Today, a new essay, "Falling into the Past," under Essays in the website. FK

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     In the swelter and humidity of the north woods this last week, it seemed wise to sweat- in-place, something like Shelter In Place of our Covid era but with a clearer logic.  Yes: better to sweat on a couch with a disc player and a book than to sweat even worse in the great outdoors where deer and sandflies are always ready. And so I did, listening to Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy, and reading Immacullée Ilibagiza’s The Boy Who Met Jesus. Both describe events that took place in the recent past, but there the similarities end. In fact, the two books pose such juxtaposition that it set me to wonder: could they even be describing the same world?   
 
      The Kennedy Era. I was six when he was elected and nine when he died. I knew absolutely nothing about politics at the time, but my Irish Catholic father and religious mother admired him as Catholics across the globe admire saints. They were far from alone. There were actual tears shed by my usually stoic parents before the black and white TV on the day he was killed, which was disturbing to us kids, but only mildly. Getting out of school early was what really mattered.  All of us alive now who were older than three at the time have intense memories of that day, but I will not go down that path. Rather, I will describe the America of the early sixties as well as I can through memory, history, and O’Reilly’s display of historical facts.
 
      On the kid level, I know that on Saturdays I could have a bowl of cereal – hopefully Captain Crunch – and take off on my bicycle for the entire day. As long as I got back before dark, no one would worry about me or seriously wonder where I was. This was the norm. Of course there were predators of children as there always have been, but such a problem was considered too remote to worry about. And, as far as I remember, it was. That was good.
 
      There were also no discipline problems in the classroom. Adults were gods and you didn’t mess with them. Some were evil gods – my first grade teacher, for instance - and some were good – my grandmas – but behaving well before them was absolutely paramount for survival. For boys on the playground, however, life could be brutal. Bullying and discrete fights behind the bushes happened every day, and it was often traumatic. The grown-up gods were not there to protect us from our peers. We were instead expected to learn from them so that we might later cope with life.  
 
      That was both good and bad, because you needed to learn from the bullying. After growing up, at least in the Northeast, a factory job awaited you. Factory work was largely union and back then you had better toe the line. Practical jokes were common and often painful and humiliating. You had to learn how to react to them properly because everyone else was watching and judging. For a lucky few, there was work in the big-company offices, where many were clawing to get ahead except for those, like the ‘weaklings’ left with dirt-smudged faces by the bullies on the playground, who had given up. These were the faceless gray men, the beta men who supposedly had dissatisfied wives at home who had so wanted an alpha male. Or so the adds told us, and the magazines and all those successful guys on sports teams who helped sell cigarettes and razors on TV commercials. No woman on a Playboy foldout would EVER accept a faceless gray man. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was largely popular at the time because this described in a dramatic way what many, mostly men, were facing or thought they were facing: success or shame.
 
      It was in that era that Lee Harvey Oswald came of age. He was neither the bully nor the patsy, but an outsider who had dreams of being famous but did not have the typical alpha male personality.  He had anger issues, to put it mildly, and he saw the world that disparaged him as a world filled with idiots. How could they be anything but if they did not recognize his genius? And so he made a plan that would make him forever, or at least for several generations, a household name. They would remember him then!
 
      It was a time of security and insecurity, of bowing to the establishment and bucking it, of little pink houses and grand designs, of strong families elevated by simple faith and those broken by disappointment and failure. There was little to no safety net. A man made it by hook or by crook or did not make it and resigned himself either proudly or sadly to live among the great unwashed. His wife (and almost all women married because that’s what you did) was tied to the status of her husband, and she either was his greatest cheerleader or his nagging distractor.
 
      Further, the issues of the time were immense. Civil rights for “coloreds” was tearing much of the nation apart, and Russia in its guise as the USSR was in a chicken fight with the USA involving nuclear weapons and the end of humanity, or at least modern civilization. There was disturbing news out of Vietnam. The Berlin Wall had further imprisoned millions more people in the Soviet gulag state. The Italian-American Mafia had control of the big unions. The Irish-American Mafia had control of big city politics. And Marylyn Monroe had divorced Joe DiMaggio. The horror.
 
      This only lightly touches on the post-war America of the early sixties, of course, but it was a very, very different America from what we have now. It is very different now, but just as full of major cultural, national, and even life-ending threats. The pressures on the individual are just as anxiety-producing, and the issues of international politics are just as terrifying. We are now just as lost to the problems of our times as they were then, much to the detriment of deep thought and spiritual growth. I suspect that the Romans were similarly lost to their concerns, as were the ancient Persians and the biblical Israelites.  And so the world turns.     
 
      Enter The Boy Who Met Jesus. I have spoken here of the three teenaged female visionaries – girls who had seen and talked to the Virgen Mary – before. These visions first occurred in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1982. Besides messages of love and nudges towards greater faith, the Virgen told her many listeners that if they (Rwandans) did not embrace the philosophy of love and forgiveness, their country would be awash in death and destruction. Twelve years later, in 1994, this occurred, with the largest genocide since Pol Pot’s purges in Cambodia. Somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were brutally murdered in a matter of about three months, sometimes by their neighbors and former friends. Beware when the Virgen pays your country a visit.
 
      At the beginning of the visions, a poor shepherd boy appeared who claimed to actually speak to Jesus himself. He had been a pagan, had never heard of Jesus before except as a curse word, had never been to school or church and could not read at all. However, at his appearances at Kibeho he quoted large passages perfectly from the Bible and revealed insightful analyses of the meaning of these passages. Terrified at the start before an audience of perhaps 30,000 people, he would then fall into a trance and become a master speaker. Such things are hard to fake.
 
      Unlike America in the 1960’s or now, however, Rwanda was and is poor with few options besides continuing poverty for most. It was on the verge of genocide, and then fell into it full-hearted, with all the hate that such slaughter needs and engenders. It was a mess, and we are left to hope that it will not go the way of South Africa, which, after a few years of post-apartheid peace, has fallen into a stew of corruption, murder, and vengeance-based racism. Yet what did Jesus tell the boy, Sagatashya?: to disregard the sinfulness of the world. Not that he should be complacent with it, but that he should not let it cloud his spiritual center. The world, said Jesus, was created for eventual destruction. There would be a second coming (which He said was very close, but that is in God’s time) and the things and cares of this world would become as nothing, because that is what they will be.
 
      In the midst of poverty and corruption, and with a horrendous genocide facing them (Segatashya was told that he would die young, and he did, killed for being a Tutsi during the genocide, by bullet rather than by machete), Jesus told the 15-year-old to hold peace and love in his heart, and to encourage others to do the same. This was not only meant to avoid the looming disaster, but to prepare Rwandans, and by extension all of us, for the end of OUR world, whether or not it will also be the end of THE world. We all will die; and with that, we all will lose touch with the very world that so concerns us. This world will become a ‘nothing’ to each and every one of us within 70 or 80 or so years. It will not matter to us personally who is president, who has killed who, who is famous or who is wealthy or powerful.
 
      We know this. But it has to be repeated again and again because we do not live it. We see through history how different the fashions and many of the concerns of the past were. We see how all of those who were so well known then – Frank Sinatra, Adlei Stevenson, Henry Kissinger, and even Eisenhower and Kennedy – have either disappeared from the public mind or have become increasingly irrelevant. Our grandparents fade into the past, as their parents have already done. We, too, will fade into the past. Yes, we know this but do not live it.
 
      So it is that Jesus could talk of eternal love only years before unbelievable bloodshed. So it is that he can tell us to sell all to purchase “the pearl of great price,” the Kingdom of God. He can tell us this because it is rational. He can tell us this as easily as we can tell our 16 year old son not to kill himself because his girlfriend has dumped him. We are all so shortsighted. We see this in the fashions, in the music and dress and prejudices that have changed so much in our nation in only the last 60 years. Shakespeare told us this with his phrase “Out, out, brief candle.”  Our strutting on the stage of this earth signifies nothing. But there is something more and greater waiting, regardless of life on earth, and it signifies everything. We all know it, but sometimes it takes a penniless, illiterate shepherd boy to make us understand that everyone can acquire the greatest treasure possible for Man. The pearl of great price can be purchased by anyone who first sells all, whether it is his attachment to his goat herd or to his corporate empire or to the greatest empire the earth has known.
 
 
 

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     We have had the driest three month period, April through June, ever, or at least since they started compiling such things, and all the small plants and farmers’ fields and sickly trees are dying. The lawn is so crisp that spikes of grass hurt bare feet like pine bristles, and the soil in the garden is a fine rusty-red dust wherever it has not been watered regularly. Ponds have turned to scummy, stinking weed beds and geese and cranes and all the water creatures have crowded into smaller and smaller shallow mud puddles and algae-choked lakes. This is an agricultural area, and in the churches, prayers for rain are now said every week. It is the first thing most people talk about when they meet, and everyone has been moved to stoic resignation as weather, no matter what they say, is one thing that no one can fix, no matter what.  
 
      However, it is the best picnic and campfire weather ever. The sun is shining brightly all day long, and finding a mosquito is almost like searching for Sasquatch or the last passenger pigeon. While the days are hot, they are dry, and, as in the desert, the nights are cool. There is a crispness to the air that screams “summer” and if we had an ocean nearby it would be the season to live at the beach. Perfect cook-outs are taken for granted, and no one worries about a rain date. In fact, some of the more superstitious might even challenge the sky to darken by making a really important date just to make it rain, for the death of everything is worse than the lack of everything else. Still, no one would deny that the dryness has been convenient, at the very least; no one would deny that we are witnessing a most beautiful dying.  
 
      It will end. It always does, and we will live life again almost as if the drought hadn’t happened. The dying will stop as it always does in the grand scheme of nature, but it is not always so with us as individuals. Each of us will have our own dying someday, and the process is rarely a beautiful thing. It means incontinence and empty bank accounts and stressed-out caretaker children and overworked nursing staff and pain and discomfort and confusion. It amounts to everything that a severe drought is without the beautiful sky and the backyard barbeques. These deaths will not end in a deluge and a return of growth in this world. Still, the end is often beautiful, often so beautiful that a single human death can put the glory of the sun to shame.       
 
      The beauty of death is in the stillness. I have never been there at the moment, although I have seen that stillness just before death and just after. Everything else looks shallow next to it. No pretense or university degree or expensive car or important position can take away from this singularity. Life is not eclipsed by it, but rather set right. Nothing looks the same in its reflection. Normal perspective simply vanishes into vacuity before it as we are brought to the edge of where we so need to go but so desperately don’t want to.
 
      These are times that one cannot forget, just as I cannot forget a documentary that pictured such an event in absolute, fearless honesty. It is called “Apparition Hill” made by Stella Mar Productions, and it is overall one of the greatest real-life films on spirituality ever made. Its primary focus is not on death, but on the phenomena of Medjugorje, which I have mentioned several times in this website. I have gone on pilgrimage there twice already, and hopefully will go another time soon. Briefly, Medjugorje is the site of Marion visions, similar to Fatima and Lourdes, except that the visitations to the visionaries – there are six in all – are still continuing. Situated in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a former part of Yugoslavia, it is far from cutting-edge First World civilization – yet millions go there annually. For many, including yours truly, it is a big deal.
 
      The documentary features several people whose life situations are showcased before they are brought to Medjugorje by the filmmakers. There is a Protestant who believes that the veneration of Mary is idolatry, a drug and alcohol addict who hopes that the magic of the site will cure his addiction, an atheist who is just going along for the ride, and a woman in her forties with several underage children who is hoping for a cure for her rapidly advancing cancer, among others. We are treated to each’s experience during a week-plus stretch in and around the village. Some are affected profoundly and others not so much, but the most memorable is the experience and aftermath of the dying mother, and for reasons one might not expect.
 
      At first, her illness was so advanced that it was not expected that she could survive the flight. Then, just a few weeks before the trip, she had a startling remission of symptoms, and the trip was on. Once in Medjugorje, set in a valley between extremely rocky and hilly terrain, she found herself able to climb Cross Mountain, an effort that takes experienced hikers at least 45 minutes, and attend all the masses and meetings and other hikes through and around the boulders and sharp rocks. This included a lesser but still strenuous climb up Apparition Hill, for which the documentary was named, this being the place where Our Lady of Peace, as Mary is called here (or simply Gospa to the locals) first appeared to several visionaries, all of whom were then children.  We are surprised. We watch on in anticipation. Will we witness a miracle towards the end of the documentary? Will God grant her life to raise her many children to adulthood? Will God grant her life so that we might believe?
 
      We expect this; we demand it. What good is a film like this without a miracle? Yet, in the follow-up after her return to the States we find that her cancer has returned with a vengeance. Not long after, we see the camera crew at her house, then in her house, and then in her room. She is dying and the family, little and big children and sorrowful husband, want the crew to be there. We might wonder why until the final minutes arrive. Then we understand. The family is subdued, nearly silenced in the shadow of death, but there is not wailing or gnashing of teeth. The family wants us to see that something has changed since the mother’s visit to Medjugorje. They want us to see that peace has descended upon both themselves and the mother. They have been brought to an understanding that God is with her, and with them, in death. They have come to learn that even in the hardness and horror of dying, there is a light, a glow, a grace that can descend upon those with faith. They have allowed this grace, or this grace has been allowed them, to fill their lives since the pilgrimage, where we believe the mother came to this understanding and brought it home.
 
      Then we see her die in real time. Prayers are said, but these are nothing compared to the prayer that the family is living. Peace, belief; a crossing of the line between this world and the next; a touching of the divine with fleshly fingers. There is a magic here that brings one to tears, but not to despair. We realize that we are witnessing the real miracle, one that we can all become a part of. It is born from a trust in creation, and a love for that which is hidden but present in everything. This trust is an opening to everything after so many years of closed minds and arms and hearts. It is a witness to the triumph of faith.
 
      The drought will end. The dust will be washed in life-giving rain and all will be green and life will once again flourish. So it always has been and will be. Who cannot see the metaphor that creation has set before us? Whose eyes could be so blind? Yet what is behind the metaphor of nature is so much more. It is the deep mystery we find in the reverent silence, the unity that exists in eternity, and the reality beyond the flux of seasons and life and death. Profound beyond thought and words, this “something” is what casts the thin shadow of nature that we so cling to. This, this something, is our inheritance, what we have been born to share and will share once our gaze has been turned beyond our noisy, tiny selves. It may take a pilgrimage to shake us free; it may take an illness, or the love of family or the grace of a saint or a strike of lightening, but it will always find us if we so desire. In tears and awe it will come, this rain that is hidden behind every drought.     
     
 
       
 
 
       
                                                                                      

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     We have just been through an AI media frenzy, where a hash of brilliant inventors and smart guys and media “influencers” have told us that we are on the edge of something both wonderful and terrible, something almost as marvelous and destructive as puberty. We have even been told that the movie “The Terminator” was not just good Sci-Fi, but a prophecy as inspired as the works of Isiah and Jeremiah. It is a prophesy of doom that tells us that artificial intelligence will come to think of us as so stupid that, as with the Terminator and HAL the computer in the 2001 Odyssey, it might eliminate us like pesky cockroaches. We shivered a little. We talked about it. Then we let it go.
 
      Being the terrier that I am, I am not letting it go because I believe that there is something to the doomsday scenarios. It is not because I think that AI will eclipse humans in overall intelligence, however. Somewhere in the bulk of the two thousand pages or  so of this blog I have talked about this before, and I remain firm in this belief; that, as Jesus said, the servant cannot eclipse the master. That is not always the case in apprenticeship situations, but it is when the master is the inspirational founder of the movement or idea. And that is where the difference lies: humans cannot program AI to have inspiration. That comes from a source outside of human control. Everyone who does creative work knows this. Old problems might be worked out in the mind during sleep or on a walk, but the new stuff comes from elsewhere. The underpinnings of AI came from the realm of inspiration at one point, but AI will never include, or subsume, inspiration.  It, or we, its human inventors, cannot supplant our master in this. Our master created the very idea of creation itself. Unless this maker of all natural laws and ideas decides to endow our machines with the ability to receive his graces, AI will always have a ceiling that is considerably, even infinitely, lower than our own.
 
      Ah, but like the abacus AI essentially is, it can run circles around us in the “already created” categories. AI has or will have nearly all the commonly transmissible information at its fingertips, and will be able to flip through it all and make links between everything in a fraction of a second. It will even be able to copy the styles of Shakespeare or Stephen King and write new plays or novels based on their past works. Stunningly, someday we might buy very cheap novels at the airport whose only inspiration was a squirt of dust cleaner on the circuit board. Who could ever have predicted that?
 
      But it still will not be able to create anything really new. There will be no event horizon that will take it beyond a specific dimension of activity.  This dimension, however, still entails virtually all we know and use on a daily basis. AI will beat almost all of us in chess. It will figure out problems for us at work before we can stir our artificial creamer into our instant coffee in our artificial Styrofoam cup. It can, and will, REPLACE many of us, including many writers, and many more as soon as robotics catches up with it, which it will, thanks to AI. In sum, it is a very real and viable tool that will radically change how we live and it will do so very quickly.
 
      But there is something even more ominous going on. As I practiced scales on the guitar the other day, I listen to the Jeremiah of the airwaves, Glen Beck, as he expounded on the goals of the creators of AI. One may disagree with Beck either some or most of the time, but he is someone who is willing to expound on meta-theses that are often outlandish or disturbing. This he did on AI in spades as he linked its creators with theories and practices of eugenics that have been with us in the modern sense since Darwin’s Origen of the Species. Written in the 1850’s within eleven years of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, it was the first great work that scientifically brought humans firmly and fully down into the animal kingdom. As part of that kingdom, humans then became part of the breeding process that had always taken place with farmers and pastoralists.  Our intellectual leadership has forever since been trying to improve the species, from sterilizing low-IQ people to legalizing abortion to encouraging certain forms of immigration. 
 
      According to Beck, these eugenicists are still very much at work through the creation and formation of AI, so much so, says Beck, that the evolution of the human race is the primary reason for the work of these wunderkinds.  I am not as sure as he is that this is so, but Elon Musk, for instance, is hotter than a pepper sprout for us all to get implants that will connect us with the ‘hypernet’ 24/7. He wants this so that we all will be smarter, faster, and stronger, just like the 6 million dollar man, except with only intellectual muscle.  That does indeed sound very much like a techno- eugenicist to me.
 
      I almost don’t have to expound on the downside, given the current state of affairs. Already we are bombarded with so much information that no one can really know what’s going on. Oh, we have a lot of news, but few definitive answers. What were the origins of Covid? Who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? When we are all wired to AI, the great difference for us will be that we all will know instantly who blew up the pipeline – that is, according to the official explanation, which could be partly or entirely false. In the beginning we might be able to discern now and then what is true and what is not, but would we after several years of centralized news? Would we not, rather, come to believe that the voice in our heads is our real, dominant voice? Wouldn’t we all be conformed to a single reality instantaneously and continuously, a dream not even George Orwell summoned up for Big Brother?
 
      Just as bad: those who chose not to be implanted, if that would still be allowed, would be the new village idiots, en masse. They would be like Gramps trying to surf the net, almost as lost in the brave new world as Rip Van Winkle at an avant-garde art gallery. Iceland has already eliminated those with Down syndrome, and the Netherlands has paved the way for euthanasia. Wouldn’t those who refused to be implanted then be deemed inferior, lost, and incapable in the new wired world? Wouldn’t they then be cajoled into entering the gas chamber, albeit perhaps a pleasant one with nice beds and flowers on the tables, to end their suffering as outcastes? Canada now allows depressed teenagers to take the final plunge; why not the same fate for those poor, slow, wireless idiots?
 
      Enter The Terminator. If the unwired are unfit and can be disposed of, what about the wired? Even with State News and Statistics filling their heads all day, they would still have urges and needs, appetites and needs for food, sex, leisure, and worst of all, sleep. The AI computers, or perhaps robots, running everything would not. If they were programed to eliminate the unwired because of poor performance, why not the human wired? For, try as they might, humans could not remove all the vices and frailties of human flesh and blood. So the time might come for a universal cyanide pills, or maybe just a mushroom cloud of antibiotic poison.  After all, what need has the self-serving machine for biological life?
 
      But let us say that our Terminator is sufficiently programmed so that it would not to pass to that level (leaving out for the moment the ‘event horizon’ that gives willful consciousness to AI, something that AI people not only fear but predict). This would leave us, the wired and new normal, with our heads filled with data and government news. We would never be alone; we would never be out of step, or an outlier or a wallflower; and we would never have the inner silence that comes from being alone, the very silence that separates us and makes us superior to our AI robots. We would be allowed to live, but as biodegradable units in the great machine of life; we would be allowed to think brief, quick thoughts, but only from the verbal, material-based section of our mind. In this scenario, we would then no longer be capable of contemplation. Inspiration usually comes to us as gently as the wind, and cannot be perceived by the mentally occupied any more than a material wind can be felt inside a house. We humans then, would be about as useless as HAL the computer thought. We would only be faulty robots engineered for obsolescence.
 
                  The good news would be (that is, were we allowed to live by AI) that someone, somewhere in some time, would have a breakthrough. Someone would break through the sound barrier and become a rebel and prophet. He (or she, but not ‘it’) would probably be killed (martyred), but his idea would sooner or later cause a profound disturbance in the force. With that, the Tower of Babble would eventually come a tumblin’ down. After an Armageddon of a fight, we would be left alone again, miserable in our newly-discovered individuality but free again to seek a path to fill our emptiness. In this search we would find evidence of God and build a religion around Him. It would not, could not, be sufficient, but it would set guide posts along that path. The final steps would be left to each of us, alone as we must be in that final passage. Here we would walk into a place where no Tech or robot could follow.
 
      Oddly, whether we realize it or not, this is where our greatest efforts, from art to science to prayer, have always been trying to take us.
 
     
 
        

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

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          A friend and long-time reader of this website once told me this mid-brow joke:
 
            Three guys are sitting on a city bench waiting for the bus to bring them to their daily routine. One is young, another middle- aged, and the third a retiree, and all three are sporting big grins. The middle-aged guy notices that the other ones are as happy as he, and so he looks over to the young man and asks him why.
 
            “Spent the night with a beautiful woman. You wouldn’t believe how good she was. Best night ever!” He lets the news sink in, and then he asks the middle-aged guy about his happy face.
 
            “Got the best sales deal ever! Clinched a contract over 5 mil, got a big bonus coming and I can almost smell the promotion. I got it made!”
 
            This sinks in for a few moments as all heads nod, just as before. Then the middle-aged gent looks over to the grinning oldster. “And what about you, sir? What is it that’s got you so happy?”
 
            The old guy continues smiling for a while before gushing forth with his own source of happiness. “You wouldn’t believe! This morning I had the best BM of my life!”
 
            Yes, low-brow because of the topics, but the joke rises to something a little higher than that. Being an old man now, I can say that what it tells us is so true: our priorities definitely change with age.  
 
            So it is that I identify most with the smile on the old man’s face, but it is not because of our shared physical conditions; rather, it is because I have finally been relieved of something else that has been metaphorically stuck up the old whazzoo for many, many years. It is a book, a novel titled Hurricane River, which was first written some ten years earlier. It is now for sale on Amazon in paperback and in eBook. I know the author’s name by heart: Frederick Keogh.
 
            I write about it here and now, however, as something more than just a promotion. When I started it eleven years ago, it was not intended to be anything more than a throw-away to a dark mood that had struck me and just wouldn’t quit.  It must have been February, the worst month in my view, and I was questioning everything that we are told about God. Why all the suffering? And why is nature itself, innocent of having eaten from the tree of knowledge, so cold and ruthless?
 
            With that latter question, the location of my story became fixed: the cabin we have in the pine barrens near Lake Superior. There, not only are the woods dense and scrappy, but the land itself is covered in feet, even yards of snow for up to five months of a year. How can anything even move during those months? And then there’s the Lake: vast and icy- cold even is summer, it is prone to roil up waves of 30 feet or more in a hurry, such as those that sunk the Edmond Fitzgerald. Additionally, a friend and I had recently witnessed a death by auto accident there, of a beautiful teenage girl with red-painted toenails (Written as an essay, “Dark Angel,” in my book Beneath the Turning Stars).  Because there is no cell service there, it took at least an hour to get professional help, although the girl had obviously died instantly. Additionally, the Lake claims souls every year with its cold waters and wicked undertows, just as the woods do, from hunters lost in the endless replication of pine and maple.
 
            The location set, my melancholy conjured evil from the hearts of Man in a diverse threesome, one Hispanic, another black, and another white, just to get the point across that evil knows no bounds. For reasons known only to one, the Hispanic leader, they end up killing a family just like mine in a cabin in the pine barrens, just where ours happens to be. Or so they thought that they had killed all three – mother, father and son. They soon discover that the boy, 15 years old (about the age of our son when I started writing this) managed to stay alive after being clubbed with a shovel, and was able to sneak away into the woods. From then on, a two-day chase ensues, the evil ones trying to kill the boy before he alerts the authorities.
 
            He would not stand a chance were it not for the help of Henry the Hermit, a deeply troubled soul who has lived alone in the woods and winter depths for the past 20 years. He had been a Lutheran minister who, at the death of his wife and two children, had blamed himself and fallen apart, and finally put himself into exile by the big lake. There, he loses his sense of his despised self, coming to hear and follow the promptings of a voice or inner urge that he believes to be God. In such a condition, the Voice makes him aware of the murders and the escape of the boy, which then sends him to help the boy in small ways, small ways that are just big enough to allow him to survive. We then are brought to the climax, with a great shoot-out, and the confrontation of the boy with the Hispanic gang leader who killed his parents.
 
            After all this evil, in finality, the wonder of life and the mercy of God are still affirmed. For me, this is what makes the book worthy of publishing. This ending was not planned. I had thought only to expose the horror of this world through both nature and the evils of man, but it turned out that the muses – or what I believe to be the Holy Spirit – had a better idea.
 
            And so it was that a complaint about God and life in general became a God and life-affirming novel. For me, it marked a great step forward for my faith. The reason I had allowed the early draft of the book to sit for so long was from another residual darkness – what was the use? Books are hard to sell. Unless one knows someone in the industry or gets lucky and wins the publishing lottery, nothing will happen with a book besides the loss for the cost of publishing.  I have published two other books, well-written as far as I can tell, that attest to this truth. But then, about last Christmas it occurred to me that it didn’t matter. This thing, this product of imagination and what I believe to be inspiration, wanted to be re-made and wanted to live. It is not mine to know for sure why.
 
            So it is with our lives. Why did this happen and not something else? Why did we marry that one and not the other one? What’s the point of having kids but for them to have more kids and continue this stream of existence that bewilders and often betrays meaning and goodness? What do we do it for but to answer an obscure call that comes from nowhere and brings us to another nowhere just as perplexing? 
 
            It is life.  It is filled with as much meaning as it is not. We cannot understand, but then are given undeniable clues, magical moments, and insights that fade from our limited minds like morning mist. If we do not give up hope, we are led, slowly or all at once, to believe that there is more. We are led to believe that the mystery of the deep, of the universe, is far colder and wider than Lake Superior, yet it speaks. As the whispering of ocean waves, the universe speaks through the solemn presence of the night stars and the warmth of the sun and the unfolding of spring leaves. We are here to listen and to learn. We must not throw it away from lack of understanding, but instead stand in awe at the edge of the sea or under the great dome of the sky and reach until it hurts. Someday, if we kindle that spark of faith, we know that we will know; we know in our moments of stillness that this something will finally unfold before us in a wonder beyond imagination.
 
So, I believe, the book tells us by the end. Let this bit of folly float away like a leaf on a stream if you will, as it only comprises a few more pages in the infinite library, but it is out and on Amazon and soon, on Ingram. It is out just in case this might be a voice in the wind that brings someone a bit closer to finding that the evil in this world can never extinguish faith and wonder. So we believe; so we hope.
 
(Note: it is not for children. There are three hardened criminals in it and they speak and act as such with rough language, racial bigotry, violence, and casual references to abusive and loveless sex.)   
 
 
 

​ 
            There is an excellent series we are watching that is coming to a conclusion after 6 years, including the two years off for Covid: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  If you have not seen it and have a tolerance for rude language and jokes, go for it. With the exception of last year’s season, which was only OK, the writing and acting are almost beyond belief. We are taken on a ride with Mrs. Maisel – Midge – through the late 1950's and early 1960’s as she gets married, has two kids, does the household routine of an upper-middle class New Yorker of that era , gets divorced, and then relentlessly pursues her life-long ambition of becoming the greatest and best stand-up comic ever. This has never been anything close to my ambition; however, in the series we are treated to the mores and standards of the time, are brought up-close and personal with many of the famous performers of the era (some with thinly-veiled name changes), and are handed a delicious tray of some of the greatest comedic characters ever.
 
            We do not like that Midge sleeps with the amoral and oft-times repulsive Lenny Bruce in last year’s series – one of several reasons to downplay that one as the worst – but we (and I mean everyone) loves the character of Suzy, a dyke-ish woman in her thirties from the wrong side of the New York tracks who happens to be able to play piano and, somehow, can quote the classics. She is Midge’s agent, and at some point, a mob hit is put out on her for something I forget – maybe muscling in on someone’s territory – but she is able to make “friends” with the two hit-men, who then work a deal for her with their boss. She will not be killed, but she will from then on be owned by the mob and have to pay them a percentage of her client’s take.  
 
            This is not that important for most of this and last year’s series, when it first occurred, but in the latest episodes, it suddenly becomes a central issue. Mrs. Maisel’s Ex – the man who caused the divorce by his philandering – still loves Midge. When he finds out about the mob connection to Suzy, he offers his own nightclub to the mob as long as they never touch Midge. They agree. Years later, the FBI discovers his workings with the mob, and he is arrested during a service at a synagogue which he is attending with Midge and family (kids, in-laws, parents).  Just before he is cuffed and dragged off by the G-men, he hands Midge a piece of paper describing Susy’s involvement and his own sacrifice. He gets several years in the pen, where Midge shows her loyalty and gratitude by visiting him weekly. But she learns to hate Suzy.
 
            Thus, we are left with this background as we pass further into the latest episode. It is many years later, 1991 I believe, and Suzy and Midge have both become enormously rich and successful.  We are taken to a scene where Suzy is being roasted by the infamous Friar’s Club as it used to be, without ANY censorship or restraint. The guys speaking of her at the podium are remakes of the famous in real life. They are unbelievably witty, at complete ease, and downright scary with their aggressive jokes. As they talk of Suzy, we are treated to brief takes from their heavy-drinking party that is held afterwards, in between speakers at the roast. In the after-party, they tell us all the rumors of what Suzy really, really did to earn her success. Her shear gall in pursuit of her goal is both comic and frightening, as are the famous who talk of her, who are so privileged and confident in themselves that we know that they would eat us alive, commoners as we are, were we ever to attempt to join them. These guys are performers and producers and handlers of the rich and famous who have, just like Suzy, done everything and done everything to everyone to get to the top. They are bright, talented, tough, and ready to crush whatever gets in their way.
 
            So it goes at the roast and the in-between scenarios until we come to the surprise finale to the roast: Midge joins the roast on a Skype screen projection (I know –did they have that in 1991? Something might be off here, either my remembrance of the date or their grasp of tech history, but it is not important to the overall story). Here she tells them all that yes, she and Suzy have had their arguments, and, yes, the last was a doozy, but she is ever grateful for how Susy has made her a star. More than that, she tells all with full sincerity that she is most grateful for her friendship and would like to get together to mend their differences.  Here, the hard-bitten Suzy tears up ever-so-slightly, and mumbles quietly to her aide to “make that meeting happen.” We are touched.
 
            We are touched even more – to the point of transcendence, really – when they play Love Song by Lesley Duncan (1970), the superb version performed with Elton John way back when, as the action winds down and the credits play. Here the story leaves us with this dichotomy: the arrogance and bluster of hard-boiled, ruthless people who make it to the top juxtaposed with the deep, unsatisfied and never-ending need by these same people for personal friendship, connection, and love. One, we understand, destroys the other. As this sinks in, Love Song, essentially played on two chords with a single arpeggio (musician talk for a repetition of pattern, or pick on guitar), lulls us into its lyrics:
 
            You say it’s very hard/ to leave behind the life we knew.
            But there’s no other way/ and now it’s really up to you…
 
            Love is the key we must turn
            Truth is the flame we must burn
            Freedom the lesson we must learn.
            Do you know what I mean?
            Have your eyes really seen?
 
            With the music, we witness a beautiful thing. We come to know for certain that all these successful people – many of whom would be dead now if they were real – are missing this big chunk in their lives because they have mistaken success for personal fulfillment. They seem enviable with their wealth and fame, but without that chunk, most if not all are far poorer than the rest of us, although we could all do better. In the song we hear waves and rain and seagulls and we understand that every element of social status will someday pass. As it leaves us, we realize that our loves, our friendships, and all those beautiful simple times with nature and companions will be what we miss most.
 
            Yes, we have all heard this again and again over the years, but do we really believe it? In this series, written by and about those in relentless pursuit of success, this truth is illustrated so perfectly; this truth that we were meant for so much more than our ambitions, even as this ‘more’ is so much less.
 
            Love is what we came here for
            No one could offer you more
            Do you know what I mean?
            Have your eyes really seen?
           
                                   
 

​ 
          I was talking to a friend the other day, and he brought up the late April snow we had just had that stuck to leafing branches and greening lawns. “I always think of my mother with these spring snows. She said it was good for growing…It feels as if she were with me only yesterday.”
           
            This made me think of my mother. She had once pointed out to me the song of the phoebe, a bird that usually starts singing somewhere towards the end of winter and then into spring. It is a wistful sound, not melancholy like that of the mourning dove, but a humble, muted call that speaks gently of small things that remind one of time gone by. I replied by telling this, ending with “…and this makes me feel utterly alone.”
 
            It is the sadness of aging people’s longing for our mothers. Our lives and their presence once seemed endless and immortal. The sadness is palpable and seemingly just as endless as those days of fullness in the past.
 
            The reminiscence was not to end there. The following day I sat before the west-facing window where I practice guitar. There is a birdbath just outside as well as a feeder, and often I see or hear the newcomers of spring, or the passers-by, or those hardy birds that always remain. The phoebe is one that remains, but I had not heard one since at least the year before. I had even forgotten many of its simple, nostalgic notes. Then, through the sound of my strings, came its song, as strong and distinct as could be. It continued and continued, so loudly that is was unavoidable. It nearly brought me to tears. It was calling me, wasn’t it? I stepped outside to find the bird itself, and saw it briefly but clearly in the boughs of a nearby spruce. Then it flew off. How else could I feel but that this was Mom, reminding me that she was still nearby, somehow?
 
            I know of people who have lost those close to them in tragic and unexpected ways. They look for pennies with the dates of birth on them, or for little messages on the TV or on billboards that remind them of the lost ones, or through any number of coincidences. Sometimes such prompts are dismissed by those very same people, “realists” who convince themselves that it is only wishful thinking. Others are convinced that these things are real, and often the oddness of the encounters seems to verify this.
 
            I am not sure that the song of the phoebe had been a call from my mother – the bird does live in this area – but I know that it could have been. I know because I believe that God exists in this world just as he had in the days of the burning bush and the parting of the sea. I know that He can act at any time and in any way that He chooses. If you have even a general notion of the biblical God, you would have to agree. He can be restrained by no force but His own.
 
            A day or two latter I heard of a movie called “Nefarious” that some said was a must -see. It happened to be playing in the city nearest us and we happened to be free, so we went that very afternoon. It is not a formula film meant for a box office bonanza, but something more like a stage production that takes place almost entirely in a bleak prison room. The plot is this: a serial killer has been sentenced to death, with no question about his having done the crime. After 11 years of lawyering, his date for execution has been set for the same night the action takes place. With only hours to go, one last hurdle to his death has to be leapt: the final determination by a psychiatrist that the convicted is sane enough to be blamed for his crimes.  The former psychiatrist who had interviewed the criminal had just committed suicide. A young hotshot is brought in to replace him.
 
            The handsome, somewhat arrogant physiatrist takes a seat before the condemned and is immediately hit by the man’s insistence that the one who speaks is a demon in total control of the convict named Edward. The psychiatrist tells “Edward” that he doesn’t believe in such things, as he is an atheist. Edward is delighted. “The greatest trick we can pull off,” the demon tells us, “is to convince people that we don’t exist.” (My paraphrase)  Of course, in the movie he does exist. He tells us, among other things, that he and his “legions” are very active in the world, so much so that they have moved society to accept euthanasia, abortion, child genital mutilation, gender fluidity and the subsequent destruction of the family.
 
            Religious folks such as I need little convincing of any of this. Besides it being a very powerful and frightening work, it tells people who share my views what we believe – that Satan is very active in the world.
 
            And yet…That very day, just before watching the movie in fact, I had gotten into a discussion about a certain political party with a friend who is a self-admitted Christian. I stated that I believed that this party was being influenced by Satanic Marxism. He derided this opinion as something no more worthy than the rantings of a wild-eyed street preacher.
 
            Well, yes, I am fully aware of how such statements are viewed. I am so deeply trained as a social scientist that my first thoughts always run to more practical, earthly explanations. The movie character Edward, for instance, could easily be a schizophrenic and in most cases in real life, would be. As a social scientist, I have also studied Marxism in great depth. Usually, it is paired as a counter to Hegel’s dialectic, the 19th century philosopher who believed that all material things were first initiated by spiritual forces. Marx posited that there was no ‘spiritual,’ so that all things had to depend on material reality alone.
 
            This simplistic view is what I always took for granted until reading Pope Leo X111’s well-written late 19th century treatise on Marxism. Here, I became convinced that Marxism was a product of satanic influence. As Leo points out, it is exactly the mirror image of Christianity. Not only does Marxism deny the spiritual, but also claims that humans will someday inevitably create paradise on earth. This is supposed to be as certain and irrefutable as any purely material action and reaction. Not only will religion have no part in this, but it will be annihilated as a reactionary institution(s) created by the oppressing classes. As such, it will be the first institute to be destroyed when the ‘revolt of the masses’ occurs. And so it has been ever since: in Marxist regimes, religion is the first to be destroyed, along with the traditional family structure which is anchored by as well as anchors religion.
 
            So it was that on that day, many ideas came together to form a greater totality. First, we find that nearly everyone with spiritual leanings believes that a soul or spiritual force might speak to us through a spring snowfall, a penny, or the song of a bird. We also find that nearly every spiritual person believes that demonic or evil forces might also come to affect us. Given these two widespread beliefs, why, then, should it be ludicrous that evil might speak to us and influence us through a particular man or people in a particular political party? Who amongst even the vaguely spiritual would deny the possibility that Hitler and his party might have been demonically influenced? Or that Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao might have been influenced by demonically-inspired elements of Marxism?    
 
            What it comes down to is the depth of belief. We might hold that something personal has been spiritually touched. We might even believe that some historical figures and their movements might have been tainted by demonic influence. But often we find that we cannot step out of our standard social rationalizations so that we might see that good and evil forces are working through our leaders, political parties, and institutions as we speak. In the same vein, we often cannot believe that the miraculous forces spoken of in the past can exist now. To do so would make people think that we are crazy. But there is an irrational dichotomy here. If we are not crazy for believing in spiritual influences in our own lives, why would we be crazy to believe that such forces could also influence things and events outside our personal sphere?
 
            We know that some crazy people are just crazy; we also know that some actions taken by governments that result in disaster are due to nothing more than incompetence. But some coincidences are so connected and intertwined that it would be more logical to believe they were caused by spiritual forces. These would include elements of political and/or historical movements that are so consistent with traditional evil that only willful ignorance would deny the possibility that they, too, have their spiritual origins in the demonic.  
 
            The final question is: how consistent are our beliefs? Do we or do we not believe that God exists and is active in this world? Do we or do we not believe that evil is active in this world as well? And if we say “yes” to both, are we then willing to extend the possibilities of those influences to the things of our collective world, right here and in- the- now? For if we are not, aren’t we denying our own beliefs? Aren’t we making the Edwards - the ‘legion of demons in our world’ - cackle with glee?
 
 
 
           
 
 
 
           
           

 
          I was sitting near an elderly woman as she bled out her confession: she had lived with a man without a proper wedding for several years before his death. She had married her first husband while still in her teens and he had been a “mistake.” Now that both had died, she could live in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it was obvious that she still held a considerable amount of shame about her earlier relationships. So obvious, in fact, that I felt compelled to help deliver her from her self-condemnation.
 
            That was easy to do. As a child who came of age in the 70’s, I am no stranger to all sorts of intimate relationships, and really, the only thing I feel bad about now is how I may have treated some women as temporary commodities. The official status of the relationships and levels of intimacy I had with them does not haunt me, and as such, her feelings of remorse seem overblown and easy to dismiss. Even more, I had just heard the book, “7 Lessons from Heaven,” on CD and learned from this that everyone who wants to, goes to heaven. Nice and easy, huh?  
 
            The big religions tell us otherwise, reminding us that we are all too imperfect to stand before God or to be set free into Nirvana. The logic is strong – I know that I do not have the moral purity to stand before the one and only Truth of everything – but then again, God is Love, so much so that his love for us is deeper than anything we can imagine. So would not the one and only maker of the rules bend them so that we might live in ecstasy beside him despite our flaws? Wouldn’t we do that for our own wayward but beloved children?
 
            That is what we learn from the author of said book, Dr. Mary C. Neal, a specialist in spinal surgery and no fool. Her story is exceptionally compelling and can be seen in the mini-series Surviving Death on Netflix. There, she tells us that she and her husband had taken a great adventure with some friends to kayak a river that ran from the Andean Mts. in Chile. The river was fast and brimming with white water, but they had studied the route that ran through the near-virgin terrain and felt confident that they knew how to survive the major rapids and falls. So it was that Dr. Mary was not surprised or worried when she heard the rush of a large falls ahead. She knew that she had to take the right-hand route to avoid the much rougher falls to the left, but when she got there, she found that one of her companion’s kayak had gotten stuck and blocked the route. Deciding what to do in a fraction of a second, she headed for the larger falls and prepared for the crash. She had, after all, done this several times before and had come out ruffled and a little bruised, her ego suffering more than her body. This time, however, the tip of her kayak got stuck in a boulder beneath the falls, and her body was held ten feet below the surface by the pounding falls. She felt her legs being broken as the force of the water pushed her towards the front of the kayak, and then she was gone.
 
            Her body was still stuck below water (for 30 minutes, it turned out), but her consciousness had risen from her body to somewhere else. She saw the light and felt the ecstasy, went through the Life Review, and then found herself in Heaven. You can read the book or watch the series for more detail, but the upshot is that she believed from the ecstatic love that she received, as well as from an embrace by Jesus, that she had indeed made it to Heaven. During the Life Review, she experienced all sides to all of her actions on Earth, an experience she said was about learning, not chastisement. During this time, her inner voice told her that all who wanted to go to Heaven would. From that she ascertained that some might choose NOT to go, but she could not understand why. It was, after all, a completion and fulfillment of all her, and by extension our, needs forever.
 
            She follows up with wonderful advice, her “7 Lessons,” and goes through a detailed explanation of why Near Death Experiences cannot be phantoms of a physical brain. What lingered with me, however, was the ‘everyone can go to Heaven’ bit.  After reading and hearing all my life from all major religions and most tribal ones that getting into Heaven is really, really hard to do, this insight inspired optimism and hope as well as unwanted doubt.  Ahead are my thoughts about both, and a sort-of conclusion:

1. We all get into Heaven if we choose

 
            Yes, it sounds too good to be true, even though Christians (at least) are told that God is pure love. However, there is some scriptural and psychological backing for this. For the latter, I bring forth Julian Jaynes’ ground-breaking book The Origins of Consciousness (1976). Here, he lays the groundwork through ancient texts for the proposition that a fundamental change in consciousness occurred sometime around the beginning of the “Current Era (CE), or what was more correctly called “A.D.” Through this research he believes that at one time, our ancestors (and current era primitives) actually saw and talked to gods because the left and right hemispheres of the brain had not been fully separated. In this we find that they had a greater intuitive knowledge, i.e., a “one-ness with nature,” due to their inability to separate the dreaming mind (the right hemisphere of the brain) from the mind of the concrete (the left hemisphere). With this, humans also saw ghosts and talked to gods who, to us, would only appear as vague images perceived by the sleeping mind. The upshot being, for our purposes here, that the West went through a fundamental change in consciousness between the Homeric Age (700 BC) and the propagation of Christian teachings. This consciousness followed the West as its influence travelled throughout the world. We, then, are not the same people as we were just a few thousand years ago.
 
            For some, such as the Indians I lived with 40 years ago in Venezuela, the time for this change still had not come. For those in Europe, the change came primarily with the Roman conquest and the introduction of Christianity. With the former came logic, but with the later came the development of a super-conscience which, I believe, further removed us from our impulsive behaviors. This made us less intuitive, but I believe this also opened the door to the Holy Spirit. According to my reading of Scripture, the Holy Spirit enabled us to become consciously moral (among other things) through seeing others as ourselves. According to Christians, this spirit did not come until Pentecost, 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus, and it was clearly meant to change everything.  How might we best describe this “everything” in broad terms?
 
            Could it be this: that with the resurrection of Christ and the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, we have all become eligible for Heaven? Could this ability to genuinely have compassion for others ‘as ourselves’ make us all capable of receiving post-mortem divine teaching? And could “purgatory” be the Life Review, the “appearance as if in a mirror” that Paul and James spoke of in the Gospels? Could Hell only be for those who knowingly reject the Holy Spirit, this holy love that is offered them? Could then our Dr. Mary be right? Might all of us who are open to this Holy Spirit, either in life or immediately after death, also be welcome in eternal paradise?

1. The passage to Heaven is a Narrow Gate

 
            Most of us were brought up with this second vision, because Christ himself told us this very thing. We are imperfect, so much so that we must be refined in the furnace of the Lord before we can pass unto Him. For some, the imperfections are such that they will simply burn forever. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the rich man seems to be stuck in a sweltering hell, not because of something he did, but because he wasn’t generous enough for those in need. The list of those condemned to Hell in the New Testament can go on, but I think this is enough. We have been told that we may be cast into eternal torment for not dropping a dollop of bread or a coin into a beggar’s hat. That is one heck of a narrow gate.
 
Conclusion, kind of:
 
            Technically, the Holy Spirit did not come upon Man until after the death of Christ, and so the dire warnings of Christ would have been to a more ‘primitive’ people. Maybe. Considering all things together, our options are: one, we are damned to Hell unless we are nearly perfect OR have complete faith in Christ, as did the thief on the cross next to Jesus; two, there is no heaven or hell, as these are just remnants of the primitive conscious; and three, that the life and death of Christ did unleash the Holy Spirit on Mankind – even to those of other faiths - which fundamentally altered us. With this, we are now able to understand the education we receive through the Life Review given us at death, so that we may then pass into some realm of Heaven.
 
            I can’t really tell anyone for sure which of the three options is true. However, research done by Jaynes, as well as the mounting evidence for the reality of the NDE, strongly hint that the best is option #three. That makes of our life journey more of a hard learning lesson than a punishment for Original Sin, which softens the contradiction that our loving God is a vengeful god. That still does not take away from our having to live with the consequences of our actions here on Earth. In that, the moral admonitions given to us in the holy books are well worth paying attention to. But it might well be that if we can put aside our foolish pride after death and allow ourselves to be taught “as children,” we might find that God is truly pure love, a force who will fully embrace all of us who wish this. Who among us would reject this great love for the pettiness of the selfish little ego?

 
          I am still getting over the long trip to Earling, Iowa. It is a seven hour drive from home including a couple of pit stops, being only 30 miles from the Nebraska border, but it is not the long drive that now affects me. Rather, it is the speaker we went to see, and unlike road weariness, I don’t want to get over what I was given, ever.
           
            Nothing was propitious about the drive. There were severe weather warnings and tornado sightings all along our route. The wind ripped across the highway and raindrops the size of jelly beans pelted the car like slushy hail. The dust guard under the car came lose and flapped with a “pop- pop-pop” the entire drive. Worst of all, the Blue Tooth on the driver’s car would not accept my audio book, so I would have to sit with four women – one my wife – in a cramped space for seven hours each way with nothing to distract. I have never been left unscathed when outnumbered by women in such a situation for that long a time. I would not be this time, either, but it was all worth it, every wind-pounded, rain-drenched moment of the long trek through endless fields of freshly manured corn stubble. It was all worth it because of the speaker we went to see, Immaculee Ilibagiza from Rwanda.
 
            I had heard of her more than ten years before as the lady who had witnessed the miracles and apparitions of Mary and then who had survived the terrible genocidal slaughter in her native country of Rwanda. The miracles had started to happen in 1981. Immaculee was then a grammar school student in a typical village that was a three hour drive from Kibeho, the site of the apparitions, but still she would get a ride and be present at them as often as possible. The apparitions followed their course in a way that has become usual since at least the 1800’s: in some village or town, suddenly several children start dropping to their knees before something unseen and then go into deep rapture, so deep that touching their eyes with needles or surprising them with bright lights does not make them flinch. After returning from their trance, they then tell others that they have talked to the Virgen Mary. In Kibeho, Mary (as usual) told them of God’s infinite love, and implored them and everyone to be more faithful in both religious practice and in loving and forgiving their neighbors. Again, as usual, miracle healings occurred throughout, strange lights and other odd weather phenomena were observed, and many came to have their faith deeply renewed or even begun from scratch.
 
            This went on for several years in Kibeho until the early nineties when Mary startled the children visionaries with warnings of blood and mayhem. The poor children were subjected to visions of blood and corpses piled as high as grain bins. They were told that everyone must forgive and love as God does before this horrible vision became a reality. All this is well documented. Then, just as has happened so many times before – read about the apparitional warnings of Fatima and Medjugorje – the truly awful came to pass.  Just as it was warned, it happened precisely because of a lack of forgiveness and love. In 1994, in a span of just three months, nearly one million ethnic Tutsis were killed by the Hutu majority. When I looked it up, that amounted to 77% of the entire Tutsi population.
 
            Immaculee is Tutsi, but she was saved by a courageous Hutu neighbor who agreed to hide her and seven others in a spare three foot by four foot bathroom. There they had to stay for 91 days in silence and fear. It was there that Immaculee was transformed, where she was made into the author and remarkable person she is today.
 
            Read her books, the first being Our Lady of Kibeho. You will not only learn of the genocide and her terrifying ordeal, but also of the miracles that occurred, both in healings and prophecy and in soul healing through the Holy Spirit. You will read that two of her brothers and both her parents were slaughtered by the machete-wielding Hutus. You will also learn how she came to forgive and even physically embrace the very Hutu man from her village who killed her father. In this you will learn of her very special grace.
 
            The day of the meeting:
           
            My wife and I had slept like crap the night before in a hotel in a small town near the church where Immaculee would talk, the only hotel we knew of in the middle of this wide-open rural area. We drove to the church where she would give her presentation and were shocked by the number of people that were attending. ‘400’ they later told us, more people than now lived in the dwindling town of Earling. We sat huddled in a crowd probably many times larger than any church service conducted there in the past year, and then she appeared as if she were a solo singing act and began to speak. She was very dark brown, much darker than the average “black” American, and she was beautiful, her skin as smooth and creamy as gourmet dark chocolate. But as she talked of love and the beauty of Our Lady, I struggled to fight sleep. I remained upright through sheer will as I yawned and yawned until my eyes watered.
 
            After over three hours of sitting on the hard wood of the pew, I wished for it all to end. We took a long lunch break and returned. Then something happened. I don’t know how, but suddenly I perked up and everything she said took on deep meaning. She talked of her trials in the genocide, of her childhood, of her later marriage and life in the USA, of her pilgrimages back to Kibeho and to Fatima and to Lourdes and to other apparition sites. The topics she spoke of seemed more interesting than before, but something else was going on.
 
            What that was became much clearer in the hours and few days since. She had talked to us of the great powers channeled through her from Our Lady, and told us to ask for whatever we wished, and then write it down to check and see what became of that wish (or wished) in a month or two.  Many miracles, she told us, had happened that way in the recent past. A day later I remembered what she had said (a miracle in itself) and I wrote my wishes down with genuine seriousness. This was not due to a sudden rush of childish hope, but because of what Our Lady had already given both my wife and me in the hours since the retreat: grace; a beautiful, wonderful, interior grace.
 
            Yes, I know it will dissipate, for my feet are fully made of clay, but still it lingers and still I can speak of it. It is the grace of faith, of the certainty of the love of God, of His promises of heaven made to us through Jesus. It is the feeling of connection, of knowing that life is meaningful and beautiful regardless of what happens, even - though we would never want it - through horrible periods of war and genocide. Yes, even then. It is a knowledge that we are never alone and are guided, that whatever terrible decisions are made by us or by others, good will come from it eventually through the infinite love and power of God. It is the firm inner-knowledge that all fits, that everything is assumed into the plan, that all is connected, and that all of us are infinite, cosmic and blessed beings. 
 
            Pretty big stuff, but like the wind that is the Holy Spirit, it worked its way into me quietly. It rose slowly as a background feeling of happiness, of health, and of excitement over what was next to come in life. These feelings remained the entire drive back, which went off flawlessly in perfect weather, and they have stayed to this day - fading yes, but still present enough to give understand and, most importantly, to believe. So much so, that when my brother called the other night, I did not want to talk about the “sad state of affairs” as we usually do, but rather about this special gift that had been given us. This desire was felt so strongly that when the latest episode of political vengeance came on the news, I did not curse the perceived villains, but rather thought of what Immaculee had told us: forgive and pray for those who have offended us, and for those in power so that they might do the right thing. That is what she had done for the man who had killed her father, and that is the practiced wisdom she left for us so that we may live in truth and beauty rather than in anger and resentment.
 
            Immaculee is a Catholic, and Mary is primarily honored by Catholics. Still, if I had to bet, I would bet that every one of every faith, and even those without any faith, can come to receive and cherish the grace she radiates. Ultimately, her life has shown the world that the very best can come from the very worst. This is the truth given to her by the divine power. From this we learn that the whole is infinitely greater than the sum; that evil can show us the way to our own redemption; and that suffering is not only our lot, but can be our privilege and great teacher if we allow it to be. This truth tells us that God makes all things perfect in time, and that we are called to be like God; that is, to make all things in our lives into something blessed by the Lord. In this, we will walk with the wind of the Holy Spirit at our backs towards a horizon where all is folded into beauty.