Sunday, December 30, 2012

The Kingdom of God is within You

From the diary of Etty Hillesum, p..44:
There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then He must be dug out again. 
I imagine that there are people who pray with their eyes turned heavenward. They seek God outside themselves. And there are those who bow their head and bury it in their hands.
This is from the book, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, by Etty Hillesum, p.150. Etty Hillesum was a secular, assimilated Jew living in Amsterdam who died in Auswitch in 1943. The diary was written after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps. Etty had a degree in law and then studied Russian language and literature. On her own she read philosophy, psychology, especially, Carl Jung, and poetry, especially Rilke. She was a patient,  personal secretary, and physical intimate of the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, also a Jew. He introduced her to the gospels and the writings of St. Augustine. Etty had several opportunities to escape the Nazi persecution, Instead she insisted on serving her fellow Jews to the very end and chose to suffer the same fate as they. Her last letter was a postcard tossed from the window of the train as it left for the concentration camp.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Life in the Ruins

From the diary of Etty Hillesum, p.40: 
Our house is a remarkable mixture of barbarism and culture. Spiritual riches lie within grasp, but they are left unused and unguarded, are carelessly scattered about. It is depressing, it is tragicomic, I don't know what kind of madhouse this really is, but I know that no human being can flourish here.
This is from the book, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, by Etty Hillesum, p.150. Etty Hillesum was a secular, assimilated Jew living in Amsterdam who died in Auswitch in 1943. The diary was written after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps. Etty had a degree in law and then studied Russian language and literature. On her own she read philosophy, psychology, especially, Carl Jung, and poetry, especially Rilke. She was a patient,  personal secretary, and physical intimate of the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, also a Jew. He introduced her to the gospels and the writings of St. Augustine. Etty had several opportunities to escape the Nazi persecution, Instead she insisted on serving her fellow Jews to the very end and chose to suffer the same fate as they. Her last letter was a postcard tossed from the window of the train as it left for the concentration camp. It was found by a farmer.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

What Is It in Human Beings that Makes Them Want to Destroy Others?

From  the diary of Etty Hillesum:

19 February, 1942
What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others? Jan asked bitterly. I said, "Human beings you say, but remember that you're one yourself." And strangely enough he seemed to acquiesce, grumpy, gruff old Jan. "The rottenness of others is in us, too," I continued to preach at him. "I see no other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me to be the only lesson to be learned from this war, that we must look into ourselves and nowhere else." And Jan, who so unexpectedly agreed with everything I said, was approachable and interested and no longer proffered any of his hard-boiled social theories. Instead, he said, 'Yes, it's too easy to turn your hatred loose on the outside, to live for nothing but the moment of revenge. We must try to do without that." We stood here in the cold waiting for the tram, Jan with his great purple chilblained hands and his toothache. Our professors are in prison, another of Jan's friends has been killed, and there are many other sorrows, but all we said to each other was, "It is too easy to feel vindictive."
This is from the book, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, by Etty Hillesum, p.150. Etty Hillesum was a secular, assimilated Jew living in Amsterdam who died in Auswitch in 1943. The diary was written after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps. Etty had a degree in law and then studied Russian language and literature. On her own she read philosophy, psychology, especially, Carl Jung, and poetry, especially Rilke. She was a patient,  personal secretary, and physical intimate of the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, also a Jew. He introduced her to the gospels and the writings of St. Augustine. Etty had several opportunities to escape the Nazi persecution, Instead she insisted on serving her fellow Jews to the very end and chose to suffer the same fate as they. Her last letter was a postcard tossed from the window of the train as it left for the concentration camp.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Losing My Religion

Having been "taken" by the R.E.M. song. "Losing My Religion," at the Sandy Relief Concert, I felt compelled to cobble together a thought or two.

The Performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiQQ6WatGJE

Some young people refer to going off to college as, "losing my religion."  They are eagerly looking forward to a life of sex, alcohol, partying, and no religion too.  Naturally, I had assumed that Michael Stipe's song must be about a young person shedding the religion that was imposed on them by their parents. But I could never get that from the lyrics. In fact, the lyrics never made any sense to me.

In Communion and Liberation, for the past few weeks, we been studying a teaching called, "Life as Vocation." Carron's general thesis is that, "The circumstances through which God has us pass are an essential and not a secondary factor of our vocation, of the mission to which he calls us." To be engaged with life demands self-awareness. And this self-awareness can only be gained by observing the self in action, in dealing with the circumstances of life.

One of the teachings of, "Life as Vocation," as well as the prior document that we studied, " was to look beyond the appearances of things, to look inside circumstances. The song, "Losing My Religion," has nothing to do with religion. Michael Stipe says that in Georgia, where he is from, the expression,  "losing my religion," is an expression that is synonymous with being at wit's end. In fact, I discovered, the song is about a crush on someone. And suddenly, the lyrics made perfect sense.  Having been "taken" by a crush, the singer's heart is in his throat, and all his insecurities are laid bare. We've all been there!

This crush was the circumstance in which the singer found himself. In wresting with his insecurities, he is on the very knife-edge of either dealing with this circumstance or not. His insecurities led me to think of Carron's teaching about the story in the gospel, of the blind man on the road near Jericho (Luke 18:35-43). Surely, as a blind man with no other choice but to spend his life as a beggar on the side of a road, his life must be full of insecurities. Surely, he must have lived on the knife-edge of survival. Surely, he knew what it means be at wit's end.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps he had been at or beyond wit's end so many times that he had lost all insecurities and had nothing left to lose. Who knows? But Carron says:

Christ does not heal the man born blind and then take him out of reality for fear that he might lose what was given to him. No. Jesus launches that man into the fray, with that Presence that healed him in his eyes; He doesn't take him out of it. I mean: Christ generates an "I" that is capable of living reality, like the blind man who had the simplicity to recognize that before he couldn't see and now he can. His awareness was determined by what happened to him. With this self-awareness, he can face everyone, not because he is more powerful, but because of this simplicity in adhering to what happened to him. This is the power of self-awareness--and in someone random, not one of Jesus' disciples!--and all of the scholars among the Pharisees could do nothing with respect to an "I" that had this self-awareness.

The point is to be consistently engaged with life. It is only the circumstances of life that can teach us about ourselves. As per Giussani, "Maturity consists in the maturation of our self awareness."

 And so it is, that to find one's true religion, one must first lose it.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Communion


On Saturday afternoons, my son Michael does volunteer work at a hospital in Brick, NJ, an area that was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy.  This past Saturday, my son asked if we could eat supper in Brick, after he was done at the hospital, and he asked if we could have Mexican food. It just so happens that we always pass a small Mexican restaurant in Brick, called Mexico Lindo.

The place looked a little rough around the edges, but we went in anyway.  We were greeted by a vivacious woman told me that they were having a surprise birthday party for her daughter's 24th birthday.  In Spanish, she told an elderly woman with a small child who were seated at a particular table to move to another so that we could be seated there. It turns out the woman was her mother. I felt awful that we were usurping them, and I apologized.

My son and I were the only paying customers. The others were there for the party--the birthday girl hadn't arrived yet, and family and friends kept arriving in advance of the surprise. There were balloons all over, and several of the guys were drinking Coronas. The girls were all talking, smiling, and clearly enjoying the warmth of familiar company.

No one seemed to mind that my son and I were present. The menu was a mystery of things Mexican, most of which neither my son nor I had never heard of before. The salsa sauce that came with the freebie taco chips sang and danced with joyous flavor. I know what fresh cilantro tastes like because we grow it in our backyard-- and this was fresher than any that I had ever tasted. The chile itself, or whatever, was awesomely flavorful. It only served to stoke our appetite in anticipation of what was to come, and we were not disappointed. From the menu, we picked at random, huaraches for an appetizer, a chimichanga, and taquitos.  Overall, the appetizer and main dishes were a memorable eating experience. My son and I were both struck by how good the re-fried beans were. My son loved the red rice.

Look--I know it was a birthday party--but as I looked and listened and absorbed the atmosphere, I could not but see and hear that these people--in this town that is just beginning to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy--were all happy and joyous.

And I'm thinking that these people are probably all Catholics, like myself. And I know intellectually--because we study this stuff in the Communion and Liberation Movement and in C.S. Lewis, etc.--that Christians are supposed to be joyous. But most Catholics that I know (of Irish/German/Italian/Polish extraction) including myself, are more often miserable creatures. At the birthday party, it dawned on me that this is what Christian joy looks like.  

These Mexican-American Catholics have something important to teach us repressed Irish-American Catholics. After I went home, I thought to myself, if this is what Mexican culture looks like, then sign me up.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Hurricane Sandy

I'd like to express my appreciation and thanks to all of the first responders--police, fireman, EMT, Coast Guard, but especially the utility company workers, repairmen, dispatchers, truckers delivering supplies, etc. who are working around the clock to serve the rest of us.
On Monday afternoon, I lost power, network, land line and cell phone service. My wife has been in Hong Kong. At home, my wife likes to buy things in bulk in case of emergency, but that doesn't mean that we know where anything is. Michael knew where one flashlight was, and the other was in my backpack. By chance, Michael found the bag in the basement with my wife's horde of batteries. Michael remembered that he had a battery operated Sony radio in his dresser. He connected two PC speakers to it, and it worked perfectly. Thanks to my wife's habit, of buying things in bulk and only on sale, we had enough food in the house for at least a month, if not three. We had a sizable cache of candles which my wife had bought fifteen years ago, in case of power failures. Over four days, with no contact with the outside world other than our neighbors and whatever was in walking distance, Michael and I listened to the news of the disaster on the radio. At night, we played chess by candle light.

I live about three miles from Raritan Bay. The Northern part of my town, Hazlet, had been evacuated early in the storm. We go to church in Union Beach. The town of Union Beach sits between Hazlet and the bay--the Union Beach border is about two miles away, with about another mile before you get to the bay. From the radio, we learned that 200 houses in Union Beach were completely destroyed, and one person died as a result of falling off his roof into the water.


During the summer, I had visited the beach at Mantaloking (near Brick/Lakewood). From the radio, I learned that the entire town was under water and that ten homes had caught fire from gas mains. Even after the homes had burned down, the gas main fires continued to burn. Utility workers were unable to get to Mantaloking because it was surrounded by flood waters. Essentially, as per other reports, plus the governor, the entire Jersey shore is gone.


Late Tuesdays night, I had a hunch that if we drove towards Rutgers, where Andrew is, we might pick-up cell phone service and be able to contact family members. Sure enough, as we approached the Raritan River, we got cell phone service. My son at Rutgers was very happy to hear from us. He said he had been trying to contact us for more than two days. To get to Andrew's campus, I had to drive around two roadblocks, but it was late at night and no one was around. Andrew is a new dorm that was built with backup generator power. Michael and I charged up our cell phones in his dorm room. And from there we phoned my wife in Hong Kong. Once she finished scolding, panicking, reprimanding, and trying to micromanage us all the way from Hong Kong on how we should be doing in the outage, Michael asked her where the third flashlight was. She did not know, but she told us where we could find an unopened package of three flashlights from Costco (with batteries already in them!). With that we would be O.K. in the dark for a few weeks at least.

We had gas and water throughout. My son and I are very glad that we had each other for company. Rather than being plugged into the Internet, cell phones, or T.V., we had each other to talk to. We did a lot of planning and preparation. It was an extremely relaxing time playing chess and just talking to him in the dark. However, on the very first night, right after the sun went down, we both said to each other, almost simultaneously, that this could get very boring, very fast. But it never did. I got to know and appreciate my son Michael better during this time, and I found that fascinating and eminently worthwhile.




P.S.
We won't be back to normal until we can buy gasoline. As luck would have it, my wife's car had a full tank of gas in it.

The unexpected thing about the storm was how little rain it had.Yes, it rained for 24 hours straight, but it was very light, not the torrents we have had in previous storms. Michael and I spent considerable time laying out and weighing down a tarp to guide falling water away from one of the basement windows, but it was unnecessary. Of course we took everything in the yard & porch and brought it in the garage including garbage cans, grill, Halloween decorations, bird feeder. We also quickly took down all the trellis' in the vegetable garden. after the storm I actually found 3 bell peppers that were able to be harvested. and this is November.

11/2/2012

Things are still bad around here.  I just received a robo call from my town's emergency services office.  They announced that at the Catholic Grammar school in Union Beach that my sons had attended, the NJ National Guard will again be distributing drinkable water and ice, as they were yesterday.  At Maranatha Baptist Church (within walking distance) they are asking for donations of clothing and blankets, for distribution, as is St. Benedict's church (the Catholic Church in the other direction.)


11/4/2012
Perhaps you had to be here, but I was amazed by this. There is a little strip mall about a quarter of a mile from our house, with a little Chinese restaurant called Liu's Garden. We get a discount there because my wife is friends with the owner (and we always pays cash!). Like us, they only had water and gas from Monday PM to Thursday. I drove by at night, and inexplicably, the parking lot was packed. My son said, "Liu's Garden is open!" I looked through their window. It was dark, but I saw a glowing light in the back of the restaurant, from the kitchen area. It was the glow of the gas flames under the woks. As my eyes adjusted, I then noticed the silhouettes of a lineup of the backs heads of customers waiting at the counter. The restaurant was packed with customers! Obviously, they stayed open solely for business reasons, but I think they should get some recognition for providing food service during the outage.


11/5
By executive order of the governer himself, today is Halloween in New Jersey, but we have had no Trick or Treaters! Sandy is the devil that stole Haloween. I was able to get gas locally yesterday. There were less than 10 cars on line, but they only had high test, and I had to pay cash. I went to my local Pathmark Supermarket, and they still have no food that requires refrigeration. Shoprite Supermarket had milk, orange juice, bacon, etc. but most of the lights in the supermarket were out. The cashier, acting very happy, said that her house is still without power, that she has forgotten what it's like to have power. Next, I went to the local bakery. There were two college girls on line in front of me who asked the cashier for donations of unsold goods at closing time, for relief efforts. The cashier, who also seemed quite happy, said that she understood because she lived in Union Beach (which had been declared a disaster area and required to evacuate). She told me that her house was intact but still without power. My in-law in Old Bridge are still without power as well.

Monday, January 16, 2012

A Reflection after attending The New York Encounter


This past weekend the Communion and Liberation Movement held its annual gathering, called, The New York Encounter, at the Manhattan Center, on 34th Street.

I was only able to attend the New York Encounter on Sunday.  The opportunity to meet and talk with people from the Communion and Liberation Movement, from all over North America, and from all walks of life, was like fresh air in my lungs. One of the people that I chatted with, a young man from Milan, Italy, asked me how I found out about the movement, which I related to him.

I also said,

"At the time when I discovered Luigi Giussani and the Communion and Liberation Movement, my spiritual growth had been blocked for a long time, perhaps a decade. My growth as a person was equally blocked as well. The most beautiful thing about the teachings of Father Giussani and CL, is that I am learning to become more human.

"I assume that what Giussani teaches about being human was always implied or assumed in the Christian tradition. I suspect that over time, with modern society and the positivistic attitude that has become so pervasive, we are losing sight of what once had been obvious. We needed a genius like Giussani to come along and make explicit those things which were once common sense. And I confess to being an individual with an extreme deficiency of common sense.

"Throughout my grammar school Catholic education, we were told over and over again that Jesus was both full human and fully Divine. Contemporary psychologists say that spiritual and psychological growth tends to occur in parallel. But there is a theory in physics that says parallel lines converge at infinity. Don Giusanni liked to quote the ancient Roman rhetorician Marius Victorinus, who said, 'When I encountered Christ, I discovered that I was a man.'  But I think that this can be paraphrased as, 'When I encountered Christ, I discovered what it means to be a human being.' It is in following Christ that our humanity and spirituality converge.