Celebrating life at death

At most funerals I hear the phrase “celebrate the life of,” yesterday at the funeral for my friend Willie W. was the first time I actually saw it happen.

Like Willie himself this was because of a rare confluence of things.

First, I think it was because of Willie’s spirit and the amazing assortment of people who he cared for and who cared for him. Willie and I were not close friends despite knowing each other for about 20 years. We belonged to the same faith-based assistance group and saw each other in church basements on a regular basis. I liked him a lot and admired him and talked to him but we didn’t hang out together other than that. What I admire about Willie was he accepted people as they were. He didn’t seem to suffer from my own fear of what others might think that sometimes keeps me separate from my fellows. If he did suffer it — and he was human, so it was likely sometimes he did — he didn’t let it stop him from being friendly and welcoming. Willie’s smile always made me feel like I could just tell him whatever was on my mind or in my heart. From what I saw of how other people responded too him, I wasn’t alone in that feeling. Before the start of the Mass, the family invited people to say a few words about Willie and everyone of us mentioned how he made us feel welcome and how he was always going out of his way to help others. One man who spoke said he didn’t know Willie that well but did know his son and that showed him what an amazing person Willie was because of the family he helped raise.

Second was the community of the church where the funeral was held. Willie was a long-time parishioner at St. Mary of the Angels, a Catholic church in Roxbury. As a result, the priest — Fr. Jack — actually knew Willie and could speak from his own experience about him. This was also true for the other clergy and laypeople of the church. So this was not a funeral held in a church, but a church community holding a funeral. Also, the St. Mary’s community is much more ebullient than many I’ve seen. In part this is because they are mostly African-American and have a tradition of  openly expressing their passion for their faith. However I know that is not the only reason. My formative religious experiences were in a mostly caucasian Charismatic/Evangelical/Pentacostal Catholic community, where people also felt free to shout, sing and raise their voices at times other than those merely required for responsorial reasons. Because of that I’ve always found quiet congregations odd or at least uninteresting. Many people I know (myself included) will happily shout with enthusiasm for a sport even on TV but will sit quietly when they attempt to face God.

Third was the celebrants. Fr. Jack, the lead priest, went out of his way to welcome and make people comfortable with the service. Before it began he noted that it was likely there Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists there and explained the different parts of the Mass in terms that emphasized the common ground for all of us. He talked about the liturgy being stories and lessons and wisdom which might have made it easier for people of different backgrounds to listen to them without feeling like they were being — forgive me — preached at. His co-celebrant was Fr. Pat, who was deaf and both spoke and signed his parts of the Mass. He spoke as many of the deaf do in a way that is not as certainly enunciated as the hearing can but this just seemed to add an intensity to his speaking. When he both spoke and signed “the Word of God” it came across as much more immediate than I had ever heard from someone who wasn’t hearing impaired.

While this was a well-planned funeral, the best parts could not have been planned — they just were.

Taking my son to The Holocaust

The Buddha’s parents tried to shield their son from all the evils of the world. I know exactly how they felt.

My son is 12 and he already knows that history is filled with ugly bits. I walked him across the field where Pickett’s Charge took place and tried to get him to imagine what it was like to be under fire the whole way, watching your friends be hit and hoping you weren’t next. He knows about persecutions – of the Indians, of the Blacks, the Irish, the Jews, and everyone else. We have talked about war and poverty and starvation and cancer and homelessness and slavery. He already has a heart that leaps to defend others who are being picked on, even as it is hesitant to defend himself.

Mostly he has known about the ugly bits as a general concept, not a specific incident. Through 6th grade that’s how history gets taught in school. There was a lot of emphasis on heroes and heroines – he wrote a report and acted the part of Louis Braille in 4th grade. Once you hit 7th grade, though, it’s time for the real stuff to be known. The first novel assigned this year was about a black child growing up in the South in the ‘30s. The second one was about a Jewish child growing up in Germany at the same time. Then, thankfully, came Tom Sawyer. But another teacher assigned a research paper. The holocaust – any aspect of it or just a general overview. Because of his friends and his family he chooses to write about the pink triangles – homosexuals in the concentration camps.

History in general and World War II in particular are things I’ve studied a lot (mom is the one to turn to for math or languages). So I pull out a general history of the war that has a brief but solid overview and then we go to the library and get some more books. That’s enough to do for now. I don’t tell him to start reading. We bring them home and they sit there. Then today he starts the reading sitting at the kitchen table. Him concentrating on the big book and me painting little toys but mostly ready to answer any questions.

“The first camp is Dachau. … Yes, Auschwitz is another. … Look a picture showing all the different colored triangles, that might be good for an illustration.” Then a pause and without really looking up from the small figure I’m painting I say, “I hate that you have to study this. Almost as much as I hate that it happened.” Even as I say it I know it isn’t “correct” but it is true. I should have the phrases reversed. I should hate the murder of millions the most but I am a father and that is not how I feel. A little later I tell him we will watch a comedy tonight and we both know this is not an optional activity, not if he is going to get to sleep.

I am not glad he is being taught this piece of history even though I know it is essential he learn it. Anne Frank. The ovens. The showers. Everyone has to know this – even if it’s another version featuring Stalin or Pol Pot or any of the others who did the same things. I watch his face as he reads and looks at the photographs. I see a little bit of it start to sink in because no one can ever take it all in at once. At that moment I don’t want him to know at all. I want to keep him in a world of StarFox and Darth Vader and grandparents who show up unexpectedly to take you out for pancakes.

I cannot shelter my son from the world and I cannot turn him into the Buddha. But, oh, how I want to.

What I believe

I got tagged in game of blog meme by my friend Pam Phillips. It’s a simple enough meme: What are five things you believe? (Pam had tagged me at CollateralDamage but I decided to move the response here to my irony-free zone.)

I believe:

1. I’ve had enough to drink
2. in God as I do not understand God
3. form is emptiness, emptiness is form
4. art is essential
5. in everyone’s absolute right not to believe

OK, now I have to pick five folks. First is easy: Jennifer. Then … hmmm … Andrew, Rob, Churbuck and Forbes. Have at it gang.

Going back to church, part 1

About a month ago the church on the corner had a bless-the-animals ceremony. I went, along with my wife and son and Roxxy, the explicit beneficiary of the service. It was held outdoors on a sunny Sunday. Many people brought pictures of their pets — living and deceased. Only one other actual pet was in attendance, a fine old black-haired mutt named Ralph who is roughly five times the size of our Pug and considerably older. He had that fine white around the eyes and muzzle that tells you you are in the company of a dog who has seen quite a bit.

Much to my own surprise I have gone back several times since then and have felt a distinct pang on those Sundays when family scheduling forced me to miss services.

While I have spent a fair amount of time in church basements at various community meetings, I hadn’t been upstairs during a church’s prime hours of operation in many years. My last regular attendance ended 33 or so years ago. I was raised nominally Roman Catholic — which meant going on Easter and Christmas. Until junior high school when my mother and I moved into a charismatic Catholic parish — St. Patrick’s Word of God — in Providence, RI.

We moved there because it was the best school my mother could find for me, not because of any particular fervent faith. My mother — Irish Catholic — had been a regular church goer until sometime in the 50s or maybe even the 1960s. But by the late 1960s I can’t remember anything more than that nominal attendance at services. It was quite confusing to suddenly be part of this community of people so fervent in their beliefs. We started going to Mass every week and the services themselves weren’t like what I slightly remembered. They seemed much longer, with people reading from the bible at times and, after communion, speaking in tongues. That was my favorite part. It was a harmonious discord, very like listening to an orchestra tune up. It went on for a while until the Holy Spirit had given up the ghost in the last person It had inhabited and then quiet returned and the services continued.

I hadn’t really thought much about God in any manifestation prior to this. It was a concept that would get kicked around now and then by me and my friends. We weren’t particularly theologically minded. God was a topic that was discussed with far less passion than say whether you like Marvel or DC comics. (I was a Marvel kid).  When it did come up it mostly seemed to consist of conversations like, “What do you think?” “I dunno but there’s gotta be, right?” “I dunno.” Things would go flat after that. This was never a problem I had when it came to the truly important debate: Who is stronger, Hulk or Superman?

So St. Pat’s was really my first extended exposure to either God or religion (the two were the same in my mind then).

We had to read the Bible a lot at St. Pat’s. I liked to read and wouldn’t have minded so much had it not been so badly written and horribly illustrated. The Bible they equipped us with was The Good News For Modern Man edition which was au currant in the early 1970s. The translation is very prosaic and seems to think that the way to connect with people is through the most stripped down writing imaginable. What truly baffled me about the four gospels was why there were four of them when they all sounded exactly the same. (And yes, this is actually what I thought in 6th grade. Precocious doesn’t begin to describe me.) The illustrations were all these simplified line drawings that were as plain and flat as the prose. I learned to read from comic books and was in awe of artists like Jack Kirby who could make characters that indeed looked like gods if not God. It is hard for a drawing like this to inspire awe in a child who has seen Galactus poised to destroy the earth in four colors.

I am the child of writers and the grand child of painters and architects. I noticed all these things even then. The greatest sin to me as a child was being boring. And the Bible, such as I knew it, was guilty. It didn’t help that we only read the New Testament and the most boring parts of the Old. I loved history and battles and the Bible is certainly filled with that. However I don’t remember even getting to read that. Just more and more about getting nailed to a cross and the like. It was bloody, but not the explosions or sword fight type of bloody that I wanted.

Being a kid like many others in some respects I tried to get into the swing of things. I would concentrate and try to hear the voice inside me. When people read from the Bible I would listen … at least until I got bored. My previous religious education was so spotty that I didn’t know I was supposed to say “Amen” before the priest gave me communion. On several occasions the priest and I would just stare at each other, he with the Host in his hand and me with cluelessness in my mind. After a while he would give in and give me the wafer which did indeed taste like paper.

I remember one time at a small prayer service for all of us in the 6th grade saying I felt a presence. A hand on my shoulder. I do not know now if I actually felt it or if I was just trying to fit in. Now I want to say I felt something but at earlier times in my life I just as much wanted to say that I was just trying to fit in. I do not trust either memory.

That said I never connected with Jesus. I could go along with the idea of God — something created everything was (and is) my thinking — but Christ seemed a little far fetched for me. I honestly asked that question for a brief while until the sneer of adolescence made it impossible to give any answer that wouldn’t discomfit my teachers and the priests.

Me, God and the dog

Friday morning I had a severe case of angst.

• over my professional life — after being unemployed I seem to be creating my own little business in a freelance mode and it scares me
• over being on the cusp of 46 — as a friend of mine put it, “your 50s are easier than your 40s not because things improve but because you no longer view your body’s failings as an insult.”
• over my kid about to start at a new school where his homeroom will have 4 times as many kids as the graduating class at his last school
• over my kid being on the cusp of teen-hood
• over all the things I felt inadequate about at that particular moment

I am well aware these are a priveleged person’s issues. I was not concerned about food, water, shelter, health, impending invasions, storms, droughts, plagues of locusts, what to wear to the Oscars or any of the sundry other real issues that many folks have to deal with on a daily basis.

Still I was angsting. Discomfited in my soul. At the time I was walking the dog. We were in the park and she was off the leash so I just took a moment, closed my eyes and asked for help. A bit of a prayer. A request for a little relief from what I suspect was an overly sensitive case of self-obsession. Maybe a hint as to what I should do next to get rid of this feeling like sand-paper was being rubbed upon my psyche.

I closed my eyes for a second or two and that was enough. For when I opened them what did I see but the dog. Taking a dump. I knew then what to do. Clean up after the dog. Then continue to walk the dog home. A simple direction. Certainly not a glorious one nor — for many — a profound one. But it was enough. I had a sense of purpose for the moment and that was enough. I cleaned up after the dog and felt better.

“Film Sets New Christian Comedy Trend”

Back in the immoral age of comics, Christian comedians seemed out of place in any other venue besides a church.

Some would argue that the only thing that goes on in a church is comedy, but that would be going for the cheap laugh and I would never do that.

Or how about: “Three comedians walk into a church. Only one of them knows he’s a comedian.”

Aren’t all comedians Immoral? (“deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong“)  The basic job definition is holding up a fun-house mirror to society & letting people consider ideas that they would never think of otherwise.

It would be hard to come up with a bigger violation of currently accepted principles of right and wrong than humbly pursuing your faith, loving your God and your fellow man even over the pursuit of material gain. Thus Christianity can be pretty damn immoral. When the late Mr. Carlin went on about the seven dirty words that you can’t say on television he was making a point about the unpleasantness of swearing serving to distract us from the true obscenities of the world like poverty, war, bigotry. For me that’s a very Christian message.

I actually have a bunch of God related material in my act. “Two phrases I hate: ‘person of faith’ and ‘faith-based organization.’ Please do not insult my belief that way. Cubs fans are a people of faith and support a faith-based organization. Me, I believe in God.” (The way things are going I’m going to have another patsy organization. GM? The Knicks? The Fed?)

In case you were wondering what the hell: “Enter Ron Pearson, a Christian who is explicit about his faith yet is one of the top secular comics in the business. … Pearson’s latest project, Apostles of Comedy; The Movie, is a masterpiece that’s sure to set a new trend in both the Christian and secular comedy world. The film fuses 4 award – winning comedians that spotlights not only the quirks but explores their private lives as they share their journeys of love, faith, hope and forgiveness. You’ll see famed comedians Pearson, Anthony Griffith, Brad Stine and Jeff Allen as you’ve never seen them.”

“As you’ve never seen them?” Well, that’s setting the bar pretty low. How about as you’ve never heard of them?

And just FYI: Bob Newhart is GOD!

Punk god illustration by George Coghill.

Notes on Military History

Prior to last weekend I had thought the funniest writer on military matters was Spike Milligan. Here is the first paragraph of Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall, the first volume of his World War II memoirs:

How It All Started

September 3^rd, 1939. The last minutes of peace ticking away. Father and I were watching Mother digging our air-raid shelter. “She’s a great little woman,” said Father. “And getting smaller all the time,” I added. Two minutes later, a man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless; he said, “As from eleven o’clock we are at war with Germany.” (I loved the WE.) “War?” said Mother. “It must have been something we said,” said Father. The people next door panicked, burnt their post-office books and took in the washing.

And it’s FOUR VOLUMES!!!

So you can understand why I thought nothing would surpass this. But last Saturday I happened to buy a used copy of Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles: Their Influence on History and Civilisation. Those of you who, unlike me, have not wasted their time reading military history have probably never heard of Fuller. He is constantly being quoted by other military historians and has been credited (blamed?) for being an early theorist about armored warfare.

Being an old-fashioned kind of guy I started reading from the beginning. The first decisive battle according to Fuller was Alexander the Great vs. The Persians at Guagamela in 331 BC.* And so the hilarity began. First there is a description of Alexander: “Alexander’s aim was to substitute peace for war, and reconcile the enmities of mankind by bringing them all — all, that is, whom his arm could read, the peoples of his empire — to be of one mind together: as men were one in blood, so should they become one in heart and spirit.”

It’s a bit clunky as set ups go, but the punchline justifies it: “Then, by destroying Thebes, [Alexander] established so great a fear of his rule that he could turn to his military object, the invasion of Persia.” Hard to have any enmities when you’re dead.

Later Fuller says that Darius, the Persian king, had an army with more than 1,000,000 people in it. Fuller presents this as fact even though that number would have been several times larger than the largest cities of the time and that the only other documented fielding of an army that size didn’t take place for another 3000 years.

Fuller remains just as funny the more I read. Sadly he doesn’t get any more succinct. For that we must return to Mr. Cuppy. From The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody:

He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time.

Turns out brevity is the soul of wit, after all.

*This immediately put me off the general. I prefer the Hittites vs. The Egyptian at Kadesh in 1300 BC. I don’t know why. I just like those Hittites.

How to tell a great story in 185 words

From The Honest Rainmaker by A.J. Liebling:

The Colonel’s ideal of feminine beauty remains constant.

In this he resembles an old wartime friend of mine named Count Prziswieski, a minor figure in the exiled Polish Government.

“All my life I have been faithful to one woman,” the Count once said to me – “a fragile blonde with a morbid expression.”

He found this woman in every country, and she never aged, although the Count did. The fragile blonde with a morbid expression, wherever she turned up, was in her twenties.

My knowledge of the Count’s predilection saved us both embarrassment one week end when I was away from my London hotel and returned to find he had been a guest there during my absence.

“Do you know the Count Ginwiski?” the night porter, an inquisitive sort, asked me. “Said ‘e knew you. Rum cove.”

“I certainly do know him,” I said. “One of the county families of Poland.”

“And do you know the Countess?” the porter asked artfully.

“Very well,” I answered. “Thin blonde woman, much younger than he is, speaks English perfectly.”

“Good night, sir,” the porter said in a disappointed tone.

That the story is in fact true only makes it — and the writing — even better. Liebling (right) was one of the writers who made The New Yorker truly great and is sadly forgotten today. For me the two best writers of English in the 20th Century were Liebling and Orwell. They were not necessarily the greatest writers of the century but they were master craftsmen. They could do more with the language than anyone else I have read.

There is a moment in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris & London that I find breathtaking. The book is a first-person account of being bitter-end broke in those two cities in the 20s. In the course of a couple of paragraphs he describes an entire night — emotional and physical — in the life of a Parisian bistro. I much prefer Orwell’s non-fiction to his fiction — which I like as well. For me the greatest of his books is Homage to Catalonia — which is about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. It is an honestly biased book. It makes no attempt at reportorial distance. However, he evenhandedly recounts

a guide to modern gospel music: “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane

God is in the details, goes one saying. Another has it that it is the Devil who lives there. One way to read this is that an ontological battle is taking place in the mouse print of credit card statements and car-rental forms. Another is that the greatest challenges and sublime moments can be found in the smallest of things. Or the ones that seem to the most trivial.

Like many people my first exposure to My Favorite Things was hearing Julie Andrews sing it in The Sound of Music. As much as I love Ms. Andrew’s voice the song struck me as catchy but also cute to a saccharine level.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

It is hard to think of a lyric not written by Andrew Lloyd Weber more treacly than this. Given that, it is also difficult for me to think of a song that — at first glance — is less-deserving of the 14-minute meditation that the great saxophonist John Coltrane gave it. But there’s a reason why he’s John Coltrane and I’m not. The great ones find, see and hear things that rest of us miss and Coltrane is definitely a great one. If you are not familiar with him, let’s just say that it is difficult to overstate Coltrane’s place and importance to jazz in particular and modern music in general.

The arrangement is deceptively simple. The band consists of Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, the incomparable drummer Elvin Jones and Steve Davis, no slouch, on bass. The song opens with bass and drums supporting the piano as it plays what later becomes recognizable as chords from the song. Coltrane and co. start the song from an oblique, but not obscure, angle. They introduce us to the song in a way that lets us set aside our preconceptions. They divorce the song from the performance most people were familiar with. They cleanse the aural palette. Not bad for the first 18 seconds.

Then Coltrane comes in with his saxophone. First he introduces the basic melody. It is played relatively straightforward and invites the audience in. There is a backbeat that and some undertones that aren’t in the Julie Andrews version but the warmth and catchiness of the melody are still recognizably there. When I first heard it this was the moment when I said, “huh, there’s really something to this song.”

Then Coltrane starts to tease the melody apart, adding notes and pauses never there before. He starts showing us more of the depth that really exists in this seemingly trivial thing. God is in the details, playing among the motes and electrons that make up the universe. I think God laughs at our notion of size. What does He/She/It/They make of the small things that we thick aren’t worthy of our attention? I like to imagine the eternal saying, “But I am huge everywhere, even here where you cannot imagine.”

Memorial Day, 2008

The Last of the Light Brigade

There were thirty million English who talked of England’s might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four!

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, “Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites.”

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant’s order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighten the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and “Beggin’ your pardon,” he said,
“You wrote o’ the Light Brigade, sir. Here’s all that isn’t dead.
An’ it’s all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin’ the mouth of hell;
For we’re all of us nigh to the workhouse, an, we thought we’d call an’ tell.

“No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir; but couldn’t you take an’ write
A sort of ‘to be continued’ and ’see next page’ o’ the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an’ couldn’t you tell ‘em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now.”

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with “the scorn of scorn.”
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

O thirty million English that babble of England’s might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children’s children are lisping to “honour the charge they made-”
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!

– Rudyard Kipling