On the short walk to my studio at night, I’ll often look up to see the stars. It’s not some deep soul-searching thing – it doesn’t start that way, anyway – it’s usually an inconsequential glimpse to see ‘what’s up,’ up there.

Casual glimpses may become a soul-searching thing. It did one night.

The night was clear. The oppressive humidity had gone from the air, and the atmosphere was as transparent as glass. The stars were radiant; pure and glistening, the way jewelers speak of their finest diamonds as being of the “first water.” That’s a jeweler’s way of saying the diamonds are as pure and clear as a dew drop. Seeing stars on such nights as these, always stirs this recurring thought: the stars may have died billions of years ago, but their light continues on as if what flame they once generated was destined to continue through the universe and live forever. Light has a destiny. We have a destiny.

I like the thought.

Do you suppose that this is the way it is to be for us, too? The light, that life force that sets us into motion illumines the small circumference that our lives inscribe. Its beams continue beyond that circle into eternity even after we’ve ceased to generate light.

I reckon that’s why the universe is so inconceivably large – so that all the energy ever generated can continue on, unimpeded, and have a space to be accommodated as it continues on its journey. Fanciful to be sure and hardly scientific, but I believe it works something like that.

That our life force, once aglow, continues shining through the books whose authors are long gone; or in other ancient writings and scrolls, in architecture and the various artistic creations that we have unearthed from antiquity. But I mean something even beyond that.

It’s common to hear and read about light and it’s peculiar, almost magical properties, this stuff of the beginning of the universe. This was the essence of the big bang that produced all the building blocks of the created universe. For sure, in the beginning was light and it illuminated the whole universe. There was also a lot of noise, a big bang, actually.

I’ve read several theories about how light behaves and about its place in the created order, but little about sound and its role in creation. Our beginnings are called the big bang. I recall no commentary on just what the sound of it may have been like.

As I write, I’m listening to Louis Armstrong singing ‘It’s a wonderful world.’ It’s broadcasting from my Echo. To hear music, I need only to make a request out loud: “Alexa” I say, “play Satchmo.”

I imagine it’s like God saying, let there be music, and suddenly there it is.

Alexa’s pretty responsive. However, when I ask her for selections from Beethoven she comes up with the most dreadful music and I can find no reason, acoustically, for the confusion. I imagine she’s not always playing with all her chips. But when she’s on, she’s on.

Discounting sound’s import may have begun long ago when the big bang happened. There was no atmosphere and no way sound could be transmitted. If there was any sound (there had to have been) only God heard it. Strangely, he didn’t think enough of it to comment. He was definitely partial to light. When God finished the work of creation, it was “everything that he saw that he had made and behold it was very good.” It was clear that he liked what he saw. Whatever he heard, it wasn’t anything he thought was worth mentioning.

Sound, like light is a phenomenon of vibration, subatomic waves. Isn’t it possible that every time we open our mouths or play an instrument, cry out in joy or in wail in suffering, these vibrations, like light, find their way into the universe? Wouldn’t they continue on the immense journey to a destination we can only imagine? Traditionally, we think of prayer that way, but with this caveat; that our voices are supposed to wind up in God’s hearing. There is a lot of controversy about that very issue, particularly about voices not being heard, such as victims of gross injustice so common today.

In fact, echoes from the beginning of time do exist today in audible although very humble forms – static heard over some television screens and other electronic transmissions.

Madeleine L’Engle, reflecting on faith and art, tells this remarkable story.

In one of the early space explorations, the astronauts in orbit reported hearing some “old time” nostalgic music over their speakers. They enjoyed it, but wondered where it came from. They assumed NASA had aired it for their listening pleasure. The astronauts radioed the people at NASA thanking them. NASA responded saying they knew nothing about it. Their curiosity aroused, NASA began some preliminary investigations to try to identify what the astronauts may have heard. Their search included identifying any broadcasting stations that may have aired the kind of music the astronauts reported hearing. They found none. They went back in time to see if some earlier broadcasts may have made their way into space. Their research revealed that the particular program broadcasting the music had been aired sometime in the later nineteen thirties.

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,” St. Paul once wrote as he stood awed at the majesty of creation. He was stunned by the sheer wonder of what’s sublime in the mundane, the glory in the ordinary. He expresses this awe and wonder beautifully in the context of his Christian faith. I think his vision applies well outside this context and has been expressed from the beginning of human existence, typically in music and art. It finds its expression in unexpected ways from the most unlikely people.

The stogy Anglican bishop of Birmingham, England was asked once what he thought was the most magnificent hymn ever written.

“Louis Armstrong singing, ‘What a Wonderful World’,” he replied in a heartbeat.

In the lyrics, Armstrong sings about what he sees, like, “trees of green, red roses too… skies of blue and clouds of white.” He also sings about what he hears – the sounds of common life – like people extending a greeting, “how do you do” or whispering, “I love you.”

This universe shimmers with light; but it also vibrates with sound, sounds like the liquid gravel voice of the one and only ‘Satchmo.’ He’s long gone, but his voice continues to be heard. The author of the music has expired, but the tones that emanated from him live on to bring us joy and send light into our lives.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Should someone greet me saying, “Rest in peace.” I’d be offended and think they are hoping I’ll drop dead. And yet it’s one of the loveliest sentiments imaginable.

Too bad we invoke it only for the dead.

In today’s social climate, our emotions are determined largely by the daily assaults to our values, ideals and to common decency. I suppose it makes sense then that we might have to wait until we’re dead to rest in peace.

With some awareness, I think we can do better.

In The Talbot Spy on August 2nd, Maria Grant wrote a column titled “Weary of Outrage but Not Ready to Give Up.” I read it with interest.

She is outraged by the mindless enormities foisted on us by the present administration. She lists them. The list includes the denial of climate change, the migration crisis, continued sexual abuse, congressional inaction against Russian interference in our voting, and the hypocrisy of the religious right. I share her outrage.

“If you think about this too much, it can destroy you.” She warns us. “We can lose hope. What is one to do?”

To retain our own humanity and sustain hope, Ms. Grant suggests two things: that we engage in actions I would describe as serving others and nurture our hope by occasionally disengaging “from society’s incessant noise and seek beauty in nature, music and literature.” I think she’s spot on. Service and contemplation – food for the soul – is the proven formula for healing a troubled soul and mending a broken world.

Contemplation is not an exotic practice. It’s a common-sense phenomenon. It’s an uptown version of the old folk saying, “Just take a deep breath and count to ten.”

I’d also liken contemplation to how I deal with a computer. Whenever it misbehaves and begins driving me crazy by committing fatal errors, I get angry. I feel overwhelmed. I’m unsure what’s wrong or what to do. Finally, I unplug it. I wait a minute of two. Then I plug it in again. Things seem to sort themselves out.

Say, for instance, your mind is turbulent and bubbling after hearing another egregious tweet from the White House. Your mind fills with disturbing thoughts that seem overwhelming, even hopeless. I suggest letting this turbulent brew boil for a bit. Then shut off the heat. That means sit with the turbulence, but don’t obsess about it. Obsessing effectively turn up the heat. Just let it be. You’ll notice how the brew will eventually cool. The fatty and fetid stuff that makes the mix so disagreeable in the mind will slowly rise to the top and congeal. Scrape it off. The brew is now transparent. Now you can see just where and to what you want to give your attention. Spoon that part out.

Being outraged by what is outrageous is good for starters; it’s proper, directs our attention and facilitates giving the matter some serious thought. Being outraged does poorly, however, when that’s all that motivates our responses. Dealing with life’s inequities requires a cool head. Resting in peace is the proper attitude to cultivate. But in the Trump era, just how is the challenge.

Buddhism addresses this matter of maintaining mental equanimity during suffering and turmoil more pointedly than most other religious bodies. Peace is its core value. It teaches ways to rest in peace, to ride gently with adversity, not later, but right now.

A tenet of Buddha’s teachings was especially instructive for me: “Victory breeds hatred; the defeated live in pain. The peaceful give up victory and defeat.” The peaceful learn how to free themselves from the frantic cycle of winning and losing, of having to be right, not wrong. They get out of the race. It’s easier, then, to act justly and wisely.

The dead-end of the win/lose game came home to me once when I was watching clips of a Trump rally. The camera panned the crowd. I watched jubilant faces, some with hands raised in the kind of salute that chilled me. I’d see red MAGA hats everywhere and some with tee shirts that read “TRUMP” while others read, “JESUS IS MY SAVIOR – TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.”

My reaction was instinctive and virulent. It frightened me. It was reminiscent of the Bund rallies of the Third Reich. I got angry. I felt appalled. My mind raced and I felt agitated. In my mind, I found myself saying to this crowd: “You are all mad. Can’t you see that you’ve bought the Brooklyn Bridge from a con man? You’ve been had; we’ve all been had. He cares nothing for you, the country (or Jesus Christ, for that matter) except as any of them may be useful to him to gain another term. Can’t you see that, are you blind?” Then I’d begin building my case to convince this crowd how right I was.

Did this change anything? Hardly. Did I feel better for it? No, not a whit.

I was confronted instead with my own combative nature. My need to win, to be right, to defeat these people by my righteous wrath provoked it. The combative nature of the rally itself suckered me down into my own belligerent nature and I went wildly into the fray mentally ready to take my opponents to the mat. As the Buddhists would say of my emotional response: it was not skillful. St. Paul would say that I was “thinking of myself more highly than I ought.”

What then is skillful? How do I direct what I feel and guide how I think and act when confronted with egregious violations of my values and ideals? How can I be effective when I have only limited energy? It all comes back to first practicing contemplation – putting things in perspective and then seeking ways to serve others.

For right now, that remains for me the most enduring formula I know for promoting inner peace and being a sane voice in a mad world. When taking this road, I take small steps and, whatever else happens, something good eventually comes of it.

A Zen tale illustrates the point.

A farmer’s plow horse wanders off. He can’t find the horse. His neighbors lament his misfortune and the hardship it will bring on him. “We’ll, see,” the farmer says to them. A few days later the plow horse returns, this time with a mare. His neighbors say how lucky he is to have another horse to plow his fields and the promise of even more horses. “We’ll see” says the farmer. One day the farmer’s son decides to ride the mare. She’s feisty and pitches him off. The boy falls and breaks his leg. “How dreadful,” his neighbors say to the farmer and how hard it will be for you to have no help in the fields. “We’ll see,” he answers.

One day soldiers arrive at his farm. They are looking for Army recruits. Seeing the boy’s broken leg, they then ride off without conscripting him.

Our fortunes will come and go like waves. Best to ride them as they rise and fall. No one wave lasts that long.

RIP.

Many “firsts” of our lives stay with us a lifetime. It’s not necessarily because they are spectacular, but simply because they are first.

First loves, whether or not they end well leave indelible impressions. It certainty has been the case for me. I recall two first loves; one was Elise (I was 10, maybe). The other ‘first’ was Barbara with whom I fell in love in my adolescence. Perhaps Barbara was really a second but it felt like a first – but I make too fine a point of this. In any case, I remembered both. That was around seventy years ago.

I don’t remember what Elise looked like, except she was tall. I spoke to her twice. I loved from afar. She moved in across the street and, from my window, I yearned for her as I’d see her come and go. For Barbara it was different, more substantive, truly relational. I loved her as a person and we did memorable things together – like going up to Manhattan to see Noel Coward’s romantic tear jerker, “Brief Encounter.” I was a teen-ager then and we both cried as we watched it.

Romantic love is among the most capricious of our human adventures; like atomic fission, the forces that generate it remain hidden, but they are powerful and unstable and, if not handled carefully, end in meltdowns. Our loves, such as they may have been remain incredibly memorable.

There are other firsts, far less emotionally laden, but nonetheless have left me with an impression lasting my lifetime.

One memorable ‘first’ for me was the day my grandmother showed me how to burn holes in a piece of paper with a magnifying glass. The incendiary nature of the trick seemed ‘un-grandmotherly’ to me. Her teaching me, however, legitimized any darker fantasies I might have entertained for starting fires. If grandma thinks it’s ok, it must be ok. In either case, I remember taking the magnifying glass outside and making lots of holes in sheets of paper. They looked like pixels and I even burned my first name into a stick of dry wood.

There was another ‘first’ when a friend and I constructed telephones from string and two tin cans. We punctured the cans at the bottom, fed the string through each hole, knotted both ends and then walked far enough apart to draw the string taught. We talked about two minutes and the string broke. We talked, it broke again. We repaired it and resumed our conversations several times. It may not have been uninterrupted service, but it was a first and, for a young boy in 1942, it was pure magic.

But, a first in our lives may also be a last if we can believe Dr. Christopher Kerr, whom many heard recently speak here in Easton. His work in hospice with dying people led him to believe that the ideation of dying people are not incoherent ideas and delusions, products of the dying’s disintegrating consciousness. Traditionally, these ideas have been dismissed as such. Dr. Kerr believes that, as the dying prepare to leave this world, they are making a purposeful spiritual return, a pilgrimage of sorts, returning to rendezvous with the first significant people in their lives. For the dying, we normally think of the main task as saying goodbye. Kerr suggests that there’s another undertaking; it’s reuniting with the first significant people of our lives and greeting them. In the act of dying, we are both going and coming.

I had my initial experience with this as a young priest. I was sitting with a young woman whose mother was dying. The young woman was holding her mother’s hand. She heard her mother greeting her own mother who had died when she was a small child. It was a moving moment for the young woman holding her mother’s hand. She was joined both here and there; here with her mother and there, as her mother was greeting her own mother, over there.

Dr. Kerr has witnessed enough of these kind of phenomena to find them credible, enough to make his life’s mission one to help people become aware of it. In one of Kerr’s Ted Talks, a woman, who was his patient, permits him to record her experience.

“I was lying in bed and people were walking very slowly by me . . . all very friendly . . . they touched my arm or my hand when they went by . . . all people I knew. My mom and dad were there, my uncle, everyone I knew was dead was there . . . I knew it was my mon and dad and uncle and brother-in-law. . .. I remember seeing every piece of their face. . .. I have seen my mother recently, more.”

In another account, Dr. Kerr tell the story of Mary. “She was near the end of her life and her four children were also present. One day Mary starts cradling a baby that nobody sees. She refers to him as Danny – a name no one understands. Mary’s sister arrives from out of town and explains that Danny was Mary’s first child, who was stillborn, a loss so deep she never spoke of it during her life.”

Kerr comments: “Yet while dying, this indescribable loss returns to her in some manner of warmth and tangible love . . . a dying patients’ physical wounds that could not be cured, yet her spiritual wounds were being tended to.”

What pleases me about what Dr. Kerr is doing is how he simply documents what he is being told and, in so doing, he discloses a spiritual dynamism undergirding all of life without making it either formulaic or dogmatic. He’s not remotely preachy. It is what it is, and he simply tells us what he is being told. It has to be said that the gift he brings to a world hungering for spiritual sustenance is that he has the ears to hear and understand.

I’ve always been drawn to T.S. Eliot’s classic line from his poem, Little Gidding.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

It’s comforting for me to consider that many of the firsts of my life I shall one day return to, but then I will see them in a new way.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

The minor pains of my childhood consisted of periodic doses of castor oil, applying iodine to cuts and scrapes or receiving the dreaded enema. My mother, of blessed memory, explained these interventions this way: “It’s good for what ails you.” It was like I’ve heard preachers tell a grieving congregation: “It’s God’s will.” Glib explanations don’t clarify anything, but they sure end the discussion.

I’ve written about my recent experience with severe pain. Since pain and suffering are, as one writer put it, one of the “non-negotiables of life,” it’s better to talk about them than ignore them.

I’ve come some distance from the pain, enough so to view my experience in a new way. What did the experience teach me?

David Mercier, regional teacher and practitioner of alternative medicine, advises us that our body’s symptoms are messages. We should listen to them. They are trying to tell us what we need to know. This formula also applies to the pain and suffering involving spiritual and psychological matters. Treat seriously what you feel and talk about it.

Pain and suffering aren’t necessarily identical. Say you feel pain in your lower abdomen. You’ve had it for a long time and thought little of it. A neighbor mentions that her mother had a similar pain. It was diagnosed cancer. She soon died. Your pain now becomes suffering. You can’t sleep, you’re fearful, constantly filled with dread. You see a doctor. “Gas” he concludes. The intensity of the pain remains but, in a roundabout way, your gas has relieved the suffering.

How we think about our pain can aggravate or minimize suffering.

In reflecting on my own recent circumstances, I’m not sure my suffering was significant. It was pain. As I look back, I see a pattern. My first reaction to pain was to numb it, to make it go away. The second was to try fooling it. The third was to fight it.

The pain was sufficiently intense to warrant opioids. They numbed the pain. I couldn’t use the usual analgesics. They were contraindicated because of other medications I am taking. I became addicted quickly, but subtly. I’d always assumed the seductions of opioids were like heroin, the coveted high it first offers, the rush. I never experienced euphoria. The opioids helped me sleep, as many as fourteen hours a day. I welcomed sleep as my escape from the pain. Instinctively I grew suspicious and stopped taking opioids. I had classic withdrawal; severe flu-like symptoms, eyes that watered all the time, and edginess. The learning for me about addiction was that wanting the high, the rush, may not be the greatest seduction in addictions. It may be the numbing they offer, particular for psychological and spiritual pain.

There are diseases we can’t cure. To ease their suffering, we manage them. Wisdom and compassion are classic management tools.

Pain made me self-absorbed. I’d hardly be aware of anything, but the pain. I mention this to say that this is normal and this self-preoccupation should cause no shame. I also mention this to offer comfort for caregivers of the afflicted: the self-absorption can cause their charges to be selfish, combative and to put it bluntly, downright snotty. (I offer this simply as helpful information, not personal disclosure.)

When proper analgesics were prescribed, pain became more manageable and my new challenge was not to numb pain anymore, but to avoid it. The task? Outfox it.

I worked this new strategy like an art, as one practices yoga; seeking just that right posture to maximize one’s skeletal and muscular potential while provoking no pain. At times, I’d even become stealthy, like a furtive cat, sneaking up on my bones imperceptibly so they’d not even know I was there. It actually worked a few times. However, my bones and their nerves quickly got wise to me. When they sensed me approaching, they’d let me know in no uncertain terms with intermittent shafts of pain. I stuck with this tactic even though it was no guarantee of success. At least I felt I could do something: thinking I had some control over pain was a big deal for me.

Soon I was in another phase in managing pain, which I must confess I found the most embarrassing. It’s the phase when I began fighting my condition.

I’d fly into rages.

I need to mention, first, a little-known law of physics which, to my knowledge, has never been successfully challenged. Drop a piece of toast slathered with marmalade from the breakfast table, and it will always fall marmalade side down.

A similar law operates in orthopedic conditions. Medical disclaimers make no mention of it. ‘Anything you touch, falls on the floor.’

The worse thing for a compromised back is having to bend over and retrieve something from the floor. I’ve discovered that whenever I pick up something from a table, a chair, a pocket, a shelf or someone else’s hand, even putting on an article of clothing, or eating – invariably all or some of it drops to the floor.

One day my underwear fell to the floor while I was performing the torturous task of putting it on. I swore out loud, issuing a string of obscenities at the top of my lungs, loud enough that my wife, out on the porch, heard me. I kicked my briefs across the floor which, of course, sent pain shooting up my back.

It’s embarrassing to actually turn on something as intimate as one’s underwear, blaming it as if it were an adversary, an enemy to be attacked.

And, so it went.

However vulgar my protests were, I have to tell you, blowing off occasionally felt great. I was happy that for the first time in my life I could affirm my mother’s explanation: “It’s good for what ails you.”

These experiences have not been clinically verified. I do suspect they’re fairly common. It’s one man’s description moving into (and partially out of) the landscape of physical pain. I believe the hardest part of being in any kind of pain is how it can seem to be something interminable.

Fortunately, nothing is forever.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

It was a casual remark. It changed my thinking. It changed my life.

Last Thanksgiving our family were all seated at the dinner table. Leighton, my very bright teen aged granddaughter, and I both like coffee. We were talking that day about different brands and how we make coffee in the morning.

I said that I had a Keurig coffeemaker that makes one cup. It sits in my studio. Every morning after I’ve had my first up of half and half during breakfast, I go over to my studio to write. I make a second cup there with the Kuerig – industrial strength, seriously caffeinated. Sometimes, when I have a need to become wired, I’ll have second cup.

She began to tell us what she’d learned in school when they studied environmental issues.

They learned that the K-Cups, which have grown so popular by making coffee so simple and convenient to brew – not to mention the easy disposal of the grounds – are not breaking down in landfills. Their numbers are exponentially increasing with no end in sight.

I felt a chill as I listened.

The K-Cup has a peculiar combination of elements; plastic, aluminum, and organic material (coffee grounds). and a paper filter. Separately the elements might break down over time. A complete K-Cup when discarded will not. Leighton told us, “The amount of K-Cups that have been trashed in landfills could wrap around the planet 10 times.”

Convenience may be what’s killing us. So many of the manufactured products that make our lives pleasant and easy, as we’re learning, “do not go gentle into that good night.” They resist decomposition long after we’ve tossed them out, and I’d add, long after we die. They last a million years in some cases. To our credit, human beings are more considerate in that regard. We decay decently and what’s most important, in a timely manner; in most cases, eight to ten years. After we’ve been tossed away we will totally decompose except for bones. They can last hundreds of years. Not to worry; they never pose any environmental degradation and if they are old enough, may tell us a lot about some of the weird habits in which our ancient ancestors indulged.

Leighton’s comment stuck with me; it nagged me, actually. It was making me very uneasy. Nevertheless, every morning I’d still go to my studio, pop a K- Cup into the Keurig and in minutes I’d have a hot cup of coffee. Day after day, I’d continue the routine, but with this difference; I grew increasingly conscious of the small wastepaper basket near where the Keurig unit sits. That’s where I throw the used cups after I’ve made coffee from the Kuerig. But when I’d look down into the basket I’d see a week’s worth of discarded K-Cups. Like the quick and uncontrolled growth of cancer cells, their escalating numbers scared me.

How powerful convenience, familiarity and ease can be in perpetuating our own destructive behavior. Habits can be addictive. How we are saved from these addictions may take a long time.

I had my first experience with this disturbing pattern of addiction when I quit smoking thirty years ago. I’d been smoking since I was twelve and I did, indeed, inhale a half a pack or more of unfiltered camels a day. Like the incident with the Keurig, when I was made aware of how profoundly destructive I was being, it didn’t change my behavior. The seductions of the things that bring comfort and convenience to our lives ‘do not go gentle.”

Long before I finally quit smoking I was serving a parish in New York City. The rector and I both smoked. He liked using cigarette holders, the kind which we’d often seen FDR using. I thought they were neat and began using one. Their filters have to be changed periodically. One day as I took the filter from the holder, the most hideous yellow slime oozed down all over my fingers. I thought “Mother of God, all this slime goes into my lungs?” In the crazy way we deny in order to perpetuate the nutty stuff we do, I stopped – not smoking, mind you, but stopped using the holder. That way I wouldn’t have to look at the pus-like substance entering my lungs with every puff. I continued to smoke.

I quit 24 years later.

I have to say there was no drama in my final quitting. I’d tried many times before. It came to me one day in what I can only describe as a still small voice that whispered in my ear: “I want to live.” I just quit. I have to say that even to this day I still miss it.

My deliverance from the scourge of the K-Cups followed a similar pattern, but it didn’t take as long.

Leighton told me about the environmental dangers of K-Cups last Thanksgiving. For the following eight months, I dodged and ducked the truths my conscience threw at me as I brewed my coffee. That was until just a day ago.

I know this will sound just as crazy as the cigarette business, but I was fully aware when I initially got the Keurig that there was a reusable K-Cup alternative. It’s a small basket that could be hand filled with coffee enough for a cup and be used identically as K-Cups could. This would leave no environmental impact. The down side of course was that it was not convenient; I had to get the coffee, spoon it out into the tiny paper basket in the receptacle, then insert it where I’d normally just pop in the K-Cup.

And so, the other day I had my first cup of seriously caffeinated coffee by a means safer for me and the world but infinitely more inconvenient.

And so, when on the second day I made coffee, again in the Keurig, but this time by the alternative method, I felt elated, freed. When I’d look down to the wastebasket where there had once been piles of K-Cups, I didn’t see one single discarded K-Cup. In the thousand steps I hoped I might take to save the world, I’d made one first step for mankind.
First, something had to make me aware. In this case it was learning what Leighton knew from school. That stuck. It nagged at me for a long time.

Being aware is one thing. I suspect that awareness begins, but is rarely heeded at first because of the inconveniences and discomforts that acting on the awareness may impose.

There are informed people and prominent scientific agencies telling us daily that environmental degradations are now blatantly obvious and have reached crisis proportions both on the land, sea and in the air. Action is desperately needed.

I believe we are at that stage today with this issue as I was when I first noticed how my cigarette holder’s filter was full of yellow slime and my wastebasket was always filled with discarded K-Cups. It repulsed me, but not enough to act.

I pray we will take the evidence, heed the sane voices sooner. It’s really a matter of life and death.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

I don’t think of personal achievements in the same way I once did. Then, my successes were all about me, about my competence and superb abilities. Now I can see those triumphs had little, and often nothing to do with me. I hadn’t seized the day; the day seized me.

An episode occurred over fifty years ago. It involved sailing.

In a twenty-one-foot sailboat, I sailed from Westbrook Connecticut, across Long Island Sound to Orient point, the Eastern End of Long Island, then through Plum Gut and down into Peconic Bay.

I had been anxious even thinking about it. I planned the course scrupulously, almost obsessively. I used the dead reckoning method. It’s standard navigation, a way of charting a course from a known location and advancing it to a new one. The calculations include estimating the boat’s speed, the compass course, gaging the force of wind, waves, and monitoring the set of currents and most crucially of all, timing. Basically, it’s going from here, hoping to get there, or making an arrival as close to ‘there’ as reasonably possible. Finding one’s way over open water has always been an iffy business, until the arrival of the GPS. Since then it’s been duck soup.

I’d once read how, in the nineteenth century with only a compass, a sextant and an old alarm clock, Joshua Slocum circumnavigated the globe. I thought I, too, was about to do something if not exactly the same, a junior version of it. I fancied myself, a Joshua Slocum, the hot dog of Long Island Sound.

The challenge was to arrive at Plum Gut at full ebb, when the incoming flood tide would carry me into Peconic Bay, giving me a free boost, increasing my speed in the water by possibly 10 knots. The current tore through Plum Gut. Going with the flow was the only way to go especially since I was on a 21-foot sailboat with only a 12-horse outboard.

I was thrilled when I completed the trip. For years I thought of it as a signature event of my life. In retrospect, it was not all that eventful, even dull at times, as I had to motor frequently. The wind was light and sporadic, the Sound mostly calm. The day was comfortable; even in the hot sun the beer remained cold in the cooler and we made Plum Gut right on schedule.

So why was this event so indelibly etched in my memory? It was a time in my life when things worked out exactly as I had planned; I aced the task I set for myself. My skills and planning acumen acquitted me; everything came off like clockwork.

Truth be told, I’d only exercised appropriate care. That I engineered this successful journey is really an illusion; had there been a squall, strong shifting winds, or taking on any more water from a hull fitting that I later discovered had cracked and was leaking badly – any of which could have changed everything.
Reckoning my success as something I achieved on my own is a diagnostic indicator of spiritual vacuity, self-deception in the service of supporting the ego. It’s a variation of “It’s all about me.”

If I’d been aware of all the other natural forces then unknown to me contributing to this successful sailing adventure, I wouldn’t be feeling self- satisfied, I’d be feeling grateful.

Of course, I should be pleased that the trip went well but for a very different reason from my original one. My safe arrival was not an entitlement for my extraordinary efforts or skill (I only did my part) but one more example how the confluence of many other factors beyond any of our efforts work together to help us realize a goal.

Being self-satisfied shuts things down. It leads to feeling entitled, since, well, isn’t everything all about me. Gratitude is different; it frees us up, increasing awareness of the wider world, of other and what sustains us minute by minute. Gratitude heals, too.

Years ago, an elderly friend told me of her troubled relationship to her brother. Growing up he treated her contemptuously. As they aged, they rarely communicated. My friend began feeling uneasy: the brother was declining, she was getting older and as difficult as he’d always been, she wanted some kind of healing. She wanted closure in the relationship before they died. How? He was uncommunicative, always distancing.

She came upon this idea. She would write him a letter. She worked hard on it. Writing it surfaced many of the old grievances she had but she didn’t want the letter to be about them, some kind of vindication of past insults.

Instead she listed any experience she could recall for which she felt grateful to him. She documented several, thanking him for those moments he’d offered her. It took some digging around but she found enough instances to warrant writing the letter. As I recall her story she finished the letter but never sent it. She reported how in subsequent meetings she’d felt differently with him as if maybe he’d softened . . . or had she? Who changed? He never saw the letter. What happened?

My friend concluded that she’d changed. That the act of composing the letter, and thinking gratefully, altered how she saw him, and something began shifting deep within her. This created an aura of gentleness in her sufficient to change the climate between them. He did nothing but it appeared he’d been impacted in some imperceptible way, nothing she could point to but whatever it was, it left her feeling that she’d finally made her peace with him. The relationship was not a happy one but the tension was gone whenever they were together. She could now be with him without carrying the baggage of the past which had burdened her.

I regard stories like this holy narratives, where we see the dynamics of real conversion, where all things are made new. As inner growth takes place, gratitude feeds and guides the soul.

Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and notable spiritual writer, in her book, “The illuminated Life,” makes the distinction between the superficial changes in our lives, like jobs, houses, relationships and lifestyles and the changes that really count. “Real change,” she writes, “is far deeper [when it] is changing the way we look at life . . . that is the stuff of conversion”

There’s no bigger transformation than going from feeling self-satisfied to being grateful; from harboring grievances to giving thanks; it heals old wounds and leaves us deeply thankful for all the passages we have undertaken in our lives. While not really knowing what we are getting into when we first plan to go from here to there, it’s by grace that we get there safely as often as we do.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Ever watch a bird bathing? It’s delightful.

The other day a yellow finch descended from a tree onto the rim of our bird bath. The finch looked around hesitantly, the way kids look to see who’s watching them before they dive in a pool. The bird hopped in.

The bath is a total experience for a bird, no question about it.

The finch ducked his beak into the water, not to clean it but to drink. We should post disclaimers. Heaven knows where that bird may have been, including the other bathers before him and what might be in the water.

He flaps his wings. Not just a perfunctory flutter or two; No. He cranks his wings up full bore, wings rising and falling with a dizzying velocity that raises a fine mist at least a foot in the air above him, like spray from an aerosol can. I didn’t mention the day was hot; he certainly enjoyed a cool down, too.

Apparently caged birds do not bathe like birds in the wild. Whether that’s because the bird’s owner doesn’t provide a proper bird bath or the bird doesn’t get that dirty in the house, isn’t clear. I’ve wondered whether caged birds quietly despair, lose all sense of personal dignity and just don’t care about personal hygiene anymore.

Several woodpeckers live around our house –they bore holes in the house’s fascia boards – but I’ve never seen woodpeckers in the bird bath. Woodworking is laborious and I would imagine after a day’s labor they would work up a considerable sweat. How woodpeckers manage their personal hygiene remains a private matter.

Bathing is more than just staying clean. Birds also stay cool by bathing. Watching babies in the bathtub is a little like watching birds in a bird bath – they have a great time splashing around. I remember my granddaughter was ritualistic about it; sitting in the bath, pouring water carefully from one paper cup into another, uttering inscrutable incantations, as her eyes focused on infinity. Then she’d slap the water and beam a beatific smile of a saint.

Bathing habits change. It has to do with what stages of our lives we’re in. During our infancy, we bathed in tubs under the watchful eye of mom and dad. In time, showers superseded baths as the preferred way to bathe. Showers are typically a solitary affair but not always. As youngsters age and become lovers, they may enjoy showering together. As the delicious glow of erotism diminishes, showering returns to a solitary exercise, purely functional, cleanliness being the issue rather than fun. Then, as time progresses and we age, we shower again with a companion, not to have fun this time but as a safety precaution. Having someone close by can be a life-saver.

For ancient Greeks and Romans, baths were a social phenomenon, like today’s malls or spas where people gather in large numbers. In the case of ancient baths, people gathered to recline in pools of water and chat – some heated as in the ancient Roman bath still remaining in Bath, England. There they’d meet friends and neighbors, socialize and catch up. I’ve read that some ancient baths grew fetid, as birdbaths can when left unattended.

Water has always been, in its various iterations, a social lubricant. People sun together seaside. They ski snow covered slopes on mountains and build homes around lakes. Water has inspiring aesthetic properties as well: Poets rhapsodize about the morning mists rising from meadows and one describes how fog rubs against windowpanes the way cats scratch their backs on stationary objects.

Any discussion of water must include its healing qualities as well as its metaphorical use in spiritual discourse and practice.

Almost all our wounds, whatever treatments they receive, are first washed.

Baptism, the rite of Christian initiation includes ritual uses of water; a couple of drops for Catholics and Episcopalian does it. For Baptists, deep water for total immersion is standard procedure. Jews perform moves in water for achieving ritual purification. Jesus was Baptized in the Jordon River.

Body and soul are, from a spiritual perspective, all about water.

I heard a Biblical story as a child. It enchanted me. I’ve never forgotten it. I knew it as the pool at Siloam. It reads like this:

“Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, (near Siloam) having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water (sometimes rendered, ‘troubled the waters’) then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had.”

Afternoons I may sit on my dock and write. Part of this essay was written there. I’m a sun freak. There, in the sun, I can overlook the creek. The creek is often as still as a millpond when I first arrive. Heat becomes oppressive but if I wait long enough, I’ll see the water slightly shiver and then ripple, and soon the breeze comes. When the water is troubled, I’ll feel comforted, released.

The angel troubles the water.

In the last couple of months, I’ve crossed the water go to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for medical services. Where we enter, there’s a large courtyard. Patients come and go. They are a myriad of different peoples: racial, ethnic, young and old, some deeply wounded, others appearing fit. As I make for the doors I feel I’ve arrived in the third world. I’ll imagine I’m at one of the porches by the ancient pool at Siloam where once “a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed” came to see the troubled waters with hope for healing. They came with the same hope for healing as I and the crowd at Hopkin’s have, now. I pray all of us will be there when the angel stirs the water. All of us may not be made whole, but we can rest assured that we’ll be aided and comforted in our afflictions.

A long way from a bird bath? Perhaps, but it’s those very tenuous connections that reveal significant parts of the human story. The reality of our universal connections is undeniable. Water, particularly, is the connective tissue of all of life. I think of that when I see the water ripple.

I would offer this thought: the fact is we are broken people living in a broken world. Look for the angel who stirs the waters. Be alert for the ripples the angel makes. Watch and wait and hope for healing. It will come when the time is ripe.

Still waters run deep; troubled waters offer hope.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Of late my mobility has been limited.

The more anchored I am in one place the more I see of it. What’s been revealing to me is that my front yard, which should be as familiar to me as my toes or my fingers, I’m seeing as if for the first time. Just sitting still isn’t so bad, after all.

And so, the other day I put a chair where I could overlook my yard and the cove. I sat there just waiting. Waiting for what? That’s the thing; I didn’t know for what, but I did know I was waiting.

It was one of those grand days that have visited the Shore in the last week or so. Not too hot; a hefty breeze and a deep blue sky filled with clouds, but uncharacteristically different kinds – the wispy ‘mare’s tails’ of the high-altitude cirrus, and in the distance cumulus clouds – I never think of them as celestial bedfellows – I’ll typically see just one or the other in the sky, separately. Everything shimmered with vitality while I just sat. I laughed at myself; “What a slug you are,” I thought, while shamelessly enjoying my immobility. I call it a no-agenda moment, not going from here to there as I always do – but just nesting here.

A small plane flew overhead. It circled around in the sky in broad swaths, like hawks do, not appearing to be going anywhere in particular but just out for a spin. I thought the pilot and I were both enjoying the same landscape; the pilot’s take on the landscape, however, would be far different than mine

Perspective alters perception.

I thought about the way I assemble my world view by shuffling around the disparate pieces life throws at me. I arrange them into customized compositions of my own. From there, I conduct my affairs as if my constructs were a reality. At best, perceptions of reality are an iffy business, usually hits, misses, and many course corrections.

Reality, like a freshly caught fish, is slippery, hard to hold firmly for any length of time. It slips from your hand or you get pricked by its spines. Reality keeps slipping from my hand; it pokes me, too. Once having held it for a minute or even less and it has poked me, I know how it feels before it gets away.

My wife, Jo, is a jig-saw puzzle enthusiast. I am not. For Christmas, she received a two-thousand-piece puzzle. The thought of two thousand pieces intimidating, but the enormity of the number of pieces energizes her. Different perspectives. To me, the complete picture displayed on the box lacked distinctive shapes and colors. Both color and form just morphed from one to another without boundaries. I considered the puzzle ominous and fiendish to put together since all the pieces seemed to lack identifiable distinctions.

Generally speaking, Jo creates a visual reality from defining the boundaries first – initially completing the puzzle’s edges and then, finding a place for a particular piece within those boundaries.

As an essayist, I put together a big picture differently. My mind seizes some scrap, disembodied, if will, not apparently connected to anything else. I will have no idea what it is. Then I try to hook another fragment up to it, something which seems likely to fit. It’s hit and miss, and frequently I stall out. When I occasion to make connections and the connections form a larger and coherent picture, I feel euphoric. I’m reassured once more, that my world, however fragmented it can seem, is of a piece, made of trillions of other pieces. I guess I like composing a spiritual ecology.

Julian of Norwich, a 14th century Christian mystic, said some remarkable things, particularly about connections and the big picture.
She said: “(God) showed me a small thing . . . a hazelnut . . . round as a ball . . . I looked at it with the eye of my understanding . . . What might this be? . . . and it was answered thus: it is all that is made. It shall ever be for God loveth it.”
Seems like a stretch, at first, but, looking closely, it’s a portrait of connections.
How can anything so small and still be so wholly inclusive, leading us from a tiny nut to the outer limits of the universe. All we know about are beginnings and ends. Do you suppose the universe has no boundaries at all?

For a minute I thought I was the earthbound nut (hazelnut, I mean) and the pilot high above me was comprehending all that there is. We belonged to the same reality, viewing it from different places.

A day later I sat on my dock. I watched a jellyfish. They go with the flow (current) and yet constantly try to ascend vertically, slowly flapping their gelatinous bells so they ever so gently break the water’s surface. That’s as far as they get. I’ve thought that they too, deep down, know that they belong to a universe far larger than the creek they inhabit. They strain to see beyond the constraints by making their vertical ascents. They never fully succeed but then, they never quit, either. Do airplane pilots feel that way? Astronauts? Is seeing the big picture what drives them?

I’ll bet the whole world yearns for a glance of itself beyond the familiar boundaries that contain it.

I think that’s what yearning is; I think it’s a universal hunger, and a hunger for the universal.

I lost an old friend recently. A nun. I knew her as Maria, her professed name. We were faculty together at Loyola. We became intimate friends. I thought of her as one of those ‘spirit people’ whom you sense instinctively walk closely with God. I’ve found such people infinitely approachable, even earthy, but there’s no doubt that they keep their eye on the big picture.

I underwent several medical diagnostic procedures recently. One included a bone scan for which I wasn’t greatly concerned. I felt mostly inconvenienced.

During the procedure, but of nowhere, I had a powerful sense of Maria’s presence, so much so that I felt of rush of goose bumps and an urge to weep, not from fear or distress; I had the distinct experience of momentarily grasping a reality, namely that when we are loved and love others, we can never be separated from this love despite, as St. Paul says: “life or death, principalities and powers.”

The big picture’s total far exceeds the sum of its parts.

The pilot made one last lazy pass over where I sat and headed north, disappearing from sight. I was alone – not really alone but solitary in the small space that I, at least for this duration, I call home.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

I’ve often talked about death with aging folk. Invariably the subject of an afterlife comes up. The discussion soon revolves around ideas of a soul and whether such a thing survives after our death. The soul’s been talked about forever. It’s tricky to define and mysterious.

As a child, I recited this prayer as a nightly ritual. I knelt by my bed, reverently placed my folded hands on the covers while saying:

Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Next, I prayed for all my deceased relatives, asking God to look after them. I didn’t want them to feel abandoned, the way I did when they died.

Their souls, I imagined, were like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Like wafting smoke in its incorporeal state, my soul would one day go through walls and closed doors like Casper unconstrained by any physical obstacles and soar between heaven and earth as it chose. I wasn’t frightened in imagining the soul’s ghostly mien. In fact, I thought it was really neat.

I believed that the best time for actually seeing souls during the day was when cumulus clouds rolled overhead. Their cotton-like configurations took various forms. I believed them to be the heavenly host, particular those recently deceased. Heaven, I noticed, had a lot of old men with long white beards and there were always loads of sheep. Like the childhood myths that I once treasured and that served me well, they became less credible as I grew older. The feeling that I somehow possessed a soul, however, I never lost. I had only vague notions about what it might be.

Many people believe the soul survives our bodies. The specific formulas vary with religious and cultural traditions, but the belief that there’s life after physical death is remarkably persistent throughout all traditions. Is it a wish? Is it a fact? On our spiritual journey, at some point, we’ll wonder about it.

As children, we see the world with a clarity we might never have again. A child is always curious. What he or she hears, sees or touches is approached with an anticipation filled with wonder. The child’s fascination at Christmas is a case in point. In childhood we live expectantly, anticipating the next wonder to appear. I believe that as children or early childhood, we are closer to what I understand a soul to be. To see deeply. The locus of a soul is in the imagination. I don’t mean this dismissively, like “It’s all in your mind,” but, yes, it’s really all in our mind. I would add “and heart” to that.

There’s a spiritual tradeoff when going from childhood to adulthood. The adult mind becomes conditioned by information that, rather than enlightening us about what we see, often skews the clarity of our perception. The greatest receptor in a child’s mind is his or her curiosity and imagination. A child’s curiosity is voracious and its imagination boundless. A child encounters the world by wondering. There’s a purity in that way of seeing that’s hard to retrieve as we grow into adults. By the time we are adults, we have developed “opinions.” Opinions are the gatekeepers of our imagination. These gatekeepers admit into our awareness only what has been first thoroughly vetted or censored. The imagination is quickly compromised. I believe that the search for our souls will lead us back to our imagination. We’ll find our souls, but only after having rummaged through all the opinions that have kept them hidden from us. Our souls are the elusive agency by which we see to the heart of a matter.

Einstein, one of history’s geniuses, changed the world because he had an insatiable curiosity, a florid imagination and some wacky ideas. As a child, he loved to imagine that he was riding on a light beam. This product of his imagination became the impetus for eventually developing his theory of relativity. He liked playing with his imagination – he called it “Gedankenexperiment,” the German for “thought experiment” or what some might call head-trips. The head-trips, however, were deeply rooted in the seat of his imagination. To say the revelation he had was all in his mind is not an understatement. The mathematical computations eventually validated the science of the idea, but the revelation of it came first; it appeared to him as an image, in his imagination.

In the spiritual life, the same phenomenon is called revelation.

An old tale gets at this mystery in another way.

The gods in their celestial abode convened an emergency meeting. Human beings were increasingly encroaching on the gods’ divine attributes and they were anxious that they’d lose their powers to humans. Humans had invaded heaven with their space rockets, decoded DNA, developed computers that speak, transferred hearts from one person to another and made new limbs for the lame to walk. “They think they’re god,” one minor divinity grumbled.

The gods decided they must hide their divine spark where humans would never find it. A variety of proposals were made: hide it in the earth’s core; lose it in black holes; or place it on the highest mountain. They finally agreed on this proposal: hide the divine spark deep in the human mind (I would add, heart) and they’ll never guess in a thousand years that’s where to find it.

Ever since we first walked the earth, we’ve been searching for our souls and, bless my soul, they’ve been right there within us the whole time.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.