Not-At-Homeness

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Bob Ritzema
Where I once felt at home.

In his book “On the Road With St. Augustine,” James K.A. Smith writes about the not-at-homeness (a translation of Heidegger’s term Unheimlich) that is a familiar part of the human condition. It’s a “sense of frustration, futility, of never arriving, never feeling settled with ourselves…” We’re searching for home, in other words for a place where we are welcomed, where we belong, where we can stop striving and rest.

Smith notes that many people try to cope with not-at-homeness by distracting themselves from the sense of alienation and restlessness. We get busy, or immerse ourselves in entertainments. There’s value, though, in letting ourselves yearn for a home. Our not-at-homeness “becomes a gift that creates an opening to once again face the question of who we are.” Smith suggests we can better understand this condition by reflecting on the lives of those who are most acutely without home: the exile, the migrant, and the refugee. He thinks Augustine was aware of such alienation, since he left his African homeland to pursue his fortunes in Italy only to find that he was too African for the Italians and, once he returned to Africa, too foreign for the Africans.

The not-at-homeness that Smith describes has grown for me personally over the last few years. My greatest sense of home for most of my life came from my visits once or twice each year to my parents’ house in Michigan. In 2012, I returned there to live with them and provide care as their abilities diminished. It still seemed like home while I was there, though it had been diminished in many ways. Both of them eventually died, and I moved to Milwaukee about six months after my mom’s funeral. It’s not a place I had lived before, but is near my oldest son. It doesn’t feel like home here. Then again, there’s no other place that seems more like home, nowhere that I belong. I lived in North Carolina for over 30 years, but that almost seems like another life now. My Michigan hometown still is full of both friends and memories, but it’s definitely not home anymore.

After reading Smith’s description of not-at-homeness, I thought of the last years with my mom. She lived in the same city all her life, and died in the house she and my dad bought back in the 1950s. Had it continued to feel lite home to her, though? Her husband died eight years before she did. Her parents, best friend, and sisters were all gone. She wasn’t totally isolated: She still had some friends and talked to her children and grandchildren. But she frequently asked “Why am I still here?” Her sense of home was only tenuously related to her surroundings. Instead, she thought more and more about a home she had never visited but yearned for, where Jim and Joann and Marian and so many others she loved had gone before her, where she would meet Jesus face to face. Her favorite song in the last few weeks of her life was a plea to be brought to that place:

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, help me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

In light of her experience, perhaps my increased sense of not-at-homeness since her death isn’t unusual, but is what will happen to most of us if we live long enough. My sense of home is like a tent staked to the ground. One by one, the stakes are being pulled up. Eventually, they will all be removed, and the tent will blow away. I’ll be ready to follow it. From this perspective, the unsettledness is as Smith describes it: not a problem but an opportunity. It’s preparation for what’s to come, provision for a journey to the home that is waiting for me.  

Posted in Death, Psyche | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

When Parents Die, Who Do They Become?

Posted on January 26, 2024 by Bob Ritzema

Ed (not his real name), who lives with me at Barnabas House, just lost his father. His mother died a few years ago.  His dad was 92 years old and under hospice care. Ed’s relationship with his dad was very strained, and he admitted that he thought of them as dead to him long before they actually died. However, he’s experiencing a stronger reaction than he expected to his dad’s death.

Both of his parents came from large families, but none of their siblings are still alive. It’s eerie for him that the entire older generation is gone. Ed also is troubled that there’s not a family home to which he can return. There’s his dad’s house, which his brother will probably end up owning, but there’s no family place to gather. It was different when his mother died. Back then, his father was still there, making plans for life without her. Now there’s no one.  

We talked about all this after our prayer time the night his dad died. I have also lost both parents, my dad in 2014 and my mom in 2022. Though the relationships I had with my parents were much different from those he had with his, I could identify with much that he was saying. It still seems odd to me that dad and mom are gone and their house belongs to someone else. They, too, were the last members of their generation on either side of the family. I think of my mom’s sisters, eccentric characters who made family gatherings memorable. It almost seems they left no trace behind, though I know they did since I know of their influence on their still-living children. I even think some about my dad’s brother, the only other sibling either of my parents had, though he died more than 50 years ago.

My perception of my parents has changed since my mom’s death. Specifically, their lives seem complete and settled in a way that wasn’t the case while they were alive. My dad’s life didn’t seem quite done while my mom was still living, probably because she talked so much about him and still had many of his possessions. Now, their lives are fixed, almost like stars in the sky by which I navigate but which have a remoteness and immutability about them.

They may be unchanging, but that doesn’t mean my thoughts about them are similarly static. I think especially of dad as he might have been at my current age. He must have undergone similar bodily changes, noticed how others’ reactions to him changed as he aged, reflected on a similar expanse of days gone by, and developed a similar awareness that his future was being shortened. I have more appreciation for him, and see myself as following in his footsteps. It’s like I’ve discovered that all along I’ve been walking in tracks that someone else made in the snow. Sure, I’m different from him, but also very much like him. And I’m also aware that, as I’m following his steps, he was following the path of his dad, who was following his dad, and on and on back to someone who spoke a different language, lived on a different continent, and couldn’t imagine the life I now live.

Both my parents now seem more exceptional and complex than they ever seemed before. They always had just been there, their accomplishments taken for granted, important but also ordinary in many ways. Now they both seem like remarkable people who did remarkable things. This is the opposite of walking in the footsteps of others I just described. They followed others, but also struck out on their own. When my dad was younger than my oldest grandson is now, he was a soldier stationed in Belgium, a combatant in a great war. His teenage girlfriend was back home, doing her part, waiting for his letters and sending off her own. Those long-ago lives now seem to me like the stuff of screen and story. What fears they must have fought, what yearnings filled their hearts! Then the war was over, dad came home, they married, and they built a life. I’ve long known the details, but the facts used to seem certain and unalterable, as if their destinies were written out and they just had to follow the script. Now I realize there must have been many possible paths, and it took courage, foresight, and wisdom to choose the one they did: the schooling, the business, the church, the home, the friends, the hospitality, the vacations, the celebrations. How did they manage to imagine all that? I’m ready to not just appreciate them but also to congratulate them for their performance in the improv theater known as life. Way to go, dad and mom! Take a bow!

I’m thankful for these new insights into Jim and Lois Ritzema, aka dad and mom. Knowing them as I’ve come to see them since their deaths helps me to know myself. I’m them to an extent, but also unlike them by way of choice and chance. Their flames burned bright, then flickered and went out. Mine will as well. It may be many years away, but the view to that future is becoming less obstructed. Dad and mom, we’ll be together sooner rather than later.

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A Year in Review, Part Two

Posted on January 5, 2024 by Bob Ritzema

Recently, I posted some thoughts about the past year. Life changed quite a bit during 2023, with a move from Michigan to Wisconsin, going from living alone to living in a communal setting, and from living in a different state than my sons to living less than an hour’s drive from each. I wrote in the earlier post about the household where I live, my relationships, my new city, and my new church. There are some additional things of note about the past year that I’ll write about in this post.

There’s been a change my prayer life. One resident at Barnabas House, where I live, had prayed the Liturgy of the Hours morning and evening for about a year before my arrival, and had tried to get others in the house to join him, with limited success. The Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Divine Office) has ancient roots, going back to the prayers that St. Benedict developed for his monasteries. Each day, both the morning and evening prayers consist  of a couple Psalms, a canticle from elsewhere in scripture, a brief New Testament reading, the song of Zechariah (morning) or the Magnificat (evening), and some additional petitions concluding with the Lord’s Prayer. Since March I’ve joined in those prayers. Most days three of us pray the Liturgy together. In the past I had included psalms in my prayers, but never to this extent and never using such a formal liturgical structure. This type of prayer requires intentionality, focus, and the willingness to surrender control over the manner in which I pray. I’ve found that spoken liturgical praying keeps me engaged in prayer and attentive to the presence of God more consistently than I would be otherwise.

I still work part-time, seeing a handful of clients every week on a teletherapy platform. I still find it rewarding to help people deal with their emotional struggles. I also bought a duplex six blocks from where I live. One unit was rented when I bought it. I decided to move my furniture and household goods from storage into the other unit. That entailed a trip to St. Louis to rent a U-Haul, load up all the household furnishings I had in storage there, and bring everything to Milwaukee. My intent was to rent that unit out short-term. There’s a nurse who has a three-month contract with a local hospital that is supposed to move in the vacant unit tomorrow. The house needed some repairs, so owning it has been a rather expensive proposition so far. It’s also taken a fair amount of time on my part. Hopefully the finances will work out okay in the long run. I’ve enjoyed doing some minor repairs, arranging furniture, and getting the apartment ready to be occupied.

I have time to read or listen to audiobooks. At the house three of us read and discussed Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” together. I also applied for and got to take part in a number of online reading groups through The Catherine Project, which hosts online discussions each centered around significant works of literature. The books I’ve read and discussed there are Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” Dante’s “The New Life,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” and Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition.” Reading with a group makes it easier to keep motivated, and I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to have serious literary and philosophical discussions with people who read carefully and think critically. I think my intellectual life is in decent shape.

I also have been physically active. I go to the gym and, when the weather is decent, jog or bike. When biking, I usually ride 10 minutes to a trail, then ride another 10 minutes down to a park alongside the Milwaukee lakefront. I eventually get to a path that goes alongside Lake Michigan and faces towards the downtown skyscrapers for about a quarter-mile, then circle around go back along the same route. The picture above was taken from the lakeside path. I really like seeing the lake in its various moods, When I jog, I head over to a nearby park and climb the hill there (the site of the city reservoir for 125 years until it was taken out of service and filled in with dirt about 20 years ago). There’s a great view of downtown, with the lake in the distance. Here’s a poem I wrote this past summer about jogging up that hill:

The hill once held a lake from which the thirsty city drank. 

Finally decrepit, it was filled with dirt, flattened at the top, 

and inlaid with paths. Pedestrians now walk where water was. 



Near dawn on Saturday, I jog through empty streets to the bottom 

of the hill, deciding that it’s worth expending breath and effort 

making the ascent. A minute, and I’m above the city, looking down. 

Treetops bloom below; in the distance buildings jut assuredly, 

commerce and cars abated to an understated murmur. 



I wonder whether God comes here to sit and watch, remembering 

generations which, synchronic with the reservoir, served the city 

well but now, like its remains, are resting underneath the soil.

As might be evident from the above, writing poetry is another way I spend my time. I write a poem every week. I did that for several years before and after the beginning of the 21st century, and have done it again for the past 5 years. I hadn’t looked back at the poems I’ve written over the years until about six months ago, when I decided to review what I had in my files. I appreciated hearing my voice from across the years—what I had observed about life, nature, and people. I ended up selecting almost a hundred poems to put in a book I self-published. It’s titled Among the Fallen Trees: Poems of Midlife, and is available for purchase through Barnes & Noble at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book/1144456264?ean=9798855665468.

I haven’t traveled much this year. My dog Zoe is old, and I don’t want to leave her for long in the care of others. I did manage to fly to Florida two weeks ago to visit my sister Mary and her husband, who spend four months of the year in Inverness. I have gone to Chicago by train three times, mostly to go to the Art Institute of Chicago. I really enjoyed an exhibition of works by Van Gogh, George Seurat, and other avant-garde artists who painted in the Paris suburbs around 1880. I’ve gone to Grand Rapids a few times, staying with a cousin and getting together with friends.

My most interesting trip was unexpected. My sixteen-year-old grandson was supposed to go during June on an intensive three-day tour of the battlefield at Gettysburg planned by his other grandfather. Ten days beforehand “Grandpa Pete” was injured in a fall and unable to travel. I filled in at the last minute. It was great spending the time with Theo. I have never been particularly interested in military history, but I came away thinking that all Americans should have more than casual exposure to the Civil War. The tour guide lived and breathed Civil War history. He walked us (literally!) through each day of the battle, showing us where significant engagements took place and explaining all the ways that the battle could have gone differently were it not for a pertinent insight by one or another of the generals, the folly of leaders who didn’t know how to lead, or the heroism of ordinary men. I got the merest glimpse of the scale of the battle and the magnitude of the destruction. What tremendous sacrifice and determination it took to preserve the Union!

So, that’s a summary of my year. I may seem busy, but most days go by at a leisurely pace. Still, it’s a pretty full life. In some ways it seems unreal. How many people in their mid-70s live in a house with a bunch of single adults whose median age is less than 40? How many get to have communal prayer morning and evening? How many can see their children and grandchildren frequently? I’m surprised, and grateful. Each night, we pray Mary’s great canticle of praise from Luke 2, which includes the lines “The almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” I can’t claim to have experienced great things, but, like her, I am deeply appreciative for what God has done for me.

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A Year in Review

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Bob Ritzema

A year ago I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, packing up in preparation for moving to Milwaukee. I had been there for ten years, ever since I came north to help my parents, and I had formed many attachments. I knew I would miss several friends. I’d miss my church, the neighborhood where my family had lived for over 60 years, Calvin College (my alma mater, the gym, coffee shops, bike trails I liked to ride on and roads I jogged on. I had already been missing  mom, who died in June of 2022. The move to Milwaukee was to be near Jas, my oldest son, and his family. On January 7, I took the trip around the lake to move into Barnabas House, a Christian community for single adults less than two miles north of downtown Milwaukee.

Looking back, life was quite uncertain then, and I was unsure whether my plan was sound. Just about everything was changing for me. Living with five people whose average age is more than three decades younger than me could backfire. Would I be accepted? Would I feel at home? What sort of life would this be?

For the most part, things have worked out well. Let me summarize the last year. 

Living with five other people has been quite an adjustment, especially for an introvert like me. Fortunately, the others all work full-time jobs, so I’m alone much of the day. We do have regular times we get together: Friday evenings for pizza and a movie, Saturday evening dinner, and brunch Sunday noon. We invite others to Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch, so there’s often someone else here at those times. The house emphasizes hospitality, which reminds me of my parents, who opened their home to so many people through the years.

When I moved in, there was quite a bit of tension, though not much open conflict, between two house members. They were the two founding members of the house. One was older and the other still in his 20s. There was a longstanding pattern of the young guy breaking promises and acting irresponsibly and the older one withdrawing and harboring resentment. In August, the younger person moved out and a woman in her 30s moved in. that change has alleviated much of the tension. I’m closer to the older founder than the other four people, and we talk quite a bit. He has always been something of a loner, and that tendency has increased in response to disappointments over the past few years, which has meant that, though we’ve become friends, we’re not as close as we could have been.

So my closest relationships are still with people outside the house. It’s been good to live a half-hour drive from Jas, Jenn, and the two grandkids who are still at home. From January to May I picked up Theo, now sixteen years old, one afternoon a week after school to take him to an after-school activity, so we got to talk quite a bit then. I’ve been to several of twelve-year old Willa’s activities as well. I get together with the family a couple times a month, usually to eat dinner together. I see my other son Elliot about twice a month as well, often by driving the thirty miles out to Nashotah House, where he’s living in student housing and working on a Master’s degree Christian Ethics. Besides family, I talk a couple times a week with my best friend, who lives in Georgia. I talk from time to time with several Michigan friends as well, usually on Skype or Zoom. I have only one person in Milwaukee with whom I regularly go out to coffee. I would really like to have a couple more. It’s difficult to find people with similar interests who don’t already have full lives.

I’m learning my way around parts of Milwaukee pretty well, though there are plenty of areas I haven’t been to yet. I’ve gone to the art museum a couple times, seeing a special exhibition on the Ashcan School and another from a collection of 17th century Northern European paintings. I’ve been to the symphony three times, hearing Beethoven’s 5th, Bolero, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, and the Messiah. When my sister came to visit, we went to the St. Joan of Arc chapel (a village church relocated from France to the Marquette University campus) and the Pabst Mansion (the former home of the beer baron). My most significant involvement has been with church. I was heavily involved in my church in Grand Rapids and many of the people to whom I was closest were members there. I visited a number of churches when I first got here, then after a couple months settled on City Reformed Church, which my son and his family were once members of and which founded Barnabas House, where I live. The pastor has a doctorate and has studied at Princeton, so his sermons are intellectually rigorous and thought-provoking. I like that. I attend both an early morning men’s group and an evening community group. I’ve started to volunteer some. I’m not a member, largely because the church is affiliated with the Christian Reformed denomination and I’ve been unhappy with the direction the denomination has taken the last few years. So I’m part of the congregation but don’t feel quite at home there. It’s another area of life with which I’m not fully satisfied.

It seems like everything I mentioned to this point has included negatives: relationships at the house, lack of new friends, issues with church. Does that mean that I’m dissatisfied or unhappy? Not really. Perhaps when I was younger, those things would have been troublesome, but they haven’t had that effect. I knew coming here that life wouldn’t be the same. Life always has negatives; that would have been the case wherever I was. Understanding that is part of contentment. Arthur Brooks recently wrote an article titled “How to be Happy Growing Older.” It’s at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/happiness-time-aging-mood/676964/. He suggests that you don’t even have to try to be happier for it to happen. Research has found that positive affect increases as we grow older, and negative affect decreases for men (but not for women). He reports on three interrelated characteristics that may be responsible for this outcome: “They react less to negative situations, they are better at ignoring irrelevant negative stimuli than they were when younger, and they remember more positive than negative information.” It seems that I have at least the first two of these. The negative doesn’t bother me, and I don’t pay much attention to it. So, though I recognize what’s negative, life as a whole seems pretty good.

This post is getting pretty long, so I’ll stop here and conclude my review of 2023 in a few days.

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I Finally Got Covid

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Bob Ritzema

So, I finally got Covid, having dodged it for nearly four years. I started coughing Sunday afternoon, and it progressively got worse the next few days. I went for a Covid test on Tuesday, and it came back positive. I’m guessing I got infected in a Lessons and Carols service last week; being around a lot of singing people seems a good way to contract an airborne virus. I think I’m already starting to recover; Wednesday was a better day than Tuesday. Here are a few observations from my experience thus far:

  • I had gotten sick and was tested a number of times since 2020, and the result was always negative. This seemed like those other times, and I’ve had the most recent vaccine, so I doubted it was Covid. I went out for coffee with someone on Monday based on that assumption, something that in retrospect seems reckless. Fortunately, he has tested negative. With flu-like symptoms, you can never know for sure it’s not Covid.
  • Besides a cough, I’ve had a runny nose, chills and fatigue. Yesterday, I laid down and rested several times, usually falling asleep. I did manage to do my scheduled work for an hour and a half, but that was a struggle. Covid certainly saps energy and motivation.
  • Covid also has changed how I’m looking at time. I usually have a sense that I should be using time productively. That’s gone. The important thing for the moment is doing what it takes for my body to heal, which mainly means doing nothing. I didn’t realize the degree to which I was ruled by time until Covid freed me.
  • I haven’t had much desire to eat. Some people lose their sense of taste, but for me things still taste the same as always. It’s just that after a few bites it seems like I’ve had enough. I made a couple of normal-sized meals and forced them down, but my stomach was uncomfortable afterwards. Now I’m eating perhaps half of what I would have ordinarily consumed, and it seems enough.

That’s what I’ve noticed so far. My doctor started me on Paxlovid today, which is supposed to aid recovery. It would be nice if I returned to the ranks of the healthy soon. I won’t try to rush it, though.

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Standing Ovation

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Bob Ritzema
Trea Turner/Rich Schultz/GettyImages

Living in community means being sensitive to each other’s struggles, acknowledging, sympathizing, and encouraging someone who is having a hard time. Last week, a member of our house (who I’ll call Ed) was involved in a tragedy, and it’s affected him greatly.

Ed offered to take care of a co-worker’s dog on Monday. The dog was a rescue that had been adopted just a couple weeks earlier. Ed is a dog owner and often kept dogs for friends, so this was nothing new. Things went well for the first hour, so, while the three dogs were playing in the fenced back yard, he ducked downstairs for a moment to take care of laundry.

When he came back, the rescue dog was gone. She had apparently jumped the fence and ran off. He and I started searching immediately, and he contacted the owner, who also came to help. Someone posted flyers and put out the word on social media. Several people in the neighborhood saw the dog, but she always ran from them. The following day, she was found dead, apparently run over.

Everybody was disconsolate, Ed more than anyone. When he heard the news, he immediately went outside and sat by himself, hunched over, for a long time. He kept away from others the rest of the day and the following day as well, except for sitting through our times of prayer, where he avoided eye contact, reading written prayers in a barely audible voice. He didn’t go to work and stopped eating. When I asked him how he was doing and whether he would like to talk, he said that he just needed some time. I knew how passionately he cared for animals and how deeply this would affect him.

I waited a couple days to see if he would talk about what had happened, or at least stop avoiding everyone in the household. Then I ambushed him. He often takes his dogs for a walk late in the afternoon, so I waited for him to leave and ran after them. When I caught up, he didn’t try to avoid me; I think he did want someone to reach out to him but wasn’t going to take the initiative himself.

We walked and talked for quite a while. I don’t want to go into detail about what he said, other than that he’s tormented by what happened and blames himself. We kept up the conversation in subsequent days.

An hour after we got back from our walk, I remembered having seen a link to a story about the help given to someone else who was struggling. I found and read the article; it brought tears to my eyes. It was about Trea Turner, a major-league shortstop who had signed a big contract at the beginning of the year to play for the Philadelphia Phillies. He struggled from the start, making lots of errors and not hitting well at all. His year reached its nadir in an early August game in which he went hitless and made an error that cost the game. A local radio producer, noticing Turner’s misery in a post-game interview, proposed a radical response: give him a standing ovation. He reasoned that it might help, and, even if it didn’t, it would be a good message to the team that the fans were behind them. So, when Turner came up to bat in the second inning of the next home game, everyone stood and cheered him. Here’s a link to the article, which has an embedded video of the moment: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/10/04/trea-turner-ovation-phillies/  

Isn’t that what we all need? To be affirmed and valued, even and especially when we fall short and are full of self-criticism and regret? And I knew someone right in our house that needed the same sort of affirmation. So, after prayer that evening, I told those in attendance about the article and got everyone to stand and cheer for Ed. It may be a small thing, but I think it touched him. And it wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t in community together.

Who do you know that needs a standing ovation?

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The Divine Office

Posted on April 19, 2023 by Bob Ritzema

In my last post, I talked about worship being the center of life. I quoted Eugene Peterson:

“In worship God gathers his people to himself as center: ‘The Lord reigns’ (Ps. 93:1). Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically.”

Putting worship at the center means that worship isn’t limited to church services but pervades daily life. I talked in that post about anchoring practices that keep me focused on the center. Since my move I’ve been participating in a practice that’s new for me: praying the Divine Office. Officially known as The Liturgy of the Hours, the Divine Office is a prayer book that developed out of the rule Benedict of Nursia wrote in the 6th century for the monastic order he established. He set 7 times of prayer throughout the day and one at night. All but one of these times of prayer is still in regular use, though most of those who use the Divine Office don’t follow the full compliment of daily prayers. There are prayers for each of the 7 hours, each day of the year. The prayers are complied in a set of books that are rather complicated to follow, though there are phone apps that reduce the complexity. I use the Divine Office app,  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.surgeworks.divineoffice&gl=US.

I and one other resident at Barnabas House get together to pray the morning and evening prayers—lauds and vespers. I sometimes listen to the night prayer (compline) while I’m getting ready for bed. Since my prayer partner has to be at work quite early, we meet at 4:30 a.m. for morning prayer. We pray again about 5:30 in the afternoon, often joined by one or two other members of the household. Each prayer session takes about 15 minutes. Near the beginning there’s a hymn that we sing, read, or listen to, depending on how familiar we are with the music. We then take turns reading portions of the prayer, and, in between the portions, read in unison one or two short antiphons. The prayer usually includes two psalms, a canticle (i.e. a poetic Scripture passage taken from somewhere other than the book of Psalms), and a brief prose passage.  Always the Scripture readings end with canticles from Luke 1: the prayer of Zechariah in the morning and the Magnificat in the evening. Then there are a few prayers for those in need, the Lord’s Prayer, and a brief concluding request.

I’ve only been following this routine for a few months, but already it’s become a well-formed habit. For most of my life I’ve used free-form prayers about situations I want to take to God, and I still do that. It’s quite a change for me to also now read prayers from a structured prayer book. These written prayers are usually much more eloquent than anything I could hope to generate. About half of the material is from the book of Psalms, which is often described as the prayer-book of the Bible. On my own, I tend to pray the same things again and again, so it’s helpful to be forced out of the well-trod paths that my spontaneous prayers usually take. It’s nice to be praying the liturgy aloud with someone else, so that my tongue and ears are being used, not just my brain. Thousands are praying the same prayers on the same day, so there’s a real sense of having contributed to a larger project. Sometimes I like to look at the app’s map of North America, which shows where others are using that resource at the same time I am.

There are some downsides to this way of praying. I notice that sometimes I read an entire psalm without paying attention or remembering what I’ve said. It would be easy to become satisfied with just having spoken the words without full assent of the heart.  The prayers aren’t specific to my life or to those around me who are in need. If I don’t remember to pray for those personal concerns separately, I sometimes neglect praying for matters that are important to me.

I have come to love some aspects of the Daily Office, though. Every morning, the first words of the day are:

    God, come to my assistance.
    Lord, make haste to help me.

And, if I listen to the night prayer, the last thing I hear spoken before bed is:

    May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a 
    peaceful death. Amen.

What wonderful bookends for the day. I don’t know how meaningful these petitions would have been when I was young, but, now that I’m late in life, they are just what I need.     


							

	
			

													
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Finding the Center


			

				Posted on March 24, 2023 by Bob Ritzema			


					

				

A Grand Rapids sunrise.





I recently blogged about having moved into a community in Milwaukee, describing the community I’m living in. This is a big life change for me, so it’s prompting reflection and necessitating adjustment. I wanted to describe a bit more what my reflections have been. 





About a month after moving in, I started getting busier with various activities, but they didn’t seem to cohere around a center. For about fifteen years, from the time my sons left home to when I retired from my full-time job, my center was work. I then moved to my home town, where my center was helping my parents. In both cases, I did plenty of other things, but the other things had to fit around the center. What is the center now? I’m active in the household where I live, with my sons and grandchildren, with working part-time, and with attending church and a men’s group. Is one of those the center? If so, which one?





Those questions were in the back of my mind when I went to the gym one Saturday to exercise. As is often the case, I listened to a podcast while working out. This time, it was episode 225 of “The Antioch Podcast” (at https://antiochpodcast.org/podcast/), an interview with Mark Charles, a Native American writer and activist. He lived most of his life away from his Navajo nation, but in middle adulthood moved back to the Navajo reservation near Gallup, NM for several years as a way of more deeply connecting with his tradition. He has since moved to Washington, D.C., a better base from which to speak and advocate regarding indigenous issues.





It occurs to me that my journey has inadvertently paralleled his. I moved away from Grand Rapids, where I had grown up, to attend graduate school and ended up living most of my adult life elsewhere. I returned home, so to speak, in 2012, when I moved in with my parents to help them with their health problems. Whereas Charles had intentionally returned to his roots, I had done so inadvertently, in response to my parent’s urgent need. In both cases, though, there was a returning to the center, or at least a center.





What was that center like for me? For 40 years, I had visited my family just at Christmas and during my summer vacation. My parents and sister had always been very welcoming, but I was a guest. That meant parties, time spent around the swimming pool, and trips to their cottage. For the 10 years after I moved back, I was no longer a guest. It was much more evident how much my parents had sacrificed to provide the hospitality they had offered me and others. For example, when dad was in his mid-eighties, it was quite difficult to keep a swimming pool cleaned and ready for guests, but he did it. He didn’t call attention to his hard work; he was just glad that countless friends and family could come swimming. Scores of friends and family members have memories of good times spent at that pool.





When I returned, the pool had been covered for good and dad was suffering from severe mental decline. My mom gave herself fully to dad’s care. She gave her all, and after he died wished she had been able to give more. She was homebound, no longer able to drive after a stroke took half her vision. Yet she continued with her life, which consisted mostly of reading, talking with visitors or on the phone, praying for those undergoing hardship, listening to music, and watching the service at her church on DVD or livestream. She eventually lost her ability to swallow even liquids and had tube feeding. She called the Isosource she poured into the tube her ‘manna’ after the food given the Israelites in the wilderness, which I took to mean that it sustained life but was otherwise unsatisfying. Yet she was grateful. She offered words of encouragement to others and never, except during the last few months of life, complained.





So the center I returned to was a place where abundance was shared with others, those in need were helped, minds were fed more richly than bodies, gratitude was unending, and faith was deep. The center was less what I did for them than it was what I had received. Perhaps I should not be looking for a new center so much as remembering the center from which I came—and remembering as well to take that center with me.





While living on the reservation, Mark Charles began the spiritual practice of watching the sun rise every day. In D.C., he goes every day to a spot on the Potomac where he can watch the day begin and give thanks to his creator. The center that he found was not in Gallup or in Washington, just as my truest center isn’t in either Grand Rapids or Milwaukee. It was in contemplating his creator.





The day after I listened to the podcast, I visited Brew City Church in downtown Milwaukee. The worship leader read something that reminded me of this deeper, truer center. It was from Eugene Peterson’s Reversed Thunder. Back home, I looked up the passage:





“In worship God gathers his people to himself as center: ‘The Lord reigns’ (Ps. 93:1). Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren. Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives. We move in either frightened panic or deluded lethargy as we are, in turn, alarmed by spectres and soothed by placebos. If there is no center, there is no cirumference. People who do not worship are swept into a vast restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no sustaining purpose.”





My parents had worship at the center of their lives, and, in taking what I absorbed from them to this new place, worship has to be my center as well. Worship and other spiritual practices aren’t meant to be the whole of life, but are what holds us fast, like a stake driven in the ground to which we are chained so that we can’t wander very far away. The question, then, becomes, what are the practices that will keep this center where it belongs? For Mark Charles, the key practice was watching the sunrise. For me, the weekly practice of writing a poem was an anchoring practice during my time in Michigan, and I’m continuing that here. I have entered into another anchoring practice since moving to Barnabas House: praying the Divine Office morning and evening. I’ll write about that in a subsequent post.

							

	
			

													
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Entering Community


			

				Posted on February 15, 2023 by Bob Ritzema			


					

				

My dog walking through the dining room at our new home.





My last post on this site, almost two months ago, detailed all the changes that had occurred in my life during 2022. I ended by describing my plan to move to Milwaukee to be near my oldest son and his family. I’ve been in Milwaukee since January 7, and I thought I would write a little about where I’m living and what it has been like so far.





Back when I first was thinking about moving, my daughter-in-law sent me a link to the website for a Christian community in the area. It was a household associated with a church she and my son had been members of years earlier. The household is intended for Christian singles. The idea is to provide a place where Christians can “live out the teachings of Christ through the daily practices of prayer, work, and relationships.” 





I visited the house a few times starting in September. I had envisioned something like a monastic community, and some features are similar. The residents don’t make any sort of vows, though, and they all work full-time jobs, so they aren’t together throughout the day. I had lived communally for a year when I was in graduate school, and it had been a positive experience. So why not communal living now?





I knew that one of the difficult things about moving to a new city would be making new friends. After my mom’s death, I was too isolated, despite having several good friends and a few relatives nearby. If I moved into a house or condo in Milwaukee by myself, the isolation would be even greater. Having ready-made relationships sounded good! It also appealed to me that the community prayed together. I had been praying mostly by myself for years, and found it challenging to keep my prayers from being stale and repetitious. Communal prayer seemed something that could benefit my faith journey.





On the other hand, moving into a house with several other people sounded daunting. Would I have enough privacy? I would only have one room; what would I do with all of my stuff? Communal living is not the sort of thing that someone in his seventies does! How would I fit with a bunch of people younger than me?





An alternative might have been an independent living facility for older adults, but those places are too homogeneous for my taste and the focus isn’t on continued engagement in the larger community, which I prefer. A mixed-age house with a focus on intentional spiritual practices might be just what I needed. If not, I wouldn’t lose anything by giving it a try. Despite my misgivings, I decided that such a move made sense. I agreed to a six month trial period.





There are six of us here, all guys. I’m the only one who has been married. One of the founders is about 10 years younger than me, and everyone else in the house is at least 30 years younger than I am. Surprisingly, I don’t feel particularly out of place. I am the only one working from the house, so I’m here by myself from mid-morning to mid-afternoon. We have three meals together during the week, meaning that we are on our own for most meals. There is a regular prayer time at 5:30 every day, but it’s not required and usually there are only two or three of us praying together. I have a pretty good balance between time with others (either those in the household or in my son’s family) and time alone. I’ve gotten to know the person closest to me in age pretty well, and I’m gradually getting to know the others. There’s a bit of conflict between the two original members of the community, mainly over differing views of how the community should function. Otherwise, everyone gets along well. The household is big on hospitality; about twice a week, there are guests at mealtime. Overall, it’s a fairly healthy, fairly functional community.





So, will I stay past the six months? I don’t know, but at present I’m inclined to. I wonder why more single, divorced, or widowed people of retirement age don’t live in an arrangement like this: there are lots of positives. I hope to write at least a couple more times in the next few months as a way of processing the benefits and disadvantages of being here. If anyone who is reading this has tried something similar, I’d love to hear what your experience was like.

							

	
			

													
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Life Changes


			

				Posted on December 23, 2022 by Bob Ritzema			


					

				

Life changes. However, I didn’t experience much change for about 10 years. As I’ve written in previous posts, I came to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2012 to help my parents. That was a year of many changes, but then things settled down. I took a part-time job that I stayed with my entire time here. My dad died, but my mom needed a little assistance, so I remained with her in her house. I settled into habits. I went to the same grocery store, gas station, and restaurants month after month, year after year.





Then everything changed. My mom’s health deteriorated quickly, and she needed more help. There were some hospitalizations, a stay in rehab, then caregivers coming into the house. Finally, in June, she died at home. She was honored with a wonderful funeral and interred at Ft. Custer National Cemetery alongside my dad.





Changes have continued for the last six months. My sister and I spent quite a bit of time going through photographs, letters, books, and slides. As I wrote earlier (at https://wordpress.com/post/bobritzema.wordpress.com/2458), my focus switched from daily ups and downs to an appreciation of her life as a whole. I could better see both her and my dad as more than just parents and grandparents, the roles I had seen them in the most. In the albums I went through, there were pictures of each of my parents as children (in each case, they are the youngest child):















There were pictures of mom with her two sisters:










There were photos of her and dad as high school sweethearts:










Life must have looked really good to them then! There were also lots of slides of their trips abroad—to Spain, England, Germany, and Switzerland. I saw those countries through their eyes. Pouring over all that memorabilia freed me to see their lives as a whole and to appreciate them as complex, multifaceted people. Going through their lives this way contributed as well to my sense of change. First they were young and vibrant, then middle aged and settled, then old and infirm, then gone, seemingly in just a few moments. Time flies, and now I recognize its speed is supersonic.





We sold mom’s house. Since I had been staying there with her, I had to find another place to live. I own a house in St. Louis, but no longer have family there, so moving there is not an option. I decided I needed time to think through what to do. Since September, I’ve been in a studio apartment in Heritage Hill, a neighborhood of large Victorian houses near downtown Grand Rapids. It’s been enjoyable to live among these old houses, built by the elite back in the late 19th century. These streets, too, remind me of change. All the original owners of these houses are gone, as are many of the thousands who have moved in and out of them through the years, like sand flowing through a sieve. Behind some houses are buildings that once housed horses and carriages. Now the streets are filled with cars. As the people and animals that once were here have vanished, so too will I be gone, probably not too many years from now. I’m reminded of verses from Psalm 103:





As for mortals, their days are like grass; 
they flourish like a flower of the field; 
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, 
and its place knows it no more.  






I will not be living where I am for long. Mindful of now being in my 70’s, I’ve decided it would be wise to relocate somewhere near either of my children. I have two sons; one seems likely to stay put where he is at, but the other is in transition himself. I’ll be moving to Milwaukee, near the more settled son, after the first of the year. Life will be changing again. In some ways I’m looking forward to what awaits me. Change has been my tutor this year, and I have attended to its lessons. I’m hoping that it will give me some time off school before long, though!










[1] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Ps 103:15–16). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.






							

	
			

													
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