God's Whisper--Maybe

It is very nearly a year since my job was lost to me.


A song occurs to me, "What's it all about Alfie?" with appropriate substitutions of name, c'est moi, the Djinn. "What's it all about, Djin-n?" In these pages and in other fora, I have offered some thoughts along the way, from the early days, in July 2011, right after the fourth of July, through each month.


I almost became a legal denizen of the transit system and its traffic court. I wrote about my first ride on the Los Angeles City trains in preparation for that role. But then I realized that I did not want to step immediately back into the realities of bureaucracy, public, or private. I was grateful to my friend for connecting me to the possibility of that job of reviewing decisions of the new hearing officers, and I felt some remorse at having let her down by deciding not to pursue it after some initial training. She said she understood, that my mind and heart were not in it right then. I hope she did.


Over the year I took three voice over courses and I was considered for one little radio commercial through an on line audition, although I never heard from them so I assume after the consideration I was not chosen. I have an on line profile on Voice123, with a kind of makeshift demo, pending the professional one that I will need to pay some bucks for, which bucks have been diverted to the renovation of my father's condominium into which I shall probably move.

I have written a rambly presently 380 page nearly finished first draft of a memoir about my life before, during and after therapy, (and one individual who I felt graced to know who led me to other individuals I remain graced to know) that probably will never see the light of day but has been on my list of things to do since I can remember. I read for the blind and dyslexic and I enjoy ever single 15 to 20 pages I do of various books each week. I plan on increasing my donation of time to this enterprise.

I almost went inactive, but decided that I had worked so hard for two law licenses, one here, and the other in New York, that I was not quite ready to relinquish the moniker, Attorney at Law.  So I am still active and dues paying. Whether I want them to or not, people I know call me when they have a legal problem. Sometimes I say I can't help. Other times, I'll take a look. And who knows, even now, perhaps something long term in that arena,will turn up that will be as good a fit as the Bar. Maybe this time I won't be in a 25 year rollercoaster ending in a big personal crash by virtue of circumstances outside of my control. I should say that my first contact with a bunch of laweyrs in ten months was at a lovely bit of spiritual direction at a local retreat house led by a professor at St. John's Seminary. It no longer stung to admit that I was one of the "top prosecutors fired by the State Bar". There were four of us. Since that time, two others have retired from the organization after helping the new leaders to take the lay of the land, and another was "let go", leaving an entirely new management team in place. I wish them at least as long as I had as a manager, a not uncommendable ten years. Was it worth it? Yes, it was. I wouldn't change a thing, even the things that made me crazy and hurt like hell.

More and more it has occurred to me that God is telling me something, but I am still not sure what it is. Or I am but I am resisting what I am hearing. Not resisting, exactly, but it is true, really true, that there is a big tug of war between spiritual development and "the world" which, as tragic and often malevolent as it often is, also has delights that I do not seem willing to give up the potentiality of, even if I were never to take advantage of them. You have read, those of you who are reading, surprisingly in places like Russia and France (not many but more than I would expect) of my increased attendance at Mass, my volunteer Eucharistic Ministry. I am trying to pray more than ever I have even the rosary which I always found difficult in its repetitions, because I cannot sit still. I am doing some morning and evening prayer now, with moderate consistency.

Is there a "holy roller" in the offing?  Well, I guess it depends on how you define the term. If it is that I am trying to say "yes" to eternal life by looking to the Trinity, that I believe Christ is the Center, that I am a sinner and that my life is not about me (in Fr. Robert Barron's paraphrased words), then I guess I am. But to be "holy" is to be truly other and allowing God His conversion, His very Divinization of human nature, so that I become transfigured, as all men and women are invited to do, to be truly "other", well, I am a long long way off and may not get there by journey's end.  But even lawyers can become saints, look at Thomas More!

I am often puzzled at the ease of dismissal of the idea of God's expectation of us to let us love Him, even as I know that letting love out or in of me from a human perspective has always been nearly impossible for me. Sometimes it is more than dismissal it is a rebellious willingness to be separated from Him, which is what Hell really is. It is perhaps the most simplistic reason why I believe, that if it IS true, then I have gained enormously, and if it is not, then I won't know about it. But it sure makes more sense to me than telling God He is a fictional putz and taking my chance on having condemned myself in the process. Seems a potentailly costly mistake, if it turns out it is one, as something deep within me tells me it would be. But I digress, as usual.

Will my efforts take? I have no idea. I have lapsed before and I am not going to swear that I won't again. I can only go moment by moment.


On more earthbound subjects, I have renewed my passport and after the condo is renovated and my renewed fear of flying is hypnotized out of me or otherwise goes on hiatus as it sometimes does, I want to see the places that formed my genetic national self, Ireland and Greece (before it goes kaput completely). I have seen Italy but maybe since I loved it so much I might go back. We shall see.

 I have always been a creature of habit. But with my entire prior personal world exploded and being reborn, I am having to consider a different response. All the usual markers are gone.


Here's the thing though. I am a little afraid to say it. With all my anxieties, and they remain legion, I find that I am one thing more often than I have been in the past. I am happier. Maybe that is part of God's Whisper.

Hollywood: Dreams and Memories of a Once Young Djin

The other day I was driving along Fairfax Avenue, just shy of CBS Television City, where often you will see lots of folks queued up for their turn in the spotlight on "The Price Is Right". I was behind one of the open air touring vans--there are a million companies--filled, given the beautiful weather we have been having, with first time visitors to Hollywood.


I could almost reproduce though 35 years in time past, my early visits to the land of oranges and palm trees, and of course, Pinks (the hot dog stand where on Oscar night the stars are known to have a bite after the show) that feeling of adventure and hopefulness I had in 1977 and then again in 1978 when I first experienced the dry warmth and bright colors of Los Angeles.


I had just begun law school then but I harbored the dream of being in the industry, joining mine to the countless others of the young and yet untried who came before me. I had written some scripts "on spec" with my then partner, Len Speaks and while I might have to have a "real job" for a while, I really wanted to be a sitcom writer.


Los Angeles, then so friendly and clean, was a revelation to me. The Bronx was as foreign from this place to me as any exotic place on the other side of the world. What the Los Angeleans hated--the spread out nature of the communities--I loved. It was bright and vast and full of promise to a kid who never considered she'd ever get outside of the Bronx. But then I had that first glimpse of the nearest thing to paradise.The City of Angels. The first time, when I had not yet learned to drive, I was taken to the beach by Dennis, then a fellow at USC, emerging from the tunnel that divided the 10 from the Coast Highway to a spot on view of the glittering ocean, I was not only dazzled but infused with a magical sense of freedom.


When I came back a second time in 1978, Len Speaks made the trip as well and we two aspiring not long out of college types tooled around (I still did not drive but he did) from downtown to Westwood, the college community adjacent to that sprawling UCLA campus, to the, yes, Hills of Beverly!

Upper left a 1978 shot of an intersection; upper right me in front of what was then Casey's Bar
Lower left, a house we stopped at in the hills, not because it was particularly gorgeous but because of
the sign, I could pretend I was rich and famous; bottom right, Len Speaks in a most mellow condition at Casey's (I think it's now a Mexican Restaurant)

Still in school, surviving the "Paper Chase" and passing the Bar and getting any job, never mind fame and fortune ,was uppermost in my mind. One thing I did know, I had to live in Los Angeles--how it would ever be possible I had no idea, but I told it to myself regularly so that somehow idea would translate one day into action.  In my case, risk aversive as I was, and remain, it seemed unlikely I would make the escape from the land of "Car 54" to the land of "Chips" (which I saw filmed in Beverly Hills on the second visit).  But the dream sure didn't hurt and it kept me motivated.

I made the move in 1981, after completing my education and working a bit in the mad bureaucracy of the New York City government as well as in the frenetic offices of the lawyer friend of a friend of my Aunt Kathleen. I found a job as essentially the secretarial "Girl Friday" (there was no title called "Administrative Assistant" in those ancient days)  in a law office that was as frenetic as the one I had left in New York, while I awaited the passing of the California Bar. The dream of being a Hollywood writer took a back seat to paying bills. Len Speaks found a new partner and in 1995 they moved to Los Angeles.

The dream, really dreams, because aside from writing I always wanted to do something with my voice, radio, voice-overs, also remote in a town of many clamoring and talented voices, did not depart--they only faded a little. I guess I used my speaking skills as a trial lawyer and ethics instructor (I know, I know, the idea of an ethical lawyer is an oxymoron; you know what? shhhhh. . .I agree with you), staying in one place for 25 years until, as an "at will" employee it became somebody's will to dispense with me and a significant number of the management team. "Thems the breaks" as they say.

Yes, there has been an adjustment, but here's the thing, the dreams are coming back into focus, and as I waited at the light behind that tour van, I felt a little of the sense of freedom that had first been triggered by the ocean blue of Santa Monica and the wide-eyed visits to the sites.  Sometimes as I drive around (yes, I did learn in anticipation of my hoped for move after I came back from my early visits) it all feels new to me again! 

It is a little different now, in this:  I am holding out no expectations of fame and fortune. I am learning to enjoy the ride and maybe create a little bit of something instead of controlling, regulating, giving orders, or taking them, except of course from the Divine Lord--and there I also have some work to do!

I used to love that UCLA shirt (me circa 1978, at age 24,  stunned by the wonders of California, in my Uncle Steve and Aunt Mary's apartment--I have been living just across the street for nearly 32 years). I think I need a new one to go along with my rekindled dreams!











Questioning One's Ministry

When I became, shall we say, circumstantially retired, I knew that I would no longer practice law in any formal sense. There is the occasional question from a relative or friend, which I avoid like the plague because of the dangers, alas learned in my time as an ethics regulator, of accidentally forming an attorney-client relationship. That is a story for another time. >p>

I have been in a sense gestating these last nine months about to be ten, trying on different things, a major project, renovating my condo, which remains in anxiety producing progress as I write-- BIG task, like it or not, and then weekly or daily projects, like reading for the blind and dyslexic, working with a couple of charities, here and there, and acting as a Eucharistic Minister for the sick at a local hospital.

Oh, as you know, I was already occasionally distributing Communion at Church, and even that remains a bit new to me. But there, surrounded by the ritual and parish accouterments, I feel in sync with the act of saying to the recipient, "Body of Christ" and the awesome nature of the giving and the receiving. But then, as I believe I may have written somewhere in these pages, about six or more weeks ago, one of my friends, already volunteering at the hospital down the road from me, asked me to join her, as the second of two ministers in that place, which has no chaplain. I was a bit reluctant, because the hospital in our parish has a cadre of ministers, and this hospital is not otherwise served formally by any parish and for whatever reason, none seemed eager. But she asked me with earnestness, and I said yes.

I am the Thursday volunteer. I receive a copy of the "census" with the names of the Catholic patients both in regular rooms and ICU (intensive care), and now, with all appropriate authority, I go to each of these patients asking if he or she would like to receive the Eucharist. If they are unable to do so for some medical reason for example, "NPO" which is the Latin abbreviation for "nothing by mouth", or because they are asleep or medically otherwise indisposed, if he or she is interested in a prayer, we will briefly pray and I always try to engage the personal so that there is some connection to the normalcy outside of bandaged and twisted limbs. Because it is a small hospital, at most, so far, there have been 20 Catholic patients at any given time, with the least about 7. After my rounds, I dispose of the census in the shredder in the medical records department, a requirement of HYPPA (confidentiality of patients) and the only record I keep is the room number, the bed and whether or not the person received.  I therefore have no retroactive idea who was in the room or the bed, which revolves weekly in any case.


What I have learned, and perhaps not something which should have eluded me intellectually, is that most people in hospital are not really disposed to either prayer or reception of God in the form and substance of the Eucharist. They are sleepy. They have just recently eaten or drank, which means that the hour "fast" has not been kept. As to that, one might and has, made exception, for the circumstances that these patients find themselves in--incapacitated or rehabilitating physically.  Allow this digression--that is a key problem--for although I was "trained" as a minister a long time ago, since I am not part of a group doing this within the hospital, when I have an immediate question, there is no one to whom I can turn. In those cases, I simply take the most conservative route, to the best I can assess it.


Or they are watching television, and oddly it rarely occurs to people to shut the volume unless you instruct them to do so. Or, as in one case, upon announcing that I was the Eucharistic Minister from the Catholic Church, the man stayed on his telephone conversation. I told him I would come back. When I did, he was still fully immersed in the conversation. I made the decision that he was not inclined toward reception. I did not return.


Oh, to be sure, there have been a couple of people, who upon seeing me and having my introduction as a representative of ministry, have become reverent immediately; one woman cried as we prayed and she received. There were one or two others like that. And although I only bring about two or three Hosts with me, and break them up if there are many recipients, there simply are rarely a number. I have been left with a host or two, and once three. My co-volunteer admitted to me that she keeps Our Lord in her car if she does not distribute them all. Alas, I have been taught that outside of the Tabernacle, if all Hosts are not consumed, the minister must consume them. So, I go to the Serenity Room, a pleasant non-denominational spot on the third floor transformed into a Church by His Presence around my neck in the pyx. And I pray and realize that I am not worthy to receive even one of these Hosts let alone more than one.

Don't get me wrong, this is an important ministry,even if all we do is pray a little or I pray, when they do not speak, or cannot speak. It is not strictly about those to whom I minister. It is about me, about my losing the sense of Mystery, of Divinity, because I am even less disposed than those receiving. That which I do only occasionally keeps me aware of the profound Nature of He Whose Sacrifice brought us the choice to follow. Something about me, something about the atmosphere, the context in that hospital, in any hospital, somehow I lose it, I lose Him. I lose Him.  He does not lose me.


So, I continue this ministry, but I realize that it may not be my niche as a Christian Catholic or as a volunteer in any sense. I continue because right now, my co-volunteer is on leave while she cares for her very sick sister, at least until June.


I guess one might say, that divested of all the things which I had once considered important, a career, authority of a sort, a self-anointed gravitas, I am discerning my place in the tapestry that is God's Will for each of us. I am presently doing a haphazard job. But that's ok. As I am also learning to live in the present, rather than in the past or the future.


What is the cliche? "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans".