Author Archives: jparquette

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 28, 2024 · 7:38 pm

Witnesses

Every year 105,000 Christians are killed because of their faith. This shocking figure was disclosed by Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, representative of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) on Combating Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, at the “International Conference on Inter-religious dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims,” (Conference as reported on this site in 2011, Catholic Culture.org)

[i]When we think of martyrs[ii] for their Christian faith, what often first comes to mind are ancient artifacts and stories, some legend, most rooted in fact. The Roman catacombs. Exposed to live beasts in the Colosseum for the entertainment of the gladiator bread and circus spectators, like all addicts needing more and more of their malformed pleasures of gore and the suffering of others to achieve new highs. We think of the original apostles; all but Judas Iscariot who committed suicide and John who died of extreme old age in exile on Patmos. The rest were murdered for their faith, refusing to deny Jesus, a refusal unto their own death.

Beheaded, crucified, burned alive, skinned alive, ran through with a sword, sawn in half. Being an original apostle of Jesus was no sinecure. They died because they had seen something that utterly transformed them and gave them absolute confidence that something was greater than death. Not for riches, not for power or conquest, certainly not for pleasure or praise, but to spread the Good News that echoes down the centuries: Jesus Christ of Nazareth died and then arose from the dead; they gave up everything we tell ourselves is necessary for happiness and died in beatitudo[iii].

What we don’t often think about is that more Christian martyrs were murdered in the last century than in all the previous centuries since Jesus walked in Jerusalem, about forty-five million of them. This does not include those murdered by tyranny who happened to be Christian, only those who specifically died for their faith. From Auschwitz to the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution of Mao and the Marxist revolution in Mexico to the ongoing butchery of radical Islam such as Boko Haram[iv] in Nigeria. From Father Maximillian Kolbe and Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross)[v] to Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro in the Catholic persecution of La Cristiada during the Marxist Mexican revolution and the courageous Cristero resistance to the atheist repressors, what Graham Greene called the “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.”[vi]

“¡Viva, Cristo Rey!”

“But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him; and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.” Acts 7:57-60, RSV (In a previous verse describing Stephen, his face was described as that of an angel.)

Stella, Jacques, 1596-1657; The Martyrdom of St Stephen

Stella, Jacques; The Martyrdom of St Stephen

In our secular culture of a sort of loosely defined neo Pelagianism, all dogs go to heaven. If most think about God at all, our god is a remote clockmaker who maybe set things in motion millions of years ago but has little or nothing to do with our day-to-day life or how we live it. The qualifier is just being a generally nice person, which is an embarrassingly low bar. Maybe you need to love pets and be pleasant at the coffee shop. The prevalent worldview about these things in young people has been called “Moral Therapeutic Deism,” the central point of which is that the goal of human existence is to feel good about oneself and be happy. Surely a flimsy and ill-defined structure and not one for which self-sacrifice, especially sacrifice of one’s life for a relationship with God makes any sense at all.

Faith like that is not a set of moral principles. Nor a philosophy. Nor just ritual, habit, and lifestyle. No, faith like that is a deep relationship of trust with a Person. An irreplaceable friendship worth dying for. As St. Thomas Aquinas famously stated, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

Not ancient history, but contemporary and ongoing, the witnesses of great devotion and love are an ongoing miracle. What prompted this post were two stories a visiting Columban missionary priest told us at daily Mass the week before last on the memorial of St. Stephen, who was murdered with large stones. All Stephen had to do was deny the truth of what he knew about Jesus, and all would be forgiven. He chose to suffer an excruciating death before making such a denial. Why would he ever do that?

Our celebrant telling the stories served many years in missions including seven in Juarez, Mexico on the border with El Paso, Texas. While there, he taught and pastored three young men in his confirmation class. One was discerning a vocation to the priesthood. Our meanest poverty here does not approach what afflicts the poor in Juarez. These young men scratched out an income as best they could. One source of cash was helping those trying to make it across to El Paso. Before we start in on “illegal immigrants” and all the rest, these are desperate people trying to escape cruel government, no opportunities, and worried each night how they will feed their kids tomorrow. As we sip our morning coffee and make whatever breakfast pleases us, we may want to ponder for just a moment what it would be like to live in such circumstances and what we would or would not do to provide some measure of security for our loved ones.

Many of these unfortunates are then further exploited by the ‘coyotes’ who traffic human beings. If they are young and female (or sometimes male), after they pay their rapacious fees, they can be trapped into the sex trade, addicted, and ruined. The three young men charged much less and got them safely over the border. However, the coyotes worked for the cartels (one of two in Juarez at the time). With cash flow that rivaled large corporations, the people trade netted as much as the drugs that were their original main product. Brutal and better armed than the police, even the gendarmes are afraid of them. These three young men had no chance at all. One evening, they were kidnapped, dragged into the desert, and stoned to death, their heads were smashed with large rocks. Again, and again, and again. Beyond recognition even with dental records. The cartel thugs then threw dead dogs on top of their corpses as their warning to any who dared to defy them, no matter how insignificant their small piece of the action was.

Called out by the bereaved families the next morning, our visiting priest went out and helped recover the corpses. He remembers carefully scraping the rocks for brain, flesh, and blood, retaining as much of the DNA as possible because it belonged to human beings created in Imago Dei and must be given reverence and be buried with them. Each year on the memorial of the stoned to death St. Stephan, he remembers his three young men. Perhaps they don’t belong in the long list of classic Christian martyrs who died for their faith, but neither were they coyote predators; they had empathy and care for their clients, caring human beings of faith and hope.

The second story the missionary priest told us that morning fits the Christian martyr description more closely. A hundred miles south of Juarez in a diocese served mostly by Jesuit missionaries, Pedro Palma, a sixty-year-old tour guide, similarly crossed paths with the Sinaloa cartel for reasons that may never be known. He was shot several times on the street in front of the church in the village of Cerocahui. He managed to stagger inside crying out for sanctuary, a centuries old tradition of protection. Sanctuary and haven ignored by the gunmen; they rushed in after him and finding him halfway up the center aisle, shot him several more times. With the last of his strength, he dragged himself to the altar and died.

Two elderly Jesuit priests who had retired to live at the church rushed to his aide. Father Joaquin Mora, 78, and Father Javier Campos, 80, were murdered alongside him. Helpers? Yes. Doing what priests do? Yes. But ultimately, they were what the gunman perceived them to be, and rightly so. Witnesses.

***************************************************************************************

Would I have such faith and confidence in my faith in Christ? I pray that I would if called to. Jesus, I trust in You.

One last witness in this post: Charles de Foucauld. As a young man he gained some fame as an explorer and author. Later he experienced as many still do, a new understanding, a conversion, a metanoia change of mind. “He lost his faith as an adolescent. His taste for easy living was well known to all and yet he showed that he could be strong willed and constant in difficult situations. He undertook a risky exploration of Morocco (1883-1884). Seeing the way Muslims expressed their faith questioned him and he began repeating, “My God, if you exist, let me come to know you.” [vii] And so God answered that prayer, and Charles discovered a new life worth living.

Later, Foucauld became a Trappist, then a priest, and worked the rest of his life among the Muslims telling them about the Gospel, the Good News. Charles was murdered by an Islamist gang of assassins in 1916 who clearly didn’t want what he was offering. He wrote many things, including this prayer that explains what becomes the deepest core conviction of all witnesses. One worth dying for.

“Father,

I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you.

I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.

I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,

for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with

boundless confidence, for you are my Father.” Charles de Foucauld

[i] Main image from UK Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Martyrdom of St. Stephen, Jacques Stella. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-martyrdom-of-st-stephen-5568

[ii] “Martyr” is from the ancient Greek matur, and then liturgical Latin, meaning “witness.” The final and ultimate statement of faith as a witness.

[iii] Great peace and joy.

[iv] “Boko Haram, which aims to expel Western influence and create a Salafi-Islamist state in its area of operations, has killed an estimated 50,000 people and displaced more than 2.5 million people since it was established in 2002.”

[v] St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, ne Edith Stein, a Catholic convert and renowned philosopher prior to the war was murdered at Auschwitz for her faith. As was St. Maximillian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar and Polish priest imprisoned for speaking out against the Nazis and while there volunteered to die in place of a married man with children who had been selected to be killed. The man he replaced eventually survived the camps.

[vi] https://www.usccb.org/committees/religious-liberty/viva-cristo-rey

[vii] https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20051113_de-foucauld_en.html

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Filed under Faith and Reason

Tagged as Charles de Foucauld, Christian martyr, Columban missionary, Juarez

March 10, 2024 · 12:42 pm

Viability

“Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.” Kathleen to Joe (Meg Ryan to Tom Hanks) in “You’ve Got Mail.”

A friend told us recently about this meme on Facebook with a simple picture of an egg and the caption, “In Alabama, this is a chicken.”[i] A spirited discussion ensued with some friends about the controversial Alabama Supreme Court decision concerning the nature of embryos and the ethics of ‘in vitro’ fertilization (IVF)[ii].

This led to another friend reminding us of a story from 1979 in nearby Newport that was covered extensively in local news. We were living in Maine at the time and were unaware of the tragedy. A woman she knows well was rear ended in her car. She survived, but her baby was killed. The baby was still in utero, and the mom was within a few days of her due date nine months into her pregnancy. The controversy ensued when the devastated woman pursued the case as a wrongful death caused by vehicular homicide. After a wrenching public trial, the driver of the other car that caused the death was found innocent of that charge, not because he didn’t cause the accident, but because the baby in the mom’s womb according to the court did not meet the requirements to be protected as a human being.

At issue in both controversies is “when does a human being qualify as a human being deserving of the protection of law all of us enjoy and count upon?” Science is clear and uncontroversial in every embryology textbook in every medical school: at conception, a new human is created, with a complete genome unique in all of history. When the sperm’s DNA merges with the DNA of the egg, the resulting zygote contains within itself all that is necessary to produce first the zygote, then the blastocyst, then the embryo, then the baby (or fetus, which just means ‘little one’.)[iii] Thus is initiated the biological wonder of an unbroken continuum that does not cease maturing for the rest of her life.[iv]

Viability means “ability to live,” the root of which, derives from the Latin “vita,” which means life. “Vita” is the same root of many other English words like “vital,” vivacious,” “vitamin,” “revive,” and “survive.” The connotation ascribed to viability in a fetus is one that can survive outside the womb. This connotation is arbitrary as a legal status. No newborn infant can long survive without continued nurture and protection, a fact well known in ancient Rome where unwelcome or imperfect infants were exposed on a rock to die. An infant is viable, so is the preborn baby. So is the zygote, the blastocyst, and the embryo – viable within the protection and nurture of a woman’s womb – but viable, nonetheless. The continuum of every life, if uninterrupted by disease or mishap or violence is built into the first instant of the creation of the new genome and cell.

Viability outside the womb is the line many have decided to draw concerning when a fetus is a human, a line coming increasingly earlier in a pregnancy. A baby born at 22 weeks gestation or 18 weeks early at 14 ounces has survived birth and prospered[v] into toddlerhood. Why not make heartbeat or the pulsing of heart tissue the standard? Or implantation of the placenta in the wall of the uterus? Or “quickening?” Or birth? Or, as some have proposed, such as Dr. Peter Singer, three months after birth? All have their merits and devotees. For that matter, why is vivaciousness off the table? We all like cute babies. Maybe only cute babies are human?

The whole debate is arbitrary, a philosophical and ethical debate, not a scientific question, which is asked and answered by the science of embryology. Advancing technology has provided another compelling proof, the visual, emotional confirmation of ultrasound images, which have in many ways changed the discussion. No one ever looked at the live images of a developing human being in their womb and thought, “This is a fetus made up of ‘meat Legos’** or an undifferentiated clump of tissue with which (because I have the power), I can do anything I want.” No, no – they put the images up on their refrigerator with magnets in wonder and joy. This is my baby.

The debate grows ever more bitter and emotional, and no court decision or legislation is going to settle the matter definitively. The public debate is mirrored internally in every human heart and mind, and it is there it will be settled for society. But there is an objective truth with which every conscience must contend. And everyone knows it.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.” Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Human beings don’t have reproductive systems: we each have half a reproductive system. One half of humans are female. One half are male. Science informs us in the instant a human sperm enters a human egg, there is a flash of light, and in 2016, a lab in Northwestern University filmed it, something to do with the zinc released from the egg.[vi] That flash occurs once in every human life and signals the very beginning of a life that a few hours later when the DNA merges contains all the genetic information necessary to create and develop our mature form. Every tiny increment along our way is human life.

An old series of memes tells us that no one has ever been heard to say on their deathbed that they wished they had spent more time at work (or watching television or death scrolling TikTok). I suggest as an analogue a series of questions each one of us will ask. Or should.

Do we want to treat life as a commodity to be frozen, collected, and selected for gender or eye color or possible defect? Or is it our obligation to respect the embryo as a unique and natural to be expected consequence of the total self-giving and loving act between a man and a woman committed for life to one another?[vii] Between a lab or a wedding bed?
In the case of abortion, do we choose a nursery or a medical waste bucket? A swaddling cloth or stainless steel? Nurture or disposal?
Do we want to objectify human life or treasure it as precious?
Do we want to base our decisions on fear, pure self intersest, and despair or hope, self sacrifice, and love?
Do we want to be givers of life or bringers of death?

In this context, where do we, (you and I), draw the line between when life is cherished, protected, and nurtured and when it can be discarded as imperfect, too expensive, too frightening, too disruptive, too damn inconvenient?

Where do you draw the line? Where do you come down – at how many weeks gestation or stage of development along the continuum? Then each of us needs to justify that position and understand why we hold it.

For me, the known science is sufficient. Not what the social and entertainment media and our culture inculcate in us, but what reason and conscience tells us is true.

It seems to me these are important questions. Not to be given a cursory dismissal with a cutesy, superficially clever meme, trivializing what is solemnly important and redefining anthropology – what it means to be a human being. We owe to ourselves an honest appraisal of what we believe, and why.

“I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.” Dr. Mildred Jefferson, mentor and much missed friend.

** “Meat legos” is a creative term from Mary Harrington’s blog and her post here in the Reactionary Feminist. She coined the descriptive “meat Legos matrix” as a name for that aspect of our destructive postmodern culture of radical self invention wherein we harbor an unjustified or delusional optimism that through technology we can enjoy complete freedom to be almost anything, including treating our bodies as disembodied objects of our imagination. The term has gained great currency in the two years since she invented it. “Meat Legos” graphically recognizes an unprecendented shift in human anthropology uhheard of for all of history and calls into question all our basic assumptions about what a human being is, what our purpose is, and the nature of the mind/body synthesis.

[i] The meme is wrong on many levels. One of them is that an egg or a chicken is not a human being, which is profoundly different. A non-fertilized egg is breakfast. A fertilized egg is a future Sunday dinner.

[ii] The case was a wrongful death civil suit filed by a couple who had preserved frozen “spare” embryos at the IVF clinic they had used. The embryos were destroyed by another disturbed patient who broke into the clinic’s freezer and pulled out a handful produced by the couple who sued him. Burning his hand on the cryogenically frozen embryos, he dropped them, and they were killed. The court found that frozen embryos were human and qualified the case as a wrongful death suit and negligent homicide. The case was not about whether IVF was licit, but about the nature of a human embryo.

[iii] “The best single sperm moves inside the egg and a zygote is formed,” says Dr. Richlin. The zygote phase lasts for around four days; it eventually turns into a blastocyst, and then an embryo.” (From: https://www.parents.com/what-is-a-zygote-7112279#)

[iv] Excellent animated video on fetal development from fertilization to birth: https://babyolivia.liveaction.org/ or some more detailed information here: https://www.britannica.com/video/192622/Human-embryonic-development-birth-fertilization

[v] One of several articles about this baby: https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-born-at-22-weeks-weighed-14-ounces-2022-8#

[vi] https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-captured-the-actual-flash-of-light-that-sparks-when-sperm-meets-an-egg

[vii] What is the nature of the act? What is its telos or purpose? Unitive and procreative or purely recreational? Should a pro choice understanding come earlier in the proceedings? Is there a responsibility in choosing to participate in the baby making act?

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Filed under Culture views

Tagged as abortion, fertility, fetal development, infertility, IVF, life begins, politics

February 25, 2024 · 5:48 pm

February Doldrums

“The “doldrums” is a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters.” From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

February is that sort of month. We’ve transited from the early bright lights and joy of the beginning of a New England deep winter in December to a grayer, resigned wait. The chores of winter are wearing and tiresome. The dust and mess on the floor from the woodstove are grinding me down; every evening ends with banking up a load of oak and maple for the night burn, and every morning starts around five with a few coals blown back to life with small wood and a hot start to keep the creosote buildup in the chimney to a minimum.

The snowblower is still covered with a tarp at the head of the driveway, gassed, and ready. New England Road salt is incrementally eating our car, slowly reducing it to rubble. Snow drifts quickly change from pristine white the morning after a night’s storm to grubby gray and randomly stained with occasional brown and yellow blots which we learn young not to use for snow cones. The shrubs and trees still await the greening, the winter snow load has broken them down a bit, and small branches stick up from the snow on the ground where the wind and freeze struck them off the Norway Maples, Eastern white pines, and our sole canoe birch tree. They await the spring clean-up and new mulch. The leaves that the fall raking missed linger under the snow, dark, wet, and growing mold.

February is a month of rumination, self-examination, and contemplating long thoughts. I remember Carl in Mount Vernon, Maine, where we lived for ten years before we moved to the tropics of Rhode Island. West central Maine in hill and lake country set our standard for long, cold winters. Carl was a skilled artist and a professional sign painter for local enterprises. He usually overwintered in Arizona after a long semi-annual migration in his old GMC pickup. One November he neglected his migration prep, got busy with work, and stayed. He had a large barn next to his house that doubled as his Maine studio. A wood burning furnace kept the old structure minimally functional all winter. I visited him one day in February when he was hard at work. A new ten-foot sign adorned the tall wall over the barn door. It was a spare winter scene with three-foot-high letters beautifully formed, that simply said, “It’s really bad!” When I stood admiring it, he told me that he painted it one miserable day with drifts piling up against his windows to remind him to never, ever neglect his fall migration prep again.

Some optimistic and courageous green shoots appear through last year’s mulch only to be covered by an icy, brittle white in a surprise Nor’easter. Cold nights in the twenties remind us, “not yet – not yet.”

“Gather gladness from the skies

Take a lesson from the ground

Flowers do ope’ their heavenward eyes

And a Spring-time joy have found

Earth throws Winter’s robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.” Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Easter”

Signs of spring are here though: the more stalwart robins are returning, fat and feathered thickly; some redwing blackbirds have shown up. Buds are swelling a bit on the early bloomers. We heard doves cooing yesterday evening. No goldfinches or yellow warblers have yet joined the sparrows, wrens, and cardinals at the bird feeder, but they’ll soon be here. Canadian geese are flocking up. Hundreds of them here on the island are now overhead one flight at a time, some already headed north to their summer breeding grounds. Not many sights are as beautiful as a large flock of twenty or fifty or a hundred geese honking in graceful, coordinated movement with their powerful wings beating the air tip to tip or in a final swooping glide into a winter corn field.

The most promising February harbinger is the opening of spring training: first pitchers and catchers, and a week later the boys of summer all show up. The Red Sox of the wonder years of Pedro, Manny, and Big Poppi have faded, and fans have retreated to the losing days of my youth. My father lived for sixty-six years and never saw a World Series win. But we are Sox fans in all weather. Some call it a mental illness, but there you are. Every spring hope and the greening rise in us, maybe to be dashed once again in September, but in February, there is only the joy of new beginnings. A couple of pitchers would help.

Late winter skies are startling blue, and the clouds look like they were painted with a pallet knife, almost unnatural. The sun is two months warmer than December, and with the windows up in the car the glare feels hot against our face. Hope is upon us, the promise of March and April unmistakable. Soon and very soon, the cascade of blooming will begin. First the crocuses, then the yellow profusion of daffodils and forsythia, followed by everything, the pink cherry blossoms, the white of the Bradford pears, magnolias, dogwoods, flowering crabs, azaleas, later the lilacs and rhododendron. The island’s splendor is persistent for months almost into autumn with the Montauk daisies.

Long, cold January and dreary February are intrinsic to the spring explosion of color and light. For me, it has always been and will remain a tradeoff well worth the price. Except for one year in Colorado, we have chosen to live our lives here in Massachusetts, Maine, and now in Rhode Island. We’ve travelled the country and always come home. The wonder of it is in the profound changes of the seasons, majestically sequencing like a liturgical procession year after year.

We talk sporadically about moving somewhere south where the winters are not so demanding, and the cold is not so penetrating when the wind blows hard off the North Atlantic. But the discussions are never long. The loss would be unbearable.

“Let the earth bless the Lord.

Praise and exalt him above all forever.

Mountains and hills, bless the Lord.

Everything growing from the earth, bless the Lord.

You springs, bless the Lord.

Seas and rivers, bless the Lord.

You dolphins and all water creatures, bless the Lord.

All you birds of the air, bless the Lord.

All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord.

You sons of men, bless the Lord.” Canticle of the Three Children from Daniel 3: 74-81

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Filed under Personal and family life

Tagged as February blues, Maine, nature, new-england, travel, winter, winter in New England

February 11, 2024 · 6:21 pm

Big Waves Break Twice

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” as spoken by St. Thomas More, “Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt

Rita and I will often walk Sachuest Beach. Sometimes we sit at Surfer End and pray or watch the surfers or the waves on a smaller wave day. We have been transfixed watching them build with the wind far out into the bay. As they approach the shore, the larger ones will break twice: once about fifty feet out and a second time when gravity again overcomes momentum and the top curls over very near shore.

Thousands of gallons cascade over suddenly with a noticeable thump that can be heard and felt up on the seawall. Why anyone would ever bring a sound maker to a beach has always been a mystery to me. Just the waves please. Breaking. Breaking. For a million years.

Recently the big ones breaking twice set me thinking about Brown v Board of Education and the more recent Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. Both were big waves that broke twice.

“To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Chief Justice Earl Warren about Brown v Board of Education

In 1954 Brown v Board of Education overturned Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 that enforced separate but equal segregation, zealously guarded practices mostly in the South. For fifty-eight years, segregation held sway. Separate facilities for black folks: lunch counters, bus seats, restrooms, hotel accommodations, sports teams, and most damningly, schools.

In Plessy, the Court held that “separate but equal” satisfied the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. But “separate but equal” was separate only. Equal was a far piece off. In Brown, justice finally prevailed.

A quick and just overturning of a gravely mistaken Supreme Court decision half a century ago, and all was set right overnight. Not exactly. The wave breaks twice. Those of us of an age will never forget the interim.

For the next decade or more, the battle raged with the Federal government stepping in many times to enforce integrated facilities when the various states refused to comply. Democrats pushed hard back for many years to sustain the old “Jim Crow” laws that stifled opportunities for minorities. Opportunities to ride at the front of the bus, opportunities to drink from the same water fountain, opportunities to eat at the same counter in the cafeteria or restaurant, opportunities to an equal education in the same school or college as white kids. Blood was shed. Dr. Martin Luther King and others were shot, hung, burned, and martyred to the cause of equality of rights and opportunity. “We Shall Overcome” was sung by Joan Baez on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and on the march to Selma, Alabama with Dr. King and became an anthem most of us knew well. The “I Have a Dream” speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963 can still bring chills almost another sixty years later.

The wave breaks twice, and it’s a brutal turmoil under the swelling surface.

“Like the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe was also egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided. We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision…” Majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson

As it was with Plessy, so it is with Roe. A gravely flawed decision from nearly fifty years before was justly undone. The second break is building. The segregationists brought out the dogs. The abortion lobby and their political allies are hard at it now with different dogs. This time many states are passing laws and trying to protect those who have no voice, while the Feds are working for the abortion lobby. The Feds have largely ignored almost two hundred attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers from vandalism to fire-bombing since the preliminary Dobbs decision was illegally leaked to a complicit press.[i] Those praying and holding signs at abortion clinics have not been so lucky. For them, it’s been predawn arrests in front of their families by heavily armed Department of Justice and FBI storm troopers.[ii] The confusion, draconian policies, and rhetoric we read and see every day is the interim as it was in those fifteen years following Brown v Board of Education. For us, it’s just the beginning.

Perhaps at some future point, a case will be adjudicated about the personhood of the pre-born human being. The science of embryology is settled without exception about the human nature of the fetus with her unique and complete genome. The sticking point is ideological and philosophical, not scientific. When does a developing human being gain the protection as persons under the law? When in the continuum of human development should the dividing line between life and extinction be drawn? Or do we simply ‘follow the science’ and protect innocent human life during its most vulnerable period from the start?

“The person—especially a woman—may be disillusioned by the fact that over time a man’s affection turns out to be only, so to speak, a cover for desire or even for an explicit will to use. Both a woman and a man may be disillusioned by the fact that the values attributed to the beloved person turn out to be fiction. Because of the dissonance between the ideal and the reality, affective love is sometimes not only extinguished but even transformed into affective hatred.” – Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility

The false binding of abortion to the freedom of women has made this discussion most knotty. Once the argument is framed as chattel or forced pregnancy, the humanity of the fetus is quickly pushed to the back of the bus.

What if we considered the discussion from the other side of the mirror, a changed vantage point? What if the sexual revolution has brought about a new type of enslavement for women? Perhaps if men were held accountable more explicitly for their participation in the baby making act, this deeper joint responsibility would allow the developing human to become once again hallowed and an invitation to nurturing, not destruction. Three generations of aggressive and irresponsible sperm donors have risen like specters from the sexual revolution. Women, rather than gaining freedom, are held primarily responsible for an unplanned pregnancy[iii]. The hook up culture assumes hooking up as an expectation, but if the baby making act makes a baby, well, the mom better take care of things because she blew the protection, right? And the kid is thrown into the soul blasted bargain.

Section 17 of Pope St Paul VI’s famous (or infamous according to your light) “Humanae Vitae” accurately foretold the predictable outcome of ubiquitous contraception as a proposed solution to this changed expectation, unprecedented in the history of our culture as a norm. “Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

One-night stands or a few weeks hook up became far too common, and the surrounding “with care and affection” often was a forgotten victim, along with the baby. Has this been a ‘freedom’ or an impoverishment for women? Does any woman, no matter how frightened and abandoned and alone, in her heart of hearts want to destroy the baby in her womb?

The momentum shift jerked the culture off its center of gravity, and the tilted axis left men, women, and developing babies profoundly undone.

“Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom – it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another. Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.” Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility

[i] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/256390/2023-witnessed-continued-attacks-on-pro-life-pregnancy-centers-churches

[ii] https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/fbi-justice-department-twist-federal-law-arrest-charge-pro-life

[iii] After forty years of Rita and I involved in helping women in this predicament, the guy walking or threatening to walk if the woman becomes pregnant is commonplace. The expectation of the man to “do the right thing” is a quaint and naive anachronism.

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Tagged as abortion, Dobbs v Jackson, Plessy v Ferguson, politics, Roe v Wade

December 24, 2023 · 8:54 pm

Christmas Letter 2023

“Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.”

St. John Henry Newman

—– Psalm 46:10 Be still and know that I am God —–

Seems like we just sent one of these out, yet here we are a year later. We’ve recently returned from Thanksgiving with our most hospitable California daughter Meg, her much loved husband Marty, and our West Coast grandkids: sensitive and beautiful Adelaide (now 6!), the magic Charlotte (4), and Koufax the German Shepherd wonder dog who will fetch until our arms give out. Marty’s extended family, as always, made us feel welcome and loved. His brothers and sister with their children fill any house with joy and good conversation. His Mom, Gloria, as always, puts on an unmatched feast in a home full of laughter and love. And any unfortunate side effects are nothing a few weeks at the gym can’t remedy.

We missed this year’s Nutcracker at Stadium Theater for the first time ever with four of our amazing home-schooling daughter Angela’s kids dancing multiple roles and her also much-loved husband, Peter, recruited as one of the fathers in the opening Party Scene that always ushers in Christmas for us. Angela and Meg themselves danced in Nutcrackers in various roles for many years. The performance never ages and enchantment proceeds. Even their most active three-year-old Lil’ Pete, held almost in check by his mom, goes quiet when the curtain goes up. To experience such beauty, color, Tchaikovsky’s timeless music, and the soaring, graceful action as a three-year-old is a wonder we can only imagine and envy We’ll watch the DVD, but we will definitely be there next year with a rebuilt budget for multiple bouquets.

We had an atypical wet summer in paradise this past year, both during our stay on the lake in Weld, Maine, and on our local Aquidneck Island beaches, but that didn’t prevent us from much great family time, swimming in fresh stream fed water of Webb Lake and the healing salt water of Narragansett Bay. A few rounds of body surfing are always exhilarating, and it doesn’t matter if the air is full of water too. The rousing competition of board and card games on the porch overlooking the choppy waters of the lake helps when things get slow on a rainy afternoon. Papa sometimes cheats and always gets caught; justice is quickly and mercilessly administered by sharp-eyed granddaughters.

An even better cloudy day pastime is gratifying the architectural imagination of cousins playing together and creating a detailed construction project – not merely sandcastles, but whole villages and forts, populated with an eclectic unlikely menagerie from horses to a T-rex and a few Lego personalities in primary colors. Often, the steep sand walls are decorated along their elaborate crenellated palisades and towers with scavenged seaweed and stick flags, scallop or quahog shells, and an occasional gull eaten crab. Great anticipation and surprising patience are shown by the abovementioned three-year-old, standing poised and ready with a truck or excavator in hand. Finally, after a half hour of painstaking construction with numerous design challenges resolved by the committee, and secret tunnel entrances are carefully dug under the moat by his doting sisters, the grand citadel is declared ready. After a picture is taken to memorialize the marvel for perpetuity, they signal, “GO!” to the relatively giant one-man wrecking crew. Sometimes a video is taken of pure glee with delight shared as much by the architects and contractors as it is by the demo guy. Not a mole hill sized mound is left standing for the wind and tide to finish off.

So cloudy days do not diminish joy when the afternoon is lighted by glories of children playing.

Fall came, and the wet warm season sparks an autumn splendor more magnificent than the previous year after its summer of drought. The winter will soon be full upon us, but Christmas lights will fend off the darkness, the cold will be defeated by a good woodstove and a well-stocked woodshed, and much-loved music that never fails us will fill our churches, homes and hearts. And joy will not be diminished.

May God’s rich blessings pour down on you and yours with a most Merry Christmas and the new beginnings of 2024,

Love in Christ,

Jack and Rita

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Tagged as Christmas letter, grandchildren, sandcastle

November 20, 2023 · 9:41 am

Cuts and Fills

“The Road goes ever on and on

Out from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

Let others follow it who can!

Let them a journey new begin,

But I at last with weary feet

Will turn towards the lighted inn,

My evening-rest and sleep to meet.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

While on a recent drive with a couple of granddaughters to their ballet class in the northern part of Rhode Island, we traveled on I-195, a tiny portion of the massive 47,000-mile-long Interstate Highway System. Originally conceived of by President Dwight Eisenhower, the same logistical mind that organized the triumphant Allied effort to destroy the Third Reich, it was enabled after he signed into law the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill committed to pay ninety percent of the costs in each state for a webwork of fine roads with a minimum of four lanes, well defined dividers, and no grade level crossings allowed — a system of limited access, high speed highways tying together every major population center across the country. The interstate system was planned as well to permit rapid military deployments of huge quantities of hardware, personnel, and materials of war should that ever become necessary.[i]

As was also presumed, commercial and residential development was planted and cultivated along these roads, changing the landscape from farm and forest to housing, manufacturing sites, and ubiquitous strip malls for good or ill. But jobs followed, providing mobility, opportunity, and prosperity for millions.

For those of us who were around before these amazing roads were commonplace, they replaced the two and four lane roads like Route 1 and Route 66 that delivered the means for all road trips. They were comparatively slower and less safe for high-speed travel with multiple on-grade crossings requiring safety controls like stop signs, traffic lights, and backups. When 95 was almost completed through Masschusetts, I was a teenage driver. The wide, fast, impeccably paved highway with limited access was built, but not yet open, the temptation for many, including me, was not to be denied. One clear fall afternoon, we bypassed the barriers. I found a way on to the highway with an older friend who owned an early Jaguar XKE. The Jag was a money pit, but it could fly. With no police, no other cars on the road, and our youthful sense of invulnerability, we buried the speedometer at 140 miles per hour. Many others tried their luck, and I heard of no fatal errors. The lane divider lines were a blur at that speed.

(Writing): “most of the time it’s more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.” Piers Anthony[ii]

As I ride now over these skillfully engineered and constructed roads, sometimes I’ll remember some of the site engineering I studied as part of my forestry course work. After extensive surveying for the proposed paths of these wonders, the data was worked hard (mostly by hand on paper or calculator in the fifties and sixties). Then came the exacting tedious slog designing the bridges over and under the proposed highway with sufficient clearances, planning the exits and entrances with drivable curves, and plotting to level within acceptable tolerances the slopes to maximize fuel efficiency up and down elevation changes of thousands of feet.

One critical calculation was the necessary cuts and the fills. Over thousands of miles over every terrain imaginable, the planners considered every soil type that must be utilized or discarded or blasted or scooped up and moved with tens of thousands of pieces of equipment and construction workers. Optimizing millions of cubic feet of earth to be moved is a gargantuan calculating challenge. Perfect optimizing to control construction costs aimed for the dirt dug out (cuts) to balance with the dirt required to raise the elevation of the road where it needs to be raised (fills).

When we traverse a raised section of the road and look down into a pastoral valley, or when we cut through a defile between fifty foot high solid New England granite vertical cuts towering on both sides, every drilled hole and blasted face was sheared off and hauled elsewhere. When we pass under or over a bridge every place the highway intersects a river, a marsh, a crossing road large or small that local people need to keep their communities together, we seldom note that someone surveyed, calculated, and designed it. Others blasted, dug, welded, compacted, carefully poured concrete to exacting standards. Every mile is a triumph of engineering, persistence, and dedication.

We blow by at seventy miles per hour heedless, listening to our tunes and podcasts, chatting with our companions, our minds wandering with the tedium of a long drive.

It occurred to me there are metaphors lying in these cuts and fills.

“A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.” Alexander the Great[iii]

Alexander of Macedonia changed the world, paved the way for the later Roman Empire, and established his dominance over a vast territory from Macedonia to Egypt and from Greece to India. He was a brutal, sometimes cruel, and brilliant general and leader of soldiers. He was a gifted orator and well educated in Greek philosophy. He died after a hard bout of drinking led to a catastrophic health collapse at the age of 33. Alexander was complicated.

Our pastor told a story last week I had never heard. As he lay dying, Alexander called together his closest advisors and generals. He commanded three things concerning his funeral arrangements. No matter how odd the instructions were, no sensible person would disobey a command from Alexander, even a posthumous dictate. He demanded that his casket be carried to his burial place by one person alone, his physician. The path to his burial place was to be strewn with all the coins and jewels in his possession. Since he was an acquisitive conqueror, there were a lot of coins and jewels. And finally, as his body was carried, his dead arms were to hang down from the sides of the casket with open and empty hands. These instructions of despair and final failure were despite his seeming great success acquiring every possible human honor.

What can be made of this bizarre story? His physician, who was presumably one of the most able in the whole empire, could not preserve his life. We are all destined for the grave. The wealth that he had so aggressively and successfully amassed was so much detritus, good only for pavement to the dead Alexander. His hands, empty and open at his birth, would be empty and open upon his death. As many have written, including in the Bible. We bring nothing into this life and take nothing away from it.

“So walk on air against your better judgement.” On the tombstone of Seamus Heaney from his poem “The Gravel Walks.”

Getting back to our cuts and fills. Surely, if there is any meaning and purpose to it, the question is where does the road we build over our lifetime lead? What is its meaning and purpose? And how are we harmonizing our daily lives to that purpose and meaning? What cuts and fills need to be made in our lives to build our road once we identify the destination? What needs to be added, and what needs to be cut away? How painstaking is our survey and analysis? How well is our highway mapped out and the way to build it understood?

What is primary and central in my life? What do I worship? i.e. Honestly and without self-deception, what is of highest worth or most valuable [iv]to me? Do I desire ardently a deep relationship with the Creator of the universe or make do with some inferior creature which can never satisfy? All our false gods are addictions, which can never satisfy and demand ever more feeding to achieve the same level of temporary satiation.

He knocks on the door, that is what He does, the Hound of Heaven. Do I swing it wide open and invite Him in? Or is the door blocked with the clutter of my life slowly accumulated since my youngest days? How frantically have I avoided the quiet time necessary to comprehend the meaning of my life?[v] “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 mist of tears I hid from Him.”[vi]

Is the addiction most central to my life the praise and honor of others? Must I measure myself by pleasing others, counting “likes?” Do I need to cut that deeply out and fill the hole with genuine humility?

Is what most important to me my own pleasure, my entertainments, and distractions, satiating my needs, emotional, physical? Do I need to cut that deeply out and practice a lifestyle more ascetic, less focused on my own wants and given over to serving others, to seeing others with the eyes of Christ and responding to the necessities they lack, and I take for granted?

Is the hidden focus of my life power, the ability to control my immediate environment and people with manipulation? Do I expect deference from those with whom I share my life? Do I need to cut that deeply out and live to identify and obey the will of my Father?

Is what is most dear to my heart an ephemeral wealth of expensive trivialities and trinkets that will be scattered on the path to my grave, the accumulation of an imaginary security that cannot possibly last or satisfy. Do I need to transform my heart and to live more simply in gratitude because everything I have is a gift, including even my life? As St. Ambrose said more than a thousand years ago, if you have two coats, one of them is yours, the other belongs to the man who has none.

Unexpected roadblocks and pitfalls will inevitably befall us, but most importantly is our road aimed at the right destination?

“He will provide the way and the means, such as you could never have imagined. Leave it all to Him, let go of yourself, lose yourself on the Cross, and you will find yourself entirely.” St. Catherine of Siena

One of the great errors of our times is a sort of spiritual inversion. At best we think that seeking God is on us, our ascent, on us and the quest we are most comfortable with: we fantasize that we control it. No, we don’t. We can’t. And most tragically, we don’t need to.

There are several parallel metaphors in this post. The first is the Master Excavator and road builder Who will make the right cuts and fills if I only ask, grit my teeth, and try hard enough. The second is the Hound of Heaven Who is the pursuer, and the One knocking at our door. He never breaks down the door, but persists and persists and persists, never giving up on us. That is the master point of this mixed metaphor post: our most egregious mistake is to assume that it is we who must fill the gap and climb the hill and forge our way to a union with God. We control the process. We cannot possibly attain the mountain top with our own efforts, but quest’s goal comes to us if we only open ourselves to His tender mercy.

One short story to exemplify what we’ve been exploring.

Occasionally over the years we have had the great blessing of carrying the Eucharist to someone homebound, including each other when one of us was down for the count.

Last week in doing that I met a man in dire circumstances. My new friend’s hair was white, thin, and disheveled, but clean; a barber had not visited him in his recent past. His health was imperiled, and his skin was gray. He could barely walk due to neuropathy. When I knocked, he called out a welcome, asked me to come in, and visibly struggled to sit up.

He lived just over the line from abject poverty and slept on a tattered sofa in a mobile home with crumpled blankets. The air was foul with cigarette smoke permeated in every piece of furniture and clothing, his refrigerator had no doors, just a small camper style fridge propped on a small platform kept what little food he had from rotting. An old cat wandered about freely and evidence of its incontinence was spotted across the faded rugs.

He was welcoming, looked me in the eye, knew all the prayers, and was eager and grateful to have the Blessed Sacrament. He couldn’t stream Mass from our parish for there was no television or computer. There was a worn unframed picture of Jesus taped up on his wall.

A homeless guy he had taken in was sleeping in his bedroom, the only other room in the home. Do I have a homeless guy sleeping in my house? Have I taken in someone who needs shelter? He has. With very limited resources and declining health, he shares what he has. It is his habit.[vii]

When I pronounced my part of the prayers and held out the Blessed Sacrament to him, he stared intently at it, leaning forward to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus. He yearned. Do I yearn with such gratitude and desire for the Miracle and the Mystery? Or do I heedlessly line up for the miracle at every Mass, a Mystery not fully acknowledged or appreciated? Do I understand in my core that the God/Man invites me to be that intimate with Him? To take Him literally within me. I think my new friend who also takes in the most destitute among us does so appreciate and so acknowledge. “Behold the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world.”

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.” Revelation 3:20 (New American Standard Bible)

[i] The main arteries are numbered in the fives for roads running north and south and progress from west to east. Route 5 along the Pacific Coast, then 15, 25 etc. all the way to the road that was created through my hometown, Route 95. 95 runs parallel for the most part to the Atlantic Coast from Houlton, Maine to Miami, Florida. Truckers usually refer to them as The Five or The Ninety-Five. The roads spanning west to east are numbered from south to north, thus 10, 20, up to 90, which in my original state Massachusetts runs from Boston to the border of eastern upstate New York, passing through the Berkshires. It ends in Seattle, Washington, crosses the Mississippi River from Wisconsin to and the northern Rockies in Montana. The system uses a large number of bypasses near major cities. The main highway usually passes through, and the bypasses help move the traffic around the congestion. Near us is 195, 295, 395, and 495 which routes pass through traffic around Boston and Providence.

[ii] Piers Anthony is a much-published British fantasy and science fiction author. Created the fictional world of Xanth.

[iii] Alexander the Great conquered one of the largest empires in human history by the time he was 33. “One of the world’s greatest military generals, he created a vast empire that stretched from Macedonia to Egypt and from Greece to part of India. This allowed for Hellenistic culture to become widespread.” (from Encyclopedia Britannica.)

[iv] The etiology of “worship” is from Old English, where it originally conveyed the idea of something being worthy or valuable. What is my highest value and aspiration?

[v] ChatGPT seconded my most faulty memory when I asked it to confirm a fragment that haunts me: Here is its summary: “Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, wrote in his “Pensées” (Thoughts) that the worst problem of modernity is the inability of people to sit quietly for an hour by themselves in a room. In one of his famous passages, known as the “Pascal’s Wager,” he reflects on the restlessness and distractions that prevent individuals from contemplating deeper matters. Here is a paraphrase of the relevant passage: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Pascal was expressing concern about the constant distractions and noise that prevent people from engaging in introspection and contemplation, which he considered essential for understanding deeper truths and finding meaning in life.”

[vi] I once memorized as part of an English Literature class with a brilliant Jesuit scholar at Boston College Francis Thompson’s classic “Hound of Heaven.” I could have saved myself a lot of pain and hurt for myself and others if I had listened to it more attentively.

[vii] Deacon John in our current parish held a training session for us and a few others just beginning to serve here. It was a retraining for us as we had been trained in past parishes. His was the best yet, inculcating into us the profound gift and responsibility of acting as the hands and feet of Jesus for others. He said, “Never forget, you are Christ, bringing Christ, to Christ!” Just so. When I told him about how it went when I went to the home of the man I described above, Deacon John said that he believes if we get to Heaven, we will be joyful to wash the feet of guys like him. Score two for Deacon John. Just so.

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Tagged as decluttering our liives, Federal Highway System, miracle at Mass

October 6, 2023 · 12:19 pm

Church Guns

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” (Mr.) Fred Rogers

When we lived in Farmington, Maine, happily we were parishioners in the wood framed, off the main street, St. Joseph Church. Sunday after Mass, we often helped with a coffee and snacks gathering in the basement church hall across the street. As well as a venue for parishioners to share stories and freshen friendships, newcomers could meet the regulars and ask questions about the parish, the town, and be welcomed into friendly fellowship. Everything from where the town dump was and good sources for the best local plumbers and electricians as they made unwelcome discoveries about their new house to how many children do you have and where do you work.

For the kids, though, there were different priorities that took over right after the weekly cookie and donut raid. Our son, Gabe, and his two platoon members, Jason, and Paul, all about ten years old, immediately went looking for the toy bin under the stairs for their weekly games, then having secured what they needed, bolted outside to get sweaty and dirty for the ride home. If we were lucky, their church clothes survived for another week with just a little stain remover. One late summer Sunday morning, we were conversing with two folks new to Franklin County, both of whom had moved to town to teach at the Farmington campus of the University of Maine.

The conversation, as conversations with new acquaintances of an academic bent sometimes go until we get to know one another, was a bit formal with some careful probes to establish the guidelines and borders. It was quite clear quite early that our newly welcomed folks were unlikely to be National Rifle Association members or deer hunters. Having never lived in a rural area or in truth very far away from an academic enclave, they carefully shared some concerns about the local folks who weren’t members of the university. Did they hunt? Did they wander around unsupervised and armed on to other people’s land?

I was trying to reassure them that most hunters I knew were respectful of other people’s property, responsible, careful, and skilled. The native-born Maine residents that we had come to know, trust, and love could be counted on for affable conversation, a devastating creative dry wit, advice both practical and theoretical, and in an emergency, they were self-sufficient, resolute, calm, and completely reliable. They just needed some venison in their freezer. Deer, as well as pastoral, beautiful, fast, doe eyed, and all the rest of Bambi lore, were ambulant meat after all. Since the predators were mostly gone, if the herd was not controlled, the deer would first strip the young trees of any bark they could reach and then starve in the winter. Our conversation partners discreetly exchanged skeptical looks. Maybe deer birth control would be a better method? Condoms were a problem, I suggested. The bucks hated them and could not be trusted to use them consistently. Doe were notorious for forgetting to take their pill. But I digress.

Suddenly, as enthusiastic boys are inclined to do, Gabe, Jason and Paul burst into the conversation with an urgent and deadly serious interruption. “Dad, Dad, the door to the closet is locked! We need the church guns!”

I think our new friends returned the next week, but my memory is fuzzy after so many years.

“The Pope? How many divisions does he have?” Joseph Stalin

The Russian tyrant and “Man of Steel” was right of course.^[1] But more right was St. Pope John Paul II.^[2] He knew the military might of the Soviet Union could not be resisted, but his battle could be waged by spiritual and cultural weapons. Karol Wojtyla understood that culture was the most dynamic force in world history, and it was there he and the Holy Spirit could prevail.

The man who would become pope and saint grew up in the most difficult of times. After the Warsaw Pact, his beloved Poland was invaded from the east and west and divided by agreement between two of history’s most ruthless tyrants: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. After Hitler broke the agreement by invading Russia, Poland was brutally ruled by the Nazis. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered, including twenty percent of its Catholic priests along with many of its writers, poets, artists, academics, and intellectuals. Both Nazis and Communists crushed any resistance by trying to destroy its culture. In the Eastern sector before Hitler broke his word, and not to be outdone, the notorious Russian secret police NKVD murdered 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in the Katlyn woods — one at a time with a bullet in the back of the head in April and May of 1940. However, the Polish culture was deeply embedded in the hearts of its people after a thousand years of Catholic thought, writings, art, theater, and poetry memorized as children. Obliterating it proved to be a thorny thicket for both the Reds and the Nazis.

Young Karol Wojtyla was part of a widespread secret resistance, but his part was non-violent. His group frequently held clandestine performances and readings of Polish literature, poetry, and plays to pass on tradition and help the strong Polish culture to endure. When the Church was harshly suppressed, he heard the call to the priesthood and secretly entered the underground seminary of Cardinal Sapieha. Father Wojtyla was ordained on the Feast of All Saints in 1946.

Towards the end of the war at the Malta Conference, the allies on the brink of defeating the Third Reich met to decide the fate of Eastern Europe. The Poles had no place at that table; they were divvied up like the garments of Jesus. To placate their former ally, Joseph Stalin, Great Britain, the United States, and other allies agreed that many of the former independent states like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, East Germany, and Estonia would remain under the domination of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) behind the Iron Curtain as Churchill explained. Poland mourned that in World War II their beautiful country lost twice. One oppressive and murderous regime was replaced by another.

The Soviets destroyed churches and church schools, making them warehouses or vacant lots, persistently suppressing the authority of the Church. Many Catholic clergy were exiled to Siberia. The puppet government installed an Orwellian system of secret police, informers, and a formidable propaganda machine. Schools were taken over to indoctrinate the children into Communism starting in kindergarten. Soviets deliberately set up social and work structures to undermine family life with small mandatory apartments and staggered shifts to make family dinners less likely. The children ultimately belonged to the state. The Church and the family are where culture is sustained, and they were recognized as the greatest impediment to full implementation of the Communist Marxist ideology.

Throughout his early priesthood, Father Wojtyla organized young people, especially couples and through camping and ski trips into the Polish hills and canoeing on its rivers. Mass was celebrated on the altar of an overturned canoe. His focus from the start was to imbue and sustain Polish culture and most importantly its faith in the hearts of its people, always emphasizing the innate freedom and dignity of each individual person as created Imago Dei. He taught and discussed around the campfire that human rights were not conferred, nor could they be destroyed, by the state. He was regarded by the Communists as a thinker, not a doer, and was to some degree left alone as not dangerous to the regime, which allowed him without protest to become first an Auxiliary Bishop then Archbishop and Cardinal of Krakow. They permitted him to attend all the Vatican II meetings from 1962 to 1965, and he wrote the bulk of one of its most significant documents, Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope.)^[3]

But the Communists soon learned of his resolve during the prolonged battle from 1967 to 1977 over Nowa Huta (New Steelworks)^[4], their planned “worker’s paradise” and factory community outside of Warsaw. Communist planning omitted the construction of any church. No need for the old superstitions in the paradise of the worker. Archbishop Wojtyla fought for years to disabuse them of their illusions that such a thing could pass on his watch.

I remember the pictures of the Ark of the Lord Church in Life Magazine when it was finally built. Prior to its construction, Mass was celebrated in all weather in a large field with a resilient large steel cross dug into the earth from the very beginning of the “worker’s paradise.” The world began to take note of this handsome and forceful leader with the theater trained voice who preached non-violent resistance and the dignity and innate freedom of Polish men and women. He was unrelenting.

When the world was surprised in 1978 by his elevation to the papacy as Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian in four and a half centuries, the Politburo started to understand fully the worst mistake of its sixty-year history of brutal rule. When he was elected Pope, he immediately announced that “the Church of Eastern Europe was no longer a Church of silence because now it speaks with my voice.”

“Open wide the doors for Christ. Do not be afraid.” His first homily as Pope spoke directly to the people and as a challenge to Communists everywhere.

In 1979 he made his first visit as Pope to his homeland. The impact was world changing. In Poland, the regime had fostered isolation and distrust, so no one knew how many were dissatisfied outside of their immediate circle of trusted friends, and how many mourned the suppression of their ten centuries deep Catholic culture and longed for its freedom and sanctuary. All feared exposing their hatred of the tyrant because informers were everywhere, and dissent earned you a long cold train ride to Siberia. If you were lucky. When Pope John Paul came and spoke tirelessly – fifty talks and homilies in nine days, celebrated numerous Masses, and led them in many prayers of hope, many witnessed after that visit for the first time they felt safe, accepted, and united. And there were millions of them.

In Victory Square in Krakow, hundreds of thousands of people chanted and sang, “We want God. We are Your people. He is our King. He is our Lord!” John Paul put his hand on his heart and wept quietly.

He spoke and it was the turning point, the first domino to the fall of the Soviet Union. “And I cry. I who am a son of the land of Poland and who am also Pope John Paul II. I cry from the depths of this millennium. I cry on the vigil of Pentecost. Let your Spirit descend! Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land. Amen.”

He never spoke once in fifty talks of those nine days about government or ideology or economics. His challenge was individual and human, one heart and mind at a time. He simply told them in essence, “You are not who they say you are. You are a Christian people united in faith and freedom and culture.” His often-quoted favorite scripture was from the Gospel of John, “The truth will set you free!”

He instilled hope in a non-violent ‘revolution of conscience.’ He called himself the Slavic Pope signaling he was speaking not just to Polish people but to all the enslaved people of Eastern Europe.

In 1980, the Solidarity union was formed in the Gdansk shipyards and led by electrician Lech Walesa as a direct reaction to the Pope’s rallying cry. He led a strike that almost overnight became national for grievances against the workers by the state. When the government eventually offered new benefits, freedoms, and fair treatment for the Solidarity workers in the shipyards who were barricaded in their warehouse, Walesa refused until the offer was extended to all the workers in Poland. Twenty thousand people gathered around the besieged warehouse in support. The government folded, and for the first time a Communist government acquiesced in the just demands of workers. All the workers.

For the next ten years, the unrest spread throughout Eastern Europe. The fire of hope and the truth about the nature of human beings was ignited and could not be extinguished by force or lies. A severe martial law was imposed in Poland. The pressure on the government went underground but persisted. Pope John Paull visited again 1983, 1987, 1991 (twice), 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2002. When Ronald Reagan saw the video of the Pope kissing the ground of Poland on his first visit, he remarked that the world had changed in that moment.

After the lid came off and Solidarity was created, the USSR through their surrogates in the Bulgarian Secret Police^[5] tried to stuff the genie back into the bottle and hired an experienced Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca, who shot at the Pope four times in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, hitting him twice and severely wounding him. His wounds troubled his health for the rest of his life. Ağca was caught and sentenced in Italy then deported to Turkey where he was convicted of a previous assassination of a left- wing journalist.

Several years later the Pope visited and embraced Ağca in the Turkish prison as well as reaching out to his family and mother. He publicly and privately forgave Ağca, and a picture exists of Ağca kissing the ring of the Pope during the visit. In 2007, two years after the death of the Pope who had befriended him, Ağca converted to Roman Catholicism. Like the founder of his beloved Church, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope John Paul responded to violence, hatred, cruelty, and vengefulness with forgiving love. Every soul, every human being precious, unique, unrepeatable, capable of transformation. Even assassins.

There was little violence in the ‘revolution of conscience’ other than what the government perpetrated. Demonstrations. Protests. Courageous stands. Way too many ups and downs for a blog post.^[6] See the footnote for a great video resource readily available. It took another decade until 1989 for free elections to finally finish off the regime.

To be sure many other factors contributed: the leadership in tandem with John Paul of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The leadership of playwright Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Walesa in Poland and many others in Lithuania, Hungary, East Germany. But this was the Lord’s battle too and that of His shepherd, John Paul II, and it was definitive.

Between 1989 and 1990, they fell one by one. Poland first, then the rest: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the infamous Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989. The guns of the Church had sounded, and the walls came down.

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.” Vaclav Havel

^[1] Unidentified photographer – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID 2003678173. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing.

Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (1878-1953), leader of the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953

^[2] http://karnet.krakowculture.pl/en/18092-krakow-john-paul-ii-in-poland-photographs-by-chuck-fishman

^[3] “Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths. In a wonderful manner….” Gaudium et spes.

^[4] Perhaps a tribute to Joseph Stalin. Stalin, his adopted name, is a derivation of the Russian for Steel.

^[5] There is great controversy and much conflicting evidence supporting the claim that the USSR through the Bulgarians hired Mehmet Ali Ağca. But sufficient collaborative testimony and investigations lay the blame clearly at with the Communists. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Pope_John_Paul_II

^[6] Great coverage of this in the 2018 documentary: “Liberating a Continent: John Paul II and the Fall of Communism” by Executive Produce Carl Anderson, former Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus. Video clips in abundance and excerpts from Mr. Anderson, George Wiegel, definitive biographer of JPII, Reagan administration National Security Advisor, and many others. Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services. https://www.amazon.com/Liberating-Continent-John-Paul-Communism/dp/B01MS4VIGH

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September 29, 2023 · 8:04 am

Body Surfing

“Always marry a girl from Texas; no matter what happens, she’s seen worse.” I first heard this from Pete Seeger during his concert at Symphony Hall in Boston in the late sixties.

The latest generation of fear filled waders with their water shoes and 50 SPF might well miss their big chance. Sometimes you just jump into the wave and ride it out. We married way too young at twenty and fifty-seven years later we’re still trying to work things out. According to current standards we did everything wrong. No pre-nup, no separate accounts – bills paid in cash out of envelopes without one for savings, no student debt because we were paying as we went with tuition paid from my summer tree climbing job. Rita was working as a registered nurse while I finished school. All in. One old beat-up car we shared with no payments, third story walk up railroad apartment, no savings account, nothing held back, in love and glad of it. She wasn’t from Texas, although I’ve known some strong women from Texas, so I’m pretty sure the quote above is true. No, Rita was a nurse, and the saying applies: Always marry a nurse because no matter what happens, she’s seen worse.

We had no carefully planned house carefully furnished, or even a budget outside of hastily scribbled categories and weekly amounts on the envelopes, and no plan for every contingency we could worry about. Twenty-five bucks a week into the “Rent” envelope. Ten into “Food.” Five into “Electric” Five into “Phone.” Five into “Entertainment,” which was spent for an occasional movie downtown or an impulse trip to the State Street Fruit Store for a fifty-cent hot fudge sundae. Sometimes when the urge struck after we went to bed, I was sent out to bring a couple of them home – whip cream, nuts, and a cherry included. Everything cost much less, and wages as always barely kept ahead of them.

Our one extravagance was the KLH stereo and turntable we bought with our wedding money. Vinyl. Eclectic. From Van Cliburn’s Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Dave Brubeck, Doc Watson, and Mozart. Stupid happy. Lots of hugs. Lots of cuddles. Still a lot of hugs and cuddles, sleeping like spoons. Some hard times later. Mistakes and some heartaches. And good times. Many more good times. Some challenging waves; some thrilling ones too. Very few regrets. Wouldn’t change a thing.

The first summer after we were married at Blessed Sacrament Church, which is where we both had our First Communions, the Red Sox won their first pennant in twenty-one years. The time before that was in 1946 when Ted Williams returned to Fenway from WWII. Before that it was two years after my father was born in 1918 when they traded away the Babe. No series win for another 34 years after that pennant. My father, a lifelong fan, never saw a series win. But he and my mother were visiting us in Northampton when they clinched the pennant in 1967. Yaz. Rico Petrocelli. Reggie Smith. Jim Lonborg. Tony C. George Scott.

Everyone came out of their houses. All the church bells in town were ringing in jubilation. Rita climbed up on my shoulders, and I started to sprint down the sidewalk dodging the crowd like a running back. She pulled my hair to stop and started to laugh. Laughing so hard she wet her pants and warmed my neck. Got angry at me for the wet pants. I loved her so.

Ah yes, All in. Jump in the wave with some good timing and the ride is exhilarating. From a distance, the observer doesn’t perceive very rapid motion, but inside the break is very different. The sound of the surf and the rush of the water in your ears, the power of the thing. You’re flying, carried along by a surge of energy that built up for a hundred miles, then breaks when gravity overcomes speed, and the shore slopes shallow. Some rough rides, some smooth, occasional misses and the wave passes over you. But, God, jump in. Hesitate when the right wave comes, and you will never see another one like it. There is no substitute.

“Sing me a melody,

Sing me a blues

Walk through the bottomland without no shoes

The Brazos she’s running scared

She heard the news

Walk through the bottomland without no shoes

Won’t you walk through the bottomland without no shoes?” Lyle Lovett[i]

We rode many waves over the years. Some tested us sorely. One memorable ride was in 1983, the year after our third child was born in April and my father died on his birthday in December. We learned once again what it was like to ride a wave that was an invitation from God.

We visited a Catholic community while at a conference during the winter in Providence, Rhode Island and met some folks who later would become close friends. We sensed a strong sense of belonging, but we already had that in Maine and could have stayed for the rest of our lives.

In the spring of 1983, all our little family – Rita and I with the three kids (only Meg who wasn’t born yet was missing) went on a four-day Easter retreat in Augusta when we were living in Maine. We had felt a prompting of the Holy Spirit to move back closer to our parents who were aging: my recently widowed mother and both of Rita’s folks. And perhaps a call to dive into a wave carrying us into deeper waters in our faith. We loved small town Maine, our parish, my job; I resisted. But in the prayer journal I kept each morning, the readings kept coming. About caring for parents. About God gathering His people. About journeys of faith. Give me a break, Lord. I like it here!

Finally, after much hesitation, on Holy Saturday, I managed to meet with the retreat director, Father Bourque (no relation to the Boston Bruin All Star defenseman.) We talked for a half hour around eleven o’clock after everyone was in bed. He had a pronounced French-Canadian accent. I showed him my journal, hoping that he would tell me to get real and stop making myself crazy. The job market was terrible, we were just coming out of a recession, and the real estate market was worse. Houses in our county were lingering for up to a year until the sellers got tired and cut their prices severely. He looked at me with startlingly deep blue eyes and said, “I think God wants you to move.” My heart started pounding. Not my plan.

He suggested that since moving a few hundred miles with my family to uncertain places in uncertain times was serious business, I should do some testing to make sure of our discernment. Ah, I thought. A good out. But his test turned out to be not trivial. Father Bourque looked at me again, “Since times are hard, test the waters for a job down there, and if that looks promising, put your house on the market.” How about something a little safer like a wet fleece[ii], Father? This test is a commitment to the wave before it breaks. “Look for the job, sell the house,” he said.

We do understand that we don’t always understand; responding and traveling in the Will of God is always in the end faith in the unknown trail, and there are brambles, stumbling stones, and blind corners. On our return Monday, I called my boss in Boston. I was on the road selling commercial projects for a large regional lumber company, making Boston wages, but in a much less expensive cost of living situation in rural Maine. Life was settled and going well. But the invitation and wave were calling. Since I was in good standing in the company, the most comfortable testing of the job waters was calling the office. “Warren,” I said, “Just thinking of maybe exploring a larger market. What have you got in say, Southeastern Mass, or Rhode Island or even Cape Cod?” “I like what you are doing in Maine,” he said, “but if you need to make a change, I’d love to have you in Rhode Island. I just fired the guy there on Friday.” I remembered what a skilled veteran told me once: don’t bother to learn their names until they’ve been here at least a year. It’s a tough business.

Be still my heart. That’s one of Father’s discernment keys, but houses stay on the market here for a long, long time. We’re still safe. I called a friend who was a real estate agent in town. Ed was my tennis buddy and not encouraging about us moving, but he said he would put a satisfactory price on it from a seller’s perspective and list it if I insisted and had lots of patience. I did insist and would be happy if my patience was infinite. We had a full price offer in five days. The wave was breaking and moving much too fast for comfort.

When we made a second visit to confirm the community, we were invited to stay with a family who would soon become dear friends we love to this day. On a walk in the neighborhood with the baby, five houses down the street, we came upon a realtor nailing up a “For Sale” sign on a less than thriving street Norway maple tree. The owner had died two weeks before, and his sister who now owned the house was selling it quite a bit below market because, while solid and well built, it was sixty years old and needed major updating – needed a new kitchen, a new bathroom, refinishing the oak floors, painting all the walls, rewiring and replumbing. But the roof was good, the furnace sound, the full Douglas fir two by four framing superlative. Made an offer. Accepted in a day. Done deal.

Easter retreat. By Pentecost we were living in Providence with a lot of work to do. That’s what body surfing can be like. The rush of power is beyond your ability to control. Moving faster than you thought you could. Twenty yards closer to the beach in five seconds.

That’s what body surfing with God can be like.

One more recent short body surfing story that ties back to the opening quote from Pete Seeger about girls from Texas (and nurses). Earlier this year, I was body surfing at Surfer’s End on Sachuest Beach (See picture from my cell phone). At 77, Rita was reading a book and sort of keeping an eye on me. She was skeptical that body surfing was the best use of my time at our age.

The key to body surfing is timing. It’s all timing. Hit the wave just as it breaks, and you can go a long way. Jump into it too early, and it passes you by. Too late, and it breaks ahead, rapidly fizzling out in front of you while you turn to wait for the next one. Thrashing and frantic swimming to catch up is useless. There are other possible outcomes. Lose sufficient attention and the wave smashes your face into the sand. Forehead scrapes that look like someone touched up your forehead with a belt sander loaded with a 24-grit belt. They can bleed profusely but without any real lasting injury other than cosmetics. I bled. Came up out of the water. Good thing there were no sharks about. Waded toward shore splashing the cleansing and cooling salt water on my head. Blood running down my face.

Rita glances up and looking concerned walks down to the water. “Always marry a nurse because no matter what happens, she’s seen worse.” It’ll all be OK now. My nurse will assess the damage. Her face goes from concern to something else. I am starting to worry about spending the evening in the emergency room. She struggles to control her emotions. She tried to resist; she really did. Then she bursts into laughter. “I told you, dummy.”

“To me, when you go body surfing, it’s a way of simplifying everything. It’s just you and the wave and the experience. Life is a balancing act.” Mike Steward, champion body surfer. From a Surfer Today article.

[i] Superb video with the incomparable Emmy Lou Harris providing in the harmony. Walk Through the Bottomland

[ii] See Judges 6:33-40 in which Gideon tests God’s promise of victory over overwhelming enemy forces by laying out a fleece for dew.

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September 21, 2023 · 11:02 am

Every Once In A While

“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” Dorothy Day

Open source courtesy of Wayne Evans

Every once in a while, I hear a story that restores my hope and saves me from a descent into disappointed cynicism. We know a young woman, let’s call her “Virtue,” who is suffering through a dark period in her life, and there have been more than a few of those she has suffered through in her life, most admittedly through her own bad choices. In former relationships, she was physically and emotionally abused. She’s more careful now in her choice of partners, but as it turns out not careful enough.

Last year “Virtue” made a mistake by choosing to engage in the baby making act with someone who didn’t love her and marry her and commit his life to her. Let’s call him DB for short. And sure enough, a baby was conceived in the baby making act. After all, that is what the baby making act is devised to do.

They were living in an apartment with a friend of the unloving male lover. When it was discovered that she was with child, the friend of the father’s, whose name was on the lease for the apartment, stated unconditionally he would tolerate no troublesome little human beings in his life. Since they enjoyed the apartment, DB, the irresponsible[i] father-to-be made the decision for all three of them: father, mother, and baby: the kid had to go. Or DB would go. She knew that her connection to the tiny human being within her womb would not allow her to “terminate the pregnancy” as the euphemism goes. So, her original mistake was not to be compounded by a tragic new one. But that is not to say it wouldn’t be difficult, very difficult.

DB was true to his word (if nothing else), and after persistent harassment failed to loosen her resolve, he left in the night with a new girlfriend to an undisclosed out of state address. “Have a nice life.” This scenario is now commonplace, especially among the poor, compounding their misery.

“And what if—what are you if the people who are supposed to love you can leave you like you’re nothing?” Elizabeth Scott, The Unwritten Rule

We met “Virtue” last winter when she was eight months pregnant and a week short of living under a bridge with no place to go. A friend introduced us. After some hectic scrambling with some good-hearted friends, collectively, we were able to secure a spot in a homeless shelter for expectant mothers – a kind of miracle given the abysmal shortage of such havens for those without options. But the time has now run out there, and the shelter needed space for new desperate clients.

We met with one of the same friends and “Virtue” recently to discuss options and help find a more permanent situation for her and her baby, now seven months old. Her situation is still far from secure. The baby is healthy, happy, relaxed, and curious about everything going on about her. She has beautiful dark hazel eyes that follow every move, eyes that stare unblinking at you in trust and candor. No pretense with babies. She is patient while the adults talk with all those strange sounds. Rolls of baby fat dimple her elbows and knees, plump that will burn off as soon as she gains her mobility and starts crawling, crabbing, walking, running, climbing, exploring, and testing her mom’s ability to keep up.

The almost toddler laughs a lot when old guys rain raspberries on her arm, and she seizes anything within range of her chubby hands. She has a minor issue that requires physical therapy, but her mom is diligent with getting her to her appointments and relies on the kindness of volunteers in her church congregation for rides to and from. Her prognosis is excellent for full health.

Her mom told us this story over coffee.

She left the baby for a short time with her parents while she ran some errands and picked up some needed groceries for them. She was able to stay a short while with her parents, but the rules of the elderly housing project where they live preclude a longer stay. She went shopping on foot. She has no car.

As she walked on the sidewalk in her small city, “Virtue” encountered a disheveled, unshaven man prone on the concrete. All the pedestrians carefully averted their eyes and eschewed intervening with his obvious predicament. Not “Virtue.” She stayed.

She knelt next to his head. His breathing was shallow. “Sir, are you alright?” No response. Roll him out of his vomit. “Sir, are you alright? I’m calling nine one one. They’ll be here soon.” Check breathing again. Make sure he is still doing that. Flag down passing pedestrians dressed in hospital scrubs. They join her and check for a pulse. A bit thready.

The rescue crew shows up within five minutes or so and takes over. “Virtue” left her name and contact information as a witness with the police officer who soon joined them. They determine acute alcohol poisoning. If left unattended and ignored the stranger on the sidewalk could have lain there until he stopped breathing.

“Virtue” told us her story in a matter-of-fact manner but was pleased she had been able to help. Sure. That’s what human beings do for one another. “What else could I do?” Without hesitation or doubt. A week short of being on the street herself with an infant, she was the one who took notice instead of stepping over the guy like all the rest hurrying to their urgent destinations. She was the one who did the loving thing for a stranger.

The French poet killed in the first World War, Charles Peguy, wrote, “The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope.” A homeless mother taught me that last week.

Jesus replied and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, and they stripped him and beat him, and went away leaving him half dead. And by chance a priest was going down on that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Likewise, a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion, and came to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them; and he put him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

On the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I return, I will repay you.’

Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ hands?” And he said, “The one who showed mercy toward him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do the same.” Luke 10: 30-37 (New American Bible translation)[ii]

[i] An all-too-common adjective for hormonal, negligent sperm donors in recent decades. As it turns out, the sexual revolution didn’t liberate women as much as it liberated and enabled irresponsible men – going on three generations of them. The unwritten rule today is that if a baby results from the baby making act, it’s the woman’s responsibility to ‘take care of’ because of the failed contraception (anti conception), and the expectation for physical coupling in a hook up culture is a given. The male may choose to pay for her in getting rid of the baby. Or he may just evaporate. No opprobrium attaches to the man who was once expected to “do the right thing” after he did the wrong thing. Increasingly rare is the man who “does the right thing” before, during, or after the hook up.

The ‘hook up’ culture is an appropriate metaphor. Sexual coupling with virtual strangers who have no commitment, no love, no sense of self giving to the other person has all the love and tenderness of a beat-up, faded tow truck backing up to a Rent A Wreck auto with a blown engine.

Great book on the topic: Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom, 2015, by Gabriele Kuby

[ii] The Samaritan was despised in first century Israel as an apostate and treated as a pariah. One of the lessons from the parable is that Jesus came for the despised, the poor, the alienated and not for the perfect and sanctimonious. “Virtue” is among the poor, the sinners like all of us trying the best we can to live in a fallen culture, the abandoned, those with few options, yet it was she, and only she, who reached out to the stricken man on the sidewalk. There is hope in that, and a lesson for us all.

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Tagged as acts of kindness, good Samaritan, homeless mother, housing shortage

August 21, 2023 · 1:04 pm

Golem, Gollum, HAL, LLMs, and Kurzweil (Continued)

“We are on the cusp of a profound technological leap that will destabilize every facet of our society. It could be more transformative than the Industrial Revolution. It could be more transformative than electricity. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has said that its impact will be more profound than the discovery of fire.” Marc Andreessen, “AI Will Save the World,” [i]Free Press, Substack

Illustration from Sir Thomas More's Utopia

Illustration from St. Thomas More’s “Utopia” Wikimedia

The title of this post suggests a bit less optimism than Marc Andreessen’s article about the changes that will be visited upon us by artificial intelligence (AI). The article quoted above as a preface predicts a transformative new reality for human beings, a change of type and form, not just physically, but in every way imaginable. Not just an alternate existence, but an alternative heaven. Its competitor is not merely other humans or nature or our own limitations. No, no, the competitor to these apostles of AI Nirvana is God, a God the AI visionaries are sure doesn’t exist anyway. Where is the reality in all of the hype and confusion? That is what we will begin to explore. Only just begin.

The terms in the title evoke some disturbing images:

Golem symbolizes the hubris of human beings–a metaphor for man’s creation going out of control once released into the world. The Jewish folklore golems were created to save us, yet they may lead us to destruction. The creatures were raised to life from mud and inanimate material and were possibly the inspiration for the name of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together from graveyard parts and brought to life. Golem is man’s arrogance and ambition personified.[ii]

Gollum is familiar to most as JRR Tolkien’s ruined hobbit. He found and recovered an ancient magic ring of great power buried in the mud. He was first obsessed by, then addicted to, and finally destroyed by centuries of proximity and use of Lord Sauron’s Ring of Power (“one ring to rule them all.”). The magic ring prevented him from aging and gave him power and protection, but his immortality weighed heavily and over centuries transformed him into a hideous evil. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[iii]

HAL is the HAL 9000, the self-aware and fatally rebellious AI super bot in Stanley Kubrick’s classic, “2001 – A Space Odyssey.” HAL kills all the astronauts, most of them hibernating; only poor Dave survives aboard the deep space flight to explore the origins of the mysterious basilisk. The connection to the topic is self-evident. “Stop, Dave… Stop…. I’m afraid, Dave… My mind is going.” [iv]

Kurzweil is Ray Kurzweil, who wrote in his popular book “Singularity” in 2005 that by 2045 computers will surpass humans in intelligence, and that event will usher in the beginning of a new and wonderful era of hybrid ‘singularity’ existence for humans and our inventions, transforming us to omniscience, immortality, and a kind of omnipotence hitherto impossible for humans. We merge into our creation, combine with it, and become all powerful, immortal beings.

Singularity refers as well to the almost infinitely massive and infinitesimally small microdot that exploded into the universe as we know it now. A tiny seed in the Big Bang expanded out in microseconds to form the cosmos. The choice of the term for our new mode of existence signifies the power its advocates predict. For them, the merging is our hope and self-created glorious future – a new man made singularity. At least to the transhumanist futurist crowd.

In Ray Kurzweil’s future, human intelligence will ignite into something that will explode exponentially into all the universe when the singularity flashes into being as we merge with the far more supple intelligence of our inventions, generating a new genesis. We will be like God and know all things, be all things, control all things. We will know good and evil as God does. Sound familiar? Think of a serpent in a tree. It will come to you.

“Some people think they know the answer. Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems “we are making God.” Transhumanist Elise Bohan says “we are building God.” Futurist Kevin Kelly believes that “we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.”

“Does God exist?” asks transhumanist and Google maven Ray Kurzweil. “I would say, ‘Not yet.’ ” These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves, or to build their own versions.” Paul Kingsnorth, “Rage Against the Machine,” Free Press, Substack[v]

I read both cautionary and some effusively laudatory articles about the potential for artificial intelligence, and especially its latest breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs). I remain intrigued, more than a little skeptical, and wondering where it will all lead. I won’t live long enough to see where artificial intelligence takes us.

Remaining somewhat neutral, I don’t share the pessimism and apocalyptic fears of some, as understandable as they are. Neither do I find potential redemption in technology as convincing as some do. Transhumanist utopians are fabulists in their predictions of human fulfillment through our own inventions. Artificial intelligence can be helpful; artificial intelligence can be problematic, but in any case, it is not salvific. A tool, perhaps a great tool. I hope we have the wisdom to control it, rather than surrender, and it will control us.[vi]

When processing enormous volumes of data in nanoseconds, we haven’t a prayer of beating them. Artificial intelligence is reasoning as well as college students, depending, of course, on how we define “reasoning.” [vii] I asked GPT 3.5 last week to write an essay at the level of a high school senior – as high school teachers might ask: to ‘compare and contrast’ equity of outcome v equal opportunity. It banged the essay out in a couple of seconds and perhaps did it credibly. Below in the footnote is a link to its unedited essay if you are curious. I’ll leave it to the teachers among us to grade it, but it probably would need some human tweaking to conform to the teacher’s requested format. [viii]

One immediate complication for the teachers of the millions now visiting the LLM sites is distinguishing between student written materials and robot written ones. OpenAI (parent company of the GPT models) recently shut down one of its tools to be able to make such distinctions. When writing was submitted to the app for appraisal and asked if a human wrote the passage, it was wrong over half the time. Better off flipping a coin. That could be a problem.[ix]

The robot is good as well at writing resumes specifically targeted to make candidates look suitable for specific jobs. Of course, they still must make it through an interview or three without a robot companion, but the resume bot should get them past the gate keeper. [x]

People a lot more knowledgeable than most of us are ambivalent to some degree about the rapid development of these technologies. Elon Musk signed on to a letter written with Steven Wozniak and 1,100 others very high on the tech food chain urging a sixth month pause on AI development until better controls were in place.[xi] It so far has been ignored.

Elon has his own technological breakthrough well underway. He is full speed ahead with his Neuralink experiments to embed a chip capable of communicating directly with computers into human brains, supposedly to cure certain illnesses, but the prospects give me pause.[xii] The Federal Drug Administration approved the experiments, and they proceed apace. What could go wrong with the FDA on the job?

These developments are multiplying at the speed of light. Dozens of startups, maybe hundreds of startups in garages everywhere are working through the night to get in on the wave. The dominant player now, OpenAI is in deep financial trouble, but there are plenty of heirs anxiously ready to fill the gap.[xiii] To pile up cliched metaphors: the horse has fled the barn, the bus has left the station, the boat has left the dock, the genie is out of the bottle and among us doing we have no idea what.

A blog post or even a series of blog posts can at best tweak your interest and start a discussion for some consideration of this Hydra. I’ll include some more links in the footnote below to suggest some possible paths for your curiosity. [xiv] I encourage you not to panic. I also encourage you not to exalt in our coming redemption in a progressive fantasy. Let’s try to enjoy the journey; the ride will be exhilarating.

“Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Ernest Hemingway, closing dialogue from “The Sun Also Rises”

It seems to me that the human mind is too subtle and profoundly complex to be uploaded into the cloud intact except perhaps as data bits to be processed implausibly into an unpredictably abridged simulacrum. Nor does it seem a blessing rather than a terrible curse for a human/robot hybrid to extend its godlike reach into the universe. Yes, computers will out-computer us, already probably are, but they do not have a brain, much less a mind, much less a personality. Their ‘imagination’ is derivative — just a highly developed word prediction neural network, and for sure they will always lack a soul.

Human beings are fallible, human beings are flawed, human beings have foibles, but human beings are each unique, one off, intrinsically precious and with a dignity imbued by their nature created in Imago Dei. They are not ghosts in a machine and cannot be supplanted by a machine in any way that is an improvement.

“Everyone is their own universe—a life, a dream, a hope, a sorrow, a joy, a surprise, a revelation, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end—even when they simply walk by you on the street.” Harlan Coben, “Home”

[i] AI Will Save the World, Free Press, Marc Andreessen, July 11, 2023. AI as redemption, the ultimate progressive optimism.

[ii] https://mary-shelley.fandom.com/wiki/The_Golem

[iii] The full famous quote from British historian, Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

[iv] Stop Dave, My mind is going.

[v] Rage Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth, July 12, 2023. What would a refusal to worship look like? A vio lovesion of resistance.

[vi] White House demands AI safeguards.

[vii] GPT3 reasons as well as college students

[viii] Link to the essay written by GPT 3.5

[ix] https://decrypt.co/149826/openai-quietly-shutters-its-ai-detection-tool

[x] Job seekers using ChatGPT to write resumes and nabbing jobs

[xi] https://fortune.com/2023/03/29/elon-musk-apple-steve-wozniak-over-1100-sign-open-letter-6-month-ban-creating-powerful-ai/

[xii] Elon-musks-neuralink-wants-to-put-chips-in-our-brains

[xiii] OpenAI ChatGPT nears bankruptcy.

[xiv] Several links to learn some more: (Others relevant to the topic were in the previous post, part one.)

Why this AI moment might be the real deal New Atlantis