I watched a pot boil, recently.

The pot, an eight-cup saucepan filled with water, was heating up on the stove. I was planning to make oatmeal. A large window near the stove cast light on the water’s surface. The glossy surface lay still like a pool of mercury, as smooth as glass. Soon, tiny whiffs of steam rose from the water as if they were ephemeral puffs of vapor dancing to and fro like will-o-the wisps, and evaporating as fast as they materialized. It was like watching mist rising from a marsh. Bubbles appeared on the surface. They darted about, like water skimmers scoot around on a pond. The tiny bursts of ghostly mists slowly coalesced to become a solid curtain of steam as the entire pot boiled and roiled, its contents abandoning itself in an ecstasy of pure physical energy. The metamorphosis was now almost complete. In a matter of minutes, if left undisturbed, the entire contents of the pot would be transformed. What was once liquid would disappear to become a gas and be subsumed into the atmosphere. Who says the watched pot never boils? We say that only because after we turn up the heat, we take our eye off the pot.

What happened was as ordinary as it gets and yet I was beholding one of the universe’s fundamental phenomena, the transfer of energy. It was a moment of Zen.

Changes are endemic to life here on the planet and to the cosmos as well. There’s no getting away from it; nothing stays the same. We notice most metamorphoses only after the fact, when the changes have been long under way. That’s certainly the case with aging, overdrawn checking accounts and flat tires. Farmers, too, sow seed and then wait to see what the soil may yield. Before that first shoot appears, a lot has been going on under the surface. It used to be the case, too, with human birth. No one knew how the state of the emerging infant might look until the advent of the sonogram. There’s something marvelous in witnessing the seamless, and sometimes not so seamless, transformations of life as they’re under way.

Just how and when changes occur is up for grabs. There was a Ginko tree outside my office years ago in Baltimore. In the Fall, the fan shaped leaves turned bright yellow and clung to the tree long after other trees had shed theirs. When the leaves finally dropped, they all fell in a single day. My staff and I would take bets on which day the Ginkgo would shed its leaves.

The changes and transformations in life create a mood of anticipation. Much of what we anticipate is pleasurable. The excitement of anticipation is like the experience of hope. Hope anticipates changes, typically welcome ones, but we rarely enjoy knowing exactly when change will occur and what form it will take. Until it becomes evident, we wait. I reckon we spend most of our lives waiting, if not necessarily always watching.

Attitudes toward change vary. Adventurous souls welcome it and relish what the next moment will bring. They live expectantly. People like me, more timid in constitution, tend to be wary of change and live more reactively. The saying, “I don’t like surprises” describes me well. Yet for all that, when surprise discoveries foist themselves upon me regardless of my attempts to manage the flow of events, I often find that I am indeed surprised and delighted for it. The ordinary can surprise us like nothing else. It can be a moment of Zen.

That’s how it was that morning when, to my own surprise, I found myself almost absurdly fascinated as I watched this common transfer of energy. I must have boiled water a million times in my life and never watched the entire process. One of the great marvels of the universe had been going on right under my nose and I never looked at it carefully. I wonder how much else goes on that I never see.

Serendipitous discoveries like the one I had that morning can be awkward to explain, especially to someone who may not have experienced its excitement in the same way. I say that because my wife had been doing errands that morning and when she returned, she asked off-handedly what I had been doing. “Watching a pot boil.” She looked at me with that expression of bland tolerance, the kind one sees on the faces of people who are sure you’re not playing with a full deck, but you don’t really pose any harm.

And such may be the point of it all. Moments like that, a moment of Zen, is often idiosyncratic but peculiarly moving. When it comes to those moments when the commonplace suddenly comes out to meet us in what seems an unfamiliar costume, revealing itself in a character by which we have never recognized it before, and we see for the first time what, for so long, we’ve been looking at.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

At this tumultuous time, what should I write about? Something profound about recent political developments. As I thought about it, I heard an inner voice: “Put a sock in it, Merrill, give it a rest.” I took this as a sign.

I decided to write about something nice instead. I’ll write about my favorite photograph hanging in the studio where I write and process films. It’s particularly meaningful.

In the winter, it has been my habit to take to the fields, woodlands and the shore to photograph. Why winter? Spring, summer and fall reveal the earths plumage and busyness but, in these climes, winter shows the land’s infrastructure and reveals some of the basics that hold everything together.

I’d made similar excursions while living in Connecticut, but they weren’t as satisfying as they were in Maryland. In Connecticut, it often snowed – hiding the landscape. Snow left a bland sheet of white over everything.

In winter, Maryland’s rural landscapes are more generous in showing their stuff. Snows are less frequent so I’m able to see the nuances of their composition. In the other seasons, it is more difficult to see to the heart of what holds things together, their primal connections. Winter can reveal these connections

Speaking of how things are held together: my first visit to an orthopedist years ago was not particularly helpful, but it got me thinking about connections. I saw a life-size skeleton in the doctor’s consulting room. I wasn’t sure what kind of statement it was intended to make. Maybe nothing more than to remind me why I was there if I should get chatty and begin to wander too far from my complaint. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. I’d never seen a real skeleton. Was this the real thing? The thought spooked me.

I trusted the doctor’s office skeleton was not a commentary on the successes or failures of his practice, but only designating his specialty. I was almost sure that this skeleton wasn’t the real thing. Still, I was very conscious of its presence and remained curious. I decided it would be in poor taste to ask.

My winter walks often included frequent visits to small, old country cemeteries, many hidden behind old churches, alongside farmhouses or in open fields, lonely and melancholy. The epitaphs were sad. There was a famous 18th century epitaph I read about, less melancholy than it was sobering:

“Remember, friend, as you walk by, as you are now, so once was I,
As I am now you must be, prepare yourself to follow me.”

Whether about the fundamentals of a rural landscape in winter or the bare bones of a body, matters like this finally came down to how all things in this astonishing universe are connected; how one thing or a single phenomenon, apparently so different from another, or even distant, are conditional upon another. I believe this is one of the principal laws of the universe. For all its complexity, we understand only portions of it, but the natural world is, as we are, all of a piece.

I especially enjoyed roaming Elk Neck State Park at the head of Bay. I took the above photograph there in 1974. It immediately became my favorite.

I’d often be the only one out in the fields and woods, except of course for the critters like herons, geese, foxes and deer that roam through the fields. It was the leafless hardwood trees that seemed skeletons of sorts and they commanded my attention more than anything I witnessed that January day when I first walked the park. It hadn’t snowed. The day was cold and clear with clouds that came and went. Everywhere the bare limbs of the hardwoods were set against the dramatic sky that was alternately overcast and then sunlit; some trees were huge. Their leafless limbs reached out laterally, a few drooped downward, but most reached upward the way some tribal worshipers throw their arms up in the air in the intoxication of religious ecstasy; the tree limbs, crossing this way and that, presented a delicate tracery like a fine filigree does when silhouetted by the light shining from behind it.

As I saw the landscape, my instinct was to stand and be still and in the presence of the trees, reverently, as if I were on holy ground. I recalled the familiar call to worship in church liturgies that begin:” The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him.” It never worked, at least in the churches I served. In seconds following this invitation, there’d be hymns, announcements, prayers, the sermon, muffled whispering, an atmosphere more like the Tower of Babel than the silence of a holy temple.

But here in this winter wood, a silent reverence was certainly the order of the day except for a bird or two and the sound of cold air as it passed between tree limbs with a soft rush.

No doubt there is particular grandeur to a tree in leaf –– especially the bold, gold and crimsons of fall and the delicate yellow-greens of Spring. There is yet another glory of trees when they surrender their leaves to reveal their graceful bodies and elegant limbs while waiting for Spring’s wardrobe to arrive.

I couldn’t count how many prints I have made over the years. If I could, I hope this would not reveal me as a misanthrope. Most images are of tidewater environs in winter, usually empty of people. The thing is, that it’s in standing in the very uncluttered expanse of land and water that I have sensed intimations of eternity.

The photograph’s value to me is not its aesthetic properties although there are some. It has served me more as a documentation of a special time when I once stood in a liminal space between two worlds, the one bound in time, the other outside it and how I had the strongest sense that both were connected.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

According to The Guardian, a rat was sighted in New York City engaged in what can only be called “take out.”

He was seen on the steps of a subway entrance carrying a pizza slice twice his size, far more than he needed. He proceeded down several steps to the train platform. A rat would not qualify for delivery services and I’m sure he wasn’t trying to catch the uptown. He was taking lunch home somewhere in the tunnels. Remarkable really but slightly irregular. I think of rats as more covert, furtive in their habits.

The Guardian also reported other animal anomalies.

In England, a kestrel was seen regularly checking out his reflection in the traffic camera on a busy corner. His vanity was insatiable: he returned regularly to check his image and primp even though he was harassed by a magpie and a raven. He also was buffeted unmercifully by high winds.
In California, a peacock somehow found its way into a liquor store. I can only assume by his behavior that he’d had a beak full, and was wasted before he even got in. He ransacked the store and caused hundreds of dollars-worth of damage knocking bottles off the shelf. This behavior in the critter world may strike some people as amusing, but I found it troubling at first.

In January of this year an aggressive squirrel terrorized the residents of Rego Park, Queens in New York. Locals have become fearful of leaving home lest they become the victims of a squirrel attack. Some residents, exercising their right to bear arms for personal safety, have taken to the streets carrying weapons, notably pepper spray. Micheline Fredrick, a Rego Park local, told the Guardian that she had been targeted by the squirrel in a bloody attack on December 21, while holding the door open for a furniture mover. “Suddenly the squirrel ran up my leg . . . and I thought how can this be? The furniture man ran inside for cover leaving Ms. Frederick to be “bitten on her arms and hands, with her little finger badly gnawed.”

These anomalies from the natural world express my own sense of this day and age where all anomalies are regarded as norms. I wish we were kinder and gentler, a little more predictable. Chaos and unnatural acts are seen everywhere. There’s little certainty, little dependability and nothing that one can, “put in the bank” as the saying goes. Where does one go for solace? In nature, of course. But the solace of nature may be under siege, too. Is nature going nuts? Or are these critters behaving as we do.

In the last four years, and particularly in the last several days, I feel I have lived in a topsy-turvy universe. Some of our elected officials have been behaving in erratic and cruel ways, like the errant rat ort peacock. More recently, vigilantes, like the predatory squirrel, stormed the Senate chamber bringing death and injury. For what reason isn’t clear. Are planets faltering in their orbits and stars crossing?
When I feel troubled, I try taking a long look. It’s to gain perspective, and in some instances, to preserve my sanity. When one enormity follows another, it doesn’t make things any easier. Like bad weather it does pass but while it lasts, it’s disturbing. One thing stands out for me in the stormy weather of the last few days.

Our democracy has been under siege. On Wednesday, January 6th the siege came to a head. Our President, charged to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, abandoned his charge by enabling and inciting a mob to attack the Capitol, thus desecrating the symbol of democracy and causing five deaths and destruction.

Taking a long look at the last few days I’d say this: it’s the nature of things to have rats that take more than they need; there are people everywhere who, like the predatory squirrel, attack innocent people; And, there are people like the birds that are so narcissistic they can never get enough of themselves; or like peacocks, love showing off wherever they go but leave suffering in their wake ; our democracy has weathered them and many more since its inception and been vindicated. Our National Anthem describes last Wednesday night and Thursday morning in a timeless, and timely fashion:

The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,

When the violence of the siege ended late, and the political rhetoric finally spent itself by Thursday morning, the flag was still there.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

 

 

In three days, Christians celebrate Epiphany. In the States, it’s not that big an occasion. However, in Puerto Rico, it’s religion on steroids. There, it’s called Three Kings Day, and it’s a blast.

The observance commemorates the legend of the Magi: the three wise men (kings) that follow a star that leads them to the infant Jesus.

I’ve arrived in Puerto Rico several times shortly after the festival ended. Evidence of it lingered everywhere. There had been parades with horses bearing the three kings, streamers still hung festively from the overpasses and colored lights blinked from trees. The festivities lasted 12 days, from Christmas to the observance of Three Kings day, January 6th, when people exchange gifts ending the celebration.

Christians stateside are less exuberant. The celebration here is called Epiphany and often passes unnoticed. Not for me. My interest began 75 years ago with an unremarkable event that I’ve never forgotten.

In church on Epiphany, we were issued a small candle. We lit it from the altar candle, and were to take it home while keeping it lighted. We were symbolically bringing Christ’s light to the world. I walked home that day with Franny who lived near me. The wind blew out my candle. Franny was older so I thought she’d know what to do. I asked her if I would be cheating by relighting my candle with hers. She replied it was ok; ‘We’re supposed to just keep it burning,’ she said. I relit mine with hers and made it all the way home. I felt triumphant.
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We have a small wooden carving of the Three Kings. It’s charming and over the years it’s endeared itself to me. It’s pictured above. I assumed for years the kings were white. I suspect that’s because I grew up in a white world where not only were the Three Kings white, even Jesus was. He was pictured in Sunday school books, and on funeral home fans, looking far more Norwegian than Semitic. This year I was especially conscious of the Black king, Balthazar. I think it’s because George Floyd had been on my mind.

I believe white people, myself included, are constitutionally racist. It’s bred into us through the cultural myths held for centuries in America about people of color. Whites are inclined to react to strangers of color with a caution and uncertainty, and sometimes fear. I wish I could say I’m not prejudiced, but my experience tells me otherwise. I’ve caught myself reacting unconsciously in racist ways.

There is a road in front of my house. I frequently walk it. The people living nearby are white and privileged as I am. They are solid citizens and good neighbors. I see strangers walking there at times, most related to residents they’ve come to visit. One day I saw a Black man walking the road. I immediately felt a strong sense of caution, even mild apprehension accompanied with the thought: he doesn’t belong here. What made me think he didn’t belong? It was obvious that his color evoked my response. I see strangers along the road regularly and I don’t have this reaction, but they are white. I think racism manifests itself like this –– with instinctive suspicion and apprehension, a reaction born of ignorance.

I swam competitively in high school. There were few Black kids in my high school and none on the swim team. We competed with many of New York City’s public high schools and I don’t recall seeing any people of color in competitions. One day, in one of our spirited, although rarely informed locker room bantering, the matter of race arose. Arty was the alpha male on the team and in the locker room. He was feared, envied and the best 100yd freestyler the team had. Arty told us that Black kids weren’t good swimmers. Why, someone asked? “Because they are sinewy and muscular and more likely to sink,” Arty told us. “Blacks lacked the buoyant layers of body fat competitive swimmers have.” Arty offered this analysis with sublime confidence which seemed to satisfy any lingering questions. Our discussion of race and athletics ended.

To my shame, I accepted Arty’s spin well into my twenties. Ultimately the incident taught me how crazy ideas can insidiously take hold of our minds, especially if the ideas appear to offer tidy answers to complicated matters. If indeed, there were fewer Black swimmers in competitions back then, I’m sure it had nothing to do with body fat and a lot more with racial exclusion. But when you know nothing, and the alpha man is commanding your attention, it’s easy to get suckered. Nature abhors a vacuum, vacuous minds especially: it fills them with hot air.

Many whites declare that they aren’t prejudiced; they’ll say they never notice color when dealing with African Americans. My question would be, why aren’t they noticing it? Skin color, after all, shapes a big part of anyone’s personhood. Except for various pigmentations, skin is just skin, except –– and this is a big exception–– the history that people of one skin color have had that those with another, haven’t.

America was blessed by Black King; we knew him as Martin Luther King Jr. He followed his dream the way Balthazar followed a star. I’d call King’s dream an Epiphany. Epiphany’s root meaning is ‘to reveal.’ When Dr. King’s dream revealed light to a troubled nation, America began a long process of reclaiming her soul. The light he held goes out sometimes, and needs someone to step up to rekindle it.

This King, however, kept the light burning all the way home.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

Depends on who, I expect. Still, our long habit of living suggests we don’t forget. The people who constitute pieces of our internal landscape may slowly drift away, but the memory of them remains secure, somewhere within.

For close to forty years my wife and I have celebrated New Year’s Eve with two dear friends, Ben and Sarah. About six years ago we were joined by Jean. For the last three years we’ve not celebrated together, nor does it seem we ever shall again. Jean suffers with Alzheimer’s. Ben and Sarah have health issues and will not be able to travel.

For millions of Americans this year, the pandemic will change their social landscape.

As I think about past years, an image comes to mind, an unlikely one at that; it’s a recollection of my first flight.

It was 1965. I was traveling to New Orleans from Bradley Field in Connecticut. As the plane roared down the runway, lifted off and banked, I looked out the window. The earth suddenly dropped from under me. I could see the wider parameters of the place I left behind only minutes ago. I remember looking from the window and seeing first the entire terminal which before I knew only as a spacious building with hordes of people milling about. As the plane ascended, I could see how landing strips converged at the terminal and how Long Island Sound, which I knew as an hour’s drive away from that area, did not seem really that far at all. As I traveled still further from where I started, I recognized the larger landscape to which I belonged, but had known only a piece of it. As the distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’ widens, a bigger picture emerges.

Jean, Sarah and Ben had been important to me, significant in the big picture. Sarah shared my professional life when I led a mental health agency in Baltimore and both she and Ben were my supports when I went through a divorce and later remarried.

Jean and Sarah had been on my staff. Jean had been our agency administrator and kept my feet to the fire in overseeing practical matters and managing the daily nuts and bolts of the agency. I was a good team builder, but as a practical manager, a disaster. Although I teased Jean about being an obsessive compulsive, I’d often think to myself: ‘Thank God she is, or the agency would be a mess.’

Sarah was one of the most competent therapists on my staff. She had been especially helpful to me in becoming more thoughtful in managing the interpersonal matters of staff. She helped me to slow down and be more sensitive to their needs. Her husband, Ben, insatiably curious, was a kind of renaissance man, interested in everything. He was handy. Ben helped keep my old VW Bug running. I taught him how to play squash. After three games, he was taking me to the cleaners.

I retired from the agency and moved to the Eastern Shore. Jean and her husband moved south and shortly thereafter he died. In a few years, she began joining us on New Year’s. Sarah remained with the agency for some years and then retired. New Year’s Eve became time for the five of us to reconnect. We usually gathered at our house to see the New Year in together.

Over the years, the diminishments of aging slowly imposed themselves on us. We began a kind of surrendering or letting go of each other although we wouldn’t have called it that. Jean’s memory loss, Ben’s cancer and Sarah’s sight diminishment forced new circumstances upon us. Even as Sarah was losing her sight, the light of her joie de vivre burned as brightly as ever. As we slowly accommodated to these realities, we stayed connected primarily through phone calls. One especially harsh ending: Jean did not know us anymore. We now existed somewhere, lost in the depths of her mind.

To say that no one is an island unto themselves may be a cliché, but it does describe the human condition. My aging has helped me see through the illusion I long held to that I am independent, totally self-reliant. I’m clearer now that I’m just one part, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle part of a larger picture I can’t see yet. I’m aware that I’m continually being fit into networks of other lives that shape and form my own while giving meaning to my life. Individuals show up in my life, subtly changing it, long before I realize what’s happening. It was like that with Sarah, Ben and Jean.

This New Year’s will be the fourth year we will not have been together.

Particular clusters in our relationships ebb and flow during our lifetime, that is, we grow close to others; we’ll be in frequent contact, do things together and then slowly disengage for a variety of reasons. Their presence was definitive at a particular chapter of our lives. Then we fell away; it was not that we cared less or there was discord: we simply drifted apart.

The holiday greeting cards we send I suspect are often the remaining threads connecting us to our many “auld” acquaintances.

There are endings and there are endings. Some endings we choose; there are those that are imposed on us, while others we gently fall into. It happens unbeknownst to us that a closure is being finalized. During a reflective moment, I believe we recognize that these endings signal that a chapter in our lives is drawing to an end.

That first flight took me to New Orleans. It also introduced me to the city’s celebrated cuisine. I ate my way through New Orleans. At Galatoire’s, I had my first Oysters Rockefeller. They were exquisite. Every New Year’s Day since, aided by a dog-eared copy of The Joy of Cooking, I prepare them. We had them every New Year’s Day. Ben and I would drink beer and open the oysters and talk in the kitchen. Jean, Jo and Sarah worked a jigsaw puzzle by the fire in the living room. It was a ritual. I’d hear triumphant hoops occasionally, as they fit another piece of the puzzle in its place.

Over the years, the three never completed the puzzles during their stay. Too many pieces, too little time. Working puzzles is more about being together, anyway. Jo would eventually finish it and send the completed picture to Sarah and Jean.

Life is a puzzle. So many pieces, so little time to see where they all belong. Occasionally we’ll see some of its pieces connect. It’s deeply satisfying finding where they belong.

Thirty years ago, we bought an artificial Christmas tree. It was shortly after we first moved to St. Michaels.

The tree was magnificent. It looked as alive as anything that isn’t, can. The tree was humongous, a good ten feet tall, thick and reaching up beyond the living room rafters. It filled the corner of the room. However, in the last few years it seemed a production to have to assemble and decorate it. This was not the case when we were thirty years younger with energy and mobility in abundance.

For years, we had two dear friends come to stay with us for a few days before Christmas. They’d pitch in to assemble the tree and it took all eight hands a few hours to put it together. Over the years this was always a warm and welcoming ritual . . . and efficient, I’d add.

One of those friends has died. The other is significantly stricken in years and is no longer able to travel. We feel their absence. We also miss their help. As we have aged, the task of putting up the tree grows more challenging. It was always a labor-intensive job, anyway, requiring a hefty measure of isometric capability and balance skills. However, these skills are rapidly fading. My wife, Jo, suggested we make the tree smaller. The art of aging well is knowing when to downsize.

Since the trunk of the tree originally came in two five-foot sections, she proposed we simply use one half of the tree trunk, reducing its height by half, making the job of getting it decorated far easier and less hazardous. Now, I no longer risk a fall by standing on a tall ladder to put the star at the top. I don’t have to sit, splayed out on the floor at the base of the tree, stressing arthritic joints, attempting to insert lower branches into the trunk, always unsure of just how I’d get up again.

Halving the tree was an inspired idea. Our beloved tree is still with us. It is, as we too have become, diminished, but still an active participant in our yuletide.

As married couples do, we have our differences. We have differences about tinsel. Jo’s idea of halving the tree I thought was great, but her insistence on adding tinsel was not. I have always found tinsel gaudy, difficult to hang and even more challenging to remove; remember that every season the tree must be disassembled, the tinsel removed and the tree stored. Tinsel has to be removed limb by limb and in some cases one strand at a time. It clings to me, like those Styrofoam peanuts that escape the box they arrived in and come after you as you try fleeing them.

We don’t act, as we once did in our more barbaric days years ago. The day after New Year’s Day, we’d incinerate our live tree in a gleeful conflagration. The upside of this was that the tinsel went up in flames with the tree. No fuss. Still, torching the tree seemed such a thankless way of ending the tender relationship we enjoyed with these trees during the holidays. Acquiring an artificial tree assured that we wouldn’t commit this kind of obscenity any more.

Jo and I have resolved our tinsel differences amicably. I simply will not get involved with the tinsel, either its going on or its coming off; it’s entirely up to her to hang and remove it. This suits her well as she doesn’t have to listen to me grouse about it.

A cloud hangs over this holiday’s festivities; the coronavirus has renewed its assaults on us with a vengeance. We’d be wise, although saddened, not to engage in many of the social traditions we routinely enjoyed at Christmas. I think of the delights of roaming around department stores, attending parties, and going to midnight church services. I liked the get together with friends and neighbors, and catching up with relatives we’ve not seen for a year.

I’ll find it hard this year not be together with family for the holidays in our traditional ways. “To grandmother’s house we go”, the popular song states. But Christmas dinner at grandma’s (our house) in 2020 could be the worst thing for grandma and the whole family. There’s no way we can be sure that we’ll not be a danger to her and to each other, mixing it up in the closed spaces of a living room or kitchen. The virus has turned everything around: the safe places of home and hearth where we once gathered for comfort; the simple pleasures of being together, have become potentially dangerous. The virtual era has begun in earnest. We remain connected in a new and strange way. Our natural instinct to protect loved ones from impending threats is to get closer to them, to hold and touch them. Now as we all feel threatened we have to develop strategies for maintaining safe distance. It makes sound medical and scientific sense, but it feels intellectually counterintuitive and emotionally hollow.

Although it happens slowly, the human family’s capacity to accommodate to the demands of reality, is good. And so, we will have to accommodate to a virtual world until we can be with one another as three-dimensional beings rather than as the two-dimensional kind.

For now, through the weal and woe of this holiday season, we can always enjoy the comfort of our Christmas trees. But for those of you who prefer live trees, best to act soon. I am told that this year, live Christmas trees have become hotter items, than toilet paper was last spring.

I wonder why?

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

The fevers of my youth have quieted, some. For one thing, I can think about falling in love more dispassionately. I’ve been thinking about it, recently.

These thoughts weren’t inspired by concerns for my aging libido. I was moved by an account I read written by the celebrated Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton. Merton describes an incident that occurred while he was walking along a city street in Kentucky. It was a transformational moment for him, an epiphany. He writes:

“In Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people and that they were mine and I theirs . . . and if only everybody could realize this –– but it cannot be explained.  There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the person that each one is in God’s eyes; if they only could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time.”

His excitement about the moment was infectious, like a man in love might write or speak of his beloved but with this caveat: the experience had none of the possessiveness usually associated with such passions. The love was wholly generous.

Love songs play exhaustively on the radio night and day. Their lyrics describe the longing the experience evokes, the desire and the ecstasy, even the pain felt from the loss of a love. Many pop songs describe the beauty and the endearing attributes of the beloved. It is strange to me that we should understand so little of what can impact us so much.

Falling in love is as universal as the common cold and like the common cold, no one knows just how long it may last.

Ella Fitzgerald didn’t care about any of love’s secondary effects, like possessiveness or jealousy, or even duration but urged us all to just ‘fall in love.’  She was remarkably inclusive, encouraging just about every creature imaginable to fall in love. Years ago, she famously sang the pop song, “Let’s Fall in Love.” The song invites everyone ––the birds and the bees, of course–– but also kangaroos, chimps, jellyfish, clams, eels and goldfish to mention but a few. She concluded her invitation by singing, “Let’s do it, let’s fall in love”

What’s remarkable about falling in love is the way someone who might seem ordinary to you and me, becomes, in the eyes of a lover, incredibly beautiful. Freud had a jaundiced view of falling in love and commented on its most transforming characteristic, i.e., how lovers impute to their beloved, attributes that they don’t necessarily possess, or no one else can see. He called this a lover’s proclivity to “overestimate the love object” or as this thought is commonly expressed: “Whatever does she see in him?”

In grade school, I fell in love with Delores. She attended our church. I saw her as the personification of beauty and grace. In hindsight, I’d have to say she was quite unremarkable, even frumpy, and I would say further she probably looked a little like cartoon depictions of Little Orphan Annie. However, this is not what I saw. Her person released some kind of mystical agent within me, that, at a certain moment, awakened a latent capacity; an ability to experience the essential beauty of others who, at least by conventional standards, wouldn’t be reckoned beautiful at all.

I wonder now if, in those times when I fell in love, I was given a fleeting glimpse of how God sees me. What God sees as so sublime and good in us, we’re still too blind –– nor sufficiently evolved–– to see it in each other or in ourselves. For us, love occurs in transitory forms, like falling in love. We become then like God who, as the lover does, sees in the beloved what is invisible to anyone else. Seeing others, seeing ourselves, and seeing the world as God does is a stunning revelation for anyone. 

Our human capacities –– such as they have so far evolved –– are still becoming; they’re slowly growing, expanding. To fully embrace the love we have latent in our own hearts, much less to experience it in others, I suspect would short out our psychic wiring. In our evolution, and I believe in our destiny, we will get there. How long, how long, though? Sometimes the waiting seems interminable.

Consumerist cultures like the one we live in, are filled with illusions: they promote glamorous people, shiny objects and expensive toys that urge us to desire and covet them so that we can have what glamorous people have. And like the toys children receive on Christmas, once acquired, by New Year’s Day are forgotten.

Falling in love’s shelf life varies. In all cases it serves a wider purpose in our destiny than just propagation and adventure. Birth control has changed how we think and feel about human sexuality and the nature of the bonding it can facilitate.  Experience, though, teaches us that love points beyond propagation to a vision even greater, to something magnificent, and while our hearts long for this magnificence we can’t quite get it. One man likened embracing love to discovering fire. Paleontologist and Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin wrote this about love’s ultimate destiny:

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Let’s do it.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

I was surprised to learn, recently, that some officials in the Chinese Communist Party read the Bible. You just never know about people.

I saw an article about this in Harper’s Magazine. The article discussed the story of Jesus and the crowd that was preparing to stone the woman “taken in adultery.” The biblical account in Harpers was from the most unlikely source: in a law and ethics textbook published by the Chinese Communist Party. It read as follows:

“Once upon a time Jesus spoke to an angry crowd who wanted to kill a guilty woman. ‘Of all of you, he who can say he has never done anything wrong can come forward and kill her.’

After the crowd heard this they stepped back. When the crowd retreated, Jesus raised the stone and killed the woman and said, ‘I am also a sinner, but if the law can only be executed by a spotless person then the law will die.’”

The Chinese take on the classic story was certainly a new way of seeing an old and treasured story of Jesus’ benignity and wisdom. It was arguing, I believe, that if only those who are spotless –– those with clean hands –– can carry out the requirements of the law, no justice could be done because no one would qualify. Imagine spotless lawyers, sinless policemen or just judges. The Chinese communists are on to something.

Human beings are flawed. All civilizations assume this. Living compromised and broken lives, is not an aberration for some, but a condition of all. Societies hope for the best, but do what they can with what they have. Diogenes, we must remember, is still looking for an honest man or woman. After so many years you’d think he’d lower the bar some.

Societies have always executed certain offenders as specified in their laws. As I think about this, everyone involved in the making of that decision of taking a life, is a flawed human being. We assume –– even hope –– that those assigned such tasks are basically good people that will act justly and mercifully.

In a 24-year career, retiring in 1956, Albert Pierrepoint executed 435 people as the Chief Executioner of the United Kingdom. He worked two jobs: one as the Chief Executioner and the other as a publican –– this isn’t a British party affiliation; it’s what tavern proprietors are called. His pub was curiously named, “Help the Poor Struggler.” Pierrepoint was totally professional in his duties as hangman and something of a bon vivant in his other job at the pub; he held sing-along sessions with his regulars, one of whom he had the unhappy occasion to have to execute.

In his autobiography, Pierrepoint wrote: “A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man she is a woman who the church says still merits some mercy. The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give to them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and in death. The gentleness must remain.”

I found his comment about dignity and gentleness remarkable considering the brutality that he had to exercise in the performance of his responsibilities. That he was able to sustain some refinement of his sensibilities, even care, when performing violence on another human being, is mind boggling.

Reading about his extraordinary career, I had mixed feelings. He was reputedly “a decent chap” who dealt kindly and mercifully in his professional duties. Still there is something primal in me and I believe in many of us that finds taking of any life abhorrent but for this caveat: when it settles scores, it feels good.

As I thought more about this I noticed that my own feeling of abhorrence of Pierrepoint’s taking a life mitigated considerably when I learned that of the 435 persons that Pierrepoint executed, 200 were Nazi war criminals. Since these were members of the party that architected and supported the Holocaust, their deaths at the hangman’s rope didn’t bother me all that much. Didn’t the Nazis deserve it? Did the others, though? This matter of capital punishment I find is a sticky wicket, and as I later learned, Pierrepoint himself thought so, too.

After his career as Chief Executioner ended, Pierrepoint wrote a memoir. In it he said:

“All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. And if death does not work to deter one person, it should not be held to deter any . . . capital punishment in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.”

The issue of capital punishment is as controversial as it is emotional as it throws a bright light on the darker places of the human heart, i.e., our appetites for revenge. And from that dark place, when we feel personally or collectively violated, the law of the claw is the most satisfying to consider: an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. It’s instinctive.

I was encouraged to see the Chinese Communists for whom state power is not to be questioned, would even bother to consider the legitimacy, if not the morality, of state executions. I could be reading this incorrectly, but I thought their ethical take on the issue was that since no one can claim the moral high ground when it comes to virtue, executions are not to be seen as rectifying moral abuses, but just a dirty job that someone, who claims no moral superiority to the condemned, is sanctioned to do.

As hard as I tried to get this matter to come out even, at least in my own mind, I just couldn’t. It was too complicated. I could see no tidy resolution. One thought did occur to me, though. If all our dealings, legal or otherwise, were conducted mercifully, who knows how things might turn out. The kind of aura that merciful attitudes cast on interpersonal dealings, often lead to pleasant surprises, unseen possibilities. Blessed are the merciful, the Beatitudes tell us. The one who blesses others, will in turn, receive blessings.

Sadly, this is a hard sell even among Christians and I’m sure it was never published in his communist manifesto, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.