Although it feels as if I am not making a dent, I have been long going through my "stuff", especially things I never use, but feel deeply attached to, and an abundance of memorabilia, to purge and simplify. I already put most of my hard copy photos in the cloud, and I included scans of cards and notes sent to me over the years, and I tossed the actual paper. I used to call this saved content of my life, before we had the electronic revolution of the last 30 plus years, "the memory drawer". Literally, it was all in drawers in my apartment. Although I believe that life on this earth is passing and not where or how it was supposed to be, and that I am (and you are) destined for eternity with God, there is this part of me, regrettable perhaps, but it is what it is, that doesn't want to have left no imprint during my time here. And so I write this blog. I have a podcast called "Ordinary Old Catholic Me" about the intersection of this life and my Catholic faith. I tell myself it isn't all about me. I just read a book about Vivian Maier, a woman whose life and eccentric connections with the world would never have been known but for the accidental discovery of her thousands of photographs that made her posthumously famous. Did she want to be famous? Given her psychological history, perhaps she would have said "No!" On the other hand, when she died all this creative material was out there, and providentially (I think) it was discovered and she has a form of immortality here in the memory of others. She had to have known that. I know that such people always fascinate me, maybe because I identify with them. And as much as I want to be known after I die, I want them to be known as well--I want to see their threads in the tapestry, and I hope that others might want to see mine, when I am long gone. In that book I just read there is a quote from Susan Sontag, "To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. By slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."
I would extend that thought to journals, and now blogs and other forms of documenting a time in lives. I read the creative remnants of the famous and the not so famous. So do many of us. When I go to an ancient place, like Pompeii, or Israel, or old, but not quite as ancient places like Oxford, and I see a sign in a quad that TS Eliot walked these grounds, I feel the connection of time, place and people. I think of it as a taste of heaven. So, there is my preface for today's entry. Yesterday, in my rummaging I ran across something I wrote just about a month after I retired. The truth is that my ability TO retire and my being (along with several others, it was not, I have difficulty still remembering, personal) compelled to retire happily coincided. It has been just about 13 years since the five minute end to my vocation of 25 years.
What follows is what I wrote just after that life event.
Lessons in an Aftermath
About seven or eight years ago, I was on jury duty at the criminal court building which in the City of Los Angeles is only about a block from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels. I found myself gravitating toward Mass during the long lunch hours, with time to spare for browsing the gift shop. On one foray, I bought a pretty calligraphic print, in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript, with the well known words of Saint Teresa of Avila, "Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you, all things are passing; patient endurance attains all things: one whom God possesses wans nothing for God alone suffices."
I displayed the print by my desk in my office where I worked as an ethics prosecutor. Immersed in reading complaints of consumers, listening to their often angry rants about wayward lawyers and my personal failure as a government employee, and worse, they perceived, as the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse, I often failed to notice it or to remember its words. I certainly failed to implement the gentle exhortation of patient endurance, time and again. I had been taking Christ under my roof in the Eucharist on Sundays and making prayerful promises about my week to come. Yet, my world was my office and its peregrinations. I did not act as if God alone sufficed. I did not feel it much either.
I had a good long run in that portion of my career--twenty-five years--about a third of a statistical lifetime. I comprehended hypothetically the dangers of being an at will long term manager in the midst of constant cyclical organizational renewal. And although I saw the signs of professional danger among several of us similarly situated, since they and I had survived before, I could again. This time, however, it was not to be. The organization was going, we were told, "in a different direction." We weren't going with them.
They say that losing a job is one of the most traumatic events in an individual's life. In the first week or so, I went through the seven stages of grief in succession and overlap. Acceptance was not coming easily.
No one is indispensable to a workplace. But I would be lying if I were to say that I was not hurt horribly to have experienced how readily dispensable I was, without regard to the passion and commitment I had brought to the work of lawyer regulation. I was both disturbed and frightened to find myself unceremoniously severed from that extended part of my life. While my colleagues and I surely did good work, as our evaluations over many years would show, we will never receive extrinsic validation henceforward. In fact, the not so implicit future and transient message of our release cannot be other than that somehow we failed. If they did not value me in that forum, I had no value.
I retrieved little from my office, my diplomas, a poster and my print of St. Teresa's words which now is displayed on my bedroom desk. I find myself noticing it a great deal. I find myself meditating on those words in a way heretofore uncharacteristic of me. I am rediscovering words of similar import by others who experienced the crucible of the secular and spiritual worlds and were irrevocably transformed leaving us their guidance for our time. Thomas a Kempis writes, "On the day of Judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done, not how eloquently we have spoken, but how holily we have lived. Tell me where are now all those asters and Doctors whom you knew so well in their lifetime in the full flower of their learning? Other men now sit in their seats and they are hardly called to mind. In their lifetime they seemed of great account, but now no one speaks of them. Oh how swiftly the glory of the world passes away. . .He is truly great who is great in the love of God. . ."
Oh the tug of praise and recognition by my peers, by my bosses, by an institution! It is still there. It will likely always be there. But finding past praise meaningless and being severed from the possibility of future praise, at least from this source, has set me in a direction of my own, fitfully indeed, but certainly.
I woke up the other day. As has been the case for nearly a month I remembered that the years of my niche legal career, painstakingly cultivated, was gone. But something conjoined the memory. I was momentarily ready to accept, without fear, the closing of that door and the opening of another where God alone suffices. Now I must pray for the Grace of patient endurance as I embark on this last phase of my life.
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Boy, are we inconsistent creatures! Well, boy, I am the queen of the inconsistent! All these years later I am still recognizing that the things of this world are transient, and yet trying to impose the memory of me into that transience. Perhaps that is the proof that we are meant to be eternal. And that heaven is the goal indeed overcoming the transient. Superseding the transient.
As I commit this old bit of my writing to this forum, the world quite literally seems to be falling apart. Our nation is in a divide not unlike that before the Civil War, a battle of philosophies, where only one can ultimately be true. Our President is afflicted with the ravages of dementia, though it remains denied by the great and powerful who tell us what we are supposed to see. He has decided not to run for a second term for President, for reasons everyone knows but is pretended to be otherwise, but allegedly he is still the Commander in Chief for the next four months. Who exactly is running our country is a matter of reasonable speculation, but is also left unspoken, but certainly they were not elected as our Constitution requires. The former President was just nearly assassinated, left unprotected by the Secret Service we all used to admire. Today, the head of that service, after a defiant appearance before a Congressional Committee, has resigned. Last week, an "accidental" glitch shut down computers all over the world. And here I am worrying about my being remembered on this earth. But it is instinctual, clearly. In a way we are all the fictional Ozymandias, the king that is only remembered because the desert dust accidentally cleared from his ornate tablet.
I just like the idea that maybe 100 years from now, someone will be sitting on this very terrace in the middle of Los Angeles, if any of our world survives, reading this entry in my blog written on this day about another day in 2011.
As to that print with the words of St. Teresa? That was moved to a wall in my living room. I am still working on the reality, the eternal reality, that God alone suffices.
