But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. — My Argument With the Gestapo

I knew May would be a crazy month for my family. Once I finished up class this semester, we were off to Tucson, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada for a whirlwind trip to see a couple of friends' kids graduate; one with an engineering degree and one with a medical degree. And now this week, for the first time in my life I have each of my kids in a different part of the country simultaneously. So, I find it hard to sleep. Not that I'm overwrought with worry; it's just a parent thing. My mind won't settle in a solid sleep. I wake up every hour seeing one of their faces, as if there's something I've forgotten to do for them, some way to care for them. Maybe as a parent of young kids you get so used to constantly doing things with and for them, your mind can't stop feeling like it should be doing so.

I seriously need to find some time to collect my thoughts after the past few weeks, and this week should, in theory, help. With a little time to myself, there should be room for some serious garbage collection in my head. I relish times to do just that. And I've been trying this morning. One of the things that never fails to amaze me about such collection is that to a person like me, it always becomes more clear that the things of this life are unclear. What I mean by this is that I'm not a person who likes to slice, dice, divide, label, name and categorize life. I tend to be an integrator. And so, when I say things become more unclear, I don't mean that they are getting separated further and that I can't fit them together or find a place for them. Rather, I mean that life becomes more integrated, and all the things begin to blend together. Human life is very grey to me, but not because there is a lack of sharpness and meaning to it. It is simply that all things are connected, and they are connected to such an extent that even the connections cannot be well identified. This may be one of the reasons I admire mystical religion so much; it deals in the realm where "There is what is. What is, is." (Parenthetically, this is why I believe one of the truly great passages in the Bible is when God sends Moses to lead his people. God declares to Moses, "I am who I am. Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I am has sent me to you.'" I'm not making a claim about the Moses Story, but I am making a claim about the Bible Story. It's a brilliant presentation. Who is God? God is That Which Is. God is That Which Exists. What else is God supposed to say to explain to a human who/what God is?)

That's a bit of background to a hundred things going through my mind this morning. I missed last Monday's Merton quote; I was driving. All day. All night. Into the next morning. And this week I've deviated from New Seeds to go back farther into Merton's life, before he entered the monastery. It seems proper to me to take something from his novel My Argument With the Gestapo (which admittedly wasn't grand enough as a novel to be published until the Merton name would sell it). It seems fitting because it's Memorial Day, my oldest daughter happens to be at Arlington National Cemetery today, and, well, because everything is grey and related. But there's no way I can sit here today and type it all up for a post. This is the problem with seeing all of life as integrated; how do you talk about its little pieces? To give it my best shot for the day, I'll start with an anecdote.

Some years ago, I was hiking with a friend of mine, one of the finest human beings I've ever met. Although we differ in some of our views, we share a deep and abiding faith in God. He's a good friend, the kind of friend that gives friendship its meaning. I can talk to him about anything. Most of all he's one of those folks who would give his life and likely his soul for me, and most likely for you, too. I bet he'd make one hell of a soldier, and in fact he was in the first gulf war. So round and round, somehow on this hike we got into a conversation and I ended up saying something, and he's the only person I've said it to who seems to have really gotten it. Which means, he'd already realized it, and was simply agreeing with me once I said it. In so many words, I was talking about faith in God, and about how it is faith that justifies our actions, and that even that faith comes from God, and that nothing is our own. And I said that I've known pacifists and I've known warriors, and in each case I think some were "wrong" and some were "right." That what it came down to was the humility and honesty of their faith—or the lack of each— before God that made them right or wrong. "It's not what side you choose, but why and in what spirit. It's not the decision one makes, but the faith behind it," I said. He stopped walking and turned to look at me. He cocked his head, smiled, and nodded. "And it's the same faith in either case," he said, his tone of voice sharing with me the wonder of faith.

It's a hard thing to accept. People who are strongly aligned to action view such a statement as heretical, as situation ethics, as absolutely dangerous. "Well then, I guess you're saying we can all do just whatever we want, and God don't mind as long as we do it for Him!" No, that's not it. It's about the nature of faith, of God, and of Man together. Either you get it, or your don't. That's all the explanation for which I have time today.

But why this matters today is that I believe in peace. I believe war is born of evil. I believe that, as Merton once wrote, it is the suspension of morality. It should always be avoided whenever possible. I know a number of people who would not kill a thug who was killing their own kid, and I admire some of their theology and all of their conviction. Their greatest fear, I venture, is that in the heat of some moment, they would kill to protect another. They would argue, I think, that one cannot say he values life if he is willing to take a life. Fair enough. I admire that. A lot. But I think one of my greatest fears is that I would fail to kill to protect another. You see, it is also fair enough to say that you cannot claim to value life if you will allow it to be taken by the vicious. There are no easy answers, but my claim is that the two views cannot be fully separated, nor need they be: there is room in God for both. It is evil that people die in wars. Evil. But does that make those who do the deed evil? Not always. I imagine my little girl at Arlington today. She is in the midst of some three hundred thousand people who gave their lives in battle; a great many who did so in the same faith that makes me pray for peace. I will say nothing negative in their presence, for she can be there today because they each believed enough to give her a tomorrow. To them and their faith I owe too great a debt. It is Memorial Day. It is a day for them, for their families, for their loved ones. And it is also a day for my daughter, for me, and for you. We are not separate. We are what is.

I think I'm still trying to recover from the past two weeks. Sorry I'm not more coherent than I am…

A year or two ago my folks were in town for a visit, and during a drive to get burgers with my dad, he reminisced for a few moments about his dad. "[My two brothers] and I were all very different from one another," he said. "And you know, my dad, he was a different dad to each one of us. He seemed to know how to be the particular dad that each of us needed him to be." And then, as his face gracefully broke, he added, "And he was good at being all three of them."

I made a mental note.

I tend to think that if you are afforded enough time as a parent, and if you have more than one kid, you sort of figure this out along the way. At the least, you realize it in the back of your mind, if for no other reason than what "works" with one kid may not work with another. This becomes self-evident in disciplining a child, and in simply trying to get them to do what you need them to do. But my dad's point is much bigger than this; it's deeper than cataloging the obvious results of spankings versus timeouts versus taking away cell phones and canceling sleepovers. It's really about seeing and connecting with your kids as individuals. It's about respecting them as people. It's about helping them learn who they are, how to be who they are, that it's okay to be who they are, and that you love them no matter who and what they are. One of the greatest things about being the parent of more than one kid is that you learn you can love a kid with your whole heart—more than life itself—and that, strangely, you can love another very different kid with your whole heart—more than life itself—yet the loving is manifested in very different ways. Love is Love, but it has so many, many different ways of being and expressing itself.

And I think there's more to it than this, too. For one thing, loving your kids is about loving them as God's children, not as your own. For another thing, loving your kids is about loving them in terms they can intuitively grasp via their own uniquely created nature; about offering them love in ways that they can recognize as loving. And lastly, this isn't merely about parents and kids—it's about all of us.

Nearly two months ago I published a post about what it may mean to live a Christian life, and said that a good place to start looking for answers is to ask two questions: what does it mean to love God, and what does it mean to love other people? In my life I am still and always searching for clearer answers to these questions. I find pieces as I bumble along my way, little tidbits and trinkets here and there, and a few of them seem to come around often. Among them are that the people we love do not belong to us; they belong to God. To love them rightly is to love them for who and what they are in God. To love like this requires a tremendous amount of faith, of humility, of patience, of acceptance and of care on our part, because who and what another person may be in God is a great mystery, hidden between that person and God alone, and not even fully revealed to that person. To love a person means, for one thing, to live with him or her in a faith—sometimes a very frightening faith—in the reality of the mystery, and to aid in its discovery. To love another person involves entrusting their life and path to God. To love a person means to help that person entrust his or her life and path to God. To love a person means helping him or her know that God can—and does—love him or her far better than you ever can or will. To love another person is to allow God to love them through you whenever God can, and to get out of God's way whenever he can't. Loving a person means believing strongly enough in God's mystery for them that you do not hide its light under the bushel of your own ego. Loving a person means learning that we are not the One who most loves him or her, nor are we the One that he or she is supposed to love the most. Loving a person means realizing that they do not exist for us, but for God. It means rejoicing in this fact. And it means striving to make it true on Earth, as it already is in Heaven.

Almost didn't make Monday for Thomas this week…

Only the will of God is indefectible. Every other freedom can fail and defeat itself by a false choice. All true freedom comes to us as a supernatural gift of God, as a participation in His own essential Freedom by the Love He infuses into our souls, uniting them with Him first in perfect consent, then in a transforming union of wills.

The other freedom, the so-called freedom of our nature, which is indifference with respect to good and evil choices, is nothing more than a capacity, a potentiality waiting to be fulfilled by the grace, the will and the supernatural love of God. — New Seeds, chapter 27

I was in the shower Friday morning, with my head in the stream, trying to recover from sleep deprivation, when I heard the almost intelligible voice of my youngest daughter.

"Whaaat?" I asked loudly, not unkindly, as I stood upright, wiping my eyes harder than any doctor would approve of.

"We blah-ta water bluh blah-blee" was all I could make out, but it sounded important; urgent, even. I could see the vague form of a child through the mist and condensation on the shower door.

"WHAAT?" I yelled more loudly, but still not unkindly. A genuine request for retransmission.

"WE BL-OTTA WATER BLEH BLIH-BLEE!" she yelled back, not unkindly. A genuine retransmission.

It's interesting how we tend to interpret things according to the way our minds work. Uh-oh, I thought. I opened the door a few inches. She knows the drill. She sidestepped and poked her head half-way in.

"We gotta lotta water where?" I asked, imagining my wife battling a gushing, broken pipe somewhere—muttering something, not unkindly of course, about hoping I'm enjoying my shower…

"No." My daughter said clearly. "We gotta water my piggy."

I blinked. I smiled, relieved, and was struck by how cute she looked in the moment. "Okay." I said. "We will. In a minute." She nodded once, as if to say to herself "Mission accomplished," and padded off.

"We gotta water my piggy." Now that's a blog post if I've ever heard one, I thought to myself.

Thursday was a long day. Well, Wednesday and Thursday were long. My schedule was all jacked up because between finishing my final paper for class and going to my eldest daughter's track meet, I was left Thursday afternoon running on two hours of sleep since Tuesday. But, in the process, I got to pick up the little shower girl at her twice-a-week preschool and this was a great serendipitous event, because she had made a Mother's Day surprise and needed to smuggle it home. It's really cute. It's a grape juice bottle turned into a flower planter and all dolled up to look like a pig. Little pink felt ears, big flat round nose, corkscrew tail, the whole nine yards. Really. it's cute. And apparently the children were given strict instructions to water the piggy every day or matters of great and dire consequence would arise.

So, you would have had to have been there, and it's a parent thing, but try to imagine a little girl in her jammies, hair all a muss, eyes bleary, looking like she's been asleep for about a week, with this simple but terribly important responsibility to meet. It's cute, it's loving, and it's a glimmer of staying on task and meeting that responsibility. It was a great moment.

I enjoyed a few minutes more relaxation in the shower. I smiled. School was finished. I had gotten some sleep. My little girl was growing up. Mother's Day was coming. We didn't have a lotta water someplace. And if I totally messed up and no other Mother's Day gifts worked out, well, at least we had a piggy.

People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.

They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are "members one of another."

The man who lives in division is not a person but only an "individual."

I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get. Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and I am praised, you die and I live; you are nothing and I am something. And I am all the more something because you are nothing. And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me; at times this even helps me to forget the other men who have what I have not and who have taken what I was too slow to take and who have seized what was beyond my reach, who are praised as I cannot be praised and who live on my death. — New Seeds, Chapter 7

In response to passages like this one and many others in Merton's work, I am left to simply raise a hand feebly and mumble, "Wow. Guilty." One of the things I find most interesting about being confronted with a presentation like the one above is that these kinds of subjects remain true and convicting and applicable no matter how much I may learn, grow and mature. No matter how far I may come, I never arrive. That's one of the great fascinations of a spiritual journey; it is never complete. You never arrive. You just keep climbing the ladder, and some days the rungs appear unsettlingly familiar to those you grasped long ago. The levels and flavors of things to overcome change, but the basic weaknesses within you remain the same: selfishness, pride, ego, stupidity, etc. They simply become more crafty and insidious. The enemy who lies within us is a very dynamic one; a chameleon who hides in the shadows of our souls, changing colors and forms as we ourselves grow and change. I am my own most formidable spiritual enemy, and sometimes I am astounded by how clever my foe can be. But I digress.

I picked this particular Merton quote in response to thoughts which go through my head whenever I receive an email with a certain basic slant, and I wrote the above paragraph because there are two edges to the sword of those thoughts. There is the side which wants to point the authors of said emails directly to Merton and admonish them in some way, and there is the side which re-reads the quote and pauses, mutters something about hypocrisy, and whispers to me to be content to remove the plank from my own eye. Having recognized my needs born of my own weaknesses, having reminded myself of them, I simply offer a few thoughts directed at all of us; myself at the head of the line.

The latest email wasn't that bad; it had a certain charming simplicity to it, and I think what it did more than anything was to cause me to remember other emails I have received and I have personally found to be offensive. It probably isn't fair, I admit, but I fall prey to the human propensity to lump things into buckets. "Oh, yeah, this idea/claim/gripe belongs in the <whatever subject> bucket, along with all the rest." And of course this is a bad idea, because there are never enough buckets to fairly differentiate everything, so things get unreasonably categorized. This is, by the way, one of the core issues in religion, politics and the like. People each have only a few buckets in their minds, and the ideas of others get thrown into one of those buckets of muck based upon one small point. [e.g., "You're pro-choice? So, then, you go in the liberal bucket! This means, to name a few things, that you are (necessarily by bucket-muck-association) a democratic, tree-hugging, anti-war, anti-gun, unpatriotic, gay-loving, pro-abortion, welfare-state, hybrid-driving, loose-living, immoral, anti-American, etc., etc." or, to be fair: "You're pro-life? So, then, you go in the conservative bucket! This means, to name a few things, that you are (necessarily by bucket-muck association) a republican, land-raping, pro-war, NRA-brainwashed, imperialistic, homophobic, misogynistic, rich-get-richer, gas-guzzler-driving, prudish, hypocritical, nationalistic, etc., etc.]. This is foolishness, but it's about the best a lot of us seem to be able to do. For a long time I've been trying to create and manage more and more buckets in my thinking, so I reduce this problem, but of late I'm coming to the conclusion that buckets are simply a bad idea. Throw away the buckets. Throw away the categorizing that improperly associates one idea with another. Let each thing stand on its own, as a discrete item. Analyze it as it stands. Understand, one, that ideas can be held in a practically infinite set of combinations and understand, two, that the buckets are fictions anyway. This is the most maddening thing of all, and I don't know why more people don't realize it: there aren't buckets that encapsulate what we believe they do. It's all a bunch of make-believe, which has been allowed (encouraged, even) to evolve so that one, we don't have to think hard about anything and, two, so politicians, pundits and related media types can manipulate us and get a rise out of us without having to work hard to earn their millions and/or achieve their maniacal power. (Deep breath). But, again, I digress.

So, where was I going with this? I'm not sure it matters because I seem to have derailed myself, but the email I received recently had a basic point, which was that the author has a job wherein he or she has to undergo random urine tests as a condition of employment. Author's point being, how come people who are getting welfare checks don't have to take urine tests and prove themselves drug free in order to get their checks? This is kind of a charming idea, and I admire its simplicity. I also like the fact that the author stated that he or she doesn't mind for some of his or her check to go toward helping people who are down on their luck and are trying to get back on their feet. The author just doesn't want a part of his or her paycheck going to people who don't try to get back up, and instead choose to sit around doing drugs. Fair enough. I can see that.

But admittedly, there's a bucket in my head that is doing a little jig and raising all kinds of tinny clatter over in a corner. Now, I'm not saying the recent email belongs in this bucket, and in fact I'm not placing it into this bucket. I'm just saying it's close enough to make the bucket dance. The bucket holds emails about things like getting rid of politicians who vote for social security to be paid to aliens (which, by the way, seems to be reasonable under law since aliens pay social security), and the bucket holds news stories about things like people being irate over how some Katrina victims spent their federal aid money. The Katrina thing always puzzled me because, for example, there were complaints about money being spent on booze and tattoos. But I doubt the complainers would raise a stink if the spenders spent money they themselves
earned on booze and tattoos, so it couldn't have been a simple moral issue concerning the evils of alcohol, skin and ink. And I have to think that at least some of the complainers don't see anything wrong with spending their own money on their own martini lunches and a cocktail or two after work, nor their plastic surgery and designer clothes which are part of their concept of self-identity, so it couldn't have been simply that "their" money was being used for these types of things. It must have been something else, and if I throw in the alien thing, what I'm left to conclude, in the plainest thinking, is that people don't want their money to go to people who don't meet their standards of what it means to be a properly behaving, properly reasoning, properly American person; whatever the heck "properly" means. The thing is, the alarm that goes off in my head when I receive emails or read news about this type of thing is that they are about some kind of division created by and between people, about what's defined to be "proper" or "right" or what-have-you, and I worry because—although it is unavoidable and even necessary that we each draw our own lines in the sand in order to have meaningful direction in our life—once division starts, it is very hard to stop.

Suppose hypothetically that somebody were to decide that since I didn't meet the requirements of their job, or match their moral or political views, that I shouldn't get a handout when I need it. Suppose, in the reverse, I decided the same thing against them. Suppose I tell you that I'd love to help you out of your bind, but I'm not going to because I know you're going to go out and buy a business suit, cologne and a razor, or make-up, a hairstyle and some new shoes so you can "look for a decent job?" Suppose I say that if you were really hurting, you'd forget about how you look, and get a job digging ditches or scooping poop until you could pay to make your own self look pretty? Or maybe I'd tell you that you're getting nothing from me because all you're going to do is go find a job digging ditches or scooping poop, and I'm not going to support somebody who has no self respect nor higher goals. Or maybe I'd tell you that I'd love to help you out, but I know you're just going to go buy hot dogs and bleached white bread for your kids, so I'm saving my generosity for somebody who cares to provide decent food for their family. Suppose some guy or gal said, "Well, ya know, I have a super-top-secret government clearance. I have to get a lie-detector test every month, the feds watch my spending like a hawk, question every big thing I buy, snoop into my sex life, I can't so much as carry a pocket knife to protect myself during the day, and generally I give up my freedom to take care of my family. Do you do that? Nope. So you had a job and you had to pee in a bottle once in a while? Big deal. Why should I help you, when all you had to do was meet the simple expedient of staying off drugs? Tell you what: you get yourself straight and moral with a work ethic like mine, show me that you're willing to lay a little more on the line to be here in America, so that you deserve to get some of my money, and then we'll talk?" Quite frankly, in this line of reasoning, eventually there isn't a single one of us who deserves to get a penny from anyone. Once you make the first cut of division it's really, really easy to start slicing and dicing until the pieces aren't even big enough to see anymore.

I know. I've made an extreme—childish even—play. In cowardly defense I'll say that it's the last week of the semester and I'm totally cranked on caffeine. But the point is, the idea that "we" deserve what others do not is questionable and extreme—childish even—in and of itself. The very concept, the very inkling of it in our brain, is spiritually dangerous. I guess that's my point, and now I actually remember where I was going with all of this. I said I'm working toward having no buckets. That isn't entirely correct. I'm working toward having one bucket. (Anyway, to have one bucket is, effectively, the same thing as having no buckets.) When it all comes down to it, there is just one bucket, with a label on it that says, "FRAGILE: HUMANITY." It holds everything, and we're all in it together. We are all members of one another. Like it or not (and there's plenty not to like), there's no getting out of the bucket. The sooner we figure this out, the better it will be for all of us.

Oh. And one more thing, about the clattering bucket and the emails and the news stories. There's something else that puzzles me. These emails and stories usually end up with something about America (a country which I happen to admire and love, by the way). They say something about how we need to fix the country, or if the country wasn't so screwed up things like this wouldn't happen, or this ain't America no more. I think some of this is true; definitely, we need to fix some things. The role of drugs in the socio-economic matrix, for example, would be a good one. But, at the same time, the folks seem to be saying, at least implicitly, that if you refuse to contribute to a society, then you shouldn't get to be fed by that society. I guess I wonder if they're saying, in short, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." I wonder, because I don't recall this idea being stated in the our Constitution. (Sincerely, if it is, please tell me so I don't remain ignorant.) The idea is, however, in the Soviet Constitution of 1936; it's Lenin's first principle of socialism. So, in which hard working, properly red-blooded American bucket does that belong?

I may be way off base with that last comment, but it seems to me that the great thing about America and Americans is that it and we help people even when people don't deserve it. This may seem like a painful crock of muck to those of us who foot the bill, but I'm willing to accept it. Personally, I'll pick an environment of blind grace and mercy over one of cold hard justice any day of the week. But that's just me—I think Jesus was on to something there.

Thanks for indulging a bit of a rant. Now I need to gather up some sophomoric, embarrassing buckets in my head, and try to throw them out.

. . . now if I can just find my Starbucks mug . . .