Take Root Devotions

AND, WHO ARE YOU?

 

A beloved member of my family lay dying in the hospital. All of us who orbited around her kept a firm grip on denial of the obvious. I was not the least delusional. Yet, like the rest, I hoped for a miracle. The intense dynamics of grief would soon test the strength of my severely dysfunctional family.

Two days before her death the Holy Spirit engaged me in a meditation that pushed the envelope of my limited experience in contemplative prayer.

I was on a 4’ ladder painting windows and I sensed it was a good idea to offer my imagination to God. I tried to offer him a blank page, so to speak. Quickly I felt like I was standing before my Heavenly Father. And, I knew he wanted me to ask him who he was. Now, no words were being exchanged. I was simply following the course of my offered-up imagination.

”Who are you?” I asked.

“I am”, he answered.

Then he said to me. “And, who are you?”

I felt a bit tense, as if this were a test or even a trick question. I wanted to answer well. Soon, I decided I could not impress God with my answers so I decided to satisfy myself. I asked myself, who am I really? I thought of some teaching from Brennan Manning, Richard Rohr, and Henri Nouwen who I’d been studying. Eventually I decided on heartfelt simplicity.

“I am Daddy’s child, I answered.

Silence followed. I sensed strength in my thoughts. Having no instruction I repeated the exchange.

“Who are you?”

“I am. And, who are you?”

“I am Daddy’s child.”

And, so it went. “Who are you?”

“I am. And, who are you?”

“I am Daddy’s child.”

Eventually I realized I was using God’s name to tell him who I was. I am Daddy’s child. After repeating this many, many times I heard this.

“Who are you?”

“I am. And, who are you?”

“I am Daddy’s child.”

“I love to hear you say my name.”

“I am Daddy’s child?” I answered.

“Yes. We share my name. It is our family name.”

Over and over for hours as I was able in my work-a-day world as a painter I kept up this contemplation. For two days it was intense. Most of the contemplation took place during work hours. Then the center of our world died. And, my precious, troubled family melted down. Extreme toxic levels of drunkenness, anger, swearing and toilet hugging sickness ensued. Much of what was said was forgotten the next day. However, I was not intoxicated and the rejection and cursing I endured was seared, tattooed in my memory.

Down, down, down I felt my self-esteem spiral. Gloom and near despair lifted ramparts to attack the weakened citadel of my faith. Until I remembered my two days of prayer and contemplation.

"And, who are you?"

"I am Daddy's child."

The darkness said I was a lousy brother, a horrible husband, a weak father but the light said my identity was not defined by association with a grieving accuser, but I am defined as Daddy's child.

No matter how true an accusation may be or how powerful and clever a false accusation may be we must remember it is the devil who is the accuser.

All God expects of us is to come to him as children. In true spiritual reality none of us is any better than the other. By nature we are all children of wrath. However, by God's call and glory we can come to him as children and receive cleansing and new life.

Our self-image must be conformed to the truth that we are our Daddy's child. That is how we must define ourselves. God prepared me to withstand a devilish assault during a difficult time of grief. He set up a shield of love and comfort to protect me from slander and accusation. He, in fact, pulled me into his lap.

The Little Flower once wrote, "Don't drag yourself any longer to his feet, follow that first impulse that draws you into his arms. That is where your place is."

Gano Rinehart

His book They are All LIfe Sentences can be found on Amazon.

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

In Concrete and Steel

Note: for my father; fourth anniversary of his death. 

 

In concrete and steel; in fine linen and other fabric; in a foolishly ornate wooden coffin; in his best suit and underneath the photo of me attached in the lid above his head lay the body of my father dead now almost two years.  Here I visit him.  As I sit here on the concrete bench shivering in winter and sweating in summer I detect little evidence that others visit his body in its sinkhole  of death.

When he was alive and still articulate he would complain to me, “No one gives a damn.  No one ever visits me.”  I had long since quit exhorting him with, “Well, Dad, why don’t you call or visit yourself.”  I lived in four houses within ten miles of him over a period of twenty years and he had only visited one, and that only once.  My first house.  He had tomade sure it wasn’t as nice as his and, once satisfied, never returned.

I watched him die.  I was there for his last breaths.  Not grasping as if with grappling hooks desperate to purchase something firm and reliable;  something that could stand up to his physical disrepair.  His final whispering sighs of life did not shout, “I am not leaving without a fight.”   No.  He just slipped away, without so much as a good-bye.
As I watched him go, as I listened to my pastor (for Dad never had a man he called Pastor), who came to comfort me and pray with all of us as Dad passed say, “I believe he’s gone,” said the Reverend. I cried.  I really hated to see him go.  I really loved him.  Still do.

Why should I love him?  It is not like I am filled with great memories of our times together.  I think it is partly because when I got older and had relinquished all my expectations of him and quit my comparisons with attentive, supportive and non-alcoholic fathers of friends I was able to be comfortable and accept him for who he was.  He never really tried to be anything much but he sure was proud of who he said he was.  I can still see his smirk when he would (and this was not that often) tell me how he was a better man than his old neighbor.  Or more prosperous, or just as happy, or basically had just as much as most others he knew.  And, subtly but certainly, let me know he knew his sons could never measure up to him.  Dad liked to give his little jabs.  If you couldn’t handle it you had to stay away.

Also, when I got older I began to see that a lot of my problems with Dad were the attitudes my mother foisted upon me.  I can see now as I reminisce that Mom insisted her sons hate her husband.   She was not happy if she detected any hint of respect or admiration of Dad from us.  I remember once writing a poem about my Dad for Father’s Day.  Mom found it and began to act hurt and troubled and almost guilt ridden that she had not taught me right.  “What is this you are saying about your Dad?  Is he really all of these things?  Or,” she asked, as she bored holes right through me with her x-ray super power eyes of disappointment, “are you trying to say poetically that this is what you wish your Dad was.  But, is not.  That this is what your Dad would be if he served God, quit sinning so horribly, and acted like a real man.”  She paused.  “Oh, how I wish my Daddy were near.  You boys need him.  He is a real man.”

Dad never saw the poem.  I obeyed the unexpressed wishes of my mother and trashed it.   If I remember correctly Dad never made it home for that Father’s Day.  It was not that uncommon for Dad to forget to come home for weeks at a time.  And, when he did he would be so sick.  Mom would wait on him like a nurse.  And, gripe like hell.  I suppose it was her way of loving the sinner and demonstrating to her sons what a saint acted like.

All I know is he was my father on earth, the one my Father in heaven gave to me.  I sit in the concrete and marble alcove where Dad’s crypt is.  Here I pray, “Heavenly Father, I thank you for giving me a Dad.  Take care of him.  I trust he is with you.  If he is in purgatory I pray for his soon release and that he quickly love your will and your peace.  And, I ask that you let him know I need his prayers.  He is still my Dad.”

It’s been nearly two years now.  He cannot come to me.  I will eventually go to him.  When I see him I will be a better son and he will be free from what kept him from seeing me as I am.

 

By Gano Reinhardt

 

Airborne with God’s Child

 

(This story happened about 15 years ago, in 1999)

 

I was aboard U S Airlines transporting a ten-month old child. I had not flown in over twenty years and had all the attendant rookie nervousness. Thankfully, I found the U S Air employees, especially the Flight Attendants, more than helpful.  The Florida Department of Children and Families placed me in coach, which I would have found comfortable, had I been alone. But I was juggling a child on my lap and had my feet straddling a diaper and bottle bag. I took pity on my seat-mates.

She was not mine but I would get the blame – the angry looks, the disturbed chilly silences – if she was to howl from Jacksonville to Chicago at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. I wonder how I appeared. A white male, nearly 50, and a 10-month old biracial child in my lap.

God’s child is pretty. A very pleasant toddler with soft curly hair, permanent tan and slightly flattened nose. Her eyes reach out and pull you in to a lucid reflecting pool; bright, inviting, innocent and fearful.

She was in a huge, loud, marvelously engineered metal tube hurling through space with strangers. Maybe she recognized me. I either visited her home or hosted her grandmother and her in my office one to four times a month since she was two months old.

My baby, God’s kid, has a crack cocaine smoking mother who occasionally resorts to crime (including blue-light special sexual favors on dangerous corners and strip club parking lots) to stave off homelessness and support her drug habit. Her daddy has been jailed several times this year. Once for beating his landlady for demanding rent and once for beating the child’s mother. However, when Mom and Dad were sober you couldn’t help hoping.  . . . Hoping for the best, however, getting a consensus on the definition of “the best” is not easy.

What bothered me most was God’s baby only visited with her Mom three times between the time she was a two-weeks and eight months old. At two weeks some anonymous tipster called the child abuse hotline after witnessing the distress of God’s child as Mom plied her trade in exchange for a roof, food and a fix.

Grandma stepped in. God bless her. And Grandma did well in the work of baby care and maintenance, i.e. diaper changing, feeding and basic protection.  Problem was in less than four months she introduced me to three paramours. One was verbally abusive, but at least he held a job and had a stable, however humble, abode. The other two were physically abusive. I have records from the Sheriff’s office and our Abuse Registry to fuel my concern.  The most recent lover, a female, was the subject of a police report that recounted a quarrel where Grandma was pinned to the ground on a public street corner and pummeled by her partner.

Grandma loved God’s baby, but she also loved fun. Yes, Grandma did good to God’s baby. But she enjoyed too much being the prize in a contest between three predatory paramours. I did not want God’s child to become the victory banner in a strange R rated Adult version of Capture the Flag.

So, I located Grandpa. The child’s mother agreed to the move stating, “I don’t want my baby growing up none like me,” so she signed an affidavit stating she approved of the Change of Custody to Grandpa and his wife.

Mom dragged Dad into my office to sign papers – both were sober, anxious. Neither had visited the child much. I suppose the cornerstone of a Florida Department of Children and Families Case Plan for reunification is parent/child visitation. Bonding is the key issue.

Chicago is a world away from Jacksonville. If the child is in Jacksonville, not visiting this month doesn’t mean they can’t visit next week. But, Chicago! This is change. However, love can override even a crack cocaine induced sorry-ness. Sometimes!

So, at 30,000 feet God’s child squirmed in my lap. Thank God for the Flight Attendants, especially Betty who kept me from missing my connection by carrying my baggage and guiding me to my seat). 

I squeezed and stretched for the bottles of Kool-Aid Grandma prepared. The state will not buy God’s child a seat of her own. I weigh 220 pounds and on my right is some 1972 high school all-star defensive back complete with beer belly. On my left is a nerdy but sizable mechanical engineer who played king of the arm rest with me. I pull a muscle in my right shoulder but I find the Kool Aid in the bag at my feet. God’s child sucks. Mumbles. Fusses. Twists. Trusts. Sleeps.

Eventually, the plane lands. Baby meets new grandparents. Grandparents without violence. Siblings without drugs. Caregivers who do not rely on a combination of Welfare, Social Security Disability fraud, crime and the occasional generosity of problematic paramours.

They take my picture. Grandpa insists on buying my lunch. I am not allowed to accept gifts. Neither, can I reject a poor, grateful grandfather’s offer of thanks. After he leaves I give my bag of hamburgers and fries to a scraggly pair who resembles the unfortunate parents of God’s child.

 

Louis Templeman

One Little Word

 

I thought I was retarded, or at least, below average in intellect.  I was a high school dropout.  My mother and my husband always told me how stupid I was.  And to prove how stupid I was, I believed them.

 I always felt very disappointed that I had to drop out of school.  After Sam and I secretly married in Kentucky the preacher did exactly opposite of what we asked of him.  He published the news of the marriage in our home town newspaper and that was like a blanket bombing of my life.  Sam had been accepted into Ohio State on the GI Bill and we planned on living in the married person’s quarters on the campus.  I had also hoped to go to school myself.  But, Mother had such a fit and had everybody believing I was pregnant that even Daddy was carried away with the news.  He told Sam, “You married her.  You keep her.”  And I was put out of the house, with hardly time to pack a suit case.  This ruined our plans and life really got tough.  I tried to stay in school but the principal said I would be a bad influence on the young people.  For years afterwards, you would have had to dig a hole to find my self-esteem.

The only thing that kept me going was my faith in God.  Mother was always less than supportive but Daddy was more loving and encouraging.  He was always very busy, at work or with the Boy Scouts or doing mechanical work for people in our neighborhood.  But he never did anything to make me feel like I was in the way.  Because of that I always had a good image of Father God.   I think my relationship with my Daddy really helped a lot.”

My life changed in 1966. I was 36. I was praying for my Sunday School class of 9-year olds.  As I was going through my Bible I happened at random upon Isaiah 50: 4: “The Sovereign LORD has given me a well-instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary.” The Lord said, “That’s what you’re going to do."  I argued with him.  I said, “I have no education.”  He said, “That’s what you’re going to do!”  And, I said, “That sounds like a psychologist or a counselor.”  And he said, “Yes.”

Not long afterwards I had a conversation with a friend when we discovered we had one sad thing in common.  Neither of us had a high school diploma.  However, she knew the method for making application for a GED and had the book needed to study for the exam.  We encouraged one another, scheduled the exam and paid the fee and began to study together.  It was a three to four hour test with very strict proctoring.  No looking up from the paper.  No talking.  One single break in the middle of the testing.  Very exhausting.  Six weeks passed and the results finally came in.  I passed all phases of the test with high marks on everything but math. 

At that point, Sam decided to move to Jacksonville, Florida.  I was boosted up enough in my self-esteem to try junior college. I made arrangements to visit and make application to Florida Junior College and take the entrance exam.  I also applied for a loan.  I could not bear to hear my mother-in-law complain to me that I was “spending all of Junior’s money.”  Neither did I want to trigger my husband’s arbitrary nature and propensity to bully fearing he would withhold needed money when it came time to pay fees and buy books.  I was determined not to cost Sam a dime.  I wanted control of my life.

I was so scared I only took one class.  English literature.  There I realized I’d read most of the required books recommended to freshmen.  I made an A and wound up tutoring half the class.  I was so encouraged I wound up taking two classes the next semester.  After that I began getting scholarships.  

The word from Isaiah was so powerful that nothing was going to keep me from gaining the tongue of the learned who would have a word of  comfort for the weary in due season.  It was in my first full semester that I learned I had cancer.  Due the promise I had from God it never fully registered with me that the diagnosis of cancer could have any impact on the goal my Savior had set for me.  In fact, I not only survived cancer but my schooling lasted 18-years in which I received an A.A., a B.A., an M.A. in Counseling, and an M.Div.

The M.A. in Counseling which I earned in 1977 but did not receive until 1989 is a curious story.  In retrospect it appears to have been a severe case of persecution. Thirty hours prior to graduation ceremonies, having already purchased my cap and gown, I was notified I would not be awarded my diploma, even though I floated through on scholarships and had earned a summa cum laude for my efforts.

My professor/advisor was a lapsed religious who had become not only thoroughly secular but rather profane and aggressively cynical in all matters moral and spiritual.  I wrote a paper once where I quoted the New Testament and Old Testament to validate my feelings and beliefs and when I got the paper back it looked like the professor had slaughtered a hog on my paper.  It was full of red ink.  When I inquired about her corrections I got a very chilly reply that use of any religious thought was very common and thoroughly unprofessional. I suspected she was the engine that kept me and a few other likeminded students from receiving our diplomas.

I was robbed but I continued to trust in God.  And, I refused to sue them.  It seemed best to walk in the ways of God’s peace rather than drag the matter through court.  Besides, I was just so hurt and the old belief of my unworthiness cast its shadow over me.  Time passed but I continued to tell the Lord, “You know I earned that honestly.  So you figure out how I’m to get my degree.”  Eventually I went to the State to apply for employment hoping to do some kind of office work.  But, during the application process there was a girl working in human resources who remembered me from the University of North Florida where we attended psychology classes together.  And she said, ‘Pat, you don’t need to work in clerical.  You need to be in Child Abuse.”  I didn’t even apply to be a Family Services Counselor, but that’s what I became.  I was denied, temporarily, a diploma to hang on my wall but I, nevertheless found occasion to practice my gifts of having a word for the weary with the tongue of the learned.

Years later I was again reminding the Lord of how I was robbed of my diploma.  He spoke to me, “You’ll get it in the mail.”  And, for nearly ten years whenever the robbery bugged and distressed me I would claim in faith, “I earned that diploma.  It’ll come to me in the mail.”

After I became a Family Services Counselor Supervisor the husband of one of my workers heard of my story and remembered the incident.  He had been an administrator at UNF and recalled the staffing where several people were denied their diplomas for very spurious and personal reasons.  He advised me to send a letter to three people within the system detailing the story and asking for relief.  My letter must have scared someone.  I was then able to advise them I was only interested in receiving the diploma I had earned and so, would they simply mail it to me; which they did.

It was faith that kept me hanging on. That one little word from Isaiah 50: 4 was like a plow that pushed through all the hard work, opposition and burdens that stood between me and God’s promise. God’s word is powerful. Martin Luther put it this way:

And though this world, with devils filled,

            should threaten to undo us, 

            we will not fear, for God hath willed

            his truth to triumph through us. 

            The Prince of Darkness grim,

            we tremble not for him;

            his rage we can endure,

            for lo, his doom is sure;

            one little word shall fell him.  (A Mighty Fortress is Our God).

 

One little word became one changed life.

Pat Shelton

[email protected]

as told to Louis Templeman

ONE REALLY BIG KISS

 

 

          As I drove down Dad’s street I was rehearsing the lie I would soon affirm for him.  He has been losing his ability to speak bit by bit over the past ten years.  And, now, it seems his memory is also starting to narrow down.  Fewer and fewer things can he recall.  And, less and less are the subjects he is able to respond to because his memory is no longer a target rich environment for my arsenal of shared memories.

          The memory he most readily responds to is based as much in fiction of his wishful thinking as it is in reality. After I became an adult I noticed Dad would take the few, the very few, happy memories we shared and would embellish them.  A five-minute warm-fuzzy of a recollection in his telling became a memory of a great evening, or even, a whole weekend.  His little rabbits of memory would multiply and run off leaving me breathless as I tried to follow his train of thought and search my own memory banks to recall what on earth he was talking about.

          It used to trouble me, even make me bitter at times, as this reasonable man, a senior, yet with full faculties, invented, in my mind anyway, tales of what a great father he was.  Years ago I challenged him a few times only to find the resulting disagreements exhausting and without personal or moral value.  I learned to let it go, nod and smile, give him a pass.  It was easier.  Sometimes my brothers and I rehearsed a bitter humor as we recounted similar experiences.

          As I pulled up in his driveway I thought of one major precious moment—a sure five minute episode when I felt I truly counted in his eyes.  And, it was cemented to my soul by being wrapped up in his arms. I was ten-years old and he was –not unusual—very drunk.  He was just home from work and still in his Greyhound Bus Driver’s uniform.  He had stopped for a poker game and whiskey after his run.  That particular night he was not a mean but a happy drunk.

          He was seated on the couch.   He was so proud of his little house and the furniture we had.  Growing up he never had new furniture.  Much of our furniture he had bought new.  He was always badgering us kids with such facts that we ate regular and had decent clothing that no one else had worn before us.  And, he never failed to bring home his pay.  Many times at meals he would laboriously notate each dish on the table and add up how much all of it would cost if we were at Morrison’s Cafeteria.

          Dad’s father was also an alcoholic but he was not blessed with the scruples to place his family’s need ahead of his bottle.  Dad did.  Mostly.  Whenever his conscience bothered him he would preach his virtues to us.  Only now do I see the pretzel my grandfather made of my father’s soul as he struggled to find the balance between personal pleasure and responsibility.  As a kid I saw no glamour or exceptionalism in his normal pedestrian paternal deeds.

          That night, as I remember, he called me to him.  He put aside his glass and cigarette and held me between his knees.  He talked to me like I was five but I didn’t mind because I was as addicted to his attention as he was to his Old Crow.  He said, “Know what I need?”  With a shy smile I shook my head, no.  And, with a warm loving grin he incensed me in a whiskey fog and said in a cute little cartoon voice, “I need a really big kiss.”  He offered his cheek and wrapped me up in his long arms as I pressed my lips into the sharp prickles of his whiskered cheek.  Then with his cartoon voice tuned up an octave to a near falsetto he jiggled me in his two-handed grip and said, “Oh boy!  That was a really big kiss.  Oh my what a kiss!  Now,” he grinned, “give me another.  I need a really big kiss!”

          My embrace of my own personal history does not allow me to match Dad’s multiplicity of personal interactions of father/son bonding.  However, I try to realize that, perhaps, he has invented a greater treasure of memories because he does in fact treasure them.  So, in that singular five-minute episode I can see a time transcending moment that speaks of the bond I almost had, ached for, but which he was not emotionally equipped to offer.  But, I did have that moment.  And, I honor it.

          After my stepmother lets me in the house I walk down the hall way to the bedroom where he resides 98% of the time.  I look into his old eyes and promise myself that I’ll never again remember his shortcomings out loud to him.  And, I think to myself,”Old fellow is this one memory what you want to hang on to as everything else in your life is slipping away?  It’s what you remember about what is precious to your life, isn’t it?  It’s the one thing you remember about us that really counts.  And, even though it’s something we hardly had it is still what we truly were.  And, all the other things that you ran after and distracted you which kept you from me are now lighter than vanity and have vanished before the slow creep of death.  For both of us this memory has substance and weight.  Maybe you overstate it, old guy, but no longer, will I understate it.”

          And, so I say as I distract his gaze from the television, “Dad, I know what you need.”  Because his many strokes have left him, for all practicality mute, I am basically speaking for him, “What you need is a really big kiss.”

          His ability to grin and be pleased is not hindered by his strokes.  His laugh is not affected.  His eyes light up in joy.  I read his mind.  I speak his words.  He offers his cheek.  We connect.  We grab our history.  Our shared love and memory.  And cram it into the present—into one really big kiss.

 

Louis Templeman            

 

 

I phoned my oldest daughter today.

 

I phoned my oldest daughter today. She has been in chronic pain for years and lately has been confined to a wheelchair, bed or to an  otherwise sedentary life. She gets out now and then but afterward she pays the price in hours or days of recovery time. She actually sounds upbeat when you speak with her as if she has found a way emotionally to accommodate the misery and inconvenience of it all. A good personality helps – particularly those of us who love her. Her attitude protects us from the full nature of the torment she endures.

 

She has filled my thoughts, fears and hopes for several weeks now. I am helpless to do any more than talk, listen or pray for her. My prayers feel so inadequate. I cannot say that I have gotten a lot of help from God, in Jesus name or anyone else’s, from physical problems – medical, employment, marital, etc. no matter what formula or posture I employ. I would get comfort. I would get perspective. I would get a “No,” with consolation in a spiritual or emotional way. All the answers I  found were wonderful, and I received all with gratitude. But, never did a pain go way, or an ache end, and never did I get rescued from a situation but always found strength to go through. But, this chronic pain for my child I find intolerable.

 

I told Spring that I was praying for her, or rather was asking for someone else to pray for her. I never had success with Jesus in this area so I decided to go “over his head.” The old prayer to Mary says, “never was it known that anyone who asked for your assistance, asked your help or pled for intercession was ever left unaided.” In my prayers I go through my paces with my rosary, or in my imagination I hold Mary’s hand and ask for the impossible. I believe her prayers will avail. Mine don’t have to. In the face of such painful heartache I am not able to be tough and exhibit the courageous faith that will cause heaven to burst into real time in my life as I experience it. Sometimes it is better if I can run to my Mommy.

 

Too few are aware of just how Mary can and will bring heaven’s touch to a world in need of help. This morning, first day of May the traditional month of Mary, I read of Mary’s many apparitions in Rwanda occurring years before the genocidal war between the Tutsi and the Hutu people that left hundreds of thousands murdered in a river of blood in 1994 and 1995. 

 

The first apparition was on November 28, 1981.Alphonsine Mumureke, a high school girl, reports seeing an indescribably beautiful woman. She spoke to her in the local language, Kinyarwanda. Mary introduced herself as the “Mother of the Word.” She taught her a prayer she was to sing:

 

Queen of Heaven and Earth,

Mother of God and Mother of ours,

Listen to those who call upon you,

Help them to know God better . . .

You know how easily we get lost

We need to know the true way,

The way that Jesus taught . .  .

There are those who don’t understand

Why Jesus wants us to follow him,

Pray for them and pray for us,

That we may know his will and believe his words.

 

The high school girl was met with some skepticism but she was validated when other girls began to receive similar apparitions. The second child, a year older than Alphonsine, was Nathalie Mukamazimpaka. The Blessed Mother stressed the need for redemptive suffering and the need for unceasing prayer. Her world, she said, was caught up in evil and hovered over the brink of an abyss.

 

A third child, Marie Claire Mukangango, also received visions of the lady whose “beauty is as great as her love for her children.” Through Marie Claire came the instructions to repent, pray the rosary as well as the chaplet of the Seven Sorrows of Mary.

 

On August 19, 1982, all three experienced the same vision simultaneously. They reported seeing “a river of blood, people who were killing each other, abandoned corpses with no one to bury them, a tree all in flames, bodies without their heads.” Marie Claire was killed in a massacre in 1995.

 

In these apparitions Mary is referred to as Our Lady of Kibeho. I first read this story in Led By Faith by Immaculée Ilibagiza. Even though her warnings were not heeded at least the good was presented. The grace was offered. Mary’s role is to lead us to Christ, wholeness and a better life.

 

Mary has appeared throughout twenty centuries in apparitions, visions, dreams and in simple individual prayer experiences and epiphanies. It seems she come when we are at the end of our rope. We reach out for her help instead of falling into frustration and doubt-filled tears. I know the arguments against this. I grew up a Protestant. But, my personal pilgrimage led me here. Without her I would have become a bitter shipwreck.

 

I know I can place Spring in her hands; and good will come of it. A good will come that would not have otherwise. Jesus said to the world as he hung upon his cross, “Behold your Mother.” Embracing that truth in my heart I hold my child to her and say, “Behold our daughter.” She will help.

 

 

God’s Instructions to Me

 

My mother, Patricia, began to tell me story of how a word from the Holy Spirit changed the whole course of her life.  “I thought I was retarded, or at least, below average in intellect.  I was a high school drop out.  My mother and Sam (her husband, my father) always told me how stupid I was.  And to prove how stupid I was, I believed them.” 

 “I always felt very disappointed that I had to drop out of school.  After we got married in Kentucky the preacher did exactly opposite of what we asked of him.  He published the news of the marriage in the Portsmouth Times and that was like a bomb blowing up in my life.  Your father had been accepted into Ohio State on the GI Bill and we got married secretly and planned on living in the married person’s quarters on the campus.  I had also hoped to go to school myself.  But, Mother had such a fit and had every body believing I was a whore that even Daddy was carried away with the news.  He told Sam, ‘You married her.  You keep her.’  And I was put out of the house, with hardly time to pack a suit case.  This ruined our plans and life really got tough.  I tried to stay in school but the principal said I would be a bad influence on the young people.  For years afterwards, not that it was good before that, you would have had to dig a hole to find my self-esteem.”

“The only thing that kept me going was my faith in God.  Mother was always less than supportive but Daddy always seemed to love and accept me.  He was always very busy, at work or with the Boy Scouts or doing mechanic work for people in his shed in the evenings or weekends, or with his air plane or with the CAP, the Civil Air Patrol.  But he never did anything to make me feel like I was in the way.  Because of that I always had a good image of Father God.   I think my relationship with my Daddy really helped a lot.”

It was probably in 1966 when she was 36 while she was on the black circular couch studying, which she did nearly every day, for her Sunday School class of 9-year olds.  She was so scrupulous about being prepared.  As she was going through her Bible she happened at random upon Isaiah 50: 4: “the tongue of the learned…”  The Lord said, “That’s what you’re going to do."  Mom said “I argued with him.  I said, ‘I have no education’  He said, ‘that’s what you’re going to do!’  And, I said, ‘That sounds like a psychologist or a counselor.’  And he said, ‘Yes.’”

Not long afterwards she had a conversation with some woman and they discovered they had one sad thing in common.  Neither had a high school diploma.  However, her new friend knew the method for making application for a GED and had the book needed to study for the exam.  They encouraged one another, set up the exam and paid the fee and began to study together.  It was a three to four hour test with very strict proctoring.  No looking up from the paper.  No talking.  One single break in the middle of the testing.  Very exhausting.  Six weeks passed and the results finally came in.  She rejoiced to find she passed all phases of the test with high marks on everything but math. 

At that point, Sam, my father, had decided to move to Jacksonville, Florida.  She was boosted up enough in her self-esteem to try junior college.  She made arrangements to visit a couple of days with a bus driver and his wife in Jacksonville, so she could make application to Florida Junior College and take the entrance exam.  She also applied for a loan.  She could not bear to hear her mother-in-law complain to her that she was “spending all of Junior’s money.”  Neither did she want  my father’s arbitrary nature and propensity to bully to withhold needed money when it came time to pay fees and buy books.  She was determined not to cost Dad a dime.  She wanted control of her life.

She was so scared she only took one class.  English literature.  There it was she realized she’d read most of the required books recommended to freshmen.  “I made an A,” she said, “and wound up tutoring half the class.”  She was so encouraged she wound up taking two classes next semester.  After that she began getting scholarships.  

The word from Isaiah was so powerful that nothing was going to keep her from gaining the tongue of the learned who would have a word of  comfort to the weary in due season.  It was in her first full semester that she learned she had cancer.  Due the promise she had from God it never fully registered with her that the diagnosis of cancer could have any impact on the goal her Savior had set for her.  In fact, her schooling lasted 18-years in which she received an A.A., a B.A., an M.A. in Counseling, and an M.Div.

The M.A. in Counseling she earned in 1977 and received in 1989; a curious story.  In retrospect it appears to have been a severe case of persecution. Thirty hours prior to graduation ceremonies, having already purchased her cap and gown, she was notified she would not be awarded her diploma, even though she floated through on scholarships and had earned a summa cum laude for her efforts.

Her professor/advisor was a lapsed nun who had become not only thoroughly secular but rather profane and aggressively cynical in all matters moral and religious.  “I wrote a paper once where I quoted the New Testament and Old Testament to validate my feelings and beliefs and when I got the paper back it looked like the professor had slaughtered a hog on my paper.  It was full of red ink.  When I inquired about her corrections I got a very chilly reply that use of any religious thought was very common and thoroughly unprofessional.”

I asked her to color in the character and behavior of her professor and she said that in class she heard her questioned as to why  she left off being a nun and the cryptic answer, “I quit being a nun because I like sex;” an answer my mother felt may have been not only less than professional but perhaps an attempt to alert the young men in the class that she was available.   At least once a semester they would have a keg party at the professor’s apartment, and, my mother smiled sardonically, “I was kept in the dark.  The invitations were always made behind my back and never publically in class.  It was obvious to me that I somehow made her feel guilty.  I always thought I reminded her of her mother, who had coerced her into becoming a Catholic Religious."

“I was robbed but I continued to trust in God.  And, I refused to sue them.  It seemed best to walk in the ways of God rather than drag the matter through court.  Besides, I was just so hurt….  About a year or two passed and I kept telling God, You know I earned that honestly.  So you figure out how I’m to get my degree.  Then I went to the State to apply for work and I tried to get on with SSI to do some kind of office work.  But, during the application process there was a girl working in human resources who remembered me from UNF where we attended psychology classes together.  And she said, ‘Pat Templeman, you don’t need to work in SSI.  You need to be in Child Abuse.’”  She laughed softly and continued, “I didn’t even apply for a Family Services Counselor job, but that’s what I wound up working.”  She was denied, temporarily, a diploma to hang on her wall but she, nevertheless found occasion to practice her gifts of having a word for the weary and a tongue of the learned.

She tells of a time after leaving her friend Gail after lunch as she was on the corner of Monroe and Newnan and she was again reminding the Lord of how she was robbed of her diploma.  He spoke to her, “You’ll get it in the mail.”  And, for nearly ten years whenever the robbery bugged and distressed her she would claim in faith, “I earned that diploma.  It’ll come to me in the mail.”

After she became a Family Services Counselor Supervisor the husband of one of her workers heard of her story and remembered the incident.  He had been an administrator at UNF and recalls the staffing where several people, including my mother, were denied their diplomas for very spurious and personal reasons.  He advised her to send a letter to three people within the system detailing the story and asking for relief.  She stuck them on their own petard and they became alarmed.  She was then able to magnanimously advise them she was only interested in receiving the diploma she had earned and so, would they simply mail it to her; which they did.

“It was faith that kept me hanging on.  I would get mad at God from time to time because he was being so stinking slow. “  This led me to suggest, "I suppose at this stage in your life, your next project is to study patience and learn to appreciate God's timing."

 

Louis Templeman