Family Help, 2013

Dear Readers,

As you may know, during the past four years the Middletown, Delaware community has been enhanced by the operation of a four unit transitional house for families in need of a home. The project was the dream of few concerned citizens for a number of years and, thanks to the efforts of a number of volunteers and the support of the town and county, the project became a reality. 

Led by an all-volunteer Board, which incorporated under the name Family Help Inc., the house was fixed up and furnished with donations. Four families moved in during the summer of 2010 and received food and clothing as well as counseling to meet their personal goals and ensure a successful transition to safe and affordable housing. Since our beginnings four years ago, several families have made successful transitions to new homes, and new tenants have moved into our housing facility.

Clearly, Family Help Inc. is helping transform the lives of many families and has made a significant difference in their lives. The generosity of many individuals and groups has allowed us to meet an important need in our community. In order for us to continue this work, we are asking you to consider making a tax deductible donation to help us make a difference in the lives of these families. Funds are being used to maintain the house, provide basic needs for the families and run a program to give them a better financial foundation.

In these challenging economic times, there are many causes in need of funds to support people. I hope you will see ours as one that represents a concrete way to make a difference in our local community and consider supporting us, as you are able.

Checks can be sent to Family Help Inc., PO Box 302, Middletown, DE 19709. If you would like to get involved in other ways, would like to have a tour of the property or have questions about the program, feel free to contact me at 302-528-5685. Please feel free to pass on this plea to others who might want to support this noble effort. 

I thank you in advance for your support.

Volunteer Board Member Dave DeSalvo and Board President Harvey Zendt

Boarding School for Old Men

-->

Today, Wednesday, October 16, 2013, at 3:21 pm, I thought I would call my mom to say hi, but then it occurred to me that mom died on October 19, 1990. 

Funny how a grown man of 60 can forget a thing like that.

If the truth be told, I have been thinking about my age a lot lately, mostly in a light-hearted way. So what if I am sixty? I feel like I am 17 most of the time—when I am not running (really half-walking, half-running) or climbing the two flights of stairs to get to my classroom or office or dorm for dorm duty.

I am thinking about my age because I was in a meeting the other day talking about whether students at my boarding school should be granted wireless access to the Internet. I am of the mind that they should have it. The rest of the educated world has it if it wants it, and there might be something that everyone, teachers and students, can learn from having access to the Internet, while teaching (or trying to) what responsible use means.

Then a colleague, several years my junior, made a casual comment about the need to get feedback from younger faculty members. Her idea was, if I understood it rightly, that this feedback might be more beneficial to the discussion about granting young people access to the Internet because it comes from young teachers who have been to college recently and, thus, are more “current” with what the trending needs are for today's college students.

OK. Score a point for the trendy young college grads.

But what about the decades and scores of decades of decisions that were once based on advice from community elders? Is the wisdom of elders even needed anymore? Does it have any value? 

The question in my mind that day was: Are the experiences of older generations useful or valid in today's boarding school community?

Moreover, I wondered: Are younger teachers expected to activate their sensitivities when listening to the advice and contributions of older teachers, or is what is new and trendy the only thing that is important in today’s school culture?

I do not have the answers to these questions, but I do know that I was there, and it felt awkward to listen to a bright, young, future star of the boarding school administrative team pass over the offerings and thoughts of an older teacher in favor of what is new and trendy and current. 

I felt what King David must have felt when he sat back and contemplated his son Absalom’s dreams and aspirations for the new kingdom of Judah. Absalom would intercept anyone who attempted to seek his father’s counsel, and say something like, “You deserve to win your case. It’s too bad the king doesn’t have anyone to hear complaints like yours^. I wish someone would make me the judge around here! I would be fair to everyone.”

And David sat back. I believe he sulked. He really wanted Absalom to rise to the position of king and take over the reins of judge and wise counselor, but to do it with patience and wisdom. Alas, poor Absalom was impatient, insensitive, and selfish. 

Might we learn a lesson from his story?

I loved my mother. I wanted to call her today to say, "Mom. How are you? I love you." I wanted to listen to her wisdom, and I felt a pang in my heart when I realized that I could not call her to check in. 

Angels and Messengers

What is Peace? Does it exist now? Will it ever? What are the obstacles to getting everyone on the planet to believe that world peace is possible? I don’t know about you, but, regardless of the current state of peace in the world, I still choose to believe that peace is a possibility.

What is Justice? Does it exist now? Will it ever? What would it take for society to believe that every person deserves justice and respect?

 
Again, I don’t know about you, but, regardless of the current state of justice in the world, I still dream of a time when every person will be treated with dignity and respect.

What is love? Imagine a world where love is unconditional.

Good readers, I believe that we must always strive to imagine a better world and never back away from the big questions. But we often get impatient with the slow progress that our institutions make.

If you feel this way, please know that you are not alone.

And yet we must keep an open mind because the fruit of our imagination is not so much what we can bring about by sheer willpower as it is about what we believe and hope for in the world around us: a better, more peaceful, just, and respectful world— a world in which people reach for higher purpose.

And this gives rise to the question of angels. Do we believe in angels? Are they real? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? Are they real? Can we see them? Are they human?

We have all heard about angles: Christmas angles, guardian angels, heavenly angels, clarion angels, Angels for Allison (http://www.stmarksjacksonville.org/angelsforallison).

What I do know is that the word “angel” means messenger, a being that is supposed to help us. Unfortunately, Christian artists through the centuries misrepresented the idea of the messenger. They painted angels using human forms, sometimes with wings and swords and dazzling costumes. This led many to dismiss angels, in sort of the same way that we now dismiss unicorns or even (dare I say it) griffins.

If this is what angels are not, then what might they be? As we have already heard, the word “angel” simply means messenger. In that sense, angels very definitely do exist. When Ghandi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world,” he was saying, be an angel, be a messenger, be an agent of goodness. Angels sit by a sick child’s bed all night with a message of love and security. They come and go from a dying grandparent’s hospital bed with a message of comfort and appreciation. Just the other day a teacher was running with his dog along a cornfield when he came across two students, one of them injured and unable to run. They had come to a crossroads and did not know where to turn so they took the path to the right, and that is where they ran into the teacher. Did an angel point the way, or was that teacher, perhaps, the messenger because he ran to back to school to get help and took them back?

Tradition tells us that there are lots of angels, and that they are almost always healthful. Of the many angels spoken of in the Bible, only four are mentioned by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In Hebrew, Michael means "who is like God." Michael is mentioned three times in the Book of Daniel, once as a "great prince who stands up for the children of your people". In the New Testament Michael leads God's armies against Satan's forces in the Book of Revelation. During the summer before my final year of college, I had to read the long poem Paradise Lost by the 17th century poet John Milton, an epic concerning the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the angelic wars that ensued thereafter. It was the Star Wars of its day—before 20^th Century Fox or Disney/DreamWorks.

Finally, Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, is the day I am writing about today. It is a day in the Western Christian calendar which occurs at the end of September. Because it falls near the equinox, it is associated in the northern hemisphere with the beginning of autumn, the shortening of days, and the harvest of God’s abundant love.

This connection of Michael to the kindness of God and the end of days reminds us that angels are messengers of kindness, order, justice, healing and the light of charity that leads to a rich and rewarding destiny.

Searching in the Dark

I read a report last Thursday that NASA's Voyager 1 probe finally left our solar system, “boldly going where no machine has gone before.” I was in my early 20’s when Voyager rocketed away from Earth. It seems strange that this tiny probe, no bigger than a small car, is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space. And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, the report said that it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this very moment, Voyager 1 is drifting in a part of the universe where it is a minute speck, and that speck has thousands of years to go before reaching the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

As a mathematician, I see the infinite in the heavens, the void becomes the space between the stars, and I realize that the universe is a place where, if not for God, it would be easy to get lost.

We all have dark spaces, and the degree to which we can get lost is infinite. A young person in a boarding school like SAS might seem comfortable in his or her skin. It might seem to the casual observer as though we had everything that speaks of connection to purpose, a sense of belonging to something vital.

But you and I know that there are dark spaces in every life. In every life there is suffering.

Yesterday I attended my first wedding of a gay couple. This very in-love couple had waited until they were almost 50 years old to get married. I was reminded that 35 years ago, a gay person would have been an outcast in most schools or even churches, a laughing stock, a deviant for others to make fun of or mock or bully.

I am very proud to write this piece today and say, with conviction, that my church school is not only a school that accepts gay students, but is a school where gay students are accepted, welcomed, and appreciated.

The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for the Creator, says, “my people are foolish, they do not know me… I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.”

This passage is a reminder that God is no stranger to infinite spaces. Whether they are the outer spaces of the universe or the inner spaces we create for ourselves on earth, there is darkness and, at times, disappointments. The dark cities of my youth were Hiroshima and Hanoi, Selma, Dallas, L.A. and Memphis. You have them too: Bagdad, Tripoli, Cairo, Damascus, even Washington D.C. New York city was certainly a dark place on September 11, 2001.

  

But God is no stranger to darkness. It is written that out of the void God created stars and planets, light and life. And, from this, humankind.

Our universe is immense. It is inevitable that we will sometimes feel lost in it. If you would only look into the sky on a clear night, you will see the infinite, and, I hope, feel its immense mystery. 

St. Paul was lost in a void of some kind. He was a cruel and ruthless man, a man who chased fame and power, a man who felt it was his purpose and duty to lord his narrow views over others and to punish others for being different. This bullying attitude served him well for a while, but he began to feel himself slipping. More and more he found himself needing to bully and persecute others. Power and greed, persecution and bullying, never satisfies, and people who engage in such practices seem to need more and more opportunities to satisfy their hunger for inflicting pain.

I imagine a bully as a lost soul desperately trying to stuff an emotional black hole with anything that will soothe his own suffering. But he finds nothing to satisfy his need. Maybe that is why, after he had done his best bullying in Jerusalem, Paul asked for permission to go to Damascus. It is said that he was going to persecute followers of Jesus there as he had in Jerusalem. God was no stranger to the void that Paul was lost in. And God is no stranger to the pain and suffering that any one of us experiences. God found Paul, stopped him in his tracks, spoke to his deeper self, turned him around so that he could live a more purposeful, joyful, and significant life.

That is the message of the gospel. Gospel is a word that means good news. The good news is that God is like a shepherd who searches the void to find every lost sheep, not just most of them, but every one. In thinking about Voyager 1 I was reminded that God is no stranger to infinity, and no matter where you are, if you are lost and willing to be found, God is there. All you have to do is say, “Here I am, God. Please find me, for I am looking to change my life, to find, and to be found by,  my higher purpose.”

Jesus taught that God is like a shepherd searching for a lost sheep. God is a woman who searches for a lost coin. Insignificant as these lost ones might be, the shepherd and the woman look everywhere.

You and I are sometimes like lost coins or sheep—small, tarnished, worn, of little value—mere nothings in a vast universe of wealth and popularity. But God knows us. Knows our reality. Knows our deepest hopes and yearnings. And God searches for us, wants to know us and steer us back to our destiny. Lost sheep live in dumps and deserts, slums and refugee camps. Their dark places may be illness, scarcity of clean water, lack of education, or poor parenting. Visiting such places in person teaches us that God finds these lost ones. How else would there be radiant smiles on their faces, laughter, hope and joy. 

Lost sheep can also live in affluent neighborhoods and schools, and their dark places are no less important to God. The more we dwell on our misfortunes, the deeper the void and the darker the place where our spirit dwells.

Yes, the universe is vast, and we are but a tiny speck in it; but we are not an insignificant speck. Wherever we are, God is searching to find and steer us toward a good purpose. And it is our responsibility and destiny to grow and learn and spread this good news.

A wise person once said that, amidst a vast universe, we could each sow some small act, and thereby reap a meaningful and life-changing habit. Sow a habit and reap a character. Sow a character and reap a destiny. What will yours be?

Discipleship—Living by Principles

A few weeks ago, my colleague at a local Pre-K–8 Episcopal school invited me to give the homily at an all-school service. He said that the theme for the season of Lent was discipleship, and that he had spent a good deal of his time teaching the community about various religious traditions and teachers, and that I might say a few words about why I have chosen to follow Jesus.

I explained to my young listeners that I had come to talk to them about building something amazing, and I brought something to help me tell the story, a broken piece of brick.

This brick, I said, is going to help me tell you a story about being a disciple. The story has three parts:

The first is for my youngest friends here in Pre-K and Kindergarten.

When I was little, my friends and I were playing by a factory near where we lived. It was a dark night, and my friends Jerry, Kenny and I started kidding about who could hit the factory with a stone. We never thought we could do it. I missed. Kenny missed. Then, to our astonishment, Guess what? Jerry, who was the oldest, threw a stone that hit the factory. Right on a window. CRASH!

And we all ran.

My mother found out, of course. And even though I did not throw the stone that broke it, she took me by the hand to the office of the factory manager and made me apologize and pay for the broken window.

That stone taught me a great lesson. Telling the truth sometimes hurts but it is always the right thing to do. The factory manager was a kind older man. He shook my hand and he forgave me. I remember him saying something that made sense about not playing near his factory, but I don’t remember what it was.

Part two of my story was for my Middle School friends. I said that the brick was a piece of the history of their school. When I moved to our town 26 years ago, the place where the school now stood was a field. It was a really nice field and part of a farm, but there was no school, no gym, no awesome playground—just grass and corn. But with vision and prayer about education on this field, together with the commitment of many fine teachers and leaders, bricks like this were used to build something very special—a school. And not just any school, but a school built on guiding principles.

Like words carved into a stone, I had learned that this school thrived on eight guiding principles including respect, compassion, responsibility, honor, enthusiasm, imagination, worship and service.

This brick, then, was a metaphor for the community’s actions and beliefs. As much as a brick is a real building block for our safety and comfort while we learn, it represents our faith and hope for what is best about ourselves and the good we can do for others.

Part three of my story was about the person Jesus. Jesus was a rabbi in a Jewish community a long time ago. Just about every major religion can trace its beginning to a special teacher. Judaism began with Abraham, Buddhism with Siddhartha, Islam with Muhammad. All of these leaders had followers that I call disciples. Just as building cannot stand without strong foundations of brick and steel, strong communities need solid leaders who know what it means to build on the principles of their founders, and these principles become the building blocks of our personal and community spirit. The brick I brought reminds us that in bad weather or good, in hard times or happy times, in sadness and in joy, we need to follow the path of a good teacher.

As a teacher, I am aware that my students are looking to me for leadership, discipline, courage, and example. If you are a student, try to remember that God does not expect you to be perfect. Holding up the broken piece of brick, I said, Look at this brick. It has a big chip broken off of it. This a visual reminder that leaders like Abraham and Sarah did not believe God’s promise at first. In fact, they laughed. But God chose them anyway. Consider Jacob who stole his brother’s birthright, and Moses who killed someone. Even Jesus ran off from his parents in a big city without telling them where he was. Peter, whose name means “Rock” was a rough and tumble sailor who often gave the wrong answers to Jesus questions, and Paul was a nasty fellow who bullied the early followers of Jesus. And yet God called each one of these, and so many others like them, to be the foundation stones of peace and harmony in this wonderful world of ours.

Now this rock got tossed out during the building of your school, but today it helps me tell your story, our story, a story that is still evolving.

Each disciple, and that means you and me, always has an opportunity to turn ourselves around. How? By turning on to something bigger than ourselves with the help of solid foundations.

The best foundation I know of, and the best principle to live by, is love. With love as our foundation, we can take more risks; we can face danger with courage; and we can make this world a much better place to live.

If we want the world to get better, and we all know it needs to get better, we need to be rock solid in one guiding principle: We need to love and care for others. Doing so will help us face our own problems and guide us on a straight path to respect for and responsibility to our community.

A long time ago, my mom took me by the hand to that factory manager, and she made me apologize and pay for the damage. Later she called my friend’s mother, and you can bet I heard it from him about being a tattletale. But we were true friends, and he forgave me. More importantly, we all felt better because we told the truth. It hurts sometimes, but I’d rather be a chipped brick in the tower of truth than a phony fraud.

My time with you is about over. I came to talk to you about being a follower of Jesus, and about following your school’s guiding principles of respect, compassion, responsibility, honor, enthusiasm, imagination, worship and service. All of these principles are held together by love. To be a disciple of Jesus, we need to practice love. I cannot be his disciple for you. No one can do that except you.

Small Town Family Help

Did you know that there are over 2000 people living in tiny Delaware who are without adequate housing? And many of these are motivated, hard-working folk who simply need a break.

What can you do?

If you are reading this, I hope, when you are finished, that you will make a small donation to Family Help, Inc. (FHI). Perhaps you will consider giving a gift of money in another person's name—a superb way to give a gift that won't collect dust, but will put food on a table and provide shelter for a single mom with one or two children.


FHI is in its third year of service to the homeless of Middletown, Delaware. Many generous people contributed money to the project last year, and several school athletic programs raised money for Christmas presents this year.

The generosity of those of us who have more of life's advantages is supporting four families with children, who live in transitional housing units on West Lake Street in Middletown, Delaware. Each family receives food and clothing as well as counseling that will, with God’s help, lead each family to more a stable and independent future. Several families have already improved their credit rating, secured jobs, and have moved into their own apartments. New tenants have moved in and are beginning to turn their lives around.

The generosity of many individuals and groups has allowed FHI to meet an important need in our community, but, in order for us to continue this noble work, I am asking you consider making a tax-deductible donation to help FHI continue its mission. Your donation will be used to maintain four apartments, provide basic needs for four families, and continue programs to help them create a better financial foundation for themselves and their families.

In these challenging economic times, FHI needs your support. Together, we can make a difference in the lives of homeless families in Middletown.

Checks should be sent to Family Help Inc, P.O. Box 302, Middletown, DE 19709.

If you would like to get involved in other ways, tour the property, or ask questions about the program, please contact Board President Harvey Zendt at 302-528-5685.

Finally, please pass this plea on to others who are in a position to support FHI's effort to help those in need. Thank you for your support and prayers.

The Dark World We Live In

Many, many years ago, Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River. The story tells us that he simply joined a number of others who were also baptized that day.

Imagine the world as Jesus knew it. Stories from Isaiah speak of overwhelming rivers, consuming fires, and God’s children being ransomed. It was a pretty dark and dangerous world.

Psalm 29 speaks of a God who thunders, is all powerful, breaks cedars, and flashes forth flames of fire—a world that is dark and dangerous.

Luke describes Jesus as a Messiah who came with a winnowing fork to gather the righteous and to separate them from the unrighteous. Apparently some Jews were cooperating with the occupying Romans, seemingly denying their faith and traditions, while others fought through terrorist acts of violence hoping for a Messiah of power to appear, while still others may have prayed for guidance but were confused about this Jesus Messiah, who seemed humble and nonviolent.

The human condition is dark and dangerous. The first verse of the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1, verse 1, states: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

Yet into this dark and complex reality we take great pains to convince ourselves that it is otherwise, that we can avoid the dark truth of our existence.

Yes, my friends, you and I are members of a master race of disillusioned human beings.

A man I know told me that one day his seven-year-old son started pulling out his eye lashes. The man and his wife were having marital problems, and in his seven-year-old mind, the boy thought that inflicting pain on himself would send a message to his mom and dad that they did not need to fight with each other, that his personal suffering would somehow save the troubled marriage.

This is what I call a self-evident truth—truth that the world is both dark and dangerous. When a child is willing to accept suffering to ransom the shortcomings of his parents, the world for that child is dark indeed.

Theologians, like Paul Tillich, Christopher Lasch and Ernest Becker who have thought deeply about culture and civilization in modern day North America have determined that we are disillusioned about the reality of our dark and dangerous world. Since the coming of the Mayflower, we have exchanged the idea of God’s thundering wrath and Jesus’ winnowing fork for the idea that we are a beacon of hope, a place of prosperity to be envied by all who look upon democracy, freedom, and capitalism, and deem it right and good. We have replaced the reality of suffering with cynicism, false hope, and repression.

But you and I know better: the truth is the truth; and self-evident truth is just that—truth that cannot be denied by rational thought.

Scientists know that the sun around which this humble planet, our island home, revolves is cooling, ever so slowly, but it is cooling never the less; and this means that this earth, and life as we know it, will one day end.

I submit to us all that this is worse than dark and dangerous. This is abject terror, and end that we all know is coming one day.

Is it better to deny this reality? to imagine it is not so? To ignore it?

The fact is that Americans like you and me would rather live disillusioned, believing, falsely, that that money, fame, power, and self-righteousness will somehow save us from the dark and dangerous reality that is this world.

We need the light of truth to expose what is false and to guide us toward the truth.

One of the books I read over the Christmas break was The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, a lawyer turned writer, former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, she won the coveted Edgar M. Cullen Prize at Yale; she clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Ms. Rubin observed that Americans are preoccupied with buying things. Buying stuff can stimulate goodness, like the time she bought a book of puzzles for her daughter that was so exciting that the child developed a passion for problem-solving. Ms. Rubin was tempted to buy similar books, but realized that more of a good thing is not necessarily better. Her child would become bored with more of the same thing.

She determined that buying more things does not make us more happy. The Happiness Project was full of other ideas to make one happy: more sleep, more exercise, singing, more organization—like cleaning out a closet— running, playing an instrument, traveling, starting a book club—all healthy distractions that remind us how happy we can be if we try hard enough.

According to Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life.” Later, Epicurus wrote, “If we have happiness, we have everything, and if it is absent, then all our actions are directed toward attaining it.”

Happiness, it could be said, is our light in a dark world. God put us in charge of finding that light and to be that light. But just read the headlines in any recent news sources to see that we have not done a very good job of being that light.

I believe this is why Jesus chose to lead the way he did, and why he said that he would some day come again.

Terrorism, conflict and chaos are all around us—in Tunisia, Russia, the Middle East, India.

Think about the tens of thousands of Indians who reacted to the December 19, 2012 rape and murder of a female university student that drove conscientious Indians to challenge their government through protests. A similar incident occurred again just this weekend. Remember the Tunisian man who ignited the pro-democracy Arab Spring by setting himself on fire on December 17, 2010, after being humiliated by a dictator’s police. Just this weekend, another Tibetan man set himself on fire in protest of Chinese rule over his region.

Such protests are uniting moments in which each person’s conscience is moved to reassert a moral good in the face of a dark and terrible event. The triumph lies in victory of that common good.

One of my most lasting memories of grade school was when my history teacher told my class that Americans have a passion and drive to seek justice, to put right in front of might, and to root for the underdog in a contest. I have never forgotten that lesson. It planted the idea that Americans unite around ideas and passions, and we will not be controlled by rules and laws if the rules are wrong and the police are corrupt.

If we read the New Testament, we find there that people wondered whether John was the Messiah, the one who would come to bring the good they hoped for. But John said that he was not, so the people wondered who would it be? What would the Messiah be like? Would the Messiah be all that people want and hope for?

And we are no different, though we live in a modern age. We are disillusioned into thinking that we can control our destiny and that God must fit into our expectations. In this we continue to be disappointed.

God did not provide me with a new iPod for Christmas. Well I guess God is not a Santa Claus. God has not balanced the national budget. Well perhaps God is not an economist. God has not wiped out the bad guys in Somalia. Well, I guess that God is not a policeman. And God did not fix a little boy’s family. God is not a magical marriage counselor.

Who is the Messiah, and when will he/she come to us again? Jesus came to the Jordan one day, and walked into the water with everyone else.  He chose to live humbly and with kindness and courage. That is a lesson for all of us. Be authentic. Be our best selves. Accept the reality that we live in a dark and dangerous world, but, above all, be brave and rely on the power of community sensibility to know what is good and right, and to make our decisions based on self-evident truth and goodness.