This Is Not The Best Possible Day

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite non-fiction authors.  This was her facebook post yesterday.

This is not the best possible day.

But it is the only day, the only day we have on all this earth. And it is not ideal for someone who is pretty sure that if things went the way she thinks they should go, life would be better for almost everyone.

It would better for the poor, for children, the suffering--coincidentally, the exact same people Jesus and Gandhi cared most about.

If people behaved better, the way I think they should, it would totally cheer Jesus up. You'd see a new side of him, a cheerier side.

What is so scary is that left to my own devices, I actually believe this.

My only hope and salvation is that I'm not left to my own devices, and to my own best thinking, and our collective best thinking.

Botox is our best thinking, along with drones.

I've been obsessed with drones since I went to Hiroshima two weeks ago, with my wild Jesuit friend Tom Weston. Of course, what you see in the footage there is Christ crucified. But on the river, we also saw a dock full of Hawaiian folksingers, in full aloha regalia and leis, slack key guitarists and little children singing to the people of Japan.
The first Americans attacked by the Japanese, welcomed by--singing to--the first people in the world that we bombed with a nuclear weapon. Wow. That is just so on beyond zebra that I sat down on the ground there and cried.

It stopped me. It gentled me.

Usually I'm getting things done, moving all the pieces on my board game ahead, whipping up a little random bluster or grievance. This is human stuff. I guess that unless you're talking Amish or Icelander, we all have it. It's a miracle to get free of that, now and then.

I had gone to Japan to see the neighborhood where my father lived from 1923 until 1938, the son of Presbyterian missionaries; God's frozen chosen, and the reason my father so laothed Christianity. But I accidentally became a Presbyterian too, at St. Andrew Prez in Marin City (services at 11:00.) and I wanted to see my grandparents's church, where he taught, where they worshipped.

And so, two days before we went to bear witness at Hiroshima, we had taken many subways and walked for a long time to find this crummy little church in my dad's old neighborhood, which was basically now Rodeo Drive.

I've heard it said that expectations are resentments under construction, and even though I have found that is true most of the time, I had high expectations of my welcome at my grandfather's church. I thought the ministers would be amazed at my story. But the Japanese ministers I explained myself to were friendly, important and busy. Beware the human factor, They kind of blew me off. What had I expected?
"Oh my God, we named our kids after your grandfather!"
Or, "Thank God for white people."

As usual, I'm in the striving business, and God is in the results business. So I said to God, Thank you for getting me here, tired and hungry with my dear and cranky friend. Talk about anti-climactic. But because of God, and Tom, I got there, to my grandfather's church.

And my grandfather's church got me to the Hawaiian folksingers in Hiroshima. And the atomic bomb that we dropped there is probably the reason my father, who fought on Okinawa, was alive, to give my brothers and I life. More will reveal itself to me later. But for now, today, I am remembering that all is change, and that things are much wilder, richer and more profound than we give them credit for. The paradox is that we discover this in the smallest moments of kindness and attention and amazement, at our own crabby stamina, at grandmas in kimonos and babies in leis, at ginko trees in a park turning from green to gold to red.