I love spring. Especially after the time change annoyance passes and life settles back into the semblance of a routine.

Except for pollen, I enjoy everything about this lovely season.

It seems like the sun shines brighter than ever although it could be that after the gray dreariness of winter, just turning on the sunshine is bright enough.

There’s something so satisfying in feeling the warmth of the son on my skin, warming me all the way through. (hey! did you see that typo? I’m leaving it in! teehee!).

I love the suddenness of the blooms. One day everything looks gray, and bam! the next time I pay attention the Magnolias are in full bloom, the cherry trees are pink and lovely, and even the blasted Bradford pears look pretty if I remember not to get too close.

I especially love the green. It is a baby green. Fresh. Alive. New. By the time summer arrives the greens are a mature, dark, mellow color, but now they are screaming new life in a way that gets my attention.

That first realization of the green around me heralds the beginning of spring better than any date on a calendar. It happens at different times, always unexpected. It is the suddenness of it, though, that renders me speechless.

I wonder how long spring has really been around me before I recognize it. I don’t like the thought of being so busy or distracted that I don’t have the time or inclination to notice the beauty that surrounds me. It gives me pause.

And then I get over it and revel in the beauty of the green.

Day 16 – A picture of someone who inspires you.

This post is a little different. You may have noticed there is a big break between this entry and the last, and by way of explanation I’ll share with you that this was set to go on time, with a different text about the same person. It happens my dear friend Jeff Gillespie passed away when the post was due to go live, so I replaced it with this because he asked that I speak at his funeral Mass.

I find myself here today doing something that I never expected. Saying goodbye to Jeff is surreal…as I have spent the last decade saying goodbye to him. Blown kisses into the press box at football games…waves across fields after cross country meets…rushed goodbyes at the parish hall after Life Nights so I could get home…lingering goodbyes at my kitchen door after  long nights of conversation…only to find one more thing to talk about before retiring for the night.

There was always one more thing to say. I think he understood that and gave me the last word in our relationship.

By the way, Jeff, that was a pretty risky move since your mother shared with me some childhood pictures of you. There was a lot of plaid in those photographs, my friend. A lot of plaid.

It’s just as well, though. We all know you looked best in Black and Gold.

Jeff and I had a few shared experiences that gave us a common language. Both of us played basketball, and while we rounded out our athletic careers with other sports, he with football and me…to his amusement…badminton, it was really a different love that we shared in common where I gained much from Jeff.

I greatly admired his writing. For starters, he wrote masterful ledes, and I am way too long-winded and given to wild tangents to ever be able to write professionally, but he had plenty to say to me about that. He encouraged me, gently but firmly, and offered me the best advice I’ve ever had about writing. He said, “If you’re not going to be honest, then what’s the point?”

Indeed.

It goes beyond writing, of course. Jeff lived honestly in everything he did, and left his mark because of it. It’s easy to see the awards that he garnered in athletics and journalism, but in my estimation, the real merit is in the multitude of unseen gifts that Jeff sprinkled about in his lifetime.

Every encouraging word. Every pat on the back. Every smile and self-deprecating chuckle brought people, especially young people, into Jeff’s circle of love. If Jeff loved you, you knew it, and he wasn’t stingy about it.

Very early in our relationship I took it upon myself to find as many ways as I could to embarrass him with public displays of affection. I would demand kisses when I saw him. I always got my kiss, even though he quickly looked down and to the side and kicked the ground like a little kid. But here’s the secret: I know he liked it. I have photographic proof of such a kiss…and he’s smiling indulgently.

That’s my boyfriend.

There was a certain shyness about Jeff that endeared him to me. One could say he was a man of few words, but that was the wrong assessment, believe me. He sat at our dinner table many nights pontificating about any number of subjects from sports to local politics to religion. It’s not so much that he was about few words as it was about being careful with the impact of words….Communication was, after all, his vocation.

I’d venture to say communication was his avocation as well, as he was always involved in some group of people, particularly our youth. His mere presence was a statement, and I witnessed how he moved within a group. That’s where one might get the impression that he was shy.

Jeff was an observer and a good listener, two skills sorely lacking in today’s world. He watched and noticed and listened carefully – with humility and charity. When he spoke, it was measured and in accordance with what he heard. As a result, his words tended to carry great weight and import. He knew his audience and how to speak to us, whether it was at the dinner table or a Life Night or in his column. He knew  “his people” and loved us.

It’s that love that I will carry with me. One of the last times we spoke I was teasing him about how loopy he was with the pain meds.  He was getting annoyed with me because he wanted to be serious and the meds were clearly knocking him out. Here’s a little quirky thing about Jeff that you’ve probably noticed. When he’s thinking and speaking he tends to close his eyes. This time, his eyes were closing, not because he was thinking of something deep to say, but because the waves of pain were abating with the strong drugs and he could feel himself drifting. I had to call to him to get his attention long enough to have him hear me say, “I love you.”

He opened his eyes wide, one might say a little out of character, but I understood. His eyes pierced my heart because in his strongest voice ever he told me, “I love you.” He punctuated it with his look, and I knew he was saying goodbye.

A few days later we were taking care of some rather important business that required a clear mind, and he was in serious pain and discomfort. When he was finally able to relax a little, he began drifting to sleep and the group started to move to the other side of his room so as not to disturb him. He stopped us, telling us to stay and mingle. Like we were at a cocktail party or something.

It made me laugh because it was typical Jeff. He was listening and observing and wanted us to mingle.

I like that send-off. He wants us to mingle. To get along. To share with one another. To love one another.

To live fully what he knew about our faith:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.”  And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22:37-39)

Because that’s what Jeff did.

My first real teaching gig was in January of 1985 . I taught employability skills to Cuban and Haitian immigrants in an adult education program tied to the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982.

I learned a lot in that job. Mostly about myself, but also about the students I taught. The amount of suffering they had survived and continued to endure seemed insurmountable to a young, very-wet-behind-the ears teacher just out of college.

It impacted the way I would approach education for the next 25 years. In fact, it impacted the way I have approached relationships, especially with people who remain largely anonymous to me.

I quickly embraced a quotation that I kept in my gradebook as a reminder to be always gentle and kind. Often I failed, but I’d come back the next day and try again.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~Plato

I thought it was a cool quote. What did I know of suffering at 21? Broken hearts and broken dreams would be replaced soon enough with a love rooted in commitment, and dreams buoyed by goals.

And lessons in suffering.

You see, a life without suffering is not much of a life, is it? It is as necessary to a good life as joy, for it provides us with perspective. In fact, it does more than that. It unites us with Christ and His Passion. So, suffering becomes an opportunity for thanksgiving.

I admit I’m not a fan of that. The petulant teenager in me wants happiness all the time. All the time. For me, and for those people whom I love.

To see my loved ones suffer is to be truly touched by the human condition. It is one of the great equalizers, as we all must face our own suffering and the truth of our mortality. Still, there is little consolation in that knowledge when we are hard-pressed to feel the sadness and desolation of illness or tragedy.

The words to console don’t come easily to me. The fight or flight impulse is clearly tipped in the flight department. I wish I had a stronger character, but it is what it is….

So it came as a surprise to me today to run across not one, but two quotes from Blessed John XXIII. The first came in an email forward, and the second popped into my head as I said goodbye to my beloved friend after a long overdue visit:

I have looked into your eyes with my eyes. I have put my heart near your heart. ~Pope John XXIII

It’s the best I can do. It’s the best any of us can do, really. To walk with each other, our hearts close to one another in our joys and in our sorrows.

in no particular order:

• towels right out of the dryer
• a manageable in-box
• a kiss in the kitchen
• coffee
• it deserves another spot: coffee
• the dog, asleep on her back
• text messages from my kids
• a good book, followed by another good book
• surprises in the mail
• a comfy sweatshirt

and megaphone wielding reminders of grace

My son attends a university in a busy, sometimes overwhelming urban center. It is an oasis in the midst of skyscrapers, parking garages, and what I would call, in the right company, a collection of unsavory characters.

I took him to campus on a very cold night shortly after we had experienced some wildly freezing temperatures and rare snow. During our little blizzard, I was fairly put out by feeling incarcerated in our comfortable home with a full pantry and central heat. Those freezing nights were forgotten as I drove through town with the car heater roaring, cutting through side streets to shave off time from my trip so I could get back home before a new round of freezing rain hit.

When I made the last left before approaching campus, my headlights illuminated an unexpected scene in a recess along the side of an old stone church. Three men were huddled together, trying to keep each other warm and away from the biting wind that swirled debris at their feet just inches away from the makeshift safety of the walls.

I’ve seen such a scene before — it’s inescapable in a big city such as this one, but I’ve seen it in Miami, and New York. In Anchorage and Paris. It’s always the same — the dim realization that there was a homeless person, and then the quick adjustment to avoid seeing their eyes. You see, to look into their eyes would be to acknowledge their humanity, and if I did that, well, I’d have to do something more, and that would be uncomfortable, donchaknow.  It would be risky, and not in the they-must-be-sociopaths-and-I’m-going-to-get-mugged way.

I would have to see Christ in their need, and I’m a big fat coward and, let’s face it, too self-absorbed to really face up to that. But I have a soul and a conscience and whatever I didn’t do that night and remained undone was perhaps overshadowed by the image that remained.

As the three men huddled together in the recess, I became aware of their disparate sizes — the one in the middle was very tall and younger, and he was flanked by an older man, and a chubby man of indeterminate age…and the one in the middle was trying to spread out a light blue blanket across the three of them, perhaps not so much to keep them warm as to act like a windbreaker.

The whole scene was colorless. It was late at night, the church stone, once probably light gray or even dazzling white was covered in soot and years of exhaust from buses and cars. The men were in dark clothes, made darker still by dirt and grime. But the blanket looked new. Clean. Warm. And its bright cheery blue was out of place in such a gray monochromatic place.

In the few seconds it took to complete the turn and remove the assaulting headlights that exposed their need, I lamented not having the usual blanket that I carry in my car. It was out of character for me to think it with the intent of actually following through. I must have felt real regret, too, because my next thought was the revelation that they would be okay that night. The bright blue of the blanket was as if Mary’s very own mantle would comfort them that night.

It resonated with me in light of two things that I had recently read, the first, The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen, was quite fresh in my mind. So fresh, in fact, that I had only finished it hours before while in the car on the way home from a trip. The other, a blog post by a guest writer at Michael Hyatt’s blog, Intentional Leadership (add him to your regular reading list), called How Do You See People? Read it. Prodigal Son might be more of a time investment (though worth it) but this post really captures, for me, how I see the poor in our society, and I’m not really talking about the three guys on the street.

Everyone we meet has something they are struggling with, praying about, surviving. We would do well to listen.