the techno-dinosaur's prayers are answered on a podcast...

There is something healing and refreshing about driving for a long distance in the safety and warmth of a well-tuned vehicle. In so many ways, the enforced solitude of my journey north to L'Arche Ottawa is a blessing: six hours one way through long stretches of wide open North Country landscape. Sometimes I head north through Vermont and cut across Quebec and Ontario; other times I go through Albany, NY and take the State Thruway to Utica before heading up to Watertown and then the border. In the winter, it is this second route that I enjoy best both because it takes me through farmland and along river beds, but also because it presents so much "big sky." There are convenient rest stops, gas stations and eateries, too! So please don't think me a hearty explorer: I relish my modest comforts along the way and often give thanks to God for them. 

This trip I had the added delight of finally entering the world of the podcast. Ok, ok, I know this marks me as a techno-dinosaur - and so be it! I also brought the new Leonard Cohen and Gil Scott-Heron CDs along as well. This trip was like a mini-seminar on wheels hurtling threw New York State at 70 mph. I listened to the On Being interviews with Fr. Gregory Boyle and then Pádraig Ó Tuama. Both were a bit of the holy speaking to me through technology about prayer concerns I have been lifting up for the past few weeks. 

Boyle solved a problem for me about communion; and Ó Tuama gave me some clues about suffering. You may recall that I have lamented not being present for Eucharist on a regular basis. I love liturgy and smells and bells and the whole high church thing. But I am not in that groove any more and there really aren't any viable alternatives for me save our participation in the the Brooklyn family's congregation. So I have been wondering where to go with this hunger - and Boyle tells me in this story:

(Relationships and incarnation are where we find God...) I think we’re

afraid of the incarnation. And part of it, the fear that drives us is that we have to have our sacred in a certain way. It has to be gold-plated, and cost of millions and cast of thousands or something, I don’t know. And so we’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’s hand, and we’ve replaced it with a chalice, because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice? And a story I tell in the book about a homie who was — on Christmas Day, I said, “What’d you do on Christmas?” And he was an orphan, and abandoned and abused by his parents, and worked for me in our graffiti crew. And I said, “What’d you do for Christmas?” “Oh, just right here.” I said, “Alone?” And he said, “No, I invited six other guys from the graffiti crew who didn’t had no place to go,” he said. “And they were all…” He named them, and they were enemies with each other. I said, “What’d you do?” He goes, “You’re not gonna believe it. I cooked a turkey.”I said, “Well, how’d you prepare the turkey?” He says, “Well, you know, ghetto-style.” And I said, “No, I don’t think I’m familiar with that recipe.” And he said, “Well, you rub it with a gang of butter, and you squeeze two limones on it, and you put salt and pepper, put it in the oven. Tasted proper,” he said. I said, “Wow. Well, what else did you have besides turkey?” “Well, that’s it, just turkey.”

“Yeah, the seven of us, we just sat in the kitchen, staring at the oven, waiting for the turkey to be done. Did I mention it tasted proper?” I said, “Yeah, you did.” So what could be more sacred than seven orphans, enemies, rivals, sitting in a kitchen, waiting for a turkey to be done? Jesus doesn’t lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends, and that’s the incarnation, I think.

(check it out here: @ https://onbeing.org/programs/greg-boyle-the-calling-of-delight-gangs-service-and-kinship)

My first night in Ottawa I shared supper in the new home of two dear friends who were married in October: truly wherever two or three gather in Christ's name there he is in the midst of us. And that feast was communion. Same tonight when I ate with my buddies at the Wabana home: there was a quick prayer of thanks before the meal and then the rest was a feast of humble thanksgiving. I really don't need the smells and bells if I open my heart to Jesus as he sits next to me at supper. Then there's Pádraig Ó Tuama story of praying the Stations of the Cross every day for 10 years:

In Catholic and Episcopal churches, you’ll find 14 images from the time that Jesus of Nazareth was condemned to death to the time that his corpse was laid in the tomb. They’re just 14 stopping points. For ten years, I did the stations every day. And what I like about the Stations of the Cross is that they don’t say, “Oh, but then, there’s the fifteenth one, where it’s all lovely, fantastic.” In the traditional understanding, there isn’t a fifteenth station. The idea is to find hope in the practice of what seemed to be the worst. And it is the worst — there’s no pretense that abduction and torture and murder are anything other than abduction, torture, and murder; however, there is the understanding that within it, we can discover some kind of hope — the hope of protest, the hope of truth-telling, the hope of generosity, the hope of gesture — even in those places.

There’s a word in Irish, scáth, “shelter.” That word can also be

translated as “shadow.” And so I think there’s great wisdom in that, in that when we look at any practice — like the Stations of the Cross — for me, I found great shelter in it. I dragged myself around the Stations of the Cross. I was part of a charismatic prayer group, and you’re always praying for each other. Like Marilyn was saying, there’s lots of words in those contexts. At one time, into a small, sacred, silent moment, the idea occurred to me — I was 19 — “You should start to do the Stations of the Cross.” And so I did; I just thought, well, OK. And I did them every day, then, for the next ten years. And I was closeted, full of shame at that stage, being put through exorcisms and then, subsequently, reparative therapy, for being gay. These were hellish experiences. And in seeing a character of Jesus of Nazareth — who, at the hands of Roman Empire, was out on the edges of that empire, being tortured because of a possibility of speaking about love in an imaginative way — I began to imagine, for a small second, that that kind of dignity might be available to me. The Stations of the Cross saved me.

(check it out @ https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-and-marilyn-nelson-a-new-imagination-of-prayer/#transcript)

There is so much pain, in so many lives - and sometimes it feels like it is too much. But, by going in to it over and over and over, trusting that in God's time the grace and dignity of love will be available to us in our flesh, I can return at least one more time. I find that being with the women and men at L'Arche who have known suffering, anguish and trauma that I can never imagine - feasting and laughing with them, weeping and praying with them, washing pots and pans with them, too - is healing for me. Whatever I might bring to the table, I clearly need to be here because when I am,I see Jesus sitting right there with us in the midst of it all. As I was heading out after a long meeting, my friends CeCe and Terry were waiting for their ride: there were hugs and laughs and looks of deep affection. What a blessing.

To close his interview, On Being host, Krista Tippett, asked Boyle to read a poem from Hafiz he includes at the close of his book. It is so good...

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’ / Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. / Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. / Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, / with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?