Four Poems

Madonna and Child

She walked past the plate glass window

next to where I sat with my friend Bill

in a booth in the worst hamburger joint on the eastern seaboard,

eating a dripping grease burger

covered with melted Velveeta cheese of all things

with fries fresh from a year in the freezer.

She was twelve months pregnant, going on thirteen.

It had to have been her first pregnancy

as young as she was

and as jauntily as she carried herself

down the walk and through the door,

wearing a red spandex top

and navy blue spandex tights,

bringing forth who and how she was

for all to see,

honor, marvel at, rejoice in, worship.

The wonder of the vision

was equal in every way

to the one that stunned the angels

who announced the Messiah’s birth.

And as redemptive.

She redeemed the day, the week, the year, my life,

all of life, forever, throughout all eternity.

And I carry her memory in my heart

to relish and adore

Mary, the mother of God,

ordering a grease burger and

making all things remarkably good

by her presence with us

in the ordinariness of our lives.

What’s It Going To Take?

Once we figure it out,

what are we going to do with it?

What’s Enlightenment going to do for us,

that’s what I’m asking.

The test is not in the knowing,

but in the doing,

in the living.

We have to look at our lives

and live them.

What’s it going to take

to enable us to do that?

What do we need

to step into our lives

every morning,

and live them

all the way back to bed at night?

Live them

the way they ought to be lived,

I’m talking.

Live them

like we mean it, I mean.

What’s it going to take

to live like we mean it?

Good Families

Good families don’t pretend to be good families

Don’t strive to do it like it’s supposed to be done,

Don’t have anything to hide,

Or don’t hide what they have to hide,

But live with everything in full view,

Available to be seen and said,

Laughed at, or yelled at, and talked about,

Brought up for review and revision,

Capable of being modified, altered, improved, changed.

Good families can be changed.

They are honest and vulnerable that way.

Bad families are fragile, brittle,

Incapable of self-assessment or self-correction,

They remain stuck, unchanging, forever.

Good Luck

There are people

who want to argue with me

about the possibility of luck.

No kidding.

“There is no such thing as luck!” they say,

when I wish them, “Good Luck!”

“It’s strictly a matter of Providence.”

When I say, “Aren’t we lucky

that God is so Providential?”

they say, “It has nothing to do with luck!”

Clearly, one of us

is missing something,

somewhere.

My Credo, Part I

Primal peoples believed the visible world was grounded upon the invisible world. So do I. I believe the spiritual world is more real than the material world, and that the spiritual realm (You could call it the Kingdom of God, but you wouldn’t know any more about it than if you called it the Spiritual Realm) exists alongside (over, under, around and through) the physical universe, and has autonomous, independent existence, as the fourth, or fifth, or however many there might be, dimension of reality. As the primal peoples would say, “It always is.” The Spiritual Realm is eternal, unending, constantly present. I can’t say much more about the Spiritual Realm, other than that it is the source of life, not in the biological sense (We can be living biologically, upright, intact, able to take nourishment with vital signs working normally without being alive at all), but in the every-other-way sense, in the deepest, fullest, richest sense. When we are connected with the Spiritual Realm, we are alive in the fullest sense of the term, and when we are connected with the things that bring us to life, we are connected with the Spiritual Realm.

A Poem About Cats

Say what you will about cats, they know what their business is. A cat is never uncertain or confused about its business. A cat knows what its business is and is always, I mean always, going about its business. I watched a cat lying under the front bumper of a car parked at the curb in Stonington, Maine. After some time had passed, it moved under the rear bumper of the car in front of the one it had been lying under. Changed scenery. The cat knew its business and was not to be deterred. Cats are like that.

Maybe it’s napping, and maybe it’s stalking a bird or a grasshopper, or waiting on dinner to come from the can to the bowl. Whatever it is, the cat knows what it is and stays centered in it, focused on it. “Big deal,” you say. “What’s a cat’s business? A cat’s business has no impact on the way the world turns!” That kind of comment works on human beings. You can shame us out of doing our business. “Photography? What does photography have to do with anything? Photography doesn’t feed the hungry, serve the poor, or establish world peace! Jesus didn’t own a camera! What do you mean taking pictures when there is real work to be done?” That would keep me from carrying a camera, but not a cat. A cat wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of acknowledging the validity of your assertions. A cat would steadfastly maintain its concentration on the business at hand.

Now hold that thought while I relate a dream reported by a member of a 12-Step program. “I dreamed I was cranking a mimeograph machine,” she said. “Turning out page after page of the same thing. I woke up enlightened. It isn’t that my judgment is bad. It’s that I’m using the wrong machine!” The irony, of course, is that using the wrong machine is bad judgment. If we exercise good judgment in the wrong way, it’s the same thing as bad judgment! It isn’t enough to have good judgment, we have to execute it in the right way, which means we have to believe in it, trust it, listen to it and let it direct our lives—even when it doesn’t appear to be working.

That’s asking too much. We aren’t cats. We have too much at stake in our lives to allow ourselves to follow a course that doesn’t work. But, here the cat comes back into the picture. What does it mean for something to work? A cat is centered and focused on what is important to the cat. A cat would call that working. A cat is at peace with itself, at one with itself. It has no pretentions, puts on no airs, assumes no postures. A cat never tries to be a dog, or even another cat. It lives in perfect harmony with itself, with perfect integrity of being. A cat would call that working.

But we have different ideas of success. Success is money, in our book, money in the bank. Plenty of it. We don’t get paid to be who we are. We get paid to be who we are not. We do not get paid to do what we like to do. We get paid to do what we don’t like to do. The most successful people we know are the people who haven’t done anything they wanted to do all their lives long. The most successful people we know don’t have a clue about what their business is. They have been disconnected for so long from the business that is truly theirs that they think their business is what they do for a living, what they get paid to do, what no one would do if they didn’t get paid to do it. You couldn’t pay a cat to do anything that wasn’t it’s business.

No one tries to take a cat’s business away from the cat and give the cat some other business. Everyone tries to do that with us. Everybody tries to tell us what our business ought to be. We have so many people telling us what our business ought to be, or paying us to do things that aren’t our business, that we have no idea what our business is, and no idea of how to know.

A cat knows its business. We don’t know ours, or, we don’t trust ourselves to know ours. This gets us to the crux, as they say, of the matter. This is our first order of business, sorting out what our business is. What are we chasing? What are we after? What are we about with our lives? Whatever it is, is it our idea or something someone else has handed to us? We have to sit with the questions and see where they lead. No one can tell you what your business is, but if you don’t trust yourself to know what it is, you are at the mercy of everyone with a guilt trip to give away or a sales pitch to make. Who knows better than a cat what its business is? Who knows better than you what your business is? But, we don’t know. We don’t trust ourselves to know. What do we need, to know?