Messy Quest

Last weekend my brother and I spent some time in Pennsylvania helping our parents empty some things out of the house in which they’ve lived for 35 years.

At one point, I came across a set of small wooden, colored blocks with the alphabet spelled out on them. They’d belonged to my dad when he was a child. My brother and I had played with them, too, growing up, so I set them aside in a box full of things we wanted to keep.

A couple hours later we were all taking a break on the back porch.

Dad: Did you come across those old wooden blocks of mine?
Me: Yes, I put them in a box of things I’m taking back to my house.
Dad: Let me see those first; I might like to sell them.
Mom: We shouldn’t sell those! Let’s keep them in the family.
Brother: I agree with that. Let’s hang onto them.
Dad: But they’re my blocks!
Me: I’m going inside to eat some potato chips. Y’all sort this out and let me know.

Eventually, I retrieved the blocks from my car, and my dad eagerly dug them out of the box. “I just spelled “CAT,” he exclaimed a minute or two later.

I could hardly mock him. My brother and I had already spent at least half an hour admiring our old Millennium Falcon, TIE-Fighter and X-Wing Fighter from our Star Wars heyday. They’d been stuffed away in the basement for the better part of three decades. Rediscovering them instantly took us back to our own childhoods. That’s a place where we should all spend a little more of our time – and there are at least two good reasons why.

First, it’s fun.

True, even my own kids are older now than my brother and I were when these toys showed up in our house as Christmas or birthday presents in the late 1970s. But there’s a kind of pure joy and wonder – a feeling we don’t experience enough as adults – that comes from seeing something that reminds you of long-ago good times. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s a lightning bolt reminder of where you came from, a throw-back to days when you didn’t take yourself and your problems quite so seriously.  

Second, and even better, reflecting on what enthralled us as kids can help us lead a more meaningful life right now.

Obviously, you don’t want to ever put too much stock in the whims of children, whose interests can change ten times in the course of an hour. But the things we were drawn to deeply in our youth can be highly accurate markers of what we are meant to do with our lives. We all know people who liked to draw and became architects, or kids who liked to take things apart and became engineers, or hawked candy on the playground and went into sales.

It’s worth asking ourselves some basic questions, no matter how old we are today: What did I like most about being a kid? What were my dreams? What happened to them?

This is a simple technique that can yield some worthwhile and surprising insights. It might just get us thinking about what matters to us most, from an entirely different angle.

And while you’re working on that, I’ll be setting up my Han Solo action figure in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. Or maybe playing with my dad’s blocks. He decided to keep them for himself.

Monday morning began the way all weekday mornings start in our house – with my son waking at 6:10 a.m. and jumping out of bed with such gusto that the light fixture a floor beneath him shakes and rattles like it’s been hit by a falling tree. I know this because this light fixture is in our downstairs bedroom.

So I did what I always do on weekday mornings – reach over to the end table next to the bed, grab the key fob that controls our burglar alarm and pushed the “unlock” button to turn the system off.

Only this time I pressed the wrong button.

The panic button.

In an instant, the burglar alarm’s high-pitched trill exploded throughout the house, destroying sleep and rendering clear thinking nearly impossible. My wife and I both leaped from the bed and raced for the alarm keypad in the hall. In an impressive display of agility, my wife beat me to the door, threw an elbow to clear the way, took the corner tighter than a sports car and punched in the code to shut down the alarm.

We then stood there in the hall twitching with adrenaline, waiting for the next thing, which would be a representative of the alarm company speaking through a box on the wall, asking if everything was all right. Within a minute or so, this disembodied person was demanding identification, lights were on, the kids were crushing us with questions – and it still wasn’t 6:15.

“My apologies,” I said to my wife as we retreated back to our room. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

“Actually,” she said, “this morning is so bleak and rainy that I’m not sure I’d have been able to get out of bed if that hadn’t happened.”

With that, she walked out to the kitchen, turned on the coffee pot and headed into her home office to begin the day’s work.

I stood there, still rueful as my kids kept repeating “What did you do, Daddy?!” But to tell you the truth, I was also rather pleased by this turn of events. In a matter of minutes, I’d gone from goat to semi-hero, an accidental vanquisher of Monday morning gloom.

And it was all because of the upbeat spin my wife decided to put on the situation. She’d have been well-justified in reacting negatively, the way many people might when their idiot spouse triggers a blaring alarm at dawn on a depressing Monday morning.

The whole episode made me think of Walter Ciszek, an American Jesuit priest whose autobiography He Leadeth Me is my all-time favorite book on prayer. Ciszek urges us to find deeper meaning in the inconveniences, unpleasant surprises and minor problems that often typify our days. Instead of fuming over little things that go wrong, he says, we need to regard them as opportunities to do something positive – because those circumstances are precisely what God intended for us at that moment.

That’s a lot to digest – and a lot easier said than done. But I’ve seen evidence that we can follow Ciszek’s advice one step at a time, even – and perhaps especially – on the dreariest of Monday mornings.

I once made a list of the best things that have happened in my career, and I was responsible for almost none of them.

Yes, I’ve worked hard to take advantage of opportunities. But the fact that the opportunities arrived at all usually had little to do with me. There was, for instance, the journalist who substituted for my ill freshman academic adviser during college and launched my writing career.  The public relations pro who was leaving her job and mentioned off-hand that I should apply for it. An unsolicited e-mail from an editor that led to a book contract. All these things helped me grow immensely, not just professionally but also spiritually.

Conversely, when I’ve tried to force things, they’ve often backfired. See the first two chapters of my book for a recap of my misadventures as an anxiety-ridden newspaper reporter in Mayberry – a job that I just had to have and pursued relentlessly until I got it.

This is a pattern not limited to secular careers. My uncle Fr. Francis Fugini, who’s been a Catholic priest in the Capuchin order for nearly 60 years, knows first-hand. If his career, which has taken him from Pennsylvania to Papua New Guinea, has taught him one thing, it’s this: You don’t know what you need.

But God does.

To read the rest of this post, please follow me over to The High Calling, where there’s great conversations going on each day about the intersection of faith and work.

This will be a short post about small things.

Here’s the situation: the kitchen in our house has three variables that do not work well together.

1. Hardwood floors
2. Relatively heavy kitchen table chairs
3. Kids who drag said chairs across the floor instead of lifting them

The sum of these three parts is me, the frazzled father and homeowner, surveying the floor for signs of the latest devastating, property-devaluing scratch.

 I tried to address this problem head on when we first moved in by applying cheap felt pads to the bottom of the chairs. This worked well for a week or so, until the kids had muscled around the chairs enough to wear off the pads. Then the awful scraping sounds resumed. Then, on the rare occasions I found time and energy to do it, I’d flip the chairs over and re-apply more felt.

For about six weeks now, I’ve contemplated getting better felt pads and fixing all the chairs once and for all. I’m definitely into contemplation, especially of the Jesuit variety. But action has sometimes been a shortcoming, as it was in this case.

Just the other day, though, when I was digging through a cabinet for a roll of Scotch tape, I stumbled across the mother lode: a box full of quality felt of all shapes and sizes.

It was an especially busy week – my folks were in town for a visit, the kids were home for spring break, I was trying to take a few days off from work. In other words, all the usual excuses – and some even better ones – for not tackling the chairs were right at my fingertips.

And yet in that very moment, I decided, “It’s time to fix these damn chairs!”

One by one, I flipped over the chairs, removed the old small felt and applied the new larger kind. This process, which I’d pondered off and on since at least February, took less than five minutes and just one crushed toe to complete.

Like many of us, I tend to overestimate the amount of time it takes to do small, worthwhile things, whether it’s calling a friend or saying a prayer or pausing to appreciate a slant of evening light. I also undervalue these things, preferring instead to focus on Bigger, More Important Projects.

It’s the small acts, though, that grease the wheels of the everyday world, that help us glide instead of drag.

St. Therese of Lisieux called this the “Little Way” – doing small, boring things with faith. She saw it as a way to transform the world step by step. Or perhaps even chair by chair.

At my annual physical exam a few months ago, the doctor asked if I get any exercise.

Oh yes, I told him proudly. I run three times a week, lift weights twice and play tennis when I can. Not bad at all, I thought, for a 40-year-old guy who was never much of an athlete. In fact, I half-expected him to say, “Wow, you are one of the most impressive bald, middle-aged specimens I’ve ever had the privilege to meet!” 

Instead, he said, “At your age, you need to think about running a little less. If you don’t, I can guarantee your knees will start to hurt.”

I’ve been running regularly for 14 years (not even counting my dismal tenure as a bench-warmer on the high school track team) and my knees have never given me a problem. My arches are totally shot, and I’ve pulled quadriceps, hamstrings and hip muscles. But my knees have remained a marvel of consistency.

Until this week.

On Monday, I noticed a rather sharp pain on the outside of my left knee. So, like any male idiot, I decided the best way to treat it would be to go for a run.

The next morning the pain in the front of my knee was gone. But by late morning the back of it hurt even more than the front part had the day before. I limped around all that day and the next like a badly aging jock.

It seemed prudent at that point to take some ibuprofen and avoid any more running until things improved, which they have.

So now I’m looking forward to hitting the road for a cautious jog over the weekend. That’s remarkable, because lately I’ve been pretty unenthusiastic about running at all in the unseasonably cold March in North Carolina. And the whole time I’ve been muttering to myself about that, I’ve also taken it completely for granted that I was in good enough physical shape to run five feet.

This week I’ve been reminded that with running, as with life in general, there are no guarantees. The next time I go out, I already know I’ll be grateful for each pain-free step, and it’s been a while since I felt that gratitude.

Maybe you know what I mean.

No matter what blessings we have, we inevitably want more. We’re often quick to discount what we do have and worry instead about how to make things even better – and that is a principle source of many of our problems.

Here’s a simple three-step antidote for that: First, pick an area of your life where you’re feeling some dissatisfaction. Second, imagine how things could be worse, because they probably could. Third, give thanks things are as good as they are.

In the meantime, I still haven’t figured out a good substitute for the great cardio workout I get from running. I’ve never especially enjoyed riding bikes or swimming. If you have any ideas, let me know. And, if you happen to be my doctor, I know – you told me so.

I have a long history of getting to the party a little late – and I don’t mean fashionably late. I was the last of my friends to learn to swim and the last to figure out how to ride a bike. And my family never bought an Atari system. Don’t even get me started on that.

At this point, I might be the only writer in the world who has not yet expressed an opinion about Pope Francis I. I was inspired to join the crowd after my friend Fran Rossi Szpylczyn’s recent upbeat post about the new pope attracted some rather testy comments.

Specifically, there’s concern about what Pope Francis did or didn’t do during the 1970s “Dirty War” in Argentina. Back then, he was Fr. Jorge Bergoglio, the top Jesuit priest in a country ruled by a military dictatorship that routinely abducted and killed civilians. Two Jesuits working in the country’s slums were among those kidnapped. They were tortured and eventually freed, but there’s controversy about whether Bergoglio did enough to protect them – and took a strong enough stand against the dictatorship in general.

This is a very serious matter that deserves thorough discussion. And once that’s done, we need to let it go. The Catholic Church, after all, has a long history of leaders who are simultaneously magnificent and deeply flawed.

The Church’s first pope, St. Peter, worked closely with Jesus throughout his public ministry – and, when push came to shove, denied three times that he knew him at all. Should we really be shocked when a modern pope arrives freighted with his own historical baggage?

We don’t really know what Fr. Bergoglio did at the time, but we do know this. People make mistakes, sometimes big ones. Sometimes they can’t be undone. That’s why our lives are a messy quest. And that’s why forgiveness is a core principle of the Christian Church. All we can do is try to do better.

That’s what St. Peter did. He shook off his cowardly performance at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion to become one of the early Church’s most influential and courageous leaders, a career that is believed to have ended with his own crucifixion in Rome.

Ultimately, the extent of Pope Francis’ guilt or innocence during the Dirty War is known only by Pope Francis.

We all know, however, that Pope Francis has spent the 30 years since the Dirty War ended living out the Gospels in a radical way, through his extensive involvement with Argentina’s poor and downtrodden, his moving speeches, his rejection of the privileged lifestyle that many top Church officials take for granted.

That’s who Pope Francis is now and has been for a long time.

Rather than wringing our hands fruitlessly over his failings – real or imagined – during the Dirty War, what if we spend some time examining our own past shortcomings instead? Over the years, I’ve certainly been guilty of not helping people every time I could have and, worse, of going out of my way on some occasions to hurt them. I know I’m not alone.

The question is:  Do we merely beat ourselves up for that, or try to move on in a positive way? The example of Pope Francis provides an inspiring answer.

Why doesn't my bald head glow like St. Ignatius'?

From a very young age, I’ve always enjoyed recapping my day, kind of like an anchor on the evening news. Perhaps it was this compulsion that led me to become a journalist.

It’s only been in the past couple years, however, that I’ve learned that my Brian Williams-like reviews of the day (“Breaking news out of Greensboro, North Carolina – Stephen Martin’s 5-year-old daughter just taught him how to use his iPhone!) could also be a form of prayer.

As it turns out, the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order of priests founded in the 1500s by St. Ignatius of Loyola, have not only given us the new Pope Francis I. They have also handed down a practical and powerful prayer known as the “examen.”

It’s a highly adaptable technique that can be approached in various ways. My friend and fellow writer Jared Dees offers a very thoughtful take on his blog. Father Jim Martin breaks it down a little differently in his Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. And Tim Muldoon provides a third interpretation in The Ignatian Workout.

However you approach it, the examen is invaluable for making some sense of your day, and it can be done in as little as 10 minutes or as long as you like. Having experimented  myself with the prayer over the past couple years, here’s my own four-step method, which isn’t all that far removed from St. Ignatius’ original prescription. (I usually do this at the very end of the day or first thing in the morning if I force myself out of bed early enough).

1. Give thanks: Start by identifying one or two things from the past day for which you’re really grateful. Don’t overthink it – just see what jumps out at you. It could be as big as a promotion or a vacation. Or, as is usually the case for me, something much smaller – a good conversation, a pretty sunrise or the sight of my kids playing together for more than five minutes without any punches being thrown.
2. Review the entire day: You’ve set a positive tone by zeroing in on a few highlights. Now go back and, as much as you can, reconstruct the day hour by hour. Try to recall not only what happened but especially how you felt about it. What were the moments when you felt yourself moving closer to God. What were the moments when you seemed to move farther away?
3. Acknowledge your mistakes: As much as most of us try to avoid criticism, nobody ever gets better at anything by focusing solely on what they did well. Be candid about your shortcomings throughout the day. Did you gossip about somebody? Or fail to give your spouse your full attention? Or lose patience too quickly with the kids? The point here is not to beat yourself up but to start looking for patterns that need correcting.
4.  Build on what you learned: You now have a decent idea of how your day unfolded – what seemed meaningful and right and where you came up short. Try to build more of the good stuff into the next day and anticipate how you might cut down on the bad stuff. Be realistic; the goal is not to have a perfect day. 

Over time, the examen can really change you for the better. St. Ignatius himself said that if you have time for no other prayer, always make room for the examen. Who knows? Maybe you’ll become the Pope. Or, failing that, somebody who’s at least a little bit easier for others to tolerate.

I went wireless last weekend, and I mean that in the old-school way – no TVs, laptops, iPods, Blackberries or even radios.

Instead, I spent a couple days at St. Francis Springs, a beautiful Franciscan retreat center nestled on 140 wooded acres in the North Carolina sticks – a getaway arranged as a 40^th birthday gift from my awesome wife. For most of the weekend, there was just me, the Catholic priest who runs the place and about 15 Episcopalians attending their church leadership retreat.

Apart from two irate dogs who charged when I tried to jog past their house (“Never go left out of the driveway,” Fr. Louis Canino told me later), the weekend was defined by delicious home-cooked meals and blessed chunks of silence.

“How are your meetings going?” I asked one of the Episcopalians, an under-achiever who works three days a week as a pediatrician in a nonprofit health clinic and the other two days as an Episcopal priest. “You know,” he said, “I kind of wish I was doing what you’re doing.”

Which was very little.

I mostly just read, walked the trails or prayed, and sometimes all three at once. And then I did those same things over and over again because there really wasn’t much else to do.

You hear a lot these days about the many downsides of our global addiction to technology – constant distraction, shortened attention spans, rising stress, stunted relationships. And those all sound like great reasons to escape now and then to places where our fancy devices don’t exist or don’t work.

The biggest benefit from my retreat: a continuity of thought and feeling that I almost never experience.

I went into the weekend wondering how I might correct my own bias toward constant action and activity, which has gradually crowded contemplation and reflection out of my life. So on Friday night, I started considering some important questions: How can I be a better Catholic? A better husband, father and son? A more focused employee and writer?

As I read, walked through the woods and savored some roasted meat and vegetables, I ruminated on these questions, as I have many times before. The difference this time: the insights that gradually arose had time to build on one another and gather momentum, instead of being fractured almost instantaneously by random e-mails, televised sports or the compulsion to check my book’s Amazon ranking 10 times a day.

I was startled by some of the things that occurred to me as I laid on benches staring up at the late winter sky. By Sunday morning, I needed a good 20 minutes to jot down all of the new and significant thoughts that had popped into my head.

The challenge now will be actually doing something with them. But that’s a good problem to have. And perhaps the perfect excuse to schedule another retreat — after, of course, receiving permission from my awesome wife.

How many people do you know who have quit a high-paying corporate job for one that pays $35 a month? In fact, how many people do you know who have walked away from a prestigious job for any reason? 

If you’re like me, probably not many.

Which is what makes Father Jim Martin’s In Good Company: The Fast Track From the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity and Obedience such a cool read.

Right now, I’m about two-thirds of the way through this book, which describes Martin’s unlikely transformation from ambitious Wharton School of Business grad to disillusioned GE corporate finance executive to fully engaged Jesuit priest, with a salary of $35 a month. (Full disclosure: Martin, who is no relation, generously endorsed my own book).

The fact that his book is a dozen years old (he’s written several amazing ones since then) doesn’t impact its freshness or urgency at all. In it, Martin shares a timeless quote from novelist Louis Auchincloss:

“… a man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson
that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it no one really cares.”

That’s a painfully accurate observation, isn’t it? And it begs a tough question: What are we going to do about it?

Take a leap.

The leap doesn’t have to be as dramatic as Martin’s, so audacious that it turns our world upside down.  But there is a lot to be said for pushing ourselves out into the margins in some way, for voluntarily seeking out discomfort and disorientation. Because that’s often what it takes to have the life we want.

I’m out in the margins right now, in fact, though I haven’t left town or found a new job or started training for a triathlon. But I am trying to do something that I’d really like to do with my life: reduce an obsession with productivity (I’m self-aware enough to know I’ll never totally let go of it) and cultivate more attentiveness instead.

This endeavor, I’ll freely admit, isn’t exactly like swapping Brooks Brothers suits for a job in a Jamaican slum, which Martin actually did. Still, for me, it’s daring in its own way.

I’m consumed with getting things done. Maybe you know what I mean. It’s how I juggle a young family and a busy day job with a book and a blog and a newspaper column. But even when I’m not doing those things I still feel like I should be doing something – folding laundry or sorting through mail or unloading a dishwasher or, at the very least, making my kids do these things for me. The more I do and the more tangible the results, the better I feel about myself.

And that’s a problem – one, in fact, that Jesus warned Martha about as she scurried around trying to bring refreshments for Jesus, resentful of her sister Mary who sat listening at his feet. “Martha, Martha,” he tells her. “You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”

Trying to embrace that one thing, an attentiveness and openness toward faith and learning, is one of the big things I want to do with my life. It means saying no to some new possibilities, carving out more time for prayer, focusing more on the needs of family and close friends, assessing the value of my days differently. It’s my modest big leap. What’s yours?

In this Lenten season of repentance, I owe the late French writer Albert Camus an apology.

In The Messy Quest for Meaning, I write about falling under the spell of Camus’ novels about a meaningless, Godless, gloomy world during my senior year of high school. I worshiped the guy back then, owned every one of his books. One of my favorite bands, The Cure, had even written a song about his most famous book The Stranger!

"Apology accepted, Stephen. But you'll never be this cool." -- Albert Camus

Eventually, though, Camus’ unrelentingly bleak vision of life got a little old, even for a jaded literature major.  So I moved on to more promising possibilities. In writing my book at age 38, I gently mocked Camus for stoking my stereotypical teen rebellion. These days, I tend to think, “That wasn’t the most mature phase of my life.”

Just yesterday, however, I was leafing through some journals I kept during my freshman year of college. It was a tough time in which a failed romance, an underlying, ignored anxiety disorder and a total lack of religious faith combined to wallop me.

For many years now, I’ve pinned some of the blame on Camus. He was the one, after all, who led me down into that dark, French, existentialist hole. What I’d forgotten until I re-opened those journals for the first time in probably 20 years is that he also helped lead me out of it.

As that freshman year stretched on, I started reading Camus’ own journals, which were more hopeful than his fiction, and writing down his inspiring quotes about living authentically. “Abolish audiences and learn to be your own judge,” he urged and seek “freedom from your own vanity and cowardice.” For a teen-ager who wanted to be his own person but sometimes felt inclined to strike a pose or got too self-consumed, this was great advice. I reflected on it constantly back then. It helped change my worldview for the better and, somewhere deep down, it’s stayed with me. I just didn’t recall that Camus was the source.

The lesson here: even if you don’t fancy yourself a writer, you really need to write things down about your daily life because:

1)      It helps you work through challenges in real time: For much of my freshman year, I poured out my troubles every day in long journal entries that nobody but me has ever seen. Back then, I didn’t know it would be therapeutic. It was actually the only thing I knew to do. Looking over these journal entries 20 years later, it’s obvious that the very process of writing them had a powerful healing effect. Getting a storm of thoughts and emotions down on paper helped greatly in making sense of them. Gratitude journals or rambling ones like mine can positively alter the way you see yourself and the world.

2)      We forget a lot of things: I have a really good memory. But re-reading these journal entries was humbling because it showed how much I’ve forgotten, not just about average days but about a crucial time in my life. I still recall the highlights well from freshman year, but there are many important details I’d forgotten. And it’s the daily details, decisions and habits, not the big dramatic happenings, that gradually determine how our lives unfold. Having it all written down means I know what really happened instead of what I tell myself happened.

3)      Somebody else might benefit later: My kids aren’t even 10 years old yet, but they’re a lot closer to 19 than I am. When they get there, I’m sure there’s a lot I won’t understand about their experiences. But I will have my own journals from when I was their age, and that will be a lot more helpful for relating to them than a bunch of fuzzy, inaccurate memories.

And before the entire purpose of this post also slips my mind — sorry, Albert.