IrvingD

I rode my bicycle everywhere. Don't tell my parents, but I even ventured into Brooklyn and Manhattan. But all that came later. As an eleven-year-old, I was just flexing my pedals in the discovery of New York, which means that I just rode around my neighborhood. One Saturday, I rode to the other side of Elmhurst, a quiet part of Queens populated by an equal amount of private houses and apartment buildings. Flying over the barrel bridge where 91st Place crosses the Long Island Rail Road, I sailed down the long hill across Corona Avenue towards the Newtown High School Athletic Field. I made a right on Justice Avenue, a quiet street that partly connects Broadway and Junction Boulevard. It got its name from the old Newtown Court House that stood on what is now a traffic triangle at Broadway, the heart of colonial Newtown before developers changed the name to Elmhurst in order to disassociate the area from the eponymous fetid creek that separates Queens from Brooklyn. Anyway, I rode ...

I sat with my mother and her friend at a Woolworth's lunch counter. Swiveling left and right from the ten o'clock to the two o'clock position on the round rotating red vinyl stool rimmed in aluminum strips, I slowly munched on a grilled cheese sandwich. A woman took the stool on my right. Her face wore a sadness that entered my bones and never left. I wondered why she was so unhappy. Her eyes darted back and forth with a nervous vigilance as if someone was looking at her. I averted her gaze, swiveled back to ten, stopped at twelve, and took another bite of my sandwich. Slowly moving towards two o'clock, I listened as the woman gave her order to the counter waitress. A cup of black coffee with a large glass of milk. Regarding her strangely, the waitress suggested that she might prefer milk with her coffee. She insisted on a tall glass of milk with a cup of black coffee. I checked in with my mother at ten, took a bite at noon, swallowed at two when I observed the woman d...

Yesterday after church, I entered into a conversation that I haven't had for a long time. Over a "coffee hour" of shrimp cocktail, specialty breads, and marvelous dips, this astute gentleman and I discussed theology and culture. We both discovered that we shared similar values and views, which was not surprising in itself. What did surprise me was our mutual understanding that American spirituality over the past half-century has shifted from one grounded in firm religious dogmas to one grounded in purely subjective feelings. Totally divorced from anything external or objective, beliefs have become a purely fanciful thing. For example, the name "Jesus" can mean anything a person wants it to mean, depending on how she feels about the word "Jesus." No connection with the Jesus of record is necessary. In fact, for many people today, any connection of Jesus to the Christian New Testament is suspect and often rejected ipso facto because the New Testament ca...

Our school building just entered the late Twentieth Century with the installation of a new elevator in the east wing. For the four years that I've been a teacher in the building of the old Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, I had grown accustomed to the very old style, manually operated elevators. In September of 2006, I stood open-mouthed as the elevator door opened revealing a little gentleman in a guayabera shirt asking, "You going up?" I stepped into an art deco car that had to be as old as my mother and watched as Sanchez pushed up on a bar closing the door and swiftly pushed the brass collapsible gate across the threshold of the car with his left hand. With his right, he pushed down on a wooden handled crank that started the motor and cables lifting us with a high-pitched whooping noise to the fifth floor. It was right out of the movies. It was right out of my earliest childhood memories, when my mother took me to places unknown that had elevators with human operato...

Pentecost is perhaps the least understood of the events observed in the Christian Calendar. Christmas, for many obvious reasons, is the most accessible and universally acceptable of the these events. Less so are the solemn events surrounding Jesus' death and resurrection. These milestones of the church year demand much more of those who would observe them, requiring a deeper commitment not only to the events commemorated, but to their meaning for faith and life. Then along comes Pentecost. How do we access it's meaning, let alone assess it? Where are its holiday markers: it's wreaths or cross or basket of eggs? The Book of Acts tells us that on the Jewish feast of Shavuot (Pentecost in Greek), Jesus' followers were gathered in an upper room when without warning they experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit accompanied by strange occurrences—the sound of a strong wind with apparitions of flames that looked like human tongues resting on each individual in the room. Im...

I was just contemplating my career in a rather WASPy mainline, Protestant denomination, and thinking of just how I don't really fit into its dominant culture. My traditional beliefs and orthodox theology have a place, however contained, in this church.  Even the West Coast generally features churches of a more conservative sort, the California congregations represent a very upper middle class, culturally WASP identity by and large. Just another indicator that this little brown brother of Spanish/Filipino extraction does not fit in. Ironically, I am preaching regularly in a nice, liberal church in a very affluent part of the city that boasts a more suburban than urban feel. The community represents one of the more elite neighborhoods of the city with beautiful, large homes on a peninsula jutting out into the Long Island Sound. This is Great Gatsby country.The people there are very lovely and welcoming towards me. Their hospitality has been wonderful. Yet I can't help but feel ...

Walking down Roosevelt Avenue the other day, I passed a Quickly bubble tea place. I called my daughter to ask her what kind of bubble tea she'd like and she wanted me to order her a green. Quickly is the name of a chain of principally cold tea and fruit drinks that describes itself as a "New Generation Asian Fusion Cafe." There is some food, but they feature drinks galore with 264 varieties of teas, slushies, and fruit juice combos. However, the main feature is "Bubble Milk Tea," a creamy cold mixture of strong black tea and milk with chewy purple tapioca balls in it. The cups are heat-sealed with a thin plastic cover which does not leak when the cup is shaken or placed upside down. One takes a wide, plastic straw from the counter and punches a hole in the cellophane lid to enjoy this exotic concoction. You have to be careful to control your suction so that you don't inhale the tapioca balls, or bubbles, and at the same time enjoy the sweet milky tea. I usua...

Today is the first day of Spring Break. School's out for the next ten days and I start thinking about all those things that'll get done before I go back. Hah! Or as one puts it in IM speak, "LMAO!" This time I got smart. I have no goals. Just do what needs to be done each day and enjoy the time off. That way-by Tuesday, April 6th-there's no guilt, no sense of having wasted all the time only to pick up the same pile of work I left in the corner on March 26th and get ready for school. That sounds like a workable plan.

Yesterday, I attended a ceremony dedicating a portion of West 61st Street off Amsterdam Avenue in New York City as "POWER MEMORIAL WAY." The renaming of that street honors the former site of my old high school, Power Memorial Academy which occupied that corner from 1938 to 1985. The corner holds a thousand memories of adolescent uncertainties, of academic strivings, pranks, accomplishments , and setbacks. Of friendships and insecurities. The corner speaks to me of countless band practices up and down W. 62nd St, and of the blasting and excavation between W. 61st and W. 60th in preparation for the new Lincoln Square Campus of Fordham University. I remember hearing the dynamite blasts from my seventh floor classroom. The building shook as if in an earthquake. Little did I suspect that society shook even more vigorously in those years between 1966 and 1970. Power Memorial opened up a dialogue between me and the outside world. It's Catholic teaching reflected the heady "...

Watching the last hours of the 2010 Winter Olympics accentuated for me just how gentle our good neighbors to the North are. From listening to the post game comments of the Canadian Hockey Team to watching the whimsical antics of the closing ceremony program, I could not help but think of that self-effacing humility which characterizes Canada. I called to mind their history with its marvelous human rights record. When our country shamelessly made broke treaties with its Native population, Canada welcomed them with more liberty and justice than they could ever receive south of the border. The same held true for African-American slaves seeking asylum. Canada became for them a Promised Land, a virtual Zion of freedom out that Egypt that was the United States of America. Over time, Canada obtained its independence from Great Britain, not by violent revolution, but by a gradual process of transfer of power from London to Ottawa. Canada outdid its former British overlords in its treatment of ...

The alarm kept its shrill appointment with me at 5:45 A.M. yesterday. I had only a few short hours of sleep as a result of burning some midnight oil and the awakening was not welcome. Moments after I turned off the buzzer, the familiar pings of a text message sounded on my Blackberrry. Who would text me this early? It was from my music teacher friend, Shanan, who wrote: "Snow day today. Go back to bed." No sooner than that happened, the all news radio station I wake up to announced that all New York City Public Schools are closed today. Yes! I texted Shanan back, "Hallelujah!" Went downstairs for a glass of water. Received a text from my daughter that there's no school. And went back to bed. The second snow day this winter. At eleven I got up, made coffee, and watched the gentle snowflakes fall. Of the many ways to relax, there is probably nothing that matches watching a steady windless snowfall of preferably large flakes. Peaceful. With coffee in hand, I surren...

One of my warmest early childhood memories is watching the Winter Olympics accompanied by a cup of tea and LU imported biscuits. I can remember back to the 1956 and 1960 games when I was four and eight-years-old respectively. My parents would gather around the Zenith black and white television with friends on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to watch downhill skiing and figure skating. I stood at the coffee table fascinated by the skiing and bored by the skating, but always eager to dip another petit-beurre in my cup of hot tea with milk and sugar. Laughter and conversation in four languages from the adults mingled with cow bells and the sportscaster's voice coming from the TV making a blanket of sound that covered the tea, the cookies, and me. No cozier spot could be found on a cold day in February.

While no one can explain how God can be both One and Three at the same time, one can affirm the Unity of God while acknowledging also the Three-ness of Persons within that Unity. The Biblical record leaves us with just that situation. Jesus comes not merely as a human teacher with unique--even divine--qualities, he comes as someone who is as much God as he is a Man. He is no avatar, or appearance of deity in human form, but God in the flesh--incarnate--as Christian teaching describes him. Jesus is fully human. Jesus is fully Divine. Yet he bears a relationship with God as Father, separate yet equal. We also encounter in Scripture a figure separate from the Father and the Son yet, at the same time, equally God with them. The Holy Spirit makes his appearance in the symbolic form of a dove during Jesus' baptism and as a wind storm of fiery tongues on the day of Pentecost in the Upper Room where 120 disciples awaited his empowerment. From the beginning, those devout Jews who became Jes...

Some things must die before other better things arise. Jesus understood the dynamics of the spiritual life and He related that life to things we could understand. He said: “Very truly, I tellyou, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24) . From a single seed you get a whole plant yielding many seeds for food and nourishment. But the single seed must first “die”—be placed in the ground, buried—before it germinates and grows. Spiritually speaking, so must we. Lent began today—Ash Wednesday. I recommend that we embrace Lent for what it really is: a tool for strengthening our spiritual life. Following the example of Our Lord, the ancient church understood that a forty day period of focused discipline helps us to concentrate on that dying which Jesus spoke about. Lent isn’t merely about “giving up” something; it’s about dying to oneself, about actively putting to death those character flaws ...

Yesterday I visited an old friend. My daughter, her boyfriend, and I went to the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. When Renee was small, we went there regularly-so regularly that she used to call the place, "my museum." Like so many parents of young children, my wife and I joined the museum with a family membership. The savings paid off for the number of times we visited the place. That membership, long elapsed during the teen years, is no longer an advantage now. Or is it? When I paid for the three of us yesterday, I nearly passed out from the cost of general admission plus one special exhibition. Although the admission price is called a "donation," one dare not give less than the "recommended" amount! Sixty dollars later, we toured the old familiar places: the darkened corridors of glass dioramas holding what must be the largest collection of stuffed animals in the world. The 120-foot model of a blue whale still hung in the Hall of Oce...

TO KEEP A TRUE LENT by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) Is this a fast, to keep The larder lean? And clean From fat of veals and sheep? Is it to quit the dish Of flesh, yet still To fill The platter high with fish? Is it to fast an hour, Or ragg’d to go, Or show A downcast look and sour? No ; ‘tis a fast to dole Thy sheaf of wheat, And meat, Unto the hungry soul. It is to fast from strife, From old debate And hate; To circumcise thy life. To show a heart grief-rent; To starve thy sin, Not bin; And that’s to keep thy Lent.

When I decided to leave the pastoral ministry for teaching in a public school, an acquaintance asked me whether I had lost my faith. I replied, "On the contrary, I am more orthodox than ever!" The change was largely vocational--not a matter of conviction. Over the years I have succumbed to what G. K. Chesterton called the "romance of orthodoxy." This romance is not a kind of will o' the wisp feeling generated by reading Chesterton and C.S. Lewis accompanied by pints of ale and good pipe tobacco. Neither does it stem from reaction to modernity with its aversion to the supernatural for the empirical, much less is it a reaction to post-modernity with its love of chaos and disavowal of any order or meaning to things. No. My Christian orthodoxy is no rejoinder to some assertion that I previously held, it is but rather a romance with truth and beauty, with permanence transcending a transitory existence, with purpose and meaning beyond the ephemeral, with God.  ...