Sin

Starting in September, when the Unity church year began, we've been urged to consider one theological topic per month. We've thought about redemption, prayer, gratitude, and more.

This month, the topic is sin. The obvious first step in thinking about sin to name the seven deadlies, which I could not do without wikipedia, (which cited Dante).

They are:

Lust: "Excessive love of others, which renders devotion to God secondary."

Gluttony: Consumption to the point of waste.

Avarice: The acquisition of wealth.

Sloth, originally acedia, a refusal to enjoy the goodness of God and the world God created; what we would now call depression. Also, refusal to act on one's gifts.

Wrath: Inordinate and uncontrolled feelings of hatred and anger, leading inevitably to violence.

Envy:"Love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs," says Dante.

Pride: Excessive love of self.

Rob Eller-Isaacs usefully emphasized the other day that sin is not about sexuality, despite the ceaseless association of the two by organized religion and by the sex industry. Simply put, as Unitarian-Universalists see it these days, sin means "closing one's eyes and hardening one's heart."

This strikes me as a useful definition, one simple way of encompassing the list above—except perhaps sloth.

Sloth—as in the refusal to act on one's gifts—gets first place in the Sin Lineup for me, because it is so seemingly innocuous. Laziness is laughable, harmless, a slow, goofy-looking creature hanging from a tree. Yet a slothful response to any of the other sins—observed or manifested in oneself—leaves them unchecked.

Sloth is reading at the dinner table because it is too much work to connect in conversation again with a family member; sloth is tossing the recyclable plastic yogurt container in the trash and later buying a Tupperware one at Target to store food; sloth is neglecting a discipline of meditation and reading or an afternoon discipline of housework and exercise. Sloth is turning away from the about-to-be homeless neighbor because it's too much work to imagine her moving in, even temporarily.

Sloth is the opposite of joy, in my book, the opposite of grateful eagerness to appreciate everything life/god has to offer, and a lazy refusal to offer one's gifts in return. I'm thinking that for me, evidence of sloth is re-resolving, month after month, and year after year, to use my gift of creativity to write something more challenging than a blog about sin--to really write about what matters most.

Girlie image from www.likecool.com/Home/Accessories/Sin in Linen 2008 Pinup Calendar. Sloth image from www.static.howstuffworks.com

Listing

I've been a creature of to-do lists, perhaps ever since I realized that my Daddy made 'em.

Somehow I inherited his addiction to resolutions, goal-setting, plans and projections. One of my favorite things is to make a table. Or a chart or a matrix. An outline is good, too.I've been known to make lists of things to do in a given month, then go back and break it down into tasks for each week and then to itemize the weeks's into days. Of course I use different colored legal pads for each type of time--month, day, week.

It's ironic, I suppose, since I don't think my father was particularly good at getting things actually accomplished. (Actually, the story goes that he was so addicted to seeming organized that as a boy he would fill in his diary in advance, as if to double the odds that he would get things done.)

Tony, who makes no lists, is far more diligent than I about finishing any project he starts. I know the truth, that for me, (and possibly this was true for my father) making lists and plans is in fact a way of procrastinating, a way of feeling like I'm actually almost done, when actually I've only conceived of myself doing. I'm always transferring tasks from one week's list to the next--or copying one year's list of resolutions on to the next.

I found this "To Do Tattoo" on a website fittingly entitled "craphound.com." I get the picture. Sometimes lists are just a way of filling your brain with crap, instead of concentrating on the present moment. But perhaps I'm like the Russian Olympic athletes (I forget which kind) who were told to visualize in their minds' eye each move of a winning swim or race.

Each stroke.
Each muscle flex. Each breath.
Each step toward the finish line.

Or perhaps my lists are my way of being intentional, of acknowledging that time is finite, and at least I want to try to fill it right.

And so, as silly as they can sometimes get, I won't give up my lists. I'll just try to spend less time making them, and more time acting on them.

Smiling at each other

I've always like Maira Kalman's style, though her subject matter is sometimes too arch and New York-precious for me. But this series of drawings that she did to commemorate a trip to DC for the Obama inauguration (including a still life of the plastic flowers in the Walt Whitman rest stop along the highway, and the portrait, above, of a smiling museum guard at the National Gallery—something one rarely sees) really captured the sense of the day for me. A colleague described these last two weeks as feeling like "I'm coming out of the fallout shelter and rubbing my eyes in wonder...." And maybe seeing an unexpected smiling face or two. See the rest of these charming works at the New York Times website (search for "Hallelujah!").

Advice for the President

Today is the presidential inauguration, and in the welter of hopes and fervent expectations about Obama's tenure in the White House, I can feel certain about only one thing: they should adopt a dog. Not just any dog: a mutt, perhaps the ugliest mutt they can find, and one from a rescue organization.

We got Archie, our nutty, clever terrier mix, from Midwest Animal Rescue Society (MARS), a group of insanely devoted volunteers who run a sort of underground railroad for dogs. Originally housed in an Arkansas shelter, Archie was slated for euthanasia because, according to MARS, the shelter"warden" was going on vacation, and had no one to substitute for him. Archie made it up here in a crate, driven in a series of hand-offs from Beebe to Saint Paul, arriving on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

He's a great little dog; responsive, enthusiastic, so eager to please. He spends hours looking out the glass kitchen door, watching "squirrel TV"; released into the yard, he literally climbs into the low crook of our biggest apple tree, trying to get at the squirrels bobbing on branches 15 feel above him. In addition to his kooky determination, he overflows with goodwill; he adores people and other dogs, and generally approaches his life with full-tilt joy. Not a bad role model.

He's counterpoint to Zooey, the Old Black Lab-ish One, who at 15 or 16 (one fact about shelter dogs; you generally don't know quite how old they are) is meditative, slow and creaky from painful arthritis. Archie livens her up, though, forcing her to compete with him for food and attention, keeping her active and at play outside more often than she would on her own. But she is her own sort of model; contemplative and uncomplaining in old age, modest in her needs; still elegant and dignified, and still capable of showing her teeth when provoked beyond tolerance.

I wouldn't consider having only one dog again; it's so obvious how much companionship Archie and Zooey afford one another. And, different as they are, the two of them offer me their contrasting ways of approaching life, undergirded by the same basic, undying love and devotion. So, I amend my advice. Barack—Michelle—don't just get one mutt. Get two.

Another teacher gone

I'm thinking today—as I have been since last Friday, when they told me he had a massive stroke, with bleeding on the brain stem—of my old friend and neighbor Richard Williams.

There's probably no way Richard would have been my friend, had he not been my next door neighbor: one BIG reason to be grateful for the motley assortment of recent immigrants, old and young hippies, striving single mothers and assorted weirdos who live on our block.

We are a true Cannery Row—sometimes violent, often rude, always struggling with the basic neighborhood niceties of garbage pick-up and alley plowing and keeping the noise down. A man was murdered on the street a block down this summer, gunned down in the street. Darin, the cop who lives three doors down, has repeatedly busted the young Asian hoodlums who run a chop shop in the vacant garage in the middle of the block. We've had pit bulls chase kids home from the bus stop. Once an arsonist tried to burn our garage down.

In the midst of all this Richard floated serene, with a kindly greeting for everyone, literally everyone who would look his way. This was a man who seemed made of love. He loved his son Bobby the cop, whose trained police dog Rico made the papers for chasing down some goon. He loved his gorgeous little granddaughters Tiedra and Tiara, who stopped by for breakfast with him every morning before heading for the bus. He loved their mom, who lives in an apartment complex just down the block, and he loved his two other daughters who lived far away—carefully re-hanging the fussy dried flower wreath that one of them insisted went so beautifully in his living room, right before she arrived for a visit.

But he also seemed to love the mailman, and the pants-sagging hoodlums who wander down the street, and the day care kids who would stream down the sidewalk past his gate as he hung over it and blessed them on their way with his greeting. I never heard him speak harshly about any of our neighbors, even the ones who deserved it, even the ones who obviously thought of him as just another old black guy—a former porter on the railroad, a pool shark, a poor man all his life.

As far as I know, Richard didn't vote, though he kept abreast of some current events. He didn't fret about about his undoubtedly tiny pension, about our troubled block, or anything in the temporal world. He believed in miracles and in the literal word of the Bible, dressing up several times a week for his visits to the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall on Hague Avenue. Surely he was a respected elder there; many women from the Hall came by whenever he was ill to help cook, clean or manage the garden. But he never proselytized; at least not to us.

No, our interactions were that classic blend of practical information and teasing banter that is the best sort of communication between neighbors. We'd remind him of snow emergencies and he'd pick up our mail when we were out of town. We'd tease him about his hatred of the gorgeous old elm tree that loomed over his house for so many years; how he hated that "dirty tree" for its massive leaf drop and twig showers, and how he missed its shade when it finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease! We helped him lay new sod on his tiny front lawn, and marveled that he would pay Chemlawn to spray their poisons on it once a week. We smelled his peppery barbecue marinades and salivated at the roasted game hens he would sometimes bring over for us as a treat.

I went in his house only a half-dozen times, only for brief chats; we weren't close that way. In winter, weeks would go by when we didn't see him, and could only watch to make sure his sidewalk go shoveled by one of the legion of us who vied to do it first. But Richard and I talked over the fence nearly every day, summer after summer, and we shared the care of the flaming red maple sapling that he planted on the boulevard right between our two houses, after the elm came down.

And when we got back from Bolivia and I saw Richard outside, watering that little tree, I felt a such a rush of homecoming. I bounded out of the car and ran over to hug him. He said "Hey kid! Don't you ever go away like that again!" I know he is happy in his heaven, but how I wish I could say that to him right now.

Little Tippy

Back in November, Tippy the Party Poodle caught some sort of respiratory bug. He coughed, first delicately and later helplessly, and declined precipitously in the last two weeks, refusing food, becoming skeletal and lethargic, and groaning a little with each breath he took.

We took him in to the animal clinic a couple of times for antibiotics, but the vet was unable to prescribe anything useful. Finally, after realizing that Tippy would not improve on his own, we went back in late on a Friday night. We were the last customers. The tech put an IV in Tippy's forepaw, and as I held him, the vet injected a full syringe of bright blue barbiturate. The effect was almost instant; although his heart beat on for a minute or two and he was still warm, his little body felt like it deflated in my arms.

We buried Tippy the following morning, in the back yard under the east-leaning dogwood tree. It was surely a kindness to take him to the vet for his lethal overdose, and yet I felt miserable seeing his curly, stuffed-toy body so rigid in death. Such a contrast between the live, obnoxious, silly Tippy, tearing in circles around the yard, and the stiff little body we brought home in a clear plastic box!

This contrast troubled me all day, as my feelings of specific sympathy for Tippy’s suffering mixed with a generalized sorrow that anything and everything must die. I thought about Janne and Rob’s son Jonah, in his late 20s, so bravely confronting a recurrence of melanoma. In the afternoon I got an email from my friend Marcia saying that her husband has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, a particularly aggressive kind. Death and its harbingers were too present.

That evening, as I lay in corpse pose after yoga exercises at the Y, I had a powerful vision of Tippy. Not surprisingly, at the end of class, when we all lay down and the teacher turned the lights and the music down, and began her now-familiar low litany of relaxation and immersion in the breath, the moment, my tears began to flow. And as they did, a rather wonderful vision—I have to call it that, as it was more persistent than a simple image— came to me.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Tippy’s little curly body again, but it was not half-covered in clods of dirt, as when I last saw it. He—his body—was floating upward into a pale blue sky, ringlets of white fur feathering out as he drifted upward, simply de-mattering into the atmosphere. The curls became swirls and trails of cloud, and within a few minutes the body was no longer blood and bone and suffering flesh. Tippy was cloud and vapor and breath, and I opened my eyes feeling relieved and so much lighter.

Cloud photo from http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~ebertd/cloud

Reclaiming Christmas

Last month, members of Unity Church Unitarian made the papers for an effort to "reclaim Christmas" from the commercialism and frenzy of activity that has come to characterize it for all but the most disciplined Americans. A service that members arranged for "Black Friday" made the papers, TV and MPR.

While the media coverage tended to emphasize an aspect of the effort that was not that important to me (organizers' efforts to dissuade people from mindlessly shopping on Black Friday) the invitation to reconsider what Christmas can mean was really useful.

The invitation sounds so simple, and it is--after thinking about what makes you tired or unhappy during this season, list the things that you truly enjoy about Christmas. Eliminate the former as much as possible, and concentrate on the latter. I realized that the gift lists I'd compile in the anxious month preceding Christmas were simply another way to Keep Busy; that Tony was tired of writing bad-tempered doggerel from "Santa" on the tags for all those gifts; and most importantly, that Laney and Anna didn't need or even want anything from a pile of stuff heaped under a tree.

So I concentrated this year on just a few things. I made a simple light display, hanging a large white star-shaped paper lantern on the porch, along with the usual twinkly white lights. We got a free tree from Hermes nursery on Christmas Eve and decorated it that same night. I hung the girls' stockings in the kitchen windows and have been putting token "gifts from Santa" in them every evening. Nothing big, mostly stuff I got in one short shopping trip to the CVS pharmacy on Snelling on December 23 --lip balm, a set of hair clips, a magazine.

At Laney's suggestion, we resolved to send a big box of school and art supplies to the little girls at Eklavya School in India, where she taught this summer. We've been slowly amassing a collection over the past week, and will finish up today with a shopping trip to Michaels', for play dough, markers and stickers. I'm not sure how we'll send the stuff; maybe with the next volunteer who goes to the school, or maybe we will splurge on postage to get it there sooner. But it's nice to imagine the glitter and stickers and colored markers being used by little girls who, according to Laney, are awarded exactly one pencil apiece at the beginning of each school term.

We've mostly just hung out together, watching movies and music videos on TV, playing card games (we had a Dutch Blitz tournament Christmas Eve with Izzy Wexler Mann and his family), eating and talking around the kitchen table. And that's pretty much been it. Not a perfect Christmas, and vastly different from last year's holiday (which we spent exploring the Amazonian jungle at Noel Kempf park in northern Bolivia.) But a good start to reclaiming the Christmas motifs that really matter—de-light, generosity, and being together without much to-do.