On Light Lifting: How Hard Do You Work?

The Melbourne Cup favourite, Admire Rakti, returned to his stall after finishing last in the race, and suddenly died. Due to his previous wins, the horse was carrying an unusually heavy 58.5 kg, although the weight itself was not apparently implicated in his death. An autopsy discovered a rare condition called ventricular fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm that may occur in athletes — humans as well as horses — in which the heart is unable to pump blood leading to collapse and death. The very strength of his heart and the speed of the race might contribute to the electrical imbalance that led to Admire Rakti’s heart failure.

            Is it possible to be too strong?

            Racehorses are born and bred to run under a set of strict conditions. They’re carefully vetted as valuable animals whose fate may be involved with millions in money. Things like weight and distance, age and form are considered in assessing a horse’s suitability for certain races and tracks. Admire Rakti had just won the Caulfield Cup which led to the extra .5 kg he was carrying.

            Is it possible to be too successful?

            I once met at a day care centre a lady called Alice, only 48 years old, yet unable to take care of herself because of her damaged memory. Alice, a school cleaner, had a heart attack at work. Now she couldn’t be left alone to make a cup of tea. But she had some memories. “I didn’t know how hard I was working,” she said. She said it again and again; she couldn’t remember she’d already said it once.

            Do you know how hard you’re working?

            We’ve spoken of the heart in the body: what about the other heart, that rules your emotions? Can the mind break, the heart break, the spiritual commitment even break? Is it possible to work too hard?

            Jesus invited the crowds that came out to see John the Baptist, the people so heavily burdened, “Come to me, and I will rest you.” It’s not the giving of a rest that’s like a cloudy feather bed where you can lie down and go to sleep. It’s the order of a master to his slaves who’ve been doing some heavy lifting: sit down and take a spell. He works them; but then he rests them.

            Heavy lifting can be sustained for only so long. Extreme speed, success, achievement can only win for so long. Unlike many masters, he respects their limitations. Do you respect your limitations?

            Heavy lifting seems to be much admired these days. We’re not supposed to have limitations. What about some light lifting?

            We could respect the rhythms of our minds and hearts and even our souls and spirits. Is it really necessary to move so fast? It’s very unlikely that you have to run like a racehorse. Nor do you need a penalty weight following your latest success. The practice of something tending to failure might be good for you: I play the piano, despite having a pinched nerve in my neck, which guarantees me a little wholesome failure every day.     

            I can recommend light lifting. Do you know how hard you work? Jesus had another idea. Take a rest, now and then.

On the Blessing of Gay Marriage.

When I was studying at UFT, I took a course called Liturgical Sources. A primary source of liturgy is Blessing. To illustrate the blessing formula, each of the students had to create a blessing for the marriage of Adam and Eve. When it came to my turn, I said, “I’m going to bless the marriage of Adam and Steve.”

            My blessing ran, “Blessed are You, Lord God, Creator of Love, who has caused your Son Jesus Christ to be born of a Virgin, to be our Light and Salvation: we thank you for the love between Adam and Steve, that we celebrate here today, and for the uniting of their families through their union. We pray that you will give them length of days together, in unity, patience, wholeness and joy, that they may serve as an example of true affection, faithfulness, and care, and  through their marriage enrich their families, their friends, and all who come to know them. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.

            The Jesuits who were taking this course with me thought this was a fine blessing: they particularly liked the part about uniting the families. Marriage was always a family affair, and this is one reason why gay marriage is so important. The churches should lead the way even if the state resists something ‘different.’ The church should be blessing gay marriages no matter what the state thinks.

            Families like marriages. (They love weddings!) You know who your family is with marriages. For who is my brother’s husband but my brother-in-law? You can have more people in your family. That’s a consideration for some of us. And you can openly acknowledge your family, which is something that more and more straight people want to do and are doing: this is my brother, my sister, his husband, her wife.

            Then there’s the blessing that gay marriage is. Rather like the blessing that any marriage is. You could get to the point of dropping the word ‘gay’ and understand that when two people commit themselves to love and be faithful, to share and support, to protect and serve one another the whole social fabric is strengthened.

            Since I’m supposed to be writing about social justice here, I’ll just mention that of the 2500 annual suicides in this country, as many as one third may be gay, with young persons particularly vulnerable. I’ll never forget a significant churchman saying, one day, that when he was a child a gay couple had visited his parents’ church for a while. They didn’t stay, but, he said, “they meant the world to me, because for the first time in my life I saw that I might have a future.” This man deserves to stand at the altar and exchange his vows with his husband. Every gay child deserves to look forward to having a future: the lack of that perspective (among other factors) can lead to death.

            What is marriage? It is a bond that, as St. Paul says, contains sexual desires and places them in a context of family belonging. It may often (not always) lead to the birth of children who must be cared for, educated and protected in a set of secure relationships. Hence it is a collective, not only an individual, responsibility: all the family is involved.  It is, as the Prayer Book has it, ‘an honourable estate’ if by honour we mean the public acknowledgement of worth and value. Married people are esteemed and respected wherever the family is regarded.  Therefore the church needs, in its pastoral oversight, to bless gay marriages. Blessing gives life, hope, love, light, and value: it is a chief Christian action, Blessing, in the name of Jesus Christ, who blessed all the world.

On Praise: All Saints.

Thomas Aquinas was a wordy man. But what attracts me is his life. All those words spilled in combat with the Gnostic heretics, who claimed that the world was created by an evil spirit. Not perhaps entirely different from today, when some claim that the world is created by nobody. Surely not the right spirit.

            It has all the ingredients of a good fairy tale. The castle, the seven brothers, the imprisoned prince, the mysterious Quest. Aquinas’ cousin was the Holy Roman Emperor. The seven brothers’ favourite thing was fighting: big landholders fighting other big landowners. Aquinas was the strange fairytale hero whose childhood question — What is God? — fuelled the incessant reading that disturbed his family: they were religious, of course, as everybody in the thirteenth century was religious, but Thomas was taking things too far. There’s a place for people like him. The local Benedictine monastery will do fine: let’s make him the abbot! (Monte Cassino, no less.)

            That’s the kind of family he has: Let’s make him take a vow of stability, run the monastery like a real aristocrat, deal with all the admin and the personalities, do a little reading in his spare time. No, says Thomas. The brothers tried everything: they kidnapped him, locked him up in the castle, locked him in with a pretty girl. He threw her out, escaped, and took to the roads as a wandering friar.

            Let’s see the world! Of course, since he’d joined the frightfully exciting Dominican preachers, he had a Dominican boss: you nearly always have someone to obey, in the thirteenth century. You will see Paris, he’s told: specifically you’ll see the University of Paris. He won’t be the last young person to be directed thus.

            Thomas was wordy, but also silent. The words were all inside. They called him ‘the dumb ox’ because he had so little to say. When the words came out, they smashed the heretics’ case.

            Dominicans like to praise God: naturally enough, God must first exist to make this possible. I sympathise: when I look around, I see much to praise. In yesterday’s hailstorm I saw the red young maple leaves tossed upside down, showing silvery undersides amongst the red in the Japanese garden. Praise. Of course. What else?

            All Hallows: all saints praise God. Francis famously praised God in nature: earth, air, fire and water. Benedict, whose name means ‘blessed’ listened carefully for praise of God in every soul. Thomas followed the Dominican way: praise, bless, preach. The first of his preaching is the existence of God. Otherwise, he said, there’s nothing to discuss.

            The God of Exodus is named I AM. Existence is the basic quality. Thomas, in the end, lost all his words. Praying before an icon of Christ, he fell into trance and had a mystical experience that changed his life. He no longer wrote a word. He had received the only thing he wanted: his Lord. Soon after, he died.

             His Lord, Jesus, called himself the Truth. As truth is, God is. Is this logic, or faith? Praise is a sure thing. All saints, praise God.

             

On pins and needles.

It started with tingling in my fingers: pins and needles. I found myself at St. Vincent’s having a nerve conduction test to see if my elbow was transmitting trouble to my hand.  The gentle, concentrated Indian doctor moved her soft dark hands across my pale, cool skin placing and releasing electrodes. Ten lists this week: she did nine of them. Elbow, wrist, arm, hand, fingers, small electric shocks invading nerve paths, something external controlling me from within: only a small amount of pain, but a disconcerting twitch that becomes a shade more daunting when it becomes a repeating drumbeat.

            I couldn’t help knowing that somewhere in some leather bar people are enjoying electric shocks with their sexual passion; or that somewhere, under grave duress, others are suffering shock torture inflicted by politics, religion, or simply the whim of their captors. We’re only trying to find out the truth here.

            The shocks failed to reveal the real situation, so we had to have some needles. A little more pain with this: sharpness, particularly in the wrist, as I had to bend the wrist ever farther, deeper into the pain. I wouldn’t like to dramatise this sharpness. Elbow, arm, hand, wrist, little dots that remain on the skin for a day or so but do no lasting harm, little cross marks inked into place where the needle has to go.

            I looked out the window over the roofs of the hospital complex and leaned into this really negligible pain. Crucifixus etiam pro nobis came into my mind: so why is the Creed a proper subject for reflection while the machine (rather noisy) roars away recording (Recordare) the flinching of my nerves for future reference? I’m no Latinist; I can hardly conjugate a verb. But I do listen to quite a lot of music.

            The most famous needle in the New Testament is the one whose eye the camel can’t get through. Or can it? Does this animal have magical properties derived from modern physics where a wave is a particle and a particle is a wave? The Kingdom of God is hard to get into, especially if you’re rich. Therefore be poor. And the disciples say: ‘Who then can be saved?’ We’re only trying to get at the truth here.

            Remember, gentle Jesus, that you did it all for me: for us, pro nobis, for all of us. If I can lie there, invaded by needles, pricked by physical pain— however limited— and yet find myself without guile in the presence of the truth of our salvation, it only proves one thing. Wherever you are, wherever you go, the Divine will remind you of itself.

            Everything in this story is small: little pains, small needles, very small camel. Only the truth is great.

On Knowing Who You Are

I had a dream where I was confused about who I was, where I was, who I was with, and when it was. I thought I was living in the past, when my husband was alive, and I was concerned that my dogs had not been fed as we moved from one house to another. I wanted to go back and feed them. Yet at some level, I knew I belonged in the present, at yet another address, with different dogs who had certainly been fed last night. What was I looking for? Why did I think I was moving from place to place? Why didn’t I know when I was living?

            When I awoke, this reminded me of Jesus’ question to his disciples: ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’ and then his second question: ‘Who do you say I am?’ In ancient times, it mattered very much what other people think of you. Ideally, it should agree with what you think of yourself. What God thinks of you, God knows.

            It matters even more what people say about you. ‘For what is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?’ This passage in Luke 9 raises the likelihood of being shamed because the Son of Man is ashamed of them. That is being cast away: we can’t trust you, because you have been ashamed of us. On the one hand, the disciples are told to be silent, but on the other hand, something honourable has to be said. How to get out of this dilemma?

            I’m afraid the world is full of prominent people who have lost themselves although they appear to have gained the whole world. It’s a mistake to envy them. Not a few examples come to mind, from politicians to business leaders to entertainment stars. Would you, in cold blood, want to change places with them? Would you like their ruthlessness, crudity and greed charged to your account? Who are they? Who are you?

            Who was I in my dream? A mean person who doesn’t feed her dogs? An anxious person trying to live up to responsibilities? Someone who moves around all the time? Someone who stays in the same place all the time? Someone living in the past, or trying to regain the past? But I knew the present existed. Those were good times, but these are good times too.

            There seemed to be a page unturned, and it had to do with feeding the dogs. Anyone who knows me knows I love dogs. Maybe I need to do more loving of dogs. More loving in general. Some people might believe I think too much, and feel too little. It doesn’t feel that way. Maybe I love thinking about ideas. Although there are surely ideas I wouldn’t cross the street for.

            I love the city where I live, so I photograph it, and its people, and its dogs. Who are we? Are we who people say we are, or who our friends think we are, or who we say we are in dreams, in public, or privately to ourselves? Or all of the above, whether in a parallel or a circular pattern? What God thinks of us, God knows.

On Ignorance

To the Buddhist tradition, suffering is caused by three poisons: hatred, greed, and ignorance. And the greatest of these is ignorance. From ignorance both hatred and greed arise.

            The Nobel Peace Prize has been shared this year between a young Muslim girl and an old Hindu man. Malala Yousafzai is 17 years old, and Kailash Satyarthi is 60. Malala, who began her speech at the United Nations in 2013 with the Muslim declaration: ‘In the Name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful’ was shot in the head by the Taliban because of her advocacy for girls’ education. Mr. Satyarthi, inspired by Gandhi, has helped free an estimated 70,000 children from slavery in India which is a major slave trafficking nexus and destination, through founding the Save the Childhood Movement and the Global March Against Child Labour. He believes that freedom is a divine gift that should not be taken away by slavery.

            Both of these heroes, the Muslim and the Hindu, would, I think, agree that childhood should be a time of learning. Not of working endless hours in a rug factory, or being mutilated to beg on the street, or being locked up in the house without instruction, or being armed and forced to fight and not to read. Jesus said, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do’ but they did plenty. Ignorance is an enemy.

            Pope Francis addressed a similar idea on the morning the Peace Prize was announced. Do we know what is happening in our hearts? he asked. What are the results of not knowing? Have we let in jealousy or envy (greed) without being aware of it? Have we let in hatred? Do we keep open house for every kind of delusion, without discrimination?

            The sin of Adam was not to aspire to knowledge, but to taste specifically the knowledge of good and evil: such knowledge belongs to God. Hatred can appear when we think we know, and don’t know. Those who hate Muslims because of the war crimes in the Middle East should observe that Malala is a Muslim. Christians who think that ‘God hates fags’ could learn that God hates nothing that God has made, that they should forgive their brother seventy times seven, and perhaps it would be a good idea to forgive themselves a few more times than that, for luck.

            Pope Francis advised the Ignatian practice of examination of conscience as an antidote to ignorance. At the end of the day, he says, you should interrogate your heart, the heart that is the seat of thought and reverence, as well as attachment and emotion. What has happened? he asks. What devils have you let in? What could be the results? What might they make you do?

            God is beneficent. God is merciful. It’s humankind, prey to the three poisons of hatred, greed and ignorance, who need to spend our childhood in learning, in peace, without being bought and sold, or confined and forbidden, or enslaved or brutalised. It’s we adults who need to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts with learning that treats of mercy and compassion. And blessed be God who gives us guidance through heroes like Malala Yousafzai, Kailash Satyarthi, and Pope Francis.

On Energy.

I have a dog who is a minimum energy expenditure animal. He’s had a traumatic time in his life, so now he wants rest and recovery. His favourite thing is sleeping. When I get up in the morning I go to check whether he’s still breathing: he sleeps so deeply I have to watch close for the subterranean rise and fall of his reassuring breath. He’ll eventually stagger to his feet, accept a dog biscuit, and find his way down to the lawn where he takes up his daytime position for sleep.

            What is energy? My dictionary speaks of vigour or vitality, ability for intense application of force, activity, or power. According to the laws of physics, energy has different roles, different works that it is called upon to perform. Kinetic energy moves things. Vigour is a drive to health and growth in living beings, which translates into forceful expression, physical or mental. Vitality is related to energy with the added component of enthusiasm or animating force of life.

            You’ll know what it is when you haven’t got it. When people are physically or psychologically drained, that sounds much like a battery that has run down and needs to be recharged. With energy. The question is: how?

            When I consult books on how to get more energy, they tend to emphasis chemical energy, in the form of food, drugs, even internal chemicals such as adrenalin. Sugar, for example, adds energy in the short term, but may deplete it further on. Certain vitamins are necessary to life: a lack of energy may be a symptom of malnutrition. Good food, sufficient sleep (a lot more than you think) and good health (absence of disease and often, its medications) all tend to giving energy.

            Some things encourage mental energy. Actual interest is one of them. The greater the interest, the more energy for investigation. In this, interest is akin to love. The more love, the more attention is likely to be given, leading to more interest and more love. I was once told that you have to fall in love with a PhD project, because eventually you’ll come to hate it. You need a lot of interest to begin with.

            Some things deplete mental, psychological or emotional energy. Worry is one of them. Unfortunately, worry is a genetic trait; I have my share of it. Just give it back to your ancestors and let them carry it. Another is confusion. Clarity about what is actually happening is energising. The rose-coloured glasses are not helpful; neither are the dark dark glasses. Clear glass is the best. You can see through it.

            To become energetic, the self-help books advise surrounding yourself with energetic people. Real can-do types. I know many people who can and do get things done, but I don’t know anyone who’s charged with energy all the time. People generally seem to be looking for help from each other. As St. Paul says, no one has all the gifts, but people’s abilities complement one another. If you look around, you’re likely to see someone who has the answer to your problem.

            People long for love and attention, and that is best addressed by loving. Love and interest will carry you a long way. It will lead to the giving of attention, which generates its own energy.

            And I’ve found that I can take a leaf from my dog, the gentle rise and fall of his breath, taking a rest when it’s needful, taking a space between moments of energy. It’s not gone; it will come back. Animating life.