The Subtle Gift

“I LOVE Donald Miller” she gushed one morning at work. She was reading his book “One Million Miles in a Thousand Years.” I wondered to myself what the big deal was but I wanted to find out so I asked her if I could borrow it when she was done.

“Is he married yet, he said he thought himself quite handsome?” I quipped teasingly. I had read his earlier book “Blue like Jazz” and I enjoyed that a lot.

“Nah, he’s not that good looking but he’s still single and I wouldn’t mind marrying him”. She sighed looking heavenwards like Don was going to fly into the room.

“It’s just as well” I thought as I flipped through the pages the next day, being a Saturday. I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love Don Miller but this book was nothing like “Blue like Jazz”.

Miller has a gift for writing simple truths in simple ways but it carries an element of twisted blitheness. See he would never use this word. But I am trying to write this piece like him. He says the most obvious things in a non-obvious way - like there is certain rightness to his wrongness and when you come to the end of his thought, the wrongness feels right. Take his sentence for instance “When I was in love there was somebody in the world who was more important than me, and that, given all that happened at the fall of man, is a miracle, like something God forgot to curse.” (Blue Like Jazz Pg. 151)

After reading this, I would think “Wow!” but wait a minute! I couldn’t love someone enough if I did not love them more than I love myself. I mean loving someone, for most of the time involves “Giving”. Giving of my thoughts, my deeds, my trust, joy, integrity, kindness, even my vulnerability (secret side)… my very Self!  And yet, given that there is much pain and suffering, even in loving just one person, I would still do it again if the decision was mine to make. So I don’t disagree with Don except where he uses the “curse” word. I think God loves us a lot like we love others, except more unselfishly, more perfectly. I mean He loves us and continues to whether we love Him back or not.

I am at work on a Saturday as I have some stuff to finish up. Butters, another colleague of mine, walks in holding a pan cake wrapped in foil. I look at her, rub my stomach and tell her I’m hungry. She gives the pan cake to me. She says she and her sorority sisters had pan cakes for breakfast. I feel envious in a nice kind of way and say, “Why didn’t you save some for me?”

Keeping in character, she retorts, “You should have come for the study and you would have got some, Lexi made them.”

“But you could have kept some!”

She replies in affectionate exasperation “I don’t have maternal instincts!”

I stood there speechless. When you like someone like that, it’s nice. Like when you feel left out of a joyful moment and thinking of it makes you feel alone, but then someone tells you, its fine and that they will keep some pancakes for you the next time around.

Shamefully, I threw a similar tantrum on Friday afternoon with the Brownie Angel. I have an Angel on my team and she makes the best brownies and chocolate chip cookies in the world! Every time a morsel is in my mouth, I swear I am in brownie heaven. She painstakingly makes them for each training event with the team and being the only guy, I help myself to a little extra. This Friday, I was rooting for three pieces that she had saved for later in a plastic wrap. I didn’t care that she held out the tray offering me a piece. I wanted the ones in the plastic wrap. So she says to me “Okay, take three pieces from the tray and you can give me the wrap back.”  

I work with a team of nine women and another half man. The other half is a young lad who’s finding his way in the world and it’s great to see him flex his wings. But it’s the girls who really fly and although I am the only one who does not have wings, I am often floating in the wake of their slipstream.

On Saturday night, we were all invited out to dinner by Kimberly’s parents who had flown in from the US to see her. At the dinner, I felt like there were some of us drunk on joy! I was talking to Ms. I-Love-Don-Miller and then I tell her again that I wasn’t too impressed with Don. And that I think I am better looking. She says with a lot of emphasis –“Women don’t like Don for his looks, Sean, we love his soul!” I was tempted to ask that if I wrote like Don, would there be women out there who would love my soul too, but I let it go.

I learned a lesson today about Listening. You can never get too good at listening. I think listening is the nobler of the other half of communication. You can get only so far by talking until you run out of ideas or emotions, but you could never run out of time when you listen. Listening builds strength in other people. I learned over the years and I have become better at it. But sometimes I am preoccupied while the other person is talking and that gets me into trouble. Sometimes I want to make a point which I think is good but the other person has not finished, and then I cut in, and then the noble intent has flown out of the window. But I am working on it.

Don Miller’s beat poet Tony says the words alone, lonely and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree but I would say that it’s true in any language. Miller says that they are words like hunger and thirst and that they are words about the soul. I agree but then if one is a sensitive person, one will almost always feel lonely. I too struggle with it and while Don speaks to his pillow in the mornings and imagines it to be a beautiful woman, I think of words like community, sharing of joy, human brokenness and helping people lighten their loads as a great and lonely thing.

Sometimes loneliness has luminous quality to it. I run each evening on a track at a Police Academy. There is a moment during my labored breathing when the darkness has covered everything and the whole place resembles the venue of a rock concert. I see hundreds of young cadets lying all over the place in stillness with luminous LCD screens of their cell phones alight, humming their shared hearts over the air waves. I wonder to myself, if their listeners will ever see the way they are being spoken to, and if they did, would they feel special. I am certain they would.

Being alone keeps you grateful as you have to be broken to see the miracles stealing into the ordinariness of the everyday life.

New thoughts on 2010!

"As I reflect on the year ahead, I realize that friendship will be as important a concern as prayer. When I think about the pains and joys of my life, they have little to do with success, career, country or church, but everything to do with friendship.... And through it I have come to discover that friendship is a real discipline. Nothing can be taken for granted, nothing happens automatically, nothing comes with effort. Friendship requires trust, patience, attentiveness, courage, repentance, forgiveness, celebration and most of all faithfulness. Like prayer, friendship needs purification as well." - Henri Nouwen

I just thank God so much for my Friends. (They include family as well!)

On running and working out....

Our physical exertion - running, marathons, and working out is an outward metaphor of hope, regardless of the fact that (for some) we end each day, dreaming with a broken heart and grateful upon waking for uninterrupted sleep. That is why I push myself each evening, so I don't have to think so much at dusk. Plus I never allow my wounds to be visible to the outside world (only to folk who are dear to me). So if you look and feel good on the outside, people think you are doing really well and I let them have that thought. I also don't allow myself to wallow in self-pity - this combined effort leads me to Hope!

O' Captain, My Captain, Thy Ship Has Come Home!

Would you be willing to wait, your whole life for a love you could own? Or if you had barely survived a hellishly hot half-moon haze of heart-break that made your every day seem like a Tsunami survivor story. With wave after crushing wave of acidic loneliness churning your heart until it resembled the twisted wreckage of a ghost ship? Not to mention your dreams, torn identity and your fragile relationships like ragged flags on a broken mast flapping forlornly in the wind with no rescue ship on the horizon. How long would you wait…three…six… a decade? Perhaps….Twelve years!!! Read these questions into your compass, if you are on a quest otherwise sail on further…

You see that burly man with the stormy hair and a crinkly smile? I could call him Captain Jack Sparrow for the route he sailed to face those questions (unlike the reel inebriated character) but I’ll just call him, Captain. For he had the courage to battle those hungry ghosts whilst on a quest for hope like it was the Black Pearl and found his ‘Elizabeth’ too. She is the one standing next to him in the picture. He is also the guy you go looking for when you seek answers to those questions for yourself.

I met him one hot summer in 1998. He brought a team of fund raisers and marketers to a project for street children in Kanpur. He was the seasoned veteran of many programs; I was the young upstart trying to make their visit worthwhile. For three days, their incessant questions dried my throat up, but we were all inspired by the end of the trip. The Captain took his crew home but we kept in touch. Over the next twelve years, we met at myriad shores… meetings, train stations, hotels, airports, cities and countries, our homes and even a seminary! As our own stories as men intersected, the crisscrossed longitudinal lines of friendship and purpose on our individual navigation charts blurred. Sometimes life seemed for us like a vast ocean – her alluring azure dazzled us with a mirage of unkept promises, fake siren calls and feral eyes watching from the dark, ever glowing but formless. Sometimes our storylines were ship-wrecked on doubtful shores; a barren waiting for the elusive glimmer of change. But we did our best to read our navigation charts and our maritime courses intersected close enough to point us towards the North Star of God’s love and grace through the miles of frozen blue wasteland.

When we anchored at port, we would catch up over a meal and talk about everything that was precious to us including the fearful – the laughter of children; the holy sound of families; the gift of friends; our shared vocation to serve the vulnerable; music and authors; the meanings of books and sometimes our hopes for the future. The conversations between us helped us celebrate the intangibles of life at its vibrant best. We talked until we split open the kernel of every thought that was dear to us. He once told me that he was sure he would end up in communal home where people who have nowhere to go, live out the rest of their lives. The wonderful emulative attribute in all of this was his elastic faith in God, and something I coveted for myself too. Our conversations were curiously peppered with a mix of blessings (his) and expletives (mine) when it came down to discussing the writing of God’s hand into each of our lives. I sometimes used expletives for emphasis as if my heart was speaking in italics. My maverick faith had gifted me that right. He would smile at me in silent indulgent amusement and I never felt judged.

Last year - his twelfth year, the Captain’s ship caught a friendly tide and surprised by joy - took him unwaveringly to his Elizabeth. She had been waiting her whole life for him. On the ninth day of May of the thirteenth year, they were married in a chapel in Toronto, Canada. I congratulate them both and say to him, O’ Captain, my Captain, your ship has come home!” The waters around my ankles are now sweet and friendly and in our solidarity of brotherhood, our shared answer to anyone facing those questions is “Stay the course, as true as you can though the waters may be icy dark and howling deep, and God’s destiny for you will meet your joy!”

I look west where the shelf of cloud kisses the horizon of the sea. I just left a harbour town behind in my last long wake, and while I move on to the next one, I pray that God would send a gull chased ship to carry me onwards out to sea. Only this time, on a sea of liquid jade gently overshadowed by a sky of swans and a thousand splendid suns…

Joy!

Love is not a feeling.

I was sitting and watching this movie on Saturday night, as one of those random flicks that hang on my perpetually surfing remote. It was a heart-warming story of a single-parent with kids trying to adjust to a new life. There was a line in the movie that got my attention - "Love is not a feeling. It is an ability." I was blown away by its truth and wanted to own it.

Six years ago, I met a man who was a father, played an instrument and was athletic just like me except for one difference. He was blind. A bout of small pox stole his sight and there was no tissue there in his eye sockets. It just carried the semblance of two hollows where if God wished He could plant afresh a new pair of eyes. But this man laughed from his belly and played in orchestras. And he had a wife who was fully sighted. Ranjan was a man in more ways than just one, like me.

He was no different, except that he saw with his heart, his other four senses and not his eyes. This ability tuned out the din that we normal people encounter when we see with our eyes. Things like shape, colour, skin texture, beautiful things pleasing to the eye. We are so used to this form of seeing that we miss the real and the mysterious like the myriad tone colourations of a single voice; the sound of a held-in breath when a person you love extends a welcome hug; the gap of interminable silence hanging between sentences of a conversation between friends that convey thoughtfulness, love and respect; the sound of your child breathing when her little head hits the pillow that lets you know your day as a parent is done....the list goes on and on... and none of this can be told to us by our sight.

I once playfully asked Ranjan if he could indeed tell the subtle indivudual differences of what made a woman attractive to him since he could not see. He said it was her "voice!" and all its nuances. I had no answer but the truth of it was a blinding light to my soul. On another occasion, I asked his wife, a Nurse, how it was that she chose to marry Ranjan, inspite of the obvious. She said she had prayed while still in her formative years, that God would give her a husband whom she could serve and take care of. Both their prayers were answered. They have a son called Rhythm, so named after their love of music.

"Love is not a feeling. It is an ability....." (like breathing almost!)

My favourite quotes in the movie are when Dan interacts with his daughters, two of whom, Marty and Cara are teenagers and like most teens passionately blinded by love at first sight.

When he is floundering miserably to make sense of it with Cara, the younger teen - " What don't I understand, Cara? Please, help me out. What is it? Is it frustrating that you can't be with this person? That there's something keeping you apart? That there's something about this person that you can connect with? And whenever you're near this person, you don't know what to say, and you say everything that's in your mind and in your heart, and you know that if you could just be together, that this person would help you become the best possible version of yourself?

Cara responds from her broken young heart - You are a murderer of love!

In another scene with the spirited Cara who is bent on proving to her dad that love is real at any age is crying her heart out after her father asks her boyfriend to leave their house. Her father standing next to his brother Marie's girlfriend (the woman that he is in love with!) sighs wistfully...

Marie: That's sweet.

Dan Burns: How is that sweet?

Marie: To be that certain, to feel that much love.

Dan Burns: Love isn't a feeling?

Marie: No?

Dan Burns: It's an ability.

Marie: Well, if that's true, then you have one gifted daughter.

"You know that feeling in your heart? When your heart is just pounding, like it's actually outside your ribs. Exposed, venerable, but wonderful and awful, and heartsick, and alive, all at the same time?" - Dan Burns

Resounding the Bell Purposefully!

It might seem a little too late, since a movement started to end domestic violence at home and send out a message to the world that the safest place for women actually renders them most vulnerable to harm. And if we as individuals are to retain some semblance of virtue and goodness for future generations, we best be cleaning up our own back-yards and spurring others on as well. In this, Breakthrough’s Bell Bajao Campaign (www.bellbajao.org) singes our collective conscience for those of us who do too little or nothing at all while walking away from a situation that may cause an embarrassment too fleeting, but might mean life or death for a particular woman and her children. I am no superman, but there have been a couple of times, when I more than ‘rang the bell’ – kind of put my self where my heart, mouth felt at home.

Sometime in April 2004 in Noida – Sector 41, dusk was falling and I had just begun my favourite evening ritual to fill up my hours before bed time - a form of active zen meditation - running! I had just broken into a cool sweat, passing some new construction when I heard the screams. They came from a shack assemblage of smog draped plastic, standing on an open plot alongside fresh bricks, mortar and cement. I hesitated for a split second and then leaped over the gutter that separated the plot from the main road. I had barely come to a standstill when a wisp of a woman with a teary child in her arms ran straight towards me screaming “Bhaiya (brother)! Please do something; my husband is beating my son!” Her pale face and eyes wide with terror, disheveled appearance, and parched lips, undoubtedly dry from screaming anguished entreaties bore painful testimony to the scars of her individual womanhood. My own fear and loathing threatened to choke me even as I screamed “Hai!” towards the entrance of the hut. The cries and shuffling sounds from within the hut stopped abruptly! Almost immediately, young boy with a torn shirt ran stumbling and falling out of the hut and into his mother, clutching her torn sari.

As I stood with my posture adopting a tinge of unnatural menace, blood rushed to my brain as I desperately tried to outthink the pace of events that began to unfold beyond our control. A man came out after a suspended interminable silence, his face, a contorted mask of rage and arrogance. I was after all, an intruder! This was his house, his woman, his affair and I had no business here. I scanned the scenery behind him. A cycle rickshaw, kerosene stove, pans and a makeshift bed of old clothes. They were rural folk – poor landless labourers who had fled the poverty of their village hoping to eke out a living in India Shining - the seductive truth that brings most of our rural poor into the informal economy.

“What are you doing?” “Have you lost your mind?” my harsh questions cut the space between us. His posture began to mirror mine but his eyes could not hide his fear. If he called my challenge, he had to have the heart to stand in front of me and take whatever came. My open palms inadvertently clenched into fists – I so badly wished away this hated moment. The woman cut the tense energy with her pleading – “Bhaiya, please tell him something, he thrashes my son often and when I try to interfere, he beats me too. Her husband stared at her, muttered something unintelligible and looked down. Now it was my turn to scream, “You have no right to hit her and why are you hitting your son?” “What has he done for you to hit him?” No reply. The sullen staring and muttering continued and it seemed like he was cursing us all.

By this time some onlookers gathered around and even tried to plead with him to be reasonable. I then barked, the ultimate wound to his pride. “If I see you hit your wife again or hear of it, I will make a formal complaint to the police and have you thrown in jail!” As if on cue, a Police Patrol on noticing the crowd, parked their van and a constable got out. He held in his left hand a stout stick and there was no pretense about what he was willing to do. Before any sanity could prevail, some of the onlookers began speaking in loud voices about the quarrel and how this man habitually abused his wife and children. The constable’s right hand shot out suddenly in an arc that landed solidly on the man’s left ear and felled him to the ground! The dazed man collected himself and started screaming like a mad man and kicking his feet in all directions. The constable then caught hold of him by the scruff of his neck and began to drag him towards the squad car. Only this time, he raised his stick! My only thought as I watched helplessly, was that this man was going to return and take it out on his wife after all of us had left the scene.

What followed next shocked my heart and wrenched my well-schooled logic from its moorings! The woman, his badly bruised wife, used her body as a shield, and began begging for mercy with the constable not to take her husband. The heartbreaking scene was that her pleading actually carried the earnest tone of love! Anyone, anywhere who has ever loved knows the intimate timbre of the voice that speaks of love for their other – an indelible tenderness suffuses their words. The absurdity of love’s generous madness in the face of anger, violence and hate was overwhelming. It was heartbreaking as it dawned on me that this way of loving in such undeserving circumstances was something almost only a woman could do! Honestly, all of us, including me wanted this man to receive the poetic justice that he had coming to him.

In spite of myself, I reached over and touched the constable lightly on the shoulder and requested him to let the man go. The bystanders, who were shocked into silence until then, gathered their courage and began to request him also. The constable let the man go with a stern warning. After the crowd dispersed, I lingered awhile and then strolled home, my evening ritual long forgotten. I kept hoping that his shame and fear would overcome his pride to hurt his wife, knowing now that the world was watching and could also be a participant.

I know this was not the last incident in her life and for that matter for most women, especially those who do not have a voice or a forum of formal justice. But if neighbours and particularly men come forward to own their favourite virtue which confers true manhood – to protect and shelter with strength and purpose, instead of being silent and abusive; women every where can own a favourite of theirs – love and nurture of children and the future of families…and men.