YEARNING TO PRAY

Yes, it does say "yearning" to pray and not learning to pray, though goodness knows I need the later as well. I want to write briefly about the feeling that comes over me from time to time that I need to pray. It's not that I feel like I need something and want to ask God to provide it. No, I just feel the need to pray, to pray without wanting anything but prayer.

That's a strange notion to some. Prayer is often thought of as a means to an end. One prays in order to get something else. What I have learned after all these years is that prayer is it's own end. Well, maybe not exactly. Prayer is a means of communication with God so it is not entirely an end in itself. God is the end we ought to long for. We long for God not in order to be rewarded or to escape punishment, but simply because we desire God for God's own sake. That's what brings me look at prayer as it's own end.

I've tried to explain this to some people with little success, but this is the solution to the problem of unanswered prayer. If what we seek is simply to pray, then praying is the answer to our prayer.

Anyone who has approached prayer in this way knows of the dry period when prayer won't come. One solution is simply to tell God, "I don't feel like praying," which, of course, is a prayer. The other solution is to develop a habit of prayer, so that one prays whether one feels like it or not. Now I know that a lot of people find that hypocritical. How can you pray and not really mean what you say? What good is saying prayers mechanically by rote? Ah, they are every good. We are to pray as we are able, not as we ought. I don't know if that's something I've read or if it's something from one of the Benedictine or Cistercian Monks I have listened to over the last 10 years, but it's good advice.

Maybe the underlying truth is that all prayer is a work of the Holy Spirit. What a strange concept–God within us prays to God outside us, or something like that. To make a habit of prayer gives the Spirit a chance to work with us, even though it may not feel like we are accomplishing much. I pray the Psalms in my Morning Prayers. It's part of the strange inversion of things that we can take Scripture–God's revelation to us, and use it as our way of speaking to God.

A lot of the time I push myself to say Morning Prayer. Sometimes I don't push hard enough, but if I keep at it day after day this strange thing happens–a yearning to pray rises in me. I just have to pray, because I have to, that's all. I have to say (or sing) the words of the Psalms or Biblical Canticles. I have to have time to meditate on Scripture. I have to add my feeble attempts to put in words what can only be expressed in "sighs too deep for words."

Well, that's my rambling for the day. By the way, the picture above is of a cross my cousin sent me. It's from Maria Lach, a place in Germany known for it's very famous monastery. They do a LOT of praying there.

May the Lord bless you on your journey, and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne


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YOU NEED THREE

Some years ago I read the wonderful little book, What Kids need to Succeed [Peter Bensen et. al. 1995, Free Spirit Publishing Inc ISBN 0-915793-78-4]. It is the result of research done by the Search Institute in Minneapolis. It is built on a list of 30 assets that children need to succeed in life–that's not just succeed financially, but live healthy, productive, positive lives. With each asset the authors give practical advice on how to help a child acquire these assets. Sixteen of the assets are external, things in children's environment that support them. The other 14 assets are the values and attitudes children need, something I have discussed in connection with virtue in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Books. One of the external assets is fixed in my mind: Asset #4, other adults. "Kids have other adults beside their parents they can turn to for advice and support. Ideally, three or more adults play this role in their lives."

A month ago I heard a lecture by Dr. Robert Brooks, a psychiatrist who specializes in family therapy and co-author with Dr. Sam Goldstein of Raising Resilient Children. During the lecture he posed a question: "List three people in your current life who would name you as their charismatic adult. What do you say and do that would lead them to list you as a charismatic adult?" "Charismatic adult" is a term Brooks takes from Julius Segal who wrote: "a charismatic adult—a person with whom they can identify and from whom they gather strength."

So I thought: who were the persons in my youth with whom I can identify and from whom I drew strength? The first person who came to mind was my Uncle Herb, my Father's brother (pictured). If the world were filled with people like my uncle, we'd leave in a near paradise. He embraced the qualities of self-reliance, hard work, living up to your responsibilities, taking care of you family, supporting your church, and never cheating or taking advantage of someone or knowingly hurting another person. He exemplified the solid virtues every man should have.

There was another lesson, the great lesson, I learned from my uncle, but I really wish he hadn't been the teacher. The great lesson: life isn't fair. You can be a diligent employee giving 110%, but still be out of a job when it become convenient for the company to move away. You can be a faithful church member, only to have a church leader treat you abysmally simply because that leader cannot work with difference in opinion. You can lead a good life only to have disease rob you of your physical and mental abilities.

Charismatic adult number two, Russell A., a member of my home church, advisor to the Luther League, and a very odd duck. Uncle Russy, as we often called him, would drift in and out of church, suddenly becoming very active in things and then disappearing again. He'd always been like that. Professionally, he work for the Juvenile division of the state. On the side he taught celestial navigation and parliamentary procedure. It must have been from him that my love of Roberts Rules of Order arose. Rus said exactly what he thought about anything. There was never any pretense about him. Maybe that example is what allows me to be the very eccentric person I am. I think what I appreciated about him was that he talked to youth the same way he talked to adults. It wasn't that he was trying to be your "buddy." He didn't try to be "with it." That would have been a phoniness incompatible with him. But he was condescending in dealing with us just because we were a whole lot younger than he was.

Charismatic adult number three, Kurt D., one of my piano teachers. Mr. D. taught for a music studio teaching piano and accordion, mostly accordion, that shows you how lo g ago that was. I went through a number of teachers before him. They often came, put in their 30 minutes of teaching, and left. Mr. D. recognized there was more to me than just another student. After a while he arranged that my lessons was always the last on his schedule so it could easily run an hour or hour and a half. After a time he would also ask my mother for a glass of beer to tide him over during these extended sessions. (He was a German after all.) Mr. D was able to teach me (I don't know how) that there was a lot more to playing than getting the right notes at the right time at the right dynamic.

After we had answered these and a few other questions to ourselves, Dr. Brooks asked: "List three young people in your life for whom YOU are a charismatic adult." You could hear a sharp inhaling of breath, some ohs, and then silence. This was scary. If each of us had needed three adults to support us and give us strength in our growing up, who were the three youth to whom we have given what we received. Oh, my goodness. What an obligation! Sometime later this Bible verse came to my mind: 'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me" (Mat 25:45 NRSV).

I wrote this much months ago and then stopped. I was then and am now perplexed over what to do. I don't think I've been one of these charismatic adults Dr. Brooks wrote about. I'm not sure I can be. So I do what I can with my abilities. Right now my church is working on a program to send backpacks of food home with kids so they have something to eat on weekends when the free school lunch programs aren't available. Some of these kids in our own community go without anything from Friday to Monday. What has really troubled me is that I have been able to enlist very few churches to work with us. But we have to do what we can, even if it's a little bit.

None of this leaves me very happy, but that is a life-lesson to be learned. The resilient person knows they can't be happy all the time, but the keep on keeping on anyway.

Keep on your pilgrimage. May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne






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WAR OF THE SQUIRRELS

By some quirk of evolution the squirrel (family Sciuridae) developed a long, bushy tail. Indeed, they take their name from the Greek word skiouros, which means shadow-tailed. Had it not been for their tail, they would look like the rest of their disgusting rodent relatives. Upon siting a rat, people turn to traps, poison, or shot guns to exterminate the varment. Upon siting a squirrel, people run to get nuts to feed the cute little creatures.

I learned early about these sneaky vermin. As a little tyke, I would to go to Hamlin Park with my Grandma Szlavik to feed the squirrels. They were so tame they would take food from your hand. Then one of the nasty buggers bit my finger. Never again would I trust a squirrel. I did, however, have a toy squirrel that I had a safe relationship with. I brought it to Kindergarten one day for show-and- tell, and we sang, "Gray squirrel, gray squirrel, swish your tail for me. Wrinkle up your funny nose. Hold a nut between your toes. Gray squirrel, gray squirrel, swish your tail for me."

My Grandmother Kofink would occasionally feed squirrels windmill cookies. (That's no so strange since those cookies have almonds in them.) However, after the squirrels had eaten their fill, they took to digging holes in the lawn to burry the rest. That was the end of the cookies. To compensate for the absence of treats the squirrels started digging up the tulip bulbs. That was an act of pure vengeance because they would take one bite out of the bulb, discover they didn't like the taste, discard it, and dig up another one.

For 21 years my life was relatively squirrel free since I don't recall seeing any in Miami where I lived. Then I moved to Ocala and was reintroduced to the little monsters. Now in general I am a live and let live sort of person. There are plenty of oak trees around here, and the squirrels are welcome to eat all the acorns the can hold. They can even store them up for the six weeks of winterish season we have here. Now, the Good Lord intended squirrels to live in trees and not in the ceiling of the church's narthex, but the narthex is the place they want to live. Several times the have gnawed their way through wood and stucco to get into the ceiling and raise a litter of baby squirrels. We always close their access hole making sure the squirrels are out foraging. Once a squirrel went to its eternal reward while living in the ceiling which produced an infernal stench. (Almost as bad as the time a lizard died in the cup dispenser of the water cooler.)

Some time in late spring or early summer the squirrels chewed the Holland Tunnel of holes though the fascia and the wall to get back into the ceiling. I tried patching their entrance with wood several times, but the always pulled the patches off. I wouldn't have minded their new living quarters if they hadn't been so destructive. First they started tearing the insulation out of the ceiling, then they knocked down the recessed lights by pushing the fixtures out of the ceiling.

We explained the situation to our pest control people who promised to investigate how to repel squirrels. We're still waiting for the report. In the meantime I believe we have gone through one litter of squirrels. As winter approached, the Congregation Council decided the squirrels had to be evicted. We hired someone to close their entrance permanently with cement and put aluminum shielding across and possible future entry sites. It was done humanely, waiting for them to go our foraging before shutting them out. Mission accomplished. The ceiling is now squirrel free.

The pesky creatures were quite displeased at being denied access to their residence, but they were only squatters and not legal residents. For several days they banged on the metal siding trying to remove or destroy it without success. I came outside one day to have words with them, warning one of their number to leave the siding alone or there would be dire consequences. He or she looked at me with contempt.

I thought the war of the squirrels was over, but I was wrong. The Monday after Christmas I arrived at the church to find a string of the outdoors Christmas lights chewed into two-foot lengths and left lying on the ground. The squirrels had begun to bite off individual bulbs, but decided they had done enough damage for one day.

Some church members suggested we leave the lights on overnight to fry the vengeful little monsters next time they went after the lights. I was sorely tempted, but it would have done no good. I noticed every day that the string of lights was always unplugged from the extension cord. I knew no one from the church was unplugging the lights, but couldn't work out what phenomenon of nature was producing this effect. The answer was the squirrels. I saw one siting on the extension cord that ran underneath the roof of the covered walkway. The weight of the squirrel was just enough to pull the cord free of the lights. The bushy-tailed rats had figured out how to avoid electrocution while carrying out their destruction.

I think we have a truce, but . . . Last week I hear a loud thump against the outside wall of my office. I went to see what it was, and five crows took off from the roof over my office. Are they the aerial allies of the squirrels? Are they starting their own battle against us? Crows are pretty aggressive birds. I've seen then chase off hawks. More significantly, I've seen Hitchcock's movie The Birds. I'm going to keep my eye on the situation . . . from a distance.

May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne



3412

It's Still Christmas

The Eighth Day of Christmas

I was talking with someone the day after Christmas. He person asked if I was glad Christmas was over. I was shocked. First of all, in my calendar Christmas wasn't over. It runs for twelve days until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. But technicalities aside, I was shocked because I love Christmas. I don't want it to be over. There isn't a time of year I like better.

I suppose I obsess about Christmas. Ever since I've been living on my own I've tried to reproduce the wonderful Christmases I remember from my childhood. That's a rather precarious thing to do, because memory plays tricks on us. It can take the good bits from a dozen Christmases and string them together making you think they were all the same Christmas.

I suppose my experience of Christmas was partly enhanced because there was never a disappointment. I don't recall my parents ever asking me what I wanted for Christmas. They just gave me things. Everything was a surprise and therefore never a disappointment. Well, there were scratchy wool sweaters and sometimes underwear, but that was always a gift from one of my more practical grandmothers.

My attempts to reproduce the Christmases of memory have always failed. It was the people who made Christmas, but so many of them are gone now and the rest of us are scattered. The picture at the top of this blog is from Christmas 1951–my gosh, more than half a century ago. That's me, my mother and father. I figure my dad must have used a timer to click the shutter on the camera. He's almost never in Christmas pictures because he was always taking them. My father would have been 29 and my mother 25 and me a few months shy of three.

Now here comes a good one from 1955 where we're all gathered in my grandparents' home.

We all seem to be enjoying ourselves, but are Mom and Grandma showing off new pairs of bloomers they got for Christmas?


A few years after this my parents and grandparents changed apartments. That meant my mother inherited the Christmas dinner. I don't know the date for the next pictures, but there are probably the early 70s. My father's mother doesn't appear in the pictures, but my mother's parents do.



First are pictures from Christmas morning. I'm dressed up in a sweater and tie, so I have been to St. Luke's church with my aunt and uncle and cousins. I'm back home and the immediate family are opening presents. The were very understanding about my desire to go to church on Christmas Day. That's my sister Karen on the left and a much thinner version of me.


Ah, Mom got a present. If these were motion pictures, you'd see her carefully unwrap the paper so it could be used again next year.


Now it's Christmas night, drinks before dinner. From the right my cousins Adele, Darlene and Darlene's husband-to-be Jim.


And from the left me, Granpa Szlavik and Grandma Szlavik. Grandpa appears to be watch television. He never joined in conversations being a very quiet person. Grandma did all the talking. She seems to be inspecting her drink which is probably my father's infamous punch. Now at the table having finished Christmas Dinner.


Aunt Martha and Uncle Herb.


Grandma and Grandpa, Jim and Darlene's head.


Mom and Dad. I must have taken this picture because Dad is leaning way in not trusting me to have framed the picture properly to include him. In one aspect I still try to duplicate my memories–the Christmas Tree, I still purchase a real tree every year and decorate it. Here's my parent's tree in the 70s.



And my tree in 2007.

Most of the ornaments I have purchased one at a time fro my tree from places like Bloomingdales and Macy's. All of the ones I buy are made in Europe–Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia. The top of my tree always has a spire rather than a star or angel. The tree my parents had when I was very little was also a spire. It broke one Christmas and was replaced with the lighted star.



Next come the pink, plastic cherubs by mother bought for my parents first Christmas tree. She always hung them herself near the top of the tree, and so do I.



Then some angel musicians she bought years later at Hoffings Department Store, six angels for 77 cents.


And some blown glass angels I bought. There were eight in all, but I gave four away as gifts to friends. I wonder if any of them still have them?

Now my pride and joy are my birds. My Grandma Kofink always had birds on her trees, and my mother, and so do I.




I like the red humming bird. There's a blue one also. Then comes every kind of ornament that strikes my fancy. Two of the oldest ones are a pink fish and a church that I bought in a set from the Smithsonian Institute 31 years ago.




And two of the newest, A Harry Potter ornament that was a gift from Tyler.




And a flamingo (I think he looks drunk) from my sister this year straight from the Lincoln Park Zoo.




A Happy Christmas to you.

May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne





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