For Today, an essay, "How the River Flows," under 'Essays' in the website.  FK    [See the comment on the essay below]

​ 
            There is a point where you know you haven’t a chance.
 
            Many years ago, a 22-year-old nephew came out from back east for a visit.  He was a real city slicker, nice enough but unaware of anything to do with the outdoors.  We took him and his girlfriend canoeing in a lake, and at one point decided to land at a dock we had once rented.  Without grabbing on to anything or paying attention to balance, he stood up on one side to step onto the dock.  The canoe began to sway.  He tried to fight it by counterbalancing and ended in making it worse.  That we would capsize seemed all but inevitable, but something in me sparked and I commanded in an unusually authoritative voice, “sit down!”  He did, and we were saved from losing our cooler and lunch and seat pads and all that.  What had seemed inevitable had been stopped, almost as if by a miracle.
 
            That time we had a chance.  But there was another time less than two years ago when I steered my bicycle into a ground squirrel hole on the dirt bed of a converted railway line.  The path was filled with them and sooner or later any rider would hit one, but usually the bike can be righted.  This time was different.  The wheel caught just wrong and pulled me over at nearly a ninety degree angle.   It was far too wobbly to fight, and something told me to give in to the circumstance, relax, and fall.  I did, and got some cuts and a pulled shoulder that bothered me for several months, but nothing more.  I had hit the point of knowing that I hadn’t a chance and gave in to avoid the worst. 
 
            I am now reading a book, The Warning by Christine Watkins, which gives testimonials of people who have had “Illuminations of Conscience,” when life flashes before the mind’s eye and one sees all the hurt one has caused, either by commission or omission.  Many of the people were those I could say were worse than I, drunkards who beat their wives and abandoned their children, or those who were more like me, who had lived careless rock- and- roll lives, rolling around the earth like a loose cannon.  Their self-condemnation, usually with Jesus or Mary or a saint in the background, caused me to squirm, but what the heck.  We are, most of us anyway, in the same boat, right?  If the guy who beat his wife had a chance, I was way ahead of him.  Heaven would not be assured, but with a little effort it seemed reasonable that I could find my way to glory too.  Which seemed reasonable until I read the testimonial of the nun.
 
            She had felt the calling since childhood in post-war Germany and had done absolutely nothing wrong as far as she told in her story: no hidden love affairs, no fellow nun she had spread gossip about, no secret alcoholism.   She was stationed to California, and then sent by request to study Christianity at a school in Jerusalem.  While there, she met a Protestant student who insisted she walk with her on the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha and the Holy Sepulcher – that is, where Jesus walked to his crucifixion, where he was crucified, and where he was buried, respectively.  She refused the invitation many times because she did not like to dwell on the ugly side of Christ’s mission.  Finally she relented, and they left for the Via in the early hours to avoid the tourist traffic.  At first she did not even kneel at the Stations of the Cross along the Via, but then something touched her.  By the time they reached Golgotha, which is at the upper portion of the cathedral of the Sepulcher, she felt another call to Christ’s suffering.
 
            There is an altar built over the exact spot where the cross of Jesus was placed.  It is easy to find, for the ‘mount’ of crucifixion was really an extremely large bolder just outside the old walls of Jerusalem, and the resourceful Romans had chiseled a few holes in the rock to easily and quickly slide the crosses into, holding them firmly until they could be pulled up, thrown away, and replaced.  A small altar has been built over the hole that is said to have held Jesus’s cross; to touch it, as most tourists do (and as I have), one has to crawl beneath the altar on one’s knees in an obvious act of submission.  Here, the nun now felt the need to do just that, but upon putting her fingers in the hole, she was struck with the Illumination of Conscience, where all her bad thoughts and deeds – and lack of good deeds – were brought forth.
 
            As said, with many others in the book, the sins revealed in their Illumination were truly grave.  So the nun thought her own were as well.  For instance, she saw that she would coyly smile in discussions so that she might be noticed or get her way.  She would sometimes glance at a mirror and notice how good looking she was.  She would talk happily with men with subtle flirting.  One gets the gist – these are her sins.  She did not see that Hell was waiting for her if she did not change, as many others had.  Instead, she had seen her slight vanities and power plays and had suffered for them.  Oh Lord, forgive me, for I am not perfect!
 
            She was in rapture for two hours beneath that altar, and afterwards understood the value of suffering – of how human sin hurts God so much. 
 
To which I could only think, “You’ve got to be kidding!”  If the minute sins of the nun caused both God and her suffering, I must be balanced on the lip of the fiery abyss, with only the slight fact that I was still alive in this world holding me from eternal damnation.  I hadn’t a chance.  Even if I had the humility to confess each imperfect act I have ever committed, I could never remember a tenth of them.  For heck’s sake, not a day goes by that I don’t look in the mirror.  I don’t always find a handsome elderly gentleman starring back, but I hope to.  Not a chance.
 
It did bother me, and probably will continue to nag a bit, but an intuition of the situation came to me.  I cannot say with certainty that it is correct, but it seemed right, and so I will tell it:
 
We are told that God is infinite love and mercy, and yet would condemn us, or let us condemn ourselves (however it is put) to eternal suffering in Hell.  Yet we know that most parents would not do that to their children in most circumstance, even after those acts that are truly grave.  How can this be?  How can human parents be more loving and merciful than God?
 
After a hard night’s sleep, I woke to understand that God truly understands us more than we do ourselves.  He knows exactly when to use a stick on us and when to offer a carrot, so that we might be reconciled with Him.  Unlike us in this life, he has all the time in the world to do this and then some to accomplish this.  On the other hand, we have free will – this is a central issue for God of ultimate importance.  So we have the right to refuse his carrot and to become hardened and rebellious by his stick.  But our death is not necessarily our real death.  Eternal hell for most of us might simply mean eons of time in different circumstance where we refuse to live with the will of God.  Perhaps there is a deadline, but that would be something that only God knows.  Otherwise, he is working on us to bring us back to him, for only God knows how long.
 
Outside of the view on the extant of our life and what that means (which is a big, I admit), most of this would be acceptable to Christian churches.  Where the other difference would be is an understanding that one size does not fit all.  For instance, those who are given the Illumination of Conscience are ready for it and/or in need of it, to turn back (or become more perfect) towards God.  Most of us are either unready or not in need of such terrifying exposure, at least at the current time of our existence, which might be far longer than we can know.  For many, the Illumination comes at death, where Christians are told we have a last chance for repentance.  For Catholics, this usually means being sent off to Purgatory, where we are worked on just as we have been in this life, to become perfect in the eyes of God. 
 
Eternal damnation for some at death?  It just might be, but those in this book who were shown that they were on the certain road to death were often, unlike the nun, much like the rest of us.  Yet we, unlike them, are not given this chance to work off our sins before death and Hell.  And that’s what I mean: one size does not fit all.  Life of the soul is eternal.  One purgatory is not the same as the other.  We might continue as humans in another place, or as spirits in a human-like environment without an Illumination.  Who knows but God?  Who knows why some holy rules are made, then taken away?  God knows best, after all.  He is eternal love and mercy.  He knows us better than ourselves and wants to bring us back.  It seems all we have to do – all that we really have the power to do – is desire to go back to him.  Then he will use whatever carrot or stick, whatever threat or promise, which will be best for us.
 
Or so it came to me.  Perhaps it is only wish fulfillment.  God does not have to make sense, after all, as he makes the rules and can change them at will.  But it seems likely that at his essence he wouldn’t mess with our feeble and imperfect desire to return to him.  Rather, he would help in any way he permits himself under free will, and then some, for as long as it takes.  This understanding does not take away the stick, as some modern feel-good religions do, but it gives us a better understand of what we consider to be punishment – that however harsh, it is ultimately meant and really is for our own good.  It would seem to me that truly believing this would give us the one chance we need, both for those of us who have done terrible things and for those whose worst sin is looking in the mirror to see only what they want to see. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

​ 
            My son often stops by on the weekend with a new cluster of bottles meant to concoct an alcoholic drink he found on the internet.  Unlike me in my youth, he will have one or two and that’s it, like a touch of desert after supper.  This last weekend the bottles included Southern Comfort and Amaretto, the latter a liquor with the delicious aroma of almonds.  He made his drink, didn’t like it, and poured it down the drain.  I for one had to wax eloquent on my experience with Southern Comfort, a whiskey and dense sugar blend that will make just about anyone sick when taken in excess.  As said, when I was young, I often took to excess, and at one time took Southern Comfort to excess.  I was a seventeen -year –old foreign to drinking, and after that night have never had Southern Comfort again.  Of course, after telling my grand story, I – now a seasoned citizen in the land of drinking – had to have a taste.  I poured a small amount over ice and added some Amaretto.  I liked it.  I poured three more full amounts before the night was done and woke up at 4 AM with a stomach ache.  There is no fool like an old fool.
 
            But because it was Saturday night and there was drinking, we stayed up late talking about Big Picture stuff.  He is concerned with the cultural drift in our society, as he should be, but I had to add some ameliorative council.  For one, it was worse in the late 1960’s and we still survived.  For two, all of this fretting and stomping is small-potato stuff compared to what really is.  As only someone swilling drink can do, I casually offered up my concept of what ‘really is’ really is.  What I offered up was true, drink or no, but it was only an introduction.  Unless we float above the land on sacred wings, that is all we can offer as long as we remain tied to our human cloaks of skin. 
 
            As I have stated all too often, and as it was written in my book Dream Weaver, in my youth I tended towards excess in more than alcohol.  In my group, the hallucinogens of the era were all the rage, and they offered up a whole lot more than someone looking for a party would ever bargain for.  One of those things granted – regardless of desire - was a deeper look at human society, both at home and abroad.  With this, a few of my friends and I were shocked to find that much of what we considered to be normal was just a whitewash, a film over what lay underneath.  Underneath was infinite mystery, vast avenues of foundational meaning, and a universal pulse of binding love.  It was marvelous and wonderful but so hard to take, even for a teen-age punk, that I for one kissed the earth afterward, so glad to be back to a ‘normal’ that now seemed so friendly and polite. 
 
            Not all were pleased to come back to the safe and secure landing pad.  Many of us from that era, including myself, pushed such chemical “aids” aside and began our trek into religion and spirituality while still dressed in our mortal skins.  But others took these visions as the whole rather than as an introduction and used them to combat a society that they had already blamed for their unhappiness.  They saw how superficial our American Way was, not realizing that ALL societies are often superficial in the face of Big Reality.  They sought to find truth and comfort by creating a social structure based on what they had learned.  To do this, though, they had to first destroy the existing social reality.  Exposed as it had been by the introduction to truth, it seemed an easy and good thing to do.
 
            As far as destroying society is concerned, they were right; it IS far easier to do than one might first realize.  To get an idea, take a look at the early sections of the Old Testament.  Many of the rules given for human behavior are simply put forth without explanation, exactly as a parent would to a young child.  If the rules are not tied together for us in a cogent and understandable way, they do seem primitive and arbitrary.  Circumcision?  A prohibition of flesh from animals with cloven hooves?  Anthropologists have tried to explain many of these rules though all sorts of reductionist theories and none of them have really worked.  When looked at with common everyday rationality, the rules do seem stupid.   So why not just throw them away and live a less restricted life? 
 
We have this going on in the much of the world today.  Many of the rules don’t seem to make sense, but rather impede what one wants to do.  Just as with my visions, many now can clearly see that a host of social norms are superficial and seem to have little or nothing to do with the Big Picture.  Why permit this and not that?  Why not just make up a set of rules that makes sense and be done with the rest?
 
I do not know about believing Jews, but for Christians, it is the New Testament that makes sense of the Old, only visible in hindsight.  While such laws as circumcision and dietary prohibitions were dropped – seen only as ways of setting the Jews apart for the sake of keeping them together to complete the story – the entirety of the nearly 2,000- year history from Abram (Abraham) to Jesus was made to prepare the way for Christ.  One does not have to be a believer to see that all the passion and fury of the Old Testament makes sense from that perspective.  It shows that, rather than being arbitrary or a way to subject women or slaves or whatever to the powers that be, many of the rules had a much higher goal in mind.  A much higher goal, that is, that could not be known by the common man until the culminating reason had come to pass.  Much like Mom and Dad keeping us from the liquor cabinet, we can’t always understand the rules until we are brought to a certain age of maturity, either personally or culturally.   
 
Which doesn’t disabuse the overall view that societal rules taken in part are often superficial.  Instead, we have to understand what the rules in aggregate mean in our current state of existence.  On the one hand, the reason for many of them, such as waiting until marriage for sex, have become abundantly clear in the wake of the sexual revolution.  The destruction of the family and the attendant confusion and unhappiness of children in fatherless households has affected so many other behaviors negatively that they are hard to count.  On the other hand, we might say “so what?”  If society is only a distractive gloss far removed from the infinite potential of our lives, why bother even keeping it?
 
It is here where the rubber meets the road with those only too willing to throw out all the old to make their own preferred version of society.  We have to first admit, as Madonna once sang, that we are material girls (and boys) and we live in a material – that is, limited – world.  We can open the doors of perception briefly, with drugs or fasting or prayer or whatever, but we always will come back to our limited reality.  This has been true through all known times and cultures.  We are made for what we have right now.  Because of this – that is, because our mortal realty is superficial regardless - we need superficial rules.  However, for two, these rules should not be arbitrary.  They should make sense in the aggregate from the perspective of the Big Picture, as the Old Testament did to the New. 
 
The question is, how can this be done?  Or, more accurately, how has this usually been done in the past?
 
No one who studies culture in general can agree upon how the aggregate rules were made.  With the aid of myth and religion, I think it is safe to stipulate that culture was formed from both the material world – that is, the practical and the political – and the spiritual.  The practical is subject to change, while that emanating from the spiritual is not, at least until its objective is achieved.  The Ten Commandments broadly defined our own once-immutable laws, aided by New Testament touches, including the discouragement of divorce and the broadening of the concept of “neighbor.”  Practical laws might include how we react to plague, or the proper length for female dresses.  The first set of rules comes from a divine or revelatory source, while the second from the superficial world of mortals.  The first forms a coherent pattern with a greater end in mind, while the second regulates on a more particular basis, subject to change with different circumstances. 
 
This brings us to the crux of our problem today: when we deny the sacred, we lump all the rules together, both revelatory and practical.  Certain elements of change in our society even tie the spiritual to the practical in ALL ways, that is, as designed solely for practical or political ends. 
 
Obviously, such a site as this disagrees.  But instead of simply condemning this conflation of cultural directives, I would like to ask the question: if the social rules are all fundamentally superficial and/or political, then how are the new ones made by the materialists any different?
 
Here’s the point: as material beings we dwell in the superficial and as such need superficial rules.  However, we are not and cannot be separated totally from the infinite, that is, the sacred.  This comes through to our rational/practical way of thinking through revelation, which “reveals” to us the integration of certain rules and their connection to the sacred.  This connection is lost in the practical world, but through faith in the character of the prophets, or through miraculous demonstrations, we are brought to hold these certain elements as important and integral to our overall wellbeing.   
 
The irony is, that those who were brought to social revolution by revelation might now refuse to accept the revelatory truth of the past.  Worse, many now design new rules only from the practical level – that is, from the rational/theoretical or simply from the personal – thus creating the very superficiality they despise.  And as these are superficial and without deep integrity, they are mutable.  Dependence on them, then, is certain to create chaos.  Chaos is the opposite of order, as the sacred is defined by ultimate unity.  One runs against the other; one leads to unsatisfactory superficiality and ultimate dissolution, the other to infinite depth and eternal meaning. 
 
            In our current era, this is the choice we must all make.  The superficial makes no claim on the supernatural and so is easier to embrace, but it only leads us, at best, back to our banal selves.  The spiritual demands we suspend a portion of our practical mind (but unlike a cult, only a portion), but gives in return at least social order, and at best the possibility of infinite fulfillment.  Which way, in the end, requires the greater courage and offers the greater reward?  
 
 
 
 

​ 
We hear that the Chinese are leading us in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.  We also hear that they are monitoring their people everywhere they go to give them “social credit” scores, determined by the Supreme Leaders, which will either allow or take away such privileges as travel, work, and possibly food and survival.  The two come together as very scary prospects.  We can see that with technology, the full spectrum surveillance nation is becoming possible.  Where such guarantees as our Constitution are not in place, near-total surveillance is probably inevitable.  Who in a ruling position would not want to have all people act as he (the ruler or rulers) desires?  It would make all governmental planning so much easier.  It would also give the ultimate high to those who live to acquire power.  Without jealously guarded laws to prohibit surveillance and control, it is a slam-dunk.
 
We as Americans are particularly revolted by such a prospect.  Our tradition gives to each of us the inalienable and inviolable right to pursue our own destiny, limited only by a narrow spectrum of necessary laws.  We share this right equally as something both obvious and divinely given.  So it is that the idea of intelligent robots is repugnant to us.  Robots do not have free will, regardless of what some say about an AI “Event Horizon,” whereby an accumulation of information and programming allows robots or computers to truly think for themselves.  This, I believe, is ridiculous.  Unless we have a ground-breaking fundamental change in our thought processes that would allow a very different type of technology, none of our machines will ever break free from programming.  Thinking robots, then, are antithetical to the very ground of our being.  That is why what the Chinese are doing is so revolting to us, and so frightening - not only because thinking robots are so monstrously pathetic, but because their manufacture would inevitably bring with it the attempt to manufacture robotic thinkers.  This, too, is impossible, but the attempt does incalculable violence to the human psyche.  In those places it will take generations to repair and raise the culture from its moribund ashes.    
 
And yet…Just the other day I was in a conversation with someone about human social perfection, freedom, and socialism.  Time and experience have taught us that perfection cannot be arranged here on Earth through human design.  It is a fact of human life, but so fundamentally unjust and tragic that young people continually refuse to accept this.  Whereas in other times the young have turned to religion or art to bring about utopia, in the material age they run towards socialism and communism time and again, despite everything that shows neither works well, at least not for long.  I understand the impulse, however.  And so it is that even people less cynical and power-hungry than the Supreme Leaders of the Glorious People’s Republic of China might dream of a society under tighter control - just for a while, mind you, until people’s priorities are ‘set straight.”
 
Let us pretend we have set our priorities straight by transforming everyone into robotic androids at birth.  We would have all the wonders of the human body, but with our less desirable traits removed.  There would be no birth defects – no blindness, no crippled limbs, no sickle-cell anemia.  There would be no genetically-caused schizophrenia or depression or bipolar disorder.  There would be no insatiable desire for drugs or alcohol, and no uncontrollable need for violence or domination.  We would all be healthy and well-adjusted, and comfortable with our other genetically-given traits that would determine our life’s trajectory, as either chemical or sanitation engineers, and so on.  We would operate smoothly and without crime.  We would no longer need strong leadership.  In a word, we would all be, or at least perceive ourselves to be, equal.  The tragedy and injustice of the ages would, at long last, be cast onto the dung heap of history.
 
Here’s the question: would we be happy?  Would injustice and pain even matter to us?  And if they didn’t, would that be a good thing or bad? 
 
Put another way, are the ups of being human worth the downs?  I have seen tragedy up close and personal on a small scale, and don’t ever want to see it again – although I, and most of us, probably will.  This is nothing compared to, say, the large-scale tragedy and horrors attendant with war.  It is apparent that the very capacity to experience the highs also makes the lows inevitable.  Like any junkie, once we experience the high, we want to re-experience it.  For some, that desire leads them to take away other’s joy to increase their own.  Criminality, cruelty, and war thus become inevitable.
 
            That’s at the core of our decision: since we can never replicate the full human will, so we could never replicate the full human joy.  One has to be a complete human being to experience genuine human emotion.  In giving up our bad traits, we would have to give up our greatest pleasures – or rather, we would no longer have great pleasure.  But would that matter to, say, those who lived through the Rwandan genocide?  Would they not rather give up the joy to avoid the horror?  
 
            I think the Chinese leadership would heartily agree that the lack of misery – and China has seen its share of misery – is worth the lack of joy.  Only the leadership should able to experience this joy, a well-deserved perk for their genius and hard work.  In Rwanda, however, they have markedly tilted towards the full human spectrum, admitting the frailty of humanity for the greater joys, not only physical but spiritual.  Immaculee Ilibagiza writes of this transformation after the Rwandan genocide in her book Our Lady of Kibeho (discussed previously in the blog section).  The genocide itself was meant to annihilate a disagreeing party from the country to make it more singular and, I suppose in the minds of many, more orderly.  After the dust settled, the nation decided upon opening up rather than closing down human potential.  It was a gamble that has so far proved itself well.  Instead of turning towards despotic order, they instead have turned towards atonement, an admission of shared human guilt, and a willingness to morally evolve.  Behind this willingness is a sense of deep spirituality that was ignited by the broad public witnessing of Our Lady at Kibeho. 
 
            This, I think, is the choice of our times: to either annihilate the potential for human evil by annihilating the natural human being, or to move organically towards a greater peace by embracing the spiritually transcendent.  The first only requires the will of harsh leadership, while the second requires the shared will of the people.  The first theoretically might eliminate evil behavior, while the latter acknowledges its eternal presence and the need to will against it.  But unless we are all made into the hypothetical androids, the first can only work for a while until pent-up hostility explodes, while the latter can lead to a steady and non-ending work- in- progress.   The first must also minimize great joy, which is experienced only through a full sense of self.  It is only through admitting our possible expression of evil that we can fully be ourselves.   
 
            In the past, the dichotomy could only lead to one rational choice: the granting of greater liberty to unleash the greater potential.  However, the android-ization of human kind might become a (near) possibility someday.  It is then that we must make the choice: free will and misery and joy, versus control and a lack of joy and misery.  In a limited way, people have decided for one or the other, China or Rwanda, for centuries; but someday we may be able to choose between one or the other for all time.  For the spiritually orientated, the choice is or should be obvious; in an age of overwhelming secularism, however, the choice is not so clear. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Painful introspection makes me plead for forgiveness – yes, someday, someday soon I will get back to the depth that silent contemplative reading brings us.  Someday soon, that is, just as soon as this latest series on Netflix is over.  Like an alcoholic the day after, I promise that I will get on my feet one day and walk tall with head bowed over trusted and true tomes of literature and philosophy.  Books are better because their production costs are much, much lower.  With that, authors don’t have to desperately search for ways to amass customers to recoup the millions of dollars owed to impatient and demanding lenders.  That is, they don’t have to pander to the masses with sex and gossip, which appear in most of these series as if by law. 
 
Alas, we do love that sex and gossip all too well.  But good TV series also bring the companionship of watching with friends and family, something lacking in dank library dens.  They can also bring out some astounding jewels of truth.  Such I have found with many before, and recently, with The Crown after only six or seven episodes.
 
The Crown: as one might expect, it is about royalty and, more explicitly, the English royalty of the latter half of the 20th century.  This was the point in time at which royalty had become all but irrelevant.  This was their own fault.  After internecine squabbles among the noble families of Europe managed to kill ten million people in WWI for absolutely no good reason, “noble” became synonymous with amoral philanderer and murderer.  Many of the crowns of Europe – the German, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, and more – were discarded entirely.  Those that hung on were mostly in low-power, relatively blameless small countries such as Denmark and Sweden.  England became the one exception.  Besides the scandals and affairs and a few skin shots - we now know that the man who plays Elizabeth II’s husband Phillip has a firm butt - this is what the movie is about.  That is, it tries to answer how it was that royalty was able to remain in Britain.  And, more subtly, it makes us ask ourselves why the nobles would want to remain.
 
The latter question is begged as the series overall takes pity on the royal family, showing just how impinged they were once their political power had been taken away.  Whereas in the past, brother had killed brother and sometimes father to become king, now they desperately tried NOT to become king.  For instance, the prince who would briefly become Edward VIII dumped his kingship the same year he attained it, 1936, to marry a twice-divorced US citizen, Wallace Simpson.  He claimed again and again that he did it for love, but we come to think differently in the series.  Rather, we come to believe that he only wanted to continue to have the good life, which in his case was not very “good.” Kingship by then had become all responsibility and tradition without the attendant power.  Who would want to be king?
 
Certainly not Edward VIII, certainly not George VI, his brother, and certainly not Elizabeth II, who would become The Queen in 1952 at the age of 26.  She is still queen today.  In the past I often wondered how the queen could be so cruel as to deny her own son Charles the crown so far into her dotage.  I do not wonder that any more.  Now I know that she remains queen to save Charles from the horrible position of head noble for as long as possible.  After several nights of watching the series, we come to see her as perhaps the most saintly of the privileged class in the past century. 
 
My fundamental question – why would the nobility want to continue to be nobility? - came into clarity last night as we watched the scandal created by Princess Margaret and her divorced lover, Peter Townsend, develop.  In reality, we now know that Margaret and Peter were all-out sexual lovers before his divorce, but the papers of the time, in 1953 I believe, only knew of a romantic affair after his divorce.  It was a scandal, then, only because a high royal had dared to become romantically involved with a divorced commoner.  In Elizabeth’s preliminary view, the affair was not so big a deal – after all, with the birth of her own children, the crown would certainly not go to Margaret, as it had to Edward.  But soon Elizabeth would be convinced that even this small scandal was important.  It was important because Royalty at large was then at the very precipice of its existence.  The people, we learn, continued to tolerate them only because the Royal Family created a sense of decorum and tradition, something like high-bred mascots, living human logos of what it was to be British.  If they did not play the part to the hilt, we learn, they would get the same boot as the Kaiser. 
 
And there is the big glaring question again that I am not sure even the makers of the series realized they had created: why?  Why did and still do the nobles care to continue on as the royal family? They have no real power, and because they are barely tolerated, every public action – and with the royals, almost all becomes public sooner or later – is scrutinized for any deviation from the ideal.  They are in effect prisoners as long as they continue on as royalty, and the hatred of the top job proves it.  And yet they desperately sought, and continue to seek, to remain as royalty.
 
 One more time: why? If they were to go, certainly they would be allowed to take some family heirlooms with them, valuable enough to keep at least a few generations rich.  They could still attend Oxford or Cambridge if they studied enough and could retain the air of snobbish superiority.  They would be more common than before, it’s true, but it seems a small price to pay for freedom. 
 
Maybe it’s tradition, then? Could they be so ingrained with their heritage and tradition that all the suffering under public eye still makes it all worthwhile?  That was certainly not the case with Edward, although perhaps it was with the others.  But still, the scrutiny, the minutia of tradition, the literal trappings of hundreds of years, all now just for show, much like our president pardoning the turkey on Thanksgiving Day.  Is duty that strong for so many, now leading into the 4th generation after WWI? 
 
The answer is, I think, no, and this is important for all of us.  Although I think with the minor nobility it still might be a matter of snobbish social ranking, with the core noble family it goes well beyond rank and tradition.  I think, rather, that their status defines their very person-hood.  For this they are willing to be miserable, just as most everyone would rather suffer than to die.  I believe this is true of the royal family because most of us choose to live with something in our lives even though it makes us miserable.  We do so because we think this “thing” helps define us.  Just as illness is usually preferable to death, so being something is better than being nothing at all, regardless.   
 
Drug addiction is the easiest way to see this, particularly with something like smoking, to which I was addicted.  Unlike heroin, not smoking does not cause horrible hallucinations and feelings of madness.  Rather, one becomes irritable for another smoke.  That’s it.  Because I had parred my smoking down to 4 cigs a day in the last decade, for me the actual addiction to the drug was minimal.  For me, instead, I could not imagine having a beer or sitting up on the cabin porch without having a butt.  It was more a matter of style, of who I was, rather than anything else.  We know for an absolute fact that smoking kills sooner or later, and yet it took all the willpower I had to (hopefully) avoid a horrible cancer because of personal style.
 
Self-destructive, self-defining choices go far beyond simple drug addiction.  I know many low-wage workers who hate their near-poverty and their jobs, but will not do anything to change the situation because that would be “uppity” or pretentious, a kind of anti-snob snobbery.  I have a feeling that this really comes from a deep sense of inferiority, but that, too, is a destructive self-definition.  Books have been written about this – see Norman Vincent Peal – but few read or heed them.  To change the self is apparently more frightening than to live in despised circumstances. 
 
This is so especially with the really big stuff.   We know that we are going to die, and that we probably only have one life, certainly in our current (mortal) body.  We know that all is passing, and all that secular society believes to be important is nothing in the face of eternity and infinity.  We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially in this day of space travel and astronomy, yet we live clutching the bosom of the earth like children about to go to school for the first time.  We remain frustrated and bitter about at least some of our circumstances, yet refuse to see beyond them.  And although we might know enough to not keep up with the Jones’s, we still worry and strive and lose and stare back at the lost chances of our human lives, as if most of it really mattered.
 
Does it really matter to us if there is a queen of England?  If her granddaughter moved to America to become a public school teacher, would we care?  No, but she would.  Stressed and stretched out before the public eye, she lives for the image of her country and her own self- image.  That is her choice, but it is a lesson to me.  The prize is not the crown or the throne or imagined social glory.  Rather, it is the infinity before us, the endless mystery, which smacks us in the face every time we fail or someone dies and we mourn.  We mourn because we are disappointed with our own limited circumstances, which, like the crown, only hem us in because we desperately allow them to do so.  We believe that something, no matter how bad, is almost always better than nothing, but we are wrong.  We are wrong because the “something” we think we have is really nothing compared to the “nothing” that we think we can’t have but do have for all eternity. 
 
 
 
 
 
  

​ 
Salmon are not as innocent as they seem.  It is the same with other animals, like cuddly skunks, but the danger of salmon is not as obvious to everyone – or perhaps to anyone besides myself.  They don’t bite people as far as I know, and they aren’t destroying the ecosystem in their natural habitat (this might not be true in the Great Lakes).  Instead, they are an exceptionally tasty fish which, alas, is less common now that hydroelectricity has commandeered the rivers of the great Northwest.  In fact, they mean nothing but goodness to the normal human on an average day – unless, that is, that person has been steeped in the history of the Northwest Coast Indians.  It is then that the average guy learns to see the danger of them, not as fish, but in what they mirror back to us humans. 
 
This wasn’t my first thought when I saw “Wild Northwest Coast” smoked fish on sale for only $6.99 a pound at our local supermarket.  My first thought was of how good it would be either plain or on a Triscuit with cream cheese, and on how it would be all mine – mine! – because so many other people (wife, kid) can’t appreciate the finer things in life.  It wasn’t my next thought either, or my next, but it hit me the following morning after I had stuffed myself on its smoky-fishy deliciousness the night before while watching the last chapters of the Amazon sci-fi series, The Expanse.  In this tale, the “proto-molecule” had developed a tele-portal that humans could take to an estimated 1300 habitable planets, which was a really big deal for an Earth wallowing in the poverty and misery of grotesque overpopulation.   But here’s the rub: regardless of the vast opportunities, the opening up of these new worlds created instant conflict among the factions for control of the portal and the resources of the new worlds.  Whereas people were formally killing each other over meager resources, now they began to kill themselves over huge resources. 
 
Of course, The Expanse is only fiction, but unfortunately it is fiction that is spot on in this case for human history.  The discovery of the New World, for instance, which, after the demise of most native peoples from disease, became a true wilderness, did not bring peace to Europe, but rather expanded its theater of belligerence.  And, lest we believe that conflict over an abundance of resources is only a Western capitalist thing, we can go to America’s Northwest Coast, where a great number of American Indians survived the initial bout of diseases to remain plentiful.  They were able to do so because they could rebuild their population quickly and easily.  They were able to maintain and rebuild so quickly not because of new medicine or the wonders of a damp climate, but because of – yes – the salmon.   
 
Until the dams, the salmon of the Northwest made legendary runs of millions upon millions up river to spawn and die.  Unlike other fish, salmon have real fat, fat that provides the necessary calories needed by mammals.  Along with the other nutritional qualities, the salmon, preserved by smoke for the winter months, were able to nourish hundreds of thousands of humans without the need for agriculture or pastoralism.   Such it was that the Indians of this area were able to create and maintain the only known high-density, complex cultural system without plant and animal domestication.  Such it was, in other words, that the people in this part of the world had it made.  They had all the food they needed without hard, continuous work.  You couldn’t get more ‘Portland’ than that, even without the craft beer and high-end coffee. 
 
Here’s the hard part, and why salmon are dangerous, at least to our self-image: with all that abundance both before and after the arrival of the Europeans, the Northwest coast Indians were in near-constant warfare.  This was done for prestige and for slaves, which they did not really need except to display for more prestige.  The slaves were not separated from the others by race, but rather by tribe and family.  Snobbery of the bloodlines of nobility was carved into their totem poles, clearly giving us a “who’s who” of elite and commoners.  Slaves were not high on the totem pole and did not have to be treated as fellow humans.  Because they were not considered as full humans, they were often sacrificed to local gods or spirits for good luck or for medical cures, killings which were often purposefully slow and painful.  In the Northwest, if one were a noble, life was good unless and until one died in warfare.  For the rest, it was often humiliating or downright dangerous.  All this death and misery, mind you, in the midst of over-abundance. 
 
In the 18th century the educated classes of Europe argued about the nature of man, at last free of the Judeo-Christian notion that, after the sin of Adam and Eve, we were born to vice.  Hobbes claimed that life was brutish and short, while Roseau insisted that we would be little angels if we were not raised in stratified societies.   Most thinkers of the day favored Roseau (excluding America’s famously practical founders), and a century later, Marx continued with the notion, citing examples of utopic indigenous societies throughout the world.   In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, an immigrant to the US, became a believer in utopia as well.  He sent out his protégées to prove just this, including Margaret Mead, who wrote about the ideal life in her famous book, Coming of Age in Samoa.  Here she concluded that before white influence, Samoans lived idyllic lives.  Wrapped in the mandatory Freudian psychology of the day, Mead underscored their free and easy sex life, which took away the evil of sexual repression, the primary reason cited by Freud for conflict. 
 
We can see from this how “free love” advocacy developed in the modern era.  We can also see how wrong they were.  The current batch of American youth are richer and safer than any other generation, yet are more addicted and more suicidal than at least the last four generations, if not all the past generations of Americans.  A revisit to the field methods and literature in Samoa also showed a great amount of conflict, including rape, in the traditional society.  Mead, apparently, had gone out to prove her professor right, regardless of the facts, as had many other researchers.  Greater study has shown fairly conclusively that Utopia is only an idea and an ideal. 
 
At our house, we have recently watched a series of sci-fi vignettes on Amazon Prime called Electric Dreams, adapted from Phillip Dick’s writings from the early 20th century.   One featured a small community left over from an atomic holocaust that was trying to rebuild civilization in its small way, but was hampered by a production facility similar in delivery service to Amazon.  What had happened was that the company’s factory had been completely automated for self-continuation, and continued to produce massive amounts of fairly useless items (ie, thousands of sneakers) after the war, now for only a handful of consumers.  As we join the small community, we see that the company is destroying the world through its over-production, delivering boxes and boxes of its trinkets by drone to this and other remnant communities throughout the world.  Our small group has decided it must destroy the factory.  It is finally infiltrated by the community’s electronic genius, but she is captured by an android and strapped down for re-programming – not of brains, but of her computer chips.  What we come to find is that all of humanity had been destroyed in the wars.  Lacking customers, then, the factory had made artificial surrogates who would serve as humans in need. 
 
However: the “mind” of the genius who is really a robot was built on the brain-waves of the real human genius.  We find that she (the android genius) had already figured this all out before her capture, and had set in her own mind a virus that would destroy the factory when downloaded.  To prove to herself initially that she was a robot, she had had to strip away not only her false flesh, but the illusion of her humanness by forcing herself to think through the programming that had made her blind to her own (otherwise obvious) android nature, as it had  to everyone else in the community.  
 
In the end, as the factory self-destructs, she goes back to the boy she had come to love, leaving all the others free to build their ideal society as they continue to live under the illusion of humanness.  
 
And that is how we live, blind to who and what we are.  And this is how the salmon can be dangerous to our continued “production” of reality: they can mirror back to us the blindness and outright wrongness of our conception of ourselves and nature; they can force us see that our needs and desires and goals are products of a shared illusion that causes us to always be in need no matter how much we have; they can show us that this need can make us jealous enough to kill, as was Cain, or make us as sexually insatiable as dirty old sultans, or as greedy as the legendary Midas and the real-life robber barons and merchants of goods and bodies of past and present.  Without this special vision, we can peel back our skin all we want but still only see flesh and blood, just as the genius robot did until she forced herself to look beyond the illusion intended to make her an eternal consumer of excess goods. 
 
We need to do the same.  We need, I think, more than anything else to see through the illusion that tells us that we are only physical animals.  The modern designers of utopia failed and continue to fail to see past this illusion, causing them to fail time and again in their endeavors.  While it is true that the theologically- minded of the past could not make paradise on Earth either, they did understand that we lived under this illusion.  They did understand that we were first and foremost spiritual beings who would suffer as long as we believed ourselves to be primarily of flesh and blood. 
 
Someday we will not believe it.  Unlike the androids, our flesh and blood will leave us someday as a part of the program, and our supernatural nature will be revealed.  If we could see it in the here and now, no matter how dimly, it might go better for us.  To do this and really believe it, however, is about as tough as turning the other cheek or giving away our last cloak. 
 
Maybe the best most of us can do for now is to realize that we sometimes have more than enough salmon to go around, and that nobody but ourselves is that impressed when we have more than we need.  Once that is out of the way, who knows what else we might find? 
 
 
 

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

​Dec 18 – And the Blind Shall See
 
They say that every cloud has a silver lining, or even better, that each setback is really an opportunity for improvement.  Sure, I’ll take that.  In two days (actually, it will be today by the time this is published) I will have a scalpel dragged across my eyes for something called a ‘cataract’ and I couldn’t be happier.  Yes, it will clear up fading vision, but even better, it may serve to cure me of an incalculable sin.  
 
It is not sacrificing babies to Ba’al or even secretly watching porn as my innocent dog sleeps at my feet.   No – rather, it is an addiction to Amazon Prime TV series, where one can watch four seasons of shows in one week; where one can be absorbed into whatever the writer or writers’ perverse mindset – and, to make it in the moving picture industry it must be perverse – might be.  A few weeks ago it was Fargo.  Now it is a sci-fi series named The Expanse.  It is so evil that it is not bad.  It is actually the best sci-fi film (or screen) drama I have seen in years or even decades.  It is so evilly good that I have given up my solitary night-time habit of reading sacred or philosophical texts, built up over fifteen years, to watch people in costumes pretend to be people they are not and who will never be. 
 
The blessing of the surgery will be that I will not be able to watch it for a few days.  I won’t be able to read either, but still, it is a step in the right direction.  Maybe, just maybe, it will give me that needed moment to pause and repent.  And maybe, just maybe, it will get me out of a vision of the future that confirms the author’s preferences of the present, as sci-fi works generally do.  It is to the latter that blindness might be morally preferable.   Jesus said, “If your eye sins against you, better to pluck it out!” or something similar, which I never thought to take literally, but now… might it bring blessings?
 
The Expanse; the characters are deliciously hard-nosed and in many ways amoral.  Certainly they would not go to Catholic heaven.  Still, it is hard to blame them.  The world(s) of the future has (have) many problems.  The Earth is grotesquely overcrowded with over 40 billion inhabitants, although the rich and powerful still live amazingly well.  Because of this, Mars has been heavily colonized by eager patriotic fanatics whose dream is to flood the planet with water to make it into a new and better Earth.  As the show takes place two or three hundred years in the future, the technology is already there for the enterprise, but all has been put on hold in the struggle to remain politically independent of Earth.  The situation is similar to the early US of A’s relationship with mother England.  Meanwhile, both Earth and Mars have sent people to work the asteroid belt out between Mars and Jupiter for its abundant natural resources, including water for Mars.  Over the hundred and fifty or so years of mining operations in the Belt, the people there have garnered a resentment of their own towards their planetary masters.  These people – who are largely hard-core miners with few niceties to their personalities - have developed their own language and customs and identity.  They are largely run now by the OPA, a subversive and growing group of violent revolutionaries similar in (lack of) subtlety and methods to the old Irish Republican Army (IRA).  Add space ships, betrayal, money and power and mix well. 
 
Then throw in a large dollop of corruption and extraterrestrial life.  A major mining concern has found an alien life form on Phoebe, and has been trying to exploit it to gain control of everyone.  First they must understand it, and to do so, they infect an entire asteroid colony of 100,000 Belters with the “proto molecule.”  They all die grotesquely, or so it seems.  This seriously angers our heroes, a group of losers from Earth and Mars and the Belt who have fortuitously come into possession of an advanced Marian warship.  They become intrinsically involved in everything, and as of last episode, save the Earth from near-annihilation – that is, for now.  To be continued.
 
It is riveting stuff if you are a sci-fi geek, which I obviously am.  I am coming to believe, however, that this is largely a spiritual venue, although if you look for it, you will find the spiritual in nearly every work whether the author or artist intended it or not.  For Expanse, it is clearly intended, which enriches it immeasurably.  The alien entity is looking more and more to be grander than just a hegemonic killer.   But first, there are always the more superficial cultural and moral undertones that sci-fi writers deal with.  Here are a few of the good, the bad and ugly ones slipped into the series:
 
The Ugly: women.  Not so much that they are ugly, as in deformed, but that they are presented to us in the mode of the day: with the same aggressive personalities and physical strengths as men.  Sure, it’s hard to say exactly where sex affects personality, but it does and, as the French say, viva la differance.  In this, only the space-age barroom prostitutes seem to have a feminine side.  Differences of physical strength between the sexes is more certain in reality, but here all the heroines literally pack the same punch as the guys.  It is an insult not only to our intelligence but to our eyes to see a 110 runway model-type knock out a brawny 250 pound weightlifter with her delicate fist, but that’s the way “gender” is supposed to be today, and apparently will be in the future, facts be damned.  Not awful but ugly and telling of a deeper real-life agenda.
 
Which we see in the “bad:” where everyone has sex at will without any consequences, like a fourteen year old boy’s feverish fantasy.  Good for guys on the make, which I suspect fueled a lot of the sexual revolution of the ‘60’s, but terrible for families, which is ultimately terrible for everyone, since we all come from a family one way or the other.  In fact, our prime hero comes from a futuristic hippie commune and is the product, we are told, of a perfect genetic blend of its eight male and eight female members.  All quaintly share in the loving parenthood, except that the “vehicle” that bore him – thank God a natural woman with a womb - seems to care for him the most.  Otherwise, there are few children and even fewer committed couples.  Happy happy. 
 
There is the good.  For one, in this future there is no race consciousness.  I don’t know how they pull it off, but the actors pay no attention to racial differences in any way that I can see.  It is surprisingly refreshing.  It feels like the fetters of politically correct oppression have finally been removed – a true breath of fresh air that tells us just how grating and constant the hue and cry of racial politics are today. 
 
There are also the heroes.  The heroes are self-sacrificing and ultimately overcome their personal failings to do their best for friends, team, and humanity.  Which brings us around to the spiritual:
 
Humanity: there are the three grand factions based on geography, as stated, and a fourth based on corporate greed, but all are seen as limited and rather stupid.  This is where the alien entity comes in.  While they are fighting its possible absorption of humanity, we see that humanity has to change.  We see that it has to become more open to all factions, and that it must act as if all were members of an extended family, above and beyond those of one’s own planet or who share the same selfish agenda.  This bringing together, it is becoming apparent, is what the alien entity intends to do, although we do not know if this will be a spiritual improvement or a Borg-like enslavement to the Prime Director.  But we are being made aware that there is something that is infinitely more beautiful waiting for humanity. 
 
I do not know yet how this will play out.  Perhaps my temporary blindness will ensure that I turn back to my stuffy studies and will never find out (although my sci-fi fanatic wife will certainly see it to the end).   But what we are given to know so far of the Proto Molecule, now that it seems done with killing people, is promising.  “It,” as some of the scientists studying it say, never stops advancing.  It goes on and on to the more complex and the more inclusive.  It never stops learning and perhaps hasn’t really killed anyone at all.  Perhaps it only enriches those it blends with, leaving private destinies intact.  Perhaps, then, is it just as we think God is.
 
God and sci-fi.  We have people mating like dogs and people fighting like dogs trying to mate; we have people unleashed from ancient custom and religion to behave like nothing but their thin selves, unhappy, unfulfilled and furtive amidst the most spectacular of technological achievements.  Kind of like us today.  And we have them searching and, in the fantasy, finding that ‘something extra’ that is beyond mere humanity.  It is all the same, as it ever was.  Just as written earlier, there is always a spiritual element in these stories, whether intended or not.  We know that in this commercial enterprise of a series they cannot and will not go full God on us with all the bells and incense, but it is apparent that the writer(s) here understands the eternal human condition.  He understands that his story is the story of humanity for all times, and that no amount of clever manipulation and technology can consciously change us.  We need, rather, something from another source that will take the best of what we have and transport this beyond and beyond, in never ending improvement.  In the old days they called that ‘going home to glory.”  In this story it may well be “going home to the “Proto Molecule,” the original force that will somehow work its way either from or through our souls into our lives, to lead us beyond our original sin of blind narcissism. 
 
Funny thing, too, that I am going blind in my mortal age, to be restored through modern technology.   Perhaps somewhere in the haze of anesthesia I will find my personal proto molecule.  If so, rest assured I will let you know.   
 
 
 
 

​ 
The title sounds a little ominous, doesn’t it?  It’s the kind of thing that tough ex-marine fathers from Texas tell their sons on their first hunting trip.  It’s the kind of thing that principles of high schools used to tell students at graduation.  It’s the kind of thing that involves my mother as well, although this is not the kind of thing that she would say.
 
The journey to this title began about ten years ago when I listened to a radio station with a Sunday morning program called Musica Antigua.  It features music primarily from Europe from the earliest period when it was first rendered into notes, or survived by being passed down, to roughly the Baroque era, which ran through the 1600’s and early 1700’s.   As most of this music, and certainly the best of it, is religious and primarily Catholic in origin, it is surprising that a radio station that loudly promotes Marxism and every fringe PC interest group should play this stuff, but apparently the intellectuals in the crowd simple cannot deny that this is the best music that the West has to offer.  It is.  And one morning my wife and I heard what I consider to be one of the best of the best, a soul- rendering choral masterpiece by Thomas Tallis called Spem in Alium.  He was the court musical genius during the reign of Elizabeth in the latter 1500’s, who was also a Catholic during the Protestant purges.  History notes that he was so wonderful that Elizabeth simply turned a blind eye even as high court officials were regularly executed for their Papist ties.  
 
I might also briefly note that the author of Fifty Shades of Gray listens to this music as he causes his sex-mates to suffer in the real world for their (I presume) mutual pleasure, which only goes to show that even the devil can recognize the work of the Holy Spirit.  Just as the aforementioned “intellectuals in the crowd” do.  Thomas might be rolling over in his grave for this if he has not already been granted his heavenly reward.
 
My mother was no sadist, and might well have been a saint, but I am no objective observer.  What she did have was a tremendous sense for art and music, and when I sent her a rather poor recording of Spem in Alium, she still was able to say, “It is music that makes me proud to be human.”  As usual with things my mother said, I would never have thought of that on my own, and as usual, she was right.  This music (get the David Wilcox version from King’s College if you are interested) not only gets to the soul, but it enlightens it, showing to us not what we think what we might be, but something much greater.  What it does no less proves to us without question that we share in our own tiny selves the unthinkable greatness of God.  Listen to this and you get an idea of what paradise is, and what we were meant to be, and still are. 
 
I for one do not allow myself to listen to it that often.  I am afraid, for one, that with such familiarity I might begin to treat it as just another bit of choral music.  But for two, it is almost unbearable to hear.  If I give it my whole intention, I cannot help but cry, in a big way.  It pulls something out of me so great that the ‘me’ I think I am really cannot contain it, like the old wine skins bursting with new wine from the parables of the Gospels.   It is, or can be, that powerful.
 
It so happened that I was in another winter funk the other morning as I brought out the bacon and eggs.  I decided to grab something like a Gregorian chant from the old CD pile to pick me up and came upon a collection of choral music that was stuffed way in the back.  The plastic package was covered in old grease, used obviously for other bacon and eggs breakfasts, but it had no recognizable number on it for me.  I put the first of two CD’s on and it played fairly typical northern European renaissance religious works.  We sat down to eat as they hummed pleasantly on.  Then came the first notes of Spem.  Oh no, I thought, I am not prepared for this, but as I went to turn it off, my wife said “no.”   So it happened that I had found our first copy, long lost, and now it was coming to bring me out of the fog of early December to a holy light.  As it played, I had to leave the room to maintain a level composure, but even from a distance I caught the traces of glory. 
 
Perhaps because of the distant listening I also caught something that I had never caught before, something that reminded me of my mother’s feelings of pride for humanity: that we were potentially so great, made as we were in the image of God, that we were not meant to be just passive witnesses to God’s glory.  We were also meant to be active in Him in this world.  In other words, with the greatness that we have been offered, it is also absolutely incumbent upon us to act in appropriate response to our gift.  The shock I felt was unnerving.  Nothing could be more humbling, and even somewhat terrifying, than to find that the price for glory was sublime duty to the will of heaven, even in the opaque world of Man.
 
We know what that duty is, too.  We know we know because of the heroes we make.  Our true heroes lend their lives in sacrifice to others, but not only to save human forms.  The hero’s sacrifice is also to bring the shining reality he sees back to the normal world.  It is the reality of eternity, the reality that brings us to tears through such works as Spem.  The hero honors glory by showing to us and himself that life is only a small thing in the shadow of heaven.  Such sacrifice, whether carried through to the death or in a long life of dedication, is the meat, the measurable substance, of holy works of art.   The one gives the encouragement for the other, while the other gives the reality to the art.  
 
The ways to become a hero are written for us in holy texts and sometimes secular works, but there is a catch: for most, these texts do not bring with them the joy and conviction necessary to strive towards perfection.  The Bible, for instance, is more a stern reprimand than an inspiration to many most of the time.  It is said – and I have experienced this – that such sacred readings can only inspire us through the gift of grace, which can be asked for but cannot be controlled through any formula. 
 
Ah, but music!   Music can move anyone in the desired direction.  How far one is moved depends upon one’s receptivity, but something almost always happens with music.  For instance, I hate nasty gangster rap “music” because I feel its violence and hatred.  If I wanted to feel it, I would feel it more intimately, but feel it I do whether I want to or not.  And so it is with sacred music.  One might reject the feeling, but it is there for the offering.  The language of music, it seems, can come pre-wrapped in grace.  In this it might well be a language akin to that of angels.   It does not bring the reason for doing this or not doing that, but it supplies the power to overcome the reluctance to follow a calling.   
 
Willingness, then, is what it ultimately gives us, whether it is an empowerment for war or for heaven.  With war, there is death, and still we march on to the pipes and drums; with heaven, there is life, but still we have difficulty.  Death is easy, it seems, compared to life, but we have been given the language of angels to help.  We can choose to listen or not, but it is there.  It is there to help us fulfill our sacred duty to compliment the spiritual gift of glory right here on earth.  It is a tremendously difficult, heroic task, but the call to duty that comes through such gifted composers as Thomas Tallis is so compelling, so beyond bounds, that we sometimes are made willing to suffer the pains of discarding our old skins to prepare for the new wine.   


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

​ 
            We know a guy who got religion a few years ago at the same church retreat where, for the first time, I dragged out my guitar to play old timey three- and- four chord religious numbers.   He wasn’t the only one.   The retreat did something for all of us, even though much of it was as cheesy as a room full of Packer’s fans.  Little did we know that this was only the honeymoon.  One older woman, for instance, was inspired to fanaticism because she began to see signs and wonders everywhere (it was she who helped me see the faces in the scroll of Isaiah in the Museum of Scrolls in Jerusalem).  She no longer does, describing herself as “dry.”  She is not bitter, as we all know God works in His own way, but she is not happy about it.  We might even say that, once the magic was taken away, she is unhappier now than before, although I don’t know that for sure.  But I do think that of this aforementioned guy.  He, too, had wonders revealed to him, which must have been marvelous until the Church revealed a wonder of its own.
 
            Divorce.  Thirty years before, he had married his current wife in a church service.  She had been married briefly before, and had gotten divorced without having children.  The cut was clean and there were no complications of any unusual sort in the next thirty years of marriage until after the retreat.  It was then that this guy found out that, because his wife had been married in a church the first time, she could not marry again in the name of the Catholic Church until she had her first marriage annulled.  She had not “gotten religion” along with him at the retreat, but put up with his first attempt at the annulment.  When that was declined, she said “never again” and left for a Protestant church.  At this time, this guy can’t take communion and is considered to be committing a mortal sin – that’s the kind that sends you to hell – every time he has sex with his wife of thirty years.  Now they seem to be having trouble with their marriage.  It might just be that the rules of the Catholic Church will cause the two to get a divorce.  Unless she then concedes to try again for an annulment with him, which is unlikely, the guy will never be able to get married again or, of course, have sex without risking eternal damnation.  
 
            It seems we are often led by a carrot and then clobbered by a stick.  For me, this poor man is suffering from the kind of legalism that poisoned the scribes and Pharisees.  It was Jesus who called them hypocrites because they only knew the law from the outside, not from the heart.  In fact, according to Christianity, many of the laws, such as those prescribing food, were put into place to condition the people for the future to do Christ’s will.  And what Christ’s will was, was that we should love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves.  Needless to say, eating shell fish was not credited as part of that. 
 
In the same vein, neither do I think the sin of this “guy” is a sin at all.  Rather, he is suffering under a law that was made to keep people from using one another as sexual playthings.  The letter of the law, if it is not pointed towards this very good end, should be meaningless, as is eating shellfish.  And yet the Church will not give in.  It is simply considered truth and that is that.  Talk about your scribes and Pharisees.
 
However, the issue at the heart of it all is sin, which certainly does exist.  As silly as it may be, sometimes we find the heart of real sin most readily in fictional movies.  I certainly think I did in the Fargo series on Netflix, made in the same spirit as the movie of the same name.   
 
It begins in Bemidji, a small town in northern Minnesota that is the only place of any size between Duluth and Fargo, North Dakota.  The series paints the people there as ludicrously stereotypical American Nordics, who face the eternally frozen world with a blank politeness that makes the rest of us laugh.  We suspect that it is too good to be real, and for Lester, the middle-aged looser who barely makes a living selling life insurance, we find this to be true.  It begins with him being pushed around by the old high school bully, against whom Lester is pathetically helpless.  He has his nose broken in the incident, and while waiting to be treated in the emergency room, meets another man who also has suffered some damage to his face.  The other man – played by a devious Billy Bob Thornton – finally gets the lowdown on what happened to Lester, then tells him that, if it were he, he would kill the bully.  Lester laughs nervously, but Billy Bob continues.  In fact, he says, I’ll do you the favor and kill the guy for you.  “Just tell me yes or no.”  Lester is confused, and as he thinks about this proposal he is asked by the nurse if he is Lester.  He says “yes.”  After treatment, he goes home to a wife who berates him for being such a looser, and who tells him flatly that she should have married the good one, his younger brother.   He has had a very bad and weird day.
 
Not long after, he finds that the bully has been murdered – stabbed in the neck while “busy” at a house of ill-repute.   He is contacted by police as a possible witness to the stranger, Billy Bob, who was known to be at the emergency room at the same time as he.  Confused and upset, he goes home to the wife, who berates him again, this time attacking him for his sexual performance.  They are in the basement trying to fix an old washing machine, and he grabs the nearest tool, a ball-peen hammer, and whacks her on the head.  She looks at him cross-eyed until blood spirits out and she falls to the floor.  For a few seconds, Lester is appalled.  Then he fully snaps, falling on her with the hammer until her head is crushed to near mush.  He has now become a murderer. 
 
His new identity is at first frightening, but as the series moves on and he gets away with things, he begins to build confidence in himself.  He feels powerful for the first time in his life.  He marries a beautiful and much younger woman, gets “salesman of the year,” a big house and, most importantly, the adulation of everyone.  He loses all sense of guilt and becomes a predator, in the mold of the assassin, Billy Bob.  For him, self-centered evil has taken over his life, and he has never been happier.  
 
That is why rules are made.  The movie makes it clear that we are all potential predators.  As the old fable tells us, we must never entertain temptation, as this is the nose of the camel in the tent that eventually will be followed by the entire camel.  The rules of the Catholic Church mean to be so unyielding that the faithful will not even entertain breaking them; and if broken, those miscreants must serve as an example to others.  The Fall of Man is real; we all are capable of evil.  Like Lester, we might not only come to act with evil intent, but come to prosper from it, and with that, come to love being evil incarnate ourselves. 
 
But I cannot forget the Pharisees.  In quiet moments of spiritual meditation, a similar picture always arises in my mind.  I have described it in these essays before; it is of a sandy beach empty of people, with a jagged cliff behind it and a still, infinite sea before it.  It speaks as the Holy Spirit, and in this, all the strife and turmoil and emotion of human life have been bypassed as so much dross.  In this, evil is envisioned as turning one’s back towards the sea and one’s face to the harsh land beyond the cliff.  In this, evil is the concern over the dross to the exclusion of the vast holiness of our eternal nature.  Evil becomes, then, exactly as we have been taught: a devouring spirit of egotism.  It might not smash a woman’s head to pulp, but it will train our sight away from the shore leading to the sea.  The moral overtones are not clear here, but the meaning is the same: we will lose God and our eternity with Him with a selfish outlook.  Here, we see religious legalism as just that: a structure built by man to facilitate the holy, but not the holy itself.  If it leads elsewhere than towards God, it proves that it has become the law of the prideful Pharisees. 
 
It is often very hard or impossible to determine the final effects of religious legalism.  Maybe, in the case of our example of the problem marriage, dissolution of that marriage or celibacy would turn out to be better for both.  Ultimately, however, it is left to the Holy Spirit to decide.  If it clearly says “eat with lepers,” then eat with lepers; and if it says “drop your nets – and your sins – and follow me,” then drop everything and walk with uncommon faith towards the sea.