Being Stripped

Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
- John Lithgow

I turned 47 this month.

47 is not a benchmark birthday, but it is bothering me anyway.  Probably because there are other indications that I am aging and I am not ready for them.  I want to run away from my bothered-ness so I pick up a magazine. It informs me that flawless skin is in style this year.  Isn't flawless skin always in style?  I examine my skin.  Hardly flawless.  I am sporting age spots and pimples.  It doesn't seem fair.  When I was younger, I thought that by the time I had to face aging I would be mature enough to accept it graciously.  Unfortunately, some days I am not.

The magazine did not help me, but Anne Lamott, did.  In Bird by Bird she tells about Brother Lawrence, "a medieval monk who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway."  It is summer, but looking in the mirror I remind myself somewhat of a tree in winter.

Anne continues, "Dying people can teach us this most directly.  Often the attributes that define them drop away - the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness.  and then it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has really been all along.  Without the package another sort of beauty shines through."

That's it isn't it?  The perspective I need.  I am being gradually stripped, or at least I am afraid I will be stripped of some of my outer trappings.  Some people are stripped suddenly through illness or injury.  I am afraid to go without those trappings.  The stripping is necessary though, because flawless skin and a firm belly can hide some of the real essence, the real beauty, some of the Christ in me.  So, if that is what it takes, I am willing.  Or, maybe more honestly, I want to be willing but I still am not quite there. 

Hell in the Rich Suburb

Long tables fill a dining hall.  It is decorated with chandeliers dripping with crystal and mirrors edged in gold.  On the tables are large platters filled with a dizzying array of delicious food.  There are steaks and potatoes, pastas piled high, sukiyaki, golden honeyed vegetables, pink salmon, round ripe fruit, turkey roasted to a perfect golden brown, even hamburgers and big home cut french fries.  Around the tables diners are seated.  They are dangerously thin and look to be ravenously hungry.  They are stuffing their mouths with food, barely chewing it.  There is almost no conversation just the clinking, chewing swallowing sounds of people eating as much as they can as quickly as they can.  A bell rings.  The food is immediately whisked away.  The poor people around the tables groan, not in disappointment, but in pain.  They are far hungrier than they were when they began.  The rich food does not satisfy.  It drains them, leaving them hungrier than they were when they began the feast.  This is hell after all.

"It is folly and extreme madness always to be longing for things that not only can never satisfy but cannot even blunt the appetite; however much you have of such things, you still desire what you have not yet attained; you are always restlessly sighing after what is missing."  Bernard of Clairvaux

I went shopping the other day with my stepdaughter.  Park Meadows mall is located in an area filled with elaborate, architect designed, large homes.  The mall is beautifully decorated to remind shoppers of the natural beauty of the Colorado mountains.  There are technology stores, (Mac, Microsoft, and Brookstone) various sporting goods stores, even a store devoted to fancy pens and another one devoted to loose leaf tea and artistic tea pots, two of my own favorite obsessions.  The upscale clothing stores are filled with items from every designer in America and most around the world.  Each store is artfully arranged to entice the shopper to hunger voraciously for more. 

I imagine my new mentor Bernard being dropped from his twelfth century Paris into Park Meadows mall.  He is still dressed in his coarsely woven gray monk's cloak.  For a moment he blinks confusedly around.  His senses are struck by the lack of dust and the missing stench of human waste.   His eyes dart from store to store trying to make sense of the abundant array of unfamiliar things.  Then his eyes meet the eyes of a woman carrying a couple of bags with the word Nordstrom printed on the side.  Bernard's eyes brim with compassionate tears.  In the woman's eyes the wise monk sees his first familiar sight, madness.  He sees the starving soul of a person who continues to try to blunt her appetites with things that can never satisfy.  She is in the throws of her addiction though.  She would think he was a mentally ill vagrant if he approached to tell her that one more Chanel bag, or bottle of perfume will never satisfy her hunger.   He sits down beside an artificial pond with its fragrance-less flowers to wait, knowing that people in the throws of the pursuit for nothing will never listen to reason.

I would like to boast that I am immune to this insanity; that I never try to feed my soul with food meant only for the body, but it wouldn't be true.  What did I do when I got home from the mall?  I went directly to my computer and logged in to my favorite online store.  I had been bitten by the madness.  I hungered for new jeans with wide stitches and a figure flattering shape...