It is at least seven weeks since a metal box containing files with 6 x 8 blue note cards was found in a storage room at the Temple. The blue cards were all filed neatly with rubber bands around each pile, rubber bands that if you touch, now break from age and dryness, even in this Florida humidity. Most of them are typed and they have dates and occasions, rarely titles. It has taken me till this morning to look into this file box. I’m not sure what I was afraid I would find.

They are sermons from the 1970’s. (I know some of you reading this weren’t even born.) I don’t know what is keeping me from going through them. I think it is an adequacy issues – are they good enough. It reminds me when I first began Spiritual Direction. My “director” was a Roman Catholic Dominican Sister who works at a retreat center nearby. When I started she encouraged me to write and journal. I chose to record my sense of the sacred and what being spiritual meant to me at that moment through poetry. The first time I shared a poem with her, she responded with silence. There was lots of silence in those spiritual direction sessions. But I was new and the absence of words felt strange. I jumped right in: Is it good, I asked.

Is it good? There it is. Are they good – those words typed in dark black ink on light blue cards? What has 40 plus years done to them? What have they done to the 40 years? Forty is a special number in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. It rained for forty days and nights as Noah’s ark floated back and forth across the waters. The Israelites wandered for forty years in the wilderness till they were ready to cross the Jordan. Jesus was tempted for 40 days and nights till he passed the test. And that is just for starters. Some say forty is associated with humility; some say transition/change.

I am going to read what’s in that box – there is no doubt in my mind, but not just yet. I don’t know why but it definitely is an adequacy issue. Or maybe it goes back to the symbolic number of the biblical forty. Am I humble enough to be willing to see that I have changed/grown/developed over the years and life is all about transition? Am I strong enough to recognize that maybe I didn’t? The days and the years grow you; the trials and the tests refine you; the blessings, challenges, opportunities and failures hone and polish. Am I willing to accept that some of them may just not meet my over perceived and probably falsely filled standards and some of them may just be plain dated or lousy or saturated with unrealized potential?

This has been helpful; thanks for hanging in with me. I think reading them would be a good exercise in humility. I think it will “grow” me. Stay tuned.

It’s been a hell of a year. Are they all like this or was this one just so intense and filled with so many shocking moments that we were reeling from what was happening both during and after. What did it all mean for our children, for our society, our future and us? We struggle with how to respond. We always do. Genesis tells us the story of Jacob wrestling with an unknown man ultimately forcing a blessing and a new name out of his protagonist. Jacob becomes Israel – the one who struggles with God and what it means to believe, to affirm goodness in a dark and fractured world, to stay true to our core values.

Different religious traditions describe this struggle differently. One of the words in the Muslim tradition for this process is Jihad. Yes, it can refer to a holy war against non-believers, but at its essence it speaks to the internal battle that wages within us between doing what is right living to our highest standards and doing what is expedient and giving in to our base fears. You can position this process in many different frames. Some scaffold it within a religious setting, speaking about the need to submit to the will of God or Allah or Jesus or HaShem (all basically synonyms for the Unknowable). Some frame it within a spiritual and ethical self-improvement venue articulating the need for balance and living in sync with the laws of nature and society. No matter where you are positioned, all of us struggle.

In Judaism we call it the tension between the “Yetzer Hatov and the Yetzer HaRa” – the Good and the Bad Inclination. (Don’t read too much into those words “good” and “bad”, it is way too complicated for 500 words.) Just know we are always weighing our options. No matter what the situation, we choose where to live internally. Shall I live with the fear of terrorism; shall I dwell in the resentment of my freedom of movement being curtailed; shall I sit with the frustration of knowing that Big Brother is listening and George Orwell’s “1984” is closer to prophecy than science fiction. And whom shall I blame and how shall I direct my anger?

As a nation we are in that moment right now. There are those who feed our fears and tell us that the solution is to label those who follow Islam our enemies. There is a tendency to want to find that scapegoat with talk of walls and religious identity cards.

All of that tells me that we need to acknowledge that as real as the problem is outside of us that there are people with guns and bombs who want to destroy our way of living, there is also a challenge inside as well. We need smart and effective ways of dealing with the external threat and we need a conscious awareness that there is a struggle going on a gut level between our fears and darker instincts to close down and circle the wagons and our higher aspirations to be welcoming and open to people in need and ideas that challenge. Islam as a spiritual tradition has much to teach. The word Jihad reflects that struggle. It is an internal process of choosing hope rather than fear, faith rather than despair, acceptance and understanding rather than rejecting and stereotyping those who call God by a different name. We need to be willing to learn from all our traditions and we need to live in that struggle. Out of it comes blessing.

I don’t know what to say. I have jettisoned the words I was preparing to post for this week. They pale to the events in Paris and the 128 plus people dead at this moment. Six different venues targeted. The same words scroll across the bottom of the screen as images of people running in the night and people placing flowers, lighting candles, at a make shift shrine in the morning. I could become news junky, glued to the TV and listen to experts and world leaders try to help us make sense of the senseless.

But there is no sense here. There is violence; there is death; there is evil, unspeakable evil. But we have to speak of it; we have to no choice. World leaders have to assure us that everything is being done to protect us; that we stand with Paris and understand that the attack is a clash between cultures and civilizations. As Pope Francis put it just this morning: It is part of a piecemeal Third World War.

I’m struggling to say something new or profound. Maybe that is too hard a task. There is nothing new to say. We can reiterate what we have said before: We will fight for the survival of our values; we will do everything we can to protect ourselves; we will not surrender to fear; we will not be paralyzed by our anxieties. We have faced evil like this before, not necessarily in this specific form, but there have always been enemies of our way of life that have attacked at the rear of the column, where the unarmed, the unprepared, the frail and the innocent congregate.

It is a terrible fact of contemporary life. I still have CNN on and I watch as my grandchildren float in and out of the room and I wonder how they see this through their eyes. What does it do to their view of the world? Are they able to compartmentalize it and still giggle and laugh at the silly, the absurd, the imaginary?

Less is more in this case. The Bible says it best. “I have set before you life and death, the blessings and the curse. Choose life that you and your children may live.” Fear is not an option. Isolation is not a choice. Hatred, stereotyping and collective blame do not help us deal effectively with how we go forward. Living does; loving does; affirming all that is good is our society will. Choosing to live.

I turned over in bed this morning, barely awake and did something to my knee. I heard it click, could feel it wrench and boom pain. That woke me up. I knew immediately that this wasn’t good. As I tried to put weight on it, I felt as though I needed to hold on to the furniture around the room as I tried to walk it off – hopeful I could do just that. What have I done or what has my body done to me? What about the vacation we are supposed to embark on in two days, the one with all that walking, the one I have been testing out new shoes and sneakers for?  This is not an exercise in self-pity and it is not a call for your sympathy, although if my Doctor is reading this, got room tomorrow in your schedule?  It is that fundamental truth underlying all our dreams, expectations and plans for the future that we are one second and one movement away from knowing in our bones how capricious and unstable life is.  I know, when you are young and your body is your temple you live in it with grace and confidence. And then again, our culture tells us that the more you exercise and take care of it, the more and the longer you can expect your physical being to cooperate and live up to your demands and hopes.

I am here to tell you yes, till no.

I am here to tell you don’t take any of it for granted. I know that’s hard. It’s not like you can walk down the street and sing praise for your health and abilities constantly. You have to make sure you are crossing in a cross walk; not bumping into people or things; are aware of your surroundings. But somewhere in your day, either when you wake up or go to sleep, there is a moment there. When you let your eyes see again; when you let your mind rest again. When you let go or when you hold on. There is this opportunity to say a blessing; to just say thank you for all that works in your life, even if imperfectly.

And I don’t promise that the blessing or the prayer will act as a personal insurance policy against the storm. I think it can be a change agent; I think it can make you (me) more sensitive and more aware. Sensitive to those whose health and mobility is different than yours; aware that what we have is good and needs to be affirmed and appreciated. It make us better people; it makes the lives we live in tune with love and hope and what some people call God. It can focus us on tomorrow and the day after and the good we can do and become.

I write this with ice on my knee and Ibuprofen within arms reach.  We’re going and this is what I know.  Just do it.   Find some time in your day to appreciate what you have and who you are.  I don’t care when; I don’t care how; I don’t care what language and what symbolism or ritual.  And neither does God.  Just breathe the blessing in and breathe it back.  That’s a “Hallelujah”.