Come move with me...

I've finalized the switch of my blogging platform.

If you have been subscribed to this blog, please go to my new site.

You can sign up on the right hand side to see posts by e-mail.

See you there!

Following Spirit Scraps

You can now find Spirit Scraps here.

If you've subscribed, you can do so on the new blog by clicking the link at the top of the page.

The Death of Bin Laden

I will readily admit that when I heard the news this morning that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by US forces, I wept. I cannot tell you all the reasons why. Perhaps it was remembering the feeling of hearing our national anthem sung at Buckingham Palace in those first dark days following 9/11. Maybe it was remembering the devastating grief of those days. Maybe it was thinking about one Marine in particular who gave his young life in this battle. Maybe it was feeling a sense of relief and perhaps even pride that we had not given up, that if the terrorist movement was not gone, at least its most visible face was no longer there.

Throughout the morning I've been checking on Facebook to see the reactions of my friends. Here's the thing about my collection of Facebook friends - they are a diverse, funny and mostly thoughtful group. So, as I expected, the reactions have been many and varied. At least a few have wondered (and come to different answers) about how we, as Christians, should react.

As I've reflected myself, I keep coming back to a story told by my father. He shared it in his book, The War Beyond My Foxhole, so I feel permission to share it with you.

He was in a village in France when he scrambled up an embankment to a bridge. On the bridge he discovered a German soldier. His first reaction was, "Why did you have to be on this bridge at this moment? Now I have to kill you or you will kill me."He shot first, and lived to tell the tale, but always telling with poignancy and sadness.

A former sniper in Patton's army, he is proud of the role he played in defeating a truly evil and dangerous man. But he has also been opposed to war except in defense of our country. Having seen war from the inside, he never spoke of it glibly.

I've thought about that German soldier a lot this morning. He had to be killed because that is what happens in war. I am glad that he is dead insofar as it means that my father lived. I also believe that Osama had to be killed because of the power he held (symbolic or otherwise) in a movement that will stop at nothing to achieve its aims, not even and especially the killing of thousands of innocent with celebration. If I rejoice, it is because it seems that the dead - the people killed in the terrorist attacks he orchestrated and the service people killed in the war to defeat him - have been given one last voice, one last word.

From all accounts, Bin Laden's radical birth began during the Afghan war with Russia. So it is that wars begat wars.

So we may rejoice that one who was committed to inciting evil acts is now gone. And we may pray that as people of faith we may have the courage to be peacemakers, to work for a world of understanding and not war. It is a world that we may never see, but what a wonderful thing to be involved in the dreaming of it and the doing of whatever is in our power to do.

Never Say Never

One of the moments I enjoy as a counselor is when I can celebrate with a client the progress they've made. I remind them of how life was when they first came to me, and we talk about how different things are now. Sometimes the change happens so gradually that they forget how far they've come.


Clients I tend to see every week or so. There are other people with whom I've worked in workshops whom I see only every year or so. Sometimes I've known them for only a year or two and sometimes I've known them for a decade or more. Regardless, the long time in-between makes their progress all the more evident.


I've been thinking a lot recently about people who've come a long way. I've worked with some people in both contexts whom it would have been easy to write off. The wounds are just too deep. They are just too damaged. And yet here they are, living lives now that would have almost been beyond their imagining once upon a time. What makes such profound transformation possible?


Mine is certainly not the definitive answer, but here are some thoughts.


Determination - They don't give up. No matter how tall the mountain before them seems, no matter how impossible it seems that their lives could ever be bearable, much less good. Somewhere inside them there is a tiny voice that keeps whispering hope to them. Every now and then they stop to listen.


Dedication - They show up and do the work they need to do. Make no mistake, healing can be hard work. It requires a lot of courage to look at how things are, not how you think they've been. It takes courage to make unconscious messages conscious and then to realize they were never true. It takes courage to change the way you've always done things. Most of all, it takes courage to allow yourself finally to feel the feelings that you have been absolutely convinced would be the end of you.


And they keep showing up. And they keep doing the work. No matter how small the step seems, they keep taking it. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. Too often in our culture we want the quick fix. We want to know if something's working right away. We tend to have little patience for the unfolding of process.


Desire - They make a commitment to their healing and to reclaiming their lives. And this commitment takes priority. They forgo going to the movies to save money for therapy. They clear out their schedules and take their vacation days to spend a week or a weekend at a workshop. They journal and read and use any tool that will help them take that next step. Although they may not know it yet intellectually, their actions demonstrate that they are indeed people of worth and value.


There is a grace that is also beyond their control, a grace that brings them to just the right person, just the right work, just the thing that they need for taking the next step. But their dedication, determination and desire has cleared out  a space into which that grace can come.


Although their pasts and their experiences and sometimes their families and sometimes even the mental health community tells them over and over again that it is hopeless, they keep on working. Until one day they sit down with me or someone else and say, "I never knew life could be this good."


Today I salute women and men of such courage. May we all take such responsibility for our lives.

An Inconvenient Dog

I knew that Oakely was an extraordinary dog for a first time dog owner. She was easy. Her foster mom said she house trained herself. She was mostly laid back, unless anyone had the gall to walk down our street or the mailman had the audacity to come to our house. In those cases, she was was fine of a guard dog as you would ever want to meet.

But she also needed a playmate, someone to be a buddy when I was off at work. It had to be a special someone, for Oakley was the epitome of an alpha dog. I combed through the petfinder listings and visited with the Humane Society and rescue groups. After several false starts, I finally found Ralphie (pictured).

The first introduction went well. The first house visit went spectacularly. Oakley was beside herself with excitement over having another dog around. Ralphie marked his territory and whined when his foster mom left, but otherwise was fine. Very quickly it became official. Ralphie was  part of the family.

Ralphie was a stray who'd been tied up by a clothesline attached to a choke collar. He'd chewed through the line to get free.

He's part Australian shepherd and part lab. This means that he is very affectionate (he's my 40 pound lap dog), very attached to his family and really just wants to be where I am, including (and especially) riding in the car.  It also means that he's high energy. Very high energy. He doesn't walk from room to room, he dashes. Moving from point A to point B always means dashing as quickly as he can, even if it's only two feet.

He's also obsessive about balls, other chew toys and rawhide chews. I've decided that while Oakley would attack any intruder, Ralphie would simply drive him mad by his incessant request to throw the ball.

He's smart in a submissive, underdog kind of way. The only real fights he and Oakley have had have been over rawhides. Now if there's one on the floor and Oakley is anywhere in sight, Ralphie will bark for me to give him the chew. It's the safe way to go.

If a rawhide isn't available, any shoe will do. Oakley grew out of that phase but Ralphie still has a fondness for sole food.

Ralphie barks. Not just if anyone is using our street. He barks if his ball has gone under a table or is otherwise unreachable. This is a national emergency and must be dealt with quickly.

In other words, Ralphie is an inconvenient dog. I had to work with him for months to get him past his terror of being walked (although it's still not his favorite thing to do.) He interrupts my plans and demands my attention, even when a gazillion other things begging for my attention.

But then something scares him, and  I look into those big, brown, gentle, loving terrified eyes, and I wonder what his previous owners did to him... and how they could have done it. For inconvenience is rewarded with grateful, generous love. I tell him that I'm glad he's in our family, and I mean it.

One of the measures of our hearts may be what we do with the inconvenient people who come into our lives. Maybe they were always that way, reacting out of their own painful pasts. Or maybe they've just become that way as a consequence of what life has brought to them. Dealing with them isn't always easy. Sometimes we have to go out of our way. Sometimes we have to confront our own grief, for seeing in their illness them reminds us of the healthy selves they once were and may never be again.

But if we are brave and wise, we will sometimes allow ourselves to be inconvenienced.

No Longer Laughing at Charlie Sheen

At first it seemed like just another  story of that peculiar Hollywood disease of Too Much Money and Not Enough Sense. We watched with the same combination of feeling envy and feeling superior that makes every "Real Housewife" franchise profitable. It was a raunchier, more expensive version of "Big." A twelve year old boy wakes up in adult world and delights in filling his house with toys. Some of his comments were so off the wall that we couldn't help but laugh.

It's time to stop laughing. Charlie Sheen's story is no longer about a Hollywood bad boy. It's about mental illness.

I am generally loathe to diagnose people whom I have not even met, much less seen in session. But I don't think that I'd be flirting with malpractice to suggest that it appears that Mr. Sheen is suffering from a drug induced mania. In fact, one of my therapist colleagues has suggested that graduate school programs show clips of his recent interviews so that students can see what full-blown mania looks like and sounds like.

It's mental illness. And it's time to move it off our entertainment cycle. It doesn't belong there. Just go to any NAMI (National Association for the Mentally Ill) meeting and ask the families of persons suffering from mental illness if it's funny to hear their loved ones talk about having special powers, secretly working for the CIA or how productive they are because they can work all day and night without stopping to rest.

It's time to stop laughing. It's time to stop watching the funny videos that people have compiled and listening to the interviews. It's time to stop supporting this train wreck. Lest you think I'm a killjoy, I know too many people whose lives have been touched by mental illness, too many people who've watched family members slip away or who have been wounded by their parents' illness.

It's time to stop laughing.

It's time to call things by their proper names.

This isn't even a guy getting goofy when he's stoned.

This is mental illness.

My Grandmother's China

Recently I helped my dad downsize. Since he was losing a kitchen, there wasn't much reason to keep all of the dishes. Many of them made their way to Goodwill. But I kept the set of my grandmother's china.

I have few memories of the dishes actually being used. Mostly  I remember them sitting on the top shelves in our old kitchen, taking up shelf space that could have gone to CorningWare.

It's not that my mom didn't enjoy using the good china. She was a firm believer that any big family dinner or holiday meal meant bringing out the good stuff. What more special day could you save it for than the occasion of having all of your children and grandchildren gathered around the table?

No, the china was kept tucked away because it had been a bit beaten by life. There were a few chips here and there, understandable considering that my grandparents married in 1917. But the dishes had also come through the fire - literally. Many years ago a grease fire destroyed the kitchen, melting the kitchen clock, charring the cabinets and leaving a dark coating of smoke over everything. My grandmother's china was in the kitchen and I suppose the dishes staked on top suffered most of all. Some of the dishes are discolored and their finish is cracked.

When I packed up my father's kitchen I made the decision that I wanted to keep these cracked, chipped dishes. But I didn't just want to pack them away in a storage room. I wanted to use them.

Part of it is that there is something graceful and beautiful about the lines of the serving pieces. I was delighted to discover that one of the bowls is called a cranberry bowl. (The regular bowl is pictured here.) Bowls like the one pictured are perfect for my winter soups and stews.

But there also seems to be something comforting about using these dishes that have come through the years and are a little less than perfect for the living of them. Some of you have come through the fire and others of you have just picked up a few nicks and chips along the way, so you know what I mean. If we all live long enough (say, past 6 months), we all wind up a little less than perfect.

My grandmother's china reminds us that we are still yet beautiful and able to serve in spite of it.

HR and Jessie Fox's china