Soulful Muse

A quick joke first,

She honked on her horn and flipped the driver in front of her the bird because he did not go through the yellow light.  She was directly behind me.  The light was yellow and he thought it wise and it’s the law.
She’s now yelling at him even if he can’t hear her and second bird-flip appears, as though 60 seconds of her life could not be enjoyed in the silence of a red light.
A police car stops along side her but she continues her ranting with hands flaying and the bird-flip appears a third time.  The officer arrests her and she’s in a holding cell for two hours.  “I knew you couldn’t arrest me for yelling in my own car. You haven’t heard the last of this,” she tells the arresting officer.  He waited for the fourth bird-flip to appear but it didn’t happen.
The officer replied, “I didn’t arrest you for shouting in your car. I saw you screaming, beating your steering wheel and yelling to the driver in front of you and I said to myself, ‘What’s going on here?’
“What caught my attention,” says the officer, was the rosary hanging on your rear view mirror and the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bumper sticker and the ‘Choose Life’ license holder and the Christian fish symbol on your trunk.  So I assumed that you stole the car!”

When I travel now I wear a hat.  Within the masses of mass travelers and nervous folks my hat seems to stand out.  I don’t know why I started wearing it but it works.  The check-in person seems to have a more welcoming smile as well as flight attendants.  “There’s something about this hat,” I say to myself.  Waiting for a flight a few years later some check-in persons from another airline say to me, “Oh, you’re the guy….”  I told you, it’s the hat.

Seated on the airplane, the guy next to me says, “You’re going to Florida, aren’t you?”  I ask how he knows that since this is not a direct flight and he stares up at me and you get the rest.  It’s the hat.

Christians seem to believe that being a Christian is like wearing a hat.  “I’m nice to people,” says a faithful follower.  “I say ‘Hi’ to everyone I meet” says another totally committed Godly person.  Unfortunately there’s nothing Godly to being nice to people.  I think Muslims and Jews and atheists (and rapists) are also pretty nice people to other people.   Unless you profess a Christian Creed of historical and non-historical details including the word “consubstantial,” which gets a squiggly line underneath because it’s misspelled, you are not a Christian.

John the Baptist is asked to identify himself and he does so the same way his cousin does, deftly denying along with a slight admittance, but not fully.  Our Christian faith is lived by our intentions and what lives and breathes behind those “nice” words we use each day.  Our Christian faith is lived by our motives and then our Christian faith is seen in our actions.  Then add a dash of sacrifice, a hint of self-denial and a lot of another person and you may have a Christian recipe.

I still like the hat, at least on vacation it works.

“One mightier than I is coming after me.  I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.”

Johnny Carson had Ed.  Ed would introduce Johnny and then sit on the couch…for 30 years.

Jack Benny had Don Wilson.  “The Price is Right” had Johnny Olson.  “Jeopardy” had Don Pardow.  Joey Bishop had Regis Philbin and Merv Griffin had Arthur Treacher.

They were the stars’ sidekicks  They were the ones who did not create shadows; it is the star in whose shadow they stood.  After their routine build-up of the star they were out of the picture.

And so enters and exits John the Baptist.  I guess if you wore camel’s hair and ate locust with wild honey (how else could anyone eat locust?!) long enough you wouldn’t, no couldn’t be the star.  It’s “someone else,” John keeps saying building up the suspense until the star arrives.

Who would be our sidekick in this wonderful journey of life?  You’d never guess who I think it is.  It’s our parents.  They are the ones who paved the way for us to enter this world, fed/clothed/admonished/counseled and tons of others duties to help us enter life’s stage to perform the one performance we’re able to make in life.

Advent is about anticipation. We kinda know what’s coming but we’re not sure how or when or the worst of all, why.  No matter how many Christmases you’ve honored through your life, you don’t know what this Christmas will bring, will mean, will prove to be.  A Christmas for many of you may have meant a holiday closer to bringing a solider home from Europe, a child’s first big gift under the tree, a resolve to do better at work or in your relationships, a hope things go as well next year as they did last year or a wish that it has to get better after this awfully long year of whatever occupied your time and attention.

People and situations can all be sidekicks to our one performance in life.  They can introduce us to all sorts of circumstances – some welcomed, others tolerated.

In case you didn’t notice, I made all of us the stars of the this earthly show.  What if we are the sidekick to someone else.  What if it is us wearing the dreadful camel’s hair and eating locust with the obligatory wild honey?  You were a sidekick to your own children – propelling them into a world that was foreign to you but trusting that they’d succeed, counseling a grandchild with advice you’re not sure of but you believe in.  (Believe me, grandchildren listen as they announce during your funeral what an influence you’ve had on their lives.)

I guess we can be and are both the sidekick and the star of our one life’s performance.  Sometimes we get to sit behind the desk with the hot lights and the microphone and other times we get to sit on the couch.

What a great word.  It’s an adjective but unfortunately we use it as a verb as though we can propel forward and predict outcomes that haven’t happened.

In our minds we have the ability to end what hasn’t begun.  We create the situation in our minds complete with sounds and colors, the conversation and the outcome.  It becomes clear to our mindful minds how an unknown situation will become known.

“It’s the flowers,” we say to ourselves as we approach her door and ask forgiveness for that impulsive fling last week.  We’re baffled because the conversation has already been settled in our minds while she doesn’t open the door but still grabs the flowers.  “How did that happen?” we say to ourselves as we leave after knowing what the anticipatory scene ought to have been.  We walk away with the question always asked of those who anticipate, “But I thought that…”

It’s both gift and curse of us thinking humans who have the ability to think forward and backwards and both times think we can assuredly predict outcomes.  “I’ll act this way to her,” we rehearse to ourselves and end up yelling at each other about yesterday’s problems.   “If I hold her hand she’ll die in peace” we say to ourselves as we return with a cup of coffee and she’s gone.

“Anticipatory” is a drama play in our minds.  We have the stage set, characters in place and the music is ready to begin as the curtain opens to our imagined act but now played in real time, only without the audience.  (Oh, wait!  There is an audience.)  The audience is in our minds.  “We’ve (I mean, ‘I’) rehearsed this and practiced it again and again.”  “This is not the way it was supposed to turn out,” “You’re not hearing what I’ve said to myself for days now.”

Lucky us humans.  We can look back and change nothing and we can look ahead and predict.  How’s that working for us?

Do we need a new cast of characters or do we need a simpler version of this mystery of life, which is not anticipated but mysteriously lived.