The Ant in the Attic

Behind my childhood home in the ideally named community of Deephaven there was an old two-bay garage and storage area, which our family called the Old Garage. The garage itself housed a vintage Ford truck, at least for a time, which has some connection in my mind with my grandfather’s handyman Walt Trolson. Across from the entrance of the garage was a square enclosure with cinderblock walls about four feet high. Here our dad regularly burned the family trash—a ritual that probably is no longer permitted in suburban Minneapolis. The Incinerator (another Icon on the map of my childhood) was the scene for one of the great dramas of my first years, the night my sister “fell in the fire.” This left her with burns treated by a doctor who still made house calls, but no permanent injury that I’m aware of. I know that it also left my father with a terrible pang of guilt every time he thought of the moment of inattention that had led to his daughter’s mishap. 

Still, sorry Sis, sorry Dad, the Old Garage moment that is most indelibly imprinted on my mind today was not this high drama. In fact, it was no drama at all. It was the seeing, and mine alone, of a solitary ant, which happened across my field of vision while I was playing in the attic over the Old Garage with Billy or David or Tommy or Shelly or  some other boyhood pal. I realized, seeing the ant in that moment, that I was likely the only human being who would ever see it; and that it otherwise would live and die unseen by anyone, except by other ants, possibly by a predator that would end its brief, inconsequential ant life. 

The next question that occurred to me and the only vital question, it seems to me now, was, Does God see the ant? Implicit in that question was the realization, at some deep level of me, that if God did see the ant, then the ant mattered, the ant had meaning, the ant had a place in creation. And, horrible thought, if God did not see the ant, then God might as well not exist. Indeed, God might not exist at all. 

I want to express my experience as clearly as possible and without any exaggeration. It may be that this did not occur to me all at once but arose as a realization in my child’s mind over a period of time. But the realization was this, that the meaning of all existence depended on whether or not God saw that ant. 

This is a more important matter than Walt Trolson’s connection with the Ford truck or even my sister’s admittedly traumatic close encounter with trash on fire. This is the only question there is. 

Because if God did not see that ant, then he probably doesn’t see me or my sister or our dear departed Dad or even Walt Trolson. And then where are we?

Approaching the Bridge

It all goes back to my grandfather, Daniel Bull. His 31-page memoir inspired me to spend thirty years listening to the life stories of 80-year-old people. That was the essence of my one-man business, Memoirs Unlimited, a private ghostwriting service. From 1988 until two years ago, I interviewed elders and edited their stories into private books of memory. Now finally surrendered to retirement, I have left that professional writing life behind. 

What you learn following a parade of 80-somethings through the towns of their lives is that by that age most things drop away. It’s delightful to share time with someone for whom ego is only a Latin pronoun. Eighty-somethings, or the successful ones with whom I worked, have ceased obsessing about themselves and their accomplishments. They were all more interested in memorializing their parents and grandparents than their own doings. My clients knew they were leaving this earth and soon—crossing the bridge from which there is no coming back, wanting to leave a few precious things behind on this side of the chasm. They entrusted these things to me to assemble into a book. 

Now 70 myself, I realize that my own dropping-away is here and ongoing. I saw this last night as I watched the only professional sport with any attraction for me anymore, NFL football. NBA: too woke. NHL: too cold. Baseball: wake me when it’s over. I missed the end of “the game of the year,” Mahomes over Allen, Chiefs over Bills in OT, because I just don’t care. Maybe it was the Patriots’ lackluster exit from the 21-22 season that did it for me, but I think it’s more than that. I am approaching the bridge, still in the distance but near enough to see. And all that matters is the One waiting patiently on the other side. 

This morning I fly back to Florida, where my wife and our condo and croquet club await. I will be jetting back and forth once a month, probably all year long, because I have a foot in both places now: here where we raised our kids and still have a home that is far too big for two old people; and there where I’ve found that 900 square feet of condo contain just about everything I need.

Also, I am flying back and forth because I’m in formation to be a spiritual director, a three-year process of instruction, practical training, and supervision beneath the enormous circus tent of the Catholic church in a small concession manned by Oblates of the Virgin Mary. Between now and October, that training includes service as a prayer companion to individuals who want to deepen their relationship with the One who waits and watches. I have prayer companions now in both Massachusetts and Florida, and Zoom, except in need, doesn’t cut it. 

This vocation, which grows in me, is mobile; relies on no fixed location; can be applied in a church, in my office, on a park bench, on a beach—wherever two are gathered together. Or three. Because He, that One waiting there, is also standing here. Always and wherever we are.  

Now and again, I am privileged to be sharing the life stories of others. 

My Morning Page

For forty years I wrote for food while thinking, When I get to seventy, I'll write for love. 

My role model was Norman Maclean, author of my favorite work of non-religious* nonfiction, Young Men and Fire. Maclean was a revered teacher at U Chicago who wrote only academic papers and books until the age of seventy. Then, thinking he was about nothing more than putting down a few stories for his children, he wrote the luminous A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories and the posthumously published YM&F.

Now that I'm seventy, like Norman Maclean, though still eight years short of the age at which Grandma Moses began painting for serious, I have told myself until very recently that I'm too tired and that writing is too hard. 

In the last month or so, though, I find that I have more energy. It's partly the Noom diet, with which I lost 15 percent of my body weight since midsummer; and it's partly the Noom exercise program, which invites me to perform things like burpees, something I haven't even said since I stopped playing schoolboy lacrosse fifty-three years ago. Today, I have more energy, and I surprised myself by actually springing up yesterday at the words “Let us pray.” 

That’s not the only reason I am writing my first post in nearly five years, however. The trigger was a text from my friend Todd at three in the morning Friday. It read: 

My main main man who may be up this early, I am here with Jane and I want to access your blog entries from our trip desperately to read and reminisce, could you grant me access

I was up, as usual, at three in the morning, and Todd and Jane were too because they were on the “overnight” at Pat House, a L’Arche home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The exchange that followed led to my reopening this blog to public view. 

Todd and Jane were, as you'll read under the L'ARCHE entries at left and right, the two L'Arche assistants with whom I took a cross-country trip five years ago, in company of core members Woody, Doris, and John. This trip was the culmination of my two years “in Community,” as L’Archers say, and one of the peaks on my life map.

It was deeply gratifying to realize before dawn on Friday that by chronicling our days on the road in the L’Archmobile (my 2016 Toyota Sienna minivan), I had performed a small, very small, service for two friends to whom I am devoted. 

It is with that smallness in mind—and heaven protect me not with delusions of grandeur—that I take up keyboard and courage, proposing now to write a bit every day. I will take inspiration from a dear writer friend of mine who every day upon waking sits down to her “morning pages.”

Lord, give me the courage and the discernment to write briefly each day my own morning pages—

—from experience

—without politics or ideology

—without mentioning family members by name

—with faith

—with hope

—with sobriety   

I’ll conclude this morning page with the famous words of my beautiful grandchild (they know who they are), “Amen, alleluia, boat!”

*NOTE: Actually, YM&F is quite religious, though I suspect Maclean, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was unchurched in adulthood if not outright atheist. 

A Blind Dog at Adoration

In the early days of my conversion to the Catholic Church, I spent an hour before the blessed sacrament five days a week, M–F, in what Catholics call eucharistic adoration.*

More recently, too much taken over by my life, I fell away from this regular devotion. Now, with the prompting of my friend Joanne, I am back on the adoration schedule in the lower church at St. Mary’s, one hour a week. I put it this way—on the schedule—because I do my best to make it, though life still has a powerful hold on me.

This week, I shared space in the chapel with an elderly woman and her dog. While she sat and knelt with rosary and breviary before the Holy Eucharist exposed in a monstrance behind the altar, the lady’s dog snuffled about and slept on a long soft blanket of crimson and gold, which the lady had arranged by her side.

Like many human-canine pairs, the lady and her pet resembled one another. I especially noticed a common squint: in the lady a sign of absorption in her devotions, in the dog a hint that the bitch (for it was a she-dog) was blind.

I became as interested in the blind dog before the Lord as I was in the Lord himself. Sadly, life takes over one’s life even in His presence. I was moved by the old woman and her steady squinty gaze toward the Holy Eucharist, but I was even more moved by the dog.

The dog was almost completely docile before the Lord, only getting up and shifting her position every few minutes, partly to sniff about and orient herself to her mistress. But otherwise: quiet, peace, serenity in the dog, and as I contemplated the dog, in me.

Finally, the woman rose to gather her things, held the dog’s leash in one hand while deftly folding the long gold and crimson throw with the other. I looked toward the woman’s face and asked, “Is she blind?”

“Yes,” she answered and then added, without missing a beat: “If no one’s here when you leave, would you please close the tabernacle?” With this single thought for the sanctity and safety of the consecrated host reserved behind the altar, she and her companion walked slowly out, the woman waiting for the dog to follow her nose at each turning.

A few minutes later, an old smart friend of mine came into the chapel, bringing me a magazine. It was a publication of The Society of Saint Pius X in which the question of “The Papacy and Sedevacantism” is debated. This friend is one of my oldest and dearest in the Church, and under many circumstances, I might have taken the journal home and read it, if only out of devotion to my friend.

But I had just seen a docile dog—blind and unblinking—kneeling before the Lord, and I concluded that I would rather be that dog than a man in his now-nearly-late 60s (i.e., me) torn by doubt and argument.

To put it another way, I would rather go to hell for being stupid and docile than to heaven stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with the certainty of my own wisdom. Of course, neither is likely to happen. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and your little dog too.

* If you are unfamiliar with eucharistic adoration, take a look at this YouTube video. In a second video, Bishop Robert Barron explains in part why eucharistic adoration is enjoying a comeback today.

Revisiting the Church of My Childhood

I double-dipped today, attending the 8:30 mass at St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in Wayzata, Minnesota; then taking in the 10:45 at Wayzata Community Church (UCC) just west on the boulevard.

The Protestant church (pictured) is bigger by several times than it was in 1950, when my parents were married here, or in 1952, when I was christened. My first Bible (RSV with black leatherette binding) is inscribed to me by Wayzata Community Church and dated 1959. I still have it.

So when I returned, a Catholic convert, to my childhood community this weekend, visiting relatives, it was important to me to return to where my faith was born.

Four babies were baptized at Wayzata Community Church this morning in a rite conducted by pastor John Ross, and they helped me revisit the spirit of my own entry into the fold, at seven months old during my first Minnesota winter. My Uncle Truck, a longtime member of Wayzata Community, warned me that Pastor Ross would be sermonizing on the Protestant Reformation, the 500th anniversary of which we “celebrate” this month.

The sermon topic was being saved “by grace, through faith.” I noted that the Protestant preacher mentioned the pope only once and used the word works in a positive vein though also only once. I told the pastor so as we exited.

“You walked to the edge of the precipice, referring to works,” I said, “but you pulled back from the brink. Well done.” He laughed. I think Truck had warned him that Catholic relatives (my wife and I) would be in attendance, and Ross went easy on us.

Tonight, we had dinner with Truck’s two children, their spouses, plus three grandchildren, all of whom are faithful Christians. It was a rich and rewarding feast to celebrate my return home, geographically and religiously.

I record this short post to register my gratitude.

Posturing While the World Ends

My wife and I are in Minnesota, my home state, for our 33rd wedding anniversary. Friday, before visiting relatives outside town for the weekend, we spent the day in Minneapolis, mostly at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Rather, my wife did. You know how it goes at art museums, guys. She wants to look at every piece twice. You pick a couple of paintings, look at them a while, then go out for coffee or a beer or a nap, depending on time of day. I went for a nap at our hotel, but not before pondering Pierre-Jacques Volaire’s painting of “The Eruption of Vesuvius” (1771).

What struck me about the painting is the three gentleman relaxing on a safe ledge in the foreground. Even their dog looks unconcerned. A caption alongside the painting suggested that the men were “consuming the scene with  an air of detachment, as though the eruption were a controlled experiment. It mirrors the way men and women of means consumed science at the time, as public presentations and social encounters.”

The men in the foreground didn’t make me think of science; their “detachment” or nonchalance led me to think instead of the collapse of our culture while the rich look on, getting richer while embracing each new progressive cause, walling out the disadvantaged with gates and private security guards while throwing money at the poor with invisible tax dollars. Ten billion for programs? Check! A dollar into the hat of the toothless man leaning against the building? Never! Better yet: take the man out for coffee. Are you serious?

My juices must have been stirred by the pope. On the plane from Boston I read Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelic Gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel. As in his first encyclical, Laudato Si, our pope lays into the money world. “In this system,” he writes, “which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

One line struck me most forcibly: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

For me, as for Hamlet, the time is out of joint. Everything seems out of proportion, and we do not connect the dots, the only exercise that could possibly put things back in perspective.

L’Arche may be to blame for my sense of dislocation. I was always skeptical of philanthropy, as a sop to rich guilt, but since I began “sharing time,” as we say in L’Arche, with men and women having intellectual disabilities, I have grown appalled at my own ignorance, detachment, and nonchalance. A neighbor would call, ask for $100 for a cause, and I would write a check, never once trying to bridge the gap between my safe ledge and the uncomfortable lives of the actual human beings “beneath me” in the lava, the people my charity check allegedly benefited.

A few months at L’Arche Boston North in Haverhill, Massachusetts, changed so much for me. Beginning with me myself. To change I had only to get off my ledge and jump in. A terrifying thought? Yes. It was.

The Single Most Important Thing I Learned in School

Last night at The Actor’s Studio in Newburyport, I took a class in improvisation for the first time in fifty years. I am not on the doorstep of a new career. I am not even in the same zip code. A chain of circumstance led me to this class, and I’m glad it did.

One of the teachers happened to be a onetime, longtime L’Arche assistant. I met her while sharing time together at one of our homes at L’Arche Boston North. I told her that I was (am) writing a play (it’s a long story). She said she was co-leading an improv class.

I explained that improv was probably the most indelible portable skill I gained from three years at a particular fancy boarding school. That and writing, I should have said. I told her I might take the class, and last night I did.

If nothing else, improvisation is a way of being that helps me be a better L’Arche assistant, a better husband, a better person. An example may help.

The Star is To Die For. The Movie Just Dies.

Aristotle asked that a drama have “unity” of action, time, and place. The new “Wonder Woman” movie has these, more or less; what it lacks is unity of common sense.

Each of its three or four acts plays out to a different set of cosmic rules. Imagine Dorothy stepping out of the tornadoed farmhouse in “The Wizard of Oz” and onto the no-man’s land of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” only to find the battle taken over by a DC Comics superhero.

In Act I we meet the Amazons on Island Something-or-Other, and we meet Wonder Woman, who is every bit as cool and photogenic as a little girl as she is in the to-die-for form of Israeli commando/actress Gal Gadot. It’s notable that everyone who told me about this movie before I saw it today told me how awesome Gal Gadot is, which is undeniable. They neglected to tell me that her movie is ludicrous.

Standing at the Door

While on retreat a year ago, I was offered spiritual direction by a priest in residence. Things did not go quite the way I might have hoped.

As a convert to the Catholic Church (Easter class of 2008), I told the spiritual director of my journey before and after that memorable vigil mass. My account was filled with more obstacles and detours than The Odyssey. It was an impressive little mini-epic of man-finding-Church against the odds he had stacked against himself, or something.

The priest listened carefully, and then responded: “It sounds to me like you’ve arrived at the door of the Church but haven’t come inside yet.”

Uh, were you even listening to me, Father? . . . I was hurt, offended, and puzzled beyond telling.

I love the Catholic Church. I have never regretted becoming a Catholic a day in my life. How could this seemingly wise, sensitive, and perceptive spiritual director tell me—ME—that I wasn’t even inside the door?

“The Hero,” Sort Of

I wanted to like “The Hero” more than I did. I fully expected to.

My brother had recommended it; he has good taste in movies; and like me, for obvious reasons, he is sensitive to old-guy flicks in which the protagonist (not to say hero) has made mistakes along the way and has serious amends to make.

That’s the case with Sam Elliott as Lee Hayden, a Western movie actor who had only one starring role, that being forty years ago. Now on the far side of seventy, Lee finds out he is dying—very early in the film and therefore that’s a very minor spoiler.

What would you do if you found out you were dying and were divorced and alienated from your adult daughter, whom you never failed to disappoint? What Lee does and the sense he makes of his condition are just about the only moral point of this movie or watching it.