Sunday, September 25, 2011

“Jesus, Moneyball, and the Controversy of the New”

25 September 2011
The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees
St. Joseph’s Chapel
Kent School

It’s hard to believe that we have only been here for just two weeks of classes.  I’m ready for the fall break; and we don’t have a fall break.  So much has changed since those precious, dwindling days at the end of August, and the beginning of September.  The reality of school is now the norm, from new classes and teachers, roommates, new clothes, new schedules, or simply figuring out the Kent schedule for the first time.  But in this, the last weekend of September, the year isn’t even new anymore; that’s the wrong word for it.  We’re really into this different reality, when what’s new becomes normal, like coming to chapel on Sunday morning.  Is it normal yet?       
It takes a leap of faith to begin the school year.  Because, even in a short amount of time, everything is changing.  We are going to change this year.  You already have.  This year is not last year; this week will be different from last week.  There is a radical sense of transformation that is at the heart of the educational experience, especially at a boarding school, in a place like this.  The constant arrival and input of new knowledge and information, new skills and ideas, and meeting people from all over the world can radically reshape the person you thought you were.  It should make you question who you are; and questioning who you are is a good thing.  Matthew’s gospel this morning presents a controversy of “the new” as the religious leaders and experts of the day question Jesus; they want to know just where Jesus gets his authority, where he gets his power and wisdom.  His ministry and teaching spring from a new source, and this strange teacher makes the distinction about things that come from human origin and things that come from God.  Jesus is doing a new thing, and his audience wants clarification about what they are really seeing, and where his authority comes from.  Or perhaps they are missing the new way of being entirely.  They are not really seeing what is happening in front of them; they have no way to understand or receive the new.      
With this gospel in mind, it seems right to question what we’re seeing right now, in front of us, right before our eyes.  At the start of the year, it is natural to ask yourself important questions.  What kind of person are you?  What kind of person do the people around you think you are?  Is there a difference between the two?  What labels do you wear?  What labels do others put on you?  What makes this year so fascinating is that you might answer these questions differently nine months from now.  You might answer them a little differently tomorrow.     
 Though many people view religion as a static and traditional force in the world, sometimes even a repressive one, for Jesus religion was just the opposite.  The experience of God and the gospel produced human transformation, a deep change of heart.  To encounter the living God was to be challenged, inspired, forgiven, and fundamentally changed as a person.  The word that is often used for this change is “conversion.”  Jesus shows his followers a different way of seeing themselves.  There is a new way of being in the world.     
How can you show who you really are to the people around you?  How can you show the world your very best as a human being?  Don’t let the easy labels define you—or the person next to you.  Try to see yourself and others as God might see you.  This is a really big step theologically: to try and imagine how God sees you and all of us as individuals.  What would happen if our identity really came from God and not the world? 

On Friday, I saw a movie on its opening night, which doesn’t happen to me very often.  I can’t even remember the last time I did that.  I might have been a teenager.  At any rate, my wife and I saw Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, as the general manager and assistant general manager of a professional baseball team that embraces a completely new philosophy.  Moneyball is a book by Michael Lewis about the 2002 Oakland A’s, and the movie and the book are about their radical philosophy.  Despite being a small market team, with dramatically smaller revenue than teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, the Oakland A’s were consistently in the baseball playoffs when the book was written.  Michael Lewis also wrote about football in his book The Blind Side, which was also made into a successful movie, which many of you have seen. 
In Moneyball, Lewis explores the out of the box thinking of Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s.  Brad Pitt portrays Beane as neurotic, tormented, and inspired, all at the same time.  So how did the A’s compete with a payroll that was generally one-third the size of large market teams?  Beane and his Ivy League assistant have a completely different approach, one that turns baseball orthodoxy upside down.  Their philosophy is a kind of baseball meets AP Statistics and Computer Science.  The first assumption of this unorthodox philosophy is that we really don’t know what we’re watching when we watch a baseball game.  One game is an insignificant statistical sample.  Our instincts and observations are actually wrong.  Beane puts into action a statistical model that highlights different statistics than the usual ones; Beane emphasizes on base percentage, slugging percentage, and especially walks; then he goes out to find the players who produce best in the new statistical vision.  Kevin Youkilis for the Red Sox fit the Moneyball philosophy perfectly.  At that time, Youkilis is playing for the Pawtucket minor league team, and the Red Sox become suspicious when the A’s are interested in their player.  So the A’s have to look for the hidden treasures, the players that other teams have overlooked or thrown away.  They can’t afford to go after the superstars and free agents; the sabermetrics, the new statistics, then point to the castoffs, misfits, or the people who have never been given a chance before.  The A’s front office compares themselves to card counters at a casino.  As they implement their new philosophy, the baseball establishment laughs at them.  But people are also very threatened by the new approach; they want it to fail.  It is amazing to watch the uproar when fearless non-conformists refuse to follow the pack.  It makes you question why we believe the pack, any pack, is heading the right direction in the first place. 
The new baseball philosophy also seems to be subtly changing the life philosophy of Billy Beane.  He realizes money is not the most important thing in his life.  As he looks for the unappreciated qualities in ballplayers, he embraces an unappreciated character in himself.  Moreover, he finds a deeper sense of his life values in the undervalued.  His daring and audacity become strangely mixed with humor and compassion, both for himself and others.  He is fighting a battle, successfully, where money, for the first time, doesn’t rule the world.  He wins on the cheap.  Beane is fighting the good fight.  At the end of the 2002 season, the Boston Red Sox want to steal him away from the Oakland A’s.  He is the hottest general manager in baseball.  The Red Sox offer him the richest contract for a General Manager in the history of all sports.  But he turns down the offer of $12,500,000 to stay with the little Oakland A’s, and to be near his daughter in California. 
The game, the life, that everyone else is watching may not be the true reality.  We need to go deeper.  When he was your age, Billy Beane was drafted in the first round by the New York Mets.  He was offered a large contract and signing bonus as a high school senior.  But he also had a full scholarship to Stanford University.  Everyone told him to go for the money; that’s the way the world works.  He has regretted the decision not to go to Stanford for all of his adult life.  Billy Beane made a promise to himself never to make a decision based on money ever again.  `   
In the new Moneyball philosophy this morning, what is the undervalued part of your character that needs to come out?  What is overvalued in how the world sees you? 
What is important to you about your own identity is not necessarily what is important to God.  God doesn’t care about the prep school or college sticker on your car (though he does root for Kent, and not Taft or Hotchkiss).  God doesn’t care about how much money you have.  The gods of wealth, success, and beauty that we chase every day will not only disappoint us when we attain them.  They also shape how we see, or fail to see, each other right now as true individuals, as children of God.  They shape how we judge the content of another person’s character: especially the one who is different from you in the area of race, class, religion, age, gender, or any other category or label that separates us.  And what you overcome is more important than what you achieve.    
I have asked you many questions this morning, maybe too many questions, to begin the new year.  You get to spend the rest of the year, and the rest of your life, finding your answers, seeing how you want to play this game called Moneyball.  You can play it by your own philosophy, not someone else’s.  To begin a new school year takes a leap of faith, into the great unknown.  Our human instinct will always tell us to land on the safe ground--the familiar landing of our own comfortable identity and habits, the quick labels of who we were in the past.  Don’t just be willing to land where you have been before.

Your leap of faith this fall may just begin the year when you finally learn to fly.
Have a wonderful year.     

Friday, September 16, 2011

“Midnight at Kent: The Golden Age of the Present”

15 September 2011
The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees
St. Joseph’s Chapel
Kent School

            I’d like to begin tonight by going backward, to a different time, perhaps a better one. When I first got to Kent, students didn’t talk on cell phones anywhere on campus.  This wasn’t ancient history, but just seven years ago.  Cell phones certainly existed, but there was no cell tower in Kent.  Was it progress or regress?  Anyone’s guess—though I have seen students fall down while walking and texting, and continue to text while lying on the ground.  I’m also not convinced that typing with our opposable thumbs is a sign of human evolution.   
When I took my first teaching job nineteen years ago, there was no e-mail and no Internet.  But there were compensations.  There was Beverly Hills, 90210.  Now I was never a big fan, but my wife was.  She grew up with Brandon, Brenda, Kelly, Steve, Dylan, and Donna.  How that crowd ever survived without mobile service we will never know. 
Along with the beautiful people from Beverly Hills, Beavis and Butthead was just about to start, in 1993.  A TV show about two teenage guys watching TV.  How can you explain the chemistry, the magic? 
Who remembers Pee Wee Herman?  I loved Pee Wee’s Playhouse—what a cheerful show for children (?).  I’m still trying to bring “The Word of the Day” back with the English Department.  (You won’t know many of the cultural references tonight, but that’s part of the point).   
            How about Mario Brothers (the first)?  I loved that little Italian baker and the adventures we had together.  Now I play Super Mario Galaxy on my Wii (with my daughters). 
            And the early nineties in music: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sound Garden.  Pearl Jam was a huge influence on Mr. Gentry’s musical development, and I’m planning to be his biographer.      
            But let me take you even further back, into the primordial mists before you were born, to the Stone Age.  The year 1986 AD or CE.  Two movies came out that changed me forever: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Top Gun.  They both turned twenty-five this year.  I was two years out of high school, but I was torn between going back to be like Ferris skipping a day of public school in Chicago, or being a cocky naval aviator like Maverick.  That was even with the gratuitous shirts off volleyball scene in Top Gun.  It was wonderful.  I had a sneaking suspicion there was something deeply cheesy about the movie, but I fought it off completely.  Oh how I hated Ice Man and Slider.  They were Draco Malfoy and Crabbe and Goyle before Hogwarts was first imagined in the mind’s eye of J.K. Rowling. 
            And then there were all those chick flicks that we boys secretly liked and watched as well: Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful.  It was all the same movie, but we didn’t care.  I once stood in line with the wonderfully pouty and attractive Molly Ringwald at a bakery in Salt Lake City.  She was my girl, on the screen.  But like me, she was all grown up now.  I became wistful and nostalgic, a little sad, as I waited for my scones.  It should have been a great day in my life, but I was depressed.    
I wanted to linger in detention with all of the The Breakfast Club.  Now Molly just plays mothers on TV.  No more movies.  She’s too busy with her kids in real life.     
            For some of the ladies who are slightly younger than me: Do you remember Sun In in your hair for that special California blond look?  Who remembers sun tanning with baby oil instead of SPF50?  We were so young, so blissfully unaware, turning gold in the sun during the Cold War.  The Sun was in.  Who knew California would be bankrupt some day?   
            Animal House came out when I was in middle school, and I was immediately ready for college before going to high school.  Someday I too would join a fraternity to learn the mysterious, cryptic lyrics to “Louie, Louie.”  They’re a little strange, and hard to follow.  The FBI actually investigated the lyrics after complaints that they were obscene.  The FBI’s official findings were that the lyrics were “unintelligible at any speed.”  They dismissed the complaint.  And I never joined a fraternity. 
The Beastie Boys were born a year after Animal House, in 1979, and the FBI never investigated their lyrics.  They really should have.  And just before those Jewish kids from Brooklyn learned they could rap too, there was Elvis Costello, The Clash, and The Police.  I vowed to be just as witty and ironic as Elvis Costello, and I’ve definitely succeeded.  Elvis would be proud.         
Ok, let’s kick it back really old school.  When I was born, there were no video games.  You heard me.  Video games had not yet been invented.  That happened in 1972 with the arrival of Pong, at the end of the first term for President Nixon.  Oh, we all thought was Pong was amazing (even Nixon did, before his second term fiasco with Watergate).  That primitive back and forth paddle game--we played it so much that it became the very shape of our brain waves.  And then came Atari, Intelevision, and Sega. 
It was a golden age.  Or so we thought.
All of this is to introduce the best movie of the summer, and the best film I have seen in many years: Midnight in Paris.  I loved it very much, for many reasons.  It is, first of all, a love letter to Paris, one of the greatest cities on the planet, and the best place to fall in love.  Even before the magic starts, literally, in the movie, the film lingers over the many sights of the city, both ordinary and magnificent.  In the movie, Owen Wilson is a revelation as Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who is struggling to write his first novel.  He is visiting Paris with his fiancĂ© Inez and her family.  Her family is conservative; Gil is not.  Owen Wilson as Gil so successfully channels the director Woody Allen; the actor is mesmerizing as Allen’s neuroses, anxiety, and wit come to life in Wilson. 
Gil is a romantic and believes in a Golden Age; it was Paris in the 1920s, the best time in human history to live, and he missed it.  Just like you missed Jerry Garcia. 
But then things change, radically, magically, at midnight in Paris. As Gil wanders the streets of Paris a little lost, looking for inspiration for his novel, an old fashioned car, a vehicle from another era, picks him up.  They have come for him, but who are they?  Gil is transported back to his golden age: Paris in the 1920s.  Gil spends the first magical evening with Cole Porter, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and then as late evening meets an early morning, Gil meets Ernest Hemingway.  He meets Papa.  What a mind, what a wild and fearless masculine enthusiasm in Hemingway.  What a night.  Was it a dream?  No, it was real.    
On the next night, he meets Gertrude Stein who offers to help him with his novel.  He meets Pablo Picasso, and he falls in love with Picasso’s girlfriend and model, a magnificent beauty named Adriana.  It’s Paris in the 20s, the best time and place to fall in love.  Of course, this is complicated because Gil is engaged to Inez in the present.  But she doesn’t understand him, not really, and Adriana has feelings for Gil in return.  Gil seeks romantic advice from Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and surrealist Luis Brunel.  Adriana is a romantic too, but she believes the Golden Age was the Belle Epoque, Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, not her own time.  On one evening, a horse drawn carriage, not a motor car, picks up Gil and Adriana and takes them back to the Belle Epoque, to her golden age.  They meet Toulouse-Latrec, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin.  The three of them, however, believe the Golden Age was the Renaissance.  Adriana decides to stay in the earlier time, but Gil makes a decision to go home, back to the Twenty-first century.  He has had a dream recently.  He calls it a small insight, but an important one.  Gil has a dream where he has to go the dentist for a major procedure, and the dentist doesn’t have Novocain.  Novocain hasn’t been invented yet.  He runs screaming from the dental office of the 1920s in the dream, back to his own time. 
Gil chooses to live in the Golden Age of the present.  In his own time. 
Perhaps you have an idea about where we are now, and where this chapel talk is now.  Everything leads up to this year—this year in your life on this planet, this jewel we call Earth.  Everything leads up to now, and now at Kent is a pretty great place to be.  We have this year together—not last year, or some supposedly better time in Kent or human history.  Don’t worry about yesterday; it’s still with you.  In Midnight in Paris, Gil quotes William Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.”  Your family and friends are still with you, but this family here, around you now, is ready to know you, and love you, and care about you too.  It’s ok to be homesick.  It’s ok to be tired and confused tonight; things will get better.  The reading from Matthew tonight is about slowing down in the sacred now, right here, in chapel, at formal dinner, and in the days and weeks ahead: To slow down in the golden present.  Jesus says don’t worry about yesterday or tomorrow—embrace the now.  The same God who loves you is in your past, present, and future, and the present is the place where we really live, where we know God and know each other most deeply.  I invite you to meet and embrace the new brothers and sisters and family around you tonight.  We replace no one from your past, but you will make friendships here that will last for the rest of your lives.  And you just happen to be at Kent in the days of cell towers, Madden 2012, and the best dentists in human history.  Now is the time of your lives. 
Welcome to the Golden Age of Kent.                 

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Walking and Thinking: A Theology of the Unexpected

6 September 2011
Opening Service for Faculty
The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees
St. Joseph’s Chapel

The lessons you just heard come from the readings specifically assigned for Labor Day.  Matthew’s gospel is about the choice between the spiritual and the material, the dividing paths between God and Mammon, the divine or wealth.  Material treasure is contrasted with spiritual riches: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  Is this a lesson for labor or against it?  Matthew is really getting at the deeper notion of vocation.  What is your vocation, deep in your gut?  What is the purpose in your life, the vision you have been waiting for?  There will be a moment this week when you’re ready to begin.  Maybe you’ve already had it.        
For me, the vocation of the educator is the active choice of thinking and contemplation.  This is my purpose in life.  Thinking is very important, and not enough people are doing it.  It takes more time and space than you imagine to really think.  For my birthday this summer, someone gave me a small book, with just sixty pages of wisdom.  It was Henry David Thoreau’s essay called “Walking,” which is really about so much more.  It is a religious meditation.  The essay is about truly giving yourself room to think, room to explore your mind and nature, the spiritual and the material.  In the essay, Thoreau talks fondly about remembering particular walks long after they are over, even many years later.  I too have been on hikes like that.  How extraordinary to remember clear details of walks in mind’s eye.  Something or somebody beyond yourself is surely met on the open road.      
Thoreau makes the spiritual objective of walking completely clear: “It comes only by the grace of God.”

So the first message tonight is this: Take a look at your legs.  Your legs.  They are beautiful.  Right down to the two feet and the little toes on each side.  We weren’t made for sitting.  Thinking and walking are intrinsically related; because we’re bipeds, or we used to be.  You know what I hate?  I hate reading those New York Times articles on my computer while sitting down, and then the article says that it’s actually bad for you to read New York Times articles on your computer while sitting down.  I also do not believe our addiction to technology has helped our mental and spiritual powers of concentration.  Quite the opposite is happening, actually.  This sermon is not a Luddite Manifesto, and I really like JSTOR.  But I will quote Science Department member Michael Greene, from his chapel talk last year. 
“If Emerson had been alive today, with our technology, he would have lost his mojo.”
This area where you live is not just made for walking; you are living in a hiker’s wonderland.  You are in a paradise that calls out to be explored; it beckons like a bride.  I also encourage you to get out and explore what happens here at Kent, in every classroom and nook and cranny of this beautiful campus.  I love that I teach Theology in the science building—and I take the time to visit the science labs.  Of course, when I do, I always have to borrow a pair of safety glasses for the rest of the day.  When I wear them in my Theology and English classes, I remind my students about the power, even danger, of great ideas in the Humanities.  They can still change the world. 
Thoreau calls us to transform our minds, bodies, and souls in partnership with the higher power that created us.  We can truly be in communion with God, like in church.  The Earth herself is an open cathedral, like the mysterious rocks of Stonehenge charting the heavens.            
 “If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.”
“I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in.  You may name it America, but it is not America…” 
The tradition of Celtic Christianity is quite comfortable with Thoreau’s transcendental vision of nature as the text of God.  Irish Christianity, which lost doctrinally at the Council of Whitby in 663, held little emphasis on Original Sin.  It rather expressed the original blessing of creation and saw God’s beauty in the human body—male and female, along with equality between the sexes, and spiritual consciousness in animals.  It is also clear that the early prophets and Jesus saw the Wilderness as a temple of the Most High God.  Like the shaman in the Native American tradition, the prophet and the messiah had to get out of society and up to the mountain for the sacred vision, or to hear the still, small voice.  Read the gospels with Thoreau in mind, and you will find that Jesus is always on the move, engaging and then withdrawing, moving and walking, seeking the ineffable Creator that was so near and accessible that he called that ultimate reality his Father, the beloved, papa.  Sometimes his disciples can’t find Jesus, and Jesus knows this.  People would have killed him sooner had he not been such an avid walker. 
Ok.  So far tonight, I haven’t even mentioned the students.  They’re here, sort of.  But I think they are the easiest part of this week and the next.  They will fill your life and your heart, and you will love them.  Most of them, anyway.  But to love your neighbor as yourself requires that you first love yourself.  How do people miss that part?  If you do not value and care for yourself, you are not likely to value or care for others.  I have been at the edge of burnout too many times to count in my career.  When you get there, and I hope you don’t, you will find that no one is applauding, because it’s not an accomplishment.  Take care of yourself.  Take care of each other.  Love your neighbor as yourself.      
Every time you go with Thoreau and Jesus into the woods, you are invited to live in the moment, at the spring of life.  You are invited to eat when you are eating, and to sleep when you are sleeping.  You should love when you are being loved.  But you should not eat when you are sleeping.       
“What business have in the woods, if I am something out of the woods?”
“There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,--the gospel according to this moment.”
Along with the slim book by Thoreau, I was also given another gift by a book recommendation from Joe McDonough: Waiting for Snow in Havana, by Carlos Eire.  I always take recommendations seriously when they come from a great walker, one who is spiritually committed to perambulation.  If I see you drive your car to the fitness center, I won’t read your books, and I do keep a list because I live next door to the gym.  But back to Joe.  He has a fantastic walk, and Waiting for Snow in Havana reads like a dream.  The author Carlos Eire is a Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.  He is also a Cuban. 
“Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am a Cuban.”
Eire says this often in the book, which teems with theology like a like a rainforest teems with life, like a child’s science experiment searches for truth and approval.  The book is about his childhood growing up in Cuba before and after the Revolution led by Fidel Castro.  If Thoreau disconnected Nature from Original Sin, Eire brings it back in a theology of Cuba and exile, in new theological terms.  But Original Sin isn’t the fault of women this time, and it certainly isn’t the fault of lizards.  Like other Cuban men, Eire knows that the creation of women is just about the most delightful thing that God has ever done.  Original Sin is rather something that human beings do to each other.  The book is a crazy and joyful meditation on loss and grief--how Carlos Eire loses his home, his family, his identity, his country, and his childhood.  But Carlos refuses to give up his mind and his God to Castro: “Loss and gain are Siamese twins, joined at the heart.  So are death and life, hell and paradise.  I struggled to deny this axiom as a child, and strain against it still in bad days.”
The book is subtitled “Confessions of a Cuban Boy. “  In it his family and childhood come alive again.  Carlos was raised by highly eccentric parents.  His father and mother believe they were Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, respectively, in their past lives, so that is how Carlos refers to them.  Carlos himself is very much a religious mystic; as a child, he has regular visions of Jesus, both in his dreams and while awake.  The Jesus who comes to see him is the Jesus on the Cross; he calls this regular visitor “Bloody Jesus.”  I have read and studied Latin American literature for years now, and I have come to the conclusion that what we outsiders call Magical Realism is really a kind of supernatural normalcy.  It doesn’t represent a world that might be, but it rather portrays authentic spiritual events that do not have a rational explanation outside of the divine.  It’s all real.  Jesus literally shows up to Carlos Eire.  If Original Sin is real, so is the redemption of the cross by Bloody Jesus in these showings.        
            “Who knows what might have happened if God had become incarnate in a place with really tasty cuisine, such as Cuba?  Questions like that have made me realize that Jesus was there in my dreams to say an infinite number of things.  Messages too vast in number to be understood all at once, or even in a whole lifetime on earth.  Vital messages, such as:
            ‘Behold your mother.’
            ‘Lipstick is wonderful.’
            ‘Lizards are beautiful.’
            ‘Demons are doomed to fail: I have defeated evil, and so shall you.’
            ‘Fear not death: You shall live forever, in a wondrous body, just like Mine.’
            ‘Drink champagne, and blow it out your nose.’

In the wild and whirling stories of his childhood, Eire presents a loss of innocence.  His Theology of the Fall has a living pulse; it is on fire with truth, goodness, and beauty.  Original Sin was not caused by the lizard Serpent and beautiful Eve, but by a totalitarian regime.  If you have ever romanticized Fidel Castro, well, you won’t do it again after reading Waiting for Snow in Havana.  Personally, I like to romanticize Che Guevara, because he was so much better looking than Fidel.  And I loved The Motorcycle Diaries.  But when you find the people who disagree with you, or maybe think independently of you, and you line them up, and you shoot them in the back of the head, you are always wrong.  Even after taking away all your property, and your God, they still want to take away your mind.  Big Brother gets to do the thinking for you, even then.  Waiting for Snow in Havana is a theological witness about the spiritual refusal to just go along.  And it doesn’t take a totalitarian regime to do this to the human mind—Americans can do it too.  Original Sin is nothing if not creative. 
I will close tonight with the last religious vision that Carlos Eire has in the magical land of Cuba, the lost paradise of his childhood.  So that the Science Department will let me continue teaching in their building, and to wear their fancy safety glasses, I will add that this religious experience is completely explainable, scientifically.  Eire has the vision while looking out to sea from a beach in Cuba, just before becoming an orphan in a new land, America. 
“It was a miracle.  It had to be.  You can’t doubt what you see.  If this wasn’t a miracle than nothing else could be.
The color of the sea was changing, as if some giant brush were being applied from beneath.  Or was it from above?  I stared long and hard at the wild cloud-shaped rainbow in the water.  There were splashes of tangerine in there too, little bits of sunset at midday, along with splashes of blood red hibiscus blossoms.
And it moved.  The colored cloud inside the water kept moving to and fro, twisting and turning with great speed…
I thought surely this was the vision sent from heaven—one that spoke to me without scaring me to death.” 

Waiting for Snow in Havana is a meditation on how rich you can still be, even when everything is taken from you.  In this last religious vision, it turns out that Carlos is watching a school of parrot fish in the ocean.  A school of fish.  But it was a revelation of the Living God to him, as potent and consecrating as the presence of Bloody Jesus. 
Your choices haven’t gone away on the first day back.  Your choices have just become more important; they have become theological.  God or mammon?  God is the choice of what feeds your soul, whether you call it nature, the wild, or the Great Spirit.  Choose the miracle of the parrot fish, when you find them on your own, in the liturgy of nature, arranged perfectly for you to worship in the beauty of holiness. 
This is a lot to think about on the first day back in early week.  Please forgive me.   
Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am a Cuban.”