WISDOM!
BE ATTENTIVE!

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily is, “Wisdom! Be Attentive!”

If you have ever been to an Eastern Rite Mass in the Catholic Church, you’ve seen the priest or the cantor hold up the scriptures and then sing out, “Wisdom! Be attentive.”

When I heard that for the first time, I said to myself, “That is enough for me. You don’t have to say anything else.”

“Wisdom! Be attentive!”

That’s a great life message!

Pay attention.

Listen! Look! Learn!

Be aware of what’s happening. Better: after what happens, take the time to figure out what happened. How did you get to where you are today? What are your values? Where do they come from? What are your attitudes, insights and outlook and where do they come from?

Don’t miss anything.

Let’s be honest. Sometimes we don’t listen to the readings. We are not attentive. We’re often somewhere else.

Wisdom! Be attentive.

HERE IN CHURCH

Here we are in Church. The readings are read, but we’re not listening. I’m sitting over there in that cushy chair talking to myself about something else and miss both readings. I can read the gospel out loud and be somewhere else – even while I’m reading. How about you?

Wisdom! Be attentive!

HOLY FAMILY SUNDAY

Today is Holy Family Sunday. The Church instituted this feast in 1921 – to stress family – to be aware of family – to improve family life.

In this homily I would like to stress today that the family is a main source of life’s wisdom.

Look at your family. What wisdom did you pick up from your mom and dad? And if you had brothers and/or sisters, what wisdom did you learn from them? It could be from good experiences. It could also be from bad experiences.

For example, when I was a kid I saw an uncle show up at our house – especially around the holidays, drunk. I saw the pain and stress it caused. As a result, I have never drunk alcohol in my life – except a tiny sip of the wine at Mass – and a tiny, tiny sip at that.

Wisdom! Be attentive.

RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, M.D.
Rachel Naomi Remen has two books that are marvelous when it comes to learning wisdom from life’s experiences. She tells about what she has learned from family and from her job as Doctor – dealing with people who are sick as well as training future doctors.

If you are a reader, I’d recommend two of her books: Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings. A lady in the parish gave me the first book, Kitchen Table Wisdom and I found the second one at Barnes and Noble. Both are well worth reading – several times.

Her books, like the Chicken Soup for this and that books, trigger for me so many memories – especially family growing up moments – that call for personal reflection. Wisdom. Be attentive.
Let me give a few examples – and they will be the rest of this sermon from Rachel Naomi Remen’s books that I have read.

If you haven’t heard of her – and you want to know more – I have both books listed on my blog. They will be mentioned in this sermon. Just go into the St. Mary’s Annapolis Web Site – and go from there – or just type, “Reflections by the Bay” with my name in the Google box and “Presto!”

Here are the examples – I use them with the questions: “Listening to these stories, do they trigger any stories from your life? Looking at your life, what are your examples that you learned from?” Look at them and say, “Wisdom! Be Attentive.”

SIPS OF MANISCHEVITZ: L’ CHIAM!

Many years ago my grandfather gave me a silver wine goblet so small that it holds no more than a thimbleful of wine. Ex­quisitely engraved into its bowl is a bow with long ribbon streamers. It was made in Russia long ago. He gave it to me during one of the many afternoons when we sat together at the kitchen table in my parents' home memorizing phrases from his old books and discussing the nature of life. I was quite young then, no more than five or six, and when I became restless, he would revive my attention by bringing out the sacramental Concord grape wine he kept in the back of the refrigerator. He would fill my little berib­-boned wineglass with Manischevitz and then put a splash of wine into his own, a big silver ceremonial cup, generations old. Then we would offer a toast together. At the time, the only other celebration I knew was singing "Happy Birthday" and blowing out the candles. I loved this even better.

My grandfather had taught me the toast we used. It was a sin­gle Hebrew word, L'Chiam (pronounced le CHI yeem), which he told me meant "To life!" He always said it with great enthusiasm. “It is to a happy life, Grandpa?" I had asked him once. He had shaken his head no. "It is just 'To life!' Neshume-le," (1) he told me.

At first, this did not make a lot of sense to me, and I struggled to understand his meaning. "Is it like a prayer?" I asked uncertainly.

“Ah no, Neshume-le," he told me. "We pray for the things we don’t have. We already have life.”

"But then why do we say this before we drink the wine?" He smiled at me fondly. "Grandpa!" I said, suddenly suspicious. "Did you make it up?" He chuckled and assured me that he had not. For thousands of years all over the world people have said this same word to each other before drinking wine together. It was a Jewish tradition.

I puzzled about this last for some time. "Is it written in the Bible, Grandpa?" I asked at last. "No, Neshume-le," he said, "it is written in people's hearts." Seeing the confusion on my face, he told me that L'Chiam! meant that no matter what difficulty life brings, no matter how hard or painful or unfair life is, life is holy and wor­thy of celebration. "Even the wine is sweet to remind us that life it­self is a blessing."

It has been almost fifty-five years since I last heard my grandfa­ther's voice, but I remember the joy with which he toasted Life and the twinkle in his eye as he said L'Chiam! It has always seemed remarkable to me that such a toast could be offered for generations by a people for whom life has not been easy. But perhaps it can only be said by such people, and only those who have lost and suffered can truly understand its power.

L'Chiam! is a way of living life. As I've grown older, it seems less and less about celebrating life and more about the wisdom of choosing life. In the many years that I have been counseling people with cancer, I have seen people choose life again and again, de­spite loss and pain and difficulty. The same immutable joy I saw in my grandfather’s eyes is there in them all. [My Grandfather’s Blessings, pp. 77-78]

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING WITH DAD: THE GIFT

Every Christmas Eve when I was small my father and I would take the subway to downtown Manhattan and go shopping for presents for my mother, my aunt, my friends, my teacher, and other important persons in my life. These were special, even magical, times. Everything was decorated for Christmas. The windows of the stores up and down Fifth Avenue were magnificent, and some even had whole mechanical villages that moved or a mechanical Santa that waved. It was almost always cold, and the night-time streets were crowded with smiling people carrying beautifully wrapped packages, the women in furs and men in overcoats with velvet collars. Thinking back on it now after more than fifty years, it seems to me that I could see the joy in people shining in the streets. Christmas music poured out of every open doorway. In my memory, it is always lightly snowing, and everyone had snowflakes on their coats and in their hair.

We would start at Rockefeller Plaza and stare in awe at the enormous, beautifully decorated tree, debating whether this year’s decorations were more beautiful than last. They always were. We would watch the skaters for a while. And then we would move slowly down Fifth Avenue, stopping in every store, thinking of the people I loved, one at a time, looking at many, many things until I found just the right one for each one of them. At some point during the evening, my father would hand me his big gold pocket watch and tell me that when it chimed I was to come and meet him right where we were standing, and then I would go off alone in whatever store we were in to find his present. While I was gone, my father would do a little shopping of his own.

I got to stay up late, far later than my usual bedtime, and it was often close to midnight when we got home, our arms filled with boxes, each of which had been specially wrapped at the store. My mother always had cocoa waiting, and we would show her the beautiful boxes and tell her about the wonderful things we had found for everyone — but not, of course, what we had found for her.

It was a chance to think about each one of my beloved people, who they were and what might make them glad. I remember the indescribable feeling of finding each present and the joy of recog­nizing it as just the very thing. There was such pleasure in choosing the paper and the ribbon and watching it wrapped in a way that was as special as the person it was for. I loved finding these presents. It made me feel very lucky.

In thinking back, I realize that I never actually saw many of these presents opened. They would be mailed away or left under other people's Christmas trees. Somehow this never mattered. The important moment wasn't in the opening, or in the thanking. The important thing was the blessing of having someone to love. [My Grandfather’s Blessings, pp. 88-89]

VISITING THE GODFATHER
When we are seen by the heart we are seen for who we are. We are valued in our uniqueness by those who are able to see us in this way and we become able to know and value ourselves. The first time I was seen this way I was very small, maybe three. I had never met my godfather. He lived in another city and when it was clear that he was dying I was taken to his home so that he could see me for the first time. My mother told me that I was going to meet my godfather and that he was dying. I was so small I didn't get the time sense quite right and understood that I was going to see someone who was dead. I looked forward to this for days.

I remember the details of this meeting very clearly, especially my godfather's bed. It was very high, higher than I could see, and made of a dark carved wood. My mother had lifted me up. Lying there among the pillows with his eyes closed was a very old man.

He was completely still and so thin that the covers didn't rise up over him very much. She put me down next to him, between him and the wall. She was talking to me softly but I wasn't listening. I watched him with interest. Then his daughter called to my mother from the kitchen and she turned away and went out into the hall for a short time to see what was wanted. In those few moments, my godfather opened his eyes and looked at me.

I remember how blue his eyes were, and how warm. In a voice that was barely more than a whisper he called me by my name. He seemed to be trying to say something more. I was very young then but I knew that whispers meant secrets, so I leaned toward him to hear. He smiled at me, a beautiful smile, and said, “I've been waiting for you.”

My family were intellectual, formal, well-mannered people who were not openly affectionate or demonstrative. My godfather's eyes and his smile were full of a great love and appreciation. For the first time I felt a deep sense of being welcome, of mattering to someone. His hands were resting on the covers and, still smiling, he slid one a little toward me. Then he closed his eyes. After a short while he sighed deeply and was still again. I continued to sit there remembering his smile until my mother came back. She looked closely at my godfather and then snatched me up from the bed and ran with me from the room. My godfather had died.

My parents were deeply distressed about my being alone with my godfather when he died. It was the forties and they consulted a child psychologist to help me over the "trauma" of it. Yet my own experience had been quite different. It was many years before I could tell my parents what had really happened and how important it had been to me. [Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp. 149-150]

COUNTING ONE’S CHICKENS

When she was eighty-four and newly widowed my mother had come from New York City to live with me. Frail and very sick with a heart condition, her physical needs were complex and I had found her care overwhelming. Over and over she had sudden attacks of pulmonary edema, a sort of internal drowning from which I would rescue her by placing rotating tourniquets on her arms and legs and injecting her with morphine. On four occasions, she had a cardiac arrest in our living room. With the help of paramedics, I had resuscitated her each time and kept her going. In the last year of her life, these good people came to our house so often I knew many of them by name.

It was clear that time was running out, and I became concerned not only for my mother’s physical well-being, but also for the state of her soul. She was not a religious woman, and what rituals she observed seemed more like superstition than spiritual practice. I had read somewhere about the importance of encouraging old people to reflect on their lives in order to die in peace. Without such remembering it would not be possible to receive and offer forgiveness, uncover meaning and to complete a life well. I did not know much about such things then, but I believed what I had read and wanted the best for my mother. Yet every attempt I made to encourage her to reflect on her past and her relationships was rebuffed.

Some of my friends were involved in spiritual practices of various sorts, and one by one I had invited them over to talk with her their spiritual paths. A few even attempted to interest her in their ways. She listened politely to their enthusiastic discussions of such things as tai chi, mindfulness meditation, yoga, and vipassana. But afterward she would tell me that meditation just wasn’t for her. It was too quiet.

As she became sicker, I became more intent on my agenda. A nonmeditator myself, I even began to sit for fifteen minutes in the morning and invited her to sit with me. Surprisingly she agreed with enthusiasm, but every time I opened my eyes I would find my mother looking at me with great love. After a few weeks of this, I suggested that we abandon it but she refused, saying that she en­joyed having the chance to look at me for fifteen minutes every morning. Eventually I just gave up.

So I was overjoyed when one evening in the living room after dinner, my mother sighed and spontaneously closed her eyes for more than an hour. Once I had determined she was not asleep, I sat in silence with her all that time. When at last she opened her eyes and looked at me, I asked her what she had been doing. “Why, I was counting my chickens,” she said with a smile.

Meeting my puzzled look with a laugh, she told me that it had suddenly occurred to her as she was eating dinner (it was chicken) that she had eaten a chicken once or twice a week for many years. She had begun to calculate this in her mind: two chickens a week, fifty-two weeks a year times eighty-four years turned out to be more than 8,500 chickens. It seemed to her to be a great number of chickens just to keep one old woman alive. She had closed her eyes then to try to imagine what 8,500 chickens might look like. It had taken some time, but she had finally gotten a picture of them in her mind. It had been overwhelming. “All that innocent life”, said my mother.

She had begun to wonder whether she had been worth the sacrifice. And so she had begun to review her life, looking at as many of her important relationships as she could remember, examining her own heart and her own motivations. It had taken a long time, but at the end she had realized that, while she was certain that she had disappointed and even hurt people in the course of her life, she could not remember deliberately causing pain or harm to anyone, or resenting anyone else’s good fortune or even telling a significant lie. She smiled at me again. “I believe I have been worthy of my chickens, Rachel,” she said. [My Grandfather’s Blessings, pp. 74-76]

MYSTERY: PURPLE IRISES
I was late for what was to be my last visit with my mother. Pushing through rush hour traffic, tired from a long day at the office, I stopped to buy her some flowers. It was seven in the evening and the florist had no purple irises, my mother’s fa­vorites, and little of anything else. Sympathizing with my dis­tress, he offered me a bouquet of half-closed iris buds from his icebox, assuring me that they would open in a few hours. I took them and waited, irritated and impatient, as he wrapped them in green tissue. A strange-looking bouquet. Then I hurried on.

Carrying the flowers, I pushed through the heavy doors of the ward. A nurse was waiting there for me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. My mother had died a short time before. Stunned, I allowed myself to be led to her room. She lay in her bed, seemingly asleep. Her hands were still warm. The nurse asked if there was anyone I wanted her to call. Numbly I gave her the numbers of some of my oldest friends and sat down to wait. It was peace­ful and very still in the room. One by one my friends came.

Four days later I was three thousand miles away arranging for my mother’s burial. It was an unseasonably hot spring and New York City was at its worst, muggy and uncomfortable. The funeral director was a person of sensitivity and kindness. Gen­tly he went over the arrangements, assuring himself and me again of the details of my mother’s wishes which we had dis­cussed on the phone. Then he paused. “There was something that came from California with your mother. May I show you?” he asked. Together we walked down the corridor to where my mother lay in her closed pine coffin. Lying on the coffin lid, still in the twist of green tissue paper was the bouquet I had left in my mother’s hospital room on her bed. But now the irises were in full bloom. I remember them still with great clarity, each one huge and vibrant, seemingly filled with a purple sort of light. They had been out of water for four days.

It would be easy indeed to dismiss this sort of experience, not to make a simple shift in perspective or find a willingness to suspend disbelief for a moment. Not to consider adding up the column of figures in another way and wonder. The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty. I will never know whether or not I was once for a moment in the pres­ence of my Russian grandmother or if my mother used my final gift of flowers to make me a gift of her own, letting me know that there may be more to life than the mind can understand. [Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp. 323-324]

CONCLUSION

When we come to church, we come here to pray and to close our eyes and listen, look, learn, not only the scriptures, the Bible readings, but also the stories of our life that the feast or the Sunday or the readings trigger. Today, look at your family, where you come from. It’s filled with stories, it’s loaded with wisdom. Don’t miss it.

What is that wisdom?

“Wisdom: Be Attentive.”

Count your chickens.

See your irises come to full bloom.

I preached two versions of this sermon. The first version had just two stories from Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. It didn't have energy. I was using a script. I wanted to tell the two stories I selected just as Rachel Naomi Remen told the stories in her books. That was at the 7 AM Mass. It was too dry and too long. So at the 10:30 AM Mass, I didn't use a script. I told the 2 stories I told at the 7 AM Mass and added 3 more stories - but all were presented in much shorter versions than in this text. It sounded better to me that way.

(1) Neshume-le means “beloved little soul. (p. 23) My Grandfather’s Blessings