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

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


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

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

​ 
There are two kinds of Mondays: special Mondays where one is on a beach in the Caribbean, or regular Mondays, where one looks forward to another week of the grind, inching one’s way from meaningless jobs to meaningless death.  Grace Slick and the Jefferson Starship chanted it this way at the beginning of an album I think was named “Starship” : “Waiting to die, waiting to die, waiting to die…,” on and on, until…
 
We will hold off on the ‘until’ part for a paragraph or two, and get back to Monday, the day we usually can trust to bring us down.  Today (as I start this), for instance, is a Monday.  It is cold and (apparently) permanently gray in my section of the world, and the next few days look to stay pretty much the same.  There are chores to do, unpleasant appointments to keep and calls put off that can no longer be put off, as well as simply annoying things going on that cannot be controlled.  Right now, for instance, the dog is barking because the manure wagon across the street is being backed off the road with the safety ‘beep- beep- beep’ blaring as it prepares to spread another several tons of fermented cow dung over hundreds of acres of drying corn stalks.   The air is putrid with the smell.  Not that I mind it that much, as I grew up shoveling the stuff, but there’s a lot of it, and its Monday.  My tea was not hot enough, either, although it would have been fine for a Friday.  Such it is on those Mondays when we are not overlooking pristine tropical beaches.  Such it is when I often feel just as Gracie said: “waiting to die.”
 
There was a time, though…Just last week I was reminded of it while driving back from grocery and hardware shopping after dusk (which comes too damn early these days, so don’t remind me).  The DJ was on the college station in Ivory Tower Madison, and he had gotten together the best of the early drug and euphoria pop singles of the middle 1960’s.  “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys stands at the top of the list for me, but there was “Itchy-Coo Park”, “Incense Peppermints”,  “Hush”, “Eight Miles High”, “Everybody Get Together (Gotta Love One Another)” , and, of course, “Magic Carpet Ride.”  Utopia-through – drugs music all, and when I was 13, 14 and 15 I believed it.  After using the drugs a little later, I still believed, but there was something lacking: the high wasn’t always heavenly, and it always ended.  It was then that I hit the road to find paradise, which is what my book Dream Weaver is about in a nutshell.  It was several years after then that Mondays became Mondays.  Paradise, I found along with most everybody else, had indeed been lost.
 
Ah, but those few years!  With those tunes I could feel paradise on the tip of my soul, there just inches from my spiritual grasp.  A little LSD here, a lot of pot there, and it would come, or so the music assured, and so I felt.  Millions of young people felt it as well, and by @ 1970 its outlines had been drawn.  Most prophesied gettin’ back to the land on free love and dope communes, but some, like Jefferson Starship, saw something different: an evolutionary movement onward, where we cracked the cosmic code so that we could wander throughout the stars, never bored, always forward, forward, forward, always moving with youthful zeal rooted in God-given destiny.  Never mind the engineering and physics and chemistry classes that would have to be crunched for such a feat: with God all things were possible.  Was not genius a spiritual gift send from God Himself? 
 
The spaceship wasn’t there for me in the car that night as the old druggy tunes rolled on.  This was 1966 again and I was a 12-year-old kid dreaming of gaining heaven the fun way, forward, always moving, if not in space, then in the space of mind.  I felt that ancient ecstasy again in the car and was deeply moved by the nostalgia of youthful optimism.  Within minutes I then felt the painful loss of that vigor and hope.   We carry the knowledge of paradise within us, and this is what makes being human so painful.  We feel the loss.  We feel it when drugs or sex or high tech or even – I hate to say this – beer don’t take us any closer than to give us a passing glance, as if we were on a quarantined cruise ship catching only glimpses of tropical islands from afar.  That is pretty much where we are.   Gaining paradise means going through the disease and taking the medicine.  It is not fun but hard and often grim work, with nothing more to goad us on than that silver seed of paradise that remains within us, a grace that gives us both despair and hope.
 
It is why, because of this grim work, that so many have come to hate religion.  It, all of the effective ones, demand discipline and denial of basic urges that try to convince us that there are alternative, less difficult paths to paradise.  We see this now as youth culture replaces the culture of elders, and as people liberate themselves from old constraints in an effort to satisfy the deep vision within.   Such actions will not deliver us, and I am no happier about it than anyone else.  I like fun and I like easy.   But I am called to paradise, along with everyone else, and I have to read the writing in the soul.  It ends in paradise, but it calls for the hardships of an Arctic expedition, for our separation from paradise is that removed, is that far.  The journey through the Arctic calls for heroism, and being a real hero is not easy.  That’s what makes the hero a hero.
 
I am still told by some old friends that we should not sell out, that we should keep the dreams of our youth.  When I am driving in my car on a cold and dark evening and the promise of youth is poured into my ears, I want to hear their words as well.  But paradise doesn’t come that way.  It comes not the way of the playboy or the idealist but of the saint and the prophet.  It is why it is said that we must give up the world to gain ‘it’, the real and eternal world.  One, the temporary, negates the other. 
 
It is now Wednesday, Monday long gone as Thanksgiving approaches.  The Pilgrims celebrated their unlikely survival on that first Thanksgiving, but they were still Puritans – hard, inflexible, suffering Puritans.  I don’t want their life, nor the life of the equally tough Indians who celebrated with them, but their approach was more right than wrong.   While witches were not roaming their bleak autumn countryside, as many thought, the temptation of the young and of the foolish was with them as it is with us now.   Since then, the call for earthly utopia has arisen again and again, only to fail one time after another.  Those of my time and place lived through one such generational episode, and it seems we are now living with the side effects of that delusion, as even gender is being considered a mere state of mind. 
 
This, too, shall pass; this, too, will not pass the test.  But still I look back and hear the music that tells of a truth delivered through lies.  I can wish only to hear that part that talks of truth, as it gets me past the Mondays of the soul.  Such is the happiness of youth in its ignorance.  Such I can still hear just as the Pilgrims drank and were merry in the wilderness of their greatest fears.  So I can celebrate even as Monday will come again to surround me with a wilderness of my own.
 
   
 
 
 
 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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