Role Models & Big Birthdays

Two of the people I compare myself and my life with the most are my father (middle) and my grandfather (his father, left). These pictures were taken somewhere around 1905, 1950ish and 1976-7. Each of us grew up in Oxford, Maryland. It’s safe to say that there is no place in the world that any of us felt or feels more at home when it comes to a location.

Things I have learned from my father: it’s possible to be a lot like someone in character and disposition while also being very different in terms of the gifts you have and the passions you pursue; sports and a love of sports is absolutely a love language; the happiness of your children is a life goal and aspiration and a moving target that as a parent you can never hit; you can say a lot with very few words; time spent with family in any location is something to be treasured; there is grace in putting others before yourself that it is not possible to know any other way; the word “damnit” is a catch-all—tone means everything.

My Dad was born in Oxford in 1944 and lived on a small farm in the town of Oxford, which would be a trip to think of there now. My aunt lives in the house they grew up in. He went to school in the building that is now the Oxford Community Center, then to Easton High School, then to Severn High School, then to the University of Virginia. He met my Mom for the first time when they were about 14 and 13 years old.

He graduated from UVA in 1966. The Vietnam War was going on. He enlisted in the U.S. Army. He got lucky and was sent to Germany, where he lived for three years.

He came back to Oxford, he and my Mom bought the house where my sister and I grew up and where they lived until 2021 when the house burned down.

He got a job as an accountant working for Fall Casson for a few years until he and three others took a chance and went out on their own starting Beatty Satchell & Company, a CPA firm. My Dad was known as “Mr. & Company” because he thought it looked tacky to have too many names on a business and didn’t need his name listed. Of the four that started the firm, he is the only one who still works there.

My memories of him as I was growing up include tax season, fishing with he and my grandfather, his office softball team (he played first base, like Eddie Murray), cookouts on the water at the Tred Avon Yacht Club, haunted houses every year as part of the Kiwanis Club, and him being asked to be treasurer of every nonprofit organization he volunteered for.

Their parenting style has always been to let their kids find their own way, make mistakes, figure out what was important, and to be supportive in every step of the way, helping us up when we fell. I fell, and fall, a lot more than my sister did or does. I always cared less about getting in trouble and more about letting my Dad down.

I have been so incredibly lucky that from childhood to now that my Dad has always been the first person I call to share good news, the first person I turn to for advice, and the first person I look to for solace when life falls apart. And he still picks up the phone.

We’ve been to Baltimore Orioles playoff games and a World Series game, Baltimore Ravens games, including playoff wins and losses. Going to a game together when they win (playoff win pictured above) is an awesome feeling.

Yesterday, my Dad turned 80. I tear up with stuff like this because I am so full of gratitude to have him as a role model, a friend, a grandfather to the girls—for them to get to know and appreciate him like I do—as someone who our family gets to share the joys, sorrows, confusion, wonder, and all the best stuff of life with. One of my all-time and forever favorite sounds and experiences is him laughing.

Turning 80. What a gift. The person having the birthday is the one who gets gifts. But it’s those of us who know and love him that get the biggest gift here.

Happy birthday, Dad. I don’t have the words to say what I actually want to say so these will have to do. I love you. We all do.

Morning Snapshots

Eastern Bluebirds are flying in front of and behind me as I skate onto the Oxford Conservation Park loop. I’ve had their shade of blue and orange in my head since I first saw a bluebird years ago and they still quicken my heart.

It is a Saturday with nothing on the morning calendar and temperatures looking to move into the mid-90s. This early though, there is a breeze and it’s perfect sitting outside weather.

Books frequently open my mind and expand my worldview. The path I am walking (or skating) I owe in part to a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton. Recently I’ve encountered another Trappist monk Thomas, Thomas Keating.

“Grace is a participation in the Divine nature, it’s not just something added on like an overcoat. It’s a radical transformation of the whole of human nature so that it can be a divine human being, meaning it can exercise freedom, compassion, love…”

Fr. Thomas Keating

From reading his books to watching the documentary, “A Rising Tide of Silence,” Keating and a former student of his, an Episcopal priest named Cynthia Bourgeault, have pointed me to the practice of centering prayer. I’ve made this type of silent prayer part of my mornings for the past month or so, and I hope to keep it in my daily routine.

This morning, I want to go outside, to make this time under my sitting tree. After my bluebird greeting, I have a deer run across the cemetery loop about 10 feet in front of me.

I’m traveling light, just a notebook, pen, and binoculars, and I sit on my skateboard on the shoreline looking out onto the cove.

For centering prayer, they recommend picking a word that can bring you back to the moment, Bourgeault describes the word as being like windshield wipers to wipe away the thoughts that always jump in the way for attention. The word I have been using is “rest.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). Psalm 37:7 says “Rest in the Lord,” which can also be translated as “Be still in the Lord,” meaning be at peace. I find that to be the right approach and mindset for me.

Sitting by the water, I breathe and close my eyes. A breeze is across my skin and in my ears like a conversation and listening, there is a constant concert of songbird voices. I can hear a fish jump in front of me to the left, and I open my eyes to see the rings it left–a cardinal flies low over the water, like it’s his cue to go on. The ascending sun reflects off the water to the right.

I am new to centering prayer, but even with my limited experience, I find that when I let my passing thoughts go, it gives me an opportunity to be closer to God. Keating’s quote that grace is for us a chance to participate in the work God is doing in the world and the love He has for us and for creation. And I can feel that this morning. And sitting alongside a cemetery, where my grandparents, family, and friends are buried, remembering and feeling them, I feel re-connected over and through time, like we are all sharing these remarkable moments.

Keating writes:

“When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.”

For most of my life, this kind of quiet prayer time, these morning moments and experiences have been solo endeavors, an introvert’s delight. And I still need plenty of those. But I also find that I can be around people and still be at peace; I can even delight in what other people are doing. Like Keating says, walking down the street, or having a cup of coffee (too early for soup), I want to take those moments with me into the world, to be a part of that divine life pouring into the world . And I am not ready for the next phase of the day to start, so I head to the Oxford Park.

I stop through Oxford Social, the cafe right next to the park, for the first time. A birding friend from my Oxford Community Center days gets in line and we talk birds a bit, and about Third Haven Quaker Meeting House, and about seminary. I walk down to a bench by the river and sit with coffee, the view, conversations off to my right, kids playing on the swings to my left, and a young boy running with his dog.

I pick up John O’Donohue‘s book “Anam Cara,” a favorite book, which Rev. Susie Leight and I will be leading a book study of starting in July, and I come across this:

“Love is absolutely vital for a human life. For love alone can awaken what is divine with in you. In love, you grow and come to your self. When you learn to love and to let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit… Love begins with paying attention to others, with an act of gracious self-forgetting. This is the condition in which we grow.”

John O’Donohue, “Anam Cara”

And it’s this openness, this paying attention to others, this self-forgetting, letting go of ourselves, letting go of myself, where I seem to be spending a lot of my time of late. O’Donohue continues:

“Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent.”

Maybe this has been a slow build over the last 50 years. Maybe all those different moments I can look back on and feel sitting here now, have all been hints and flickers, breadcrumbs or candles of encouragement. And each epiphany adds to a longing, pushes further into the search. Maybe with the state of the world, the worry, the suffering, the confusion, the time is coming that we need to look at differently and help others do the same; we need to live differently and help others do the same.

Maybe when we have moments of sitting quietly and emptying ourselves out, what’s there that we connect to, is Love (God is Love). And what could be more important to share with each other?

The Sitting Tree

I love Shel Silverstein. I have never wanted to punch a character in a story more than the boy in his book, “The Giving Tree.” (as he gets older, not when he was a kid). I had a hard time reading it to the girls because the boy just takes and takes and blows off the tree, and never gets it. My blood is boiling a bit now just thinking about it. But Silverstein couldn’t describe humankind in our time any better.

I aspire to a more complementary relationship to the trees in my life (I get the irony of having a wooden skateboard in the photo). Over the past several years, a particular tree stands out. It’s an Osage Orange tree on the shoreline of the Oxford Cemetery. I have made a point of sitting under it for some time now.

Of late, rest has been hard to come by. At lease the right kind of rest. Rest, for me, is about tuning out the constant demands of what is coming up, and being completely in the moment. It’s when time doesn’t matter and actually passes differently. It’s not the kind of rest that comes from sitting on a couch or sleeping at night. Frequently, it comes from being outside–hiking, walking, skateboarding, reading, bird watching, exploring, kayaking, paddleboarding, reading or writing. I haven’t had enough of that time, those moments lately, and I can tell.

When I rest is when I am open to wonder. When I rest, gratitude overflows–in part because I am not rushing to the next thing. I am not in a hurry.

Thursday morning, I fought the pull of the couch and hit Oxford Conservation Park with longboard, binoculars, and notebook. “Skatebirding” has become a new favorite thing to do. I skated to the cemetery and pulled up under my “Sitting Tree.”

Double-drop longboards make for great birding seats. As I sat to clear my head, think, pray, and take in the morning, a raft of ducks was just off the shore. Watching them move about as a group, they were doing what ducks do. And what is it that people do in that way? What is it that is natural to us, that puts us in a place of doing what we should be doing?

Beyond Mallards, Canvasbacks, and Wood Ducks, I don’t know all the duck types around by first sight. Watching them and checking Cornell’s Merlin App, I pegged them as Ruddy Ducks, but pinged a birding expert friend to make sure. As I watched them, time moved differently. A solo Bufflehead swam up to the Ruddies a couple times, thinking they were his peeps, and then both times flew away skimming the water in a hurry when he realized they weren’t.

These are not my photos, they are from bird ID sites, but the top left is a Bufflehead and the others are male and female non-breeding Ruddy Ducks.

It was the tree, the ducks, the cove, the breeze, the sunrise, the shoreline, and I got to be a part of it. Sitting there, gratitude and joy welled up and started coming out of my eyes. I know I can’t communicate it, but maybe you’ve had moments like that.

Skating back to the conservation park, I wanted to write all this down–something I haven’t been doing enough of except chicken scratch in notebooks.

We’re looking headlong into the holidays. It’s a busy time of year, it’s nighttime dark at 5:30pm and it’s getting colder. Mornings like yesterday remind me that I need to rest. And to rest, I need to get outside. The Sitting Tree is still there. Where am I?

Walk this Way

Jesus walked. A lot. Walking, praying, eating with friends, hanging with the unruly–these are some of the things he spent the most time doing. The pace and intentionality of Jesus’ life are among his key examples for us.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book “An Altar in the World,” talks about Jesus’ walking practice:

“Sometimes he had a destination and sometimes he didn’t. For many who followed him around, he was the destination. Whether he was going somewhere or nowhere at all, going with him was the point. Food tasted better at the pace he set. Stories lasted longer. Talk went deeper. While many of his present-day admirers pay close attention to what he said and did, they pay less attention to the pace at which he did it. Jesus was a walker, not a rider. He took his sweet time.”

[Aside: it makes it really hard to stomach when some bonehead says if Jesus lived today, he’d have a private jet to go around the world. You might want to go back and review the Sermon on the Mount, or say, anything he said in the Gospels…]

When I think about my best days, there is some part of each of them that have been spent walking, exploring, hiking, doing something at a slower, intentional pace, even if it’s around the yard. We’re in a hurry often enough, taking time to walk, to slow down, seems essential.

I like any chance I can get to drop some wisdom from Gary Snyder. In “Practice of the Wild,” he links walking with adventure and humility:

“Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.”

I think that’s part of it, the slow pace of walking and the vastness of the planet, it is humbling and beautiful at the same time.  It puts us in our bodies and lets our souls breathe.

If you’ve been around Oxford for any period of time, you’ve likely come across Bruce Mills. When I was growing up, Bruce lived down the street from us, and spent a lot of time in the park, playing electric guitar, spreading out black and white photographs he had taken and developed, laughing and philosophizing, later on doing Tai Chi. For the better part of a few decades, Bruce rides his bike from Trappe to Oxford to paint houses. The times that he’s had a car, he felt like he missed out.

“When I get into a car, I turn the key and I’m there,” he once said. “When I ride my bike, I can breathe, I can smell the earth, I can get my thoughts together, I take my time.”

I like so much about that. I think Jesus might have a bike if he lived bodily in today’s world. But it wouldn’t be a fancy, upscale bike, and I can’t see him decked out in spandex with a GPS and figuring out his pace and heart rate. Personally, I think Jesus would have a beach cruiser, letting go of the hurry, and smiling in the breeze.

On Vocation: Five Golden Things

“It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure,” was an ad slogan the U.S. Navy used in the late 1970s and early 80s. It must be pretty good since it still sticks in my head. What if we could go through life like that? What if we felt that way about our jobs? Our lives?

Not all jobs feel that way. But for the life adventure attitude, we’ve got to dig deeper than just a job and look at vocation.

A man knows he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live, and begins to live. – Thomas Merton

I don’t claim to be in that space Merton describes, but I am getting closer, and I am getting a pretty good lay of the land for what that looks like. For our purposes here, let’s think of vocation as a hand; as the work we do in the world with our lives. Our hand, like most hands, has five fingers. The fingers are all part of the hand, and the hand is made up of the interconnecting fingers. You can’t separate them from each other, they are all part of the same thing/work/life/vocation.

Disclaimer: I am a work in progress and things change and evolve over time. In describing these things, I am putting words towards things I have found in life to this point to be the things that seem to make up aspects of vocation/calling. Check back frequently.

1. Fatherhood. This is the one role in life I am least prepared for, it takes improvisation, winging it, frustration, questions, blood, sweat, and tears. And it’s the role that means the most, rewards the most, defines the most. Nothing else I do, or could ever do, compares to it.

2. Writing/Reading/Learning. This has been a part of me, a defining part for 30 years or more and counting. From the notebook in my back pocket, to grabbing a book with coffee in the morning, it is a part of me that never turns off. For the past six months, Tidewater Times has been a great outlet for me to write about everything from nature to history to incredible people and cool goings-on in our community. I hope to make this more and more a part of my life over time.

3. Being outside. I feel most alive outside, in nature. I can be running (preferably trails), walking the dog, hiking, paddleboarding, kayaking, bird watching, skateboarding, but being outside is where my soul feels both most alive and most at peace. Recognizing that and making sure to recharge that way and make the time for it is a daily practice.

4. Building/connecting community. It’s not a coincidence that when I was at a major crossroads in life and career, it was the Oxford Community Center that needed a director. When I think about my family being in the area since the 1600s; the evolution and changes in the town and the community; the players and personalities that have helped shape this place in the past and during my lifetime, it seems like a place I am supposed to be, involved in work that I am supposed to be a part of. I can look around and see and feel a connection to the town and the Eastern Shore in ways I have never seen or felt anywhere else. I’ll just leave it at that for now.

5. Spirituality. I saved this for last for a reason. This is where the change has been taking place and the reason for my reflection on vocation and for this post. I have been a lifelong spiritual seeker. My path has taken me in wonderful, rich, and unexpected directions at just about every step of the way. Over the past year and a half especially, that direction has revealed itself more through a deepening relationship with God, through Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the love that flows through the Trinity, through our hearts (my heart), and into the world. I’ve never felt anything like it, and how could I have?

It’s when I have let go and allowed God to work that I have felt most free, most driven, and the most connected. On an October Friday, I put a gameplan out into the Universe, which I have no other way to describe then that I just knew those things were what I was supposed to be doing. The three parts of the plan are: 1) writing/sharing, 2) learning and studying, and 3) helping to create a community of Christian small group study. That Sunday, Father Bill Ortt stood in front of the Christ Church Easton congregation and said that they were looking for someone to lead small groups. He said you don’t need any experience, he had more than 30 years worth and that he would look to help train/mentor the right person.

That began a conversation that has helped reveal a calling (of sorts) and that has turned into a part-time job as Assistant for Small Groups and Christian Education with Christ Church Easton.

Vocation is the big picture. It is doing the work that you feel called, charged, fulfilled to do. It isn’t necessarily connected to a job, but it can be, and when it is, then you know you are doing the work you should be doing.

As God has revealed life and vocation to me, and helped me see what those things are that charge me and that I can give back, I have Frederick Buechner’s words in my head a good bit, “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I don’t know about the world, so I’ll start with myself, my family, our community. And we’ll see where it goes.