Today, a new essay, "Woods Stories," under Essays in the website.  FK

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Ah, poor Jerry Falwell Jr., or maybe you haven’t heard.  Few probably care except to raise a sardonic smirk and say, “Here we go again.”  Apparently, the son of a preacher man and inheritor of Liberty University, along with his wife, were swingers, which is to say, traded spouses to relieve the boredom of married sexual life.  Here we go again with another hypocrite who cannot practice what he so vociferously preaches.  The worst of it for the public parallels the fallout from the Catholic priest scandal by creating a cynicism which leads to the rejection of the good because of the bad – and sometimes legitimizing the bad, as in “If even a preacher (or priest) can’t keep his pants zipped, how can (or why should) I?” For me, while I know that fewer priests per capita have been found to be sexual involved with the under-aged than public school teachers, still, it at least seems to be that the holier-than-thou are more accursed than the average guy.
 
Maybe it’s true; maybe the devil tries harder for those who are trying harder to escape him.  This is held as axiomatic for many believers, but I think the grander take-away is this: that it is very, very hard for anyone to eschew all the things of this world.  Even the saints – maybe especially the saints- have a hard time, although in part because they set the bar higher for themselves.  For instance, after my favorite, St Augustine, conquered his sexual desires, he went on to disclaim himself for enjoying eating.  Not binging, mind you, but eating. He realized that he was required to eat to stay alive, but he suspected that he might sometimes eat for the sake of taste.  Oh horror. Such scrupulosity is so far above my abilities that I feel no shame in my weakness regarding food, but only amazement at his strength.
 
But it seems that we are all set upon by a certain weakness that we do care about and that becomes our special vice to conquer.  Some, like poor Jerry Jr, are cursed with the humiliating need to flail it about until all the world is given to picture their pink behinds twitching away with accompanying grunts and groans.  Some walk the line with addiction, while some are congenital liars.  Akin to the liar, there are also many of us who need some sort of trophy so that we can present ourselves to the world as something grander than what we know we are.  Given my recent experience, this might well be the special vice given to me to conquer. 
 
It happened last Thursday, at something called “Adoration” at the Catholic Church.  It is the Catholic belief that the host is not a representation of Christ, but his actual body.  So it is that when a host is consecrated – that is, ritually turned into the body of Christ – it can be worshiped and ‘adored’ just as the man-god would in human form.  Personally, I don’t really care for most of the ceremony of mass, but Adoration is a perfect for meditation, with the host serving as the mantra to keep out external and unwanted thoughts.  After several minutes of this meditation, I usually ask for some advice, or anything God wishes to tell me.  Last Thursday I got the message loud and clear: “Psalm 131.” 
 
I had myself memorize the number, but then forgot about it until I went back that night to read more of Augustine’s Confessions.  In this, he quoted a psalm, and with this I remembered my own psalm and looked it up.  I was hoping for some sign to proceed forth to greatness, like David when he was told to conquer the Philistines, but instead I got this: “Oh Lord, my heart is not proud, nor are my eyes haughty; I busy not myself with great things, nor with things too sublime for me. Nay rather, I have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child.  Like a weaned child on its mother’s lap [so is my soul within me.]…(Psalm 131, The New American Bible)  I understood this to mean: Nothing but child’s stuff for this lad, who is but a weaned babe on his mother’s lap.  No greatness for this one.  Bummer.
 
Being disappointed showed right off the bat my own need for recognition, and this immediately set off this not-too-sublime mind of mine in pursuit of why I needed recognition.   This forced me to recognize that I don’t need anything beyond what I have: a family in pretty good shape, a house, money for food, and the common distractions of reading, writing, playing guitar and, alas since Lock- Down, watching Netflix and Amazon Prime series.  Sure, I’m getting old and nothing works quite as well as it used to, but such is the fate of all flesh.  Otherwise, I have everything I need, or should need.  But I don’t.  Obviously, I want people to be impressed with me. 
 
This is, when looked at with the naked eye, an embarrassment, a state of affairs much like the un-weaned child, who sits not with contentment on his mother’s lap, but cries to be nourished with something that, given his age, he should not want or need.  I want, but I don’t really ‘want.’  I have been thoroughly fed and should now be a man in need of none but God’s succor, but this is obviously not so.  Still I cry: Oh give me a great deed to accomplish so that they may build statues to me, at least in their minds!  Yes, all so unnecessary and, when looked at squarely, so pathetic.
 
There is an odd ending to this lesson, however.  Friday night, after I had written the first page of this essay, I went back to reading Confessions (this Friday was also Augustine’s official day of recognition).  Since it is a dense book, I only read a few pages of it a day, and often miss reading it when traveling, so I did not catch what Augustine had really been writing about for all of this section of the book.  Finally he told the reader in no uncertain terms that this section had not been only about his famous struggles with sexual dalliances, but with temptations in his life in general.  The sexual need had been the most shameful thing for him, but he had also to struggle, as briefly mentioned above, with food and with such nothings (to us) as enjoyment of music and visual beauty.  All of these were temptations that could and sometimes did lure him from thoughts of God, and all of these things he admitted to largely subduing.  But there was one thing he thought he might never be able to conquer:
 
 “…there is a third kind of temptation which, I fear, has not passed from me.  Can it ever pass from me in all this life?  It is the desire to be feared or loved by other men, simply for the pleasure that it gives me, though in such pleasure there is no true joy.  It means only a life of misery and despicable vainglory.… yet in what others say about us and in what they know of our deeds there is grave danger of temptation.  For our love of praise leads us to court the good opinion of others and hoard it for our personal glorification.”  So it is that I was in part redeemed, for if one of the greatest saints of the Catholic Church could not conquer his need for praise from Man, who am I to condemn myself? 
 
But there is a catch.  It is not that I am freed from such a problem.  Rather, it shows me that a once-common man, Augustine in his youth, was able to subdue the other lures of the material world for God, leaving only this one tenacious element of pride.   Just as with Augustine, I should be able to do away with those others, and, since I now understand it, should work on dispelling the distraction of personal glory all the more.  Although we – at least I – often treat self-betterment as if it were a game, for Augustine it was no game, but rather a struggle between eternal death and eternal life.  It was a big, big deal to him, and clear to his supreme intellect that to be caught up in the things of this transient world is folly.  And so it is; so it is that, when vices are written out as I have done regarding praise, they do show themselves to be attitudes of weakness and vainglory. 
 
Augustine should know: he died 1600 years ago, and all is less than dust except for his thoughts.  All he knew, from the Roman Empire to contemporaneous theories on geography and cosmology, are antiquated, of interest only to historians and those who dally in the past.  All the conquerors and emperors and great artists and singers and philosophers of the day are either now poorly remembered or gone from all human memory.  To be revered by Man is vainglory, just as Augustine said, and other temptations are even more ephemeral.  Where, then, is a way out of this “game” but to acknowledge the truth, that all is folly in this fallen world?  For a man of Augustine’s genius, admired as he was and is in spite of himself, he could do nothing less.   
 
  
 
 
 

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Yesterday, as I stretched on awakening from my afternoon nap – I take one because I can – the first thing I saw was the book binding with the title “Iberia” (by James Michener, if it matters).  Funny thing was, in my semi-sleep, a part of me did not realize what that meant.  Another part did, and it wondered at the part that didn’t.  Iberia?  What’s in a name?  The part that didn’t know wondered at its foreign sound, and languidly guessed at what it meant: Tales of Arabian Nights?  Mohammed and the zealous hordes?  Which is to say, this mind had an idea, perhaps taken from the mind that understood, but not an exact idea.  It was different.  How could that be?  How can we have two thinking minds?
 
This morning I was looking for a decent CD to run on the old portable that sits on the dishwasher while I cooked a breakfast that had to include peppers and tomatoes, since we have 15 tons of them in the garden and they are threatening to mount an attack.  I shuffled through them (the CD’s, not the tomatoes and peppers – one does not shuffle through a mountain), seeing some that are definitely for winter only, or for spring, until I found one on the bottom that took me by surprise.  It was conductor David Wilcox’s Cambridge Choir rendition of Thomas Tallis’s masterpiece, “Spem in Alium” (which I believe I have mentioned here before.  If you need a big nudge to believe in God, this is it.), which I have been looking for over a year.  And there it was.  Of course I played it, and it brought the well-needed whelming of faith that is usually so hard to achieve.   I thought that this is why I found it (primitive that I am) and it was, but only in part.  It also suggested to me an idea that went so well with Iberia.  Here it is:
 
Think: when you lose your glasses, you really do know where they are.  Your mind is playing tricks on you, like a leprechaun that is stationed in your brain.  And when you are standing on stage and forget your lines due to stage fright, horror of horrors, you certainly do know your lines, but that leprechaun is acting up again.  One part of your mind is working either apart from another or actively against the other part.  I will not try to understand why here, and I’m sure it can fill a psychologist’s doctoral thesis, but it is so. 
 
Now think of that rush of spiritual feeling that many get from Thomas Tallis’s work, or from other songs or from cathedrals or the rock formations of Zion National Park.  Yes, these outside elements tip feelings off, but they are not in any way the feelings themselves.  We might have a great one-liner from “Dust in the Wind,” but there are none in the rock formations at Zion, nor really in “Spem,” because the words are in Latin and they can’t be understood anyway in the blending of the chorus.  Rather, the feelings come from within.  They were hiding there all along and needed prompting.  This is not like sex, that often needs another body or imaginary body to get the juices flowing, but rather something else that is entirely free from the material world, although it can be invoked by things of the material world.  It is, and has to be, within us at all times (wherever ‘within’ is). 
 
We live, then, with our normal side paired with the immortal and the sacred, both always being with us even as the sacred is normally sensed as being apart.  Like the glasses we lost, a part of us knows where the sacred is, but just like the glasses, we continually forget where we put it.  Something, a leprechaun of sorts, hides it from us even as it knows how to retrieve it.  Even if it is bequeathed to us by the Holy Spirit - which it must be, just as life is – it is still there with life, necessarily side by side.  The question is, what stops us from living with it at all times?  Unlike sex, an experience of the holy does not wear down our bodily chemical needs, nor does it age or become undesirable.  Like sex, if we experience it once, we want it again, and unlike sex, with spirit we can and want to have it all the time, forever. 
 
But that is not for this world.  That is the problem we as a spiritual species are set with in this dimension of living.  We are beset here by two minds, one on and one usually off from the one on, the latter relentlessly distracted by the hard-wired world of brick and mortar.  It is the job of the great spiritual leaders to give us techniques of “memory” that are used for tasks far more important than finding glasses or memorizing lines, and it is the gift of great artists to help us break through the maze of memory loss to get back to base one, back to our origin and to our future, our alpha and omega.  This is something we want to do, just as we want to find our glasses, but to want is not enough.  Finding the memory, the mind that always knows but hides, is what we need to do. 
 
The ways to do this always converge on denial of this world for the other.  It makes sense – we cannot remember where our glasses are if we are simultaneously thinking about other things, which is probably how we forgot them in the first place – but who wants to be mindful all the time?  This is the greatest challenge for the Masters – to find the technique that can save us from forgetfulness.  To follow such technique(s) is the greatest challenge for ourselves.  But if we at least know that the other is there, or are told by those we trust that it is, we just might drift towards it as our life naturally fades.  It might be that, as our material brain deteriorates, we can finally come to hold in our other mind that which lasts forever.   It could just be, then, that grandpa or grandma in their dementia might have turned the tables, with the daily mind lost to the spiritual mind.  It might just be.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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It’s been a strange summer of disrupted plans and unplanned excursions, the latter being attempts to patch over the former, with the default being camping trips to state forests and pilgrimages to the always-faithful cabin in the UP.   So you will note irregular postings which will probably continue into September, as lemons are stubbornly being turned into lemonade.  Who do I blame the most for those lemons: the virus, the amoral news media, the immoral politicians, or the ignorant and frightened masses? 
 
Or maybe myself.  Time will tell, but this last week was spent up at the cabin, where I heard the book-on-CD, Explorers of the Nile, by Tim Jeal.  Oh, the Dark Continent!  It went so well with my readings of the Old Testament for its barbarities and cruelties, from god-like perverse kings to the outrages of the Arab-Swahili slave traders.  The book should be read by every Black Lives Matter supporter who imagines that the evils of slavery were invented by white slavers in Anglo America.  They will discover, if they can bear it, that those evils existed in Africa during and long before – and long after – the American experiment in exploitative racism.  The list of casual cruelties is endless.  Read the book for the disgusting details. 
 
But this is not about blame, which has become such a useful, if dishonest, tool in current political discourse and action.  Rather, it is about the nature of ourselves, we of all colors and geographical backgrounds.
 
We have visited these grounds before: what is Man?  Is he the harsh force of nature as depicted by Hobbes, that man whose life is “brutish and short”?  Or is he the benevolent Bambi in the woods, if only the yoke of civilization had not been placed on his shoulders, as Rousseau the raconteur wished to tell us a few years before the triumph of the guillotine?  In Africa we have a sometimes-surprising glimpse of that nature through the outlook of the many explorers who sought fame and adventure in attempting to discover the source of the Nile, something sought since the time of the Pharaohs.  Some, like Richard Burton, thought that, ultimately, the black savage was irredeemable.  Some, like David Livingston, loved him but wished to convert him to a better way through Christianity.  And some, like John Speke (the one who discovered the source, though this was clouded by his co-adventurer and later enemy, Richard Burton) found this “savage” so much more refreshing than civilized man, who was in his opinion was cowed and tamed to a degree in which life itself was not really worth living.  For this reason above all he had become an explorer.
 
But the cruelties.  While certain of our citizens burn buildings to protest the brutality of Western Civilization – the same hypocrisy I found in the old days of the Vietnam War “peace” movement – they do not realize that most of the ideas that they hold dear about human rights and anti-racism came about through the Judaeo-Christian religions.  The people of the Old Book were every bit as brutal as the warlord chiefs and slavers of 19th century Africa, and the iron hand of the Roman Empire did nothing to further soften them.  Rather, it was the voice and edicts of their god, who has become for many of us our God, which civilized them in the manner in which civilization means compassion and mercy.  But messed up?  How many times have we heard of - or experienced ourselves – the neurosis which defines much of modern life?  It is this mess of unhappiness, propelled by inner feelings of guilt and worthlessness, which John Speke wished to escape, even at the expense of his health and ease.  
 
In a different way, our revolutionaries in the street are fighting to relieve themselves of the boredom and comfort of their controlled lives by destroying their source, even as they fling around empty notions of justice.  It is not justice that they really seek, but freedom from civilization.  I know – I have been there, although I have never thrown a Molotov cocktail at anyone.  I tried to shirk the yoke of civilized decency in my youth, which led to what I have written (wait for the plug) in my book, Dream Weaver.  I, too, believed in the goodness of humans if only we were set free – from capitalism, from religion, from school, or from whatever seemed handy at the time.  
 
Of course, our current revolutionaries have no intention of setting YOU free.  And that is the way it works without our notion of civilization.  With no eternal moralities to confine us, we would be less neurotic, but so much more selfish.  In the days before the maturation of Christianity – and we might include some other religions based on compassion – the strong controlled the weak.  They controlled them as much as they wanted too without having to think of others as people equal in worth to themselves.  Those others were commoners, or of different ethnicities, or of darker skin or, as we are seeing now, of the lighter variety.   There was no eternal one-ness, only a one-ness of the ego of the honorable lord-high mucky-muck and his chosen cronies in race, family, or ideology. 
 
What do we find from the explorer days of the Dark Continent?  It may or may not be Man-in-the-rough, as there were true nations in central Africa, which only technological Europe of the time could call primitive.  But it is Man without compassionate religion, Man without realization that all humanity is his brother and sister.  As the explorers tell us, life in Africa was freer and lither in personal expression, but far more brutal and usually shorter.  There, the morally compassionate could not live for long with the other, the natural ego-centered self.  At that time there was no real choice to be made.  As one African chief told an explorer, “The good are only good because they are weak.  Once they become strong, they become bad.”  But now, because of that pesky thing called the moral conscience, there is a choice. 
 
It is seldom that we have the chance to fully compare the ‘other’ to our own side, but in in our current world of doubt and tumult, we now can. History tells us that we cannot have both equality and moral relativism at the same time, for without that inner morality, the strong always end up abusing the weak.  Fortunately, we are still able to choose which direction we want.  Such books as Explorers in Africa show us the consequences of our choice – that there is no path that we might take that will fully satisfy our human nature.  However, it is clear, at least to me, that one choice leads to a more mature and greater truth than the other.  Hopefully, we are grown-up enough in this liminal time of history to make the right decision. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Lo those many years ago when I was writing my thesis and thought myself an old man – at thirty five, little did I know – I came across some unexpected problems.  One group of Indians I had lived with in back-woods Venezuela used bananas, along with sweet potatoes, as their staple food.  The problem came when I looked up the provenance of the original banana.  Did it come from tropical Africa, the Near East or Southeast Asia?  Not a bad question to ask when we know that potatoes, tomatoes and corn came from the New World, sugar from the Nile delta, and pineapple from far east Asia.  It should have been a question answered simply, right?
 
It was not.  It happens that no one really knows where the domesticated banana came from, and there are, or at least were in the 1990’s, still arguments about where the original wild species sprang from.  Archaeological sites with banana traces, they tell us, are hard to find, as the banana is tropical and things in the tropics that are not made of stone do not last long, and as for seeds, well, domesticated bananas have no seeds. 
 
The problem came up again with dogs.  The same group I lived with had this small, very agile hunting dog breed that I had not seen elsewhere, so I looked up the origins of the domestic dog.  Were dogs, in general, world-wide before the arrival of Columbus?  Answer: unknown.  Many authorities on the subject tell us that the domestic dog arrived with Europeans, but we all know about the Aztecs and the Chihuahua breed, made small and hairless and docile for the culinary appetites of the Azteca upper class.  So, dogs were here, but barely, according to the records (and what about Huskies and Eskimos, aka, Inuit?)  Or were they here big time and simply not noticed?  Early dogs and wolves and coyotes, after all, are from the same source and are capable of interbreeding and creating viable offspring.  Maybe those canine bones at the old camp sites were Fido in the rough. 
 
The same can be said of human species.  It is still held that we all came out of Africa, and a DNA marker test claimed that Eve – the mother of us all – spilled out her troublesome, world-trotting brood about 50,000 years ago, meaning that all of modern humans were once brothers and sisters just a few years ago, in geological terms.  That sat well with the crusaders against racism in my graduate days in the 80’s, but the past twenty years has seen a remarkable change in the genetic records.  Now it is thought that humans had many genetic offshoots from an original proto-hominid over the past several hundred thousand years, including Denisovan, Flores, and the well-known Neanderthal species, or sub –species.  These can no longer be dismissed from the modern Sapiens sapiens because it is believed that most of us carry some of these “other” genes, somewhere between one and three percent among Asians and Europeans, although less to nearly no percent in sub-Saharan Africans.   And don’t get started on the Australian Aborigines.
 
Meaning, at least to me, that things are still up in the air, which is a challenging place to be.  We need a foothold if we are to start an investigation, and air allows only wing-holds, which are fluid and unsubstantial.  With no foot holds, we can begin to accommodate all sorts of ideas, crazy and standard alike.  We can say that aliens seeded the world, literally mating with the proto-hominids on earth.  There is some possible reference to this in the Bible, in fact.  Or we can say that races are fundamentally different, as common knowledge once had it.  As the author of The Last of the Mohicans (James Fennimore Cooper) wrote, “we [races] all have our gifts.”  This, unfortunately, was the belief which opened the door for slavery based on race, which led to the anti-racist “one out of Africa” preference later on, with or without paleoanthropological evidence. 
 
Meaning, we don’t know even a slice of what we think we know.  Our knowledge is hindered not only by a shocking lack of evidence – some hominid species are represented by only a hand-full of bones – but by several twists of prejudices and preferences that cloud the correct interpretation of evidence.  We can use this to take a second look at all our beliefs today, both those before “PC” and those of “PC” itself, or at any other beliefs or interpretations.  I believe I could even make a stab at clouding the objectivity of mathematics, but I won’t because my time on this earth is limited.  Let me only conclude that we don’t really know where we came from and certainly do not know where we are going to.
 
Boy howdy, do we see this in the old movies and TV shows.  Often, our reaction to them is, “How sweetly naïve they once were!”  But they were not naïve at all.  They – those people behind the black-and-white images on the screen - started wars, developed massive corporations and nations, tortured and saved and loved and hated, all with the complex passions we have today.  They were not naïve, but rather were working off a different set of facts using different reference points.   It is nearly a guarantee that we will look really, really stupid – perhaps criminally so – to some generation or to generations in general to come. 
 
It is this that St Augustine was working towards when he wrote that real knowledge was a gift from the Holy Spirit, not an intellectual acquisition.  Dipping back into his work Confessions once again, he reminds us that he studied with the intellectual greats of his day, 4th century Rome, at a time and place when most kinds of thought were allowed – certainly, I would say, as much as is allowed in America today.   As we do today, they had a vast array of cultures to learn from as well as vast resources in historical records, preserved as they were in the great library at Alexandria.  They were closer to the greats then– to those Einsteins known and unknown who invented the fundamental roots of technology and formal logic.  Many scholars were aristocrats whose slaves did all the work for them as they studied and thought without disturbance.  This was Augustine’s world.  And yet he discovered real truth only in the writings of the crazy Jews from now-destroyed Palestine.  The truth was not just in the writing itself, but in what was behind the writing, buried layer upon layer within.
 
Which brings me back to that odd time in Jerusalem’s Museum of Scrolls where I saw dozens of faces embedded in the calligraphy of the scroll of Isaiah, one of the prophets most closely identified with Christ.  They were not there, of course; they could not be.  Only an older woman and I could see them.  The faces seemed much bigger than the writing, but were still none-the-less embedded in it.  Impossible, but there was no doubt that they were there for us.  This seems to me to be an example of what Augustine was talking about.  The faces, just as the writings, did not portray the truth, or at least not all the truth, but acted as a door-way to the truth, a door that was opened only by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For me, that gift is still giving, even as I write this.  It is a lesson from Spirit that what we know – the facts – and what we believe we know – our reference points – signify no more than squiggles on a piece of paper.  What is important is what we are allowed to know beyond our ignorance and prejudices.  Such is the gift beyond human knowledge, and the only truth of any people or age. 
 
All we think we know by our own devices, then, is contingent, and will forever be.  Real knowledge is only that gift from the Holy, sparked by our investment of time and effort into the spiritual keys we have been given, such as the Book of Isaiah (or not.  Rain falls on the just and unjust alike).  It is so because truth is far, far beyond what we can even imagine on our own.  See how alien the faces in the scrolls were, how unexpected and surreal.  See how impossible it was that the promised King of the Jews should come as a common laborer who was tortured and killed like a common criminal.  Such things are forever outside our expectations until they are revealed.  Such it is with every truth – outside, beyond, given to us only at the whim of the infinitely creative principle.
 
Where did we come from?  Where from the banana?  I imagine the latter might someday be answered, and the former never, but it is enough to know that even the most basic questions can lead us into an endless maze.  That is why we were told by the prophets to be like children; not to be immature and rude, but to be wide open to learning, to things beyond our smug premises.  God works in mysterious ways because we cannot know a scintilla of how he works unless we are given the gift of insight.  Few will then understand what we have learned, but it will be alive at least within us.  We might peal the banana, but knowledge of the heart of Man will remain only within the realm of the miraculous.        
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Midsummer dreams have been interrupted with the yells and screams of a preposterously clamorous late-season election, so I am going to do something revolutionary: let the screamers and their worried targets disappear in the rear-view of my summer world and get back to dreaming. 
 
Ah, midsummer: fireflies and comets hanging in a warm night sky, the alien ‘wizzz” of dragonflies as they hover and shoot off with physics-defying speed, the green leaves and changing colors of wildflowers, and, yes, even the sting of hungry deer flies and ever-present mosquitoes - all of it a dream, an escape from the hardness of winter and from existential cares. 
 
You have your own dreams and I mine, all of them circling around the security of a living summer that seems eternal, even though we know it isn’t, but seemingly enough so that we can allow ourselves to relax and let our minds wander.   And so I did this morning after checking the garden with its foot-long squash and ten-foot-high sunflowers, and then shaking my bare feet to free them from dew and grass clippings before re-entering the house.  I thought of this and that and of what I might write today, finally fixing upon a subject of lightness, that is, of no consequence, like dandelion or mild-weed fluff, a mere triviality that could nevertheless make someone very wealthy: that is, David’s stone.
 
The idea did not come from nowhere, like existence and the law of seasons, but from my reading of the Old Testament which has revealed itself to be at times boring and at other times as rapid-fire an action story as ever has been written.  I am at One Kings now, about a third of the way into the Catholic version of the Old Testament, where we have already passed through the demand of the Jews to have a king, the rise and fall of Saul, the first king, and the rise of David, the greatest-ever leader of the Jews, referred to over and over again in the New Testament for his familial connection to Jesus Christ. 
 
If we have not been informed or have forgotten, we might be brought back to David for his heroic battle against Goliath, the gigantic leading warrior among the Philistines.  The set-up is this: the two armies are arranged on two ridges separated by a valley.  The Philistines call over to the Jews with, “Hey, why not save a lot of killing by having our champion, Goliath, fight your champion?  The losing side will become the subjects of the winning side, so, fair enough?”  Then they trot out Goliath, who in my Bible was not really a huge man, but only a normally large man of about 6’4”, but who carried a sword that weighed several hundred pounds, making him an obviously strong man who must also have had one hell of a wicked grin, maybe like the face of the last biker you saw in a bar before you woke up in the hospital having your face reconstructed. 
 
So anyway, Goliath stands alone in the valley (the challenge taken by the Jews without a vote or a thought.  They were different then) and all the Jews tremble in fear until David, who had been a guitar player for Saul up until then, a youth probably in his mid-teens who still was without a beard, tells the king that he will do it.  Questions abound until David insists that God told him that he was so favored – not because he was all ginned up, mind you, on the violent impulse of unthinking testosterone - and so is allowed to go into the valley with only his sling and one fine, perfect stone.  We all know what happens next – Goliath laughs, then Goliath dies from that one perfect stone lodged in his forehead.  With that one stone, all of history was changed: David became king, solidified Israel, and also became the father of Solomon who made the first temple in Jerusalem, those two acts setting into place the rest of Jewish ancient history that for Christians culminated in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, direct descendant of David.  Goes to show what one act of inspired bravery can do, like that one comment you made to the girl at the party that set you apart and made for your future family, and so on. 
 
So here’s the light fluff of summer that could make millions of dollars.  Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark?  How a great movie was made about the recovery of the Ark of the Covenant, which I found out was simply a box (adorned, of course) that contained the tablet of the Ten Commandments, the Rod of Aaron, and a clutch of manna from the days in the desert?  Well, how about the Stone of David?  The perfect stone that killed Goliath and set Israel on the long road to bring the world its Messiah?  Don’t you think that such an item would have been saved by the Jews after the battle?  Don’t you think that it, too, would have been placed in a special box or some container or somewhere special for (hopefully) eons of Jews to look upon to remind them of their special relationship with God?  And don’t you think that such an item would have magical, spiritual power that might, oh, I don’t know, kill off godless communists who, after they find the stone hoping to use it as a weapon alone, are killed by its power?  Or maybe crazed Al Qaeda acolytes who believe themselves to be worthy, only to find, when finally put into use, that they are the unholy ones destined for death by its righteous wrath?   
 
I’m here, Hollywood, if you want me to write the story.  I come cheap – one percent of the gross and all the craft brew I can drink during production, no cocaine or hookers necessary.  Oh, and a hotel with a good pool, needless to say, but one that is surrounded not by beautiful young people trying to break into the industry, but by fat old guys and gals like me who would rather die than wear a Speedo.   I would write your script after scrupulous research and change it around a bit to make it look like I didn’t steal the whole idea from Raiders, and it would not only be a block buster, but would also set out a real search for the stone, for it must be somewhere.  Unlike the Ark, stone does not rot, and it must still exist, perhaps in the crown of a statue in some mountaintop monastery in Greece which, we will find, has never been guarded at all because, like Jesus himself, great things come to us from lowly sources that do not shout their greatness but simply are great, like the stone flung by David himself.  This might be a perfect stone, yes, but otherwise still simply a stone picked from the ground, made great not because of its form but because of the will and courage of the one who used it, making that pebble into one of the greatest forces in all of history. 
 
Just - as I would say in the script but also here because it is true - just as any of us could be guided to a stone, a tool of sorts picked from lowly dust, to be used, if not for great things, then for things of meaningful consequence, measured in minutes or perhaps even in eons.  Just as any of us, inspired by a nudging of spirit, might come to speak that one just-right, perfect phrase at a party to that one girl who later…
 
But we get too deep.  This is midsummer, and these words spell out only a mid-summer dream, a mid-summer dream that insists that all is a dream; and even though winter will always come, so does the dream that is also just as real as long as it is kept as a dream; as long as it is kept far, far away from the stones flung with hatred and rage.  Floating free, it might then come to rest not in the forehead of a giant, but gently, like dandelion or milkweed fluff, on things of the earth that rise to the stuff of dreams, for the moment or for eons to come. 


 
 
 
 

 
It was his mission, not mine, but I understood.  I remember well the thrill of being a teenager opening that $15 bag of stems and seeds to choke on some Mexican weed that now couldn’t get into a CBD shop.  The high was more psychological than real, but so was the allure: the tempting possibility of gaining the knowledge of the forbidden fruit while also dealing a blow – or so we thought - to The Man.  It was worth going to jail for, we thought.  We were fools and probably still are, but less radically and less obviously so.  The mission of my friend, after all, was to find legal weed.  Ah, the transparency of youth!
 
So I went with my eager friend into a liquor outlet named “The Party Store” in the small city of, well, let us call it “Munchkin,” on the shores of Lake Superior, Michigan, not too interested in getting high, but feeling the adolescent pull of something exotic and out of the mainstream.  Their name surely meant that they knew the where-abouts of a legal pot dispensary, and they did: “The Dragon’s Breath” or something like that, they told us, just across the street from the hardware store where we had just shopped five minutes before.  This was the same hardware store I had been in two days before that, where a young woman who worked there had told me in a hushed voice, “I have to watch what I say.  They are sooo Republican here!” I have been going to that shop for nearly 20 years, and they were that Republican, not that it mattered to me.  But it did matter to my cannabis-seeking friend regarding who we might ask about a pot shop.  Not there; the “Republicans” might not approve, or so we thought in a knee-jerk reflection back to 1969, when the location of “The Man” seemed so obvious. That, too, was a foolish youthful notion, but whatever.  We now had the name and location of a pot shop.  Next stop surely would be hippy heaven.
 
There are some, maybe most, realities that do not live up to expectations, but The Dragon’s Breath did and then some, a hippy heaven indeed.  There were posters, pipes, screens, bongs, the weird smell of patchouli mixed with something else, and most especially, the blown-out caretaker, all arrayed in a smash of psychedelic colors.  The caretaker was a young man of about 20, and his pink eyes gleamed out from locks of lank hair with a stoned acumen that was remarkable, given his obviously elevated state.  Surely The Weed had to be here.  But in this heaven, there was not only no beer, but no pot. 
 
“The nearest store is in Gwinn.  We just have all the other stuff,” he said, waving his hand about loosely like a groom waving at everyone at the reception except the bride.  This was seconded by a growl from the square-headed pit bull at our feet, the favorite breed of drug dealers.  We, especially my friend, were out of luck, camels at an oasis that had everything but the water. 
 
I was all for leaving, as he could simply go to the place in Escanaba on the drive home, but he meant business.  “Is there some other way I could buy weed around here?” he said in an astounding nod to all those cop-and-pusher shows I’ve been watching ever since Covid 19, phase one.  “Nope,” said the stoner, now eyeing us old guys with short hair even more suspiciously. 
 
Undaunted, my friend waved off the look with a surprising lack of self-consciousness and moved through the wall of beads that separated the front from the back of the store.  There we found more stuff from the reefer world, including a huge selection of “chillums,” or small wood pipes favored in my day for smoking hashish.  He fingered several before choosing one while the suspicious stoner continued to eye him and I eyed the other products, settling on a box titled, “Artificial Dried Urine.”  What the…? 
 
As my wannabe pot-head friend peeled off a ten-er for the chillum, I asked the young stone-meister about the dried urine.  He looked at me with my ample, un-druggy-like form and cropped white hair, and then disappeared mutely behind a blood-shot wall of suspicion.  I continued with the same lack of self-consciousness as my friend: “Oh, it’s something strange, huh?  Like some weird sex thing?  I mean, as far as I know, they sell stuff like this to keep animals like woodchucks out of the garden.”  I shrugged, perplexed at finding garden products in a head shop.  He eyed me again, sighed internally, thinking (no doubt), “Well, he’s probably just stupid and not a cop,” and then relented.
 
“Yes, some people use it for fetishes (a word I did not expect him to be familiar with, but it’s a new age), some for gardens and others – and this is illegal but some still do it – for urine tests.”  Ohhhh.  Duh.  In a state where pot is legal, it is still forbidden by most companies to show signs that one uses it.  This is because, unlike alcohol, there is no cheap and easy test yet to show whether or not the traces of pot left from use are still active, or are just a by-product of a fun weekend. 
 
And thus it remains a forbidden fruit.  It couldn’t be better for the growers and sellers, even if they could advertise on TV, which they can’t, reinforcing its forbidden nature even as it is legal.  Every purveyor from the underground knows that we want to explore what is forbidden.  We often continue on with what is forbidden even when we don’t like it, hoping that someday it might give us what we imagined it would – hoping, in the case of pot, that it might still give us the transcendental knowledge denied by our culture that will, in the words of the infamous snake in the garden, make us “… like the gods who know what is good and what is bad.”  (Genesis 3, 5)
 
And so it was with great amazement that later that evening my friend posed this question to me while I was hunkered down with a cold bubbly glass of another, less forbidden intoxicant: “Why bother with thinking about God and eternity when such knowledge will be given us after our death?”  To me, he might well have said, “Why do anything else but eat bananas and scratch our arm pits all day?”  After all, what had he been doing that afternoon but pursuing questionable esoteric knowledge from the wrong side of town? 
 
But the question has since forced me to think a bit more about the quest for esoteric knowledge, and for this short essay I have narrowed my answer down to two points. 
 
One: We have no idea if our questions are answered after death.  In fact, we usually study the spiritual to find out what might await us after death, and what we can do now to make that outcome more favorable.  For Christians, for example, it is impossible to get into heaven once Christ is offered and then rejected.  For Buddhists, getting into heaven is impossible, period, unless one knows that one must reject attachment to all things and then does so.  The truth is, all the religions I know about require some pretty heavy lifting before the pearly gates are swung open for our (hopefully) eternal reward – the ultimate pleasure and knowledge gained from union with the divine. 
 
And Two: We are made for answering the big questions just as we are made with hands so that we can create tools.  Tool- making requires knowledge.  Tools are what separate us from being meat on the hoof for the bigger predators.  Knowledge, then, has not only been good to us, but has been essential for our survival.  And, like our trips into outer space, we never know what our knowledge-seeking might bring.  We just have to know.  We had to know how lightening works, for example, and that has worked out well for us with everything from the light bulb to the electric car.  We are now spending billions on super-accelerators and who-knows-what to find the building blocks of the universe, for better or for worse, with few practical ends in mind.  How, then, could we not want to know what is Behind the building blocks?  How could we not want to know the original law that created all other laws? How, that is, could we not want to know the mind of God?
 
The need to know took us out of the Garden, but is apparently necessary to get us back into the Garden.  Regardless, we were created with a will to know that has brought us our greatest triumphs and many of our defeats: crossing Antarctica, finding the source of the Nile, discovering microbes and galaxies, and discovering the laws of physics and chemistry that have made MRIs and atom bombs and space ships.  All this we have gained from the will to knowledge that drives us on and on before the final curtain falls, a curtain which might not, for all we currently know but simply must find out beforehand, be final at all.
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
If I haven’t mentioned it before, I should have.  Back when we began attending church for the good of our son, an old, old, ancient priest who could have been preserved since the Byzantine Empire was pulled from retirement to give us all a lecture on proper Catholic sexuality.  No, it is not a contradiction in terms since the Church loves large families, but the restrictions are numerous, and for our times, somewhat ridiculous.  Nothing but organ to organ sex without birth control and, of course, only in marriage.  He almost turned purple when mentioning oral sex, so much so that I thought the tomb might be calling him back, and I couldn’t help but look around at the young couples and their reactions.  While I was smiling slyly at my wife, most looked like the dog being prepared for a bath: unable to avoid it and dreading every moment. 
 
Since then, I do not know of any fellow church-goers whose grown children have not first lived in sin before marriage, if they are or have been married at all.  It is as if there are two universes for the faithful, and neither the twain shall meet.   Most have simply disregarded the old admonishments, because that’s the way it has been since the Boomer sexual revolution and there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube (although I have done it.  It takes care and patience and is really not worth it).  I myself find much of the restrictions petty and pointless.  However, it is clear that the family structure was perpetuated in large part by pre-marital restrictions, and that without them, fewer are getting married and even fewer are having children, or at least are having no more than one or two.  There are long-term consequences for that, many of which still remain largely under the radar.
 
Still, while I believe that the old ways are gone forever and I am not deeply mourning much of the loss, there was a lot of wisdom in some of them, reaching even beyond family stability.  This has been made clear by a new series we are watching on Amazon Prime, “The Fall,” with Gillian Anderson (X-Files) as the flawed police hero who is brought into the dark and tangled underground world of Belfast to solve an ongoing spate of serial killings.
 
Serial murderers: when have they not been connected to sexual malfunction?  Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, the Boston Strangler, Jack the Ripper – the list goes on and on – were all psychosexually sick puppies, warped in early life or the womb or before time began to derive pleasure from other people’s pain and death.  In our movie it is the same, this killer a decent family man who makes his living as a psychologist for the bereaved.  He apparently loves his two children and also seems to be fairly good at his job, at the very least feigning sympathy for his patients, but in private goes online to shop for victims, then stalks them to learn their ways by night.  He then strangles them and dresses them for Playboy-style poses that he takes home on his IPhone to enjoy, naked and panting in the house attic. 
 
It could be the house basement as well, both reflecting the dark desires that the serial killer knows are forbidden by society.   Such killers are almost always men, and men know why; it is not just that men are generally stronger than women, but that their sex drive is much more demanding.  Read any story of war or of ancient times or The Bible itself, and you will find men, even common men, behaving badly due to the sexual urge.   In this we can see an ugly truth: that although most men do not desire that a sexual mate suffer, most strongly desire a sexual mate and will do almost anything to get one or more than one.  The extent to which they will go or not go is largely determined by their culture and familial background.   In the past, part of a soldier’s pay was being allowed to have his way with the enemy’s women (or for some, girls or boys as well).  Many if not most did.  Ask a warrior of Genghis Khan’s army if he felt sorrow for the women he raped and he would probably kill you with righteous indignation.  It is, he would say as he drove his spear through you, the way of the world and the way of the victor.   So it has always been. 
 
And so it would still be without well-honed moral restrictions.  Even the decent Mongolian warrior did not rape within his community and certainly did not go after his mother or sisters.  The outcast would, and he would be like the rapists and, most out on the fringe, the serial killer in our own society.  There is a difference, but by how much?  If the average guy would rape under certain conditions, how far is he from the angels?  How much is he like and not like the psycho-sexual killer? 
 
There are reams of volumes written on this, and for good reason.  It is obvious from the greater study of sexual violence and perversion that restraint among men is the norm, but we know the dividing line between the psycho and the normal is not a division between two universes.  The twain sometimes do meet.  The important thing is knowing how to keep them from meeting.
 
Lord knows the founders of Catholicism knew of sexual violence.  They lived, after all, in the latter half of the Roman Empire with its many unbelievably perverse emperors, and the general chaos of war and rape.  There is death in war, and killing was and is condemned, but they could not condemn sexuality.  It is the great fact of most multi-cellular life, and without it the world we know could not exist.  So what to do, from great thinkers who understood violence and perversion from daily life?  Rules.  Rules against the temptations of the greed of polygamy, against rape, against pornographic thought, and against anything that might tempt one toward the dark side of sexuality.  Maybe they didn’t get it all right, but they knew they had to try.   
 
I recall a foreign reporter and popular personality talking about the “lizard mind,” which was a catch-all phrase back then for those desires and actions that rise from the pre-rational mind.  Murder is one, sex another, as well as appetite, and probably all those things that rise to the order of the Seven Deadly Sins if traced back from conscious thought.  When we let them go, we know, we are behaving like animals, but there is something more; when we let them go, we are behaving like thinking humans behaving like animals.  Animals are not kind and will kill their own and eat their young under certain conditions, but not even the house cat is truly perverse.  As far as we know, only humans can take basic drives and distort or enlarge them, and hold them in their minds as fantasies that can be fulfilled.  It is not just upbringing; dogs and horses and so on are often treated cruelly from birth (by humans), but they do not alter the sex act or plan rapes.  Only humans can do that. 
 
But only humans can be repelled by such acts.  It is our human ability to reflect, then, that causes both cruelty and perversion as well as kindness and compassion.  These have been called the devils and angels of our soul.  And while socio-biologists have laboriously worked out some reasons for human altruism, they have not for anti-social violent perversion, at least not to (my) satisfaction.   A release valve for human socialization?  But why should we need a release valve for something that is supposedly programmed within us?  Why not just call them devils and angels and deal with them from there? 
 
There is a reason that Satan is pictured as a snake, a lizard.  His is the lizard mind that plays with free will – the ability to think and make choices, but also to imagine and fantasize – distorting the gift of the angels that we have also been given beyond the mind of animals.  This, not sex but the perversion of sex – was not meant to be.  This, the dark side of sexuality, is the snake in the garden that teases the imagination and allows it to act as though the ‘other’ is only an actor in our fantasy life.  It is the essence of egoism, the faulty self-perception that we and only we matter, which is a distorted view that free will does not necessarily make, but allows.  This is what is at the bottom of the great Catholic ban on so many sexual things.  The rules are meant to starve the lizard and direct the will towards a more perfect goal.  The means might sometimes seem ridiculous, but not the ends.  This does not justify all the means, but should have us reconsider just what the means were meant to be for us all – as a guide to lead us away from a potentially endless spiral into egoistic darkness that can block out all light.  
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
It was another conversation with the brother, so long I can’t follow the strand of conversation now, but somehow he got to telling me about his musician, age 60-something friend.  “He had two sons, and one of them committed suicide.  Then he comes down with prostate cancer.  Then the other one killed himself.  After all this he asked me, ‘Why does God hate me?’” 
 
I have been listening to a book on CD, one from Stephen Hunter named G-Man.  Hunter has a very successful series centered on Bob Lee Swagger, a super sniper and Viet Vet who tracks all sorts of evil people and often kills them from afar.  In this latest, 71-year-old Bob Lee (aka, Robert Lee.  I hope we are not forced to burn his books) researches the life of his enigmatic grandfather, WWI vet and Arkansas county sheriff @ 1930.  Grandpa, too, was an excellent marksman but turned to drink in his last years for reasons that are not understood.  Bob finds that Gramps disappeared from the record in the second half of 1934, then reappeared in December of that year – exactly the time when he turned back to the bottle.  With expert investigation, he discovers that Gramps had been a part of the fledgling FBI and was key to getting rid of Pretty Boy Floyd, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and co..  However, all that was stricken from the official record, and the whole operation seemed to have destroyed Gramps.  Why?
 
We find out towards the end of the book.  Talking with his now-pal, Bureau head of the Chicago unit, he admits to “wanting to lay with men.”  Pow!  This from a guy that until that point was portrayed as the most granite-like character one could imagine.  It comes to be that Gramps is so fearless because he believes God hates him for his desires – desires he has never acted upon.  Gramps goes to a clinic in Hot Springs towards the end of the year to get rid of his desires, but no luck.  He then returns to Blue Eye, Arkansas to die a hopeless drunk, preferring to end his days in dark anonymity that he feels is his just punishment.
 
It is, for most of us, a culture shock and shows how much we have changed in just a few decades.  Gay desires are no longer considered the end of the line, a bridge too far, but rather just another variation of the human condition.  Fine.  But still, we are often faced with evils, real or imagined, that make us believe that God is out to get us.  Since we are told that He is a just god, then the evils, or evil desires, that befall us are the result of either evil within us or evil that we have done.  Ever thought it best that Grandma should die soon to end her suffering from a hideous disease, and when she does, it is now your fault?  Kid born with autism, or becomes a drug addict or kills himself?  Punishments for that 1972 Playboy you lusted over, or that candy bar you stole, or that wish you once had that the world goes up in flames to finally end it all.  If we sin, even in thought alone, punishment, we are sure, is sure to follow.  
 
The Playboy and the fantasies wouldn’t faze most of us now, but what about the suicides of my brother’ friend’s sons?  Wouldn’t most of us feel that we were being punished? I think I would.  Or financial ruin out of the blue, or a bizarre cancer at a young age, or being blinded, or…?
 
I was again astounded a few days ago at the relevance of St Augustine’s Confessions, where he discusses the problem of the existence of evil from a good god (he became one of the early Christians in the Roman Empire in the 4th century).  He goes through all the logical points of the well-educated Roman citizen of his day, to come to this conclusion: that all is explained only in God’s divine light.  He tell us, in further explanation, that in the ingestion of the host in Holy Communion, the “food” in this case does not change to become a part of us, as other foods do, but changes US so that we might become more like God.  God does not need anything from us to increase Himself, not vengeance or the smoke from charred sacrifices, or anything else.  Rather, what He does is to use our lives to bring us closer to Him.  It is all for us, not for him, all the movements of life or the sacrifices we make, so that we might change into something more like Him.  Not for Him but for ourselves.  The logic, if we may call it that, of the divine light, then, is apart from us, so far above us that we continually fail to see the point, both of what we consider to be good and what we consider to be bad.  We are only partial.  To see, we must be so much more.  As Augustine relates through his Greco-Roman logic, when we see in part, we see corruption (evil), but if we were to see in full as God does, we would see prevailing perfection.  We need growth in the divine light to understand; otherwise, we cannot understand the source or meaning of evil, not as it shines in the perfection of the light.
 
Augustine ends his ruminations on evil with this: “And when I asked myself what wickedness was, I saw that it was not a substance but a perversion of the will when it turns aside from you, O God, who are the supreme substance, and veers towards things of the lowest order, being bowelled alive and becoming inflated with desire for things outside itself.” Evil, then, is not from the world as made, but from the free will of that or those who have free will.  Certainly this answers the question of the worst agony of the man with the suicidal sons, but it might not answer the question of his cancer.  What good is in disease?
 
It brings me back to my dark essay, “Nightmares,” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars, where I ask: what of the suffering of little children?  What of the hell for parents with a child dying of a brain tumor?  What of the natural disasters that could not be anticipated, the freak tornado in the city schoolhouse, the Corona virus?  Where is the good in that?  And if it is ultimately good, what good does it do us now?  Why inflict this pain of evil on us if, in the end, there is no genuine evil made by God?
 
St Augustine’s answer above is more subtle than first meets the eye, at least for me.  Evil again is in the will, but it is not enough that we will human good.  Rather, we see evil because we cling to that which is human without that which is God’s.  Christ did cry for Lazarus to show that he understood the sorrow of Man, but then he raised Lazarus from the dead.  He knew all along that he could do this.  He knew all along that no one dies in the fullness of God’s truth, and so no one who fully understands should have sorrow.  In the end, in the fullness of his mission to be born, Christ was crucified, died, and rose from the dead, to show us both the human side and the God side, the side of sorrow and the side of eternal truth and glory.  It is we ‘of little faith’ who know sorrow because we have failed to abandon ourselves to the will of God.  It is here where we find what the light knows – that its knowledge is beyond ours.  And it is only through full submission to the brilliance of the light, where we can push our own thoughts aside and learn truth.  We must consider again the lesson of the Holy Host: that the substance of the host is not turned into our bodies, but rather, the bodies are turned back into spirit, the ‘substance’ of God.  The later far overrides the former, subsuming it as an ocean subsumes a raindrop.
 
We cling to that which is human and that which is not God through will.  Augustine saw that.   The Buddha saw that in telling us not to cling to anything of this earth, but Jesus lived the lesson through his own agony and resurrection, a truth above truth written in a language we can begin to understand, which can then bring us further and further still.
 
I would not send this essay to one grieving from the loss of a son.  It smacks too much of the abstract.  But it is not.  Consider, if you are not now beyond such an act in your suffering, the grand passage of time and the infinitude of space and we see the smallness of our sufferings.  We have been shown that God understands and cares, but that lingering sorrow is not the final truth.  Lazarus was brought back from the dead, just as Christ was risen.  We are told to lose our will to God’s will, and are told that all the sufferings we have are to help us to do just that.  This is not piety in the sky, but a fact in the highest logic of the light.  
 
As a man who would become a saint, Augustine understood this and lived its truth.  We are asked, then prodded, by our lives to leave our own will for God’s will.  And Augustine was right: to do so is too difficult a path to follow from our own human perspective.  We can do so only through faith, which is the ultimate tool we have to submit to God’s will and find the eternal truth of the light.  It is impossible to do so on our own, and nearly impossible to accept that we must lose ourselves – lose everything - to gain everything. 
 
Augustine, a genius scholar of his day, went through all the thought experiments that he could before he accepted that we live by the will of God alone, and can truly see only through His light.  It is impossibly difficult to do, but he shows us that it is also easy once we willfully submit to that which brings us everything and takes everything back in one great, endless breath.  
  
 
 
 

​ 
It began with the slaughtering of a pig, or at least the important stuff did.  For me, it started with helping my son buy a new/used car at the dealer’s, which cost us four hours along with thousands of dollars and endless links to the bank, insurance companies, home for SS ID pictures, credit checks – all that and the usual dickering which is all pantomime, because they have this down to a science.  They are going to get their cut, give or take a few hundred dollars, no matter what you do, and it’s just as well to walk out thinking you got a bargain even though you didn’t, because in the end all goes to dust, especially cars.
 
So, the pig.  Our neighbors, nearly two miles down the road but still neighbors in corn country, had invited us to a pig roast at 5 PM, but because of the car thing, I didn’t arrive until 7, and everyone except my wife and a few other neighbors were drunk as all get out.  The boys, many of them in their 60’s and 70’s, had stayed up all night smoking a whole pig, and everyone knows that to do so takes lots and lots of beer and no sleep.  They were wasted and looked and talked all the world like movie depictions of Appalachian low- lives.  The others had arrived two hours earlier, and, although not wasted, were still well-lubed.   I hoped to join them soon and so quickly took up a beer before the hunger set in.  I asked and was pointed out the way inside the shed to where heaps of shredded pig were steaming away in Sterno buffet warmers, next to beans, a few green and healthy things, and chips and what- not.  I took some beans onto a paper plate and then moseyed over to the warmers, removing both lids to reveal said pig, and was about to dig in when the girlfriend spoke up.
 
“We loaded the pig onto the trailer, but I didn’t know we were going to kill it, just drop it off.  It was awful.  They shot it with the deer rifle (which was still leaning against the shed, telescopic lens mounted as if the pig needed to be picked off a ridge) but it didn’t die.  So they tied it up with chains and hung it to death, twitching all the way.  That pig died in pain.”  The boyfriend, it turned out, was a farmer who could not get his stock to the stock yards for slaughter, since all those employees were quarantined with the dreaded virus, so he had donated the pig.  All they had to do was the killing and butchering.  The pig had been named Rex.  So it was all I could do to choke down one sandwich, considering the hideous screams of the dying Babe/Rex, but there had been a lot more happening in our neighborhood that week than a porcine execution.
 
It was, instead, the human executions that had taken most of our interest.  I had been up north painting the cabin the whole while, having returned to the news just the night before.  It was the first thing my wife mentioned after saying, “I have to be really careful about locking all the doors now.”  She told me what she had read in the paper, but the guy with the pig and a few others actually lived next to, or knew well, all the characters in the horror story.  As the eating was done and the mosquitoes quickened and the drinking slowed, this is what I learned at the pig roast about the farm on the next road over:
 
Dad had died earlier in the month, and the house and everything else was in probate.  There was the sister and two brothers left, although one brother was not mentally an adult, and the sister and her husband had gone over to the house to mow the lawn.  Maybe they were going to sell it soon, but we were told that they had been doing that for years after Mom had died and Dad had aged.  The next we know for certain was that 911 was called (by whom I forget – maybe the couple?), but by the time the policeman got there, there were two bodies lying in the driveway, that of the sister and brother-in-law.  Shortly after the policeman got out to inspect the bodies, which he probably did after calling an ambulance and back-up, shots began to buzz around his head.  He returned fire, got a look at the shooter, and then made another call to the fire department after the house burst into flames.  The murderer, the mentally adult brother, was then seen dashing from the house as it belched smoke and fire.  No one gave immediate chase, but the fire department was not allowed to put out the fire because of the possible presence of the shooter.  It was these charred ruins that we saw yesterday, the day after the pig roast when the street was clear, and all that remained besides the char were yellow police-line ribbons marking out the burnt remains. 
 
The brother/murderer is still on the run, which is astounding since he is in his sixties and the corn that dominates the landscape is only a foot or two tall, not nearly high or thick enough to hide even a child.  Still, there is a great swamp nearby and knots of trees here and there, and who knows?  One neighbor said she saw him from her car, shirtless and shoeless on a seldom-traveled road just up from us, by an old country cemetery.   Everyone has continued to take an interest in locking anything that can be locked.  One does not want to find a desperate murderer in the barn when one goes out to find a tool to fix the drape hangers. 
 
The best thing is, these no-sleep, pig-killing, way -over -drunk guys knew the murdering brother well.  He had not been quiet and polite, or a loner.  Rather, he had been married, had three kids, and had made an annoying racket all his life.  When the SWAT team showed up after the shooting to ask questions of the brother’s closest neighbor – who also happened to be the farmer who owned and helped smoke the pig – he told them, “Yeah, he’s always been crazy.  He shared a driveway with me, and he set up barricades so that no one could take that turn off the driveway to his house.  He patrolled his property line on his car or motorcycle, and yelled and screamed at anyone who stepped over it.  Really, the whole family is crazy.” 
 
The pig farmer told us more, detailing the classical signs of paranoid schizophrenia in the killer.   We might think that this explains why he killed his sister and bro-in-law, but the insane rarely kill people, even though they often give us the creeps when they start talking to us on the city sidewalk.  What was it that made this guy from farmland USA go so far beyond the pale?  
 
Take a class in criminology and you will find that even after a hundred years or more of scientific investigation of the criminal mind, no one is really sure exactly why people smash through this strongest of cultural restraints on behavior.   Another strong restraint is that on public sexual exposure, but we can understand that in a way, because for certain psychological reasons, this humiliation gives pleasure.  But to kill?  Some do enjoy it, but that is not often the case with the crazies, Baby Face Nelson perhaps being an exception.  They do it because they feel they have to.  They feel, I believe, as if it balances a world that for them has never been balanced.
 
That still does not explain why this man actually went through with this balancing act, because most with similar disabilities do not.  After all, what can upturn the world more than murder?  In the not-too-distant past, a crazed killer like this would be deemed possessed by an evil demon, or even Satan himself.  In a way we all still kind of believe this sort or thing, as such stories give us the creeps beyond the need for self-security.  Perhaps it is this feeling of the “creeps” that gives us a clue: that is, that we get an unconscious sense that we could do such deeds ourselves.  Cain was not crazy when he killed Abel, only jealous; and in old Inuit (Eskimo) society, a few killings were to be expected in a man’s life.  Rather, it was the number that eventually turned him into an outcaste who had to be killed.  It is possible, then, that we could all commit murder, and all it takes is the nudge of mental disease or jealousy or maybe just a three-day bender to get us to raise our fist or weapons.  Maybe.
 
The nature of man: as an animal, to kill is to be expected.  But as a human, although possible, it is not expected.  If we say it is the law that stops us, why do we first make the laws?  Obviously, it is because we want others and ourselves to not cross the line.  We are not, then, creatures of stimulus-response, but of s-r and conscience, a conscience that some say is a socio-biological and necessary adaptation, but that begs the question.  If we can analyze our responses, are we not then beyond mere instinct?  Few believe that the constraint of murder is merely an adaptation, but rather a moral certainty, which itself is beyond both analytical thought and animal instinct.
 
Which is a high-falootin’ way of saying that we have a built-in morality that is not based on reason or biology alone.  Something has to override this spiritual governor in our soul to get us to kill, whether we are crazy or not.  It is a mysterious thing, however - even in the New Testament, there is frequent talk of people being possessed by demons.  Are they free, then, of the sins they commit?  Or is there something in them still for which they are responsible? 
 
This question of willed morality figures into our society in a big way sometimes.   Given both a free will and an individual spiritual conscience, could there be family guilt “unto the seventh generation?”  Or could a race, say, deserve the curse of slavery for a digression in the past by another of its kind?  Or should another race be punished for enslaving that race because there is no such thing as a hereditary curse?  But if there is not, should not the others, too, be judged only on their individual actions? 
 
It seems so.  The crazy killer went beyond what most crazies would do; and even people who believe only in materialistic causation still blame individuals for their moral failures.  In the end, you can’t have it both ways.  We are individually responsible or we are not responsible at all.
 
Also in the end, I did not have another piece of Rex, I just couldn’t, and we are still locking our doors.