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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.
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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February 26, 2026 · 3:10 pm

Migration

 

“There they go!   See them over the trees?

The emigrants from Ecuador —-

On to the mountains, over the seas

On wings that I shall hear no more!

 They are all I had and all I was,

And there they go on their even way!

There is the last, and my own, because

He wanted most of all to stay!

Father Arthur MacGillivray, “Migration,” From “Sufficient Wisdom” 1943, Bruce Humphies, Inc. Boston

 

I had an unexpected inquiry last week from an archivist at Eastern Michigan University which had come into possession of a collection of Father MacGillivray’s research files on writer and poet Muriel Rukeyser. I had written a post about Father MacGillivray a few years ago and my time as his student; she was looking for any source of possible information about him and his biography because as a Jesuit priest, his disciplined reticence about himself left very little biographical information. Once anything is posted somewhere on the internet, it has its own existence and a kind of immortality. She managed to find it, so even my brief post had been vacuumed into her search. If you have some curiosity about this gifted teacher of literature and poetry, you can start here: Sufficient Wisdom. He is worth some thought[i], especially compared to what passes for education now in too many schools.

The exchange prompted me to dig out my old copy of his book, and I discovered anew the poem, “Migration,” quoted above in the collection. I do not know the circumstances or people that he met that inspired the poem, but Jesuits still serve as missionaries all over the world. What struck me is the kindness and empathy, which seem sadly to be lacking in much of our public furor over immigrants both documented and undocumented.

His poem is spoken in the voice of a villager in Ecuador who stayed behind when the last friend, family member, or neighbor left. “They are all I had and all I was.” It doesn’t tell us if the voice was too old or unwell or afraid to leave, only that she was alone. The understated emotions remind us of what is missing in our understanding of their plight. People don’t leave their ancestral villages and all they and generations before them have ever known casually.

Rod Serling occasionally used to introduce the original 1960’s “Twilight Zone” episodes, with “Imagine if you will…”   So…. ‘Imagine if you will’ what  risks and circumstances it would take for a small rural town family to uproot completely from their village, and the village of  generations of their family before them, their family and friends and entire social network, then walk a couple of thousand miles to a land where they know no one, don’t speak the language, and have no promise of a livelihood or know what awaits them. Imagine what dire conditions would cause you and your family to leave everything you’ve ever known all behind. They don’t leave because they want to; they leave because they must. Perhaps we could conjure up some empathy for their plight.

 

It’s a restless hungry feeling

That don’t mean no one no good

When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’

You can say it just as good.

You’re right from your side

I’m right from mine

We’re both just one too many mornings

An’ a thousand miles behind.    Bob Dylan, “One Too Many Mornings”, 1964

 

 Since I wrote about this in August here, Coming Home, I’ll try not to cover too much of the same ground except a reminder of a caveat from an old boss and my experience working for national corporations. Some young ambitious corporate bureaucrat would hear some horror story anecdotes from a location or two that may or may not have been exaggerated for effect. The stories might very well have been true; the error was in extrapolating, interpreting, and fabricating a reactive wider response into a blanket policy they would talk senior management into. Inevitably it would do as much damage as good and would cause much cynicism in lumberyard employees about ‘front office’ cluelessness.

Of course, some of the anecdotes of horrific crimes committed by ‘illegal’ aliens are true, and none of us would protest when the perpetrators suffer the full consequences of their actions: arrest, conviction, incarceration for a long time, and then banishment. But what are the data for the great majority of undocumented workers? Most states don’t track or report arrest records by citizens v migrants v undocumented migrants, but Texas does, and that’s the source of the best long term study. Undocumented workers commit crimes at less than half the rate of citizens, and it’s even more of a discrepancy for violent crimes and murder. See the note below[ii] and the link to the actual Department of Justice study using the Texas data.

The same applies to the anecdotes about ‘illegal’ immigrants who live luxuriously on the public dole, leeching off the tax dollars of the rest of us hard workers. Again, perhaps there are always going to be some, and the abuse needs to be ferreted out and remedied. But the vast majority eke out a living doing jobs most citizens won’t do. They are a net positive to the economy, and even though there are individual towns that lose a bit, especially with schools, in aggregate, immigrants are a huge help, including the undocumented ones. They pay taxes, send whatever they can back to their families to help them, harvest the food we eat, clean the hotel rooms we enjoy, build the homes that we live in. Again, below if you want some discussion points for your Facebook friends are the data and articles[iii] that we should understand so that we will not be manipulated by social media posts and hype by politicians with an agenda.

Management by anecdote is flawed. Don’t ignore the 99 percent of immigrants lawful behavior or for that matter we shouldn’t forget the great majority of our border patrol officers who work their entire career in dedicated service to the country and who do their jobs diligently and lawfully and never draw their weapon. Political posturing and rhetoric that drives fear, distrust, division, and hatred to create policy or motivate protest is woeful and hopefully a temporary condition we are living through as we have before from “no Irish need apply” on down. As a nation, we need to do better than that. We have better angels, let’s listen to them.

Not to say anecdotes do not add perspective and get us thinking in another direction, so here’s one of mine from fifteen years ago about an immigrant (documented or not I have no idea) who did some excellent patio work at our old house in Providence. Selvin’s humanity, kindness, self-deprecating humor, and generosity towards the family and friends he left behind in Guatemala are extraordinary, and I was honored to get to know him. The post tells the story, so I’ll leave you to it if you have interest. Selvin.

Making America Great Again means returning to the embracing kindness and welcome of our better nature, not the xenophobia, mistrust, envy, and animus that informs much of the debate on these issues, especially in social media and on the internet. Return to the poem Emma Lazarus wrote which is memorialized on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor overlooking the adjoining Ellis Island with its hospital and welcoming center.  That was the defining character of our great nation, and it needs to be again.

 

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”  Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

 

May our properly formed consciences guide us individually and as a society. May we be accountable for our love or lack of it.

 

Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose:

releasing those bound unjustly,

untying the thongs of the yoke;

Setting free the oppressed,

breaking off every yoke?

 

Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry,

bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house;

Clothing the naked when you see them,

and not turning your back on your own flesh?

 

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

and your wound shall quickly be healed.

Isaiah 58: 6-8a

 

[i] Father MacGillivray hosted Robert Frost and e.e. Cummings visits at Boston College. He was the longtime moderator of The Stylus, the BC literary magazine and contributed his own poems and reviews, as well as being published in a variety of other journals. His book of poems, “Sufficient Wisdom’ was published in 1943 and was well reviewed. I am the fortunate owner of an original first edition that was once owned by Admiral Richard Byrd and inscribed by hand to him by Father MacGillivray. Prior to BC, he was the head of the English Department in the founding faculty for Fairfield University, the Jesuit college in Connecticut. Father MacGillivray was a “pioneer” at Fairfield University. When the university opened its doors to undergraduate students in 1947, he was a member of the first faculty, serving as the Chairman of the English Department.  As the inaugural department head, he was responsible for designing the classical Jesuit English curriculum that defined the university’s early academic identity. He was a well known poet, a friend of Robert Frost and correspondent with T.S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and other prominent poets. A ‘legendary’ professor at BC with a sharp Jesuit wit and sense of humor, he was unforgettable to his many students over his thirty year career there. I was fortunate to be one of them.

[ii] U.S. Department of Justice–supported report, “Unauthorized Immigration, Crime, and Recidivism: Evidence From Texas (2012–2018)”, provides arrest rate data across several felony categories:

Violent crime arrests (2012–2018)

U.S.-born citizens: 213 per 100,000

Undocumented immigrants: 96.2 per 100,000

Drug crime arrests:

U.S.-born: 337.2 per 100,000

Undocumented: 135 per 100,000

Property crime arrests:

U.S.-born: 165.2 per 100,000

Undocumented: 38.5 per 100,000

Homicide arrests:

U.S.-born: 4.8 per 100,000

Undocumented: 1.9 per 100,000

 

[iii] Two articles. The Importance of Immigrant Labor to the US Economy and this one with more information and a good summary about Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants. Please read them, so we are informed, not just manipulated.

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February 12, 2026 · 12:15 pm

Snowy

“When the white owl flies, winter has found its voice.”  Inuit saying

Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge had another short visit from a snowy owl, the second such visit this winter. She had a two day layover in December at the refuge, was just passing through we think and has not been spotted since she was hanging around Island Rocks. She left before the paparazzi showed up. Snowy’s have a following, and when they grace us with an appearance the parking lot fills up.

If they are on the roof of the visitor center as one was four years ago, the small lawn area in front of the main entrance is overrun with photography equipment worth more than my car. On tripods – lots of tripods sprouting like a field full of oil rigs with large telescoping lenses.  A photographer and ornithologist told me one lens could cost fifteen thousand dollars.

We volunteer Friday afternoons in the Visitor Center. From December to February, at least a few visitors come to the hospitality desk each week to ask us where any snowy owls have been spotted with the excitement of a neighbor enthusing about the Pats back in the Super Bowl. Snowy owls are celebrities. Reports of a sighting on E Bird or Merlin are shared with online contagion as excitedly as if Taylor Swift was spotted at a Newport restaurant with her NFL star fiancé.

During the winter of 2022-23 a pair of snowy owls moved in for the season. The refuge had to close off the Price Neck Overlook Trail where they were nesting because too many hopeful observers were wandering off the trails to locate their nest, and they were stressing out the birds. Hard to get a parking spot, even with the overflow lot opened, so a snowy layover is a mixed blessing.

When they are hunting for lunch, it is major entertainment. A pair of barn owls were nesting on the refuge at the same time the snowys took up residence. Barn owls are not scarce globally but are considered rare and endangered in Rhode Island. Not as many barns for them as there once were.  They became rarer still on Aquidneck Island after the snowy owls killed them both at the refuge. Another volunteer saw a barn owl grab a vole just before the snowy owl snatched up both the barn owl and its prey. Lunch and dessert. I would have loved to have seen that encounter.

“The snowy owl belongs to the great white silence of the Arctic, and when it comes south it brings that silence with it.”  Bernd Heinrich, Winter World

Visits by snowy owls used to be more common before the water warmed up in Narraganset Bay.[i] Our visitors were not fully mature, so they had mixed gray, black, and white feathers and not the purer white that earned them their name. Farther up north in the tundra if food becomes scarce, the snowy parents make a pragmatic decision when their hatched owlets grow larger and fledge. Time to get booted out of the nest and make their way south to find food. Ducks and barn owls beware. Darwin had some things right. Failure to launch is not an option.

Because the bay waters are warmer and the winters are demonstrably less severe than in the days of my coming of age, the owls don’t have to come as far south to eat regularly. Thus, their visits are now less frequent.

It has not always been that way, not even counting the long era that lasted about eight millennia from twenty three to fourteen thousand years ago, when most of Rhode Island was under a mile deep glacier. That’s a long cold snap. Salty ocean water freezes when its temperature drops to 28 degrees, while freshwater freezes at 32. With billions of gallons of water Narragansett Bay takes a prolonged period of very cold weather to freeze over, especially as it is flushed twice every day with the tidal flows from the ocean.

We have enjoyed warming water for generations now, and especially so in the last fifty years. The winter surfers and the New Year’s Day polar plunge folks appreciate it. But this year is the exception to the trend and so far has been the coldest winter in thirty years. The ice we’re seeing now in some spots in the bay as shown in the satellite image is a rarity. Rhode Island needs to stay cold for a long while for Narragansett Bay to show ice.  If warmth is lacking for long enough the bay can freeze solidly as it has frozen in the past, although we are unlikely to experience that again in our lifetime.

Beginning around the edges as an advancing gray slurry with the waves still undulating softly under it, the surface becomes ever more languid as if the sea is nodding off. Light and oxygen diminish under it as it solidifies, and the small inlets succumb to the proliferating crystals of ice. Torpor descends slowly below the ice as light and warmth fade. The fish and crustaceans slow their hunting and eat less; the metabolism of cold blooded species slows as the temperature drops in the water.

At Weaver Cove on our western Narragansett Bay shore a few hundred yards offshore this week we watched a raft of brants (a type of smaller goose). There were at least two hundred of them swimming together in a small area with no chop or waves – clear open water as still as a woodland pond. As if by prearranged signal, they rose as one and flew very fast towards Prudence Island. They are a resolute sign of defiance to the winter and refuse to go gentle into that good night.

According to then Deputy Governor William Greene, the winter of 1740-41 was “the coldest known in New England since the memory of man.” Except for a few days of warmer, rainy weather in mid-December while the General Assembly met in Newport, the deep cold was unabated. Perhaps then, like now, when the state legislature is in session, there is plenty of hot air. “Soon after this,” said Greene, “the weather was again so exceedingly cold that the Narragansett Bay was soon frozen over, and people passed and repassed from Providence to Newport on the ice, and from Newport to Bristol.”[ii]

“As cold as the winter of 1740-41 had been, the winter of 1779-80 was worse. From mid-December through mid-March, frigid Arctic air – accompanied by three major nor’easters – kept the temperature below zero for 11 consecutive days. Not only did the bay freeze, but according to some sources, much of Block Island Sound and the ocean beyond almost to the Gulf Stream was solid.”[iii] That was the winter that followed the killing weather of 1777-78, when George Washington and the remnants of the Continental Army were struggling to survive at Valley Forge.

In those times, sleds brought firewood to Aquidneck Island from the mainland because the British Army occupying Newport had cut down nearly every tree on the island for their campfires and the fireplaces in the homes their officers had occupied. Many residents whose families had been here over a century left. Newport never fully recovered as a major east coast port after the troops pulled out, leaving salted wells and scuttled ships to block the harbor. Sleds traversed the bay and people walked from Providence to Newport.

Cold is not a distinctive attribute as much as a lack of one. Like darkness is not a discrete quality, but a lack of light, so cold is a scarcity of the comfort of warmth. Nature has other analogies in our human self-inflicted winters. Vice is a poverty of virtue, corruption is a failure of renewal, death is an abandonment of life, indifference is a refusal of love, contempt a dearth of humility. Evil is a privation of good, not a Manichean battle of the Force v the Dark Side. Unlike the cold heart of winter which we suffer but can do little to change, virtue, renewal, joy and gratitude for our lives, love for one another, choosing the good, and humility are choices that are ours to make and live. In those choices, the ‘winter of our discontent’ is held at bay.

While we complain a bit about the cold, former Mainers like us quickly adapt, burn a little more wood in the stove, put together a hearty beef stew or a mood brightening lasagna, gather for church suppers in our parish and patiently wait for the spring and cherry blossoms that will soon emerge.

Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dream, “The white owl moves across the tundra like a drifting thought, as silent as snowfall.”  New Englanders take what pleasure we can from the silence of the winter, persevere, bring in our wood from the shed, warm up some hot chocolate, take solace in reading by the stove, and wait. We wait. We’re good at it.

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” Rachel Carson, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” 1956 article in Women’s Home Companion

 

[i] The satellite image was posted by local TV station WJAR showing ice forming in Narragansett Bay in January of 2026. The upper bay section near Warwick shows a large frozen area. Floating ice fields can be seen floating just west of Prudence Island and a few other places. A prolonged cold snap has promulgated the ice, which we haven’t seen here for a while. Point of reference is the small foot like projection on the northeast end of Aquidneck Island. That is Sachuest Point where we have spent hundreds of happy hours.

The snowy owl photo was taken on the rocks at Sachuest Point in 2022 by me.

The chart showing the warming of Narragansett Bay was generated by a spreadsheet of five year increments from 1950 on from the University of Rhode Island Physical Data Master files showing the recorded temps and trend line.

[ii] From a 2014 article in the Jamestown Press, “When Narragansett Bay Freezes Over.”

[iii] Ibid

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January 26, 2026 · 12:13 pm

Fragments

“I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke. Friends will arrive; friends will disappear.” Bob Dylan, “Buckets of Rain” from the “Blood On The Tracks” album

I’ve written before about the sudden revelation that broke in on me when I was rocking, singing, and reading to our kids getting ready for bedtime many years ago. I realized with a jolt that there would be a last time that I would share this intimate, precious time, and I would not know when it was while it was happening.[i] In another post, I wrote about our many Maine times, our decade living there and the forty years of summer visits since, mostly on Webb Lake in Weld[ii]. Again, it struck me that there will be a last visit, and it is unlikely I will know that while we are there.[iii]

Nostalgia for me tends to peak around the turn of the year in the stillness of winter, and this year is no exception. The similarity of other events and even other relationships to reading to our children or the still ongoing summer idylls in Maine is inescapable. Those undetected last times occur and have occurred with friends and family too. We have all experienced similar ‘last time’ visits with those we care about. They don’t come with notices or calendar reminders. They come and they go and rarely do they announce themselves. Last time visits are seldom perceived in real time except in retrospect. People move away great distances. We lose track or we move. Jobs change. Relationships suffer neglect and fade away. Sometimes years afterwards, unfortunately, they are only acknowledged in our reminiscence at a funeral. Too late to do anything differently than we did. Or didn’t do.

I’ve come to understand that our lives pass by often in fragments as a mosaic rather than a perfectly scripted narrative with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end like a Hallmark movie. Development of the story is inadequate, and the denouement is without the satisfaction of a happy or even recognizable ending. Not to be morose, but I see this not so much as a heartbreaking breakdown like a sad country song, but more like an invitation to do better. To be better.

“Donde no hay amor, pon amor, y sacarás amor.”

Where there is no love, put love—and you will draw out love.

Saint John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love

 

Last weekend we were eating at our favorite breakfast joint. We are not fine dining gourmands; we are breakfast joint folks. Have been all our lives.[iv] The waitress welcomes us with strong fresh coffee in solid mugs (tea for Rita) as soon as we are seated – diner coffee, no baristas or expensive, complicated options needed – a bottomless cup for under three bucks. She circulates among her tables from time to time with a fresh pot and refills the mugs.

She starts scribbling our order on her pad before we have our coats off or said more than good morning. Our order rarely varies; she looks from one to the other of us and tells us what she knows we’ll order. They can carry six plates at once and the food comes hot off the grille, rarely taking more than five or ten minutes. She never annoys us or hovers and asks how everything is so we’re coerced into mumbling an awkward response with mouths full of eggs, home fries, or blueberry pancakes There are advantages to being a regular. We know all the waitresses in the place. And the cook.  We have a nodding smile acquaintance with other regulars.

After she confirmed our order, last week she asked a shy question. If you are breakfast diner regulars, you know that breakfast diner waitresses are not shy. They give as good as they get to the patrons at the counter and the tables. Lighthearted familiar repartee with shared laughter is the point. Last weekend, though, she leaned over and said very quietly, “You are ‘prayer people,’ right?” The topic had never come up, nor did I think we were particularly obvious about it. I replied that we were such people. Or tried to be.  She said, “I’m worried about my daughter. Can you say a prayer for her this morning?”  She told us the situation, which was temporary, but concerning. Of course, we replied in tandem. This week she thanked us as soon as we walked in and told us all went well.

It may be that we are offered a dozen opportunities a day, heavenly invitations that we miss. But this one was overt. Every day we have opportunities to love, to connect, to be open, to listen. And every day we are too busy or distracted or self-occupied to notice them. Invitations come from family. From friends. From colleagues at work or social organizations.  From casual acquaintances. From waitresses. From strangers.

The loneliness and alienation of our culture is legend. The richest country in the world, maybe ever, and instantly connected to everyone, everywhere, and yet we are isolated. Starting most especially with young people who grew up never too far from a screen, usually in their pockets.

Our connections are digital, not analog – false touchpoints without touch. Not only our connections with other human beings, but too often our connections to natural things, wild things, untamed things – they too are screened through our screens, removed from anything real and focused and present.

We are products and consumers of the Machine[v] we have created and named Progress. We are trained to be consumers, programmed to be consumers. It’s what keeps the Machine oiled and running smoothly. We mine for “likes” and approval to prove to ourselves that we exist. The Machine feeds us exactly what we want to hear, and we dutifully ensconce ourselves in our silos and lap it up.  We have become a voracious appetite doomed to never be satiated. Then we wonder why we are lonely, depressed, suspicious, and resentful.

We all know what the solutions are to our festering isolation, yet echoing St. Paul, we don’t do them. We revert to our screens, our non-threatening disconnected connections because connections with real things, real people get messy and uncomfortable. Woods trails are muddy with roots and rocks and hidden obstacles. Other human beings impinge; they may ask of us who knows what.  We know that a walk in the nearby woods or fields or on the beach is what will begin to heal us. We know that a live open ended conversation with another person will begin to heal us. We know that reaching out with a simple act of kindness and love will begin to heal us. But we are tired. We are distracted. We are busy. We are afraid. The screens beckon.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Thomas Merton, “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” (1966)

[i] Rockee Sing, Dad, Do Rockee Sing

[ii] Summer Kitchens

[iii] Both posts cited above in the endnotes are included in the book published in December, “Shelter In The Storm,” available on Amazon. Written around the themes of the mosaic of our past, the people and places that inhabit our lives, and our faith is Someone greater than ourselves. Get the book. Give it a good review if you’d be so kind. They help in prioritizing searches for others.

[iv] Here’s one old post, but there are others. Diner. Didn’t make the cut for the themes of the book. Maybe the next one?

[v] A book well worth your time from last year. Against the Machine, On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth. Get a copy. Read it. It will change your paradigm.

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December 24, 2025 · 10:35 am

Christmas Gravy

“There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles.” Dylan Thomas, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

My father was an incurable competitor and would add savor to any enterprise with a small bet. Golf, tennis, volleyball, street football, who could throw a football for the longest distance, or cribbage, he was always ready to go. If a thing was worth doing, it was worth betting on. At least for low stakes.

I can’t remember for certain whether it was a big family get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, which were annual events for our family either hosted at home or at some relative or other’s home, but my memory is that it was Christmas dinner. Joyful, well lubricated with punch or highballs or beer. Laughter, singing, storytelling, joyful, loud and chaotic, moving from room to room, hugs, with lots of Irish jokes that went over the cousin’s heads most of the time. Just what a large family gathering should be.  At Christmas, it often meant caroling with my father’s pristine church voice tenor leading the way.

The gathering that I remember here was a two turkey affair with five uncles and our  aunts who actually ran the day, some grand uncles and aunts, and a dozen and a half of cousins were underfoot. I was one of those underfoot. Cousins lived in their own company at these times, a world largely ignored by grownups unless we became too raucous or broke something fragile.

My mother was the youngest of the six children of Jim and Molly Lararcy, all born before or during 1920. All of them were part of the Greatest Generation which weathered first the Great Depression, then the bloodiest war in human history. Four girls and two boys. Jim was a tin knocker sheet metal craftsman; Mary Ann, called Molly, was a dedicated home maker.  My dad met my mother because she was the twin sister of Sonny Laracy; they were youngest two of the Laracy kids. Sonny was my father’s Army buddy; they served as scouts together for the Ninth Armored Division. My father was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and he survived that ordeal to come home to his beloved Betty.

My father resolved that this annual dinner was better celebrated with a contest, a friendly wager, a bet on gravy superiority. He was our regular Sunday dinner cook and prided himself on superior gravy.

Early on the morning of the holiday, my dad took extra pains with his submittal to the hotly contested and critical gravy contest with my Uncle Jim. He tasted it repeatedly and tweaked it with a little extra flavoring and spices until it was almost perfect. Two tureens of piping hot gravy were on the table to pour generously over our mashed potatoes, vegetables, stuffing, and the carved up birds. A secret vote with little slips of paper was organized, and everyone got to write “Jim” or “Jack” on one of them to deposit into an empty shoebox.

After dinner and the punishing desserts that finished us off, the food coma left some of the oldsters nodding off in the most comfortable chair they could find. It wasn’t time yet to start singing, but my father rallied the voters to gather around for the vote counting so he could bask in adulation and victory. He was never a guy who gloated, but he far preferred to win in any contest.

He lost. Not even close. Uncle Jim had outdone himself and my father. His gravy was the clear winner. My father pouted later at home and speculated that the ballot box had been stuffed. Maybe with mail in votes? Perhaps one or two of us was disloyal?  At the party, he was a gracious loser, albeit a disappointed one.

On Christmas Eve, my father would inevitably attend Midnight Mass. As I got older, I had the privilege and pleasure of going with him. Alone in the choir loft with him, the choir, and the organist. My father was the soloist. His mother had been a professional singer, and my dad’s tenor was heard at USO shows during the war. Always before Mass, he “loosened up his pipes” with a shot of Southern Comfort or Jack Daniels. Just one. Not enough to impair, but a little help stretching them out. “Oh, Holy Night” silenced the full church.

 He’d be “cooking the bird” through the night and make the gravy in the morning. After Mass, he would be up most of the rest of the night he wasn’t cooking, wrapping presents for the happy chaos in the morning under the tree with the six of us kids. We’d go to Christmas Mass after the grand openings as a family.

As the oldest, once I regrettably outgrew Santa, the consolation prize was to play a role in the adult drama of getting the kids to sleep before Dad went to Midnight Mass. The role involved sneaking outside and ringing bells, so the younger siblings would hasten to their beds, convinced the big, white bearded guy himself was soon to be on the roof and wide awake kids would prevent him from coming down the chimney. We’d set out cookies and milk for Santa and a couple of carrots for the reindeer by the fireplace. My second job was to eat the cookies, leave a few crumbs, drain the milk glass, and nibble the carrots

L to R: Mark, Jack (kneeling), Barry,Beth, Greg

convincingly. Being part of the conspiracy with my folks was the consolation prize for growing up.

After Midnight Mass, now sleepy myself, I’d fulfil my cookies and carrots duty and head up the stairs to sneak into bed in the room I shared with (at the time) three of my brothers. My sister, Beth, got her own room, a gender discrimination benefit no one questioned or resented. My youngest brother, Marty, had yet to join us. Carefully, I’d slip under the covers in my new pajamas careful not to rouse Mark with whom I shared the double bed. Mom always got us new matching Christmas pajamas, the one present which we were allowed to open on Christmas Eve.

Full of cookies and carrots, I’d lay my head on my pillow, listen to my brothers sleep breathing, calm down, content even while excited for the morning. Close my eyes. Wake up early when the young ones started to slip down to the family room to see if they could guess what they were going to open after my bleary eyed folks made the coffee, got their camera, and sat in the chairs by the tree.

“I could see the lights in the other windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night.  I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”  Dylan Thomas, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

Christmas announcement.

After many years of doing this, at the request of friends and family, I put together a book of blog posts with some editing and additions. Not a biography or a narrative, but a mosaic of an ordinary life described in the past, people, places, and faith that formed us.

If you have interest, it is available in an affordable paperback on Amazon. An e version, hopefully soon, will be available for those who prefer their library in their tablet. A review and five stars would help get the book seen if you are generous enough to take the time.  Or share with your friends of similar taste who might enjoy the read on a cold winter night. It would be much appreciated.

Here’s the link to the book in Amazon. Shelter In the Storm

Or you can search on the title in Amazon. 

The cover was drawn by our granddaughter Ellie, who is fifteen. Her drawing is of the camp that four generations of us have enjoyed. For over forty years on Webb Lake in Weld, Maine, we have swam, climbed, canoed, read in our hammocks, and enjoyed smores around campfires there. It is featured in a couple of the essays.

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November 19, 2025 · 12:57 pm

Swing me, Wally

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” Jane Howard, Families 

We are rapidly approaching holiday family gathering times. They are, as we all have experienced, a blessing, but a blessing with its complications.

Growing up in a small town, the older kids went to Midnight Mass and sang those nostalgic and beautiful familiar carols. We all knew the first verse and most knew the second; after that it was hit or miss. My father used to solo at Midnight Mass in his perfect tenor after a quick shot of Jack Daniels or Southern Comfort at our house to ‘loosen the pipes.’ “Oh, Holy Night” or “Panis Angelicus” at Communion.

Any resistance to going to bed after Mass was dealt with by telling us Santa just doesn’t come to houses where anyone is awake. In the morning there was a barely past sun rise gift opening frenzy with bleary eyed parents who had wrapped gifts until an hour before the kids got up. Next came a quick and unfancy breakfast, some magic time to play with new toys and tally them on the floor of our shared bedrooms. Define the borders of each kid’s stash. I slept in a room with three brothers. One single bed and a bunkbed. It never felt crowded.

The Christmas rituals continued with a turkey dinner for which my father had sacrificed the rest of what little Christmas Eve sleep was available. After he dropped into a quick nap nodding off in his chair, he and my mother would round us up each carrying a new favorite toy.  We would pile into the station wagon unstrapped and boisterous, then head over a few miles to Uncle Timmy and Aunt Julia’s Federalist style two story house in an older neighborhood for a casual supper and the annual gathering with our menagerie of uncles, aunts, and cousins. To be more accurate, Timmy and Julia were our great uncle and aunt, Julia was one of two surviving sisters of my mother’s mother, the late Mary Ann (Molly) Laracy, ne Manley. The furniture was solid wood with elaborately carved legs, heavily upholstered in a dark floral pattern, well maintained with arm covers on the chairs, and not much of it was comfortable.

Timmy was genial, slightly flushed, quietly observant, and quintessentially Irish with a knowing eye and a ready quip. He was tall with huge hands and prominent knuckles. He sat at the head of the dining room table while the kids ran carefully amuck. We loved him and his humor. He was also the town chief of police, and as we learned years later he was universally feared by potential malefactors as in ‘don’t ever mess with Timmy Cullinane.’ For his grand nephews and nieces though, he was benign Uncle Timmy, and we felt safe and welcomed in his home. Julia was gracious, kind, with a calming smile, and supplied her loving hospitality without pretense or expectation. Their only child, Marie, taught at the Boston College School of Nursing for many years. Marie baby sat for us once or twice in a pinch when she was still in school, and I confess I had a crush on her soft voice and warm, smoky laughter. Like most of my cousins, she called me Jackie, a name I’ve rarely heard since.

While the adults savored the buffet, drained the spiked punch, and relaxed in mirth and conversation in the formal dining and living rooms, the cousins lived their own version of Christmas in the rest of the house, avoiding being underfoot and annoying the grown-ups. Four of us were born in 1946 of the four Laracy sisters and their husbands recently back from the war. Later came more cousins, including my five siblings. The older cousins would retreat to the back stairway off the kitchen and play school, a game devised and supervised by my cousin Mary. Always supervised and taught by Mary because, well, because she was Mary. She eventually did enjoy a successful career as a teacher in public schools. I do not believe she could use the stairs for her students there, but I wouldn’t put it past her.

The game went like this. The pupils all started bunched up on the bottom step. Mary asked us in turn a question, usually history or science, and the answers she was looking for were determinative.  Any arguments disputing wrong answers were not just discouraged; they were futile. Each correct answer allowed the pupil to scoot up one step. There was crowding and jostling and an occasional elbow. Each wrong answer dropped us down a step, but you could not descend lower than the floor, so there was only so far to fall. Mary would often seem slightly more pleased with a smug smile when demoting us than she was gratified to give us a promotion to a higher level, but that just might be my faulty memory. I can’t ever remember a winner. The game went on until we gave up with numb legs and found the next entertainment or a loud complaint escalated until an aunt came over and broke up the class.

“The village policeman always seemed to be about. He knew the foibles of the whole countryside and trod softly, seldom needing to do more than quietly suggest.”  James Herriot, “All Creatures Great and Small”

One of Uncle Timmy’s most reliable cops was Wally. Always squared away, big hands, Billy club hung at his belt. Salt and pepper hair, tall, and perhaps ten pounds over his ideal weight by today’s standards, but he carried it well. He frequently played volleyball with the adult men evening league in the high school gym. Knew everyone in our community, or at least all the families. We lived in a growing municipality run by elected selectmen, and we were in transition from a small mill town that still had some factory housing to a larger bedroom commuter hub halfway on the rail line from Providence to Boston.

And everyone knew Wally. Trusted him. The kind of policeman you called when you needed help. The kind of policeman who showed up when you needed help. Rumor had it that, like Uncle Timmy, as friendly as his preferred manner was, Wally was not to be trifled with. An aggressive belligerent drunk would likely need first aid before they locked him up for the night. A particularly troublesome one who hit a woman might require stiches in the emergency room. No one was shot or damaged permanently, but consequences were administered swiftly, and such rough justice was painful and unlikely to be forgotten.

Wally did not wear a balaclava to mask his identity from his fellow townspeople. He was not afraid to be identified or worried about reprisals or ashamed of what he did. I’m not sure if law enforcement that needs to mask up to go to work says more about the cops or about the rest of us. However, masked agents of the law do not strike me as a societal improvement from guys like Wally.

Wally’s main claim to local legend was as a crossing guard for the school before and after classes. He especially enjoyed the elementary school crossing three blocks from the town hall and the old police station. In days of yore, law enforcement sergeants and below did not consider it beneath them to spend a half hour of their shift helping kids safely navigate crossing one of the more heavily traveled streets: Main Street, Common Street, Stone Street, School Street. Even the names evoke clear and pleasant memories for me.   A policeman’s job was to keep the town safe for the residents, and kids crossing busy streets were in their care.

Our Wally was special though. His big grin would flash as he recognized his regulars, calling them out by name. His signature move, if they wanted, was to grab their wrists both gently and securely and spin rapidly around. Sadly today, that would probably cost him his job. But for the kids in the nineteen fifties, although it was thrilling and felt a little risky, his strength was unmistakable, and no one was ever afraid. We were flying.

We’d run to him and cry out, “Swing me, Wally!” And he would make us soar.

“Most street cops are honest men doing a hard job. The good ones know their streets like family.” Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

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November 9, 2025 · 3:49 pm

Afterward

  Ed died a couple of weeks ago. We went to his funeral, incongruously in the stately beauty of St. Mary Church in Newport where the Camelot Kennedys were married. Regular readers have met Ed here in another post. He was the gentle and once suffering soul who lived in an unmaintained mobile home with filthy floors, smoked too much, could barely clear the couch in his hovel to get to the bathroom, and took in homeless people just a click worse off than he was. He slept fitfully on his sagging couch with disheveled gray blankets of an indistinguishable original color, and his guests slept in his bed.

   Later he was moved against his will to a nursing home when pneumonia and advancing neuropathy and Parkinson’s took him down. The ambulance brought him to the hospital, and they wouldn’t let him go home again. We continued to bring him the Eucharist on Sundays after Mass there and celebrate a brief liturgy. It wasn’t a bad place as such places go, and the staff was kind. He was always astonishingly attentive and grateful and reverent with the Blessed Sacrament.

   I took him on an outing one morning in late September after he had recovered somehow from a bout with COVID. He was officially in hospice, but the nurse said I could take him out if I promised to bring him back as soon as he got tired. He could no longer walk, but the nurse helped me move him into the car from the wheelchair. His frail body weighed about as much as my twelve year old granddaughter.

  I had hoped we could go in the chair to a bench overlooking Second Beach outside the Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center where we volunteer on Fridays. He once loved to walk the trails there when he could. Now even the move in a wheelchair to the bench was beyond him. So, we remained in the car and talked and just sat. Then we drove a couple of miles to Sweetberry Farm, drank coffee, and ate blueberry muffins from their small bakery there. We parked overlooking the orchard and fields and distant hills next to the tall hydrangeas. He most wanted to lower the windows and examine more closely the blooms on the hydrangeas. He was content to sit in silence and contemplate the flowers until he asked quietly if we could go back to his shared room so he could take a nap in his bed.  

“When they heard the sound of the Lord God walking about the garden in the breezy part of the day..” from Genesis 3

  Adam and Eve hid from God because they were afraid and ashamed, though they had never been that before they listened to the snake. They ate the fruit of the tree of good and evil, which was the only fruit of all the delightful trees in the garden from which they had been forbidden. Even though they were completely happy, they wanted more even though they had been warned it would ruin them. They wanted to become like God, to be God, and we still do strive to be so. In doing so, we struggle, fail, alienate ourselves from God and from one another; hurt ourselves and others. We want to be God, but we’re not and cannot be.

  But we are given a lovely image, a glimpse before the Fall when the Lord God walked about the garden in the breezy part of the day. Adam and Eve could join Him, talk with Him about all that is wonderful, laugh with Him, take in the incomprehensible beauty of the garden, of all God had made for us to enjoy, to be utterly joyful within.

  Now, this little bit of anthropomorphizing God is metaphor. We have no idea what before or after are.

  We have been told that whatever comes after our earthly heart stops and our brain stills will be more than we can ‘ask or imagine,’ but we cannot know what the beatific vision will be like. We have been told that there is more than dying and returning to the earth – dust to dust. More than ‘that’s all folks.’ More than a final corruption.

  We have been promised a new body that will last forever, a spiritual body, but not a spirit alone. We won’t be angels. Angels are a different order of creatures. We will be human beings with bodies as we were created from the earth, but in the image of God. Like Jesus, we will be resurrected as He promised for us. We will be ensouled but also embodied. A perfected body in the presence of God. Without disappointment or fear or pain. The breath of God will be within us.

  I dreamed last night. Ed was there. We somehow slid down along the stair walls together in a circular rotunda, very fast, laughing like fools, nearly flying. At the bottom I walked down a well-lit whisper quiet institutional corridor with light tan Formica walls with a pleasing design and matching Formica countertops until I came to a doorway and entered a small room with a desk. Ed was in the room helping an older lady write a letter she needed to petition some authority for help. He was happy to be her companion and aid. He looked up at me and smiled. I woke up.

  My imaginings of heaven are woefully inadequate, but I hope there are little houses in neighborhoods of friends that I love and with whom I am completely affable. Laughter is often heard. We share leisurely conversations about all things that are beautiful with lots of comfortable pauses to enjoy the evening breeze. And there is a yard with a garden to work in until it is green and pleasant and orderly with healthy shade trees, oaks, maples, and birch, perhaps there is a hammock looking up into one of them through the branches into a bright blue sky and billowing clouds, and hydrangeas to prune when I want.

   In the evening when the sea breeze comes up, maybe a walk in the vineyard overlooking the beach with my Lord talking softly or merely silent in sublime company and nothing needs to be said. Blissfully leg weary at the end of the day accomplishing fruitful things in the garden with my well worked hands leaves me pleasantly tired from a day well spent.

  Although Jesus told us that there will be no marriage in Heaven, deep friendships will persist. I like to think I’ll still be able to spoon sleepily with my dearest friend, Rita, with her hair that smells like spring. I like to fall asleep at night. In heaven I hope to fall instantly asleep and dream the unfettered joyful dreams of the redeemed.

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High and abides in the shadow of the Almighty says to the Lord: My refuge, my stronghold, my God in Whom I trust” Psalm 91 and the beginning of Sunday Night Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.

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October 13, 2025 · 4:49 pm

Whispers Of Another Kind

It appeared to me that there were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both” Father George Lemaître (from a NYT’s interview[i])

Father George Lemaître’s “Big Bang” theory predicted a cosmic whisper proven to exist a few decades later, a Cosmic Microwave Background radiation that changed our model of how the universe came to be.

Road Not Taken, Heather Millenaar

Within us all is another sort of whisper that is analogous to the cosmic whisper that points to creation. An uneasiness, an anxiety that we may deny, ignore if possible, and it is unique to human beings, unknown to other animals as far as we know. We work hard to distract ourselves from it. Linked to self-awareness and foreknowledge of our own mortality, there are three certainties that buzz in the background of our existence. Our mortality – finitude as biological life, our contingency every moment of every day, and the nagging unavoidable question that something greater than and outside of ourselves exists and resists understanding.

This inner voice is incessant, yet just a whisper most often overwhelmed by our favorite loud distractions, diversions, entertainments, screens, busyness, and noise either discordant or pleasant.  When on those rare occasions we pay heed to Blaise Pascal’s warning and spend an hour alone in a room by ourselves in silence, the whisper comes a calling, and it is a gentle murmur, the faint echo of the hole in our hearts.

All of us have sensed the soft insistent voice as a disquieting – a background restlessness. Many have defined it from different perspectives. Philosophers and psychologists, saints[ii] and sinners, and the incredulous and the curious have wondered at this unease, this whisper. The nineteenth and twentieth century produced many minds who sought to understand it. Georg Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Edmund Hurrserl, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein[iii] and many others speculated about the source of this Anxiety, this hum, this unavoidable “inquietem” when the finite encounters the infinite. Most of us, too, have our own evasions or explanations through philosophy, psychology, or some spiritual path.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood….”  The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

Since the topic is unwieldy, and I’m trying to write about it, I get to define the borders of the inquiry. All complaints about half-baked abridgement and sophomoric errors, please direct them to the author or editor with kindness and look past the gaps in the landscape.

Edmund Husserl was the creator of a branch study of philosophy he named phenomenology. He was troubled that philosophy (and science too) had accrued so many abstractions, theories, and inherited concepts that obscured the raw experience of things. He conceived phenomenology to attempt to bracket assumptions and preconceptions to recognize “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst!). In “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” he wrote, “The exclusiveness with which the total worldview of modern man let itself be determined by the positive sciences and blinded itself to all the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity signifies an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.” When we use and value terms like “authenticity” or “intentionality” or “lived experience,” the soil in which those ideas developed were phenomenology, and Edmund Husserl planted the seeds.  His influence on the twentieth century and subsequent streams of thought cannot be overstated.

As it happens, what starts as speculation in the faculty lounge, a century later diffuses through to social media and common understanding. Ideas do indeed have consequences, oftentimes unintended.[iv]

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5).

To keep things tightly abridged, we’ll limit this inquiry to two of Husserl’s most brilliant students, Martin Heiddeger and Edith Stein, who contrast in their conclusions and their lives. They illustrate two of the three prevalent responses to the whispered, insistent invitation. The third, and most common, we experience every day on our screens.  Postmodern people put whispers on ignore, and we are all often complicit. Politics, sports, celebrities, “death scrolling,” entertainment, convincing ourselves that our frantic busy-ness is urgent are among our devices of avoidance. This response works effectively for most of us most of the time. For a while.

Take a brief excursion with me to examine the other two paths followed by Husserl’s prize pupils who acknowledge what we hear in silence.  Stein was Husserl’s research assistant (1916–1918), and Heidegger was Husserl’s star student who eventually succeeded him as professor. Stein and Heidegger met through their shared connection to Husserl. While not close coworkers, they were part of the same phenomenological school. Both believed the scientific and cultural inclinations for abstraction endangered the meaning of our direct perceptions unbracketed by preconceptions. Each acknowledged some form of the whispers but were sharply divergent in their answer.

Martin Heidegger, 1933

Heidegger named ‘Angst’ as our unspecific fear of being finite in an inescapable abyss and inherent in ‘Dasein,’ our personal experience of human existence.  Angst is the unease that grips us when the everyday meanings of life fall away and we face the raw fact that we exist — alone, free, and finite. Heidegger’s proposed response to nothingness is authenticity. Face the great emptiness honestly. Don’t flee into distractions or comforting illusions. Let Angst strip away false securities so you see life as it really is — fragile and contingent. Accept our finitude and that we are “being-toward-death.” Our mortality gives us urgency and depth to existence. Live it with lucid courage. Live deliberately, aware that our choices define who we are in the face of the void.[v]   From this and Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-power’ emerged our culture of celebrity worship, self-obsession, and self-invention in all its manifestations like a slime creature from the bog.

“Angst reveals in Dasein its being toward its own most potentiality-for-being—that is, being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”  [vi] In a slightly updated synopsis, “Suck it up, buttercup!”

Edith Stein thought that Heidegger was vivid and right in “Being and Time” as far as he went, and he succeeded in defining our existence as finite, temporal, and oriented toward death. But she thought he was incomplete. She acknowledged the whispers but knew we needed something beyond our inadequate self to reply to them.

Without transcendence, Heidegger’s descriptions of human existence are truncated.  Stein believed this leaves a “half-truth”: man is finite but as a person is also open to the infinite. For her, his analysis ends “at the gate of eternity,” but refuses to step through. Each human being is an irreducible person with individuality, vocation, and the capacity for communion with God. Where Heidegger stresses “being-towards-death,” Stein perceives being called to life eternal. Where Stein saw what Augustine wrote in his ‘Confessions’ about the longing and hole in the human heart, Heidegger saw only the hole, and his solution was insufficient. His was a work of great force, but in the end it left the reader in darkness. The soul longs for light, and he shows us only the night.

Their lives could not have ended more differently. Heidegger followed the logic of his convictions and became enamored himself of the German Volk and eventually with its leader. He never repudiated his involvement with the National Socialist movement in Germany. He became the Rector of Freiburg University and in his notorious “Rectoral Address,” he said these things, again with a bit of Nietzschean influence: “The spiritual mission of the German people is to find and preserve its truth in its fate.” And “The Führer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” Not much else needs to be added to that.

Stein’s conversion from atheism was a miracle story. She read St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, and a light came on within her. “This is the truth,” she marveled. Edith Stein did nothing halfway. She became first a Catholic, then a professed Carmelite nun. She fell in love with her Creator. In April of 1933, she wrote to Pope Pius XI about the rise of Nazism. “For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. … As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christendom about that which oppresses millions of Germans…. Everything that happened and continues to happen daily comes from a government that calls itself ‘Christian.’ … The responsibility must fall, also, on those who brought this government to power and still seek to justify it. I am convinced that this is a general disaster for humanity.”  Historians believe her letter influenced the pope’s encyclical in 1937, Mit brennender Sorge (With burning Concern), which condemned Nazi racism. Later, to her prioress she said, “I understood the cross as the destiny of God’s people, which was beginning to be laid upon them then.”[vii]

Heidegger died in bed of an infection at eighty six in 1976. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) was murdered in 1942, gassed in a Nazi gas chamber at Auschwitz together with her sister, Rose, who also became a Carmelite.  St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was canonized as a Catholic martyr on October 11, 1998, by St. Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter,” wrote St. Jerome. He encapsulates what it means to hear the whispers, and like St. Augustine who understood that we were made for union with our Creator, Jerome knew it begins here and now. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross knew that a life without listening and responding to the whispers of God was a life truncated, a half-life, a life that falls short of what it could be, what it is intended to be. Or as St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Each of us in moments of reflection knows that we are called and created to be something more than randomly evolved ambulatory meat destined only for annihilation. Heeding the whispers is how we begin. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

   I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

   Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.” “Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson

[i] Duncan Aikman, “Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth,” The New York Times, February 19, 1933, p. 3.
Shareable reproduced copy available via the Vatican Observatory archives: Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth (PDF)

[ii] One of the earliest commentators on record is St. Augustine. In his Confessions, he wrote about this undeniable underlying whisper, which he understood as a hole in our heart as creatures made in Imago Dei. His most famous and oft used quote spoke of it. He recognized this unease when the finite confronts the infinite. “Oh God, You made us for Yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

[iii] Since there are more than a few professors who occasionally read this and a couple who teach philosophy at good universities, I won’t embarrass myself by pretending to know a lot more than I do about the details and texts of these great minds.

[iv] A seminal book for me a few decades back was Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences.” Written in 1948, I still recommend it to your attention. The line can be followed from Husserl either as an extension of or in opposition to his work as varied as the Existentialism of Satre, the Absurdist resignation and nobility of Camus, and the personalism of St. John Paul II. Nietzsche, Descartes, Hume, Foucault, so many others have contributed to and formed the radical “culture of self-invention” that so amplifies and distorts our understanding of human longing in these post Christian times.  All of this is well beyond the scope of these humble musings.

[v]An echo of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ in this and a foretaste of our culture of self-invention.

[vi] Being and Time”, Martin Heidegger, 1927

[vii] Heidegger and St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross illustrations from two articles. Heidegger from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/heideggers-notebooks-renew-focus-on-anti-semitism.html

St Teresa from https://www.ncregister.com/blog/edith-stein-this-is-the-truth

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September 23, 2025 · 1:55 pm

Whispers

“Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”  Albert Einstein

Be bad enough to get a handwritten margin note like this from your professor on a freshman physics quiz. Imagine being an aspiring young physics scientist and mathematician getting this commentary in a letter from Albert Einstein in the nineteen twenties? That would have a fledgling mathematician rethinking his career and switching to something like becoming an engineer – driving a train.

Fortunately, young brilliant Georges had a fallback career and confidence in his ideas and his abilities. Father Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest[i] who proposed a theory when he analyzed the equations in Einstein’s theory of relativity. His investigation led him to the conclusion that the static and eternal universe model as it was then currently understood by Einstein and most other physicists was inadequate. Father Lemaître proposed that his examination demonstrated that the fabric of the universe, that mysterious combination of time and space, was expanding, and doing so very rapidly. Not just the trillions of galaxies and seemingly infinite solar systems flying apart from one another and us like shrapnel, but the whole universe was expanding into an unknown void like a balloon. An ‘abominable’ conclusion was the reaction from the greatest scientist of modern times.

Georges had experienced a career setback before when as a highly decorated soldier for bravery in WWI, he was transferred to the artillery to learn ballistics with the potential for officer training. But when he told his instructors that the ballistics math in the manual was incorrect, he was bounced out for insubordination. Some guys never learn. Undaunted by his earlier rebuff from the artillery trainers that derailed his military career, he persisted with his conclusions regarding relativity and developed a theory that became known derisively as the “Big Bang.” He wrote to Einstein suggesting that his equations showed that the universe was expanding, and thus going backward in time, the corollary was that the universe had a day “with no yesterday.” In effect, “Nonsense!” responded the good genius from Princeton.

In the thirties, another renowned scientist, a gifted astronomer in England, Edwin Hubble,[ii] demonstrated that the galaxies were flying away from us as proven by his observations of a red shift phenomenon in the light from his images. Not only flying apart, but those farthest away were flying apart even faster than the relatively nearby ones. Eventually it was shown that while Einstein had proven nothing within the universe could exceed the speed of light, the entire universe could expand faster than that.[iii] Einstein eventually conceded that Lemaître’s Big Bang and ‘day without a yesterday’ theory that the universe had a beginning was right. Albert Einstein and Father Lemaître later met and conferred. As we say around here, they were both “wikkid smaht.”      

Not until the fifties did researchers at the AT&T Bell Labs, using advanced instruments, and others from Yale University detect and identify the existence of a barely detectable radiation, Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is ubiquitous and distributed throughout the entire universe. The extremely low temperature CMB was predicted by Lemaître’s math of the Big Bang Theory and verified again the singular event that was the origin of every known entity in our universe, including our tiny planet. This cosmos of ours is still expanding with unimaginable speed from its instantaneous beginning. For the CMB discovery, the AT&T and Yale scientists shared a Nobel Prize.  Father Lemaître learned of this new confirmation of his decades old work shortly before his death, the margin notes from the Professor finally put to rest.

Our universe is imbued with a tiny whisper of its beginnings. A whisper from everywhere that permeates and penetrates all things, including you and me.

Father Georges was once asked in a NY Times interview by a skeptical reporter how he could reconcile his brilliant career as a scientist with his vocation as a priest with the implication clearly that the two were incompatible. His elegant and simple answer resonates into our times now hewn with a false bifurcation of science and faith.[iv]

These whispers suggest those of an entirely different kind, but perhaps they are the same.

Until next time.

“The real cause of conflict between science and religion is to be found in men and not in the Bible or the findings of physicists… For those who understand both, the conflict is simply about descriptions of what goes on in other people’s minds…. I was interested in truth from the standpoint of salvation, just as much as in truth from the standpoint of scientific certainty. …

It appeared to me that there were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both.”  Father Georges Lemaître (from the NYT’s interview)

[i] “Lemaître studied engineering, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923. His ecclesiastical superior and mentor, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, encouraged and supported his scientific work, allowing Lemaître to travel to England, where he worked with the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington at the University of Cambridge in 1923–1924, and to the United States, where he worked with Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1924–1925. Lemaître was a professor of physics at Louvain from 1927 until his retirement in 1964.” From Wikipedia biography.

[ii] The same Edwin Hubble who was the source of the name of the space deployed Hubble telescope that forever changed our view of the universe.

[iii] Galaxies flying off the screen indicates what is now known as the event horizon. If something, star, planet, galaxy, accelerates away from us faster than the speed of light, its light cannot ever reach us, and it effectively disappears. What happens to them after that is empirically unknowable; even their continued existence can only be inferred. And in fact, galaxies do ‘disappear’ never to be seen by our eyes again beyond a horizon that beggars the imagination. That will get your wonder button pushed. But I digress.

[iv] Duncan Aikman, “Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth,” The New York Times, February 19, 1933, p. 3.
   Shareable reproduced copy available via the Vatican Observatory archives: Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth (PDF)

Illustrations:

1.) societyforthehistoryofastronomy.com-public-domain-wikipedia-commons.jpg Father Georges Lemaître

2.) From https://strangenotions.com/fathers-of-science/

3.) Open source NASA from Hubble Telescope galaxy 240 light years away and moving fast.

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