See the response essay to "A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" in "comments," placed Dec 9.  For some reason, it was attached to the last essay below it (see below) from Nov 20.  FK

​ 
          We set off again for “Up Nort” in the UP for Thanksgiving break, a time when all the deer had most probably vanished deeply into the forest after the opening of the season the weekend before.  With difficulty, we got ‘Loaded for Bear,’ my son eagerly awaiting his first big-game kill, and me almost, kinda hoping we got nothing.  To my way of thinking, deer hunting is so regulated and the out-of-state licenses so expensive that it is better left to the rich and foolish, but we attached the baggage rack to the Jeep just the same and motored up in the gloom of late November.  Once there, the gloom continued, aided by a constant flurry of Lake Effect snow that drifted slowly but relentlessly onto the six inches already on the ground.  We attended the outhouse, got our gear set for early morning, and I, by tradition, opened the first beer to while away the quiet, lightless hours of the late-season evening out beyond the grid. 
 
          I should like to report that we shot and then tracked a 12-point buck through the darkening forest, got lost for the night after finding it panting and panicked, and then barely made it back at pewter-colored dawn, our adventure set for all time.  That, however, would be a lie - not my first, but one so bad that not even the evening news would have the chutzpa to repeat it.  No.  Rather, we froze our pattooties off for nothing, and then, on the last morning, packed up early to beat the threat of a large storm just begun, threatening to bring down another six inches and the possibility that we would be stuck until God knows when – with the beer supply almost gone.    
 
          My son, however, would not have us return with the back-rack empty.  “Hey Dad, why don’t we cut a Christmas tree on the way out and avoid the supply chain mess?”  “But,” said I, wanting nothing more than to get back to roads that were plowed, “we really have to get out of here.  Anyway, we’d have to search for an hour to find a good one.  Forget about it.”
 
          Of course he did not, and as we crunched and slid down the two-track from the cabin, he pointed to one small, spindly tree by the side of the trail.   “It will only take a minute with the chainsaw,” he said, to which I replied, “and half an hour to wrap and tie it down,” but my voice of reason was quickly lost.  The tree, maybe not so terribly bad after all, would be ours to bring in the birthday of Mankind’s savior king. 
 
          We arrived home well after dark, and all I wanted to do was unload the baggage and check my e-mail, but noooooo - Jeff would have us trim the tree and set it up.  He did do the preliminary decorating, though, and afterwards it didn’t look too bad, at least not as bad as the cedar we had cut off our property the year before in the midst of the Covid crises, when I had to attach additional boughs to the tree with duct tape to give it at least a little character. 
 
          So, OK, we had saved seventy bucks by not shooting a buck and instead taking a tree, and the tree was off our own northern property, so what the heck.  The lights strung from its slender branches shown in the shadows of night, and all seemed at least kind of well.  Until the next morning.
 
          When you buy a tree off the lot, it arrives cold and stiff at the house, smaller than expected, until it has time to warm.  The boughs then lower and, usually, the tree seems to be much fuller.  But not this one.  With this little spruce, what little body it had was completely lost as the boughs drooped to indoor-heating level.  While the tree had not been glorious the night before, the morning surprised me with the sparsest, ugliest tree that I had ever seen in any home that I had lived in, from the age I started to remember things to the present.  
 
          “Holy crap,” I uttered to myself.  My first thought was to take off the lights and ornaments and chuck the thing out the front door, where it would dwindle into total nothingness in a matter of weeks.  But no.  For Jeff, even after he became fully awake, it was not so bad, no, and besides, it had come off our property - and besides too, thought I, it had also become a substitute for your buck, the tiny limbs an acceptable alternative to a massive rack.  I had to laugh at the situation in the dark way that we old people do because of our so many defeats in life, and then said, “Oh well.  It’s gonna be a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree for us this year.” 
 
          “What,” said Jeff, “is a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree?  I saw the cartoon like, twenty years ago, but I don’t remember.”
 
          “What the …? That’s un-American!,” I exclaimed with horror, and then went on to expound – expounding on small things is what do best – on just what a Charlie Brown Christmas tree is.
 
          We remember it, don’t we?  There was to be a Christmas nativity play at the grammar school, back in 1965 when such plays were possible, and Charlie “Blockhead” Brown was picked by bossy Lucy to get the tree, as he could do little else.  Charlie was not stupid, but depressed from a world he saw as hard and unfair.  He always had to side with the underdog, so of course he almost always lost, marking him out from all his peers as The Looser.  And so it was at the Christmas tree lot.  There, amid the normal trees, was one scraggly little one that cried out for attention and care.  Of course Charlie bought it, and of course the kids were appalled that this spindly little tree would be up there on stage with them as one of the centers for their school play. 
 
          Charlie Brown became even more depressed, of course, until the day of the glorious play itself.  Then Linus, the thumb-sucking philosopher in the bunch, proclaimed that maybe the tree wasn’t so bad at all.  Maybe, in fact, Charlie Brown was right, and all it needed was a little love.  So the kids dropped their contempt for Charlie and his tree and set out to make it full and beautiful, which they did as one can only do in make-believe.  Later, the play went on with all the shepherds and wise men and Mary and Jesus, until it came time for Linus to speak, playing what looked to be the smallest and most vulnerable of the shepherds: 
 
“…And the angel said to them, Fear not: for behold, / I bring you good tidings of great joy, /which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, / which is Christ the Lord…/
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, / Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” (From Luke, chap. 2, St James Bible)
 
          
          Thus spoke Dad, with a butchered version of ‘Luke’ as written above, and then the most amazing thing happened.  Instead of a snort or a casual shrug or rebuff from our worldly son, he said, “You know, that’s right.  All it needs is love to bring out its beauty.” And this said with complete sincerity, as if he were discovering a truth that had been hidden within him for years. Could the author of the cartoon and the play, Charles Schultz, wish for anything more?  Could the meaning of Christmas be understood any more clearly?
 
          Of course the tree remains just as ugly as before, but good Lord, could anyone be given a better family legacy through any Christmas tree?  For there, as Linus understood, stands a mere plant in all its poverty and want that speaks for what we need most and all that we could wish for.   
 
         
 
         
 
                    
 
                

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

​ 
          In the lazy country summers of my youth, mid-to-late season was often visited by choruses of cicadas.  By then, we were browned by the sun and foot-hardened by weeks without shoes and felt, without actively thinking about it, at one with nature.  That feeling was echoed and solidified by the cicadas, whose day-long love songs penetrated far deeper than the hot sun, warming something inside that I could not then understand, but craved.  I finally came to grasp the meaning of the mood when the “Acid Rock” era erupted in the mid-1960’s, especially through the epic “Sgt. Pepper’s” album put out by the Beatles.  The album was spacey enough, but it was a small song by George Harrison that really did it, through the use of the sitar.  There I found the magic of the cicadas, and there came to know what it meant: Nirvana, Godhead.  The drone of the instrument excited the same feeling as the hum of the cicadas, which both brought about the deep sense of a united eternity. 
 
          It’s not easy to maintain a mood such as this, but I was struck with two artistic works these last two weeks that were able to do just that.  One was the new Dune movie, whose advertisements promised us would not be the flop that earlier attempts at capturing the ethos of the Dune sci-fi series had been.  They were right, although, just as with the hum of cicadas or the drone of the sitar (or bag pipes), the movie might not be for everyone.   As with the cicadas, some might be annoyed at the slow (monotonous) progress made by the movie, which is to be understood.  But not me.
 
           The mood.  It comes out in the background music, yes, but also in the majesty of the special effects, which can only work in slowness.  We are shown stupefying, huge space craft that hover like disembodied mountains in thin air, and are offered the weirdness of the witches of Macbeth by mysterious women sealed from the world behind veils.  Most importantly, we are shown the vast emptiness of the planet with the sand-like “spice” that is necessary to travel across the intra-galactic empire that lords over all humanity.  Here on this planet we meet the harshness of a desert people and find in them the mysticism that is born from emptiness, reflecting with precision the birthing of Islam.  Here in the vastness and emptiness and space, we find the drone of the cicadas and the awe of creation; here in trackless sameness we find the endless summer of youth played out against eternity. 
 
          But all so emotionally cold.  Dune reflects well the nature of God (Allah) most favored by Muslims: Pure Will.  God has willed all creation into existence, and it is to this will that we must submit.  To let just one step fall out of line is a violation of eternal law, a losing fight of puny humans against the great Almighty who lords over infinity with inscrutable ease.  Nature, God’s reflection, is no more forgiving, for to get lost in the desert – to go off the beaten trail – means certain death.  This is the mood of Dune.
         
          Just the week before seeing “Dune,” I read an unlikely page turner, a biographical anthology entitled Caryll Houselander, Essential Writings, by Wendy Wright.  Born in England 1901, Houselander fashioned her eccentric Catholic Christianity through the two world wars.  She was eccentric not because she challenged the faith, but because she grasped her faith’s essence in ways impossible for most others.  She had no room for superficial piety or homely sentimentality, but instead went straight to the heart of the Christian definition of God: Love.  Not the love of a boy and his dog, although that is no tiny thing, but rather the love that we so often hear about but cannot grasp because of the very heavy stick of divine punishment that lies besides it.  Would any of us, for instance, send an errant child to eternal torture?  If not, what could possibly be the nature of this love that supposedly defines this god?
 
          This Houselander answers, not so much in the logic of her writings, but in the mood they convey.  An artist and woodcarver by trade, she had learned to carve out the essential feeling in words as well as wood.  Through her, the chorus of the cicadas brings not only eternal mystery, but a closeness, an intimacy with both God and his creation. 
 
          Since she plays no music, nor has any special effects to show, I must try to convey the crystalline sense of God’s love (through Christ) the she gives us with her words in the limited format of this essay:
 
          “All our life is only a journey, a series of attachments and detachments.  I keep thinking of W.B. Yeasts’ perfect lines, ‘Our souls are love and a continual farewell.’/ What is said of the material journey is also applicable to the journey of the spirit.”
         
          “But it was not with our suffering that Christ fell in love; it was with us.  He identified himself with our suffering because he identified himself with us, and he came not only to lead his own historical life on earth, but to live the life of every man who would receive him into his soul, and to be the way back to joy for every individual.  He took our humanity in order to give us his, and since guilty man must… ‘make’ his soul through expiation, through personal atonement, Christ chose to atone for mankind as each man must do for himself: through suffering…”
 
          “Christ did not become man, only to lead his short life on earth…, but to live each of our lives.  He did not choose his Passion, only to suffer it in his own human nature…, but in order to suffer it in the suffering of each one of his members, through all ages, until the end of time.”
 
          “He took our humanity, just as it is, with all its wretchedness and ugliness, and gave it back to us just as his humanity is, transfigured by the beauty of his living, filled full of his joy.  He came back from the long journey through death, to give us his Risen life to be our life, so that no matter what suffering we meet, we can meet it with the whole power of the love that has overcome the world.”
 
          I do not know if the quotes above are enough to give the reader the sense of divine love that the biographer has conveyed through Houselander’s words, but I can say that in reading the book, I was as physically affected as I had been with the buzzing of the cicadas or the panorama of endless dunes spread out before me.  What love she has seen!  It is not the dripping sentimentality with which we are so familiar, but the selfless, more perfect form of love that parents have for their children.  Here we are led to understand that the stick of eternal damnation is what God wants least for us.  Rather, we are as lost in this (material) world as the drug addict is lost in his addiction, and can only come back to a healthy balance through our own will, a will that is fortified for the task once the path back has been freely chosen.  As with the recovering addict, we must choose the path ourselves, but once done are encouraged and helped in our effort the whole way with the achingly perfect love of God the Savior. 
 
          So both Will and Love overwhelm, as they must to be understood, for each is necessary for the emergence of our hidden greatness.  Neither can be understood in logic alone, as any honest theologian must attest.  And while faith needs no proof, the crucial sense of the divine – of what has existed in all humanity for all time – depends on mood.  The great sculptures and artists and musicians of the European Renaissance(s) were filled with this saving light - and so, too, are some artists today, even in Hollywood, and even in 20th century Britain. 
 
          Mood, though - however true it feels - is often not Truth, as anyone filled with vengeance or hatred will show us.  God could be a brutal dictator without Love, and an ineffective eunuch without Will.  Only the merger of these moods will show us the way.  Combined, they are Nature and Humanity spread out across the universe, the drone of the cicadas and the sacrifice of Christ which together make the “spice” that leads us through and past the stars.  They are within us, waiting to be experienced through the right movie, the right sound or picture, the right words, and a will open to loving grace.  For those with cash, the experience is worth the price of admission.  For those without, the price has already been paid.          
 
         
 
     
         

​ 
          I had a professor of cultural anthropology at U Michigan who was considered the bad boy of the field, ripe with revolutionary rhetoric and writings.  He would now be considered mainstream, but at that time, the department had actual social scientists who saw him for what he was: an enormous ego inflated by moderate talent and a ripe – and reciprocated – lust for women.  The phrase I remember him most for was “epistemic murk,” which he used to describe people or cultures with limited or negligible boundaries to their realities. “I love chaos,” his third wife once told me just before they headed off to the New School in New York, where I heard he had a literal harem of female admirers.  I do hope she continued to love chaos, but somehow I doubt it.
 
          Chaos: every rebel artist sees himself as the avatar of chaos, and for good reason.  In chaos, new horizons are discovered which are lived as separate realities, or even new dimensions.  For reasons both known and unknown, our society lives for the new, as opposed to traditional societies that cling to the perfection of the old, and the author of novelty is often treated to great wealth or even popular deification, if only for that person’s fifteen minutes.  I have had a personal fling with it myself, although I have never had the talent to be an artist.  For me, getting involved with the novel ideas created in the epistemic murk of hallucinogenic drugs and cultural deconstruction was (supposed to be) enough to propel me to sub-genius status, hopefully genius enough to get a small harem of hot co-eds myself.
 
          Alas, we know the end to that story.  But it is true – in chaos we CAN find new realities, powerful enough to appear as new dimensions.  Thing is, only the greatest of megalomaniacal egos can handle such chaos.  As inflated as my ego was, it was brought to the altar of the weird and found wanting.  I found it scary and nightmarish in that distorted church, and - sniff – I wanted to go home.  After a time, I did. 
 
          Years and decades later, I found myself cruising the less frightening frontier of Netflix, that area that exists after all the good stuff has been watched, and there I was confronted with someone who’s ego was not only big enough for that other dimension, but owned it as much as any human in this world could. 
 
          The documentary is called “Struggle – The Life and Lost Art of Szukalaski,” directed by Leonardo DiCaprio and his father, about the Polish/American artist and sculptor, Stanislaw Szukalaski.  His sculptures were done with great skill, but were also grotesque in ways oddly familiar to me.  After watching the documentary for a while, I found out why: once in America, Stanislaw discovered the pre-Columbian art of Mesoamerica, including the Mayan and Inca’s, art that he considered “pure” and free of degenerate Western influences.  He had been a recognized artist without that presence, but it was this influence that truly made him known to me.  In was in this alien world where he found ripe material for his genius and a gift for stunning novelty.  And it was to this same world that I had once traveled and had been repelled, and was now reminded with shuddering certainty that I could go to again.
 
              American Indians: as with many in our country, I had long been drawn to them, but primarily to the woodland and prairie cultures within our current national boundaries.  But I had also always had a fascination with Mexican culture, and by college had been drawn into studies of Spanish, of Latin America, and of pre-Columbian art.  The latter I found both compelling and disturbing, more so because it was clear what a lot of that art was meant to represent:  death, suffering, blood sacrifice, and inevitable, crushing doom.  Towards the end of these undergraduate studies, I came to know a graduate student of mycology who was paying the bills by growing and selling psilocybin mushrooms, which were called the “food of the gods” by the priests of several Mesoamerican cultures (in fact, this “food” was rediscovered by the West in Oaxaca in the 1950’s, where its use had continued secretly in the shadow of Spanish cultural dominance).  I visited his “farm” more than a few times, and it was in the trips lent by his crop where I had come to better understand the greatness and ferocity represented by this art. 
 
          Chaos cannot exist by itself, but only by a disturbance of a formerly firm reality.  The Mesoamerican reality was not chaos, but was another form of understanding so alien to the West at the time of the Conquest that is seemed diabolical – which in many ways it was – and to the Western mind of today appears to be chaotic.  But that is only so because its premises cannot fit within our shared cultural tapestry. 
 
          Broken down to the simplest terms, the universe of the Mesoamerican empires was dominated by the reptilian mindset, where the crudest of human desires were matched with the steaming and consumptive reality of the tropics.  In that world, one lizard eats another, which reproduces with another, whose offspring eat another, and so on and on forever until, as this form of logic holds, the universal energy is eaten by itself – the classic dragon or snake eating its own tail.  In this world, then, life must be given to the source of life, the sun, or all life will die out.  There is no pity or respite here, just as a snake will not have pity on its prey, or on its offspring.  Here, nature is automatic and final, as loving as a falling bolder and just as inevitable. 
 
          This world also must come to an end, as no amount of human sacrifice of life can match the overall loss of life force. The energy of the living inevitably must peter out, but there is always the eternal hold beneath all reality that defies logic and creates life out of nothing.  From this, another age is born.
 
          On the other hand, the Christian world of the West is based on mammalian logic.  Here, we might find warm and fuzzy consolation, as self-sacrifice and peaceful cooperation is emphasized.  Here, the gods – represented in one overarching God – sacrifices himself so that humans will not die out, but will live forever.  This world, too, will end, but not because of entropy; rather, the reptilian forces - the snakes in the garden – must instead be vanquished first before a new and permanent kingdom of love is established.
 
          It is telling that Stanislaw’s work was heavily influenced by Nazi philosophy, combining the concept of the Man-God (the Nietzschian superman) with extreme nationalism.  This is the abode of the reptile, where force and existentialism (that is, living only for today) prevail.  Ideally, this was the opposite of Marxism, where people were destined to become One, a proletariat of equals, each giving and receiving selflessly to and from one another.  However, the later was a false premise, based on an abstraction that was blind to the full reality of what it is to be human.  Because the ideal was unachievable, the Marxists, too, were (are) compelled to use force as relentlessly as the fascists, turning the promised warm fur of collective comfort into the far colder and harder scales of a totalitarian state.   
 
          Which leads us to the confusion of today.  Szukalaski was well aware of the American paradox in the post-war years, where he saw US culture being shamelessly manipulated by market forces, giving us a form of headless (mindless) materialism.  This did not square with the noble image of a free and democratic society.  In time, the marketing firms learned to play with this unease, co-opting the mammalian cultural structure to extend goods to everyone in a superficial bow to humanism, while increasingly pushing forward an agenda where all are indistinguishable, either by race, nationality, or gender.  There is little that is warm or fuzzy about this.  Rather, raw power was unleashed to extinguish our differences, to make us into working and consuming widgets in a one-world oligarchy, in what is now called by some the “Great Reset” or the new “One World Order.”  This has brought our collective anxiety to unbearable levels. 
 
         The confusion is between the message and the reality of this new system.  Unrelenting force – the reptilian mindset – is being used to make us into good little mammal-sheep, whether we want to be or not.  In pushing back at this force, we are told that we are fascists or racists, ‘et al’ – that is, reptiles.  At the same time, we are told that the reptiles running the show are only good shepherds, although it is very clear that self-interest rules above all. Thus we have entered a vast, world-wide era of cognitive and cultural chaos.
 
          And so, we must welcome in this new era of chaos so beloved by artistic genius.   As we are neither reptiles nor sheep, but creatures of reason who long to pull opposing forces together into a cohesive whole, this era will not last long.  Something new will come, and be upon us relatively soon.  The new era on the horizon will probably tip towards either the mammalian or the reptilian templates, but not necessarily.  In chaos, as my professor said, is epistemic murk, and out of this cognitive muck, anything can arise, utopian or dystopian, or something altogether, something well beyond our cultural contexts.  In this time of increasing confusion, then, we must ask for prayer, for it is there in the fields of chaos and creativity where the gods, or God, walks.  Out of this infinite garden, anything is possible.  So let us pray, especially so that the god who answers us is the Good Shephard and not the hungry snake.  
 
          
 
 
 
         

Today, an essay, "No Home No More" under "Essays" in the website.  FK

​ 
          There were so many jokes about this motto in my youth that I can barely write it with a straight face, but the Boy Scouts still had it right with this one: Be Prepared.  You just never know.
 
          Take yesterday, for instance.  I had slept later than usual, but still followed the same routine: take the dog outside and down the driveway, greet the morning with a long look across the field, now bronzed with mature corn, then trudge back for the necessary caffeine jolt.  I like the routine and have never called for more excitement in it, except maybe for a wish for an apparition of Mary over the western horizon, or, more tenuously, for a UFO sighting.  But sometimes we get more than we ask for.  Be prepared.  This time, I heard the sharp chirp of rubber on road, a thump of some sort, then saw a beater 90’s subcompact limp past our drive with the front right side bashed in.  I consciously tried to memorize more details, as it might have been involved with something illegal pertaining to my neighbor’s property up the road, and then I continued with the routine gaze and walk back for caffeine. 
 
          Since I had woken late, however, I had taken the dog out before the oh-so-necessary brushing of teeth.  That took the place of the first cup of tea back in the house, but half- way through, with my mouth full of suds, the phone rang.  It was said neighbor up the hill.  I knew it had to do with the red beater, so I hastily and grumpily spit the soap out into the kitchen sink by the phone and answered, to hear his voice immediately.  “Fred, someone just hit a deer next to my driveway.  Its back end is busted but it’s still alive.  Would you come over and help me drag it off the road?”
 
          Well, no.  You don’t simply drag live deer anywhere if you want to remain intact.  They have sharp front hooves that can defend against coyotes, and killer back legs that can spring a 100 pound deer over a seven foot fence.  And so I told him.  To which he replied, “Well, then can you kill it?” 
 
            Lovely.  I did not have trustworthy ammo for the old military Mauser, did not have the rifled shotgun barrel even cleaned, let alone affixed to the 12 gauge, and the other armaments about the house were too small to quickly kill a deer.  I said that as well, but in the mix of his plea and my foggy morning mind, I found myself five minutes later standing before a pathetic deer that had crawled off to the side of the road by the neighbor’s mailbox.  I told him not to touch it until it – she – was good and dead.  He then said that he would get another neighbor’s gun for me to use to kill it.  I will not go into why he chose me for the job and not the neighbor with the proper gun, or why he wouldn’t do it himself, but in another seven minutes I found myself holding an old, well-oiled twelve gauge in one hand and slipping a deer slug into the chamber with the other.  The deer looked at me with the unexpected trust that my dog has before I pulled the trigger.  Because I could not get properly at the heart with the first shot, I had to use another round.  This time, I easily found the heart.  The force of the close-range slug made the deer carcass nearly leap hole-body from the ground, and then it lay still, unquestionably dead.  We dragged it over to the corn field on the other side of the road, and that was that, at least for me. 
 
        But it wasn’t, as it never is with deer.  That morning we had an appointment to bring my wife’s car to the mechanic, which explains the uncomfortable rush earlier on.  Arriving barely on time, I told the garage owner about the deer episode (for interest and perhaps to explain my disheveled appearance), and he told me that I had violated the law.  I had, technically, hunted a deer and could get a 500 dollar fine and a suspension of any hunting licenses over the next three years.  “You’re supposed to call the police to shoot it” he said with the frank certainty of one who ‘Knows the Law.’  Oh for God’s sake.  No police had been around, however, and would never be, as shots fired in our rural area are taken for granted, regardless of the season.  Still, I had shot a deer and it made a difference.
 
          I am not talking about legal issues here.  Rather, a deer is a large mammal that shares traits with us along with its size.  It had, after all, looked at me with those trusting, silently suffering eyes.  I had not flinched in killing it, as I had killed many animals for food while doing fieldwork in the Amazon, and as this had been an essential mercy killing.  That was what bothered me, though: I had not flinched whatsoever in shooting the deer.  I had killed a fellow hairy creature, and felt little more than annoyance that this might make me late for an appointment.  This made me think about the other killings we all do, from swatting flies to slapping mosquitoes to mindlessly stepping on ants.  And this made me think about the importance of life.
 
          It was reported that in later life, Mahatma Gandhi had taken up full ahimsa, which is a word for total pacifism that does not allow even the killing of insects.  For the Parsees, this ban on killing is extended to a ban on male masturbation, which, they say, wantonly kills sperm cells by, literally, human hands.  I had long laughed at the overall idea of ahimsa until just a week ago – a week before the deer killing, by coincidence.  At that time the housefly season had led to an infestation in the house, which led me to swatting them with joyful exuberance until it struck me that each fly is a miracle, a clod of matter made animate and at least genetically willful.  I imagined how excited the world would be to find one single fly on the surface or underground or anywhere living on Mars.  That simple truth led me to understand how significant life of any kind might really be. 
 
          Later that week I was presented with a very large caveat to that, however, when the local Catholic radio station aired a discussion about the wonders of St Joseph of Cupertino.  He is known as the Flying Monk, as he would consistently float in the air while saying his prayers.  This was during the 16th century, when the Catholic Church had been disrupted by the Protestant Reformation, and had struck back with the implementation of the infamous (Spanish) Inquisition.  At that time, the flight of an individual was seen as a sign of witchcraft and as such was NOT a very beneficial miracle to exhibit.  As the Church would make no exceptions, they subjected poor monk Joseph to its rigorous tests, but had found him so profoundly stupid that they could imagine no malice or guile in him.  He, alas, floated when speaking to God, which he did as simply as a child.  Afterwards, his fellow brothers tried to hold him down, as his flight caused people to come and gawk and generally disrupt, but when they attempted to do so, they, too, floated about the Cathedral or wherever they were at.  All this has been written down, as they were want to do then, including the fact that the brothers or anyone else in a certain vicinity were not dragged upward with Joseph, but rather were lifted as if on an invisible platform.  It was also noted with alarm that Joseph would change shapes at times, elongating to ten or twelve or more feet.  There were other miracles that happened around him, but I could not hear over the static of the radio. 
 
          I will buy the critically objective book about this by Michael Grosso, titled, I think, “The Man Who Could Fly,” but for now, something becomes startlingly apparent when considering the abilities of this particular St Joseph.  The facts are these: he regularly upended the accepted laws of physics, and of this there really is no doubt; and two, he did not do any of this by conjuring or “work,” as he was considered too stupid to be punished even by the Inquisition.  By the joining of these two traits, I am led to believe that he existed primarily in another world, with only a shell of his being present in this one.  He was probably not stupid in an existential sense, but only in this world in which he was essentially an alien.  He was much like a person today who is caught in a dream which makes little sense, which often presents the dreamer and other actors defying the normal laws of time and physics, and in which the dreamer can have little effect no matter what he tries to do.    
 
          Which has further led me to make another conclusion: that the marvel of life might not add up to much at all.  For St Joseph, life seems to have been little more than a passing dream.  The only difference between us and him might be that we are somewhat more consciously invested in this particular “dream” than he was or could be.
 
          So what of this dichotomy?  Is life just a dream that we can brush off with the coolness of a swat of a fly?  Or is it something proved more real by the pathos in the eyes of a wounded deer, or the sorrow in the loss of a parent or a friend or a child?  
 
          If we could use any question to prove the paradox of life, it would be this.  The wise have pondered this question forever, arriving either at the conclusion of the Existentialists – that life it essentially a vapor, as St James put it – or a test – as St James went on to claim.  Said St Paul, “We do not fix our gaze on what is seen but on what is unseen.  What is seen is transitory; what is unseen lasts forever.”(2 Cor, 4:18) In simple karmic terms, life might be but a dream, but if we mess with one of these dreams, we might be fall into another which is infinitely worse.  The life of St Cupertino strongly hints that this life is not all there is to our existence.  Who would not believe that he lived with at least one foot in another world? 
 
         His experience, however, does not tell us definitively if our actions here affect our re-location, or simultaneous existence, in that other world or world beyond this life.  Compassion towards the natural world, in general, does not guarantee a positive reaction: try helping a wounded bear cub with its mother nearby, or gently carrying a rattlesnake across the road.  In both cases, one’s compassion will probably not be reciprocated.  Still - compassion towards our fellow man more often than not leads to mutual affection.   By discovering this hidden truth behind natural law, we might better understand what St Paul tells us: that we must loosen our focus on the apparent to gain access to what is beyond.  In freeing us from the competitive laws of survival here, then, we are left free to fly elsewhere.
 
          So we come back to the pathos in the eyes of the dying deer.  I now see that it was not the death or the killing that was so important, but what was generated by the interaction.  My focus should have been on the act of compassion rather than on my schedule.  It very well might be that our focus during such instances in our lives is what determines whether we float from this world into something grander, or remain standing on the ground, annoyed by the flight of others.       
 
           [Note: this will probably be the last essay until the 20th or so of October.  Fall is the busy time]
 
         
 
  
 
       

​ 
          As I stiffly got out of the Jeep after the long drive back from up north, my wife came to help unload a few things and give me the news of the last four days – personal news, that is, not the type that I often seek that divides people into political factions.  As someone with a big lawn and large garden, the most important news always concerns rainfall: this time, about a quarter of an inch, mixed with hail, but with no noticeable damage.  Good.  But there always seems to be one piece of news after a trip that is a shocker.  One time, I came back to find that a man had killed his sister and brother-in-law at their deceased parent’s house and then burned the house to the ground less than two miles away from us.  A policeman followed up almost immediately, and the killer, hidden behind the flames, had taken a few shots at the cop and then disappeared into the surrounding cornfields.  That was two, or maybe three years ago, and he has not been found since. 
 
          This time was no different, although the surprising part of the news did not involve violence.  Said the wife, “Do you know Michael ------?  He’s been calling you.  He said you knew him back at U Michigan.” 
 
          Yes, I remembered him from 35 years ago.  He had lived in the same Co-ops as I had, and as had Mark ------, a man whom I had known who had gone berserk years later and driven a rental limousine into an 18 wheeler, both he and the limo going up in flames.  I hoped that this call would not hand me the same sort of news.
 
          It didn’t, but when I returned the call I found that Mike had been through some hard times concerning women.  He had divorced twice and married thrice, each time with a woman who eventually developed schizophrenia.  I had known the first at the Co-ops, and did not then consider her any more unusual than the rest of us at that place, a housing complex that definitely attracted its fair share of “unique” people.  After marriage and a child she had run off with Mike’s best friend.  In time, she simply had run off, period, to live out of homeless shelters, joining the army of ghost people who haunt our cities by the thousands. 
 
          The second wife did not last too long, but the third is still with him when she is not in the sanitarium.  They love each other, he told me, but the disease is an awful one, often leaving Mike alone to provide for the family and care for their tween special-needs child.
 
          After pondering these facts, I hesitated, and then had to ask: Why do you think that you attracted so many women with a similar illness?  To which he replied penitently, “Karma.”
 
          Americans and people in Western-culture nations in general have come to understand this word in a certain way: that personal misfortune is due to bad or selfish things that we did in a past life.  We are not always certain that we have had past lives, however, but we are certain that we deserve the misfortune.  It is a term from India that coincides with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, but we have clad it on to our own historical tradition of sin, and the need to be punished for our misdeeds.  In the former days of Christendom, that meant penance in this life and a form of purgation in the afterlife.  Nowadays, punishment for so many simply means irredeemable fate and doom.
 
          This is a shame, although not a punishable one.  Certainly, we often have to pay for our sins in this life – getting caught in adultery, for instance, can end up making us pay a LOT – and, for all I know, we do have past lives that must be rectified.  The latter is not a Christian belief in general, but more importantly, traditional Christianity does not believe in irredeemable karma concerning misfortune in this life.  Instead, a Christian is told to embrace the “suck” as they say in the Army; that is, to look upon misfortune, even that which repeats itself and seems to make no sense, as an opportunity. 
 
       “Follow me and take up my cross,” Jesus exhorted his followers, by which he meant, redemption is often only found through suffering that is offered to God.  This is one of the hardest concepts to believe in, in Christianity, although some parts of it are easier than others.  For instance, if one continues to marry women with considerable mental problems, this might be one’s opportunity to suffer through helping these women and the children who are engendered.  Another part, the biggest part, is a lot tougher and is sort of a karmic boomerang.  In this, we are told to believe that suffering comes not from our personal actions, but from our collective actions – or what we might call the collective unconscious – started, mythically, by Adam and Eve.  To redeem us from this collective sin – our collective karma – Christ came to physically suffer for us; and to redeem ourselves in our own personal way, we are told to suffer for humanity as Christ did.  Thus, if we somehow were to have no suffering, we could not join Christ in saving humanity.  On the other hand, if we have abundant suffering, we have abundant opportunities to save ourselves, often by offering ourselves up in saving others. 
 
          Suffering actually does have something to do with real karma.  According to the Buddha, the only way to relieve ourselves of karmic burden is to deny all attachment to everything.  This, we are told directly, will take away all our suffering, as suffering is caused by attachment.  From both a Christian and Buddhist perspective, the material world is either nothing or, with Christians, “meh” compared with heavenly glory.  It is this assessment of our reality that allows us to either remove all attachment to it, or offer ourselves up in suffering and service.  In both cases, we are rejecting the primacy of the things and pleasures of this world; and it is only in this rejection that we can free ourselves from the pull of gravity and fly at last and for all eternity with the angels. 
 
          So, Mike, the many sufferings that you have somehow been chosen to endure might be obstacles to your happiness now, but are also major opportunities for you to help achieve a far greater happiness later.  Not that I would want them or any other suffering, mind you, but no one can live a full life in this world without eventual suffering.  It might be schadenfreude, but it is still true: the richest and most privileged among us often suffer the deepest forms of suffering, from the Kennedy-type tragedies to the dark sorrow of wealthy families broken apart by greed and resentment. 
 
          Our sufferings, then, must be seen not only as generic karmic consequences of being human, but also as tests offered that, when passed, allow us to further our spiritual careers.  Otherwise they will simply be seen as a punishments - in which case, they might make us sadder or wiser, but not necessarily better.  But we have been shown the better way: for who can argue with the one master who told us that attachments make us miserable, and with the other, that the giving of ourselves to others and to God above and beyond personal pleasure and profit brings us greater love, which brings us closer to God, who is the very definition of love?  In the former we see the negative and in the latter, the positive induced by suffering, but in both there is meaning beyond brut suffering - beyond brut karma. 
 
          Good luck to us all then, and when that fails, may we seize the opportunities, the ones no one wants, that bring us the greatest fortune of all.     
 
 
 
   

​ 
          We raised horses when I was a kid, Appaloosas who preferred the outdoors and went semi-wild every winter, their coats as thick and layered as a Russian Cossack’s.  The bulk of my family’s property was called The Cedars because the second-growth Eastern red cedar had taken over what was once rough pasture land, and on this property towards the bottom were old apple trees once tended by crusty Yankee farmers.  In the fall, the apples would drop and these wild Indian ponies would gobble them down until their multiple-stomach digestive systems fermented the apples.  We would watch in amusement every year as the horses foamed at the mouth, staggered around like human drunks, then plopped down in comfortable dust wallows that they had formed over the years.  I have no idea if they had hangovers, but like many a human, they did not seem to learn from them if they did.  It became something of an annual rite, enjoyed, I presume, by all.
 
          It was probably a terrible thing for the horses.  I don’t know, and, what the heck, those days are long-gone now, so long-gone that I had not thought of those ponies and their apples for ages until I noticed a young tom turkey staggering about in our over-grown garden just last morning.  The weather of late has been humid, and the shortened days are now causing the nights to cool considerably, bringing a light mist to the garden at dawn that made this stumbling tom seem like an emerging zombie turkey, lurching in the gloaming for a taste of unpicked corn or, who knows?, some flesh from living turkeys.  Turkeys being turkeys, it could be, even though the flock to which it belonged was nearby, a large group of sixteen parading around the edge of the road.  No running in terror for them; and, coincidentally, no running to save their former comrade, either. 
 
          My first thought was that the turkey, like the horses, was drunk on too many garden produce.  But no: many feathers were broken and it seemed he always lurched to one side, indicating a definite wound or break in a leg.  My wheels began to slowly turn: by the road + hurt turkey must = car.  So it was hurt and dying, falling among the over-abundant tomato plants as the dog took a definite and not very neutral interest.  I called the dog off first before thinking that perhaps the dog would be doing it a favor by ending its life quickly.  Still, I restrained her.  I felt sorry for a turkey who had been helping to wreck the garden and who I would have gladly shot and eaten a month or two later, in-season of course.  Meanwhile, the flock continued on its way, its brother or uncle or cousin left to the tender mercies of humans or dogs or of nature in general. 
 
          So as I stood barefoot in the cool, wet morning grass, the wheels began to turn more quickly.  How is it that I could feel sorry for a turkey?  And how is it that its nearby flock couldn’t, literally, give a flying flatulence about their very kith and kin? 
 
          It came to me that the foundational questions to ask are: does our empathy make us stand out alone in nature?; and: how did we among all creatures get it? 
 
          Certainly, before we answer these questions, we must hang our heads in shame, all of us, regardless of race, creed, etc.  As if I needed more proof of the evil of our species, I am just finishing a new non-fiction, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, by Matthew Frank, about the history and ongoing horrors along the West South African diamond coast, where DeBeers Enterprises continues to corner the market on the world’s diamond supplies, keeping a fairly abundant commodity outrageously expensive.  The company itself follows the law for the most part, which is still, even in post-Apartheid South Africa, ridiculously loose concerning their near-totalitarian powers over the workforce on this otherwise deserted coast.  They employ child labor, as children are the preferred size for those being lowering hundreds of feet into the ground into tiny drill holes.  They get lung disease before puberty, and die at the average age of 37.  Everyone is searched just about everywhere, small tortures are given to those trying to smuggle, and it is said that many simply disappear forever in the everlasting sands of the vast Namibian desert. 
 
          Worse, though, are the illegal operators from many nations, from China to the US to India, who use slave labor, particularly children, for hellish mining operations that often kill them in months or a few hideous years.  All for a hard and shiny rock that supposedly says, as the commercials tell us, “I love you forever.” Could Satan be more fiendishly perverse?  
 
          And yet…what of our local turkeys?  They are still roaming the yard and garden, oblivious to their fallen comrade who is now dead and quickly rotting in the adjacent field.  Peering out the window, I can see that our dog is doing her best to dislodge the feathers now that the corpse is getting soft.  I can clearly see that she has already gotten the head.  I must stop her soon, before she starts on the more dangerous bones.  To do this, I must lift the rotting corpse up into the crotch of a tree and hope that the raccoons take care of it before knocking it to the ground again.  We’ve been here before. 
 
          At this point, I no longer feel sorry for the turkey, but for myself.  If this were a human corpse, this attitude would be seen by most as a sign of depravity or of moral tragedy forced by brutal circumstances.  That, along with our shock and disgust with the treatment of diamond miners, among many other things, is what we might see as our salvation. 
 
          And it is.  Still, we might wonder how we got compassion and how we maintain it.  The new “head” chaplain at Harvard is known as an atheist, someone who is part of the “Good without God” movement.  This is not unusual for our elite groups these days, this pairing of non-sequiturs with moral self-righteousness, but is the philosophy correct?  Certainly, we can be a good person without believing in a god or gods, but can we be a good people for several generations?  Without a North Star, where might the moral compass point?  Consider: if we reverted to nature, we would become overridingly selfish and unconcerned about the well-being of anyone other than ourselves and our dependent children.  We would also most likely become much worse with time: unlike the turkey and other beings of nature, our ability for abstract thinking enables us to vault above the casual cruelties and momentary greed of nature- in- the- raw.  Isn’t that how it happens in real life?  Isn’t every society constantly pulled towards the elevation of those in power at the expense of the rest?  Without a transcendent good, then, wouldn’t morality be used to drag any society toward the tyranny of one small group over all others?  
 
          In fact, Karl Marx had it right when he saw religion as the “opiate of the masses,” as it was often construed and abused by the ruling classes.  However, he ultimately had it wrong, for even as religion was being used, it was still curtailing the worst impulses of the greater society.  In the Christendom of the West, it was not religion that was abusing people, but rather the distortion of religion.  Even so, against every desire in a tyrant’s twisted psyche, he and everyone else were always eventually called to bow before the greater moral principles of love, charity and forgiveness, or be despised and, often enough, eventually deposed.  So it was, and is, that the moral compass provided by religion (if it has not become too corrupted) ultimately holds against the selfish compulsion of nature.
         
          The other question, however, has not been answered: where did the universal impulse towards spiritual authority come from in the first place? 
 
          We might say that it is God or the gods or a genetic predisposition for social order, but I think the answer can be distilled into a more universally accepted word: beauty.  A dying thing is wrong, is off, is distorted, is ugly, and we want to make it right again.  Right is what beauty is;  a diamond is beautiful but ugly when mined and treated with greed.   We want to set that moral failing right again, so that the shine of the gem might be made beautiful again; a beaten and wounded Samaritan is wrong, is malformed and malfunctioning.  We want to set him right again.  Even drunk horses are wrong, and still I worry, just a little, that we did not do the right thing. Things and beings that look and work the way they are supposed are what make beauty and happiness.  We rejoice in our world when things work well and all is as it should be, frozen in time and space in perfection. 
 
          We have a sense of perfection, then, that thrills us as beauty.  We were given this, of course.  It is a gift, not a side-order of social evolution.  We must be shepherded towards this set again and again or else become lost in nature as it is moves us through time, but we know what is ultimately the most beautiful and in that, the most perfect and the most good.  That is where we find God; or, in other words, that is where we find the Good.  It is inside us, as the atheist minister thinks, but it cannot exist without a separate creator, and it cannot continue without guidance through the collective efforts of Man as directed by this creator. 
 
           Which makes me wonder: did our Harvard minister ever wonder why he might feel sorry for a dying turkey?  Who, if not this transcendent good, put that in him?  Was it a sense of goodness passed on from his ancestors that somehow appeared out of nowhere?  Or was it, rather, the spirit of too much fermented fruit that made him fall into the sand and, blinking into the dust, think that we who are filled so often with froth and foam determine all things bright and beautiful?   
 
 
 

​ 
          It has been a long, hot and tangled summer, as if all the extraordinary mess of our recent history has shot us out of a canon across the land.  Camping spaces?  Maybe a “primitive” site without electricity, if you are lucky.  Lone walks among the great sights in our parks?  Give me a break - you might have to stand in line.  We are, it seems, frantic in our wish to get back to normal, to enjoy summer in America as we imagine we always have.  But behind it all, we know that something big lurks.  There is something in motion that prowls amongst us that is unknown, dark and scary.  We have our theories, from small to grand, but where is truth?  In what or in whom of our contemporary news bloggers and media personalities can we trust?  We are tied metaphorically in a knot in which we cannot find the beginning or the end.
 
          From classical times, we hear of the story of the Gordian knot that signified the contradictions and unknowns of life, a knot that no one could untie until victorious Alexander the Great came along, severing the knot with one swift slash of his sword.  There you go, he told the world, forget about your conundrums.  Success speaks for itself, and success is found in dynamic action.  He was there to deliver us from our uncertainties.  Although he was a simpler man, Nietzsche and Hitler could have said the same things with even darker implications.  The knot, we find, cannot be untied with force.  Hitler’s actions led to greater and greater problems, ones that have entangled our collective lives ever more tightly with each passing year, with or without force.  It is clear we need some genius who can solve our problems, for we are obviously incapable.  Don’t be surprised, for instance, to look at empty shelves again in the toilet paper section of our supermarkets; don’t be surprise, I will add, to find many other shelves empty as well.
 
          So it was recently that I was trying to enjoy a normal few hours reading a commercial action novel, called, I think, Sons of Valor.  It was an honest book about SEAL action in Afghanistan (another new knot to figure out) that promised nothing but the action I expected and craved, but there was an unexpected “twist” to be found in the female lead character as she pondered her situation in the intel section of her SEAL unit.  She was a Brainiac, and kept a collection of what she called Celtic knots by her desk, reminding her of the complexities of human actions and life itself.  The knots had no obvious beginnings or ends, yet coiled themselves about in intricate designs that simply begged the questions – where did they end, and where did they begin? While the book itself did not go into the spiritual aspects of this, it led me, spoiler of fun and simplicity, to do so.  Weren’t the knots about human life in particular and Being in general?  Of course they were.  And, while our heroine focused on solving parts of them from the greatness of her brain, it became clear to me that these knots were, like sacred spirals and mazes and mandalas, meant to bring one out of the intellect and into the realm of inspiration, which means literally “informed by spirit.”  Simply, they were meant to take us to the spiritual realm where impossibilities and incongruities were solved by traversing a different path in a higher realm. 
 
          Then something funny happened.  As I was sitting around doing nothing, I was taken to notice a design on a piece of furniture.  In an instant I could see angels living in the design, and was simultaneously given the understanding that THIS is what the Celtic knots and so much more were really about.  The angels were living ideas who were represented materially in the design.  They were not pressed or frozen into it like a bug in amber, but were active in sustaining the idea behind the design.  They were, in a phrase, all about the meaning behind the design.  Without them, the design and by extension, the furniture, could not exist.  Nor could the author of the furniture, who was probably not aware of what his design was, but was inspired subtly to craft it none-the-less.
 
          We can extend this idea infinitely into the material universe, but one of my next thoughts was: yes!  That is what UFO’s are!  Living thoughts projected into the material realm, to be seen by a few or many or maybe just one of us who has been suddenly inspired.  How many people could have seen the angels in the design as I did at that time?  And who the heck would I mention it to when it did happen without them thinking me crazy?  Maybe the cat? 
 
          It goes further in my own experience.  I have written before of the scroll of Isaiah in the Jerusalem Museum of the Scrolls.  To summarize, an elderly woman and I were looking at the unfurled scroll when she nudged me and said, “Do you see the faces in the script?”  I said that I did not, and then suddenly, I could: dozens or more faces in the script that were larger than they could possibly be within the small letters, but were there regardless.  These, I believe I now understand, were the living presences behind the meanings it the scroll.  They kept the scroll alive, for without them, these particular forms of angels, it would be impossible for anyone to truly understand it – as impossible, really, as seeing faces in the letters without a certain momentary grace from elsewhere.  These faces were the embodiment of that grace, and they were alive and active and absolutely essential for common humanity to understand not only the scrolls, or the Bible, but anything in this world as it truly is. 
 
          Our world, then, is a living place, as the ancient and primitive seers have always intuitively understood.  These wise people were usually elevated among their peers because those who could not see were still aware intuitively of this living, thinking presence.  These people, too, were now and then given the small grace to see the angels of design behind the world. 
 
          We have been talking about small artifacts of man, and perhaps ET’s, but of course the phenomena of the living intelligence behind the material world– behind the veil – extends well beyond these artifacts.  It exists in the flowers and in all of nature in parcels and in whole, as well as in all the doings of humans.  With us, there is malice mixed in with our many thoughts and deeds, but all is ultimately sustained and governed by the angels – the emanations, if you will – of the great Divine Intelligence.  We in the Catholic faith are often told that the world would disappear in an instant without the will of God, and often we are given small examples of this that must also be writ large. 
 
          Which, too, brings hope to a world in incredibly complex and, frankly, messed-up times.  While we might run around frantically trying to make things seem normal again, were are, in effect, only trying to cut the knot with the sword.  We cannot escape the fact that there is something going on right now that is so profound that if we looked at it squarely we might faint from dread.   However, behind it all is an all-encompassing, moving and living intelligent design that will find us in the end.  In all the fear and misery, that alone should give us hope. 
 
          So it is that to see the angels is to transport us past each anxiety small and large.  In the personification of this intelligence, they (the “angels”) show us that they are always there in everything, and in everything they can be with us. If we don’t try to cut the knots of understanding with our swords, they can give us all we need to know about everything, and dispel every fear, for it all lives, each and every thing, forever in that higher realm. 
 
          All this to be found in a knot, in faith, and in angels, the simplest and most difficult paths through the chaotic and irrational.