For this Christmas season, the essay "The Night My Father Shot Santa" from my book Beneath the Turning Stars, under Essays in the website. Merry Christmas! FK

 
          Pop rock has been so far from my mind for so many years that I still speak of Kurt Cobain as hot contemporary. Necessity, however, is often the mother of retro, and nothing speaks of necessity louder than being in an isolated area without normal gadget connections. Of course I speak of the region in which our little cabin is embedded up nort,’ where I found myself a few weeks ago driving, quiet and alone on the curvy road along the Lake Superior coast. My modern mind confused by the inactivity, I reached for the dusty dials on the car radio and clicked on the FM button, and then the search buttons. Country, country, county auction, NPR, obscure preacher, and then, finally, pop rock. Not Classic, but rock favorites that extended well beyond Sweet Home, Alabama, landing me in unknown, post-Grunge territory. I listened; the beat was good, the guitar scintillating, the production way beyond anything from days of old. I listened more and ferreted out the lyrics: “Give me a word/give me a sign…Whoa, heaven let your light shine down!” A search for heaven, my kind of stuff!
           
            And on it went, good, good stuff, so good that later, back in civilization, I put forth enough information to raise the song on Spotify. It is called “Shine” by Collective Soul, and it was even better on the ear buds, so good that I might have given myself a heart attack at the gym as I pedaled on the stationary with the song blasting so loudly I couldn’t even tell how exhausted I might be. In those few minutes I felt the thrill of youthful invulnerability which was so wrong back then and even more wrong now, but so satisfying that I could believe that life went on forever with one adventure after another. Ah, stupid, arrogant, fun youth!
 
            It was then that I found out about another modern convenience from the Spotify entertainment center: that they would take a song from you, categorize it, and add a long, long list of other songs that somehow paralleled the original piece. Suddenly, I was inundated with all sorts of post-early 90’s pop music and groups. I listened. I skipped over about half that I simply did not like, but listened to a dozen or so that I did. What I found from this delve into recent pop was anything but comforting.
 
            “Shine” had a glow of optimism to it, as if paradise were just around the corner waiting to be discovered. Most of the rest, however, including those by Collective Soul, were not so hopeful. In fact they were dismal. One, “Loser” by Beck, was fun and bouncy with an incredibly seductive beat, but spoke basically of its title. The singer (the object of the lyrics) and his girlfriend and whoever else was entangled with him were all useless losers, getting by on drugs and food stamps and possible grifts in Vegas. Says the refrain, “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Yikes. There was no redemption in the lyrics.
 
            Another by Collective Soul, “December,” was a harder, grittier plunge into existential worthlessness. Speaking, it seems, to his girlfriend, the refrain grinds out, “Turn your head and spit me out!,” which I interpret as an allusion to an unartistic and non-reproductive act of sex, with the implication that she is spitting ALL of him out. More, he asks her, “Why follow me to higher ground/lost as you think I am?” The two are close, they are co-dependent, but disdainful of each other, sterile in both collective soul and body.
 
            But oh, the clincher is a simple and genuinely beautiful ballad that draws from a dark underground of unabashed neo-paganism. Titled “Lightning Crashes,” by Live, it contains versus like these: “Lightning crashes/a new mother cries. Her placenta falls to the floor. The angel opens her eyes/the confusion sets in.” Then, “Lightning crashes/an old mother dies. Her intentions fall to the floor. The angel closes her eyes/the confusion now belongs to the baby down the hall.”
 
            With the music, the dark intensity of this begins to tug the heart from the chest, only to  reach a greater height with, “Like rolling thunder chasing the wind, forces pulling from/the center of the earth…I can feel it, I can feel it!” Wow. It is the force of nature, its greatness, its mystery and darkness, its depth, and its seeming pointlessness (‘confusion sets in’). Powerful and unsettling, to say the least.
 
            To say that these songs represent the youthful mind would be an unproven excess. I know, however, that these represent a large element of people at least a generation younger than I. Maybe I can compare them with the rock hits of my era, the late 60’s and 70’s, which spoke primarily of drugs and sex and earthly paradise. We all didn’t believe it and we all didn’t act largely on this shallow philosophy, but we were all effected. Whether through cause or effect, it was then that premarital sex became the norm, which was then followed (necessarily) by legal abortion, and then, quickly, by the watering-down and emptying of the churches. What we could see back then in the music and the lyrics could quickly be matched with the remake of Western culture.
 
            Applying a similar rule to the new pop, what came AFTER the counter culture and sexual revolution of the 60’s and 70’s could be said to be almost catastrophic. What is described in the lyrics is not romantic sex or even Hair Band-style reckless and wild sex. Rather, it is sex that is cynical and shallow and meaningless, something that leads to nothing more than broken relationships and resentment. This is something that one might expect from two or more generations suffering from high divorce rates, or no married or even cohabiting parents at all. Turn your head and spit me out. And if you do it the old-fashioned way, the resultant child might not even know the father. As if that should matter.
 
            Even more importantly, we can see the frightening depth of meaning and searching in the last and heaviest song mentioned, “Lightning Crashes.” Here, life is not a cheap voyage of drugs and welfare checks, but is recognized for what it is: an experience extending from the depth of the earth upward to the wings of the angels. The songwriter fully recognizes the reality beyond the quotidian and superficial, but he cannot find coordinating meaning. That is, he cannot make sense of this depth. Rather, “confusion sets in,” from birth to death. The depth is unknown. In the language of the ancient cartographers when referring to unknown lands, “Here Dragons Be.” Mystery and darkness, pain and death, and ultimately fear; real fear, not like losing your house but losing your very being.
 
            All this is commendable for its honesty, but also expository of the other part of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. This is when the churches were changed - and then emptied out. Before then, mystery had long been identified, along with evil and birth and death, but the coordinating part had been figured out. This unabridged explanation of existence is really why, more than conquest and domination, that the Christian religion spread so quickly and widely.
 
            The ancient pagans were no dummies, nor were they squeamish about the truth of the natural world. We are born in pain and fear, live in episodes of more pain and fear, and then die in pain and fear. Back then, some sacrificed human life as propitiation to a creator or creators who obviously were heavy-duty, demanding dudes and dames. All the old pagans did something intense and startling to reflect the startling and intense reality of their lives.
 
            It was Christianity that figured it out and put together all the pieces, from death and evil and boundless mystery to the spectacular and eternal life in another sphere. It is all there: fear of eternal damnation (the heavy), but also hope of eternal salvation. More than that, there is a plan. The intensity of life and death does not bring about life-long confusion. Rather it all – sex, family, life, death, suffering – has a place and a purpose.
 
            Without this plan, we see a pit before us that ends in the horror of bottomless darkness.
 
            As a contrast to the aura of these tunes, I later listened to what I consider (in my relative ignorance) to be the greatest song of grace ever made: “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis (from the Elizabethan Era). Through its many parts (the version with conductor David Wilcox is the best. Peter Phillips is also good), it answers all the questions posed by the current pop-rock musicians. With its vast array of musical parts, it speaks to the infinite variety of life; and with its mood shifts, from near-frightening to the cheek-strokes of angel wings from on high, it encompasses both the frightening and the jubilant, both the birthing mother and the dying mother.
 
            At its end, there is no room for confusion. That is the key. Here we find perfect order made from chaos and imperfection, and a perfect destiny for all who are born into ignorance and who fight against meaninglessness. The Elizabethan Era was cruel and dirty and often brutish and vulgar, but for all who questioned and sought, there was an answer. And all, or nearly all, accepted that answer, whether they wanted to conform to its teachings or not. In the time when there were many dragons, there was ultimately nothing to fear. We had purpose and a destination. Whether or not we took the right road was up to us, but we could all see the sign post and knew which way we should go.
 
            There is no going back, except to what was left us in artifacts. We are different now and can never be as we once were – and that is probably a good thing. But it has been figured out for us. We don’t have to sing of bitterness and fear. Rather, it is time to put up the old sign post in a new language. It is time for a new Thomas Tallis. We don’t have to go the way of modern pop-rock, although I’ll take the beat. We have to admit, in spite of everything, that some things have gotten better – which might have been the reason for our confusion all along.  
 
              

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          The wind howled at 45 mph sustained, the rain came and went like fits of tantrums, and my son and I were in a cabin with no computer or TV. There was the handy IPhone, however, which has a download function so that programs can be saved while in range and played later while out of range. Since the cabin is out of range for anything but a Sat. phone, we had our downloads and nothing but the downloads. And they were good.
 
            Podcasts. Were it not for my wife, I would still be using an Olivetti mechanical typewriter, and were it not for my son, I would still be listening to nothing but commercial radio. But saved podcasts we had, one being a several-hour-long stilted conversation between Joe Rogan and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. 
 
            Or Fetterwoman as he once called himself. It was this quirkiness that led Rogan to invite him on, this and the fact that Fetterman had suffered a stroke during his senatorial campaign – which he won - that had made him incoherent. Two years later, he is vastly improved, but still hobbled, having to listen to other’s conversation through a computer that turns spoken language into written language. He must do this because he cannot understand spoken language.
 
            My son could not understand this. Is he deaf? Rogan, too, was mystified, and so asked him just that: did the stroke make you (Fetterman) deaf? No, he replied: rather ‘I cannot understand spoken language. I can still reason and still read but cannot understand the spoken word.’ (paraphrase). The reason, Fetterman was finally able to describe, was that the part of his brain that took the sound of language and turned it into meaningful words was severally damaged. He could still read language and think in language but could not translate the vocalization of language. Very, very odd and very telling.
 
            It is telling like the magic goblet that we have seen since grammar school. We all remember: what do you see when you look at this picture? For most, the first thing they see is the oddly-shaped goblet. When we are told that there is something else there, sooner or later two faces appear, staring at each other across the space that holds the goblet. Huh. We can see one thing, and then something totally different by a simple change of perspective.
 
            Let’s look once again at the Old Testament and compare it to the New. In the Old, there was no heaven for anyone but the very special – like Elijah beaming his way into heaven on a golden chariot.  Hell was for all, but held only the ragged remnants of our earthly selves that would slowly dissipate into nothingness. God’s threats and rewards were made for the living, either as individuals or as family or tribe or nation. Thus the messiah was thought to be a remake of the earthly King David; this belief apparently was the reason Judas betrayed Christ, so that this great prophet would finally get his butt in gear and drive out the Romans. It was not only Judas, however, who had no idea about who The Christ really was. The other apostles remained completely baffled by the thought that God would die for humanity through his son and then rise from the dead. God dying? What the…?
 
            “…not the smallest letter of the law…shall be done away with…” Jesus said (Mathew , 5:18). However, according to Paul, “He is a real Jew who is one inwardly, and true circumcision is of the heart.;” In other words, the Law was to be fulfilled through its interior, deeper meaning, which is ultimately to love God with all one’s being and to love one’s fellow Man as one loves himself. In this we see that from the time of Abraham to the preaching of the Gospel after the death of Jesus – a span of nearly 2,000 years - a huge change of consciousness had taken place, with the Law moving from appearance into the conscience. With this, the Jews (and later the Christians) began to think twice about bashing in the brains of the babies of their enemies and selling off their women; they had now begun to see others as themselves and to court the love of God in their hearts.
 
            Almost all are aware of this change, yet we still fall short of living what we know to be true. On the one hand, we are like Fetterman after his stroke, able to understand the meaning of the Word in our minds but unable to “speak” it in our daily lives. The ability to do so is there, but only marginally. We need to practice what we preach again and again so that it might grow. We are still seeing the goblet rather than the faces even though we know that the faces are there.
            Translated into our vision of the cosmos, people of our age now know without a doubt that the universe is vastly beyond our grasp, a nearly infinite mystery of dark stars and black holes and stuff we cannot even imagine. But still we fritter. We still are hurt by the slights of others, hold resentments, have affairs for the thrill of it, and endlessly chase after money, prestige, and human power, even though, through our knowledge of the cosmos, we know that all these things are infinitely petty.
 
            On the other hand, linguistics and pictures are only the start. There might be – almost certainly are – realities around us about which we know nothing at all. To see these, we would need a teacher to tell us where and how to look anew. And then be given a new faculty by grace to see.
 
            I had this experience while visiting the museum of the scrolls in Jerusalem. There, at the end of the exhibit halls, was a partially unrolled Dead Sea scroll of the prophet Isaiah (who of all the prophets speaks most about the coming of Christ). I was standing before it and looking at its foreign writing without understanding when an elderly woman next to me asked, “Do you see the human faces in the words?” I answered that I did not until I took a second look. Suddenly – with the suddenness of seeing the faces in the goblet - I saw the heads of hundreds of different people in the Hebraic writing. They were as varied as a general population would be, most with longish hair and beards, all in black and white like the writing itself. In retrospect, the faces appeared much larger than the writing, although they were fully contained by them. This could not be. This was physically impossible. And yet it was.
 
            This is where I believe we are today. We have been given the scroll and the words have even been interpreted for us, but we are missing something to understand them better. Within this scroll is a living reality that is beyond our current ability to see. We are like the Jews at the time of Christ, aware of the prophecies but unable to perceive what was truly meant by them. God will die and rise again? But these were not the Jews of the Old Testament. Time had altered them, allowing some to begin to perceive. The Way had to be pointed out to them, but they were ready to receive the grace necessary to understand the rest, to work upon the human potential that had been so long hidden that would allow them to understand.
 
            This new understanding is still being fulfilled in our time, but it seems that this phase is coming to an end. It is not just the Christian faith that is dying in the very land that it came from, but the truths of other faiths as well. In a manner of speaking, we have all been given a spiritual Testament and have understood and practiced this as far as we could. Now there is a timely need for the pointing of another finger, and for the gift of grace to allow us to understand this new thing that is being pointed out. 
 
            This seems to be happening at warp speed, just as a new era of materialism is rocketing upwards. Where is the force to counter the belief that AI is about to become a superior form of humanity? Where is the power to counter the belief that humans can create this new Frankenstein with technology, eliminating the need or even the thought of God? In another manner, such crucial questions as these were being asked by the Jews 2000 years ago: where is the force that can counter the pagan Romans? Where is the new David that was spoken of in the Old Testament?
 
            He came then, but not as expected, just as it is a near-certainty that our new David will not come or be as we expect. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, and he allowed himself, King of kings, to be tortured and killed like a common criminal. No one of that time could have seen that coming, even though it was clear for all to see in hindsight that Isaiah had described him perfectly. So what are we missing now? What faces in the goblet have we not seen? And who will point this out to us? Because of a dire need for a counter force, I believe we will find out soon. We wait in fear and hope.
 
 
 
              
 
 
 
             

 
            The German word “volkgeist” has some pretty heavy baggage but carries a worthy idea, meaning in English “the spirit of the people.” The word became common knowledge after the Nuremburg rallies in Nazi Germany, where one was infamously filmed in all its astounding and frightening glory in the 1934 epic “Triumph of the Will.” Hundreds of thousands of Germans attended the festivals that ran annually until 1938, along with tens of thousands of helmeted troops, often lit up during the night with blazing torches illuminating giant swastika flags. Hitler’s speeches were nearly hysterical, and the people clung to them like drunken fans at a rock concert. The crowds and the leader were one. They shared a terrifying volksgeist in a frenzy of national unity.
 
            We are all aware of our own segments of volksgeist. A rock concert was mentioned above, but we also feel it at sports games and revival rallies and, yes, political rallies. This feeling of the “folk will” can be small or overpowering, long-lasting or evanescent, dark and scary or light-filled and hopeful. We had our own frenzy of national unity after 9/11, which led to major, even drastic changes in domestic and foreign policy, including the implementation of a few “forever wars.” We are now having these frenzies in a divided nation beneath the shadows of the coming presidential election. Harris benefitted through the Democratic Convention, and now Trump has it, the frenzied spirit, in lieu of a few assassination attempts and what- have -you. It may not last, just as the initial Harris “vibe” did not last.
 
            This thing, this spirit of the people, is hard to maintain through intentional force, although people and groups of people try. Hitler did it very well, aided by a set of disastrous events in the past followed by a startling succession of successful conquests. In such cases, failure is the quickest way to neuter the buzz. In this country today, the opposition to Trump is trying to stomp out the momentum with buckets of everything thrown against the wall in hopes that something might stick. Something might. A buzz is usually not based on tangibles (although Hitler’s initial success was very tangible), and so can rise and fall as easily as notes on an amped-up electric guitar, even on a national scale.
 
            My first realization of a serious national volksgeist came during the most profound era of change in recent American history: the 1960’s. The younger audience might laugh or yawn, but the repercussions were tangible and profound. From sexual mores to government programs to race relations, everything changed, for better and for worse. I wrote about it in the beginning of my hitchhiking autobiography Dream Weaver. For the young, the vibe was magical, a siren call to utopia that was so overwhelming that the impossible seemed inevitable. It fizzled away in the 70’s, but left us with the world tremendously changed.
 
            Fizzled away; to those who were political actors in the 60’s, the volksgeist was purposefully infiltrated and worked out exceedingly well, but for the rest of us young dreamers, the vibe erupted, burped, then slipped into a pair of flared white double-nit hip-huggers to dance the Disco. Yet there was an expectation that this 60’s vibe was the beginning of a new era, the Aquarian Age, described by another German word, the “zeitgeist,” or spirit of the age. This supposedly is to have much deeper roots than the volksgeist and should carry us through the next 2,000 years, just as Jesus carried the age of Pisces, the fish, for the last 2,000. What, though, can we say of the meaning of numbers? While past civilizations thought numbers were magical, we do not; they number things and that is it. 1,000 or 10,000, they are simply human constructs, nothing more than digits that can run through a super computer like pizza through a frat house.
 
            But there are things that are happening that are creating a world-wide vibe at “zeitgeist” levels. We have spoken here before of the supposed words and prophecies of Our Lady (the Virgin Mother of Christ) at Medjugorje in the otherwise bedraggled nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Within the lifetime of at least some of the 6 children who were and still are being given visions, an era-changing event is supposed to happen (the children are now mid 50’s to 60). Supposedly, a sign of Christ will appear in the sky, and everyone will be subject to a life-review, something that is usually given to each of us at our death. Some will die from fright, but others will see themselves as God sees them, and because of that they will fundamentally change their lives. We can only imagine the magnitude of this change. It would truly bring a new era, a new zeitgeist, a new age, just as we felt was certain back in  the 60’s, and just as the astrologers have predicted for two thousand or more years.
 
            Predictions are easy, however, and we have seen so many pass by unfulfilled. In the first millennium, whole towns in Europe stopped work and hunkered down for the new age. It did not happen, and it is probable that many starved to death following that cold New Year’s Day. Another end of an era was expected after the bubonic plagues of the 14th century. In retrospect, a new age – the modern era of individualism, secularism, and capitalism - did come to Europe, heralded by the Renaissance, but such changes occurred over centuries as a “process” rather than as a singular miraculous event. There certainly were sudden shifts in places like Milan and Florence, but they did not impress the whole continent as a new age.
 
            Regardless, a millennial-style shift seems to be embedded in our DNA, and such things have occurred. The appearance of the Spanish galleons off the cost of Mexico in 1519 comes to mind. The Aztecs had expected it from their own prophets, just as all of Christendom has been taught to expect a second coming and an apocalypse as well. Such was first predicted by Christ for the Jews, and it did occur with the diaspora and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans some 40 years after his death. But for the rest of the Middle East and Europe, the complete rise of the Christendom – and the new era – was not really fulfilled until the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day of 800. It took a long time to get there, and I don’t believe it was taken by the masses as a shining new age. Should we expect anything different?
 
            There is more news from Medjugorje. A large group of Catholics went there just weeks ago, many of them friends of ours. One spoke to a priest established there who is known for his great eloquence. Decades before, he had received his M.D. from Oxford and was on his way to a comfortable living when he was mysteriously called to Medjugorje. There, he had various visions and locutions from Mary, along with (if I remember correctly) hauntings from demons, all leading to his becoming a priest and great evangelizer. With such credentials he is well respected and not to be taken lightly. So when he said the following (purportedly) to my friend, she took notice: the great change, he said, the new era, the time of the illumination, all of that spoken of by Mary at Fatima and Medjugorje and Akita (Japan) and Kibeho (Rwanda) and other places will occur within the next 2 years.
 
            Of what we know, the change will not be subtle nor take centuries to manifest. The world has been exposed to the conscience-changing spirit of Christ, and now the time to complete the first phase of this history, this “age of Pisces,” is upon us, which will lead suddenly to a new age. Coincidentally, this would be right on target according to numerologists - almost exactly 2,000 years after the resurrection of Christ and the exposure to the world of the Holy Spirit.  
 
            What should we make of this? This prediction is recorded here, and if nothing happens in the next two or three years, we might dismiss our priest’s prophecy. If nothing happens in at most 40 years towards this end, we might be able to discard the whole lot of the Marian prophecies.
 
            So: on the cusp of this great event or great fiasco, I have to ask everyone: do you feel it? Many boomers felt the ‘60’s vibe, many reading this felt the Obama vibe, and we have recently experienced the blip in vibes of our two presidential candidates. But this event is so much bigger. Perhaps we should sense it as wild animals sense the coming of earthquakes. The priest in Bosnia felt it, and I, not gifted in this way, do as well. Many Christians are biased towards this belief, but whose world view isn’t in one way or another? And could not a bias held by so many severally affect reality?
 
            But we are not talking about a movement of social phenomena here. A miracle has been promised, and there can be no taking it back with hedging and excuses. The visionaries of the last century and then some were and are either off their rocker or were and are speaking the word of God through Mary. So I ask again, do you sense the coming of the new zeitgeist? If so, we have been told how to prepare. If not, if it is all hogwash, we will all die someday and should still prepare. That last prediction you can take to the bank.   
 
              
 
 
            
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          “April is the cruelest month…” T.S Eliot, “The Wasteland”
 
            I grumble and joke about this one famous phrase every April when I start bicycling again. I usually begin on the first warm-ish day in the first week, but shortly find that one cloud, one change of wind, one passing day or even a few passing minutes can change everything from “nice” to horrible. Back when our son was only about 7 or 8, he and I started out on a tandem bike on a fine sunny day, only to find ourselves deluged with cold, wet snow and an icy wind some 5 miles from home. As we were instantly wet and had no place for shelter, I made the decision to peddle on like crazy until we got home. It was miserable and exhausting. When we finally arrived, I stepped off the bike with trembling legs, only to find my son covered in icy mud spun up from my back tire. My wife saw him too, and I did not receive any kudos for rescuing our child, to say the least.
 
            The poem goes deeper than that, however. From the very beginning, it lets us know that any hope we might have in spring is really only a cruel joke. All that new life that is stirring will die, just as you and I will. The joy of the wedding and of the healthy birth are more than matched by the sorrow, even horror, of sickness and death, both of which are inevitable. Hope, then, is an illusion. Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow, we shall die.
 
            `Such we find in any study of nature, no less so than in a new and very popular non-fiction book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, by Jonathan Slaght. This is the autobiography of an ornithology doctoral student doing a five-year study in Primordia, Russia, a coastal wilderness near the Sea of Japan just south and east of Siberia, on the rare ‘fish owl’ species. Talk about the cruelties of nature. Dogs chase deer that cannot move in the deep snow and tear them apart, thawing rivers drag down game and flood the forests, ticks burrow into hosts to suck blood while they spread disease, and Amur tigers are driven to eating humans by infestations of parasites in the brain.
 
            Humans are a huge part of the cruelty as well: in National Geographic style doom and gloom, we hear of habitat loss through poaching, over- fishing, over- hunting, man-made fires, and personal anger towards entire species driving, some to kill them on the spot. The people are also often brutal to one another, both in broad resource wars where roads are seeded with spikes to ruin tires and cabins are burnt down, and in vicious personal fights, often within families (nothing new there).  In such instances, humans mirror the harshness of nature.
 
            And yet the author loves the land, referring to it towards the end as a near paradise. Humans are disturbing that paradise, but Slaght is no preservationist, believing that humans can live and work within the land at a sustainable level. Balance and beauty and bounty can reign. Paradise, while not within our grasp, can remain at least within our distant view. Done right, the Earth can truly be our benevolent, although strict, mother.
 
            This view brings to mind an eternal question: if God is all light and love, and God made Earth, should Earth not be paradise? Slaght studies the workings of nature within and between species and finds the relationships to be as beautiful and varied as infinite structures of snowflakes. They all fit together so well, not so much as a law but as a ballet, with some species moving this way and another that, going to and fro and back and forth within the loose confines of a limited stage ruled over by the oscillations of weather and climate. He is right. If you can begin to grasp the intertwined patterns of nature, nature becomes a marvel of art and architecture far beyond the abilities of man, a display of cosmic might that is beyond measure. For some, this marvelous union of complexities might be defined as paradise.
 
            However, if one means by “paradise” ease and gentle beauty, one would be horrified by the savagery of actual nature. We could all compose an enormous list of the discomforts and downright tortures we that we are subject to, knowing that some of them are unavoidably coming our way sooner or later.  Here is the eternal conundrum and why many sincere people simply cannot believe in a wise, just and loving god. As Jesus himself said, what father would give his child an asp when he asked for fruit? And yet, there we have it: not only are children born with hideous diseases, but nature itself doles out pain and death on a regular and unstoppable basis. What father indeed.
 
            The conundrum, however, is not a problem at all when looked at from an eternal perspective. It is this that I wrestled with in my novel, Hurricane River. Horrible things happen, but to what end? In the novel, I discovered (I write to learn far more than to teach) that for those who are still alive, life continues after tragedy, and often good things follow from the bad. Those who have died are promised a greater and eternal existence, but we don’t have to focus on that. Instead, we can plainly see that new order eventually arises out of chaos, just as it does in nature. Equilibrium is reached again, even after such horrors as the Nazi holocaust.
 
            So we read it again and again. In another note from the New Testament, Paul tells us that all things work out well for those who have faith in God. The key is the phrase “work out,” given God’s infinite timeline.  While paradise was supposedly on Earth in the epic of Eden, imperfection was then brought into the world – a world made perfect (as it only could be) by God. The horror we see was brought on by a change in our perception, one that included an historical timeline. Still, perfection exists, as our ornithologist Jonathan Slaght tells us, as seen through the marvelous and intricate balance in nature. As a species we screw up this balance, just as we did with the mythical paradise, but perfection is still inevitable through timeless reality. In the end – as we perceive things – balance will be achieved, both within us and without us. As is nature, so are we, both entities existing in an eternal and undeniable truth that may be seen to reflect the power, glory, and yes, the love of God.
 
            We do not have to believe in the Christian definition of God to see the beauty and balance. One can be a Jeremiah Johnson (of the movie, as played by Robert Redford) and come to understand that tragedy in human life is part of the natural flow of things in nature, which is overall a marvel and a glory. But hundreds of millions have experienced the being of God, just as millions will experience Him this very day. To those with this experience, God is self-evident, most declaring that His presence is more real than our natural reality. For those without the experience, this tells them little except that this Presence is no passing dream or illusion or hallucination. Just as the piecemeal understanding of nature and its cruelties can be broadened into a perspective of awe and wonder, so God can emerge from an abstract cloud as an undeniably real being. And this being, say the experienced, is love. Just as a real appreciation of the beauty of nature goes far beyond a colorful sunset, so the experience of the love of God goes far beyond the love of a puppy or a child or spouse. In this love lies the timeless balance that we see in nature, and that we can see in the human sphere. Perfection is found in love, along with everything else that is timeless.
 
            Love is the beauty, the forever, the joyful embrace of a universe. It is the spawning of salmon as well as the movement of stars. The laws of nature are from love, but they are not love. The laws of Man are often from love, and if they are not, they will fail, but even those that are good are not love. Love is the total and can only be the total. When ‘being’ is seen in pieces through time or space, it cannot be love. It is imperfect, and in that, bad things happen. Even then, though, perception in time reflects the wholeness of love when taken as a greater whole. We can experience that when studying nature and its marvelous balance. We can grasp that when studying the gives- and- takes in human history. In this, the skeptical might begin to understand that the spiritual is something real. From such observations can faith be strengthened; from such studies might we understand that what is broken will be made whole, and that perfection exists in the timeless.
 
            So we can say that T.S. Eliot was wrong. April leads not only to winter, but to April once again. There is perfection and beauty and love in the whole. Sun and warmth will turn to snow and mud and back again, but there is something gained in the entirety. No moment is a fraud or a trick. The waterfalls and tides and forests and birds, all of it, are never isolated and contained. They all work within the boundless wonder of divine law. And so do we.                                                       
 
 
 
 
 

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            Successful authors are often asked, “How do you come up with your ideas?,” to which they usually reply, “I get tidbits here and there from the news, books I read, daily events…” and so on. How dull. I am not a successful author, not in the Best Seller sense anyway, and I have a much better explanation: I am given my basic ideas from God or my guardian angel or from the collective unconscious, which are then super-imposed on news, books I read, daily events and so on. The first part is a gift. The second part is a lot of work.
 
            Some work is harder than others, and I feel like Calvin from “Calvin and Hobbes” when he is pretending to be a super genius mad scientist who has just invented something like the transmorgrophier. In his mind, his head swells to alien proportions, and he uses Latin-based words when English would do just fine to show his genius. In the end, though, even with his swollen head and two-dollar words, he still can’t really make a transmorgrophier. 
 
            Me, I deal in things a little less challenging than machines that can change people into insects, but still I am forced to struggle. Today, for instance, I was given two ideas that must be molded -  transmorgrophied – into one greater, more complete and deeper meaning. Here I am pulling open the curtain. A grown child, me, must now not only pretend to make something bigger and more meaningful, but actually do it. Too bad I don’t have a stuffed tiger (Hobbes) to help me.
 
            Here are those ideas, taken separately. The first came from nearly daily arguments – I mean discussions – about certain political notions that I will not mention here. At the root of them was the dualistic understanding that one is either a victim or victimize. If one is the former, it is supposed that one should hang one’s head in shame in deference to the latter. After going round and round the mulberry bush on this basic idea, it hit me: we are not trapped in a one- or- another world, but really have our feet in several of them at the same time. For instance, we all understand that if one possesses more than what is necessary, then one has a moral obligation to help those who have less. However, in this we miss the idea that if one is poor, one also is a person with a full soul who also has moral obligations. Unless it is a matter of life or death, one should not steal, and if one must, one must only do so to survive. One must not also do things like sell drugs or his children or murder for hire, among many other immoral acts. The poor person is, then, just as obligated to live the moral life as anyone else. In that obligation, he is also responsible to relieve himself of his poverty as best he can through honest means.
 
            This changes everything. Violent crime is then not solely the fault of society rather than the individual, illegal transgressions of borders are then not solely the fault of Wester hegemony, and so on, and to think otherwise is to rob the so-called victim of his human-ness.
 
            Idea # Two: While reading the book of Judges in the Old Testament these last several days, I could not  help but see how unbelievably primitive these people were. One, for instance, would kill all of his 70 brothers to attain the role of supreme leader – these 70 brothers made possible by harems that numbered women in the hundreds like cattle – while another would slaughter an entire tribe, men women and children, for an offense from hundreds of years earlier. On top of that, the people of Israel would revert to the worship of pagan gods with their orgies and child blood sacrifice again and again despite the blessings and victories given them by the one true God of their people. It is simply hard to believe what barbarians they were. In comparison, we can see how much we as a human race have improved.
 
            Here comes the big idea that puts the other two together: the improvements that we think we see would be laughable if a fool acting as a murderer is funny. In the first example, we can see how wrong we have been in assuming that one person or group fits either into one simple category or another. If we believe in the essential Christian thought that all is divinely made for a purpose, we can never insulate anyone from their rights and obligations before God. These rights include the privilege of eternal life and those obligations, the acts (and suppression of wrong acts) that will bring them, us and anyone to realize eternal salvation. 
 
            This thought expands into the next: if we are fundamentally wrong about this supposed dichotomy, in what else are we fundamentally wrong? Should we even attempt to count the ways? Let’s start with this: if a society’s vision was wise and expansive, we would expect to see a society in overall peace, where most were in agreement over the most fundamental aspects of their communal arrangements and moral foundations (I did not say ALL because that would mean that we all knew everything and that we all operated from benign impulses - but still, most). Yet instead, we have fundamental disagreements about the most basic principles. This includes thought #one, where one’s temporary status on one issue is seen to be the full portrait, but there are many others. Abortion, for instance. Could the protection of the foundations of human life be more essential? And yet people of good will have fought and continue to fight over this one issue. It might even decide this year’s presidential election. Where is the wisdom?
 
            Crime, for instance. Here, we can expand on thought #one again: should a characteristic or circumstance determine one’s responsibility for moral behavior? Should someone’s race or ethnicity or residential status determine whether or not they will be prosecuted for crimes? Or, war for instance: when should we proceed with war, the most fundamentally destructive behavior a nation can engage in? Do we have anything even close to a consensus on that? Are we in fundamental agreement on Ukraine and Israel, even as billions are spent and thousands are killed?
 
            Or marriage and sex and families, for instance. I hate to even proceed with this because it is so basic and so fraught with contention. Should we have gay marriage, should homosexuality be normalized in schools, should kids be allowed to “transgender,” should divorce be made easy, should the pill be available to children. Or drugs (for instance): should one or some or all be legalized? What penalties should be applied, if any? And why, oh why, do so many get caught up in taking them, to the point of addiction, sickness, poverty, and death? Why have we, in our wisdom that is so much greater than the old Jews, not figured our way out of this one deadly disaster?
 
            The big idea, the one from God or the angels, gets ever bigger. We can, and perhaps must, quote from scripture at this point:
           
            He has made everything appropriate for its time,
            and has put the timeless in their hearts,
            without man’s ever discovering,
            from beginning to end, the work which God has done.  (Eccl 3:11)
           
            We are more than the flowers and the trees and the rocks, for the timeless is in our hearts, but we do not – cannot – understand in this world the full intentions of God in the timelessness of his creation. We are more than ants, and have our obligations and our eternal reward, but our understanding of who we are and where we are is as if we were ants in the cosmic scheme. On the scale of one to eternity, whether we are at number 10 or number 1 million hardly matters – we are still that far from the end. In the Christian Bible, an era was ended with the Old Testament and a new one begun with Christ, but this did not include attaining perfection in this world, at least not until the Apocalypse. Instead, the great leap forward that defines the New Testament was in obtaining Christ as a bridge so that we might cross an uncross-able chasm to God. We have learned tidbits here and there, especially from the Bible (whether one is a believer or not) that has helped end such things as slavery and female servitude, but still, we fall far short.
 
            How, then, do we proceed, or is this only an intellectual enterprise?
 
            In one sense, it is easy – that is, if one has faith. Although we are fastened to the world in our daily thoughts and so cannot even begin to understand the “work that God has done,” we have this very same Bible that tells us of the end to this world and how to rise to the other, the eternal. We then have the basic blueprint for how we should live and for what we should live for.
 
            On the other hand, it is impossibly hard and truly only an intellectual enterprise IF we proceed to understand the world from the viewpoint of the world, that is, without faith in the cosmic designer and his Holy Spirit.  If I were to write from this vantage point, I could only say what the famous authors say about their ideas – that they come from a patchwork of daily events and little more. Life, and life’s stories, would only be a source of amusement or of pain or pleasure, but never a story that proceeds from, and points to, greatness.
 
            And that is how we all must see our own stories. We are but tiny incidences in this vastness, but we come from and are bound for greatness. If we were to truly understand the power and glory that is in our midst, our society would evolve to such a height that it would be pointless to compare it to those of the past. Instead, as members we would move in awe throughout our lives, praising the blessings of our very being with every holy minute.
 
 
 
 
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          An old friend of mine came out to visit me Up Nort’ last year, flying into Marquette from his academic enclave in Martha’s Vineyard, and gave me a rather remarkable story about coastal Indians in pre-Columbian Connecticut. He told me that there had been such abundance there that the natives had not even bothered to build villages. They moved from place to place like carefree hippies in a VW Microbus, digging clams and spearing fish and holding free music festivals – OK, I made that last one up – and, with the exception of those spears, owned nothing. Further, all remains found were absent any signs of violence – that is, broken skulls, slash marks on arm and leg bones and so on. The conclusion was, as he put it mimicking Claus Schwab, “They owned nothing and were happy.”
 
            “Neo-Marxist propaganda!,” I shouted, losing my cool before rationally arguing against such a point. “This makes it all about materialism. If this is true, there is no need for God!” Meaning I got to the ultimate point while skipping the explanation, which I did get around to eventually, but the momentum was gone. I had been blindsided and ended up not convincing anyone to the contrary. Claus Schwab still undoubtedly reigns in Martha’s Vineyard.
 
            I will not detail the counter argument here, which really should not be necessary anyway. Nowhere else in the world has any society, whether they be the Shoshone and Australian nomads or the wealthy chiefdoms of Hawaii and our North West coast, been free of violence. In Connecticut, the individuals of such wandering peoples were gone before they could be studied and the material evidence of their lives was by definition thin. They left almost nothing, as said, including organized grave yards. To form a Schwab-like conclusion from such scraps of evidence is more a wishful bit of propaganda than useful science.  
 
            More to the point, people have always had something to fight about, and in most cases these fights have had little to do with material possessions. Our neo-Marxist friends may not find the story of Cain and Abel convincing, but it does give us a window into an ancient mind-set. Taking place in the early post-Edenic world where there were few people and an abundance of resources, this story is about a man who killed his brother over jealousy, not stuff.  This remains the case with peoples throughout the world. The resource-rich Yanomamo of the Amazon acknowledged killing primarily for women, and before the rise of drug gangs in post-60’s America, the great majority of murders were committed by jealous boyfriends or husbands.
 
            To the latter point, sexual matters have always been at the focal point of social control and loss of personal control. Freud and a host of psychologists have long known this, although their solution to the problem has usually been to encourage the expression of sexual feelings before repression can begin. Such remedies have not met with overall success. The present state of sexual happiness among young people is at a low point even as sexual permissiveness has never been greater. What is wrong? With even the poorest among us struggling with obesity from our abundance, and with all free to walk around in many cities wearing sadomasochistic butt chaps and dog collars, why are we not content?
 
            Sex is a very strange thing, especially among men. Practically speaking, it should not be. Animals typically go through their mating rituals on their pre-determined schedules and then move on with their lives. Not so human men. As one man from a small tribe in southern Brazil said, “Our wives are manioc (a bland carbohydrate) while other men’s wives are meat.” One does not have to guess that among these people, women are almost always the reason for violence. So it is that, while men might be temporarily satisfied with what is prescribed to them by social norms, they will not be for long. They will want other sexual partners and other ways of doing it with various sexual partners. Hugh Heffner was not a freak, but a norm writ large. Without a sense of scruples, most men’s goals would be to live the life of Heff.
 
            Without even mentioning what such a lifestyle would do to the family, we could not all live that way for more reasons than I want to go into here, including the fact that most women would not like to live their lives as mere sexual commodities. But it is worse than that. If we men could have every woman we wanted, we would still want more. Like the sultans of the Ottoman Empire, even if we lived in a beautiful garden with hundreds of young women available to us, we would either become depressed or go insane – or get a nice war going to relieve our frustrations: our frustrations over having everything we want and feeling worse for it.
 
            Such is sex, a microcosm of the futility of complete and permanent fulfillment in this world. And such is sex as to show us to what horrors such lack of fulfillment can lead to if we allow for it.
 
            My wife and I have recently finished watching the series Mindhunters on Netflix, and have come away shaken from this mostly factual investigation of sex-based serial killers through the eyes of the FBI @ 1980. The FBI at that time was beginning to profile such killers as Charley Manson and Son of Sam David Berkowitz, usually with a Freudian slant. Often, it would go like this: one killer had a prostitute mother and an absent father, another had a domineering and berating mother, and so on and on with histories of broken and aberrant social backgrounds. But it was, and is not, always so easy. One man in the series had a very decent home life, was intelligent, and had access to avenues of success. And yet, as far as was determined, he temporarily fulfilled his sexual needs by abducting and torturing to death adolescent boys. What the….?
 
            It seems that it goes back to the earlier statement, that ‘enough’ is never enough, and with the energy behind the sexual urge in men, this lack of fulfillment can lead to extreme perversion and danger. It is my bet that none of us had perfect childhoods regarding sex or anything else, and that few of us are fully satisfied with the sexual aspects of our lives – yet almost none of us commits acts of violence or murder. At this point in our (American) history, I would bet that most of us do not even depend on multiple partners or sex toys to achieve those ever-brief moments of fulfillment.  Obviously, some have had worse lives than others, but most with uncomfortable or even horrible backgrounds are not violent sex offenders. In other words, there is something else that the FBI files did not delve into that makes a sexual predator, and oddly, it contradicts the modern viewpoint of the experts. It points to a lack of self-control that is grounded in extreme narcissism.
 
            In his book, Beheading Hydra, Fr Dwight Longenecker preaches the tried and true doctrine of moral certitude while countering the modern psychological narrative of sexual permissiveness. For him, such permissiveness is a key component in the modern de-Spiritualizing of the world, and he is right: with the “if it feels good, do it,” attitude, we are directed inward towards ourselves, not outward for the love of spouse, family, and God. We become lone actors. Cruelly, as mentioned, we are being led to believe that this path will lead to happiness – which it has not and will not – while disregarding the greater world of both other people and its spiritual aspects.  His analysis amounts to this: we must control impulses that eventually will plunge us into an endless and depressing search for permanent physical happiness and instead follow a disciplined life that will deny immediate satisfaction in exchange for permanent spiritual happiness.
 
             I must add that I don’t particularly like this conclusion. As an East Coast baby boomer, doing what feels good was what life was all about. I would love it if we could all live in mobile communes, like those supposed coastal Connecticut tribes, and live out our inner desires in perfect harmony with everyone else. But it doesn’t work out that way. The lizard mind is only part of our mind. The other has its foot in eternity and will never be satisfied with the momentary fragments of compelled pleasure that rules the animal kingdom. Having a higher kingdom – and we all know deep down that we do, from the fathomless well of our arts to the mountain tops of our inspirations – directs us towards controlling the lizard mind to achieve eternal cosmic bliss. Some have tried to have it both ways, but the followers of Jim Jones and Charley Manson learned too late what the wise have always known.
 
 
                  
 

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          I came late to the series “The Day” on Netflix, as I was in the hinterlands selling books. The form of selling was new to me: set up a table and an umbrella and give customers the thrill of actually meeting the author of the wonderful, fantastic novel Hurricane River, a fiction thriller that takes place in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. I was in Seney, just 25 miles south of the park, so it seemed like selling there might be a good idea. On the other hand, it was to be at the annual Lumberjack Fest, something known more for the beard contest, ax throwing, and the beer pavilion than for connoisseurs of literature.
 
            Beer – huh! I saw large jugs of whiskey passing hands, so one might expect a little more than gentle buzzes from the day-drinking that began at 11:00 AM. My wife suggested through texting that I stay under my umbrella until closing at 6:00, catching people who had been made generous by alcohol, but I declined. After 4 hours of watching a small and lackluster crowd wander by on their way to the Elephant Ear tent (deep-fried bread), I had had enough. I had sold 3 books in 4 hours – that’s a 45$ take minus expenses – and it was time to head back to the cabin for a nap.
 
            On the following day, Sunday, I made it home to Wisconsin cow country to find my wife exclaiming excitedly about the series mentioned above. “The Day” was the Japanese telling of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, taken from a long account written by the plant manager. My wife had already seen the first 3 of 8 parts and quickly briefed me on those first three. We delved into part 4 that night, with me willing to accept the value of the series while still retaining doubts. I had found that Japanese productions are so different from our own that they border on the bizarre – and often the boring. But maybe…
 
            Alas, no such luck – at first. It was like an episode of the old Star Trek without light travel and space monsters, what with cheap production and endless talks on radiation risks. I could almost hear Captain Kirk yelling at Scotty to change the laws of physics.  Boring. But then I began to see something else.
 
            For one, over time it became clear what was at stake here. An earthquake and subsequent tsunami had damaged the nuclear plant to such an extent that it was threatening to go full nuclear. As it turned out, by the last of the series everyone expected it to go nuclear. It was out of control and the nuclear material could not be adequately cooled. It was goin’ ta blow, Captain. In an aside from the plant, we saw an expert approach the prime minister and tell him that 1/3 of Japan, including Tokyo, was about to become uninhabitable. 50 million of their 120 million citizens would have to be moved. In addition, all corporate entities were about to pull out, leaving Japan a ruined nation, worse off than after WWII because they would not have the territory to rebuild. What Japan was facing was the end of what Japan had once been and the beginning of a tortuous future of poverty and weakness.
 
            More importantly on the minute-by-minute action of the series, I began to understand how Japanese tell stories. This truly was closer to Star Trek the Original than I had thought, but the tone was very somber on this very serious subject. What was important to the creators of the series, and I suspect to the intended Japanese audience, was the moral aspect of the reactions of the plant personnel. The event of nuclear devastation was backdrop to a celestial lesson that was being given to Japan by their amorphous god (the Zen Buddhist approach to the Supreme Will can only be explained as being amorphous. I will capitalize the word God from here on out anyway). What they were being told was this: they had built a Tower of Babble, something contrary to the Will of Heaven, and through nature, this Will had tipped it over. That was the first and foremost lesson. But Japan was gifted with many more lessons, several hundred and several million more on a smaller scale, and it is on these where the show focused.
 
            How does one behave under the pressure of death? This is truly where character is tested. Were Man not foolish and ignorant, this would not be so. All are going to die anyway. We know this and should live our lives accordingly, adhering to the good in which our culture(s) has imbued us. We should do our duty, live selflessly for others, and not forsake dangerous or difficult tasks. These rules should be taken for granted and followed universally and flawlessly. Yet for those who live as if they are immortal, this is astonishingly difficult to do. This often includes most of us, and we cower, run and hide, and make excuses.
 
            Not so the engineers and management at the power plant. Risking hideous death by radiation, the workers fought to stay at their posts regardless. A group of young men asked to be released, but were taught a lesson by their elders: remain steadfast and do your duty. And they did. As the disaster expanded and hope diminished, the chief in charge told his subordinates that he would die there in honor of those who already had. He was the captain who would go down with the ship. Others who may have been unsteady with this sacrifice took courage by this example. The entire series, then, revealed itself to be a morality play involving actors both powerful and humble. Of the latter, their ordinariness spoke to the viewers: this is how YOU should behave; this courage and sacrifice is what it means to be Japanese and fully human.
 
            At the end, we are returned to the big picture: Man’s Tower of Babble. Through the words of the station chief, we are treated to his own exquisite poetry that tells of our place in the universe. Clearly, he opines, nature is God’s creation, and we should always remain subordinate to its health and its ways. Greed for power – literally, in the case of the nuclear plant – will always end in ruin. We should always remain humble before God, who has displayed himself in nature - both the nature of the natural world and in humanity’s purest self. We must be content with what is enough; we must limit our disruption of Mother (and God’s) Nature.
 
            In the end, the plant mysteriously cools on its own accord. No one understands completely, even to this day, how this was done and Japan was saved. This is fact. Why this happened is left to our spiritual conjecture. But the lesson of the near end of a nation should be learned well, for Japan and humanity at large may not be given a second chance. Even today, the area around the plant is poisoned, and will remain so for decades. Even today, the experts are still trying to work out a plan to dispose of the irradiated materials. A solution is not guaranteed, and Fukushima stands as a warning to all who believe they can play at will with God’s creation.
 
            As a postscript in the manager’s own writings, we learn that he contracted lung cancer within a few years after the incidence. Shortly afterward, he died from his disease at the age of 58. Staying brave and loyal to his company to the end, he blamed the stress of the situation and his smoking habit for his cancer. Of course we know better, but the lessons we must learn can only be done when carried out to the end. Once at this end and taking his last gasps, our manager left this world protecting his people and giving the young a lesson about smoking.
 
            Still, the production is ultimately about God through nature. We are not in charge, but are instead only temporary caretakers. Like the stewards in the Parable of the Talents (Mathew, 25:14-30) we are here to invest our gifts for the love of God and our fellow man, not for our personal glorification and power. All life is imbued with ‘The Way’ which courses invisibly through all existence. In light of the Fukushima disaster, we are reminded that we must always follow this divine way in everything we do, flowing selflessly within the currents of the natural and social world. Doing anything less takes us out of our natural selves, where folly and destruction are sure to follow. In the end, not even Captain Kirk can defy the laws of God’s physics.  
  
 
 
 
 
 
                

This week, the essay "Patterns of Paradise" under 'Essays' in the website. 

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          Last week we rode the concrete waves ever eastward to the rocky hills and stony shores of New England via Buffalo, New York and the nearby wine country of the Finger Lakes, a beautiful area that belies the grime of the City to the south. We went to visit the remnants and new members of my family as well as the old campgrounds and sites that have become an integral part of this trip, including the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass. Set on a hill overlooking the Berkshire Mts. and the town itself (made famous to the world through Arlo Guthrie’s epic ballad, “Alice’s Restaurant”), it is where a group of priests in the 1940’s rescued proponents and manuscripts of Sr. Faustina from Poland, a task that eventually led to the sanctification of Faustina and the institution of the prayer of Divine Mercy in the Catholic Church. It is a tranquil and holy place splayed over dozens or even hundred acres that make one feel ‘holier than thou’ in spite of one’s real self. I say this because, to visit, we had to first stay the night before in a nearby campsite in a state park, a place set against steep mountains and encumbered with a bunch of pesky East Coast rules that make one feel less than charitable.
 
            One such rule concerned firewood. My wife got out of the car to sign in and surprisingly got into a several minute conversation with the guy manning the entrance booth, something that is normally closed by an 8 PM arrival. At one point he asked, “And we have firewood for sale if you need it,” to which my wife answered, “No, that’s all right, we bought some at that farm just down the road.”  Doh! She got a lecture about transference of firewood and such, which I suppose is OK because the guy would not really know if we got it just down the street or not, but after driving all day, this was just another pain in the butt that was not welcome. The other rule in the campground was even worse: Alcoholic Beverages Prohibited. Of course, having camped most everywhere in these United States, we knew the drill:  open the beer bottle in the camper, pour it into a Solo cup, and sit back at the fire like you’re chugging diabetes-causing soda pop.
 
            And that is exactly what we did, burning verboten firewood all the while, even as we planned on visiting a holy site the following day. Next morning we woke without a felony charge, and after a particularly steep mountain hike, we slid down to Stockbridge as innocent-looking and meek as you please.      
 
            A question came back to me some days later, however, probably when I was knocking back my third cup of coffee while navigating the Jeep and our little trailer back west through the Poconos: was this kind of scofflaw activity a sin? The firewood really was from the nearby farm, and we hadn’t known of this Massachusetts’ law, but the drinking part we knew about all too well from other prohibition-minded states. We long have figured that the content of the law was more important than the letter, and we figured that the content had to do with keeping out raucous parties and preventing littering  and fights, none of which we ever did, at least as far as anyone could notice. But that’s what we have always surmised. Maybe some of the law-makers were members of the Harper Valley PTA and really did believe that the mere presence of alcohol was a sin; maybe they thought they should keep the very possibility of youth being corrupted by the presence of a beer can from ever happening; and/or maybe they believed that “spirits” were evil spirits regardless that would pull campsites into a whirlwind from Hell with the mere twist of a wine bottle screw-top (we do not usually get the best for the woods). What do we really know?
 
            So we were scofflaws who thought we knew better than officialdom, which is a sign of pride, which is the deadliest of sins. Yet I do not feel bad about it in the least.
 
            I think most readers would agree that this is small potatoes and has little to do with any sin that a god who creates universes with a single word would care about. But it does bring in the concept of us mere mortals achieving perfection: at what point can we say before God, “good enough?” At one point does a lenient attitude become a slippery slope, where any rule or law or moral code might become a matter for our personal interpretation? To prevent ourselves from falling into the infinite depths of relativism, where can we feel safe in drawing the line?
 
            It truly is not so easy to decide, for as good as we might want to be, we don’t want to be snarled in the red tape of human bureaucracy for the few years we have on earth. There are rules, after all, and there are rules, something I discovered years ago while fixing a ruined house into which we had sunk our life savings. At that time I was 40 years old, and had lived almost exclusively for 20 years in the world of ideas and concepts cooked up by pot heads and university professors to the delight of us wannabe eggheads. We argued about everything and often sought an agreeable compromise. House fixing, however, was real: a beam poorly placed could cause collapse, and a drywall poorly sanded would look cheesy. The people who had previously lived there were drug-addict renters who had cleaned the place out of copper wiring and tubing after they had been served eviction notices. I had to replace those, and the worst was the tubing: the soldering had to be perfect or it would leak forever. At one point I had asked a carpenter who we hired to do some difficult work, if I could let a particularly difficult spot leak “just a little.” He was horrified. You don’t let pipes leak, just as you don’t cross uninsulated wires or fail to caulk windows. You simply should never argue or conceptualize yourself out of this sort of physical workmanship.
 
            We might say, then, that certain sorts of moral laws are non-negotiable, too. We know the biggies, for they were etched onto rock tablets nearly 5,000 years ago to serve later as THE guiding light for western Asia and all of Europe. But even these we tinker with. Adultery? Sure, many fail sometimes with this, this sin of the flesh being the most human of failings. For some, though, this has become nothing more than a Massachusetts drinking law, easy to dismiss as backward, patriarchal and oppressive. We were also given the law against dissing our mothers and fathers, which has now become par for the course, and taking the Lord’s name in vain, which I admit to doing almost daily. But even as we break one or another of these laws regularly, most still generally agree that such actions are wrong. At least we are trying.
 
            But others have become entirely negotiable, and these laws are not nothing-burgers, either. For instance, some types of genuine theft have now been deemed OK by the law in certain cities as long as the goods are valued at less than $1,000 per visit. In Milwaukee, the mayor has proclaimed that adolescent “joyriders” should be allowed two or three car thefts apiece before they are prosecuted. To say that these get-out-of-jail-free cards are paths on a slippery slope is to say that an Olympic ski-jump is a playground bump. Personal property might create social differences, but it is what makes the world function. Without it, why would anyone work, or at least make something great? Santa Monica, California, is now almost devoid of stores, and the Magnificent Mile in Chicago is now more a mine field of theft and violence than a high-end shopping area. Talk about leaky pipes.
 
            Murder is the heaviest of crimes, and it has not only been legalized but praised in its form of abortion. To say that this isn’t murder is again like letting the pipes leak. It may seem like nothing because the victims can’t speak, but it will swamp and ruin the woodwork of society eventually just as leaky pipes will ruin a house. I say this as one who once was very comfortable with abortion. From a scientific perspective, one that I once had, the fetus is only a clump of barely distinguishable cells. But there is a plan behind the cells, and they inevitably grow. What might not appear to be human will almost certainly become human. We might as well say that, since babies are not capable of rational thought, they are not fully human and can be killed, too. The arguments about this are far too long for this essay, but in the end I believe that this is one moral problem where there really is nothing to argue about. Again, pipes should not leak.
 
            Most distorted by us – and by far the most important - is the first commandment, to “have only one God” before us. This is not part of our human penal code and should not be, but it makes adherence to all the other commandments a breeze. It was designed in its literal meaning for the pagan people of the time who worshipped statues of cows and such, but it was and is also meant figuratively for those of us who might put things of this world ahead of God. This is what most of us do most of the time. It is at the root all crimes, for to put God first, we would love him above all else, and thus would adhere to all those other things that he wants. And, as Jews knew and Jesus made explicit (Mark 12:30-31), if we put love of God first, we would also love our neighbors as ourselves. Obviously, if we did this, there would be no crime. Halleluiah. This barely leaves us any moral wiggle room. Going back to the commandment against adultery, for instance, we can imagine that someone - children, parents, or one of the spouses themselves - is going to be hurt by these actions eventually.     So it is that even a scofflaw like me has to admit that following God’s rules make things better. Leaky pipes might be tolerable for a while, but in time, something will be ruined, if only just the water bill.
 
            Rules. Without God we inevitably get mutable laws given to us by those with ulterior motives. They are subject to constant manipulation and eventually lead to chaos or tyranny. That is why we need sacred law, which can be known as true through both divine revelation and lots of time. Over decades or centuries, have we found that it (the sacred law) does not play favorites? Have we found that it leads to an orderly life that allows for the raising of children and the contemplation of God? Overall, has it proven to be fair and just for all? In the case of our commandments, I believe the answer is obvious.
           
            As for me, I’ll stick to the sacred rules as much as possible but still tiptoe around those manmade ones, especially those made by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  On that bug-filled night, I found that sitting before a fire of local, if not state-approved, wood and drinking a few cold ones after a long day made me happy. This made my family happy, and thus everyone around us happy. There’s love of neighbor in there somewhere, I just know it, hiding behind the drywall among the leaky water pipes.