pelicans sweep by in formation, crashing into the ocean for food. Way out a container ship has sat all day, waiting, I suppose, for news from Wilmington that the berth is ready. Who knows....

How soft and lovely it all is.....

Into the eye of the storm

Last year we left the beach on Oak Island a day early since a hurricane was coming. It chased us up I-95 for hundreds of miles.

This year, It looks like we'll be driving through Earl (what a dumb name for a hurricane--of course, naming hurricanes is dumb in and of itself) to get there.

You really can't mess with Mother Nature, you know....

more than you want to know...really....

Someone emailed and asked why I've been neglecting my web.

The truth is, the last week has been a blur of pain, discomfort and narcotic relief.

The faint of heart should stop reading now!!!

Last Wed, unbeknownst to me, the urinary tract infection I didn't know I had blocked my (how to put this politely?) well...urinary tract.

Bern took me to the hospital where they discovered the infection and put in a Foley tube to relieve me. The tube didn't work and by the time we drove back home I told Bern I needed to go back.

It was on the second visit that I heard six of the most terrifying words I've ever heard: "You need a larger tube...." After misadventures galore, it was finally in place and we came home about 2 am.

By 5:30 I called an ambulance. I wasn't coming home this time until they fixed it. After about 35 minutes of savagery, they finally gave me an IV and a shot of some of the nicest stuff I've ever met and decided to wait for the urologist on call.

I got another IV hit of that wonderful stuff (I'm glad I don't remember what it was since I would probably be tempted to steal some) before the urologist arrived. He looked for all the world like Kurt Vonnegut and put in a tube with three separate openings in the end with a simple twist. I told him he was good at it and he said, "I do this for a living, afterall."

He sent me to the floor and they hung two bags about 3 liters each above my bed and started them running inwards to where liquid usually doesn't come from in that direction. So the rest of Thursday and Thursday night I absorbed enough saline to flood the lowlands and got several pills that we're as good as the injected stuff but good enough. The nurses on the floor were amazing--Florence Nightengales on each shift--but the urologist who came to check me out Friday afternoon (Kurt Vonnegut having left for the weekend) decided not to remove the tubes until after the weekend to give the antibiotics time to do their wonders.

I tried to protest but all he had to say is, "If I take it out now and you don't do well you have to come back through the ER."

Come Monday the infernal internal plumbing was removed and after nearly blacking out the first time two times I did what the tube had been doing, it settled down a bit. They had given me Oxycontin to take home. (I call it "hillbilly heroine" since people in Appalachia crush their grandmother's prescription up and inject it--a real problem in the mountains.)

All was almost well.

(I once visited a sometimes member of the parish in the hospital after surgery and asked when he could go home. "As soon as Mr. Poopy comes" he told me.

An elderly, distinguished man, waiting for 'Mr. Poopy". Which I had to do until today....)

Well, I warned you to stop but there you have it--why I haven't been writing on my blog....Just in case you wondered....

Rainmaker

Here's something I've noticed this week--any time I start to take the dog out, it starts raining, sometimes violently. So, I've been thinking, maybe I could hire myself out in drought plagued places and Bela and I could make it rain. I told Bern, thinking it was a good idea.

Bern told me it was ready to rain almost at any moment this week and the dog and I had nothing to do with it.

Another idea was to get advertisers to hire me to tell them if their commercials were a. lame,
b. misleading or c. trying to sell something people don't really need.

I shared this idea with Bern but she allowed that advertisers are, in no particular order, a. trying to distract you with something lame b. misleading or c. sell you something you don't really need.

So two ideas for my next career bottomed out in the same day.

There's always tomorrow.

That old unfamiliar feeling

Yesterday I went to the Open House at UConn/Wby for the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI). The place was packed and the joint was jumping. The director of the program said that this year the number of students at OLLI might surpass the number of regular students at the branch. I'm teaching a 4 session class in Oct. on the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. The told me the class was closed---fully enrolled and asked if I would allow 5 more. I did and then asked for 2 more spaces for two friends who had been too late.

During the day walking around, listening to a fascinating physics lecture, talking with people, explaining what we'd be doing in the class, I got that old 'unfamiliar' feeling that receded deep inside me decades ago. I got in touch with what was my goal and passion in my 20's--to teach. I was going to go to either the U. of Virginia and get a Ph.D. in American Literature or go to Iowa's writers' workshop after my BA. Either way I would have gone I would have ended up spending my life in college classrooms. That was what I wanted to do with all my heart...

But there were two problems: one was a war in SE Asia and my draft # was something like 14! and I had applied, just to get my two favorite professors off my back about it, for a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a Trial Year in Seminary. I kept telling the people from the Foundation that I didn't want to go to seminary and they keep smiling and saying, that makes you perfect! They annoyed me so much I accepted it when offered--one year at Harvard (I didn't even apply--Rockefeller $ opened many doors...) and then back to my game plan...back to teaching young minds for the rest of my life, trying to ignite them with the love of words.


The second day I was in Cambridge, I got drafted. The letter really begins, "Greetings". After a lot of time on the phone with my college chaplain and then the Bishop of WV, I was a 'postulant for holy orders' and my draft notice was rescinded. Those were the days when Episcopal bishops could boss draft boards around! If I had gone to UVA or Iowa I would have been in the Army or in Canada. So, I took it as a sign that I should give theology a whirl. And several years later I was visited by an Archangel and became ordained. The rest is what my life has been.

But yesterday the smell of chalk--actually I didn't see any chalk--white boards and markers and big screens around the room have done away with black boards--so, it was walking around that building, seeing those classrooms and those active, older minds longing to be ignited that made me nostalgic for the boy I was at 21. "Professor Bradley", I thought it would be, not "Father Bradley". I don't regret in any way the direction I went...but it was exciting and inspiring to rediscover that old unfamiliar feeling. "Gladly would I learn and gladly teach...."

on the road

I'm hard pressed not to think the economy is doing better than is reported after driving to Baltimore on Friday and back on Sunday. There was scarcely anywhere to park in any of the stops on the New Jersey Turnpike, Delaware Turnpike and I-95 in Maryland. Every time we stopped--and we stopped more than usual because I have been hydrating so much that I have to plan ahead for rest stops. 3 times down, 4 times back--7 different stops and the same mobs at all of them. Long lines for Starbucks and in some cases, the women's bathroom. People buying $3 bottles of water like water was going to disappear somewhere in New Jersey. The traffic wasn't terrible but the traffic reports were. On the way down Radio 880 kept saying the GW bridge was a minimal wait. We spent an hour getting across the Bronx and Manhattan. On the way back there was supposedly a 40 minute wait on the upper level and we took less than 10 minutes. Go figure.

The Delaware River Bridge has a message board above the 4 or 5 lanes in both directions that says--has said every time I crossed it--"IN CRISIS...CALL..and then a #". Bern thinks its for people who have anxiety about crossing bridges (since she does) and I thought it was to convince people not to pull their car over and jump (though I don't really think about jumping off high places...well, I do....). Most likely it is for people in these edgy time who are having trouble getting through the day, but making a cell phone call on the Delaware River Bridge seems risky at best.

It's truly amazing to me that there aren't 3 or 4 pileups every 50 miles on I 95. thousands of people, in heavy traffic, going 80+. Don't tell me human beings don't have really good fine motor skills. And a lot of luck.

We visited Josh and Cathy--well, actually Cathy and the girls (our 3 granddaughters) because Josh was in Peurto Rico for a bachelor's party. Then, in a couple of weeks, all 5 of them are flying to Germany for 4 days for a wedding. These wedding rituals are out of hand, it seems to me. My best man, Dan Kiger and my father had a couple of beers sitting at my parents' kitchen table the night before my wedding. And the reception had cake and punch--and liquor for Bern's family and a few of mine in the basement of the Gary Country Club. That was it. And that was 21 days short of 40 years ago. Bern and I started dating when I was a Senior and she was a Freshman in High School. We've known each other for 45 years. I'm not sure what the strain of a 3 day bachelor's party on an island or a wedding in a European Union country would have done.

It reminds me of Roger Rose, who I saw at a 10 year high school reunion. He said, "those were the best years of our lives, weren't they?" I replied, "Lord, I hope not!"

I noticed over the years the expanding tendency of 'front loading' the wedding process to such an extent that many people get divorced still owing money on the reception.

Lord, I'm becoming my father, complaining about how things have changed....

The Archangel Mariah

(Since I can't figure out how the copy a document to my blog, I decided to type in a chapter of what I'm working on about the church and being a parish priest.)

The questions that drives people in seminary crazy is this: "Why do you want to be a priest?"

There are several reasons that question so bedevils those studying for holy orders. First of all, everyone and their cousin has asked you that ever since the first moment you imagined it might be a possibility--you being a priest and all. Parish priests, parish discernment committees, bishops, commissions on ministry, standing committees, admission committees, seminary professors, strangers you meet at cocktail parties--there is no end to the people wanting to know why you want to be a priest.

A second reason is that a call to be a priest is primarily that: a Call from God to you. It's a deeply personal and profoundly important event or series of events. There is, even in his era of 'tell all', some needs for privacy. If what God has to say to you in your heart of hearts isn't one of those things you have a right to keep to yourself, then what is?

But finally, the most prominent reason nobody in seminary wants to answer that question is that, on the deepest level, you don't have a clue! For most of the priests I know--not all, certainly, but most--the 'call to priesthood' was as complex as a jet engine. There are lots of parts to it, most of which can't be extricated or distinguished from the parts right next to them or at the other end of the whole contraption. I doubt that there are many people who can explain all the intricacies of a jet engine. The same is true, it seems to me, about a call to ordination.

I once witnessed one of my seminary classmates lose it when asked the question. We were at some reception or another at Virginia Seminary and a well-meaning, sincere woman was talking with him and asked, "Why do you want to be a priest?"

He took a gulp of sherry and said: "One night I was sleeping naked with my window open during a thunderstorm. (Being southern he said 'necked' instead of 'naked') "And lightening came in my window, struck me on the genitals and didn't kill me....It was either become a priest or move to Tibet."

I swear this really happened.

Once the woman recovered from apoplexy, she said, in a gentle Tidewater accent, "I imagine that doesn't happen often."

"Only once to me," my friend said, looking around for more sherry.

Another friend, Scott, when he was a seminarian at Yale working with me at St. Paul's, New Haven, told me he was about to lose this mind with the Standing Committee of the Diocese of West Virginia.

"No matter how many times I try to tell them," he said, "or how many different ways...they still ask me why I want to be a priest."

"Why don't you tell them you want to be magic ?" I asked.

Scott laughed. "Are you crazy?" he said.

"Who knows," I told him, "it might shut them up."

After I preached at his ordination, Scott gave e a wondrous pen and ink sketch he'd based on 'being magic'. It's on a shelf in this little office where I'm writing. I still love it, two decades later.

I don't have to resort to tales of lightening storms or to the very clever longing to be magic. I know why I decided to be a priest. The sky didn't open up. I didn't hear God's voice speaking to me out loud and in English. It was simpler and yet more marvelous than any of that.

I was visited by the Archangel Mariah.
*
Mariah was the only member of St. Gabrial's Mission, the campus ministry at West Virginia University back in the 60's and 70's, who was older than 35, besides our priest Snork Roberts. Mariah was 82.

St. Gabrial's had a ministry of hosting international students in the basement of Trinity Church on Friday nights for games and food and companionship. Mariah was the source of that ministry. That's one reason she came to St. Gabe's. The other reason is she wanted to be with young people. She couldn't stand stuffiness in any guise. The three-piece suits and women in hats at Trinity's services were to much for her. She preferred the company of college students and week-end hippies.

I strain to remember her over more than 35 years of memories. She was a tiny woman--no more than 5'2" and most likely weighed about 90 pounds fully-clothed and soaking wet. She had wild gray hair that she wore tied back as best she could. And there was her face: her eyes were an indescribable color--green, blue, gray in different lights--and practically lost in the most remarkable set of smile wrinkles I've ever seen. Mariah smiled and laughed so much that she tended to look a tad Asian--there were slits for her eyes to shine through. She had all her own teeth and showed them off smiling and laughing. Her face, in spite of her age, was actually 'girlish', elfin, like the face of a loris or lemur--some exotic animal whose name begins with an 'l'.

Mariah's passion (what Joseph Campbell would have called her 'bliss') was the international students at WVU. Every Friday night you could find her in Trinity's undercroft playing cards and listening, playing backgammon and listening, playing some obscure board game and listening. Always playing. Always listening to the young people from faraway places with strange sounding names. WVU had a remarkable engineering program so their were hundreds of students from developing countries studying in the part of the middle of no where called Morgantown, West Virginia. One of the informal courses they all had to study was Culture Shock. In the late 1960's there were no ethnic enclaves in Morgantown, unless you considered Rednecks or Fraternity Brats ethnic groups. Those students from Africa, Asia, Central Europe and the Middle East had no contacts with their homelands besides each other. No internet back then and international calls were still ridiculously expensive. It wasn't like living in New York or DC. Morgantown was referred to by many of the students--many of whom, like me, were from the sticks to begin with--as 'MorganHole'.

At that time there wasn't much in Morgantown for anyone, much less people thousands of miles from home. And nobody much was interested in the well-being of those foreign students except Mariah. Mariah was interested in them with a vengence.

She welcomed them into Trinity's basement, into her home and into her vast, expansive heart. She got them to write home for recipes and tried to reproduce them as best she could from the local Kroger's selection of food and spices. She learned enough of each of their languages so she could greet each of them as they would be greeted at home. She matched them up with people at the University and in town--all of whom she seemed to know--who might have some faint connection or interest in Afghanistan or Bulgaria or Korea or where ever they were from. She was a one woman network of 'connections for those folks so far from home, those strangers in a strange land. t

There was something almost Biblical in her commitment to the strangers in our midst. She would welcome them all and do any and every thing possible to make them a little less anxious about finding themselves plunked down in such a place as Morgantown. Mariah was sometimes the victim of those she befriended. Being from a different culture and far from home doesn't make everyone trustworthy. If there is a lesson to be learned from working with any minority group--racial, cultural, economic, etc.--it is this: People, so far as I've been able to discern, are, in the end, 'just People'. We all share the same deep-down 'being of human beings'. The international students Mariah dedicated her energy to were no different than the outsiders and oddballs of the student body that Snork loved and cared for--some of them will rip you off big time!

The Lord only knows how much money Mariah parceled out to foreign students. And surely only the Lord knows how much of that money could have just as well been tossed off the bridge that crossed Cheat Lake outside of town. But she never fretted about it. That what she told me when I spoke to her after seeing $100 or so pass from her hand to the hand of a Nigerian I knew loved to gamble.

"Never mind," Mariah told me, "I'll just let God sort it all out...."

At one level that is ultimate foolishness. On another, deeper level, it may just be one of the best ways possible to live a life. And that, above all, was what Mariah was good at--living a wonderful life.

After I finished my MTS from Harvard Divinity School, I worked as a Social Worker. Bern and I lived on the third floor of a house down a charming brick street in Morgantown. During our time there, the home base for St. Gabrial's Wednesday evening Eucharists was the attic of that house, accessible only from our apartment We would gather up there--20 or 30 of us--and celebrate the holy mysteries seated on the unpainted floor. When we passed the peace there was always the danger of getting a concussion from smacking your noggin on the exposed joints and beams. It was a dimly lit, uncomfortable space, but it served quite nicely as the upper room of St. Gabe's.

It was after one of those outrageously informal communions that Mariah, who I had already determined was a saint (St. Mariah of the Nations) revealed herself as an Archangel, at least. After Mass--if I can dream of calling our attic worship that--we would all retreat down the stairs to the apartment where Bern and I lived. There was lots of food. People brought cookies and brownies (often with a special ingredient) cheese and bread, fruit both fresh and dried, nuts and seeds and we'd have some feasting. Plus there was always a lot of wine. Some of the St. Gabe's regulars would go down to the front porch to smoke a joint--not normal, I suppose, for most Episcopal coffee hours.

I was in the kitchen with Mariah. She'd managed to get me there alone by some miracle since people tended to clump around her wherever she was. There was something about how well she tended to listen to whatever nonsense you had to say that made her a people magnet. But we were alone in the kitchen when she said to me, balancing her wine glass and a handful of cheese with remarkable grace for somewhere her age, "When are you going back to seminary and getting ordained?"

I was three glasses of wine and a trip to the porch past whatever state of sober grace the Body and Blood of Christ had provided me up in the attic. I was then, as I am to some extent today, a 'smart ass'. Ironic and Sardonic were my two middle names in those days. I can still be depended upon to lower or deflate whatever serious conversation I come upon. "Nothing serious or sacred' has been my motto most of my life. I never realized how annoying that can be until my son demonstrated, in his teen years, a genetic predisposition to that same world view.

So, in my cups, you might say, I replied in a typical smart-ass way.

"My dear Mariah," I said, "I'll go back to seminary and get ordained when I get a personal message from God Almighty."

She smiled that smile that made her eyes almost disappear and, after a healthy drink of what I assure you was bad wine--we drank only that vintage in those days--said words that changed my life forever.

"Jim," she said, "who the hell do you think sent me and told me what to say?"

Never, before or after, did such a word as 'hell' pass through Mariah's sainted lips. She was never even mildly profane. I stared at her, suddenly as sober as a Morman or a Muslim--or both at the same time.

She finished her cheese, put her wine glass in the sink and embraced me. I held her like a fragile bird. She kissed my cheek and whispered in my ear, "Well, you've gotten your message...."

She left me alone in my kitchen with dry ice in my veins and some large mammal's paw clutching my heart. I found it hard to breathe. Two trips to the porch and a full juice glass of the Wild Turkey I kept hidden under the sink on Wednesday nights changed nothing.

I called the bishop the next morning. Only after I had an appointment scheduled with him could I tell Bern what had happened and breathe naturally again.
*
When Mariah died a few months later, I was one of her pallbearers. She was light as air for us to carry--three international students and three members of St. Gabe's. Archangels don't weigh much. The are mostly feathers and Spirit. She was buried from Trinity Church. Snork did the service and did her prould in his homily of thanksgiving for so rare a soul. I was registered for seminary by then. Bern was up in New York acting in an off Broadway show. We would meet up in Alexandria in September. Mariah's granddaughter, Clara, who was a member of St. Gabe's as well, embraced me at the reception following the funeral. It was in the basement of Trinity where Mariah had spent so many Friday nights. Many of the foreign students brought ethnic food. Clara told me Mariah asked about me on the day she died. She wanted to know if Clara knew anything about me and seminary. I'd left my admission letter with Snork and he showed it to Clara. I tried to call Mariah but she was too ill to speak on the phone, but Clara told her the news.

Clara told me Mariah smiled they eye disappearing smile when she heard. She smiled through great pain.

"You tell Jim I told him so," she said to Clara and Clara passed that on to me.

Her last words to me: "I told you so."

That works. That will do nicely.


(Ok, that took a long time. Can't anyone out there tell me how to copy a word document into a blog???)