I’ve written a fair number of words about my friend Father Dan Begin and have decided for various reasons to begin sharing them now and then. This is a transcription of a homily delivered on August 3, 2008, in which Dan explored the theme of choice, based on readings from Isaiah and from Matthew’s account of the loaves and fishes. I hope both believing and non-believing readers can find something to appreciate here.
I can tell you that whatever happens, there is a banquet set before me by a Parent who loves me.
Most of us have never been really, really, really hungry. Most of us, even if we feel really hungry, have actually eaten very recently. Now here is an interesting thing. In the seminary we had a secret society. We would do subversive things, like read the Dutch catechism. We’d read Jean Paul Sartre. We’d read terrible underground books. We were going to solve the problems of the world, though, as you can see, we haven’t quite accomplished that. To solve world hunger, we thought we had to feel what the people felt. So we went on a five-day fast.
After about the first hour on the first day, we were already hungry. By three hours, we were starving, and by seven hours, our hunger was beyond imaginable. By the second day, we just felt blah. Then you develop a headache that you just cannot make go away. On the third day, you still have the headache, and you feel all-over dreadful. By the fourth day, the headache goes away, and you feel kind of high. You hardly think about food, and meal times pass by, and you don’t pay attention. And by the fifth day, it becomes really, really hard to eat, and so when it was time to start eating again, I couldn’t eat a whole piece of toast. It’s hard to get your system to eat again.
Now, this experiment was exciting, because the whole group of us was bound and determined to do this together. We were going to have an experience. Of course, the true reality of hunger is something much different, something we didn’t even get close to.
Around the same time I read an article. I can’t remember where it was or who wrote it, but the author was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II. He described real, true hunger much better that I ever could. He wrote that the prisoners got only two handfuls of rice every day. After awhile, he said, you lose all motivation. You are totally drained physically, and it’s probably worse to eat a little bit than nothing at all. Eating that little bit is just enough to keep you surviving. You lose all concern for anybody else. You lose the ability to believe in a God or anybody else. Day by day, you just wait for those handfuls of rice.
One day, this man did something that made the prison guard angry, and the guard dumped all his food on the ground. The prisoner just lay on the ground crying, as he describes it, thinking that handful of rice was everything for him, and now it was gone.
Then another man approached and gave him half of the rice he had, half a handful. In that half of a handful, all of a sudden everything came back. The man’s belief in God, his belief in love, his belief in life—everything came back with that gift of only half as much as he was getting regularly. Because of a moment of love, half a handful of rice was worth a whole life. What an amazing thing. Hunger calls us: the only way to survive and make sense out of life, the only way to survive and make sense out of God, is through that sharing of food.
In the Gospel today we hear the story of the feeding of the 20,000. That’s 5000 men plus women and children. You figure it had to be at least twenty thousand, maybe thirty. And notice that the evangelist makes sure to say there are significantly more people besides men in the world. Though the world counts only men, the evangelist says, look at all the women and children—they’re people, too. That was a very profound statement.
Here’s the situation. Jesus’s idol, the person who brought him to the beginning of his ministry, his cousin, John the Baptist, the one who got the whole ball rolling, the one who Jesus said is “greater than an angel,†not only was dead, but brutally murdered. He had his head cut off at a banquet. What a horrible, horrible thing.
And Jesus was so horrified, and he was so frustrated. He said to his disciples, “I have to get away. I can’t do this any more.†He needed to just be alone. He found his way to a deserted place, but by the time he got there, the crowds had already heard where he was going. Somebody leaked it. And there they were: 25,000 people. He said, “Oh, well. I guess it’s not time to mourn.†His heart was moved with pity. He was hungry for time alone with his God, but he gave up what little he had to share with others, with 25,000 others.
The apostles said, “Send them away. You’re in control. Tell them you’ve cured their sick. Tell them to go away.â€
Jesus said, “There’s no need for them to go.†He didn’t want them to go. Though he didn’t want to see them at first, now he didn’t want them to go. He told the disciples to feed them. And the apostles got testy. Understandably so. They said, “What do you expect us to do? We have only five loaves and two fish and thousands of people.â€
He said, “Give me what you have.†Now, this story is recorded in every Gospel. The multiplication of loaves is actually recorded six times, because there are other records of feeding the 2000 or 3000. Six times in four gospels, it’s recorded over and over. It was so significant to the early Christians in the time of the Gospel writing that they made sure it was put in over and over and over again. No other story has six versions.
Jesus was telling them, “You with your very little bit can do anything if you believe. You with your very little bit can change the whole world if you choose. But if you choose to keep that little bit, you tie my hands.â€
It was a little boy, as it’s recorded in Matthew, who gave his five loaves and two fish. He came forward, not the apostles. The apostles probably had stuff stashed away, but they weren’t going to tell anybody. A lot of people probably had stuff stashed away, but they weren’t going to tell anybody. Some commentators think maybe that’s what the real miracle was. People took out their stashes. First, they thought, “I’m not showing this to anybody,†and then some little boy embarrassed them and said, “Here’s what I have,†and all of a sudden people started pouring out what was in their pockets, and they had more than enough
But in that moment, something more significant than the food happened, just like with that half a handful of rice. Something happened that said to people, “Once again we can believe that our God takes care of our needs. Once again, we believe that together we can make things happen. Once again, we can believe that life is a banquet, even when we’re hungry. Once again, we can choose the life that’s set before us, knowing that our life is the banquet and the gift and the food. And knowing that even in the hunger we may find something so significant, something so much more powerful than anything we can find when we’re full.â€
And the message just shouts out loud and clear. Jesus didn’t take a poll and say, “Who’s a sinner here? You need to get forgiven before you can get any food.†He didn’t take a poll to see who’s good and who’s bad. He just said these are people. It’s just like New Yorkers rushing to help at the World Trade Center. There were people in need. Run and meet those needs.
The first reading from Isaiah is also such a beautiful passage. “All you who are thirsty, come to the water. It still flows. Whether you think you see it or not, the water still flows. All you who have no money, come, receive grain and eat. Come, come without pain. Come without cost. Drink wine, and drink fresh milk. But don’t spend your money on what is not bread. Don’t spend your wages on what fails to satisfy.â€
Institutions, no matter which institutions they are, over and over and over, want to take control of the meal. Institutions say, “You can eat because you’re one of us. You can’t eat because you’re not one of us. We’ll offer what we have to you over here, but not to you over there. Some people are the kind we want. You others are not.†But unlike institutions, families do not choose who is part of their life. Isaiah—and this is before Jesus—says that God has a family. God is this Mother who has our name written on the palm of her hand, and She will not stop being Mother.
Isaiah speaks of a God who says, “Come, come eat of my food, drink of my wine. Come, share the banquet of life.†This God does not make exceptions. This God does not say it’s only for this one and not for that one. Even if your mother should forget you, this God says, “I shall not forget you, because I am the perfect Parent. I am the one who knows you always and forever, who knows you inside and out.†In the last part of this chapter, Isaiah says, “Seek the Lord while He may be found. There’s still time. You can find God. Let the scoundrel turn away from those wicked ways. Let the wicked one repent from his sins and come back. Come back, and eat of the food that God presents to us.†And that banquet is laid out before us right here, right now.
Most of us wake up in the morning, and we look to our Parent who has presented us with a banquet, and we say, “I don’t like that. Get it away. That’s nasty. That’s bitter. That doesn’t appeal to me. It might be all right some other day, but today I want something else.â€Â And we want to give the Parent of the Universe the directions on what my banquet should be. And, of course, my banquet is all about me. My banquet is healthful. I have my medical covered. I have my house in order. I have my banquet, and that banquet is the one I choose.
But what about the reality banquet? What about the real banquet? Whether I choose to accept it or not, I woke up today knowing that I’m going to have an eternal life. I woke up today knowing that I have a God who loves me. I woke up today knowing that I have people who love me. I can’t tell you how things are going to work out in my life, and I can’t tell you how things are going to work out today. I can’t tell you if I’m going to be breathing half an hour from now. It doesn’t matter. I can tell you that whatever happens, there is a banquet set before me by a Parent who loves me.
But there are those in the institutions who would try to take all that away from me.  In my mind, I can choose to believe them. Terrorists may make me afraid all the time. And if I choose to walk around being afraid all the time, well, that’s my problem, because they can only kill the body. They can’t kill the soul.
Churches would have me believe that unless I follow particular magic formulas or particular sets of laws, they can exclude me from the love of God. But St. Paul says, “Who, who can separate me from the love of Christ? Who will separate us? Anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or the sword? No, no, none of these. In all things we are conquerors, if we know whose hand we hold. We are conquerors if we know who we are. We are conquerors if we know what we inherit. We are conquerors if we know that we are sisters and brothers and heir to the same thing as Jesus Christ. We are more than conquerors.â€
Instead of believing what others tell us, we need to go to the Somebody who knows, and that’s our Parent. We need to say that beautiful prayer that Jesus taught us: “Father, Abba, Daddy.†We need to recognize that nobody, but nobody, can take this away from us. Shame on us if we believe that they can.
We don’t need all of the things that our country provides for us. We don’t need all the things this church provides. We don’t need all the things that the world insists that we need. We don’t need a ten-year plan. We don’t need to go through our medical benefits. We don’t need to have insurance for this that and the other thing.
I was talking to someone the other day who works full-time and then 36 hours more. He said. “I just crave a day off.â€
I said, “Quit one of your jobs.â€
He said, “Oh, I can’t.â€
“You’re working, and your wife’s… “
“No, to pay all the bills, we have to do this,†he insisted.
Well, I thought, if in your mind, you have to do this, you have to do it. It’s what you choose to control you. You choose what separates you from the love of Christ, from the love of life, from the experience that lies right before us.
And so, we’re challenged today by these readings. We’re challenged to ask, “What did I wake up with this morning? This is the food that God has presented to me. This is what God has given me.†I may seek other things and better ways, and that’s not a bad thing, but I can never say I don’t have enough unless I choose to say it. If I give away moments of joy, moments of peace, if I waste my time in moments of anguish and pain and suffering because things are not exactly the way I want them to be, well, then, that four-letter word “want†needs to get out of my vocabulary. “Want†will just destroy me. I need to choose: This is what I have, and this is what I can do with it.
And then I need to dream. Dream! What can I do with this marvelous gift I have? Perhaps I’m ninety-six years old and can’t do much. Maybe I can talk to some child and give her a little story from the past. I can use what I have.
How can I use who I am, what I have, the banquet that’s laid before me, and recognize that it’s a new banquet every day, that there is always enough, and that in God’s plenty I will never go wanting? In choosing that gift, we find that the kingdom is right here and right now.
“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish—but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.â€Â —Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov, catching butterflies
A weird concatenation of circumstances. Coincidence. Or, as we sometimes say in our family, when we want to annoy each other, “coinkydink.”
I was in Nashville on Saturday getting my hair done for my daughter’s wedding. I had considered not getting my hair and makeup done, because of the expense and the risk of looking funny. But in order to hang out with the girls, I opted for the full monty. When the young woman doing my hair politely asked what I do for a living, I mentioned teaching, and then I thought, Go for it, and mentioned that I wrote a book. I was describing the book’s topic, alluding to my mother and using the general term “mental illness,” when the stylist asked me what the mental illness was, and I told her borderline personality disorder. Her hands in my hair suddenly got very still.
“My mother has borderline personality disorder,” she said.
There ensued a meeting of minds, a sharing of experiences, and some rueful laughter. Suffice it to say, the stylist and I hugged when my coif was complete, and she gave me her email address.
Then today, my daughter’s wedding announcement appeared in the (wait for it) New York Times. A couple of weeks ago, Margaret was asking for the appropriate titles for her parents’ jobs in order to submit her courtship story for the paper. I dutifully said that John programs films for the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque and the Cleveland Museum of Art and that I teach Latin at Cleveland State. And then I thought, Go for it, and Margaret dutifully added the title of my book, Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother.Â
As of tonight, my website has had about five times its usual number of hits. Who knows what else will ensue?
No one understands more deeply and poignantly than I that this past weekend was about Margaret and Tim and their friends. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But it has other ripples of meaning, too, for everyone who attended.
Some people say there are no coincidences. I think there are. If they have meaning, we don’t know it. If they don’t have meaning, we can ascribe it. I like what that cheeky Vladimir Nabokov wrote about coincidences, but I also like how frequent, mysterious, and meaningful they can sometimes seem.
It’s been years of writing, reading, revising, waiting, feeling hopeful, not feeling hopeful, and waiting some
 more. Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother is now available, published by Red Giant Books this week.
Try always to patronize your local independent bookstore. That applies here. Even though stores will not have my book in stock, they will look it up and find it on their distributor’s website and order it for you. You’ll get it just as quickly as you would from that giant online retailer, where it’s also, of course, available. If you get a chance after reading, reviews on that website (Amazon, if you’re not following) are supposed to be very helpful, so please consider submitting one.
Thanks to everyone who’s been so encouraging and inspiring. Thanks for reading today as always. I’ll try to write something more interesting when I get my thoughts together and can figure out what I’m actually feeling.
Once upon a time, directly after Latin class, a certain John asked a certain Kathy to see a movie called The Sand Pebbles. Sadly, Kathy, a member of the marching band, was unavailable because of a football game on the night in question. John did not ask Kathy out again for about seven years, during which they both graduated from college and lived in different places and got jobs and Kathy took a lot more Latin classes. Finally, about ten years after that first invitation, John and Kathy got married.
When we began dating for real, I reminded John of that long-ago request for a date. He didn’t remember it, but he remembered (being John) the movie and remembered taking another girl at our high school instead of me. Now, after almost fifty years of not seeing The Sand Pebbles, I borrowed the movie from the library.
Steve McQueen
It’s a long movie. I watched all of its three hours through my high-school eyes at the same time as my present-day, married-to-a-film-buff eyes. It had that epic look of certain prestige movies of the time—vistas of sea and Chinese landscapes, Panavision, long takes. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, the script tackles issues like imperialism, racism, and religion. Steve McQueen plays a sailor in the 1920s on an American gunboat in China. He’s a rebel and iconoclast. Love interest Candice Bergen, nineteen years old to McQueen’s thirty-six, is an idealistic missionary.
I kept thinking that though the movie’s trying hard to be liberal, trying hard to say the right things, it’s racist and sexist in spite of itself, in today’s terms. Both the Chinese characters and women are subsidiary and one-dimensional. It’s a world created and dominated by white men. They’re pretty well-intentioned white men—i.e., the writers and directors and producers—but after fifty years, history and diversity have passed them by.
I tried to imagine how it would have felt to see this movie on a date. Sitting next to a boy! My high-school sensibility was shocked! An appealing young Chinese woman is auctioned off to the highest American bidder in a bar, until a very young, lovesick Richard Attenborough snatches her away to protect her. A few scenes later, after some months have passed, we learn she is pregnant. I was a pretty sheltered adolescent, and I would have felt squirmy during these adult-themed scenes, tame as they are today.
In a twist, though, the movie is more violent than I usually see now. I think I was more inured to violence back then, getting my weekly ration on Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and the rest.
What would have happened if I had skipped that football game, aside from being thrown out of the band? Would John and I have enjoyed each other’s company and become a high-school item? Would we have dated for awhile and then broken up, bitter and broken-hearted? Or would I have “bored†him, like some of the girls he dated in high school?
At the time, I felt sad, because boys (let’s just say) were not falling over themselves asking me out on dates when I was in high school. I liked John Ewing and would have gone out with him if he had asked again. In fact, I asked him to a dance the following year, and he turned me down. Years had to pass for the Fates to bring us together. And here we are now in 2016, and what are we doing? We’re going to movies together.
You most often train dogs with treats to reinforce their behavior. My husband has a habit of “dropping†bits of food for our dog Roxie when he’s eating. Then he acts disappointed when she begs. “John,†I say. “She was trained. You literally trained her.†She thinks if she gazes at John, looking adorable (and she can hardly help that), she’ll get a treat, and she’s usually right.
Last week, a student reminded me of this training. This young man missed a lot of classes at the beginning of the semester and turned in all of his papers late. He made only a comment or two in class, a seminar focused on discussion. There’s also a class website, where the students post comments and questions on our readings in order to prompt reactions in class. He contributed nothing to those. I computed a generous B for this guy, recognizing that his attendance had improved and that though his papers weren’t great, he had revised and improved them willingly.
On the last day of class, he asked me if he could bring up his B to an A by posting comments on the discussion board for all the readings we had done since January. Those things whose purpose, as I said, is to inspire class discussion. I responded, “No. That would be stupid and meaningless.†He grinned sheepishly, pushed it a little further, and then gave up.
I felt furious about this question, no doubt just a shot in the dark for the student. He must have figured it was worth a try, but to me it manifested a lack of respect for the class and our subject matter. As I continued to fume, my thoughts slowly moved away from this particular student to the underlying issue. Grades.
Our system is designed to create my student. Every little action and assignment in the classroom gets a response, a gold star, a treat. That’s how students are trained—to aim for those things. Forget the purpose of attendance, the writing assignments, and those online postings. They’re just different means to one end, the grade.
My student is Roxie. Like her, he behaves the way he’s been trained.
Although I just finished Bleak House, which I began back in January, don’t ask me who Gridley is, because some of the minor characters are a muddle in my mind. I could tell you a little about Smallweed and Snagsby and Guppy and the Reverent Mr. Chadband, but just now I can’t recall Gridley’s deal. So many subplots, so many characters.
Everyone remembers the Dickens villains, like the convict in Great Expectations or Fagin in Oliver Twist. The cold-hearted lawyer in Bleak House, Mr. Tulkinghorn, has no redeeming qualities. Nor does the brilliantly named Mr. Vholes, another (surprise!) lawyer. In contrast, the narrator Esther Summerson and her guardian John Jarndyce are standard-issue Dickens’ paragons of virtue. I’m fine with these one-note characters to buttress the book’s moral structure, but I prefer the more nuanced folks.
Dickens does goodness very well, sometimes leavened with human frailty. I loved Mr. Bucket, the eminently capable and kind detective, even though he mistreats the orphan Jo. When I was telling someone how much I loved Dickens’s good characters, he said, “But they’re always the rich ones, aren’t they?” They’re not, of course. For Dickens, poor people pass more easily through the eye of the needle.
The most moving part of the book for me was the aristocratic Leicester Dedlock’s transformation near the end of the novel from a stuffy, ludicrous hypocrite to a humane, forgiving husband. It’s a brilliant passage, conveying Dickens’s egalitarian sensibility.
His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of [his wife], his general conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.
And then today, in a relieved rush, I read straight through Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. It, too, contains a spectrum of human behavior. And it’s about mothers and daughters, a subject in which I have some interest. I recommend it.
This whole dog thing started because of a story Verna used to tell over and over again. It was a very sad story I can’t bear to repeat, but it had to do with leaving behind her much-loved dog when she moved to Cleveland from Pennsylvania decades ago. I used to drive Verna to church, and whenever she saw someone walking a dog, she would repeat that story, much to my dismay, and end by saying she loved dogs and wished she could have a dog in her apartment. Even when she became unsteady on her feet, Verna would insist she’d like to have a black lab, her favorite breed. A lab could have knocked Verna over just by breathing on her, but that was the kind of dog she hankered for.
If you don’t much care for dogs, you should probably stop reading now. Sometimes when I start on this track, even talking to people who loved Verna, their eyes glaze over, and I realize they’re feeling the disengagement of non-dog-lovers when people like me start going on about dogs. Not everyone loves dogs, so feel free to just move along and read something else now. No hard feelings.
Verna and Portia
Verna died a couple of weeks ago at the age of 95, and her funeral was today. I’ve been thinking about what to say about her, if anything, and finally felt inspired by our dog connection. Because Verna loved dogs and couldn’t have one, a few years ago I asked my friend Joanne to bring Portia, her lovely golden retriever in possession of an actual therapy dog certificate, to visit Verna with me. Portia is calm and sweet, and Verna really enjoyed meeting her and petting her. Then, by a convoluted set of circumstances, I acquired our little dog Roxie and tried her out with Verna. At first, Roxie was antsy, exploring Verna’s rooms, and Verna would insist that Roxie must have to pee. But she didn’t. She just had to get acclimated. After awhile Roxie would calm down and sit on Verna’s lap, and Verna would pet her. Even though Roxie is about one-tenth the size of Verna’s preferred dog variety, they got along. Verna called Roxie cute and enjoyed getting her face licked. Roxie accommodated herself to Verna’s skinny lap and sat with her for as long as we wanted her to.
About ten months ago, Verna’s health problems worsened. She ended up in a nursing home about five minutes from my house. I soon ascertained that the nice attendants welcomed visits from dogs, and I began taking Roxie along with me. Some of the other residents clearly didn’t like dogs or were afraid even of a seven-pound Maltese, but others were excited to see Roxie come in. Verna always enjoyed it, and Roxie made things easier for me, frankly, because as Verna’s memory gradually failed, Roxie gave us something to talk about. Verna couldn’t tell stories anymore or recall her recent visitors. Because Verna’s mind was entirely in the present, Roxie was the perfect visitor, because Roxie the dog lives in the present, too.
Roxie
It moved me not only to see how much Verna enjoyed Roxie, but how earnestly Roxie attempted to do the right thing for all of us. It was hard to balance on Verna’s sloping legs in a wheelchair, and Roxie would keep her eyes on my face, checking to make sure she was supposed to stay there. Eventually, she’d settle in, lie down, and accept Verna’s affectionate petting. She’d greet the other residents joyfully, even when they were loud and clumsy.
Like pretty much everything in life, these memories are a mixed blessing now that Verna’s gone. I’m glad she and Roxie got to know each other, I’m grateful the nursing home was welcoming, and I’m happy I visited as much as I did, although I could have done more. Now, though, when I look at Roxie’s entreating face, I don’t just see my funny, much-loved dog. I see her perched on Verna’s lap, and she reminds me of my loss.
