Today, "Hoarfrost" in the Essay section of the website.  

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          After publishing “The Quiet Voice” for several years, I inadvertently fell into writing a series of primarily autobiographical essays which showed remarkable patterns of completion or resolution and teaching.  This led to the publication of my book Under the Turning Stars, and eventually to an end of this remarkable stint of inspiration.  What this period showed me was that ordinary life is filled with stunning patterns that we can see in our lives if we only look.  Somehow, we are all special and are regularly treated to miraculous coincidences that speak to us of divinity.  How these patterns may help us is often left to the individual, or just as often, remains evident only to God,  at least for a time.   
 
          It was to the latter set of coincidences, where remarkable events happen for reasons unknown to us, to which I was treated this last weekend.
 
          We were on our way to the Wisconsin River for a canoe and kayak trip with a group of church parishioners.  My wife and I were in the front seats, and in the back was a friend who was also the organizer of the trip.  Since we had church news in common, we eventually got to talking about the many parish priests who have passed through our town.  It had been revealed to us not long ago by certain members of the Church hierarchy that the Catholics in our vicinity have a reputation for being particularly ornery, and that most priests are fearful of being given into our hands.  Subsequently, the Fathers are relieved when they are moved from their position of martyrdom, usually within a few years, to another parish.  One priest was mentioned who actually wanted to stay with us but was forced to leave.  On and on the discussion went until naturally and inevitably we fell to talking about the Big Scandal that had happened some four years earlier.
 
          It concerned poor Fr B, who, after supervising the building of the new church, was accused by a purported victim of having had sexual contact with him when he was a student in the parish-run middle school.  The accuser, in his mid-twenties at the time and living in a gay community in Los Angeles, talked in excruciating detail of the sexual engagements.  Because of this, Father B was dissociated from the Church, which withdrew its financial support from him during the long year and a half between the filing of the lawsuit and the trial.  During this time, Father B went into debt and suffered all manner of emotional torment until he was finally and soundly vindicated via the stunningly baseless claims of the accuser.  As one juror said, “This should never have gone to trail.” After going over the details of this tragedy, the conversation inevitably turned to the character of the accuser, who we had all known, since he had gone to school with our children.
         
          What came up was a mixture of nothing and not-nice.  In other words, he was weird but generally harmless, except for a few remarkable incidents.  One was the time he spit in a teacher’s coffee.  He had been dared to do so after the teacher had left the classroom briefly for some reason, and so he did.  When the teacher returned, and just before she took a sip of the coffee, a distraught classmate warned her.  Outrage fell from heaven.  The principle of the school was involved, as well as the adopted parents of the perp and the very same priest who this kid was later to accuse of sexual predation.  Perhaps there is a connection here, but there was another even more remarkable connection: the teacher who had suffered the insult had recently died, and in a stunningly violent way.
 
          The rider in our car had not known of this death and of course wanted to know.  My wife dug into it quickly, having read the news of it only the day before.  Here’s the story according to the AP account:
 
          Four people had been struck by lightning just outside the White House in Washington, DC.  At the time of the report, two were still alive but in critical condition, while the other two had been pronounced dead.  This had never happened before near the White House; really, how many people are killed by lightning in the heart of a major city?  The report went on to mention that the two people who were killed were a couple celebrating their high-numbered wedding anniversary.  They were from a city near the parish.  My wife explained how another woman had texted her, telling her that the wife who had died had in fact been a teacher at our parochial school, and in fact had taught our son.  From my perspective, it was amazing that we knew the couple who were killed in a one –in- a- billion freak accident.  It was also, from my perspective, an amazing fact that she had been the one who had been the victim of the coffee spitter, who then had gone on to ruin the life of the very priest who had so severely chastised him for this misdeed.  I learned the latter as my wife told the story in the car.  And so I joined the passenger of the car in astonishment.
 
          Now, for the meaning of these connections.  Number one: I don’t know.  I don’t know the circumstances of that teacher’s life or those of her husband or the full background of the student who spit in her coffee; I don’t know if Father B needed a kick in the butt to get out of a holy rut, or if such was needed for a reexamination of Church policy, or even if such a powerful event was intended for the needs of anyone else involved.
 
          There is a parable in John (Ch. 9, 2-3) where Jesus and the disciples come across a man known to have been blind from birth.  The conversation goes like this: “Rabi, who sinned, the man or his parents that he was born blind?” Answer: “Neither this man or his parents sinned” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him…” 
 
          In other words, the man was born blind to increase the faith of those around him years later, to the time when Jesus approached him with his disciples, discussed him, and then cured him.  Who could have known but God Himself? 
 
          A tougher example is found in the Book of Job, where this poor guy’s life is destroyed just to settle an argument between God and Satan.  Of course, God wins and Job is restored in all his wealth and family (apparently, new family), but during the trials, all Job’s friends believe he deserves his fate because of some hidden sin.  Both these stories warn us that we cannot know the mind of God until He sees fit to reveal His intentions. 
 
          But still, events make things happen in us.  This freak accident with a woman who had once been the teacher of my son, and who had also been at the center of a possible whirlwind of ego and revenge, raises a sense of astonishment in me, along with an awareness that something greater often touches us in ways we could never imagine.  Any of us at any time could unwittingly be at that center of revenge, or could be struck down by lightning near a national monument.  Or we could be born blind so that years later, our unfortunate fate might elevate others to eternal life.  We might not know what special events mean, but we are often made aware of special events in our lives that occur for purposes which may or may not be revealed to us or to others in our lifetime.  By these, we learn that we are not mere grains of sand on an infinite beach - that we are not only brief illuminations of life that are pointless in the vastness of space and time.  Rather, we are made to understand that we are so important that infinity chooses to stoop down to our tiny presence and work through us for purposes that are often beyond our reasoning, but that are there none-the-less.  So it is made clear by the creator of galaxies and supernovas that we ‘little nothings’ are also at the center of the universe just as we are and where we are.  
 
          The misfortunes of this woman have also enhanced in me what the Bible calls the “fear of the Lord,” for, although I may understand that everything works eventually towards the good, I also understand that in my brief span of mortal life I might be visited by anything or any event, for better (in my estimate) or for worse.  We do not sit aside and view the cosmic struggle in an audience, but are intimately involved as actors directed by an unheard voice.  We stand at the edge of supernovas into which we might be plunged at a moment’s notice.  Such is our importance, and such are our lives.  Be alert, be amazed, but never be bored.  
 
         


 
 
  

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          We were returning from a short camping trip and made the customary stop at the Kwiky Mart for bathroom, coffee, and/or grease when I overheard two working people’s complaints.  It came first from the man with the blue shirt with a name on it who was wheeling in a pallet of milk products.  “I feel bad all the time.  Stomach ache, muscle pains, headache.  I never really feel good.”  This to a woman who was checking off the items on a delivery list.  “Me too,” she agreed. “I start with feeling bad when I get up and it goes on all day.”  Both were probably in their mid-40’s and both were overweight, although not massively so.  They had the look of the Working Man – tired, slightly pallid, and in need of some kind of pill to keep on truckin’.  It is the look of just about everyone past youth, at least in small town America. 
 
          The experts would have you say that it’s America’s fault for having fat and corn syrup in everything, and having too much of that everything, but feeling bad is a pretty universal thing.  When I was living with the Indians in South America, both the exotic back-woods groups and the more nationalized river peoples, they, too, desperately wanted medicine all the time.  With those who could not speak Spanish, they would come to me with an open palm with the other hand pointing to the head or stomach or legs or anywhere, indicating pain and discomfort.  What I gave them was aspirin, which they wanted all the time.  Most of these people were not even middle-aged, but in their late 20’s and 30’s.  They did not have Cheetos, but they did have fires in their roundhouses that would choke those not used to them.  No matter, they, too, felt bad much of the time.
 
          Just last week I was down in the garden when a thunderstorm announced itself with a huge zap of lightening followed immediately by a stunning explosion of thunder.  Feeling very exposed, I made a mad dash for the house that was some 100 yards uphill.  Those first 50 yards felt like a snort of good cocaine – I flew as I hadn’t in decades.  I felt young and swift and powerful with wings on my feet. Then, like an old jalopy, everything started to come apart.  More than a week later, I am still limping, with a long-range healing process ahead of me for my right Achilles’ tendon.  More pain.
 
          Not that that’s the only one.  Like the working people at Kwik Trip, I will often wake up not feeling well.  I didn’t used to.  This is relatively new and something I have attributed to old age, but on second thought, this has always been so, if in different ways.  It was as a kid that I experienced the worst sicknesses of my life, from chicken pox to vomiting to really, really bad flues to burning sore throats to coughs that kept me out of school for weeks at a time.  All this while slim and trim and active and young, so young that the immune system wasn’t prepared.  Later in adult youth I almost never got sick, but often had self-inflicted pains, from hang-overs to broken bones.  In short, there has never been a year without noticeable physical trauma, that happening monthly in childhood and now, nearly daily at the beginning of old age. 
 
          So it is that pain and sickness have always been Man’s companion.  Why this is so can be boiled down to four major reasons: 1) shit happens.  It’s just the way it is and then you die; 2) science tells us that the universe is entropic, or gradually loosing energy.  The body does the same on a much smaller scale and much quicker pace.  This is a fancified way of saying that shit happens; 3) we are a fallen species ever since Eve was tricked by Satan, and are being punished for it.  This is true, but punishment alone makes God out to be a ruthless, vengeful tyrant; and 4) we are fallen, yes, but are clay in God’s hands, to be reworked into perfection. 
 
          As the reader might guess, the latter seems the most reasonable to me in a world that is both ordered and often indescribably beautiful.  So it is said in the book of Jeremiah (18: 1-6), where the Lord tells the prophet that Israel will be destroyed so that it may be remade like a block of clay, as it had fallen into sin beyond redemption.  Thus was to follow the scattering of the “lost tribes of Israel” during the Assyrian invasion, with the remnant Juda left behind.  Thus the world can still follow the rise and fall of the Jews in the Bible, always returning to the faith, until the time that fulfillment, according to Christians, came in Christ.  Thus are we brought to the realization of suffering for purification, and to the retention of hope and redemption for our souls.
 
          So it is understood, but I can say right now that I hate suffering.  Throwing up is almost beyond belief, and that is nothing compared to other pains and illnesses.  But I have to also say that sometimes it is absolutely necessary.  As is gospel at AA, the drunk must first reach bottom before he can rise again from the ashes.  Personally, I have experienced prolonged suffering and it has always brought a beneficial change in habits along with greater enlightenment.  This is often the only way wrong paths can be righted, or new paths found.  Whether or not my imperfections are caused by the Fall of Adam, I do have them and they often – no, almost always – can be altered only by some sort of painful crises.  The last crises of all, of course, is in our dying, in which we might hope for the greatest and most beneficial change.
 
           Pain.  The last two essays have dealt with the end of our era.  Jeremiah preached suffering at the end of Israel’s earlier phase, and so it is being preached now.  Just yesterday I was at a picnic where the current mess of our nation was brought up, and it was pretty much understood that we are now entering an era of suffering.  More so, many thought, as do I, that this suffering will reach far beyond mere financial corrections.  One does not have to be a religious zealot, but merely a social scientist, to see that the basics of our national, social and cultural existence are quickly disappearing, from the definition of the family to the definition of a woman to the definition of governmental function.  It is all coming unglued with relentless purpose, just as it had in the times of Jeremiah.  We might not have an Assyria to destroy us, but we most certainly have ourselves to do the job, and other nations ready to take advantage of our weakness.  But, unlike Israel at that point in its history, the US is important to the entire world, and with our fall or great decline will come the fall or decline of much of the world. 
 
          Pain.  It will always be with us in an imperfect world.  For humans, it provides a learning lesson, given both to the individual as well as to the collective.  We do not like it, but those of us who survive and even those who don’t can gain from it.  So it is from stubbing a toe to undergoing cancer to undergoing revolution, poverty, and war.  Prayer is at the very least a message from the self to the self to give us hope in pain.  In a world made of order and beauty, there is every reason to believe in hope.  So we speak to ourselves and others in prayer that this crisis, too, will pass, and with that we will find a more perfect world afterwards.  So speaks the potter to the clay.   
 
          I