Kosher Alternatives

Some time ago (it was in the summer) I was on an errand to get some meat to barbecue for dinner. I don't recall exactly why, but I was on foot and in a hurry (meaning: kids were hungry). I was high-tailing it for the local "big-name" grocery store near our house. On the way I passed a Jewish deli that I have walked by a million times. On this day I thought to myself - "Hey, they've got meat in here and it'll save me a lot of time to just go here and run back home". So I went inside and asked if they had any brats. The man behind the counter, clearly an orthodox Jew, said "I've got kosher hot dogs that are to die for! How many do you want?". I bought a half dozen, thanked him and went out of the door with a smile on my face.

It wasn't until I was half way home again that it occurred to me how stupid it was for me to ask an orthodox Jew if he was selling pork sausages.

What I remember about it was that the guy didn't bat an eye at my question. He just proposed, in a very positive manner, a kosher alternative to what I had asked for. He didn't correct me, or remind me that Jews don't eat pork, or take offense at the insensitivity of my question. The result was that I left his store feeling that I had bought something even better than brats - kosher hot dogs (turns out they were actually pretty good...). I would have no hesitation about going back there again to buy something else - not because the kosher hot dogs are that good, but because of the welcome I felt from the man behind the counter and his willingness to share, in a positive way, his particular culture and life.

In all honesty, I am not this way about the particulars of my culture and life and I wish I was.

Too often, with the particular Catholic things that I do - natural family planning, not eating meat on Fridays, reverence for the Eucharist, praying the Rosary, etc. - there is a tendency for me to hide these things away as if they are offensive to other people. It is likely the case that, at least on occasion, because this is how I act about these things, I have inadvertently "taught" other people to react to these things, about which they would otherwise have no pre-conceived notions, as if they were things that drive us apart. The analogy for the deli would be for the man to say "No, no brats here, we sell food for orthodox Jews only, is that what you want?".

Ironically, this isn't what I intend, but in honesty, it is what I sometimes do.

I wish I had more of the spirit of the man in the Jewish deli - if someone comes to me asking about contraception, I propose the "kosher" alternative - natural family planning - "It's the best!". Worried about your kids sexual behavior? I've got books on chastity! How many do you want? Life got you down? Are you suffering and not sure what it all means? I've got Jesus Christ truly present in the Eucharist - Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity - in the Adoration Chapel!

"It's to die for!"

Dark Knights and Dragons

A recurring nightmare I have had recently takes the form of me being helplessly sucked into storm sewer during a flood. I am scratching the walls trying to stop myself from being drawn in but the force of the water pushes me on. In my dream, I feel some sense of the panic that would accompany such an ordeal. As I am drawn further and further down I begin to sense that I am doomed - no one will be able to reach me as far as I am going. Finally, I come to a point of constriction of the pipe and I am pinned in utter darkness with the water rising all around me and it is then that I have this overwhelming sense of fear that this is where my life will end - alone and in the dark. This is it. There is no hope. About then is when I wake up and have a tremendous feeling of consolation that I am actually safe in my bed.

Life at times seems to me to have the form of this nightmare - at times I feel alone, drawn along by a torrent of water that takes me further and further down. The teaching of Jesus Christ is that the world that is presented to our senses is a "veil". Sight, hearing, feeling, taste and smell cannot access ultimate reality. To do so, we would need a "sixth sense", but this is nowhere promised us. Lacking this sixth sense we are "in darkness". In fact it seems to me to be worse than this - we are more accurately " in dangerous darkness". A recent trip to the emergency room for one of our little ones brought home to me the darkness of the senses. My mind was saying "I know you are with me God, I know you are hearing my prayers. I know that everything is going to work out no matter what. Even if this child were to die (albeit a remote possibility in this particular case, but somthing that goes through my mind nevertheless...), indeed especially if this little one were to die, things work out, but all of my senses are telling me I can't handle it and that this is the end of the line. Please God, heal my child."

I'm thankful to report, Bubby was okay.

I have also recently found this idea of our human sensual darkness developed quiet elegantly (my surprise at this resulting only from my ignorance...) in the book "The Dark Night of the Soul". Written by St. John of the Cross, a contemplative Carmelite Monk living during the time of the Catholic Counter-Reformation movement, the book describes both in detail, and with a first hand familiarity, the process of human beings rising to encounter the Divine. But the path described may not be what we want to hear. Especially not the modern ear.

St. John refers to this process of coming into union with the Divine as a "Dark Night" and it is a reference to the veiled darkness our senses have in regards to higher things. A key point made in the book that jumped out to me is that fasting, prayers, almsgiving and all the traditional practices of religion, while not without value, are not the ultimate path to God, because inevitably they arise from our own motives and remain under our control. The ultimate path to God is to abandon one's self to what comes in life and to find the will of God in it. There is another book, "Abandonment to Divine Providence", that makes a compelling objective case for the sublimity of this method, but St. John is concerned with the human experience of the process and the description is challenging.

Ironically, I wound up picking this book up in the Eucharistic Adoration chapel one Friday morning just after Christmas when I went up there to cover a Children's Adoration hour that is hosted by our Parish. With me in the Chapel at the same time was a mother with her four young children. This day, she had her hands full with her charges. I don't remember exactly why, but I was struggling with my own journey as a parent that morning and had come to pray specifically without the kids so I could settle down.

What unfolded next makes me chuckle. As I was reading in the Dark Night of the Soul things like this:

"This night, whereby we mean contemplation, produces in the spiritually minded two sorts of darkness or purgations, answering to the two parts of man, that is to say, the sensitive and spiritual. And thus, the first night or sensitive purgation is that wherein the soul purges and strips herself naked of all things of sense, by conforming the senses to the spirit; and the next is, the spiritual night or purgation, wherein the soul purges and denudes herself of all mental activity, by conforming and disposing the intellect for the union of love with God. The sensitive is usual and happens to many, and it is of these beginners, that we shall treat first. The spiritual purgation is gone through by very few, and those only who have been proved and tried, and of these we shall treat afterwards. The first night or purgation is bitter and terrible to the sense. The second transcends all description, because it is exceeding fearsome for the spirit..."

Literally, at the same time as I am reading this, I am hearing the woman's exasperation with her children behind me. I realized that she was having the exact same feeling I was having and had come to get away from. I don't know why this is, but nothing seems to make it easier to struggle with my kids than to watch someone else struggle with theirs. At one point I casually turned around and saw that she was holding the two "middle" ones (probably ages 3 and 4) physically apart trying to stop a fight as I saw behind her that the 1-year old was eating a blue marker (and had been for some time given the amount of blue I saw in his mouth...). When I whispered the fact to her attention she let out this exasperated groan and "lost it", went into "drill instructor mode" which caused all of the kids to snap to attention. Since I relate quite readily to the sentiment, I turned back around and didn't look again. After the kids were under control I heard her plop back down in a chair and I knew exactly what she was thinking (been there...).

That's when it occurred to me - parenting is my entry into the Dark Night of the Sense - not just in terms of the small, exasperating challenges, but also the big, scary ones like middle-of-the-night trips to the E.R. Parenting is not under my control, but is rather about a surrender to what God has in store for me. And my response to the particular challenges I am faced with is process whereby my soul is "purged and stripped naked of all things of sense, by conforming the senses to the spirit."

I don't know if I am able to write this blog adequately to convey the full sense of what I am experiencing. Somehow, in the ordinariness of my life as a parent, I have gained a small experiential insight into one of the greatest of the spiritual classics that treats of the loftiest of topics, namely salvation and eternal life.

That just blows me away.

Debbie Does Destruction

Recently I have noted a significant rise in the popularity of the "Extreme Fighting" shows, UFC and the like. I admit that, as a martial arts hobbyist, I have followed these things myself, in the past, since their modern origin in the early 1990's (I remember watching UFC #1 when it first came out). The early exhibitions had an element of "testing" the various martial arts styles against one another - pitting Brazilian Ju-Jitsu against Muay-Thai kickboxing, etc, to see who was the "Ultimate Fighting Champion". However, the bouts were often not well matched in terms of the competitors' physical abilities and they tended to either result in a immediate knockout or to wind up in the much-dreaded, boring, stalemate on the ground.

Since those early days, a considerable evolution in no-holds barred fighting competitions has occurred - indeed a new, synthesized and entirely pragmatic "Mixed Martial Arts" fighting style has arisen along with a class of competitors, drawn from the ranks of ex-collegiate All-American wrestlers, Brazilian jujitsu champions, Japanese shoot fighters and anybody else with the "guts" to take that sort of beating, whose sole "occupation", as it were, is to train full-time to beat other people up. This phenomenon has seemingly hit a marketing gold streak, meeting some sort of need in American popular culture that has lain dormant since the demise of professional boxing in the wake of the rise and fall of Mike Tyson.

In the early days of the extreme fighting shows, they were always "Pay per View" and I noted that they tended to be presented with one of two tones. The first, characteristic of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, presented the fights in a sporting motif, under bright lights, with clean cut commentators in brightly colored sports coats talking through the technical aspects of the match and a referee in a striped shirt. The second, examples of which escape me now, tended to present the event in the terms of a quasi-street fight, complete with heavy metal music (anything by "Rage Against the Machine" could be counted on as a standard...), a barbie-doll shaped ring girl (wearing a bikini that made you wonder exactly why she bothered to wear anything at all) strutting around with a "Round" card, a raucous crowd and a dark arena. There was something ominous about these "darker" exhibitions. The emphasis was less on technique and far more on seeing somebody get "beat up" (somehow a stronger term for that seems more appropriate but I'll hold off...).

In the most recent packaging of the extreme fighting consumable, I see a blending of the two styles into something that is trying to approximate the tone of professional boxing. There is theater - ring girls, heavy metal, etc., but it is somewhat toned down to make it easier to the masses to consume. And there is emphasis on technique, which has far greater traction now due to the higher level of expertise of the fighters and the commonality of the Mixed Martial Arts style.

Yet, for some reason, the idea has come into my mind that there is something about this no holds barred fighting phenomenon that is akin to pornography.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary explains that the word "pornography" comes from the Greek pornographos meaning "the writing of harlots" and defines it as "the depiction of erotic behavior intended to cause sexual excitement". Well, with that definition, my thesis doesn't get far.

However, there is an interesting quote (I've been unable to find exactly who said it - I'm guessing JPII) that the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but rather that it doesn't show enough, meaning, specifically, that it deliberately fails to show the personhood of the people involved. Notice, that with pornography, we never care WHO the people are - We never ask, for example, "whose son is that in that threesome"? Whose sister are we seeing bent double? The whole thing functions on the depersonalization of the participants.

Herein lies the latent "pornographic" element of the full contact fighting. With the rise of one after another of these chiseled, highly trained competitors, the personality of each individual tends to get lost and it becomes less and less about who they are (as in "Whose son's body is that laid out on that mat after taking a kick to head?") and more and more exclusively about what they can do. All Star wrestling has been approximating this sort of thing for a long time, but there is a real difference between the two. All Star wrestling is like people acting out pornography with their clothes on. Extreme fighting is like hard core pornography.

I think this is relevant because many people who would never dream of having bunch of guys over to their house to watch the latest hard core porn film in a group, will gladly invite a bunch of guys over to watch a man get hit so hard in head that his body assumes that (unfortunately, by now...) all too familiar rigid form on the mat and cheer for it.

I was surprised to learn that it is the official teaching of the Catholic church (sorry I don't have a reference) that any competition, of any sort, which has as part of its objective, to do damage to a human being, is intrinsically evil. My surprise with this comes because professional boxing falls under this heading - the point of professional boxing is to knock the other guy out, which is doing damage to his body. I grew up watching professional boxing and never had any sense that anything was wrong. It's fine line of course - the point of professional football isn't to hurt people, it's to tackle them, but it's silly to think that damage isn't being done. It's also interesting that the evil of this is not waived by the consent of the competitors or their goodwill toward each other. It does not make it okay if the two full contact fighters stand up and say "good job" and hug each other after beating each other down, anymore than a woman working in the hard core porn industry telling us that she is happy doing what she does makes hard core porn okay.

Of course, the final form of this will be a unholy marriage of the two (porn & violence) - indeed it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see that it would take a deliberate act of the will to prevent these two from coming together. The same crowd that wants to see these fights wouldn't blink at incorporating hard core porn - they'd cheer all the more, buy more beer and even more money would be made. Following that, you could take volunteers from the full contact fighters who would be willing to fight with weapons to the death - and you'd get some and this would be even more of a spectacle.

It's all been done before.

My Christmas Muse

In the soft glow of Christmas evening, I collapse into my chair.

It's over.

The gifts are opened, the food is eaten, the songs are sung.

It's late.

I look at the small Christmas tree in front of me. The lights sparkle in my half-open eyes. Vince Guaraldi plays softly in the background. I'm falling asleep.

This is what Dad used to do.

In my right hand is a coffee cup. In front of me is a pair of 2T "footie" pajamas that is way past it's bedtime and way too excited to sleep.

Strewn across the floor everywhere are material reminders of the goodness of God. In the distance, I hear the dishwasher start up. Mom has gone up to bed. This is Christmas 2008.

"Choo-choo!"

I look down from the tree into sharp brown eyes and a big grin. A vision of unabashed joy makes me chuckle.

God is good.

My smile slowly fades.

I begin to remember.

My eyes return to the tree.

This is what I have been waiting for.

Where are you?

I can't always capture you in my memory - your personality somehow runs together with your brothers and sisters. I see things in each of them that I know are somehow similar to you, but the totality of who you uniquely are slips away. I find I need pictures now to call you to mind.

I knew this would happen.

A tear runs down my cheeks.

It would be great to have you back.

"Choo-choo, choo-choo!"

A little hand insists on my presence on the floor. I clear a spot and lie down.

So busy! Yes, put that there, put this here. No dad, not there, over here! Look at this, look at that!

As I put the little wooden train on the track, the action reminds me of a model train set long ago under a different Christmas tree. I can almost hear another voice.

"He likes trains".

Boy, does he ever, Dad.

You know, he reminds me of you somehow.

Remember when you took me to that big train museum in Duluth? I do.

We're gonna take him there in the spring. He'll get a big kick out of it!

You should have seen him when we turned the tree on for the first time this year, he just started clapping his hands and said "Yay!"

He loves Christmas trees and Choo-choos.

The two of you would have been best buddies.

Heck, I'dve had to check, each time you came to visit, that you weren't sneaking him out the door as you left! Ha ha.

I'm sorry this all took so long Dad, for me to finally grow up, for the grandkids and all.

I'm sorry you died first.

"It's alright. I had a good run. Pay it forward".

"Choo-choo, choo-choo!"

Do you know, bubby, do you know who's not here?

A little body flops on top of mine.

You're tired bud. You're rubbing. Let 's go up. I'll put you down. Dad's got you.

As I rise from the floor a little head rests on my shoulder.

I reach my full stature. I am facing the window.

Both feet on the ground, head up, eyes straight ahead. That's how we do it.

"The Lord is great and greatly to be praised in the city of our God."

A reminder of God's material goodness under my bare foot as we start for bed...

Mannequin Devotion

For a time I was in the habit of going down to the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis to pray on weekdays over the noon hour.

Whenever I'm at the Basilica, I'm a little overwhelmed. I feel like I'm in a Catholic "playground" of sorts - there are so many chapels, icons, stained-glass windows and other means of prayer I don't know where to start.

After a somewhat disjointed first few trips down there, I decided to (go figure...) systematically make my way through the different parts of the building on different days in order to break it up into smaller, more digestible pieces. These experiences wound up being a great way to break up my work day. I would slowly walk around inside the building in silence, usually as the only one there, and study all the windows, or the Stations of the Cross, or the high altar, or the ceiling, etc. It was, almost always, somehow a simultaneously a very "grounding" yet uplifting experience.

On one occasion, after having already made several trips, my attention was drawn to the statues. Now, statues are among the most quintessential form of Catholic devotional art. They are ubiquitous and yet simultaneously controversial. I came to realize that for me, personally, the statues were just sort of "there" - they didn't bother me, but besides noticing that these in the Basilica were the fancy marble kind (as opposed to the more common painted-porcelain kind) I really didn't get what they were for. I had heard somewhere that statues were there to help us connect with whoever was being represented. I had also read that in the east the icons had a similar function, but were believed to have an almost sacramental character - that is to say as if the person represented were somehow mystically present thru the icon.

So, with this in mind, one noon hour I plopped down in front of the main altar in the Basilica and decided I was going to pray "with the statues". I noticed right away that around the main altar are statues of the twelve apostles. So, on a whim, I decided to read the gospel of Luke while looking at the statues. It was kind of a neat effect - every time one of the apostles had a line in the gospel, I looked at the corresponding statue. This somehow brought the story to life - in a way sort of like the old "film strips" we watched in grade school - a succession of still images with dialogue behind it. It was kind of cool - I felt like I was starting to "get" the statues.

On another occasion, I sat in front of the "Sacred Heart" statue of Jesus and read the words of Jesus in the gospel of John. Again it was a special experience ~ the statue really did have the effect of making Jesus seem somehow "more" present. It was as if my subconscious was being engaged by the physical image on some level.

Not long after, I had a very odd experience. I was shopping at the Mall of America and all of a sudden I was "weirded out". I had seen something out of the corner of my eye. My head snapped around and I found myself looking at a row of female-shaped mannequins in the window of a sporting goods store. As I continued walking, it dawned on me what had happened - in praying with with statues, my sub-conscious had become acclimated to connecting with physical images. In this case, as I walked by the mannequins and my subconscious tried to connect with them I was repulsed because none of the mannequins in the display had a head - something I would not otherwise have noticed.

Of course, the mannequins were not intended to represent anyone in particular, they were simply something to hang clothes on. But what was also weird was that the shape of the mannequins was somehow realistic enough to get my subconscious to try and engage with them. I don't think that the simpler mannequins from the 1970's would necessarily have done this. In fact, these particular mannequins were physically very realistic. I don't think I would be too far out on a limb to say that there was somehow a certain amount of eroticism intended in these images, in particular with the pose. It looked like they might have been made from a 3D scan of an actual female body builder or dancer - except for the missing head.

I'm not sure exactly what my point here is - it has something to do with the philosophical contrast between connecting with a real person through an obviously artificial image (the statues and icons of Jesus or the apostles probably don't look anything like they really looked) versus using of a accurate reproduction of a real person's body in a way that separates the personhood element out (what does it means for an image of a headless human body to have an erotic element anyway?)

I want to unpack this idea a little more. I think it is also related somehow to the notion that pornography and nudity are two different things. There can be pornography (even hardcore pornography) with no nudity whatsoever and there can be nudity that is not pornography. The issue has to do with personhood. If an image brings to mind the name (and thereby the identity) of a person, that image may not be pornographic, even if it shows the person naked. But even a fully clothed image (or, for that matter by extension, an actual person's fully clothed real physical body), if it succeeds in disconnecting the idea of personhood (as in, I no longer care WHO I am looking at, but rather it is only about WHAT I am looking at) from the image, then that image may still be a candidate for pornography.

In any case, I'm willing to wager that boys and young men these days spend a far greater deal of time looking at sexy headless mannequins in shopping malls than they do at religious statues in churches.

Great.

I'm not making it up...

My third daughter is a child of wonder. She is a fountain of vitality and youthful energy. She is the type of kid for whom it is more appropriate to say, instead of "she runs", rather "she skitters". But the thing I love the most about her is her sense of wonder - everything she hears is fascinating and marvelous. She wears her heart on her sleeve and makes these big facial expressions that make me smile every time I see them.

Case in point: The girls come with me on Saturday mornings when I go to train karate. The karate club is training right now at an inner city start-up church that meets in an old retail storefront on University Avenue in St. Paul. The building is in a state of half-repair and there are hazards galore for little girls to hurt themselves on. The girls always want to come with me and always discover, about five minutes after we get there, that watching dad do karate for 90 minutes is interminably boring. We bring backpacks full of crayons and books and snacks and dolls and you name it, but all of that buys us about a net of five minutes of pre-occupation. Then it is boredom. Unfortunately, the hardest part is that dad seems so busy with what he is doing and he doesn't seem to be paying very much attention to them.

At some point, it was realized that a surefire way to get dad's attention is to announce "potty, potty, potty" which is the emergency signal which means "I have waited too long and now I'm about to have an accident". Generally, we are pretty good about only saying this during real emergencies. But, at karate, and in particular when it is boring, the truth gets bent a little bit. On several occasions, I have jumped out of line in the karate class, swooped up a little girl with crossed legs, and bolted for the toilet at the end of the hall. And, on some of those occasions, stood there, waiting and cooling off and stiffening up, while they take their time on the potty and then tell me they don't have to pee. What's more, the bathroom has two doors, one from the hall, that we use, and one from a classroom on the other side where there is typically a bible study going on at the same time we are there for karate. Based on how clearly I can hear what the teacher in the bible study is saying, I extrapolate that they are probably clearly hearing all of our dialogue about wiping and pooping and peeing.

On one particular morning, I was in the bathroom with daughter #3. She really did have to go and she was particularly chatty. To redirect her attention and try to quiet her down I whispered "Suzie, we have to be quiet". Hearing me change my tone to a whisper, her eyes got big like she expected me to tell her a secret. "Why?" she whispered back, louder than she normally talks. "Because this is the Lord's house" I whispered. Her eyes got big. "This is the Lord's House?" she said, looking around. "Yes". The chatter died down a little bit. We finished up in the bathroom fairly quietly and I went back to training.

About 15 minutes later, I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, bee-lining full speed for the bathroom. Now, because of the hazards all around, this is a "no-no" - we always go to the bathroom with dad so dad knows where we are. I started chasing and calling after her "Suzie, wait up. Suzie, do you have to go potty? Wait for dad." etc. She got to the bathroom door, threw it full open so that the bible class would have clear reception and shouted back to me at the top of her lungs "DAD, I CAN'T WAIT! I HAVE TO TAKE A POOP IN THE LORD'S HOUSE!"

I'm not making it up.

Every Man to His Post!

No, I don't mean everyone should be blogging...

Rather, I am referring to a scene toward the end of the third movie in the Lord of the Rings series ("The Return of the King"), where the enemy is marching en masse (and I do mean "en masse") on the city of Minas Tirith, which in the movie, is a symbol of human civilization. The leader (called the "Steward") of Minas Tirith has become corrupt and has actually (and secretly) come under the control of the "head bad guy", known as Sauron (who is a pretty good approximation of the devil).

The scene I am referring to juxtaposes showing the "mad" Steward carrying out some sort of twisted "suicide of honor" (taking his comatose son Faramir along with him in his despair) while the battle is raging at the main gate of the city. The sense, as you watch, is that the people of the city are looking to their leader to defend them, and he is not there. At one point, the Steward finally looks down from his lofty tower and sees the enemy army and is so struck with fear he panics and shrieks "Run for your lives, run for your lives!!!". As he says this, you see the confused (and confounded) looks on the faces of the soldiers who are trying to keep their nerve in the face of such overwhelming odds. In classic movie style, the scene finishes with the white wizard Gandalf striking the Steward down with his staff and in a strong, authoritarian voice (the voice of a commander), saying "Every man to his post". This command (and tone) brings the soldiers, who a minute ago were standing around not sure what to do, back to clarity - you see them start instictively moving in the way that they have been trained.

I sense that we are in need of a Gandalf right about now. There is a sense that we are in for some serious trouble. The economy is in a shambles, the political divide increases with each election, there's swine flu, there's nuclear Iran, there's environmental disasters, high school shootings, asteroids passing near the earth. The list goes on. It seems like, through it all, the TV blurts out "Run for your lives, run for your lives.". When I meet to talk about things with my peers, there is a lot of hand-ringing. I have to admit there are time it seems like it would feel good to see a newscaster hit over his (talking) head by Gandalf and to hear some words that make sense - "Every man to his post, work your job, save money, love your wives, raise your kids, keep the faith".

Now is not a time for panic, it's a time for falling back on what we know works - on what has worked for at least 2000 years, if not more.

Every man to his post!