"With Duty in Mind"

This post is dedicated to Mary McCue.  Mary was an incredible friend, colleague, and mentor.  She lived a life full of compassion and grace with a deep sense of duty to her family and the rest of humanity.  Rest in peace Mary.


April 28, 2011

"With Duty in Mind" is the motto for West Point's Class of 1999.  It is inscribed on our class crest.  If the motto ever slips my mind, it will come to me again on days like today when our alumni association sends out an email advertising Class of 1999 merchandise.

If you're interested, they've got "With Duty in Mind" scrawled across everything from ball caps, to golf shirts, money clips, to tie tacks.  If you're considering buying any product that legal and non-perishable, I'm sure there's a way to get a version with our class motto on it.

While I can poke fun at the marketers all day.  The reality is that duty really was always on your mind during those four at the Academy.  Duty seemed to emanate out of the gray granite walls and rise like steam off the the asphalt in Central Area.  Duty coated us like the humidity rolling off the Hudson River and dropped down from above like snow from the gray January sky.

We had the duty to have our hair cut in a certain way.  The duty to have our shoes shined and rooms inspected.  It was our duty to keep our grades up and our two-mile run times down.  If you ever had any doubt about the scope and specifics of your duties as a cadet, you could always find the answers in the the United States Military Academy Regulations.  The regulations were as thick as my hometown phonebook and they were detailed enough to specify which direction a cadet's toothbrush should point in their medicine cabinet.

After over a decade out of West Point, it's hard to even imagine trying to live life again according to the duties outlined in that massive book of regulations.  That concept is still fodder for the occasional "back at West Point" nightmare.  That's close enough to going back for me.

But on the other hand, I believe that there is something powerful to the statement "With Duty in Mind."  There are few things more powerful than a life lived with sense of duty or few things sadder than a life lived without.

Everyone develops a purpose or justification for existence.  Personally, I believe that our purpose is intrinsically tied to duty.  More specifically, the purpose of our lives is to humbly fulfill our personal duty to the Divine, ourselves, our families, our fellow humans, and the world that was created for us.

Naming the purpose of life is a tall task, especially for someone who was lucky to get out of their college Philosophy class with a B-.  Thankfully, there was higher power that spoke to the issue and I just took the cliff notes.  The foundation for this statement is taken from what Jesus called the two greatest commandments and a line from Genesis describing people's duty in Eden.

• "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." Matthew 22:37
• "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Matthew 22:39.
• Man's duty to "cultivate and care" for creation. Genesis 2:15.

Each individuals specific duties vary with their talents and abilities.  As described by Jesus, "Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more." Luke 12:48.

The nature of each individual's duty will also vary.  We're not all called to be Mother Theresa and care for the poor on the streets of Calcutta, but we are all called to fulfill our duties.  The nature of those personal duties is a matter of discernment.  Personally, I think that this is the hardest part.  The world pulls us in so many directions.  We really need help in figuring out how to set those key priorities and tasks.

I don't think that this statement of purpose is that profound and I don't think it's exclusively Christian, but I think it's important out another specific example from Scripture because the nature of our duties has been convoluted, oversimplified or misstated so many times by members of the Christian community.

In speaking about Judgment Day, Jesus said that He will tell the righteous, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father.  Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." Matthew 25:34-36

The righteous will ask when they did those things for Jesus.  He will respond, whatever you did for someone in need you did for me. Matthew 25:40.

Jesus puts it point blank in that passage.  The only ones of us that will deserve a final, lasting reward are the ones who fulfilled their duties to their fellow man.

It's a tall order and none of us will fulfill those duties every day, but we've got to try.

"My Heart is Full of Nails"

April 18, 2011

In my job, I have a lot of conversations with people who live with serious mental illnesses.  The conversations range from those about the weather with one of my colleagues who is in long-term recovery from bipolar disorder to phonecalls from callers who are in deep psychosis and in need of immediate hospitalization.

Usually, the individuals on the other side of the conversation fall somewhere in between those lines.  The stories that they bring me vary from tragic to uplifting.  I've talked to mothers desperate to get their children into treatment before something horrible happens.  I've listened to a wife struggling to grasp why her husband committed suicide.  I've listened to people locked in their own delusions and paranoia.

All of the people who call or dorp in want answers or directions to someone that can help.  Sometimes, I can point them in the right direction, other times I have to try and decide whether to tell them that there is no one that will help them until after something tragic happens.  They or their loved one have somehow fallen into an abyss of legal redtape and scarce public funding.

The conversations can be horrible and depressing.  They can also be powerful and uplifting.  The conversations can carry messages more powerful than the greatest sermons.  Today I had one of those conversations.

The woman sitting on the chair in front of me was about sixty.  She'd come into the office while I was trying to organize some receipts.  It was forty five minutes later and she wasn't showing a sign of slowing down.  I tried to focus and not think about the waiting receipts.

The woman is a well respected professional in our community.  In our last few phone conversations, I could tell she was struggling.  She was very agitated and listed off more than a dozen local conspiracies that she had reported to authorities ranging from the Drug Enforcement Agency to the Governor.  I couldn't tell which one or parts of those stories were accurate and which reflected a major drift from the perception of reality.

The woman's eyes were wide. Her head haloed in curls.  She was leading me deeper and deeper into conspiracies, explaining how they tied together.  So far I couldn't see anything we could do to help her.  She just wanted to be listened to by someone that cared.  I tried to focus.

Then she looked up at me and said something completely out of contex from the rest of the conversation.

 "I need to forgive them."  She repeated, "I need to forgive them."

I looked up at her trying to figure out if she was talking about the same group of alleged serial wrongdoers or if I'd missed something.

The woman put her hand over her breast.  "My heart is full of nails.  I need to forgive them.  It's just bringing me down."


The conversation continued for another twenty minutes.  The woman made her way out of the office, but I couldn't get her words out of my head.  My heart is full of nails. I knew that feeling too well.  It was the feeling of a heart full of anger, resentment, jealousy, and the sting of betrayal. 

I couldn't help thinking, "How many nails do I have in my heart?" It wasn't hard to think of five or ten off the top of my head: failed relationships, bad business deals, petty disputes that escalated into something bigger, etc. 

Human beings hurt each other in both minor and major ways everyday.  While we can take steps to protect ourselves, bad things will still happen to us and often someone else's actions will be the direct cause of those bad things.

The question is how do we handle it?  Do we let our wounds fester by filling them with angry thoughts of revenge or do we heal them through forgiveness? 

It's a painful process to forgive those who have wronged us, but it's essential daily step on the path to the divine.  In the words of Jesus, your ability to access the Kingdom of Heaven depends on your willingness to forgive those who sinned against you. Matthew 5:44-45 ("love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you."); Matthew 18: 22-35; Matthew 5:22 ("whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment..")

If we cannot muster up that ability to forgive, then we have no one but ourselves to blame for our "heart full of nails."

I learned a lot more from my expected visitor than I ever would have gotten from those receipts.  Hopefully I was able to pass on something in return.

Footsteps on Beach

October of 2004

I stepped onto the beach in Florence, Oregon.  Late afternoon was turning into early evening.  The dark water of the Pacific surged against the sand.  Gulls cried from the sky above.

I wasn't quite sure why I was there.  Two hours ago, I'd found out that my fiance had left me.  Our final fight had been about faith.  She'd spent almost a year trying to convert me from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity.  Yesterday, I told her that I just couldn't do it.  I respected her faith, but I couldn't believe in it the same way that I did Catholicism. 

Today she was gone.  I looked around the empty condo and then got in the car.  She was going North away from Eugene.  I went West.  The road stopped in Florence and so did I.


I took off my shoes and socks to walk barefoot.  The sand was cool. I focused on the feel of the sand against my toes and the sound of the rushing waves.  I tried not to think about the painful irony that building into a full crisis of faith.  I believed God is love.  1 John 4:8.  She also believed God is love.  But our differences in approaching that divine love had torn ours apart.  How could that be God's plan? 

The wind whipped my face.  I tried not to think that she was probably on her way out of Portland and heading East down the Columbia River.  Eventually she'd cross into Washington, then to Idaho, and back to Montana.  She's pull onto the same street that I used to walk her down after school and stop at her mother's house. 

What would she do if I called her up and told her I'd become anything she wanted me to be: Born Again, Jehovah's Witness, or even a snappy dresser.  If God is love, wouldn't that somehow be right?

I noticed a set of footprints to my left closer towards the water.  It was the only set of footprints on the beach, excluding the ones trailing behind me.  I remembered a prayer that I began using in the spring of 2002.  I'd envision Jesus on a beach walking in front of me.  His footsteps were laid out and all that I had to do was walk in them.  As I moved through the prayer, my anxieties and stresses fell away as I settled into His footsteps - giving up my worries and trusting in the way.  In those footsteps I knew that I didn't have to understand the plan in order to get where I was supposed to go.

As I daydreamed, the stranger's footprints to my left began to drift right until they were just a few feet away from me.  I continued forward and began to realize how similar my natural stride was to the distance between the stranger's steps.  In fact, there didn't appear to be that much difference in the size of our feet either.

I remembered the prayer and smiled.  I sheepishly looked around, saw no one, then took a long step with my left foot and dropped it onto one of the footprints.  I put my right foot into the print before me and then stepped again with my left.  It was a clumsy game.  It seemed that the more I focused on getting the stride perfect, the worse I got.

I quit playing and continued to walk.  My mind move back toward theological doubts.  Then on accident, I stepped directly into one of the footprints.  My foot settled in perfectly.  It all matched: length, width, and shape.  Eery. 

Without thinking, I stepped forward with my other foot and landed in the the corresponding footpring.  Again, it fit.  I wasn't playing anymore.  I tried to calm my mind and simply let myself walk.  Each step fit perfectly into the footprints laid out before me.  The footprint and stride were both identical.

I tried not to think of the chances that those prints had been made of by someone my exact height and footsize.  They even seemed to gimp a little bit on the left leg like I do.  A statistician might have been able to come up with a rational explanation, but I'm not a statistician.

I walked for two miles in those footprints.  The waves slid onto the sand and the sky began to darken, but still each stride fit like I was stepping into my own footprint.

Somewhere in that journey, I decided that I didn't have to wrap my mind around the religious implications of my fiance's departure.  For better or worse, she was gone.  There was nothing I could do about it, but somehow the stranger's footprints in front of me had convinced me that it was okay. 

I was on the path that I was meant to be on and really in the end that's all we can hope for.


I developed this prayer after the experience.  It's still the foundation of my daily prayer life.

Jesus, please grant me the wisdom to see the path that you want me to take and the courage, discipline, and grace to take it.

The Upside of Suffering

April 8-9, 2011

For those going through a divorce, there are days when it all makes sense.  In our case, a chimp with a fifty-word sign language vocabulary could come up with a list of reasons why it is the best thing for me, my ex-wife, and our kids.  By this stage in the process, I can usually see the chimp's logic.

At other moments and other days, it feels like someone cut out my heart with an jagged sawblade.  April 8th, 2011 was one of those days.  I had to come face-to-face with the reality that she is never coming back to us.  The first word in "irreconcilable differences" is operative.  It is over.

I played with the kids that night and put them to bed.  After getting the elves down, I called a friend, did some work, and watched an episode of "The Office."  Anything to keep my head from the pillow and the sad thoughts that would keep me from sleep.

My gaze kept returning to a red book on the desk in my livingroom, "Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body."  I felt beckoned to open it up and try another chapter, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  The first 124 pages had been excruciating as it examined the divine root of spousal love.  I thought that it might help me come to terms with my new reality.  Unfortunately, the book had done nothing more than to add in questions about the divine and how it related to my failed marriage.  I was willing to take the hit on my daily Looking 4 Answers quiz by passing up the day's spiritual reading.

I went to bed about midnight.  My daughter Fiona came in around one and sometime after three she gave me a kick that brushed away any semblance of sleep.  I went downstairs hoping to find a distraction.  The laundry was done.  The house was clean.  I didn't want to turn on the TV to risk waking up the girls.

It was just me, grief, and that damned red book.  I didn't understand why it had to hurt this bad.  I'd saw it coming and I thought I was moving on.  What was the point in all the suffering?

I put aside the question and picked up the book.  The first dozen or so pages barely even distracted me from the thoughts of why my prayers hadn't been answered.  Why we'd failed so miserably when I knew that we both really tried.  The pages went along and I didn't find hte answers that I was looking for.  I knew that Creation had been broken and that evil was a reality in the world, but there had to be an upside.  I'd seen too much goodness to just fall into the pit of despair.

Why had I been called to read this book that wasn't helping?

Then on page 138, I saw it, "This analysis of our fallen situation has a sobering corollary: Because love runs counter to the logic of domination, a genuine lover is bound to suffer.  Anyone who wants to love must face the possibility of indifference and rejection; he must be willing to suffer on account of the fractured unity of human existence[.]"

The book went on to describe how suffering has a special capacity to reveal love.  Human suffering moves others to compassion, inviting us to comfort them in their sorrow.  As Pope John Paul II described in Salvici Doloris, "[S]uffering is present in the world in order to release love, in order to give birth to works of love towards neighbor, in order to transform the whole of civilization into a 'civilization of love.'"

At some level, something clicked.  I rewound through my memories of the collapse of my marriage and realized how many acts of kinship and love had been directed my way through that suffering.  Friends calling to see if we were alright.  Near strangers offering to do anything to help us get through the days.  Colleagues at both mine and my ex-wife's work displaying boundless depths of patience and compassion.  A staggering amount of support from my family.

My daughters and I are closer now than we ever would have been without the sorrow created by the distancing of a wife and mother.  Earlier that day, I'd held my little brother's new baby boy in my arms and found out that they were considering using my name as his middle name.  I don't know if they would have given me that honor if they hadn't seen how hard I'd worked to try and keep this sad little family together.

I knew that while I would not wish this sorrow on anyone.  I also couldn't deny that it had led to a powerful force of good in my life.  While I could not guess with any certainty  on what the future brings, I would feel comfortable betting that some of the further good things to come will spring from the reaction to this sorrow.  For better or worse, that is how the Divine works.

The red book's message of peace allowed me to turn off the light and go back to bed.