​ 
I just don’t know.  It started at the neighbor’s annual Smoked Turkey Dinner, where many people there were friends of friends – that is, largely unknown to me.  But I thought I did know them, at least a little.  At 65, I was towards the younger end of the group, and none as far as I knew were coastal elites or college professors.  Thus I believed that on a few things concerning recent events we would all agree. 
 
I was right about one thing.  We will have forgotten this in a few months, but just now, my bet is that most have heard about the man in British Columbia who dresses as a woman who went into a women’s beauty parlor to get a Brazilian hair wax on his very male genitals.  The proprietor was a female Sikh, and she refused.  By B.C law, the woman was a bigot and the shop was closed.  The court case continues to this day.  It has been brought up by conservative and religious news media as an example of how crazy things have gotten.  I agree, and so did everyone there who voiced an opinion. 
 
I should have stopped there, but I always carry on more than I should, and so went further to mention the sex change mania that has suddenly fallen about us, visibly present even in small towns in the Midwest (although I cannot verify that what I see here is real sex change or just presentation).  I reported how juveniles are being allowed to have their testes or breasts removed and then given a steady diet of opposite - sex hormones.  I stressed my opinion that this is intense child abuse, as well as insane.  Some agreed, but many remained silent and one woman, who had worked in at the local factory all her life and was now 73 years old, disagreed.  “If they want to do it, let them.  This thing has always been with us but before you had to keep it hidden.” 
 
I was flabbergasted, and began a harangue – I admit, not the best way to persuade, but I was not thinking calmly then – about it.   “They are being enculturated to believe this! (A neighbor then suggested the term “groomed”, and I switched to that).  They are being groomed by education departments to believe that their confusion about their sexual identities, or simply their adolescent unhappiness, is due to sexual dysphoria.  They are being told that it is perfectly fine to mutilate themselves forever contrary to their physical natures, and that this will bring them closure and happiness.  This is not only perverse, but simply wrong.  Those who have had sex changes are the unhappiest people in the world.  40% of them have made serious attempts at suicide.” 
 
To which she leaned over to my wife with raised eyebrows and said, “Does he always get this argumentative?” 
 
Yes, I could have been smoother, but how could a woman her age have been so absolutely sold on something so alien, so barbaric, and ultimately, so stupid?
 
To me this is a sign of the crumbling of our civilization – not the only thing but another serious sign – and when I talked to a friend a few days later on the phone, I said so.  He laughed.  “It’s just a fad like bell bottoms.  Everyone suddenly wants them, then no one can get anything else, and then everyone wants something else.  Just a passing fad.”
 
“Getting your balls or breasts lobbed off is a passing fad?”
 
“What I mean is, it will pass.  The suckers who fell for it are stuck, but it will go away.  It’s actually kind of funny.  We’ll look back on this like we do on platform heals with gold fish in them and leisure suits.  It’s nothing.”
 
I was stunned again.  Have I been that wrong?  Have I listened to too many religious nuts and been sucked into the zaniness myself?  Sex change is weird, and sex change in children is criminal, of that I am sure, but should its presence in our society send up signals of alarm?  Or is this just another thing that will pass, like free love communes and the hair mullet? 
 
On the one hand, I would have to disagree with my friend.  The silly stuff of the past was not presented as normal to children in the classroom in a way that is clearly propagandistic, and its marks run far more deeply.  Not only are thousands now permanently mutilated, but millions of younger people are unsure of the roles that their gender should have them play, or don’t believe that there are any roles at all.  They are at least implicitly encouraged to have sex with whoever turns them on at the moment with no strings attached.  Having no strings attached means having no sense of the natural imperative of hetero sexual activity, which is procreation.  Procreation is how we get families, and with families there are duties and obligations involved regarding one’s mate and the children.  Without this linear connection, the unity of the family, or even the natural inevitability of the family, is lost, and without that, the bonds of people within society are lost or weakened.  These, too, then become arbitrary.  With that, all sorts of bad things happen – fatherless children, crime, a lack of respect for community, and on and on.  It goes on and on so much that I and many others see increasing instability, governmental encroachment, loss of God, loss of the meaning of life, and eventually, loss of such a society – our society - in the future, to either collapse or dictatorship.  Unless, that is, we stop it, or at least seriously try.
 
On the other hand, societies have functioned successfully alongside rank perversion and meaninglessness before.  We are told that the elevation of Julius Caesar to dictator mirrored a cultural decline among the Romans, who were becoming increasingly secular, cynical, and corrupt.  Yet they soldiered on for another 350 years.  The European plagues of the 14th century caused a widespread dissatisfaction and eventual revolt against theocratic culture, and yet what came of that was not collapse but the dawn of the modern era for the West, an ascendancy which lasted into the 20th century. 
 
So it is that a break with what made a nation or culture great does not always lead to its demise, but it does lead to great change.  In Rome, that did indeed lead to a dictatorship, but not in Europe.  We can trace the eventual decline of Europe to the Renaissance, but there’s a very successful 600 years – including an elevation of human rights and dignity - between the change and the fall.  
 
It is obvious, then, that a prediction for the future of our society should first include an examination of all former peoples, nations and empires that have been categorized in the archives.  At this point, however, in consideration of both sides of the issue with my limited knowledge, I still must come to the same conclusion: that current trends will either cause us to fall into some form of dictatorship, or be destroyed by an invading force of people who ARE secure in their moral foundations.   The former will happen as the natural basis for society – the family – is destroyed by exactly what we see happening now, leaving Big Brother as the primary source of care and discipline.   The latter will happen once the people no longer feel an intimate bond with the nation or culture strong enough so that they put their lives on the line to maintain one or both.  That, too, is happening, as long-standing fundamental beliefs are being vaporized by an assault of cultural and moral relativism.
 
Bell bottom pants were a bad idea and probably indicative of something else happening in society that was more profound, but as far as we know, they had no lasting effects.   By contrast, the notion that foundational structures in nature can and should be superseded on a whim (and maybe with a scalpel) wears its profundity on its sleeve.  Fads have little to no influence on the important things of this world; alterations or negations of natural functions do.  To put it simply and bluntly, it means that we have become so disillusioned with what ‘is’ that we have to pretend we can change the world into what it isn’t and was never meant to be.  Our hope, the beginning of our healing, will not be found by redefining nature, but in understanding why we can no longer abide by its basic laws.  What is it that has made us so disillusioned?  Unless we come to understand this, our very society will become like a fad, and fads don’t raise children or defend borders.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
It was another trip to the UP, and once there, another possible death.  On the serpentine newly-paved road past the dirt two-track to the cabin was a police car by a pick-up truck that had smashed into the trees off a curve, airbag popped.  The ambulance was just arriving.  The first responders did not seem in a hurry, meaning there had been only slight injuries or obvious death.  I still don’t know, although the chill that has become familiar up there came to me again. 
 
All very real, but what I want to talk about is not real in almost any sense, for on the long drive up I listened to a book on CD, a book by a very famous author, Dan Brown, titled Angels and Demons.  
 
I knew the author from his first famous novel, The Da Vinci Code, as hackneyed and trite a book as I had read in a while.  Stock phrases abounded, as did stock assumptions about big things and institutions.  Even the main character’s name, Robert Langdon, could have been pulled from an early 60’s spy novel.   And yet I had stayed up until 3AM to finish it.  Like it or not, Dan Brown knows how to turn black words into bricks of gold.  Like many other readers of his books, I love the sense of historical conspiracy, the religious issues involved, and of course the deadly ‘seriousness’ of them all.  Like too-sweet chocolate, I wince at the taste but have to have more even though I know it will make me feel sick. 
 
This one, Angels and Demons, was a big chocolate bar, with 15 disks of an hour-plus each that I could not quite finish, either on the drive or at the cabin, where I had to burn electricity stored in a handful of precious D batteries.  But I did hear enough, 9 CD’s, to write about it, or really, to write about what it did not and could not say. 
 
The plot: enter a disgruntled secret organization, The Illuminati, whose time has come to exact final revenge on the Catholic Church for – OMG – burning Copernicus at the stake nearly 500 years ago, as well as for threatening or jailing or killing other Renaissance and early Reformation scientists for their heretical views.  Bad ancient Church.  But bad Illuminati, too, for the enlightened scientists (thus the name Illuminati) that had started the organization to protect themselves from the Church had been infiltrated long ago by many other religion and Church haters, including – gasp – the secret members of the ancient Indian-Muslim sect, the Hashashin – known now by its Anglicized word, the Assassins.  Over time this bad Illuminati had then infiltrated many other institutions, from the US government (note the pyramid and glowing eye on the dollar bill) to the nuclear research center and particle accelerator in Switzerland, CERN.  And it is there where a tiny but vastly powerful particle of anti-matter was stolen by an Illuminati Hashashin and secreted in the Vatican just as the Conclave of Cardinals was meeting to proclaim a new pope.  Vatican City was to be destroyed, along with the top echelon of the detested, and often vial, Church. 
 
Thank goodness for Robert Langdon, professor at Middlesex Community College – I mean, Harvard – of Art History, whose specialty just happens to be the Church and the Illuminati.  Fortunately for him, his lack of STEM knowledge is satisfied by a beautiful young Italian woman scientist whose adopted father had been a Father of the Church as well as CERN’s leading scientist – the very one who had created the anti-matter, which had been neutralized in a containment system – the one stolen by the assassin - designed by his daughter Vitoria (this adopted Father had been the first to be assassinated by the Hashashin.  Enter filial revenge).  And off and running they go to save the Church and Vatican City, as well as thousands of Roman lives.   
 
We are brought back in time to the 1500’s and 1600’s, with secrets hidden from the Holy Powers, to see how science had outsmarted the big, clumsy hand of Roman faith.  Back in the present, Cardinals are being killed one by one before the Big Explosion, their manner of deaths harkening back to ancient Pagan sciences that mixed pantheistic worship with observational and mathematical brilliance.   Revenge is being satisfied as in days of old, where an eye was traded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, albeit with a lag time of 500 years, and against a Church that now has no secular power. 
 
 
But as I read the sometimes accurate and sometimes fictional historical and occult references, it was not the corny writing (the Italian scientist, we are told breathlessly, has almond-scented hair and lithe, sun-tanned legs) nor the denigration of the Catholic Church that bothered me.  After all, what did I expect?  Rather, my disappointment was due to the lack of mystery in this mystery, although I should have expected that, too.  Where, it stuck me over time, was the real strangeness?  For me, it is not to be found in the devious underground society, and certainly not in the technically interesting but otherwise dry science.  Rather, it is to be found in the very point of the Church itself.  Yes, it would have been nice if he had contextualized the Church’s paranoia in the 16th and 17th century in lieu of the Reformation and rising secularism, but that, too, is not surprising.  But as a mystery writer, it is almost odd that he missed the greatest mystery of all, that on which the entire Church is built: the mystery of the Holy Spirit.
 
This has been done by commercial entertainment before.  “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had Spirit influence the sequence of events throughout the movie, and of course it was present in abundance in the Ark itself, but Brown seems to have no sense of spiritual power at all, not even where it exists in the pagan rites and symbols.  He should know this stuff.  It has long been believed that there is real spiritual power in the pagan religions, as even the Bible attests, although it was not nearly as great as God’s power.  This, the power of the Jewish god, or God, was manifested in the prophets and the greatest of priests.  After Christ, Christians came to believe that God’s power is now accessible to all adherents because the loving relationship of God the Father and Christ the Son has been realized.  It is this relationship that forms the Holy Spirit.  Its power is as limitless as God Himself, and it is what the Church is built upon.  It is not built upon good deeds or being nice and certainly not on worldly power.  Those are to be found in it, for better and for worse, but they are not part of the foundational mystery.        
 
So it is that Brown’s mystery misses the real mysteries of life.  In his depiction of science, he gives us the “flat earth” impression that things are only as he sees them - that all that exists is eternal and soulless, to be deciphered by the “pure language” of mathematics and objective observation.   As for religion, which forms the other half of his subject matter, he gives us a few pagan symbols and a power-hungry Church, but no spirit.  None.  Yet, objective reality is wrapped in unanswerable riddles, and the Church is embedded in the workings of the Holy Spirit.  Where is his sense of real mystery?
 
It is, I think, lost in the materialistic view of life, that which the Church was so desperately trying to quell 400 years ago.  Brown should know that the Holy Spirit, the foundation of the Church, is not a flimsy myth.   It has not only cured thousands of people, quite objectively, but has also appeared subjectively to millions.  I have known a few of these millions and count myself as one of them as well.  There is nothing, no-thing or any non-thing, which is more mysterious than the Holy Spirit.  Yet Brown wants us to believe that mystery is created by time and secrecy alone.  That is good only for a standard mystery novel or a soap opera.  If Brown wants to rise above the rest, he should take the mystery of the Holy Spirit, and spirit in general, seriously. 
 
I should talk.  The guy’s as rich as Croesus, an ancient king I am sure he will unite, or already has united, with the Knights Templar.  We are talking dime novel vapidity here.   Still, it is Brown himself who chooses these religious topics, and so I believe is deserving of this critique.  It is as if we were to choose to write about a trip up north and witnessed an accident and felt the floating sense of death - and then went on and on about the bumper sticker on the guy’s pick-up.  We’d be missing the most important point. 
 
Which might make, I suppose, a greater writer out of Dan Brown than we suspect.  It could be.  For all we know, in his vapidity he might very well be purposefully channeling the volkgeist of our era.  In that vacuum, he might be telling us exactly what we are missing in life: that, just as the death of the guy is more important than the bumper sticker, so the foundation of the Church is more important than any personal or historic episode.  He might just be saying that in a code so well hidden it is almost as mysterious as the Holy Spirit. 
 
Or he might be just as he seems.  Still, he channels and points, whether he knows it or not.  The rock of the Church is not really a rock, just as the true temple of the Jews was not the stone and mortar Temple.  Just as we ourselves are only represented temporarily in flesh and blood and in history, and all the rest is to be found in a holy spirit too grand to fit into a dime-store novel or in this world.      
 
   
 
 
 

Today, an essay, "Pink Moon," under Essays in the website. FK

​ 
            A few months ago, I wrote to a friend of mine from graduate student days who is still in the materialistic mindset we were taught as a given.  I told him of the odd vision I had at the Museum of the Scrolls in Jerusalem, where an un-furled issue of Isaiah, copied by dedicated Essene ascetics 2,000 years ago, suddenly revealed dozens of faces very clearly in the Aramaic (I believe – a close version of Hebrew) script.  I did not see them at first, but was alerted to them by an elderly woman by my side.  Another woman to my other side could not see them at all.  For days later, I believed that this scroll was only a copy made by modern methods, and that the faces had been cleverly included in the script.  Once home, I found that I had been mistaken – that this was the original.  I looked up information about it and could find nothing about anyone seeing faces in the script, although new high-spectrum technology had confirmed that other writings could be found underneath. 
 
            That could explain it in part, and this might have partially appeased my friend, who did not doubt my testimony, but sought more credible reasons for this “appearance”.  He also thought it might have been caused by my imagination making faces from the designs in the script that I otherwise could not make sense of.  This also might be true, but after thinking about it some more, I realized that the faces I had seen could not possibly have been contained in the script, which was only a fraction of an inch in height.  The faces were clear and sharp, and on reflection, much larger than the script.  Somehow the faces, then, had been magnified.  I do not know how this would be done, and in the end I could not appease my friend’s genuine skepticism, which I frankly understood.  I would have doubts about it, too, in his shoes.   In fact, I still have a few myself.
 
            But that is the nature of things that happen from the spirit.  They come from another set of laws that we do not know and cannot imagine.  Time might become irrelevant, as might size or even one’s history or life-long reality.  It is why we question miracles and anything else that comes from this realm.  They simply don’t make practical sense.
 
            So it is, too, with prophecy and divine apparitions.   In Donal Foley’s book, Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World, the author tries to make sense of Marian apparitions as they relate to history, in a necessary after-the-fact way.  Why, he asks, have Marian apparitions become so much more prevalent, especially since the Enlightenment, and more so, in the last one hundred and something years?  Taking this reality, this increase in apparitions, he matches them to what was happening in history at the time, and what happened after the manifestations.  We have, for instance, the first apparition of what Foley calls the new era (post Middle Ages), in 16th century Mexico at Guadalupe.  The Aztec Empire had fallen, but the people themselves had stubbornly resisted any attempts at conversion to Catholicism.  Then the Aztec Indian Juan Diego was treated to a vision of Mary, who gave him an imprint of herself on his cape, a cactus-fiber tilma, and a great bunch of roses that miraculously grew by her side in the middle of winter.  The tilma and image on it remain intact and vibrant to this day.  With these miracles, the entire Aztec nation, numbering some 7 or 8 million, converted to Catholicism, the greatest non-coerced mass conversion ever. 
 
            At this point, we understand the movement of the spirit, although we do not know how “it” could do what it did – it was to convert pagans to the true faith.  What happened less than ten years later in Mexico, however, is harder to understand.   A massive plague of unknown origin, one that is still only guessed at today, swept through Aztec land, killing 90 to 95% of the people.  The scope of this tragedy is difficult to imagine.  The population of Mexico would not catch up to the old numbers until the early 1900’s, almost four hundred years later.  This changed almost everything about Mexico, from the legacy of Aztec culture to its world-wide political power.  Why?
 
            This pattern of apparitions and later devastation was to continue in Europe.  There was one before the devastation of the Revolution of 1848 (La Salette), one during the formation of Darwin’s and Marx’s theories (Lourdes) and the most famous one of all, that in Fatima, Portugal, during the final year of WWI.  Foley points out the connection between these: the Revolution continued the rationalization of Europe with the spread of industrial technology and unbridled capitalism, where Darwin’s “randomness” could take hold, as well as Marx’s godless appeal to the suffering masses, while Fatima marked the beginning of the struggle between spirituality and materialism on a world-wide scale.  Of the latter, Fatima, the rise of communism in Russia was predicted a few months before it happened, as was WWII and the collapse of communism in Russia.   And we should not forget the apparitions in Medjugorje before the fall of Yugoslavia and the Serbian massacre, and the appearance of Mary in Rwanda just a few years before that horrendous genocide.  The small point being, be afraid if an apparition of Mary happens near you.  But what is the larger point? 
 
            For one, it seems we need help.  Mankind has always made at least parts of the world a brutal place, but for the religious, it is obvious we need help now more than ever because of the steep, unprecedented rise in atheism and secularism in general.  That is absolutely true, and probably gives us a good explanation for the proliferation of Marian appearances – if one is religious, that is.  For others, it is a sign that the decrease in religious believers is causing people of faith to hallucinate a savior mother to (vainly) buttress their childish security blankets as reality brings these silly wrinkled ideas closer and closer to irrelevancy.  Both these ideas are understandable reactions to the apparitions.  But what of the “thought” behind the apparitions themselves?
 
            First, we must believe the apparitions truly happened, which many will not admit even given enormous amounts of evidence; for instance, several thousand people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, including stone-cold Marxists and skeptical journalists, who could not help but believe afterwards - and yet how many still doubt?  Moving forward in belief from there, we must also admit to fundamental elements that confound human thought, let alone logic.  Consider the reason for the apparitions, which is to increase (Christian) spirituality for the greatest amount of people, so as to avoid atrocious events.  Some of these events will be caused by humans, and can be made logically accountable, but some will not; some will be pestilential or geological or astronomical in nature, beyond the control of humans.  God’s hand, then, is raised to punish us unless we repent.  However, God knows all; God knows our hearts and what we will do.  Will He give us an apparition that will convert enough people to avoid catastrophe?  Or will He convert so that the already doomed souls will go to heaven?  Or will He give us just enough so that we might consider conversion, and so base our belief on faith, which is an act of the Will?  If so, where is the omniscience in that?  Also, are we to believe that a simple change of heart can cause meteors to stop and dictators to fail (or not – we don’t know)?  Where is the science in that?   And what about the miracles themselves, which are often meaningless, as far as we know, except for being impossible.  Why these and not, say, the appearance of a fifty -mile -high alabaster tower that Man could not erect, and whose reality could not be denied? 
 
            We don’t know the answers to any of the above, at least not for sure.  Why did I see the faces in the scrolls?  Why not the image of a brilliant angel with flaming sword telling me to proclaim Jesus from the Olympian heights of the Washington Monument?  Why such a thing that has no apparent meaning and only is of passing interest to others?  We might see these spiritual things as Carl Jung saw more casual events, as “synchronic,” in tune with some side of reality that we cannot understand.  The problem is, that some of these anomalies are potentially of great importance, and that such things share this unknowable quality is greatly frustrating to most of us.  Tell it to us straight, we demand; stop hiding things in some supernatural code, Spirit, if you want to really tell us something! 
 
            Of course, if we believe scripture, we have been given certain things in very simple and specific terms.  But the big stuff – the really big stuff regarding the meaning of life and afterlife and all that – remains intangible, evidential but never quite touchable. 
 
            I do not think God is playing games with us, at least not with these things of obvious spiritual import.  Rather, I think that we cannot even begin to think like God.  The very way the manifestations occur gives evidence of other ways of thought that we can only wonder at – like omniscience and free will running side by side.  Or dancing suns as a proof of divine authenticity.  Or faces in scrolls, given to me and another for some reason not yet imagined, let alone found.  Or the real meaning of life and existence and action and morality and on and on.  We don’t know.   We don’t know because the reality we know does not allow us to know.  We see, as St Paul said, in a glass (impure old-fashioned mirror) darkly.  What comes to us in apparitions and synchronic events, and ultimately in everything we experience, has a significance that is simply beyond us.  How does one teach calculus to a chimp?  A straight-forward answer in our terms would not answer the question, but would most likely obscure the answer with our own incorrect thoughts. 
 
            So we also might wonder at Foley’s analysis.  It seems potentially correct in hindsight, but we still do not have foresight.  The people who saw the vision that came during the onset of unbridled capitalism at La Salette could not know that this was a warning that such ruthlessness would bring us godless totalitarianism.  Maybe we, too, are being told something else from these apparitions, something far greater that we cannot grasp.  Maybe another code is hidden in the series of apparitions that are speaking of things far greater than the things of normal history.  My bet is that they are, but that what they are saying is as hidden as the meaning of the faces in the scroll are to me simply because we are incapable of understanding – at least for now.   Which gives us a clue as to the real importance of faith. 
 
[P.S. :  After writing the above, it came to me that the Faces I saw were an indication that Scripture could become alive and personal for me.  That answered, it still leaves the question of how that would or will be. ]
 
             
 
            

For today, a new essay, "Love Is Love," to be found under the Essay section of this website.  FK