Today, a new essay, "Panic Button," under "Essays" in the website.  FK  PS - and take a look at the beautiful comment on "Real Presence" (below) by Cal 

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The party was over and the darkness beyond the tiki torches was denser for the descending fog.  I was more than ready for bed and one beer over where I should have been, but she wanted to stay later.  “She” was a retired nurse, and even as her husband shifted uncomfortably in his seat, she projected a great interest to talk.  Things hummed around recent events and church stuff for about an hour until we got around to spiritual things, where death inevitably entered, and where, it became apparent, she wanted to be. 
 
I did too, even as I had to fight slipping into sleep.  I had been against the thought of death until well into middle age, when it finally appeared to me as the great arbiter of truth.  I explain how this happened in the story “Dark Angel” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars.  I have spoken of it before here, so I will not go into details, but in summary, it is about a car accident on a road deep in the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that a friend and I happened upon on the way to the family cabin.  A few other people had already stopped, and something in the feel of things out there in the middle of nowhere compelled us to stop too.  It was as we began to walk to the wreck that we felt it, the eerie presence of spirit that I called the dark angel.  It was still and calm and frightening in its depth.  We were to find that a 17 year-old girl had died in the accident, and the feeling from her death hung with us for weeks.  It was unavoidable and totally otherworldly. 
 
The retired nurse knew it well, but she insisted that death had a feeling of complete peace and was not eerie at all.  She did admit that new nurses often ran from a room where someone had died exactly because of this feeling, but they were then talked into returning.  Death and its attendant spirit was, as these seasoned nurses knew, normal, and only once had it ever been horrible.  Our guest had not witnessed this, the screaming of a woman dying of cancer, but she and all the other nurses who were not there said that they were relieved that they had missed it.  That would have been horrible.  But this was exceedingly uncommon.  To the people who worked in death, it was almost always a peaceful and solemn experience.     
 
I had read of this before, about the “beauty” of the after-death spirit.  In the sweet little book Night’s Bright Darkness, by Sally Read, the author opens with a remembrance of an Irish nurse who washed and wrapped corpses.  The nurse treated the bodies politely as one would treat delicate people, and after the preparation would part the curtains to the day and open the window, saying, “Now we open the window and let his soul fly…,” just as she said for the man who Read had helped to prepare with her.  Read had been terrified up until then, but suddenly she felt the corpse become small and insignificant.  How, she thought, could this happen in a modern London hospital where, “The soul was long out of fashion.”?
 
I still recall with a bit of shame the last time I saw my terminally ill father a short time before the incident in the woods.  By then I lived far away, and my visits to him were infrequent.  He had been in an old folk’s home for over a year, ever since he had become incontinent and blind, and in that time he had become almost totally silent, sleeping most of the time.  They said he had cancer of the brain, but no one really knew for sure.  Really, to all involved, he was just another dying old man with no future. 
 
The hallway to his room had the usual stink of urine and antiseptic, and lost-looking old people with walkers and wheel chairs wandered about.  I found him in bed and asleep as usual, but he awakened instantly when I said hello.  He replied very brightly and with great pleasure, “It’s good to see you again, Fred!”  Still oddly uncomfortable, I began to mention some political shenanigans then current, as my father had always had a keen interest in the news.   The words fell in the air like lead.   It was not just that he was not listening, but that this other spirit was there, the same one that I would come across a few years later in the UP.  It had no interest in the politics or daily life of Man.  Rather, it spoke of truth as a deep cave speaks of silence.  Both my words and my attitude felt irrelevant.  My dad would slip into death a few months later. 
 
In the Book of Exodus, we find Moses tending a flock of sheep near Mt Horeb (Sinai) when an angel of the lord appeared to him in a fire flaming out of a bush.  As Exodus 3: 4-5 says, “When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, ‘Moses!  Moses!...Come no nearer!  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’”  This is it: in the presence of death we are on holy ground, which can be anywhere.  This is what we feel.  Death does not bring all of the Holy down upon us, but it is the opening, an unwavering and undeniable presence that is stunningly real, so much so that the uninitiated run from it in fear.   Some become callous to it, and some use it in mockery out of defiance, but this only underscores the point that “it,” not just death but the “it” that comes with it, is a big deal. 
 
My conversation with my dad fell flat because it was as nothing in this presence; so it is with any social pretense or discourse at all.  Death tells us, “Here, look.  This is your true home” - not the cold stillness of the dead body, but the awesome “other” which greets what comes out of the body, now finally free to acknowledge that which was always there.   The rest of our concerns are like the golden calf worshiped by the Israelites even as the Lord spoke on high to Moses.   We swim through this “other” like fish through water, but are overwhelmed by the frenzy of active life.  It is often only death that reminds us of what our priorities really are: the peace-filled reflection and awe-filled worship of the holy presence.  For if we understood, we would know that we are always on holy ground, just as our still bodies and freed souls will one day proclaim to all in the sacred sound of silence. 
 
 
 
 
 

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            “Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead.  Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover.  In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.”   - from Julian: vol 111,  by Wilmer Wright. 
 
It was suggested by a religious pundit that we should ask, while at church, for some words given by the Holy Spirit.  I try to do this but surprisingly often forget, but I did not forget last Sunday morning.  It is hard to hear this voice at first, as it has to go through the filters of wishful thinking as well as counter-voices of cynical disruption (maybe my own particular curse), but at last I got through to what always feels like the calm in the eye of the storm.  It was there where I rested my mind seeking advice, but what I got instead of words was a clear and beautiful picture of sand being washed around by low ocean waves on a beach.  I could sense the meaning, which was incredibly deep, suggesting that all acts of nature were God’s voice to us, but I wanted the words; I wanted the words now!  Every few minutes I tried to go back to that space for the words, but still got this picture that was both beautiful and filled with portent.  After several times the spirit apparently relented, for I finally got a one word answer, mentally shouted at me.  It was “Patience!”  It was not as full of meaning as the picture, of course, but with it I did finally understand better what was being said.  It was that God is in all things, timeless, and that all things will work eventually to the satisfaction of God.  Like the ocean and waves and sand, however, God’s time stretches into eons and eons, way beyond our time.   Things will come around, but often not when we want them to.  God will not be rushed.  All things right and beautiful will come when the time is ripe. 
 
So I read the message from the Oracle of Delphi (written above), to Julian the Apostate, ruler of the Roman Empire out of Constantinople, in 362 AD.  These were the last words ever recorded of the oracle, who chewed on laurel leaves and inhaled their smoke to go into a trance to reach the gods.  Julian had just traveled to Antioch to winter-over his army before attacking the Persians and was looking for oracular advice.  Instead he got this message that told him that the gods no longer spoke to the oracle because the age of the gods had passed.  This was a bitter blow to Julian, not for the lack of advice on Persia but because of the news that the classical gods of the Romans and Greeks were now effectively dead. 
 
I suppose he could blame much of this on his uncle, who had been the emperor before him.  It is complicated, but it boils down to this: the emperor before Constantine, Diocletian, had avidly persecuted the Christians, who had become an overwhelming threat to the old Roman system of belief, before retiring, leaving the empire to two chosen “caesars,” both of whom had very ambitious sons, Maxentius and Constantine.  Constantine had a Christian mother, Helena, but was not a Christian himself when he met Maxentius for battle at the Milvian Bridge by Rome in 312 AD.  It was there that he saw a cross brazened in the sky inscribed with the words, “In Hoc Signo Vinces - conquer by this sign” – which he did.  In gratitude, he legalized Christianity, then became Christian himself.  In the 320’s he moved to the solidly Christian east and built his new Eternal City at the Bosporus, called Constantinople (now Istanbul).  There he prospered, did some good and some awful things (for instance, he killed his oldest son and boiled his wife alive in her bathtub), and died, leaving the Empire in a mess once again.  After killing his brothers, his son Constantius II reigned briefly before dying young, leaving the empire to his nephew Julian.
 
Up to that time, Julian had been a scholar of classical literature, in love with the glory of the pagan past.   He despised Christians for being so dewy-eyed and meek and forgiving, preferring instead the virtues of courage, honor and duty of old Rome.  Much to his disappointment, however, he could not persuade the bulk of the people in his eastern kingdom to turn back to the old days, not even with carrots and harsh sticks.  Even as he waited for war in Antioch, the people there despised him, so much so that he left as soon as possible.  He had recently tried to cause the collapse of Christianity by rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, thereby mocking the prediction of the second coming after the rebuilding, but an earthquake had destroyed his efforts and no one would dare try it again.  And then in the midst of a hateful populace at Antioch and his other failures at pagan conversion, the Oracle of Delphi had told him that she was out of business.  There were no more gods. 
 
An emperor cannot simply turn away from a war, and Julian believed that by defeating the Persians he could bring back the loyalty of the people to his rule and to the pagan gods.  Alas, the campaign was a fiasco.  He was forced to retreat, was picked apart by guerrilla-like tactics along the way, then was met by the full force of the Persians, where he was killed in battle by a spear through the side.  It is claimed that his dying words were “Vicisti, Galilaee – Thou hast conquered, Galilean.”
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The sands are not just the “sands of time” but an ordering of the universe over vast periods of time.  Certain things will come to pass, but only as they fit with everything else in exquisite divine harmony.  For the Roman/Byzantine Empire of Julian’s reign, the time had simply come for Christianity and there was nothing that the all-powerful emperor could do about it.  It is interesting to note that since then, Christianity’s time in the Mideast has also waned, its near-demise beginning with the conquest of Constantinople by Muslims in 1453, and extending into the present, as radical Muslim leaders, as well as the state of Israel, marginalize, exorcise, or simply eradicate Christians to this very day.  Yet, less than 40 years after the fall of Christian Byzantium, Christopher Columbus began a new epic for Christianity in the New World.  Now we find Christianity in decline in the very states and colonies where it had once thrived.  The sands of time are endlessly shifting.  If the New Testament has been interpreted correctly, few of the “elect” will be around at the Second Coming.  Is it this, then, what the moving sands are pointing to in human history?
 
It is the same with us.  We simply don’t know our fate, or when or if our prayers will be answered, at least as we might understand it.  The puzzle of our universe has an infinite number of parts, and the time limit for assembly extends farther than we can understand.  I must constantly remind myself that it is not my puzzle, and that I am only a small part of it.  I might enjoy my part by acknowledging the ability and wisdom of the maker, or I might fret and fume that life stinks because I do not always get my way when I want it, or anytime at all.  I simply cannot understand how it all fits together, but must have faith that it does fit together.  This even the Oracle at Delphi understood. 
 
“Vicisti, Galilaee” could also be, “viscisti Deus - you have won, God.”  Of course He has.  When one makes the rules and is the only one who knows them, what else should we expect?  Wonder and joy would be an appropriate response for us in life, not bitterness and antagonism.  We must not try to rebuild the Temple before its time, and, of course, I should not try to get my way with anything without patience.  No matter how powerful the gods, whether I include Zeus or myself among them, we are still just shifting sands flowing in the infinite, churning sea.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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            It was not all fun and mosquito bites up north.  The two story cabin needed another coat of preservative stain, and standing on ladders on tiptoes while the sticky chemicals ran down our arms and spattered our hair wasn’t what memories are made of.  But we finally gave up for the season and headed down to do the “lighthouse walk,” a stroll of 3.5 miles along a nice gravel path to the old light house that is now manned by no man at all, but rather a computerized machine.   It was Labor Day weekend and of course the parking lot was filled with cars and SUV’s and campers and one lone bicyclist with long-distance gear attached to the front and back.  I noticed him with passing interest, a guy of about thirty dressed in spandex who couldn’t have had less fat on him if he had been flame cured.  I pointed out the biker to my son and would have continued on had my son not seen a small license plate attached to the back of his seat that said “Washington.”  With that I had to stop for a small chat, whether the biker wanted one or not.
 
            “You come all the way from Washington (state – a good 2,000 miles from the UP)?”
 
            “Yeah,” he said with no small pride, “and all the way to the east coast.” 
 
            “Holy cow!  And you’re heading back to Washington against the wind?”
 
            Of course he was.  He had gone all the way to Bar Harbor, Maine, tooled around Acadia National Park, and was now on his way back against the continental west-east wind just in time to beat the snows in the Rockies and Cascades. 
 
            “I bet you’ve had some adventures, huh?”
 
            “It’s been a good ride.”  And with that, the conversation ended.   He was not annoyed and would have continued, but we had a time constraint ourselves, and more to the point, it seemed to me (maybe incorrectly) that his adventures – or at least the ones he would talk about – all had to do with the challenges of biking.  I was looking for my kind of adventures – being taken in by some fanatical religious family in the Green Mountains for a week, or a single woman lonely for some anonymous company, or escaping a half-crazed pot grower in Michigan after being sky-high for three days straight.  Those are the kind of things that had happened to me in my travels (I will plug my hitching book here, Dream Weaver), but it was apparent to me that this would not be the case with this man.  With him, it seemed to be all about the biking.  What he was doing was an amazing feat, but that was it.  Climb the mountain and come down.  Courageous and undoubtedly moral, but limited. 
 
            Perhaps I jumped to such a conclusion so quickly because of an uncle of mine who recently died at the age of 97, only his last year spent as somewhat of an invalid.  He had lived an astounding life of adventure.  Growing up on the Connecticut shore, he had rowed across Long Island Sound in a home-made boat as a boy, climbed the vertical faces of several large cliffs in the area without gear, and in his late teens had competed to be a diver for the US Olympic team.  When the Big War came up, he served as a pilot for the B-17 bombers out of England, then again as a jet pilot in the Korean War.  He became a math teacher so that he could spend those long vacation days sailing and mountain climbing and scuba diving and who- knows- what.  He even ran marathons into his 70’s until his knees gave and his kidneys bled.  He was one tough and fearless guy.  And yet when my wife met him, knowing of his many adventures, she said, “I never met a guy who has done so many things who is so boring.”  This was no disrespect to my uncle, who was not any more boring than many of us.   Rather, she presumed he would have been fascinating, a Sir Richard Burton of America, not some math teacher who happened to have done some things. 
 
            His two sons were cut from the same cloth.  One was flying hang-gliders back in the early seventies when they were even more unsafe than now, jumping off sheer cliffs for updrafts.  He held the state record for staying aloft, which he kept breaking again and again until he stopped flying.  When I asked about his record flights and why he had stopped, he said, “At a certain point I learned how to stay up as long as I wanted.  It got boring.”  His brother had no fear of heights either, or of anything else as far as I know, and made big  bucks hanging from wires repairing really big and tall bridges.  But he, too, had little to say about it.  For him, a job was a job. 
 
            There are others too, remarkable people who strike one as unremarkable.  They may be that way because of humility, which is a virtue that I could better learn, but in the cases I know of, that is not likely.  Rather, these people seem boring to us because – and I am presuming here – life seems boring to them.  That is why they do remarkable stuff. 
 
My mother, the sister of the fearless math teacher, was precisely the opposite.  A walk around the block for her was an adventure, sometimes one of wonder and sometimes one of fright.  Colorful flowers and sun and shade literally sang to her, but stray sounds could be those of women or children in danger.  Nothing was a simple as it seemed to the rest of us, and she was in almost constant amazement.  She would NOT have made a good bomber pilot, and it would have been an adventure itself to see her work up the nerve to approach a cliff’s edge, let alone jump off it with a hang-glider. 
 
            The point is, she didn’t need additional excitement.  Life itself provided more than enough excitement as it was.  I am sure that heaven for my mother is color and light, without a stray sound of potential danger or discord. 
 
            Most of us aren’t as fearless as my uncle, or as replete with adventures as my mother, but most of us need at least a little more than what we have to keep the juices flowing.  Life as it is is simply not enough, and there is no objective measuring stick for us in what constitutes “enough.” Some men are satisfied with one wife, while others need an endless array of women, or men, or children or whatever, seeking satisfaction in a certain lane where it is never fully achievable.  The mother of the red-headed skate border, Shawn White, tells us that her son was always pushing the limits, doing back-flips off the house and racing recklessly down steep paths because he could never sit still and could never be satisfied for long with the last thrill.  The pain he often had to endure could not deter him.   Then there are the alcoholics and the drug addicts and the billionaires and the professional soldiers and on and on, people obsessed with finding completion that can never be found in behaviors and things. 
 
The above are the special ones that we all see and shake our heads at or sometimes envy, but I think we all have our little obsessions that we think will bring us ultimate satisfaction: chocolate; ski trips or Hawaiian beaches; fishing; mountains or wilderness or a Buddhist monastery; and of course the ever-popular desire for lots and lots of money to complete a host of other obsessions.  Many of these work for a while, but we are often surprised when none of them work forever. 
 
            It is obvious from this that we were built for completion but often have to learn at great cost what the completion is.  Of course it is God, the truth of which is so elusive because that is not how we ordinarily role.  We learn that we must accomplish tasks or own things to be admired by others and ourselves.  Many of us are told that it is God we are after, but how can we be satisfied with an abstraction when a solid act or possession is so much more real?  In time, it becomes obvious to anyone who observes that this “hard” reality is not the real reality, but this truth slips away far more easily than it came.  How is it that we can we hang onto this idea when everything else in our ordinary society and personal nature tells us otherwise? 
 
            The biker was fulfilling his own need for the time being, which was definitely not mine.  But even had I had the additional adventures, I would have been left flat and disappointed not long after, in need of another adventure, another fix.  I know this because it has happened again and again, as all things eventually pass back to the standard unsatisfactory reality of the present. 
 
My uncle had no religion or spiritual nature that I know of, and he made it explicit that no memorial or anything at all be made at his death.  Ashes to ashes, and that was it.  Until now, I have thought that he himself was flat, needing the thrill of death to even feel alive, but maybe there was something to his dangerous obsessions after all.  Many paths sincerely taken can lead to the truth.  In the end, he could no longer defy death because of his age, precisely when death was not only at his door but finally inevitable.  Maybe then he had gotten his needed “hallelujah” moment and his fearlessness had served him well.  Maybe then as he looked ahead to the final adventure that would truly lead to no-thing, he had calmly nodded and finally understood: so this is it.  After so many struggles, at last I am here.  Thank God. 
 
           
 
           
 
 

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Because I can, I often take an afternoon siesta in the upstairs office.  The old bed sits by the north facing window which is partially covered by a tattered, old-people style curtain that lets in flutters of filtered sunlight.  So it was last week when I plopped down, exhausted with age, and was caught immediately by the blue light that flowed across the ceiling from the reflection off a small above-ground swimming pool that lays just outside.  This played first with my sight, then my pleasure, then my memory, transporting me back to those great summer days from childhood and youth.  Then this, too, shifted, from pleasant memories to the sting of aching nostalgia, captioned by the thought, “never again.”  Those great times – not “great” as in large or magnificent, but in simple joyfulness -  were gone for good, along with the people as they were, and others altogether.   Two close friends of mine from the old high school and early adult days are now dead, as are my parents; most of my friends and, of course, girlfriends are off on lives of their own which will never match with mine again, at least not like they once had.  So is the way we thought and the music we listened to, and even the comic books that spoke once to our vision of the world.  All gone forever. 
 
This is how it has always been for me in late August when the summer is dying even as it comes into its greatest green-gold beauty, and even as the gasping heat of mid -summer dissipates.  It used to mean the start of a new school year, then later in life the start of football season and new opportunities for recreation and parties.  Now it means only what is past.   Never did I think of certain epics of the past as all that great as I lived them, or at least any better than any other times past or what was to come.  Now I want to bottle them, as that old song by Jim Croce said, and keep them forever so that I might live them again and again. 
 
That day the emotional pain was so great that I actually had to get out of bed and gratefully lose myself in work.   And it was then that it hit me, strange as it was: that it is the good times in life that become more painful than the bad, or at least the ordinary bad.
 
The bad I am talking about are the sins and faux pas of our lives, the mean things we did or the good things we did not do, or the social blunders that we stumbled into that might even be remembered to this day by others.  They could be the cross word to the stranger or the cheating on a faithful girlfriend; they could include the time we got drunk and did or said something outrageous or embarrassing, or the stupid teen-age thing we said in a fight with mom or dad.   They are more numerous than we could ever believe on a normal day, but seem to come out in an endless array late at night or some other time of alone-ness.  They make us squirm.  We want them to go away, and if we are religious, they make us pray for forgiveness because no good god could ever get along with a jerk such as ourselves. 
 
Not fun, I admit, but not the same as the pain of a long life of good things.   What we wish we did not do or wish we had done are nothing compared to the things we did do that were good fun or were sublime moments of beauty and insight.  The ugly are the trash we wish we had never wallowed in; the good and the beautiful are the coins that we carelessly threw away, not out of stupidity but because that is what we do.  We take the good for granted and are blown away by the bad, but it is the good that is the more enduring and endearing to us, and what we miss most.  Astonishing as it seems to me, what we long for that once was is more painful to us than what we hate and wish would go away.    
 
            As we live through this golden time of year, we might keep that in mind: that this will never be again; that the soft breeze of morning over ripe fields, or the first cup of tea as we watch the birds come to the bath outside the window, will never be quite like we see them now.  Nor will our children or our wife or husband or our friends be as they are now, ever again.   We cannot put them in a bottle but we can appreciate them more as they are.  With that, the pain of remembrance might become even stronger, but so will the goodness of now.  And I wonder: if these are our most ingrained and lasting memories, might this not be the same in eternity?  Might not the good outweigh the bad by seven to one, or even seventy times seven to one?  Might not an intelligence that imbues us with such longing and knows what is most dear to our hearts count that most, and our dark transgressions only as fading shadows? 
 
 Until after Labor Day, FK

 

Today, an essay, "Discernment," under Essays in the website.  FK

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We have excuses for being jerks; some are good ones – say, you just caught your wife with the oil delivery guy – and some aren’t.  For instance, one time at a Quicky Mart a guy flung hatred at me because I had parked somewhat in front of him in a designated parking space as he was filling his car.  His anger was so bad I almost reached under my car for a camping tool that is often there, but my wife had a clearer head.  After calming me down, she went inside to get the bread or whatever and then came out to tell me some more about the guy, who had gone from filling his car to shopping in the store.  He had come up to her in line and had practically laid down his life for her, apologizing nonstop until she could finally leave the store.  He had had a really, really bad day and was so, so sorry.  He should have been, and he was.  His bad excuse, it turned out, had not been the excuse at all.  The excuse was that his life at that moment really, really sucked. 
 
Yesterday didn’t really, really suck, but it was one of those days where the weather smothered everything under its heavy, sticky weight.  Weather is really not a good excuse either for being a jerk, but regardless, it put me on edge in a non-attractive way.  I was able to stay quiet for the most part and not bum everyone out, but I did a good job of bumming out myself (bummer: a word made by the hippies of the 1960’s for bad acid trips.  A bad acid trip is a usually- temporary trip into panicked insanity – a real bummer).  I did this by observing.  And what I observed made my lips curl – hopefully not visibly – in contempt, for this and that and really, everything in quotidian life: conversation (she said, he said, blah blah), the un-mowed lawn, the rotting trailer that has needed fixing for three years, for myself (of course), and for…TV. 
 
The last is too easy, I know – who doesn’t have contempt for TV, even as we all watch it?  Nowadays, I only watch one certain national news show, some pro and college football, and the local news for the weather.  That evening it was for the news show, and there it was, all pap, not only the ads but the ‘serious’ news.  ‘Blah blah’ would have been nice compared to the nattering and rodent-like squeaks they all seemed to emit.  The lips curled again – what fools these mortals be!  And it was here, at the height of my lordly contempt, that it came to me: I was doubting.  In the sweltering fog of the day, life had lost its coherency, its immersion in meaning.  Now it was this and that, all mindless nattering, which was true.  It was true for the people who were speaking that I observed, because they were indeed focused on small stuff, and for me, who was not seeing how things and people and everything worked together from small to large to the infinite.  My contempt was, again, ultimately for myself.  There in front of the glowing, flickering tube, I realized that I had allowed myself to be drop-kicked back into the ontological dumpster. 
 
From there came the slow climb out, slipping on metaphorical banana peels and empty bottles the whole way.  Think – what is this world you are in?  It goes on and on forever, and here you and everything are, all nicely arranged from nothing.  Of course there is a God, and of course it all hangs together.  Don’t let the dark gravity pull you down again.  Look, you fool!  If faith is blind, unfaith is even blinder, seeping through you from the inside out.  How can you let this happen to you – again?
 
This contempt that was really doubt did not suddenly drop off any more than the persistent sticky weather did, riding with me into a morning dream that got me up way too early in the soupy darkness.  After a walk with the flashlight and the dog and a cup of tea, I was here before the golden calf of our era, the computer screen.  It was at this altar that I planned to write on this very topic when just beforehand I thought to grab a book by the side, Rediscover the Saints by Mather Kelly.  This was not my usual habit, but I picked it up and opened it to the next chapter I was going to read tonight or tomorrow or soon, and there was the title: “Thomas: We All Have Doubts.”  Imagine that. 
 
Yes, it really could be coincidence, even though that is unlikely, but it is not coincidence that we live in a world way, way, beyond our comprehension even as we spend most of our lives convincing ourselves that it is all so easy to understand, so much so as to be worthy of our bored contempt, at least at times.  Thomas is infamous for declaring his disbelief of Jesus’s resurrection until Jesus himself appeared before him and, knowing all his thoughts, asked him to place his hands in his wounds.  Thomas fell on the floor in worship and went on to die a martyr’s death (as all the 11 apostles – the 12 without Judas – did except for John) in India, but still we recall him only for his disbelief.  We are admonished by Jesus himself to believe without seeing (or touching), but we do not, even while we see and touch God’s marvel every moment.  We live a miracle that is graspable, not in its entirety, but in its magical wonder – but we push it away.   It is in our face – it even is our face – at all times, and yet we think and talk and act as if this miracle, no less stunning than the resurrected Jesus, is no great shakes at all.  We have nothing on Doubting Thomas.  If it were not for an act of grace, a dispensation for our willed ignorance, even the resurrected Jesus would not maintain our faith for long.  We would explain it away somehow, like we do the infinite universe, and then cry for another good adventure movie to take away our bored annoyance of day-to-day life.  The faith of Doubting Thomas puts ours to shame.
 
Maybe my excuse for being a jerk is a good one after all.  Since it all hangs together, the muggy fog of weather might have permeated my senses like an inadvertent drug or virus.  Not my fault.  Thomas was not there with the other disciples when Jesus first appeared after his death.  Not his fault.  Who else would have believed? 
 
It should be a lesson and a slap-down.  We all are at fault.  The power and the glory are all so easy to believe because they are before us in living color every day, from a pulsing sun a billion- billion times the power of a hydrogen bomb to simple birth and death and everything else in between and beyond, each enough to convince the most skeptical of con men, and yet here we are.  Nattering.  Starting fights.  Curling our lips and denying miracles even as they appear fully dressed before us.  Sometimes it takes the fog of a lousy day to take the fog away.     
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 

Cal’s comment on the blog below concerning social problems came exactly at the right time.   As I turned on the radio this morning (Monday, August 5), all the news – and I mean ALL – was about the new round of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.  I am not sure exactly why these hit us so hard, for we have gangland mass shootings in many major cities every weekend, but they do.  And when they do, they actually chill the spirit and make us question what the hell is happening in society these days, for this kind of shooting, at least on a regular basis, is fairly new.   Has something integral changed about us?  And if so, what has changed, and what can we do about it?
 
That is Cal’s big question, although it came regarding changes that the information elite are trying to make on gender identity.  Cal’s comment compared social problems with global warming, and his answer to both was: we adapt to them or perish.  What’s new about that? 
 
In reply, I agree with Cal – there is nothing new about adaptation. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah happened almost 4,000 years ago because they did not adapt to God’s demands.   But after a visit by Jonah, who had seen the light after spending three days in the belly of a fish, the city of Nineveh was saved because they DID adapt to God’s demands.  So if we were to take a biblical approach to our problems, the answer would be easy.  Obey God’s commands.  Do not do evil, as defined by both the Ten Commandments and by great spiritual leaders such as St. Paul, who particularly hated sexual perversion.  That’s it.  If society were to take these things seriously, then, we would probably have fewer mass shootings and suicides and drug problems.  After all, they had far fewer of such things in the 1930’s when evil corporations ruled over a hungry people and the KKK rode unscathed throughout the Jim Crow South.  They did not, because the vast majority of people, even Klan members, knew that there was a greater law, even if they crossed it at times. 
 
Or so the story would go if one were a believer. 
 
I am a believer, but I am also an anthropologist.   While I might write ‘epistles’ on some matters, on others I write as a social scientist with speculations as prone to error as anyone’s.  Even though social science has been poisoned by political correctness in the past 30 years, we can still do the old time stuff if we want to, and this old time stuff tells us that societies react to massive change with violence and depression.   This most would agree upon, but after that, the arguments begin.   The progressives would say that the changes we are going through are good and necessary.  Unfortunately, they would continue, the old White Male guard is fighting a doomed but desperate battle to retain its hegemony, or, as President Obama put it, is “clinging to their god, guns, and bibles.”  Conservatives would say that the very changes the progressives are making are the reason for the uptick in mass shootings and suicides and other social ills, and that they should stop it and let society settle down, lick its wounds, and regroup.  This view ties together social, cultural, economic and demographic (read immigration here) changes.  There are too many changes in too many areas, they say, and they are happening too fast. 
 
My view on this centers on aliens, but not the type that the El Paso shooter was concerned about.  Space aliens.  This came to me after I had called a friend of mine who is also an anthropologist.  As we talked, the topic natural drifted to the rapid and unprecedented social changes we are going through.  We kept in mind that these changes, unlike Cal’s global warming, are happening purposefully, not as a byproduct of production but as willful systematic attempts meant to fundamentally alter society.   The question then came down to this: WHO is masterminding this assault on old cultural values?   My friend quickly brushed away the standard bugaboos of the Koch brothers or George Soros and went straight to the Russians. 
 
“Oh boy,” I said, “we’ve settled that issue.  I’m not going to listen to this paranoid stuff.”
 
“No, wait!” she said.  “It’s aliens!  Remember when George “W” Bush said he had looked into Putin’s eyes and saw that he could trust him?  Putin was using KGB mind control techniques.  He had control of Bush after that, but Putin is a stooge for Aliens who are controlling HIM!  You see, they want to destroy the societies of the West so that the world falls into chaos, like what happened with the Europeans and the American Indians.  We will become easy pickings for them and be slaughtered or enslaved.  After this, they will continue to terraform the world, just as we are being made to do now (unknown to our conscious mind) with our pollution, which will eventually kill us all off and make the world a paradise for them.”
 
It was a lot more detailed than that, but one gets the picture.  She was saying it tongue- in -cheek, knowing that I would not buy it otherwise, but I think she really believes it.  And that is the point.  What the, let’s call them “changers,” are doing seems like an alien conquest to many of us, but from within, like Putin’s mind control.  It is apparent to those like myself that the world- dominant culture of the West is actively and very quickly destroying itself for no rational reason.  Charges of racism and sexism, etc, are simply covers for an underlying dissatisfaction bordering- on- hatred among the changers.  Much of (traditional) social science is confused because the ‘changers’ are our own spawn.  We have more rights and food and freedom and medicine and free stuff than any other cultural group in known history.  Our enemies still lag far behind in power.   And yet it seems we are destroying – not improving but destroying – ourselves.  Why? 
 
The changers, many of whom are social scientists themselves, would say that the destruction is merely of an oppressive old guard, a necessary step to allow a new and better society take its place.  But measures that break up the family and weaken the military and economic strength of nations do not add up to “improvement” to me.  So again – why?  And what should we do about it?
 
This situation cannot be compared with the global warming hypothesis.  We can adapt to that, but how do we adapt to a crumbling society?  There are only so many people who can go to the far-off hills and live off the grid.  Instead, the answer must be to first identify the cause of the social affliction, and then to find the antidote.  For my anthropologist friend, the problem is so intractable that she half-jokes about alien invaders.  I understand her confusion, but disagree with the conclusion.    
 
Sort of, that is.  In a way, what is happening with us could be blamed on an alien force.  Drawing upon social science, I would say that the most influential ‘changers’ are situated in the universities where they teach to an increasing portion of the population.   That is where the ideology is formed and disseminated, but as we dig deeper we head into alien territory.  Why are these teachers so unhappy with their cushy and privileged lifestyles?  And why do so many students actually swallow this propaganda?  I believe this tsunami-like trend IS due to an alien force, but not one from outer space or even from across the border.  Rather, it is a force that we have kept more or less at bay for centuries, one that is now being allowed to emerge from inner space, where it has always been – lurking.   
 
To find it from the social science angle, we must go to its occult sibling, psychology.  Here, the general belief (based on Freud) is that the spoiled, self-centered child that we all are at age two never really goes away – rather, he is gradually enculturated, caged by social restrictions and norms traditionally upheld by culture gods.  He hates this cage, but calmer thought prevails with age, and with this he subdues his desires, for the social and spiritual good.   
 
It is here where many intellectuals have increasingly diverged from the past: instead of perceiving this enculturating force as good, many profess that it is the “cage” that causes the rage, rather than contains it.  Take away the cage and we get a happy, fulfilled society.  This is not what Freud intended; rather, he saw enculturation as a necessary evil – otherwise, the little two year old becomes a demon predator. 
 
Thus it is that the alien force is our suppressed ego unleashed, a selfish, irrational being that believes it is the center of the world and all that happens in it – that is, a god.  It is a very jealous and vengeful god when it doesn’t get its way.  This seems to be the popular spirit of the moment, where unhappiness is believed to be caused by others suppressing natural desires.  Lift off the lid of oppression and bango!, utopia.  The violent side of this inner child, this popular spirit says, is caused by all the “ism’s” we are so familiar with.  Tear down the (white male or whatever) hierarchy and we’ll all be gentle and happy as little lambs. 
 
This couldn’t be more wrong from the religions of the Book.  From this perspective, it is Satan who is lurking.  Our moral will and our God are what keep us from Satan’s enslavement, although we are never fully free, children of Adam that we are.  To cast off the moral strictures of religion is to give in to Satan.  With Satan, we get the object of our desires initially, but this sort of internal anarchy always leads to chaos, which leads to war and death and all manner of nasty things.   With Satan, we find that satisfying our desires is never enough, because we have allowed ourselves to be like Satan – who wanted to displace God.  That is, we have allowed ourselves to believe that we are our own gods, and so must continually try to prove it.  To prove it, we must continue, that is “progress,” to dominate everything as God does.  Since we cannot, our belief in our inner god leads to increasing frustration and rage and violence.  Thus the trap of Satan. 
 
Take your pick: what society is now dealing with is either Satan or a two year old megalomaniac all grown up and carrying a needle – or a gun.  Different sides of the same coin.  In the end, we always find that freedom can only exist with self-control.  Without that comes chaos, whether from Satanic or psychological roots, and chaos can never last.   And if we do not control ourselves, someone else will.  Someone else will, and we will have less freedom than we had when we did have self-control. 
 
There, Cal, is the root and the answer – in my opinion.  We need not adaptation but internal control, based preferably (almost necessarily) on the wisdom of our spiritual ancestors.  And there, then, is the debate.  God or child?  Good or evil?  The answers are certainly written in epistles and in the Gospels, but that has never stopped the world from criticizing them.   
 
 
 
  
 

​ 
I just don’t know.  It started at the neighbor’s annual Smoked Turkey Dinner, where many people there were friends of friends – that is, largely unknown to me.  But I thought I did know them, at least a little.  At 65, I was towards the younger end of the group, and none as far as I knew were coastal elites or college professors.  Thus I believed that on a few things concerning recent events we would all agree. 
 
I was right about one thing.  We will have forgotten this in a few months, but just now, my bet is that most have heard about the man in British Columbia who dresses as a woman who went into a women’s beauty parlor to get a Brazilian hair wax on his very male genitals.  The proprietor was a female Sikh, and she refused.  By B.C law, the woman was a bigot and the shop was closed.  The court case continues to this day.  It has been brought up by conservative and religious news media as an example of how crazy things have gotten.  I agree, and so did everyone there who voiced an opinion. 
 
I should have stopped there, but I always carry on more than I should, and so went further to mention the sex change mania that has suddenly fallen about us, visibly present even in small towns in the Midwest (although I cannot verify that what I see here is real sex change or just presentation).  I reported how juveniles are being allowed to have their testes or breasts removed and then given a steady diet of opposite - sex hormones.  I stressed my opinion that this is intense child abuse, as well as insane.  Some agreed, but many remained silent and one woman, who had worked in at the local factory all her life and was now 73 years old, disagreed.  “If they want to do it, let them.  This thing has always been with us but before you had to keep it hidden.” 
 
I was flabbergasted, and began a harangue – I admit, not the best way to persuade, but I was not thinking calmly then – about it.   “They are being enculturated to believe this! (A neighbor then suggested the term “groomed”, and I switched to that).  They are being groomed by education departments to believe that their confusion about their sexual identities, or simply their adolescent unhappiness, is due to sexual dysphoria.  They are being told that it is perfectly fine to mutilate themselves forever contrary to their physical natures, and that this will bring them closure and happiness.  This is not only perverse, but simply wrong.  Those who have had sex changes are the unhappiest people in the world.  40% of them have made serious attempts at suicide.” 
 
To which she leaned over to my wife with raised eyebrows and said, “Does he always get this argumentative?” 
 
Yes, I could have been smoother, but how could a woman her age have been so absolutely sold on something so alien, so barbaric, and ultimately, so stupid?
 
To me this is a sign of the crumbling of our civilization – not the only thing but another serious sign – and when I talked to a friend a few days later on the phone, I said so.  He laughed.  “It’s just a fad like bell bottoms.  Everyone suddenly wants them, then no one can get anything else, and then everyone wants something else.  Just a passing fad.”
 
“Getting your balls or breasts lobbed off is a passing fad?”
 
“What I mean is, it will pass.  The suckers who fell for it are stuck, but it will go away.  It’s actually kind of funny.  We’ll look back on this like we do on platform heals with gold fish in them and leisure suits.  It’s nothing.”
 
I was stunned again.  Have I been that wrong?  Have I listened to too many religious nuts and been sucked into the zaniness myself?  Sex change is weird, and sex change in children is criminal, of that I am sure, but should its presence in our society send up signals of alarm?  Or is this just another thing that will pass, like free love communes and the hair mullet? 
 
On the one hand, I would have to disagree with my friend.  The silly stuff of the past was not presented as normal to children in the classroom in a way that is clearly propagandistic, and its marks run far more deeply.  Not only are thousands now permanently mutilated, but millions of younger people are unsure of the roles that their gender should have them play, or don’t believe that there are any roles at all.  They are at least implicitly encouraged to have sex with whoever turns them on at the moment with no strings attached.  Having no strings attached means having no sense of the natural imperative of hetero sexual activity, which is procreation.  Procreation is how we get families, and with families there are duties and obligations involved regarding one’s mate and the children.  Without this linear connection, the unity of the family, or even the natural inevitability of the family, is lost, and without that, the bonds of people within society are lost or weakened.  These, too, then become arbitrary.  With that, all sorts of bad things happen – fatherless children, crime, a lack of respect for community, and on and on.  It goes on and on so much that I and many others see increasing instability, governmental encroachment, loss of God, loss of the meaning of life, and eventually, loss of such a society – our society - in the future, to either collapse or dictatorship.  Unless, that is, we stop it, or at least seriously try.
 
On the other hand, societies have functioned successfully alongside rank perversion and meaninglessness before.  We are told that the elevation of Julius Caesar to dictator mirrored a cultural decline among the Romans, who were becoming increasingly secular, cynical, and corrupt.  Yet they soldiered on for another 350 years.  The European plagues of the 14th century caused a widespread dissatisfaction and eventual revolt against theocratic culture, and yet what came of that was not collapse but the dawn of the modern era for the West, an ascendancy which lasted into the 20th century. 
 
So it is that a break with what made a nation or culture great does not always lead to its demise, but it does lead to great change.  In Rome, that did indeed lead to a dictatorship, but not in Europe.  We can trace the eventual decline of Europe to the Renaissance, but there’s a very successful 600 years – including an elevation of human rights and dignity - between the change and the fall.  
 
It is obvious, then, that a prediction for the future of our society should first include an examination of all former peoples, nations and empires that have been categorized in the archives.  At this point, however, in consideration of both sides of the issue with my limited knowledge, I still must come to the same conclusion: that current trends will either cause us to fall into some form of dictatorship, or be destroyed by an invading force of people who ARE secure in their moral foundations.   The former will happen as the natural basis for society – the family – is destroyed by exactly what we see happening now, leaving Big Brother as the primary source of care and discipline.   The latter will happen once the people no longer feel an intimate bond with the nation or culture strong enough so that they put their lives on the line to maintain one or both.  That, too, is happening, as long-standing fundamental beliefs are being vaporized by an assault of cultural and moral relativism.
 
Bell bottom pants were a bad idea and probably indicative of something else happening in society that was more profound, but as far as we know, they had no lasting effects.   By contrast, the notion that foundational structures in nature can and should be superseded on a whim (and maybe with a scalpel) wears its profundity on its sleeve.  Fads have little to no influence on the important things of this world; alterations or negations of natural functions do.  To put it simply and bluntly, it means that we have become so disillusioned with what ‘is’ that we have to pretend we can change the world into what it isn’t and was never meant to be.  Our hope, the beginning of our healing, will not be found by redefining nature, but in understanding why we can no longer abide by its basic laws.  What is it that has made us so disillusioned?  Unless we come to understand this, our very society will become like a fad, and fads don’t raise children or defend borders.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
It was another trip to the UP, and once there, another possible death.  On the serpentine newly-paved road past the dirt two-track to the cabin was a police car by a pick-up truck that had smashed into the trees off a curve, airbag popped.  The ambulance was just arriving.  The first responders did not seem in a hurry, meaning there had been only slight injuries or obvious death.  I still don’t know, although the chill that has become familiar up there came to me again. 
 
All very real, but what I want to talk about is not real in almost any sense, for on the long drive up I listened to a book on CD, a book by a very famous author, Dan Brown, titled Angels and Demons.  
 
I knew the author from his first famous novel, The Da Vinci Code, as hackneyed and trite a book as I had read in a while.  Stock phrases abounded, as did stock assumptions about big things and institutions.  Even the main character’s name, Robert Langdon, could have been pulled from an early 60’s spy novel.   And yet I had stayed up until 3AM to finish it.  Like it or not, Dan Brown knows how to turn black words into bricks of gold.  Like many other readers of his books, I love the sense of historical conspiracy, the religious issues involved, and of course the deadly ‘seriousness’ of them all.  Like too-sweet chocolate, I wince at the taste but have to have more even though I know it will make me feel sick. 
 
This one, Angels and Demons, was a big chocolate bar, with 15 disks of an hour-plus each that I could not quite finish, either on the drive or at the cabin, where I had to burn electricity stored in a handful of precious D batteries.  But I did hear enough, 9 CD’s, to write about it, or really, to write about what it did not and could not say. 
 
The plot: enter a disgruntled secret organization, The Illuminati, whose time has come to exact final revenge on the Catholic Church for – OMG – burning Copernicus at the stake nearly 500 years ago, as well as for threatening or jailing or killing other Renaissance and early Reformation scientists for their heretical views.  Bad ancient Church.  But bad Illuminati, too, for the enlightened scientists (thus the name Illuminati) that had started the organization to protect themselves from the Church had been infiltrated long ago by many other religion and Church haters, including – gasp – the secret members of the ancient Indian-Muslim sect, the Hashashin – known now by its Anglicized word, the Assassins.  Over time this bad Illuminati had then infiltrated many other institutions, from the US government (note the pyramid and glowing eye on the dollar bill) to the nuclear research center and particle accelerator in Switzerland, CERN.  And it is there where a tiny but vastly powerful particle of anti-matter was stolen by an Illuminati Hashashin and secreted in the Vatican just as the Conclave of Cardinals was meeting to proclaim a new pope.  Vatican City was to be destroyed, along with the top echelon of the detested, and often vial, Church. 
 
Thank goodness for Robert Langdon, professor at Middlesex Community College – I mean, Harvard – of Art History, whose specialty just happens to be the Church and the Illuminati.  Fortunately for him, his lack of STEM knowledge is satisfied by a beautiful young Italian woman scientist whose adopted father had been a Father of the Church as well as CERN’s leading scientist – the very one who had created the anti-matter, which had been neutralized in a containment system – the one stolen by the assassin - designed by his daughter Vitoria (this adopted Father had been the first to be assassinated by the Hashashin.  Enter filial revenge).  And off and running they go to save the Church and Vatican City, as well as thousands of Roman lives.   
 
We are brought back in time to the 1500’s and 1600’s, with secrets hidden from the Holy Powers, to see how science had outsmarted the big, clumsy hand of Roman faith.  Back in the present, Cardinals are being killed one by one before the Big Explosion, their manner of deaths harkening back to ancient Pagan sciences that mixed pantheistic worship with observational and mathematical brilliance.   Revenge is being satisfied as in days of old, where an eye was traded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, albeit with a lag time of 500 years, and against a Church that now has no secular power. 
 
 
But as I read the sometimes accurate and sometimes fictional historical and occult references, it was not the corny writing (the Italian scientist, we are told breathlessly, has almond-scented hair and lithe, sun-tanned legs) nor the denigration of the Catholic Church that bothered me.  After all, what did I expect?  Rather, my disappointment was due to the lack of mystery in this mystery, although I should have expected that, too.  Where, it stuck me over time, was the real strangeness?  For me, it is not to be found in the devious underground society, and certainly not in the technically interesting but otherwise dry science.  Rather, it is to be found in the very point of the Church itself.  Yes, it would have been nice if he had contextualized the Church’s paranoia in the 16th and 17th century in lieu of the Reformation and rising secularism, but that, too, is not surprising.  But as a mystery writer, it is almost odd that he missed the greatest mystery of all, that on which the entire Church is built: the mystery of the Holy Spirit.
 
This has been done by commercial entertainment before.  “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had Spirit influence the sequence of events throughout the movie, and of course it was present in abundance in the Ark itself, but Brown seems to have no sense of spiritual power at all, not even where it exists in the pagan rites and symbols.  He should know this stuff.  It has long been believed that there is real spiritual power in the pagan religions, as even the Bible attests, although it was not nearly as great as God’s power.  This, the power of the Jewish god, or God, was manifested in the prophets and the greatest of priests.  After Christ, Christians came to believe that God’s power is now accessible to all adherents because the loving relationship of God the Father and Christ the Son has been realized.  It is this relationship that forms the Holy Spirit.  Its power is as limitless as God Himself, and it is what the Church is built upon.  It is not built upon good deeds or being nice and certainly not on worldly power.  Those are to be found in it, for better and for worse, but they are not part of the foundational mystery.        
 
So it is that Brown’s mystery misses the real mysteries of life.  In his depiction of science, he gives us the “flat earth” impression that things are only as he sees them - that all that exists is eternal and soulless, to be deciphered by the “pure language” of mathematics and objective observation.   As for religion, which forms the other half of his subject matter, he gives us a few pagan symbols and a power-hungry Church, but no spirit.  None.  Yet, objective reality is wrapped in unanswerable riddles, and the Church is embedded in the workings of the Holy Spirit.  Where is his sense of real mystery?
 
It is, I think, lost in the materialistic view of life, that which the Church was so desperately trying to quell 400 years ago.  Brown should know that the Holy Spirit, the foundation of the Church, is not a flimsy myth.   It has not only cured thousands of people, quite objectively, but has also appeared subjectively to millions.  I have known a few of these millions and count myself as one of them as well.  There is nothing, no-thing or any non-thing, which is more mysterious than the Holy Spirit.  Yet Brown wants us to believe that mystery is created by time and secrecy alone.  That is good only for a standard mystery novel or a soap opera.  If Brown wants to rise above the rest, he should take the mystery of the Holy Spirit, and spirit in general, seriously. 
 
I should talk.  The guy’s as rich as Croesus, an ancient king I am sure he will unite, or already has united, with the Knights Templar.  We are talking dime novel vapidity here.   Still, it is Brown himself who chooses these religious topics, and so I believe is deserving of this critique.  It is as if we were to choose to write about a trip up north and witnessed an accident and felt the floating sense of death - and then went on and on about the bumper sticker on the guy’s pick-up.  We’d be missing the most important point. 
 
Which might make, I suppose, a greater writer out of Dan Brown than we suspect.  It could be.  For all we know, in his vapidity he might very well be purposefully channeling the volkgeist of our era.  In that vacuum, he might be telling us exactly what we are missing in life: that, just as the death of the guy is more important than the bumper sticker, so the foundation of the Church is more important than any personal or historic episode.  He might just be saying that in a code so well hidden it is almost as mysterious as the Holy Spirit. 
 
Or he might be just as he seems.  Still, he channels and points, whether he knows it or not.  The rock of the Church is not really a rock, just as the true temple of the Jews was not the stone and mortar Temple.  Just as we ourselves are only represented temporarily in flesh and blood and in history, and all the rest is to be found in a holy spirit too grand to fit into a dime-store novel or in this world.