Today, the traditional essay on Christmas, "The Night My Father Shot Santa" under "Essays" in the website (it may be found in my book of essays, "Beneath the Turning Stars," available on Amazon).  As I am editing and re-editing my book, "Hurricane River" for publication late Spring, I am only writing two essays a month (beginning and end of the month) to give extra time.  On the other hand, some good ideas have come my way in the past week or so, and if I have time, I will add a short essay before Christmas. If not, Merry Christmas, and see you early in the New Year!  FK

 
            A certain someone I know told me about an upsetting incident that he recently experienced at the factory where he works.  He had gone to another area of the shop to get some information from someone he had known for a while, a man of about 60, and got one heck of a surprise when he approached him.  Instead of a “hello” and an answer to his request, the man showed him a picture on his pocket phone.  It was, as the man stated proudly, a photo of his male member.  “What the hell are you doing?” said this certain person.  “Oh,” the older man said innocently,” this is the picture I send around to pick up chicks.  Everyone my age does it.”
 
            This someone knew better, and just after he told me the story, he said, “I’m going to look up this guy.  He must have priors.” After about ten seconds on the phone, he almost jumped in shock. “Holy shit!  He’s a class B felon and did ten of twenty years for molesting a minor under age 13!” A little more probing brought him the additional information that the older man had been a school teacher at the grade 2 level.  Obviously, he was not a teacher any longer.
 
            How could someone hurt such a young child?  How could he have no remorse for it, but instead continue his perverse sexual lifestyle?  And how could a rational man not know that he would eventually be caught for such crimes and be sent to prison where he would get the worst treatment by his fellow felons than any of the murderers and rapists among them?
 
            Back in the olden days of the early 20th century, there were a few philosophies on life that were all the rage in the social sciences.  There was Marxism, of course, and eugenicists and Nazis, all of which fell out of favor, at least for a while, after WWII and the cold war era of the 1950’s.  But there was another one that lingered on, sometimes having strong surges, which is affecting Western nations in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to this day.  Most don’t think of it as a social theory, but it has become increasingly apparent that it is. 
 
            It is usually referred to as Freudian psychology, and anyone who went to college during the last century is at least a little familiar with it.  When I was in graduate school in anthropology in the 1980’s it was no longer in style, as it had already run its last renaissance in the previous decade, but it was still necessary to discuss it. In anthropology, the main purveyor of this theory had been the “Father of American Anthropology,” Franz Boas.  Coming to America from Germany in about 1890, he was a contemporary and countryman of Freud, and he spread Freud’s culture-crashing theories among his students.  Most famous of his students was Margaret Meade, who he sent to Polynesia with explicit instructions to prove Freud’s theory on sexual repression.  Repression, had said Freud, was at the base of our discontent with Western Civilization, and although he knew that all societies had some forms of sexual taboos, he considered them so excessive in the West that they were causing neurosis and personal misery, and even war.
 
            Meade went to Polynesia and came back with exactly what Boas wanted, made popular in her wildly successful book, Coming of Age in Samoa. In this, she reported on a hedonist’s dream, where adolescents had sex without restraint and almost without pause.  Many took this to mean that we not only could, but should follow their cultural model.  Wouldn’t it make us happier?  Wouldn’t it cure us of so many neurosis and, by golly, even end war?
 
            Freud was more subtle than this, and Meade backpedaled on the simple conclusion people had made, saying that a nice middling degree of repression – exactly how to measure this she left uncertain – is necessary so that people are not forced into sex that they did not want or were not ready for, but the die had certainly been cast.  Hugh Heffner went on to use an increasing liberalization to market mammary glands, and ‘Free Love’ began its reign not long after that in the late 1960’s.  Along with the Pill and no-fault divorce, the West jumped into a brave new world that promised more pleasure and happiness, a social universe that would give us ‘Love, not War. ‘
 
            Divorce, AIDS, gay marriage, NAMBLA and MAPS, and confused and “transitioning” children have followed, along with rising crime, nihilism, drug addiction and even greater neuroses.  Wars have certainly not ceased.  What went wrong?
 
            To begin with, Freudian psychology, like most theoretical premises, did not function nearly as well in the real world as it did in the library and study.  Life is more complex than anything people can imagine, and in hindsight it is easy to see that any basic instinct imprinted into humans cannot be let run wild, as is does in the non-human natural world. 
           
            As it is, cows eat.  Humans dine.  We, too, have been given the instinct and need to eat, but we have turned such need into cuisine, and often times, into feasts. If we consume everything we want at the moment, most of us are in for big trouble.  Personally, in a world without restraint, I would be hefting around scores more of excess pounds, suffer rotten teeth and diabetes from chocolate candy, a diseased liver from alcohol, cancer of the lungs from smoking assorted herbs, and a whole host of other maladies from things we have made available for excess and vice. 
 
            Fortunately, we are taught by the wisdom of our elders - and more and more now by our departments of public health - that we have to eat our greens and moderate our appetites concerning everything that we really want.  This is because our specie’s ingenuity has taken the basic needs of consumption and expanded the possibilities in so many ways that we have made the world a trap for excessive consumerism.  Clearly, our intelligence and creativity have given us much more than what we need to survive - so much more that to let go and ‘just do it’ will lead to an early grave.
 
            Almost needless to say, so it is with sex.  Long ago in a class on the ancient Middle East I read of the habits of the court of pre-Islamic Persia.  For one year or month, the “in thing” might be to have sex with boys dressed as girls, the next, girls dressed as boys, the next, orgies of opposite sexes, then of same sexes, and so on in nearly infinite variety.  The satiety only lasts for a while, and if all things are doable, then the participants must begin looking for a more exotic high. We read of Jeffrey Epstein and Orgy Island, with Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew and many others of the jet left unnamed, going along for the ride.  They don’t need 13 year old girls - there are whole penthouses of willing 18 year old's available for a price - but they must have the thrill of gliding above societal law.  It may be that some perverse acts are compelled in a few people by repression, but far more brutal acts occur from lack of restraint.  Tiberius had his pool full of children he called “the little fishes” who performed for his wishes until he grew tired of them and sought the thrill of throwing them off the palace cliff in Capri to watch them split open on the rocks below.  It is doubtful that he ever had any sexual restraint imposed on him in his life, and certainly none in adulthood.
 
            The point being, as most societies have understood for eons, is that the lack of sexual restraint leads, at the very least, to brutal conflict.  In the natural order, human males are often like mountain goats butting heads during rut, except that our rut never ends. You can’t run a village with that going on all the time. Further, somewhere in our moral evolution we happened on the novel idea that along with getting every sexual desire fulfilled comes the suffering of those who often unwillingly serve them. See dead ‘little fishes,’ above. 
 
            So where is Margaret Meade’s middle ground of restraint?  She could not name it, and I suppose no honest social scientist could, but we can get a good idea from the consequences of one level or another endured in a society after a few generations.  Ours has very obviously flown over the coup, big time.  Man/boy love is coming to a theater and media outlet soon, and then to a legislature near you.  “Love is love,” after all, isn’t it?
 
            Fortunately, until now at least, societies have not been run by social scientists.  They have been ordered primarily by long-held religious beliefs.  Some of these only serve the masters in a theocracy, it is true, but others have stood the test of time through many periods of change and history.  Catholic Christianity is one of those.  Even I, as a practicing Catholic, believe that some of the rules of sexual restraint of the Church might be excessive, but the results of those rules have long proven to have outperform our liberated society.  The (social) world was not a happy place in the past, but it held us together; the (social) world is not a happy place now, and it is disintegrating.  We must come again to understand that the human capacity for thought has given us free will that has enabled us to live beyond our natural instincts.  In scripture, this led to the destabilizing and cursed knowledge of good and evil. So it is that we have to hold back, and we need the wisdom of a divine source to know exactly how and when to do so. 
 
            Yes, I believe that there must always be some flexibility in the rules, as our complexities reach beyond our understanding, but there must also remain a firm and immovable foundation that guarantees the reproduction of the species, the unity of the family, and respect for the individual.  Such, in its own way, is how the natural world is ordered and maintained; and such it is that we must make it for ourselves.  The same hand that orders nature must be sought by all of us, with particular note given to those who show themselves to be guided by selfless grace.  Only in this way might we steer ourselves back to a more perfect natural human order.    
 
 
 
 
 
              
 
           
 
             

It is two weeks later and things have changed, as I knew they would.  More so, the good that I thought might have poured into me from Medjugorje seems to be taking its stride.  Or so I pray.  The wonderful truth is that the delirium from sickness and lack of sleep and general jet lag and dysphoria have subsided and left me back in good ‘ol Wisconsin.  It is cold and gray and achingly normal here, true, but it could be way worse.  

Back to normal: just a few days ago I was dragged along to dine at a Mexican restaurant with my wife’s church women’s group, which is normally not of any interest to long-married men.  We know what most women talk about most of the time – not the Packers - and most of the time it leaves us bored out of our gourd.  But this is not always the case, and with the beer and tequila flowing at a little faster pace than normal, things actually got interesting.  

First off, there was the curious insight from our friend’s husband, who was sitting with her, related to the astonishing fact that he had technically died just a few months before as they slept peacefully together at home.  She is a nurse, and she woke to notice that her husband was not breathing.  At all.  She felt his pulse and there was little to nothing there.  She then pounded on his chest several times, so hard that three ribs were broken, and finally brought the heart beat back.  Then came the EMP’s and a three day coma for the guy.  What is interesting is that he admitted to not remembering anything of his life for two weeks!  Other facts were missing from his life, too, but otherwise he was talking and thinking with his normal, vivid alacrity.  

What surprised me about this was, first, that his wife had brought it up, which obviously made him uncomfortable.  It must have been the Margaritas.  And second, and the most ‘curious’ tidbit of all, was his response to this question: “So, no ‘come to the light’ moments or loss of fear of death for you?” “No,” said he, “there was nothing in that darkness, not a thought.  But I have lost all fear of death.  Death is a great nothing, so I now have nothing to worry about.  It is ultimate peace.”  

Which made my wife wonder how he understood what ‘nothing’ was if he really was in a state of nothing, but it was the insight about ‘nothingness’ that surprised me because he is Catholic.  Catholics live to avoid Hell and achieve Heaven.  Eternal life is the final and strongest point of the faith.  And yet, he longed for this peaceful nothing, so much so that he had made a pact with his wife, that she would not save him if there were a next time.  They were both in firm agreement on that.  An interesting thing to ponder, but there was much more to come from the table discussion.

It was probably from talking about death, but Medjugorje and the outing of the demon naturally arose, much to everyone’s interest.  I mentioned it in the last blog/essay above, and it can be seen on UTube now (Marija’s Apparition, October, at the Castle.  In my last essay, I said the vision had taken place inside, but the video shows that it had occurred in an outside courtyard).  After the apparition of Our Lady, the screaming of the so-called demon was interminable and quite convincingly not of human origin.  In the video we never get to see just from what woman – surely it was a woman by the undertones - it came.  It lasted for many minutes, stopped, and then droned on for another few minutes.  Which might make us wonder: if demons exist, then what of that dreamless, lifeless nothingness in death described above?  If there is something more on the other side of the curtain, why would we think that there is nothing there to fear – or to long for? 

Back at the table, the talk continued about death, demons, and then finally, the prophecy.  This is the most significant claim that has come from the visionaries.  As long-time readers of these essays might recall, the visionaries at Medjugorje predict a major re-alignment of the world within their lifetimes, or at least within the last of one of their lifetimes.  Such it is that they have set themselves up like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose founder, Charles Russell, claimed that the end of the world as we know it would come with the death of the last soldier from WWI.  The last, I believe, has died, but where is that brave new world?  For that new world was to be radically different and better, after an apocalypse.  So it is for Medjugorje.  There is little wiggle room left there, either.  The claim is time sensitive, and the change will be huge: many will die, and a “permanent marker” from God will be set at Medjugorje leaving no doubt as to its supernatural origin.  

The man who had died and been brought back nodded his head when I said that this might bring an end to this most unusual attraction.  The youngest visionary is in his early fifties, so the end as we know it should happen within the next 30 years.  Most had to agree with us cynics on this – that if the big change did not happen, Medjugorje as a pilgrimage site would be all but finished - but the discussion did not end there. Rather, we speculated on the “end of the world as we know it” scenario.  

Now, with two exceptions, everyone there was in his or her 60’s or 70’s and we all know what old timers always think of the younger generations’ world: chaotic, immoral, heading into decline and collapse.  So it has often been since the days of Plato.  Still, it is interesting to note that most there did not gasp at the thought that the Medjugorje prophesy might be a great delusion or hoax.  It simply didn’t matter because most agreed that the world was on the brink, regardless.  No, not on the brink, but already over the brink, now in freefall.  Most were simply waiting for the laws of moral physics, the spiritual double of the formula of acceleration, 9.8 metered per second per second, to kick in, plunging us into some awful depth at a greater and greater speed.  This was all said so matter-of-factly, as if talking about the inevitability of winter. 

Cynic or no, I had to take into consideration the sincerity of the visionaries and length of time they have made their claims (and indeed, the visionary who we stayed with, Mirjana, might be the most genuine, sincere person I have ever met), as well as the seemingly objective view of a world in serious decline.  Among us elderly, there was certainly a kind of consensus that something really big is in the works.

It gets even more alarming, though, as I have heard much of the same from my son and his 20-something friends.  Most think the near-future will be worse than we oldsters believe, because they do not have our faith in God’s purpose and in such prophecies as those from Bosnia-Herzegovina.  They do not believe in God’s redeeming virtues, but rather in raw nature’s wrath.  Like Druids reborn, God for them does not reign from beyond nature with love, but from within nature with steely, unremittent justice - and woe to us who have sinned with such greed and avarice against our great Mother. 

Certainly, we might remain skeptical of demons and of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and of prophesies of the End of the World as We Know It.  However, many cannot help but perceive from a clear-eyed and rational perspective that other worlds, or other realities, do exist beyond our limited senses and minds, and that our human world cannot continue for long on its current path.  Of the latter, I am reminded of the silly song from 1969 (number one on the charts!) “In the Year 2525” by the one-hit wonder duo of Zager and Evans.  Let me conflate some lyrics from the song to give the general idea: “In the year 2525 ...ain’t gonna be no husbands or no wives…everything you think do and say/is in the pill that you took that day…”  Yeah, it’s looking something like that, isn’t it?  In a world where morals are being consumed by science and her discoveries, what is NOT coming next?  Which horrors out of so many – genetic manipulation, mind control, biological warfare, nuclear proliferation - will consume the world as we know it first…or last?  

Clearly we must change our current path, and almost as clearly, there are many different paths to take.  As it stands now, if raw nature is in charge, our future will be one of vast destruction, and soon, and then barbarism; and if God is in charge, vast destruction might be just as necessary to change course, except that this course will ultimately change things for the better.  One way or the other, though, major change is coming.  We can feel it as well as reason it.  Maybe the Jehovah’s Witness’s timing is just a little off; perhaps the visionaries of Medjugorje might be a little off as well.  Still, in consideration of everything, I do hope their apocalyptic vision, at least one or the other, is true, for we are better off in God’s hands than in nature’s.  

So I will be praying for greater faith and an end to this era, not because I hate humanity and the world, but because the better part of me cherishes it all.  Better the terror of demons and the bitter pill of divine justice than Mother Nature’s pure fury, or worse: the sugar-coated pill from Big Brother that will give us eveything that we are allowed to think, do, or say.


 

​ 
          I was so disappointed at the time.  Many of us had been seated at the great outdoor church that is central to Medjugorje, ready for Mass, when it was mentioned that there would be an apparition of Mary for the visionary Marija just moments and one mile away. The fortunate ones heard the call and headed out for an experience that would mark their visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina for life.  Meanwhile, I sat shivering on a pew as Mass proceeded in Croatian, oblivious to the meaning of the sermon and unknowing of the apparition until an hour later while seated at a pizza restaurant.  Then the news trickled in: Marija had been given an unexpected celestial visit at a luxury hotel called The Castle; and all had gone as usual until The Possession. 
 
          The Possession.  I had witnessed one on my last visit to Medjugorje nearly five years earlier when Mirjana, another visionary, had had her special annual visit from Mary on her birthday, March 18.  It was outside, and as we waited, even the birds – even the wind – had gone quiet until the screaming began. Without explanation it was clear what was happening.  We were witnessing a case of possession and I can tell you that to hear it is no small thing.  It sends cold chills right down to the toes.  It is like watching a horror movie at the drive-in, and then realizing that it is true, that the Zombies, chain-saw massacres and demons are right outside your door.  Beware! 
 
          The story that night was told to us in text messages and gossip, until finally we were to hear the rest of the details from an actual witness.  In a nutshell, what she told us was this: as Marija sat passively for her most lovely visit, a member of the audience suddenly shrieked and then cursed.  It did not seem possible that the bizarre voice could come from the victim herself.   This alien presence then pled for mercy as it was apparently forced from its poor victim by the sanctity of Mary’s presence.  It was said that the voice of the demon soon trailed off as if receding into the distance – this in a closed room- with its final screams being, “Help me! Help me!”  Some young people in the audience came to believe, at last, in Hell, which might do them some good.  Most who were there quickly reinforced their allegiance to Jesus. Others expressed skepticism: was this just showmanship?  Was this Elmer Gantry-style carnival spirituality engineered for profit? 
 
          The last question will always linger over any peculiar happening at a spiritual event, from healing to talking in tongues, for that is the way we are.  It doesn’t matter that we understand nothing of creation or our purpose in life without the aid of our spiritual betters; we will always try to put things back into our boring but manageable box.  At heart, we are all deathly afraid of the unknown; and at heart, we are particularly afraid of unknown evil.  It does not have to shriek at us from a writhing victim at a religious gathering, either, for it is silently dormant in all of us in the personage of death.  Manifestations of the dark side can be no more than reflections of this ultimate evil, placed upon us, Christians say, by our own arrogance and impudence towards God.
 
          But certain apparitions of evil still take us by the short hairs.  I did not see the flight of the demon that night, but I did struggle with the dark side during much of my stay in this most Catholic of sites in the former Republic of Yugoslavia. 
 
          To begin with, I had had a presentiment that this visit was going to be difficult for me, even frightening.  Understand that nearly every pilgrim in Medjugorje believes that his steps towards this goal are and have been guided by some celestial force or forces, particularly the graces of the Virgin Mother. With this, nothing is given to chance and everything out of the ordinary is considered a sign.  So it was that the incident in the garden some two months earlier had taken on significance for me.
 
          What happened was this: I was down in our large vegetable garden about 70 yards from the house when thunderclouds suddenly bellowed directly overhead, unleashing both the sound of thunder and the fury of lightning.  Without thinking, I sprinted all-out for the house, forgetting my age and my weak Achilles’s tendons.  For 20 yards I flew like a twenty-year-old athlete, giving me an unusual youthful thrill until, like an old jalopy, everything suddenly crapped out.  I could nearly hear the ball bearings grinding and the muffler dragging. 
 
           Two days later I was severely lame in my right ankle.  Given that it was two months from our trip, I did not give it a second thought.  However, by the time of the trip, I was still as lame as ever.  In Medjugorje, where rocky hills are everywhere and everyone walks, I was going to have to struggle mile after mile, day after day.
 
          That was the small of it.  The presentiment also had real internal roots that came from nowhere I could locate, and within the first few days in Bosnia/Herzegovina manifested themselves all too well.  I was un-customarily weepy and lethargic.  The food seemed bland, the bed hard, the bathroom leaky.  The thrill that should have permeated me, as it did others, was often simply lacking.  I felt strongly that I was on a purgative pilgrimage, and should have girded myself with a belt of thorns.  A horse-hair whip would have fit in, although it seemed unnecessary.  Every step was a struggle, and sleep was never enough.
 
         Then, three days from the end of our trip, disease struck.  On the second night, I coughed so hard that I dry-heaved for nearly a half hour, non-stop.  The following day, my stomach muscles were so sore that every cough was an agony.  Chills and profuse cold-sweats predominated.  Days later came the unbearably long trip back, the sleepless nights, the endless discomfort in tiny plane seats made by closet sadists.  Within a few days of our return, we found as a group that about a third of us had been manifestly infected with Covid. 
 
           Maybe that would explain the dreams, for they were the weirdest and perhaps darkest part of all.  On the night of my retching, which felt close to death, I had an ongoing dream that seemed to last for hours.  In it, the universe was depicted as a vast organism made of tightly-fitted triangles, like pizza slices.  With the removal of one, it was shown to me that everything filled back in as is nothing had happened.  In my mind I was made to understand that, while we had free will, our will could never displace the overall will of the ordered universe, both existing perfectly side by side.  This also explained how we could have secular time combine perfectly with the endless time of God, all at once.  I marveled over the genius of it that night, although I can scarcely say more about it now.
 
          Then, on the night of our return, I had a deep 10 hour sleep where, first, I had a long and congenial conversation with Fr Leon, a famous speaker at Medjugorje, followed by a torrent of information of unknown content that poured like Niagara Falls into my unconscious.  The power of it was both frightening and exhilarating, and I had the distinct feeling that this power was coming directly from Medjugorje.  What exactly it poured into me I did not and still do not understand.
 
        It may have been nothing but sickness, all of that dream weirdness.  However, the possession of that woman was not, and the sickness and lameness were all very real.  And it is this where the basis for the purgative pilgrimage lies.
 
         Yes, this world of ours really does end in the grave.  To hang on to any shred of it is to court fear, loss, and ultimate tragedy.  Sin may be seen as this clinging, and pain and suffering are there to convince us to let go.  The aforementioned Father Leon referred jokingly to his time with the “happy-clappy” Christians, and we know what he means: in his youth he wanted to have light and love and joy without the darkness and pain and fear, but that is not how it works.  No religion worth its salt, and certainly none that can last 2,000 years, avoids the key issues of suffering or death.  In Medjugorje, our Mother points the way to the cross just as much as she touches our heart with her love.  It should not surprise us, then, when demons howl and pain and suffering afflict us there – especially there. 
 
            Still: It is Halloween today, a day that held our distance ancestors in terror of the coming darkness, and our Christian ancestors in hopeful prayer for their dead.  Now we joke about death and evil and eat candy and whistle past the graveyard as if such breeziness can make it all go away.  That’s OK.  We laugh on pilgrimage, too, and they feasted before the day at Cavalry.  But we cannot learn without facing the darkness.  It is faith and trust in God’s perfect goodness that we must nurture.  It is why we pray and travel to holy places and stand before the evening sky to reach as far as we can into the fading light for one last kiss of celestial beauty.  It is why we yearn with reverent hope to grasp that divine promise, here, there, and anywhere, before the closing darkness descends upon us in this broken world.   
 
 
         
 
             
 
 
          
 
 
 
 
              
 
 

​ 
          It happened: try as I might to avoid it, politics pushed its angry head under the tent of my conversation once again.  No, really, it wasn’t might fault – at least not mostly.  It was at a neighborhood croquet match just completed, a bunch of people as old or older than I seated at a picnic table for a final good-bye to summer and the departing snow birds, when she said it: “We should just have a popular vote on everything.  That would fix things.”  This in reply to someone else’s complaint that everything now was so, let us say, “messed” up. 
 
             Of course I had to open my big mouth.  “That would be even worse than our current leadership.  Most of us don’t know that much about what’s happening, from finances to world politics.  A lot of it is beyond our understanding (money) or necessarily held secret.  We would be the really blind being led by the partially blinded, manipulated like never before.” 
 
          Oh, the look of evil I got from her!  I am not really sure why – maybe it wasn’t politics but my smart-ass approach – but peace had been temporarily shattered. 
 
          Fortunately, I was able to break the evil air with a few observations about breaking air.  As we were a bunch of old folks, we all had out stories, but allow me to return to a more mature point: what I said is true.  No one knows the whole of everything.  Some of us know a lot about one thing or a few things, but most know less than we think we know about just about everything.  This realization brings doubt.  Doubt brings darkness and troubled thought.  We strive – need - clarity, even fake clarity.  Maybe my dismissal of that woman’s clarity was the cause of the hateful look and it really was all my fault.  Then again, maybe it was really the weather’s fault, as the dark October skies have filled me with a coffin full of grave and sepulcher thoughts.
 
          While the weather may have started this descent into doubt, it was a chance (is anything really just “chance?) detour into our church library that brought it to full force.  As the woman who was managing things there has decided that she is now too old or too busy for such things, the library has become a mess of books scattered about with no rhyme or reason.  So it was that I shuffled at random through a pile and walked off with one that seemed promising – Notes from the Underground (written of a few essays back) by Fr Cozzens.  As an old priest, the author questions the authority of the Church concerning all sorts of things, especially sexual things, about which the Church seems particularly preoccupied.  As I read and often nodded in agreement on several things, general doubt about all things increased.  Will God really send me to Hell for purposefully missing a Sunday mass?  Will I be condemned to eternal torment if I remarry after a divorce without an annulment?  True, there is scriptural evidence for much of Church dogma, as well as some practical reasons, but many pronouncements such as those above seem to be more in line with the letter rather than the spirit of the law.  This made me think: how much of this or any religion is based on discursive law divested from spiritual law?  How many bricks, we might then ask, can we remove from religion in general before the structure crumbles?
 
          Another book came to me shortly after, Salt and Light, by Eberhard Arnold, a German author writing from between the World wars.  This book was given to me by an old and politically radical Catholic woman several years ago shortly before her unexpected death.  I figured I knew what it was about, and, not being a radical myself, shelved it and forgot about it.  Suddenly, just after finding that other book by fateful chance, this appeared before me on my bookshelf as if by magic.  We never know when the Holy Spirit or the guidance of angels is with us, so of course I had to read it.  And it, too, was disturbing, as it, too, led to great doubt concerning the truth of discursive orthodoxy. 
 
           In summary, it talked of the Sermon on the Mount, that impossible list of things that Jesus said were necessary to live by to enter the Kingdom.  We all know what some of these things are: love your enemy just as you love your family, turn the other cheek to be stricken again rather than to strike back, give your tunic as well when asked for a cloak, and so on. Such behavior is impossible for us and seen by most to be metaphors for the perfect love of God.  But Arnold has a different idea.  Says he: think not of these commandments as laws such as were written for Moses; rather, think of them as pointers, as signs, telling us that we must give ourselves totally to the Spirit.  For any human attached to this world, the New Kingdom is beyond them, but for those who have abandoned themselves totally to God, the behavior described in the Beatitudes would come naturally and without thought.  That is the only way the new laws of Christ can be fulfilled: not by any force or pressure or rules from the outside, but by the inspiration of God.  We cannot demand this, but we can will ourselves to accept this.  The rest must be done by Spirit.
 
          I have long known this truth and in fact argued with the woman who gave me the book about this very fact.  Her extreme activism, I told her, applied human force, which would necessarily produce a profound counter-productive reaction.  While this made me feel smarter than her, the book slyly took away my prideful inner certainties.  Within a few chapters, I found that I have been hiding behind the written law of our church more than I have thought.  And just as with the beginning of this essay, my acceptance of Church doctrine started with politics.  The conventional Catholic Church is now a bulwark against the lunacy of woke-ism (you can tell my political affiliation), which has brought me under its overall fold.  However, I soon realized that such an alliance can easily close the ‘self’ to that which is beyond the letter of the law.  No permanent good can come from the rhetorical thoughts of man.  Clearly, no heaven will ever come to earth base on, say, the dogma of Marxism, but heaven cannot come to us through the dogma of the clergy, either.  The two are certainly not the same; unlike Marxist philosophy, many religions point the way to heaven.  But we cannot take the sign for the real thing. We must open ourselves to the force that inspired our religion, and then allow for the internal change that is necessary for true conversion.
 
          Such it is that doubt is essential both in the world of politics and in the world of faith.  Still, unless we want to live the tragically stoic life of an existentialist, we must have certainties in our lives, some framework that helps us understand our own significance.  For politics, I think we need the test of time to clear our thoughts of the rhetoric, vitriol, and outright lies.  Did going to war with X bring long-lasting positive results?  Was Y really a stooge of a communist or fascist or enemy country?  In hindsight, should I trust this person or party more, or trust this institution or that call to war?  So we must make our judgements, hopefully with care and precision.  And hopefully not like my paternal grandfather, born 1888, who believed that the government was so corrupt that it faked the moon landing.  Then again, maybe he was smarter than I.
 
          For religious institutions, I think we have to contemplate where the dogma brings our hearts and souls.  Think again of the Sermon on the Mount: does this law or that action promote the vision of Christ?  It is far from easy, I know. For instance, should we be accepting of this or that sexual practice if it appears to adversely affect society, the family, and/or the children?  Should we live and let live, knowing that such non-judge- mentalism might lead to personal or social destruction or even death?
 
          In retrospect, there is no way to fully dispel doubt without a full-faith effort in something, with which we must drop all doubt.  Is God love?  Is the God of Abraham and Jesus – and His other aspects as shown by the other great religions - real? Is He all-knowing and all- powerful?  Somewhere inside we know.  If in the clarity of contemplative silence the answer is “yes,” then we must drop our doubts.  Then the rest will come.  As St Thomas Aquinas said on this deathbed, “All I have written [compared with the eternal presence he was experiencing] is as straw.”
 
          So doubt until there is no room left for doubt.  This is certainly uncomfortable for those like me, who have caught themselves resting on a pedestal of pride and security.  To take the sign – or the propaganda – for the real thing will, without doubt, bring us to a dead end.  On the other hand, to deny where these signs are meant to take us will almost certainly bring us to a death as certain as winter.    
 
         
                                                                                                

​ 
          “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens….He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without men’s ever discovering, from the beginning to the end, the work which God has done.” (Eccl, 3:1, 11)
 
          We went camping in Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin a week or so ago, and while there, crossed over the Mississippi into Iowa to another park, Effigy Mounds National Monument, where a series of large effigy mounds have been preserved.  These, earthen mounds in the shape of animals, particularly bear, were made by American Indians until about 1100 AD.  I talked to some young women who worked for the park service to ask them why they think this mound-building culture came to a fairly abrupt halt.  They gave me the official line that is written in the literature – that the people advanced into a higher level of agriculture, and so gave up the adulation of animals.  This does not make sense, as higher levels of agricultural dependence leads to more surplus, giving more time and human resources to create public works.  It also avoids the historical connection between the upper and the lower Mississippi. 
 
          I do not know why the park service used this poor archaeological theory.  Maybe I am simply behind the times.  However it might be, we had just come from a diner where strong coffee had been served, and as I had had three cups, I was ready to give a lecture of my own.  I told them that the southern reaches of Wisconsin (and northern Iowa on the west side) marked the northern terminus of the Mississippi Mound Culture, which reached its zenith in Cahokia, across the river from St Louis, around 1100 AD – and then collapsed.  At the time of the early Spanish explorers in the 1500’s (read Coronado’s account), and until a time just before the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804, large chiefdoms still existed (smallpox put an end to those), but not as they had before 1100.  Further, the Anasazi cliff dwellers of the American Southwest, whose cities were connected by road and trade and ceremony with the Mayan and other population centers to the south, also collapsed around 1100.  Of this, archeologists posit the most probable reason: dramatic climate change.  How this also affected the well-watered Mississippi valley I do not know, but they were intimately linked together somehow, and both probably came to an end one way or another because of this dramatic change.  Great changes in weather at this time were also reflected in the writings of the Vikings, who were forced to leave southern Greenland because of the looming mini-ice age which was to last until about 1800.  We have been gradually warming ever since. 
 
           It seems, then, that climate change may have had a huge impact on American Indian culture, and probably on Europe as well.  So it was that I spoke at the visitor’s center, but as the caffeine continued to roar through my nervous system even after I had left, I was led to make other connections concerning climate changes.  “You know,” I said to my long-suffering wife, “climate change has had enormous impacts on many civilizations.  Did you know that northern Africa, where the sands of the Sahara rule, was savanna up to 3000 BC, with lions and giraffes and elephants and so on?  Did you know that the Romans were still hunting elephants from their chariots in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco as late as the time of Christ?  Just think of it…” From there, revelations in a coffee cup began to flow over.
 
           Yes, think of this: Egypt began its march towards dynastic splendor during that dramatic and fairly quick climate change.  Because the lands around the Nile were no longer receiving adequate rain for normal agriculture, irrigation systems had to be put into place.  This required coordination of labor and the invention of higher technology and math, which led to greater class distinctions and tech development, and then to deistic leaders who needed the cover of a godly cloak to justify their increasing this-world privileges; which led to the need for great public works in their honor, including the pyramids, and more tech and more hierarchy and more public surplus and on and on in one great game of cultural dominos.  After many centuries, the Greeks took from Egypt their math and technology, which was then taken by the Romans and used to dominate the western swath of the Old World for a thousand years. 
 
          As my thoughts eventually run to the spiritual, more dots connected thusly:
 
          Without an advanced Egypt with large stores of grain, Jacob - the grandson of Abraham, the father of the Jews - and his twelve sons would have starved to death during a great famine in the Fertile Crescent.  Instead, they were able to take refuge in Egypt, where they prospered and multiplied into the millions over the next 400 years.  We all know the rest of the story: the Jews escaped from Egypt, were given their laws from God through Moses, and after 40 years of wandering, they made the walls of Jericho come a-tumblin’ down, and Israel was born.  After another 1300 or so years, Jesus was born.  Israel was then a part of the Roman Empire, which had built roads and maintained trade throughout much of the Old World.  Because of this, the message of Christ was able to spread quickly to the millions upon millions in the ancient civilizations.  Christ’s moral and spiritual message, combined with Greek knowledge and logic, later led to the development of Western Civilization, which eventually dominated the entire world, making us the people we are today. 
 
          And none of this would have happened without the dramatic change in climate around 3000 BC.
 
          Paranoid thinking, perhaps, but this whole chain retains a strong element of truth.  Yes, other factors were involved, including disease and the fickle fortunes of war, but climate change no doubt had a strong role.  Thanks to LIDAR (laser radar), huge civilizations from the past are being discovered in the Amazon and Central America, often pointing to climate change as the major contributing factor to both ‘rise and demise.’ Today’s theories on anthropogenic (man-made) warming notwithstanding, weather is generally out of the hands of Man, part of natural cycles too vast and complex for any peoples’ understanding.  One might even say that weather has been exclusively in the hands of God- and, at least until now.   
 
         So, as Ecclesiastes says, God has put the timeless into Man’s heart, making us long for the designs of the Eternal, but still, unable to discover “…from the beginning to end, the work which God has done.”  The connections I made above might sound like the ravings of a man after a three-day jag on crystal meth, but they are not far-fetched, and really only scratch the surface of all that happens that makes what happens possible – and, if we believe at all in intelligent design, what makes it all planned.  Overall, we can never see how events happening now will cause those tens or tens of thousands of years in the future.  No science, from astrology to particle physics, could ever reveal how the present will form the future.  Such work is formed by greater hands.  This does not mean that we should lie about helplessly in the face of cosmic forces, but it does show us where our place is in our collective destiny: relatively small and dependent.  Flail and bellow as we might, we are like babies in a crib, dependent on powers far greater to relieve our needs.  These needs, ultimately, reside in the timelessness that God has placed in our hearts, and it will be within the parameters of the Great Designer that they will be fulfilled. 
 
          A little screaming does get momma’s attention, though - that we know.  But we all have to understand that Rome was not only not built in a day, but was built in part because North Africa became a desert through natural, not human, means.  Our agency in the natural world is so small that we might want to better contemplate the admonitions of the great prophets: that what most lies in our hands is our moral behavior and the focus of our intentions.  This is where the most important aspect of our will begins and ends.  The rest lies dormant in our hearts, waiting for the time beyond time when our longings will be fully revealed and answered. 
 
 
 
          

 
          When I was nine, I was shot in the eye with a BB and blinded.  I was visiting a friend more than two miles uphill from my house, and had to ride home on my bicycle, one eye showing nothing but red.  I was a dutiful Catholic boy at the time, often talking in my head to God, and as I rode on that cold late-winter day down the hills, I prayed, “God, if I am going to go blind in that eye, have a car kill me now.”  Stoic in its way, I suppose, and deeply pathetic, but we allow such things for children.  As it turned out, my prayer was answered – I did not go blind, and so was not killed by a car.  Or at least I could see it that way.
 
          Not many years later, as I was reveling in the blinding joy of being a Baby Boomer in the late ‘60s, I listened to the good rock – the stuff they played off of albums on college and bootleg FM stations – with the attention of an enthralled believer at a Billy Graham revival.  The words of the singers were considered deep or even prophetic, especially for such acts as The Grateful Dead or The Doors.  With the latter there was one phrase that really struck me, words written and sung by master showman Jim Morrison: “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.”  “Really?” I thought.  That broke with everything I knew about the Master Planner.  It gave this 14-year-old a tough decision to make: believe in The Doors, or in Jesus Christ, who Himself said that if we pray for what we need ceaselessly, the Father will answer. 
 
          That, too – the deification of rock lyrics – is pathetic and less excusable at that later age, but I can at least say that Jesus won the decision.  I continued to pray for things that were probably not good for me at the time, or that I was approaching all wrong, and continually did NOT get what I prayed for, which never presented itself as a problem.  In my mind, my life was not my own, but in the hands of the all-perfect and all-loving God.  I would let him know of my needs - he did already, but just in case to show my enthusiasm- and he would do the rest.
 
          I have to say that I have received a good portion of what I prayed for after the passage of much time, but have also been disappointed in many other things.  Still, sometimes it seems as though my desires are instantly gratified by prayer, so much so that it is a little frightening.  I know damn well that I am an egotist, and in holier modes know that it is usually for the better that I do NOT get what I want.  Losing an eye, after all, would have been preferable to death, at least as far as my parents were concerned. And so I try to pray now more in gratitude, and for wisdom.
 
          But prayer – what is it?  In a book mentioned in the previous essay, Notes from the Underground by Fr Donald Cozzens, the author poses this situation regarding prayer: Let’s imagine that God hears our prayer to save Aunt Rosie from dying, and then says to himself, “Gee, I was going to take her life today, but you all have prayed so hard that I’ll give her a few more years.”  Put in that context, Jim Morrison turns out to be the prophet I thought he was. Yes, it is ridiculous to think that you can petition the Lord with prayer.  His mind, after all, was made up from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. 
 
           That is not the end of it, however.  Cozzens brings another vector into this age-old debate: willfulness vs. willingness.  Willfulness means having it our way.  It means getting the hot babe we want at 16, the Ivy League college we want at 18, and the high-roller job we want at 22.  It means perpetual health, high times, vacations in the Caribbean, perfect children who also attend the right schools and marry the perfect mates, and a soft and beautiful death. On the other hand, willingness means going with God’s flow, accepting what is given and moving on to other things in faith and gratitude.  It means working at what we think we want, but accepting what we get and adapting to the new circumstances.  Cozzens uses the example of the “flow” of the athlete, how he strives for certain results, but relies on harmony rather than excessive effort to get him there.  It is exactly what the Zen archer does when concentrating on the bullseye, determined but not anxious about the result.  He lets the arrow fly, relying on his decision that hitting the target is the correct action to take in the moment.  If he misses, that is OK too, for it was not meant to be.  He has intent and desire, but does not try to force the results against the ‘Will of Heaven,’ as the Eastern religions often put it. 
 
          Obviously, what that means for prayer is to have the intent – to pray for the result – but to accept the result without bitterness or excessive disappointment.  It might be that ‘now’ is not the right time, or that more time it needed to rethink the desire.  Maybe in that interval a better alternative will show.  
 
          But there is something more in this, and greater.  Cozzens quotes the great philosopher Soren Kierkegaard to nail this down: “Prayer does not change God but changes him who prays.”  That is, it is not the physical results that matter with prayer, but what happens to the person who is praying. Touching the spiritual helps one get into the flow, directing one towards proper outcomes rather than towards immediate “willful” ones.  With this in mind, we might not try to redirect God to give Aunt Rosie another few years, but rather, be directed by meditation in prayer to wish for Aunt Rosie’s comfort and salvation in her allotted time.  Or, we might pray for Aunt Rosie to live for a few years longer, but accept the results with grace and humility.  Either way, we are going with the will of God, diving deeper into the cosmic flow.
 
          There is even more; while prayer might help us to have faith, it also brings us to greater integrity and personal authenticity.  The authentic person does not need to impress others or himself, and so does not need those things that the everyday self often prays for, for those things that it does not get, or does get but often without the imagined satisfaction.  The authentic self needs nothing more in this world than its immediate physical needs.  In the space of silence and solitude in which our more authentic, prayerful self exists, we no longer long with ordinary exterior values; we no longer have the pressing need to willfully move God to comply with our worldly desires.  Rather, we come to appreciate more the closer relationship with God that is found in deep prayer and reverent silence.  While we might still plead for Aunt Rosie and others out of compassion, prayer that is willing rather than willful takes us out of our egoistic self, to an inner solitude that allows God to be.   
 
          What is the answer, then: can we petition the Lord with prayer?  Cozzens might agree with Morrison that we cannot, not in the way we often think.  In the final analysis, we might never know.  However, as prayer focuses our attention on the subject at hand, it also takes our focus away from the simple agency of the self.  In this, we are allowed to free ourselves from the rat race of social climbing and of constant motion as we delve within to a quieter, calmer, and often wiser awareness.  In this, we bring greater peace into the world; in this, we change the world for the better; and in this, we get closer to whatever we are wishing for, for all wishes eventually are meant to make us happier. 
 
          So, go ahead, Jim, and petition the Lord from that island you share with Elvis and Jimmy Hendrix.  You might not get what you ask for, but if you try sometime/ you just might find/ you get what you need.   
 
           
 
 

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

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


 
 
  

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