Sometimes the beach beckons me to the serenity I find at the shore, so one winter day I went to walk the desolate beach at Smith Point to watch the tide coming in. The beach was isolated, except for me and one other man who was standing on the shore, yelling at the tide, “Come on! Bring it on! I dare you! Come one inch closer and you are going to get it, buddy! Come on! Bring it on! Just try it!”

The man was clearly disturbed and so I walked close to the dunes and as far away from the shore as I could in order to avoid him and I continued my walk. Some time later, when the tide was fully in, I walked back down the beach. The man was no longer there and the place where he had been standing was now completely covered with water.

Later that same day, I returned to the beach, longing, once again, for a sip of the serenity that the beach provides. And once again, the beach was isolated, except for me and the same man who had been there earlier that day. Once again, he was standing on the shore. But this time the tide was going out and he was yelling and taunting the tide, “Don’t go! Please don’t leave! I’ll do anything if you stay! Please, don’t leave me!”

His threats and taunts could not keep the tide from coming in; and his pitiful pleading could not keep it from going out. He was powerless over the tide, and he lacked the serenity to accept the things he cannot change, and he looked like a madman railing against the inevitable.

I had come to the seashore seeking serenity; he had come seeking change. But I did not find serenity, and he did not find change. I got into my car to return home, thinking about how the had allowed the tide to disturb his day, and I had allowed him to disturb mine.

How many times do we suffer needlessly because we lack the willingness to accept the things we cannot change? Like trees refusing to bend with the wind, we snap. Like a tide coming in and lapping against our expectations of the way we want them to be, and in our refusal to accept the changes that life brings, we lose or discard the ability to experience the serenity that acceptance affords.

Allow me to tell you another story: We have all heard stories about how, periodically, whales or other sea creatures beach themselves for some unknown reason.  Well, a man was walking the shore one day and it was littered with dead and dying starfish. Periodically, the man would stoop down and pick-up a starfish and toss it back into the ocean. Another man was watching him and shouted, “There are thousands of starfish stranded on this beach. Your efforts are well-intended, but they won’t make a difference.” The strolling man stooped and picked up another starfish, tossed it back into the ocean, and said, “It makes a difference to that one.”

Clearly, this man knew that he was powerless to completely reverse the dire situation; but he had the courage to change the things he can, no matter what an onlooker was shouting at him from the sidelines. Many times, when confronted with a situation over which we feel powerless, we choose to do nothing. Our goals and dreams seem like dead and dying starfish on a beach and so we walk away. We may take Jesus’ saying that “the poor will always be with you” and seize that as an opportunity to do nothing about it. And yet, we sometimes can muster the courage to rescue at least some of our goals, dreams and visions that have been beached and we place them once again into nourishing water and they live again. We support the soup kitchen at  our church ~ the Congregational Church of Patchogue ~  knowing that ~ on a world scale ~ our efforts won’t put a dent in poverty and hunger and therefore we can’t make a difference. But as we pass a single bowl of soup to a single, hungry person ~ we know that, like a starfish returned to water; it makes a difference to that one.

The “courage to change the things we can” portion of the Serenity Prayer reminds me of an old saying:  “Don’t let those who say it cannot be done stand in the way of those who are doing it.”

“The wisdom to know the difference” portion of the Serenity Prayer reminds us that wisdom is a gift from God. The prayer asks that God grant us the wisdom that we cannot attain on our own.

No wonder it is so famous and prayed so often by so many. The small and narrow Serenity Prayer was conceived in a little stone cottage in Heath, Massachusetts by theologian and professor at my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary in New York, Reinhold Niebuhr, around 1932. The Serenity Prayer was printed on cards and distributed to the troops by the U.S.O. It had also been reprinted and distributed by the National Council of Churches. It became more widely known after being brought to the attention of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1941 by an early member, who saw it published in a New York Herald Tribune obituary.

The popular version of the Serenity Prayer is not the entire prayer. Here it is in its entirety:

“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen.”

My daughter, Maya, was killed in a car crash ten years ago today at the age of six. So why am I telling you? Sometimes (maybe always) I need a witness to what I am going through. It is like, in some ways, you make me more real. And in some ways, you help to keep her from fading, fading, fading slowly away. Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian season of Lent, a time of introspection, atonement, fasting and prayer. And then arrive those words… those beautifully horrible and yet somehow comforting words… “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Now a little about Maya: In most respects, she was ordinary. She had a favorite color; never went to bed without a stuffed animal; favored some foods and avoided others with great fanfare. She liked to draw. Unordinarily, she died at age six, before her goal of crossing the street, unescorted, to retrieve the mail was realized. She loved Elvis Presley, his gospel album in particular. She was more sharing than perhaps a child her age should be, I suppose. She noticed everything, taking all of it, all of it, all of it, in. I was so eager for the incessant talking to begin in about a year… a year that never came.

I sometimes knocked on her head, checking to see if the melon was yet ripe. “What’s going on in there?” I asked, as she shook her head back and forth, not willing to tell me.

I knew how to love her, and I did so very well, up until the day she died at the calloused hands of a, at the very least, distracted driver: an ugly, violent, fiery end to hope and promise.

After her death the Christians piled on me with their well-intended but rather useless spirit-speak of distant worlds and eventual reunions. I know they meant well. But I didn’t want to see her eventually in heaven. It was past dark when I was called to the hospital, given the news, and identified her body. She was supposed to be in bed, not dead. The sun had not yet risen when I donated her eyes and heart to other children in need of them.

I feared sleep and tried to stay awake forever because I somehow knew that I would awake and suddenly, shockingly, realize that she was gone… gone?… what?… and I would remember that I had donated her eyes and heart and that  one mere day earlier all of these thoughts would have been unthinkable… and unnecessary. And then her death would live all over again… which it did, and does, on such days as this Ash Wednesday, Lenten, tenth anniversary of her death.

Sweet sixteen. Ashes to ashes.

She never visits me in my dreams. Sometimes I plead with her to do so. Silence! Absence? Will there ever be a time when I can visit her without sinking? Imagine falling off of a building and never, never, never reaching the ground… just an eternity of wailing and flailing. That is how I live, but only sometimes now. Things are better. But I resent that I know about the eternal falling, and I hope you have no idea what I am talking about, or maybe you are in the same club and, if you are, God help you.

It passes, thank God, until it comes back again.

Strangely, I am doing okay. So are the other lives that the driver destroyed without even an apology or a traffic ticket. No blood was drawn to test the driver and therefore no charges were brought. but the blood of two of my children was splattered on the streets. My son, you see, then ten, was in the car. He survived and is in college now. Both of us are forever changed, of course. But I realize that despite the loss, one was taken and one was spared… yes, one was taken, but one was spared. Thank God, my daughter was taken but my  son was spared. And he is a good boy. Handsome, intelligent, well put-together by the plastic surgeon and the psychotherapists and the church. But he was also  a child without a childhood… hideously mature at  age ten… stripped of a sense of safety… but his life was spared… and he is ~ yes(!), he is ~ doing as well as can be rightfully expected. With him, I am most proud. And I am also most sorry that I must admit that, when Maya died, I vowed to be the best provider for my son that any parent could ever be. But I also, I now know, encased a part of my heart in cement. My  love flows somehow less freely. It never quite reaches the whole of me. It is simply not safe to love as fully as I loved before… before… before…

I don’t know when, if ever, I will be able to remember Maya without falling into pain. But I do know that if I had not known how to grieve ~ I would be dead. Grief washed my daughter’s blood off of me, and replaced it with light. The problem is, at the moment, the light is too bright for me to be able to see. Soon the fog will roll back in and… and… I will go have lunch! And walking to the restaurant in wintry New York, I will feel the cold air blow through the holes in me. And I will probably order lunch box number 3 with brown rice and miso soup. And I will call my surviving children tonight. I will lead my congregation in the beginning of the season of Lent. And I will trust God to do for me what I simply cannot do for myself. And strangely, mysteriously, and, dare I say ~ perversely, I will know that life is good.

Sometimes silence is as much of a weapon as a sword. Judging by the response of national news networks and social media ~ the lousy weather on the East Coast is more startling than the beheading of 21 orange-clad Koptic Christians by twenty-one black-clad ISIS terrorists with matching knives on a beautiful beach in Libya. The cinematography was flawless. The orange-and-black theme was brilliant. And the choice of a beach rather than a prison was no coincidence. What, after all, are  our associations with the beach: fun, sun, nature, picnics,  etc. And now the staging has changed our associations to 21 severed heads bobbing up and down on the beach in a tide red with the blood.

We all now know what it feels like to be paralyzed by evil. We don’t know what to do about it and so we turn to such things as a roast beef sandwich on a wintry day for comfort. We turn to a myriad of ways to deny and ignore such atrocities, of which there have recently been many. At least it didn’t happen here (wherever your “here” happens to be ~ excluding, of course, at  the moment, North Carolina). And at least a shootout in Paris at a kosher deli or a cartoon office is something to which we can relate because a fierce, tactical police and military response could be staged and executed. And at least the killer of  three young Muslims in North Carolina is now handcuffed and also wearing an orange  jumpsuit. But we don’t know what to do with 21 severed Christian heads lying on a beach that we cannot name or recognize.

My fear is not ISIS physically coming to my part of Long Island or your community in who-knows-where. They don’t need to. They are already here. In some respects, ISIS and other terrorists knows us better than we know ourselves  ~ and so they do not need to come or go anywhere in order to conquer us, or at  least a part of us. ISIS knows how to produce state-of-the-art videos of mass murder; or the single victim murders of people being burned alive in a cage that are filmed from multiple camera angles ~ and they apparently know how to produce feelings of numbness and impotence in many of us as well. But not all of us…

And so, on Wednesday, February 25^th at 7:00 in the evening, there will be an Interfaith Gathering of Empathy and Solidarity at the Congregational Church of Patchogue (Long Island), 95 East Main Street, in response to the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians by 21 ISIS terrorists; the attacks on a kosher deli and the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris; the killing of a Muslim pilot burned alive in a cage; the recent (still under investigation) possible hate crime killing of three Muslim youth in North Carolina; acts of terror in Copenhagen; and other deplorable events that cry out for a spiritual response amid the military, police and other political responses. This service does not endorse one religion over another; and is inclusive of non-faith communities and traditions as well. We have been presented with a great opportunity to transform tragedy into solidarity. A spiritual response by religious and secular people and groups to affirm our common good will be greatly appreciated.

A significant majority of my friends, followers (Facebook, Twitter, blog, print media, etc.) and acquaintances are decidedly not religious and are somewhat mystified by my use of such words as “Sabbath.” But let’s break it down quick and  simple: If God (Jesus, Higher Power, Yahweh, Good Orderly Direction, etc.) took a day off, then perhaps I should as well.

Honoring the Sabbath is not necessarily a religious activity, nor is it confined to Friday (Islam), Saturday (Judaism), or Sunday (Christianity), As a matter of fact, I work on Sundays. But not today, since church services have been cancelled due to the weather. Therefore the church is cancelled, but the Sabbath is not.

Like a computer that needs to shutdown once in a while to receive updates ~ I need a time set apart from the world that sometimes grinds me down and beats me up once in a while.

Declaring a Sabbath ~ even if it is a half day ~ gets me centered, calms me down, and helps me to prioritize my flurry of random and chaotic activities whose primary purpose sometimes seems to be merely to create more activities.

Now here comes the  “religion” or “spirituality” alert..

A large part of, purpose for, and benefit of declaring a Sabbath is to get spiritually fit. And the best way to do that, at  least in my life, is to use the time and place to reflect on the things I have to be grateful for ~ even this lousy, blizzard weather here in New York today. The barren trees remind of my sometimes barren soul. The gale force winds remind me of the emotional gales that sometimes sweep over the surface of my life. The hissing of the radiators reminds me that I, unlike countless others, have heat and a home. My silent breath reminds me that with rarely even a single “thank you” my body continues to be of service to me… and, in gratitude, I  continue to be of service to a great and good God of my understanding.

But in order to to that  I need to rest and reflect ~ and I do so in the spirit of a loving God who  has granted me yet  another day to count my countless blessings and to be of use to others…

Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jesus the Christ struggled with the redemptive quality of suffering. I love the idea that there can be a “quality” to our suffering.

Sometimes God works through snow plows that try to block us into our driveways and homes to keep us from harming ourselves or others by us nobly venturing into areas where even angels fear to tread, i.e. hazardous roads. The rumor is that even in heaven they have “snow days”. Be safe.

It was a beautiful day at the Congregational Church of Patchogue yesterday. First, during the Children’s Talk, the kids were given a greeting card of appreciation by the pastor for their presence in church; they we spoke about the huge (I mean, huge!) box of chocolates given to our soup kitchen workers as a token of appreciation for their dedication; then the kids appreciated the grandparents (their own and all others) who received their handmade tokens (cards) of appreciation for Grandparents Day. Long ago I quit the Take People & Things for Granted Committee. So nice to be appreciated! And so nice to appreciate others!

Someone casually mentioned those who are unlovable. Show me the unlovable, and then show me the unloving, and then I will show you the transformational power of love that leaves no one and nothing behind…

One Saturday morning in Manhattan, I walked into a family-owned hardware store (precious few of them left anywhere) to buy a box of nails. I saw a man kneeling down in an aisle, looking for something on the bottom shelf. What he was really doing was passing item after item discreetly out the door to another man who was collecting the items in a backpack. Moments later, the store owner, wielding a baseball bat ~ seriously ~ was about to take a swing at the head or back of the kneeling thief. I had an instant flash that the kneeling thief would possibly not survive such a hit, especially to the head. Without thinking or knowing what would come out of my mouth, I heard myself shout, “Don’t do it! He’s a human being!” The owner instantly shouted back, “No he’s not!”

With that, the thief ran out of the door. “There goes about a half a dozen faucet handles”, the owner said to me in anger and disgust. “There goes about a half a dozen years in prison for manslaughter if you had hit him” I said in response to his response.

I understand hate. I understand ignorance. I do not understand a person choosing willful ignorance as a way to make it easier and more palatable to hate. In order to smash the man’s head in, the other man had to make his victim a non-human,  or at the very least a lesser human. Hate and violence are still possible without the presence of ignorance ~ but they are much more difficult to rationalize or enact.

I can deal with haters and angeroholics. But I have a hard time dealing with people who refuse to understand, who openly reject compassion and empathy, who deny brokenness in themselves and punish it in others.

Seeing myself in other persons and other persons in myself really messes with my vengeance and retribution.