Sharing Epiphany

Today is Epiphany, celebrated as Christmas by some and as a day of wonder and awe by others. I'm one of the latter. For me, this is a day to celebrate the aha moments of life.

Which brings me to an op-ed I read in yesterday's Washington Post. In it, James Naples, a surgeon and medical residency program director, shares how he conquered the yips, an unexplained loss of skill that affects high-performing athletes, performers and, apparently, surgical residents. 

Early in his training, Naples explained, he began to struggle through even basic procedures. "My head had gotten in the way of my hands." Then he met a new senior surgeon, Dr. E., who in the three minutes it took the two of them to scrub for an operation, totally changed the younger surgeon's trajectory. The older doctor was warm and open and approachable. There was only one thing to avoid doing in the upcoming procedure, he said. "Everything else is fixable." 

The effect on Naples was profound. The younger surgeon realized it was okay to make mistakes, that it was part of the learning process. Now he's mentoring new doctors, encouraging them to share their fears and doubts. '

I'm not a surgical resident, but the lesson that "all mistakes are fixable" resonates with me, too. "What thing worth doing — in our jobs, families or communities — is not susceptible to the folly of perfectionism?" Naples asks. "With honesty and empathy, we all can help others find peace with fallibility." I'm grateful that Naples had his epiphany and shared it with the rest of us.

(A photo not of surgery but of an Epiphany surprise.)

Sacred Journey

When I read the obituaries of Frederick Buechner last week — he died August 15 at the age of 96 — I wondered how I had missed him all these years. He is the author of 39 books — novels, memoirs, sermons and other nonfiction — and is known for encouraging people to listen to their lives. 

"Listen to what happens to you everyday," he said, because it is "a kind of praying." The "hurly-burly of life" often drowns out that sound, he continues. But for that reason, we must pay even closer attention.We find our purpose, he wrote, in the place where "deep gladness meets the world's need."

Some spend most of their lives looking for this place, this intersection. Others find it early on. And some, of course, never find it at all. 

But it's good to learn about one who not only found it for himself, but who took the time to share it with others. I've already ordered one of Buechner's books, the library being short on his work. The Sacred Journey arrives next week. 

Trust Exercise

It's 24 degrees this morning as I take Copper for his early morning walk. He and I have a pre-dawn rendezvous. He wanders into the living room fully expecting me to be there, because, of course, I usually am.

It's not important to him that I'm trying to get some writing done, or some online shopping, or that I'm checking out bathroom fixtures or insurance questions or any other of my oh-so-human preoccupations.

He wants the crisp air of winter in his nostrils, the crunch of frost-stiffened grass under his pads. He wants to trot a few houses down the block as if he owned the place, then trot those same few houses back to the sure promise of a yummy breakfast and a warm house.

His trust is pure and complete. I could learn something from it.

Appreciating Advent

It's the first day of December and the first Sunday of Advent, and I've been trying to remember the last time we had such a tidy confluence. With Christmas on a Wednesday, that means each Advent Sunday will have its due, too.

I love Advent — the medieval-sounding hymns, the plain purple vestments, the wreaths and calendars, the air of joyful expectation.  Advent is about preparation, and I love that, too, because it reminds me that there are things worth waiting for and they are all the sweeter once they arrive.

Advent is often lost in the shuffle, folded into the Christmas season, but it has much to offer on its own. It reminds us to plan and anticipate, to watch and wonder, to read and reflect — and to do all of that secure in the knowledge that what we search for we will find, what we long for will be given to us.

Transcendence

A friend sent me an electronic Easter card, the kind that comes with music and motion, with sweet scenes of birds and bunnies.

Only this one played the powerful "God So Loved the World" by John Stainer.

I've heard this piece before and marveled at it, but something about the animation of the dove — a pure white bird flying heavenward, spreading flowers in its wake — and the dynamics of this hymn, the great swells of its sound, the ache in its harmonies — spoke powerfully of the mystery and the promise of this day.

I write these words in the office, a room I don't often sit in this time of day. I don't know why not — because it sits in the front of the house, the one the light touches first.

It is not just Resurrection we celebrate on this day, but transcendence.

Passage to Spring

Lent arrives early this year — before Valentine's Day. This is cruel timing for those of us contemplating a 40-day ban on chocolate.

But if it gives us an early Easter and an early spring (not that those two necessarily go together ... ) then bring it on.

Meanwhile, the wind is howling in from the west and roads are slicked from last night's freeze. This will be the coldest week of the winter. A fitting time, then, to begin a spiritual pilgrimage, a journey, a passage.

I always remind myself that "lent" comes from the word "to lengthen." Seen this way, then, lent is a passage to spring. It is a time of lengthening days, of birds on the wing. A time of promise that soon we'll be green and growing again. 

Fighting Fear

I try to think of something else but it's hard not to. I have a daughter flying into Dulles from West Africa this weekend.  She's not arriving from one of the affected countries but from somewhere close. And while at this point the extra scrutiny (temperatures taken, isolation if necessary) only applies to passengers arriving from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, I wonder if officials will widen the net, start checking those arriving from any West African nation.

It's fear at work, I know. But fear is contagious, too. And just as there's no vaccine for Ebola so also there is no immunization for fear. Information doesn't help — it's hard to read a newspaper or watch the news — but ignorance is no better.

One of the most poignant news programs I've heard about the epidemic described what doctors and nurses do in Liberia before starting their shifts. Here they are on the front lines, dealing with Ebola patients every day, wearing substandard protective gear and working in primitive conditions. And what do they do before anything else? They stand in a circle, they pray and they sing. 

If they can sing, so can we. Sing in their honor. Sing for their safety. Sing until the fear goes away.

Radiant Way

For me it's a return to work after two weeks off — a good day to celebrate the Epiphany, a feast that marks revelation, the manifestation of the divine and, in the words of James Joyce (courtesy of the Writer's Almanac), the "sudden 'revelation of the whatness of a thing,' the moment when 'the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant.'"

The workaday world sorely needs some radiance, some shining representation of its meaning and purpose.

So today, on my return, I will look for it.

On Faith and Coincidence

I just realized (in my typically math-challenged way) that yesterday, the first day of 2014, was also my 1, 200th post. A pleasing synchronicity between calendar and art — even more enjoyable because I was unaware of it until today.

I like to think that there is order in the universe, that such coincidences don't happen randomly. What purpose could there be in this one? Only this: that any coincidence heightens my belief that there is meaning in creation.

Which leads me to ponder passages from Marilynne Robinson's essay "Freedom of Thought."

For almost as long as there has been science in the West, there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists among us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be "explained," associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  ... 

If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

 Being grateful for the "endless brilliance of creation" — and believing that it is a creation — these are thoughts I take with me into the new year. That they were triggered by a "random" coincidence, so much the better.