Loving my family...

From time to time some pictures emerge that just touch my heart - mostly pictures of my family - near and far. Yesterday my posting included a photo of my daughters from my seminary days back in NYC. They were 5 and 3 respectively. (As you can tell, I LOVE this picture!)

Earlier this year, my oldest daughter, Jesse, posted a few shots from her new home in Brooklyn. She and her beloved husband, Michael, bought a condo right on the edge of Brooklyn's Chinatown - in what is known as Sunset Park - and I just love these pictures, too. They speak of a young woman having a ball living her own life and loving deeply. And, they have a certain Meryl Streep quality a la "Julie and Julia" that I find so endearing as perhaps only a poppa could... And you can still see the "little person" inside the adult, yes?I think of the poem William Butler Yeats wrote for his daughter that includes these lines:

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

This fine young lass, who so resembles the Irish side of the clan, is one of the reasons I have hope in life. It was my privilege to deliver her in a Los Angeles apartment back in the 1970s - while organizing with the Farm Workers - and even when we've pissed each other off... she has been a treasure.

My other daughter, Michal Clare by name, is equally beautiful, bright and engaging. She lives a mere 45 minutes away and works as a part-time writer, sometimes editor and regular part of the area food bank bringing emergency supplies to seniors throughout the Berkshires. She is another ray of hope in my world. This picture came about shortly after Di and I returned from the UK and Michal was being interviewed by a NY Times reporter about parents who come to stay in your small apartment for a visit. (This used to be her kitchen in NJ - her current kitchen is not much bigger!)

This special child is equally close to my heart but in a very different way from her sister - and well it should be. When Dianne and I were wandering around Scotland, we kept coming upon her likeness as she is truly the Scot of the family. What's more, in addition to be a perceptive and creative writer, she is a baker with an incredible gift for bringing the blessing of bread to those in need. In an almost primal way I think she knows, to paraphrase Gandhi, "that there are people so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." She recalls for me the words of Simone Weil: "The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."

I have been blessed with two bright, loving and very real young men as sons-in-law - both wonderful guys - and both fascinating in their own unique ways. Jay, who is Michal's husband, is a farm mechanic with a graduate degree in economics. He has been in the military, done organizing with health care unions on both coasts and LOVES Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie. He is a voracious reader with a careful mind. We just came upon this picture of him playing at a recent farm talent show. He is a hunter, lover of dogs and a sweet partner for my daughter. He, too, is a joy in my life.

His counterpart in the wider family - if such a thing can be said - is Michael who is quiet, stone-cold funny, patient, loving and a great soccer/basketball player. He is another fine baker and cook - some thing he and Jesse treasure - so when they come up from NYC it is always a feast.

For the longest time I didn't know what was going on in his head - he is soooo quiet - but now that we've spent a few years getting to know one another, I realize that in many ways he is much like Dianne. Still waters run deep - and he is still and deep with a biting sense of humor that is spot on. I was blessed with celebrating their marriage ceremony - and as I thought of them both I kept coming back to my favorite Scott Cairns poem - which goes:

The thing to remember is how

tentative all of this really is.

You could wake up dead.

Or the woman you love
could decide you're ugly.

Maybe she'll finally give up

trying to ignore the way

you floss your teeth as you

watch television. All I'm saying

is that there are no sure things here.

I mean, you'll probably wake up alive,

and she'll probably keep putting off

any actual decision about your looks.

Could be she'll be glad your teeth are so clean.

The morning might be

full of all the love and kindness

you need. Just don't go thinking

you deserve any of it.

I know that I don't take any of them for granted. In an almost childlike way, I still give thanks to God for them all before I go to sleep almost every night. Some might say that is not very "post-modern" of me, but I know that the love we share is never deserved and always pure grace.

And then there is Dianne: quiet, hard-working, tender and hard often at the same time, my favorite person who welcomed me into her heart when we were both wounded and confused. She was embraced by my daughters when they were teens - no mean feat. She has matured in creativity and spiritual depth - a true partner in ministry and music. And she is the most fun person I have ever known who loves to travel with me and knows how to cajole me out of my cranky old man impersonation (which sometimes is not an impersonation.)

Here is one of my favorite pictures of her taken in Quebec City last summer... each of these beloved people speak to me of blessings - especially as the poet, Kabir, puts it in this poem.

Friend, hope for the blessing of God while you are alive.

Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think... and think... while you are alive.

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,

do you think

ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

just because the body is rotten -

that is all fantasy

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment

in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now,

in the next life you will have the face

of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find our where the blessing is,

and believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: when the Guest of Blessing is being searched for,

it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest

that does all the work.

Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.