Take Root Devotions

Anxiety 6-5-10

 

I met with Fr. Tom Beasley today for what we call “grouping.” Ideally it is a meeting of 2 to 5 men who feel safe and comfortable enough to share problems, weaknesses, moral lapses or just the heavy stuff of life with one another. Many men have done this for years because they find it to be an anchor in the week, or a place and time to get something off their chests. It is part of the Cursillo or Kairos fellowship. Very informal, very nice. Usually.

As we began I opened with, “I’ve had a lot of anxiety lately due to what happened to me last Friday and what has happened to Victor.” He listened and I talked.  

Last Friday my daughter was awarded her E-6 and her HM 1 classification in the Navy. I was very proud and she was excited and wanted me there. She invited me to attend. It was to be in the hospital at the Jax Navy Base. I wondered if there would be a problem with Navy security but she planned it out and I trusted it would be OK. Had Friday not been a 100% Security Check day there would have been no problem. However, I and my future son in law were directed to wait in the car by the side of the road while they did what security people do. Lots of phone calls, papers to sign and frowning.

I apologized to him for the delay and the embarrassment. He was level headed and told me not to worry. In about ten minutes the officer on duty walked up to the driver's side of the car looked passed him at me and loudly said, “Sir are you a sexual predator?” I thought of a couple of appropriate truthful answers but realized nothing would fly but, “Yes.” So, he got that. Ten more minutes of phone calls and paperwork and Navy vehicles doing official “look-sees” and Scott drove me off base and back to my car. Twenty minutes later she called me in tears and anger over the way I was treated and especially that her daddy was unable to see her “frocking.”

I must also share this. And, this I was a bit proud of. I was driving home feeling dejected and shamed when I realized I did not need to miss part two of the day. I had been invited to the frocking and a lunch with them. So, I confirmed with her our lunch schedule and in the mean time I went to see my old friend Nelson. I laid out my embarrassment and frustration to Nelson and his wife Georgette. That did a lot to give me courage to hold my head up and move on. The rest of the day went fine.  However, anxiety had placed a dagger in my heart.

On Monday, Tom called me and told me Victor had been violated. As far as he knows it is because he, being a couple of months away from being set loose from supervision, was $300.00 in arrears to the State on his probation obligation. There has to be more to it than just the debt for him to be violated. I’ll find out more later. But, Tom feels that is correct. I called Eddie Rhoden who checked and said he thinks there are no new charges. Nevertheless, I found it very troubling. So many of my friends and acquaintances that did time with me have had a “violation of probation”.  Victor is so methodical and such a stickler for doing the right thing that it bothered me that he fell again. Maybe, he’ll be let out soon like a few others I know of who were violated briefly and returned to the street.

After Tom and I talked about this he offered this story.

A sexual offender with a probation monitoring box on his ankle and a large receiver on his hip (very chunky and impossible to hide) was in a service at St. John’s Cathedral (Episcopal) and the Dean (the in-charge ordained lady) learned about his presence and then about his charge; and then she had a fit.

He had been introduced to St. John’s by one of the deacons who ministers at UCI. The worshipper with the monitoring device was ostracized by church leaders and the deacon was livid. He wins a soul to Christ and the Church stiff-arms him.  So, now, the bishop, having heard of the conundrum, has proposed to fund a sex offender/felon church where the lepers can worship without offending the dean and others who would find it uncomfortable. I told Tom it may come across (as it did to me) as an insult. I can understand, somewhat, the hysteria fueled reaction to the man with the monitor but there must be some way to address, in the Church, this issue in a more Christ-like way.

So, I told Tom that this was some note. I came to him with two good reasons for anxiety and he gives me a third. Tom said part of the issue is the Canon (Episcopal position in the church) was ex-FBI and has researched sex offenders and says there is no getting better or change for them. In other words, they are permanent in their moral deviance. This is the word of a man who is invested in capturing and punishing.  I told Fr. Tom that the opposite was true according to studies of therapists and professionals invested in recovery and restoration. Of all former prisoners sex offenders are (except for those convicted of murder) the least likely to be violated for a new charge or new offense. However, they are more likely than any other group to be violated on a technicality (curfew violation, inability to pass a polygraph, non-payment of required financial obligations, etc.). So, the stats can be easily skewed.  

There are daily goads that keep me a bit paranoid: hearing a too-loud knock on my door, a police siren near-by, seeing a patrol car in my rear view mirror or sitting in some social setting knowing a slip of the tongue could easily result in one more embarrassment. Nevertheless, I must fight against this darkness. My methods are:  I must continue to use rational, not emotional, thinking; fellowship with friends who understand or share in my situation; and I must regularly use the tools learned in therapy to keep my feet on the sunny side of the road. And, indeed, there is a sunny side of the road. The bad things tend to shout their presence while the good things in my life can go unnoticed unless I willfully maintain my gratitude for them.

Today I will say to good-bye to my precious wife. She and her daughter are going to vacation in Miami. Even though she have been married almost ten months, her child is still having trouble with her decision to marry me and we have yet to meet.  It could be uncomfortable as I drop off at her daughter’s home. She may stay inside until I drive away. I imagine, and Joy is sure of it, that this will eventually be resolved in an appropriate manner. This is not one of the things I can change. So, I accept it for what it is and move on to doing the next best thing which will bring peace to me and my world. It has helped me to unload this letter and share it. Hope it is not too heavy to read. Peace and hope.

Gano Rinehart

Gano has published a book on Amazon - They are All LIfe Sentences

EASY TO BE HARD

                           

He was completely naked; alone in the tiled shower section of the quiet prison dorm. His shining body, his natural ebony skin tone, stood in stark contrast to the old, poorly constructed concrete block building. It was built with inmate labor in the 1950s. The glare of institutional ceiling lights wrapped an eerie halo about him. He was alone. He was wet, potentially visible to at least 70 pairs of eyes. He was shaving his groin and legs.

For all the dreariness and relentless sameness of prison there are occasional and exceptional moments of strangeness, ugliness, beauty or uniqueness which have tattooed themselves in my memory. This was one.

It was off-putting and a bit jarring to observe this moment of reckless immodesty, primping and vanity. Could he be doing something he found personally satisfying? Was he grooming himself for some convict he was sexually attracted to? Or, was this part of his practice of sexual trolling, his purpose to draw to him a partner to hedge against the loneliness of the crude and rough environment he lived in. Or, an advertisement to attract another lonely man who might have coffee or potato chips or cigarettes to trade for a hidden moment of quick sex in the mop closet.

It was just a thought, an attempt to explain to myself a completely strange sight. I shifted in my bunk to remove this sight from my field of vision and continued reading my book.

Such an image becomes indelible and invites personal reflection and attempts at explanation or commentary. The perpetual pressure and intense interior physic hegemony of loneliness is common to the vast majority of God’s children and is magnified in the prison environment. The methods used to mitigate the pain of loneliness and to assuage the intolerable thirst it causes may vary widely. However, it certainly would unfold into predictable patterns of behavior that would surely include most, if not all, of humanity.

When I think of this man in what seemed to me an extreme exhibition of narcissism, I am troubled when I couple it with the familiar saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It is indeed troubling to think that any expression of human behavior is potentially a mirror of who I am or who I could be. It is possible to take it even further and ask myself, “Is what he is doing really worse than what I do? Or what I think?”

It is easy to judge, easy to be hard, easy to think myself superior in the light of extreme, shocking or bad behavior. What we are required to do in our ancient holy faith is to see what disturbs us and to be thankful that Jesus Christ has paid for that behavior in his own blood.

Jesus could not say – the only human who could not – “there but for the grace of God go I”. Instead he says, “Any evil that can be properly judged must be paid for. And, in my death it is taken care of. It is paid in blood.”

So I must say to any memory of any person or behavior that I find disturbing, “the same blood flows for us all, because we all sin. And, we are all loved.”

 

Gano Reinhardt

Gano the Lizard King

 

As I was returning home from my morning walk I spied a skittering lizard; quick, quick across the sidewalk, leaping on to a weathered, tottering cedar fence, and slipping through a knot hole not unlike Alice. That little fearful reptile alerted me and I began to count. I saw them in azaleas, on fences, in a concrete access to a water meter in the easement of the road, in a rose garden. . . . I counted until thirteen before becoming bored with it,

In the past two years I have saved the lives of a handful of lizards. I have rescued them from the windshield of a moving vehicle, from a bucket of exterior latex paint and from the mouths of cats. If lizards used Facebook or other social media I am sure that some of these who ran for their lives would have, instead, been friendlier. As it was my ministry among lizards has gone completely unnoticed.

It is in moments like this I rely on my Catholic faith which teaches me the value of unheralded good works. It supports random acts of kindness, not for accolades but for the good of God’s kingdom, his church and the whole world. This is a noble attitude. It is the moral high road.

I remember my Kairos weekend. Kairos, like Cursillo, is a three and a half days retreat where the participant encounters the love and kindness and truth that is the Christian faith. There are five to ten people who give talent, time and money for every one person who benefits from the retreat. This work, not random but orchestrated, is an overwhelming act of kindness. One of the rules in this work is there is no room for individual glory and that our thanksgiving should be first of all to God.

 

GAno Rinehart

REMEMBERING MY FORMER INVISIBILITY

 

Jon Troneck was wild. Way too wild to be a Little League pitcher. However, his father, owner of Troneck’s Grocery the only store at the time in Folly Beach, S. C., sponsored the team. Having uniforms was the payoff for allowing little Jon his time on the mound. Years later I had reason to recall his pitching style.

An Optometrist was examining my eyes. “I can see by your retina that you received a blow to the head, maybe years ago,” she said. Immediately, even though I had not thought of him in years, I blurted out, “Jon Troneck. Little League pitcher. Man, was he wild! I wasn’t even playing. I was a spectator. I was on the sidelines.”

The blow to the head knocked me out. I woke up on a table with a bag of ice on the side of my face. When I arrived home my mother was greeted with a son whose face was at least 25% larger than when she saw him four hours earlier. She gave another ice treatment, some aspirins and put me to bed. The lack of alarm over my wellbeing seemed normal to me.

That was about fifty years ago. Old school parents were prone to do home treatments and stay away from the expense of a doctor. Nevertheless, I have often wondered what I would have done had the same happened when my children were teenagers. I am convinced I would have known a concussion needed medical attention. In that growing older gives us the gift of perspective, particularly in hind-sight, I have come to regard my childhood as a time of my invisibility. It was probably more common in the 1950s and 1960s when children were to be “seen and not heard.” I know my brothers and some of our friends suffered from the same affliction.

My father had a conflict. Although he loved his sons and provided faithfully for his family, he was reluctant to grow up. He had a night life that kept him busy and a job that had him all over the southeastern United States. He was often absent. For that reason I was usually invisible to him. My mother, suffering from anger, betrayal and depression because of my father’s habits operated in a robotic mode where she mindlessly plodded from task to task from within her perpetual black gloom. Her sad predicament blinded her to much of life, making my brothers and me rather invisible.

As a result of this invisibility we basically kept whatever schedule we wanted. We left when we felt like it and returned home as we found it convenient. My older brother and I kept to predictable and acceptable limits. We rarely raised the eye brows of our neighbors and friends. My younger brother was, by comparison, completely unbridled.  He went to school when it suited him. When there he was prone to display his considerable skill as class clown. He never finished the 8^th grade. By sixteen he was on his own traveling the highways using his thumb and 18” hair as his passport. I was also a hippie and was with him on many of his adventures.

I have many regrets and very little nostalgia for those days. My lost-ness was rooted in my innate embrace of my invisibility. We could ruin our young lives because we were invisible. We didn’t really register on anyone’s radar screen, except as a colorful aside in the talk of folks who felt superior to us.

A few weeks before I graduated from high school, Shepherd, our neighbor across the street was in our living room getting her graduation gown hemmed and fitted by my talented mother. My younger brother was near and reached over to feel Shepherd’s gown, commenting on how pretty it was. In distain over his gesture she snipped, “Get a good feel. It’s as close as you’ll ever get to a graduation gown.”

My mother, with pins held firm in her clenched lips, looked up at Shepherd in disbelief. She looked at her youngest son. She felt sorry for him and at the same time hoped he’d be motivated by a little negative gibe. He stepped back in an awkward embarrassment of silence. Shepherd kept her nose in the air while my mother returned to the favor she was doing for her neighbor, while ignoring her son’s hurt feelings.

This invisibility gave people permission to insult us in our own house, even in front of our parents. My older brother’s friends were free to bully me in my own house and on occasions even destroy my possessions in “fun”. Even with the perspective granted by fifty years of living I have trouble reconciling much of what happened. I am thankful we did not endure, as did many of my peers, psychological disorders, brutal physical or sexual abuse. My pain rates as small potatoes compared to what many endured. Nevertheless, we all still feel the long shadows of childhood and can only pray and process the memories. It is the good and the bad that makes us who we are.

Only Joseph and Mary, in my opinion, did everything right as parents. And, as they were a gift to Jesus even so my parents and my youth were a gift to me. It is not easy to juggle this idea of them being a “gift” with the painful memories. Yet, we are not juggling with only one ball. My grandparents  presented a similar paradox to my parents, even as, I must admit, I did the same to my children. We have to keep all these balls in the air as we reconstruct our memories and make sense of our lives.

My parents were God’s gift to me. I am God’s gift to my children, even though I do not feel that I was that great of a dad. It is my Catholic faith and trust in the providence of God that allows a healing balm to sooth my recollections.

Your way was through the sea,

Your path through the great waters;

Yet your footprints were unseen.

You led your people like a flock

By the hand . . . .     Psalms 77: 19f

Looking back at the “great waters” I traversed, I can now see I was not alone. I can see that God can and does draw straight with our crooked lives. I sometimes cringe when I wonder what memories or complaints my own children have against the home I provided. Allowing God to take us “by the hand” we find strength and comfort to forgive as well as to ask for forgiveness. Maybe I felt invisible. Maybe that was a problem. But, God is also usually “unseen”. He is unseen but he is not blind. His love makes us beautiful to eternity and to the angels. Eventually, we will all enjoy what is called the beatific vision. No one will be invisible then and everyone we see we will love. This love will render us all visible and beautiful.

Gano Reinhardt