My Name is David and I Am Needy

I am a needy man. I have moments of despair and doubt, loneliness and uncertainty, disappointment and pessimism. I need reassurance in those moments. Sometimes I can get it directly from God, feel the Presence, have a clear conversation with Jesus. Sometimes I get it indirectly, through a moving song, film, book, poem or even facebook post. Sometimes I get it personally, receive it from someone who loves me.

On my best days, I am still needy. What makes them my best days is that I recognize that fact and ask for what I need.

Maybe I'm setting the bar too low, but I anticipate I will always have one need or another. I live in a world made of human beings and temporal things. People are here for a season, not always available, passing on or away. Things last for awhile, then evaporate or wear out or become obsolete.

Don't get me wrong; there are a handful of people I trust completely, and others to whom I respond according to what they present. I'm not cursing my life in a temporal world, nor preaching that everyone is useless and going to hell in a hand-basket.

I'm just saying that sometimes I am needy and I reach out to these sources in order to satisfy my need.

I believe my neediness is what guides me to God. I am not self-sufficient, and how foolish it is when I think that I am. I needed parents and a heritage in order to get here in the first place. I needed care, food, direction, lessons, training. I did not teach myself to ride a bike the moment I popped out of the womb. People encouraged me to sit up, crawl, walk, run, and so on until I began experimenting with that daunting two-wheeler (four-wheeler if you count the training wheels!!).

Yes, my name is David and I am needy. My ultimate satisfaction will be my union with God. Every need I feel is a reminder and a signpost that leads me deeper and deeper into that union.

Tonight I had a brief encounter with a group of people who do not know they are needy. The claw and clamor for recognition, demand their superiority, and fight like the Gospel's "sons of thunder" for first place in a competition they believe leads only to first place or dead last.

Our false sense of independence is what throws us into these violent competitions. Ego wants a statue erected to it and the best seat at the dinner table.

Jesus doesn't support that attitude. He says to not take the seat of honor, but the lowliest one at the table. He says in order to be great in God's world, we are called to be servants, not slave-masters.

If we give up competition, what is left? Give up competition! How un-Western, let alone un-American!! What is left is cooperation governed by compassion. If we are busy serving each other, nobody needs to win because everyone will.

When we act as if we have no needs, we are dangerous to ourselves and others. We no longer see ourselves as human. How can we then relate to the humans around us?

No, my friend, I hate to disillusion you about priests, but I have to let you know this one is chock-full of needs. That is what opens me to love.

Thank You, God, for bringing me to the point of recognizing how wonderful it is to be needy.

Pace e bene,
Fr. David+

Necessary Grace and the Meaning of a Single Day

In the middle of a busy afternoon, the cell phone rang. "This is the hospital calling and we have a patient who would like to see a minister..." I am one of the overnight and weekend ministers on call, so I shifted my day and headed to the hospital. Who am I to know what to say to a stranger on a hospital bed? What words can I offer to a family whose loved one just died? The hospital doesn't call me for people who can wait for the day chaplain. I don't often know how I will be called upon to serve; this leaves plenty of room to depend not only on grace but on necessary grace. I stopped at the nurse's station to check on the patient, but his nurse was on her rounds and the man at the desk could offer no information. After a short walk to the room and a knock on the open door, I met the patient. He was an older man, although I could not tell if he was all that much older than me. Heavy, restless, and uncomfortable with a mass of grey dreadlocks and piercing brown eyes, he looked up at me and said, "I'm going through some stuff." Medication and weariness interrupted his thoughts from time to time so that constructing a sentence ebbed and flowed like trying to start a car motor on a cold winter day. Sadness, regret and doubt clouded his words. Relationships had fallen away; expectations were unmet; potential was unrealized. Jobs came and went, some good, some not so good. He was a talented photographer in the 35mm film days; his illiteracy never allowed him the chance to catch up. He had never become the man his mother envisioned, never felt able to fill his father's shoes, lost touch with his children, and was estranged from his brother and sister. This was his life: alone for three weeks in a hospital bed, with one visitor other than me in all of that time. His next home would be a brief stay at a hospice facility. Lacking a heart transplant, there was no other prognosis and the one he had was short-term. He did not look at his life and ask me, "Is God punishing me? Does God not like me?" He only asked, "How can I know I'm all right with God? I have failed at many things." I quoted Psalm 51:17 to him. "My sacrifice is a contrite spirit; my humbled heart You will not spurn." I assured him that the moment we ask, "Am I all right with God?" God rushes to answer, "Yes, and how I love you!" It is not in our achievements that God delights, although we feverishly continue to build our personal Towers of Babel as though they make a difference in eternity. It is in our hearts that God delights, in hearts turned toward God, in hearts that ache and long to feel connected with God. God does not need us to have a perfect heart, only a humble one, only one that needs God and knows it. He was tired, so I excused myself and told him I will see him tomorrow. Tomorrow? Tomorrow, he will be taken off of an IV medication and switched to oral prescriptions. This will increase the likelihood that the hospital will be able to find an "end-of-life care placement" for him. I asked the nurse to include a staff note to let me know the next facility to which he goes so that I can be a friend to this man who could use one. Tomorrow may or may not find him still here. He does not seem to have many tomorrows left. But he had today, and today we talked, and he cried, and he told the nurse it helped. Today he had the opportunity to hear that God loves him, loves him deeply and fully as if he were God's only child. God forgives him. God is always offering a new start to him. I hope he'll be around for me to see him tomorrow. We were a somewhat unlikely pair to find common ground, but faith, hope and love make up some powerful common ground. Today, I could offer him all three. A time will come when faith will be rewarded and hope will be fulfilled, and only love will remain. Forever. Not regret, not sadness, not doubt. Pure love. Necessary grace.

Faith?

There was an important life-lesson waiting for me in the book "High Calling" by Evelyn Husband, about the life and faith of her husband Rick, who was the commander of the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia:

Faith begins where you think it ends.

Belief will carry you pretty far, but when the fog is thick and the path is uncertain, when questions have no answers, when the "how" or "why" don't make sense, that next step is where faith begins. Until you need it, until there is nothing else to support you, faith is not faith.

I'm not sure why God thought it was such a good idea to set things up so that we sometimes have to rely on faith, but I'll go on faith that it is.

Blessings,
David