Lying on this lounge

Outside the university pool

On this sunny, gentle breezy, and lazy June day,

I feel the warmth and grace of Your benevolence.

I am reminded of teenaged lounging in the bosom of my grandparents' yard.

The sun like this, the breeze like this.

I was so aware of the benevolence of family.

Dad's folks just next door, Mom's folks here, the birds, butterflies, and I

With not a care, lying here in the sun, trying to get tan.

There are these days,

When all care is distant,

All wariness gone.

You are so good, good God,

And we so prone to forget the ease with which You grace us.

Those days in Nanny's yard I was full of the love of family.

There was no death but my own to contemplate.

And yet I was aware of how much Christ's cross

Had won for me.

These days, long since, when so many have died and I have lost so many friends and family to death or distance, I often contemplate the losses more than the gains of life.

But today I remember the fatherhood of it all.

I recall the words of John's last discourse,

Where Jesus says, I and the Father are one...and...

May they all be one as You and I are one, Father.

So many times have I wondered at those words.

Today I have a new thought about how You yearn for us to be one.

I'd had yearnings in years past for all my loves to love one another.

Those dreams, long since dashed by distance

And the self-absorbed contemplation of my abandonment,

Reawaken in this sunny lazy afternoon.

I realize in my bereaved bones that You, Lord, and Your beloved Son, in the union of the Holy Spirit, bask in the union You have together, that like my grandparents all gathered now to You, You baste your beloved creation with the buttery blessing of sun and stories, drenching doomed time in love and dreams of mindless benediction. Will eternity be like this, will all my loves be found within the sacred circle at your universal poolside, lounging in Nanny's yard? I hope so. Happy Father's Day. Thank You for this.

There were many suitors

Penelope had nothing on me

When I was younger

prettier in a way

somewhat sexy

and promising potential for power,

...over what I don't know

but people wanted to be around me

a lot.

Teaching and preaching brought me kudos and command of my own coterie of acquaintances and

Some few friends,

Love's loyalty learned only at time's telling.

Younger still, yet dumber in so many ways,

Like Telemachus, unaware of my potential for dominance,

I was quite unsure of myself,

Feeling like an outsider all the time

Someone un cool,

A wallflower not only ignoring the dance but also unaware there was one,

Ignorant of the games all my jock cousins played,

I felt unacceptable, unlikable. Unnoticeable,

And yet in prayer I found this Friend, more unacceptable than I, living His unacceptable life as a Jew in Roman Palestine, He had more potential for power, more potency in fact, as He made miracles, curing incurables, sighting the blind, hearing the mute, giving voice, sight, hearing, even life itself. But He had enemies.

I found much meaning in Him and reveled in my learned worth won from His attentions. I could see the value in loving my neighbor and found within wellsprings of care for others and well-being in myself.

I became loveable and loved so freely, so totally, always enjoying the new because she or he was beloved of God, redeemed also by the blood of my Beloved Friend.

It was quite a good run,

Quite a life I was leading.

With some success and some entourage

I began to be not irrelevant to my peers but threatening.

It became important to put me down, to crush my enthusiasm, to denigrate my successes,

But then I found lovers tiring

Audiences going deaf

Admirers diminishing

Patrons going blind

Beloved family and

too many friends

dying

not only orphaning me

but abandoning me to the unappreciative murmurings of detractors.

I find myself believing the detractions.

I avoid getting to know new lovers

I do not enter the fray, meeting new colleagues, new clients, new patrons,

Or new congregations

Because I trust almost no one

I expect to be a boring presence.

I'm afraid that this is the curse of old age. I have stumbled into it finally, Decades late, still, I am complimented on looking young or good but I know the truth that touches even the sarcophagus of Agamemnon, Who once was powerful, now lies rotting into insignificance. I relinquish the battlefield too soon

to any Trojan.

My scars may never be licked by the Odyssian dog .

I may never be found the true potency in the palace,

The reward of Penelope's patience.

So , where is my reward for living for the Lord?

Actually I find that I know myself a sinner a person of failed Faith. In my grief over the loss of dead and dear ones, and former friends, who've drifted unexplained from my boat's side across the wine dark sea into a distant and unheard of stygian fantasy, a Narnian world of lions and wizards.

I miss so many and I fear their non-existence more than my own.

There is rot at the bases of Hope's colonnade.

That old rugged cross may be forever vacant,

Never to be carried

By the Living Lamb, for me.

And yet, I cannot abandon Him who bleeds

Even now with me in my broken body, in my empty nest, He bleeds and breathes His Spirit over my very wounds. I am alone and yet,

Even now,

I marvel at His steadfast gaze from the gallows of Calvary across the

Chasm of my sinful fearful inquisition,

From the upper room handing me bread and wine and

Saying, Take eat, drink THIS is my Body, my Blood.

It is into the eternal entropy He falls.

The falling away that is my inner self mimics that one.

And falling with me,

He dies

And I rise again,

Tentatively stepping into the garden,

Aware that some nurse will recognize Ulysses,

Some Mary will try to kiss Him here again and I will

Be again at home.

With Him.

Hope for heaven is a mythological reality, true,

But I cannot think it only exists in the misguided collective unconscious.

There is too much still small voice.

He is alive.

There is the possibility of wisdom in old age which cannot be buried forever in self love.

MARANATHA.

In so many bible stories You are the God of glory, establishing a kingdom,

speaking to prophets and shepherds who enter the fray fighting, winning.

Why is it so hard to see the truth of divine intervention in the mess we make of

things or to understand how the will of God is working in the world?

A young man, I saw the Church, a beautiful mansion right out of John's Gospel. Jesus

spoke of many mansions in His Father's house; I thought the Church one.

The promises of angelic protection over and prophetic insight into what we do and

how we should act, produce many mansions. They are not the Kingdom.

These paintings are about my looking for God's kingdom in the Church:

Invitation, Collaboration, Communion, Contemplation, and Transformation.

In each there is a person, a heroic person, looking to the great house, the Church,

considering it a foothold on the planet for God's kingdom of love.

But the glory of the golden rose is harbor to a brown hermit lying, hidden with a

black widow, perfidious bureaucrats preferring profit, power, and pride .

The path from youthful hope brought this pilgrim to exhaustion, intimate with

frustration, 'midst Catholic colleagues proffering personal programs.

Embracing my own angels and devils, I focused finally on Jesus dead, risen, calling

the penitent pilgrim to road's end again, looking far out and deep within.

At the precipice I find openness to the universe and to a universal real presence

pulsating in mysterious energy, far beyond my ken. I am keen on it, intent.

The hero finally ignoring the City of God in brick and mortar, paying abject attention

to the flitting infinitesimal presence accompanying him, waits.

In the end the Church is embroiled in a world of political hopes, philanthropic needs.

She does good, avoids evil, and often misses the mark. She's not the kingdom.

In the real Kingdom of the heart, we look beneath failures, see beyond all

appearances, delight in the smallest instances of God's beneficence, and

as penitent pilgrims, we walk, waiting for wisdom, watching what seems

appropriate, wandering where God's Breath in small stillness inspires.

Dennis McNally SJ

24 July 2010