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by Rector John Graham

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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Most of our activity is right-handed, in the metaphorical sense: straightforward, common-sense responses to commonplace needs. We’re hungry, so we grab a fork or a sandwich and eat. We’re tense, so we open a bottle of beer or wine and have a drink. We’re bored, so we turn on the TV.

Within, though, a metaphorical left hand is at work. It’s not sinister or sneaky, but it operates in secret and keeps its own counsel. Probing the spirit, it finds hungers food cannot satisfy, anxieties alcohol cannot quell, emptiness entertainment cannot fill.

The Lenten fast stills a right-handed activity. We give up a certain kind of food, or alcohol, or television. Then, the left hand shows us what it’s found. From its revelations we learn anew that we need more than the right hand can give.

It’s not so much that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, as that it doesn’t care. It works on its own terms, in its own time. Whenever the Lenten fast turns our attention to it, the left hand is ready to show us things the right hand has kept us too busy, or distracted, to notice.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

In 1967 I was 12 and wanted nothing more than to become an Eagle Scout. But I was sure I’d never meet the insect collection requirement for Nature merit badge: 50 different inspects preserved, labeled, and mounted in cigar boxes. And without Nature, no Eagle! The Columbus suburb where we lived didn’t have that many different insect species, and I was deathly afraid of bugs larger than houseflies. Then my Uncle George and Aunt Anne invited us to their farm in Southern Ohio for a family reunion.

When we got there, I realized we’d found the motherlode. Insects of all kinds, everywhere. My mother took her scaredy-cat son and the jar with formaldehyde-soaked cotton in the bottom into Uncle George and Aunt Anne’s field. When she caught one, she’d have me hold the jar until the insect expired, empty it into the storage box we had with us, and give the jar back to her to catch the next one.

I didn’t really earn my Nature merit badge. I didn’t look very hard for good insect hunting grounds. We just happened to get invited to a farm. My mother did most of the work, and didn’t make me face my fear. I don’t know if she talked with my Scoutmaster about how the collection was completed. I should have done so myself, but didn’t. He accepted my cigar boxes without asking too many questions. I have a feeling he knew I’d gotten some help.

Human self-awareness begins with an acknowledgment of joys we’ve received but haven’t deserved, and griefs we’ve been spared though our action or inaction, words or silence, might have invited them. I didn’t have to catch many insects, and I still became an Eagle Scout. We don’t really know ourselves until we see how mercy has, at very important junctures in our lives, trumped justice.

Thursday, Feburary 25, 2010

Note: This is the second in a Lenten series on self-awareness, inspired by Jesus’ words in the Ash Wednesday gospel: "Do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing."

Sakena and I have been taking ballroom dancing classes off and on for several years. My favorite instructor is Justin. He doles out pithy aphorisms to guide clumsy, self-conscious students like me: “take small steps,” “keep everything underneath you,” “shift your weight with each step,” “dancing is really just walking.”

In a way, Justin is trying to move us from awkward self-consciousness to a healthy self-awareness marked by humility: know your limits; respect the dance’s structure and discipline; remember that it’s more about the dance than it is about you.

The best dancers, like many great artists and great athletes, seem to move beyond self-awareness altogether, into a place some call “the Zone.” A larger force takes hold, and things happen almost independently of human awareness or intention. Shots find the basket, the bat finds the ball, dancers glide across the floor, the music flows out of the instrument. The left hand (maybe the left foot) doesn’t know, or care, what the right one is doing.

Every once in a while we witness this sort of thing. When we do, it feels like one of us has transcended self-awareness and taken his or her place, if only for a fleeting instant, in an Awareness larger than ours.

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