Anticipating a couple days holiday, starting today, I still find myself here…early…with just one other person…in Starbucks. I suppose the routine of coming here, and the coffee, the journaling, is not merely a habit–it’s that to be sure, but it’s also something that puts up a scaffold on my day.

Annie Dillard said something like, "A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time." Another favorite author said, "So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart."

This is a hard lesson for those of us resistant to schedules, agendas, dockets. But it’s just as difficult for those that have lives over-run by lists and clocks. Uber-schedules and no schedules are both ways to avoid life. Both ends keep our minds off the moment. Keep us unmindful. Keep us living ahead of ourselves, or behind, seldom sunk into the moment, outside of which we are robbed of contentment. Because it’s in the moment where there is enough. Where there is a surfeit of "being."

I came across some lines by Walt Whitman that are in some way related to all this. I wish I could say I recalled them from "Leaves of Grass" but instead I found this quoted in E.B. White’s essay in "The Elements of Style." Such is my life. Rag and bone collector.

In any case the quote is in sharp relief for those of us who fall back into living ahead or behind ourselves, and so wanting more of we know not what.

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough.

I particularly like the laughing flesh bit. It reminds me of my late uncle Mike who lived in Chicago and descended on Saskatchewan every summer. I still see him walking the pasture fence line every morning and sun-soaked afternoon, with that blue polka-dot handkerchief tied to his bald head. On him the thing looked regal.

And in the evening, at the kitchen table, I’m full of something like delight, as I watch his whole body and especially his shoulders shake uncontrollably every time he laughed, which was often. It was like he was created to laugh. It was his vocation. I imagine God joined him every chance he got.

So now Deb and I will take a slow drive to Canmore; and if the sky is clear, we will look for a long time, at the Three Sisters, and wonder at the ancient beauty and breath and laughter that brought them to be.

Live your day. Be well.

Technorati Tags: Annie Dillard, Psalm 90, E. B. White, Walt Whitman, Time, Beauty, Peace

Fadil Fejzic, is someone I would want to meet.

Muslim man in Central Bosnia (A James Mason photo)

I read this story in James Alison’s new book Undergoing God, but it’s Chris Hedges, a war correspondent who covered the Bosnian war, who met Fadil and tells his story in his provocatively entitled book, War is a Force that gives us Meaning.

Hedges tells of meeting the Soraks, a Bosnian Serb couple in a largely Muslim enclave.

The couple had been largely indifferent to the nationalist propaganda of the Bosnian Serb leadership. But when the Serbs started to bomb their town, Goražde, the Muslim leadership in the town became hostile to them, and eventually the Soraks lost their two sons to Muslim forces. In the city under siege, conditions got worse and worse, and in the midst of this Rosa Sorak’s recently widowed daughter-in-law gave birth to a baby girl. With the food shortages, the elderly and infants were dying in droves, and after a short time, the baby, given only tea to drink, began to fade.

Meanwhile, on the eastern edge of Goražde, Fadil Fejzic, an illiterate Muslim farmer, kept his cow, milking her by night so as to avoid Serbian snipers. On the fifth day of the baby having only tea, just before dawn, Fejzic appeared at the door with half a litre of milk for the baby. He refused money. He came back with milk every day for 442 days, until the daughter in law and granddaughter left for Serbia. During this time he never said anything. Other families in the street started to insult him, telling him to give his milk to Muslims and let the Chetnik (the pejorative term for Serbs) die. But he did not relent.

Later the Soraks moved, and lost touch with Fejzic. But Hedges went and sought him out. The cow had been slaughtered for meat before the end of the siege, and Fejzic had fallen on hard times. But, as Hedges says, When I told him I had seen the Soraks, his eyes brightened. "And the baby?" he asked "How is she?"

If these are not the eyes of Christ, the eyes of Allah, the eyes of Mother God, I don’t know who’s are. If this action, this gift, is not worship incarnate I have no idea what worship is, no idea what Christianity is.

Technorati Tags: Fadil Fejzic, James Alison, Chris Hedges, Bosnian war, Beauty, Peace

One day, in a conversation with Andrea, I discovered that I knew her as a nun in a previous life. And it came to me that it’s not really surprising she is amazingly talented and big hearted. It’s like a former lifetime of contemplation has ripened, flowered and now flowed over into this one.

Unfortunately for me my former life as a domestic prelate had the opposite effect.

In any case, and to the point: the "Andrea House and Friends" fundraising event was sold out. Deservedly so. Andrea and friends were wonderful.

Hopefully, for Andrea (Acupuncture Works) and the Change for Children people, who are heading off to Nicaragua to provide health care services to the children of the Pajahito Azul orphanage in Managua, Nicaragua, they will have raised the resources they need.

Of course you can still donate online at Change for Children. (Just select Nicaragua projects and comment that it’s for Andrea House. Should do the trick.)

By the by, Andrea has a very infrequent Myspace blog. However, her performance notices are mailed out. Unfortunately you need a Myspace account for this. But the upside of signing-up is that you can listen to some of her music.

Technorati Tags: Andrea House, Acupuncture Works, Change for Children