GUEST POST BY GEORGE LARRIMORE      

Around 7:00am on August 19, 1966, two teenage boys crept to the stage entrance of the Mid-South Coliseum and climbed inside a couple of garbage cans.  They had tickets for the concert that afternoon but they hoped to see the boys in the band up close. They knew it would be hot that day.  Not as hot as July 17th, when the thermometer at the airport reached 101.  The day was dry, the sky a bleached blue and the two boys sat curled up inside the hot, stinking trashcans until noon, when a Coliseum employee discovered them and shooed the boys away.  The boys (whose names have been lost to history) had tickets, so they did get to see The Beatles that day. And they have a great story to tell, fifty years later.

Those teenage boys were part of the phenomenon called ‘Beatlemania.’  How big were The Beatles?  When they first appeared on television, on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, one third of all the people in America watched.  In April of that year all of the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart were Beatles songs. In April of that year they had fourteen songs in the Hot 100.  And they’ve sustained:  The compilation of The Beatles #1 singles was the top selling CD of the decade between 2000 and 2010.  In March 2013 American Idol devoted an entire show to their music.

On that day in 1966 The Beatles arrived in Memphis at around 2:30 in the afternoon after a flight from Boston where they had performed at an outdoor racetrack the day before.  They paused for pictures at the Airport then went straight to the Coliseum where two shows were booked, one at 4:00 the other at 8:30.

It was just another stop on their third tour of America, playing to promote their newly-released album Revolver.  They had met Elvis the year before so there was no need to stop at Graceland.  What no one knew at the time was that these fourteen shows would be the end of The Beatles as a touring act.  In just ten days The Beatles would play Candlestick Park in San Francisco then never play for the ticket buying public again.

There was a weird vibe in Memphis even before the concerts. Their spokesperson, Tony Barrow later called it “A nasty atmosphere.  A very tense and pressured kind of day.”  There had been death threats.

It wasn’t the music, it was what John Lennon (always known for his candor) had said to London’s Evening Standard in March of 1966: “We’re more popular than Jesus right now.”  In the same interview he predicted the demise of Christianity and Rock and Roll, or both.  In America there were calls for a Beatles boycott.  Record burnings followed.  Lennon tried to talk his way out of the controversy but it didn’t work.  The media, then as now, love to build up idols.  And then tear them down.  By late summer the controversy was still front page.

Memphis, then as now, was in large part a conservative Christian city.  It was often said back then that Memphis had “more churches than gas stations.”

That August day, a fundamentalist minister, Reverend Jimmy Stroud, was staging a rally outside the Coliseum. Six Ku Klux Klan members, in their hooded white costumes, held a sidewalk protest.   Across town, at the Auditorium, a kind of anti-Beatles rally was about to begin.  The next day’s headline in the Press-Scimitar read ‘Christian Youth Rally Jams Auditorium, Even as Beatles Play at Coliseum.’  Eight thousand young people (“a happy throng”) attended.

The Memphis City Council had already put the band on notice, voting to cancel the concerts.  But that didn’t stick. Hunter Lane, Junior, a progressive member of the Council, contacted Pat Rainer, about to go into her senior year at Central High School and President of the  local Beatles Fan Club (twenty members, all girls), asking if she wanted to present the band with a key to the city.   The key, she says, was “about an inch long” so she went out and had a bigger, brassier one made.

Rainer had tickets for both shows on the “second or third row” for the afternoon show.  And, like everyone else we’ve talked to, said the music was all but impossible to hear.  Jack Chapman remembers, from his seat, that “They were the size of ants.  And there was nothing but screaming.”

Larry Raspberry, whose band The Gentrys had opened at the Coliseum for another British band, Herman’s Hermits, says nobody took sound seriously back then.  The Beatles music was played through the house public address system.  “The same one they used to announce basketball games.”

Tickets for the shows cost $5.50, about $37.00 in 2016 dollars.  And there were four opening acts. Ironically, neither show sold out.  About ten thousand attended the afternoon show, the nighttime show drew twelve thousand five hundred.

Between shows the band held a news conference where Pat Rainer was planning to give them the key.  She recalls George Klein sitting behind her and telling her she needed to make her move.   She was suddenly  “face to face” with Paul McCartney when she handed him the key. “I opened my mouth and I could not say a word.  I could not speak.”

It was during the third song in the set (If I Needed Someone) that the most notorious moment of the Memphis concerts happened.  A cherry bomb, that sounded to some like a gunshot, exploded in the crowd, injuring three people.  

Karen Young Ockerhausen doesn’t remember much about the concert (“It was all a fog”) but she recalls the explosion. “It went off two or three rows in front of me.”  She was so frightened that she immediately left the Coliseum.

On stage The Beatles clearly heard explosion, but kept playing.  John Lennon (who acknowledged, ironically, “There had been threats to shoot us”) talked about the cherry bomb incident later in a interview.  “Every one of us looked at each other because each thought it was the other that had been shot.”

According to the Press-Scimitar, writing the next day, a girl named Vicki Arnold, then sixteen, admitted she tossed the cherry bomb.  She claimed a boy standing close to her had lit the fuse and put it in her hand and she had to throw it. But she later admitted she had brought firecrackers to the concert in her purse.  She and a boy named Richard Henry Price were taken to Juvenile Court but were later released.

It has been debated for fifty years whether the cherry bomb incident made The Beatles finally decide that enough is enough.  While it may have been a factor the whole story is a lot more complicated.

No doubt, for The Beatles, performing live was not what I had been when then they were playing all nighters in Hamburg or smoky gigs in Liverpool’s Cavern Club.  By 1966 it must have felt like playing over the sound of a jet engine.  The shows, each about thirty minutes long, could not have been satisfying.   But the most important factor may have been that they were then, making music in the studio that could not be replicated on stage.  While they had already made huge hit records their best music was yet to come.  Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band was a year away.  Abbey Road, the White Album and Let It Be were not even in the gestation stage.  All innovative, all of it ahead of the crowd.  By 1967 the Beatles’ music was “all about the vinyl.”

Susan Weeks loved The Beatles so much that she and her cousin would play their albums to each other over the phone.  Susan’s parents drove her to Memphis for the concert from Clinton, Mississippi.   After dinner with her great-aunt they dropped her off at the Coliseum.  She was by herself, wearing a Royal Blue jumper that her mother had made.  Over that was a “psychedelic” tie that she had bought.  From her seat, about halfway back on the main floor, she could tell the boys were wearing pinstripe suits and could tell what songs they played but couldn’t really hear the music.  Not that it mattered.  She was there.  “I could not believe it was really them.”

Susan has been to hear Paul McCartney, now in his 70s, play the songs she loved when she was young.  She still loves the music.  So do her children.  And on a shelf in her closet she still has that blue jumper and the psychedelic tie.  She never washed the jumper because Paul McCartney “breathed the same air that was in that room” in August of 1966.

 

That's it, Kroger, you've gone too far.

Closing the Perkins store at the end of this month rips it with me.

First, you doubled the size of the Sanderlin location. I adjusted, learned the new layout, and scheduled more shopping time to board the shuttle bus from the produce to the frozen aisle.

Then you rebuilt the Plaza store, the one in my neighborhood. As long as I shop the Thunderdome on Thursday, rioting is unlikely. Even hoping the Midtown store will address critical sushi shortage in the two blocks between Fresh Market and Sekisui.

But thousands of Memphians have been buying groceries at the corner of Poplar and Perkins since, I want to say, the late 1960s. When it was Seessel's, it was the heartbeat of East Memphis.  Whether you were dashing in with your classmates after White Station let out, or indulging a late night craving for chess pie, it was the landscape we grew up with. My late friend Vic Vescovo used the black "courtesy phone" in there as an alternate home phone, dialing the house to "see if they needed anything" just as a front for seeing and being seen. I suspect he was not the only one.

Through the transitions to Albertson's/Schnuck's/Kroger, we hung in there, because we could start and finish a week's grocery shopping in under an hour door to door.

But what really kills me is parent company Delta Division's rationale, that their other stores at Truse Parkway and Sanderlin within a 1-mile radius can "better serve our customers."

Really, Kroger? Scanning the Wednesday grocery ads in a Memphis Press-Scimitar from 1966,  the groceries serving East Memphis were Carondelet, Dixiemart, Del-Farms, Stepherson's Big Star, Hogue & Knott, A & P, WeOna, PicPac, and Montesi's.  FIFTY YEARS AGO.

We might not have had sushi, but we did have some choices.

That Guy in the Bed Next to Me

      When I realized my son was using drugs - really using, not experimenting any more - I turned to escapism.
      When I wasn't crying (which was often), I was reading. In a year, I burrowed through Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and blazed on through World Without End; all five books in the Game of Thrones series; most of the novels of T. Coraghessen Boyle; short stories by Flannery O'Conner and poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Words filled up the places where fear and despair threatened to engulf me.
       What I failed to read - 18 inches away from my nose - were the signs that my husband was suffering too. "What are we doing this weekend?" he would ask, and often as not, I'd say, "Nothing."
       "I'll be glad to pick us up something for dinner," he'd offer. "What do you feel like eating?"
       "I don't care." What did it matter?
       Or he'd take another tack. "I need to go to this meeting in Hilton Head in October. Come with me."
      And I'd act like the trip was a punishment. My body might have checked into the hotel, but my head was still back home with my son's problems.
       In an odd way, it mirrored those early toddler years when a man loses his place in the pecking order, upstaged by an infant who requires all his wife's time and focus. Addicts, too, can be big mewling babies who gobble up any spare energy, and tantrum when they don't get their way.
      For a time, my husband must have felt he'd lost his son - AND his wife.
      Women are so sensible: when we're upset, we say so and we say why...volubly. I've never understood why men just can't say, "I thought I would have a different kind of son, and I'm grieving that."
      But, just as our marriage rebounded after the toddler years, we're in the throes
of a marital comeback. I diverted my paperback budget to a streaming movie subscription, and know what? Binge-watching Netflix side-by-side on the sofa is a lot less solitary than books.
   
     
       
     

The Three-Digit Phone Call

        "Hello, is this the Piper residence? Will you take a call from your son?"

      It's the psychiatric hospital calling on my adult child's behalf. The caller ID displays only the hospital's prefix in a distant zip code. Three digits tell me two things: he's safe...and he's sick.

       How is it possible that my heart can both leap and sink at the same time?
       When I see "510," I think: "Thank God!" and "Oh no!"      
       Since it's the third hospital in a year, I have learned a few things about talking to my inpatient. I don't ask how or why he got there, because his account will be unreliable. Anything he says in the first few days is likely to be incoherent, belligerent, or maudlin. His mood will be unstable for up to fourteen days. When his conversation turns to ranting and blaming, I disengage. "Why don't we talk when we're both less out of sorts?" Click.
        I don't promise anything, If he needs something, his social worker will tell me. I don't negotiate with the disease. It's not my job to find benefits, a bed or a flight.
       It's my job to keep myself from drowning.
       I read somewhere that congruence exists when one's talk, actions and feelings match up. I am a long way from congruence. As far as what my son HEARS, my walk and my talk are consistent:  when you're ready to consider a long-term treatment situation, we will help. Until then, it's yours to figure out.
       As for what I FEEL, I FEEL like getting on a plane and flying to his bedside. I FEEL like putting him in a taxicab from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River just to set eyes on him. I FEEL like sending money.
       But those actions constitute a rescue. Rescue occurs when you do something for a competent adult that they can do for themselves. And if he's competent enough to find the dope man, he's competent to find the Drop-In Center. Ditto for the medication: if he can find money for booze and weed, he can find $10 for the prescription that would keep him stable all month.
        "Act your way into right thinking" was just one of those yellowed 12-step phrases that hung on the wall at my home group...until I had to do it.  And I do mean acting: I deserve an Emmy for some of the performances I have given in the last year while my son plays Relapse Roulette.
       But maybe the congruence is starting to happen. Consider: when a hospital begins discharge planning, their first attempt is usually to reunite the patient with family, especially for youth. My son's doctor asked me to consider bringing him home. I did.
      I got very still and pretended he was arriving at the airport at 8:45 that night  - with no agreement about rehab, no ownership of his illness, no movement forward -  and I did a gut-check. (It's an old therapy trick: you make your mind shut up a minute, and listen to your gut, because it will tell you the truth.)
       And it felt...sickening. The prospect of living the last four years over again filled me with a palpable dread that made me all but swoon.
       I was polite but resolute when I emailed the social worker to decline being part of any homecoming plan.
       Poet Charles Bukowski once said he'd rather drive from New York to LA in reverse than live certain parts of his life over again.  That goes for me, too, brother. As of a few months now, the thought of hitting rewind is WORSE than the anxiety about what the next years will bring.
       Am I "acting my way into right thinking?" Or just acting? Some days it's both.

Yes, This Will Be on the Final

Jill Piper's Totally Unscientific Quiz for Addicts' Moms.

          An addict's mom has to be on her toes to get through the day. How would you handle the typical situations below?

          1.Your adult child's phone bill comes.  Do you:

                   a. Stuff in drawer with others

                   b. Divert that amount to new custom-fitted bras

                   c. Pay it because as long as she has a phone you know where she is

          2. What's the best binge food for crying jag:

               a. Birthday cake

               b. Rotel dip

               c.  Ashes

           3.     Your friend's child just finished medical school. Do you:

                a. counter that your kid is taking a “gap year”

                b. manage icy smile 

                c. say Serenity Prayer through clenched teeth

           4.     Micro amounts of cash disappear from your wallet when your adult child                        drops by. Do you:

                  a. Leave a few $1's and $5's lying around so addict won't get to your real                      money

                  b. Hide wallet in zip compartment of vacuum cleaner

                  c.  Tell yourself you must have bought something you forgot about

5.     Your son lives in a house with no utilities. Lately he's been asking you to pick him up so he can shower & use your computer to “look for work.” You:

                   a. See his number on the Caller ID and let it go to voicemail

                   b. Figure if he's resourceful enough to buy drugs, he can figure this out too

                   c. Drop everything and work on his problem

                    

                6.  My favorite film or TV show about addiction or alcoholism is:

                    a. I 'll Cry Tomorrow with Susan Hayward

                    b. My Name Is Bill W. with James Woods

                    c. Nurse Jackie with Edie Falco

                    d. The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland

                    e. Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon

                7. Who's more gratifying to blame:

                    a. Child's second grade teacher

                    b. Husband's side of the family

                    c. Self           

                 8.  Your son wants $5 for cigarettes. You:

                      a. give him $5  if he promises to go to a meeting

                      b. withhold $5 until after he's been to a meeting

                      c. buy pack of cigarettes and smoke them yourself

Self-Scoring:  The correct answer is there are no “correct” answers. ( You knew that was coming, right?) I have done “all of the above,” and a lot of them more than once. We respond to our children's addictions in a thousand different ways and employ a thousand different coping strategies. Some make us feel better for a few minutes, some make us feel worse. I have found that if I give myself permission to feel everything on this conflicting, heartbreaking continuum, I can tolerate the ambiguity of my situation. As long as there's cake.  - Jill Piper

If Only Longing Would Fix It

        While visiting New Orleans recently, I took in the World War II Museum. The experience begins with a simulation: you board a train, you feel it move across the rails, and through the use of film, you see a black and white America pass by the windows. Most of the young soldiers have never been more than fifty miles from home, and their future is uncertain.

       And their mothers' job was to let them go....into separation, danger and not knowing.

Those mothers had little expectation of getting word from their sons, perhaps a letter or card from time to time. Others would get that dreadful telegram from the state department.

       Theirs was some serious waiting.

       When I lost touch with my faraway son a few weeks ago – no phone, no texts, no Facebook – it took me to a new level of panic. As moderns, we expect to reach anyone, any time. Nightmarish scenarios multiplied themselves in my mind: he's friendless, he's jailed, he's overdosed.

How frequently the metaphor of war is invoked to talk about addiction: the “war on drugs,” “battling an addiction,” “in the trenches” and so on. And it's a comparison not without merit. Sometimes drugs feel that way to me, that my son is off fighting a dangerous enemy that is beyond my comprehension.

     Then I remembered the example of those World War II moms. I can wait fretfully, until I am paralyzed with worry, or I can contribute to the war effort . My most important job – and maybe the only job within my power - is to pray.

Loss of Focus

When my young adult son moved to the West Coast three months ago, among the wreckage he left behind was a 2002 Ford Focus. It's easy enough to shred his unpaid bills, but I have a view of his junker out my kitchen window every day. There are worse things to look at than a GM rustbucket, I guess, but this car thing has gotten personal.

For months I ignored it. But increasingly it's become a dirty, daily reminder of the circumstances that brought it to my doorstep: I moved it here during his hospitalization last July. The come-apart was cinematic in scope, featuring glass breakage, a three-day disappearance, and mystery abrasions to his extremities.

I'm not certain what triggered this episode, but I suspect pills, weed and a steady contempt for his legitimate meds had something to do with it. While he was at large, I began to worry that he'd kill somebody in his car. So I used my spare key and just took it. What would I rather deal with: someone's accident-shattered life or another of his irrational tirades? 

Last summer I had high hopes for his dual diagnosis treatment. Ditto for the three sober living situations since. But sobriety's just not in the cards for him right now. As long as he's out there, I know I can count on the disease to cheerfully refund his misery. So I plan to outwait it. 

Meanwhile, there's this eyesore in my driveway. 

How, in less than a year, does someone turn a gently driven sedan into a crackmobile? Not only was the transmission locked up, the console was ripped out, the grill fell off the front, the body has been beaten with a baseball bat, and cigarette burns have made Swiss cheese out of the cloth seats. On humid days, does the feral smell come from the rat droppings or "product" still clinging to the interior? 

Still, I continued to store his car thinking, "Pretty soon he's going to get his act together and he'll need a car to go to work," or "Once he has a job, he'll save up enough to fix it himself."

Please. As Spanky used to say on The Little Rascals, “Wish cotton was a monkey.”

It dawned on me that I myself have been as stuck as that car while he yo-yo's between treatment and relapse. I've felt unable to move forward, useless to anybody, badly beaten up and sorely in need of an interior detail. 

Last week I couldn't look at it one more day. I called and donated the car to charity. I was never so glad to see the back of anything in my life.

Removing the car opened up space in my driveway, but not nearly as much space as it made in my head. I have heard it put this way: like his Ford, I can let go, or be dragged.

Enneagrammatic

For 20 years I’ve been running a numbers game. In my attempts at enlightenment I have consulted the twelvesteps (Bill Wilson), the fouragreements (Don Miguel Ruiz), the seven critical choices (Dr. Phil), and the five people you meet in heaven (Mitch Albom). For a historical perspective, I also reviewed the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile)—the Classical Era’s answer as to why people are the way they are.

Despite these and other sincere efforts, my 19th nervous breakdown arrived right on schedule at mid-life. Always a pushover for a self-understanding scheme with a numerical rubric, I signed up for an Enneagram workshop (from the Greek prefix ennea meaning nine).
Turns out, the nine-point personality system was my One True Thing.
According to Helen Palmer,  author of The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life,  the Enneagram is an ancient map to the nine basic personality filters. While it has its roots in the monastic traditions of the Middle East and Asia, the Enneagram corresponds to the nine psychological types recognized in today’s counseling professions: the Perfectionist, the Giver, the Performer, the Individualist, the Observer, the Investigator, the Enthusiast, the Protector and the Peacemaker.
“The Enneagram gives us a very clear map of the nine different ways we fall asleep to our lives and respond to life on automatic,” explains Sandra C. Smith, M. Div. and Certified Enneagram Consultant in Asheville, North Carolina.  “When we respond to life from an automatic posture (to paraphrase Jesus) we do not have eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Smith says spirituality is as individual as personality. “Our journey to wholeness will involve a deeper understanding of both of these. Self-observation is key for personal growth and spiritual development. The foundational theological question is ‘Who am I?’”
Each of the nine personality types has a certain filter that guides one’s attention down a particular path.  Do you know someone who has to have everything “just so”?   How about the person who’s always at the center of some drama?  What about someone who requires a lot of time to themselves?   According to the wisdom of the Enneagram, each of these basic temperaments has its virtues and its vices, and no one type is “better” than any other.
Rather than offer another behavioral inventory, the study of the Enneagram goes deep toward discovering  a person’s motivation and habits of attention. If we can understand what motivates us and how our attention is hijacked by our habitual responses, we can discover the direction in which our spiritual work needs to go.
Sandra C. Smith“We really do have two selves, an automatic self and a present self,” Smith continues.  “The automatic self, when we are in it, is in lockstep with our patterns and knee-jerk reactions, and we’ve fallen asleep to life.  The automatic self sees reality through a specific filter that is shaped by our core fears and avoidances. This automatic self is really a contracted posture, both of the body and the heart, and it resists the present moment.”
Presence is the state in which spiritual growth is possible.   “If I am awake and fully alive, I am resting in the lap of the holy, and when I move into a place of essence, I can offer love and compassion,”  Smith explains. “When we are all there in our present self, type structure fades.  When I am present, it is in that place of presence that I become receptive.”
At the two Enneagram workshops I attended, I discovered I am a Four, also known in various “Ennea-books”as the Individualist, the Tragic-Romantic, or Artistic temperament.  (Because there are many teachers who have different names for each type, it’s more uniform and neutral to refer to someone as a Two or a Seven than with the descriptive nomenclature “Giver” or “Enthusiast,” which can be mistaken for a label.)
Fours value themselves for their individuality, their specialness, their originality.  At the obnoxious end, the expression of our “terminal uniqueness” can be so aggressive that its turns people off.   We are attracted to the extremes in life, and we are comfortable with despair and beauty, both our own and others’.  A phrase like “the unbearable lightness of being” makes actual sense to a Four.  What we’re not so great at, it seems, is doing ordinary stuff, like going to a job five days a week or tolerating an uneventful stretch in a relationship or task. In fact, the thought that another one out of every nine personalities is ALSO a Four is a massive affront to my Individualism with a Capital I.
At the end of the last workshop, Sandra Smith asked me, “Jill, what would your life be without drama?”  My first thought was, “Dunh,  I would cease to exist,” but I’m finding that’s not true.
When I take a step back from being a prisoner of shifting emotional states, what I find is that stillness feels pretty nice.  When the people around me report that they are finding me too intense, I try to believe them.  Drama, I’m finding at 50,  is better indulged as a  spectator sport than as a participant,  so I’m getting my intensity from Battlestar Galactica on DVD andWicked on tour.  When I’m tempted to create some chaos, I try one of the breathing techniques  I learned in the workshop and become present to whatever I’m feeling, and let that sadness or nostalgia or anger just have its voice.  The description of  a Four’s inner state “nailed” me closer than anything I’ve ever read, and I have hopes that I can move away from my investment in being seen as an “original” to a genuine connection with holy origin.  Being present is not the same thing as being seen.

My Achilles' Heel

At first the ache in my left heel was little more than a tenderness when I put my feet on the floor in the morning. I had no way of knowing this condition would impair me for nearly a year, culminate in surgery and educate me in the ways of chronic pain.
Plantar fasciitis, my diagnosis, is an inflammation of the fascia, the bands of tissue that connect the heel to the balls of the foot. On X-rays, a comma-shaped fragment of bone is the visual clue that the condition has been present for some time. The spur is not the cause of the pain, but is evidence of the body’s attempt to repair the torn fascia.
Not to put too fine a point in it, but the diagnosis came as I had just concluded a period of deep darkness and disorganization. My mother and father had both died of dementia after years of suffering; lifelong friends had moved away; a hit and run accident had cost me thousands of dollars and months of discomfort; my childhood home had been demolished.
To a chapter at the end of which I desperately wanted to place a period, plantar fasciitis came as an ellipsis…a three-point punctuation mark meaning no end in sight.
For months, pain dictated my routine. Instead of taking orders from my mind, my foot was in charge of where I went, what I said yes to, and how many productive hours I had on a given day. My physical and emotional selves were stalled at the same intersection; I couldn’t move forward and I couldn’t go back.
Our attempts to understand the origins of illness are as old as the Bible. In John 9:3, followers of Jesus ask him, “Who sinned: this man or his parents that he was born blind?” In Biblical times, suffering was commonly attributed to sin. The mind/body connection is a frequent topic on talk shows. Oprah has said that when her clothes fit too tight, viewers can accurately conclude “she’s going through some times.”
A newscaster friend of mine, who does three newscasts a day, community events and all the duties of husband and father, broke his arm recently while riding his bike. He interpreted the fracture as an opportunity to examine his tendency to overbook himself. “I took my fractured wrist as a gigantic stop sign from my higher power,” he said. “As I pondered the cast and all the multi-tasking I am prone to attempt, I took a deep breath and asked for God’s help in slowing down…It might be the best break I ever had—an opportunity to slow down and get in tune with God’s will.”
While many Christians have learned the habit of mining it for meaning when illness comes our way, I wondered if I had done anything to court the pain in my foot by being stuck in so many places.
Did the emotional vulnerability of grief and care-giving predispose me to injury, or did I feel fragile as the result of months of inescapable heel pain?
Dr. David Forbes, a founder and director of Nashville Integrated Medicine and trustee of the American Holistic Medicine Association, said the subject doesn’t lend itself to oversimplification. “To me there are two polar opposites that are frequently voiced, neither of which I find accurate or helpful:
“The standard Western notion is that it would be absurd to liken what’s going on with a patient’s health to the events in their life in any kind of causative way,” he says.
“The other pole is that there’s some kind of linear, easily definable cause and effect link that would sound like, ‘I’ve got this illness so let me figure out what I did wrong.’ That’s very popular in this kind of fundamentalist new age approach.”
Dr. Forbes favors the notion that everything is deeply connected. “At the same time there is a mystery there that we cannot fully comprehend. So we have to step very lightly in drawing too many direct linear connections, particularly to the degree that it causes tension and anxiety.”
There are common conditions that have a significant component of “here’s where I swallow my stress,” according to Dr. Forbes,. These include upper back and neck pain, stomach discomfort, lower back pain and bowel issues. “Stress always plays out in body tension and where we hold tightness. Everybody packs that differently.”
The thrust of integrated medicine (also variously called holistic and alternative medicine) is to acknowledge the relationship between not only lifestyle and health, but life circumstance.
Forbes said it can be helpful for people to connect the dots. “If they’ve come from the standard Western background they need to see if, for instance, the fact that they’ve been swallowing their feelings all their lives might be connected to their gastritis.”
But don’t blame yourself. “There’s also an enormous number of people who connect those dots too tightly and get completely wrapped up in anxiety and tension of ‘how did I do this to myself?’ That’s why I think it’s important to hold a center line that leaves open the very real mystery that we don’t know exactly why something has happened.” While holistic medicine looks at the whole person, it’s still grounded in medicine, not an emotional scavenger hunt.
“I believe there are many reasons why (medical) things happen, only one of which is that something has happened in our lives that needs to be corrected,” he said. “That’s definitely a possibility but not the only possibility. We have to honor the mystery in that. Holding that mystery always at the center of it is what’s essential to giving ourselves a break while we look for remedies. We look for links but with a very soft, gentle heart.
“My ultimate measuring stick for anything I’m going to engage in with a patient has to answer to the law of love or it’s a miss.”
Stephen Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, used an illustration from medicine to make a point in his non-fiction book about living an authentic life, The War of Art. Pressfield cites the work of a Jungian psychologist whose specialty is working with people who have been diagnosed with cancer. Once they embrace the deeper, more grounded perspective they acquire from a brush with mortality, it’s remarkable how often their cancers go into remission. Pressfield writes,
Is it possible… that the disease itself evolved as a consequence of actions taken (or not taken) in our lives? Could our unlived lives have exacted their vengeance upon us in the form of cancer? And if they did, can we cure ourself, now, by living these lives out?
It’s something to think about. But back to my foot.
I wish I could tell you I thought happy thoughts and the pain went away. But that’s not what happened. I had surgery. I guess the truest thing you can say is a medical solution led me out of spiritual situation.
The textbook of Alcoholics Anonymous contains the before and after stories of recovering alcoholics from all walks of life. One of the stories, written by a doctor, contains this passage: “When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away.”
He was talking about his problem with alcohol, of course, but he could have been talking about my left foot.
(This article originally appeared on explorefaith.org.)

Sunday Morning Rebel

Just when you think a teenager could use God in his or her life, that’s precisely when they’re likeliest to experiment with disbelief.
After years of attending Sunday school and temple, bible school and church camps, teens often need to go on a spiritual quest independent of the family. Parents can feel dismayed when they find themselves alone in the pew after their churchgoing children hit 13 and older.
According to Niles Goldstein, founding rabbi of the New Shul congregration in Manhattan and author of eight books, including Gonzo Judaism, resistance to the family’s religious observance goes with the territory of the teen years. “Parents would do well to start by recognizing these are human beings in transition,” says Goldstein. “They are smack dab in the middle of this space where questioning and rebelling against everything, including of course religion, is to be expected.”
Teens are, in fact, programmed to explore the concept of “who am I and where do I fit in,” counsels Mimi Doe, author of Spiritual Parenting and Nurturing Your Teenager’s Soul. “That’s the basic spiritual journey of every teen.” Doe encourages parents to welcome this exciting and necessary phase of self-discovery, even if it clashes with the family belief system. Instead, parents panic, saying: “This is the religion we have gifted you with, this is who our family has been, this is who you are,” Doe explains. “And the teen is saying, ‘I need to find that our for myself.’ ”
Rebellion wears many faces, ranging from “oversleeping” and indifference to open controversy.  When teens say, “Jennifer’s mother doesn’t make her go” or “I don’t get anything out of it, it’s boring,” those are statements that are accurate for them, says Rev. Eyleen Farmer, a youth minister in the Episcopal Church.  
“Underneath those excuses, they’re saying, this same tired old stuff doesn’t touch my life. When they say, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ I’ll say,  ‘Okay, tell me about the god you don’t believe in.” Often teens will describe a deity who is judgmental and punitive. “Maybe this kind of a god needs to be abandoned,” Farmer adds.
Churches fail to connect with teens at many points of entry. Girls may feel detached from liturgies steeped in masculine language. Plus, kids accustomed to the pace and pizzazz of the internet can find it difficult to engage with sacred texts such as the Bible, the Torah or the Book of Common Prayer.
And on Sunday mornings particularly, Farmer says, don’t underestimate old-fashioned sloth.

HOLY FIRES & SACRED COWS
Your child has a spiritual journey that is not yours.
Understanding that teens are on a spiritual quest is critical to navigating this passage, according to Mimi Doe: "This is not an intrinsic threat.  It’s an opportunity to create, not a divide, but a bridge between us.  By interpreting it as a betrayal, as opposed to an exploration, that’s our issue about our job—our fear that our child will turn against what we hold so dear.
"Then we set up a tug of war, and do we really want a tug of war over spirit?"
There are already many competitors lined up to hijack your child’s spiritual yearnings. Teenagers come equipped with restlessness, passion, and wildly creative energy, all components of, what Rev. Farmer calls, a “holy fire” just waiting to be ignited:
"Most of the time this passion attaches to the secular world, with the irresistible seductions of power, sex and fame. That energy and God-given beauty gets claimed and tamed by the powers that people of faith try to oppose.  We struggle to help our kids resist false gods because we struggle with them ourselves.
"Part of our children’s most intense yearning is to know that within them is some spark that is no less than love itself."
The point of a spiritual life, continues Farmer, isn’t to turn children into more regular churchgoers.  “It’s to touch some place most authentic in ourselves. That can lead to a desire to be in community, although it may not look like coming in through the front door.”
Another door into the life of authentic (rather than handed-down) faith my be service to others,  in part because it capitalizes on a component of the teenage heart already in existence—a crusading generosity and quest for justice.
Rabbi Goldstein also recommends service work as a place for teens to engage their faith. “We are commanded to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Maybe through a soup kitchen or a non-profit, kids can put in a couple of hours of age-appropriate work. The idea is to get it out of their heads and into their guts.”
When it’s time for children in his congregation to prepare for the bar and bat mitzvahs, he asks them to engage with six of the traditional practices of Judaism—not just memorization of texts.  The practices may include dietary law, prayer discipline, and ritual. “I try to make sure there’s an experiential component to this passage [into adulthood].  You can’t know what it means to be a Jew by reading a book.”
Goldstein adds, “I don’t care how their religious journey unfolds, but I would not be doing my job as their rabbi if I didn’t explore at least a sampling of some of the ancient and powerful practices of the faith.”

TO BE THERE, OR NOT TO BE THERE
You cannot dictate the contents of your child’s heart, but you can still uphold family ritual.
All the clergy represented above thought it fair to insist on teenagers attending some kind of worship. Mimi Doe calls it a “habit of reverence.”
“I think it’s critical to set aside a time that teens observe a quiet worship time, and I believe kids embrace that structure,” she explains, adding that parents may need to be open to a teen’s preference for a walk in the woods or a shift in the soup kitchen. Moreover, Doe contends that parents need to be consistent about their own commitment, and come from a position of clarity:  “It’s as true at 2 as it is at 18: ‘we believe that Sunday (or Saturday) is sacred, and in our family we go to church.’ Whatever these habits of reverence are that we have created throughout our family’s life, these habits stick with them for the rest of their lives.”
Other clergy recommend letting children attend services with their friends in other congregations.  If you want accountability, ask teens to bring you the bulletin from the service they attended.
“Perhaps the greatest argument for pushing ‘insistence’ more than ‘backing off’ is that nowhere other than faith-based places is ‘goodness’ the goal,” writes Rabbi Micah Greenstein of Temple Israel congregation in Memphis.
“In school, the goal is doing well.  Among peers, it’s popularity and material success. In society, it’s ‘happiness.’ While virtually all parents say they want their children to value goodness over popularity, material success and narcissism, there is no place other than church or synagogue whose message is ‘doing good’ versus ‘doing well.’ ”

(This article originally appeared on explorefaith.org.)

Homework Help from St. Benedict

Homework Help from St. Benedict

Written By Jill Piper

Homework Help from St. BenedictSince August 14, there has been one topic and one topic only in our house: homework.
Vocabulary drills, algebraic equations and lines of latitude blanket our evenings like an insidious London fog, choking off the air supply of the stuff that makes us a family: togetherness, entertainment and do-nothing time.
High school and middle school homework for two take a combined four and a half hours, with both parents on call until bedtime. By the time we have to start homework, our two sons have had all of an hour to unwind. I will spend the next three hours in a graceless ricochet between 6th grade science (kitchen table), freshman English (dining room), and what passes for dinner (cooktop).
Most disturbing of all is when I feel I’m in collusion with the schools for the theft of our family life. Nightly “reinforcement” (a euphemism for homework) puts me in the role of enforcer. Even if I feel the assignment is pointless, I must shepherd my son through it. I may not feel like doing it, but he’ll get the zero. That can’t be right.
Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish certainly wouldn’t think so. In their book The Case Against Homework, Bennett and Kalish report that staggering amounts of homework do not improve standardized test scores or college preparedness. Instead, excessive assignments negatively impact family life and children’s well being.
According to Bennett and Kalish, students are doing half again as much homework as they did in 1981. An Associated Press-America Online poll put the national averages at 78 minutes per night in elementary grades and 99 minutes for middle school. Three hours of homework five nights a week is a routine expectation in high schools, and the real figure may come closer to four or five for students with challenges of one sort or another.
Bennett and Kalish also expose the standard homework advice as urban myth:
Plenty of books insist that if parents just established a good homework routine (a quiet spot to work, nearly organized school supplies, a tasty but healthful snack, and an adult available to answer their questions), kids would happily buckle down and do it. But it’s not that simple. For many kids, homework is like having to do their taxes every night. How would we feel if we came home to hours of work from five different bosses?
Parents who have started science projects at 9:30 p.m. will cheer at the section titled “Cardboard, Glue and Pasta: The Homework Hall of Shame.” (The all-time low on my list was a book report in the format of a cereal box. The teacher’s instructions: if the book you read were a breakfast cereal, what would the box look like? )
A homily from some years back that made an impression on me was one in which the priest advised, “Every household needs at least one non-anxious presence.” That was the position I aspired to when I elected not to return to full-time newspaper work after my boys were born. Given my nightly angst amid the homework avalanche, I doubt I would qualify as that even-tempered presence today.
The tension of the dance between being mom and homework cop brought me to an emotional bottom recently, on the night of the mandatory drug awareness meeting at my older son’s high school. While they ate Pop-Tarts for dinner in the car, my sons heard me sob and swear all the way to the program. I knew it was neither becoming nor parental, but there was no stopping the tears. By the time we arrived at the auditorium, I had pulled myself together enough to sit listlessly through the film-cum-lecture.
At bedtime a good friend called. (I don’t know about you, but as soon as I hear the voice of someone who’s sympathetic, I can tune up all over again.) In her phone call was the best argument I have yet heard for getting in balance about the homework issue. “You don’t want them to think they can’t come to you because you’ll find it too upsetting if they have a problem.”
It had not occurred to me that my own sense of overload might be sending them a signal to shut down. Suppose they need help but hesitate to ask because it might set me off?
With the new pair of lenses my friend gave me, I went about the work of reviving the non-anxious presence.
The Serenity Prayer reminds me to accept things I cannot change, like the amount of work that comes in every night. It also reminds me that it takes courage to change the things I can, including my own attitude. How much of my resistance to my sons’ work is a reaction to forces—or other adults—I can’t control in my own life?
One of the bits of ephemera on my bulletin board is a dog-eared Christmas card. It says,
Do not fear what may happen tomorrow. The same loving Father who cares for you today will care for you tomorrow and every day. Be at peace, then, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginings. —St. Francis de Sales.
I have moved these words of a 17th century bishop from the corkboard to the dashboard.
I’ve also made some other changes. I’ve decided to forego all mention of homework until it’s actually time to do it. Within seconds of picking them up at the end of the day, I used to ask my sons how much work they had. All it accomplished was to extinguish any fleeting elation they might have at being out of school. (Truth be told, their estimates were unreliable more often than not. “You told me you could do it in half an hour!” Voilá, a conflict is born.)
Second, I’m going to limit how much I look at “Powerschool” and other such online progress reports to once a week. Monitoring the dailies keeps me anxiously focused on what’s missing and what could have been neater, timelier, more accurate and so on.
Lastly, I’m throwing out somebody else’s rulebook for my family’s mental health. The non-anxious presence (when I can locate her) is drawn to the Benedictine rule, the topic of a Sunday school class last year. The Benedictine rule suggests spiritual fitness results from a balance of work, study and leisure.
“All must be given its due, but only its due. There should be something of everything and not too much of anything,” writes Sister Joan Chittister in Wisdom Distilled from the Daily.

In the 6th Century, Benedict introduced the idea that all things—eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, working and praying—should be done in moderation and in community. The religious life until that time had been practiced in solitude by hermits living alone in the desert to seek God. Benedict’s genius, according to the Online Guide to Saint Benedict of Nursia, was “to understand that each person’s rough edges . . . are best confronted by living side by side with other flawed human beings whose faults and failings are only too obvious. . . .He understood that the key to spiritual progress lies in constantly making the effort to see the Christ in each person - no matter how irritating or tiresome.”
That, I think , is the real work of the home.

(This article originally appeared on explorefaith.org.)