Insight Trails

Practice: Running into Happiness

By Jon Berry

I'D JUST TURNED THE CORNER ONTO ELLIOT ROAD ON an 8-mile run from my Dad’s farm to the Indiana High Point Wednesday evening when that strange sensation returned. I did a quick inventory. Nothing actually wrong. No pains or strains. Just a feeling of lightness. Then it hit me. Right. I was experiencing happiness.

    Sealing the conclusion: I’d started singing along with the Springsteen song on my iPod (“I ain’t here on business, baby, I'm only here for fun…”). And my hands jet-winged out as I turned the corner, then started keeping time like a backup singer in an old Motown video.

    My mind drifted to wondering if Shakespeare had, in fact, gotten it right in the sonnets, that in midlife, with its attendant maturity, sadness, and clear-eyed realism (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red, than her lips red…”), happiness does not recede but grows more precious and real.

    How I got to this point, I don’t know. Eight months ago, hitting one of those emotional bottoms that come in middle age, I’d made a vow to get myself to a better place. We blew up the TV (OK, not exactly, more like canceled the cable service, but I’ve always loved that line from the John Prine song).

    I cleared the pantry of all the foods I reflexively reached for when I felt what the Buddhists call shenpa, that “tightening, tensing, closing-down,” poisoning, hooked sensation, in the words of the author and teacher Pema Chodron, of wanting to withdraw and “not be where we are” that can be set off by an event (“someone criticizes you”) or just unease, restlessness, or “insecurity of living in a world that is always changing.”

    I recommitted to meditating, and, moreover, to doing anything I could to keeping it fresh – including creating a guided meditation playlist of Motown songs. (Amazing, when you listen, how Psalms-like certain songs are – “As I walk this land of broken dreams, I have visions of many things…” What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?) I started reading more; started training more – running, biking, swimming; tried yoga (ha); stopped drinking; tried to reach out more to friends and family...and other things.

    But I can't honestly say whether those resolutions were cause-and-effect to my running up Elliott Road, smiling first at the miles of rolling farmland stretching to the horizon in all directions, then at the friendly black Lab who came out to greet me, then at the cow that wandered into the road, while I occasionally snatched a lyric to sing (“you were only waiting for this moment to arise”).

    Nor can I really explain the other similar feeling running a 10k in Central Park in New York the previous sunny, bloom-filled Sunday with a friend and his daughter, then joining a larger group for a walk. Or going to concerts, museums, and dinners recently. Or, back in November, running two miles of the NYC Marathon with the “running priest” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (who eventually sped ahead to make his commitment to lead a 5:30 Mass).

    Which is the problem with happiness. We can do all we can to make a place for it in our lives. We can follow the self-help advice to “choose happiness.” We can pray for it. But in the end, it’s ephemeral. It comes. And it goes. There’s good reason “happiness” is so close “happenstance.” Both share the Middle English root “hap” which means “luck.” More than “pleasure,” “satisfaction,” or “joy,” happiness means “good fortune.” We can create space for it, but not expect it. When it comes, it is a surprise. One friend says he feels “attacked” by happiness. Rather than take credit, we can only give thanks.

    I’ve recently started reading In the Valley of the Shadows, the new book by James Kugel, a Biblical scholar and Harvard professor. The subject is far from happiness. It’s a meditation, set off by the author’s treatment for cancer, on the meaning of religious belief. The book is strikingly self-aware and beautifully written, perhaps most memorably for its depiction of how the author describes, when he receives his diagnosis, “the background music” of life suddenly stops. Life grows silent. He experiences a primal feeling of being very, very small. 

    Turning to Ecclesiastes, he realizes anew that we pass through seasons of life (which, he says, translates in Ecclesiastes as “Everyone is in a season, [for] there is a time of [doing] each thing in this world” – not “for everything there is a season” of the Byrds song). But we “never quite succeed” in understanding life. There is always “something hidden.” Life, to quote the original Hebrew, is “hebel” – not so much “vanity” (“all is vanity,” as Ecclesiastes is usually translated) as a quality of being “fleeting” and “ungraspable.”

    To the list of “To-Do’s” for happiness that I’ve worked through these past eight months, I’d add one more, then: try to have faith. In her book, Faith, the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg says that in Buddhism, hard times are considered “the proximate cause of faith.” If we open our hearts and minds to take in suffering, there is healing –“not because the suffering itself is redemptive or healing” but because if we open ourselves fully in the face of suffering, we let in all life – including the capacity for healing, love, joy, and happiness. One of the meanings of saddah, the word for faith in Buddhism, she notes, is hospitality.

    I’ve been wondering if – in contast to the drawing inward of illness that Kugel describes, there’s a centrifugal force in happiness that propels us outward into connection. My friend who describes happiness as an attack says one of his first impulses, when he experiences happiness, is to tell someone. I wonder if it’s an impulse in all creatures. I’ve always loved how my dog, about 15 minutes into a walk, turns back and smiles. “Isn’t this great?” he seems to be saying to us. I wonder if the same thought goes through his mind when running toward a tennis ball we’ve just thrown, he suddenly breaks stride and, for no reason beyond the joy of it, leaps through the air. “Isn’t this great?”

    After 40 minutes of running, I reach Hoosier Hill. In truth, while it’s the highest point in Indiana, the "peak" (1,257 ft. elevation; pictured throughout) is only an ever-so-slight incline higher than the surrounding woods and farmland. I always stop to read the logbook where “summiteers” record their impressions. There’s usually some wry humor.  “Not as hard as Mt. Whitney,” note Carol and Jim from Baltimore, who have now summited 35 states' high points. “Raining. Morale low. Rations lower. But summit gained! Looking for safe descent,” quips Brooke, from Palo Alto, CA. “Failed in our first attempt to reach the summit 2 years ago. We needed help from Garmin GPS to locate,” jokes another person. “Meet me here when the levy breaks,” writes C.S.

    But then I come across a different kind of message, speaking directly to happiness, and it puts a goose-bumpy coda on the week. “Happy to be here today. Tomorrow makes 2 years clean. I am truly thankful for my life. Life ain’t so shitty.” He signs his name, and then writes “Indiana boy,” then “p.s. Thanks, God!”

That’s I.T.

I’ve lab-tested this 20-minute Motown guided meditation recently, and personally have found it happiness enhancing. Who knows, you may start the day with a dance move. Here’s the list: “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love)” (Junior Walker); “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” (Jimmy Ruffin); “Mercy Mercy Me” (the marvelous Marvin Gaye); “Tracks of My Tears” (Smokey Robinson); “What’s Going On” (Gaye); and, to end with uplift (hey, this is Motown), “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” (Marvin Gaye and Tammy Tyrell) and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin & Tammy). All can be previewed on YouTube.

For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadow, or to buy a copy, click here.

For more on Sharon Salzberg’s Faith, or to buy a copy, click here.

The Puma Chodron quote is from the Shambala Sun article, “How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked.” To read the article, click here.

And for more on Hoosier Hill, the Indiana high point, click here, here, or here.   

Street Wisdom

By Jon Berry

MY CELL PHONE BUZZED: “HAVE YOU HEARD FROM____?” I’ve learned through experience to be wary of text messages from people I don’t know asking for my friend’s whereabouts. So after making a quick mental checklist of the possibilities – someone looking for money? someone looking for a fight? a social worker? collection agency? – I texted back circumspectly: “Yes. Who’s this?”

    “I know him from the homeless shelter. He’s a friend.” Then, seconds later, “Do you know where he’s headed?”

    I didn’t have time for this. I’d just come off the train at Grand Central Station, and needed to squeeze through the rush-hour crowd and get a downtown subway to a lecture by a renowned spiritual teacher.

    “Dunno,” I replied, still skeptical. “He didn’t say.” That was true. I had seen my friend the day before, to give him some things I’d been keeping for him. But he didn’t say where he was going. My guess is he didn’t know himself. “He wasn’t too communicative,” I added.

    The next day, my friend resurfaced. I asked him about the texts. “Oh, yeah, that’s xxxx,” he said. “He’s been a good friend.” I changed the phone number on the texts to a name, and sent an update. “Good to hear,” xxxx replied. “Hopefully he will be good. Thanks for letting me know.”

    Years of keeping company with people on both sides of alcoholism and addiction – the sufferers and the friends and family trying to detach with love – have created a reflex in me to go to dark places when I’m on unfamiliar ground. But reality is more than darkness. And that should not surprise me.

    In Liberation Theology, people talk about the lessons that can be learned from those on society’s margins. The marginalized “can help cultivate a new look at the way things are.” If we learn anew “how to listen,” we can gain insights “in places where we least expect it” (Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor). 

    I sort of got it intellectually when I read it in seminary. But, to really get it, I had to have real-life lab practice – like seeing again last week that that friendships exist, too, among the homeless, maybe especially so. I needed to experience that a lesson can come in unexpected places, at unexpected times – including on the way to what I think is my lesson. As a friend says, “If you want to hear God laugh, make plans.” 

    The surprise of insight in places we least expect it came through in my reading this week, too. On the recommendation of my friend (who found solace in it during a recent stay in a drug-treatment program), I bought Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer’s 1998 memoir of the decade he spent living on the streets of New York addicted to crack cocaine.

    In some ways, the book confirmed my worst fears. Life on the streets can be predatory. There's what the author calls "the pocket incident": two men carefully cut into the pants pocket of a sleeping homeless man and make off with a wad of cash. Guys routinely con each other and the system – and assume the system does the same to them. “It’s all a hustle,” advises one of the author’s acquaintances. What outsiders think will be havens, like the homeless shelters, turn out to be riven with a “watch-your-back, watch-your-mouth, watch-out-for-number-one, jailhouse mentality.”

    But it’s not all darkness. There’s a moral thread that runs through Grand Central Winter. Guys keep an eye on each other. It’s rare for someone to get lost on the streets; the homeless generally know where each other are. There's humor. There’s creativity; for a while, a group of guys keeps a large population fed on the food thrown out by the train crews because it’s passed its sell-by date. There are charitable impulses, like when Stringer tries to give a passerby a copy of Street News, the newspaper for the New York’s homeless, arguing “If I couldn’t give something to someone every now and then, wouldn’t that make me even poorer than I am?”

    Most important, there’s hope. The author eventually puts down his crack pipe and goes into recovery. It’s not a clean break. He has near-misses, then relapses, leading to an epiphany, on his knees, praying for help on Dog Run Hill in Central Park, and receiving it in the form of a seemingly heaven-sent dog that dashes up the hill...sits down...and leans into him. "I break out in goosebumps," he writes. "From that second...I never, ever had another craving."

    Stringer remarks that he does not know any “hardworking, moral, churchgoing, non-addicted American who would go to the lengths to which recovering addicts and alcoholics go for the sake of spiritual growth." He repeats the oft-heard wisdom in the rooms that “religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”

    On the other side of that hell, he finds that the “miraculous world” that he believed in as a child, then through “grinding disappointment” had given up on, is still present. It’s in the joy he rediscovers in his travels through the city, coming up out of the subway, seeing the day with new eyes. Most, though, it’s in the people whose stories he hears – “people who’d stopped kidding themselves” and now “took solace in revealing their weakness and pain.”

    “I doubt if people are ever so profoundly attractive as when they are being honest about themselves,” he writes. “…Damned if it isn’t a miraculous world after all.”

That’s I.T.

 For more on Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter, or to buy a copy, click here.

These are times of incredible need. Please remember to support your local food bank, organizations dedicated to providing homes for those ready for them like Habitat for Humanity, and organizations providing services to those in need. Some New York-area ones: City Harvest, the Food Bank for Westchester, Midnight Run, and SHORE (Sheltering the Homeless is Our Responsibility).

Spiritual New York: The Widening Circle

By Jon Berry 

WHAT DO YOU CALL A LAPSED PRESBYTERIAN WHO makes an offering to a Buddha in her Manhattan apartment before she leaves for a business trip? Or the man who puts his Jewish identity aside for a moment when he passes St. Patrick's Cathedral to go inside and light a candle? Or the practicing Catholic who feels most spiritually connected not inside a church  but sitting at Jones Beach watching the waves come in?

    My answer is: Friends. People I learn from and lean on, and whom I try to reciprocate in their times of need. Fellow travelers in spiritual New York.

    Over the years, they – and the many more like them in what has come to be an ever-widening circle – have come to embody a saying I love: “Your problems are only as big as your God is small.”

    I tend to use the word “God” carefully. I don’t have a good, day-in-day-out, working definition of what the word means. Frankly, I hope I never do. Sure, it’d be nice if God had Louis Armstrong’s voice – and, while we’re at it, preceded every pronouncement with the 1-minute, 35-second trumpet solo that opens Louis’ version of La Vie en Rose.

    And yes, in my mind’s eye, Satch is sometimes accompanied by a fleet of angels who look just like Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire, coifed in long, ponytailed hair, wearing long, dark overcoats, and quoting Rilke. Better than a burning bush.

    But, in the end, some things should be beyond our creaturely grasp. Otherwise, where’s the adventure?

    That said, there is a feeling that I get when I’m part of a group that is gathered in what the Buddhists call lovingkindness, Christians call “the beloved community,” and, in 12-step, is described as the healing and recovery found in the group. In these times, I feel part of something good, loving, and right that is larger than myself.

    Likewise, there is a sense I get when one of those fellow pilgrims says something – be it the trembling words of worship, or a mischievous gleam over coffee – that is a wisdom I’ve known, but never heard; that is truer than I had imagined; or seems to have been plucked right from my soul. As the old Quakers said, “that Friend speaks my mind.”

    At such times, I see how a more spacious spirituality can make the hardest problems seem smaller. It may not be La Vie en Rose. But it works.

    This was such a week. The more I put myself out there, the more that spaciousness got played back to me. It came through in new experiences – leading a group to the East Village to join 40 New Yorkers singing (actually, often, roaring) the ever-expanding, thrumming harmonies of the rural American tradition of Sacred Harp.

    There were new lessons – a lecture in lovingkindness meditation at Tibet House. (Tip: Choose 2-3 wishes. Direct them first to yourself, then extend them to others. “May I be happy. May ____ be happy.” “May I live with ease. May ____ live with ease.” “May I find peace.” “May ___ find peace.” “May I be healthy and whole. May ____ be healthy and whole.” Try it at home. Then try it in the subway, a supermarket, or walking down the street – remembering to not walk too slow. This is New York, after all.) And there were trips to familiar havens – silent wors hip among Friends on Sunday; three12-step meetings. 

    But what I’ll most remember is many conversations with friends, asking them about their practices, how they handle situations, what they lean on.

    There’s a perception in the wider world that New York is a spiritually bereft city. Being the center of the financial empire (Wall Street), media empires (The Times, The Journal, the news networks), and, yes, may as well, baseball’s evil empire (the city’s beloved Yankees), the thinking goes, rules out having a spiritual center.

    It’s like the conventional wisdom that I read in the press, and sometimes hear in seminary, that the loosening of Americans’ religious affiliations, and the rise of new practices like yoga and meditation, have somehow made this a less spiritually serious country. Some see us as a nation of confused, feckless spiritual grazers in need of being corrected and brought back into the fold. I don’t agree.

    Rather, in the personal stories I’ve seen play out in New York, I see something close to the non-polemical, open-minded, trial-and-error building of spiritual “toolkits” that Quaker blogger Diane Reynolds, quoting recent readings of hers, wrote about last week. In the stories is a spiritual experimentation like the essay’s description of “the creative and improvisational nature of jazz,” more about “invention than perfection.”

    My friend goes into the church and lights a candle because, “it can’t hurt” and, in fact, feels right. With an adult child in recovery from heroin addiction, he’s earned the right, I’m persuaded, to try whatever he thinks can help. My other friend goes to the beach because every pore in her body tells her that’s where she will find serenity; invariably, she does.

    And there’s the friend who, with her mom, was attracted to the century-old Buddha they saw in the store in upstate New York. As her mother grew ill, they bought the Buddha. When her mom passed, the statue came to my friend’s apartment, where it now has a special place of honor (photo below). When she leaves the offering of coins to the Buddha before heading off to the airport, she is, in essence, redrawing her connection to her mother.

    Along the way she’s acquired more Buddha’s, as well as a few Shiva’s and Ganesh’s. She carries a tiny, smiling Buddha in her purse. “It sounds silly. But it makes me feel good to know he’s there,” she laughs. “I’ll stumble across him, and feel relieved.”

    In their own, idiosyncratic (the root of which literally means “mix it oneself”) ways, I’ve come to see these friends as like the early Quakers who said they knew spiritual truth “experimentally.” They’re following the Buddha’s advice to his followers to take nothing on his word, but to test everything and find truth themselves.

    Their personal striving after new images seems to me not so different from the absorption, in a different age, of the ancient pre-Colombian Nahuatl metaphor flor y canto, flower and song, into Christianity – the notion that beauty is a blessing, a reflection of the divine – and that we are to respond to it with flower and song of our own.

    In breathing new life into their beliefs, I think, they are enacting a conception of God that I read a year ago in seminary, and that could grow into my definition: that “God is the communion of all things fully alive.”

    The journey to connection is not easy. Many of my friends these days have been to the place Dante describes when he writes, “In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” They’re proof of what the poet David Whyte, who often quotes the Dante image, says: “Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence.”

    They have lived on the other side of the equation “there but for the grace of God go I” – the place others dread going – and have found that grace is evident – in fact, can be more abundant – on the other side. The least I can do is listen.

That’s I.T.

Steady, wise, and touched with joy and wistfulness: That's how I hear Louis Armstrong's La Vie en Rose. Have a listen by clicking here. Who knows, you, too, may hear angels sing from above. Let me know what you think -- and whether another voice or instrument better captures the Eternal to you. 

I’ve written often enough about 12-step, it’s probably time for a link. Here’s one for those who interested in learning more about Al-Anon, the amazing, six-decade-old fellowship for those impacted by others’ alcoholism and addiction. Here’s a link Al-Anon/Alateen World Service Organization. It includes questions to consider if you think you or someone you know could benefit from Al-Anon, and lists for finding meetings around the country. 

Given how often I write so about the silent worship of Friends, it’s also time for a link for those interested in learning more about Quakerism, my other spiritual base camp. Here are links to Friends General Conference (where you can find newcomer info and directions to meetings) and Friends Journal, the magazine of "Quaker thought and life today." 

The Quaker Blog I referred to is Emerging Quaker, by Diane Reynolds, a journalist by trade, now a student at Earlham School of Religion (where I've studied). The essay I cite is “Utopia.”

Learn more about Sacred Harp by clicking here; find out about New York area sings here.

The idea that "God is the communion of all things fully alive" is from Elizabeth Johnson, in her book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. Click here to learn more.

Practice: Taking a Chance on Life

By Jon Berry

IN SEMINARY, STUDENTS LEARN VARIOUS TERMS FOR TAKING A CHANCE ON LIFE. There's Pascal’s Wager, the 17^th-century proposition that the rewards of belief are so compelling that even non-believers should give it a try (“fake it ’til you make it” in today’s parlance). Kierkegaard speaks of the leap of faith toward the eternal moment. 

    For my part, I prefer stories. Lately, with the turn to spring, I’ve been thinking about a great uncle who took a chance on life as it presented itself to him in the early 1900s in the farm country of Indiana. Claude Elzy Berry was a runt of a kid – 5 feet 7 inches tall and 165 pounds – from a nowhere town (Losantville, IN, current population: 257). But he finagled his way into a tryout with a baseball team.

    From 1902-1917, Uncle Claude crisscrossed the country playing catcher for professional ballteams from Dallas to Louisville, the Chicago White Sox, and Indianapolis; then Cedar Rapids, Fort Worth, the Philadelphia A’s, Cedar Rapids (again), Williamsport, and Philadelphia (again). He then went west to the Pacific Coast League, playing five seasons for the San Francisco Seals, then going to Portland, OR, before spending his last seasons in Pittsburgh and Kansas City.

    By the time he retired at age 37, he’d played for two major league teams – the White Sox and A’s; one of the teams in a controversial, short-lived league that tried to take on the National and American leagues (Pittsburgh of the Federal League); some of the most colorfully named teams in sport (the Dallas Griffins, Cedar Rapids Rabbits, Williamsport Millionaires, and Pittsburgh Rebels, also known as the Stogies, one of the great all-time names), and even got a couple baseball cards (two featured above). 

    Moreover, he piled up stories that we are still telling a century later. Like the time he bet the legendary Ty Cobb a straw hat that he’d throw Cobb out stealing second. He lost the wager when Cobb, who besides being fast was notoriously dirty, called time out after hitting his way onto first, pulled out a file, sat down on first base, and sharpened his spikes. The thoroughly spooked rookie second baseman was nowhere to be found when the ball and Cobb arrived at second.

     Uncle Claude earned a measure of distinction with his game as well. While he never became a standout hitter (in baseball’s Deadball Era, hardly anyone did), he was known for his arm and ironman durability. Uncle Claude caught a staggering 167 games for the 1908 San Francisco Seals – more than most teams play today. He once caught every pitch of a 24-inning 1-0 Seals win over the Oakland Oaks. Both, so far as we know, are records that stand to this day.

    Those Seals – known for their guile and wit – also captured a special place in etymological history. The first recorded use of the word “jazz” in print was a 1913 story in the San Francisco Bulletin describing the team as “full of the old ‘jazz.’” The piece went on to define “the ‘jazz’” as, “why…a little of that ‘old life,’ the ‘gin-iker,’ the ‘pep,’ otherwise known as enthusiasalum.” (To do: work enthusiasalum into a conversation with friends or colleagues.)

    Uncle Claude remained the family trickster to the end of his days. According to one of the weathered clippings lovingly copied and passed down through the generations, he once carried around a $10,000 bill for a few days “for the thrill” of seeing the “shock” of shopkeepers when he’d ask if they could break it for a $5 purchase. (“A hundred-dollar bill?” marveled a gas-station attendant. “Hundred nothin’. That’s a thousand-dollar bill,” chimed a second attendant – to which a third, with a choice profanity, exclaimed, “That’s a $10,000 bill!”) 

    To younger generations growing up in small-town Indiana, the stories lit up the horizon. They showed that life is possibility. It is to be relished. No matter where you come from or which side of the tracks you grew up on. No matter what had happened to you that day. It was a lesson we never forgot.

    For the past month, I’ve been carrying a scrap of paper in my pocket with a snippet from a meditation. “Life involves one risk after another.” It’s a reminder, like a verbal string around my finger, to stay open, take a chance. The reading ends with a quote from Helen Keller: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.”

    In the way these things happen, life has been feeding that message back to me lately. This week, my Dad – an 85-year-old farmer who’s itching to get on his tractor and start working his fields – told me a cousin’s daughter is going sky-diving to celebrate her 18^th birthday. A Quaker friend has just come home from three months facilitating non-violence workshops in Latin America. Over dinner another friend shared his dream of moving to Spain after he retires to join medical missions to the Third World. Two friends – one old, one new – are deferring opportunities to work in the corporate world to start their own businesses.

    We hear so often that life is there for the taking, it's easy to tune out. But who’s to say it’s not right – that, in fact, at any moment, we could be Pete Rose, the Ty Cobb of my generation, standing by third base near the end of one of the greatest games of all time, game six of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and his Cincinnati Reds, shouting to the Sox’ grizzled third-base coach, Don “Popeye” Zimmer, “Hey, Popeye! Popeye! Win or lose, Popeye, we’re playing in the fucking greatest game ever played!”

    It begins – going back to Kierkegaard, Pascal, et. al – in faith. This week, I read that in Pali, the language in which Buddhist texts were first written, the word used for faith, saddha, translates to “place the heart upon.” When we take a leap of faith for something we care about, we are placing our heart upon it. Faith, then, is not a static state – something we eventually achieve – but an action. According to the book, Faith, by Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist author and teacher, saddha was a verb. “We ‘faithe,’” Salzberg writes. “Saddha is the willingness to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure.”

    I don’t think it’s such a big leap from baseball to spirit. (And not because the statistic that Uncle Claude took pride in later in life was a streak of 20 years of churchgoing without missing a Sunday.) In both we see glimpses of what life can be like, that we can take back with us into our daily lives. We’re given images, visions, messages that we will wrestle with in the days after – for example, the quotation from William Penn recited by a Friend in my Quaker meeting last Sunday that's been grappling with me through the week: “Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity…for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.”

    When we take a chance on life, we are, in a phrase another friend told me this week, “taken to the edge – and softened.” It’s there that, in the traditional Quaker term, “way opens.” We see and hear things that challenge us to take the next step – even if we’re not sure what the next step after that one will be. 

That’s I.T.

According to the story passed down in the family, Ty Cobb so much wanted to win the wager with Uncle Claude that, despite banging a hit off the wall that could easily have been a triple, he stopped at first. Thanks to my Uncle Bill Berry (who, himself, got a big league tryout) for letting me record him telling the story. The details on Claude Elzy Berry’s career come from a combination of news clippings from 1943-1974 in the Richmond (IN) Palladium-Item and Baseball Reference’s minor-league and major-league reference guides. The story of the San Francisco Seals’ association with “jazz” can be found by clicking here.

The Pete Rose quote – fast-becoming one of my mantras – is from the book The Long Ball: The Summer of ’75 – Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played, by Tom Adelman. Click here for more information.

In addition to insightful reflections on faith from a Buddhist perspective, Sharon Salzberg’s book Faith is a beautifully written account of the author’s spiritual journey – one that I never would have guessed. Click here for more information.

No music in this week’s essay, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Louis Armstrong lately, especially Life Is So Peculiar, a good reminder to keep our sense of wonder. Unfortunately there's not a pristine version on YouTube, but here's one that comes close. There's a nice recording of the song on four-disk budget boxed set, C'est Ci Bon: Satchmo in the Forties (available on Amazon here; some of the tunes are also in iTunes); the colletion also includes three of my other Louis favorites: his slowed-down On the Sunny Side of the Street; C’est Ci Bon; and La Vie en Rose (sigh).