Clarence McConkey's Blog

Stop Pulling the Covers, Billy

2011-12-20T06:50:00.000-08:00

As a child living in a dilapidated old frame house with a coal burning stove in the center of the living room with no indoor plumbing, no running water, with two bedrooms for six children and two, sometimes three adults, with the outside temperature during the winter sometimes -15 degrees, with snow, fueled by a howling north wind blowing it through the loose window frames, my brothers and sisters and I had the time of our lives. This was never more true than at Christmastime.

I sometimes wonder today if children in America could ever possibly visualize what it was like to play guessing games or read the Sunday “funny papers” under a mountain of covers on Christmas Eve in a freezing bedroom. Never mind there was little prospect of any Chirstmas gifts except for the school classroom exchange (local merchants anticipated these exchanges with a good supply of sacks of marbles, dainty handkerchiefs, Big Chief writing tablets and boxes of crayolas.) I was astonished not long ago to learn Big Chief writing tablets were no longer being made, alas, alas! There was of course the Christmas Eve church service with children receiving sacks of candy with an apple or orange in the sack. Later, under our mountain of covers we laughed, imagined, created wonders of our minds, thought of the unfortunate children in India and Africa, told stories, ghost and otherwise to brighten our lives with magic and wonder. When we would finally settle down for the night it was in anticipation of knowing we had hardly begun to explore all that magic and wonder. A whole world awaited us.

Most modern families give the best they can for one another in the family at Christmas. There will be a young person who will receive the gift of a new car perhaps and mom or dad may find a new expensive watch under the tree. Children will give and receive from the abundance of all the good in the stores of America. We will each celebrate Christmas as we are wont to do, sometimes frugally, sometimes excessively. This is Christmas as we’ve learned to express it. But for me, one of the greatest of all Christmases would be if I could have my three-year old brother back, he of the fatally ruptured appendix. What he and I would do would be this: He and I would turn down the heat in the house until it was freezing. We would jump into our bed with a mountain of clothes on and a mountain of covers over us. We would make a tent of the covers and we would tell stories, ghost or otherwise. We would play “Three sailors went to sea, sea, sea to see what they could see, see, see.” We would laugh and be merry and would know of a certainty that to be a child in Kansas, in the winter, was the greatest of all blessings. I like to think, my imagination is at work here, that just before we snuggled down to sleep I would say to Billy, “Merry Christmas, little brother” and he would repeat it back to me.

Such a time that was, so much laughter, so much happiness, so much pleasure, so much joy. And here is where my spirit soars to the starry sky. Just before sleep, from under the covers, out of the great winter night, my brother and I might hear, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, to people of goodwill.”

MAY GOD BLESS US EVERYONE.

The Christmas Laundry

2011-12-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

Sometime near the end of the year l980 it was my unchosen duty to help watch over the long decline of seven year old Lizabeth Sterling during her unstoppable Hodgins Disease. As children are, by nature, optimistic and hopeful, she was surrounded daily by her family, her friends and the medical staff. She was encouraged by all these in her upward tending spirit. Children are also, by nature, clairvoyant in a way not open sometimes to adult sensibilities. She knew! No one told her, no one attempted to prepare her, she simply knew she was dying. It was she, seven years old, who brought me into the world of her dying. One day, without warning or hesitation, she asked me what it would be like to die. Her asking wasn't shaded by fear, she simply wanted to know what lay ahead. So we talked about those things that come naturally in such a conversation, God, family, joy, life, and going on to a new life. I held her hand, she watched me to be sure I was being honest with her, and she asked, "Do you think they will have clean sheets for me there?" The question obviously came from the daily condition of her bed with IV's, blood, catheter and more. I said, "Lizabeth, the sheets done in the laundry of heaven are always white as snow." On the day of her death her family asked if new linen could be placed on her bed before she was taken up from it.

Such is the form and nature of our human community. It is always the wanting of newness, the release from oldness that permeates all of Christmas. There is a cleanness somehow buried in the carols and readings and prayers of the Christmas season and we are eager to have our children, our husbands and wives, our family and friends, experience this. I would like to feel no one is excluded by their own inflexibility from what is offered by all the season's presents. The thing about wanting life to be good and hopeful and renewing is that it's always, forever, already good and hopeful and renewing. To feel all this in our spirits we may sometimes need to change the linen. Christmas is not only a season, a holiday, a date on the calendar, it is real when we recognize what is already good and hopeful. No, I can't come and do your laundry. I can do the next best thing. I can point you to a laundromat. For all appearances you might mistake it for a manger.

SMALL TRACES

2011-10-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

In my home library of films I have one called PAN'S LABYRINTH. This movie, made in Spain, is a fairy tale/fantasy/life imitating art/real life story of a girl who in the midst of the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War (1936-40) saves her infant brother's life by sacrificing her own (the Christ theme). Her death is the occasion for her to be reborn to a new life of peace and eternal life (The Salvation theme). At the end of the movie there appears on the screen these words: "She left small traces of her time on earth visible only to those wise enough to look for them."

To some extent the world we live in, and the world that has always been as far back as the one we see in the movie 1,000,000 B.C., has been a world where the traces of our having lived in that world are sometimes hard to find. Who in this year 2011 can tell us who Amico Bignami was or Elijah Lovejoy or Vaclav Havel or Lucretia Mott or Leonidas La Pucelle D'Orleans or Hugh Latimer or William Rontgen or Charles Dodgen are or were? The perplexing thing about these persons is, they made the world healthier or richer or more beautiful or more liveable because of their small traces. Yet in this age of our knowledge of nuclear power and complicated mathematics and science that boggles our mind these living souls are unknown to most of us even though their traces leaves to us more than any science will ever do.

Well, lest we find it difficult in our busy lives to look up Lucretia Mott or Vaclav Havel to see the effects of their footprints in our lives and our world perhaps we can take one moment each day to be wise enough to look for traces within our own households. To look is to see the traces left by our own children, traces we seldom acknowledge or even recognize, the traces of our husband or wife which are left in our lives every day, the signs of our parents which we sometimes eulogize at their funerals but seldom during their life's journey with us, a neighbor perhaps, or someone in our community, that person who has touched our lives, or perhaps tried to, while they and we were still living. How many times have we said to ourselves, "O, I wish I would have told her (grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, cousin, brother, sister), how much I loved them? The fact that we feel this debt to someone from our past is witness to our sometimes delayed acknowledgement of the traces they left in our lives.

Today, perhaps, or tomorrow at the latest, we may leave off the TV, the newspaper, a few minutes from our job, and create a few traces of our own in the sands of this human community. Then, perhaps sometime in the future, others will be wise enough to look for the traces of love and patience and courage and kindness and forgiveness and generosity which we have planted in and for them.

Why Tooth Fairy Must Thrive

2011-09-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've been reading in Harper's Index that according to surveys taken by VISA, the average donation to Tooth Fairy in 2010 was $3 and has declined so far in 2011 to $2.60. What? What has happened to human decency anyway? What's a respectable Tooth Fairy to do these days, go on welfare? Tooth Fairy is an American invention and institution. Can any of us imagine what our lives would be like if Tooth Fairy emigrated to Monaco? Where will the hopes of children with their precarious front teeth find a new source of inspiration by which to endure the pain and humiliation of a jack-o-lantern face? What will happen to the factories that make the little white boxes in which Tooth Fairy hides extracted teeth until morning? In fact, will there even be a morning for millions of children who know they will wake up to a Tooth Fairyless world? How can this present civilization survive with such hopelessness among our children when the main gift of those children to us has been hope itself? Never ask me to live in a world where an empty gum socket is symbolic of the cruelty and dishonorable penury of the Tooth Rich.

The times call us to arms! Ring the bells, sound the tocsin, cry out a new world crusade for the restoration of benevolence and empathy from those of us who have reaped the joyfulness of Tooth Fairy's gifts and have sown nothing but childhood despair in its place. To arms, all who love children! Let your own memory of 'The Morning After' $3 in the little white box be your guide to a new economic age of Tooth Fairy.

We shall overcome!

2011-08-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

The 1960's and 1970's were years of great change in America especially in the area of race and social change. In some of those years I worked as pastor in the Inner City of Omaha, Nebraska. In those days the Inner City anywhere in America was a place of danger and violence. Parts of Omaha were burned down following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Those years were also years

of challenge for people everywhere in America who ventured out into society with words and actions of reconciliation and creative relationships across racial lines.

A week ago I watched and listened on PBS an entire program, rich in memory for me, of nearly all the folk singing groups that flourished during those years. Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limelighters, The Kingston Trio, Pete Seegar, The New Christy Minstrels, so many others. Their music enriched and encouraged, challenged the status quo in America. Last evening, also on PBS, I watched a program of some of these musical prophets. There was Peter, Paul and Mary again, and my mind went back to those times in the Inner City when, with others in different forms of ministry, we gathered in churches, community halls, back rooms and even vacant buildings, talked together, prayed together, and above all sang together the songs of faith, protest, affirmation and hope. There were times when these small clusters of workers with their prayer and song, were about the only voice of hope there was to be found.

So, in letting these two programs wash over my spirit with their memories, I sang the songs as they were being sung by the groups. I sang the song which was really the theme song of the whole protest movement in those years, "We Shall Overcome". I can never forget in those halls and churches and community buildings standing in a circle, holding hands, often with tears on our faces, letting the world know of our hope:

We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome some day,

O, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.

So much of what was believed in that time has come to pass. But the message remains. There is still much to overcome in our society and of course always in our personal lives. Singing and believing, and acting on that singing and believing with creative and courageous action, is an everyday event in lives everywhere. In the midst of fractured families, breaking or broken marriages, children losing their way, dealing with our own personal demons,

We'll walk hand in hand, we'll walk hand in hand, we'll walk in hand some day,

O, deep in my heart, I do believe, we'll walk hand in hand some day.

When that walk is one of freedom from bitterness, freedom from strife, freedom from selfishness and hardheartedness, we can come to that freedom and let it wash over us like the Balm of Gilead. O, deep in my heart, I do believe!

The Law of (Endless) Probability

2011-05-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

In a blog I wrote that appeared on 12-17-09, I told the true story of a little boy who once rang my doorbell. He had a ball and mitt. On my answering the doorbell he asked, "Can you come out and play?" I answered, "Absolutely!" Yesterday, I answered the doorbell to a little boy about the size and age of the first one who, holding a smaller boy by one hand and a soccer ball in the other, asked me, "Can you come out and play?"

What are the odds for such a thing as this happening twice? They are astronomical at best. Yet in the world of Mathematics there is something called the Law of Probability. By virtue of this law one can predict the odds of such and such happening. One uses ratios, accumulated data, time factors, then poses a hypothesis as to an event occurring or reoccurring. I am confident in utilizing the Law of Probability in making the following predictions:

God will be good
A mother will be cured of breast cancer
An alcoholic will find new and sober life
An errant child will rediscover his or her family
A husband/wife will forgive his/her husband/wife
Someone will find laughter after a season of grief
The sun will shine
God will be good

O, and lest I forget, sometime another little boy will come and ask me if I can come out and play. I count on it. It's the Law of Probability.

AS THE WORLD TURNS

2011-03-22T18:58:00.000-07:00

I don't know if the daily soap opera "As The World Turns" is still running on television. My mother heard (on radio) then watched (on television) that program while she did the ironing and rocked her babies. But there is a real life world that turns and it turns every day, every hour of the day and every minute of every hour of every day. I can see this world turn from my study window, from my living room windows, from long walks through the community, from the newspaper and radio and television, from hospital visits and conversations with friends and strangers. As the world turns on its daily appointed rounds it exposes to us the violence, the sorrows, the greeds, failures and grinding pains of daily life. The daily turning of the world in which we live, the ambitions, the emptiness which pervades so many lives, is shown to us as clearly as if we were watching it in 3-D.

But 3-D of course is an illusion, it enables us to see what isn't there. So, I say, off with the 3-D glasses! Only then can we see the beauty of the trees along those walks, parents loving their children, people doing impossible things and overcoming improbable odds. In looking at life as it turns we know the blind "see," the deaf "hear" and the beauty of things that so boggles our minds we want to break out in some Te Deum of praise. Just now the world is turning and so can we. So, excuse me now, I've got to go sing a duet with Luciano Pavarotti from the DVD "Rigoletto." He needs me to sing the bass part. Besides that, before the world turns too far today, I'll go say "Good Morning" to the priest across the way who lives with an oxygen tank. So many blessings, so little time to be blessed, how fast the world turns.

Whatever Happened To Christmas?

2011-01-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain, especially in the later years of his life, became increasingly disillusioned about American politics. Once, when he was writing about such things as political parties and political figures, he wished them all to the Devil. Being in Tucson, Arizona, during the week of the recent shooting there, listening, watching and reading the editorials, speeches and interviews with all kinds of prominent Americans, I found myself asking: whatever happened to Christmas? Whatever happened to all that peace and goodwill to men (and to women) (and to children such as Cristina Taylor Green)? Whatever happened to angels singing sweetly o’er the plain, to joy to the world, to love that came down at Christmas? Didn’t we listen for the Child who shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace? One of the starkest symbols of all that was lost from the Christmas Promise was putting the district of Congresswoman Giffords in crosshairs as a potential target. Whatever happened to Isaiah’s prophecy that in the spirit of the Lord’s Day we would beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks?

Christmas is still here of course and will likely come again. But as I watched and listened and read the deluge of animosity, diatribe and accusation from all along the political spectrum, I thought: at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863, the orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours; he spoke of conflict. Abraham Lincoln spoke for seven minutes; he spoke of reconciliation. Who remembers Edward Everett? Abraham Lincoln is immortal.

My unasked for advice to politicians, and to myself, comes from the first two words of one of Theodore Roosevelt’s most famous lines, “Speak softly……” As far as the next five words are concerned, “…..and carry a big stick,” we would do well to wish those five words to the Devil in American life.

BRINGING DOWN HEAVEN

2010-12-17T11:42:00.000-08:00

For many past years my daughter, Anne, and I, have created the Christmas cards that have gone out to friends and family. She does the art work, I do the words.

This year we have collaborated on our 2010 Christmas card and they have been mailed out.

Both the art work and the messages on these cards are at least in part devised to appeal to children who, as we know, seldom receive cards which speak to them. Here for this year-ending blog is the message on this year's card, unfortunately without the dazzling art work of Anne:

"Once upon a time in a faraway country there lived a boy by the name of Eli.

Every day he tended the sheep on his father's farm.

Because Eli had a very active imagination he sometimes imagined flying through the air visiting all the exciting places he read about but knew he would never see.

One day while tending the sheep a man appeared to Eli asking him if he would like to visit those exciting places.

"Yes, yes," said Eli, "but I can't leave the sheep."
"The sheep will be just fine until we get back," the man replied. "Now hang on because here we go!"

In a moment Eli found himself soaring high above the earth, through the air, past the heavens, through the clouds, far beyond all the stars and planets.

As they soared high above the heavens Eli said, "Nobody will ever believe me when I tell them where I've been and what I've seen."

The man who was guiding him said, "Just take this little piece of heaven
in your hand, hang on to it, and when people ask where you've been just show them this piece of heaven."

When Eli looked at what he had in his hand he was amazed at what he saw.

The piece of heaven looked like the hugs his father and mother gave him every day. It looked like the neighbors who picked him up when he fell on the rocks while he was playing.

It looked like his own friends who sometimes on Saturday's visited the children who were patients in the Children's Hospital.

What he held in his hand was very light so he held onto it very tightly.

Once back home he thought he ought to quit imagining things like having a cloud in his hands.

But when he went to bed that night just before he dropped off to sleep, he took the piece of heaven out of his hand and looked at it.

To his astonishment he saw in the cloud the man who had taken him on his journey.

And as he went to sleep he thought how beautiful it is that a person, even a child, could make a heaven out of ordinary things...

        Like hugs

             And neighbors

                 And children who care for other children

                       In this world."

I personally like the thought of Rev. 13:13, ..."come down from heaven to earth." What this speaks to me is that the lofty themes of heaven can so easily be translated into the mundane, daily, things of earth. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth," is the way heaven, a theme so prominent at Christmas, is translated into human love, forgiveness, patience, kindness and so much else. So, at this year's ending, with so much to gratify and please, my blessing to all, and I know Anne joins me in this, "May God give you the dew of heaven." Gen. 27:28

AND MAY GOD BLESS US EVERYONE!

STANDING WITH AND HOLDING UP

2010-09-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

My mother went into a nursing home sometime in her early 90's. Even then she was able to do things and had a sharp mind. Whenever I or one of my brothers or sisters would get in to see her we would take her down to the house which we kept open for her. Because she could outcook and outbake Julia Child, she would want to fix things for those of us who were there.

One day when I was with her I took her down to the house and after awhile she wanted to know what we would like for lunch. Whatever it was that day she asked if we would like her to make an apricot cobbler.

Let me tell you, my mother's apricot cobblers were just the next thing to manna from heaven, MAYBE BETTER!!

She got out all the ingredients and got the cobbler ready to put together. At that point in her life my mother was very unsteady on her feet which is one of the reasons she was in the nursing home. She had had a couple of strokes.

With all the ingredients in front of her on the work table I stood behind her ready to catch her if she faltered or needed support. She made the cobbler, we had lunch, and I've always thought of that as an example of how to make a cobbler with flour, sugar, apricots and a whole lot of standing with and holding up.

Gotta tell you, isn't that what it means to be in a family, a community, a circle of friendships, a marriage, a human need, standing with and holding up? The peculiar thing about this is that standing and holding is most needed when the other person in that marriage or family or community is the weakest. Nobody needs hold up Atlas. Through love and patience and prayer and stick-to-it we may make it possible for the other person to become strong, to survive whatever is causing the weakness. Not only this, but standing behind and holding up just might end up making the sweetest, most succulent, cobbler this side of heaven. Maybe even the other side as well.

I’LL BE DOGGED!

2010-08-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

In the west African nation of Mali there is a natural hill formation that features at one spot a contour of the letter U. For many hundreds of years this site has been the center of the most important religious ceremony in the life of the people of Mali. Once every 60 years the movement of the earth brings Sirius to the center of this formation. This is the occasion of the ceremony suigi. This event is based on a belief that 3000 years ago celestial beings visited Mali form Sirius. Most of the people of Mali see the appearance of Sirius in this formation only once in their lifetime.

Sirius of course is the Dog Star. The months of July and August are commonly called Dog Days. July and August supposedly got that name from the fact that dogs, suffering from heat, become listless and run out of energy. Sounds like me. I don’t have any idea whether celestial beings from Sirius visited Mali or not, but I’ll tell you something. The messages the Mali people think they received when Sirius appears in the sky during sigui isn’t far from other visitations that brought wise men and magi to a new understanding of how God works in human affairs. I do something as often as I can remember to do it. Early in the morning while it is still dark, I look at Sirius and I receive messages about so many things it boggles my mind. The people of Mali are superstitious, dependent on myths, on signs? Yes and so am I. It’s amazing what messages I receive about life and death, love and laughter, hope and healing, just by looking at the Dog Star, especially in these Dog Days.

The Frontier of our Spirit: Deciding to Go On

2010-07-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

Not so many miles north of where I live here in Central Nebraska there is the little village of Bartlett. Bartlett was established as a pioneer town out on the Nebraska prairie frontier, not so different now, I suspect, from the frontier days in which the town was established. I have an old record book which tells me that in the 1890's a small group of people were trying hard to keep a Sunday School open there in spite of hard winters and few people scattered all across the prairie. As the fall weather began to turn to winter on the plains in 1892 the people holding the little Sunday School open decided to hold a meeting in which people could vote as to whether or not to keep the Sunday School alive. In the afternoon of Sunday, October 25, 1891, that group of 39 persons gathered to make their decision. I would imagine there were pros and cons, differences of opinion, maybe a divided sentiment. When the vote was finally called for the records say this: "It was decided by vote for the Sunday School to go on."

It would be a great thing if all our 'goings on' could be decided by a support group of family, friends and even neighbors. Sometimes it can. But not always. Sometimes we face our "going on" alone after a divorce, after the death of a loved one, after a mistake or crisis or a failure. Friends and family can often affirm a decision we make but sometimes we are the only ones who can make that decision. It is then our faith takes hold, our confidence in ourselves is renewed and we become aware that "Nighttime is only the other side of daytime."

Sometime when you're driving through the scenic wonderland of north central Nebraska, you'll come to the little frontier town of Bartlett. What you'll see, in addition to other mind-boggling mysteries and magic, is a little church where 119 years ago a pioneer group of 39 souls 'decided to go on." Just like you and I can every day, out on the frontier of our spirits.

Centripetal Force of a Parent’s Love

2010-05-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

I find myself fascinated of late by programs from National Geographic and History Channel, as well as from various readings, to learn that planet Earth is remarkably free from being devastated by stellar asteroids that tear through space by the millions. Planet Earth has been struck in the past, notably in the Yucatan and in Siberia. We do find small pieces of space stuff that have hit our planet but nothing like what slams into many other planets as a part of life in the great out-of-space. The reason given for our relative freedom from such disaster is the planet Jupiter. Jupiter has such an enormous sucking (centripetal) power that it sucks into itself those asteroids and flying stellar debris that might otherwise slam into our earth. In other words, Jupiter is looking out for us.

Mother's Day is past, Father's Day is coming on, and I think how much centripetal force parents bring onto themselves for those of us who are their children. Every day they bear our bruises and burdens, take onto themselves our fears and failures, absorb our sorrows, act as healers, angels of mercy, forgivers, lovers and menders. More than any parent can know, or any child can know, parents are like Jupiter, shielding the child from the rocks and dangers of all this physical and emotional debris floating around in their lives. For myself, even though my parents are well situated in their eternal place in the heavens, I know they still, from that position, in my mind and heart, keep busy centripicating (forgive me Mr. Webster), the hurts and fears that come to their earthly child. Bless you, my mother, bless you, my father, bless your child with grateful praise for so great a world as this one in which we live.

Lights Coming On Again

2010-05-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

The beginning of the First World War in 1914 brought forth from Sir Edward Grey, England's Foreign Secretary, the prophetic comment, "The lights are going out everywhere in Europe..." This comment was to be a truly prophetic analysis of four years of death and destruction. What I try to remember in my reading of history of that war was that in the spring of 1919 those lights began to come on again. They've come on after every war, after every natural disaster, after every personal tragedy, after grief, loss and heartache in any of our lives. I cannot know how many beautiful children died this very day somewhere in the world or how many marriages came apart or how many failures there have been or defeats suffered. Their name is legion of course. Whatever the number, they were lights going out in someone's life.

Then, I look out the back window where I live, out across the patio, and I see what it means in Genesis 8:22, "seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease." The caretaker here on this Thursday morning is cutting swaths through the burgeoning grass, farmers down the line are putting in corn in straight rows that go on for half a mile without a single flaw in the row, birds are making their nests and bees are buzzing for all their worth. Not only this but everywhere there is recovery after sickness (I love the Prayer After Recovery in the Episcopal Prayer Book), comfort after sorrow, hope after despair and life after death. Perhaps there could have been a better world created by the Creator God but this one is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. I've done some gardening, fed the birds, petted a dog, laughed at some jokes, loved my neighbors and especially my family and feel this may be the best there ever was. Life does that, making lights come on again like a 1000 kilowatt bulb right in our faces.

Dancing With the Lord

2010-03-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1518 the people of Strasbourg, France, suddenly began to dance in the streets. Men, women, and probably young people and children, went into a dancing frenzy. Once they began to dance they couldn't stop and they couldn't say why they were dancing, they just danced in a fury until in the hot sun they began to fall and many died.

John Waller has written about this strange event in A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. This phenomenon has been analyzed from many angles. No one has been able to fully understand it.

I have a theory, they danced BECAUSE THEY WERE HAPPY! There are worse ways to die. David danced before the Lord (1Sam.6:14), we are to praise him with timbrel and dance (Ps.150:4), "...there is a time to mourn and there is a time to dance..." (Ecc. 3:4), when Jesus entered Jerusalem for Passover people threw palm branches on the road, cried out, "Hosanna, Hosanna!" and probably some of them broke out into a break dance, and in that marvelous, wonderful non-canonical book in the Catholic Bible ACTS OF JOHN, "Grace danceth. I would pipe, dance ye all! (vs. 95) and then, "Thus, my beloved, having danced with us the Lord went forth." (vs. 97).

On Palm Sunday I dare you: get up from your seat in church or during Passover from your synagogue, go out into the aisle and dance! Dance for joy, dance for faith, dance for the Lord who is present in our lives, dance just for the fun of it, just for the Hosanna of it. Praise him with timbrel and dance, dance, dance!

Blue Skies and Practicing Hope

2010-03-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many words there are in all the human languages for "up" and "down" but there must be hundreds. They all describe the daily life of almost all of us. "Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down," is the musical way of describing our human journey, Paul Robeson sang it so powerfully. Life is yin-yang, push-pull, a tug of war, and for all the hazards and uncertainties that brings us I never thought it was so bad a way to live. If nothing else it keeps us from being bored out of our minds. It keeps us from being ordinary, predictable, safe. I've suffered a lot of ennui this particular winter from the prolonged cold here in Nebraska and I've had visions of all those years our family spent in the Republic of Panama with 85 degree temperature year round, warm oceans, fresh fruit in the garden every day of the year. Then I remember those times in that beautiful country when I was nostalgic for wintry mornings and sleds and snow and... Sameness can be deadly.

I tune into this human peculiarity when I see the stresses and trials of my friends and acquaintances. I sympathize with their defeats and undeserved sorrows. I've never been so dumb as to be a blind Pollyanna or reckless Candide who see nothing but blue skies and pure joy. Life is a lot more than constant blue skies even in Panama and certainly a lot more than just continuous joy. But even so, I'll tell you something: Bitching and blaming never turned a grey sky into a blue one and complaining never in the history of the world made a 'down' into an 'up.' What does help us at least move closer to an 'up' is the knowledge that practicing hope makes hope. "See the birds of the air, how they neither spin nor gather into barns, yet see how they are fed.'" Life is a waiting banquet, a banquet of good news, of victories great or small, of hope unconquerable, of expectations, of efforts, of attitude. So - in the midst of our downs, hey, look up, son-of-a-gun!, the sky has turned blue and we didn't even know it.

What’s That You Say?

2010-03-02T15:18:00.000-08:00

In our recent book, WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, my daughter, Amy and I write a lot about how language is developed and used.. As far back as 500 BCE the Greeks advocated the development of an international, or alternative, language that everybody in the world could learn. The Greeks thought such a common language would prevent wars, assist in international business dealings, promote academic and cultural ties and stall off domestic violence. With such a language children and parents could actually understand one another! The fact is, we have such a language, in fact, more than one. The most important one is Esperanto. 100,000 people can speak and understand Esperanto. Esperanto is spoken in at least 83 countries. There is an annual World Esperanto Conference. More than 100 periodicals are published in Esperanto and more than 30,000 books.

I have a basic Esperanto grammar book. It hasn't gone well. I haven't found anybody else who can speak or understand it. I've had to revert to my basic English with attempts at other languages when I'm in the countries of those languages. Thank goodness I've never visited the Inuits of NW Canada.

Then I think, well, maybe I'm capable of a second language after all. I can say, "Hello," in the language of every one of those 83 countries. All I have to do is smile, that's "Hello" in any language. Even the Inuits recognize that. Every 'foreign' language speaker understands the language of a warm handshake, an arm around the shoulder, a 'Please," "Thank you," "You're beautiful," "What's your name?" and "I love you." If someone has offended us we have only to say, "I forgive you," and KAZAM! barriers of language fall.

I'm going to take up Urdu. I have no idea what, "shlaa" means in Urdu but I know what "You're my friend," means in any language. So - whoever you are or wherever you are, let's talk, you and me, beginning with, "I do believe, really, that you are one of the most important people God ever created." You'll understand that; it's our common language.

Giving Up Not Singing for Lent

2010-03-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

I've sometimes thought the Season of Lent must have been created to remind us that music may well be the most God-centered way for us to express our longing for a more perfect union with Him/Her. Written prayers we read by rote or confessions that don't confess anything or giving up chocolate for 40 days seem to me to miss the mark of Lent which is glory and not gloom. I've never gone much for sackcloth and ashes in Lent. I much prefer standing out in the garage singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" or riding my bicycle down the park path letting Haydn's "The Spacious Firmament on High" scare the living daylights out of the kids and dogs within hearing. I have no intention of downgrading prayers, confessions and creeds - but when it comes time for me to let out the Spirit and to tell Christ how I feel about him and about the state of my soul and about my earnest efforts toward a deeper spiritual perfection, I find it more to my liking to sing my version of "Hallelujah (hey, try spelling that without looking it up) Chorus" or "Sing With all the Sons of Glory" or waiting for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to lift me up to repentance and to send me winging upwards with, "O, Thou, That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion."

Yes, of course, we all have our own way in spiritual disciplines, to all that is holy and divine. For me it has always been singing out like a madman. I'll tell you something, I once blew off the facing of a hand held microphone in a service by singing to excess, "Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken." Remember, on the night of the Last Supper before Jesus went out into the night before Golgotha, he and his disciples "sang a hymn."

Lent is for singing, brothers and sisters. Where we sing and what we sing and how we sing is of course up to the singer. For myself, every day in Lent I sing half a dozen hymns. I generally like what I sing. I can only trust the Lord to like it too. That why I sing it.

When We Grow Up to Be Little

2010-02-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

One day, when my granddaughter Jaime was about 4 years old, she showed me something she was playing with. To please her I said, without too much thought, "Gee, I wish I could have one of those." To which she replied, again without too much thought I imagine, "You can, grandpa, when you grow up to be little."

Ah, Peter Pan and Linus and Bert and Ernie and Alice in Wonderland and Snow White and...how much you tell us about one of our most precious gifts in being human beings, the gift of imagination. The astonishing thing about literary figures, such as Alice and Peter Pan, is not that they never grow old, it is that we don't want them to. And why don't we? Because they represent something magical which is the vital balance to our real world of stress, anger, disappointment, war, and unspeakable cruelty.

In my own journey how often I discover that my folly is redeemed by the wisdom of Charlie Brown and that the unendurable was made endurable by the philosophy of Cinderella. To be in touch with the unseen world of music, art, faith, great literature, the saints of the Church, of the heroes of our national life, of the inner world of "The Railway Children" or "In America," is to touch the flowing fountain of renewal. For myself, Paul Robeson singing, "There is a Balm in Gilead," on an old LP is a source of unending magic. We are no less empowered by what we can't see than by what we can see. As Alice reminds us, "Why, I do five impossible things before breakfast."

What we see and hear with our eyes and ears is no more curative than what we hear with our spirits. That kind of cure is a necessary part of our growing up to be little in order to see the world that is beyond the world. I hope you’ll share with me ways in which you have “grown up to be little.”

Forever In My Heart on Valentine’s Day

2010-02-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day, that festival between Christmas and Easter, has become, next to Christmas, the most expensive holiday/festival in American life.

The amount of money spent on those outrageously priced greeting cards and the even more atrociously priced gourmet chocolates, not to mention flowers costing enough to start one's own greenhouse, have often become a substitute for human words that cost nothing except a tug on the heart of the sender. "Roses are red, violets are blue..." may tell us something about Botany,but not much about how we feel about a mother, father, child, wife, husband, etc... It isn't what cards, flowers and chocolates say to a friend or loved one, it's what they don't say that has transformed the day created in memory of the martyr St. Valentine, to a 'card day' instead of a "I know the sacrifices you've made for me," or "Through all these years you've been the one steady strength for me" or "I have so much pride in you I can hardly contain it" day.

This doesn’t mean I won't send some symbol of hearts or Cupid with his little spears, but with those symbols I will send along my personal thought to family and friends that they are loved, appreciated, remembered, cherished and are forever in my heart as "the sun of my soul." With or without a card or flowers when we care enough to send the very best, we send ourselves, writ by hand.

Looking Forward as well as Backward

2010-01-31T06:15:00.000-08:00

"Thus I ended this month with the greatest
joy that ever I did any in my life, because
I have spent the greater part of it with abundance
of joy and humor, and pleasant journeys, and brave
entertainments, and without cost of money..."
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1661

So now, like Pepys I end the month with great joy. Like him I have spent the greater part of it with humor and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments and some of this costs a bundle so I part ways with Pepys there. I endured the blizzard of '10, remembered January is named after the Roman god Janus who with his 2 faces looks forward as well as backward. I tried to enrich the friendships I have across 3 continents but especially nearby. I celebrated the great Arcangelo Correlli (1653-1713) who filled the world with music and once led an orchestra of 150 violins, experimented with recipes in an international cookbook given me by Amy, fell down on the ice, sang Auld Lange Syne to myself, saw a play, read books, watched "Don Giovanni" on the VCR for the 10th time, kept faithful to the devotional readings of the yearly liturgical calendar and “ thus ended the month with the greatest joy that ever I did any in my life.”

An S is an S is an...

2010-01-26T08:27:00.000-08:00

On one of the worst nights of all the worst nights of the Iwo Jima campaign I fell into a shell hole saturated with the cold rain. In a moment, from out of the darkness, another Marine fell into the hole beside me. In the next few minutes no less than three other Marines took refuge in the hole. In the cold and darkness and steady rain the five of us fitted our bodies together and tried to sleep. We were a human 'S' of bodies, when one turned we all turned. We knew nothing about the 4 others beside us, but in our compactness, we gave warmth and comfort to one another. All this was done without a word being spoken.

"Why," asked the Confederate general James Longstreet during the Civil War, "do men fight when they are meant to be brothers?" I wonder that myself. Some of the worst verbal battles I've seen in my life have been in church meetings. A clergy friend of mine knocked a board member to the floor. Catholics and Protestants in colonial New England, having both found freedom in the new world, proceeded to try to deny that freedom to each other. Husbands and wives, having promised to love and cherish one another, kill one another.

One day, when I was a child, I heard, and probably saw, my first radio. I was told the voices coming from the set were from little men inside. I believed it! My knowledge now enlarged by years and experience tells me the voices I hear come not from the outside but from the inside and that if we are ever to rise above our worst natures we will learn better how to listen to our best natures. This may well consist of not making asses out of ourselves with others but rather making "S's" with them.

I tell you for a truth, an "S" in a shell hole can be amazingly warm and life giving.

The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise...

2010-01-13T06:31:00.000-08:00

I'd rather be a Could-be if I cannot be an Are

Because a Could-be is a maybe reaching for a star-

I'd rather be a Has-been than a Might-have-been by far

For a Might-have-been has never been

But a Has was once an Are.

Good for you, Milton Berle, good for you!!!! in reminding us that the quality of our lives is often a result of what we tried to do and failed more than in what we did successfully. I think that so many of the things I risked in the past now are some of my greatest joys and precious memories. The barriers you and I set up enclosing us are usually self made. "I could never do that," "I would never do that," "What if I fail?", "I'm too old," "Wait until I'm retired," What will the neighbors say?, Better be safe than sorry."

I don't think so and I'd never be dumb enough to say that to Raold Amundsen or Ernest Shackleton or Lucretia Mott or John Glenn or Florence Nightingale or Marie Curie or Sacajawea or... I dare you to endure the scorn and laughter that was heaped on Antonie van Leeuwenhoek when he risked his professional life by declaring diseases were caused by microscopic life forms and not by 'vapors.' Tell the Sherpa guide Norgay not to be the first man to scale Everest because it's too high. I dare you! I dare you to tell Christ to quit making a fool of himself and come down from that cross. I dare you!

The quicker we are to adventure to the east the sooner we see the sunrise.

Goodbye to All That in the New Year

2010-01-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Robert Graves in his autobiography, published in 1930, uses the phrase, "Goodbye to all that" to describe some of his feelings about 'The Great War.' Goodbye to all that seems like as good a theme as any other I know through which we can launch ourselves into the new year. Goodbye to all that is a taking leave of, a putting away, a dropping off, a departure. We move from North Dakota to Miami, that's saying goodbye to cold winters. We move from Miami to Seattle, that's saying goodbye to summer heat and humidity. We take old clothes to Goodwill, we throw away the bandages after laser eye surgery, we "bid a fond adieu" to loved ones at funerals. Goodbye to all that can be a grieving, a thanksgiving, a "remembrance of things past" (Proust).

It can also mean liberation from that past, ("Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last!" MLK). It can mean a new direction for our attitudes, new determination in the face of our faults and weaknesses, ("Never give up, never give up, just never, never, never give up" Jim Valvano of NC State Univ., dying of cancer), and most of all it can mean a cleansing, "Wash me and I Shall be Whiter than Snow." The big and little guilts we carry, the regrets, the sense of something not complete about our lives, is grist for the” goodbye to all that” mill. The New Year is as good a time as any to say goodbye, to put away, to chuck it, to cast it off. Like Robert Graves such a conscious decision to not let the past bog us down in self pity or mindless indecision is like listening to a melody that unchains us. It is like plunging into the waters of the Pool of Bethesda (John 5: 1-9) from which we emerge, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last!

Follow The Star to The Inner Child

2009-12-22T09:12:00.000-08:00

As a child of the 1930's Great Depression many of my memories of Christmas are colored by the number of people who died in those days before antibiotics. Pneumonia, scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, all took their toll and the toll included good friends with whom I went to school and played with. In my book, BITTER HERBS OF MEMORY, I tell of one of these friends, Cecil Holmes. Cecil and I, as children, used to have long conversations concerning things we knew nothing about but which helped to seal our friendship. Cecil was a whiz at Arithmetic and many a time he slipped me the answers to the problems we were working on. I would tell him how awful I felt being dumb at Arithmetic. During the winter of 1935-36, an especially hard winter weather wise and disease wise, Cecil and I talked about things we would like to get for Christmas and Cecil said he would like to have a puppy more than anything. One morning our teacher, Miss Goerlitz, had all of us bow our heads to say a prayer for Cecil's family because Cecil had died during the night of scarlet fever.

In the late summer and early fall a bright star appears in the heavens just ahead of the rising morning sun. That star is Alpha Canis Majoris, the Dog Star, Sirius. It is 23 times brighter than the sun. Sometimes today I look at Sirius in the night sky and I wonder if Cecil had his wish, if he himself rises in the heavens every morning and for no other reason than just for the joy of doing it, works a few Arithmetic problems along in his descent to the horizon just to show his brilliance as he goes soaring high above us 'dumb' earthbound watchers.

And the Star in the East that led to Bethlehem? Could that have been Cecil in his yet-to-be human life? How many of us are led every day to new victories, to new adventures, to new discoveries, because we follow a star that enriches and enobles? I like to think so. I look up into the night sky illuminated by something that thrills me even thought I can't define it. It is a part of the mystery and the miracle of life on earth.
And so, with Tiny Tim, and just maybe with Cecil, I say, "May God bless us everyone."

Come Out to Play, Inner Child

2009-12-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

One morning in late summer, once upon a time, I was getting ready to walk down to my office just a few blocks away. In these daily walks I sometimes passed a house where a little boy could be seen outside mostly just killing time as far as I could tell. I usually spoke to him and now and then I could see a woman whom I assumed was the boy's mother. On this particular day as I was about to leave the house the doorbell rang. When I opened the door and then the outer storm door there stood this little boy. He was holding a bat, glove and ball. When I opened the outer door he said, "Can you come out and play?" It took me all of 5 seconds to answer, "Absolutely! Give me 1 minute."

It took me less time than that to put on jeans and a T-shirt and to go out. The boy and I, his name was Sam, crossed the street in front of my house, and went onto a vacant lot. For the good part of an hour I pitched the ball to him as he became adept at hitting. When I had worn myself out chasing balls hit over my head I told him I needed to get to work but that he could come again and I'd play with him. We did that several times before he started to school in the first grade.

One day when I walked past his house his mother was there. She said to me, "I want to thank you for playing with Sam, his father isn't here anymore and he doesn't have any brothers, he gets lonesome. He told me you had said he might very well play for the Cardinals some day. He was very excited."

"Coming out to play" doesn't have to mean hitting a ball or kicking one around. It can mean letting someone help us with our loneliness or getting rid of old prejudices. It can mean pitching out of our psyche troubling resentments and jealousies that thrive in all of us. It can mean letting out for useful purposes positive, helpful, healing attitudes and acts.

Tell you what! Why don't you get up now from wherever you're seated, during this second week of Advent. Go to the door, open it, and with your very best imagination and playfulness, envision another little boy, having come straight from his house in Nazareth standing there saying to you, "Can you come out and play?"

The Light of The Inner Child Shines

2009-12-11T06:15:00.000-08:00

At different times in the past I've been able to attend one or more of the 8 days of Hanukkah in a Jewish synagogue. Hanukkah is celebrated by Jewish people usually coinciding with the early days of the Christian Advent Season.

Today on this 11th day of Advent Hanukkah begins at sundown. Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication or Feast of Lights, celebrates the rededication of the temple at Jerusalem in 165 BCE. The temple had been razed by Antiochus Epiphanes IV as a part of his effort to wipe out the Jewish Faith. During the 8 days of Hanukkah there is much in parallel with the celebration of Advent, or Christmas. It is a time for the exchange of gifts, the playing of games, and the singing of songs. One of the familiar songs sung especially by Jewish children is "O, Chanukah, O, Chanukah." Among the verses in this exuberant song are these, translated from Hebrew to English:

O, Chanukah, O, Chanukah, come light the Menorah,
Let's have a party, we'll all dance the Horah

Spin the whirling dreidels, all week long
Eating the sizzling latkes, sing a happy song.

Now light them tonight then, the candles all in a row,
We'll tell the wondrous story, of G_d in all His glory,
The wonders of long ago.

I hear this singing about dancing, having a party, spinning, happy songs, and I think, of all the people who have ever graced this earth the Jewish people have the least reason to sing and dance. Persecution has never been absent from their personal and national life. I remember Psalm 137 as the Jewish captives being led away into slavery cry out when commanded to sing by their captors, "How shall we sing the songs of the Lord in this strange land?" Indeed, how can any of us celebrate life in the midst of personal grief, defeat or uncertainty? I think the celebrants of Hanukkah know a thing or two and it's given to us in Psalm 18. "O God, thou dost light my lamp" (the Menorah), "thou dost lighten the darkness" (the end of the Holocaust, 1945), "and by my God I can leap over a wall" (badly burned Glen Cunningham breaking the 4 minute mile).

Hanukkah/Advent/Christmas is about light after darkness, breaking barriers, overcoming obstacles, letting this little light of mine shine, shine, shine!

Gotta do it! It's in us, waiting for just the right moment to come out and sing and dance and play.

Happy Holidays: Welcome Back, Inner Child

2009-12-02T06:02:00.000-08:00

About the middle of November each year The Child in me becomes restless, wanting to come out and play. He emerges from the secret place where's he's been hiding in my innermost being for the past year. The Child waits to see if I'll take his hand and let him lead me. He reminds me it is time to think about Thanksgiving and then to Advent and on to Christmas further down the line. I welcome The Child with joy after so long an absence. We frolic around the house, play games like Cheat-the-Devil and Fox and Geese, if there's snow outside of course. He and I laugh and sing songs and make fools of ourselves and long before either of us is tired of the antics Christmas becomes fixed in my mind and I warn the Child not to go too far away because great and wonderful things are coming down the pike, just over the horizon.

It takes me a while to grow accustomed to this change of seasons but The Child takes the lead. Before I know it I'm thinking pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce and the first Sunday in Advent and after that the journey to refuge far from Herod. Such thoughts take me back each year to my own childhood, to years past. I remember the richness of memory, wonderful things happening, a few defeats, more victories, gains and losses, and those times then when something so magical, so mysterious even, brought tears to my eyes. There was birth and death, pain and healing from pain, so much joy it sometimes nearly smothered me. My need to love often overwhelms me, love for that child next door who is being shuffled around between separated parents, the Thanksgiving dinner for folks at the Salvation Army, the birds that sing so cheerfully in the cold.

My Inner Child is like Christopher Robin in disguise. I hear Christopher Robin say to Pooh, "Promise me you'll always remember, you're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."

The Inner Child that's hidden away in each of us is restless to break out from the long year's confinement. We can make room for him/her and while That Child waits for us to take him by the hand to go out to play we can read the opening lines on page 74 of WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, www.wordplay.ca, Robbins/McConkey.

So, come now, Child, let's you and I go tearing down the path into the woods. Why? Because we're both children, that's why, and because that's what children do.

A Remembrance

2009-11-03T06:47:00.000-08:00

There are times in life when we pause as a reminder to ourselves – a reminder that in spite of the daily grind and routine, there are moments that call out, asking us to mark them in some special way. This blog entry represents just such a moment - it is a tribute to two special people whose lives intersected with mine over 60 years ago.

With never “a murmur nor repine” we went gaily off to war together from the Grainfield, Kansas railroad station, Henry, Loren and I. Henry and I came home with our gaiety diminished by one. Loren was buried at sea after Saipan. He had been a gift from the fertile earth, a child of the land, dust and furrows, seeds in springtime, the birthing of piglets, the crowing of cocks and the currying of favors from the unpredictable seasons. No form or logic can account for such a terrestrial child lying down to abide peacefully in the immensities of Poseidon’s immersing embrace.

Except, perhaps as Mother Earth and Poseidon together agreed to give back in equal measure what had been lost at Saipan. Henry became surrogate for the missing Loren. In seedtime and harvest, sun and rain, calm and storm, Henry took up Loren’s stewardship of the land, herder of herds, shepherd of lambs, mender of fences. Henry gave away his gaiety on the islands of the Pacific. There is a completion to things, a time of seasons, interconnectedness, stretching all the way from Grainfield, Kansas to Saipan to Iwo Jima and islands beyond. This completion is a gathering convocation of three small-town boys guided through the somberness of war by the cheer of peace.

This is written in memory of Loren Ikenberry and Henry Doxon and our lost fraternity.

Photo above: (From left), Henry, Loren and Clarence, Grainfield Train Station, September 20, 1943, awaiting the train to take them to Marine base in San Diego.

The Joy of Blogging

2009-10-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

I got to wondering the other day why the word "blog" is so loosely defined in the nomenclature of internet language. We know what an email is, we know what 'Send' means and we know precisely how to Spell Check. What we don't seem to know is how to define "blog" except to say it is an exercise in opionating (which is a word not found in my dictionary so that's consistent with the nebulous nature of "blogging."). All this has to do, if indeed it has to do with anything, with getting something off our chests (which hasn't anything to do with chests but with our brains because that's where ideas are). I like to think there's something really profound back of all this, but for the life of me I can't think of what it is.

That's the joy of blogging you see, a blog can mean whatever the blogger wants it to mean and whatever the reader of the blog thinks it means. One thing I do know, it's what's written on page 42 of WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, (Robbins-McConkey; Wordplay.ca, 2008:
Waters of mountains, waters of God
Cleanse us, renew us, so shabbily shod
Rios de Chile, streams of burnt snow
Melt us, toe us, beyond friend or foe.
Currents so fast, pools deep and clear
Tune us, quiet our hearts still to hear
Lord of the River, God of the Stream
Teach us your song, our dryness redeem.
-Carla Piette

My love for you, Sister Piette, is saddened by your death by drowning in El Salvador while rescuing a political prisoner.

Music–Divine Therapy for Inner Harmony

2009-09-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

My music calendar shows me that this is the 218th anniversary of the premier of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" in Vienna, with Mozart himself furnishing the background music from the harpsichord. After 218 years the music from this opera, however many times we've heard it, still inspires, thrills and even sometimes brings tears of laughter and sadness to our eyes. Music does this, poetry does this, a good book can do this and certainly love can do this. I like to think that music that "hath charms to soothe the savage breast" is something that comes directly from God as a part of faith's consolation and therapy. My daughter Amy and I will be speaking at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona over the weekend and one of the things I want to say in my "brief hour on the stage" is music was created in the heavenly realm to compensate for our inability, or refusal, to hear the Divine Voice in any other way, such as through art, literature or the wisdom of children.

I think Mozart knew a thing or two about God that we, who are less than he himself or Beethoven or John Denver, have trouble hearing. A child born deaf or who loses hearing through a childhood disease may very well hear celestial things hidden from those of us who have “normal hearing." In our book Whirlwinds and Small Voices, Amy and I write of ways in which the Creator/creating God uses music to do the soothing of our distresses. As the troubled Saul looked to the singing of David for rest and peace so in like manner can we use such divine therapy for our own inner harmony. It works; try it! Sing, hum, whistle, croak it out, make a sound, the whole world will hear you and thank you. Perhaps you’ll share with us a way that music has led you to an inner harmony.

Happy Monday... remember Tuesday, too

2009-09-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

I've often had the thought that there must have been something clever (Godlike?) about the way life is fixed so we automatically pass from one day to the next. If a day didn't pass, actually end, until we had done everything we needed to do, did the forgiving we needed to do, the loving we needed to do, the getting over our mistakes we needed to do, most of us would still be on the first Monday of our lives. Thanks be to God we're going to be given Tuesday however we might have messed up Monday. Tuesday is often a better time to straighten up Monday than if we tried to do it on Monday. I personally like the last line of the poem, “New Every Morning” on page 15 of WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES (Wordplay.ca):

Every day is a fresh beginning
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And in spite of old sorrows
And older sinning
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.
- Susan Coolidge

"Take heart with the day and begin again." See what a new day can do? I was supposed to write this blog yesterday but I blew it. Now there is opportunity to do it in a new day. What a blast! Today I may even forgive those bunnies out there eating away at my garden. Yesterday I wasn't ready to do that, today I am., AMAZING! Who have you forgiven today now that you've had time to sleep on it? I'm going to get out of here and go bake a bunch of peanut butter cookies and take them down to my shut-in neighbor. Wanna come with me? Just send me your affirmative and good for you! Onward Christian soldiers, going as to war with peanut butter cookies!!!

What’s Your Secret Recipe for Vital Balance?

2009-09-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

Don't we sometimes take on the weight of the world without having to do so? We say, "If I just had more time," when all the while we've had all the time there is, 24 hours a day just like everybody else, no more, no less. God didn't invent an eight-day work week, friends. Haven't we sometimes thought we ought to get up early in the day to help the sun rise when what we ought to have done was to get up to see the sun rise. This is one of the themes Amy and I will be discussing in our keynote address at the upcoming conference, “Investing in Family Support,” October 4 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

How many times have we wished for an extra day or just a few more minutes in the day? It's a natural instinct. Learning the nature of the Vital Balance (a term coined by the legendary Dr. Karl Menninger) is what counts, measuring our commitment to our work by our commitment to our own personal growth and enrichment of our spirit.

You agree? Disagree? Maybe you have a secret recipe for achieving Vital Balance in life and work. Share it with us. Perhaps it could inspire someone else.

Can't Give What We Don't Have

2009-09-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

That’s as true for parents, clergy, therapists and educators as it is for the Salvation Army when it has run out of money. Parents can't teach their children to be good citizens with those parents speeding 70 miles an hour in a 35 mph zone. Doctors who hold an MRI film up to the light and see a trip to Paris will never have a patient thank him/her for caring. In working with children with special needs, the heart of our new book, the worker/parent/therapist/clergy person/educator is reminded that a child recognizes instantly sham, pretense, and false caring.

Have you experienced this when interacting with a child, either in an educational or conversational setting?

What about the little boy in the restaurant whose parents ordered broiled fish and broccoli for themselves, and when the waitress asked him what he wanted, he replied, “I’d like a hamburger.” His dad jumped in “Oh no, he doesn’t. He’ll have broiled fish.” The waitress replied to the young boy, “And what will you have on your hamburger?” The boy turned to his parents and said, “See….she thinks I’m a real person.” What parent hasn’t reacted in a way that unintentionally denies his child’s status as a “real person?”

Getting in touch with who we are as “real persons”, or as A. Lincoln said, “the better angels of our nature,” makes us all more authentic - whatever we are and who we would like the children to think we are. Daughter Amy and I will be speaking on topics related to recognizing children as real persons, burnout and the “vital balance” when we present the keynote address at the Investing In Family Support conference in Scottsdale next month. You can find more information at: http://www.infanthearing.org/events/ifsc_agenda.html.

BLOG #2—The First Day of Re-creation

2009-08-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

Well, once I tried beginning the week with Tuesday, it didn't work because Tuesday was dependent on what had happened on Monday, you know, the thigh bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected to the... everything is connected to something and the beginning of the week is connected to Monday for most folks, with the exception of those believers who believe the first day of the week is Sunday.

At any rate, to get going in the workaday world we start on Monday and that's where Robbins-McConkey start in their new book. . . . . . . . . . "Monday's child is full of grace," we're told in that beautiful poem. Monday is our beginning again, our beginning of re-creation, beginning over, beginning in spite of yesterday, beginning when we thought something was the end, a failure, a divorce, a meltdown in the stock market.

Genesis tells us God began the world on Monday, the first day and that's where we can begin with new life, the renewal of our efforts, forgiveness after sin, wholeness after brokenness, light after darkness.

Got a good thing going here. God, let me in on it and this first page of the book is a zinger—can't wait for page 2. Read it! Be new in the Good News!

BLOG # 1

2009-08-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

Lots of things around these days telling us about creation. We've got History Channel, Science channels, National Geographic, academia, journals and magazines all along the library bookshelf. This is good because it keeps us up to date on stars, planets, black holes, novas, galaxies and new discoveries from OUT THERE!!! What is lacking in this surfeit of things related to the universe we inhabit is RE-CREATION, making things new, starting over, doing it from the ground up, becoming something we've not been so far. Can't start the universe over but we can start ourselves over. A great book just off the publisher's press, WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, co-authored by me and my daughter, Amy McConkey Robbins.

It says exactly what the Re-Creation process is for any living human being. Looking out like toward the Milky Way is one thing but it doesn't change the Milky Way. Looking inward can change everything. The authors tell us how this can be done. In this blog, I will take you through the seven-day cycle of re-creation of the spirit, just as Genesis tells of the seven-day cycle of Creation. In short segments, you’ll get a sense of both the spiritual and secular practices that contribute to one’s re-creation. By the way, others have told us that this is a great book! Get a copy at Wordplay Publishing, www.wordplay.ca for only $14.95 plus shipping. Or just read the blog and see what wonders of re-creation are in store for you!