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About jparquette

Fortunate and blessed in companionship with my wife of fifty seven years, in health and in modest, but more than adequate circumstances. Life is good.
August 26, 2026 · 12:17 pm

Greg

“Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for… “ Gerald Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

My brother died. To write that makes what seems impossible, possible, what seems surreal, real. He had done something he loved in the morning – a round of golf with one of his sons, Mark.

In the early evening, he was doing something else he loved – walking their border collies with his beloved Margy. He just stopped. Everything stopped. And he fell. One moment he was present with the sights and sounds of a quiet neighborhood summer evening in coastal Massachusetts, present to his curious and leash pulling dogs, and present to his wife in pleasant familiar companionship. The next moment he was not. He was one of my kid brothers. There are six of us. Always will be six of us, present or not. Greg is the guy with the grin and the Ireland sweatshirt he brought back with him from an anniversary trip with Margy.

Eight years younger, but he rarely did what I told him to do. I had insisted that the oldest one gets to go first, I was not going to say goodbye to a brother, that was the younger sibling’s burden to deal with. Greg didn’t listen. Or if he did, he ignored me.

Barrry, Marty, Greg, Mark, Jack, Beth, Sibs forever

We talked or texted almost every day. Eight decades into this sibling thing, and we all still communicate to each other almost every day. Debating current events, politics, stories about our latest adventure, our Patriots, Bruins and Sox, music, philosophy of life, a meme, an odd story link someone came across, whatever was troubling us. Sometimes animated. Sometimes laugh out loud funny reading a text. Frequently that would be a text from Greg. Sometimes sharply disagreeing, but never without love. Very rarely more than a week passes without hearing from any of them unless someone is travelling far afield for a while. I haven’t heard from him this week. That isn’t an ache yet, but it’s a troubling void that will be a chronic ache and a hollow spot I cannot fill.

 Paul Gregory Parquette was born in Norwood, Massachusetts on February 15, 1954, the son of our parents John and Elizabeth (Laracy) Parquette. Greg was raised on Marguerite Road in Walpole, Massachusetts with his five siblings.  Next to youngest. Greg channeled his energy into sports from my earliest memories of him; playing baseball, football, and hockey. After graduating from Walpole High School, Greg attended two technical colleges, receiving certificates in HVAC and computer technology restlessly searching for something to make a living he would like to do. At GTE Sylvania Technical School Greg was top of his class. He was very bright but not academically drawn beyond that. Eclectic continuing education for the rest of his life. He never stopped learning.

Greg explored several career paths over the years: tried working keyboards at Adage in Woburn, as a machinist at Bird and Son in Walpole, and then a building superintendent at Castle Village Apartments in Randolph. He built his first serious career at Nippon Electric Corporation as a field technician. With NEC, one of his favorite tasks was to prepare for the World Series of Golf in Akron, Ohio. Greg set up all the computers, televisions and wiring necessary to broadcast the event across the nation. Got to know and befriend golf pros and CBS television sports personalities. He took on all challenges.

In 1992, in a major career path change, Greg left NEC for an opportunity with Fidelity Investments, a challenge he was well suited for and normally a job that required a degree or two. With Fidelity Greg learned Vendor Relations Management, acting as a liaison between the benefits and financial planning company and their clients, organizing their retirement and benefit plans. Until his retirement in 2017, Greg helped his significant clients, including General Motors, protect the futures of their employees for twenty five years until his retirement in 2017. While doing this he coached his son’s teams and served many years on the elected Franklin School Board where he lived.

Greg with our Mom at our daughter Meg’s wedding

In 1977, a young Greg hit the local social scene in his then fashionable leisure suit, visiting Dixie’s in Wrentham with friends. He caught the eye of his future bride, Margy, who was there with her friends. Their first date ice skating led to a second date, and over a few months, their love at first sight deepened. Our lad was completely smitten. On June 1, 1979, Greg married the love of his life, Margaret Rose Hanley, at Saint Mary’s Church in Franklin, Massachusetts. The newlyweds made their home in Randolph, moved to Braintree, then purchased their first home in Franklin in 1983. There they grew their family, welcoming their sons John and Mark.

Greg was a present and active husband and father who loved spending time with his family. As his boys grew older and became interested in sports, Greg was always there to support them with what he was so passionate about. He had coached Pop Warner Football and jumped at the opportunity to lead his own kids. He helped any way he could, whether it was coaching or volunteering his time and athletic skills for their teams. Greg never missed a game, sometimes leaving work and calling home to tell the kids to be ready and waiting in the driveway for him. Greg was able to keep up with the kids on the field and at home, swimming in the family pool every evening after work and playing “Wingo”, a rowdy game they created together with developing rules.

The Franklin branch of the Parquette family enjoyed traveling across the US from the Grand Canyon to Florida and North Carolina. They went biking across Nova Scotia, camped in Arcadia National Park, and rode in an RV to Toronto where they caught the Blue Jays playing in the World Series, getting access to the dugout thanks to friends. Later after their children had grown, Greg and Margy continued to travel, visiting Montana and other sights in the US. They celebrated their 35th anniversary making lifelong memories on a 10-day trip across Ireland. 

In his free time, Greg was a friendly information source for local sports. Whether catching the Beanpot Tournament with friends or watching the Sox play, every season he stayed current with his favorite teams Patriots, Bruins, and the Sox.

He continued to play golf with gusto and some self-provided entertaining play by play and to ride his bike all over town. He rode in a 150 Mile fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis in two grueling days while in his fifties. He especially loved golfing with his sons. After Greg and Margy retired in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 2018, Greg organized the Redbrook CC Golf League every Wednesday. At home, Greg kept busy around the house, doing yardwork and home improvement projects, including a complete finished basement build out.

Greg was lovingly described as talkative, always having an interesting topic to discuss. Always ready for a conversation. He loved debating politics, much to the chagrin of those around him, with Greg often sharing news to make sure that everyone was “well informed”. Within his music-loving family, he was the one who most closely inherited their father’s beautiful tenor. Greg was the anchor leading Christmas caroling. Greg and Margy put in many hours of work for many years on the hospitality details while hosting our large extended family Christmas Eve gathering at their home. In addition to the beautiful carols, a highlight was a cutthroat Yankee Swap with deviously wrapped gifts. The competition to provide the most swapped gift and the consolation of bringing the gift no one wanted to be stuck with was ferocious.

There are many ways to describe Greg: loving, funny, kind, passionate, considerate. He was a mischievous son and sibling, a dedicated father and husband; and finally, a loving grandfather.

Three years ago, Greg was promoted to the role of “Papa” with the birth of his grandson Declan, whom he loved with all his heart. He will be sorely missed. I expect more than a few times in the coming weeks as has already happened, it will leap unbidden to my mind, “I’ve got to send that to Greg. That’ll make him crazy or make him laugh.”

Expecting still his advent home;

   And ever met him on his way

   With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’

Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’ Alfred,  Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.

I must share some anecdotes that will always make Greg real to me. He won’t mind. Growing up in a family of eight, there are a thousand stories that made my mother prematurely gray. Car accidents, old beater $200 cars that only lasted until the next inspection, sports injuries, broken furniture from boys rough housing in the family room, school pranks that got out of hand but somehow avoided permanent police records, girlfriends gained and girlfriends lost. I could write for hours, but your patience would soon wear thin. All families have their favorite oft repeated stories.

One comes to mind that exemplifies Greg’s self-deprecating humor. He thought it demonstrated the Parquette boy’s aptitude for social miscues, a talent which we all share. Always a Parquette genius: if we are to make a funny screw up, make sure it is as public as possible and leaves us in an embarrassing situation. Greg enjoyed making us laugh at ourselves and our shared family proclivities, even if the laugh was at his expense.

When he was NEC, a large multinational Japanese owned computer corporation, he was awarded “Employee of the Year” for the whole company. A large annual awards dinner had him at the head table near the CEO and board members from the U.S. and Japan. Sitting on a raised stage in front of a roomful of well appointed dinner tables in a luxury hotel convention center. He bought a new suit for the occasion and was understandably nervous. The fall motif featured colorful autumn leaves centerpieces and pitchers of apple cider at every table.

During one of the major addresses by a senior executive, his attention was firmly fixed on the podium and the speaker. He refilled his glass from the apple cider pitcher over his lap but neglected to make sure the glass was under the pitcher. He realized his problem when he felt wet, a half glassful of cider poured out on his lap and soaked in. He managed to cover it up as well as he could and got through the dinner. We never heard what his exit was like. He told this story, ended it by pulling a wry face as only he could, and burst out laughing.

Yearbook picture

A second memory exemplifies his dogged persistence. In the early eighties, interest rates were ruinous. Not just for credit card debt, but even home mortgages were out of reach of those of us with modest means. Greg had a good job, but he was not rich. To qualify for a mortgage for the house of their dreams in Franklin, he shopped hard for interest rates. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a bank offered a substantially lower but limited rate and capped the offer. First come. First served, and when they were gone, they were gone. He had great credit and knew if you could get in the door, he could grab the mortgage rate that would allow them to buy the home. Doors opened Monday morning.

He spent the weekend in a foldout flat lawn chair and a blanket outside the bank so he would be among the first in line Monday morning. I remember visiting him there and bringing him coffee and something probably unhealthy to eat. He had a book and a portable radio to listen to a Sox game.

It was for his family. His Margy. Sleep is overrated. I cannot think of this sacrifice without remembering he thought it was a tiny price to pay. He spent a lot of the next twenty years improving that home. Building decks, putting in swimming pools, erecting a fence, and finally a big addition to help with Margy’s mom after she was widowed.

Ah Greg. I would believe you special if you weren’t my brother. But you are.  Oh my.

C.S. Lewis wrote a book about the death of his wife, a wife he had met after years of believing he was a bachelor don forever. He married his good friend to care for her and her son as she was dying of cancer. He wrote that what shocked him was how deep grief felt like fear. I understand that profound insight better. The book is one worth reading and rereading. He titled it, “Surprised by Joy.” He alludes to his wife Joy, his awakening as her husband, and both the joy and pain of being with her until the end.

The tile was taken from the William Wordsworth poem, “Surprised by Joy.” In that poem, Wordsworth mourns the loss of his three year old daughter Catherine. After her death, he experienced something beautiful that triggered joy. His mind told him to share it with Catherine and was reminded abruptly that she was no longer there to hear it. I know how that feels.

Christmas Eve Greg and I caroling

My last personal memory with him was two weeks before he died.  Occasionally we’ll go to a Newport Polo match five minutes from our home. We especially enjoy it with our local grandkids and our California grandkids when they visit. This year it was the America Ireland match always hotly contested. Greg and Margy showed up. That’s the thing about Greg. He often shows up. For our granddaughters dancing in Nutcracker or Swan Lake. He brings flowers and drives an hour to join us.

The kids love the ponies and the speed and stomping the divots between halves. Before every match, the full crowd stands for the national anthems, first the Irish, then the Star Spangled Banner. The piped music over the public address system and the dozens of flags along the sideline are moving. But hardly anyone sings. Except our family. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Greg. We sang. Loud. His always good pipes were well lubricated.  As grief slowly dulls its edges into lasting gratitude, what a grand memory to hold.

I’ll miss having Greg to share something beautiful with. And to sing together again. My faith tells me I will, and I can anticipate that with great joy. He was one of my most faithful blog post subscribers and commenters. Dozens of comments over the years that I can reread and cherish. Wish I could send him this one. He definitely would join the conversation.

“But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,

Even for the least division of an hour,

Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return

Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;

That neither present time, nor years unborn

Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.”   William Wordworth, Surprised by Joy

I expect Greg would prefer a less somber and more hopeful epigraph. Love you, bro. See you on the other side.

“Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.” 

Dylan Thomas And Death Shall Have No Dominion

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July 14, 2026 · 5:24 pm

Journeyman

“A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.” Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture.”

Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot refugee, immigrated to Boston when he was thirteen. Apprenticed to a silversmith, he learned his craft well and built a good business. His son followed in his footsteps apprenticed to his father as was the practice for millennia. Joseph was a carpenter as was his son in Nazareth.  There is much to be said for the personal handing down of skills and understanding. The nurturing of young lives, training them day by day into respect for themselves, for each other, for hard work and its fruits. Apollos later anglicized his name to Paul Revere.

Paul Revere, J.S. Copley

His son was born in 1735 and became renowned for his beautiful craftmanship; some of his works are still displayed in art museums including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. [i]After the Revolutionary War that helped make him famous riding through the countryside to Concord and Lexington, to further his status in Boston society he decided to switch teams from a skilled artisan to a wealthy merchant as a nascent industrial age emerged.

Revere the son developed the business into lucrative trade after expanding out into other metals: copper and iron. He began manufacturing iron sash cord weights, church bells and rolled copper roofing, including the roof of the original capitol building in Massachusetts. Revere Copper Works started with a foundry and rolling mill in nearby Canton and still exists as the oldest still operating manufacturing company in America, albeit no longer in New England. Paul Revere was an early advocate of tariffs to protect his business from foreign competition, not to protect jobs, but to enhance profits.

Paul Revere exemplified America’s transformation from an agrarian society of rural farmers and local artisans into a nation massing in cities. American citizens converted by necessity from small-farm stewardship and skilled apprenticeships into specialized wage laborers ever more fragmented and distant from the self-sufficient small community folks who led the sort of lives Thomas Jefferson considered necessary for the American experiment in democracy and a constitutional republic to flourish.

Our agriculture and food supply providers devolved as well with thousands of skilled farmers gradually shrinking to far fewer large international corporate agribusiness managers, machine and chemical dependent, with its primary goal production and bushels per acre the sole measure of success. From mules and sweat and careful planting to harvesting combines and giant tractors. Utilization, not nurture. From the patient, observant skills of the artisan to tending the repetitive pounding of our technological wonders. From painstaking, paying close attention, respectful husbandry to mechanized plowing and harrowing. From rolling contoured pastures to strip mines.

“The first belt knife given by a European to an Indian was a portent as great as the cloud that mushroomed over Hiroshima…Instantly the man of 6,000 BC was bound fast to a way of life that had developed seven and a half millennia beyond his own. He began to live better and he began to die… In the sum it was cataclysmic. A culture was forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to. All corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality….” Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire, 1952.

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

What can be learned from this brief quote and history lesson about what befell Native Americans? Can that lesson be applied to the great unsettling that seems to have uprooted our culture leaving us all unmoored and trying to figure out how we wound up so divided, adrift, and confused? Our two oldest granddaughters are on the cusp of Generation Z. They are the first generation in human history to grow up with an instantly accessible and seemingly unlimited portal into a strange, dangerous, and contentious world wide web in their pockets. Discerning information from disinformation, a tower of Babel unrivaled[ii]. As Jonathan Haidt put it, “The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone.” [iii]

We have always struggled with what Blaise Pascal called “Divertissement” or distractions. In his posthumously published in 1670 “Pensées,” he lamented that most human tendency to seek distraction in entertainments, amusements of every kind, work, trivial conversations, gambling, addiction, ambition, even war. Anything to avoid confronting ourselves and thinking about our mortality, and the question of God. “(J)’ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.”   (“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”)

Already well-practiced talent in our predilection to distracting ourselves from the “Big Transcendent Questions,” our creativity and invention have led us to the most pernicious distraction ever devised. Not ex nihilo, but a progression, a development of our irresistible and relentless pursuit of distraction from what we most want to avoid.  Can this profoundly disrupting technology now be accommodated to in a few years?  Or like the Native American suddenly discovering a whole world beyond their centuries old culture, are we “forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to.”

For everyone older, the transformation has been no less disorienting than for our befuddled Generation Z, and we are just as perplexed about what to do about it. Some of us long in the tooth can even remember a world before the web, even before the blinking cursor, MSDOS, our first desktop personal computers with no hard drives, and the first awakenings of our future: before the deluge of data that assails us every waking moment, and certainly before the shocking portent of artificial intelligence and synthetic consciousness. We old ones are truly anachronism personified.

We have barely cleared the highest rise of the world’s scariest rollercoaster, having endured the slow, clanking, inexorable, hooked-up tow to the top. Now we have crested the peak and are experiencing that vertiginous moment and glimpse of what’s to come. You thought the ride so far has been disconcerting? Raise your hands over your head, maybe start screaming if it helps some, and get ready for the ride of your life.

The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend.” Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, The Unmaking of Humanity, 2025  

So, we ask, ‘what is to be done?’  How do we survive the plunge?  Perhaps more relevantly, how do we find peace from the din? Silence the unremitting tumult, the cacophony of the screens, the absolute noise of it all? Always connected, often lonely. The Solution will not be found in some innovative Federal program. There is no Solution in a new Progressive Program devised in a focus group or think tank. Never has been.

Not Solution, only solutions. Tens of millions of them. One heart, one mind, one soul at a time. With shared hope, we will gather to support one another in small communities of faith and comradeship, volunteering our time and energy. We can grow a few things in our gardens and relearn that connection with wild things, with the soil, sun, rain, and gentle husbandry; plant indigenous pollinator gardens instead of clearing more ground for chemically sustained fairway lawns squandering thousands of gallons of water. We can patronize local small agriculture through farmer’s markets, buy from artisans in our own towns, and frequent local coffee shops rather than do business with corporate chain stores. Learn their faces and names and stories. Have conversations we don’t have to type or thumb onto our phone screens. We can regularly worship with our brothers and sisters in that church down the street, acknowledging that there is a God and we are not Him.  

But, just maybe, we can shore up a foundation under it all, more essential than even those precious common efforts. Our healing and hope will take place in quiet rooms early in the morning with the window open and a good cup of coffee. Listening. Just listening.  

“The LORD said: ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will pass by. There was a strong and violent wind…then an earthquake… and then a fire—but the LORD was not in them; after the fire, a gentle breeze.[iv] When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. 1 Kings 19:11-13

[i] Image: Paul Revere, J.S. Copley, Museum of Fine Arts, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

[ii] Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons / Google Art Project

[iii] The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt, 2024

[iv] The original Hebrew text, “qol d’mamah daqqah,” translates literally to “the sound of a thin, gentle silence”

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July 5, 2026 · 5:26 pm

Visitation

“But even old men have young memories.”  Allen Levi, “Theo of Golden”

Ralph Town, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Decades ago, the first time I watched a moose swimming on Webb Lake in Weld, Maine, I had no idea how to help the poor thing out in the middle of a near mile wide stretch of water. If it started to founder and go down, I’d never get it into my small canoe, and a moose may not understand I’m just trying to help. My panic built. My embarrassing ignorance was apparent about the power of a moose in the water. I tagged along parallel for the rest of the way, and the bull unintentionally demonstrated how foolish I was.

The trip started on the east side of the lake where the huge animal was leisurely browsing knee deep in the water lilies, pondweed, duckweed, and horsetails off the shore. When it reached the far shore, it stood up without a pause and began to leisurely browse in similar water weeds to those he left behind as far as I could tell, not even breathing hard. I failed to see the improvement in the deliciousness of pondweed that induced a moose to swim nearly a mile, but I was not privy to the moose’s unhurried unconcern with the effort required to get to a new patch of soggy fodder.

A second lesson in Webb Lake wildlife lore occurred a few years later when I paddled a couple of miles down lake toward the southern end of the lake and the outlet into Webb River. The river was the route more than a century ago for the winter harvest of thousands of pine, hemlock, fir, and spruce logs as they were sent down the spring high water seventeen miles to the Androscoggin River and the timber mills. The longest ones with straight grain were valued as masts; they went all the way down the river to the sea and the colonial shipyards in Bath. Now the Webb River is rarely navigable most of the year as it meanders down through Carthage and forms the border between Mexico and Dixfield before it empties into the big river.

I always am the earliest riser in the camp and cherish those times when I can slip away in the canoe on the mirror surface of the early morning lake undisturbed by the winds that usually flow down from Tumbledown at the north end of the lake as the day progresses. The red predawn sky accompanies the silence broken only by the quiet splash of my paddle and the occasional plaintive loon cry, creating treasured memories. I’d get back in time to the camp to greet the sleepy ones and make breakfast.

The lake narrows considerably at the south end, and one time I came too close to a hidden loon nest I didn’t know was there along the darkened early morning east shore in a wooded area with no cabins. The male blasted out of the reeds and rose up out of the water in an impressive noisy display of aggression and wingspan spread intimidatingly wide to protect his mate and the small clutch of one or two eggs or the tiny brood of little loons (as distinct from the brood of our little loons back at camp). I detoured as fast as I could paddle to the opposite shore.  I regretted spooking the birds because too many encounters with too many people could cause them to abandon the old nesting grounds they return to every year and seek a remote lake not so infested with people like me. Webb Lake without loons would break my heart.

Today’s third lesson was what prompted me to remember these Webb Lake canoe stories.  I was on the lake in a large flatbottomed canoe by myself in the early afternoon and loaded no ballast rock in the front to keep the bow from lifting. I struggled to paddle without any counterweight in the front, and the wide beam made it awkward to move up in the tandem configuration.  Large lakes surrounded by mountains have their own weather, and unexpected wind can flow down suddenly over the hills down into the lake like a waterfall with considerable power. The wind came up along with whitecaps. With my unwieldy bow acting like a sail, I fought uselessly to resist it and paddle back to the camp. What I could manage was to guide the canoe to a nearby shore, drag the canoe up into the woods, and walk back on the camp road. Later when the wind subsided, it was easy enough to walk back and paddle home. In the early morning, the lake is often as calm and steady as the gaze of a wise old woman on a porch waiting for the sunrise. Fighting the wind is foolish, much better to go with it to safety.

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.” Wendell Berry, “Jayber Crow”

Raphael, Deliverance of St. Peter, Vatican Museum, Public Domain

What provoked all these canoe memories to bubble up was reading about the deliverance of St. Peter from jail in Acts 12. But I expect you’ll need a connection.

Peter witnessed the bloody death of his lifelong friend James, the brother of John, at the order of King Herod. Herod then had Peter arrested to ready him for the same fate the next day. Trusting nothing to happenstance, Herod had him chained up behind bars with four guards on a rotating shift, two of them chained to Peter, one on each side. The text said the fledgling Church was praying earnestly to God for him. Peter did what anyone would do in such terrifying circumstances: he fell asleep.

The same Peter who denied Jesus in the courtyard out of fear and panic on the night of the Lord’s execution on the cross, the same impetuous, emotional Peter leaping from the boat to try and walk on water, the same Peter drawing his sword to cut off the ear of the servant in the Garden of Gethsemane, the same Peter terrified by the storm while Jesus slept in the boat. That guy once so easily riled up. Chained up awaiting a certain painful death, he nodded off now secure in the trust he had in God. Clearly something had happened to Peter.

But in my reflection on the reading, what struck me first was the angel, the messenger, the envoy on a mission from God to rescue Peter. There was no turmoil, hardly any effort, and like the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe, no possibility of resistance. The jail doors fell open silently, the guards fell asleep, the chains fell off Peter like autumn leaves drift to the ground when it’s time for them to let go. The angel gently woke a drowsy Peter and led him out to the street and away. No drama and not a chance of another outcome. If God, ipsum esse, the ground of all existence from moment to moment, wills that an envoy leads Peter to safety, well, Bob’s your uncle, he’s as good as free.  

Angels are sent on missions which they always complete with the power of God. Our task is to listen and do what they tell us if ever we are asked. Resistance is as futile as fighting the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe. We can grumble and struggle, but all that will accomplish is to make us anxious. Guide it where it’s taking you, be thankful, pull into the woods, walk home.

“When you are old and can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven.” Wendell Berry, “Hannah Coulter”

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June 28, 2026 · 5:55 pm

Fledging

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.”  Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

I learned to climb trees competently and was taught by the foreman of the Northampton branch of an old and respected Massachusetts arborist company, Frost and Higgins. Century old tree companies in New England then tended to be associated with old Yankee names like Bartlett, Allen, Frost and Higgins. The foreman, however, was part of an eclectic crew. Bill was of Polish genes, as were a lot of people around Springfield. We could find kielbasa in the local market a lot easier than chouriço, linguica, or hot Italian sausage.

Bill was a natural athlete who once had a major league tryout as a pitcher. A year in minor league buses and Motel 8 convinced him he didn’t want to pay the dues to try the odds of making it to the Show. He was a veteran of the 101st Airborne.  On our first Saturday orientation he had the two new climbers learning to jump off a platform and roll when we hit. Safety training in the sixties. All of us learned quickly, if we didn’t already know, that gravity has no mercy and suffers no alternative. The second part of the lesson was Bill’s summary of his personal comprehensive safety program, “If you fall, three feet before you hit the ground, you’re fired.”

Climbing skills were tested more in pruning than in takedowns: no spurs, farther out on small limbs, balance, surefooted. We had to learn different criteria for the types of pruning, but the priorities were dead wood, diseased branches, crossing branches rubbed with bark abrasion, branches growing back into the tree, small suckers robbing the tree of nutrients. How fine we would have to cut (and how far out into the twigs we would have to climb) was determined by what was needed and purchased by the owner. Climb to the highest safe crotch into which we could climb, tie in, and work our way down, kicking cut branches and hangers to the ground as we went.

Picture a pendulum, and you are the weight. Tied in at an angle, we would walk out to where we needed to be to reach what needed to be trimmed. The farther out I climbed, the greater the potential for centrifugal energy. For swings back into the center of the tree, gravity was just as effective an engine as in falling. Gaining speed as the restorative energy built headed towards an equilibrium, hopefully controlled, feet forward facing the target. Swing from branch to branch, from pruned branch or leader to the new one needing attention. A few crash landings in the learning curve were expected.

American elms, back when there were a lot of them, could easily reach 80 or 90 feet, were the most challenging for me to get up. And occasionally frightening. Spread out leaders like a vase meant a lot of rethrowing of my rope and shinnying to get to the top. Shinnying is a good term for what happens to your shins. Abrasion and pain are two others. They were also the most fun to swing unimpeded by intervening branches once I was tied in. I learned to fly.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” G.K. Chesterton

When an osprey (or most any bird) learns to fly, little elegance is involved in the beginning. We often see the chicks in the nests around the island. The parents sit patiently on the eggs then with diligence feed the chicks once they hatch.  Their little open mouths are a steady demand. The adults fish persistently in the always nearby water, riding updrafts, circling, searching, dropping like doom itself onto some small fish it spots. We’ll see one strike the water like a stone and emerge many times with the still struggling prey twisting and protesting its fate. Back to the nest to the ever ready open beaks of their offspring. At first just pieces, later whole small fish down the waiting gullets.

The time comes for the chicks to learn to hunt and fend for themselves before the autumn migration, otherwise, what’s the point of it all? A little like an arborist learning to climb before they fly, they are awkward, unsure, a bit clumsy, a bit underpowered. They perch on the outer rim of the large nest and flap their wings against the wind for days, building strength in their soon-to-be-powerful pinions that will keep them alive. “As awkward as a fledgling bird may look, this is a natural stage, and the parents are most likely nearby.” (Massachusetts Audubon Society).

The first flight is sometimes accidental, a short hop to a nearby branch. Or a slip to flutter to the ground. Gradually over several weeks, they lengthen the journey with perhaps a few barely controlled crash landings back in the nest. Their parents mostly watch unless there is a real disaster; if they are stunned on the ground and a predator comes near, it will learn the sharpness of osprey mama talons. The adults incrementally decrease feeding their fledglings until necessity drives the fledglings to the water to learn their craft. I’ve never seen a first plunge for an osprey into the water to grab their first fish, but there must be one. I expect it takes a few tries to hone their instincts, to see with their keen eyes the prey slightly offset by the distortion of light from the air to the ocean and waves. But eventually they will eat and find their own mate for life, build their own nest, raise their own chicks, and fulfill their calling.

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots, the other is wings.” Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River, (perhaps quoting an earlier source).

A first grandchild is unique and remains so. Each one is precious, but the memory of the birth of the first one is indelible. Her name is Gianna. Her mom, Angela, our next to youngest daughter, taught for a while after college and gained her master’s degree in education. Once her children started arriving (there are now five), Angela went all in for them, homeschooling them from kindergarten. She has laid down her life for her children for eighteen years every day. Gianna is her first graduate. Angela and her parents shed a few tears of gratitude. I expect a few more will follow later this year.

The G Unit will fledge this August and take her first extended flight to Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She earned high honors almost every term in a challenging classical curriculum with a mixture of home and many online classes. She studied Latin and in depth works of a lot of Dead White Guys eschewed by most public curriculum. I remember well written papers on Plato’s Republic, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, C.S. Lewis, Homer, Eliot, Virgil, Aristotle, and many others: names that once helped define the social imagination and shared Western civilization that sustained a culture for a few thousand years until the deconstructionists convinced us that they could do better. And didn’t. She earned a very large share of her college costs in scholarships and grants, but she will help with an on campus job.

She danced ballet as her mom had done for a dozen years and her moments of glad graceful movement rival any osprey. She sings much better too, having performed as an alto through her high school years in the statewide Rhode Island Children’s Chorus (RICC) High School Honor Choir with Dr. Christine Noel. Her first audition for that was challenging during COVID and done by a submitted tape.  Dr. Noel recognized a gift she could help form and called within a day. She was right. They will miss her, and she will miss them. Dance three or four times a week with Heritage Ballet. Practice chorus once a week at the RI Philharmonic Carter Center. We will miss those too, although three of her sisters still dance at Heritage, so our blessed days of chauffeuring beautiful dancers to practice and attending their performances will thankfully continue.

I have written about G before several times in this forum, starting when she was three. Type her name in the search box on the home page, and you can follow her progress. She retains her sharp intelligence and sense of ironic humor. Adding to her repertoire, she developed a world class eye roll that someday may freeze the blood of some lucky suitor. She is in no rush for that, and neither are her parents and grandparents.

I expect if I am granted the time, I’ll be writing about her again. Rita and I pray for her each day along with our other six grandchildren. That will not change while we are able.  

This year she will fledge, trusting her young wings and heading south to the big city of Babylon. Such an odyssey is both wonderous and frightening for her grandparents. She has proven many times to be levelheaded in many situations with sound judgment. Her dorm and roommate are assigned. Her wings have developed strong flapping out there on the edge of the nest. Her persistence has gained vigor shinnying up vertical challenges. Her parents have done all that any parent could do to support, guide, and love her. They have been there for her, and remain so, but now it will be more remote.

But, dear Lord, she’s only eighteen. Watch over her. Keep her safe. And let her soar.

“Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,

that hovers over its young,

spreading out its wings, catching them,

bearing them on its pinions…” Deuteronomy 32:11

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June 14, 2026 · 7:03 pm

Gaslit

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” Attributed to Rita Mae Brown

When the first snowstorm blew in last winter, I hadn’t used my snowblower much in two years. I am the neighborhood snow remover for four driveways; most guys like playing with toys that have loud motors. I was happy to fire it up. And fire it up. And fire it up. Wouldn’t start. Shoveled out the old fashioned way only about five inches of light snow. Went to the local hardware store and bought a sparkplug.

Wanted to get ready in case the big one hit that the long term weatherman was telling us might happen, and I did what any reasonably handy person has done for two hundred and fifty years. Watched a YouTube video, took apart the eight things that had to come off to get to the sparkplug and replaced it in my driveway. Our 24” Ariens has an alternate electric starter, so I ran the power cord out from the outlet off the back deck.  After a little prompting, she started up. The pull cord hasn’t been able to get it going for a couple of years. Let it run for a while, and while the thing ran steadily, it ran rough. I thought I would wait until the annual preventive maintenance of the spring to let the experts diagnose the imperfections. Since we hadn’t had much snow for two years, I thought we would be OK.

The biggest blizzard in fifty years hit hard on my birthday in February and kept us inside feeding the woodstove for nearly two days. Deep, heavy, and drifted. Just under three feet of the stuff according to those that measure such things. My limited mechanical aptitude held up for the storm. I had stationed the snowblower at the end of the driveway under a tied down tarp and with the power cord running to the house. I was able to get my driveway cleared. Two or three hours more cleaned off those of my elderly neighbors.

The town plows were MIA for a couple of days on the side roads keeping the main routes open, but a fine young man from nearby Escobar Farm roared in on his giant tractor with a front end loader bigger than my car. The wheels were taller than I was. He seemed to enjoy running noisy machinery at least as much as I did, and he opened the five roads in the whole neighborhood until we all had access to East Main Road that the town had cleared. Free at last.

All was well on Birch Road. We could get to church, Home Depot, Clement’s Market, and Coastal Roasters coffee shop, and that’s all a guy really needs.

“If your liquors too red it’ll swell up your head. You better stick to that good ole mountain dew.”  Stanley Brothers, Mountain Dew

When the daffodils came up and red wing blackbirds came back to the suet cage next to our birdfeeder, I realized I was well behind in preventive maintenance schedule for the snowblower. My old snowblower service company closed its doors for good last summer, so I had to find a new one. I don’t have a pickup truck anymore and needed someone who could pick up the machine. The company that services our lawnmower every year didn’t work on Ariens. A trusted friend who had lived here for decades recommended a small place a couple of towns away. When I called, the owner was friendly, smart, and knowledgeable. Picked it up in a day. Gave me a reasonable estimate for the PM work.

He called me a couple of days later and asked if it had been running rough, cycling higher revs with slowdowns, and needed more choke than required when it was new. “Yes.”  Ah. He asked if I ran regular gas in it. “Yes.” Spending the extra on ethanol free gas and buying it in cans someplace other than a gas station didn’t seem critical to me. Much cheaper and more convenient at the bottom of the hill Cumberland Farm into my own can.

“Thought so,” he said. 

“Oh, oh,” I replied to myself.

“Your carburetor needs to be rebuilt. The jets are corroded and ruined. It’s the ethanol in the gas. I knew it as soon as I started it up.”

Somewhere in the ancient past I knew that too. I ran special straight gas in my chainsaw like the saw shop warned me to do. I may have even known somewhere in my corroded memory that I should have done the same thing for the lawnmower and snowblower small engines but hadn’t. I either ran them dry at the end of their season or put some Stabile in the tank for the off season. I thought that was good enough, and they kept running. Until they didn’t. The indestructible lawnmower soldiers on. I promise to treat it better. But the snowblower carburetor is a winter creature and less forgiving.

Four hundred dollars later, I had the lesson permanently engraved. Much cheaper than a new self-propelled, 24” competent snowblower, but four hundred I could have better used for a weekend in Maine to visit old friends. When I got it back, it ran like a different machine with power and enthusiasm; started with one pull on the cord. Who knew?

I should have.

“I don’t know if I’m smart, but I think I can see, when someone is pullin’ the wool over me.” Bob Dylan, Let Me Die in My Footsteps

Large motors in cars have been adapted by their manufacturers that see which way the wind blows to run on ten percent ethanol biofuel mixed into our petroleum. Small engines like chainsaws, lawnmowers, and my unfortunate snowblower have smaller jets more easily corroded, and the fuel stored by less than diligent owners like me can sit unused off season for a longer time.  Ethanol attracts water; if enough water accumulates, separation can occur, resulting in a water/ethanol layer that can cause corrosion, poor combustion, and fuel-system problems. It can even eat your carburetor.

Ethanol is most often manufactured from ground up corn, a convenient cooperative of government mandates, farm state politicians, a zealous farm lobby and late to the green party Big Oil anxious to appear agreeable to the people who will occasionally superglue themselves to museum masterpieces to save our much abused home planet. While it does do its job for the corn farmers by keeping food prices and sales up, things are more expensive for the consumer, especially for those least able to pay. But you have to break a few eggs, and I’m not sure how much it accomplishes in keeping the oceans from rising into our kitchens and slaughtering millions along the coasts as climate Ph.Ds. Greta Thunberg and Al Gore predict.

The corn lobby, agribusiness, ethanol refiners, farm state congress members who enjoy political donations and lucrative speaker’s fees at conventions in places like Turks and Caicos, and well paid, well-nourished lobbyists love ethanol, but artificially supported prices because of the five or six billions of bushels of corn used to make the stuff every year affect a wide variety of other folks.  More expensive corn on the table and the increase in ground corn feed which raises dairy and beef price affects everyone who buys groceries, which is most of us. Lower income consumers, some poorer countries which rely on food imports to survive, livestock farmers, and anyone buying gas take it good and hard as H.L Menken warned us.

Some critics say ethanol just placates the planet protectors but with no real positive effects for the planet. Ethanol is about a third less efficient than the petroleum version, so it reduces over all miles per gallon by about 3%. When you add in the manufacturing energy to make the stuff, the additional diesel used for farm equipment and to transport it from farm to manufacturer to the place where it is diluted into the bulk of our fuel, and the energy to produce the extra fertilizer it takes to grow it, there are those who say it does not save much carbon from being pumped into the atmosphere, if any. And it ate my carburetor, so I am not feeling particularly charitable to the corn lobby this month. I know it’s my fault deep down, but I would have liked some help protecting myself from myself.

I can live with burning straight real gas in my small engines. I’m probably not despoiling the atmosphere very much, and at eighty, the shoveling and mowing with an old hand reel mower is a bit beyond my long term capability. If you want to superglue yourself to the Mona Lisa on my account, I have no objection and understand your concern.

” Nothing is ever really lost as long as we remember it.” Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Golden Road

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May 31, 2026 · 7:25 pm

Minks, Piping Plovers, and AI

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

I got a call at the wildlife refuge where we volunteer on Fridays from an excited woman who spotted a furry creature when she was walking the trails the evening before.  She wanted to know if anyone had reported a lost pet ferret.  “No,” I replied. “Tell me what you saw.”  I love some of the calls we get and questions from visitors at the desk.

She described a small, long, slender mammal with a luminous coat. I told her it was more than likely a mink, of which Sachuest Refuge has a few. “Wow!, “she said, “I didn’t know we had those around here.” [i]

I told her the story of a friend of ours who had an artificial fishpond her late husband had built for her that she was very fond of sitting near and watching the various finned and gilled creatures swimming about. One morning, she made her way to her fishpond chair to discover carnage. Half eaten and uneaten dead fish were strewn willy nilly on the rock riprap banks as if a plague wiped them out. Every last one of them. Nothing but lily pads left in the pond. A mink living in her stone wall had its way with them. A similar nocturnal mink catastrophe befell the outside fishpond at the local Agway store, but some carp survived. I said to the lady on the phone that not everyone has a positive experience with minks, and since they are smaller than most folks expect, it takes a whole lot of them to make a coat, but I was happy she enjoyed seeing one. They are beautiful.  When I volunteer at the visitor center, I sometimes get in trouble entertaining myself with an interjection of reality. She was a very nice woman full of enthusiasm and bubbling over with happiness.

Although minks are not endangered, I do object to turning them into coats to signal our prosperity, and I like to see them too. See them being minks. Slinking through the meadow grass, catching fish, raiding waterfowl nests for eggs, snatching meals snagging crabs, small voles or mice, making little minks and dodging coyotes, Northern harriers, and red tail hawks.

Our ranger here is young, smart, hard-working, pleasant, and passionate about what she does. She manages the trails, fields, woods, shoreline, wildlife, visitors, the visitor center, projects at other national wildlife refuges, the bureaucracy of her home office, and unruly volunteers like Rita and me. Good thing that she has a lot of energy. This weekend she was training a new batch of volunteer piping plover watchers and monitors. Piping plovers are wonders to watch feed and fly in murmuration. They are endangered and some of them nest along the rocks at the refuge end of Sachuest Beach. The rest of the beach is a walking haven for us for eight months of the year, and a popular swimming, surfing, and sunbathing haven for thousands in the summer. Keeping the tourists and local swimmers away from the piping plover nests is just one of our busy ranger’s many responsibilities. [ii]

“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”  Aldo Leopold, Round River (published posthumously, 1953)

Only human beings discover the wonder in nature and want to protect other species, deriving no real Darwinian benefit to us. Just beautiful and true in some hard to define sense, so we find it good. Only human beings would dedicate their lives to doing good for a small shoreline bird that is darting back and forth between the waves with their tiny legs a blur to pick out small crustaceans and bugs. Or attend a class to learn how to help. A mink would only notice a piping plover if it wanted to hunt for its nest. A mink would not watch in wonder as a plover danced between the waves. A mink would not ponder the morality of eating an endangered species’ rare eggs. Not for a nanosecond would it hesitate to suck out breakfast.

Transcendentals: beauty, truth, goodness, are cherished by human beings. Some would argue we are a randomly mutated collection of cells which somehow by extraordinary chance evolved into consciousness, then an inner life, then a conscience with an unlikely set of common values. Some would argue that pondering transcendentals and seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful indicates we are creatures with a purpose Not a lucky accident but created in the Creator’s Image with the desire deep in our heart for unity with the transcendental. I would be in the second camp. Protecting piping plovers would be one small piece of evidence.

But that perspective is being challenged at a fundamental level. “What is a human being?” and “What is virtue?” and “What is human meaning and purpose?” are once again being debated in all their implications with the emergence of new technology and the machines we create developing so rapidly that it seems to have assumed a life of its own. And every premise is being deconstructed in its aftermath.

I’ve ‘chatted’ with a variety of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence: Claude, Alexa, Grok, Gemini, Co-Pilot and mostly ChatGPT To be sure, in the last three years the progress in these machines is extraordinary, in conversational fluency, calculating skills, problem solving, precise responsiveness with nuance to inquiries with fewer errors and hallucinations. However, they remain remarkably capable, even uncanny simulacra.[iii]

Humans have long excelled in fabricating uncanny simulacra with a gift to evoke other human responses, emotions, and new ideas. Michelangelo ‘s David silences the observer with its detail, beauty, power, and presence. But it will never slay Goliath or seduce poor Uriah’s wife. A detailed online map with links could help us better appreciate Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge, but it will never be the complex reality of marsh, rocks, waves, flowering fields and shrubs, over two hundred species of birds and mammals, wind, weather, and awe. AI can tell us most everything about a mink: habitat, food, where and how it builds a den, how it lives and reproduces, how it lives with detailed descriptions and images. But it will never experience the excitement of a hiker who sees one for the first time. Andi will never be a mink.

“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.” Paul Simon, Sounds of Silence

Last week, a new voice joined the debate in a profound way. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical a year after Chicago born Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected to sit in the chair of Peter as the 267th Pope, leading over a billion Catholics. He has made the news a few times, most recently when a president made the inane comments that a world religious leader had no business speaking out on the morality of war.  But I digress.

He wrote forty three thousand words on the nature of Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the rest of us. How it intensifies the debate about the nature of a human person. Ghost in machine? Accidental consciousness fired up in random atoms? Exceptional combination of the material and spiritual created by God Imago Dei with an obligation to care for the rest of creation? Meat Legos or a person with an eternal destiny and unique calling? He wrote how we are distinguished from our machines with an uncrossable border. Our crisis is not merely ideological; it is intensely anthropological and will have an impact on the rest of my life and yours in unpredictable ways. We ought to be paying close attention.

Magnifica Humanitas will stir introspection and debate in the Church and society to a degree perhaps not seen since his predecessor Leo XIII wrote his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum. Leo XIII released his a hundred and thirty five years to the day before this one. He wrote about the human costs and implications of the Industrial Revolution. Leo today reiterated and expanded the Catholic social principles from Leo XIII that instantiate the teachings of Christ in new ways to address our postmodern culture. As usual, way too much for a blog post, so I’ll let one sample inspire your own reflections.

“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

“Maybe someday I’ll wake up

And I’ll do what I should

Write a song to make heaven and earth

Go waltzing in time.” John Prine, Beautiful World

Let us all go to work.  None of us will escape. There is much to be done. No one will be exempt from the effects and implications of this dialogue with our future. I heard a story this week from a talk by Monsignor James Shea, one of our favorite writers about our times and culture. He said Pope Paul VI (now St. Paul VI) was asked by a journalist what was the most momentous day of his life. His questioner fully expected to hear about the day Paul was elected Pope. Or his ordination as a priest. Or his baptism followed by some remarks about salvation. None of the above. It seems saints see things differently.

“Today,” Paul replied. “Today is most momentous day of my life. It’s all I have.”

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” St. Mother Teresa

[i] Photo open source from Wikipedia, Mink for Wiki

[ii] Photo: I Naturalist – c Grigory Heaton some rights reserved, cc by NC

[iii] Simulacra is the plural of simulacrum, which I find best describes what AI does and is. A simulacrum is a representation of a something else. An effigy. An image. A reproduction made from something other than the original it represents.

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May 3, 2026 · 2:38 pm

Faces

“The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter.” Cicero, De Oratore

In 1968, the year after we were married, I vaguely remember going to see the brilliant movie “Faces” written and directed by John Cassavetes in the downtown theater in Northampton where we lived. Going to a movie was our mutually enjoyed extravagance back before movies too often became caricatures, CGI, and comic book superheroes. Our date was often followed by a fifty cent hot fudge sundae at the State Street Fruit Store soda jerk counter if it wasn’t too late. “Faces” delved the emotions, vulnerabilities, and masks of the characters in the tragic dissolution of a marriage, intensely personal and focused on close ups of the actors with a handheld camera.  I don’t remember much of the plot, but I do remember the faces.

Faces do that to us. Anatomy books tell of forty three muscles and over ten thousand documented expressions, some powerful and some subtle. The human face is unique to each person; facial recognition software is based on that certain knowledge. With any degree of awareness, we are sensitive in the extreme to the subtle shifts in the facial expressions of those with whom we are most familiar, especially in our spouse that we love and especially in a spouse of nearly sixty years.  Our faces have evolved over these many years, but while our shared life together has drawn us ever closer, her character, her essence, her irreplaceable “Ritaness” has not changed, and her face mirrors the same person I fell in love with all those decades ago.

We often read the same books. We’ve been reading Carl Trueman’s book published last month, “The Desecration of Man,” [i] which like most of what Dr. Trueman writes, provides an insightful look into what we have wrought in our postmodern culture. There is a memorable passage in the book where he discusses faces in a way that traces a particular woe the sexual revolution has exacerbated.

Trueman explains the impact and roots of how ubiquitous pornography has metastasized into a billion dollar industry in every corner of the internet and on every kid’s smartphone and has been enabled through the insistent undermining of the exceptionalism of the human person. What he calls the “desecration of man” developed for centuries as we incrementally substituted understanding our existence as a unique created being made in the image of our Creator (Imago Dei) with evolving as a lucky collection of atoms. From a miracle hybrid of soul and body to a rearrangeable assembly of “meat Legos”[ii]. But I digress.

In one chapter, he quotes a passage from Roger Scruton’s book, “The Face of God.” Scruton describes pornography as “a marginalization, indeed a kind of desecration, of the human face.” Porn, which is a demeaning drama of prostitution in front of a camera, replaces a unique face with a body, and any body will do, interchangeable and consumable. When we look upon another’s face, we see an “I”, a subject; when we look only upon a body, we see an object to be used. Trueman invites us to share a thought experiment.

A groom anxiously awaits the appearance of his bride while he stands next to his best man at the front of the church. Suddenly, the back door opens, the bridesmaids and entourage process into the church with the organ playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.”  But instead of the woman he loves and to whom he pledged his troth, another woman walks in with a face not the one he cherishes.  Perhaps she’s even beautiful, but would he be satisfied with this stranger? Would he still be willing to commit his whole life to her for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health until death do them part?

The sexual act out of the context of this pledge is hormonal lust, not love, a selfish act of using another person for pleasure.  In this transaction, we objectify another human being, and they objectify us. At least ideally, the marital embrace once was considered as holy, a unique intimacy between a man and a woman based on surrender and trust, and a loving lifelong commitment. Together out of that commitment, they share responsibility and sacrifice in mutual love for childbearing and rearing commensurate with the sacred telos of reproduction and continuation of our species. All these aspects were recognized to be intrinsic in our nature as man and woman and our relationship. The status of sexual relationships now, while casual and ubiquitous in entertainments, is merely a desirable component of personal self-fulfillment and pleasure, thus, “If it feels good, do it.” The hook up culture that resulted has diminished us.

So, has the millennia old definition of what it is to be human been jettisoned as well, tragically and in grave error? Has our understanding of what it means to be human become incoherent and abandoned the Creator’s vision for us as made in Imago Dei? Is the postmodern, progressive understanding of us as a random collection of molecules evolved accidentally in a harsh and unforgiving universe an improvement or an impoverishment? Have we stopped seeing each other’s faces?

“In her face I saw such things as make me say:

‘Now God, who made such a one, be praised.’”  Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova

When I look at Rita, I see her face. Always have.

From the dedication to my book:

 In a sudden revelation, Rita or I will look at each other and declare, “You’re a different person than me.” After almost six decades of married life, that is not a simple proposition.

  I will look over at her reading or praying near the woodstove early on a winter morning with her finger absentmindedly twirling in her hair just above her ear and become filled with love. We have come so far together. I joke that we grew up together, but it was after we were married.

 Astonishingly at just over nineteen, she committed to living our lives together for better or worse, and before we were twenty one, we took the vows. She was a respected assistant head nurse on a large floor in a city hospital at twenty two while she provided the bulk of our thrifty livelihood while I was still in college.

When our children started coming after I graduated, she put aside her dreams, career aspirations, and who knows what else  to throw her lot in with a guy who wanted to climb trees for a living. She created our home out of new whole cloth and held up more than her end for many years until she returned to the workforce a quarter of a century later to lead and hold together a couple of different prolife nonprofit organizations.

 Imagine! Committing to share a life with someone and all that entails. Ups, downs, our own frailties, fears, uncertainties, gifts, and liabilities. All in. Nothing reserved. Yet, she did it. With me. Takes my breath away sometimes.  

” When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face” William Butler Yeats, When You Are Old

[i] Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, Carl R Trueman, Penguin Random House 2026

[ii] Mary Harrington’s perfect description of the malleable body under the influence of postmodern radical subjectivism.

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April 24, 2026 · 12:52 pm

Don’t Get In The Truck!

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”  Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? (Advice to the Young)

When our kids are young, things blur, memories telescope, or as our daughter and mother of five recently put it perfectly, “Days seem endless sometime, but the years fly by.” Grandchildren, however, seem like different stories to us. Time is slower. Each one is indelible and unique. Proverbs 17:6 put it perfectly, “Children’s children are a crown to the aged.”

Little anecdotes are embedded in my mind like diamonds in a coal mine; they pop into my consciousness at odd moments and always bring at least a smile – sometimes welling up emotions that make the old guy fill up unexpectedly.  There are seven grandchildren, all expertly homeschooled, but I’ll tell only a few tales. They all have their different interests, talents, and endearing idiosyncrasies. Four of them dance and just helped perform a professionally choreographed ‘Swan Lake,’ learning multiple roles each. They dance with grace and control, passion and beauty, lost in the music. That’ll make an old guy cry every time.

Two live in Southern California and are competitive multisport athletes who always try hard at eight and six. We’re out west for a First Communion and will catch the last tournament weekend of the spring softball season. The First Communion girl is my early morning cuddler. When she was younger, I’d be the first one up until she came down the stairs sleepy, warm, and smiling in her pj’s to cuddle on the coach and I’d read to her. Now she reads to me. Insists on it. Koufax, their 90 pound German Shepherd lap dog, usually joins us and puts his head on my lap.

Locally, there was the ‘scooter’ who never really crawled because she didn’t want to relinquish whatever she was holding in her hands and flew across the floor sitting and motoring with one leg scissoring. Now she is confidently conversant with Chesterton or Augustine, Flannery O’Connor or Homer, Tchaikovsky or K-pop. Next fall she will be heading off to Catholic University of America in Washington. She sings her last concert next month with the statewide honors choir. Alto. Oh, I’ll miss that voice down the street.

Then there was the button kid. Before she could talk or walk, I’d hold her while wearing one of my decades old well-worn three button Eddie Bauer sweaters. She would immediately start on my buttons with ferocious concentration. Buttoning. Unbuttoning. Buttoning. A half dozen cycles faster with each iteration. Her concentration was only exceeded by her eye hand coordination for such a tiny person. Now she is fifteen and draws with equal concentration and coordination. Recently, she drew the cover for my book of the camp on Webb Lake in Maine. And portraits. Lots of portraits. One of our extended family in-laws is a professional artist. “That’s incredible,” he said. Papa thought so too.

Another budding scholar is in her third year of Latin at 12 years old. We call her scary for her prodigious memory, relentless logic, and omnivorous appetite for books. She is the resident expert on dragons (seven types) and devoured C.S. Lewis, E.B. White, and Laura Ingalls Wilder just about whole. She told us she wants to be an architect and build things while simultaneously a prima ballerina and mother. But she would make a formidable attorney. She always wants to know what the rules are. Exactly what the rules are. When she was three or so, she was happily clearing out a nostril. Her mother suggested that it was not a great idea in public. “Don’t pick your nose.”  The little lawyer got quiet, thought a bit, and sought clarification.  Precisely what would and would not cross the line? The girl just wanted to know. Looking up in complete seriousness, she asked, “Can I pick the other one?”

Finally for this post at least, there is the emerging wildlife ranger who is now eleven and loves all things fauna, wild, domestic, or imaginary. Her current favorite is the sugar glider. On the way to ballet lessons, we always pass what we would call in Maine a ‘beef critter’ farm – laconic Maine teleology. We observe which large ones of the herd get moved into the fattening pen, the next to last stop for these Black Angus steers. We count who’s left each week. Our ranger knows the ones in the pen are destined for the steak grille and leather coat factory and are all males. She knows the local Gurnsey and Holstein dairy herds are all females, and she understands that and why these things are so ordered.

I never explained to her how bulls got to be steers. Giving her the details that castrati put on weight faster and are better marbled with tasty fat than bulls has not come up, and I’ve not introduced the subject. I have some concern that an eleven year old in an intemperate moment might explain it to her five year old brother with some mischief in mind, and he’d need a couple of years of therapy to recover.

I clarified to her that when the time was right (for the farmer), they were trucked off site to a butchery and returned to the farm store for sale in labeled small plastic wrapped packages.  She accepted this well and acknowledged she liked a good cheeseburger too. When she was about nine and learning about what befalls the beef critters, she decided to warn the ones she had gotten to know and count, although I never noticed any of them paying her any attention. Probably for the same reason, they never figured out the sign out front about fresh beef for sale. After a while, when we passed the feeding pen of the short timers, she would roll down her window and yell to them, “DON’T GET IN THE TRUCK!!’

“The lonesome friends of science say

“The world will end most any day”

Well, if it does, then that’s OK

‘Cause I don’t live here anyway

I live down deep inside my head

Where long ago I made my bed”  John Prine, The Lonesome Friends of Science

Have you read about the possible polarity switch that may have been underway for the last few hundred years? [i] The outer core of our planet is molten liquid iron and nickel. The core is superheated and moves with the rotation of the Earth and creates a natural geo-dynamo that generates our magnetic field. The magnetic field screens us from cosmic rays that would destroy our DNA like scarab beetles in the mummy’s tomb. Without our magnetic field deflecting the solar wind, it would blow away our atmosphere and evaporate our oceans, turning our beautiful blue ball into a desolate red rock like Mars.[ii]  Poor Mars has no chance and no magnetic field protecting it. A polarity change occurs when Earth swaps poles as the core moves around every four or five hundred thousand years. Here in Rhode Island, our compass would point no longer to Maine but to Florida.

Such a mind bending shift happened 780,000 years ago when our compass switched to its current setting. Briefly in geological time, our magnetic north pole moved south about 40,000 years ago, but migrated back after a couple of centuries, and there are many hotly debated signs like a slightly weakening magnetic field that might signal it’s in the process of doing it again. Geologically, a flip is overdue. Might play havoc with navigation for us and the birds which have their own inner compass.  Not to worry, it takes centuries for the magnetic North Pole to migrate that far. It won’t mean that we lose our magnetic field, but there would be disturbance in the Force.

We live in a time of disruption. And the disruption is not limited to geology.

“You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, the times they are a changing.” Bob Dylan

 In the previous post, Remnant, I quoted Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis) talking about a change of eras rather than an era of change. Having magnetic north move around is unsettling enough, but if we lose sight of true North, that’s a far more serious problem for us human beings.

Circling back to our grandchildren, what world are we leaving for them? Our culture has changed so radically that our parents in 1940 would be dumbstruck as if we had fallen into a sci fi dystopian novel. We are muddling along in a change of eras; no surprise we are befuddled.

There are countless examples.

When discussing beef critters with our granddaughter, I avoided the bull and steer part. In doing so, I avoided the bull and cow part too. Because she helped care for a baby brother, and she understands the basics anyway. She knows that a Holstien dairy cow spends her life in fields and barn giving to the farmer and us from six to nine gallons of superb milk every day. What I didn’t have to explain to her, because it is common sense, is that steers missing a few parts will not start producing milk or calving; they are just bulls without portfolio.

Ideology and philosophy uprooted our postmodern societal imagination and enforced how gender is now a matter of identity and choice. But ideology and identity do not change biology. British cultural commentator Mary Harrington coined an ideal term for the oddness of our redefined self-created image.  The human body remade into whatever we want it to be, she described as “meat Legos.” But biologists like neo atheist hero Richard Dawkins clarified that actual biology is clear: there are large gametes and small gametes, and efforts to change that are futile. The pain of those suffering from gender dysphoria is incapacitating, and they deserve all our love, sympathy, and respect as human beings. Whether rearranging their body parts may help their identity issues is intensely debated, but it will never result in a biological transition.

Ideology cannot redefine what a human being is. Not for lack of trying.

Our modern turn to radical expressive individualism, profound skepticism, deconstructing the limitations and controls of formerly commonly understood civilization, and radical self-creation has percolated down into our confused common societal perceptions for the last few hundred years from Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Satre, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Seeding in and metastasizing like many hazardous ideas in faculty lounges, these notions have diffused into popular understanding, not just gender labeling, but in almost every aspect of our culture. The pace of change has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Imagine even twenty five years ago, a candidate for the supreme court before a Senate confirmation hearing being asked to define a woman and having no answer. No breaking news that we are confused.

Another sign of the times that would have been rejected without hesitation by my parents is genetic manipulation, especially its use combined with IVF and surrogacy for eugenic goals to create our perfect kid.  I’m sure you can come up with your own without much brain work. Transhumanism. AI controlled autonomous weapons. On and on.  In Jurassic Park, the most memorable line for me was from Dr. Ian Malcolm who told Dr. John Hammond who revivified the dinosaurs, “Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do it.”  That may be the most ignored warning of our times.

 

“And I know just what I’d change if went back in time somehow

But there’s nothing I can do about it now.” Willie Nelson

 

The shifting ground of our era is one of moral instability when the unquestioned principles of millennia that were the foundation of our civil order are now seen as inhibiting human freedom. Subjective freedom, not what is right, has become our lodestar. True North is on the move but has not entirely disappeared. At least not yet, he said hopefully.

Well recognized figures like Dawkins, Elon Musk, and Jordan Peterson have been expounding that while, of course, they don’t believe that Christianity is literally true, they favor a ‘Christian culture,’ because a shared common belief system of morality and reality with widespread acceptance keeps our society from decomposing. They are right. What they fail to acknowledge is that while a Christian culture does have indispensable value for societal cohesion, without a Center, it cannot hold.

So, dear grandchild, when common popular beliefs some rolling up to your gate in a faded and dented stake body truck, but no longer seem wise or coherent, well, “DON’T GET IN THE TRUCK!”

“Those who kill God discover in the long run that they have to step up and be gods and provide all that God once offered: a stable meaning and significance to life. Or given their rejection of the traditional Christian answer, they need to provide a response to the psalmist’s question, “What is man?” Carl Trueman, “The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity” 2026

[i] I’ve been told by a professional editor whom I greatly respect and admire that I wander too far afield in these posts. He’s right, but bear with me, and maybe these strands in this one will weave together for you in the end. Or not. On the About page of this blog, from the beginning, “I write this to help me clarify my own thoughts and to encourage (I hope) contributions to the “Great Discussion” in which we all need to engage. I especially enjoy the juxtaposition and relationships of seemingly disparate topics.”  I’m too old to change now. As the bumper sticker says, “Not all who wander are lost.”

[ii] https://theconversation.com/earths-magnetic-field-protects-life-on-earth-from-radiation-but-it-can-move-and-the-magnetic-poles-can-even-flip-216231

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April 5, 2026 · 4:29 pm

Remnant

“First of all, we are at the end of Christendom. Now not Christianity, not the Church. Remember what I am saying. Christendom is economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending — we’ve seen it die…We live in it from day to day and we do not see the decline.”Bishop Fulton J Sheen in a TV address in 1974

The Call of Gideon’s Army

Sometime in the mid-eighties, I cannot remember the details of the occasion, we were in the sacristy prior to a Mass at the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Providence quietly talking with a monsignor who is now a bishop in another diocese, a perceptive and thoroughly educated man of deep thought and understanding.

He spoke about Gideon’s army and how God  used a tiny group of three hundred men to save the kingdom of Israel, a small cohort selected and ready to face long odds of survival against thousands.[i] God does not need a task force. The monsignor was sure that is what the Church and Christianity were facing at this point of postmodern, post-Christian history and equally sure that the tiny, storm tossed dory of our faith would weather the times. The intervening years have done nothing to dissuade me of his observation, verified daily in the news. The deconstruction of the foundations of an ancient culture seems mutually assured, undermined within and without the church and most disastrously within individuals – confused and alienated, lonely and depressed in record numbers.

Jorge Bergoglio, when he was still an archbishop in Argentina, famously noted that we are not in an era of change, but rather a change of eras, a change that began centuries ago as early as pre Enlightenment late Medieval times with William of Ockham [ii] and with each new revolution has accelerated and deepened. After the Eastern schism severed the unity of the Church, the Protestant Revolution heralded the scattering of Christendom into more than 2,000 denominations. It seems every few months I see a new rented storefront church with four dozen folding chairs and a new pastor, a slightly different focal point, three guitars, a set of drums, and great enthusiasm.

Another signpost on the road to the dissolution of Christendom as the social imaginative that informed a culture was the French Revolution ushering in a virulent anti-Christian conflict. A vicious confrontation  enforced a fierce secularism reducing all we know to the material, humans to a collection of randomly organized atoms, and God to a superstition for the unenlightened. The revolution committed to redefine Freedom as the new benchmark of justice. Freedom for what remains unclear, followed immediately by tyranny and unspeakable entirely predictable violence.

A scant few decades later, the Industrial Revolution redefined and deified worldly success and the accumulation of wealth as the benchmark of human flourishing. Science emerged as the franca lingua of our time and for many today it is the primary, if not sole, arbiter and proof of all things true – a reductive myopia and worldview that some more thoughtful folks named with considerable alarm “scientism.” The dizzying pace of this revolution continues unabated with Artificial Intelligence now exploding in our pockets after we have become thoroughly acclimated and addicted to its precursor internet with tracking algorithms, instant connectivity, and a flooded river of information. Where this will lead is a perplexing uncertainty that is impossible to predict.

The Sexual Revolution of the Woodstock Generation and the Sixties welcomed into the mainstream culturally catastrophic ideas that have destroyed families, commitment, trust, and the understanding of who the human person is, seeming at least temporarily to have deconstructed the ancient patterns which formed human families, and their communities, and perpetuated our weary species.

What began in revolutions of radical rearranging of ideas and philosophies has distilled into desperate sadness, confusion, incoherence, and void in individual hearts and minds.

“In our own time, it has been particularly challenged by an abandonment of the Faith — a phenomenon progressively more manifest in societies and cultures which for centuries seemed to be permeated by the Gospel. The social changes we have witnessed in recent decades have a long and complex history, and they have profoundly altered our way of looking at the world.”  Pope Benedict XVI, Ubicumque et semper[iii]

Human beings are hard-wired for worship, the transcendent and for God. We are born with a hole at our center more extensive than our insecure egos can satisfy on their own. Our souls and nature both abhor a vacuum, so “our heart is restless and will not rest” until the hole is healed. If not with real healing, then we will make all efforts to fill it with something. Not worshipping something is not an option, or as Bob Dylan sang, “Ya gotta serve somebody.” In post Christendom times, often that will be a derivative of a progressive religion that is in suspension like a sugary powder in the water in the cultural tank in which we live.[iv] We absorb this sugary powder convinced it is our own enlightened idea and comfort ourselves with that illusion.

This religion comes in a hundred hues, but there are shared characteristics common among them. With five minutes of introspection, we recognize where they surface in the social imagination that informs us – influencing how and what we think. The articles of this creed are pervasive, either subtly or not so subtly, in what we read and watch. In our news, our popular books, our entertainment, and are most prevalent in our educational mainstream carefully managed by an elite two or three generations deep now in this false faith.

Too much for a blog post, so I urge you to read the books linked in the notes below for more depth. However, there are signposts of which we should be aware that have become part of the language and assumptions absorbed into our understanding of how life is, our religion and our ruling philosophy, even with regular churchgoers. This faith is a type of neo-Gnosticism, that ancient multifaceted heresy that periodically grows a new head. One of its properties is a belief that it possesses superior guiding wisdom as insider knowledge or enlightenment known only to those who know. You know who you are.

The foundational precept is that if we tweak our exterior circumstances according to this wisdom, reform our society ‘out there’ with the right adjustments according to that wisdom, we move forward to our perfect world. In this lens, history is linear, and progress is always positive. From transhumanism to the right to alter our own bodies to political tribes which all have their own ideas of human perfection, we have come to believe we can create our own reality, and it will be better than what we have been given. We can decide what it means to be human. We can avoid asking the awkward question, “Just because we can do something, should we do it?”[v] We can make our own heaven. We can choose our own truth and remake ourselves in our own image. We can define our own good and evil like we were picking it from a tree, a dangerous vanity which we have done before a long time ago, and it did not go well.

Fundamentally utopian in assumption and structure, this belief system ignores what St. Thomas More knew when he coined the term “Utopia” for his book centuries ago. “Utopia” combines two Greek words and means “no place.” Given the disastrous results of every contrived utopian scheme from the French Revolution to the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Venezuela, it is a treacherous faith.

 Utopian collective solutions rid us of two uncomfortable features of Christian faith: individual responsibility because the problem is “out there” in everyone else, and the doctrine of the Fall asking us for repentance and deep personal change. Our times are the most prosperous in our history, for the wealthy, of course, but for the rest of us too, with conveniences in the most modest of American homes undreamed of by the richest kings in past times. Yet, we remain riven with record high loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Social media is a convenient foil, but it is an accelerant, not a root cause. The deeper mystery lies where it always has, in what Augustine called “incurvatus in se,” or turned inward into ourselves, his description of sin. Not a series of unfortunate acts, but a condition which needs a cure. Utopian fantasies cannot fix that and putting our trust in them exacerbates our avoidance of personal responsibility and our alienation. 

According to this post-Christian faith, our salvation is based on ridding ourselves of our illusions, learning the rules, and gaining enlightenment, and is not a question of sin and repentance. This utopian ‘faith’ leaches into our politics and crosses ideological lines. Two examples for clarity. For the ‘woke,’ the requisite enlightenment is different than from the MAGA version, but both presuppose a certain knowledge and trust that will lead us to the promised land. Both assume the unenlightened are at best ignorant and at worst evil. True to Giradian theory, each set of true believers also has their own set of scapegoats that society must suppress or rid itself of. You know who they are. Watch Newsmax or MSNBC commentators; they will happily point them out to you from two poles. Misery, distrust, and animosity proceed from this as surely as rot festers in malignancy.

“Freedom is an incantatory word in all Progressive forms of faith, not as something to be achieved through a road of discipline and the development of virtue according to a divine pattern but by breaking the perceived bonds of oppression that limit the self-creative process.”  Monsignor James Shea, “The Religion of the Day”

A committed remnant core should not discourage us; this has been the pattern since the beginning. Numerous times, throughout Church history, a remnant revived our faith with periodic renewal and necessary pruning. In previous times of heresy, corruption, confusion, and neglect, there has always been a remnant to grow new and fruitful life. Holy men and women who will not compromise have always led renewal in these times. We call them saints.

The “Judaizing” tendency afflicting the early Church produced the remedy of Paul’s teaching on grace and the decisions made at the Council of Jerusalem. Brilliant theologians like Irenaeus fought the early Gnostics that denied the goodness of creation. The Arian error denying the divinity of Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity spread through the entire Church, including the majority of bishops; it was only defeated by the heroism of saints like Athanasius, Augustine, and even Nicholas (yes that St Nick) who punched Arius in the face at the Council of Nicaea in 325, where a creed was written that we still pray at Mass today.

The corruption and affluence of medieval cities destroying the Church from within brought forth Francis, Dominic, and the mendicant orders. The unbelieving rationalism and violent revolution in the eighteenth century sparked the liturgical renewal of priestly reform in figures like John Vianney and John Bosco. Always from the beginning the likes of Aquinas, Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Sienna, Ignatius, Therese of the Little Flower have risen up in small remnants of love and faith to counter crises and address new cultural changes in ways as various as needed for their times. The list is almost endless into our own times.

Now is our time, the times we have inherited. We have lived among saints now. Mother Teresa, Karol Wojtyla, Maximillian Kolbe, Fulton Sheen, Padre Pio, and those who walk with us still in our diocese, in our parish, in our neighborhoods, in our homes, who are yet to be widely known. There are signs or stirrings that something is already going on. It may just be the beginnings of the Spirit once again visiting His people. Young people, especially Gen Z and Millenials, are yearning for something beyond radical subjectivism and self creation. Having never been exposed to Christianity even in their homes growing up, they know that something is missing, a terrible void in the their young lives. For the last few years more and more are first exploring and then coming to parishes and campus ministries like Newman Centers. Look here. Listen here. I do not know if the tide has indeed turned, but the generation with the lowest church participation ever recorded has begun to realize the culture we left them left a hole in their heart. They are right. Do not be afraid or discouraged or abandon the struggle.

True freedom is not invented, but it is, as it has always been, discovered in the faith brought to its culmination in Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago when the Creator of the universe, a universe that was unnecessary and pure gift, broke definitively once into human history to redeem our confusion, loneliness, alienation, and blinded self-destructive self-creation.

Upon reflection, may we realize that He redeemed our human existence in the only way possible – by entering our self-created hell and becoming one of us. He experienced in the same living flesh as we have everything we experience: our joy, human love, and wonder of discovery, but also our crushing disappointments, He suffered every indignity and pain that we most fear. Yet, He said, “Do not be afraid.” Scourged, beaten, ridiculed, abandoned, stripped naked, and executed most cruelly. Dead, buried in a tomb in the darkness, ended.

Resurrection. Not a symbol, but an actual historical happening that differentiates Jesus from any other religious figure, and Who is the center of our faith. Everything changed, and for the Christian, it is the central event of human history. He destroyed death and all suffering in an unlikely way that only God could have imagined and devised. He rose again, and invited us to join Him, not fallible, atomized, and tangled as we are, but recreated new and divinized. He became one of us.

Not stuck in our own inner torment, in the soul destroying ersatz autonomy of an impossible self-creation – but breaking out into the light to discover the release of new creation with the eyes of faith, a new creation which cannot be seen by the eyes of our body alone. A gift of faith, a gift freely given to all who ask. To see beyond the now and material and come to the realization of our true nature made in the image of God. Not a grim slog into the murk, but a long, sometimes wandering, journey into the light.

We are, each one of us, a strange and unlikely alloy of body and soul; heart and mind; spirit and earth.  The surprising truth is that God created and placed us here in these times to be a sign of and to fulfill that call to be what reaches beyond ourselves. Each of us is a miracle alchemy of whimsy, wonder, and work of every variety. Beyond all reasonable expectations we are to rise into gratitude, peace, joy, and true freedom. Not the license to scratch every itch, but the freedom to be what God called us to be, to choose freely the good, the true, and the beautiful into eternity.

“On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him. So, Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed.” John 20:1-8, New American Bible Revised Edition translation 

[i] In the Book of Judges, God directs Gideon to reduce his army of 22,000 to defend His people from the hordes of Midian, Amalek, and the Kedemites. The first cut to 10,000 sent home all who were inexperienced proven warriors, and any who were afraid. The Lord told Gideon that he needed even fewer for His purpose. The final winnowing seems at first to be mysterious: He instructed Gideon to observe his troops after a long brutal day in the sun, when they came to a source of water. Those that knelt to drink with their face in the water he sent home; only the three hundred who scooped the water to their mouths and lapped it from their hand remained for the battle.

[ii] Research William of Ockham and the evolution of the philosophies of voluntarism and nominalism to understand how this began way before modernity.

[iii] As quoted in “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission,” Monsignor James Shea, University of Mary Press, 2020

[iv] The ideas that form our progressive religion Monsignor Shea describes in depth in his follow up book, “The Religion of the Day,” University of Mary Press, 2023. Strongly suggest you buy a copy of each. They are more long essays and can be read easily in a couple of sessions each. You will gain great insight into the confusion that surrounds us.

[v] Spend a fruitful half hour and listen to a good summary of what this new faith is and how we should respond to it, from the author of the books noted above, Monsignor James Shea, and you will hear it far better than I can write it. “What Does it Mean to be Human?”

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March 5, 2026 · 1:00 pm

The Art of Fire Maintenance

“I understood what he meant by a house being finished when you can warm it.”

Walden, “House-Warming,” Henry David Thoreau

Snowing. Again. Not the demonstration of the power of nature blizzard from a week ago that is almost impossible to walk into, but light snow, steady, gray skies. A good afternoon for a comfortable chair with our feet up by the wood stove, warm with a good book. Rita is next to me doing the very same.

I have spent most of a lifetime with wood – climbing trees, cutting them, then lumberyards, building with it. We’ve also heated our homes with wood for over forty years. Since learning how in Maine. Making mistakes. Refining our technique, building woodsheds – three of them at different homes. Cutting, splitting, now at eighty buying cords of seasoned oak, maple, ash, birch, and apple that some other professional cut, split, seasoned, stacked and delivered.  I only have to re-split some of it with my good heavy maul against a solid maple cross section chopping block. I enjoy splitting wood so long as I don’t have to split cords of it. Wood warms me twice as the proverb says.

We use quite a lot of kindling in the fall and spring to relight the wood stove. House gets too hot, so when it does, we let the fire die out. My obsessive compulsive never-fail fire lighting. Crumpled up newspaper, a few ‘logs’ of tightly rolled newspaper, kindling that is gathered cleaning up the driveway after our wood is delivered – splinters and chards of dried hardwood and bark. On top of the kindling and paper, small split wood is stacked crisscross for two or three layers with room in between pieces for air to circulate and smoke to rise. One match ignites the pile at the bottom in four or five places. After it fires up for ten minutes or so with the vent wide open, the fuel mixture blazes into intense heat, and I can build with larger stove wood on the glowing coals. Four or five times a day, we load it and control the heat by the size of the load and the position of the vent.

In the winter it can burn for weeks off that one match, banked up at night with the biggest pieces, and revived in the early morning from the coals about four am. Sometimes it needs the attention of a birch and leather handheld bellows to encourage it when it needs a little help. The fire snaps and issues a quiet rush of fresh flames until it once again catches on its own. The stove creaks and crackles too as the cast iron expands to accommodate the heat. Morning sounds.

Bellows, fire tongs and poker. Small shovel and airtight ash bucket to clean out excess ashes, gloves to handle the wood and avoid splinters in my fingers.  A handmade wood box to store the day’s supply after I haul it in from the shed helps keep the mess and dust manageable. What I once cut and split when I was young from sixteen foot logs, I now buy from a reliable local source cut and split, still costing less than oil for our back up furnace. Good tools, lessons learned over many years. Warm in any storm even if we lose our electric power, and we could even cook a bit on the top in a pinch. Sometimes on a cold night I sleep out by the fire to feed it early in the predawn hours to keep the home and family warm.

Musing by the fire. About warmth and weather and wood and other wonders.

“I had for fuel a good supply of wood cut from the forest… which I had stored up.”

Walden, “House-Warming,” Henry David Thoreau

Firewood costs less than framing and finish lumber, but it accrues value in similar ways. Hardwood is denser, has less potential creosote to gum up and cause chimney fires, burns hotter and longer if it is properly seasoned to the right moisture content. A cord measures four feet by four feet by eight feet. One hundred and twenty eight cubic feet of seasoned hard wood that weighs about 3,700 pounds.[i] I move it piece by piece four times: to the wheelbarrow to push to the woodshed, stack it carefully in the woodshed, later take from the woodshed in our durable canvas sling log carrier to stand in our wood box, and the final move as needed is into the stove to keep us warm. Two to two and a half cords handles heating our downsized bungalow nicely for a winter. Our old drafty farmhouse in Maine required eight or nine.

Our son once worked for a division of a large investment company setting up office and remote computer systems to track the accruing value of their assets. South America, New Zealand, southern U.S. What they tracked was the growth of trees in their forests. Investors could buy shares in them. Incrementally, year by year, annual ring by annual ring, a tree’s diameter thickens to support its expanding height and breadth. Growth is extrapolated by professional foresters who estimate precisely the board footage per acre for eventual harvest. The carefully monitored board footage increase is the return on investment valued by the shareholders. Foresters will measure and brokers track the investment like others track income statements, balance sheets, organic growth, share valuation, and ‘green field’ new ventures.

There’s a lot of compiled science, data, and calculations about heating a house with wood or anything else. Our Quadra Fire stove isn’t the most expensive kind with a catalytic burner, but for a combination of affordable and practical, it’s a solid stove with its re-burner tubes, and it burns as cleanly as most. Science tells us the estimated 24 million BTU production of a seasoned oak and maple cord is equivalent in a stove like ours to about 160 gallons of fuel oil in our 85% efficient furnace, which sits quietly most of the time. Wood burns and emits more CO2 than the oil equivalent but with an important distinction. The harvest of wood should be regarded more as agriculture than despoiled park land. Wood is a renewable resource.

Trees survive and grow like all chlorophyll based plants by photosynthesis, a multistep amazing series of chemical reactions within its millions of living cells every moment of sunlight. To simplify a multistage process, that I once studied in detail: photosynthesis harnesses the energy of the sun[ii] absorbed by chlorophyll and uses it to combine atmospheric CO2 with water from the roots to create glucose and oxygen, which is expelled back into the atmosphere. Glucose is used by the plant for energy, a building block for its other necessary proteins, and the oxygen provides the rest of us with clean air. A tree is an efficient carbon processor and atmospheric cleanser.

Every day, cell by cell the trees renew fixing carbon into new potential fuel until the cycle begins again. Tree carbon will recycle whether we use it or not.  What grows will decay as inevitably as its life cycle in the forest. Or as in our fire. Harvested or unharvested, it will return to the air and soil. The only variable is time frame.

That is why many consider burning wood for heat as carbon neutral. It releases the carbon bound in the tree more quickly than wood left to rot back into the soil, but the carbon released is the same quantity, rotted or burned, over time. In contrast, burning oil has a similar source of carbon from rotting biomass a million years old, so it releases carbon that would have remained in the ground. Oil, gas, and coal are essentially new sources of atmospheric carbon. Oil doesn’t reabsorb its carbon by regrowth like wood does. Even as we burn, the trees for our future heating seasons are efficiently recleaning the air from this year’s CO2.

Robert Frost once wrote in a poem about a vine covered cord of stacked and split firewood he found abandoned for unknown reasons in the woods. He wondered about the work and care that went into the stack and how it returns the dead wood to the air and soil one way or another.

“What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labor of his ax,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.”   Robert Frost, “The Wood-Pile”[iii]

Science can tell us quite a lot about burning wood and heating homes, but like all science it can rule only on a reductive truth, a constricted concept of reality, not false, but not comprehensive either. Ah, my son, all truth cannot be expressed as science. Not all truth is measured; some of it is simply recognized. Science is one basis of reliable and objective truths; however it is not the only source.  Empirical observation, theory, and experiment are marvelous tools, invented by Francis Bacon, but the scientific method is based on principles that are philosophical, even metaphysical, and cannot be verified by science. The erroneous claim that truth can only be established by the scientific method is self-refuting for it cannot be proven by its own rubric.

In addition to the scientific method, an example of truth that cannot be proved by science is intelligibility upon which all science relies. No lesser light than Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”[iv].  Why is the universe explainable in abstract mathematical terms human beings can describe and formulate?  Nothing makes the intelligibility of the universe inevitable or provable by the scientific method. To believe that intelligibility can exist without an Intelligence or Designer behind it is a leap of pollyannish fancy in service of an agenda.

Another set of ideas is the mystery of the ‘anthropic principle.’ Astonishingly narrow ranges of at least seven physical forces are indispensable to allow the formation of carbon, stars, planets, water, and other non-negotiables necessary for our existence. These include gravity, the cosmological constant, both the strong and weak nuclear forces, and the ratio of mass from electrons to protons. Tiny variations in strength in each of them would doom formation of atoms, complex molecules, stars, planets, galaxies and the existence of all known objects in the universe.[v]  The odds of these forces existing within these fine-tuned parameters out of all possible potential ranges have been calculated to be less than one in all the subnuclear particles or quarks in the universe. Science can tell us with great exactitude their measurements and why the fine-tuned range is essential to our existence. But it is mute on why they are so perfectly suited to me writing this, and you reading it. Science cannot speak to why existence exists.

A third obvious, but unscientific, proof is what has been called the argument for the existence of God from contingency. Stick to a summary, please Jack, as this is already a long musing. Everything we know is contingent, in other words, we exist, but we are not necessary. We are caused and therefore contingent upon other prior existences. I exist because my parents existed. That oak tree exists because another earlier oak made an acorn from a fertilized flower, dropped it after it ripened according to gravity and the nature of its stems. A squirrel carried it off and buried it a few hundred feet away, and after it rotted, the seed within the acorn germinated in soil, warmth, and moisture conditions necessary for it to prosper. Both oak and squirrel evolved over a few million years from more primitive forms of life back to before recorded history.  If everything we know is contingent upon some other cause, what do we call the necessary first thing? The non contingent being without a cause? We cannot be ‘turtles all the way down, in infinite regress and defy all logic, can we?

Science can tell us so much about how, what and when, but cannot speak with any eloquence about why there is something rather than nothing[vi] at all.

These are the truths, and many more that we can ponder and read, and learn about on a cold, snowy afternoon in front of our woodstove.[vii]  What is good, and what is evil, and why. Poetry, literature, the good, true and beautiful expressed in art of all kinds. In Act Five, Hamlet spoke to his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Are these ideas not true as well? Self-evident? A kind of ‘true’ more indispensable to the mind, heart, and soul of a human person, that strange hybrid being of body and soul, spirit and earth, mind and mud.

And those complex truths are something the scientific method will be utterly insufficient to explain.

“Shut in from all the world without,

We sat the clean-winged hearth about,

Content to let the north-wind roar

In baffled rage at pane and door,

While the red logs before us beat

The frost-line back with tropic heat.” John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snow-Bound- A Winter Idyl

[i] By contrast a gallon of oil weighs about seven pounds, so the BTU equivalent 160 gallons of fuel oil only weighs about 1,700 pounds and is a very efficient storage source of fuel. Using it requires setting a thermostat and calling up the service company if it doesn’t work. Wood is a lot more work. Hence, oil is still far more commonly used, but oil tanks can run dry at the least opportune moment like a blizzard when deliveries are unavailable. A well-stocked woodshed is a security bank of warmth.

[ii] As a sidebar, science demonstrates that almost all our energy is stored sun or star light one way or another. Fossil fuels and wood are obvious. So is solar. Slightly less obvious is wind power, but wind is produced by the unequal warming of sea and land, a warming produced by the sun. Water power is enabled by the evaporation of water from the sea due primarily to the warmth of the sun, and subsequent rain gathered into streams, rivers, and eventually controlled by dams. Even nuclear power is based on the controlled release of radioactive energy in the form of heat. All radioactive elements were produced in older stars billions of years ago and released in the form of the collapse of neutron stars and the explosions of supernovae, which is gathered again hundreds of thousands of light years away by gravity to help form new suns and more to the point, planets.

[iii] As another aside. If a tree falls in a dry forest, the carbon and methane produced are equivalent to burning. Very little methane is produced and the fire consumes it. If it falls in a swamp and under the mud and water, frozen or otherwise, anerobic decomposition turns much more of it into methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas. So, in some common conditions, rotting in the wild pumps more greenhouse effect into our atmosphere. Another plus for woodstoves.

[iv] From Einstein’s 1936 essay “Physics and Reality,”

[v] For a good summary of photosynthesis with detail enough to understand the principles, see this Britanica article.

[vi] By nothing, we infer a nullity, absolutely nothing, not the quantum field of enormous potential energy some propose as an explanation. A quantum field of energy that leaps in and out of existence is not nothing, just another turtle.

[vii] Image of our woodstove at the beginning just a phone photo from me. The sketch of Nonna and Papa reading and thinking by the fire is by ChatGPT based on my description. Not perfect, but I think the point is illustrated, and I don’t have my grand-daughter’s artistic talent or patience.

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