In the swelter and humidity of the north woods this last week, it seemed wise to sweat- in-place, something like Shelter In Place of our Covid era but with a clearer logic. Yes: better to sweat on a couch with a disc player and a book than to sweat even worse in the great outdoors where deer and sandflies are always ready. And so I did, listening to Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy, and reading Immacullée Ilibagiza’s The Boy Who Met Jesus. Both describe events that took place in the recent past, but there the similarities end. In fact, the two books pose such juxtaposition that it set me to wonder: could they even be describing the same world?
The Kennedy Era. I was six when he was elected and nine when he died. I knew absolutely nothing about politics at the time, but my Irish Catholic father and religious mother admired him as Catholics across the globe admire saints. They were far from alone. There were actual tears shed by my usually stoic parents before the black and white TV on the day he was killed, which was disturbing to us kids, but only mildly. Getting out of school early was what really mattered. All of us alive now who were older than three at the time have intense memories of that day, but I will not go down that path. Rather, I will describe the America of the early sixties as well as I can through memory, history, and O’Reilly’s display of historical facts.
On the kid level, I know that on Saturdays I could have a bowl of cereal – hopefully Captain Crunch – and take off on my bicycle for the entire day. As long as I got back before dark, no one would worry about me or seriously wonder where I was. This was the norm. Of course there were predators of children as there always have been, but such a problem was considered too remote to worry about. And, as far as I remember, it was. That was good.
There were also no discipline problems in the classroom. Adults were gods and you didn’t mess with them. Some were evil gods – my first grade teacher, for instance - and some were good – my grandmas – but behaving well before them was absolutely paramount for survival. For boys on the playground, however, life could be brutal. Bullying and discrete fights behind the bushes happened every day, and it was often traumatic. The grown-up gods were not there to protect us from our peers. We were instead expected to learn from them so that we might later cope with life.
That was both good and bad, because you needed to learn from the bullying. After growing up, at least in the Northeast, a factory job awaited you. Factory work was largely union and back then you had better toe the line. Practical jokes were common and often painful and humiliating. You had to learn how to react to them properly because everyone else was watching and judging. For a lucky few, there was work in the big-company offices, where many were clawing to get ahead except for those, like the ‘weaklings’ left with dirt-smudged faces by the bullies on the playground, who had given up. These were the faceless gray men, the beta men who supposedly had dissatisfied wives at home who had so wanted an alpha male. Or so the adds told us, and the magazines and all those successful guys on sports teams who helped sell cigarettes and razors on TV commercials. No woman on a Playboy foldout would EVER accept a faceless gray man. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was largely popular at the time because this described in a dramatic way what many, mostly men, were facing or thought they were facing: success or shame.
It was in that era that Lee Harvey Oswald came of age. He was neither the bully nor the patsy, but an outsider who had dreams of being famous but did not have the typical alpha male personality. He had anger issues, to put it mildly, and he saw the world that disparaged him as a world filled with idiots. How could they be anything but if they did not recognize his genius? And so he made a plan that would make him forever, or at least for several generations, a household name. They would remember him then!
It was a time of security and insecurity, of bowing to the establishment and bucking it, of little pink houses and grand designs, of strong families elevated by simple faith and those broken by disappointment and failure. There was little to no safety net. A man made it by hook or by crook or did not make it and resigned himself either proudly or sadly to live among the great unwashed. His wife (and almost all women married because that’s what you did) was tied to the status of her husband, and she either was his greatest cheerleader or his nagging distractor.
Further, the issues of the time were immense. Civil rights for “coloreds” was tearing much of the nation apart, and Russia in its guise as the USSR was in a chicken fight with the USA involving nuclear weapons and the end of humanity, or at least modern civilization. There was disturbing news out of Vietnam. The Berlin Wall had further imprisoned millions more people in the Soviet gulag state. The Italian-American Mafia had control of the big unions. The Irish-American Mafia had control of big city politics. And Marylyn Monroe had divorced Joe DiMaggio. The horror.
This only lightly touches on the post-war America of the early sixties, of course, but it was a very, very different America from what we have now. It is very different now, but just as full of major cultural, national, and even life-ending threats. The pressures on the individual are just as anxiety-producing, and the issues of international politics are just as terrifying. We are now just as lost to the problems of our times as they were then, much to the detriment of deep thought and spiritual growth. I suspect that the Romans were similarly lost to their concerns, as were the ancient Persians and the biblical Israelites. And so the world turns.
Enter The Boy Who Met Jesus. I have spoken here of the three teenaged female visionaries – girls who had seen and talked to the Virgen Mary – before. These visions first occurred in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1982. Besides messages of love and nudges towards greater faith, the Virgen told her many listeners that if they (Rwandans) did not embrace the philosophy of love and forgiveness, their country would be awash in death and destruction. Twelve years later, in 1994, this occurred, with the largest genocide since Pol Pot’s purges in Cambodia. Somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were brutally murdered in a matter of about three months, sometimes by their neighbors and former friends. Beware when the Virgen pays your country a visit.
At the beginning of the visions, a poor shepherd boy appeared who claimed to actually speak to Jesus himself. He had been a pagan, had never heard of Jesus before except as a curse word, had never been to school or church and could not read at all. However, at his appearances at Kibeho he quoted large passages perfectly from the Bible and revealed insightful analyses of the meaning of these passages. Terrified at the start before an audience of perhaps 30,000 people, he would then fall into a trance and become a master speaker. Such things are hard to fake.
Unlike America in the 1960’s or now, however, Rwanda was and is poor with few options besides continuing poverty for most. It was on the verge of genocide, and then fell into it full-hearted, with all the hate that such slaughter needs and engenders. It was a mess, and we are left to hope that it will not go the way of South Africa, which, after a few years of post-apartheid peace, has fallen into a stew of corruption, murder, and vengeance-based racism. Yet what did Jesus tell the boy, Sagatashya?: to disregard the sinfulness of the world. Not that he should be complacent with it, but that he should not let it cloud his spiritual center. The world, said Jesus, was created for eventual destruction. There would be a second coming (which He said was very close, but that is in God’s time) and the things and cares of this world would become as nothing, because that is what they will be.
In the midst of poverty and corruption, and with a horrendous genocide facing them (Segatashya was told that he would die young, and he did, killed for being a Tutsi during the genocide, by bullet rather than by machete), Jesus told the 15-year-old to hold peace and love in his heart, and to encourage others to do the same. This was not only meant to avoid the looming disaster, but to prepare Rwandans, and by extension all of us, for the end of OUR world, whether or not it will also be the end of THE world. We all will die; and with that, we all will lose touch with the very world that so concerns us. This world will become a ‘nothing’ to each and every one of us within 70 or 80 or so years. It will not matter to us personally who is president, who has killed who, who is famous or who is wealthy or powerful.
We know this. But it has to be repeated again and again because we do not live it. We see through history how different the fashions and many of the concerns of the past were. We see how all of those who were so well known then – Frank Sinatra, Adlei Stevenson, Henry Kissinger, and even Eisenhower and Kennedy – have either disappeared from the public mind or have become increasingly irrelevant. Our grandparents fade into the past, as their parents have already done. We, too, will fade into the past. Yes, we know this but do not live it.
So it is that Jesus could talk of eternal love only years before unbelievable bloodshed. So it is that he can tell us to sell all to purchase “the pearl of great price,” the Kingdom of God. He can tell us this because it is rational. He can tell us this as easily as we can tell our 16 year old son not to kill himself because his girlfriend has dumped him. We are all so shortsighted. We see this in the fashions, in the music and dress and prejudices that have changed so much in our nation in only the last 60 years. Shakespeare told us this with his phrase “Out, out, brief candle.” Our strutting on the stage of this earth signifies nothing. But there is something more and greater waiting, regardless of life on earth, and it signifies everything. We all know it, but sometimes it takes a penniless, illiterate shepherd boy to make us understand that everyone can acquire the greatest treasure possible for Man. The pearl of great price can be purchased by anyone who first sells all, whether it is his attachment to his goat herd or to his corporate empire or to the greatest empire the earth has known.
In the swelter and humidity of the north woods this last week, it seemed wise to sweat- in-place, something like Shelter In Place of our Covid era but with a clearer logic. Yes: better to sweat on a couch with a disc player and a book than to sweat even worse in the great outdoors where deer and sandflies are always ready. And so I did, listening to Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy, and reading Immacullée Ilibagiza’s The Boy Who Met Jesus. Both describe events that took place in the recent past, but there the similarities end. In fact, the two books pose such juxtaposition that it set me to wonder: could they even be describing the same world?
The Kennedy Era. I was six when he was elected and nine when he died. I knew absolutely nothing about politics at the time, but my Irish Catholic father and religious mother admired him as Catholics across the globe admire saints. They were far from alone. There were actual tears shed by my usually stoic parents before the black and white TV on the day he was killed, which was disturbing to us kids, but only mildly. Getting out of school early was what really mattered. All of us alive now who were older than three at the time have intense memories of that day, but I will not go down that path. Rather, I will describe the America of the early sixties as well as I can through memory, history, and O’Reilly’s display of historical facts.
On the kid level, I know that on Saturdays I could have a bowl of cereal – hopefully Captain Crunch – and take off on my bicycle for the entire day. As long as I got back before dark, no one would worry about me or seriously wonder where I was. This was the norm. Of course there were predators of children as there always have been, but such a problem was considered too remote to worry about. And, as far as I remember, it was. That was good.
There were also no discipline problems in the classroom. Adults were gods and you didn’t mess with them. Some were evil gods – my first grade teacher, for instance - and some were good – my grandmas – but behaving well before them was absolutely paramount for survival. For boys on the playground, however, life could be brutal. Bullying and discrete fights behind the bushes happened every day, and it was often traumatic. The grown-up gods were not there to protect us from our peers. We were instead expected to learn from them so that we might later cope with life.
That was both good and bad, because you needed to learn from the bullying. After growing up, at least in the Northeast, a factory job awaited you. Factory work was largely union and back then you had better toe the line. Practical jokes were common and often painful and humiliating. You had to learn how to react to them properly because everyone else was watching and judging. For a lucky few, there was work in the big-company offices, where many were clawing to get ahead except for those, like the ‘weaklings’ left with dirt-smudged faces by the bullies on the playground, who had given up. These were the faceless gray men, the beta men who supposedly had dissatisfied wives at home who had so wanted an alpha male. Or so the adds told us, and the magazines and all those successful guys on sports teams who helped sell cigarettes and razors on TV commercials. No woman on a Playboy foldout would EVER accept a faceless gray man. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was largely popular at the time because this described in a dramatic way what many, mostly men, were facing or thought they were facing: success or shame.
It was in that era that Lee Harvey Oswald came of age. He was neither the bully nor the patsy, but an outsider who had dreams of being famous but did not have the typical alpha male personality. He had anger issues, to put it mildly, and he saw the world that disparaged him as a world filled with idiots. How could they be anything but if they did not recognize his genius? And so he made a plan that would make him forever, or at least for several generations, a household name. They would remember him then!
It was a time of security and insecurity, of bowing to the establishment and bucking it, of little pink houses and grand designs, of strong families elevated by simple faith and those broken by disappointment and failure. There was little to no safety net. A man made it by hook or by crook or did not make it and resigned himself either proudly or sadly to live among the great unwashed. His wife (and almost all women married because that’s what you did) was tied to the status of her husband, and she either was his greatest cheerleader or his nagging distractor.
Further, the issues of the time were immense. Civil rights for “coloreds” was tearing much of the nation apart, and Russia in its guise as the USSR was in a chicken fight with the USA involving nuclear weapons and the end of humanity, or at least modern civilization. There was disturbing news out of Vietnam. The Berlin Wall had further imprisoned millions more people in the Soviet gulag state. The Italian-American Mafia had control of the big unions. The Irish-American Mafia had control of big city politics. And Marylyn Monroe had divorced Joe DiMaggio. The horror.
This only lightly touches on the post-war America of the early sixties, of course, but it was a very, very different America from what we have now. It is very different now, but just as full of major cultural, national, and even life-ending threats. The pressures on the individual are just as anxiety-producing, and the issues of international politics are just as terrifying. We are now just as lost to the problems of our times as they were then, much to the detriment of deep thought and spiritual growth. I suspect that the Romans were similarly lost to their concerns, as were the ancient Persians and the biblical Israelites. And so the world turns.
Enter The Boy Who Met Jesus. I have spoken here of the three teenaged female visionaries – girls who had seen and talked to the Virgen Mary – before. These visions first occurred in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1982. Besides messages of love and nudges towards greater faith, the Virgen told her many listeners that if they (Rwandans) did not embrace the philosophy of love and forgiveness, their country would be awash in death and destruction. Twelve years later, in 1994, this occurred, with the largest genocide since Pol Pot’s purges in Cambodia. Somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were brutally murdered in a matter of about three months, sometimes by their neighbors and former friends. Beware when the Virgen pays your country a visit.
At the beginning of the visions, a poor shepherd boy appeared who claimed to actually speak to Jesus himself. He had been a pagan, had never heard of Jesus before except as a curse word, had never been to school or church and could not read at all. However, at his appearances at Kibeho he quoted large passages perfectly from the Bible and revealed insightful analyses of the meaning of these passages. Terrified at the start before an audience of perhaps 30,000 people, he would then fall into a trance and become a master speaker. Such things are hard to fake.
Unlike America in the 1960’s or now, however, Rwanda was and is poor with few options besides continuing poverty for most. It was on the verge of genocide, and then fell into it full-hearted, with all the hate that such slaughter needs and engenders. It was a mess, and we are left to hope that it will not go the way of South Africa, which, after a few years of post-apartheid peace, has fallen into a stew of corruption, murder, and vengeance-based racism. Yet what did Jesus tell the boy, Sagatashya?: to disregard the sinfulness of the world. Not that he should be complacent with it, but that he should not let it cloud his spiritual center. The world, said Jesus, was created for eventual destruction. There would be a second coming (which He said was very close, but that is in God’s time) and the things and cares of this world would become as nothing, because that is what they will be.
In the midst of poverty and corruption, and with a horrendous genocide facing them (Segatashya was told that he would die young, and he did, killed for being a Tutsi during the genocide, by bullet rather than by machete), Jesus told the 15-year-old to hold peace and love in his heart, and to encourage others to do the same. This was not only meant to avoid the looming disaster, but to prepare Rwandans, and by extension all of us, for the end of OUR world, whether or not it will also be the end of THE world. We all will die; and with that, we all will lose touch with the very world that so concerns us. This world will become a ‘nothing’ to each and every one of us within 70 or 80 or so years. It will not matter to us personally who is president, who has killed who, who is famous or who is wealthy or powerful.
We know this. But it has to be repeated again and again because we do not live it. We see through history how different the fashions and many of the concerns of the past were. We see how all of those who were so well known then – Frank Sinatra, Adlei Stevenson, Henry Kissinger, and even Eisenhower and Kennedy – have either disappeared from the public mind or have become increasingly irrelevant. Our grandparents fade into the past, as their parents have already done. We, too, will fade into the past. Yes, we know this but do not live it.
So it is that Jesus could talk of eternal love only years before unbelievable bloodshed. So it is that he can tell us to sell all to purchase “the pearl of great price,” the Kingdom of God. He can tell us this because it is rational. He can tell us this as easily as we can tell our 16 year old son not to kill himself because his girlfriend has dumped him. We are all so shortsighted. We see this in the fashions, in the music and dress and prejudices that have changed so much in our nation in only the last 60 years. Shakespeare told us this with his phrase “Out, out, brief candle.” Our strutting on the stage of this earth signifies nothing. But there is something more and greater waiting, regardless of life on earth, and it signifies everything. We all know it, but sometimes it takes a penniless, illiterate shepherd boy to make us understand that everyone can acquire the greatest treasure possible for Man. The pearl of great price can be purchased by anyone who first sells all, whether it is his attachment to his goat herd or to his corporate empire or to the greatest empire the earth has known.
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