Reading the Signs

 I know that for many of you reading this, you are probably thinking astrological signs or something like that - that isn't what this week's reflections are about.  Rather, it is just picking up on subtle things that maybe the Holy Spirit is saying, and that we sometimes miss.  Then, Fr. Grassi, my former parish priest in Charles Town, also complemented what I was thinking in his homily at Mass yesterday, and let's see if we can integrate those here.  I am still working on the article I want to put up that addresses things such as the Lamsa Bible and related issues, but that is going to entail more study.  The reason for that is why I am writing this today.   Let us begin by first talking about Fr. Grassi's homily briefly.

For anyone with any background in Catholic theology or philosophy, listening to Fr. Grassi's homily yesterday rings with a bit of familiarity.  He was talking about the "tyranny of work," and how it is almost a sin against the self to be always busy and never taking time to just rest.  He observed (correctly I believe) that now the technological advances society has adopted have also choked us - we are now taking work home at all hours, and we have smart phones, smart watches, smart glasses, etc., in addition to desktop and laptop computers.  His homily was very convicting to me, as I find my mind racing with this, that, or the other, and I am always checking a screen for something even when nothing is there.  All of this is of course very relevant to the day and time we live in, and I believe Fr. Grassi hit the proverbial nail on the head with what he shared.  However, it also demonstrated that Fr. Grassi is an astute student of what he reads to, as much of what he said deals with a negative trait in society called acedia.  This is a term that the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper talks about a lot, especially in his seminal book Leisure: The Basis of Culture.  Although Fr. Grassi didn't mention the concept by name, he pretty much identified the core aspect of acedia - being so busy that our activities almost become an idol to us.  I won't get into Pieper's total analysis of acedia, as I have discussed it before, but Fr. Grassi's homily definitely reached something.  And that is what I want to talk about today.

The reason I haven't been as active last week is due to one thing - I am working on my first fictional creative writing piece.  I have only ventured into fictional writing a few times, and mostly it was not anything overly spectacular.  It takes a special gift to write fiction, and I am not endowed with it in all honesty.  But, I also remember what Robert Newton Peck, an old friend and perhaps one of the best children's writers of the 20th century, once wrote in his book about writing - get the raw idea out, and then refine it later.   So, I used personal experience to construct a fictional story that entails a long-distance relationship where an American teacher falls in love with a Filipina, and he feels imprisoned by circumstance (some of that part of the story also resonates with Fr. Grassi's homily too) until one night he and his Filipina fiancée have an identical dream - in it, they are twenty five years old again, both of them (despite the fact in real life she is about 14 years younger), and in the dream they are beginning to make a life together.  At a point in the dream during a small storm on the Sulu Sea outside their Palawan bungalow, they realize that they are in a dream but feel the connection strongly.  They both wake up to rather unsatisfied lives, and they are their real ages again.  But, as they video call each other, it dawns on them - they have not been able to be together for the five years they had their relationship, and between bureaucratic red tape, financial constraints, and other factors, it seems hopeless.  But then this dream opens up something, especially in him - after a heartfelt talk with her, in which she reminds him to "remember twenty five," he makes a decision during his morning commute to just act on his true feelings, and within six months he had made the arrangements, and he makes a one-way flight to the Philippines where he and his girl step into a new life together - a very touching scene on a beach, where the sand sends a surreal feeling to his mind as his bare feet step onto it, solidifies the entire overarching point of the dream.  As a result, they make a life together, and it ends up being a beautiful story.  I won't go into a lot of detail about the story itself, but I wanted to summarize some lessons to take away from it that I dressed in a fictional scenario. 

The whole point of the story boils down to one thing - sometimes the life we think we are living actually obscures the real person we actually are.   We are afraid to let that real dimension of ourselves out because to be honest, it would probably cause problems with most people.  The majority of the people we call family and friends would not have a clue as to that inner part of us, as it is something we often cannot explain for ourselves.  The protagonist of the story is actually based on myself - it is about an inner aspect of myself I don't often share with just anyone, and this story provided a creative platform to sort of let it out.  And, like Pieper's discussion of acedia, we tend to let things choke those parts of us which would actually be liberating because we have schedules, tasks that keep us busy, and a lot of mind-cluttering distractions.  That unique aspect of ourselves is then just sort of obscured, although at times things we come across remind us that it's there.   The point of my story is that if we know how to look for it, that right person is going to be there to help us rediscover that, and that person is often one we love - a husband or wife, a soulmate, a fiancée.  Those people are a gift of God for a reason, and they are the ones we are meant to give our entire selves to, even those hidden things we don't feel comfortable sharing.  Let's take a totally hypothetical example of what I am talking about.

Let's say there is a guy (or a girl) who is a brilliant person, but they are also somewhat introverted.  The image they give to those around them is someone who is withdrawn, and also hard to know.  This often leads to them getting ignored in the same way that Ficus tree in a bank lobby is - you know it's there, but it is not something you think about or care to pay attention to.   However, underneath those layers is another person - this may be a guy who actually maybe likes singing karaoke, or he secretly may even like something like skateboarding but doesn't feel like he is someone who should do that.  In his mind, he secretly may fantasize about it, but he is scared to death to try it because it would look out of character for him.  Is this pride?  I don't think so - it's more fear of being rejected or misjudged than anything.  But, then he meets a nice girl who really connects with him, and all of a sudden he's thinking of trying it for the first time.  He may fall on his ass doing it, but he just gets to that point where he has to give it a go.  In the story, it is something similar, but not skateboarding (and believe me, personally that is not my secret guilty indulgence either!).  He feels comfortable with that new soulmate, and she encourages him as he begins to share those deep things about himself.  And, at some point, he just has to let go and go for it.  That is the second point of the story too. 

I talk about this because this is me - there are intimate things about myself I don't share with just anyone, and many of you reading this know what I am talking about.  Even in 28 years of marriage to Barbara before we divorced, I never truly felt comfortable sharing a lot of things with her - it was not her fault, but one thing she told me once is that it seemed like there was a shell I had that she could not penetrate, and to be honest, she was right.  The connection, in other words, was not really there.  Sure, we cared for each other, and even had some wonderful moments together as a married couple, but that dimension of our relationship was missing, and it was no one's fault.   We have a series of mental and emotional filters that are actually good for us, as they prevent the wrong people from weaponizing our personal feelings against us.  But, if we don't take care to develop relationships of trust, that is a part of us that remains repressed and we never are quite our complete selves as a result.  So, that is why God instituted marriage - that soulmate is just that; they are connected to you at the soul level, and in a sense this is what Scripture describes as "the two becoming one flesh."  This doesn't happen with just anyone either - God built in those protections with us for a reason, so we should not consider them bad.  And, that leads to the second aspect of this - the feelings of frustration and incompleteness.

Protecting yourself is a good thing - it keeps you from being wrongly exposed to the negative influences that can destroy us.  But, it can also be overdone too - we can be so walled up that no one - not even God himself - can get through to us.  And, we start to feel it.  Because you can never be your full self, you feel like something in your life is missing, and that repression can become a prison to us.  It needs to be broken by someone or something, and that someone should be the person we choose to spend the rest of our life with.  And, we compensate that by distractions; we become overly busy, and we let routine and calendars enslave us to the mundane while that important aspect of ourselves is repressed.  That is the real danger of Acedia - it can potentially lead to a type of idolatry of busy-ness.  And like Fr. Grassi noted, it becomes rather tyrannical to us. It often takes a radical step to bring us back to where we should be, and that is the point of my fictional story.

In the story, the teacher, after that dream, has a heartfelt video conversation with his Filipina love, and then his morning commute to work, has an epiphany.  While he was taking an Uber to his school where he taught, a thought came into his mind - "I wish this was taking me to the airport to fly out of here," and then his inner dialogue pierces with this question, "Why not? What do you have to lose?"  He ruminates on this all day, and that causes a crack in the facade he built up over the years - the realization that he couldn't do that slavish routine anymore led him to say in his heart "This is my time, and this is my fiancée's time - it is OUR time!" and he returned home that evening a different person - a realization became clear that he needed to just step out, and so he did.  Within six months, he and his beautiful Filipina fiancée would be sharing a smoldering, tender kiss on a distant beach in Palawan when he not only made the step, but he did so radically - he bought himself a one-way ticket and had no plans to return.  There is a saying I have utilized and others have too that is proverbial - sometimes you just have to rip off the bandage.  My character in that story did just that, but it took a dream and an Uber ride to make him realize just what he needed to do.  Now, I want to transition to my personal feeling in this.

The point of creative writing - especially a fictional story - is that the author is often talking about themselves, and that is true here too for me.  The character in that story personified me, and to be honest writing it helped me to see more clearly.  Will I make that radical step my character in the story did?  I don't think I am there yet, but I think God was speaking something through that to let me know that sometimes you just have to take the first step, kind of like the old Rankin-Bass Christmas cartoon Santa Claus is Coming to Town, where a young Kris Kringle actually converts an evil wizard into a good friend.  The wizard, named Winter, was scary, evil, and had a lot of issues within him.  Kris giving him that little toy train was the catalyst that cracked that ice shell around Winter's heart, and Kris sang a song in that cartoon to him that summarized it - "Put One Foot in Front of the Other."  Taking the first step is the hardest and scariest sometimes, but once you take that step, it's a whole new world and you see things in a new way.  With a lot that has been going on the past few years, I think that is where I am personally, and my character in the story definitely had that revelation too, just like the fictional wizard Winter did in that old Christmas cartoon.  A few months back, I talked about the "unknown frontier," and it ties into this - you won't know what the frontier is unless you take the first step toward it.  What's ahead may look clouded, scary, and uncertain, but taking that first step may be the best thing you can do for yourself.  I am preaching to myself with this too, as  I am sort of in that process myself, and it is no accident I was able to write the story either.  I could say much more about this, but it would take a lot of sorting out to really do it, and I don't have the time to do that now but may hash it out in my journal at some point so I can articulate it better.  Rest assured though, I will be revisiting it. 

Thanks for allowing me to share my thoughts this week, and will see you next time.