​ 
            But there’s a tree, of many, one,
            A single field which I have looked upon,
            Both of them speak of something gone;
            The Pansy at my feet
            Doth the same tale repeat:
            Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
            Where is it now, the glory and the dream?             
                    (from “Intimations of Immortality…,”  W. Wordsworth)
 
            To see a world in a grain of sand
            And a heaven in a wild flower,
            Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
            And eternity in an hour.
                        (from “Auguries of Innocence,”  W. Blake)
 
 
One of our favorite holiday jokes in the house is from Gary Larson’s cartoon, “The Far Side,” in which he draws three old-fashioned style kings seated at a Joe Poluka bar.  Behind the bar is the bartender drying a glass with this reply:  “More like three wise GUYS, I’d say!”  That would be me and my rebellious friends back in high school as we pondered the literary greats, especially the Romantic Poets.  Just reading it made us feel wise, even though we were teens with superiority complexes as long as a king’s robe with no, as in zero, experience in the greater universe.  We would seek it out, of course, and I for one have become sadder for it, and in pale compensation, somewhat wiser.   We had the drive, though, sparked by the Romantics because they spoke to us of what we had so recently lost: a fundamental innocence that made us closer to paradise – or God, if you wish.  As children we did not know of our greater kinship with God, because we had nothing to compare it to.  It was as teens coming into the world that we began to understand the price of adult reasoning.  We could then regret the loss of what we had formerly taken for granted.  As said, pale compensation – so pale that we wanted that lost glimpse of heaven back.  That is why we used the hippie drugs and took paths in directions that would lead us away from standard success.  I will not know if it was worth it until I am dead and have received an even greater depth of comparison.  I am not always hopeful of what I will find.
 
The Romantics, though: they were at the forefront of the Age of Reason, writing only a few years or decades after the world-shattering revolutions in America and France.  The Industrial Revolution was beginning as well, and the last shreds of innocence – not kindness, but innocence – from ancient times were disappearing.  The world was becoming hard with pragmatism and science and the complexities of capitalism, and the Romantics were perhaps the first to recognize what Europe – and someday the world – was losing.  Just as my friends and I in adolescence, those before the poets had not realized what they once had – a simple, non-judgmental relationship with God and nature.  They killed, lusted, enslaved and plundered, but they did not doubt the existence of a God-driven universe, one filled with spirits and magic at all turns.  Now it was slipping from not only the poets’ but society’s grasp, and they longed for it as only those who are hopelessly bereaved can. 
 
I should not say “hopeless,” for just as us wise guy kids sought a direction, so did the Romantics.  They thought that they could get back to heaven through nature, but not as a farmer might.  Rather, they thought it could be done through art.  Just as the religious tried – and still try - to dispel all things from their minds other than God, so the artists of the new Age of Reason sought to clear all impurities from their minds that did not relate to his art. 
 
Those who call themselves artists still do.  Last weekend I attended a classical guitar workshop where we not only played our amateur pieces, but received advice from the impossibly talented professionals.  One, a guy I already knew from Madison, virtually bared his soul before us as he told of his journeys with the guitar.  He had begun as a teenage shredder, a fan of hard rock, before he heard a classical guitarist play.  “I can do that,” he told himself, and for the next thirty years that is exactly what he has done.  Trying to find the right sound obviously controls every aspect of his life.  He is still embittered, for instance, by his experience on stage when a student of the world-famed Segovia harangued him for forty five minutes for not using the right fingering to play the same notes.  He also told us of a recent experience with a dying friend and student, Jimmy, who had come to him for last words of advice on his playing.  Our expert told him that he would have to learn to sight-read those things that were memorized, and memorize those things that were sight-read.  This does not seem like much to us, but it meant everything to the two of them, as I found out later at the wine and cheese table.
 
It must have been the wine, but I had already intuited it.  As he passed by our group, I said, “Please don’t take this in an offensive way, but…” there was a pause of expectation – “you seem to hold for music and guitar what others hold for God.  What I heard you say was that you had to clear your head of all other things to truly grasp the music as it should be, in its purist form.  You are looking for perfection in form and beauty.  You are looking for heaven in your art.”  Too which I received a genuinely grateful response: “Yes,” he sighed, happy that I understood, “I have replaced religion with music.” 
 
He had.  I have changed my practice method because of this understanding which he conveyed almost magically, something hidden cryptically in his words.  I understand better now that somewhere in music, and in anything we call true art, are the footsteps of God.
 
I have thought about this concept since then, wishing to find truth that is beyond dogma or self-righteousness.   The Greeks understood that truth was beauty and vice-versa, but might not have fully grasped the situation, just as our expert guitarist seems to be a little off.  The truth is, oddly enough, that truth itself and beauty are artifacts of creation, not the urge or power of creation itself.  Music and art in perfect form imitate foundational creation, but are not this, are not the impulse that could only come from the prime source.  There is no art or appreciation of art in a vacuum.  Rather, perfect art is sought after and appreciated for its imitation of God’s will.  This can bring us to the foot of the source, but still not bring us to grasp the source itself.  Art is not an idol, but is rather more like a liturgy, there to bring us before God, while not being God himself. 
 
Thus the Romantics, other serious artists, and ignorant adolescents sensing a fundamental loss, are on the same path as the great mystics of the great religions.  They are all seeking a purity that will bring them to the source, to paradise – to God himself, however envisioned.  Artists have only to understand that art itself is the path rather than the endgame.
 
Which brings me to one more thing I think our Madison guitarist has found out: just as with the great mystics, I think he has realized that to find perfect art, one must die to everything else, to experience what the mystics have called, ever since St John of the Cross, the “dark night of the soul.”  It is a lonely and terrifying place, the necessary transitional space that must be lived before coming before God.   In this we become absolutely pure, carrying no baggage.  It was the reason that I think our guitarist mentioned Jimmy, his dying friend.  In the no-bull transitional space of death, they were both finding the language of eternity through the practice of the guitar.  I think this had brought the two of them to take the first frightening step beyond the altar of art to touch the true Holy Grail that is the chalice, the being, of God. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
Poor Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning author, has gone the way of all flesh, as has his bestest buddy, Fidel “Fidelito”  Castro, but his astounding book One Hundred Years of Solitude lives on as one of the most entertaining and profound books of our age.  As with works by many authors, the novel exceeds the wisdom of the author.  Marquez’s masterpiece takes place in Columbia, right next door to Venezuela, whose revolutionary leader, Hugo Chavez, was also a bestest buddy of Fidelito.  The record of that relationship is writ tragically large in Venezuela now.  Marquez should have known better, as he himself wrote of the violence and ruin we court when we forget history.  In so doing, or so he wrote, we are not only doomed to repeat history, but are eventually doomed, period. 
 
We go back to the primary fictional village in his book, Macondo, founded by the wandering patriarch of the Buendia family.  We see it grow into a town and then into a small city as it goes through a set of personal histories affected and reflected by the looming events of national history, all in surreal Technicolor similar in its magical realism and depth to the Bible.  At one point, everyone begins to forget things.  They forget things so much that they put notes up to themselves to remember things, only to forget who put them up in the first place, and why.  The town falls into a state of stupor.  Somewhere around then, the civil war begins (a civil war which continues in reality, albeit subdued, to this day), and at one point thousands are killed and taken out of town by rail to be dumped somewhere off in the jungle, or off into the distant sea.  Nobody remembers this, either, or at least no one is supposed to remember this.  In this, Marquez is giving us the message: don’t forget your history; remember what has already occurred to understand what is happening today.  If one does not do so, one will never understand the present.  
 
While Marquez presented the situation in quirky nightmarish form, we would do well to read and ponder his story, for it is obvious that we are caught in the same trap of forgetfulness ourselves.  As I see it, it manifests itself in two primary ways.  The first concerns modernistic hubris, in that we seem to think that all the ugly stuff of the past is now long gone, put behind us by our supreme sophistication.  This is ridiculous: the horrors of our past are alive and well within us now.  I am not just talking about Hitler and antebellum slavery, but our larger past, which includes the Roman Empire, the feudal states, the religious wars, the Inquisition, the pogroms – all of it.  The point of this history is not to shame us or just to humble us, but to show us what we as humans are made of.  We, all of us, have a violent and greedy dark side.  This is not just true of certain classes or races of people, but of all of us who share the human genome.  With this realization we should understand that we can fall into barbarity or totalitarianism at any moment.  It is not something to play around with.   We are not fundamentally different emotionally and morally from our collective ancestors.   Rather, it is only our fragile and relatively recent discoveries about our potential that keep us, however tenuously, from terror and enslavement.   
 
Second: in forgetting our history, we have allowed others to rewrite it.  As a former history student, I have been alarmed by the – I almost hesitate to call it what it is – selectively destructive propaganda that students are now taught.  If you consider yourself a centrist or right- of - center in the political debate, you are already familiar with the complaint.  In this (for instance), George Washington is defined by his ownership of slaves, not his unbelievable sacrifice to his country for an idea of freedom, or his epic courage.  Abolitionists such as Adams and Franklin are forgotten as the current historical eye focuses instead on slave-owner Jefferson, forgetting his own brilliance and call for freedom for all, at least eventually.  In this, it is forgotten that all the civilized world from China to the Mississippi Basin to Peru had slaves that were often brutally mistreated or killed.  Instead, the expanse of real history is perverted and distorted and reshaped for certain ends which seem ominously like something Marquez would mistakenly admire in 20th century Havana.    
 
There is more to history than just politics.  In the end of One Hundred Years, the descendants of the founding Buendia patriarch become morally perverse.  The male inheritor begins to have sex with his sister, bizarre sex that is presented with some humor to slightly veil a greater ugliness.  It is through this, in a magical way that seems quite ordinary in the context of the book, that the remnants of the city implode, and it reverts to the chaos of vine and forest that it once was.  We see that in one hundred years, the history of civilization has been writ small:  we are taken from foundation to prosperity to violence and political corruption, then to moral decay, then to final and total destruction.  It is Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Egypt, the Mayans and the Ming dynasty, all of the great empires in a nutshell.  In Macondo, as in most empires, the end began when people forgot their history, that which tells all of us who we really are.  It is knowledge that can spur us on towards our potential for greatness as well as warn us of our potential for barbarity. 
 
This, our moral history, is now being taught in distorted form.  We are now being told that the great moral structure of our civilization painstakingly built over millennia is bigoted and wrong.  As one former truth is demonized, those who want to are then able to move on and demonize the whole thing.  Is theft really theft if one is only stealing from an (presumably) undeserving upper class?  Is it really murder if the victim is too young (or too old) to speak, let alone vote?  Is any of the moral code for sexual behavior valid if parts of it have already been tossed into the rubbish heap?
 
What does real history tell us happens to a civilization that does such things?  It took Macondo only one hundred years to find out, but that is fiction.  In reality, collapse might come in a year from without, or over centuries from within.  In each case the trend is downward.  Renewal is possible, but only if we have the courage to remember who and what we are as fully and honestly as possible. 
 
 
 
 

​ 
There is Playboy and LGBTQ and DMT and a whole lot of stuff we do or would like to do, and it is not cool at all with Mother Church.  We not only criticize her for her disapproving gaze, but give her a good kick in the arse, as the British say, and then walk away and forget about her (or her reformed Martin Luther recommitted allies).  For a while.  But life has a way of turning us back to the important stuff, whether through tragedy or impending death, or through simple grace.  In whatever case, grace is oddly enough.  It wasn’t always so, because it wasn’t always there, or so we are told; or so we are told by the very institutions we once kicked to the curb. We might not ever agree with all the rules, but it is hard to argue against grace.  And although the Church does not dispense it, it does lead us to it, and it is this that, for millions, makes all the difference in the world.
 
Practically, it shouldn’t.  Tell me to point to grace and I could not; tell me to go to my bank and push in the numbers to withdraw an envelope of grace and I cannot.  Like the Beatle’s love, money can’t buy grace and grace can’t be used like money.  As it is no-thing, it should then be worthless, but like love, it is a no-thing that counts for everything. 
 
But once, in a desert long, long ago, we are told that a people had nothing but spiritual hard cash money, or something like it.  I for one would like to have this divine money, but no matter: just like grace, it disappears; and unlike grace, it will never reappear, and most likely will never take us to the Promised Land.
 
Way back in the world of Technicolor – that would be the (19)50’s and early 60’s to you gamboling foals – we had blockbuster movies from directors such as Cecil B. De Mille taken straight from the Bible.  These movies made stars of its heroes, too.  We had Kirk Douglas as Spartacus and Anthony Quinn as Barabbas, and the greatest of all, Charlton Heston as Moses, whose mighty staff could not be pried even from his cold, dead fingers, or so we must believe.   It is by this latter movie based on the Old Testament that we were brought into the time of miracles, when God spoke straight out to people, from Abraham to our epic Moses, by (or for) whom the greatest miracles of all time were performed.  How often, in times that can be historically documented, do we have accounts of such miracles as the parting of the Red Sea, of manna from heaven, of boundless water from a rock in the desert, or of the flashing thunder and stone tablets of Mt. Sinai?  Who would not want to witness this stuff now?  I for one am sure that I would be convinced of the whole saga of the Good Book with just one little parting of a nearby lake.  My life and priorities would then be set.  Never again would I worry about the things of the world, and Holy would be my name.  Yet we are amazed when we see the chosen ones turn time and again against the mighty, bearded Charlton Heston-turned Moses.   Within weeks of the parting of the Red Sea, we find the people “murmuring.” They want to go back to Egypt, where they would be slaves but at least would have food and water.  They curse Moses.  So down comes manna, out comes water from a rock, and on and on it goes, from one miracle to the next as the people bitch and moan all the way to Jericho and the Promised Land.  How “stiff necked,” as the Bible says it, can people be?
 
The point is, “stuff” can never be enough, as incredible as it seems.  A miracle can be explained away, and if it is not, it is quickly subsumed by the ordinary standards of reality.  In fact, impossible things happen all the time.  Way back in the early years of this website I described dozens of these things, from Wee People to ghosts to miracle healings to ESP, most categories of the “impossible” attested to by multiple witnesses or subjected to scientific scrutiny.  And yet I do not see a great turning of the world towards the spiritual.  We are, like the Israelites, a stiff-necked people, so absorbed in our own pitiable sense of reality that we cannot see the forest for the trees, no matter what.
 
Enter grace.  In Catholicism, grace is represented by the Holy Ghost or Spirit, part of the Trinitarian (three in one) God.   No, no one understands the Trinity, just as no one understands the workings of the Holy Spirit, which is the deepest way (as far as I know) that God works through us.  The Church claims that the Spirit was made available to us through the sacrifice of Christ.  It is this spirit that is freely given to many, though none deserve it.  It is the core mission of most Christian religions – certainly Catholicism - to make us more open to the Holy Spirit.  The dispensation, or ability, to receive the Holy Spirit is called grace.  And it is this grace that allows us to believe even though we do not see, as opposed to the Israelites who could see without believing. 
 
Thus it was that poor Moses was denied entry into the Promised Land.  It happened that at one point, the people were bitching and moaning again about God and His failure to provide for them.  They had already received the Ten Commandments and had suffered through the stupidity of worshipping the Golden Calf, and here they were again, wishing to be dead or slaves or what-not, anything but to believe in a God who had towered over them as a huge fire for weeks and weeks, and who had done wonders for them such as the world had never known.  Stiff-necked.  Anyway, relenting once again, God commanded Moses to raise his rod towards a rock and tell it, in words, to bring forth water.  Instead, Moses raised his staff and hit the rock, for he did not believe that mere words would be enough.  For his disbelief, God decreed that Moses would live to see the Promised Land but never enter it, because of his doubt at the site called Meribah (‘contention’).  In the end, then, not even Moses, the man of miracles, could complete the journey.
 
And so it happened that at the age of 120, still strong and with good vision, Moses died on Mt Nebo as he stared across the Jordan at the Promised Land. 
 
This, as it turns out, is not only Moses’s story, and not only Charlton Heston's story, but all of ours.  Each of us at some time in our lives is a slave to the world of security, so deeply afraid that we need something special – something like a wicked pharaoh – to get us moving towards the Promised Land.  If we then leave our secure place, we must suffer through a desert of deprivation, supported at times only by our faith.  If we hold it together long enough, we just might reach the river that separates us from the Promised Land, but once there, still will not be allowed to pass for our transgressions and our disbelief.  But now, unlike Moses, we are told that we can cross, with the aid of the Holy Spirit which descends upon us through saving grace.   
 
I admit that to most of us, this sounds like a script more likely bought by Walt Disney than Cecil B. DeMille, a story more suitable for children than adults.  How can we swallow such a large fish tale?
 
We can because it comes to us like the enigma of the serpent swallowing its tail, the Alpha merging with the Omega, all supplanted by a kiss.  We accept this story by experiencing the Holy Spirit through grace – that is, we accept the Holy Spirit simply by experiencing it.  We are drawn towards it through its infinite sweetness, opening to it willingly.  It comes as a wisdom that surpasses words.   As such, it cannot be conjured through our own volition, as Moss had thought.  It is not something experienced on the outside, like the physical miracles of Moses, but internally.  As such it becomes a part of us.  To question it is to question not one’s senses, then, but one’s very thoughts, including the thought of being.  It is, in essence, a non-physical experience more memorable to us than physical experience.  It is, as such, a reflection of its source: something un-graspable and unseen, but more real than what we can hold in our hands.
 
Such direct wisdom can be denied, but as it is imperishable, it is much harder to do so.  Still, the whole process is a mystery unto itself.  Such it is with the Holy Spirit, and such it is with our lives, each and every one a saga as grand in its own way as the life of Moses, just waiting to be played out.   Unlike Moses, we have the benefit of having the wings of Spirit to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land.   But, like Moses, even with grace we still have our failures at Meribah, our many doubts.  We must, then, look to heaven as a new people for the mercy denied Moses, to be forgiven our lack of courage for when we are given, but fail, to try our wings on the lofty heights of Mt Nebo.    

 
When I was first married and settled into a real house, not a student room or jungle hammock, I got a subscription to Playboy.  My wife hated it, and to this day I don’t really know why.  I did not buy it for “porn,” as, even thirty years ago, Playboy was the softest of the soft.  It was, after all, born in the 1950’s, when certain body parts could be shown only if they served a purpose higher than mere titillation (ie, “art”).  Of course I’d glance at the photos, but I really, truly got it for the non-censored articles and interviews.  The naughty jokes were clever, too, and there was always the great college football review every August.  The only things I could see wrong with it were the emphasis on expensive grownup toys (wretchedly materialistic) and the puffy, faux intellectualism of the Playboy Philosophy.  It’s not that I disagreed strongly with its luxury-padded libertarianism, but that it went on and on as if it were really about something more than a certain man’s need to explain to himself and to the world, and I think to God, his obsession with sex. 
 
That certain man was the originator himself, Hugh Hefner, who I first read about in an interview in his own magazine.  His parents, he said, were Waspish Episcopalians (as I recall) who were the very picture of staunch puritanism, which included, we need not be told, their attitudes about sex.  Heff, like most young men, loved sex.  At the same time, he didn’t want to outrage his parents over something so venial.  I am sure he didn’t want to go to Hell, either.  So he made an artsy, tasteful mag for the gentleman of distinction, which he hoped would eliminate the sordid reputation of the sex act itself - no matter that, whatever the class or the financial status of the person, to rut is to rut.  Bow ties do not a torrid night make, but Heff thought that the pretty bow would excuse the drooling done once the bow tie came off.   
 
He was a person of his age, as most of us are, with a need to excuse his behavior, a need which went beyond my own generation’s.  I, for one, rarely felt guilty about sex before marriage, but rather was concerned if I had engaged in it with proper mutual respect.  Today’s youth, it seems, does not even care about that, as free porn videos, many of them self-made, have flooded the internet and made the whole thing almost wearying.  The down-grading of sex since the Age of Hefner – the first person in the US, I believe, who sold porn (however soft) right out in the open – has not gone as planned, as men back then got more excitement from a pair of legs than the young folks now get from full and frontal live action, but I precede myself.  Rather, I want to return to the reason for Hefner’s magazine, besides profit, in the first place: to normalize his prurient interests to all those on heaven and earth.
 
As a near- post-war man, I understand his problem.  He did not want to be seen as the slimy sex trafficker of his parents’ age, when sex itself was supposed to be viewed largely as a procreative act which was otherwise to be suppressed.  He wanted to move us all beyond this notion that was both made and promoted by most of the Christian churches of the day (not to mention most other religions).  We baby boomers carried his wish further, and today, many of the Protestant denominations have turned away from the prudery of the past.  Not all have, however, and most especially not the original nomination, the Catholic Church.  Not that I have thought of it that much, having become an active member in the Church again only well after married and middle-age life.  But recently a peculiar set of circumstances sent me back into Hefner’s day.  It has bothered me ever since.
 
It happened while talking in confession to a priest.  Besides my general selfishness and orneriness, I don’t really do much of anything anymore.  I should have seen that for the sin of omission that it is, but instead I looked for something that might interest the priest.  When he mentioned in passing “lust,” I grabbed onto that.  Yes, I lust, and the advertisers know it.  Every time they show a hot babe next to a product I reflexively lust, and, according to advertiser philosophy, associate that longing with the product, which I then go and buy, never really knowing why and never really understanding why it doesn’t bring me the pleasure I think it should.  It was not a good idea to bring this up because I do not feel bad about this occasional lust, only stupid, but the priest grabbed at it (as I should have known he would), and said that, what the heck, it was not of great importance.  I agreed.  He continued: “except if it led to”…then he said it, the taboo-ed word itself: “masturbation.”   
 
For men  – I do not know about women - there is nothing more universally scorned in public and more practiced in private than masturbation.  From what I’ve heard, they used to love to rage against “onanism” in the pulpit in the olden days, but now most clerics are (gratefully) silent about it.  I think this is because of the Hefner Conundrum – that is, that religion will be avoided if it condemns something that most of us do and will continue to do.  People no longer feel they have to go to church, and the church needs people.  Driving them away with something so common and, to the naked eye, so harmless, doesn’t make sense in the greater scheme. 
 
I, however, had to know what the Church thought, and so asked the priest if it condemned masturbation as a mortal sin – that is, as a sin that will send you to Hell if not confessed.  He said, a little to my surprise, “yes.”  I arched my eyebrows in genuine concern, and then shifted the load from us happily adjusted and bow-tied gents to the youth: “But the young guys!  They have ready porn whenever they want!  What do you think they do?  Most are too embarrassed to confess this to you.  Are they all going to Hell?”  He replied that it is a matter of grave concern, yes, but that it is not a mortal sin if the passion is too great to bear. 
 
That, to me, is about as clear as mud, and Heff must be rolling in his grave.  But Heff did not die a happy man.  He had a heart attack around age 70, and then went through a period of deep depression.  He made the talk show circuit for a while after and told the interviewers that he was over that dark period.  Viagra was a part of his new happiness, and he was proud to let us all know that he was now living happily with twin platinum blonds who looked all the world like Vegas gold diggers from the 50’s.  Not long after – he was then going into his 80’s – he died.  They say he was lonely and confused and in fear towards the end.  Apparently, not even Heff thought his explanation to God for his obsession would work.
 
I think it was Heff’s Conundrum – wanting to have sex without being told he was offending God – that started the whole ball of humanity rolling down the aisle of ‘wokeness.’  Sex is a powerful drive, and young people often have weak ties to traditions that they do not make.  Heff helped exploit that, and now we are left with the fruits of it.  The list of broken families, confused youth, the tremendous increase in suicide and the unexpected decrease in sexual satisfaction that the young now are experiencing suggest to us the possibility that the expression of certain things – including sexual things - often leads to more problems than their suppression would.  
 
And that is the Church’s conundrum.  They do not want to lose parishioners because of excessive rules against sex, but they have known since Biblical times that sex can lead to all sorts of unholy behavior and cultural chaos.  It seems to me that they no longer know where to draw the line.  If not at masturbation, then where?  At heavy petting among singles?  At oral sex among married?  It is even probable that priests, at least the young ones, are nearly as guilty of onanism as the great unwashed.   Does it benefit God, if not the world, if they beat their chests and beg forgiveness each time?  Or would it be better if they just admitted to an “overwhelming passion,” said a little prayer for general forgiveness for being human, and then moved on?  Would the latter send them to damnation, or would it help to avoid excessive concern over it, something that could cause problems, too?  
 
I have no magical answer for this.  That few Catholics know that masturbation is a mortal sin, or that certain sexual acts in marriage are sinful, underscores the Church’s conundrum (I do not know even now which acts within marriage are considered mortal sins, if any).  Most would rather let it go, emphasizing holy humility and good works and mutual love and respect, but the rules are there, and according to them, a whole lot of people might be going to hell from an act of common human weakness and from an inability to confess out of embarrassment.  If I can declare anything, I would say that if they believe these rules, they should make them clear to everyone, for it is their job to save us from Hell.  If not, they should remove them.  Otherwise, we can rightly say that they are playing with fire here.
 
So it comes down to this: the Church has trapped itself in its own conundrum.  Fifteen-plus years ago, when I was first going back to church, our local church would bring in a very old, scarlet-faced priest once a year who would tell us in no uncertain terms how sinful most sex acts were.  Looking around, it was easy to see that some were embarrassed by the harangue, some were amused, while others simply rolled their eyes, but none looked convinced.  It is fairly obvious that most who still attend do not believe in the old-time sex sins, period.  The Church nominally does, but…what?  Should they recant and join the New Age movement?  Admit to centuries-old mistakes?
 
Might it be that masturbation makes monkeys of us all? 
 
By the rules, mortal sins send us to Hell, but God can do anything, and no one is really deserving of saving grace.  It is awarded out of mercy, and anything made or thought of by man is in need of it.  Perhaps that should begin the best sermon about this whole conundrum.  Maybe that would allow those poor red-faced boys to continue as faithful followers without bringing before them the threat of damnation or the demanding dregs of humiliation for something the Church is, more often than not, too embarrassed or too afraid to talk about. 
 
[As is often the case, today’s liturgy is exactly about sexual acts, including Paul in Romans 12, and the Gospel from Luke 12.  In Luke 12:48, we hear Jesus tell us, “Much will be demanded of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be entrusted with the person entrusted with more.”  That, I think, makes explicit what the Church warily implies: that some things are beyond the novitiate, but are demanded of the elders or acolytes.  This would absolve the young from their solitary acts, while demanding more from us oldsters, which is certainly an easier task – if one is not named Hugh Hefner.]

 
In the classic movie, Forrest Gump tells us what his mama always told him: “Life is like a box of chocolates: you have to bite into them to see what they are,” or something like that.  Which is true but only so far, like most metaphors.  We know that, while you might get the pasty artificial strawberry flavor or the sought-after caramel nugget, both are going to be sweet (unlike so much of life).  It can also be said of books.  For instance, I got a book on audio for our long trip up north last week that was titled The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter, featuring the return of Bob Lee Swagger as the seasoned man of action.  Like the chocolates, we know what the overall flavor will be: action adventure with lots of gun play.  But we don’t really know until we read (or hear) it what other flavors, or information or messages. it might give us.  
 
This one, by Hunter, has given me quite a bit, from the interesting –but- not- unexpected to the totally unexpected.  On the expected side, we are given an alternative scenario of the Kennedy assassination, which our man Swagger is tracking down some fifty years after the fact.  It appears that a rogue section of the CIA was responsible, but was able to cover it up so well that the patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, continues to take all the blame.  What is interesting in this fictional cover-up is how well this book, published in 2012, mirrors the manipulations of the CIA, as well as the state department and the upper levels of the FBI, in their attempt to take down our oddest of presidents, Donald J. Trump.  This book nails it, so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if Hunter, or whatever his real name might be, is a rogue former spook who is taking his former company to task.   Really excellent stuff. 
 
What was unexpected, though, was how the ‘social glue’ among those in the government agencies detailed by Hunter was so pivotal.  I was also surprised by how affected I have been by the old blue-blood Ivy League status symbols that form this social glue.  It just might be, I found not long after this book, one of my worst personal devils among so many.   
 
In the heartland, this form of snobbery is much less pronounced, with status leaning primarily on quantities of money, but in the East, especially the Northeast, knowledge of the blue- blood code is central to all the social climbers.  It is also troublesome for a lot of otherwise-contented people who are confronted with this snobbery on a more or less regular basis.  In this social climate, where you ‘came from’ is paramount, even if you don’t believe it yourself, because the connected people often run the innards of government, and own the most desirable properties.  It is these people who call themselves the Best and the Brightest, who live the most enviable lives in material advantages and who tell you what you should think if you want to be acceptable to them, the trend-setters.  No matter that they might take a 180 degree turn in policy or opinion on some cultural matter, they are always right, and if you disagree with them, you are not only wrong, but wrong in a vulgar, ignorant peasant sort of way.  You are obviously not of the manor born.  But they are, and they run things.  If you are not of the class, or have not pushed your way into the class by admission to Harvard or Yale and fulfilled your role there as someone compliant with the ruling class, you are lesser, and your opinion worthless.  Fight them or their power, and you will be destroyed by their righteous (and class-protective) wrath.  As Hunter says of Kennedy in his book, the president was assassinated because he was running policy counter to the opinion of the ruling class, even though his family had made inroads into the very same class, albeit by immoral means.  This conflict with the ruling-class is precisely what, I believe, is causing all the astounding drama whipped up since the inception of the Trump administration. 
 
All interesting in an objective sort of way, but during a night not long after hearing this book, my old nemesis the unconscious struck again.  I felt once again the pains of being outside of the class that my parents had so wanted me to belong to, even though they disliked it with a passion.  And that was the rub – we, my parents and I, were made to believe that we wanted to be part of the aristocracy while still maintaining disdain for it.  But you cannot do that if you wish to belong, not unless your pedigree goes back to the Mayflower and your treasure is as great as Midas’s.  I had never thought that I bought into the northeast class snobbery, but it is quite clear by my dream that I did, because the feeling of failure I felt during the dream was so palpable.  I had also thought that any sliver of that sense of class that may have snuck into me would have been cleansed in light of the greater wisdom brought by age.  Again, that is apparently not the case.  
 
This is a big deal, not only for myself but for all of us.  Class envy is not merely a silly butt-sniffing ceremony we are compelled to repeat as humans, but a source of horrendous conflict, some of it almost deserved.  Communism is based upon it, and communism has killed at least one hundred million people over the last century, with Chairman Mao, who is still revered in China, taking the dubious prize as biggest mass murderer in history.   Class envy is not merely a social thing – it often dictates who gets fed and whose ideas run the nation – but it is largely so.  All societies above simple family hunting bands have a class system, and in it the commoners are often stung by the notion that they are inferior. Regardless, they are compelled by the upper class to accept their status, as the upper class has most of the power and the money, but the rest resent it greatly.  Add a little starvation or a losing war to this formula, and you get revolution and often-times mass slaughter.  As I said, it’s a big deal for us all.
 
It is especially disappointing to me to find this sense of inferiority and envy still in myself because of my high regard for the greatest social class buster himself, Jesus of Nazareth.   We are all well aware of his slighting of the rich and powerful.  It is not that having wealth is the problem, but rather, that having wealth requires one to be both generous and wise.  In the story of Lazarus, the rich man allows Lazarus to starve to death while he dines voluminously, where even his dogs eat better than he who sits dying outside his door.  In the end, Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell for not caring for his fellow human beings.  In another parable he tells us that one cannot serve two masters…that “You cannot serve both God and money.”  If we are to be rich, it cannot be for its own sake, but as a consequence of worthy action or work that does not take us away from our primary duties: to love God with all out heart, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  These duties themselves, if properly followed, would cleanse the field of envy and greed and abuse of power. 
 
It is what the founders of Plymouth colony, under Cotton Mather if I remember correctly, tried to do: create a ‘shining city on the hill’ to mirror the New Jerusalem, where all shared all and worshiped God continuously.   This failed within the first full year, just as socialistic governments usually do and for the same reason: some were slackers who made those who worked, and had to share, justifiably angry.  Saint Peter was well aware of this when he stated from his Christian community that “if one does not work, one does not eat.”  But it is one thing when under the management of a living apostle, and quite another when under the management of mere men who are naturally subject to the culture of their birth.  With the relinquishment of the dream of the perfect Christian community, the pilgrims went on to create Beacon Hill and the American version of aristocracy – whose members are exactly those who now rule our government from within, as well as create our cultural standards.  They are the people of God who went from the “Shining City on the Hill” to Beacon and Capitol Hill in a few short centuries.  It seems that it is not only my life that is affected by social status, but even those who once claimed the greatest of moral intentions. 
 
It is this that is the greater point: that we all have to deal with our dark side.  It is not only wealth and status that control us, but many other things inherent in our human nature.  I wrote recently of the ethnic slaughter in Rwanda, where neighbors killed neighbors in such a frenzy.   In this slaughter was not only hatred of the ‘other,’ but also hatred built on pride and all those other deadly sins such as envy and lust.  We know, if we dare to know, that we are not far from the consequences of these failings ourselves.  We, too, are a mess, and, just like the Pilgrims, are so far internally from our conscious ideals that we seldom can make our great moral plans actually work.  It is this darkness that we have to acknowledge and confront if we are to make a better world. 
 
We are told in the New Testament that this darkness can only be overcome by grace, a gift that is neither deserved nor guaranteed, but granted to those who make themselves available – as well as to some who do not.   Prayer helps, because, besides communication, real prayer is a willingness to admit our failings and to act on the ultimate commandments: love God and neighbor.  To do that, we cannot serve the masters that are money, or status, or prestige, for those build a house that cannot stand.  So it has always been with societies, which always crumble.  But we do not have to.  Or if we do, we should know where next to turn.   With a little grace and humility and a lot of mercy, we can find our way out of the dark underworld that relentlessly turns every City on the Hill into a city that has lost its ideals, then becomes lost in time.        

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An urge is not always heaven-sent.   For instance, a few weeks ago I went to the library to get books on CD, because I thought – too optimistically – that I would be heading up north.  As I passed the “new book” section, a certain book, Ratsnake, caught my eye.  Reading the cover blurb, I found it was the autobiography of an undercover cop for the Tobacco and Firearms department (ATF).  He set up large buys from drug dealers off the Florida coast or infiltrated biker gangs for drug peddling, sometimes keeping in character for years.  It cost him his first marriage.  It also, as I found reading it later, cost him a sense of – well, I don’t know how to put it.  He was a good writer; the adventures were truly adventures; but after 70 pages or so, I felt I needed a good dose of penicillin.   I couldn’t continue, and it sits downstairs now waiting to be returned to the library. 
 
But some urges do seem to be heaven-sent.   We have had some old folk’s health problems going on here, and it so happened that not long ago I had clicked into the site, ‘Lady of Good Hope,’ for the one approved Marian site in the US, right near us in Champion, Wisconsin.  There, they were having a special healing service, as they do nearly every month, where Mary and, of course, the Holy Trinity, are called upon for special graces so that one might either be cured, or “healed” (where the affliction is not cured, but the reason for it is revealed).  It was a good experience overall, but I can’t say that I was transported to heaven, or that either one of us kicked up our heels like youngsters.  We did, however, go to the gift- and -stuff store afterwards, where a particular book, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Immcaculee Ilibagiza, called out to me loud and clear.  I have just finished it, and it has made my week.  Such books that recount recent miracles that have been scientifically verified are just the thing for Doubting Thomas’s such as myself.  And, as any such book should, it also has put the fear of God in me.
 
Anyone over thirty knows what the nation of Rwanda stands for, besides gorillas in the mist: massive genocide.  Up until 1994, that nation had been ruled by Hutus, who were lording it over the Tutsis, who in colonial times had lorded it over the Hutus.  As the year 1994 approached, things got worse and worse for the Tutsis, beginning with a severe quota system that kept them out of government schools and positions, and ending with the kind of hateful rhetoric we associate with Hitler.  Then the genocide happened, where about one million people, mostly Tutsis, were murdered by their neighbors with the consent and prodding of the government.  What followed next was civil war, more oppression, and then an unlikely truce.  I think the Tutsis got back in government, but in any case, the murder and bigotry has stopped and Rwanda is now a very unlikely peaceful country in the midst of many nations in turmoil.  In my opinion, there might be a spiritual reason for this newfound peace, one that the author Immaculee, an ethnic Tutsi who lost most of her family to the purge, writes about so sincerely: the Mother of Sorrows, the local apparition of the Virgin Mary in the tiny town of Kibeho.
 
During the genocide the village was torn apart, but beforehand it had drawn tens of thousands of people due to the visions of three girls at the local Catholic school.  The first happened to Alphonsine in late 1981, then to Anathalie, then to the fiercest of critics of the two, Maire –Claire.  There, the girls went through and became lenses for what has become standard since Fatima: deep trance states, mass visions of Mary, rainbows, a spinning rainbow-colored sun, and many miracles including documented healings.  Within a year or so, many other children from Rwanda were touched by Mary, and even Jesus, and were drawn to Kibeho to display similar behavior and pull in similar visions and miraculous healings.  For a few years before the late eighties, Rwanda was on spiritual fire.
 
Perhaps one of the most astounding well-documented cases involved a young girl who had been called to Kibeho, named Vestine.  Like Alphonsine and Anathalie, Valentine was called to heaven, but this time by Jesus.  The vision and request was recorded live (I believe) by Radio Rwanda a week or so before Easter Sunday, where she told an enthralled nation that Jesus was asking her to die for him.  He (Jesus) promised that if she accepted, she would be taken up on Good Friday and returned on Easter Sunday.  She would be dead, but not permanently.  Again and again Jesus spoke through her, telling all others not to bury the body during this time.  She would come back to life on Easter.  The moment when Vestine accepted the request was on live radio. 
 
Good Friday came, along with a host of priests and doctors set to document and inspect every aspect of the promised “death.”  Vestine appeared as normal as usual as she sat by her bed awaiting the time, surrounded by the doctors with an array of instruments to record her life signs if anything happened.  It did.  At precisely 3 PM she was forced back with a sudden jolt onto her bed, where she then lay as if dead.  The pulse was taken, the equipment clicked away, and all the doctors agreed that she had fully died.  They did not know what else to do but wait.  After an hour, Vestine took one great breath and then stopped again, her pulse still.  For the next 40 hours she continued to take one breath every one to two hours until, after that biblically magical number of 40, she suddenly sat up with a smile, grabbed a towel near her bed, and began to walk into the bathroom to clean up for Sunday mass.  Of course they stopped her and re-measured her now -normal vital signs, and then asked her what heaven was like.  She told them that it was indescribable; that music had colors, that colors had music, that everything was so different that words could not describe it.  Then she finished with, “But I can tell you this: I begged Jesus from the bottom of my soul to let me stay there.  He said that it wasn’t my time, so that I must leave.  There has never been a sadder moment for me.”   
 
After several years of such miracles, though, all the visionaries coming up onto the stage that had been built at Kibeho had a day of terror.  They were given (and conveyed) images of massive piles of rotting corpses without heads, of torrents of blood, of hellish destruction and waste.  They screamed and sent many in the audience running in terror.  The Virgin Mary told them (through the visionaries) that they had not listened!  These visions of horrors continued on into the months, so much so that Radio Rwanda ended their broadcasts of the visionaries.  Then in 1994, at the urging of the government on radio, the madness began.  It would take years and years to undo whatever damage could be undone.
 
I cannot find it right away in the book, but I believe the Virgin told the visionaries that “the world was first destroyed by water.  The next time it will be by fire.”  She most certainly told them that the end was coming soon, where Jesus would cull his flock.  The chosen would include those of all religions and beliefs, as long as they had lived according to God’s will, but many would not be saved.  Her message stated clearly that the world’s people, including but not exclusive to those in Rwanda, held evil in their hearts.  Need we, she could have added, anymore proof?  And of course we were told that all of us need to mend, to atone - for the end is nigh.
 
We have heard that ‘the end is nigh’ ever since Christ let us know that there would be a final day of judgement, but many things give this current warning more weight.  For one, it was accompanied by shared visions and hundreds of miracles, many scientifically documented; and for another, several other collective visions of Mary since the 1960’s have said the same thing, from Egypt to Argentina to Japan and to Yugoslavia: that the end is nearing and that we better get our houses in order.  All those, too, were accompanied by supernatural signs and miracles. 
 
And so I have my miracles, my proof, and the horror as well.  When Mary comes to town these days, there is reason to worry.  She often is giving fair warning of local disasters: ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, religious cleansing in Egypt, or wholesale slaughter in Rwanda.  But she is also telling all of us that this evil is in us all.  A day will come, she says, and not too distantly, when we will have to account for ourselves.  See the miracles, she says, and believe that this is true.  And then do something about it.
 
It, the end of the world, will probably not happen in my or most of the readers’ lifetime.  It might not happen for 6,000 years, as God’s time is most certainly not ours.  But each of us has only a limited time on earth, and that end is coming very soon by any broad-view standards.  One way or another, that end will begin our day of judgement, or so we are told; or so we are told, not by some madman on the street, but by an apparition that is appearing with greater and greater frequency throughout the world, accompanied by great and impossible signs.  I for one both want to believe, but also to not.  Belief, at least for Christians, has always been a double-edged sword of great comfort and great terror.  But one thing is for certain: life is short, and we cannot take our gold, or any other thing, to the grave.  It might well be that all we take with us is the essence, the sum total of our life’s work on earth.  In light of eternity, the only thing these miracles could wish to convey would be the authenticity of the message.  With such startling signs of both evil in the world and of powers beyond the world, we could well say that, yes, we have been given fair warning.
 
 
 
  

Today, a new essay, "Panic Button," under "Essays" in the website.  FK  PS - and take a look at the beautiful comment on "Real Presence" (below) by Cal 

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The party was over and the darkness beyond the tiki torches was denser for the descending fog.  I was more than ready for bed and one beer over where I should have been, but she wanted to stay later.  “She” was a retired nurse, and even as her husband shifted uncomfortably in his seat, she projected a great interest to talk.  Things hummed around recent events and church stuff for about an hour until we got around to spiritual things, where death inevitably entered, and where, it became apparent, she wanted to be. 
 
I did too, even as I had to fight slipping into sleep.  I had been against the thought of death until well into middle age, when it finally appeared to me as the great arbiter of truth.  I explain how this happened in the story “Dark Angel” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars.  I have spoken of it before here, so I will not go into details, but in summary, it is about a car accident on a road deep in the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that a friend and I happened upon on the way to the family cabin.  A few other people had already stopped, and something in the feel of things out there in the middle of nowhere compelled us to stop too.  It was as we began to walk to the wreck that we felt it, the eerie presence of spirit that I called the dark angel.  It was still and calm and frightening in its depth.  We were to find that a 17 year-old girl had died in the accident, and the feeling from her death hung with us for weeks.  It was unavoidable and totally otherworldly. 
 
The retired nurse knew it well, but she insisted that death had a feeling of complete peace and was not eerie at all.  She did admit that new nurses often ran from a room where someone had died exactly because of this feeling, but they were then talked into returning.  Death and its attendant spirit was, as these seasoned nurses knew, normal, and only once had it ever been horrible.  Our guest had not witnessed this, the screaming of a woman dying of cancer, but she and all the other nurses who were not there said that they were relieved that they had missed it.  That would have been horrible.  But this was exceedingly uncommon.  To the people who worked in death, it was almost always a peaceful and solemn experience.     
 
I had read of this before, about the “beauty” of the after-death spirit.  In the sweet little book Night’s Bright Darkness, by Sally Read, the author opens with a remembrance of an Irish nurse who washed and wrapped corpses.  The nurse treated the bodies politely as one would treat delicate people, and after the preparation would part the curtains to the day and open the window, saying, “Now we open the window and let his soul fly…,” just as she said for the man who Read had helped to prepare with her.  Read had been terrified up until then, but suddenly she felt the corpse become small and insignificant.  How, she thought, could this happen in a modern London hospital where, “The soul was long out of fashion.”?
 
I still recall with a bit of shame the last time I saw my terminally ill father a short time before the incident in the woods.  By then I lived far away, and my visits to him were infrequent.  He had been in an old folk’s home for over a year, ever since he had become incontinent and blind, and in that time he had become almost totally silent, sleeping most of the time.  They said he had cancer of the brain, but no one really knew for sure.  Really, to all involved, he was just another dying old man with no future. 
 
The hallway to his room had the usual stink of urine and antiseptic, and lost-looking old people with walkers and wheel chairs wandered about.  I found him in bed and asleep as usual, but he awakened instantly when I said hello.  He replied very brightly and with great pleasure, “It’s good to see you again, Fred!”  Still oddly uncomfortable, I began to mention some political shenanigans then current, as my father had always had a keen interest in the news.   The words fell in the air like lead.   It was not just that he was not listening, but that this other spirit was there, the same one that I would come across a few years later in the UP.  It had no interest in the politics or daily life of Man.  Rather, it spoke of truth as a deep cave speaks of silence.  Both my words and my attitude felt irrelevant.  My dad would slip into death a few months later. 
 
In the Book of Exodus, we find Moses tending a flock of sheep near Mt Horeb (Sinai) when an angel of the lord appeared to him in a fire flaming out of a bush.  As Exodus 3: 4-5 says, “When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, ‘Moses!  Moses!...Come no nearer!  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’”  This is it: in the presence of death we are on holy ground, which can be anywhere.  This is what we feel.  Death does not bring all of the Holy down upon us, but it is the opening, an unwavering and undeniable presence that is stunningly real, so much so that the uninitiated run from it in fear.   Some become callous to it, and some use it in mockery out of defiance, but this only underscores the point that “it,” not just death but the “it” that comes with it, is a big deal. 
 
My conversation with my dad fell flat because it was as nothing in this presence; so it is with any social pretense or discourse at all.  Death tells us, “Here, look.  This is your true home” - not the cold stillness of the dead body, but the awesome “other” which greets what comes out of the body, now finally free to acknowledge that which was always there.   The rest of our concerns are like the golden calf worshiped by the Israelites even as the Lord spoke on high to Moses.   We swim through this “other” like fish through water, but are overwhelmed by the frenzy of active life.  It is often only death that reminds us of what our priorities really are: the peace-filled reflection and awe-filled worship of the holy presence.  For if we understood, we would know that we are always on holy ground, just as our still bodies and freed souls will one day proclaim to all in the sacred sound of silence. 
 
 
 
 
 

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            “Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead.  Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover.  In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.”   - from Julian: vol 111,  by Wilmer Wright. 
 
It was suggested by a religious pundit that we should ask, while at church, for some words given by the Holy Spirit.  I try to do this but surprisingly often forget, but I did not forget last Sunday morning.  It is hard to hear this voice at first, as it has to go through the filters of wishful thinking as well as counter-voices of cynical disruption (maybe my own particular curse), but at last I got through to what always feels like the calm in the eye of the storm.  It was there where I rested my mind seeking advice, but what I got instead of words was a clear and beautiful picture of sand being washed around by low ocean waves on a beach.  I could sense the meaning, which was incredibly deep, suggesting that all acts of nature were God’s voice to us, but I wanted the words; I wanted the words now!  Every few minutes I tried to go back to that space for the words, but still got this picture that was both beautiful and filled with portent.  After several times the spirit apparently relented, for I finally got a one word answer, mentally shouted at me.  It was “Patience!”  It was not as full of meaning as the picture, of course, but with it I did finally understand better what was being said.  It was that God is in all things, timeless, and that all things will work eventually to the satisfaction of God.  Like the ocean and waves and sand, however, God’s time stretches into eons and eons, way beyond our time.   Things will come around, but often not when we want them to.  God will not be rushed.  All things right and beautiful will come when the time is ripe. 
 
So I read the message from the Oracle of Delphi (written above), to Julian the Apostate, ruler of the Roman Empire out of Constantinople, in 362 AD.  These were the last words ever recorded of the oracle, who chewed on laurel leaves and inhaled their smoke to go into a trance to reach the gods.  Julian had just traveled to Antioch to winter-over his army before attacking the Persians and was looking for oracular advice.  Instead he got this message that told him that the gods no longer spoke to the oracle because the age of the gods had passed.  This was a bitter blow to Julian, not for the lack of advice on Persia but because of the news that the classical gods of the Romans and Greeks were now effectively dead. 
 
I suppose he could blame much of this on his uncle, who had been the emperor before him.  It is complicated, but it boils down to this: the emperor before Constantine, Diocletian, had avidly persecuted the Christians, who had become an overwhelming threat to the old Roman system of belief, before retiring, leaving the empire to two chosen “caesars,” both of whom had very ambitious sons, Maxentius and Constantine.  Constantine had a Christian mother, Helena, but was not a Christian himself when he met Maxentius for battle at the Milvian Bridge by Rome in 312 AD.  It was there that he saw a cross brazened in the sky inscribed with the words, “In Hoc Signo Vinces - conquer by this sign” – which he did.  In gratitude, he legalized Christianity, then became Christian himself.  In the 320’s he moved to the solidly Christian east and built his new Eternal City at the Bosporus, called Constantinople (now Istanbul).  There he prospered, did some good and some awful things (for instance, he killed his oldest son and boiled his wife alive in her bathtub), and died, leaving the Empire in a mess once again.  After killing his brothers, his son Constantius II reigned briefly before dying young, leaving the empire to his nephew Julian.
 
Up to that time, Julian had been a scholar of classical literature, in love with the glory of the pagan past.   He despised Christians for being so dewy-eyed and meek and forgiving, preferring instead the virtues of courage, honor and duty of old Rome.  Much to his disappointment, however, he could not persuade the bulk of the people in his eastern kingdom to turn back to the old days, not even with carrots and harsh sticks.  Even as he waited for war in Antioch, the people there despised him, so much so that he left as soon as possible.  He had recently tried to cause the collapse of Christianity by rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, thereby mocking the prediction of the second coming after the rebuilding, but an earthquake had destroyed his efforts and no one would dare try it again.  And then in the midst of a hateful populace at Antioch and his other failures at pagan conversion, the Oracle of Delphi had told him that she was out of business.  There were no more gods. 
 
An emperor cannot simply turn away from a war, and Julian believed that by defeating the Persians he could bring back the loyalty of the people to his rule and to the pagan gods.  Alas, the campaign was a fiasco.  He was forced to retreat, was picked apart by guerrilla-like tactics along the way, then was met by the full force of the Persians, where he was killed in battle by a spear through the side.  It is claimed that his dying words were “Vicisti, Galilaee – Thou hast conquered, Galilean.”
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The sands are not just the “sands of time” but an ordering of the universe over vast periods of time.  Certain things will come to pass, but only as they fit with everything else in exquisite divine harmony.  For the Roman/Byzantine Empire of Julian’s reign, the time had simply come for Christianity and there was nothing that the all-powerful emperor could do about it.  It is interesting to note that since then, Christianity’s time in the Mideast has also waned, its near-demise beginning with the conquest of Constantinople by Muslims in 1453, and extending into the present, as radical Muslim leaders, as well as the state of Israel, marginalize, exorcise, or simply eradicate Christians to this very day.  Yet, less than 40 years after the fall of Christian Byzantium, Christopher Columbus began a new epic for Christianity in the New World.  Now we find Christianity in decline in the very states and colonies where it had once thrived.  The sands of time are endlessly shifting.  If the New Testament has been interpreted correctly, few of the “elect” will be around at the Second Coming.  Is it this, then, what the moving sands are pointing to in human history?
 
It is the same with us.  We simply don’t know our fate, or when or if our prayers will be answered, at least as we might understand it.  The puzzle of our universe has an infinite number of parts, and the time limit for assembly extends farther than we can understand.  I must constantly remind myself that it is not my puzzle, and that I am only a small part of it.  I might enjoy my part by acknowledging the ability and wisdom of the maker, or I might fret and fume that life stinks because I do not always get my way when I want it, or anytime at all.  I simply cannot understand how it all fits together, but must have faith that it does fit together.  This even the Oracle at Delphi understood. 
 
“Vicisti, Galilaee” could also be, “viscisti Deus - you have won, God.”  Of course He has.  When one makes the rules and is the only one who knows them, what else should we expect?  Wonder and joy would be an appropriate response for us in life, not bitterness and antagonism.  We must not try to rebuild the Temple before its time, and, of course, I should not try to get my way with anything without patience.  No matter how powerful the gods, whether I include Zeus or myself among them, we are still just shifting sands flowing in the infinite, churning sea.