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          Time melts away as we force it into routine.  This is a bad thing when we look back on our last decade and say, “How did the time go by so quickly?” But it is a good thing when we want that time to fly, which we might while waiting in line at the DMV or while traveling long distances on well-known routes.  
 
          So it has become with my near-monthly trips to the off-line cabin in the UP.  While the route is not bad – nothing like that through NYC or northern Jersey – it does get stale after many outings, even when passing through Green Bay and the towering mass of Lambeau Field, and it is then that my routine has helped enormously.  With a bag of pretzels at my side and a book-on-CD in the player, it is almost as if time does not exist, except for my two stops for gas, the restroom, and a 16 oz. cup of coffee. 
 
           Sure, time flies by with this routine and I am there before I know it, but it’s the coffee part that gets me.  Coffee to me is like an illegal drug that has been smuggled across the Mexican border.  It focuses my attention so sharply that nothing else matters but what is right at hand, which is good for letting time fly but horrible for multi-tasking.  When I arrived at the shockingly quiet cabin in the back of beyond, it is that quality of singularity that started my problem.
 
          Normally, the first thing I do when arriving at the cabin is to open the hatchback and start pulling gear and etc. out to pile onto the porch.  Because of a recent birthday present to me of an expensive fat tire bike, however, my wife insisted that I lock the bike rack to the car and the bike to the rack, just in case some clever heroin addict might cruise the rural gas stations to steal from travelers.  So it was that I had to take out a cluster of keys from the seat console to unlock the mess, along, of course, with the key to the cabin. 
 
            That might not seem like a job requiring multiple degrees in applied science, but with my coffee mind concentrated lazar-like on unlocking the bike and rack, something happened that caused the cabin key to be misplaced, aka, lost.  I discovered this, of course, as I shifted my mono-focus from the bike rack to the gear, and to getting it off the porch and into the cabin.  The discovery that the key was nowhere in my pockets or in the car or on the porch then sent me into a panic.  Overreacting, I turned to bitter self-recrimination and then to a scrutiny of cosmic forces as my addled mind tried to decipher the meaning of it all.  Why me?  What have I done to deserve this?  What hidden agenda might the spirit world have in displacing the key?     
 
             The consequences weren’t even that dire.  I had a spare hidden under the porch, which I hadn’t seen in a few years, but which I found, slightly tarnished, exactly where I had put it.  I was in.  But still it bugged me.  There were practical reasons for this annoyance, one being that I needed to leave a spare for other people coming up later, but that was only the smaller part; the larger part still remained in the cosmic question: why, in the grand scheme of things, had this happened?
 
          I can hear a reader say, “Oh, come on!  You let a key fall out of your pocket.  Big deal!,” but this reader does not know the coffee mindset.  At that time, there simply had to be a bigger reason, and one was found almost immediately.  This came about as I was putting the cabin key back in the console.  It was then that I noticed another key that I had never used which looked suspiciously like the cabin key.  It was silver, not brass, but the cut of the key looked exactly the same.  This was confirmed when I placed the two of them together, and then easily inserted the new-found key into the keyhole of the door to the cabin.  Eureka!  I now had the extra key I needed, one that I had had all along but had not known.  That in itself gave rise to spiritual speculations of Biblical proportions concerning loaves and fishes and the power of belief and more.  But the coffee mind was not satisfied.  There was something more to this lost key than even those things.    
 
          My searching soul was not long in wanting.  Just the day before, I had been exploring Mathew, chapter 5, where one of the greatest teachings of Jesus is presented, the Beatitudes, or Sermon on the Mount.  Along with the lowly and the poor of spirit, number 8 on the list blesses those who are “pure of spirit” or “single hearted.”  Looking into the footnotes, I found that this joins other admonishments in the Bible calling for personal integrity, meaning ‘wholeness of being’ or ‘being of one mind.’ That made me think: in concentrating on the bike, I had somehow misplaced the key to the cabin.  This had come from a type of single-mindedness, yes, but a pathological one.  The reality was that I had two important things to keep in mind, the keys for the bike and the key for the cabin.  That I had forgotten where I had put the later showed that I had not had integrity of thought concerning my intentions.  I had let one thing slide for another, while both should have been placed as if on a list, each set of keys or key given its time and place.  What I had done was like putting a new pair of diapers on a baby before taking off the soiled pair. 
 
          And so it came to me: purity of heart, integrity of the spirit – this is something that I lack so profoundly that it has become a standard condition, not only for me, but for most, at least in our society.  Freud even gave us a layered diagram of the mind, where we think and act from three (major) platforms, the id, the ego, and the superego.  In this, one barley knows what the other mind is doing, if it knows at all.  We might be telling ourselves that we love our fiancée with all our (singular) heart, while another part of us only wants to see her naked, and another is with her because her family connections or money will bring us prestige or wealth.  Which, we have to ask, is ourselves?  This we have to ask if we want purity, or integrity, of spirit.  Where in the mess of our minds might we find our true selves?  For if we can’t do this, how can we bring ourselves to a singular purity? 
 
           In my fieldwork with a more primal-level people, I found that they did indeed have more singular, almost innocent, states of mind.  This is why Western observers from another era thought of primitives as child-like, even as they killed and birthed and enslaved and did all those things that their civilized counterparts have long done.   And it is true - their lives are less complicated.  It would be hard for me to imagine one of them running around in a coffee frenzy as I had done.  They certainly would not lose one key while dealing with another.  But they, too, are not fully integrated.  They have a subconscious that manifests not only in dreams, but in spectral illuminations similar to Lady Macbeth’s as she wandered about the castle yelling, “Out, out, damn spot!” They also might have mercurial, uncontrolled turns of emotions. The problem of achieving purity of heart, then, would be helped but not solved by a having a less complicated life. 
 
           As of yesterday, I struggled to figure a way out of this dilemma.  Last night, the answer slowly dawned on me when my wife found a small, engraved wooden box in the household clutter.  It had been given to me from an excess of funeral gifts that had been handed out to the attendees.  It contained a small-print Catholic edition of the Bible within.  The important thing for me, though, was the engraving on the box: a dove embossed over a cross.  We know what the cross is for – God’s sacrifice for our benefit – but not all might know the meaning of the dove.  It means “peace,” but not just ordinary peace.   It is the peace that the “paraclete” - literally, the “advocate” – has been sent to bring us.  It is not the kind of peace a South American Indian living in a small village might have; rather, it is a divine peace created from the divine sacrifice meant to save humankind from it frenzied fits of mind, from coffee stupors to uncontrolled tremors of hate and visceral need and envious greed.  It is the peace, as St Paul put it, which surpasses all peace.  It is the peace of the Holy Spirit that brings true integrity of mind, and it can only come through this Spirit.  It is a type of magic that cannot be performed from a worldly view that, by its very nature, embodies differences that all but guarantee conflict.  It is only through this integrity of mind with mind where mind can meet soul and conjure unity from diversity, rivalry and competition.
 
         So the two keys brought me to this big question and to a bigger answer.  But another thing happened.  A day later after the key fiasco, a great rain came, and as it was ending, I made my way through the cloud of mosquitos to the outhouse, and then back again past the car.  As I approached the vehicle, it occurred to me with absolute certainty that if I looked behind the car I would find the key.  Of course, there it was, the rain having washed away much of the sand that had covered it.  So, from two keys had come three.  I might say that it is similar to the appearance of Jesus, where from the Father and Son had come a third, the Holy Spirit, although that might be taking it too far.  But certainly, through adversity and effort had come something greater.  I had gained both a key to a simple door in this world and a key to another far greater, the one united incongruously but seamlessly to the other.  How even the simplest of things can lead to amazement.          
 
         
 
 
 
                
 
         
         
 
          

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          I could pretend to be a classical music snob, but I would be caught short by anyone who knew anything in a minuet – er, minute.  But my mother listened to the masters during my youth, and because of this I was granted at least the possibility of enjoying all those horns and tympanies and oboes and other instruments that would never make it into my normal listening fare of blue grass and folk.  So it was that this possibility, along with an Olympic game and a commercial for beef (“What’s for Supper”), would send me to Aaron Copland, the composer of Fanfare for the Common Man and Rodeo.  Because of their commercial exposure, everyone knows at least a part of both.  Of Rodeo, anyone born before 1965 has heard most of the movements in the John Ford western movies, especially those featuring John Wayne.  They are quintessentially American tunes, expressing the best of the myth of our country by eliciting a panorama of wide open spaces and the rugged individualism epitomized by the roving cowpoke or the striving industrialist of the expansionist era.  These melodies define us as we –at least the older generations – wish to be: tough, optimistic, and ready to move on a dime to another corner of the half-continent that we call our own. 
 
          But there’s an oddity here to be found in the composer himself.  In the button-down era of the first half of the 20th century, Copland’s homosexuality would have been appalling to the average Joe who he wished to epitomize.  Fortunately for him, he was born into an upper class New York City family where such things were seen as quirks of intellectual superiority, and into an era where people simply didn’t talk about such things.  While his sexuality would not be a big deal for the average Joe now, we still have in the man and his best-known works a juxtaposition that is hard to fathom.  How could this financial and cultural elitist speak with the voice of the common man in America? 
 
           He was there on the religious front as well, speaking for an extreme latter form of Puritanism found in the Shakers @ 1900.  These people created great furniture, but never any heirs to their great agricultural holdings in rural America, as they forbade sexual contact.  Just a few decades ago, as the last of the Shakers were dying off, several younger people rushed to join to inherit their vast, and now priceless, real estate holdings.  I don’t know what happened in those cases, but in another very popular work, Appalachian Spring, Copeland works his opus around the Shaker song that I know as The Turning.  You have heard it, too.  It speaks of religious fervor and purity and the rejection of material comforts.  Again, this would not include Copeland in just about any way.  And yet, there his work stands as a deep calling to the myth of American religious purity.
 
          What are we to think of this clash of personality, lifestyle, and creative renderings? 
 
          I came upon this dilemma through a comment by a friend of mine.  I had made a silly joke with adolescent sexual innuendo – the dumber the funnier as far as I am concerned – when he retorted with something like, “And this from a guy who writes about the mysteries of the Holy Spirit.”  Yup, and this has puzzled me about myself as well as guys like Copeland and all sorts of culture creators who often belie in their works the cruder aspects of their own nature. 
 
          There is a man, David ….. , who writes some of the best Catholic popular tunes out there –  note that “good” and “popular” don’t often go together in Catholic music – with some absolutely filled with the sense of the Holy Other.  Meanwhile, as of this writing, he is involved in a bitter court case involving several young adult males and sexual abuse.  We who present music to the church have been advised to avoid his works, at least until the man is cleared in court (which seems increasingly unlikely).  Again, what the heck?  Such things seem to present us with an unsolvable dilemma. 
 
          Except that they don’t.  We all not only know someone who is both a jerk and a good guy all in one, but know that often enough, that guy is us.  This is not only a reflection of our own failings, but a reflection of our attempts to BE good guys.  It is well-known among Catholic priests, for instance, that the more one tries to engage the Holy, the more one will be tempted, even besieged, by the opposite, or even the demonic.  Nearly every saint I have read of has had confrontations with the demonic, some of these lasting a life time.  The only difference between the saint and the man sincerely looking for the good is that the saint never budges an inch for the bad.  We should all understand by personal experience why saints are in extremely short supply.   Veering from the sacred, it is also known in linguistics that comprehension of something is in part known through its opposite. Without black, we would not fully understand white.  And so it seems, too, with the sacred, or the good, or the viral or the chaste.
 
          But our spasms of emotions and desires go beyond a simple internal dialogue defining things both physical and moral.  In “It’ a Wonderful Life,” the good man yells at his wife, takes a swing at another man, and questions why he ever engendered “all these kids.”  Such inner conflicts and contradictions in the real world are not only normal, but nearly universal.  Still, the initial criticism of the friend points to a deeper reality – that inner conflict (often expressed in outer conflict) is normal in the world we have built, but is not normal in the universe at large.  Natural laws rarely contradict themselves, except in Star Trek.  The truth seems to be that we simply do not understand our true natures.  We are contradictions to ourselves because we are befuddled, both about ourselves and the nature of the world in general. 
 
           By Christian definition, the world’s only perfect man was Jesus Christ.   Yes, he expressed anger and even despair, but does anyone believe that he lost control in these situations by releasing repressed emotions?  We are rather to believe that certain situations called for such emotions.  Anger at another’s brutality or harmful stupidity, for instance, might be compared to the spank or rebuke you give to your little child who keeps running into the road.  “Wake up!” says the shout.   And so it could be that our inner contradictions are wake-up calls to alert us to our true natures and to the dangers of the false narratives we have incorporated into ourselves.  Could anything be more telling about the overall health of our civilization than the gender dysphoria now sweeping through the young like a plague?  Or the peaceful protestors everywhere burning down our cities?  Or the proponents of both national and personal disarmament obsessing over the right to abort children? 
 
            Yes, we are a bundle of contradictions.  The music of the elitist can truly elicit the spirit of the common man, just as the music of a sexual predator can set in us the peace of the Holy Spirit – and just as a common buffoon writing from his home computer can touch on that same Spirit.  But in a perfect world – in the world that Christ calls us to in the Sermon on the Mount – these contradictions would not exist, or so the voice of the saints tell us.  Much of humor rises from a recognition of contradictions, to make fun of ourselves for our daily hypocrisies.  How could this be wrong?  But when we live by these contradictions and are controlled by them, we mess up the world, at least a little.  The worst aspect of this is that by living in them, we pass them on to the next guy and to the next generation.  It is from contradictions of values and morals that the wheel of humanity’s tragic history turns.
 
           To seek purity of heart and soul, then, requires a complete overhaul of the self that is built upon the shifting sands of personal and social contradictions.  So it is that the saint is an outcast and the prophet – along with the honest comedian - is despised.  To reject our collective contradictions of thought and behavior is to reject ourselves, and, worse, is to tell us what we already know and do not want to hear.  It might even be that a naughty joke can expose our contradictions about sex and love – and, just as likely, expose the clay feet of the clown who tells it, the same clown who might also be looking for an exit ramp from the endless circus.      
 
 
 
                
 
          

​ 
          “You’re nothing but a big baby,” my wife said this morning, and she’s right.  After a visit to the doctor’s - just because they kept bugging me about it - I have been almost shattered.  Not that cancer was found, or MS or anything devastating like that.  Rather, bloodwork showed that bad things could be about to happen: high fat and glucose levels have me heading for heart and stroke problems along with the possibility of diabetes.  Nothing yet, mind you, but hell, they tell me, because you are FAT (it’s all your fault, you porker) you’re going to DIE!  Oh, and get a booster.  And a flu and shingles shot.  Porker. 
           
          This said in not those exact words but pretty darn close, so much so that I found myself shaking like a dog at the Vets when the ordeal was over.  Because I am over 65, they had also given me a dementia test, which I passed with flying colors despite being a porker, but I was so disoriented that I could not find my way out of the clinic.  I had to ask, and then quickly looked around for the men in the white coats to take me away. 
 
          It’s like that: walk into the doctor’s or a hospital, and you lose all dignity and mature volition.  Once again, you are a kid creeping around a middle school filled with teachers, always on the verge of being caught committing some mortal sin.  Never mind that we truly are intended to live only about three score and ten without modern medical attention, and that almost everyone has something not quite up to par with them by their late ‘60’s; never mind that it’s normal to get old and die; never mind that life is not a race, and that we don’t live to live longer than the next sucker, but to live.  Or at least should
 
          But, yeah, I’m a baby.  I don’t want to be told what to do, and I don’t want to be told I am going to die soon because I alone, and in a vicious and careless way, have turned myself into a fat slob.  That kind of talk starts fights just about anywhere else.  So OK, I’m a baby, but my abject cowardice didn’t start at the doctor’s office yesterday, where the voice of the God Doctor chastised me over a group of numbers on a sheet of paper (the book of Sins).  No.  The cringing baby-man that was me coming from the doctor’s office yesterday started his journey into pathetic-ville nearly a month before at the dentist.
 
          Ah, the dentist.  Usually, the dentist is filled with pain and expense but rarely with derogatory or life-changing chatter.  No one likes to go, but it usually amounts to only a stain upon the day, and maybe a groan as the next dates for a root canal and cap are discussed.  Not so a month ago.  After the standard time-consuming cleaning, the dentist always comes by to give the mouth a quick once-over.  Usually that’s it, although sometimes a pick is sent towards a tooth that creates a shock of pain and the dentist issues a phrase like, “number 27 distal, carries,” meaning that you’re coming back for a drill.  But this time, the voice of authority said, “Ah, see that there? (Said to the hygienist, not the silent victim.) White on the side of the tongue.  Always note the white.”  Then to me, “I’ve noticed a white sore on the side of the tongue.  You always have to check that.  Come back in two weeks and if it’s still there, I’ll send you to a specialist to fix you up.”  Although I can tell you for almost sure that her tone didn’t mean “if” but “when.” 
 
          Yes, she’ll send me to a specialist who specializes in hideous cases of mouth and tongue cancer.  I knew what she meant right off the bat but didn’t think much of it.  I had mentioned to her a semi-memory of having bitten my tongue in my sleep a few nights before, but she only repeated, “When you see white, you have to check.”  Still, there was nothing to worry about.  It most certainly was a cut from a bite and would go away soon.
 
          Unless it wouldn’t.  A week later I started checking the spot several times a day.  I looked up “tongue cancer” on Google, and found out awful stuff about it.  One gets it primarily by smoking a pipe, which I did in my middle years, with drinking heavily, which I did in my earlier years, and getting papilloma virus from unprotected sex, which I may have gotten during those early years of heavy drinking because no one is really careful at closing time, especially back in those days of radical and foolish freedom in the ‘70’s.   Usually - the advice continued - by the time it showed up, it was already deep into the lymph glands and would require chemo and radiation and radical surgery, including removal of the lower jaw and large sections of the tongue.  Even then, the 5 year survival rate for males was only 25%. 
 
          The weekend after that, and only two days before the fateful return to the dentist, we did our planned “Walk to Mary” from Green Bay to the Shrine of our Lady of Good Hope in Champion, the only approved Marian visionary site in the US.  It is a 21 mile walk that begins at 7:30 AM., and the first prayer one does is for good weather.  This we got.  We also were swept into a surprise confession where the priest admonished me to pray to the Virgin throughout the walk.  The walk was long and torturous, as it had been the last time we did it 4 years earlier, but there was something transcendental about it this time.  I felt that I was really walking with Mary, corny as that might sound.  I was often consciously above the physical self with one foot in that spiritual realm that we all inhabit but usually do so without noticing.  It was wonderful in a way that would not seem wonderful to anyone watching objectively.  This was not a true ecstasy, but rather a promise of it to come.  The walk was worth every blistering mile.
 
            Then came the next day.  There was the usual intense soreness, of course, but also a sense that the sore on my tongue had gotten worse.  I would go to the dentist the following day, Monday, and with this, I knew she would send me to the “specialist.”  There, the best I could hope for was a biopsy and then a long week or so of waiting for the dreaded results, after which I would be proclaimed OK.  That was the best.  With two and possibly three bases covered for getting the disease, it seemed to me that it was more likely that I would get the thumbs down and then start the long and torturous slide into a painful and unsightly death.  Even though a gentle voice told me that I was just fine (you baby!), I dismissed this as wishful thinking.  That night I forced myself to go through the long agonies of the process, preparing myself for everything from jaw-removal to saying goodbye to the family.  I did not think I would sleep, but eventually did.
 
          Next morning was bright and cheerful.  I knew I was better, and a check in the mirror showed that every last trace of the sore – the bight mark, I now knew for sure – was gone.  Just like that.  It was a miracle that the dentist confirmed an hour later.  All that worry was for nothing, or so I thought.  But then came the infamous doctor’s visit a week later, as stated above, where the good physician actually yelled at me, his reddened face glowing above his silly white mask: “You can do what I tell you or I’ll put you on pills!”  He really said that.  A few minutes later found me stunned and walking around in a circle looking for the exit, a confusion enhanced, no doubt, by having eaten too many 80% cacao chocolate bars. 
 
          That was two days ago (now four) as I write this, and since then I’ve been thinking.  Sure, there was rudeness and abruptness with the diagnosticians, but what the heck did I expect?  It is a certainty that life will bring pain, agony and finally death.  This is not pessimism or dark drama, but a fact.  When such certainties arrive at the door, we should not be surprised at all.  If we were sane, and if our worldly self had its head on right, we would simply sigh or shrug and brace ourselves with quiet stoicism for this painful, and perhaps last chapter, in our lives.  That we (or at least, we babies) should be shocked is a sign that our thinking and our self-perceptions are entirely wrong.  If we have failed to bring such certainties into our lives, what else have we failed to do?  That is, just how ignorant are we? 
 
          Back to the Walk to Mary; On the last 5 miles of the walk, we met up with the priest who was largely responsible for the Walk, a Father Rocky, who is famous among many Wisconsin Catholics.  The question that I had in my mind all day surfaced as I talked to him: Why do we do this? It was not that I thought it silly, but that I didn’t understand the compulsion that we and thousands of others had to suffer for nothing more than an idea that would not bring wealth or fame or even political freedom.  His answer was that we did it because we were called, and that this was a form of our devotion and love, which would be recognized and reciprocated. 
 
          This gave for some food for thought, which had led me to this: we walk, and we worship, because we know that there is something far greater to this world than we ordinarily understand.  We walk and suffer and endure because suffering and endurance are what life is finally all about.  We do both because we recognize that somehow, the one – the greatness beyond us – and our inevitable agony and death -  are intertwined; that is, that our mortality is intimately linked to our immortality.  When we recognize one, we should recognize the other.  That is sanity; that is truth.  And that we may experience a little miracle here and there along the way is further proof that this world is only a shadow of a greater world.
 
          So my tears and trembling when confronted with pain and death are the tears of a baby who resents the slap on his bottom at birth, even though that is necessary for further survival.  These are wake-up calls, to bring us out of the cocoons we have built around our near-sighted egos.  What we believe to be real is not, even though the roots of truth are right before us.  Ultimately, we must realize that we have nuthin’ to lose in this mortal coil, just as a diagnoses of advanced cancer makes all our material possessions seem as nothing.  That is the truth exposed.  The curse of knowing we are going to die is also our greatest blessing, bringing us back to what is really important and what is the more real.  Even miracles are only bright nuggets in light of the vastness we stand before each and every moment, even though we convince ourselves to look the other way.   
 
         
 
         
 
          
 
        
           

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          “Mother Mariana de Jesus was truly a heroine in the practice of atrocious penance. She wore a hairshirt that covered her whole body, and she placed small iron tacks even on her tongue and in her ears, leaving free only her face and hands, which all could see….Not satisfied with this self-inflicted rigor, she had herself scourged by the hands of another.  For this, she chose a strong, robust woman…” (from The Admirable Life of Mother Mariana by Fr Manuel Pereira (1790), trans. By Marian Horvat)
 
          Mother Mariana, now being considered for sainthood (which I believe she will obtain) is not the only sainted person to go out of their way to torture themselves.  In fact, it is rare to find a Christian saint who did not.  St Francis wore thin clothing and slept outside in the rain, eating next to nothing; St Anthony lived in a one-room mudbrick hut with only one opening for a daily deliverance of one loaf of bread and water for 20 years; St Catherine of Sienna lived for months on only the host of Christ, and so on and on.  The reasons they gave for their chosen sufferings were to save the world from itself, just as Christ sacrificed himself, and to redeem themselves, who, each felt, was the very worst of mankind.  This from people who would literally give you their last crust of bread and die so that you might be saved. 
 
          But really, tacks under the tongue?  Mother Mariana was to become abbess of a convent in Quito, Ecuador in the late 1500’s.  At the time, her self-punishments were initially criticized as excessive, but once people saw her in ecstatic trances, they understood perfectly why she tortured herself.  In those days, after all, ordinary people would walk through the town center on certain holy days flogging themselves.  But to us, there seems to be something mentally unstable about these practices.  If we add to this how the saints – particularly the female saints -  describe their ecstasies through the divine spouse-hood to Jesus, we arrive at the foot of Dr. Freud and his discourses on sexual frustration.  In other words, to those of us today, many if not most of these saints would be classified as psycho-sexually sick. (This self-torture is not restricted to the distant past.  For instance, it is now known that Pope – now Saint - John Paul II, who was among us until less than twenty years ago, wore certain cutting cords under his garments to illicit discomfort and pain).  In this enlightened age, how can we think otherwise?  And wouldn’t that, then, cancel out any special graces that these saints were supposed to carry?
 
          It gets worse.  According to the afore-mentioned book on Mother Mariana, she also was tormented for months at a time by the devil, who destroyed her physical health while trying to destroy her faith.  This, too, is nearly universal for the saints, getting at the root of what St John of the Cross famously described as the “dark night of the soul.”  Padre Pio, a famous miracle worker from the early to mid-20th century, was said to emerge from his cell in the morning bloody and bruised after bouts with the devil, as well as with other evil spirits.  Is this “fighting with the devil” not some sort of mental illness as well?  Perhaps an expression of bi-polar syndrome, or even schizophrenia? 
 
          Perhaps.  The Catholic Church has tests to determine who is really undergoing spiritual testing and who is sick, much of this based on works coming from these people.  Other religions – I have read most about the Hindus and Buddhists – have these tests as well.  Do miracles surround these people, and are these for the good?  Does spiritual enlightenment flow from them regularly?  For if it does, it could not be from the devil.  As Christ said, a house divided against itself cannot stand; Satan would thus not continue to grant good deeds and words. 
 
          Still, reading about some of these torments will often lead the modern mind to become suspicious – my mind, for instance.  As said, the saints believe themselves at times to be re-living the passion of Christ, and thus sacrificing themselves for the betterment of the world.  How this occurs is a mystery of faith that no one on earth completely understands, but it is the primary tenet of Christianity.  It is this lack of understanding that grants us doubts.  Sure, the Son of God might be able to redeem the sins of the world through his suffering, but Uncle Giuseppe?  Mother Smallchurch?  To do so, we must imagine, one would have to be extraordinarily close to God. 
 
          Thus the necessity of miracles to prove the sanity and veracity of a saint.  Mental patients do not heal people with stage 4 cancer, or accurately tell the future time and again.   But those are only outward signs.  Inward purity is necessary to stand that close to God, and the way forward for many religions is to suffer acutely.  The Sun Dance ceremony of the Plains Indians calls for the participant to hang himself from a scaffolding by thongs pulled through his chest muscles; Hindu holy people might spend the now-iconic lifetime in a Himalayan cave living off of one handful of rice a day; and Christians such as Padre Pio and Mother Mariana, might have to suffer the torments of Satan to burn the soul clean of the impurities of Man. 
 
          Yes, it does all make sense from a religious point of view, although, again, the modern reader will probably not be comfortable with these sufferings.  The results of such suffering by these saints, however, can be astounding.  For instance, as related by 16th century testimony and as collated by Father Sousa in the 18th, Mother Mariana was told directly by Christ himself that much of her suffering was to be done for the 20th century.  The 20th century, she was told, would see the worst crises in the Church in its many-century history, including unspeakable corruption in the Church itself and a massive loss of faith by the laity.  This has indeed happened, and could not have been foreseen through reason alone 400 years ago.  She was told that this was to be the devil’s century, and Mother Mariana was asked (and the challenge accepted) to suffer for a fruitful end to this abominable time that most of you reading this have just lived through.
 
          We cannot say, from the religious perspective, that this vision was wrong.  The apparition of the Virgin at Fatima doubled down on this for the 20th century.  But has her suffering, along with many others of the saints, and along with many other apparitions of the Holy Mother, worked?  That is the hard part.  From the modern perspective, which often includes my own, much of what the saints suffer from seems more from mental illness, but wouldn’t such a determination be exactly what people in a lost age would think?  One, that is, such as our own?  If the prophecies are correct, where might we find the fruits of the saints in the last century?  Were they then planted, but are yet to come?  Have they not been enough, all in vain for such a lost age?  Or have their visions been mere expressions of mental illness, regardless of the many miracles? 
 
          It is claimed by the Catholic Church that all of us who go to heaven must first be cleansed of our sins through the fiery agonies of Purgatory.  But what of suffering here on Earth?  Might not the human direction of history demand a universal suffering from all of human kind?  What might that look like?  Might our suffering, our trials for purgation, simply be to live in the brave new world that big technology and big government have planned for us? From neural inserts of nano-technology to universal surveillance, might not the horrible penances of the saints from the past be preferable? 
 
          Take your pick: the new world order or a new Noah’s Flood.  Both are punishments that we well understand – just as the Saints understood and understand their self-punishments.  Actions have consequences.  Self-deprecation might lead to charity and compassion, but self-love breeds selfishness, and selfishness breeds every type of evil in human organizations.  This is the law of humanity, if not of God.  It is just a question of who among us will pay the price, and how.  For this, I pray that the suffering of the saints, and of Christ himself, are indeed efficacious.  If not, neither faith nor the lack of it will save us from punishments worse than tacks under the tongue. 
 
           
         
          

​ 
            There are tears and then there are tears; there are times to cry for some while not for others; and few are shed by the average American for anything but something at least as deep as the chest, and usually as deep as the chasms of the heart and soul.
 
             For this I must just talk about us in the US, for crying is controlled by culture almost as much as sex is.  The tough-as-nails Comanche, for instance, could torture a pregnant woman to death, or have an enemy shove burning embers down his throat, without shedding a tear.  But if one of their own was killed, especially more than one, the tears HAD to flow with histrionics, to be followed by vows of vengeance, which would continue the cycle of sorrow and hate for at least another generation.  We also have the tough old warrior Jews wailing at the loss of children or wives or kingdoms, as did or does just about every male warrior in any war culture.  As said, righteous sorrow cooks up some pretty righteous anger, and anger makes a pretty fearless warrior. 
 
          But for us, tears are a more private and often shameful thing.  We all know that men are not supposed to cry for just about anything, and for that, I am glad.  We have enough loss of control in our culture.  Unfortunately, that does overflow into things men can cry over, like the death of a parent or child, or the marriage of a daughter or birth of a child or grandchild.  Women can cry over lesser things, but not to the point of seeming to be unstable.  We know what those things are intuitively.  A woman can cry over her son getting a scholarship to Big U, but not over spilt milk, at least in ordinary times.   Children can cry over everything, but are quickly taught the limits after reaching a degree of linguistic fluidity.  Just as potty time must be controlled, so must tears, as with appetite, as with adult drinking and sexual satiation.  Much of culture is control, after all, and culture is the essential reason why humans have remained viable as a species.
 
          Culture also recognizes its limits, however, or at least a good one does.  A certain degree of creativity is allowed in most, as is the breaking of certain rules in certain situations (or following different rules in different situations).   Tears – crying – are allowed with us, as we have seen, in specific emotional situations depending on one’s gender, age, and position in society.  For us, tears must and usually do come from a deep emotional well.  That is why they must be regulated, and that is why they must also sometimes be allowed.  Deep emotions are like blood to the limbs of culture – they keep it alive and healthy.  We just have to keep a check on the daily blood pressure numbers for all-around health. 
 
          So that’s it – we are brought to tears by extra-ordinary emotional events, good or bad, and are allowed or even encouraged to express them in certain circumstances.  But there are some events that stray from our cultural path into a liminal, or twilight zone.  We might, for instance, cry with certain music.  Sometimes it is because the song reminds us of a particularly poignant episode, but sometimes not; sometimes, we cry from it because it elicits an uncontrollable welling of unknown emotions that cannot be shut down.  For me and my wife, this happens when we listen (from a good speaker) to Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, just about every time.  It is as if the music draws out something from within and jets it through us in an irresistible surge.  We like the feeling, but do not like to be seen while weeping, so we listen to it – only now and then, as if it were a strong drug – by ourselves.  These tears are not shameful for the self, but are too much for public viewing.  As said, a twilight zone for tears. 
 
          Thing is, Tallis’s music is fundamentally and at its core a chorus for a high Catholic Church service. 
 
          And so we are brought to those other tears in the twilight, the tears of religious faith.  I have a cousin who was once a pretty bad-ass dude.  Once, when he was about 20, a guy failed to pay him for an amount of cocaine.   So J….. punched him out and then dragged him to a tree (they were meeting in a forested area) and tied him up.  For the night.  J…. was later brought before a court for drug sales, assault, and by far the worst, kidnapping.  After thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and the pleading of his war-vet father, he was released with all sorts of community service provisions and demands.  During that time, J…. “got Jesus,” and that was it forever, right up to this day some fifty years later.  In any conversation he cannot help but bring up his conversion and/or his faith, and with that come the tears, this from someone who is still a pretty tough guy.  We get a little embarrassed for him, and the non-religious move to the other side of the picnic area or room, but he doesn’t care.  He inhabits his twilight zone with absolute self-assurance. 
 
          I have been to more Christian retreats now than I care to recall because I have become the background guitar player, and I see tears every time in a host of people, from fragile old ladies to big bruisers.  Another relative who was raised Catholic but only pops into a service once every few years told me that he starts crying like a baby every time the bread and wine are consecrated.  That might be why he seldom goes, not for the feeling but for the exposure of the feeling.  I have my own experiences with faith and crying, all leading to the question: why?  Crying for faith is not prohibited, but it is not condoned either.  It is not a sign of weakness, but it is a little too personal for the individual weeper and for those around him.  So why, since it is an embarrassment, would people be unable to stop crying at spiritual moments?
 
          Death of a loved one, the wedding of a child, both are OK to cry at, and both are signals of the deepest kinds of transformation.  Intensely beautiful music can bring out tears that are yanked from an emotion too deep for daily use.  For its part, Spirit brings forth both intimately- related sensations, giving us a clue as to the nature and reality of Spirit.  Since it is almost certain that nothing that is not related to the ‘real’ can bring out intensely tearful responses, we must give a nod to the actuality of Spirit.  And since nothing trivial can bring out such responses from ordinary people, we know for certain that the presence of Spirit is anything but trivial. 
 
         Spirit, then, is most likely real, or points to something real, and is most definitely something that is experienced with intensity.  We understand the tears at a funeral; those at a wedding are a little more baffling.  We understand, for instance, that the life of your once- baby girl is taking on a great change, but why the tears?  Even more puzzling are those shed for music, or some other art; and even more are those for Spirit.  Why, for Spirit, should we experience such emotions for something that cannot even be seen or heard?  For something that was never your now- deceased father, or for something that never once played on your knee? 
 
          It must be because Spirit comes straight from our heart and soul.  This is where its reality lies.  It is life-transforming in its realization, as it is outstandingly for my cousin, just as it is intimately, deeply emotional.   It goes to our very core.  It is both in us and part of us.  The startling thing, and a good part of what makes us cry, is the simple discovery of its presence.  Like good sex with the same spouse, it can be a surprise and a delight every time, and, unlike the spouse or music, it is forever with us.  More mysteriously, it does not give us a directly physical delight.  Rather, it arises not primarily from our physical depths but from beyond any organ, beyond our eyes and ears and our tactile senses.  It arises, rather, as a realization of our being. 
 
           So both Spirit and our ‘being’ exist, and both exist outside of physical reality.  More, Spirit affects our being with joy and an ecstasy that often brings us to tears, however embarrassing they might be.  Not the “tears of a clown/when there’s no one around,” but the tears of an immortal being encountering its truth as an immortal being whether anyone’s around or not.
 
         Deeper than an ocean, vaster than the sky, more terrible than an exploding star, such is within all of us just waiting to get out.  The well of tears is only a distant warning or harbinger.   
It is why the wise fear the Lord, and why the bravest among us might weep.
         
              
 
         
 
           

​ 
          When we were finishing off the cabin up nort,’ I bought a faux-marble (read, linoleum) counter top that needed a hole cut into it to fit the kitchen sink.  I had done this before, and took it into the garage right here down south to power-tool it into perfection.  At the back end of the counter top was a rise to keep water from flowing off the back, and with the fit of the sink, I simply couldn’t force the jig saw against the small space it provided to finish off the hole.  After much thought, I got much longer saw bits with which I could hold the saw above this rise.  It did eventually do the job, but I broke several of the saw bits and, having no support for my hand on the table, the hole that was cut was wretchedly jagged.  It didn’t matter, as the sink lip would cover that mess, but it did make me puzzle: how had I done it before so easily?
 
          Well, duh.  What I had to do was trace the outline of the sink on the bottom of the counter top, where everything was nice and flat.  That’s what I had done before, but this time, I couldn’t see it until I had finished the job the wrong way.  This was almost 12 years ago, and as I can still remember my wife’s name, this was not a case of early Alzheimer’s.  Rather, I had simply overlooked the best way for what seemed at the time to be the most obvious.  I had, then, seen only the immediate cutting without grasping the overall concept of cutting such a hole.  This happens.  Recall the NASA engineers when they crashed a 20 million dollar rocket on Mars because they had mixed up English and Metric measuring units.  I can hear their giggles of embarrassment as I write. 
 
          Welp, considering the bigger interests of this blog on the miraculous, the unexplained, and the spiritual, I missed the forest for the trees again on the last essay.  Not that the essay was bad.  Maybe it was a bit too heavy on the philosophy side, but still, there was a valid point to be made and it was made well-enough, I hope, to be understood.   Recall that I had gotten the main idea for the essay from a quote by Mark Sykes about his hatred for his own English ruling class.  But there was something even more interesting in the book found not at the very beginning, but towards the end, and something that was more relevant to the book (The Man Who Created the Middle East, by Christopher Sykes) at large.  That is, that Mark Sykes, the co-author of the infamous Sykes-Pico Treaty, had also been behind the Balfour Declaration.
 
         Of course we all remember the Balfour Declaration.  OK, of course we probably don’t, unless you’re an Israel or Middle East buff, and it was poorly named, to boot.  Arthur Balfour was First Lord of the (British) Admiralty at the time of the First World War, and his greatest contribution to said declaration was to deliver it to the War Department from the hands of Sykes and some influential Zionists.  Without Sykes, then, the Declaration would not have been made.  The meat of this declaration was to ascertain the right of the Jewish peoples to occupy a homeland in Palestine.  It led directly to the beginning of the establishment of the Jewish nation of Israel.    
 
          It gets more interesting.  Mark Sykes should never have been born.  His father, Sir Tatton, was unbelievably wealthy and unbelievably neurotic, even more “eccentric” than the average wealthy bachelor of Victorian England.  He worried constantly about his health, and wanted nothing to do with women in the romantic sense (nor men).  Having reached his middle fifties, it seemed that he would make it to the end as a rich and lonely old man, but fate – and a scheming mother – threw him a curve-ball.  The wife-to-be, Christina (also of the elite class), was a single young woman who came in need of help during her travels.  It was then that she happened to ask for the support of Tatton, who was there at her moment of distress.  As a gentleman, he escorted her to a respectable hotel, and there got her a room, and himself another, for the night.  The following day, when the mother heard about this (maybe she had cooked the whole thing up in advance?), she threatened scandal if Tatton did not marry her.  As that was the worst that could happen to a gentleman of the era, he agreed.  Six months after the marriage (that is no misprint), he took his bride for the first time (reportedly while drunk, and in a very awkward manner), which is when Mark Sykes began his life on earth.  
 
          Almost everyone knows that the Second Coming, as promised in John’s Book of Revelations in the New Testament, is not to occur until after the re-formation of Israel.  1900 years after the Jewish Diaspora – a blink in the eyes of God’s good time – that part of the prophecy was fulfilled.  And as we now know, this would not have happened were it not for the feminine manipulation of an aging neurotic gentleman who managed to get drunk and perky for at least once in his life.  This is oddly reminiscent of Abraham and Sarah, the old infertile couple that was promised by God a son (Isaac), who would start a nation “as numerous as the stars.”   As it so happened, Mark Sykes managed to father 6 children before his death in 1919 (?) of the Spanish Influenza, that disease being the father of our fears over Covid, which has led to actions that have changed the world profoundly in ways we do not yet know. 
 
          Connections and connections.  In the previous essay, I saw the more obvious traces of world history, as calculated by Man.  In this, I write about another connection far more profound.  Who could have guessed that the eccentricity of Tatton would lead to the rebirth of Israel and its re-entry into world politics?  In this latter, world politics, Israel stands large as one of the focal points of history, for both possible good and horrible evil.  All this is based upon one weak strand of a family line, leading in its way to the new David, a democracy-king of a united Israel on earth. 
 
          Some may see the craziness of it all as just another quirk in time, but one has to think: what was the likelihood of Israel ever becoming a nation again?  And by such a random glitch in human society?  Who could have put that together, ever? 
 
          I finished the last essay proclaiming the ultimate leadership of the Holy Spirit, which is underscored here.  I have no proof of its existence other than the apparently random creativity that often comes before meaningful movements in history, all far beyond anyone’s calculations.  These movements happen in each life too, if we look for them.  It appears that we are not the authors of our own lives so much as the pens or the key boards.  We can run out of ink or break down if we choose to fight the Spirit, or we can choose to move along with it as best we can.  With the latter, we might then sit back on occasion to contemplate the forest surrounding our lives rather than each single tree, and marvel at the great power that is imbedded in each of us, even as each is but a whisper or hair in eternity. 
              
 
 
 
            

​      
          The other night as I was walking through the TV room on the way to the fridge, I noticed that the final episode of that silly show, Lost in Space, was airing.  In it, they had the swashbuckling younger man of the group confronting an alien who was most certainly going to end his life (Surprisingly, it didn’t!)  As there was no way out, he closed his eyes and said out loud, “Lord, forgive me for all the people I have hurt in my life.”  It was supposed to be a funny moment, as we know this Interstellar Don Juan had most certainly sinned, but it also told us that even the adventurers amongst us not only have a conscience, but realize that they are fundamentally selfish.  Even these ne’r do wells, we understand, have moments of self- recrimination.
 
          This does not mean that they hate themselves, but the seeds of self-hatred have been planted.   Recall Pontius Pilate as he washed his hands after the judgment of Christ.  His wife had told him that she had had a dream telling her that her husband should leave this innocent man alone.  He had to do his duty and quell the mob, but he felt fear from his wife’s dream, and guilt.  This, too, does not mean that he had a sense of self-hatred, but the seeds were there. 
 
          I have lived with an autonomous Indian tribe in Venezuela, and have read extensively about many more, and it does not seem that they have self-hatred.  Rather, they have fear of consequences from the spirit world and, like Pilate’s wife, have dreams that make them feel afraid, or simply bad.  Anthropologists have said that the ancient world and the world-view of the primitive are different from “us”– the “us” taking in, at the very least, developed cultures with Western influence – in that they are socialized by shame rather than guilt.  Shame is the feeling of public social disapproval, while guilt is an inward sense of self-disapproval.  This is part of what Jesus meant when he said that the law (of God) would be written on men’s hearts rather than in books.  This is the interiorization of right and wrong apart from public display.  It is where I believe we can find the beginnings of self-hatred.
 
          In a book I am just completing, The Man Who Created the Middle East, by Christopher Sykes, we learn of the life of Sir Mark Sykes, the English aristocrat who was co-author of the much maligned Sykes-Pico agreement of 1916, when England and France were deciding how to partition the crumbling Ottoman Empire.  Many of the troubles we now see in the Middle East (a term popularized by Sykes) have been blamed on this treaty, rightly or wrongly.  More to our point, what was most remarkable in this book was a quotation from Sykes that appeared on the first page of the first chapter: “I hate my kind, I hate, detest human beings… their very stench appalls me … The stupidity of the wise, the wickedness of the ignorant, but you must forgive, remember I have never had  childhood…”  This from a man who inherited a mansion and 40, 000 acres of prime English territory, villages and villagers included.  How did this hatred of his own class, the ruling class, and by extension himself, come about?  And how did it affect his most notable mark on the world? 
 
         When one reads the journals of the conquistadors, one never gets the feeling that there is self-hatred anywhere among them.  Rather, we see unblemished and self-righteous imperialism in full bloom.   But something happened shortly after the Middle Ages.  While there had been people in Christendom who daily repented of their sins since the time of the Church, we don’t see a majority express a persistent self-abasement until somewhere around the time of the Pilgrims.  A leap in the interiorization of sin had taken place after the Renaissance, or so it seems from the writings.  Even if this timetable is off by a century or two, we certainly see this sense of lingering dark guilt in the novels of the 19th century, which were written primarily by the elite educated classes.  For reasons too vast for this essay, and perhaps beyond my scope anyway, by the time of Mark Sykes’ birth in 1879, the sense of guilt that had been set in modernizing man by high religion had been replaced by a clinging sense of self-loathing.  This has very obviously progressed to the common man of the Western world today, but it had begun with the most educated and privileged among us. 
 
          For Sykes, he detested the blind arrogance of the European colonizers.  At the same time, we can see the extreme arrogance of Sykes and his outlandish sense of self-worth.  This clashed with his guilt over the doings of his own ruling class, just as this sense of righteousness underscored his own moral and intellectual superiority.  Thus, we clearly see the strong underpinnings of both self-love and self-hate operating on his life at the professional level.  His goal was to kick his own class in its colonizing butt, which would then justify his self-love and privilege. 
 
          Confusing, yes, but so relevant to our own times and nation as to be painful.  We have now among the elites in government and education a sense of self-hatred so strong that they wish to destroy the culture that enabled its development.  “Get rid of that which gave me this uncomfortable self-hatred, and I shall be free!” Just as with Mark Sykes, a deep-seated sense of privilege has these people believe that they have the right to destroy that which has made them, and made them so miserable.  They must demolish that which gave them their fear of gay elements within themselves, and their racist beliefs, and their class snobbery brought about, they think, by capitalist wealth.  Then, with the society abolished that brought them to their sufferings of guilt, our leaders in thought and actions believe that they will elevate themselves to some kind of amorphous utopia.
 
          They will not, for they miss the point of the evolution of consciousness, particularly of Christian consciousness.  Jesus proclaimed that with his new order, “not a letter of the old law will be abandoned,” but rather will be written, as said, in our hearts.  This is the real movement.  Self-hatred comes from the recognition of our own failings in light of Christian teachings.  To destroy the basis for self-hatred is to destroy hopes of our liberation.  Rather, we are to realize that our brothers and sisters are ourselves, and as such should not isolate ourselves from the lives and troubles and destinies of others.  But we must follow the law that has been written in our hearts, the moral platform from which human action and thought should emanate. 
 
          When the woman is about to be stoned for adultery in the famous Gospel, Jesus asks the man without sin to cast the first.  One by one they walk away in recognition of their own guilt, forced to identify with the woman.  Once alone with the woman, Jesus tells her that he does not condemn her either.  Rather, now that her life is given back to her, she should go and sin no more.  The law, we are told, is to stay intact, but be enforced with compassion and forgiveness.  Such laws were made to develop empathy and give us a way out of the old Roman belief that the victor – the resplendent self – has the right to enjoy the spoils.  For the woman, if she were to continue in her adulteries, she would continue in the short-sighted ways of self-indulgence, ignoring the feelings of her husband, or the wife of the lover, for the whims of her wandering desires. 
 
          The law is still among us, and I do think we are still on a path of moral evolution.  We have now come to a difficult impasse in our society, led by a self-hating but also self-loving elite who cannot stand the pain of their guilt and so wish to (and think they have the right to) throw the baby out with the bathwater.  This, too, shall pass; this movement, too, will be recognized for the fundamental selfishness that is behind it.  We then must learn to recognize our mutual failings and forgive those as we forgive ourselves, and then go forth to sin no more.  The result will not be utopia, but rather a reflection of its promise, where good prevails even as we recognize and empathize with the failings of ourselves and others.  In Buddhism, this might be called the Middle Way.  In it we are to overcome self-hatred in the recognition of our shared condition, and work not against social and religious morality, but with it for the benefit of ourselves and for others. 
 
          This goal has been there all along, right before our eyes.  What keeps us blind to it are the very selfish desires that the anti-capitalists and cultural nihilists pretend to despise, yet so often embrace.  It is a tricky path we have been set to follow.  To recognize light, we must understand darkness; as we mature morally, we also are allowed to see, and are tempted to follow, the opposite path.  The alternative to the law written in our hearts is to live in a Romanesque world of the conqueror, or in the dark and hate-filled chaos promoted by many in our elite classes. 
 
          It is true that it is always darkest before the dawn.  In spite of everything, history intimates to us that we are being led and aided by a greater power to someday realize the new Eden.  Let us pray. 
 
         
 
           
   

​ 
          As we speak, one of my brothers is having open heart surgery.  He has strong opinions, as do I, and we have argued quite a bit and not always congenially.  We have not descended into not talking to each other or anything harsh, but some residual resentment has remained – until now.  Now, in light of life-threatening illness and major surgery, all that seems so small and pointless.  That, I realize, is the realty of our greater situation.  So much of our resentments and arguments are really nothing compared to the big issues of life and death and family loyalty and health.  So much of conflict is no more than a self-serving ego boost; so much of life is treated as a basketball game where we must win at the buzzer - until life itself is at stake.
 
          There is a venerable tradition in the Catholic Church called “adoration,” where a consecrated host is placed in the center of a cross-shaped holder (the “monstrance”) and worshiped very, very respectfully by the faithful, as in the Church the host is taken to be the actual body of Christ.  In our church, this takes place every Thursday in a small chapel besides the main building, and there people come in, pray silently (or crawl slowly towards the Eucharist, as one Mexican woman does every week), and leave.  At times as I sit there I do feel a little foolish.  After all, to the non-believer, we are praying and kneeling to a piece of unleavened bread.  But if one sits there and convinces oneself that it IS God in the flesh, and then meditates with increasing inner silence, funny things begin to happen.  Pieces of the past show up explained in novel ways, or a quiet voice speaks of its love for you, or a solution to a problem pops up.  For this reason, I always ask for some gift, some insight, some anything that might come from Christ, and always I am rewarded, if not right then, then within minutes of leaving the chapel.
 
          So it was a few weeks ago when I sat in the delicious silence of the holy, that the “voice” – not really a voice but a knowledge transformed by myself into a voice – gave me something remarkable.  More than a voice, it showed me in deep feeling what true charity is: it is the strong desire to give everything we have to others out of love.  Most importantly for me, this giving is done with gratitude and with joy; and this giving, done in love, is seen and felt as the greatest gift of all for the giver, a rare blessing bestowed on a privileged few. 
 
          Of course, this certain inner sense disappeared within me in minutes, but the memory and implications of it have remained.  I know now why truly holy people give, just as I know now that such a state of being is truly a gift beyond price.  In it, there is no more competition, no more anxiety over status or worry about jobs or university degrees or winning arguments.  In this state we live the way we were meant to live, and through it we forgo the worst forms of suffering to which we subject ourselves.  It is a state where we finally live within true realty, where life is valued over all other things and opinions. 
 
          As life becomes a miracle when accompanied by faith, I was not surprised when a book I recently bought as a present for my wife, which I finished just last night, told me much more about this revelation.  Titled The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Father Henri Nouwen, it is a treatise on the famed parable in the New Testament, a treatise so beautiful in its authenticity that it cannot help but impart a sense of holiness to the reader.   It is not an academic exercise, but rather a meditation on Nouwen’s own life after he first sees the painting (a reproduction) of the same name by Rembrandt, in an institution for the mentally challenged.  There in the muted shadows and flashes of light of the picture, he notes the nearly blind eyes of the father as he hugs his returned son, as well as the hands that he has placed upon the kneeling son’s back.  He is drawn to this as to nothing else in art that he has previously seen, so much so that his meditation upon it gradually opens his own aging eyes to his own difficult spiritual journey. 
 
          As with anything of importance, a flash of genius or a turn of mind does not complete the message, but rather begins the process.  For Nouwen, the meditation began with the obvious searing love of the father as he clasps the back of his penitent son.  There is nothing but forgiveness and gratefulness in the old man for the son’s return, even though the son had committed a horrible offense by grabbing his inheritance before the death of the father.  There is no wagging finger or remonstrations or hurdles to leap before the son is taken back.  Rather, the fatted calf is slaughtered and a magnificent feast begins because, as the song goes that is taken from this parable, his son was “lost, but now is found.”  In this, we find not the God who demands and who sends lost souls to hell, but one who is open to complete love to those who choose to return.  Like the old man in his final years, God has nothing to lose by forgiveness, only something to gain. 
 
          Author Father Nouwen knows, however, that his journey through the painting was not completed by marveling at the love of the father.  Rather, he then sees himself as the younger, wayward son who must still repent of his sins on a personal basis so that he might feel that he personally deserves the love of the father.  This is the character that he believes most of us identify with.  Later, his attention is drawn to the eldest son, who stands by watching the reunion with skeptical eyes.  Why, this son asks in the parable, does the father celebrate the wayward son when he, the elder, has always done as he was told?  The father replies that the elder son has always had everything, but that the younger had become as if dead to the family.  Here, Nouwen has us understand both the sorrow of the prodigal son and the resentment of the elder son, and how we all share in both traits, as sinners and as those who feel life’s injustice.  Why do bad things happen to us even when we have been good? Why did we not get the promotion we deserved, or the respect or the love that should have been ours?  The elder son, then, is in all of us, too.
 
           In the end, Nouwen tells us that he has forgone his job at a prestigious university to oversee a home for the mentally handicapped.  There he sees both open love as well as open resentment and hurt, expressed clearly by people with no guile.  There he understands, now as an old man himself, that his role – and all of our roles – is to become the old man, the father (or mother, naturally).  This was his calling in the priesthood, as it is the calling for us all: to realize that, in the end, we all will have nothing, not health or usable wealth, except for our individual selves.  At this he understands what Jesus meant when he claimed: “Anyone who loses his life for my sake…will save it.”  When we have nothing to lose, as God does and as every dying person does, we are able to let loose the world and open our arms to everyone.  For humans, there is in this the ultimate pain of existence - the loss of everything; but in this is also the ultimate blessing: an ability to love unconditionally, as we no longer have anything to gain from the world or lose.  What good would any other attitude do at this point for us or for others? 
 
          It was this realization that happened naturally when my elder brother went in to surgery; and it was this realization that was given as I meditated upon the stale bread that I believe to be the body of Christ.  What use have we for greed or malice (the younger son), or spiteful resentment (the older son), in light of the dark certainty of death?  As with the imagination of the Eucharist, it is in the imagining of our own death that the reality of our situation becomes clear – along with the solution to our problems. 
 
          It took Father Nouwen six years after first seeing Rembrandt’s painting to discover his true calling and what he must do to fulfill it, and he had been a priest for many decades prior.  It is not an easy thing to let go and open up without resentments or conditions, but such a decision speaks to truth and to our greatest assignment for our time on earth.   It is through this decision that the sorrows and frustrations and losses of life are replaced by the beginnings of joy, where nothing else matters but this loving joy itself.  After everything, we will all become the nearly sightless old man whose only desire will be for the return of what was once lost. 
 
 
 
         

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          There are pills and there are pills.  I could rally a defense or mount an attack on the original “The Pill,” the birth control pill, which has almost certainly allowed our society, and now much of the world, to change family structure, morality and government.  There is also the abortion pill, and the pill for men who are in the, let’s say, drooping time of their lives, and so many other pills that lift us up or let us down.  But none of those is the pill I wish to write about.  Rather, my pill does not exist and may never exist, but it does raise some really interesting questions.   
 
         Enter Ponce de Leon, the conquistador who sought the Fountain of Youth in Florida.  Old people still go to Florida in search of it, but what they find in The Villages is rather a pale replay of youthful dreams that still end in death.  But our man Ponce listened to legends, and in fact it was reported by stragglers from a Spanish expedition that the natives listened to their own legends, too, by confirming on these pale ‘extra-Florestrials’ the ability to heal all illnesses.  The stragglers, knowing that their lives were on the line, complied with their requests to attempt healing, and much to their surprise, found that they were often successful.  Thus, the power of belief was confirmed to their astonished eyes.  Still, mortality ultimately could not be held at bay.
 
        Now enter my extra-terrestrials.  Let’s say that one day late in life I find myself limping along on a short and sad hike when out of the blue a celestial light beams from the sky, carrying with it a glowing man with a large head and a tiny mouth.  He holds out his hand to this terrified future me, letting it be known that the pills he holds before him will keep me eternally young, as long as I take one each year.  He then beams up, and after I discard my soiled underwear, I count the pills: one thousand, to be exact, meaning that I could stay young for the next one thousand years.  I pop one in my mouth and, shizam!,by the time I get home, my hair is grown in full with its youthful color and I am jumping around like the young, bright-eyed pup I once was. 
 
          I could imagine what I would do first after that, but after a short while, I would have to think again about this marvelous gift.  Yes, I could stay young for a thousand years, but that would mean that I would see my wife die of old age before me, and then my son, and then all future wives and children I might have over so many centuries.  I would have to rethink everything before I came to the inevitable conclusion that I must share these pills with the wife, and then the kid.  Than I would have to think again: I would have to share this with future grandchildren as well and, thanks to our youth, to our own future children until, in a few generations, we would form a group who would die together at the same age within a few centuries or less.  Meanwhile, all our friends would be dead, as might be everything that we hold sacred.  Imagine, for instance, the Pilgrim’s view of transgendered children or gay marriage and soft porn on TV, or - say a prayer now - Facebook, not to mention the possibility of dying by nukes or germ warfare or mutant zombie DNA freakazoid lab-generated soldiers.  Maybe they would not want to live in that future after all, no more than I might not want to live in ours.
 
          Then again, maybe I would.  Much to my surprise, I have found that even the very old, people who I once thought slid gracefully into that dark night, have the same fear of death as the young do, or at least the same desire to keep living.  Would I share my pills to give up so many of those thousand years?  We can draw analogies: would we give our coat to a loved one, or to anyone, and maybe freeze to death for our generosity?  How about giving away those last slices of bread when we are starving?  How about sharing that 401K nest egg even when we are not starving? How about sharing any of our earned comforts and securities to those both known and unknown, if we knew that such giving might harm us in the future?   How about sharing our wealth even if we thought we would not be harmed but would only lose that cushion of safety (and maybe a few trips in the winter to Florida, that mistaken land of youth)?  If not even that, just how generous would we be with our ability to cling to life itself? 
 
          I asked my wife the question about sharing the pill, and she responded instantly and with angry passion.  “Why would I want to live see my friends and family die?”  What kind of monster, she was saying, do you think I am? 
 
          I cannot speak for anyone else in particular, but I can speak for myself.  I think I know what kind of monster I am.  I have fought for prestigious positions and over slights to my ego, so why not over life?  Would I give up my seat in the lifeboat?  Would I not grab at a swimming man to save my drowning hide?  And, in the world that I do know, have I given up what extra I have to the point of losing my security blanket? 
 
          The Pill: the original stops life from happening, the one from the ET stops death from happening.  In each case, it is or would probably be all about ME.  The pleasure to do my will; the opportunity to keep what is mine.  Nothing of what I do or keep is forever, but I would like to make it so.  I cannot, but that does not stop me.  Imagine the view someone standing in eternity might have of me.
 
          It is said of God that he is Love, and let us pray so, for he is also Justice.  “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” said a dying Jesus, but I sort of do know what I do.  The comfort is that St Paul also fell in with the likes of me, saying, “I do not do what I want to, but what I hate” (Romans 7).  For Muslims, one gains eternal life if, in the end, the balance of what one has done for the good outweighs what has been done for the bad, and we can only hope that we are judged by the better angels within and without us.
 
         The lesson to me, at least, should be to share the pill and share life, for both would or will run out sooner or later, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.  The curse of humankind is that we can contemplate our future, which must include death.  Since we know that all ends in ashes, maybe we can turn that foresight from a curse to a blessing; maybe we can use it to do what we should and not do what we hate.  At the very least, I think I know myself well enough now to abandon any longing for the hidden curse of the Pill.   ET, get thee behind me and go home, go hooooome. 

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          The hardest lesson we have to learn in life starts in infancy and continues on throughout our lives: that is, that none of us are the center of the world.  Dictators have a hard problem with this, often taking down everyone with them when they fail.  Hitler wanted to burn Germany to the ground; emperors from China to Mexico were buried with their concubines and soldiers, sometimes by the tens of thousands.  They thought they were the centers of the world, and then impending death, the great equalizer, came to destroy their fantasy.  If they must die, then, so must everyone else around them.  I suppose this included their dogs. 
 
          The trouble is that each of us has only one full perspective within himself, which makes it subjectively clear that each IS his own center of the universe.  To make it even more complicated, each of us really is at the center of the universe, which includes all of us, and all at the same time.  How true this is becomes clear when confronting death, as millions did during the great world wars of the last century.
 
          In Joseph Loconte’s sublime book, A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, And a Great War, we are treated to the effect of one of the great wars– WWI – on two of the most influential authors of our time, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, reflected primarily in their best known works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, respectively.  Both were young men during the conflict, Lewis only coming of age for service towards the end of the war.  Both fought on the Western front, which was and still might stand as the most hellish place on earth to have ever existed.  Here, millions of men remained virtually unmoved in stinking trenches for years at a time, surrounded by rotting corpses, excrement, and disease (the greatest modern pandemic, the Spanish Influenza, sprang from these pits of hell).  Both witnessed the maddening futility of dying for one’s country for a yard of land here, or a farm house there, just to be pushed back after massive casualties the following day or week or month.  And both, as Cambridge dons (professors), were surrounded afterwards by the effects of the hideous futility of this conflict.
 
           We know the effects of this war well.  While religion and spirituality had been waning among the upper classes since the publication of Darwin’s and Marx’s startling works in the mid- 19th century, the Great War hammered everyone else with the pain and disillusionment of cultural deconstruction.  God apparently was indifferent to human suffering, so much so that many came to believe that either he didn’t exist or that he simply wasn’t worthy of worship or even respect.  The institutions of government and religion were rightly proven to be fallible at best and complicit in mass murder for profit at worst.  Common morality and behavior were often tossed away along with belief in these institutions.  Darwin and Marx, along with many others, helped with the rest.  For the former, the designs many had seen in nature were now expressed in terms of indifferent randomness, and for the latter, the institutions of order were seen as only points of power that bent the masses to the will of the ruling class.  For those who fought in the trenches or lost loved ones in them, as almost everyone in Europe did, this loss of confidence is more than understandable. 
 
          The mass movement away from institutions and morality of the past is obviously relevant to this day, as mores and beliefs of hundreds or even thousands of years continue to fall.  Oddly, however, this did not happen with the subjects in Loconte’s biography.  And, in contrast to the popular movements of their day, this lack of cynicism began with ancient cultural myths. 
 
          This was due at first to Tolkien, the elder of the two.  Even as a Catholic, he had been fascinated with Northern European myths for years.  By the time of the end of WWI, his research and experiences in the trenches had brought him to one great conclusion: that legitimate myths were not made by men trying to understand God, but by God trying to help men understand Him.  Just as the Old Testament differs from the New, so the Eternal had to speak to people within the confines of their limited understandings.  In the Judeo/Christian myth (I use this respectfully), God had to teach his people the meaning of his overpowering rule through the moral laws given by the prophets, which were intended to carry people beyond their cultural limitations.  For Tolkien, the Judeo/Christian myth was much like many others, with two exceptions: the former brought one to an overwhelmingly positive conclusion, and it was historically real -   that is, the Judeo/Christian myth was fulfilled within the confines of normal rational human thought.  With this realization, doubt and cynicism were bridged, first by Tolkien and then by Lewis.  With this, the two separated themselves from the pack of their peers as well as from the increasing trend in the West of secular pessimism.
 
          But for a deeper look into the thoughts of these two great writers, we must first enter the Ring.
 
          The ring of power: we are seeing that on display even as this is written in Ukraine, where the frustrations of Russia’s Putin have finally boiled over into all-out war.  Never mind that the man is the richest in the world and can have or do anything he wants in his vast nation.  No – the desire for ever-increasing power never ends.  This reflects the temptations of this world, where, if left unchecked, the ego comes to see itself as the center of the world and the arbiter of all things.  So it was that the aristocrats of Europe’s past could throw away millions of lives of their lesser citizens; and so it is that the “lesser” citizens can, then and now, throw away the wisdom of the ancients.  And so it was that the Ring in the trilogy, taken from the great and evil Mordor, came to ruin the poor everyman, Gollum, with its promise of power.  This ring was to come into the possession of Frodo, another noble but humble everyman, whose job it was to destroy the ring in the cauldron of Mount Doom before the Evil One could regain it and shut out all the remaining light of the world. 
 
          In the culmination of the trilogy, Frodo does arrive at Mount Doom and is in the position to cast the ring into the pit – but he cannot do it.  He, too, has succumbed to the power of the ring.  It is only the power-lust of Gollum at the end that saves the world.  He bites off the finger of Frodo that holds the ring, but falls into the cauldron in the process, along with the ring.  Gollum, who was once a Hobbit like Frodo, might then be seen as the dark side of Frodo, who has allowed himself to be corrupted by the things of the Earth.  This part of him, and in all of us, must die, as our bodies die, so that, with divine guidance, we might return from the dark pit, resurrected, to walk into the light.
 
          Such it is that the myth manufactured by Tolkien is a cheat-sheet to the great God-given myth of Christianity.  The ring of power tempts us all, in both big ways and small, as it stands for the driving force of our individual egos.  We might tame this drive if we follow the moral laws set for us by religion and/or society, but in the end, we must finally fail and die – if we rely only on our own will-power.  Ultimate defeat is what we find in the plurality of the world’s myths.  In the J-C myth, however, God’s grace will come to save us if we have willed it to our greatest abilities.  The intervention of Gollum, like the intervention of Judas Iscariot, is an inevitable evil that can and will be worked into the good by divine will.  The failings of Peter, who denied Christ three times out of fear for himself, will be pardoned and made good by Grace, whose ultimate reality is seen in the historical presence and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
 
          So it is that the saving of the world is left to the everyman within us, for each of us is indeed the center of his own salvation.  In Tolkien’s view, every soldier he saw fight and often die on the battle field was his own world and carried within him his own weaknesses and greatness, the latter found in the giving of self for the sake of his comrades-in-arms.  Our failings are due to our self-centeredness, but it is within the self, where we are the center of all things, where salvation is and must be found.  Thus, each of us is the hero of his own myth.  In view of both Tolkien and Lewis, which myth, and which ending we experience is up to us.  We must either have the courage to give our faith to the one who fulfilled and exceeded Man’s greatest myths, or carry the burden of this world alone and fail at the mouth of the cauldron.