I've posted before about Vinnie, a mentally challenged young man I know, and from that post I'll remind the reader of two things:

(1) Vinnie speaks pretty well and gets his point across, sometimes he's really funny without trying to be, and he always speaks sincerely. He knows the value of communication and of being transparent. (2) Vinnie knows the value of many things much better than I do. Lots of times he comes to church at the same place I go. Vinnie was formed by the same Loving God as me. That's why he's my brother. I'm going to watch him more closely this year. I think he's here to be a teacher—for people like me.

I saw Vinnie at church services today. He came up to me after they were over, said "Hi," and held out his hand to shake mine. I returned the gesture, offering, "Hi Vinnie. How ya doin' today?"

"I'm doing good I was just wondering if you have any plans for lunch today—" he said. Most of his sentences are spoken with the inflection of part statement, part question.

At this, I was thinking Vinnie was trying to ask me out to lunch, maybe because I gave him a ride home recently. So I said, "No, I don't, I'm just going to go home because I have some other things I gotta go do later. I don't really have time to go out to lunch today. But thank you very much for asking."

"Ohhhh okaaaaay," Vinnie said as his eyes gazed past me, looking around the church auditorium, as if searching for something. I decided it would be a good idea to try to clarify the conversation, so I asked, "Were you wanting to ask me out to eat with you today?" At this point, I'll just note ahead of time that this is how we normal, average, blah-blah people think: Ah-hah! I did a nice thing the other day, and so I'm being offered payback! Good for you, Vinnie! That's so nice of you!

My brother Vinnie, though, he's much more clearly focused than us, far less calculating, with no ego whatsoever. His response? "Uhm no I was just going around asking the older people to see who's going out to lunch to see if somebody might take me out with them—" I smiled broadly and genuinely, and explained again that I was going out of town, and didn't have time to go eat. Vinnie told me good-bye, and continued with his quest.

The lesson from Vinnie to me here? I'm having trouble finding all the right words. It's a very clear, very simple lesson, but it's big. It's a big lesson about how we should relate to other people, versus how we actually relate to other people. I think the best way I can put it is, Vinnie wanted food and he wanted companionship. No calculations. No ego. No attachment to outcome. No strings. No reading into things. No hurt feelings. No embarrassment. Clean. Pure. Simple. Childlike. Innocent. Just basic human needs, as natural and acceptable as daybreak and nightfall. I need. You give? No? Okie. I ask somebody else.

Naah… we normal, average, blah-blah people would never be satisfied with something so uncomplicated. We can't seem to think we're alive unless we have something to be unhappy about, and somebody to blame for it.

This post has an underlying complication, which to my mind is a rather large one, that I will try to address in a later post; one that I started this past week but have yet to finish.

In the vivid darkness of God within us there sometimes come deep movements of love that deliver us entirely, for a moment, from our old burden of selfishness, and number us among those little children of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven.

And when God allows us to fall back into our own confusion of desires and judgments and temptations, we carry a scar over the place where that joy exulted for moment in our hearts.

The scar burns us. The sore wound aches within us, and we remember that we have fallen back into what we are not, and are not yet allowed to remain where God would have us belong. We long for the place He has destined for us and weep with desire for the time when this pure poverty will catch us and hold us in its liberty and never let us go, when we will never fall back from the Paradise of the simple and the little children into the forum of prudence where the wise of this world go up and down in sorrow and set their traps for a happiness that cannot exist. —New Seeds, chapter 31

There are moments in God, beautiful, mind-numbing moments, where the Love of God is glimpsed and all of life becomes crystal clear in its profound simplicity. To the human mind God is full of paradoxes, and the profound nature of that simplicity is one of them. It's an absolutely glorious thing. But true, the moment never lasts, and only the scar remains. And those scars, over time, remind us of God's Love while we are in our normal everyday living. We remember, though we cannot feel at the moment, that it answers everything. We hold onto enough of our memory of those moments that our view of life is forver changed. Even though we fall back to our weakened states of self-absorption, we never forget that Love rules all, and that we are on this earth to be part of that Love.

The souvenirs brought back to our house this weekend include a book of poetry and a poster from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial. I was greatly touched that my wife and daughter would pick these two gifts for me. I like to think that, perhaps, they say something of what I try to stand for in life; that even though I am weak and frail and full of selfishness, I carry the scars and do not forget their pain. The poster is of a very famous quote by Martin Niemoller, a quote which exists in many variations:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . and by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Niemoller is a very controversial figure because in the 1930's he held anti-Semitic views. To be clear, I know almost nothing of Niemoller's life, but it remains that this quote (or rather, versions of it) appear on walls at both the U.S. and New England Holocaust Memorials. For good or for bad, Niemoller has become somewhat of a hero in relation to the Holocaust. It may be that Niemoller serves as a perfect example of his poem. He didn't speak up for those who were "different" from him, and in the end the system caught up with him—a lesson we should take to heart, I think. Do not believe that we stand alone, cherished and special, while others fall by the wayside. Hatred, fear and insanity are rarely satisfied in erasing only one or two "different" classes of people. Once a single class is done and gone, those who hate have nothing left to do, no one left to hate, until they can invent the next class that is not quite enough like them, and so must be eliminated. The poster I was given notes that the Nazi party created colored symbols to denote each class of people they needed to eliminate in order to cleanse society. Among them were the communists, the socialists, the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the emigrants. Should this list give us pause? I think so. I think a list, period, should give us pause.

In those moments where one touches the Love of God, when one glimpses briefly through the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, one learns that God's love is about a Oneness; about a Love that gathers us one to another in God and makes us all one in God's presence. To divide humans into groups, factions and classes is the antithesis of Loving them. A Christianity which divides and casts out, therefore and quite clearly, is really not much of a Christianity. Yet, to say so is to cause division, and here is where I will work on the complication—another day.

A year or two ago, I started writing a post about falling in love at first meeting. You know, you meet somebody, and in just a minute or two, you feel a connection in your soul, and you think, "I love this person." Well, the reveal at the end of the post was that I was writing about a little girl who was about six years old at the time, and who happens to be blind. She calls herself "Yozzie," although I have no idea what her real name is or how I'm supposed to spell her preferred nickname.

Whenever I'm in the correct mood, which is to say I'm not in a hurried and/or self-absorbed state of mind, I try to kneel down when I talk to little kids. I like to be on their level physically, because it helps to put us on the same level in other ways. They know I care enough to be right there with them on their terms, and I'm forced to be so. (Try it sometime. It works.) So on this particular day, I knelt in front of this little blind girl, we talked for a few moments, and she held out her hands to touch me. She even asked first, which I'm going to guess is a point of etiquette she'd been taught. So she placed her little hands on my shoulders, my chest, my neck and the sides of my face. Maybe she wanted to know what I looked like in her mind, or maybe she was just trying to remember me. Or both. But, what really amazed me was how much different it felt to be touched by this little blind child than to be touched by anybody else. I really, truly felt like she was seeing me. It was one of the most careful, thoughtful, gentle touches I've ever experienced. It was beautiful. I doubt I'll ever forget it.

I have a very, very soft spot in my heart for the way that life always strives to find a way to keep living; to make the most of whatever it has been allotted in life. I've written about it before, and I hope to write more about it in the coming months. But for the purposes at hand, I'll just say that it is all the more moving to me when it involves the youngest among us, those who in the prime of their innocence and hope find their own paths in life—sometimes more meandering by necessity, and perhaps sometimes more direct than the rest of us; distracted less, I suppose, by the trivial and mundane. And so, I've summarized two posts here tonight.

Before leaving with those two summaries, I'll end with a third. I want to say thanks to the life of Jeff Healey, who died this month at the tender age of forty-one. More than forty years earlier, Jeff lost his eyes to a rare ocular cancer. A blind toddler, Jeff went on to learn to play the guitar, starting at the age of three. Whether he was self-taught or not, I don't know, and can only guess. He learned to play famously, play well, and play uniquely—with the guitar resting flat on his lap. To me, it's one of those seemingly simple things—a thing about innocence, about hope, about chasing what you love, and about how life finds a way for itself. ( If you want to see Jeff play, here's a cover I like.)

Jeff, thanks for the music, man. And Yozzie, wherever you are, I wish you the greatest of life's joys. I pray that you find a way for yourself; a wondrous path that shines brightly and beautifully in the lives of all those you touch. Meeting you was a gift, and I love you.

I couldn't resist the reference to pop culture. And by the way, this post has no relation to the previous one.

I just made my usual late-night run to X-Mart to buy "stuff," and thought I'd make a quick post now that I'm back home.

I doubt my acquaintance Vinnie will ever read this blog. But if you do, then hi Vinnie. I'm glad you stopped in.

Vinnie is a young man doing the best he can. Sometimes I see him gathering carts at X-Mart, wearing one those fluorescent vests and getting a little help from that cart-pushing robot-thing he calls "Buddy." Sometimes he's cleaning the tables at the little dining area inside X-Club. He works hard; he's always sweating and doing his job with gusto. He's glad to have a job. He knows the value of feeling like you're doing your part.

It takes Vinnie a long time to count change when he does his own shopping, and he doesn't have enough money to buy anything you'd call "stuff." He buys food and once in a while some clothes. He knows the value of a dollar.

Vinnie can't drive a car. He isn't qualified. So he rides a bicycle. He knows the value of transportation. He wears his helmet. He knows the simple beauty of being alive.

Vinnie speaks pretty well and gets his point across, sometimes he's really funny without trying to be, and he always speaks sincerely. He knows the value of communication and of being transparent.

Vinnie's big dream, last time we talked, was to someday have his own trailer house with air conditioning and a refrigerator. He knows the value of a comfortable place to call home.

Vinnie knows the value of many things much better than I do. Lots of times he comes to church at the same place I go. Vinnie was formed by the same Loving God as me. That's why he's my brother. I'm going to watch him more closely this year. I think he's here to be a teacher—for people like me.

May God richly bless the special people of the world. They, like children, are the precious ones.

I don't know how long the link will be active, but this news story is about one of my cousins. A year or two before he died, David told my mom that there were only two men who had ever shown any constructive interest in his life. So my mom asked who they were, and he said one of them was my dad. Pressing further, my mom asked what my dad had ever done to merit the complement. "Once when I was little, I was trying to build something, and he showed me how to hold a hammer the right way."

I was told this story yesterday, and I can't stop thinking about it. Out of thirty-five or forty years of living, a guy remembers five minutes of "how to pound a nail" as a meaningful memory of feeling valued.

Kind of makes me reconsider all the moments I interact with everybody else. I get so lost in the past or the future; a past done and gone and a future which may never come, that I forget life is happening right now in this very moment—that life is happening only in this moment. And—my God—how the most brief, most simple of things can forever mean something to another soul.

Think about it. I know I will.