Down in the Tube Station At Midnight (or anywhere, anytime of day)

Every so often, I have a guest commentator on my blog. Today, my guest is my husband, Rick Dougherty. At the dinner table, Rick related the story you are about to read. I felt it was vital and important; a story that needs to be shared and thought about deeply. This is a story about people in the Bay Area, about homelessness, about addiction, about suffering. It is also a story about intuition, compassion and engagement. I hope you will take this story to heart.

***

I was coming home from work in San Francisco today, heading down the escalator to the BART station, and noticed a young man in a grey hoody and jeans standing near the turnstile. His backpack lay against the column behind him and, as people walked past to head down to the trains, he was asking for fifty cents.

Normally I would have walked past, but something about him caught my attention. He had a very gentle demeanor, a soft voice and spoke very well. He was very thin but didn’t seem to be ill or worn like so many of the homeless do. I had taken this all in as I put my ticket into the slot and walked through the stile, and was about to move on but instead, just out of curiosity, I turned back and asked him where he was going. For a moment he looked a little puzzled, so I said that fifty cents wouldn’t take him very far. Then he gave a slight smile and a conversation ensued that moved me deeply.

He told me he was just trying to get enough for something to eat, and when I asked him where he lived he said he was from Danville but hadn’t been home in three years. He had been sleeping on benches at the airport along with many other homeless people. The police would walk past them every night on their way to eat but so far didn’t seem interested in them. I asked why he didn’t go back to his parents and he said that they had thrown him out of the house because he had become hooked on heroine.

Before it all fell apart, he had seemed to have a great life in store. He loved baseball and was a great pitcher, a lefty with a 90 mph fastball, and had received a full scholarship at St. Mary’s. But at the end of his sophomore year a teammate saw him shooting up at a party, and when the news got out, he was not only off the team but was expelled from the school.

He said that in the past three years he had overdosed eight times and that each time the medical team had been able to revive him, the last couple of times only barely. You’d think having gone through that he would have learned his lesson, he said, but within half an hour of being released he was out looking for his next fix.

I told him my own family had been riddled with alcoholics and I had learned that the only person who can save an alcoholic, or an addict of any kind, is themselves, so there was nothing I could do for any of those family members but walk away. I said that it was because of that experience that I was reluctant to give him any money. To my surprise he said, “No, don’t give me any money. I’ll just go buy heroine with it.”

I asked if he had looked into any treatment programs that could help him, and he said that he didn’t think he could make it through the twelve-to-fifteen month programs. But if he didn’t even try to grab onto a rescue line, I replied, the there was no chance at all that he could change his fate. But if he took that very first step, he might begin to feel the confidence that he could control his life and could regain the determination to see it through and pull himself back up on his feet.

He shook his head again and said he wasn’t sure he could do it. I told him that in the end there were parts of him trying to run his life, his body and his mind, and that he would have to decide which one would run it in the end.

He nodded solemnly, as did I. I wished him well and we shook hands. Then I headed down to the trains.

***

This is a simplified version of the story from the way it was told at our dinner table, but that is the whole story.

There are a great many things that could be said about the story you have read, but the one aspect I want to draw your attention to has to do with engagement. 

I know that I have had similar encounters with people, over the years--people who were, for all intents and purposes, struggling to deal with something. Who knows what it was that made Rick turn back? I can only think there is some sort of intuition involved. 

We will never know if anything Rick had to say to this young man will have a lasting impact (he has survived overdosing eight times, but cats only have nine lives), but I cannot help but feel that when we follow the intuition that tells us to engage,--that it is not only okay, but we need to engage--this opens a pathway for positive change.

In your dark night, whose face was it that made you smile? Whose warm hand touched yours? Whose kind word or funny joke? How was the darkness dispelled? What unexpected encounter changed your life? 

When you pass people huddled on the street or in the tube station or in the airport, what is it that will make you talk to one of them? Are you tethered to a virtual muffler, or are you tuned to what is happening around you?

Whose life might you unknowingly influence for the better?

One last thought: We shall all be changed, of that there is no doubt. If we shall all be changed, let it be through compassionate, caring engagement.

The Jam: Down in the Tube Station At Midnight

How Does The Garden Grow?

We are miracles of being. We are packets of life that burst into a world that is often unprepared for us, although it is furnished with the potential to serve all our needs.

As adults, perhaps we spend too much time weighing the potential of life to serve us, while not enough time in service to that integral nature that sustains miracle upon miracle, and has done since opposite somethings began to attract, in those first unprecedented moments of creation.

For sentient individuals, this span of existence, in whatever form we take, is so brief and brutally free, while filled with such inexplicable beauty in each moment that is our now, I wonder why any person would isolate themselves in the virtual.

Reality and realism are a calling. Immersion in what-is, above what-can-be, is an essential landscape I fear is missing from the lives of many. This is not to say that what-can-be is unimportant or missing from the world. What-can-be lies within a limitless field of creative potential.

Sadly, most people frame their lives, whether they will admit so or not, within prisons of what they deem are “inevitabilities.” Mortality aside, nothing is inevitable. Therefore, all things are possible.

What-can-be could be seen as that which you grow in your garden. What will your garden contain? What will you grow? From whence shall the seeds be harvested? How often will you water the young seedlings that sprout after you have the seeds you have acquired? What culture will you grow? How will it impact the world?

These odd questions are vital, yet rarely directly addressed in our upbringing—the upbringing that shows us primarily how life must serve us. Parents too seldom pass to their children the knowledge of culture—where it comes from and how it is perpetuated—beyond the mere experience of it; I think, sometimes, we haven't learned all that is required to bring culture to birth and nurture it; to build and maintain it; to pass it on to its next conservatorship.

To think this way seems beyond so many people. Artists perhaps, may have the greatest potential and sensitivity to the philosophical implications of life in service to beauty. Too many others feel that sort of dedication is someone else’s domain and responsibility. Too many others believe that culture is and should remain free, and by that they mean, existing without investment. Somewhat like parents who expect schools to train their children to be good people, yet invest nothing or little in seeing to that themselves. Somewhat like people who decide how to vote based on what they read in checkout counter tabloids or what they see on Fox News.

Is this how the garden grows, the garden of you and of all of us?

From one impulse through many impulses, from one voice through many voices, from one set of hands through many sets of hands, your life flows. Infinite messages flow through all your experiential pathways. To which and to how many shall you respond? And what will be the result of that response or interaction?

Life is a series of callings within the single, yet infinite, garden of being. Yours is to choose. “Life is all about choices,” a friend once reminded me.

The paradox of life is that it supports you while you support it.

How will you nurture what has nurtured you? This is a vital question, a real question.

Everything depends on your answer.

Fallen Leaf

The falling leaf
tumbles in song,
a sentiment swept along
by the relentless wind,
whose soulful breath provides
counterpoint and amplitude.

The tumbling leaf
brushes by the cheek
of the budding rose,
arousing its petals
to release divine fragrance,
by way of blessing and gratitude.

The tattered leaf
leaves bits of itself
embedded wherever it lands,
continues, even while it dies
to sing, in joyful abandon,
life’s magnitude.

Never ultimately sung, this leaf,
atom by atom, dust to dust,
over the whole wide earth,
nurtures the sacred soil,
indicating an essential truth:
to a single miracle, death and life allude.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Long Night Moon

Blooming night,
sailing the height
while earth is still,
comfort the heavy heart.

Cold the night,
hardscrabble the ground, despite
all efforts to till
our soil to its best;
perhaps a forgotten art.

Clear, the sight,
on this, the longest night;
watching, be eased, if chill,
awaiting warmth, as test
and testament to sum and part.

O, Maternal Night
and all stars in flight,
watch over valley and hill,
call Dawn to make blessed,
and release all seeds to new start.

Your cool gaze
            will have prepared earth
            for renewal and rebirth;
may it be to a new and more wondrous phase.

© 2013 Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Have a Hollow, Jello Christmas, along with Pavlov’s dogs?

As we approach the final shopping weekend before Christmas, I thought I would jot a few lines about the holiday.

First of all, it is thought of as being a Christian Holy Day, but it really isn’t. It is thought to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus, but it’s not. The winter holidays are pagan. Church Father’s (somewhere in the early 4^th Century CE) thought it would be a good thing for Early Church PR to have some sort of Feast Day to balance out the Church year with Easter, and what better way to be welcoming to pagans (you plan to convert) than to syncretize a new holiday onto their own winter festivals?! So, if you wondered about the pine and fir trees, the yule log, and all that… it has nothing to do with Jerusalem, Nazareth or Egypt… it has to do with Saturnalia, Festivus, Yule and Dies Natalis Solis Invicti. Because of the magic of Wikipedia, you can look up all these festivals and find out what they are about, but basically it is about the season of winter and the winter solstice. It is a true fact that New Zealand holds its Yule festival in July… (Think about it.)

So, to all those cry that the spirit of the season has been usurped, and that we must put "Christ back into Christmas," I have to reply, we can't--Christ was never in it!

The traditional giving of gifts is always misconstrued to be the “Gifts from the Magi”, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But, folks, the truth of the matter is that the gift giving tradition comes directly from the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. It was all about conspicuous consumption, drunken debauchery and eating to excess. Even Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) had to retreat to a suite of rooms in his manor, in order that the noise from the festivities might not interrupt his studies. Toys were given to children, and gag gifts exchanged between adults. [You know those ugly Christmas sweaters we all love to hate? Well, the togas at that time had to be either really tacky or were doffed completely, during these Empire mandated celebrations.] The gifts, if you want to know, are about the agricultural god Saturn, who was the embodiment of prosperity. You exchange signs of prosperity with others so that you will be blessed with prosperity—that’s the general idea. There were sacrifices, also… I won’t get into gory details; this is a family blog. All you need to know is that Alexander the Great found a way to eliminate that element from the holiday picture.

We are, therefore, acting in a truly Roman Empire sort of way when we deal with Christmas, which makes the holiday not very Christian, at all (because it isn’t). Add to that the fact that we have all been trained to be good little consumers, and you have a complete mash-up of priorities: giving to the poor means getting for ourselves. We must decorate and cook and wrap and give and get and buy and buy and buy and and and and… and by and by get stuck in traffic jams, everywhere, with grumpy people who fume and yell and text and commit acts of road rage against fellow drivers. How celebratory is that?

Sigh.

In the face of all this craziness, I and my colleagues have been commuting (though certainly not rushing at great speed) on these holiday-frenzied roads and public transit systems in order to offer the simplest, but perhaps the most profoundly intimate gift that can be given or received: sound. Into the sanctuary of churches, concert and social halls, living rooms and other spaces, set aside from the noise and the rushing and the personalities, musicians gather with scores, voices and instruments to soothe the savage breast (of strangers or family and friends) with healing vibrations. In the past few weeks, there have been many concerts, small and large; there are more to come. Give the gift of music to someone you know, with concert tickets or CDs purchased from local groups. There is a lot of great music happening where you are--don't miss it!

Is your ChristeSaturnalimas seeming shallow, hollow, empty of feeling or too full of hassle? Get away from all of that. Hie thee to a concert, now! Settle into a seat. Close your eyes. Let the music help release your spirit, to make it soar. In appropriate concert situations, public dance might figure in. Join in and let your body go; that is singing, too. Listen to beautiful music via electronic media, or go to the shore to hear the waves and the birds. Trust me, you will feel much better for it.

And have yourself as much of a merry something-or-other and as happy a New Year as you can stand.

How To Give Thanks

Greet the morning sunlight,
both as friend and miracle.

Feel each footstep
as a handshake, as a greeting;

Know that every touch
is an engagement with All That Is.

The whole world is smiling at you;
smile back, with warmth and feeling.

Let the empty chair fill itself,
Keep your door open to opportunity.

Drink deeply from the well of possibility,
the source of the river of life.

Take a slice, accept your portion and be filled;
share with family, friends and those in need.

Respect the wonder of Earth’s vegetation,
medicine for our health and wellbeing.

Know that each conflict has built into it
an opportunity for healing and renewal;

Move beyond the frayed fabric,
find a proper loom for mending, and be glad.

The star-kissed wind blows through you;
sing praises, sing praises, sing praises!

Weave yourself into the earth;
it will be glad to accept you,

And offer you back, as a restorative gift,
to this world of wonder.

© 2013 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

First Amendment Convolutions

While reading my local paper, I came across the following letter to the editor:

It is disturbing that California's attorney general, Kamala Harris, believes that access to contraception trumps the First Amendment ("State questions corporations' religious rights," Nov. 11.). Religious business-owners should have the right to manage their own companies according to their most basic beliefs. The First Amendment does not simply guarantee the freedom to worship; it ensures "the free exercise thereof," which extends beyond Fridays at the mosque or Saturdays at the synagogue. Subtle attempts to undermine this guarantee to all Americans, masked in pernicious language like "regulatory obligations," should be what the attorney general is protecting us against, not standing up for.

This letter had been written by the pastor of a church. The name of the pastor, church and community from which this letter came are not important. It could have come from anywhere, been written by a religious leader of any denomination or faith.

This letter is clearly about denying rights to women. The pastor perhaps owns a business. Surely the church is not the business he owns, is it? Hopefully the employee in question is not a female church secretary…

What I find most interesting is the ironic twist accorded to the First Amendment. To me, it is clear that the author of the letter is unclear on the letter of the law, as well as a bit muddy on the tenets of his faith. The author of the letter seems to imply that the religious freedoms accorded by the First Amendment allow one person, in the context of practicing and keeping of their faith, to deny rights to another person.

This is, of course, not true under the letter of the law. This kind of confused thinking is what the separation of church and state is all about, and why it is essential. This is what the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Labor Movement, the LGBQ Movement and all of the Movements since, have reared up to remind us all. We should all be equally treated under the law. It could also be argued that we should all be treated equally under divine providence.

Your beliefs and your practices are yours. You are welcome to them. You cannot impose them on others. The First Amendment applies to individual conscience, not collective consciousness. The First Amendment allows you to say you don’t like contraception, and to rail against contraception and to campaign against contraception, but it does not entitle you, because you practice a certain religion that has dogma and doctrine against it, to deny any person the right to access, have and use contraceptives. Even if you are a business owner, your business cannot deny any worker access to contraceptives, whether you pay all or part of the insurance coverage for your employee or not. To do so is to disrespect and violate the privacy and rights of your employee, which surely is not what any divine being would require of you, in order for you to be a good person, ostensibly living a life of righteousness and equity.

You are free to exercise your right to be a dogmatic doctrinaire, even a misogynist; you just cannot impose your personal will, whether or not it is informed by your religion, on others—and that means not in the work place nor in your church.

Pernicious is the language that claims the golden rule, yet excludes people from the rights and dignity they should naturally be accorded. Pernicious is the hate hidden in a convoluted, conditional and inconsistent rhetoric of love. Pernicious is the morality that counsels, “You must do as I say, or you will go to Hell!” The First Amendment is not a club to be wielded against someone else.

I am grateful that the attorney general of California is holding people, religious and not, to their regulatory obligations under the law.

Mr. Pastor, sir, if you don’t want contraceptives, the Good News is you are not required to have or to use them. The bad news is, you can’t force others to do as you would do, not even your wife. It is none of your business what other people do with their health coverage, and why should it matter to you? The sad truth is it costs you nothing that someone else can obtain and use contraceptives. While you may believe that the use of contraceptives is ungodly, —    though how you would arrive at that conclusion I don't know, as the Bible does not mention them at all — you have no legal grounds by which to deny their availability to or use by anyone.