Looking for Heaven in All the Wrong Places

It's been awhile since I've posted and I have no excuses, except I've been busy, busy, busy, chasing obligations and following through on tasks. Admittedly, I do have to earn a living still, and jobs, work, require both effort and attention. And I've done OK with all that, but what does it mean in the end?

I'm exhausted, and it's not for not getting enough sleep. Heaven is not in the everyday grind of work, either its successes or failures or all things in between, but in the everyday opportunity to rise above the fray and remember why we're here. We're here to honor (and maybe even enjoy) the space of living itself, the awesome view from the perch of existence to simply solve problems, smooth over breakdowns, finish what we started and then STOP to BREATHE.

It's breathing that shows up as a challenge these days. I can actually feel myself gasping for breath. But every once in awhile when I stop and let myself do just that - BREATHE- I'm a different person, an aware person, not looking for heaven in the gritty details, but in the air itself. I love the opportunty and it's with me, and you, every day, all the time.

Religion and Politics

There's a reason why we learned to never bring up these two topics in polite conversation. There was even a time in the last century when we learned the importance of polite. But that seems like a century ago.

Politics are often revealed in issues, in the stands we take about taxes or war. And university classrooms are notorious for opening up such discussions. I have a student who sits right in the first row every class. He's from Dallas and his parents are wealthy enough to have flown him home twice from Boston for two day family visits in the first six weeks of school. He was speaking up against taxes in an inadvertant reference I inadvertantly must have made in class, revealing my own liberal leanings. Ooops! It was right in my face.

This seems to beg the question: are religion and politics a subject we can casually brooch in a university setting, even when the discipline is in the liberal arts, but not specific to any religion or politic viewpoint? Or should we tread lightly, so as not to end up in the mire of unwanted argument? At a few local universities here in Boston, there are conservative student groups who are taking their complaints public against liberal leaning professors. I suppose this means we should rmember what our mothers and dads taught us: these subjects don't mix. It's time to run a more polite classroom. Or it's time to forget the importance of polite.

Character Development

Remember when you suffered a loss as a child, or your boyfriend spurned you as an adolescent? Your parents or other well-meaning people consoled you with: suffering builds character. If this is true, what does it mean?

It's not suffering that builds character, but squaring with reality. And the facing of truth brings up the discomfort of turning away from denial, which sometimes includes extraordinary discomfort, if not excruciating pain.

OK. So why is squaring with reality and facing down denial so damned difficult? Character development is a messy business, and reality is not transparent most of the time. It can take years to see the writing on the wall. This blind-spot shows up in all the currect foreclosures for people who bought in to the fantasy that they would always be able to make their mortgage payments, even after getting a sub-prime loan. I understand these fantasies, but who among those losing their homes (read dreams, dignity, security) is sitting there happy to have a stepping stone to character? What value does this behemoth "character" offer?

Wisdom. Unless we completely throw in the towel, there's always another day, always another chance. We construct a fine picture of how life should look (often too much like a Morning in America campaign ad) and we come to believe that's reality. Then a crisis hits and we come to see what really counts. The fine art of building character, the end of which is wisdom, and the invitation to which is wisdom in action, is to see the mini-crises while they're happening, to read the tea leaves that offer us a thousand tiny warnings to pay heed, to wake up. I bet your mother never said it that way.