Reflections in a Lake on a Warm Autumn Day

Luis Rivera, Channel 13, Orlando

It is noon before I finish my various chores, reading email and writing responses. But my body is crying out for a walk after a week of illness and doctor’s visits. Already in my gym shorts and tee-shirt, I don my knee brace, my sunglasses and my tennis shoes and off we go.

It is already pretty warm for a walk, 85°F according to the National Weather Service weather station at the Orlando Executive Airport which sits just across on the north shore of Lake Underhill and that we’re headed toward an unseasonably warm (about 10-12 degrees unseasonably) high of 87 before the day is through. Weather Underground promises that the low for tomorrow night may actually dip down into the upper 50s. But summer seems invincible today, perhaps yet another harbinger of climate change that will soon drastically alter the world in which we live.

The airport was created by dredging the swampy shores of the lake and using the fill to create the runways needed for the US war effort during WWII. The airport was the heart of the Orlando Air Base which once sprawled a couple of miles in every direction, the base lands now marked by shopping plazas, urban housing and parks like this one. Today, a toll road bridge splits the lake into two halves, the southern half ringed by a 1.6 mile walking and biking path.

This lake has long been my place of escape from the maddening world around me. Cars rush by overhead on the expressway bridge gushing gallons of carbon monoxide and soot, the occasional boat or jet ski roars on the water leaving a trail of nasty fumes and overhead the periodic jet enroute to either Orlando International or the nearby executive airport rumbles through the sky. Yet there is a serenity on this lake that defies all human efforts to desecrate this place of beauty.

I come to the lake to experience myself as part of something larger than my very limited existence. The lake never lets me down.

Down in the Hydrilla

As I begin crossing  the pedestrian bridge attached to the side of the expressway bridge structure, I stop to watch the sun glinting off the rippled surface of the water. A very light   breeze blows from the south where cumulus clouds hug the horizon, the rest of the sky an almost cobalt blue fall sky.

Below me, I notice that the hydrilla have begun to take over the shallow lake bottom on the lake’s western end. Hydrilla is often seen as invasive enemies by boaters due to the tendency of the weed to quickly proliferate and entangle the propellers on boat engines. A large hydrilla concentration indicates a high level of unnatural nutrients in the lake. But today the long lacy shoots are quite beautiful as they wave in the current just below the surface flowing from one of the many springs which feed this magnificent lake.

My spirit leaps to the hydrilla below, waving in the current, looking up at the glinting diamonds of sunlight on the lake surface. This is what I sometimes visualize when I am engaged in contemplative prayer, the coolness of spring fed water flowing past me and the occasional distraction overhead of ideas and feelings floating by only to be released as I return to sandy bottom.

Far too often I want to get aboard those passing boats and floating objects. There are lots of interesting ideas and feelings to engage there. But it is at the bottom, the place without words or feelings, the place where spirit is present, that I return, over and over.

I resume my walk, my torn meniscus aching slightly in my ace support covered knee even as I give thanks that I am feeling well enough to walk again after a week of illness.

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Graceful Birds in Monet Settings

On the eastern end of the lake, a black anhinga sits on one of rocks piled up along the expressway bridge foundations to prevent erosion.  Its blue black wings are spread to absorb the sun, drying off from a recent dive into the lake for its noontime meal. I don’t want to think too long about that. The anhinga opens its beak to allow the breeze to fill its gullet, its neck expanding and contracting like a blowfish as it gulps down the fresh air. There is something incredibly beautiful about these graceful birds and I always stop to look at them if even just for a moment to appreciate that beauty.

Across the lake, the maples, sycamores and even the cypress have taken on golden, brown tinges, the very subtle signs of autumn here in Central Florida. The lake is so still on this eastern end that the docks with their fishermen and the cypress which line the southern bank are reflected in the still water, the slight breeze able to penetrate the phalanx of apartment complexes lining Lake Underhill Drive creating an almost impressionist image a la Monet.

What a beautiful day this is, indeed.

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The Anti-Francis

This day would provide me with encounters of both thesis and antithesis of the spirit of St. Francis, one of the two patron saints of the religious order to which I belong (Clare being the other).  My first encounter would be with the antithesis of Francis in the parking lot at the park’s eastern end.

Noise spilled out of a black Mercedes Limo Van, its motor running, diesel fumes pouring out of its rear. The door of the van was open allowing me to observe that the air conditioner was running even as the cool air was quickly escaping out the open van door. On the wall inside the van behind the driver’s compartment, a large screen television blasted commercial advertisements for consumer goods invoking the name of the veterans whose day the US celebrated yesterday. “Veterans Day special on new vans this week only….”

My heart was heavy as I walked past the van to the end of the loop of the parking lot, my turn around point. It was sad enough that this behavior serves to destroy the good creation all around us. But what was even sadder was that the human occupant of the van was completely unaware of what an incredible day he was missing. Television programs are always available. Days like today are hardly a given.

I began the homeward journey dispirited. My hands began to fill up with the plastic items I picked up along the way - plastic bottles drained of their water out of the tap which was sold as “purified,” straws and cup lids from soft drinks bought at the convenience store across the street, a pointed plastic dental floss tool tossed into the grass where children and animals play. These would all go home with me to the recycling bin. I can’t pick up all the trash at the park (and no single person should ever have to) but at least this handful of items would be returned to cycle of voracious consumption without requiring more costly and dirty fossil fuels to replace them.

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Perfect Joy and an Avian Audience

As I neared the middle of the curve Lake Underhill Drive makes around the lake where the huge brick Four Square Church advertises Sunday services in three different languages across the street, I suddenly saw the counterpart of the anti-Francis. This modern day Francis, like the original Francis of the late middle ages, was homeless. His worldly goods were spread out on the blanket he sat upon next to the banged up bicycle he used for transportation.

But amidst all these reminders of his poverty, this Francis sat strumming a guitar and serenading the ducks and herons along the lake shore. As with the Prince of Fools of Assisi who used to preach to the birds, this man’s avian audience was attentive, stopping their swimming and pecking for food long enough to listen to his singing.

His song was absolutely beautiful and his face was serene. Here on the shores of an urban lakeside park, this homeless man had discovered perfect joy. And slowly the black Mercedes van -  its waste of costly fossil fuels and its sooty pollution, its occupant oblivious to anything other than immediate and superficial gratification - all faded out of consciousness. For the moment, I was enraptured by the perfect joy of a modern day Francis who had found a way to let go of all of the possessions which perhaps once owned him, a man who incarnated the spirit of the poverello of Assisi.

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Our Mother Deserves Better….

I was nearing home now. I was beginning to drip with sweat but happy to stretch out the muscles of my legs after a week of inactivity. With the joy of my encounter with the Francis of Lake Underhill still warming my heart, I turned to spend a moment just gazing at the beauty of the lake.

It was then that I noticed the Styrofoam cups from the convenience stores and the plastic shopping bags from the nearby grocery stores bobbing in the aquatic plants just offshore. As I stop to pick up a plastic bottle top from the sidewalk, I saw several black plastic bags of dog excrement, freely provided by the city to assist dog owners in curbing their dogs, strung out all over the grass near the exercise station. The trash can where the bags are required to be deposited were a mere 20 feet away.

There are times that the earth almost screams out in agony from the treatment that its human animals inflict upon it. I have experienced that agony before. I felt it at our Lenten retreat at the nuclear testing grounds on the Shoshone Reservation west of Las Vegas where ancient people had been removed from their ancestral lands made uninhabitable by radioactivity. I felt it at the Earthworks Urban Farm run by the Capuchin Order in what is left of downtown Detroit, a place where the topsoil was so contaminated that the top 5 feet had to be scraped up and moved out before anything edible could be grown there. And on this day, in the bright sunshine of a beautiful fall day on the shores of an urban lakefront park littered with trash and excrement, I felt that agony again.

Our Mother deserves better treatment than this. And we are better people than careless and selfish behaviors like these would indicate. Francis himself reminds us of this in the Canticle of the Sun,:

May you be praised through all your creatures, especially through Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us

And may you be praised through those who forgive for love of you

Francis taught his followers to be grateful for and respectful of the good creation which we have been given in trust for all living beings. He taught us to be forgiving of the failings of our brothers and sisters as we, too, need to be forgiven. And he taught us to live in a manner by which our lives manifest praise of the good creation we have been given to love and to learn from and the Creator which lies within, beneath and beyond that Creation. 

I am grateful to the lake for these reflections this day. Even as my heart grieves for the harm done to our earth this day, I am grateful for the joy I have encountered in this little corner of the good creation. I offer my reflection from this encounter that others may consider their own relationships with "this fragile Earth, our island home." (BCP, 1979. Eucharistic Prayer C) 

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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“Here on the shores of an urban lakeside park, this homeless man had discovered perfect joy. And slowly the black Mercedes van -  its waste of costly fossil fuels and its sooty pollution, its occupant oblivious to anything other than immediate and superficial gratification - all faded out of consciousness. For the moment, I was enraptured by the perfect joy of a modern day Francis who had found a way to let go of all of the possessions which perhaps once owned him, a man who incarnated the spirit of the poverello of Assisi.”

You are welcome to read the remainder of my latest blog entry at the link provided below. As always, thoughtful responses are welcomed and published.

http://frharry.blogspot.com/2015/11/reflections-in-lake-on-warm-autumn-day.html

Could ISIS be onto something important?

I have watched with horror as the events spilling out of Paris last weekend have developed this week. The accounts of the brutal attacks and loss of life were horrible, difficult to watch.

In the wake of those attacks, the well named worldwide web has prompted many of us to be aware of similar attacks by terrorist groups which we had, for the most part, simply ignored previously. A devastating attack on Beirut the day before the Paris attacks was comparable in terms of deaths and horror. The attack on a Kenyan university a few months ago also swam back into focus with similar casualties and horror. Many of us who care about our world have had our unconscious Eurocentric lenses brought squarely – if painfully – back into focus.

We have also had to become honest about our fears of attacks on our home shores. The US House voted last night to restrict and tightly screen refugees pouring out of the open wound once bounded by European drawn national borders in places named Iraq and Syria. This comes on the heels of 27 US state governors declaring that their states would not accept any middle eastern refugees, statements with little legal basis but with enormous potential political capital in exploiting the paranoia of a fearful public.

I wish the situation was as clear as many would like to make it. Yes, the US is a nation of immigrants with a history that is closely connected to our greatness as a people and as a culture. No, there probably isn’t a huge chance that refugees fleeing the brutality of life under ISIS will prove to be ISIS operatives once within US borders. But the memory of the 9-11 terrorists, living among us and striking at us using the training we provided them and our own airliners, is still fresh in the memories of many Americans. Where does one draw the line between a raw paranoia whipped into a frenzy by ratings seeking media and a reasonable concern for national security?

There is also a religious element which lies just below the surface here. Many US residents operate out of a presumption of superiority of the particular brand of the Christian religion they hold which tends to express itself in an uncritical but common equation of Islam with violence and terrorism. This blissful ignorance willfully avoids the reality that most of the actual terrorism committed in this country has come at the hands of those acting in the name of the supposedly superior religion. Indeed, Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph found his deadly vocation in a movement called Christian Identity.

No Room at the Inn

A common meme currently making the rounds on social media displays a couple of renditions of the argument that were the infant Jesus and his family seeking refuge in the US today as they are reported to have done in two different Gospels, they would be out of luck. The Gospel of Matthew reports the Holy Family having sought refuge in Egypt from the infanticide launched by a King Herod tipped off by his own soothsayers of Jesus' birth, the slaying of all Hebrew infants a means of eliminating any potential rivals to the throne.  Had Egypt responded to the Holy Family’s request for temporary asylum as has the governor of my own state, we probably would never have heard of Jesus.

A second version of that meme compares the US to a more heartless version of the little town of Bethlehem with no room in the inn for an at-term pregnant mother and her husband. Without even a stable, an infant could not have survived a birth in the harsh elements of early winter Judea.

Of course, both versions are designed to appeal to Christian compassion and the long held value of hospitality in the Christian tradition. They are also designed to bring into focus the role of varying degrees of xenophobia in Christian ideation and how such thinking and resulting behaviors are antithetical to the heart of the Christian tradition with its commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. And if there is any doubt about how far the term neighbor stretches, Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable features a culturally despised political enemy as the one who proved neighbor to the man in need.

The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt as refugees from Herod’s homicidal paranoia and the current flood of refugees from places that were once called Syria and Iraq bear some striking similarities. They are both flights to escape terror, torture and death. Matthew’s story is set in a Judea in which a client king had been placed on the throne by the world’s controlling empire of the time. Herod was responsible for keeping the peace in the Roman province and was keenly aware of this role even as he was widely reviled by his own people. 

In the current story, ISIS came to power in the wake of an invasion by the world’s current imperial power. A destabilized Iraq, an imploding Syria and a wealth of weaponry left behind by the invading imperial armies when they exited Iraq provided the raw materials for the rise of a self-proclaimed caliphate based in high visibility torture and the terror which results from it. Clearly, Jesus’ family did not play a direct role in their own need to flee Judea. They were merely the collateral damage of imperial machinations over which they had no control or ability to influence. The same is true of the refugees hemorrhaging out of the former Iraq and Syria.

Bu here the similarities end. In Luke’s story, Joseph and Mary were given shelter of sorts, albeit shelter designed for non-human animals. There amidst the lowing cattle the Christ child would be born. In Matthew’s story, the flight into Egypt occurred with no checks at the border, the family being able to return to their native Judea after the danger to their infant son had passed.

The US House and the governors of our states, when placed in the roles of the owner of the stable in Bethlehem or the officials in Egypt in charge of their borders, come up pretty short. Ironically, it is often these self-proclaimed followers of the Christ child who are most vociferous in their desire to keep out those currently in his position of extreme vulnerability.

Wrestling with the Shadow

I have struggled with my own responses to the attacks on Paris. I watched with equal parts horror and glee as the French announced its response would be “merciless.” Within 24 hours, that response became clear with the bombing of the city that supposedly serves as ISIS headquarters. The anger in my heart leapt with joy as the news of the bombing was announced. They deserved it, my Shadow gloated.

At the same time the sorrow already in my soul deepened as the lives of ever more people bearing the same divine image I and everyone else bears were lost in a hail of fiery explosions. No one deserves to die like that, particularly civilians already suffering under the tyrannical reign of ISIS.

Yet, I find myself in a quandary. On the one hand, I recognize that we cannot bomb our way out of this cesspool of violence and inhumanity that our own short-sighted actions essentially spawned in the first place. Indeed, if anything, the rise of ISIS from the ashes of Iraq serves as the consummate argument against using military force to resolve international problems. Violence always has a way of begetting more violence.

On the other hand, the leadership of all these groups from Al Qaeda to Boko Haram offer no indications that they are open to negotiating. If anything they appear inclined to engage in ever more deadly high visibility attacks like those which shook two world class cities this past week. How does the world deal with the immediate danger they pose without the use of coercive force and the violence which flows from it?

Even as we wrestle with the immediate dangers posed by terrorist organizations, it is the long range concerns they present that must not escape our attention. An essential question to be considered is what makes an operation like ISIS attractive to recruits from around the world? What could possibly prove so compelling to a young man or woman at the beginning of their lives that they would be willing to strap on an explosive device and detonate it in the public square? Clearly, the threat of violence and death are simply not deterrents for these true believers.

It is important here to note that every religion has had true believers willing to kill and die for their faith. While Islamic fundamentalists have been the recent focus of the world’s attention given their role in terrorist attacks, in truth the only real difference between the Christian fundamentalists of our own Bible and Beretta Belts, the Jewish fundamentalists of the West Bank settlements and the Islamic fundamentalists we so deeply fear is their degree of extremism – largely driven by the degree of insularity of the echo chambers in which they thrive – and their access to power.

Pathologies of Modernity – the Message from ISIS

Last night while flipping through the channels trying to find something non-jarring before bed, I stumbled across a provocative appearance by former Undersecretary of Defense for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman on MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell show. Sherman spoke of the role of opposition to modernity in attracting young recruits to the ISIS movement.

Sherman cited Pew Research reports from a number of countries where Islam is prevalent which found that while young residents of those countries were comfortable with the technology that modernity has provided them, they simultaneously fear modernity due to its threat of losing the sense of self. Movements like ISIS and Boko Haram readily provide a sense of identity, however limited and artificial it might be, to people who have largely been the losers in the globalization project of modernity.

I believe that ISIS may well have a few points here that we need to consider.

One of Sherman’s more salient points was how disrupting the infrastructure of ideologically-driven terrorist groups must be a focus of world efforts to combat them. Modernity’s free market fundamentalism has constructed the world as a global marketplace with little concern for what is being sold to whom.

The manufacture and export of weaponry worldwide has escalated even as that weaponry has increasingly been used against the people and nations it was allegedly produced to protect. The majority of ISIS’ current stockpile of armaments was either produced in the US or marketed by US companies. What might the example of ISIS with its ready access to the weapons we produced that they are using to terrorize our world suggest to us about the need to revisit this rather uncritical aspect of modernism?

There are two other points regarding fundamentalist groups like ISIS and its epic clash with modernity that merit consideration. First, virtually all fundamentalist movements include in their ideological core elements of patriarchy in varying degrees of pathology. Frankly, the argument that women must cover their own bodies whether they wish to or not because men cannot control themselves otherwise has never been a terribly compelling argument and could only arise in a culture in which unearned male privilege to define a culture was presumed.

In many ways, fundamentalists of all stripes have something to fear and much to learn from modernity with its liberationist and egalitarian values and its confrontation of repressive sexual mores. Repression validated in the name of tradition and religion still remains at its heart repression.

On the other hand, modernity has its own pathologies that not just fundamentalists find unbearable. While women have been freed to express themselves as they see fit, their bodies have simultaneously become commodities for marketing and thus consumption.

The free market fundamentalism of neoliberal modernity has also produced an enormous disparity and resulting social inequality that perpetually threatens to dissolve its societies into chaos. Entire cohorts of young workers today face underemployment on a good day and unemployment on most days in increasingly stratified societies in which a tiny elite enjoy the good life while the rest struggle. Their despair provides the fuel propelling a descent into the darkness of nihilistic identity groups across the developing world and in its expanding pockets within the techno-industrialized world.

While modernity has freed its citizens from the superstitions of religion and the constraints of the tribe, modernity has resulted in the very atomization and alienation that creates a ready supply of potential recruits for ideologically proscribed tribes that will readily provide identity and existential purpose. These young jihadists of all stripes are not simply confronting us from the outside. We are producing many of them in our own backyards.

A New Consciousness for the Brave New World

US culture has never been known for its ability to delay gratification or to see the big picture. Pragmatism with its preference for immediate action is the dominant philosophy in the US even at times when gradual, deliberate and thoughtful policy has clearly been the better path. But the ease with which cosmopolitan urban centers can be attacked and the flood of refugees which appears to be only the harbinger of even greater flows of desperate people fleeing inhospitable regions ought to suggest to us that business as usual can no longer work.

While Albert Einstein was known primarily for his work in physics, he also was an astute observer of and commentator upon human nature and societies. Einstein often noted that “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” We stand at the threshold of a new world. Postmodernity has made us very familiar with the failings of modernity. But it is neither a new revealed religion, as it so often is treated in the academy today, nor is it a solution to the problems it so readily brings into focus.

We must develop the new consciousness needed for this brave new world we have no choice but to face. If we are smart, we will take seriously the messages that ISIS is sending us about how we should construct this new world. Though their medium is abhorrent, we ignore their message to our peril. 

All images taken from Google Images All images taken from Google Images

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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Brother Ass Shakes Hands With Sister Death

Francis of Assisi saw the world as the place G-d’s goodness was recognized. He was intentional about recognizing the relational aspects of all Being. That included his own body, which he called Brother Ass, and the end of life which all created beings face whom he called Sister Death. Francis recognized these as aspects of our own finite lives that all of us eventually must acknowledge.

Abusing Brother Ass

For most of his life, Francis sought to live a life of strict poverty, denying his body food and comfort, engaging in a self-denying asceticism that sometimes shocked even the beggars he served. Francis treated Brother Ass much as Italian peasants treated their donkeys, driving them with fear and thrashing them with whips. His desire to follow Jesus in all things including his suffering was consummated near the end of his life when he received the stigmata on his hands, feet and side like that of his Lord, which would continue to bleed until his death.

As Francis neared the end of his life, he voiced misgivings for his treatment of his body. His abuse of Brother Ass was a rather jarring inconsistency with an incarnational theology which saw the divine in all aspects of Creation and treated it with deep respect. Confessing to a fellow friar an uneasy conscience about the way he’d treated his body, the sage brother attending the ailing Francis asked him if his body had not served him obediently in everything he’d asked of it.

The saint admitted that it had been obedient in all things, “sparing itself nothing, rushing almost head-long to obedience; shirking no labor and refusing no discomfort.” The brother then asked Francis, “So, where is your generosity toward your body, Brother Francis?” At that point Francis repented and apologized to Brother Ass.

At the end of Francis’ life he would often refer to the coming of Sister Death. As Francis lay dying, naked on the earth as he had requested, having embraced Franciscan poverty to its furthest extreme right to the very end, he had the attending brothers add these lines to his magnificent Canticle of the Creatures in homage of Sister Death:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your will! The second death can do them no harm.

Francis insisted that death was not alien to human experience, something of which to be terrified and to seek to escape through whatever means possible. Rather, death was simply another dimension of a human experience in which G-d was present in every aspect. Like every other aspect of the Creation in which the divine is mirrored and immanently present, Sister Death is to be respected and embraced.

Brother Ass Seeks His Due

I’ve thought about these two aspects of Franciscan theology a good bit the past couple of weeks. When I retired in September, I told myself and a handful of trusted friends that I had retired in part to engage in some badly needed healing. Truth is, my extrication of myself from my career in higher education was much more painful than I had anticipated. I incurred an awful lot of wounds in that process, particularly during the last two years at the university.

Letting go of the anger, the bitterness and woundedness has been an ongoing process in the three months since I finally left my former life in academia. I am grateful for the time I have had to pray, meditate, garden and wade through a lifetime of papers, art, photos, books and mementos which have accumulated in my office and library. I am just beginning this process but it is a bittersweet joy to engage this clearing away of those things which once were important but no longer serve a useful role in my life and making way for those things which will surely come to take their place. Indeed, this process is proving essential to the badly needed healing I had anticipated.

What I did not realize was that my healing would be physical as well as emotional and spiritual. I knew I had not taken very good care of Brother Ass during my lifetime as a driven lawyer, then seminarian, then graduate student, and finally college instructor. I worked long hours, often ate a poor diet, drank way too much and collapsed into bed too many nights well past the time I was guaranteed a good night’s sleep.

I was told by friends who have recently retired that I would experience a great sense of tiredness once I finally retired. That has come in spades. I find myself sleeping 9 hours regularly and sometimes taking naps in the afternoon. My physical labors come in spurts with enough energy to work 3-4 hours in a yard that is finally taking shape after such a long neglect. My attentiveness to the interior of my house lags behind but I have begun piling up books by topic on my library floor awaiting scanning and ordering on my shelves, and culling books which no longer form a part of my ongoing interests, soon headed for the Friends of the Library store.

Until I retired, I had always found reasons not to go to the doctors. My blood pressure medicine would run out and I would beg for refills and promise to come into the office “just as soon as I am finished with ___( insert urgent project du jour here). Dental appointments would be set and then reset as “something came up” each time.

And then, suddenly, my dance card began to empty, my calendar became increasingly bare. Now I had no excuses for not attending to the physical problems I had become expert at both avoiding and denying. Like Cinderella hearing the clock strike midnight, I was suddenly brought face to face with Brother Ass, having endured all the abuse I had heaped upon him over 62 years of hard living, suddenly demanding his due.

Replacing my front tooth was my first project. The porcelain cap on the tooth had come off just after my return from Europe in June and I had gone four months needing a replacement. My former dentist had not been in the network of insurance covered providers and with retirement I no longer had the luxury of paying the difference. The new network dentist not only repaired my front tooth so I could smile again, it was a fraction of the cost quoted me by my former out of network dentist. One down.

Next was getting my aching knee some attention. About two years ago I wrapped my ankle around Oscar, my dachshund, and in an attempt to keep from stepping on him, swung my knee around quickly only to encounter the immovable object of a coffee table stacked with oversized books on Greek art, Celtic civilization and Cuba. The result was a torn meniscus that cannot be repaired and has sometimes proven debilitating.

I take several supplements that supposedly help the inflammation and, truth be told, I can tell the difference when I periodically stop taking them. A referral to a local orthopedic surgeon resulted in several cortisone injections into the knee and the news that I’d need a knee replacement soon. Unsatisfied with that diagnosis, I asked for a second opinion. My current specialist has provided a series of lubricating injections into the knee that thus far seems to be helping defer what may be an inevitable date with a surgeon’s knife. I am walking a couple of miles daily and working 3-4 hours in the yard without much pain. So far, so good.

I thought I was finished. But that was just the beginning.

My primary care doctor had recommended I get a colonoscopy five years ago. Knowing the pain and indignity such involved, I had found a host reasons to avoid that procedure. But with my empty calendar confronting me, I finally agreed to set the appointment.

Truth be told, I had every reason to have the procedure done. My father had had a close call about three decades ago with a colon cancer that had completely blocked his intestinal track and nearly killed him. I will never forget his physician calling my sister and I into a consulting room and telling us, “You need to know that your chances of getting colon cancer in your lifetime just went up 50%.” Adding to that a mother who had died of breast cancer, taking chances on my own diagnosis of cancer was not a game of Russian Roulette I need to be play.

For some reason, my PA had ordered both colonoscopy, which looks at one’s intestinal track, and endoscopy, which looks at one’s esophagus. The specialist prefaced his discussion of my results with the statement, “It’s a good thing you decided to come in when you did….” Gulp.  Turns out my colonoscopy was clear. Good news and somewhat expected given my vegetarian diet. The endoscopy, however, revealed Barrett’s Syndrome, scar tissue from a history of acid reflux with the propensity to develop into a deadly form of cancer. Surprise!

It’s quite possible to have damaging acid reflux and not be aware of it. The doctor said the scar tissue had been caused about 20-25 years ago. This would have been right in the middle of my time as an attorney where my hard driving professional life and hard drinking private life could well have produced the acid backup into the esophagus to damage those cells.

I am now taking a medication to prevent further damage to the esophagus and my doctor is telling me that during my next endoscopy he can laser off the Barrett’s cells. When the laser burns heal, new esophageal cells will replace them. “You’ll have a brand new esophagus,” he said. At that point, any threat of cancer will be ended.

During my scope results appointment my internal medicine doctor inquired about my ear. I’d had a rash on the top inside of my left ear for a couple of years that periodically would go away completely but at other times becomes crusty and bloody. I had looked it up online and decided it was a form of seborrhea along with a patchy spot next to my right eye. My doctor was not convinced and referred me to a dermatologist.

The dermatologist took one look at the two spots and, like my internal specialist, began with “It’s a good thing you decided to come in when you did…” As it turns out, both spots were developing skin cancers. He removed both, sent them away for biopsy and scheduled me for Mohs surgery to remove the margins. That surgery is tomorrow.

So the bad news was that the dermatitis I had been battling with diet and ointments was actually skin cancer. The good news was that both were basal cells, stage 1. As the scheduling assistant told me when setting up my surgery date, “If you’ve got to have cancer, these are the best kinds to have.” Thanks, I think.

Blessings in Disguise

My thoughts go back to Francis as I consider how badly I have treated Brother Ass over my lifetime. Considering how dependably it has served me, even when being asked to be constantly overextended and pushed beyond its limits, I probably owe it a good bit more consideration than I have shown it. Unlike Francis, who died in his late 30s, blind and exhausted, I am getting a second chance to live in a manner which honors Brother Ass and demonstrates generosity and gratitude. I’m taking that seriously.

It’s ironic how events in your life which seem to be tragedies sometimes turn out to be blessings in disguise. My DUI accident in California prompted me to stop drinking for a year to reevaluate the way I used and abused alcohol. Without that wakeup call in California, I could have well been on my way to esophageal cancer if not alcoholism.

Similarly, prior to the train wreck that prompted my departure from the university, I would always have found excuses not to go to the doctors. I would have ignored signs of ill health even as the rash on my ear periodically bled and my aching knee required up to four ibuprofen at a time just to be bearable, a regimen which is not good for one’s kidneys or blood pressure.

Indeed, my primary concern prior to retirement was hypertension. Ironically, within two months of retirement, my blood pressure was down 20 points to normal. I lost nine pounds. My medication has been decreased and the doctor is considering taking me off medication entirely if the current trend continues. Amazing what time to walk, sleep and the ability to regulate your diet and consistently take your medication and supplements can do for a body! And what might that say about the way most of us live to work?

Greeting Sister Death

While Brother Ass has been my focus the past three months, I also have thought a good bit about Sister Death. The word cancer causes a chill to run down most 21^st Western spines with good reason. Memories of my father’s close brush with death and my mother’s agonizing years of chemotherapy and radiation immediately came to mind when the dermatologist began with “It’s a good thing you came in today…” Indeed, a cousin my age had died at 24 from a melanoma that spread so rapidly that he went from healthy jock playing in a local baseball league to dead in just 18 months from diagnosis.

I cannot say that I am unafraid of dying. Death is the great unknown and the fear of annihilation of whatever essence of me there might be rumbles around in the background of whatever equanimous understandings I might ultimately verbalize about dying. Social theorist Ernest Brecker described it well when he said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

Yet like Francis, I do see Sister Death as part of the compact that every living being has made as a condition of existence. Like Francis, I hold to a belief that death is not so much an extinction as a consummation of life. And as Franciscan theologians have long taught, I believe that all Being comes from G-d, finds its ground of Being in G-d and ultimately returns to G-d. When the time comes, I pray to be able to joyfully embrace Sister Death.

Of course, I cannot rationally explain that. I also cannot avoid Brecker’s assessment that this might well be rationalization on my part. But I have had a number of experiences of what I would call the holy throughout my life that suggest to me that something more lies beyond the world we experience and attempt to control through our reason, quantification and technology. While the latter are the currency of post-Enlightenment understandings of truth, I have long known that there are limits to those understandings. Indeed, my life is a testament to both that currency and its limitations.

My immediate concerns are not that I will die soon. My Barrett’s is inactive and unlikely to develop into cancer even without further treatment, particularly given my lifestyle and dietary changes. My skin cancer could recur but I will walk out of the 6-8 hours of Mohs surgery cancer free. As most of my doctors have said to me, I not only do not look my age (most guess I’m in my 40s) - the beneficiary of youthful looking genes from both parents -  I’m also in pretty good health for a 62 year old. For that I am deeply grateful.

What I am concerned about is trying to ascertain what the remainder of my life is going to be about and how to live into whatever purpose that life might have. While I’m not totally convinced that each of us has a single purpose we come into life to meet, I do believe that purposeless existence is essentially a waste of the gift of life.

I have seen this first year of retirement as a badly needed sabbatical with time to lick my wounds and heal emotionally, spiritually and physically. But I have also seen it as a time of discernment. At 62 I’m not free to pick up and leave for a new calling as in the past. And, truth be told, I’m not even sure where I need to apply my energies at this point.

My departure from teaching left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth for the endeavor to which I have devoted most of my life. While I miss my students and the public scholarship events that once excited me, I don’t want to teach classes or present public scholarship just to have something to do or in pursuit of the pittance these events pay. And I still feel the need to exorcise the demons of years of learning and experience that demand to be expressed in some kind of published writing, the writing of these blog posts being a first step in that process.

So I still don’t know what I want to do with my retirement. I want to invest my remaining time and energy in something that will actually mean something and hopefully can make the world a little better place. But nothing has really captured my imagination thus far.  It is not surprising that I write these words at the start of the Advent season which began Sunday. Like Advent, this season of my own life is a time of watching and waiting.

When Sister Death comes, I want to embrace her warmly, leaving behind all regrets for a life not well lived. I want to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant,” whether that comes from G_d or simply from within my own heart. I’m in no rush to meet Sister Death. But I am praying that when she does finally come, I will be ready to embrace her.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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