Monday Morning Meditation #51: Hoist by One's Own Petard

Since I knew how the story of Esther turned out, I planned to speed through and past that this week, but in such cases my plans rarely work out. Instead, I ended up mulling over the story of Haman. Truly, there are four stories in Esther: (1) Esther, (2) Xerxes, (3), Mordecai, and (4) Haman. Each would serve as an excellent source of meditation: Esther was brave, Xerxes compassionate, Mordecai wise, and Haman proud. Although the story of Esther is the one that likely grabs most people's attention, it was the story of Haman that riveted me.

First, I found some intriguing parallels with modern history. Haman planned a genocide of the Jewish people centuries before Hitler actually carried one out. While clearly the similarity in the names is coincidental, I do find fit it interesting that both Haman and Hitler have two-syllable names that begin with H.

Second, Haman was a self-absorbed, ambitious, proud man. He planned to achieve glory through others' suffering. How ironic that he was killed by the same device he built to kill Mordecai.

Reading: Esther 7:10

Meditation: As I read Haman's story, one phrase kept revolving through my mind: hoist by his own petard. The origin of the expression, as far as I know, is Shakespeare's use of it in Hamlet (hah, another person with a two-syllable name beginning with an H) when Hamlet gets the letters with the death threat against himself and realizes that he can turn the tables on the two who wrote them. Certainly, Haman is the kind of man that anyone would love to hate and would love to see dead, but I think that is one of this situations in which our human drive for justice rides roughshod over the gentler attribute of mercy. While Haman was blinded by his ambition (a fatal flaw that Shakespeare treats in some of his tragedies) and by his pride (a deadly sin, in this case, literally so), if we feel a sense of glee in the demise of Haman, we, too, have a long way to go in spiritual development. And I do have to admit that my initial reaction was satisfaction with the ironic and "well deserved" ending of Haman's life. My second reaction was "oh, oh, not kind, long way to go, lots more to learn." My final, and lasting, reaction is to feel sorry for Haman. We all have only one life on this earth. Haman's decisions trivialized his life. Let us all avoid the kind of pride and ambition that ultimately requires us to give up the only life we have.

Contemplation: That is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to private prayer to thank God for giving me a life and the free will to make choices good and bad, to praise Him for His ability and willingness to guide me through those choices, to repent for any time that I have trivialized His gift by making choices for myself that He would not make for me, and to ask Him to forgive me for those times. Then I will spend as much time as I can in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves, giving the choices back to Him.

I will leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:

Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts. (During the week, he also posts great homilies and other thoughtful discussions. I enjoy reading those, too.)

For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.

Justice or Mercy?

This afternoon I was too angry to be angry. Ever had that feeling? Knowing that it is better to say nothing because what you will say will be so awful that it will take forever to make up for it? Yeah, that kind of afternoon. (Let alone that we still do not know Nikolina's surgical status -- all that is still pending. So today was not the best day for bad news.)

Nonetheless, bad news forced itself into my happy little day. And it all happened so innocently. I had taken time off work to be available to help Shane with any family needs before, during, and after Nikolina's surgery and decided to use some of my found time to balance my checking account. I opened the online version, figuring it would only take a few minutes since I was pretty much caught up, having balanced everything last week, which was pay day. And then a thunderstorm overtook my sunny day. To my horror, I saw that a $1500 payment to the IRS that I had put into my list of checks-by-mail account as a temporary place holder had not been removed when I sent the paper check on pay day to the IRS (my bad) and the bank had gone merrily on its little way and already mailed it, with an arrival date of today. Needless to say, I do not live in that echelon of society that can swallow an extra $1500. Trying to get the $$ back from either the bank or the IRS will take weeks; that much is for certain. The first payment already cleared, and now the second payment, unless something happens, will bounce (or all my other pay-bills-by-mail will bounce and cost a fortune in bounced check fees and quite a bit of embarrassment and paperwork with the companies that are expecting paper, not rubber, checks.) Putting a stop-payment on an IRS check was a nervous-making thought. So, the only reasonable approach seemed to be to find the extra money somewhere -- and I knew where. I could take out an advance on one of my credit cards that would cover half of it, and the rest could be taken from savings for now. We had put that amount of money into a savings account six months ago for an expense we had anticipated (and still anticipate); that could be borrowed temporarily. So, off I went to ask Donnie to go take it out of the bank while I worked on getting the credit card advance.

And then that little bubble of perpetual happiness that seems to bounce up and down around me wherever I go got a leak. Donnie became very quiet. He had that little-boy-caught-with-his-hand-in-the-cookie-jar look on his face. Finally, he admitted that (1) he had never put the full amount into the savings account and (2) over the past six months he had been removing the money bit by bit to buy himself comfort things (like foods that I don't buy because they are bad for his diabetes and little gadgets that I don't quite understand the need for). Now, there is nearly nothing in the account. My happiness bubble was leaking pretty fast, and I decided I had better do something to get out of the house -- uh, I could pick up the mail -- before I totally lost it and said those forever-type things.

On the way to the mail, all kinds of things went through my head, most of which centered around divorcing the "freeloader" (Donnie has not been able to find a full-time job since we returned to the USA from Jordan three years ago and brings in small amounts of money through freelance graphics, which he typically keeps for his own use unless there is an unexpected urgency), divorcing the "thief" (Donnie has emptied one or another account in the past without telling me -- the only joint account left is the savings), or putting the "child" on a short leash (making him turn over his checks to me and then giving him an allowance). Clemency was not among any of my thoughts.

Of course, divorce won't solve the current problem. However, the leash might take care of things in the long run! And then there is the real situation. We have been married 40 years, definitely have a quiet but deep bond of love (when I am not angry), survived all kinds of trauma and drama (more than a dozen families together would be expected to survive), parented a bunch of kids, serve actively and happily as grandparents to Nathaniel and Nikolina, and stability is needed now more than ever for Shane and his wife Lemony, given the situation with their children, for Doah who will need to have a united front to solve his addictive-medicine dilemma on Monday and beyond, for Lizzie and Blaine who have just moved to South Carolina on a shoestring and both about to start new jobs who will need a little financial support for a short while, and for Noelle who herself is trying to provide emotional support to her significant other who will likely be in a care facility for the rest of his life due to total renal failure. Shura has returned to Russia to be with his natural parents, has had Julie for support anyway, and has not needed us for a while. Ksenya is busy becoming famous in Hollywood and has her natural mother here now. Nonetheless, at least a half-dozen members of the successive generations do not need to have their parents losing their cool at this moment in their history. Still, the thought of total freedom, just walking away into the sunset, enticed me, well, at least for 5-10 seconds.

In real life, away from my thought-life, I guess it boils down to the one thing I did not consider on the way to the post office: clemency. (Not that the post office trip helped much: there in my post office box lay a demand for payment for $650 for a bill that we have sent evidence twice that we have paid in full! Argh! Is anyone in the billing office capable of reading?) Sigh! Clemency...That is not the choice I feel like making right now. It was not even the choice that came out in the two daily mass readings that I heard this morning. One was the post-battle sacrifice of the king's daughter and the other was the binding and ejection of the guest who came improperly attired to the banquet. Sheesh!

I am going to go walk around the mission grounds in just a little bit and talk to God. I am pretty sure God will hand me back my happiness bubble and teach me more about mercy, my initial reaction always being oriented toward justice rather than mercy. And then life will go on - because it has to and because God always makes my boo-boos stop hurting.

Oh, the money? I sort of forgot about that, didn't I? Nothing to worry about - I already asked God for help, so I have indeed forgotten about that problem other than being ready to follow any guidance that comes along. Actually, after today's thunderstorm, I am looking forward to tomorrow's rainbow, just one of those many gifts from God!

The Extra Manager at Today's Meeting

We are reading 1 Samuel in our Bible Studies class through an interdenominational scripture class published by SEEK. Tonight, we discussed chapter 23, in which David twice seeks the counsel of the Lord. One of the personalizing questions posed in the SEEK study materials is "When was the last occasion that you went before the Lord with a decision that needed to be made? Did you have a sense that God did lead and guide you?" (For me, that would be, ah, like, every day, given the life complications that I routinely run up against.)

The question immediately brought to mind the first meeting I had had this morning. Without revealing confidential information, I can share that two senior managers and I, their supervisor, had been called by our Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) office to a pre-mediation discussion with our organization's attorney and Human Resource director about an age discrimination complaint that had been filed by an employee from one of our branch offices who had been fired for absenteeism and poor performance by his first-line supervisor, Shirley. Prior to this meeting, I had, as usual with such meetings, asked God for guidance. (I don't like to play with people's lives without that kind of assistance.)

Once assembled, we introduced ourselves and our roles since our organization is quite large and not everyone knew everyone. The role of most of the members of the assembled group was clear. Roger was Shirley's supervisor, and I was Roger's supervisor. However, why Marvin had been called in was a puzzle to everyone, including to the EEO specialist who had set up the meeting and sent out the meeting invitations. Marvin, like Roger, was a senior manager, but he was not in Shirley's chain of command. We all agreed that it looked like an accident that Marvin was there, but he might as well stay because he had ridden there with Roger and me and would be stranded until we were ready to leave, anyway.

It appeared that Shirley had done an adequate enough job of counseling the employee and had some documentation to back up the firing. Curiously, the employee had only asked for reinstatement for six months as a redress for discrimination. I moved the discussion away from whether or not we could give a non-discriminatory reason for the firing (we could) and whether or not we could back that up with documentation (we could) to why the employee would only ask for a 6-month reinstatement. Well, it turned out that this was the amount of time he needs to be in the organization in order to qualify for retirement -- and, having started with us pretty late in life, he is already of retirement age. Based on this information, I ventured that we not look at this complaint as one in which we could justify whether we had done things right (all the correct documentation, following the rule book) but rather as one in which we could justify whether we had done the right thing (the humane approach to a person's life). Doing the right thing rather than always doing things right, a leadership concept introduced by Warren Bennis in his book, On Becoming a Leader, is an approach that I vigorously advocate for all the supervisors within my division.

Now, the problem with doing the right thing -- retaining the employee long enough for him to be able to retire (Where else, at an advanced age, would he be able to start the whole process all over again so that he would enough time to earn a pension?) -- is that continuing to work for his current first-line supervisor would be very problematic and probably impossible for a number of reasons that I cannot share. Hmm...Just as it started to seem that there would be no choice except to support the first-line supervisor's decision to cut the cord in advance of retirement and the lawyer and HR officer began moving in that direction, I looked at Marvin and got a "scathingly brilliant idea" as Hayley Mills in the lead role of Mary in the movie, The Trouble with Angels, was wont to say. Marvin is the senior manager of our Internet products, one for which the employee could work from his current branch office location on a flexi-place, short-term basis. Marvin acknowledged that he could probably find six months of work on a special project for the employee and stated that he would be willing to take him on. Voila! A chance to the right thing!

"Now I think we all know why you were called to this meeting!" I told Marvin.

Oh, yes, to answer the question from tonight's Bible Study class, I did indeed get a sense that God did lead and guide me today!