​ 
I have a lame excuse – I ask no pardon for the pun – if this essay is shorter than the usual four pages or so: my back hurts.  A lot.  This is probably because I have been traveling like a maddened albatross these last few months, but it happened so suddenly that I don’t really know the reason why.  But there it is – one move to the left or forward and, zing! – I nearly shriek like the princess sleeping on the pea and fall to the floor.  We are hoping for a quick resolution.
 
Perhaps I should not.  Just yesterday I received the “zing” as I was walking with my wife, bringing out the old speculation about the nature of pain.  Why must we have so much of it?
 
A year or so ago I read about a woman in England who has no sense of pain.  Apparently she is not numb and can feel everything except for pain.  Naturally, she is covered with scars, mostly those from burning, but the article reported to us that she is perhaps the happiest person that the reporter had ever met.  With no pain, there has been no trauma.  Imagine a life without that dark background of pain from youth and how trusting and calm one might be with life in general.
 
However, this woman lives in a protected environment where large fires and wolves and sharp rocks and murdering tribes do not invade her life.  We can understand that without pain, we would not have survived as a species.  The trouble is, why do we have so much pain?  Why must a tooth hurt like hell for days on end, when its demise will not kill the sufferer, and when the only remedy for it in the past was forceful removal?  Why must a ruptured appendix continue to torture us when, in the past, the only remedy for it was inevitable death?  These facts of life do not point to pain as simply a warning system meant to keep us out of danger.  Rather, they make it seem more like a nervous system scheme set to torture us, and sooner rather than later. 
 
On greater thought, as I walked along waiting for another zing to turn me from bold warrior to fairy-tale princess, an idea slowly formed through the haze that excessive pain was, in fact, just as necessary for human life as “warning” pain was.  This is not for physical reasons, but for reasons concerning what it is to be human.
 
Dogs don’t need excessive pain.  There has long been an argument concerning animal pain, whether or not it is real pain or ephemeral, and I think we – or at least we dog lovers – can safely say that dogs truly do suffer.  However, I would argue that their suffering is different from humans, in that it is not surrounded by the context of dimensional time and by comparative abstractions.   Such is a mouthful, I know, but if I can put it more simply, it means that humans linger over pain as something to remember, as something to live, and as something to anticipate.  Animals have memories of pain, too, as Pavlovian training can tell us, but for the most part, animals are almost entirely in tune with the moment.  Pain for them exists as a point in time only, not as a lingering state of discomfort or living hell.  So for humans, pain turns from a single sensation in time to an extended idea of pain. 

​There are many examples of how we as humans view pain differently.  For one, an animal will never purposefully kill itself to end its pain.  Humans do not do so in great numbers, but in great enough numbers to mark ourselves as different.  For animals, then, the instinct for self-preservation is never overcome by an internal dialogue that weighs the value of life with pain against the value of death without pain.  We, however, can think ourselves into pulling the trigger or drinking the poison.  That is either a great blessing or a great curse, but it does point to another difference between animal pain and human pain and how we might deal with it.
 
On the natural level, pain for humans more often than not makes normal life seem better, not worse, exactly because we can hold comparisons in our mind.  For someone in chronic pain, the memory of life without pain brings forth the inner beauty and joy of regular life.  The sufferer might think, “What a fool I was!  I had it so good,” much as we oldsters say, “Youth is wasted on the young!” (Which, speaking of pain, is painfully true).  There then becomes the hope that we might someday return to that state that we once took as a ho-hum, and how filled with gratitude we would be for that pain-free state of life. 
 
This, gratitude, brings us to another level where pain actually enhances life.  So many of the saints – maybe all of them – either suffered enormous amounts of pain beyond their will, or willfully brought it on themselves.  Just as living with pain might bring us gratitude for life without pain, so many have learned that living with pain might bring even greater – even supernatural – gratitude for the promises of eternal paradise. 
 
There is a little glitch in the logic here, I know: eternal life is an abstraction, something that separates us even more from the animals, and even from ourselves, for many do not even believe that this concept is sane.  It might be that for some, the afterlife might exist entirely in their heads, perhaps even in a psychologically unhealthy way.  However, that often does not matter.  In some cases – in many, many cases I would argue – long-lasting pain brings a greater sense of the holy to those who had not previously even considered the reality of the sacred.
 
I have written about Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who found enlightenment in the suffering of the Nazi death camps in WWII, but he is not alone in finding spiritual knowledge through suffering.  The book Alive claims that each of the survivors of that long winter on the top of an Andean mountain found a special, supernatural relationship with God.  I, too, have experienced that on a personal level through some long-standing pain and have witnessed it in many people dying of old age.  There often comes a softening and a sense of mercy, of forgiveness, to many suffering souls, as if they now understand our common plight as humans; as if they now understand or are beginning to understand what it means to ‘Love one’s neighbor as oneself.’ 
 
It is true that understanding growth in spiritual life through suffering is not always easy to grasp.  Of course not: nothing on the supernatural level is easy to grasp as long as we are on the natural level.  However, there is a correlation here between the natural and the supernatural, just as there is the lived experiences of many millions who would agree with the concept of spiritual growth through suffering.  And, although this growth does not only happen to Christians, this phenomena does help us to understand better the value of Christ’s suffering for us.  Just as our suffering might bring forth more compassion for others and a greater sense of the spiritual, so the suffering of the son of God might bring forth a more thorough compassion for humanity in all its sin and misery.  What appears to be a mystery beyond humanity, then, might instead be a mystery that also lives within the human soul. 
 
This then - this compassion we gain through suffering - is something that is shared with us by God.  It is also something that further sets us apart from the animals.  But still I beg: God, heal my back!  Suffering is the one gift that gives us more than most anything, but is also the one that most of us would rather return to sender, or exchange for something that fits just a little more comfortably.       
 
 

​ 
We had quite a contrast this weekend.  Since Saturday was rainy and Sunday was a family day – Fathers’ Day – we spent an hour or so going over what Amazon Prime and Hulu and Netflix had to offer, and chose two.  The first we watched was “Paterson.”
 
It should be called a jewel of the small movie genre.  Purposely humble in every way, it is about a bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, New Jersey, who also is a poet.  We first see the city that he drives through and his home, both deteriorating remnants of an older and more prosperous past, both strikingly reflective of the sort of old, early industrial ugliness that only the Northeast can offer.  As the camera panned around, in fact, this is exactly what I said to my wife. 
 
This was exactly what we were supposed to think, so that we might be shown how wrong we were.  For Paterson the man, we find that he loves his city of Paterson.  There, he has his eccentric but beautiful wife who he adores; there he has the old buildings and the old mill waterfall and all those interesting people who are unknown but live lives full of drama and hope; and there he has those people of Paterson from the past, from comedian Lou Costello (Who’s on First) to poet William Carlos Williams, who everybody at least once knew, all of whom rose to the top despite the apparent dreariness of their hometown.  There he also dreams and writes poetry purely for the sake of the craft and for the doors to other realities that words can open.
 
It is a beautiful movie, full of the small magic of all lives, and of a love that transcends the ordinary.  Please see it. 
 
Then came Sunday, with a dramatic change in the weather and a dramatic change in the venue that we let into our house, the Hulu series, “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner.  There, the scenery is of mountain Montana, vistas that are grand beyond most dreams.  And here the protagonists (of the series) are just as grand or are trying to be, almost everyone clamoring to claim swaths of the vast acreage for the expansion of their own egos.  Costner is the main man, a cattleman with a ranch the size of Rhode Island, with a need for power and control just as big.  He is joined by his troubled grown children who have been molded by his heavy hand, and confronted by his enemies, who want the same acreage and power that he has and is trying to keep.  One is the Indian leader raised in the city with bitter racially-charged political views who wants it all, everything, for his tribe and, really, for himself; another is the realtor who wants it all to become staggeringly rich off the little people from elsewhere who long to share at least a little bit in the grandeur of the mountain and prairie fastness, a grandness that their increased presence will belittle and even destroy.
 
Might I add that this is a drama about unhappy people who need so much because they are fundamentally unhappy?  It is as well-done drama, so well-done that I found it difficult to watch.  I am now back to reading, but I get glimpses of it as I pass through the TV room where my wife continues on with fascination.  I guess I have become soft in certain ways in my old age.
 
Which I find odd since I am still a hard-ass in so many other ways.  Let me take a few paragraphs to demonstrate this as part of my own story.
 
It begins with a group practice for the music that we will play and sing for the upcoming Retreat in our local Catholic church.  In this, I am the guitarist for lack of anyone else who wants to do it, as I have been for the past five (I think) retreats as well, making me a polished pro in the field of guitar/religious musicology.   So confident am I, in fact, that in the last two retreats I played unpracticed but well-known songs for the chorus and the audience to fill in the dead-spaces left as people came back to the main space after workshops and such done elsewhere.  One of these filler songs was “Kumbaya.” Little did I know the trouble that this song would cause.
 
I first became aware of its “demon” presence as I left the church after mass just this past Sunday.  There, a friend on the retreat committee and someone in the know told me, unprovoked, “Do NOT sing “Kumbaya” again at the retreat.  People hate it.”  To which I was amused once again at the superstitions and idiosyncrasies possible in church communities.  In light of my amusement, I replied with the politically incorrect phrase, “Really?  Well, that’s gay!”
 
No, what I said last has nothing to do with the drama to come, except for its political incorrectness.  This little show happened two days later at practice, where for the first time we were to go over music for the Mass at the end of the retreat.  Here, we would be joined by two other singers and a piano player (can’t play guitar at mass.  Don’t ask why), and as we were about to start, the prohibition of the song “Kumbaya” came into conversation.  The regulars thought the prohibition odd and stupid, but one of the new singers, a young woman and teacher at the Catholic school, chimed in to disagree.  “I believe they are correct in stopping this song.  This is cultural appropriation! (of black music by white people, as if I need to explain that these days). 
 
To which an older lady, once a teacher at the school herself, and I broke down in derisive laughter.  You have got to be kidding!   Said the older teacher, “we are too complex a society in America to shut out this or that cultural contribution.  That’s just ridiculous!  To which I added, “Then we have to eliminate rock and roll and most pop music because these have black roots.”   The younger teacher sputtered, unable to reply, whereby the older one started to add more comments.  At this, the younger began to turn red with anger, and so I said, “Forget about it.  We can’t convince each other,” which I knew all too well from previous encounters over things “woke.”  And so we did, spending the next hour and a half singing other people’s music regardless of cultural appropriation.
 
But it did not end there.  After we had finished practice and were packing up, the younger teacher said, from out of the blue, “I feel very hurt that you laughed at me,” to which the older apologized.  I did not.  Rather, I said, “No apology from me.  This racial stuff has been drummed up to replace class as the engine for Marxists trying to tear our culture and nation apart.  It is dangerous and immoral and must be stopped.”  To which the younger left without comment, and the rest of the older people, who had remained silent, vociferously agreed with me.
 
To which: which one of our stories above is the most Real? 
 
In the first, we have the unlikely situation of a man in a low-status job in a low-status city who is in love with both his wife and his life.  He sees the beauty, as well as the drama, in the common- and even the less-than-common; in the second, we see people in a beautiful setting.  Most of them are rich, but they and everyone around them are miserable; and in my story, we have a typical drama-free setting suddenly upended by minor drama over a current political controversy.  Of course, mine is the real: no author would try to sell a book or movie based on something so petty and unpleasant. 
 
Mine speaks of the normal drama most of us have in America, but in its way, is it not more like the over-the-top “Yellowstone” in its over-sized proportions?  For this is what we often do: take a pleasant situation and mess it up.  I do not put any blame here; rather, we have all been pulled into a controversy that is makes little sense in the richest, fairest, most diverse nation in the world.  This, along with many other controversies we are involved in, should not exist.  We should be happy, but like those living in rustic mansions amid the splendor of the Rockies, we are not.  Mt story is most certainly the most real story, but it is also one that is fit for drama queens and soap operas world-wide, where unnecessary messes are produced for the sake of ratings.  Only here, we are not arguing for ratings.
 
Yes, mine is the most real, and perhaps “Yellowstone” the next, but I’ll take the world and world-view of “Paterson” any day.  This world can be had by us all, not because the world we experience is perfect or lovely, but because our attitude towards it can make it (nearly) perfect and lovely.  And, as “Paterson” shows us, if we are pure in this desire, we will have help along the way.
 
[Spoiler Alert – go no further if you want to see the movie and be surprised]
 
Here is what happens: Paterson keeps a single notebook where he writes his simple but poignant poems.  He usually keeps it well-hidden, but one day he leaves it out on an end table, and the household dog chews it to bits.  Several years of his work have been destroyed and his heart is broken.  He goes to the park that has a view of the waterfall to meditate on his misery, and is met there by a stranger who is obviously Japanese.  This man is a poet himself, and has come to Paterson to see the home of William Carlos Williams.  He asks Paterson if he is a poet, and Paterson answers, “No.  I am just a bus driver.”  “Ah!,” says the Japanese, “very much in the way of Williams!”  We understand from this that it is in the common things where the poet finds the greatest beauty and wonder.  Then, as the Japanese man leaves, he gives Paterson a present: a blank notebook.  “Ah ha!” he says with a smile.  We are to understand that the best way to start over is with a blank slate, our troubles released.  In our openness, beauty will find us again.
 
So I pray for an end to drama and for the simple appreciation of what we have.  In America, we can all live in our own Rocky Mountains, or with the poetry of Paterson, New Jersey.  Both are here, and both are waiting to be opened by our wonder and with the help of our better angels.  Come by us, my Lord, come be us.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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It wasn’t much.  The days have been hot and dry and clear, bad for gardens and for the big industrial farms of the area, but beautiful for the light and shade and freedom of living without need of coats or shoes or, if we were another people, underwear.  For me, I have had a special bonus of seeing beautiful sorrel colors everywhere, an intense reddish brown in the trees and the earth and horses and the deer.  Whitish color deer, it is said, are a portent of a deep winter, but bright sorrels mean nothing to me.  They are only a particular sort of beauty that I had never thought of, a new idea painted in living color. 
 
All good, all the more wonderful until a minor comment from someone hit like a poison dart, a pinprick of anger that was so small that it should have passed like a touch of intestinal gas.  Instead, for some reason the beauty not only withdrew from my life, but disappeared altogether like a half-forgotten dream – as if it had never been.
 
The badness has mostly left.  The poison has worked its way through, it’s strong effect akin to a flash from a little alcohol on an empty stomach.  But how could it be?  How could days of happiness and wonder vanish with one spate of bad humor? 
 
Then again, why would it not?  Isn’t that the way it is?  How often do we let – I said “let” – little things mess up the big things? 
 
It has certainly been that way with politics for many years, and recently that other thing, the nasty little disease that flew on silken wings from the east.  Ruined, we were brought to think, our lives have been ruined, doomed, destroyed.  Certainly, either from politics or disease, some were and some will be and all will be eventually, but not one sorrel horse or beautiful, sun-lit day will be blotted out because of any political posture or lab-fueled virus.  Everything remains as beautiful and wondrous and awe-some as before.  The difference is only that an interior cloud, a dark shadow, has come to block what most everyone should see.
 
This shadow has always been at the forefront of the thinking of the great philosopher philanthropists.  Why, they ask, are we unhappy?  We do have to work by the sweat of our brow, as was said of Adam and Eve after the Great Expulsion, but is that the full reason?  Does weeding a cornfield neuter the rhythm of summer or squelch the perfume of wild roses?  Does daily monotony by itself suck out all the joy of living?  Or is it the poison dart, the stings of bad humor and bad intentions that cause us the most suffering? 
 
We might think of the sociology of group conformity, or the psychology of the ego, or the political science of class structure, but all of it begins with ourselves.  The problem then becomes a matter of will: are we free-agents or more like puppets being bounced around like emotional billiard balls on some giant god’s pool table?  I contend that we are both; that in this beautiful world we are both twisted by bad humor and bad events, but also have the ability to say “no” to them on a lasting level.  Otherwise we are thrown about like cannon balls on a ship at sea, or, as said, are forced to dance like puppets on the strings of fate. 
 
I for one have never been very good at self-control, and have even extolled the freedom of emotion as if I were Isadora Duncan dancing naked and drunk in the Fontana di Trevi (we might now say, “a rock band in a Vegas ‘pleasure’ house).  But I have since found that the forfeit of control to emotional whims often runs contrary to the inherent wonder of nature.  For instance, it turned out that my reaction to that small verbal slight was a prelude to high humidity and a slate of roiling thunderstorms.  And so my days of joy were more likely dashed by a change of atmospheric pressure. 
 
So it is with the uncontrolled; so it is that we touch on something that the afore-mentioned philosophers of human joy should never forget: that whether or not the masses control the means of production, a baby will still cry, will throw fits, and then will be as gentle as a lamb; and whether or not we are raised in the slums or a golden ghetto, we will find fault with others and will resent any slight to our egos.   To be at the mercy of fate, to body chemistry and physical accidents and so on, we forfeit prolonged happiness.  We are not blank slates, then, but creatures of change, of calms and storm, and only the force of will can smooth those tempests.  Were we wise enough, we might even see beauty in the worst of storms and calm in the highest seas.
 
Gautama Buddha was beset by tigers and demons as he sat unperturbed beneath the bodhi tree; Jesus of Nazareth took a nap in a fishing boat during a great storm while his panicked disciples begged for mercy.  Both knew that beneath all horrors and storms is an eternal calm, and within that calm a beauty and joy without end.  They knew because they were no longer controlled by the things of nature, but rather lived within nature as full humans, as people of will.  Most of us cannot reach this state, but we can have faith that what they said and experienced were true.  In this faith is the wisdom that shows reason for calm, a wisdom that stands, as the Old Time Religion says, as “a rock and a savior.” 
 
Such calm and joy will not be secured inside a Skinner box or in a radical classroom.  Those things and ideas are of this world only, jagged earthly rocks on a small coast in an infinite sea.  Calm and joy can only be found in the depths of this sea, that which has been called the spiritual realm, which imparts eternal beauty to temporal things.  To dive deeply within takes astounding faith and courage.  I have not found that fortitude yet, but the time for strength is soon coming.  It is coming for everyone.  Will we panic amidst the jagged rocks on shore, or seek the Rock of Ages, not matter how deeply it lies?  What will rule in the end, the given of passing nature or the will to enter eternal beauty? 
 
 
 
 
      
 

 
UFOs!  Not too many years ago, many of these essays were dedicated to UFOs and spooky, easy-science versions of quantum physics that dealt, at least obliquely, with UFOs.  After reading a dozen or a score or more books on such things, I ran out of angles of discussion.  What was left were pretty much the same old arguments wrapped in new paper, leaving one to guess – only guess – at the veracity or sanity of the author.  So it was that these essays veered away from things extraterrestrial or extra- dimensional.  
 
Now we are entering what I believe will be a very short-lived period of enhanced excitement over things ET, thanks to a classic porkulus-style addition to a stimulus bill demanding that any covert information on such things be given to our senators by June 1.  So the movie “Independence Day” is supposed to be joined with an alien-themed post-Memorial Day.  Except that first the suspected long-secret agencies that have such info must respect the order to relinquish their data, which is unlikely except for a few crumbs, and that the Senate committee must then agree to share such crumbs with us, the People.  Talk about trickle-down politics.  The result will probably be the release of more blurry photos of moving tick-tacks that might be alien craft or might be light refracted from camera lenses or ocean waves.  Choose your poison and put on your tin-foil hats. 
 
Maybe it is because of the mini-excitement from the possible revelations, but for some reason my wife and I saw two UFO films on Amazon Prime last week.  One was somewhat of an oldy, @2005, titled “The Phoenix Lights,” by Dr. Kitei, which had many photos and interviews concerning the sightings of extremely unusual lights by 10 thousand people or more in the Phoenix area in 1997.  The iridescent orbs had an orange inner glow that seemed attached to a vast, mile-long V-shaped vehicle that glided soundlessly over not only Phoenix, but all of central Arizona.  Among other things, people almost unanimously stated that any stress or fear they had on seeing the lights went away as they passed over, replacing those feelings with ones of peace and joyful awe.  Most perceived intelligence behind the lights (and the possible craft) that was both wise and benevolent.  They looked forward to a second coming of sorts (more sightings came afterwards, but what I mean by this, is a closer degree of permanent contact), seeing in the intelligence a possible savior to humankind. 
 
The other was “Close Encounters of the 5th Kind,” centered primarily on the testimonies of Dr. Steven Greer, a true believer who, with his purported and, I suppose, verifiable contacts with government agencies, was very credible – even though he shouldn’t be.  His repeated contacts with UFOs, many photographed, as well as his sharing of information with those “black” agencies or officials, has convinced him that what those in Phoenix believe is true: that the UFOs carry an intelligence that is beneficial, even sanctifying, to humankind. 
 
There are two reasons why these films stand out enough to be discussed here: one, that the lights over Phoenix were witnessed by so many credible sources who reported seeing and feeling the same things, almost to the individual, meaning that their unique reality is virtually beyond doubt; and, two, that the documentary involving Dr. Greer put forward such a keen idea on the nature of the ETs that it simply must be discussed, especially here in a website concerned with spiritual issues.
 
God: such a concept came to mind as Greer and his fellow UFO enthusiasts (I believe they have their own group, but I forget the name) described just what the intelligences behind the UFO’s are.  Combining quantum theory with a wide assortment of sightings and encounters – nothing unusual there – they nevertheless were able to convey an extremely difficult concept in an extremely intelligible way.  It goes like this: material reality is largely empty, and what is not empty is merely slowed-up energy.  Speeded-up energy is immaterial and merges into thought, both existing at a higher-level field of reality.  What the ETs are able to do is slip out of the thought-energy field into the slowed-down material field.  That is how they get here, either from another reality or across space, and that is how they leave, often instantaneously. 
 
The bare bones of this idea seems thin without more quantum-physics underpinnings – which I am not qualified to adequately express – but the merging of this idea with spiritual/religious beliefs shows striking similarities.  First, it gives to material reality a very limited scope of importance.  From the UFO perspective, what is the “real” world but a broad and fairly static idea stuck in time?  If that is all our physical reality is, of what great importance is death?  In fact, we might see death as a great liberator – just as religions often do.  However, for death to be a liberation, we might believe that the right thoughts must be in place to replace the “frozen” thoughts of material reality. 
 
Let’s look at this from a Christian perspective:
 
Imagine you live in the higher sphere of thought.  First, there would probably not be a fully separate “you,” as thoughts would be fully exposed, lived and shared, but let’s start with that.  You (collective or otherwise) stumble across this frozen or gelled reality (frozen by a certain “sin”?) and see the misery, the suffering and the agony of death.  All of this is unnecessary as you know, but how the hell do you get people out of this self-imposed trap?  To solve this, let’s say you put yourself in human form and then tell everyone, “Hey, all your selfish nonsense and suffering is unnecessary.  Just think this mini-reality away and all will be cool.”  That would work if people could just change our reality with thought, but we cannot because we believe fully that this is the real reality.  Because of this, you would be put down as a delusional idiot, or some peyote hippie living in Taos, New Mexico. 
 
So you come in at the truth from a different angle.  First, you prep the people over many centuries to believe in a higher authority (remember, you are beyond time and death and can change physical reality with a thought).  Then you appear in the flesh, as Harry Chapin once said, ‘in the usual way.’  You poop your diapers, drool, learn to speak over several years, and bleed and cry out when wounded.  You do all the human things, then finally come on the scene with the truth buried in the code you had been forming over the past centuries.  Of course, most don’t believe you even though you heal the sick and raise the dead, so you go along with the plan and suffer torture and death, the realist of the real to humans.  Then you come back from the dead.  See, you can say, I told you so!  If I, who has lived and suffered as a full human, can do it, so can you. The higher reality (of thought) can conquer even the terrible finality of death! 
 
The reader gets the point.  We can go on, but our truth is that most don’t truly believe in this religious-based savior.  So…enter the UFO’s.  We are now a people who believe in the miracles of technology, even as we don’t understand most of it.  It just works.  So, out of the blue comes a superior technology that sure seems to work, even as it then appears to be only an illusion – or a thought.  We are torn.  We see, we believe in technology, but where are the nuts and bolts as the UFO’s defy physics even to the point of appearing and disappearing as if only an illusion?  As the people of old believed in the harsh finality of torture and death, so we believe in the harsh material reality that can be manipulated by science.  But what happens when things appear to go beyond science?  However, just like the Good Book prepped the people of old, we have been prepped by the Good Book of Quantum Physics.  We are told, though we can’t fully understand, that our reality COULD be just like a dream, and our souls – our being – willed and immortal thoughts.  Voila!  Saved!  If you can believe, that is.
 
All this is fascinating.  Just as the idea of the martyred man-god was sprinkled throughout humanity for millennia, so too is the idea that the world is a dream, and our reality more in line with thought processes and will.  Both concepts work in the spiritual realm and both have been used to alter common human consciousness.  It might seem to the true believer in the major religions that the UFO people are frauds or nuts, and to those in the religion of UFO’s that the people of standard religions are superstitious and antiquated, but both beliefs are working towards the same end with (theoretically) the same tools: that thought backed by the fullness of faith is reality.  As Jesus said, “I assure you, if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you would be able to say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move.  Nothing would be impossible for you.” (Mathew, 17:20) And so it would be for anyone living in the realm of thought-reality.
 
I will not proclaim that both are equally correct, but the similarities of both kinds of belief are startling.  It does seem that a new techno-religion based on the old beliefs in God and faith is trying to emerge, and maybe, through UFO’s, it will.  Maybe our government will allow us greater insight into this phenomena in the coming weeks, as at least kind-of promised.  If the emerging reality of UFO’s is truly a new kind of second coming, though, one can be certain that most of our leaders will not understand this.  They are leaders because they believe in this world, not another kind of reality.  They will be stuck and either hide most evidence because of the fear that this is an unknown beyond their control, or they will have experts rationalize all of this away into “swamp gas.”  However, just as the resurrection convinced hundreds, and then millions, of a higher reality, maybe something will come about that will be so overwhelmingly convincing that only the willfully blind will ignore it – just as they once did thousands of years ago. 
 
Or maybe some of our military minds are correct – that the UFO’s are not only real, but have come to “Serve Mankind” – to serve, that is, via a diabolical cook book.  After all, higher vibrational realities, including thoughts, aren’t always good.  
 
Either way, good or bad, faith or hard truth, we get to wait and see as life drifts in and out of winter, in and out of death, and our dreams fly out on lights and odd-shaped crafts into the night.   
 
 

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I must say that I foresaw it at the time.  In the early 1970’s, the movie “American Graffiti” became the blockbuster entertainment of the year.  Starring Ron Howard, Wolfman Jack and Henry “the Fonz” Winkler, it took a look at an idealized Saturday night in 1950’s LA, with drag racing and rock and roll, girls in poodle skirts and fluffy sweaters, and greaser hoods (The Fonz et al) a-rumblin’ and a-kickin’ ass.  We loved it.  After the tumult of the 60’s and earlier 70’s, even us youngsters were looking for something a little simpler – something that we could say was quintessential Americana. It was fake, of course, as all movies are at least somewhat fake, but the reaction was real.  It kicked off a 50’s nostalgia phenomena that lead to the TV series “Happy Days,” which could only be destroyed by its ugly offspring, “Joanie Loves Chachi.”  Yes, even amidst the haze of reefer in college dorms, I watched it and longed for it.  In the chaos of epistemic murk (as a professor once called it), it gave us something we could all fit comfortably into. What I foresaw, however, even as a punk college kid, was the day when we would look back to the ‘70’s with equal nostalgia. [Note: to those who care, alert reader Cal informed me that the Fonz was not in the movie.  Looking it up, the "hood" was played by Paul Le Mat, his movie name being John Milner.  Gosh, I hope I got it right this time!]
 
Earlier this week this nostalgia happened for us.  We were told to watch a movie, “Sons of Sam,” by our neighbor.  It was a four-part series that claimed that the ‘Son of Sam,’ aka David Berkowitz, New York City serial killer of ’77-’78,  did not act alone, but was rather part of a Satanic cult which joined him in those killings along with several more, leading even to ties with Charley “I’m already dead” Manson.  The evidence was compelling.  I’ll get back to that in a bit, but let me first talk about the nostalgia that my wife and I experience in the first hour of the series, which focused on the murders and the case as it was proceeding in real time. 
 
New York, 1977, was a notorious mess.  I lived in the Northeast at the time and was well aware of the hookers and peep shows in Times Square and the danger of walking just about anywhere in The City at night.  The Disco Era was in full swing, highlighted by the decadent Studio 54, where people snorted coke and had sex with strangers on (what we were told anyway) a regular basis (this, just before the AIDS epidemic exploded).  Those who ‘Son of Sam’ killed were often coming back from the discos, doing drugs and having sex in their cars on what the police called “lover’s lanes,” as, in New York, there weren’t too many isolated dirt roads on which to make out around the steering wheel.  The Son of Sam – that’s how Berkowitz signed his letters to the newspapers – shot the women in the cars as they necked and etc., often injuring or killing the boyfriends.  It had New York in an uproar, which also helped make Geraldo Rivera famous.  So…what was so nostalgic about a corrupt city and a bunch of idiotic young people “blowing” their lives away?
 
Surprisingly, many things.  The Hair – ah yes, the hair.  Cool guys with long sideburns (I still have them, a holdover from then) and long, carefully quaffed hair; women in skirts with even longer curler-crimped hair, and many others with the wispy Farah Faucet look.  There were the double-nit trousers too, and the large lapels and shirts open to the sternum.  But most of all there were the attitudes and accents of the interviewees, pure 20th century New York.   Good lord, the dropped “r’s” and the swallowed vowels (caught, for instance, was pronounced “cauwt” – something I think I may also say, being from the Northeast), along with the tough-guy ferocity of the young dudes and of the older mothers of potential victims, one of whom claimed, “want to know what to do wit da killah?  Give him to us mothahs and we’ll take cah of ‘em!”  And oh, yes, the now-vintage cars and the grime and the overly-political police and the rude in-your-face journalists who were just waiting to get punched in the nose.  It was such pure New York and such pure hedonism and such pure righteousness for us; it was just so, that is to say, certain and unreflective that it made me ache for those bad-old, good-old days.
 
Those times did not have the gloss of the ‘50’s, with kids in coon-skin hats and black hat/white hat well-defined cowboy shows.  We were instead a hedonistic bunch, but we had been raised by work-ethic parents who might not have been very spiritual but who went to church every Sunday and dutifully allowed themselves to be shot at in patriotic wars.  They had given us an American cohesion, which was reinforced by a limited media that we all watched and read and kind-of believed in.  We were a cohort, and as arrogant and defiant as we were, we had an understood ethic where guys behaved this way, girls that, and everyone sought to become independent of their un-cool parents as soon as possible.  This was us in the ‘70s, new Americans who never-the-less understood ourselves to be all-American, unconsciously believing ourselves to be lords of the human universe. 
 
Much of that attitude has been irredeemably changed.  The younger people coming into power now are at least as arrogant as we were, but they lack the unconscious superiority that we as Americans assumed, something now described as White Privilege or Patriarchy.  There is something good in that reflectivity, if the criticisms are presented and taken in humility (which they usually are not), but there is something very precious that has been lost: a belief in ourselves and the society that formed us that allowed us to attempt and often succeed in doing the impossible.  The English once had it, which allowed a small Island nation to change and nearly own the world.  With that came the age of science and all the technological wonders that sprang from it; and with that came the ethical changes that took us from casual cruelty to the more thoughtful perspective that other humans deserve the same consideration that we would like. 
 
Which, through a warped sense of logic, has led us to the rejection of the very society that spawned such humanitarianism.  This naturally is causing a decline with everything from economic security to birthrates to individual liberty.  Things, as the poet said, are coming apart, which, with a little closer watching, was evident in the “Sons of Sam” series.  As sexual mores and drug usage changed, other things were changing as well.  Satanism did increase, along with a plethora of New Age personal religions, and with them came a further dismantling of the basic blocks of society, which, whatever they may be, all healthy cultures must believe in to remain healthy.  While bad failing societies might have such internal certainty (we can still call it unconscious arrogance), ALL successful societies must have this.  Otherwise, they are thrown into the deep blue, or, more in keeping with today, into the big dark vacuum of space.  They – we - then revert to basic survival instincts, which are good in a pinch but terrible for long-term social order.  When we cast out basic certainties, we can no longer accomplish great things together.  With that, we decay and eventually collapse as a society.
 
Which is why the ‘70’s brought on such painful nostalgia.  The old American certainty was there, but it was also obvious that it was veering from the past, moving from Disco sex to devil worship and senseless murder.  One could see it, the turning point, as certain in hindsight as the Munich Accord which led to WWII.  If we could only put it back in a box… but once Pandora’s mischief is released, it cannot be caged until it has run its course. 
 
We can never completely rise above debased societies.  The martyrs of the early Christian years were killed in great number and without mercy for centuries, but that did end, the Christian era replacing a crumbling ancient world that led, eventually, to European world dominance and the great evil and good that this has brought us.  Its fall was built-in, as Europe could not rise to meet the moral demands of the religion that made it great (as no nation or nations ever could), but what will replace it will be much worse for a while for many – maybe even as bad as the Roman world was for Christians and the myriad of conquered nations.  For those of us now who wish to avoid the chaos, this is a time for great faith.  What will not kill all of us will make us stronger.  But, oh, for the certainty of the good ‘ol days!  We could not live them now, as we can see all too well behind the group-think of yesteryear, but how simple it seemed!
 
It wasn’t then, not really, as no time is when lived authentically, but innocence certainty is always there for anyone, just waiting for us.  Someday this pure innocence might truly rule, if and when both the arrogance of hegemonic certainty and its demoralizing counter-punch have finally become exhausted.  I think this is what is meant by the End of History.  We can live a little bit of this innocence now, maybe even more so, given that things indeed seem to be falling apart.  This might allow us to get beyond weakened unconscious social beliefs.  Certainly, many of us will at least try to live lives of greater innocence and purity. 
 
For now, I will make another prediction: someday soon, we will look at the 2000-teens – maybe even 2020 - with the nostalgia we reserve for times of naïve simplicity.  If that time really comes, it would be best to be secure in one’s spiritual faith.  

 
Tragedy of tragedy, the storied romance of Bill and Melinda Gates is over.  Alas, as the spokesperson for the family said, they are no longer “growing together.”  This does not mention the time Bill has spent with a former girlfriend over the past several years, or anything else.  I guess we are supposed to simply shake our heads and say, “Well yeah, if they are no longer growing together, I think they SHOULD split.  I mean, what else is marriage for?”  Excuse me as I reach for the barf bag.
 
Ok, ok, I am not being justly sympathetic to Bill because of what I think I know of him.  It is not as much about his wealth – I would not want the responsibility of that much wealth, although I’d take a few million off his hands – but about his power and how he got it and how he wields it.  That conversation would be for another time.  But really: grow together?  Is that what we are, stair- climbers for each other until one misses a step and then “sayonara”?  Is that a good example for a marriage?
 
I often try to give a full disclosure on myself before writing an opinion, not because my life is an object of fascination, but because I want to at least try to avoid being a hypocrite.   Here it is: I have never been divorced, but that is deceiving.  Before marriage, I had several relationships that at one time would have been considered marriages.  I also did not marry until well into my 30’s, when experience had shown me that the initial flush of “love” in a sexual relationship was illusory at best, and often dangerously deceptive.  As a plug for my own work, I have an essay on that, “My Guitar,” in my book Beneath the Turning Stars, where I think I describe the danger of confusing a loving relationship with sexual chemistry very well.  Oof-dah.  To think of that experience gives me both a feeling of shame and an even greater feeling of relief.  Boy howdy was I allowed to dodge the bullet, praise be to my guardian angel and anyone else who came to my rescue.   
 
That said, I at least believe that marriage is a one-time thing that must be enjoyed and endured for a lifetime.  This is in the Bible, both in the New and in the Old Testament, much to the chagrin of the Jews and Jesus’s disciples.  In the book of Malachi, for instance, it is said that “you must…not break faith with the wife of your youth. / For I hate divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel…” (Ch. 2) In the New Testament: “I now say to you, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery…,” to which the disciples replied, “If that is the case between man and wife, it is better not to marry.” (Ch. 19)  To which I say, who is the wiser, Jesus or his disciples?  For, as we oldsters all know, the ‘mystery’ ends somewhere between the first few months and the first decade, give or take.  From then on, one finds oneself dealing not with an illusion but with another human being, and as many of us know, it is hard enough to have to deal with ourselves.
 
I did not fall into this topic by accident.  Not only did I read the statement in Malachi last night – finishing the Bible at last, after nearly a year – but I heard that a female friend is suffering from depression because her marriage of nearly 40 years has come to a dead-end.  They have nothing in common anymore, she  says; he works and comes home and eats and such and then goes to bed; he is too tired to do fun things; and, we might suppose although we do not know, things are probably not a-boil in the bedroom (or elsewhere).   What is she to do?
 
How many books have been written about this problem?  In the bad old days of my youth, I was dumped and did some dumping myself over some of the same said problems, albeit after months rather than decades.  Thinking of her situation actually makes me feel a little frightened.   Michael Crichton wrote in his autobiography, Travels, of such a feeling at a party with friends and wives.  When he and they learned that one part of a couple was missing because they were breaking up, all went silent, each thinking, “Who’s next?  It could be us,” the thought casting doubt on the potential reliability of each spouse present.  Yes, this could be any of us at some time, although the infirmities of age might overwhelm such considerations in the near future for some of us.  Even then, someday that wife or husband next to us might be thinking, “There’s got to be something – someone – better.  I have only one life to live, and it’s passing me by!”
 
The books on marriage: the most famous I have not read.  They are usually displayed on day-time talk shows meant for women and include ways to spice up a marriage.  The one I have just quoted – the Bible – states simply that “thou shalt not,” which is always easier said than done.  In the New Testament particularly, we are supposed to shun the ways of the material world and live for pure spirit.  Pure spirit does not need sexy lingerie to spice up a marriage.  It only needs spirit, the purer the better, where there really wouldn’t be something better on the side, as pure spirit is always good all unto itself.  There, problem solved.
 
Of course it isn’t, and the common religious remedy would be to pray for patience and returned love or at least duty.  This isn’t quite as bad as it might seem, as the randy old Earnest Hemmingway once said (my paraphrase): “I should have stayed with the first wife.  She was just as good as the rest,” famous last words that could come back to haunt many of us.  As for myself: I say, get a good hobby or hobbies that are passions.  Live your life together with your spouse and have regular contact, but do not be dependent on him or her to make your life exciting.  Freud said that this is what most men do when confined sexually by a marriage, something he called “sublimation,” and he should know.  The hobbies or work are supposed to be compensatory, but I for one can’t imagine having sex all the time with multiple wives or paramours or whatever voracious potentates like King David called his many, many lovers.  (OK, I could imagine it at certain times, but not at others.  Once the dinner is eaten, it is time for other entertainment). 
 
What this all means for the depressed friend is, I admit, not much.  She can change, but she might not be able to change her husband.  That is the way it is with relationships, and sometimes we are unpleasantly surprised by how powerless we are when the other one decides to do something – like divorce – when we do not.  Still, the Bible makes an enduring call to both this-world duty and spiritual-world reality.  Nothing of this world endures, not its trinkets or money nor our power or health.  The world, from children to spouse to alcohol to concerts, will let us down one way or another in the end.  It, in totality, is not enough for long.  This is one of the major points of wisdom. 
 
But we are all spiritual beings, meaning that we have a potential for endless beauty and wonder.  While we are attached to this world, we are just as limited; but once we become attached to the spirit, we are not.  While the “mystery” may leave the marriage on one level, it need not ever go on another.   This relationship creates what the Catholic leaders call a “holy marriage,” which does not mean one that is a-sexual, but rather one that is focused on spirit.  This works all the more the more we focus on spirit.  Again, it is not easy, just as not eating too much or drinking too much or whatever our excesses are is not easy, but it can be done, as successful AA members tell us. 
 
But again, to have a happy spiritual marriage would require that both commit to it.  If only one does, he or she might pay the price of continued suffering in the marriage or a break-up of the marriage by the other.  Still, the point might be made that the worldly rudiments of marriage cannot keep people forever in love.  Such it was that Elizabeth Taylor once confessed, “I marry so much because I love being in love!”  I don’t think she really died choking on a chicken bone, but I am sure she did not die perpetually in love.  Such are the dreams of adolescents. 
 
I suppose that now I should hide this essay before my wife reads it, as she might assume that she is not the constant focus of my adoration.  Fortunately, she rarely reads what I write because that mystery is gone for her.  So be it.  I would hate the responsibility of being perpetually interesting.  And, having admitted that I do not have ultimate control of my marriage, I believe it is time to stop writing and get down to another of my passions, playing guitar.  Not the sad guitar in the essay about the phony lost loves of my youth, but the exciting one that is always one step away from my ability, a challenge I will never really master – like eternal love.  And so the mystery never ends. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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​ 
When we arrived in Utah, I was forced to think of Edward Abbey and his classic book, Desert Solitaire.  In this, he wrote of his time during the 1950’s as a summer ranger in the parks area, and spoke of the tourist reaction to the arches, the “windows,” the canyons, the massive balanced rocks and the jutting cliffs layered with geological colors: ‘The Midwesterners saw the wonders and spoke of God, but there is no need for God here.  These are magnificent works of nature, but there is no god inherent in any of them’ (my paraphrase).  And so the dry Canyonlands struck me as well.  There was no god there.  The size of it all, the great rocks of thousands of tons, the intricate patterns etched into the land, were all well beyond the hands of any god.
 
Or my god, that is.  For any believer in a monotheistic god, this is a ridiculous claim, as God is the maker of all things, including the universe and the very laws of nature, but it was as I felt: my god was not that powerful; how could he be when he was comfortably ensconced in a modest church in a modest town in southern Wisconsin? 
 
That was how I felt then as I walked among the fit young people of the Southwest who were biking up the steep hills, climbing the impossible pinnacles with ropes and pitons, and rafting the roiling waters of the Colorado and Green and San Juan rivers.  Amongst them I was nothing but a fat old fart huffing and puffing his way over pedestrian trails trying desperately to keep pace in the high altitudes.  Here amidst the grandeur and sparkling energy of youth I was a side-story, a has-been - as was my Midwestern god.  Under the cape of a great cliff or in the depths of a shadowed canyon, both had been humbled as if to nothing. 
 
Fortunately, most of those impressions did not last long.  For one, how could I expect to compete with the youth that I had once been myself?  That was something I had coming to me, and the sting of that truth settled on me like age itself – slowly, and with a bit of humor.  On the other hand, I found that I did not have to apologize for God.  While I might well be a fraud – of course I am – that is my own defect.  We enclose God with our own restrictions and deficiencies, chained as much to our infantile image of Him as we are too many other major concepts.  Read Freud.  It was, then, not the mountains that made God small, but my own image, one that was dashed apart by the staggering heft of the naked geology of the Southwest.  
 
So it was with you, Edward Abbey, and so, I suspect it is for most who deny anything greater than what they themselves can conceive.  We lock the enormity of human potential inside our expectations, just as we lock the unfathomable universe inside a tasteless box of astrophysics and theoretical mathematics – and just as we lock God inside the sermons and tales of our youth, or even in our present-day hum-drum life. 
 
There is more, though, to the Christian god that makes the jump from chapel to mega-universe so difficult to grasp.  This is the One who supposedly sent down a fully divine son to live and eat and defecate and die just like the rest of us.  This man-god came to preach not the cosmological or geological truths of our universe, but rather moral truths that dealt only with the affairs of humans.  Yes, he raised the dead and cured the blind and generally was able to disregard the laws of physics and of life itself, but did he make mountains?  True, it was his “father,” as he himself called God, who parted the seas and hovered above the tribes of Israel for forty years as a truly cosmic god, but who even in the time of Christ still truly believed that? More importantly, his son did not crumble mountains and so on, and for those who look at the Christian religion from the outside, there is nothing more to the life of Jesus than a string of moral teachings that are more congruous with the world of the ancient Middle East than with our world culture today. 
 
Should the Son of Man have come to raise mountains from the dust or call down the stars to swoop dangerously close to our little planet?  Would that not have convinced us of his divinity and of the total sovereignty of God the Father? 
 
In a word, no.  We have about us the creation already, which we have reduced to mental formulae even as we have radically increased its size.  The proof of the creator is already here, so obvious that we of little minds often cannot see it.  It is the moral truths that we cannot see and that must be brought out, so that we might not only live well among ourselves but lose the blinders of our vanity.  It is then that we might see beyond the thin gruel that we have made of our daily lives, and of our perspective of nature.  500 people are said to have seen the risen Christ at the same time, well attested to by many who were put to death for this account, but still we do not believe.
 
The great canyons and mountains bring us to awe when seen anew, just as the ocean does.  This is a start, but do they enlighten us?  Or do we become used to them, as backdrops for our ordinary human-centered lives?  That is what I had done with the concept of the infinite, which was broken and rebuilt by the renewed discovery of the vastness of nature.  But that is not enough, as Edward Abbey’s words exemplify.  God is not seen in his mesas and Canyonlands because our vision of Him has remained, for many, as small as our childhood introduction to him.  The Midwesterners who spoke of God near Ed Abbey were right and he, in his conceit, was wrong.  The grandeur absolutely speaks of God, as do so many things that we have set aside, classified, and taken for granted.  Is rising from the dead less spectacular than forming a mountain?   Is dying for humanity any less humbling than the expanse of the night sky?  Or are they apiece, like youth and old age, combining wisdom and energy and humility to aid in our inner search?  What we might find within is not a mass of cliffs and boulders, but rather the given capacity to appreciate all of their grandeur, for that is the only place that this sentiment lies.  Awe is not on the outside, but the inside, a gift that can also serve as our source of deliverance.  Edward, you made the greatness only as large as your world-bound spirit and are the smaller for it, just as I am the smaller for my comfortable corn-belt god that is humbled by the size of a cliff. 
 
 
 

 
 
While we were attending to the burial of my mother-in-law a few weeks ago, we were welcomed to stay with an old high school friend of my wife and her husband.  It was in a beautiful rural area of Mississippi and we got along like bread and butter, but I was a little bit startled at one of the last things the husband said to me as we were leaving: “Fred, you are an unusual person.”  At least I think that is what he said.  Maybe it was “interesting,” but if that, I still took it to mean unusual.  I replied that he was too, giving back to him his meaning, whatever that might have been, and all was right, but it got me to thinking: what is an unusual person?  How do we define that? 
 
To begin with, I asked my wife if she thought I was unusual.  She said “No, just …… up.”  It was, I presumed, a joke, but I couldn’t stop.  After that non-answer (I hope), I started going through people we knew, asking “Is he unusual?  How about her?” and so on until it dawned on me that there were at least two criteria for “unusual”: the outward presentation and the deeper, more private person.  After doing it this way, it became clear that some people, at least as far as we know, might present themselves as normal but be unusual, then vice-versa, then normal/normal, then unusual/unusual, for a total of four possibilities, just like those genetic boxes we used to draw for eye color and so on.  Continuing with the genetic model, it might be that “normal” is dominant, but then again, that might only account for the “normal on the outside, unusual on the inside” side of the equation. 
 
So we moved on down a list of friends and family members keeping the inner/outer orientation in mind.  Along the way, it did occur to me that this was more of a Rorschach test of ourselves than anything else, but let me leave that for a moment.  Rather, the more we got into it, the more nuanced it got.  Yes, there were those who were, to us, clearly unusual/unusual, and others who were normal/normal, but those increasingly had to be put into context.  For instance, a normal accountant would be a highly unusual football professional; a normal priest an abnormal bartender, a bouncer an abnormal ballet dancer, a cop an abnormal socialist activist, and so on.  From some perspectives, then, the issue became cloudy.  I determined for myself, for instance, that although I might be unusual for a carpenter, I am pretty ordinary for an academic and writer, making me initially unusual, but really normal, even – sigh - bland.  Maybe.
 
Obviously, we have to question everything here, but it also became fairly clear that some people were simply unusual, even whacky, no matter what the profession, just as some people were inherently normal regardless of the profession.  On the one hand, we might consider that certain professions draw unusual people, making the normal undertaker, for instance, pretty unusual in a mixed crowd, but not always.  On the other hand, we might agree that some people were simply unbalanced or marching to a different drummer whether they were part of a New Orleans transvestite dance troupe or a member in good standing of the Pipe Fitters Union - all in all making this kind of categorization very complex and almost endlessly nuanced. 
 
Certainly such considerations are subjective, making this a personality test of the judger as well, something that could only be corrected by a sampling of a much larger, randomized group of judges.  How many would think that the entertainer Prince was an unusual fellow?  How about George W. Bush?  Then we must ask the truly complex question: Why?  Was Prince unusual for his androgynous style, his music, his drug addictions, or his overall personality?  Did we really know his personality?  And what about Bush’s secret artsy side? So on and on it goes.
 
Easter has just passed, and if one keeps up with the daily readings on the Catholic calendar, Monday after Easter is the day that Mary Magdalene walks to the tomb, only to find two angels in it, but no Jesus.  She turns to find someone who she thinks is the gardener and asks him if he might know where the body has been taken.  With a few words, her vision clears and she sees that is it Jesus himself standing in front of her, not a gardener.  As we are told, it was then that she saw Jesus for who he is, just as the three apostles saw Jesus before the Resurrection in his glorified body during his transfiguration on Mount Tabor. 
 
His glorified body: what is it?  It cannot be a mere outward presentation to the group, nor a reflection of privately held quirks.  So then what?
 
It occasionally happens that I am brought to see a part of my personality that I had not known existed.  Some of these configurations have not been pleasant to witness, but some have seemed like a reflection of a personal transfiguration, a vision of the soul that is the very BEST I could be, bestowing on me something like the characteristics of a wise and genuine saint.  This informs me, and I think all of us, that many aspects of the self are somehow hidden, even to the private self.  Now, I understand why the uglier, even nasty, images might be tucked away by the subconscious, but why would we hide our better aspects from any level of self or society?  It is true that we are not doing this consciously, just as many of our prosaic private quirks are not hidden consciously but from psychological habit, but this is different.  The better part should be extoled by the society at large, so why hide them?
 
The reason must be that this glorified self that we probably all share would NOT be extoled by society at large, but rather make us extremely, even dangerously, unusual.  On the surface of it, Jesus was killed for the blasphemy of suggesting that he was the son of God,  but we know well from the New Testament that the Jewish powers-that-be despised him for exposing their hypocrisy, something that many had not realized about themselves before.   Here we witness the fury of men who carefully conceal elements of themselves, only to be exposed as if they had been caught in bed with another man’s wife.  Such humiliation of people in power will never go unpunished. 
 
So it would be with us.  So it is that we hide ourselves from this best-version-of-ourselves with all our might.  Some cannot do it so well, just as some cannot hide their other quirks either, and these are the people we would call unusual.  Those who cannot control the best or the worst of themselves we either constrain in public institutions, relegate to street-life, or publicly mock and effectively destroy.  And while some traits simply must be tamed for any society to continue, our better sides are muffled because they would rock the boats of those  who feel confident, even superior, in their social facades.   
 
We Christians are told all the time that we will eventually suffer for our beliefs if we actually profess them and act upon them.  For most of us, this is not a problem, because we have spent so much of our lives sculpting our inner selves for the outer world (and for ourselves) that to stray from our script is almost an impossibility.  As in most great undertakings, to take that leap from our practiced self to something greater requires faith.  It also requires us to reject the ego-salves that we have been handed by our social/cultural/political milieu.  Tough stuff to do. 
 
Back in Mississippi, I did not want to be called ‘unusual,’ at least without a positive modifier like “unusual in your vast intellect,” because I did not want to be seen as the one chicken in the flock who gets pecked to death.  It is a natural reaction to the world as it is.  We fight other, more acknowledged temptations stemming from our biological natures as well, but the fear of being ‘unusual’ is the most hidden and perhaps the most powerful obstacle we must overcome before we can become truly unusual in the best possible way.  To do so requires the faith that this self is really there, and the courage of the martyrs who stepped from the edge of mere self to realize their cosmic identities.     
                                                                       
 
[Note: I will not be posting another essay until sometime in the first week of May.  FK]
 
 
 
 
 

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I was on the phone with my brother the gun nut, er, expert, discussing deer rifles.  Hunting deer is not my obsession, but my son has suddenly taken an interest in it, so I thought I’d get something more than the single shot 12 gauge, without rifling, that I used last year.  Anyway, the conversation got carried away as usual, and then he told me this unusual thing about a video of two US Army snipers in the first Gulf War.  As I have read, in many cases the guy with the gun is accompanied by a spotter who helps identify an enemy, not just to spot him but to make sure he IS an enemy and not just some pistachio farmer. 
 
So the shooter and the spotter scope a guy over a mile away who suffices as an enemy.  The shooter has a single-shot bolt action .50 caliber sniper gun with a super scope and tripod for absolute support, and he pulls the trigger on him.  “Holy shit!” says the spotter, who is also looking at the ‘kill,’ “that guy just did a flip in the air!”  They both laugh.  “He looked like a swastika floating in space the way his legs and arms were going.  Gimme that gun for the next one.  I gotta do that!” 
 
That’s one way to laugh.
 
Now here’s my favorite joke of all time: What’s round and purple and conquered the world?  Alexander the Grape!   
 
OK, maybe it’s in the delivery, but those are two situations, or mind pictures, that elicit laughter, one of a man being spun in the air by an extremely powerful bullet, and the other of an imaginary warrior who could be nothing but comic, even in his armor.   One, awful, the other, about as ridiculous and harmless as you can get.  Why, then, might both make us laugh? 
 
This goes back to a similar discussion I had on humor many years ago on this blog.  It was about fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s definition of humor as something that put other people in submissive or humiliating circumstances.  My conclusion was that this was so, but not always so: laughter also came from the unexpected, like the identification in the above joke of the world conqueror with a Greek grape. 
 
After a recent reading, it has occurred to me that there is much more to humor.  It concerned a book by an evangelizing Catholic named Mathew Kelly, speaking about his book, I Heard God Laugh.  He claims that God is joy and that laughter is also joy, so the two often come together.  He claims that the people of old who scribed the Bible perhaps forgot to put down the funny parts.  It must have often been hilarious, says Kelly, to be in Jesus’s company, with a man so filled with God’s joy.  This mirth must have burst forth regularly.  I am not sure about that, but Kelly is certainly right about one thing: the scribes and prophets and apostles who wrote the Bible did not have a sense of humor, so much so that it is nearly impossible imagining Jesus telling a joke about Alexander the Grape. 
 
My guess is that he probably didn’t tell such jokes, and that he certainly didn’t laugh at a more common equivalent of the man being shot with the .50 cal., something we can call the “slippery banana” joke which, considering, isn’t that funny for the guy slipping on the banana – or catching a bullet.  But I bet Kelly is right about there being humor while living with Jesus, and not just the subtle stuff 
 
I say this because I believe there is an even better way to lump humor together in all its various forms: that humor comes forth from the recognition of the unknown; that is, it is both a factor of self or human deprecation AND novelty, rolled into one.  This would make laughter a potentially powerful ally of God and the spiritual, for in both cases, it demands from even the haughtiest some degree of humility.
 
There is more to humor than humility, however.  In recognizing that we do not know and cannot ever know the universe, we recognize the infinite creativity of God; and in laughing about it, we rejoice at the infinite possibilities of our world and our separate lives.  Life, then, can never be a grind; and life can offer infinite possibilities, from eternal heaven to only God knows what.  As we rejoice in laughter, we also subtly understand that the weirdness of the universe is, or can be, benign – that its infinite possibilities are directed by a force or forces that just might offer us everything we could ever want, and more.
 
This is not to deny that laughter is often whistling past the graveyard – that is, laughing to shield us from the terror – but in even that, why would laughter help us, except by confirming through our humorous stoicism that there is hope even in terror?  For if there is no hope, would anyone, at least anyone sane, be brave enough to laugh?
 
However, there might just be a problem here: that is, if humor is based on the recognition of our limitations in an infinite universe, how could God laugh with us?  According to Christian ideas, God, including his son, Jesus Christ, is all-knowing.  How then can anything be funny? 
 
I think I know how.  When we do magic tricks for our kids, or tell them of Santa or read them fairytales that they hear with wide eyes, do we not feel their joy and their wonder?  Isn’t this what God would be doing if he laughed?  And wouldn’t this be the best sign that God is more love than fear, enjoying our joy of his infinite creativity along with us?
 
It is a big statement, to say you heard God laugh, but laughter itself is almost as big as God.  It can be mean, but it is only mean in a small way for people who are acting small.  In its depth, it is our humble recognition that life is WAY over our head, but that we are grateful for so great a challenge, for so great a mystery.  In this we voice our belief without words that this universe just might be worthy of our trust.  
 
If God laughs along with us, we know that it is not in the small, mean way, for how could that be possible for something larger than large?  Rather, it is the reaction of a creator who takes joy in his creation, who expresses this joy through us and for us.  It is the reaction of a creator who walks with us, helping us to grow beyond slapstick to the profound wonder that we were made to share.  In its greater form, this is the laughter that is called Awe. 
 
 
 




 
 
 
 
 

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            Less than two weeks after our last emergency trip, we got the call again, and this time it was for real.  A nurse who had worked for 20 years in hospice saw the signs of death in the breathing, and maybe in something else, but she knew – and it was so.  So that is where we went, to a funeral for my wife’s mom.  Unlike last time, death was not nearly as present as loss, a disbelief that someone who had been in our world for decades and a lifetime was now forever gone, elsewhere, to only God knows where.  May you be blessed, Mary Ann. 
 
            Everything went as well as can be, but that did not matter to our dreams.  Recently, my wife dreamed that her mother had been buried alive – horrible but impossible, as she had been embalmed.  Why? As for myself, I had a dream of a different sort.  It was no more wanted than Vicki’s but it insisted not only on being presented, but on staying in memory by a chance discussion.
 
I know for a fact that I am not the center of the world – centers of the world aren’t routinely ignored by the rest of the world – but I wonder about “chance.”  It is my feeling that whatever made the universe could certainly make something important for me while making something else important for someone else at the same time, all as seamless as the cloak of night.  In this case, chance involved a discussion about a dream by our host, an old friend of my wife who had insisted we stay with her during the ordeal of death and funeral and the sorting of property.  Her dream had been a typical anxiety-at-work dream, something that was only of minor interest to me until it sparked the memory of my own dream the night before.  It had been forgotten, and for good reason, but from then on, it was not to go away.  No chance of that.
 
The dreamscape had been formed right there in the large, woodsy lot of our host in rural Mississippi.  The trees had budded but not grown into leaf, just as in the waking world, and the sky was hung with clouds from the rains the night before.  I could have been standing in the front yard fully awake, so identical it was to the woken world.  Then came the substance, not in sight but in feel.  Quickly but sublimely, I got a surge of what true hopelessness would be like.  This was not the feeling that one might get at the wrong end of a firing squad or just before the blow of an avalanche.  Those are one-time senses, or so I suppose, where life is about to end and there is nothing to be done about it.  No, this was much worse.  This was about an eternal hopelessness despite the surrounding scenery.  This was about hopelessness both here and there, in a field of flowers or in a bed with the naked and the beautiful.  It did not matter where one might be or what one might be doing.  All about was hopelessness. 
 
Can I describe it any better?  Can anyone describe anything that is felt as total and eternal?  Although no words came to me, I believe I figured out what this was: a glimpse of Hell.  It did not need fire or demons or anything ugly – just the sense, the certainty, of eternal hopelessness.  That was all it took to cause a remote sense of horror and doom.
 
It is my wish – my hope – that the remoteness of this horror meant that this was not a personal message, but rather a warning for us all to never let go of hope.  From old it has been said that hope is one of the three things we are supposed to have for a good life, the other two being “faith” and “charity.”  Oddly, it is hope that I always thought I had a lot of, with a lesser amount of faith and a miserly thimbleful of charity.  But hope?  Wasn’t I taught that we could do anything in America if we tried hard enough?  Wasn’t the sky the limit, and then not even that, as Apollo 11 showed us? 
 
Was it, then,  a message of a political and cultural nature reflecting recent changes in America that some believe have bleached out all hope?  There might be some truth to that, but there was much more depth to it.  Yes, recent history has been discouraging – what era has not had its bad moments? - but this came at the time of the funeral of my mother-in-law, and also only two weeks before Easter.  What is death by itself but the end of hope?  And what is Easter but the supreme hope in death?  Death in the raw is absolute to us, an undeniable end to the person we knew, while Easter, as we all know, denies this finality.  In our current era, we hide death in institutions, but the dream world knows.  The dream world can also be informed, so that it might relay to us that, even as death seems a dark end, we must still have hope; we must still have hope or else live in Hell.
 
Would this hell be forever?  I don’t know.  Could we die without hope and then remain in the realm of the dead without hope?  Would we then live in the gray nether-world the Ancients envisioned, left to fade away into gloomy nothingness?  So the Hebrews thought, until Resurrection came to the believers.  To BELIEVERS.  Certainly, faith is linked to hope, for who could have hope in a world built on death without faith?  And let us not forget charity, for who would give up his wealth to strangers without a belief that something greater than us held us together in an embrace that at the very least hinted at universal love? 
 
Faith, hope, and charity, the last two impossible without faith, and faith not demonstrable in this world without love.  All are linked, one leading to the other, one dependent on the other.  Without hope, life is an abyss of occasional pleasure and certain disappointment.  With faith, we turn our gaze outwards from ourselves and downwards to those united to us in love, proof that the universe is not an ocean of unfeeling emptiness.  We cannot truly live without hope, we cannot have hope without faith, and we cannot see faith without charity, without love.  When we die, it might be that an invisible golden chain will be extended towards us, a chain whose links are made from faith and hope and love, and we might be called to grasp it - or not.  It might be gold and eternal but it might also be easily missed, camouflaged by the limitations of the world.  It might be that we first must have faith and hope before we can even find the chain that leads to perfect love.
 
Hope is not always easy.  A death, a funeral, fear of the cold hand, fear of being buried alive.  Horror.  At such times hope is often lost.  It is also at such times when hope must be found, for without it, the horror comes true.  With hope comes something so much greater - but we first must believe to hope. 
 
Oh Dream in Death, I hope the love they speak of at Easter will bring us this belief.  Faith, hope, and charity:  grant us this golden chain that takes from us the hopelessness that only our nightmares can truly understand.