"My Messy Room"

The junk is piled high and wide. I am in the midst of a forced cleaning of our “furnace room” because we need a new furnace (have you priced furnaces lately?). So far I have managed to move the junk about 20 feet, from the furnace room to the door in my home study. Up until recently, of course, that junk was precious to me. An old dehumidifier I was sure would miraculously heal itself the next time I plugged it in; basketball coaching shoes which I kept “just in case” I started coaching again; and enough assorted books and magazines to start a store. I am trying to work up the strength of mind and will to take it all to the town dump, but excuses abound, like “try writing about it and perhaps it will make the mess disappear.”

Kathleen Norris wrote an amazing book titled Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith containing short entries about faith and life.  In her  entry on “Repentance” she tells the story of a little boy who wrote a poem about how angry he gets when his father yells at him. In his poem his response, he imagines, is to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town.” The conclusion reads, “ ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself I shouldn’t have done all that.”

It is hard to clean up the messes in our lives. Sometimes they come because we ignored the growing monster in the other room, allowing hurts and wounds to pile up because it was easier to throw them in the furnace room that throw them out when we knew we should have done so. Sometimes we allow our emotions to ruin not only our lives but our families, our homes and even “the whole town.”  It isn’t hard to create a messy room, but it is really hard to clean it up, as any mother of a teenager or wife of a “rat packer” like me can attest.  But, I know that once I get the junk out the door, into my trunk and delivered to the dump I will feel like a man set free.  The little boy, in his confessional poem, was taking the first step toward the healing that repentance offers in the great tradition of “Have mercy on me, O God….” (Psalm 51)

 This first weekend of Lent find a time to gather with others and begin cleaning up the mess we all carry around inside our lives, so that by Easter you have plenty of room for the sheer joy of the Resurrection to rise within you. Norris concludes,  “If the house is messy…why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell.”  Time to clean.

On Being Thankful for Maya

I awoke tired.  The long week won and my body lost. Caffeine didn’t help. Being tired makes me cranky, just like with little kids when they  wake up after a night of too little sleep. Being cranky in turn makes me anxious, and I can say “Don’t worry about tomorrow” a thousand times and I still am anxious.  Being anxious makes it impossible to be  creative, so there is no point in doing the work I had planned for the day. I tried to relieve my symptoms at the piano, but to no avail.  So, at 3:45 p.m., being tired, cranky, anxious and dull,  I got up, left my study and headed for the movies.

I settled in on Zero Dark Thirty, the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  I am not a movie reviewer. I do not recommend movies.  The “interrogation scenes” made it tough to get through the first hour. Two grown men left the theatre, and I don’t think it was to go to the bathroom.  I am not saying what I took away from the film is what the movie is about, or what the writers wanted me to see. But, what I saw is a young woman, Maya, who is a CIA spy trying to break the ring of criminals who live to destroy the United States, my religion, and everything else they have been brain-washed to think we stand for. When Maya is spared from death by a suicide bomber she sets out on a personal mission to find and kill bin Laden. Her motives become personal and her passion for revenge deepens. As I sit all alone in the theatre watching the credits roll I am thinking these things: -there are people who hate me because of my skin color, my religion, where I live, and if they could, they would destroy my family and my home; -there is a real Maya, and many like her, who make it their business to make sure that doesn’t happen.  I want wars to end. If there is no Maya evil triumphs.

I went home and my wife, visiting our grandsons, called me and invited me to tell my “da Boyz” a story via Skype, which I happily did.  When the story was over, and as the last image of those little boys faded from the screen I thanked God for Maya.  That seems wrong to me on many levels.  But, Maya’s singular passion, her overwhelming sense of being “called” to redeem the memory of her friends killed by the enemy bomber, seems so essential to me.  I hate that we need Maya.  I love that Maya lives. If Lent is about anything, it is about learning that we all need someone who will make a personal, passionate sacrifice and engage in a relentless commitment to disciplines because of a  love so intense that one would do anything, even die for people, people you love.  And we should try to be like that Someone.  I went to bed tired. Conflicted. Thankful.