​ 
If you are like me, you have probably had fantasies of valor.  This is true enough that there is even a phrase for those who simply can’t resist pretending that their fantasies are true, called “stolen valor.”  I am from Connecticut and the thought of Senator Richard Blumenthal still makes me wince every time I recall his fake claim to combat in Vietnam.  For many of us, even the dark side to such valor – the PTSD and messed-up life that many had or still have from combat- has an imaginary romantic side.  It is unavoidable. 
 
Just last night, on Memorial Day, I saw a film with Ben Affleck called “Triple Frontier” that was an excellent dark memorial to former combat vets.   Here’s these former Special Forces dudes living unsatisfactory lives – nowhere jobs, divorce – when one who still lives the life by working as an anti-narco guy in Peru, invites them all on an adventure.   They are to kill this kingpin murderer, who needs killing, and saunter away with a great portion of his fortune. 
 
It is not a super-hero film.  They are good at killing, yes, but they mess up and are deeply troubled by the people they have to kill.  In the end it becomes not about the drug lord or the money, but rather about nobility: to remain human, they must sacrifice what they desperately want.  It is difficult, as it must be, but the relief they show afterwards tells us of their inner turmoil about the killing game, and how they must justify it by following only the highest values.  They are warriors, but not murderers, and they must demonstrate this in the clearest way possible.
 
In the real world, brave soldiers are given medals, the greatest being the Medal of Honor.  While some, like Blumenthal, would roll like a child on a mattress of medals, most put them in a small box and stuff them in the back of the dresser drawer.  They know that they, too, have had fear and are not the icons of courage that the medals tend to make us believe; and they know that other men, many who lost their lives, were braver and more deserving then they were.  This is how it always has been, at least in our nation, but it is the Medal of Honor winners who have the greatest problem.  This is because, regardless of inner guilt and turmoil, they truly have shown courage as great as any of us can know.  What distinguishes them from the other medal winners is the duration of their courage.  Although one man may show a great flash of bravery and risk his life to take out an enemy site, Medal of Honor winners have all shown such courage over hours, or sometimes days.  Many are medics who go back again and again into live combat to save wounded soldiers.  All have shown heroism long after the adrenaline rush is gone.  All have proven to be people in whom courage is a fundamental part of their being.
 
And most, according to a recent article I read in, I think, the New York Times, feel oppressed by that honor.  Of those interviewed, the most common reason for this is the feelings of guilt – not that they were not brave enough, although with some that still exists, but that they did not do enough.  They may have saved fifteen men under impossible circumstances, but they did not have enough time or strength to get to those last four guys.  Those faces of the last four haunt them.  The Medal brings back the memories of, as one man says, the worst day in his life.  He does not want that memory.  He does not feel happy that he is brave and that others idolize him for it.  Rather, he wishes that he never would have had the opportunity to show to the world his fundamental courage – which, ultimately, even in the midst of war, is really his fundamental humanity.  
 
Such bravery is not born from aggression, but from self-sacrifice.  The Medal of Honor hero cannot tolerate that another to whom he is united should suffer.  One might believe that they were like Father Maximillian Kolbe, the Catholic priest who was put in a Nazi death camp for his passive resistance to the fascist state, and who then volunteered to take the place of another man who was to be killed by starvation.  As an aside, of the ten prisoners starved to death for an attempted escape of another, he outlasted all of them.  Because he simply wouldn’t die, they injected him with carbolic acid.  He has since been sainted, because in his acts he followed the way of the sacrificed Christ. 
 
Such I think of the Honor winners.  One, according to the interviews, rejected his “sainthood” and remains sullen against the powers that put him in the position to become a Medal winner, but the others suffer through.  Most learn to live with their Honor, even though the memories tear at them, so that they might do good things.  As the article says, these are made -men (I believe at least one woman has also been a recipient – she, from her bravery in the Civil War) who never have to worry about their incomes again.  They are wanted by every company who needs good publicity.  More, they continue to promote the welfare of others through charity work – and who could do it better?  Unlike Christ, they did not believe that they were born to be self-sacrificing saviors.  But most take up the cross, as is said; it is their special privilege and honor, and their special burden, to do so.   They were, like the traditional saints, chosen to suffer to better humankind, whatever their personal wishes or private religious beliefs.
 
So it is that even a Hollywood movie has recognized this.  In “Triple Frontier,” all glory is given over to honor the lost, and to help the survivors.  These men who have learned to kill have also learned what it means to forget about their personal desires for the sake of others.  It is exactly the circumstances of inhumanity that made them realize their humanity.  It is why, I believe, Memorial Day is more important than flags and patriotism or even about the specific soldiers who died.  Rather, it is about our recognition of our own collective humanity, and the regrettable need in this troubled world to suffer for others.  It is only through this that most of us can see the greatness of our potential, not as winners in the social game of big houses and money, but as cosmic beings who exist above Darwin’s law of ‘survival of the fittest.’  The hero, then, is modest, not because he must be, but because what made him a hero has also made him modest.  We are only tiny creatures made large by our humility, and through our humility, our self-sacrifice.  The Medal winner almost always is made brave by valuing the life of others above his own.
 
It must be confusing to the hero.  It is a heavier burden than we common people can really understand.  It is, hopefully, a gift to the hero after all is said and done.  It is most certainly is a gift to the rest of us.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
I remember my father’s favorite pastime once he hit his seventies.  It was not golf or watching the Boston Red Sox but rather seeing if his friends or acquaintances were in the obituaries.  He had lived in the area all his life and had been a businessman, so he knew a lot of people, as was made obvious virtually every morning when he unfurled the morning paper and went straight to the obits.  There was always someone there, and often more than one.  He himself figured he would die at age 80, which was well within reach at his age then, although even at 84, when he did die, his search in the obits was still almost as if he were looking for himself.
 
I am in my mid 60’s and am not doing that, at least not yet, but still I find myself discovering that people I have known on the level of contemporaries or near- contemporaries are dying at an unsuspected rate.  Last week, a friend from back East where I was raised sent me the obit of my high school girlfriend, a relationship that had ended badly because of me, but one that had surprisingly turned into a sporadic friendship later on.   She was the girl obliquely mentioned in my book Dream Weaver, chapter 7, and one of the two big reasons that I hit the road in such a desperate state.  I had almost sent her the book several times before, but now never will.  Dead at age 65.  I hadn’t figured on that at all.  I even remembered that, if she had lived five more days, she would have made 66.
 
On about the same day, I learned that a woman who I had had a lively conversation with just two months before had also died.  She was eleven years my senior and had been sick with this or that, but still had retained the unbounded, often too-unbounded, energy for which she was known.  Now dead.  Just this Saturday as I walked into the church for her funeral, there she was, set out for one last silent conversation.  She looked “so life-like” as is often said, and given the energetic way I had last encountered her, the fact that she was dead seemed impossible.  That is my way, it is true: it always takes me a few months to really believe that someone is dead, but this was much harder.  I expected her to jump up and say, “Oh, come on Fred, can’t you take a joke?” 
 
In the Catholic Church the funeral mass that is held for the dead has all the necessary elements that lead to the Eucharist, or communion, including the homily which is almost always given by the priest.  Thus it was for this funeral, but I knew the relationship that this woman had had with the priest.  She was an activist, a social justice warrior who thought the Church needed a kick in the pants to help remedy racism – she was raised on the early 60’s civil rights movement and had never given it up – as well as homelessness and so on.  Father P., on the other hand, believed that social activism should be secondary to spiritual awareness and growth, the latter being far more important for the individual than social justice in this world.  She, “M,” steadily forwarded all sorts of projects for the Church through Father P, most of which were shot down as impractical (most, in fact, were) which caused her no end of anger and frustration.  It reached such a point that it was widely reported that she had actually punched the priest in the stomach.  This was undoubtedly true, as her later actions largely proved.   I had never seen her in this mode, but people had shown me text messages that she had sent that were filled with anger.  They were hard to read and harder to believe, but they, too, were undoubtedly true. 
 
So I was wary as to how Father P would treat her life, death, and the suspected fate of her soul.  Not surprisingly, he did mention her at-times excessive energy and talk; surprisingly, however, this took a back seat to a far rosier eulogy than I had thought possible.  As he went over her life and then her death, it became apparent that Father P was actually in awe of her – not because he had had a change of heart about social activism, but because of how she had died.  I had seen her two months before, and it was at about this time that her health had taken a sudden plunge and she had gone to a hospital.  And it was at this time that Father P’s faith was raised not by the fist of rebellion but by an unexpected outpouring of faith and redemption.  As Father P said, “About two months ago, all her anger and shouting had stopped and she began to submit to the suffering of Jesus.” 
 
He then became more specific.  In her progress towards a death she knew was soon to come, she saw herself repeating the stages of suffering that Jesus had gone through, from the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the judgment, the scourging, the carrying of the cross, and so on.  Moreover, she had not imposed this comparison on herself, but was shown this by the actual, at least to her, presence of Jesus, right there in her hospital room.  Said Father P, “Jesus appeared to her and gradually taught her the value of her suffering, just as his suffering had value.” (note: these quotes are all paraphrases.)  As she sloped towards death, he said, she became more peaceful, more accepting, and more radiant with faith.  Jesus, he said, had taken to her and then had taken her altogether.  In Father P’s professional opinion, she had been embraced and was on her way to heaven. 
 
The sincerity with which this was said was shocking, although in a good way.  It was obvious that he believed that Jesus had come to her.  Father P had been there, just as he had been there for hundreds of other dying people, and if anyone would know, he would.  He had seen something special in her which had renewed his faith, however necessary for him that might have been. 
 
I am still somewhat bewildered by it all – by her death, by Father P’s reaction, by this mark of faith and actual presence of Jesus, and now, even by my own understanding of it all – of life, of suffering, of death.  In a lesser way than to Father P, the story of her death, even though it is second hand to me, has opened my eyes one little bit more in the realm concerning suffering.  This is the toughest thing to understand, as in Christianity this is also combined with the belief that God is absolute love.  How could a loving God allow suffering? 
 
What I have learned from M’s life and death, then, is this: that God’s love is sacrifice, a willingness to help and even suffer for others, rather than some jolt of youthful hormones usually associated with love.  In her life she sought to sacrifice for others, even though this sacrifice was often misplaced or even counterproductive.  But in her death she was led by Jesus to the ultimate sacrifice, in that hers’ became a sacrifice for the love of God, just as God in Jesus had sacrificed his all for her and for all of humanity.  This sacrifice was, as St. Paul noted, a “completion” of Jesus’s sacrifice – not that His was incomplete, but that ours’ was, or is until is passes through Him.  We have to take up the cross to follow him, as they say.  Suffering is what is meant by that – and the pain and fear of death can be that necessary sacrifice.   
 
All this to understand what love really is.  This is what Father P saw.  It is still hard to understand all the angles on this most critical and fearsome matter, but this much is true: no greater love is found in the world than that found when we sacrifice our well-being and life for another.  This is true for Christians and non-Christians alike, and is still known as the “Roman Virtue.”  How this can be done by our own suffering and death through Jesus remains in part a mystery, at least to me.  On the other hand, I get it, or rather, a part of me gets it.  A ray of light has shown forth from M’s death to help me understand, and to grasp a little bit more what this, this fallen world that is still in God’s hands, is all about in light of the perfect, ultimate truth: that, to overcome the selfish we must sacrifice to any and all, and in this way we become, in actions, like God.  And in this way, as we become like him, we may join him. 
 
On the one hand, simple; on the other, far, far away.  But she saw this truth and let it be known through Father P.  For those who search, then, she at last gave what was needed to achieve her goal of social justice - not a sacrifice for this side or that, but rather for all. 
 
 
 
       
 
 
 

​ 
It seems almost impossible now, but when I was a kid in the mid 60’s, it had only been about 20 years since the end of WWII.  For adults now, that is like 1999.  Remember 1999?  We had the weird Y2K commotion, and that was about the time of the Macarena, but do you remember that time as a different era?  Do you tell stories of that time when, say, the iceman came through town on a horse-drawn wagon to deliver ice door to door with tongs?  That was what my dad told me about growing up in the 20’s, but no – 1999 was no “good old days.” 
 
And neither, then, were the 1940’s to adults in the 1960’s.  That was a time not that long ago for many millions who had lived through the trauma of WWII.   The trauma ran deep, as is does still for army Vets and refugees today, but the numbers who were affected were on a scale hard to imagine now.  Yet, our soldiers who returned – forget about the tens of millions of refugees – were told by an acquiescent society to forget about the bad stuff and get on with life.  Hey, we won!  Get a great post-war job, make babies, and start planning on white-washing that picket fence!
 
The reality must have been different, though.  In the recent book Unbroken, we learn of a rescued POW whose life almost disappeared into a bottle due to post traumatic stress.  My own father quietly let his own (former) PTS known to me when I was a young adult, although as subtly as he could.  But it was really in the early and mid- 60’s when I learned of the suffering of the Greatest Generation although I didn’t know it at the time.
 
I was not supposed to know it.  It was hidden in black and white films made in the late 40’s and early 50’s that spoke to those people, mostly men in the US, of their deep psychological trauma.  As I child I could not know this.  They rarely were direct, as, say, Unbroken or Born on the Fourth of July were.  Rather, they depicted men involved in dark, psychotic fantasies that never were resolved – hardly the formula for box office success.  And yet those movies were made, so apparently they sold, to, I would think, those men who silently suffered, along with their wives.  They knew.
 
I remember one in particular that still gives me chills.  It was about an officer in some agency, maybe the FBI, but something official where they wear guns, who had been exiled on an island where he was constantly watched, never allowed to escape.  He knew that they were up to no good – that they were keeping him on the island because he had information that they did not want out.  He did not remember that information, but he knew that his was because of the drugs they were slipping him, and because of their brainwashing.  As the movie unfolds in ominous black and white, we see him plotting to escape, making it to the lighthouse at the tip of the island, overcoming the guards and stealing a gun, and then making his way to the top of the spire to confront the arch-villain.  There he was going to find out the truth behind his incarceration, and then force the villain to take him back to the mainland where he would expose the plot to the proper authorities. 
 
We root for him the whole way, hoping for his escape from this totalitarian dystopia.  But then, at gun point, the villain speaks.  At first we do not believe him, conniving villain that he is.  Then it begins to become clear: the villain is no villain, and the hero is not a prisoner on the island, at least not as he thinks.  Rather, this is a mental institute for those made insane through deep trauma.  The hero’s trauma is not war; rather, it is one made by his mentally unbalanced wife who had drowned their children, who he finds floating face-down in front of their vacation property as the wife sings some eerie chant.  Here, she either kills herself with the hero’s gun or is shot by the hero himself.  I can’t recall, but in either case, this revelation rocks us with such horror that we begin to understand his trauma.  We get a sense of why our hero is desperately trying to hide this reality because it is simply too much for him to bear.  We also get a sense of the great sacrifice that the institute is making to try to heal this man – who is, as an agent of whatever capacity, a true but broken hero. 
 
I know two Viet vets who confess to PTSD to this day, a psychological nightmare that continues to screw them up royally.  We can imagine that the trauma of guts and death, so far beyond what they were raised to expect, haunts them as this disturbing movie does us, but for real and to the bone.  It was a movie that took me decades to understand as one of several post-war film noir’s made as quiet tributes to the men who suffered mentally but could never say so publicly.     
 
Trauma – it happens when bad things happen that we have not been trained to expect.  Warfare is an over-the-top example for us, as we, unlike, say, the tribal Sioux, were not raised to relish killing and to expect dismemberment and death.  But it is no exaggeration, no advertisement for psychology, to say that we have all been traumatized.  In my own small circle of friends and family I can recount so many of deaths, so much sickness, several problems of insanity, of drug abuse, of bad divorces – the list goes on.  These, too, are in their way over-the-top, for none of these are necessary for us to become traumatized.  Rather, all it takes is life as it is.
 
Why this should be is puzzling, as, according to science, we were bred for this life over millions of years of evolution.  Think, however, of your own child or some other small child that you have known well.  Are they all geared-up for pain, for violence, for mental nastiness, for failure and disappointment?  Are they set to take on the world as-is like some soft, pudgy ant?  Or can you tell already that they are going to be upset, to be torn down, and on occasions to be turned upside down by events of this life?  Of course.  This is the trauma of every one of us, whether we want to be silently stoic about it or not.  And somehow, even as this is the destiny of all of us, it doesn’t seem like it should be, not to those who promote social panaceas, nor, really, to any of us.  It seems as if, like our soldiers in war, that we were not raised or even made for this life.  
 
I don’t think we were.  I think, rather, that the world in which we have grown to understand is like the fake world of our hero, made in our own minds to blot out some horror that sent us to this world in the first place.  I could allude to the Garden of Eden and the Fall, but for many that would be too fanciful.  And yet, the evidence for our trauma, of some sort of break with our full being, is all around us.  It is, for one, in our desires for a perfect world, which I doubt troubles any other animal.  Where did we get that notion of a better world?  More so, we often see glimpses of the majesty and mystery of the world that shatters our quotidian perceptions.  We see in these glimpses a far greater truth than we ordinarily know, but we then inevitably fall back into our gray, tiny little world.  Why?  We obviously have the capacity to know a greater reality, but something in us makes us refuse it. 
 
That, I believe, is where the trauma of ordinary life comes in.  We all have to block out the fantastic at a very young age to deal with the older brother, the older kids at school and the school itself, so that we might deal with the even bigger traumas of adult life.  We hunker down; we blame the authorities, whoever they might be, or life itself for our discontent, until we are confronted (blessed, really) with a larger truth – which we quickly forget.  We don’t want to be vulnerable, to be amazed, to be out our depths ever again.  So we go back to living on our little island for the traumatized, helped now and then by the sages and prophets, but often to no avail.
 
“Be as the little children” was never intended to mean, “Be selfish and ignorant like children often are,” but rather, “be trusting and open to all life has to offer.”  I honestly don’t know what type of world we would then have – certainly, we would have to have additional guidance from some holy or superior force to keep us from living on the island of “Lord of the Flies” - which refers to Satan and has great repercussions, but that is not the point being made here.  Rather, it is that we are all in need of therapy for the trauma of life.  For this therapy to work, we need both openness and trust.  The trick lies, then, in finding the right lighthouse keeper in whom we can finally trust, who can lead us out of our trauma and back to the mainland. 
 
 
 
 
 
                   

​ 
It is with embarrassment that I admit that I was a history major as an undergrad, which I did because I liked it and because it was easier than physics.  Still, it required all-nighters for finals because of the huge amounts of memorization.  Interpretation, though, was another thing, something that came naturally along with the data.  Here are the facts, ma’am, and after that, it ain’t hard to see the truth. 
 
Well, no, actually; it has taken me decades to fully appreciate that both facts and interpretations can be manipulated, either subconsciously as I did as a student dependent upon the professors, or consciously, as do provocateurs of some kind of political agenda.   In the encyclopedic book Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World, author Donal Anthony Foley gives us a broad overview of (largely) European history, primarily of the 19th and 20th century (along with a brief look at the time before, and the colonial period in Mexico) with the eyes of an orthodox Catholic and biblical scholar, conveying some surprising facts and interpretations of the facts that we would never find in the secular classroom.  For instance, did you know that the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles Joseph, who took over from his dad Francis Joseph (who started WWI by attacking Serb nationalists for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) tried desperately to stop the war without calls for recriminations of any kind? (He was roundly rejected by both the British and the Germans, who wanted an all-out win regardless.)  And more: Charles Joseph was forced to resign at the end of the war, where he went into exile in Madeira, Portugal, where he died in poverty.  In 1972 his body was exhumed as the first step taken to declare him a saint for his efforts at peace.  His body was found in almost perfect condition – meaning it is likely that the man who was the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the calamitous First World War will be made a saint.  That was never in any of my history books. 
 
And oh, how involved it gets, as European history from any perspective always does.  Continuing with this war period, in May of 1917 Pope Benedict XV, appalled at this suicide of Euro-Christian culture, directed the invocation “Queen of Peace, pray for us!” so that Mary would intercede in human affairs to help stop the war.  Just over a week later, Mary appeared to the three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, at the Cova da Iria, or “Hollow of Peace.” Here she told the children that Russia would become something of the anti-Christ (but would return again to Christianity), and that Europe would be plunged into a greater war if they did not heed the Christian call for prayer and worship (and so on).  Later that year, Lenin and his gang took over Russia, forbidding worship and nearly everything else that is personal, and of course, WWII followed 20 years later with even greater ferocity than WWI. 
 
And so the book moves, following a history of Marian apparitions, from Guadalupe to post WWII Europe, with a constant look at the surrounding normal facts to show (if not prove) that Marian apparitions reflect current history, and are attempts to get humanity to move in a more godly direction and away from greed, war, and other sins. 
 
But wait, as the advertisement says, there’s more!  In addition, he shows with varying degrees of probability how the narrative of the Bible coincides with both the movement of current history and the apparitions of Mary.  In other words, he sees the whole movement of history as a recapitulation of the Bible, with the clear distinction that, now that the Savior has come, we are given the possibility that his mother – the ultimate mediatrix between God and Man – might intercede for us.   Unlike traditional history, the outcome of this history is set: we will eventually end up at the final judgement.  History in his view, then, is all about how we get there. 
 
I cannot do justice to this book in a matter of a few pages.  It is vast, covering the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, Darwinism and Marxism and Freud, Free Masonry, the Catholic Church in general, and a large part of Biblical history.  The latter is mostly too arcane to feature here – for instance, it compares the Virgin to the Ark of the Covenant, drawing extensive parallels between its biblical history and Marian apparitions.  The logic is that Mary was the carrier of God just as the Ark was, so their histories, and our lives as well, have all been and forever will be intertwined. 
 
This is heady and heavy stuff, however, so I will swerve in another direction that has something to do with me personally, and that contradicts a part of Foley’s thesis - although it shouldn’t, as it keeps within his frame of reference.
 
I go back to Fatima, the greatest Marian apparition of our times.  The appearance is intimately connected with Russia and Europe and peace and war, as we have seen, but there are ever more wrinkles to it.  Bishop Fulton Sheen, who is about to become a saint himself, pointed out in the 1950’s that Fatima is the name of the prophet’s favorite daughter and the most beloved of women in the Koran, aside from Mary.  Mary’s appearance at Fatima, then, is to Sheen an indication that God is advocating a kind of detente, or coming together of Islam and Christianity. 
 
Some 80 years later, Pope (now saint) John Paul II called another Marian site, Medjugorje, which I recently visited, the culmination of the vision of Fatima.  It is significant that Medjugorje was in the former communist nation of Yugoslavia, in the area now called Serbia-Herzegovina.  The visions of Mary to the (visionary) children there began in 1982, eight or so years before the fall of the state.  Thus we have featured here the conflict with communism, mentioned at Fatima, but now at its conclusion, with religion victorious over dialectical materialism and totalitarianism.  But the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by a period of ethnic cleansing, especially in Serbia – the nation where WWI began - based primarily on Christian vs Muslim tensions.  Recall Fulton Sheen’s reflection on the name of Fatima.  Today at Medjogorje, Mary continually calls for peace, including peace between religions, so much so that she once told one of the visionary children that the conflicts between the religions were based on humanity’s misunderstandings, not on God’s truth. 
 
This has brought our author to vehemently oppose the authenticity of Medjugorje – why, he rightly claims, John the apostle wrote that Jesus said that there is no way to the Father except through him, the son.  This is true, but it is clear that God, and His voice in Mary, have ideas that might supersede both Christianity and the Bible.  God is not limited in any way and can do things that are against our understanding of Him– just as Jesus surpassed the understanding of the Jews who were awaiting another Davidic king of this world.  I don’t claim to know the answer to this apparent biblical discrepancy, but St John Paul understood it, and it is clear that Mary appeared in Medjugorje just before the end of communism and at the beginning of modern Muslim violence to bring God back to a people forced away from religion, and to resolve the mounting Muslim hostilities in the world, thereby facilitating peace once again.  It all fits, from Fatima to Mejugorje, but for that biblical discrepancy.
 
I wager that a scholar and believer like Foley could solve this discrepancy if he were open to the idea that God might take his children back to Him even if they practiced different, even imperfect religions.  They may then have to be converted to the Way once in the spirit world, but it might be His way to take them any-way.  
 
All that aside, the view of world history, especially that of Europe, from the biblical and Catholic perspective is far more attractive than one might think.  In fact, it is far more attractive than many of the histories interpreted through Marx or the current neo-Marxist theories that see history as a product of trans-sectional group conflict and oppression.  For me, it is even more attractive than the more “objective” view that I was taught, which saw historical movement in terms of greed and power.  So yes, I would say that we are directed – that history is not, as social Darwinism and materialism would have it, a matter of intersecting vectors of survival strategies and randomness.  To one who is studying the complexities of the Bible, the idea that the Bible might recapitulate itself again and again as the word of God that lives in history is also attractive.  After all, if history is directed, the Bible would certainly be a good source to help in understanding that action. 
 
Our own interpretations, however, can never be said to be the end-all for all things that are and will be.  Historians such as Foley who put God in history might be better off if they realized that there are some things that must remain hidden, at least from certain epics, so that history can continue as it should to fulfill the Divine Plan.  It simply makes sense that we cannot know the future if we wish to fulfill it, and it is why we should not go to fortune tellers – as Oedipus found out.  We certainly cannot discern all that will come, and we probably will never discern the meaning of all that has been until the end of history.  Still, Foley gives us a sharp, sometimes even shocking, look at our own world through lenses of the divine and the miraculous, coming close to proving that we are part of the Divine Plan. 
 
As for me, I believe it more and more the more I read history.  That is my own perspective, of course, but time has shown me that this is the more enlightened path.  Foley’s interpretation will not show up in public school history classes anytime soon, but that is as it should be.  In a directed world, we are brought to ideas as we are ready to receive them.  Amen I say to that, and I tremble at the thought of what more is to come.                           
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
It was a long journey.  Not the journey to the Southwest, although that was one of 2400 miles which included everything from thunderstorms to, of all things, a late-April blizzard; but rather the journey through the audio book we brought with us, Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson.   It was, we can figure, bound to be long, given the plot: some 2000 volunteers in the year 2600 -something take off in a space ship made of a dozen-plus tubes several kilometers long, each containing a different biome, to terraform a planet, or its moon, some 12 light years away.  Unfortunately, this book is “realistic” in the sense that Einstein’s law of matter and energy are maintained, thereby limiting the speed of the ship to below-light values, in this case, 1/10 C (speed of light).  Adding in acceleration and deceleration time, this means that the volunteers must travel for 170 or so years before their final destination of Aurora.  Which means that it will be their great and great-great grandchildren who will be the terraformers rather than themselves.
 
The book is not long only because of the length of the journey, though; rather, the author has an almost unnatural grasp of mathematics, astrophysics and micro-ecology, and she has many points to make, including: the nature of consciousness, given the complexity of the ships’ computer; the social problems faced by humans confined to an extremely limited environment, including the necessary loss of freedom extending even to reproduction; and the problem of environmental balance and of maintaining the human species itself.
 
It is to the latter that Robinson gives her all.  She lets us know that to maintain a ship in environmental balance presents problems that, given time, are insurmountable; that humans in such an environment over time will themselves be plagued by illnesses and such phenomena as Island dwarfism, leading ultimately to their decline and demise; and that any biomass capable of supporting life will have some sort of native life that will be opportunistic or predatory – that is, which will be hostile and ultimately fatal to human life.  We are also informed through the descendants of the volunteers that they resent the fact that their ancestors condemned them to this inadequate life that has separated them from that for which they were made, to face a fate not of hope and colonization, but of failure and death.
 
In short, the author tells us that this search for the last frontier is more than useless.  Yes, Robinson concedes that, given the unlikely event that we can thwart the laws of physics and supersede light speed, we might be able to find some planets suitable for terraforming that are not hostile to human life, but that is a huge “if.”  In this she effectively rains on our, us sci-fi nuts’, parade. In the Star Trek series, we boldly go where no (one) has gone before to, as Captain Piccard puts it, “evolve,” but that is only because they can travel at the unbelievable speed of 26 light years an hour (as told to me by my Trekky wife).  In the real world, there will be no terraforming and no spreading of colonies throughout the galaxy, or at least not for the next thousand generations.  So, she argues, instead of spending the billions we plan to spend on a Moon base and then on a voyage to Mars, we should simply spend that time and money on the social and environmental problems here on earth.  We will, she claims - and probably rightly - never make back whatever we put into a space program, so why waste the time, the energy, and often-times the lives in doing so?
 
We even find hints in her writing of the anti – “Male Eurocentric conquest culture” so popular today, for to go boldly forth is a quest of both wasteful and thoughtless dominance.  I disagree with the latter, but have little to argue against the premise that the space program is, for the present, probably a loser in terms of profit.  I can say that the ruinous, Eurocentric male culture of the Roman Empire is what eventually led to our technologies today, including medicinal and horticultural advancements, although it took 1500 years.  With this I can speculate that the technology of space might someday help us all in spectacular but now-unknown ways.  It is a good counterargument, but still posits only an abstract possibility. 
 
What is NOT speculation, however, is that, without an unlimited ultimate goal or final aspiration, we will perish more surely than those pioneers in the ship’s bio tubes.   What Robinson offers us in the end is Gaia worship, a New Age-ey take on traditional nature worship.  That sort of thing might have been fine for people from other ages where the world itself seemed infinite, but that would not do for us.  We would feel as trapped as the descendants of the voyagers to Aurora.  As a matter of fact, that is exactly WHY we are trying to go forth into the stars.  For those of the Kennedy generation, this was not an effort to save humankind from environmental extinction, but to give a modern diverse nation – one with people of many religions or no religion at all – a shared goal that was greater than our imaginations and yet excluded no one based on race, creed, color and so on.  It was seen, and correctly, as a broad unifying concept that cost a lot of money, yes, but cost far less than civil war, revolution, or foreign conquest.  It was seen to be, and still is by many, (as) an antidote to a society devoid of basic universal truths and direction that does not force anyone into a theocratic or materialistic or, for that matter, naturalistic utopian vision.  The vision of the stars, then, serves as a religion that does not conflict with those with a religion or those without one. 
 
It works well: for those with religion, the exploration of the stars is a material form of exploring the extant of God’s works, of what He intended by his creation.  In this way, it can be seen as a sacred challenge, a knightly quest in this world that augments our passage to the spirit world, something that challenges our courage and our belief in a creator, and increases it with this noble pilgrimage.  For those without religion, it gives them most of what they need in this world, which is an ultimate challenge and vision.  It does not give them a pathway into the land of the dead, but the awesome wonder of the galaxies can’t help but create the kind of wonder that leads to worship.  Win/win for us and for society.
 
Except for the cost, both in money and, as she reminds us, in lives.  For that, the book is a good lesson in ethics: should we sacrifice the lives of those yet to be born for the dreams of their parents and grandparents?  Maybe not.   But for the individual and for the society from which he comes, the monetary cost is much like the bill from the doctor’s – it might be large, but every sane billionaire knows that good health is worth every penny of his fortune.  Space exploration, I believe, is our doctor.  It needs ethicists and management, but not abandonment.  Thanks, Kim Robinson (not Will, you Lost in Space fans) for bringing back an issue that sorely needs to be addressed.