Plain Ordinary Everyday Grace

Walking the Labyrinth—September4, 2009—The Greek Orthodox Church today celebrates the feast of the Venerable Anthimos the Blind, who died in 1782. As a child he lost his vision during a smallpox epidemic, but one day at Mass he recovered sight in one eye. He worked with his father as a ship’s mate for some years afterward, but eventually went blind again. He retired to a monastery and took vows, but spent all his time in church praying that God would restore his eyesight. His fixation on the topic was evidently an irritant not only to his fellow monks, but became tedious even to the heavenly hosts: Anthimos told his monastic brethren that during prayer, two angels appeared to him and escorted him to St Mary, the Mother of God. Anthimos was delighted by the heavenly vision, happier yet that his prayers had been heard and his sight was to be restored. He was in for a bit of a shock. The Queen of Heaven addressed Anthimos sharply, telling him his prayers were self-centered, and he would not be getting his sight back. “Your continual prayer that your sight be restored,” she chided him, “is profiting you nothing.” Anthimos took this heavenly kick in the teeth to heart, left the confines of the monastery, and began preaching that people should have faith in God despite their difficulties. Over the years, he became renowned for his spiritual insight and his prayers for the healing of others—especially for those who were blind—seemed to have a special efficacy. September 4, 476 AD is the date historians say the Roman Empire officially came to an end. On that day a German chieftain, Odoacer, told a Roman teenager, the recently-anointed Romulus Augustulus (“little Augustus”) that he couldn’t be emperor anymore. Odoacer took to calling himself the “King of Italy” and sent Romulus, who was evidently a bit simple-minded (no doubt why he was appointed in the first place), to live in a country villa with his aunt. According to medieval chroniclers, Augustulus finished his life quite happily as a keeper of chickens. More than 1,000 years later, in 1554, Friar Cornelio da Montalcino, a Franciscan who’d studied the Hebrew Bible with a rabbi living in Rome, renounced Christianity and converted to Judaism. September 4 of that year, officers of the Inquisition took the former friar in chains to the Campo dei Fiori (“Field of Flowers”) and burned him alive. It was an effective lesson: no Roman Catholic priest is known to have converted to Judaism for the next 350 years. On this day in 1682, Edmond Halley first saw the comet which now bears his name. Halley isn’t famous for seeing it. Millions before him did that. The comet was called after him because Halley figured out (twenty-five years later) that the comet he’d seen in his youth was the same one that had been recorded by astronomers in 1456, 1531, and 1607, and has a 76 year orbit. He correctly predicted it’s reappearance in 1758. That year, as astronomers across Europe noted its presence in the pre-Christmas sky, the comet was given Halley’s name. Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835, while the comet was making a scheduled appearance. In his biography, he said, “I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It's coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it.” Twain died the day following the comet's reappearance. On September 4, 1781, the provisional governor of Alta California, Felipe de Neve, came into the Bahia de las Fumas (“the Valley of Smokes”) with 44 settlers and decided that they would erect a settlement. They named it El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, finding the area called that on a map made by Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish army captain who’d traveled the valley 15 years earlier. Over the years, of course, the village of our Lady of the Angels has grown to a city of 9,862,049 and shortened its name to Los Angeles. A look outside any window in the city shows that it is still accurate to call it the Valley of Smokes. Today in 1886, Geronimo rode into Skeleton Canyon, 30 miles outside Douglas, Arizona, and surrendered to the commander of the United States 4th Cavalry, General George Crook. He had eluded the cavalry for ten months, but that summer was one of the hottest ever recorded in Arizona, with temperatures every day topping 120 degrees. The streams dried up and the desert grasses withered. Army posts set atop the tall Arizona mesas tracked Geronimo's movements by telescope. When the chief was told the cavalry had been ordered to pursue him even into Mexico, he lost heart and asked General Crook for a parley. After his surrender he (and, ironically, the Indian scouts who’d helped track him) went as a prisoner to Pensacola, Florida and from thence to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was reunited with his family. Geronimo became an American celebrity, and learned the promotional ways of the Whites: he made a fortune selling photographs of himself, appearing at events across the country—they erected a special pavilion for him at the St Louis World’s Fair. In 1905, he rode with Teddy Roosevelt in his inaugural parade. He died and was buried in 1909 at Fort Sill, but he’s back in the news today. Earlier this year, Geronimo’s descendants filed a suit against the Yale secret society of the Skull and Bones, claiming that six members of the society, while serving in the United States Army in 1918, stole Geronimo’s skull from his grave. The story is being widely dismissed (his body was—and presumably still is—buried under a large pyramid of cement and Arizona stones in the middle of a military graveyard), but some have linked this allegation with the Illuminati (are you paying attention, Melissa?) and the Roswell Cover-up. The first full moon in September’s sky is called the Grain Moon in central Europe, the Wine Moon around the Mediterranean and the Apple Moon by the ancient Romans; the Celts called it the Fat Moon, for the coming harvest. This is the 247th day of the year, 118 remain in 2009. On the old Roman calendar today is pridie Nonas Septembri, the beginning of the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games. It was the major festival of the Roman year, kept in honor of Jupiter. The fifteen-day celebration centered on horse and chariot races, boxing contests, and gladiatorial fights. The Ludi was unlike the Olympic Games of Greece. The Romans who thronged the Circus Maximus (which seated 250,000) were less interested in athletic prowess than combat sports. Thousands died in the annual contests; their families were invited to take consolation from the laurel crown awarded by the City for display on the tomb of the dead athlete. The United States Congress has had food on its mind in Septembers past: this is National Chicken Month, National Mushroom Month, and National Rice Month. Put them together and you have the basics of a patriotic meal. Next time you're tempted to criticize our Congress remember how many things like this they do for us.

I CAN WALK. A commonplace, but as I’ve been either in the hospital or a wheelchair for most of the past three years, I'm still boasting about it. Walking is exhilarating and for the past two weeks, I've been walking every night. I have to wear a big, 25 pound plasticene boot to do it, but that’s a small inconvenience when weighed against the joys of ambulation! I circumambulate Park Ferman every night from 8.30 till 9.30. I listen to the surf crash on the rocks below the beach wall, watch the moon wax each night (from the sliver of Shakespeare’s "horned moon" two weeks ago to the Fat Celtic circle now in the sky as I write); I give space to the raccoons as they bumble away at my approach and avert my eyes from the young lovers trying to hide in the shadows as I pass. I am walking again—and while I walk, I meditate. Not a formal “meditation”—which for me requires a book—but a mediation nonetheless. The word meditation comes to us via Latin—as do so many other good things!—and its old Latin root means “to measure.” I don’t count my nightly steps but I do “measure” and “meditate” on what I see and hear as I walk. What I measure and meditate on as I walk—a dead bird, a plastic cup, a pile of leaves, the moan of a distant buoy—measures something about me and the world I inhabit and the others I inhabit it with.

When I was young, my grandmother once told me I was “extraordinarily ordinary.” I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I remembered her words. Despite how those words sound, I knew she meant something good by them. Later in life I asked her to explain them. At first, she was surprised I remembered, but she said, “I said that because you are ordinary and everyday but in the most extraordinary ways.” That wasn’t too illuminating, but as I’ve discussed with you before, words have creative power. Her words did for me. They were a gift. I came to understand that I am utterly ordinary but that the ordinary is capable of discovering extraordinary things. Even the most gifted of us is more ordinary than not. We each have the capacity to discover how extraordinary is the world in which we live and the extraordinary characters with whom we share it. Earlier this week, I saw Dr Jack Kevorkian interviewed on television—not once, but twice (I guess he’s written a book). You may recall that he is nicknamed “Doctor Death” (of which he is quite proud), so-called from helping some people kill themselves. He told the interviewer that, all things considered, he wished he’d never been born. His life hasn’t been worth all the trouble he’s had to go through. He said other stuff too, some intentionally provocative, reminding me of a spoiled teenage boy or an arrogant politician—one appointed, not elected, to office. Of course he decried the evils and duplicities of religion and boldly declared his atheism—such things are de rigeur for scientific heroes today. He was a sage spokesman for the Brave World he hopes is coming until—until—the interviewer asked him if he was going to kill himself. Doctor Death became indignant at the question. “Why should I?” he demanded. “You said you didn’t feel life was worth living,” came the answer. The interview didn’t last much longer.

The majority of us who say we don’t want to keep living don’t quite want to die. Why? Pain is bad and suffering is worse, but we cling to life. We cling tenaciously because in spite of the pain and suffering and tedium which can preoccupy us (if we want them to) we still catch glimpses of beauty and uncover fountains of grace, even if we don’t know what it is we’ve found. Dr Death may regret his on-going suffering, but he evidently likes the taste of buttered popcorn or the sound of a barking seal. Though he wishes he'd never been born, he doesn't want to check out just yet. He's waiting for something good. He may not know what, and he might not agree that he's waiting, but that's why he's grasping at life with the tips of his fingernails. I love the glories of a Solemn High Midnight Mass on Christmas, but the unexpected poke of my dog’s cold nose on my bare arm, because she wants me to quit reading and pet her, brings no less delight. My grandmother was right: I find the ordinary to be extraordinary, and brimming to overflow with grace. It’s meant to be that way for each of us, extraordinary or not. Those of us walking in faith, no matter how dim our faith and halting our steps, need to meditate as we walk. We need to measure and weigh the lives we’re living and, as much as we can, measure ourselves. That which gives value to our lives isn’t to be found in the clashing cymbals or bursting cannonades of an 1812 Overture; it’s in the quiet, the ordinary, the humdrum: that’s where we discover grace most often. It’s always there. I can measure it as I walk. So can you.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I pulled Round Up the Usual Suspects, about the making of the movie Casablanca. Casablanca is one of my favorites with a generous handful of the most memorable movie quotes in the history of film-making. “Round up the usual suspects,” “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “I’m shocked, shocked to learn gambling is going on here!” and of course, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” I’m sure you know the most famous “quote,” “Play it again, Sam” never actually appears in the movie, though a couple of lines come close. I could fill pages with great lines from this movie, most from the pens of Julius and Philip Epstein, the twin brothers who wrote screenplays for Warner Brothers. These two took an unproduced play, Everyone Comes to Rick’s, and turned it into Casablanca. This book tells how a hundred unforeseen accidents and scores of unlikely people came together to make one of the best movies yet. The author, from a family long-associated with Warner Brothers, drew her information from studio archives and interviews with many of those involved in the production. She gives us the background leading up to the filming (Warner Brothers bought Everyone Comes to Rick’s the day after Pearl Harbor) and brief biographies with some eyebrow-raising asides of the major players on either side of the camera : Paul Henreid, who played the leader of the Czech Underground, was the son of an Austrian nobleman looking for a role that would establish him as anti-Nazi; Ingrid Bergman, who, for the sake of each picture, “psyched herself up” to fall in love with her leading men, in this case, took an instant dislike to Bogart and he reciprocated. “I kissed him, but I never knew him,” she said later of her co-star. Michael Curtiz, the director, was a recently-immigrated Hungarian whose English was not good (his son said of him: “He spoke five languages, all of them poorly.”). Max Steiner, the music director, hated “As Time Goes By,” and wanted to replace it with a composition of his own. The role the censors played takes up a whole chapter, and another is given over to the movie’s production difficulties as one of the first wartime movies made under new government-imposed restrictions on materials—wood, paint, silk, celluloid, even nails. Every new chapter tells of fresh problems which make the success of the picture increasingly dubious. In the end, the author says, it succeeded because of something she says is much missing in Hollywood today—professionalism. I can’t speak to that; I’m just glad it got made. This is the story of how that happened. Round Up the Usual Suspects was published in 1992 by Hyperion Press; the author is Aljean Harmetz. You can find it on Amazon for about $2.50 or $20.00 at your favorite bookstore under its new title: The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II. While you’re at it, pick up the movie!


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures.”—Geronimo

“The buffalo is all gone, and an Indian can't catch enough jack rabbits to subsist himself and his family, and then, there aren't enough jack rabbits to catch. What are they to do? What would any of us do?”—General George Crook

“You're basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won't work. That's why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They're all religious problems.”—Jack Kevorkian

“I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.”—Humphrey Bogart

“I made so many films which were more important, but the only one people ever want to talk about is that one with Bogart.”—Ingrid Bergman