First thing she said was in answer to my pigeon-Mandarin question.
We were among a gathering of medical staff at a Chinese government hospital.
Lunch-time in a dull gray government-appointed canteen. Stomach-of-duck and jelly fish were served.
From a group of twenty-some participants, the young lady plucked out a seat next to mine.
I asked what she did for the hospital.
"I'm a G.I. doctor," she said.
"Oh, that's impressive," I said. She looks, I'm thinking, maybe in her mid-twenties...
"I'm in my forties."
We smiled. Beijing water is spiked with something...
"Have you been to America?"
"I studied in Mississippi. Do you know where Mississippi is?"
"Sure," I said. Deep south. In the Bible Belt...
"It's in the Bible Belt."
I nodded. No words for this...
"I went for five months. Now I'm Christian."
"Hao de. Me too."
The good doctor was all smiles and appeared quite happy, joyful.
"I'm baptized. In Mississippi."
I'm peddling software... In China...
Having an Exodus moment...
Hearing holy words this Lent from a communist government's gastrointestinal Christian physician baptized in Mississippi...
Thinking of Moses' words as he noticed the burning bush,
"I must go over to look at this remarkable sight,"
Finding God and miracles in the billions in Beijing this week.
--tim
Friday, March 8, 2013
Friday, March 1, 2013
Finding Miracles
On to the middle kingdom this week, lugging along a few thoughts for the ride.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
this one introvert in the billions in Beijing this week,
Beside restful waters he leads me;
to the scrum on the other side of Earth led in silent retreat,
he refreshes my soul.
On to trusting, finding miracles and God in the billions in Beijing this week.
--tim
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
this one introvert in the billions in Beijing this week,
Beside restful waters he leads me;
to the scrum on the other side of Earth led in silent retreat,
he refreshes my soul.
On to trusting, finding miracles and God in the billions in Beijing this week.
--tim
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Endurance
Cheated the other day.
Broke the fast.
Sneaked a peak at the TV at ten.
The newsman was in an ice fish hut.
His top story was about him.
This just in...he'd caught a dinky walleye in a frozen lake.
Lucky me letting silence slip to catch this news.
Some nights are hard to keep the fast. Especially mid-winter nights when the big news is it's well-below zero.
Lakes are frozen.
Fish still bite.
Good thing the large, dark Newfie lays by our front door. She absorbs tonight's chilly draft.
She watches me watch the tube.
She's thinking,
The real news is you're not missing much, Man.
Paul's letter to the Hebrews (10:36) had the day's headline,
You need endurance to do the will of God and receive what he has promised.
-tim
Broke the fast.
Sneaked a peak at the TV at ten.
The newsman was in an ice fish hut.
His top story was about him.
This just in...he'd caught a dinky walleye in a frozen lake.
Lucky me letting silence slip to catch this news.
Some nights are hard to keep the fast. Especially mid-winter nights when the big news is it's well-below zero.
Lakes are frozen.
Fish still bite.
Good thing the large, dark Newfie lays by our front door. She absorbs tonight's chilly draft.
She watches me watch the tube.
She's thinking,
The real news is you're not missing much, Man.
Paul's letter to the Hebrews (10:36) had the day's headline,
You need endurance to do the will of God and receive what he has promised.
-tim
Friday, February 15, 2013
This Guy in Church
Walked up to communion the other day behind this guy in church wearing a long cape draped down his back that said,
Repent
He held up a tall pole with his hands, on top of which was a sign, the size of those you see waving back and forth at political conventions that say Obama or Bush or Four More Years.
On the front of this guy's sign it also read,
Repent
and to expand on his point, the back of this guy's sign said,
Turn From Sin.
Wondered while walking up to communion about my sign if ever moved to do what this guy in church does...
What would my sign say?
Repenting...only when it occurs to me
Or maybe Turning from sin...kinda
Probably (since never knowing when-to-say-when) my sign would say,
Four more years
But this being a walk toward New Jerusalem, maybe it'd be good to start my sign in a more simple way,
Todah rabah!
-tim
Repent
He held up a tall pole with his hands, on top of which was a sign, the size of those you see waving back and forth at political conventions that say Obama or Bush or Four More Years.
On the front of this guy's sign it also read,
Repent
and to expand on his point, the back of this guy's sign said,
Turn From Sin.
Wondered while walking up to communion about my sign if ever moved to do what this guy in church does...
What would my sign say?
Repenting...only when it occurs to me
Or maybe Turning from sin...kinda
Probably (since never knowing when-to-say-when) my sign would say,
Four more years
But this being a walk toward New Jerusalem, maybe it'd be good to start my sign in a more simple way,
Todah rabah!
-tim
Friday, February 8, 2013
This Lent
Two thoughts.
First from Thomas Merton,
I need only to be nothing...to be at peace and poor and silent in the world...
And this from Abraham Heschel,
God is waiting for man to seek him.
Hope this Lent is good for you.
--tim
First from Thomas Merton,
I need only to be nothing...to be at peace and poor and silent in the world...
And this from Abraham Heschel,
God is waiting for man to seek him.
Hope this Lent is good for you.
--tim
Friday, September 28, 2012
Send My Roots Rain
The title's a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit Poet.
His poem Thou Art Just Indeed, Lord hit home the other day. Home being full of struggle, doubt, fatigue with Thou's unfair mystery.
It begins with these words
Thou art just indeed, Lord, if I contend with thee;
After leaving home and dropping our youngest kid off at college, doubt surfaced at a sidewalk cafe in Omaha.
Doubt about God.
And, if He is somewhere, then where?
The conversation crabbed about the Mysterious One's mysterious ways given life's unfairness's and injustices.
But, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners prosper? And must disappointment all I endeavour end?
Disappointment contained mostly in the hidden-ness of it all. A never-ending journey of searching, seeking, attempting to see truth, life, the way. Yet, without confidence. Often fruitless, dry, alone.
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, how would thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost defeat, thwart me?
Indeed, poet. With friends like this why fear enemies?
Might life be any more difficult and challenging with Your hidden and unknowable movements? Why so much mystery for us mystified, struggling humans?
Birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain
A patron at the Omaha cafe finished supper just then leaving an empty chair across the way as a fellow diner, mystified and struggling, on a crowded sidewalk wondered,
"Mystery, why not reveal Yourself more clearly?"
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain
Then that non-descript chair, ordinary though different from all the others, its place just over there at a different table yet on the same hustling sidewalk, as if prepared for a simple question -- a plea, really -- set alone in silence, now at the ready, beamed a helping of purpose, without doubt, stuffed with Life.
Sending my roots rain.
His poem Thou Art Just Indeed, Lord hit home the other day. Home being full of struggle, doubt, fatigue with Thou's unfair mystery.
It begins with these words
Thou art just indeed, Lord, if I contend with thee;
After leaving home and dropping our youngest kid off at college, doubt surfaced at a sidewalk cafe in Omaha.
Doubt about God.
And, if He is somewhere, then where?
The conversation crabbed about the Mysterious One's mysterious ways given life's unfairness's and injustices.
But, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners prosper? And must disappointment all I endeavour end?
Disappointment contained mostly in the hidden-ness of it all. A never-ending journey of searching, seeking, attempting to see truth, life, the way. Yet, without confidence. Often fruitless, dry, alone.
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, how would thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost defeat, thwart me?
Indeed, poet. With friends like this why fear enemies?
Might life be any more difficult and challenging with Your hidden and unknowable movements? Why so much mystery for us mystified, struggling humans?
Birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain
A patron at the Omaha cafe finished supper just then leaving an empty chair across the way as a fellow diner, mystified and struggling, on a crowded sidewalk wondered,
"Mystery, why not reveal Yourself more clearly?"
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain
Then that non-descript chair, ordinary though different from all the others, its place just over there at a different table yet on the same hustling sidewalk, as if prepared for a simple question -- a plea, really -- set alone in silence, now at the ready, beamed a helping of purpose, without doubt, stuffed with Life.
Sending my roots rain.
--tim
Friday, August 31, 2012
A Rainbow
Kid #2 sent this dispatch from her post in the Dominican Republic the other day.
It was from a fellow named Rick, a priest who runs the NPH orphanage in Haiti, written the day after Isaac plowed through the place.
The report is a bit long.
And toward the end, there's some real-life emergency-room-street-drama. So, it's for mature audiences.
But, there's a rainbow at the end if you stay with it.
Promise.
Hope you give it a read this long holiday weekend.
---
"Storm clouds are never very good news for a country tottering on the edge of survival. Even the super powers brace for super storms, and as we have seen, often do so in vain. How much can we do before the gigantic forces of nature?
Storms bring the obvious problems of floods, mud, and homelessness, trees that crush people and buildings, and objects that deliver their destruction by flying on the wings of savage winds. We saw this again yesterday.
Less obvious problems are the weakening of infrastructures, like our own hospitals when no one can get to work, when power is lost, when the sick are sopping wet and shivering cold because buildings made to protect from heat and sun above cannot protect against rain coming is sideways on high gusts of wind.
I am thinking at the moment of Fr. Francilome, who was brought to us in a coma yesterday after a terrible car accident in the drenching torrent. He came for a CT scan of his head, so we could send him to a private hospital with capacity for neurologists and neurosurgeons. It was pathetic to me, how in such conditions as yesterday, we could not offer him much protection from the same storm that so hurt him.
'Let us pray. His signature words, far from his silent lips now, are now our words for him. Let’s use them full heartedly.
Less obvious still, brought by life’s storms, is the inward journey of storm chaos. We human beings absorb it. We take it in. Some, sadly, welcome it as “home”, as “how it is”, never to be otherwise. Fate. The storm damage is also emotional and spiritual.
"The nearby river rises and rises, fed afresh from the mountain rains, ripping wider canyons along its track, as it is forced to take more water than it was carved to handle. Storms dump whole lakes worth of water on mountains, and these lakes seek the sea.
The river is so fast and furious that if you fall in, even if you are the best swimmer or super athlete, you are lost and taken to your death. On the river banks, hundreds of residents of a tent city, mouths wide open before yet another force of destruction, take the scene deep into themselves and try to make plans for escape, as they clutch their children: plans to go where? With whose help?
If there were such where’s and who’s, they would not even be on this riverbank, almost three years after the earthquake robbed them of even subsistence wellbeing. What is the emotional and spiritual toll these tragedies take on them, in this storm?
Or, think of the children in our orphanages, and the hundreds of orphanages around the country. Young minds and hearts, with damaged feelings and spirits from so many tragedies already at such a tender age, safe in a building but hiding from another manifestation of doom.
And what do storms do to people like me and you? We are helpers, and often enough wounded helpers with our own problems and sorrows.
How many stresses and strains does it take before we become cynical, before we don’t want to hear any more, before we don’t care?
It is to be expected that that can happen.
But let’s not say it is normal.
Let’s never say it’s normal.
It can never be normal for human beings not to care about each other.
I started making my rounds at 4am yesterday, to all our mission sites, winds and rains still railing. At 5am, some police approached St. Damien Hospital just as I returned from St. Luke Hospital and before heading to Cite Soleil. A police car approached, sputtering along, emergency lights barely flickering. Out came a screaming woman. She buckled over in the hospital lobby, dropped to her knees and lowered her head onto the chair.
I ran for the only help anywhere nearby, a clean white towel from my office, since I could see she was about to have a baby. I caught the baby from behind, into the towel, and cleaned off our newborn brother and stimulated his cry.
As I held him, aware that my arms where the first ever to hold him, I was on my knees behind the crouching mother, a woman from a poor tent city, who now had her baby in a bloody public scene, during a hurricane.
Neither of us could move, until we had help to cut the umbilical chord and untangle ourselves from this bizarre scene. It was one of those moments when life seems absurd, cruel, and random of meaning. I looked out at the storm, and knowing full well what life conditions awaited this baby within hours, I cynically said, “Lot’s of luck, kiddo!”
Suddenly, I felt the presence of the kindly forces that guide those who allow such guidance in their lives. Those who deeply understand living faith know what I mean. I was led to understand immediately that my cynicism had no place, and was dangerous to me, to my own path, to the baby in my arms. The kindly forces asked me if I was sure of what I had said. It is not that I heard a voice. But I was challenged and I felt the question put straight to me, “Who are you, to talk that way to a rainbow?”
Noah was given the sign of a rainbow, the sign of contradiction to the destruction of the storm. I was given the sign of a child. Yes, who am I, to talk with such arrogance and cynicism?
So, correctly and gratefully chastened, I murmured this prayer to the little rainbow in my arms: 'I wish you the blessing of even half the love and strength I have known in this life. Welcome to our world, a little rough around the edges, but it’s a beautiful place.'”
Fr. Rick Frechette, CP
Port-au-Prince
August 26, 2012
---
-tim
It was from a fellow named Rick, a priest who runs the NPH orphanage in Haiti, written the day after Isaac plowed through the place.
The report is a bit long.
And toward the end, there's some real-life emergency-room-street-drama. So, it's for mature audiences.
But, there's a rainbow at the end if you stay with it.
Promise.
Hope you give it a read this long holiday weekend.
---
"Storm clouds are never very good news for a country tottering on the edge of survival. Even the super powers brace for super storms, and as we have seen, often do so in vain. How much can we do before the gigantic forces of nature?
Storms bring the obvious problems of floods, mud, and homelessness, trees that crush people and buildings, and objects that deliver their destruction by flying on the wings of savage winds. We saw this again yesterday.
Less obvious problems are the weakening of infrastructures, like our own hospitals when no one can get to work, when power is lost, when the sick are sopping wet and shivering cold because buildings made to protect from heat and sun above cannot protect against rain coming is sideways on high gusts of wind.
I am thinking at the moment of Fr. Francilome, who was brought to us in a coma yesterday after a terrible car accident in the drenching torrent. He came for a CT scan of his head, so we could send him to a private hospital with capacity for neurologists and neurosurgeons. It was pathetic to me, how in such conditions as yesterday, we could not offer him much protection from the same storm that so hurt him.
'Let us pray. His signature words, far from his silent lips now, are now our words for him. Let’s use them full heartedly.
Less obvious still, brought by life’s storms, is the inward journey of storm chaos. We human beings absorb it. We take it in. Some, sadly, welcome it as “home”, as “how it is”, never to be otherwise. Fate. The storm damage is also emotional and spiritual.
"The nearby river rises and rises, fed afresh from the mountain rains, ripping wider canyons along its track, as it is forced to take more water than it was carved to handle. Storms dump whole lakes worth of water on mountains, and these lakes seek the sea.
The river is so fast and furious that if you fall in, even if you are the best swimmer or super athlete, you are lost and taken to your death. On the river banks, hundreds of residents of a tent city, mouths wide open before yet another force of destruction, take the scene deep into themselves and try to make plans for escape, as they clutch their children: plans to go where? With whose help?
If there were such where’s and who’s, they would not even be on this riverbank, almost three years after the earthquake robbed them of even subsistence wellbeing. What is the emotional and spiritual toll these tragedies take on them, in this storm?
Or, think of the children in our orphanages, and the hundreds of orphanages around the country. Young minds and hearts, with damaged feelings and spirits from so many tragedies already at such a tender age, safe in a building but hiding from another manifestation of doom.
And what do storms do to people like me and you? We are helpers, and often enough wounded helpers with our own problems and sorrows.
How many stresses and strains does it take before we become cynical, before we don’t want to hear any more, before we don’t care?
It is to be expected that that can happen.
But let’s not say it is normal.
Let’s never say it’s normal.
It can never be normal for human beings not to care about each other.
I started making my rounds at 4am yesterday, to all our mission sites, winds and rains still railing. At 5am, some police approached St. Damien Hospital just as I returned from St. Luke Hospital and before heading to Cite Soleil. A police car approached, sputtering along, emergency lights barely flickering. Out came a screaming woman. She buckled over in the hospital lobby, dropped to her knees and lowered her head onto the chair.
I ran for the only help anywhere nearby, a clean white towel from my office, since I could see she was about to have a baby. I caught the baby from behind, into the towel, and cleaned off our newborn brother and stimulated his cry.
As I held him, aware that my arms where the first ever to hold him, I was on my knees behind the crouching mother, a woman from a poor tent city, who now had her baby in a bloody public scene, during a hurricane.
Neither of us could move, until we had help to cut the umbilical chord and untangle ourselves from this bizarre scene. It was one of those moments when life seems absurd, cruel, and random of meaning. I looked out at the storm, and knowing full well what life conditions awaited this baby within hours, I cynically said, “Lot’s of luck, kiddo!”
Suddenly, I felt the presence of the kindly forces that guide those who allow such guidance in their lives. Those who deeply understand living faith know what I mean. I was led to understand immediately that my cynicism had no place, and was dangerous to me, to my own path, to the baby in my arms. The kindly forces asked me if I was sure of what I had said. It is not that I heard a voice. But I was challenged and I felt the question put straight to me, “Who are you, to talk that way to a rainbow?”
Noah was given the sign of a rainbow, the sign of contradiction to the destruction of the storm. I was given the sign of a child. Yes, who am I, to talk with such arrogance and cynicism?
So, correctly and gratefully chastened, I murmured this prayer to the little rainbow in my arms: 'I wish you the blessing of even half the love and strength I have known in this life. Welcome to our world, a little rough around the edges, but it’s a beautiful place.'”
Fr. Rick Frechette, CP
Port-au-Prince
August 26, 2012
---
-tim
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