What to do with your Diamond

Spirituality and Health magazine printed an Indian parable that I wished I'd put into my book, Money As Sacrament. (Ten Speed Press) It's a profound tale on the meaning of true wealth. It first appeared in his newest book, The Jesus Guide to (Almost) Everything by Rev. James Martin, S.J.


The sannyasi (wise man) had reached the outskirts of the village and had settled down under a tree for the night when a villager came running up to him and said: "The stone! The stone! Give me the precious stone!"

"What stone?" asked the sannyasi

"Last night the Lord Shiva appeared to me in a dream" said the villager "and told me that if I went to the outskirts of the village at dusk,I should find a sannyasi who would give me a precious stone that would make me rich forever."

The sannyasi rummaged in his bag and pulled out a stone.

"He probably meant this one," he said as he handed the stone over to the villager. " found it on the forest path some days ago. You can certainly have it."

The man gazed at the stone in wonder. It was a diamond, probably the largest diamond in the whole world, for it was as large as a person's head.

He took the diamond and walked away. All night he tossed about in bed, unable to sleep
Next day at the crack of dawn he woke the sannyasi and said, "Give me the wealth that makes it possible for you to give this diamond away so easily."

Dear readers, pass this story on. It's meaning is meant for all of us.

musings on Moving Forward

I lost myself the other day. I can’t find her. The self I mean. Where did she go? Self, Self, come back. Did you go because I was blind to you, the real you? Because I was off in some foreign place looking for meaning after my friend died, a force that broke my heart? Come back self, come back. I’ll give you time, my smile, Come back. Speak.

This early dawn, I race my bike along the river walk, glad my aging legs can travel 11 miles an hour. The river quickly captures my heart. I feel her presence, her moods, her quiet murmuring nourishing my hope of finding myself again.
I sail past every ripple and out beyond, I see white patches of sailboats, calm, serene, moving toward some star. Self? Are you out there? A Pelican glides above the river’s radiant surface. The whole site is wonderful, a vast body of life to every flashing animal underneath, every hyacinth on top, every moving sunbeam.
The wind whips around me. I sniff happiness from fisher folk who sit at the grasses’ edge, holding hard their fishing poles for a St. John’s dinner. I love how their strong black fingers tighten around their long poles digging below river’s surfaces. Wide brimmed hats turn, eyes smile, notice me and wave. I’m a part of these folks. God, knows, they are a part of me.

I bring my reading to the monthly writer’s group. Butterflies never cease to accompany my readings. I worry! Will they listen to what I say, really listen? I want them to like me. I want to spill something of my soul to them.
But Jim believes I get mired in too much seriousness, prone to shout out what’s wrong with the world. Too much shouting about suffering?
But damn it, what good am I if I don’t attend to the weeping around me? If I miss the you in the you that is poorly dressed, the you that is like me. What good am I if I fail to honor the hungry, the green Ford that broke down by the river walk?
Soren Kierkegaard ‘s line rings in my head: “What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.”
Okay, okay I’m still a Catholic.

I like my writer’s group. I wish I saw them more. They smile when I breeze in, ask questions like “how ya’ doing?” I smile, say something silly. But open my heart in a quick second? Tell them how I’m really doing? That I can’t find my self right now, my real self? Tell them how I weep for the loss of my long-time soulmate, about other friends that have moved away, leaving me empty inside. Tell them that I am hardening to life, growing tired of the darkness?

When I was a young nun, everything focused bright. Sure, I wore heavy black serge, topped with a weighty white cap. But honestly, my classes nourished my soul. Life was easy. I had religious rules and I followed them. Rules governed my classes also, but there was much fun and spirited learning. We sang Gilenau’s Psalm 8 for prayer: “How Great is your Name O lord Our God!” We sang as if God were leading the sing-a-long, perfectly in tune.
We played classroom exercise games, practiced and performed Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado in shiny Japanese costumes for the entire parish. My little yum yum, Elizabeth, writes me fifty years later about her new title as Delray’s Superintendent of Schools. Oh, I need those kid’s love now, to hear their shouting: “Sister, he pushed me.” Or not knowing how to answer brainy Rochina’s Colandro’s furious challenge: “Sister, what does adultery mean?“

In my office, I click these forlorn thoughts and stare at my framed antique Mother Mary, whose eyes reflect the sweetest of mothers. She hangs beside the arched orange and black Abbey du Thoranet, a French monastery. They are a pair, mother and monks. I pause to take in the moment. It feels like I’m being religious.

As for my self, well, maybe she’s on her way. Last night, I finished rereading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings classic, The Yearling. The final chapter completely pierced my soul. I broke down. I found oneness with the pioneering sorrow, the growth, the change that happened to son, Jody,
A not so simple tale of loss. Jody’s beloved fawn, Flag, grown now to adulthood, continued to pinch away the seedlings of their meager corn crop. Nothing could stop him, so Penny, the best of fathers, directed: “Jody, take your gun out and shoot him.”
I felt Jody’s horror, his adolescent feelings turning to hate, his refusal to do such a thing. Life without Flag wasn’t possible. But he obediently shoots the animal, and stricken by total alienation, runs away, far into the dark Florida woods, hungry, sleeping under live oaks, uncaring of the forest danger. After three days, starvation finds him longing for the father who always knew what to do to make things right.
He returns, finds his aching bent father sitting alone hunched before a fire. Penny weeps at seeing his lost son. Looking up closely, Penny sees a son that’s different now, grown, a new self. Suffering had born him as man.
Penny speaks, not only to Jody but to me: I read them aloud again and again:

I’m goin’ to talk to you, man to man. You figgered I went back on you. Now there’s a thing ever’ man has got to know. Mebbe you know it a’ready. ‘Twa’n’t only me. ‘Twa’n’t only your yearlin’ deer havin to be destroyed. Boy, life goes back on you.”

....You’ve seed how things goes in the world o’ men. You’ve knowed men to be low-down and mean. You’ve seed ol’ Death at his tricks. You’ve messed around with ol’ Starvation. Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ‘Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ‘tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I’ve been uneasy all my life.

.....I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin’. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever’ man’s lonesome. What’s he to do then? What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.”

I put the book’s pages down, feeling a new and strange sense of sorrow. Somehow, I was swept back to that young nun that was once me, no longer a nun and definitely no longer young, but now, in her long lifetime, has had to face losses, and recently, that of her beloved friend.
Perhaps, when we go looking for the lost self as I had done, maybe we find it in segments, in unsuspected places, in the moving flow of a giant river, in the heartfelt stories of a good book or in a simple wave from a black woman fishing for her supper.

More than any biblical narrative, Marjorie’s words pierced deep my unknown places, pushing forth so many more tears, granting me discovery of a new self that perhaps can move forward.

Thanksgiving

Last Sunday, my husband and I visited the local Unitarian church that feeds us so well. Jim and I sat near the front. The day’s leader took her place, lit the candles, and led the prayers that are prayed each Sunday -prayers of peace, of thankfulness for the freedom we’ve been given.    
I held Jim’s hand as I listened to a rare litany that captured my heart, that came across as a basic Jesus teaching. I sat forward not wanting to miss one word . . .
 Litany of Restoration

If, recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our salvation . . .

If you are black and I am white, 
It will not matter.

If you are female and I am male,
It will not matter

If you are older and I am younger,
It will not matter

If you are progressive and I am conservative,
It will not matter

If you are straight and I am gay,
It will not matter

If you are Christian and I am Jewish
It will not matter

If we join spirits as brothers and sisters, the pain of our aloneness will be lessened, 
And that does matter. In this spirit, we build community and move toward restoration.

As we drove home, I reflected on the coming Thanksgiving feast, and what, after all, does really matter as we approach our table laden with all sorts of traditional nourishing fare.   

In my many years I’ve attended numerous Thanksgiving repasts, felt all manner of Thanksgiving grace poured out, lost myself in endless chatter with my tablemates about mundane and not so mundane matters. 

Would it be too much to ask that this spirit of Thanksgiving continue throughout the year? Rather than what I heard last weekend from the lips of my friend, a savvy and totally caring pastor.

This world’s becoming more dangerous, more & more evil. Even if he thought so, does such a statement help to change anything? I guess he didn’t realize it -we rarely do- but that sort of fear mongering conversation accomplishes exactly the opposite of this season’s ennobling goodwill.  

This Thanksgiving, I pray for the goodness that matters, that we take a good close look at how goodness falls into our everyday life. This Thanksgiving I herald the gift of a fresh season from nature, of my neighbor’s kind deed of donating her bicycle to a homeless man, of my joy at finding a new friend at my toastmaster club. Of even of a recent spirited conversation with a friend of such (surprise!) different point of view. Yes, it all matters, every bit.

I give thanks for a gay neighbor who prepared a special meal for a club member recently hospitalized. I’m thankful for the cheery volunteers of Grace ‘n Grits with whom I meet each week to prepare a huge breakfast for the homeless of Sanford. I lift up in prayer my stalwart immigrant friend from Bolivia who teaches me about perseverance, refusing to give up after losing his engineering job of long standing, not losing faith during the following lonely weeks until he landed an even better paying position.

Dear friends, in this special season let’s renew our watchfulness over the airwaves’ prevailing currents of fear, to be receptive instead to God’s persistent goodness everywhere manifest. Let’s offer thanks for even those undesired economic mysteries we live with, if only as God’s topsy-turvy ways of teaching us things we evidently need to know and would otherwise shun. Let us honor both life’s highs and lows, including letting go of so much of what’s not good for us. Let us live with reckless trust in that constant gospel injunction crying out more than any other: Fear Not!
 
I’m happy that my husband and I were there last Sunday to hear that beautiful summation of what really matters, and of Thanksgiving blessings that only await our proclaiming them.

Spirit, Meaning, and Money: Feeding the World

Spirit, Meaning, and Money: Feeding the World

Feeding the World

It’s a Miracle!


Every story explodes more story. Take the example of how a few loaves and a few fishes once wildly burst into a feast of overflowing baskets. I love that story. I love the smile on Jesus’ face as the people are filled. It’s one of the few stories found in all four Gospels.

Thousands of people lounge on the hillside, hungry to hear Jesus’ words of wisdom. For hours, he offers simple, truthful guidance. Like us, the people are starved for authentic truth, for the deepest meaning of what religion has to say. Jesus has holy answers.

Exhausted, first thing Jesus does is sit down. He spends time looking over the crowd. He then shares some of his most insightful parables. When finished, he sees how his nourishment for their souls now calls for another kind of food. So he tells his disciples, “These people are starving. I am too! What’s for lunch?” Sitting in that crowd, I would have been starving as well.

Remember, we’re looking for a miracle here.

Holding up those five loaves and two fishes, Jesus utters the most beautiful of prayers: “Thank you, Father.” Then he blesses this sparse food, consecrates it, giving it power, rendering it so much more than just another hurried picnic.

Then Jesus delightfully doles out the morsels. More food is on the way; generosity begets generosity. He smiles. In fact he laughs with this insane, pure joy of giving. All the people laugh too. The wonder of it all.

Can we do something similar? Don’t we always have something for someone under our noses who can use an extra dollar, a meal, a helping hand at just the right time? When we happen to be the one on call, doesn’t it usually end in something like joy?

As if on cue, Jesus hears a child shout: “I’m full!” He toasts his disciples, then directs them: “Okay, collect the leftovers. We can send them over to the next town.” The men collect and continue to collect. Is there no end, they ask themselves? A tiny meal had become a banquet. A miracle!

Well, yes and no. Perhaps it’s better understood as the most ordinary of outcomes in God’s paired down economic order: give to get! And you multiply your giving.

This story reminds me of Leandra J. Carroll, mother of the current famous singer: Jewel. She writes in her book, The Architecture of All Abundance how her own money continues to multiply: "Though it varies from year to year, I challenge myself to disperse up to 60 percent of my income, after taxes, to benefit areas other than my own personal gain, primarily humanitarian endeavors. I am aware this constitutes a radical generosity, yet it seems my income expands exponentially as a result of my commitment.” Leandra smiles at her own miracle of giving, a personal loaves-&-fishes explosion that overflows, an experience too much to bear and must itself be shared in her prosperity book.

Finally, another loaves and fishes story I found yesterday as told by Paulo Coelho in the recent issue of Ode magazine: Abd Mubarak was on his way to Mecca when he dreamed that he was in heaven and heard two angels having a conversation.
“How many pilgrims came to the holy city this year?” one of them asked.
“Six hundred thousand,” said the other.
“And how many of them had their pilgrimage accepted?”
The answer: “None of them. However in Baghdad there’s a shoemaker called Ali Mufiq who didn’t make the pilgrimage, but did have his pilgrimage accepted, and his graces benefited the 600,000 pilgrims.”
When he woke up, Abd Mubarak went to Mufiqu’s shoe shop and told him his dream.
“At great cost and much sacrifice, I finally managed to get 350 coins together,” the shoemaker said in tears. “But when I was ready to go to Mecca, I discovered my neighbors were hungry, so I distributed the money among them and gave up my pilgrimage.”

And now, onto us! Consider our own filled hands, our soul’s capacity for a loaves-&-fishes miracle. Perhaps our coins could be feeding the needs of five thousand. Perhaps our hands could be feeding the world.

One Family Under God

Sounds so red, white, and blue, doesn’t it! But will you be my friend if I think differently from you? Will you be my friend if I believe a woman has the right to choose whatever’s given her? Will you be my friend if I believe gay people have just as much right to love as heterosexuals? Will you be my friend if I believe those without a home are given us to befriend? Finally, will you be my friend if I believe that a Jew, and a Muslim, are just as “saved” as any Christian brother or sister?
"Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you." Noted religious writer Karen Armstrong, a favorite hero of mine who has authored over twenty books on religion and who like me spent formative years as a nun, identifies this golden rule as the bedrock directive of all the world’s faiths. I watched her the other night on PBS Bill Moyers’ Journal. Her words rang with a welcome rock-solid basis for universal inclusion.
Religion isn't about believing things. It's more like ethical alchemy, about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.
Yes, behaving! Even as I walk downtown, past Sanford’s famed church-on-every-block of every denomination, I’m reminded to behave in a way that reflects the goodness of each of those expressions of good faith, to love them for their traditions, even for what I may take to be their shortcomings.  
In our post-9/11 era Karen Armstrong has become a powerful voice for ecumenical understanding, for the virtue of compassion that links us, makes us connected beings. She presents her current project, a worldwide Charter of Compassion, in a video that can be found on Google.
Compassion is not pity, but the ability to walk in another’s shoes. 
I’m reminded of my favorite New Testament scripture: Matthew 25:  I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink, in prison and you came to visit me. I was naked and you clothed me . . . 
It seems I’ve always been chasing religion’s Good News. Baptized into the Greek Orthodox church, I attended a Baptist Sunday school and then a Catholic grade school. Following college as young Sister Mary Adele I enrolled in Barry University’s Religious Studies graduate program. There, in lively classroom discussions that exploded any easy theological complacency, I heard the definitive voices of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Karen Armstrong’s current voice fits into that probing theological chorus. 
A visiting professor ended my Miami classroom experience to say: “You all possess some part of religious truth, but each of your truths is simply part of an entirely bigger sphere of God’s truth.”
It has taken time, but slowly I am coming around to accept the ground of that reality, that any downplaying of another’s belief is venturing far from the mandate to walk in his or her shoes.  
Here’s how another prominent thinker sees our Heinz-57 clan. Albert Einstein, who upended the way we think of our physical world, was often asked, “What religion are you?”  His most famous retort: “I’m a mosaic!” Which is to say, “Yes! I am all of them.”
  In my weekly life for the last three years, I attend an energizing group who have become more family for me than many I can remember. Our Toastmasters Club in Altamonte Springs, begins with a traditional Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Then I listen to heartfelt talks by dark-skinned Americans, by Asians, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and who-knows-what shade inbetween, altogether a tasty soup of ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. Sometimes I’m stretched by the differences. More often Jim and I come home richly nourished: how we see ourselves in each of these brothers and sisters! God’s family lived up-close.

A matter of Time, A Matter of Love

A Matter of Time, A Matter of Love
(Gay)

Because of the reigning media frenzy regarding gay marriages, I recently pulled out last year’s Christmas card from a male friend living in Los Angeles. On it were three little boys in bright colored smiles. His two year old gazes down with delight at a new pair of twins all bundled up; three precious children setting out on a remarkable journey with their two dads, a committed gay couple together now for about six years.

Its a great photo. But of course one dad happens to be a professional photographer. These days though he takes few pictures: Leonard is a stay-at-home dad while his partner Dan works. Their children are solid proof that love, no matter how manifested, does indeed work.

Is anything lacking here? From where my camera focuses, these dads have everything required to propel their sons into healthy, fulfilled adulthood, beginning not leastwise with their rambling four bedroom home and its recently redesigned nursery room of perhaps too many toys. From where I sit these guys have got it together.

These men didn’t adopt. They arranged the births with the help of a young woman in need who played surrogate mom for them “one step removed”. One of the men is father to the children; they are physically his offspring. But to see this family you’d never guess any distinctions in parenthood. You hear a lot of fussing and gurgling in that household these days. And like any other family meeting life’s unexpected twists, they were overwhelmed when the second go-round delivered a set of twins.

Against this backdrop of domestic bliss experienced in truly generous proportions, I hear the chorus of so many Christian leaders hammering away at any idea of gay union. The facts, the evidence of so many stories like Leonard’s, argue otherwise. As Leonard himself once simply put it to me, “I’m called to live a gay life and have responded to that vocation.” Gay partners, both men and women, in our time are bravely forging a new way to fulfill the most venerated of all biblical vocations, the call to love.

So what of these other biblical calls, so-called, peppering us from so many pulpits? Well, what is seen to be biblically correct, the black-&-white defined for all time right-&-wrong, has in fact been undergoing enormous shifts --you could say like everything else connected to our vital human condition. Check the record in even my own lifetime . . .

In the South, we once preached that God’s law prohibited African-Americans worshiping in the same church as us. “Build your own churches!” we said. “God’s Law demands it!” Mercifully, in our own time that “biblical” truth was left to die a natural death so that in many christian churches today blacks and whites can be heard singing Amazing Grace in one voice.

Then there was that commandment that God never intended interracial marriages. They even came up with a fancy word for it, although I have yet to find linguistic traces for miscegenation in the bible. But ministers insisted the bible said whites and blacks couldn’t mix. Well, who stares anymore when an interracial couple passes by on the street?

Only last Sunday a charming young couple sat ahead of me at Mass, a black man with his white partner. At the sign of peace, they turned around to smile and shake my hand, and later, as they took communion I could see that at last we were coming around to accepting what marriage is really all about.

Changing truths! Do truths change? As a former nun, I’ve seen many “commandments” in my own little community of sisters find new expression in today’s world. Maybe we’re simply digging deeper to find the same basic truth: that life is about love. And that that never changes. If anything is changing, mercifully it’ll be us!

That same Sunday, after my church experience with the inter-racial couple (the expression itself is already dated), I delighted to see in the Sunday New York Times marriage announcements a photo of two men announcing their union. How brave of the Times to print it! How brave of the couple themselves! Our culture and our religion will one day follow suit. One day we won’t be the least surprised to see same sex announcements.

I smoothed out that delightful photo of Trevor, Ethan, and Garrett with their Kodak-perfect smiles that speak a thousand love words, placed it on my fireplace mantle and lit a lavender candle beside it. It burns that we may soon leave all this verbal violence far behind us. I know love will win out. It always does. It’s only a matter of time --and a few brave souls to help us move forward.

I’d like to be around when these three boys pay tributes to their dads, airing their treasured memories of how their dads read to them and took a day off for a day at the zoo together. Maybe how, when one dad caught the flu the other took his place at work and hired a nanny for them. But maybe by then they won't need to tell the stories: two dads will be just another commonplace in this great pulsing kalidescope we call life.

Yes, one day I expect gay marriages will be pretty normal. Who knows, maybe on that day the pulpit itself will at last be abandoned as last ditch defense for a belief on its way out.
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Adele is a money peacemaker and the author of Money As Sacrament, a book for women. It's in all bookstores. She's available for personal money coaching at 407-263-4482 Visit her website:www.moneyassacrament.com.