Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

I'm just your basic wannabe mystic, I'll admit. But I've slowly been reading my way back though the works of Annie Dillard, whose writing I first encountered while teaching Freshman English. Now, Annie seems like a true mystic to me, and I never get tired of her muscular prose and her visionary approach to the world. My favorite of her books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, has a fascinating chapter entitled, "Seeing." At the end of this chapter she describes an experience of seeing the "tree with the lights in it": I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors ...

Winter has settled in here in the mid-Atlantic -- with a cold thump. I just learned that the low in North Dakota was -44 degrees this morning! So I guess we can't complain about our projected low of +9 tomorrow morning. The dogs don't care much for the cold, however. When I put them out in the yard, they stand and look at each other, as if puzzled. What is she thinking, putting us out in weather like this? She wants us to do what ? Now if we could just get some snow. About two feet would be fine -- enough to shut down my place of employment for a day or two. I love being snowed in! Snow, please!

Notice that I'm not using the word resolutions ... this is more like a plan. Plans suggest flexibility, fluidity, adjustment. Resolutions suggest, well ... resoluteness . None of that here! But I am hopeful, even if not resolute! So here we go! Listen more; talk less. Pray more; talk less. Stop whining when you do talk. Lose the remaining weight. 23 pounds is good, but it's not enough to be healthy. So keep dieting. Stop at 115. Then have a hoagie . When you get to 115, go on a cruise with J. Don't worry that there is no money for a cruise (or for anything else). Save the chardonnay for Friday and Saturday. Your waistline will thank you. Your liver will be ecstatic. Do NOT check on your 403b(7) retirement account several times a day. Check it only on Friday night. Wash down with abovementioned wine if needed. Spend more time with friends. What're you saving vacation days for? You have no money to travel with! Carry a dollar in your jeans pocket when you go to work...

I read somewhere recently that some people are "Christmas" Christians, while others are "Passion" Christians. I must fall into the latter category -- I find Lent more meaningful than Advent, and I am completely absorbed by the time the Triduum arrives. That's the most important time of the year for me. By the time Thanksgiving is over, I am ready for a break. But here comes Advent! There's no place to hide! Overnight: total-immersion Advent! At the mall, yesterday, when I finally began the little bit of Christmas shopping that I am going to do, I kept hearing that Christmas song on the loudspeakers, the one that insists that Christmas is the happiest time of the year. So I must be missing something. Christmas wears me out. A local radio station began all-Christmas-music-programming *before* Thanksgiving! It's the middle of December and I've already been caroled to death! And merchants must be truly desperate, because at least 80% of my email this mo...

Pride goeth before a fall. It began with the turkey. The turkey had to be better this year! I went to the market on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and bypassed the frozen turkeys in favor of a fresh one, a nice little 13- pounder . I have trouble getting frozen turkeys defrosted in time, no matter how soon I put them in the fridge. So this year would be different. The turkey would be fresh . If I noticed the words organic and free-range , they failed to register. Until I got to the register, I mean. Imagine the deer-in-the-headlights look on my face when that turkey rang up at $41.11. I stared blankly at the bored, gum-snapping teenage cashier. How could I admit to her that I wanted to trade in my organic and free-range turkey, unpolluted by antibiotics, used to the happy, carefree life outside the coop, for a deep-frozen, overfed lump of turkey which would end up, even after days of defrosting, in my sink on Thanksgiving morning with me cursing at it? Naturally, I lacked th...

Actually, that's all I'm seeing at my backyard birdfeeder. Sparrows. Back in the summer I had quite a variety of birds: cardinals, tufted titmice, chickadees, and a bird which I think was a type of woodpecker. Now? Sparrows. I know all the birds haven't flown to warmer climes. The question, then, is: where are they? I posed this question to my friend, who looked at me with pity before asking me what I was using as feed. "I don't know," I said. "Seed. I get it in bags at the grocery store." My friend winced, and gave me the address of a nearby birdseed emporium. I found my way there, and was suddenly in bird wonderland. There I found every birdfeeding and bird-watching accessory known to man. Ground feeders. Pole feeders. Squirrel baffles. Birdhouses of all sizes, even bird apartment-buildings for purple martens. High-powered optics for viewing birds. And a puzzling array of foods: nyjer seed, peanuts, corn, you name it. Plus several seed blends, in ...

OK, the election is history. The lawn signs are gone. I am sleeping like a baby, in the knowledge that Obama will be our next President. It's now time for me to turn to the other issues that matter to this blog. One is the Prop 8 fiasco that has taken place in California, where a slender, 52% majority voted to deny a basic human and civil right to a significant segment of the human population. What next? It's a slippery slope, ladies and gents. It's not much of an imaginative leap from marriage to property ownership, enfranchisement, and other basic rights. Are you going to take those away from the LGBT folks as well? Of course, speaking prominently on the question of Prop 8 was one of its major supporters, Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren, who appears on this blog from time to time whenever I need an example of a wolf in sheep's clothing, or a portrait of an aquatic bottom-feeder. In justifying his views, Pastor Warren had recourse to the Bible, a 2000-yea...