Pondering my emotions

Recently I was somewhere and one of the other people there was truly annoying me. Nothing they were doing or saying had any inherent annoyance factor in them. But I felt myself getting agitated and anxious. I wanted to say something (which would have been inappropriate and wrong given the circumstances) or I wanted to escape (which wasn't rational either).

An hour or so later I found myself in my car with a 40 minute drive ahead of me and decided to ponder the emotions I had felt. I wanted to unwrap what was going on inside me. I wanted to understand, in some way, the feelings I had experienced in those moments. What was it that was annoying and agitating me so much without any rational reason?

I long ago came to believe that we don't 'have feelings'--Feelings 'have us'. My emotions and feelings, I've come to understand over the years, are autonomous things that rush in and seize or embrace me. A feeling of love and wonder 'embraces' me. Feelings like I had that day and like embarrassment or anger, 'seize' me and hold on for dear life. (Just remember when someone you cared about was sad or mad or afraid. Then remember how you saying "don't be sad/mad/afraid" seemed to help things....) No 'feelings' I believe, or inherently 'good' or 'bad'. That's  just what we judge and call them. Fear, for example, is as morally neutral as awe. My feelings come and go. I can neither bid them come or command them to leave.

Feeling are in an existential way. I'm not my feelings. I am merely embraced or seized by my emotions. Who I am is the being experiencing the feelings and emotions. They don't define me anymore than I control and manipulate them. They are like autonomous things that I encounter during my life. And there is more value in pondering them than in reacting to them.

And, perhaps the best way to react to the feelings--whichever they are (the ones I judge 'bad' and resist or the ones I judge 'good' and enjoy)--would be to embrace them, whether they embrace me or seize me. Sort of like holding a crying child in the latter case or holding a loving child in the former case. Sort of like holding myself whatever I'm feeling....

You know, I just re-read all this and think I've gone too far to fast.

This is the way I deal with emotions (at least the ones I find unpleasant) but reading this makes me sound like a mad man of sorts.

Here's the truth, cutting to the chase, what I most often find is so about people who annoy or upset me is that I am either reacting to some part of me I don't quite embrace that I see in them or reacting to something in me that I truly embrace that I find contradicted by them.

Does any of this make any sense?

Since I'm not sure, I'm leaving it there.

(By the way, what I figured out about the guy who annoyed me was that he is a lot like me but doesn't agree with me. He was acting out his formality and conservatism the way I act out my informality and liberalism. So, in a technical term, he PISSED ME OFF. That simple. I saw my own obsession with the way I want to be perceived mirrored and backward in him. I don't know, that seems sort of valuable to know to me....But like I said, I'm leaving it there....)

The Moon, the Moon....

I was just out with the bad dog to 'go bathroom', which is what I tell him this last trip outside of the day since it's after 10:30 p.m.

Today was a great day for me. I watched Obama--TV for hours and thrilled to the day of his second inauguration.

At some point Bern said (and I agree), "I'm glad we lived long enough to have a President we could really love...."

So, my political leanings are not a secret  (if they've ever been!!!)

And out with the bad dog in the Arctic air that is moving into New England, I saw the moon, draped in haze and clouds, no other lights visible in the sky, no stars, no Jupiter, that has been brilliant the last few nights, about a third through its waning, it was so mysterious and veiled and beautiful that I took it as a sign for our future.

Mysterious, veiled and beautiful.

I'm not sure what that means, but I am so pumped up from this Martin Luther King holiday and Barack's inauguration that I believe it might just be true.

The Future: mysterious, veiled and beautiful. 

Much to be desired. Much to be longed for. Much to lean into.

I want to lean into such a future, for me, for you, for all of us.

Ponder that possibility.

Lean into that Possibility.

Long for it.

Stan the Man

Stan Musial, who played 22 years for the St. Louis Cardinals died today. (Nevermind that I assumed he died years ago, it was just today and he was 92.)

Stan Musial was the reason I wanted to be left-handed all through my childhood. Stan the Man was left handed and his batting stance was so weird that I tried for years to emulate it. He crouched and had his legs close together and his arms near his body and when the pitch came he 'uncoiled' and hit it a mile.

I grew up watching him and Ted Williams on the Baseball game of the week with Dizzy Dean as the announcer. They were the two best left-handed hitters, in my mind, of all time.

Ted died years ago and had his body frozen to be thawed out when it would be possible to live again.

Stan was normal as hell--as normal as Ted was odd. Just a normal guy who could hit the hell out of a baseball.

Ted played 19 years (missing three years in the height of his talent by serving in WWII) Who knows what he would have done if he'd played those years.

Here were some of their records.

Ted       Stan         
19          22    years played
2292    3026   hits
521        475  home runs
1839    1951  Runs batted in

Stan had many more doubles (725) and triples (177) than Ted.

And they both played their whole careers for the same team (Cardinals and Red Sox), something very rare these days.

Stan the Man was a part of my childhood and one of purest hitters ever. He never struck out more than 50 times in any year. Good players today strike out 100 times and think nothing of it.

The Man could play.

I'm sorry I didn't realize he was still alive. I'm sorry he's dead.

We won't see his kind anytime soon....

'Course, if you don't like baseball, I've just wasted your time....

Somewhere over Western Pennsylvania

WARNING...WARNING...HAS REFERENCES TO BODILY WASTE! THE FAINTHEARTED SHOULD TURN BACK



It's 8:13 p.m. and I should be on a plane from Philadelphia to San Francisco by now, probably west of Pittsburgh. And I'm not.

My week long trip to San Francisco would have included a Board Meeting and School Builders Meeting of the Mastery Foundation, worship at Gregory of Nissa church and a three day program called "Music that makes a community". All of which I looked forward to greatly, along with the possibility of meeting with Jen Hornbeck, the last of 32 seminarians I supervised and one of the best.

Fred, my friend, had volunteered to drive me to Bradley Airport, which would have been a good conversation about life and the church and how the two are really not the same. He was an hour and a half from coming by to get me. My bag was packed and my Puli dog had been staring at it for most of the afternoon knowing bags are not good news. He even barked at it for a while, expressing his anxiety and distress. When I knew I wasn't going, I took the bag and the Puli upstairs and unpacked while he laid on the bed. He calmed down after that.

So, here's what happened. At about one p.m. I went to the bathroom and had blood in my urine. I drank copious amounts of water and discovered after a couple of quarts, that I had blood clots as well as blood.

This is not unusual. The radiology I had after having my prostate removed 6 or 7 years ago, scarred my bladder. So, every few months this happens. Just scar tissue slothing off and going the only way it has to go. The doctors tell me it will just continue to happen, drink more water than makes good sense and hope it clears up in a day or two. However, it can cause a urinary blockage--which has happened twice, one of which meant a three day stay in hospital as the pumped about a hundred gallons of saline solution into my bladder and back out which, not unsurprisingly, required not one but two tubes up my you know what. Not pleasant, let me tell you.

So, when it happens--and it happened the last time less than a month ago (it will become more frequent, the doctors tell me, as I age)--I begin to drown myself with fluids and pee about every 15 minutes. If I'm lucky, it clears up in a couple of days or sooner. But if I'm not, the whole thing could shut down and I'd have to go to the ER.

Didn't seem to be a situation conducive to getting on an airplane. I would have had to get the cabin attendants to bring me fluids on a constant basis and would have had to go to the bathroom around 40 times between Hartford and San Francisco. So, my heart breaking, I had to call Ann, the head of the Mastery Foundation, and Michael, the guy I'd be staying with in San Mateo and the airline and my urologist. I was feeling cowardly and guilty about not going, but Michael is a prostate cancer survivor like me and has had experience with this kind of thing and told me I was doing the right thing.

One good thing is that I won't miss Bern and the creatures for a week, I'll see the NFL playoffs and the Inauguration.and not miss a week of writing here.

But I am disappointed. But peeing blood clots in an airplane bathroom (you can't control where the damn things go!) would have made it look like a slasher film.....I know, more than you needed to know.....

Fido vs. Dad (RIP)

OK, so my friend's father is dying. In hospice care in Ohio. And he's planning to go out and be with him until he dies.

"I've wished him dead so many times," my friend told me, "and now that it's going to happen I am torn up inside in more ways than I can count."

It wasn't just a teen-age rebellion that took him away from his father--it was a life-long thing. They never seemed to connect. A stern, cold man and his son. As my friend describes his father to me--as he has over many years--it has become obvious to me that his father was a classic, text book Narcissistic personality. Their relationship--tepid at best and bordering on psychologically abusive at worst--has always been problematic. But my friend didn't cut his father off, as some may have, he visited a couple of times a year every year. He spent time with his father--painful though it was in so many ways. He gave it the old college try. And it never worked. Never. My friend's sister had a more compatible father/daughter relationship, but even she saw how troubled the relationship between her father and brother was.

My response to his 'wished he were dead...torn up inside' confession prompted me to say, without really thinking, "It's much easier when a pet dies...."

I thought I'd gone too far too fast but my friend looked at me and said, "you know, it really is...."

Take me for example. I had an almost idyllic childhood. An only child with two doting parents. Never anything like my friend and his father. Oh, when I came home for Christmas in 1970 with long hair and a beard, my father greeted me at the door and then wandered off in the snow to weep. And he certainly drove me crazy from time to time. My mother was the tough one, but we seemed to get along even in hard times. I was at my mom's bedside when she died and had left my father in hospital, driven home in 10 minutes and walked in the house to a ringing phone to tell me he had died.

But relationships with human beings are always fraught with mixed emotions and unspoken things and things left undone. The last time I saw my father alive I said, "I'm going home now, Dad". He was in a later stage of dementia but that last conversation was as lucid as we'd had in two year. He replied, "I am too." Had a parishioner said that, I would have sat back down and knew what it meant. But not my father. And I've spent decades regretting that I didn't sit back down and be there with him as he went through that mysterious door to whatever comes next.

But Fido, that's different. Our relationships with pets--dogs and cats and even Guinea pigs and birds in my life--are devoid of the drama and complexity of human relationships. When a pet dies, the pain is intense and pure. It is like a scalpel slicing cleanly through our hearts. When people die--especially our parents--it's like trying to cut open your heart with a butter knife.

The circumstances have taken a butter knife to my friend's innards. It's not pretty and not clean. Decades of complexity have been funneled down to what will be a single moment, a single death.

I'm a priest. I've seen what dead does to people more than anyone should have to. I've seen more people die than anyone not in a medical profession. I watched the kaleidoscope of emotions flash across the family's faces. I know how inscrutable the pangs of death are.

I am probably a good person to have with you when someone dies since I just lay low and don't say anything. I'll hold your hand as long as you want. I'll listen to whatever--whatever--you need to say and share and I'll be present to what every you need to feel. But I won't say anything. I'll just hug you and let you cry and talk.

If your pet dies, I have lots to say. The death of a pet is universally similar, I think. The death of a human being holds individual pain/guilt/regret/confusion that none of us can truly share with each other or ever understand.

Who was it that said, "Happy families are mostly happy in the same way. Sad families have their own unique sadness." Some Russian and I didn't get the quote accurate.

The same could be said of death. When a pet dies, we all know how it feels. When a parent dies, the whole gamut of feelings is up for grabs.

So it goes.


(I'll be in San Francisco for a week and won't be able to blog since I don't have a laptop. And, for those of you of a proper age, "I will wear some flowers in my hair..." I said that to a colleague who is in her late 20's/early 30's and said, "But you aren't old enough to remember the song...." She replied, "I know it from the Forrest Gump soundtrack...." Imagine that.)

The Waiteville of my childhood

I have two 6 foot high bookshelves in my little office at home. One of them is solid and has  lots of the copies of stuff I've written and several volumes of the Interpreter's Bible and my printer and two things that have to do with my computer and Bern's which I don't understand but which blink at me all the time and I know if I disconnected them I'd be thrust immediately into computer hell, so I leave them alone, blinking aimlessly, so far as I can tell. I also have pictures of my children as babies and toddlers and a picture of my Dad an a chalice and several stone lions on that bookshelf.

The other bookshelf is unstable and held straight by a piece of laminated coal that someone gave me because I'm from West Virginia. So, a week or so ago I decided to empty the unstable book shelf and give the books away. I gave the novels to the Cheshire Library and the religious books to St. James in Higganum for their library. I've never been attached to books as books. I go to the library in Cheshire weekly at least and check out books I want to read. And if I ever need any of the religious books, I know where they are. But they were very dusty and made me sneeze, so I can't imagine needing them any time soon.

I did keep some books of poetry and a book called If you meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill him which I've had for 40 years or so, and my copy of Joachim Jeremias' The Parables of Jesus, absolutely the best book about parables ever, and Lamb by Christopher Moore (which everyone should read) and The Hundredth Monkey and The Giving Tree. Everything else is gone to Cheshire Library or St. James. Next week, when I get back from San Francisco, I'll take the rickety bookshelf down and out.


On it, though, I found a plate with a likeness of the New Zion Union Church in Waiteville, West Virgina dated 1863-1966. It was something I took from my parents home. Waiteville is in Monroe County, the most South-east county of the state. Monroe County is where White Sulphur Springs is, which is the only name you might recognize from the whole county unless you're from West Vriginia and realize Lewisburg, the county seat, is where the WV State Fair was held--and may still be.

Zion Union Church is called that because everyone in Waiteville was either a Baptist or a Methodist and there weren't enough people there to have two churches. So a Baptist would preach one week and a Methodist the next. And the graveyard for Waiteville was there where most everyone buried there would be in some way related to me.

We used to go to Waiteville every Memorial Day for the Dinner that raised money for the graveyard's upkeep. The dinners were unbelievable: fried chicken, baked chicken, chicken and dumplings, pork in an endless variety of forms, rare roast beef, green beans cooked into an inch of their life in fatback, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, baked potatoes, fried potatoes, potatoes au gratin,  potato salad (lots of Irish folks there, including the Bradley/McCormick clan) sweet potatoes in several iterations, lots of jello salads, carrots and onions, peas and onions, just plain onions, gravy in several forms (gravy is a food group in Southern West Virgina) and desserts beyond imagining all topped with whipped cream or brain-numbing homemade ice cream.

Once, on some Memorial Day (linear time confounds me) I was wandering around the grave yard where countless ancestors were moldering in the grave, and happened upon two grave stones that said: JAMES GORDON BRADLEY and JAMES GORDON BRADLEY, JR. That is my name and I almost fainted away (I was, hard to believe, a delicate child). I'd never known I'd been named for ancestors. Those were my great and great-great grandfathers. My grandfather's name was Filbert and my father's name was Virgil. God figure. I could have been James Gordon Bradley V but for Filbert and Virgil in between.

Another year, my crazy great aunt Arbana (ever know anyone named 'Arbana'?) had put confederate flags on many of the graves of my ancestors for Memorial Day. Though Monroe County was a boarder county and there are slaves somewhere in there, most of the Bradleys and McCormicks had been true blue Unionists. My Uncle Sid and Uncle Russell went around gathering the Confederate Flags and cursing their Aunt Arbana.

My great uncle Amos was buried from Zion Union Church. I was at his funeral when I was 8 or so. (Linear Time, like I said....) It was February and bone cold and the boys digging the grave were having trouble with the frozen earth and kept sending messages to the Baptist minister to keep preaching, which he did, for an hour or so before the grave was ready.

Great Uncle Amos was a man about 5'4". He was a McCormick. He liked a bit of whiskey from time to time and used to keep it in his barn where my father and uncles would go with him whenever we were in Waiteville.

The story goes like this: there was a revival at Zion Union Church and great-uncle Amos responded to the altar call. He had his head down and the Revivalist came by, laid hands on him and said, 'bless the little boys', though Amos was 24 or so. Afterwards, out in the night, some of his friends were kidding him, being much taller than him.

"God bless the little boys," they said, circling him out on the road.

"Hump," Amos is reported saying, though I don't know if this is true, "I'd rather be a little man like me and go to heaven than a great big son-of-bitch like all you and go to hell." Then, I was told as a child, he hitched up his britches and walked away. That was the night, the apocryphal story goes, that he met my great-aunt Arlene, who had been saved like him. Only her salvation 'took' and she was a teetotaler while Amos had some whiskey in the barn. Arlene was 5'10' and weighed about 200 pounds to Amos' 95. But they had, so far as I knew, a joyful if childless marriage.

New Zion Union Church, founded in the midst of the Civil War, is, so far as I know, still there, though I haven't been to Waiteville for 40 years or so. Maybe I'll go someday before I die, to walk the graveyard and say soft things to those of my blood.

That might be something I should do....

The World Book of Records

I need to get in touch with the Guinness World Book of Records to see if I qualify as the World's Clumsiest person.

I am so clumsy it is terrifying. If something can be dropped, I will drop it. I dropped a tiny little glass bunny into the sink (and therefore into the garbage disposal) which would have had terrible results. So I reached down into the garbage disposal and fished around until I found it, scraping and bruising my hand and, for a few minutes, since I was holding the little bunny, couldn't get my hand back out. I was just praying that Bern wouldn't find me with my hand stuck in the garbage disposal--which is probably why I got the scrapes and bruises.

If something can be tripped over, I will trip over it. We have a rag rug on the back porch and it froze during the recent cold spell so that a little piece of it stuck up and I tripped over it every time I went outside. But now, with the rug flat and thawed, I still trip over it every time I go outside.

And talk about bumping into things! I am the champ at bumping into things. I always have a couple of bumps or blue spots on my body from bumping into things. I bumped into the piano at Emmanuel Church in Killingworth a few weeks ago and still as a little blue where I hit it. That piano has always been in the same place--it didn't move in my way--I simply stumbled against it, probably tripping over the century old + hardwood floors.

Now comes the 'hitting your head on stuff' part of my claim for the world record books. I hit my head on something almost daily, even stuff you should never hit your head on. And when I don't hit my head, like in our basement where the washer and dryer are, I'm always ducking under the heat pipes. I must look like one of those birds you can get to dunk their heads into a glass of water. I flinch when I'm still several feet from the pipes. And today I realized there is a new thing to hit my head on--our kitchen renovation ended up with getting a new cabinet hung above where we keep the food for the dog and cat. I bent down to get the dog food to feed Bela dinner and almost hit my head. I will, eventually, hit my head on that cabinet though I know it is there. I hit my head on things that are not even at head level. I hit my head the other day on my steering wheel when I reached into the front seat of my car to turn off the motor. I'd gotten out of the car without turning off the motor and taking out the key, which I do more than you would expect--just jump out and start away when I realize the key is in the ignition and on.

I'd like to claim all this is a result of aging. But it isn't. When I was 8 or so, my father took me up on a strip mine to teach me how to ride a bike and I road the bike off the strip mine. So, I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was in 30's.

And getting lost, oh, don't get me started about getting lost. When our kids were little we were on the way to North Carolina for vacation from New Haven and somewhere in Maryland I somehow got on an Interstate that had no traffic on it, which was great, except it suddenly ended and I had to drive our VW bus over the median to go the other way on a yet unopened section of some Interstate I got lost on. Every since then, our son just expected to get lost on any trip we took. More often than not, he was right. Once I was coming back to Cheshire from Wolcott and ended up in New Britain, which, if you look on a map seems an unlikely place to end up....

And if 'opening things'--or, more correctly, 'not being able to open things' is a category of Clumsy, well, I can't open anything without a sharp knife and a screwdriver. But this piece has gotten worse with age because 'packaging' has become an art form. Lots of people I know who used to be able to open things can't now. Progress, that's what they call it, ironically. "True Progress" would be making things easier to open, it seems to me....

Don't drop or bump into anything and don't get lost or trip. "Opening things", in that you're on your own....