As Eve Asked Adam About That Lump in His Throat

Creation. The Tree of Life stories. After Adam met Eve.

The first Tree of Life story. Somehow, the Tree of Life was associated with the challenge to know God. At the end of the stone age. Before the nomads set forth. From the garden. “God looked at everything He had made, and He found it very good.”

The apple. Adam. Eve. Adam was there first. In the story. And he DID seem to care. About God. And then about Eve. And she had wanted the apple. And so the story. About breaking the relationship with God.

And so there was this relationship. Cave men. Or men from Mars. In a relationship. Adam first with God. And then Adam with Eve. As she entered the story, the one commandment had preceded Eve. Just one commandment. The first commandment. About the apple.

In the narrative, the one commandment had never been given to Eve. But Adam seems to have passed down, to have explained, the one rule. Clearly he has explained the one simple commandment. When all humans, if actually acted upon to eat the fruit from the Tree of Life, were doomed to die.

To know God. For cave men, it is not possible to like, to love anyone, unless you first know them. The greatest gift to be passed down was knowledge. So, did Eve know God? Directly? Before she ate the apple? I see no reference that they ever really met. Face to face. What happens in a relationship when only one party knows, works at knowing, God?

And so the story. About God. About creation. Giving Adam and Eve everything. And about inheritance. Not so different than what I had given my own kids. Knowledge. Money. The ability to survive in the world. Beyond the lifestyle of just stone age men. And stone age women.

And so the story. Creation. The injustice of creation. From the perspective of a writer in the Land of 10,00 Lakes. In the location of the lake. When Adam, or someone, might end up living closer to the lake. Living in the age of hysteria, there was all the injustice of creation. Or since the injustice that Adam was closer to God? Eve and the perceived to be injustice. When Eve, who had never gotten to spend time alone with God, like Adam had. What was Eve’s perspective in all of this? Apparently, Eve did not really care too much about the one simple commandment. Clearly when it came to the one commandment, her actions bespoke her beliefs. Did Eve know God? About the one commandment, she more or less said, “I don’t care.” Maybe not much different than my kids, she was born into all of this, and never inquired as to from where everything had come. So what would be Eve’s motivation, concerning the one commandment? Born in His image. Formed in His likeness. In the perspective of a woman. In a world where Eve did not have a lot of choice. It was either Adam or no one? Or the apple? Was Eve silently unhappy with Adam? When two people always argued about the important choices. But born second. The second child. The unfairness of it all. In a role of having to bear children. Of the timing. Of not really truly knowing –even in the garden – God. Not really seeing God directly, before she approached the Tree of Life. Maybe the original agnostic. Or not too unlike how an adopted child goes in search of the birth parent, in the search for the divine. “What’s He gonna do to me? Or what will your God possibly do to us, when I eat the apple? And you do likewise.”

And then seeing this tree. So was the demand for authority, establishing a degree of order, proof of love? “Don’t eat the apple.” Or was this just a sin of pride, similar to the stories about the serpent? In days when Adam and Eve had not figured out the equation. Of God. Of each other. Of conditional love versus unconditional love.

Somehow, this Tree of Life was associated with the challenge to know God. Was the tree about Spiritual knowledge? Or simply the Truth? Or maybe the Tree of Life story was all about what was missing for Eve, and she wanted some knowledge of God, or desired to be like God.

Love and desire. Establishing the proper degree of order. What happens in a relationship over issues of sharing love? Or was it over issues of sharing authority? She only had wanted the apple? Or it was more than just an apple? Now in her desire to share in a relationship, with Adam, and with Adam’s God, there was this communal need for greater union, starting in her relationship?

In the love triangle of a man, a woman, and God, there was Eve. The text clearly states it was Eve who picked the apple. And she ate the apple first. But he did know from where the apple came, since Adam was with her at the time. He was an accomplice to picking the apple. Yes, Adam knew from where the apple had come. Poor Adam, having to decide between God’s authority, and Eve’s. Having to decide about actions out of love. Or actions out of fear. The fear of the Lord.

Eve broke the relationship with God. With the inheritance, the dowry in the Garden of Eden, lost.

Trying to understand order. Law and order. Or God, trying to figure out Eve. She must have been a lot more complicated than Adam. And if Adam wanted to help populate the earth, in his relationship with Eve….well, God and His one commandment had to play second fiddle. What could you do about it? In the perspective of Adam? If you loved this woman? Adam had already figured out not so much her mystery, but he was letting Eve decide everything. In the days before any guy ever had married. But if he was smart, and wanted to try to be happy. Because maybe the fear of the Lord was not proportionate to the fear of Eve.

Now Adam seemed honest. Real honest. And he said that he ate the apple, because the woman that he shared a relationship with had first eaten it. He seemed to have wished to have shared in all of her mistakes. In her human nature.
Cave men. In the stone age. How hard cave men had worked. With their clubs. Lovable stone men. And their women. Like the one who had picked the apple? In power struggles of knowledge. About the Tree of Life. When Eve was essentially saying, “I don’t care.” About that one commandment. Had she failed at the Tree of Life, in the challenge to know God? Cave woman with their power struggles with men, and with God. Or just their insecurities, in the days before make-up. And before matchmakers.

How hard people searched to find God after Adam and Eve. Because Eve ate the damn apple. When at that point, God had seemed pretty satisfied about His relationship with Adam and even Eve, even if Eve was not satisfied.

Maybe it was a lot like last night. Speaking of clubs. In the discussion who the Appleton minor league baseball club had been affiliated with. For the past 50 years. In Wisconsin. Adam’s noble human nature seemed greater than mine. I just offered the right answer. Never was there an affiliation with the Minnesota professional baseball club. NEVER. While the three women in the room talked to each other. And arrived at the wrong answer.

Presenting the hard work of the past. By cave men. With cave women. How hard cave men worked. For water. For cave women. In those Byzantine relationships. Before marriage. Cave men who did not even seem human. Compared to me. They did not seem real lovable. Compared to me. Until forced to choose, like I was forced to choose. In looking for union, with a woman not unlike Eve.

Such was this, the start of unconditional love. When Adam was forced to choose. Between God and Eve. And he knew enough to tell Eve she was right. On behalf of procreation. And the future of the world.

It was in January that I visited that 3,000 year old fort in the Aran Island. Amidst all the rock. And no real tillable land. How hard in the culture it had been then for the Irish. And then over time. In their hard, hard lives. How hard their lives were, compared to mine. How hard people worked for their food. My ancestors. The tour guide that day talked about Oliver Cromwell. Was he in the Aran Islands, I asked? Noel the bus driver said he had been. Then 6 weeks later, on a public television show with Rick Steves, it was stated Cromwell never was there. Last weekend, my friend with all the family in Ireland said, speaking about dealing with authority, Cromwell was never there. But Adam and Eve might have been.

Yes, how hard people worked for water. And the hard work to find food. That present day nomads took so much for granted. When man and woman had failed in the instruction to cultivate and care for the earth. And now doomed to die. God who made the heavens and the earth, now had an additional purpose for His heaven?

Afterward, the punishment. For those cave women, with their calculating stone hearts, about dealing with authority. Women who, similarly, since Eve had to carry Adam’s children within. Only now God would be intensifying the pangs of child-bearing. And Eve had in every day life an affliction of desire to be with Adam, and he was to be her master. With no mention if Adam was allowed to remind Eve of this.

So the theme of pain, along with human nature. In the beginning. It seems apparent that even Adam could never boss around his wife. Like you ever could in a true relationship, boss someone around. And when God never had much luck with Eve, either. In this chapter.

And so the story about breaking the relationship with God. Presenting all of the hard work of the past, but with this need for healing. With a need for healing, for the present day nomad doomed now to die. Somehow, the Tree of Life was associated with death. And relationships. And how hard relationships were. Especially for cave women, with their cave men. And how hard people searched to find union again with God, ever since the beginning.

So what had been changed by Eve, after sharing an apple? With the ensuing theme of pain, when it came to the kids. Eve, soon to be taking care of someone else, in those ensuing relationship, with her own kids. With their same kind of doubts over obedience and authority.

The memory of it all. All the hard work required in relationship. Did Adam ever get to ask God if relationships were harder than creation? And then dealing with loss. The irony that soon Eve was to be dealing with her kids who often, too, said, “I don’t care.” So the ongoing pangs of bearing with your sons, the one who looked a lot like Adam, physically. As the need for more commandments multiplied, until there were state legislatures.

So what else had been changed by Eve, after sharing an apple? After eating the fruit from the Tree of Life, Eve had this longing every day to be with Adam, and he was to be her master. And THAT was Adam’s punishment in all of this.

And so the theme for everybody of pain, with fertility, which, for the most part, had felt so good. At least in the beginning. And the irony of all of this apple business, which had started over the relationship. But finally, for the present day nomad doomed now to die, there was at least God, and the memory of it all. When it seems apparent that, in Adam’s view anyway, if Eve had never came around, no one believed how great it had been here. Between Adam and God. But with no real reason to write it all down. Not until there was such conflict, such pain. And women, with their viewpoints about the various degree of pain. Theirs was the worst. And to write it all down, otherwise no on would believe it, until they found out all the hard work required in relationship. Based, in different proportion, on love and authority. And the irony of all of this. That Adam never had an apple juice again. In his life.

And so the story of creation, and procreation. Before the editors and proof-readers were hired.

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Té Tremble

In modern times, one universal truth since the French Revolution has included the anger and the fear that the young always directed at institutions which sheltered a civilization. Not at all unlike the anger and the fear that came out of slavery. Like in Haiti about the time of the French Revolution. Before the Louisiana Purchase. The anger and the fear directed at royalty and the clergy. At the time of the French Revolution, the anger at all of the estates, including the journalists covering the story.

The anger over the powerlessness. The always and everywhere identity of being a slave. This powerful identity from the past in the New World based upon race that is not allowed in polite society to be discussed. Or about that anger from the past which had come of slavery.

I spent part of last weekend with the descendants of displaced slaves. I attended a program on Sunday about rebuilding Haiti. After waking earlier that day to “Speaking of Faith,” a National Public Radio program that morning which had discussed life in western Alabama where shelter had always been based upon a social order of the soul, with its burden of history. The houses of western Alabama always had had porches, in a day when air conditioning did not cut off a family from a neighbor, with a concern of long-term survival. Whereas part of the rebuilding process, part of the architecture included recycling building materials of the past, and an architectural teacher from the University of Auburn mentioned the slave houses in this part of the Alabama. As he was talking about the importance of an architecture that was committed and engaged, he asked who now could ever understand in this day and age slavery? “Either its social and/or cultural part at the time of slavery?” In western Alabama, Where had been the descendants — with its displaced slaves and the slave masters still present. Architectural students from the University of Auburn had to find out about the truth in the collective memory of slavery, in the architectural systems being re-created.

The Saint Paul Public Library offered a panel discussion with sponsorship of the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library with mostly Haitian people. Max Adrien is a Haitian-born Hamline University French professor with a Ph. D., from Tulane University in New Orleans where he helped establish a Haitian Creole program. In examining Haitian history, he told the story which began on December 5, 1492 in Haiti. Where Columbus sank the Santa Maria. Why Columbus came, with the late 15th century European God. Perhaps initially with a 16th century benevolence. To find a route to the east. To avoid the Ottoman Turks –those fierce Ottoman Turks. Adrian said he had a B.A. from Loyola University in Chicago, and knew well the theology of Columbus’s world. In a five minute history, he spoke of the arrival of the French who formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola. With the encouragement of Louis XIV, the French West Indian Company had begun to grow tobacco, cotton, indigo, and cacao under the labor of the enslaved Tainos who inhabited the island before Columbus’ gang arrived. With high Taíno mortality attributed to a missing immunity to Old World diseases, a French monsignor had suggested going to Africa to import replacement labor. And thus the history of African slaves from hundreds of different tribes, with hundreds of different languages. The estimated number was 790,000 African slaves in 1783-1791. And so the story of displaced slaves, from Africa.

Thirty years younger than the United States, Haiti was the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Adrien discussed Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution from France that caused enough fear to Napoleon for the United States to complete the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana, with its sugar base economy. Louisiana, with its same French connection. Louisiana, caught in the same slave trade triangle as Haiti. He made mention of crippling reparations paid to France after the country’s revolution in order to lift an embargo. And its history has shown the ongoing dependence ever since, based on reparations for the freed slaves, and with the old paradigm of slavery. In the 18th century, Haiti was the richest island in the Caribbean, with its economy based upon sugar.

Barbara Pierre-Louis, a Ph.D. candidate, gave a personal account of her Haitian history, where reference was made to Paul Farmer’s powerful book, The Uses of Haiti. Both of these speakers had been in Minnesota on January 12, 2010 on the day of Té Tremble. Roulio Lundy was a young Haitian who had married a Minnesotan in March 2009 but was home on the island. One of 19 children, he gave a moving account of visiting a neighborhood where a woman his own age had prepared him lunch as he readied to journey 60 miles in his car to return to his mother’s home on that Tuesday. After turning down an invitation to eat food three times, he finally took the food and put it in his back seat and set off for home. Five minutes down the road, there was upheaval on the road he was driving on. The sky turned black. And the buildings along the side of the road collapsed. It seemed the end of the world had arrived. He spoke of picking up 3 young men in his car as he resumed his travel, witnessing horror after horror of adult men sawing off their arms, to escape from the rubble of their buildings. Offers of all worldly goods were made by those trapped if somehow they could be saved. The four men distributed the food and water in the car as they came across horrific scene after horrific scene. And he found that the woman who had prepared his food had died in the earthquake. He had a flat tire later that afternoon, and took a wheel off another care to continue on, at one point abandoning his car. It took him until midnight on Thursday to complete his journey on foot to his mother’s home. He found that all of his family member were alive.

There were questions. One question was from a woman who had sponsored a child through the NGO called World Vision. The Minneapolis wife of Roulio Lundy suggested that the people in the audience take a different approach. She told of the dislike of non-government organizations (NGOs), who have been helping in Haiti for 50 years, with more poverty today than 50 years ago, with a greater number existing on less than $2 per day than ever before. The view there that the people were poorer, and the NGOs richer. Causing in the view of many locals, more damage than good. The NGOs that seemed to want to do something. That was the environment in Haiti before the earthquake.

Yes, I had spent part of the weekend with the educated descendants of displaced slaves. Maria Roesler-Lundy had married a descendant. Her husband was the only member of the panel who did not carry a post graduate degree from an American university. And all of the Haitians had spoken of the prestigious schools in Haiti. The few prestigious schools. Education maybe not unlike the air conditioning which had cut off so many from their neighbors. And there was this undertow of class, even among the descendants of displaced slaves, some who had gotten the chance to attend the prestigious schools, to pursue passing on the academics to the next generation. With or without the anger at the concept of the 16th century God.

The institutional advancement of a nation. Maria Roesler-Lundy came over to give a more explicit answer dealing with World Vision. She said her answer had not been about just World Vision. Her answer dealt with not giving just money alone to Haitian causes, but the need to get actively involved with the people in the nation. And when her husband compared this crisis of rebuilding to being about more than sharing money but similar to preparing food and then eating it with the people, and suddenly I was overcome with the realization that the only reason he was standing in front of me was because he had not stayed to share the food prepared by his former next door neighbor. And I understood the reasons hat he had wept at the conclusion of his speech delivered in Creole.

His answer was about creating a relationship. “Don’t try to change the Haitian people,” someone had opined on “This American Life.” The moderator had wrapped up the program quoting an American physician who had gone to Haiti long before the earthquake. He had commented upon all the Fixit types who come to town and get right down to work. Never starting the morning, as the locals ask each day, “How are you? How did you sleep?” There were now a lot of foreigners who skip the morning greeting each day. The advice of anyone going to Haiti who would deal with Haitians was “Try to understand their point of view.” Because in Haiti, there were some grateful and some ungrateful.

Institutional advancement in Haiti was a slow and cumbersome process, Apricot Irving reported on “This American Life.” The pitfalls of the old model of the 19th century benevolence could be seen over and over. Many Haitians were experts at receiving aid, but not changing their own lives, maybe attributed to a built up immunity to Old World theology, as some kind of remnant of an slave culture. Foreigners always in charge, with hope that the Haitians would catch on. Immunity maybe to the 16th century God of Columbus, who somehow had allowed slavery. And then the 19th century benevolence. As the slaves over time had become dependent on their slave masters. And now this cowboy culture from the US, when the problems are there to fix. The Fixit American Men from Mars, and their women, giving out of what these people did not have. Of technology. Of water. It was the social order of slavery.

The doctor that Apricot Irving interviewed said, “Build a citadel and you build another benevolent dictatorship. The cowboy to fix the problem. For efficacy, service and security…why not become a benevolent dictator?” The choice was to either continue the dysfunction, or to create a new model. To replace the old model in this slave culture. Of Papa Doc. Or the NGOs. Or think about the hard work of community building. When along the way, services in 2010 will not be provided. And that admittedly was a terrible choice. Building true community takes time….with a perseverance in a relationship. Between people.

So the reconstruction of Haiti. And the choice between the old model and the new. The old model which creates a new slave plantation, dependent on the masters. With all of the fruits just like before. . . With the distance. And the consequence. The ensuing anger, the violence…the discontent. Or the choice which comes with authentic generous sharing. When people gave, out of what others did not have, with a true caring. A never ending caring, which was seldom recognized when any people were enslaved. So the reconstruction of all of the shelter which always has been based upon a social order of the soul.

And so the spiritual architects, in the reconstruction of Haiti. In 2010.

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Free the Hikers

An International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran report published in mid-January 2011 said that Iran has hanged an average of one person every eight hours since the beginning of the new year. Amnesty International is very concerned that, after an unfair trial, Saeed Malekpour is facing a death sentence in Iran, with reports “he was tortured in order to confess to his crimes.” Last month Dutch-Iranian Zahra Bahrami was executed, having been convicted of drug smuggling.

So what is worse, pornography or torture? A web programmer who had written photo uploading software that was used in a porn website, Canadian resident Saeed Malekpour was arrested in October 2008 by plainclothes officers . Kept in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran for the past two years, Saeed Malekpour had been initially in solitary confinement for almost a year without access to legal representation. One year after his arrest, Saeed Malekpour was put on state television to confess to his crime of designing and moderating adult content websites, acting against the national security, insulting and desecrating the principles of Islam. “A large portion of my confession,” Saeed Malekpour wrote, “was extracted under pressure, physical and psychological torture, threats to myself and my family, and false promises of immediate release upon giving a false confession to whatever the interrogators dictated.”

According to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI), 121 people have been hanged between 20 December 2010 and 31 January this year. Saeed Malekpour has now been sentenced to death for running “indecent” websites. If these were porn websites, his wife claims, they were without his knowledge. Informed of the verdict, the 35-year-old Iranian born web programmer is facing imminent execution and has been transferred to solitary confinement, until the supreme court sanctions the administration of his execution.

The principles of Islam. Or the administration of those principles. Or the view into the administration of principle, in view of human rights. The human rights to communicate something about living free. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, as president, 26 years after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Khomeini government then had placed the Ministry of Culture in charge of reviewing all books before publication. With the imposition of strict rules on book publishing, which now under the current president’s regime, seem to threaten the life of a writer. A literary spring during the era of Mohammad Khatami’s presidency beginning in 1997 had once opened up the cultural atmosphere of book publishing.

The principles of torture that seems to be woven into the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which comes with the human desire for power. The power of one human to say who is stronger. The power of one human to say that he/she knows God best. The power of one human to say that he/she knows the manner to know God better. It all was the same conflict that Eve had with Adam, as she offered him the bite of the apple. It was the same conflict that had Cain kill Able. It all revolved around the first commandment relating to knowing God. That commandment was why Adam, why Eve, were not to eat the apple.

The power. Governments wanting power, cloaking police and secret police in plainclothes. Looking for challenges to power. Using torture to keep human power. Just as had been done following September 11th by the American government, distorting the principles of the American constitutions, when American power was challenged. Just as in Cairo, as plainclothes police arrest hundreds of demonstrating opponents of President Hosni Mubarak, placing them in detention, subject to torture. Since President Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, he has his security services detaining, using various method of torture on people off the street. Like the CIA had kidnapped people and held them in detention. Not all that dissimilar to the three Americans arrested near the border of Iraq, while on holiday, when asked by Iranian authorities to come over. A man in authority, in the name of government, in uniform, with power. The two males were at least provided legal counsel, even if they did not get to talk to their attorney alone on the day of the trial, before or after the court proceeding, in their trial this week. Their attorney, Masoud Shafii has said that he had not seen his clients since Sarah Shourd was released, with requests to visit them repeatedly denied by Iranian authorities.

When the government of law seemed subservient to government of men. The Iranian press reported the number of trial sessions will depend on the presiding judge. Did this all seem like a “show” trial, in a country with a religious state where you had to try to show others you prayed. In a system sounding a lot like a Communist regime, where you first had to belong to the Party. Only Communists had not been allowed to believe in God, publicly.

When absolute power corrupts, and provides distortions in concepts of fairness. The distortion that led Cain to kill Able. The distortions which lead to capital punishment, in the name of justice. The distortions which led governments to want to manipulate the news of the world, or just control the release of the Truth.

It was a challenge to governments to try and cover the news, based in Damascus, Syria. Where then 17-year old Tal al-Molouhi, a high school student has been under arrest since 2009, on charges of revealing information to a foreign country. In her blog. There was not much left in the rights of journalists as newspapers collapsed in the past few years. There was little left of the Society of Professional Journalists. Was this the same motivation behind the detention of Shane Bauer that no one writes about. A professional journalist based in Syria, with the 45-year ban on public demonstrations, state-run television, and all of the “security” forces, where the government goes looking for 17-year old bloggers. And graduates in journalism from Berkley are allowed to write freely, but just not hike on weekends?

When armed groups” in Iraq “receive financial and logistical support from Syria,” according to Iraq General Raymond Odierno’s previous comments to Al Hayat. Yet traditional media never really reports on the financial foundation of all these “insurgents” in Iraq. When the money for weapons, a great deal of money, most come from somewhere. Iran presenting itself as the natural representative of the non-Sunnis and non-Arabs nations, opposing both Israel and the West in the region, allied with Syria in support of Palestinian “resistance” to the supposed ambitions of the West and Israel in the region.

POST SCRIPT: On Valentine’s Day, chained and blindfolded, Tal al-Molouhi was brought into court and sentenced to five years in jail. In Syria. Where 80-year old Haitham al-Maleh has been incarcerated since October 2009 with a three year prison sentence for spreading”false information. About Syria, the recipient of Iranian oil money to prop up the power of the family of a long-time dictator.

Egypt. There no longer was a Society of Professional Journalists left. Not when their papers were on their last ropes. There were no labor unions offering protection. As governments smirked about it all. The news last week was about journalists being beat up and released. People like Hilary Clinton, who hated the press. AND it had been Obama who had kicked 3 journalists off a plane during the last campaign, because their papers failed to endorse him. On February 14th, the U S State Department in the way of Hilary Clinton has clamored for the rights to an internet connection, in the Middle East. The communication systems that could be bugged, or turned off or turned on. The ones which had been developed by the U S Military but became prevalent under the presidency of Hilary Clinton’s husband. Technology in which the location of every cellphone user could be found. The Clinton administration, not exactly the stalwarts of freedom, having set up the Joint Task Force-Civil Support in October 1999 as a “homeland defense command.” In 2002 this evolved into the establishment by the Pentagon of the U.S. Northern Command, charged with carrying out military operations within the United States. Up until the Clinton Presidency, the U S armed forces under Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 had been barred from domestic operations, except in specific, limited circumstances. There was a hollow ring to the words of the Secretary of State today, by a government which issued National Security Authorization letters which no one was allowed to talk to anyone about –not even a lawyer –under the terms of the Patriot Act.

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Dust

Philanthropy—that you might have what I have. When I was in the process of giving away a book. About what seemed a normal way of life . The movement in the story. From a time so long ago. Before the mysterious disappearance.

Tradition: You had to be looking at what it was which you were about to give away. To appreciate the movement in the story.

Having to resume a life, as if nothing had happened. All the ongoing movement in the story. Over the inheritance. The land was still here. The children grown. With a growing numbness. To the inheritance. And working for a losing cause. Cognitively impaired. With anger.

Philanthropy—that you might have what I had. What seemed a normal way of life. Like in the life of Cain and Able.

Having to resume a life, as if nothing had happened. After an injustice. Maybe after you have been forced to move. By the war. Or a sinking economy, with rising prices. Or by famine. Or just because your parents had shared one apple. And witnessing all of the truth which comes out of anger. With a demand for custody. Ask Eve. After she ate the apple. About the developing anger of her son, Cain. With his certain lack of self-worth which had developed. Working for a losing cause. A child of divorce asking about this all-loving God, with some doubts about the God of his father and of his mother. Over issues of fairness. And discrimination.

The Cain question: How can God not love my mother? Even if she had been, in an updated story, divorced? A child, wondering, how could such great parents be kicked out of the garden? For just eating the apple? And why should they lose custody rights? To the garden. Over a simple apple.

The Cain question: Waiting, to know more. About custody rights to God? On Ash Wednesday. Numb, at this point, about inheriting the earth. With an indifference in such a fast paced world. So, ‘Adios.’ To God. To the God of Adam and the God of Eve.

Wanting your own kids or grandkids to think. About their past. And the custody rights. To slowly think and understand. This creation. About all the problems in life. When both the giver and the recipient slowly thought about the great gifts.

Ashes. When you had to dispose of the ashes. What to do with the ashes? When one day you died. And the old-time costs of funerals were like the cost of health care. Just so prohibitive.

The old adage: Get lots when you are young. The anger over having been placed in a container of ashes, instead of in the ground. With all the expense of disposal.

The Nora Lynch story, by Thomas Lynch. To find me in his story. About ashes. What to do with our ashes. Mobile people wondering what to do with our ashes. In a society that spent so much to have mobility.

This western identity was so much about the mobility. Movement from one place. From home. With home security. With all the systems of home security and oil to keep warm. Oil to move around. Laws. Traffic regulations. Young people trafficked. Passports. Visas. Going to school. Junior year abroad. Going to work. Laws, to address the movement. The demand for mobility, and ‘destination’ weddings. With some sort of immigration policy. And caller ID.

Love. Coming home. Living with awareness. Nomads, with some degree of awareness, about all the movement. Awareness about how to position your feet. When you were not particularly aggressive about your personal life. But your wife was. About going places. About escapes.

The bonds which came out of stories. Using words to try to move humanity forward. Using words to convey the most important parts about being alive. Or, maybe Facebook. About true intimacy. Before people forgot.

Living with awareness. And how to position your feet. And learning how softly to hold the club. When a tradition was passed down to you, and it was your turn. But you messed up the mechanics, and due to a slice one day or a hook the other, you just were out of control of your intentions. And your short game. Oy-vey. Mobility. Distance. Speed. Maintenance. Having to be conscious about how close to keep the hands to the heart. The speed of understanding, when you were moving so fast, out of control. Compared to stationary people. The anger over having been placed in Group 2. As society distinguished the mobile from the immobile. Having been thought to be mobile, based upon your heritage. The anger at having been placed in Group 2, as immobile. With a dimming awareness —due to genetics, philosophy, or the environment. Which could not be my fault.

Escapism. Deep rooted self destructive behavior. The speed of anger. That never left. Below the surface. Lingering anger. The speed of understanding about the underlying anger. Over history. The self destruct in nature, that brings us to die each season. And then the ashes. With a slow speed in understanding. As your field lies fallow. Absorbing things, about the world. And the movement from one place. A lot like dust.

So, remember guys, that thou art dust.

The slow speed of understanding. About what to do with the ashes? Move to Phoenix? As a child of divorce. The anger over having been placed in this group. Separate. With pain. Because of some problems at home. With life. That had involved no choice by the kids.

Nomads. When you came from this tradition of nomads. Ah, with all the mysterious disappearance. Of nomads. With all the various degrees of understanding of God. But you should give thanks for all which you had. And for all the days of your life. And then start giving alms. To those who never had what you had. With various degrees of understanding, with the missing bonds, over the distance, which had never developed in relationship.

Love and mortality. Philanthropy. Passing it on, after your fertility was spent. Intimate sex and fertility, in such an unfair world. To somehow move a people in exile. Somewhere. The movement in the story. What had just happened here? Outside the garden. In this life? With all the need for numbers.

When you saw someone die. Or when you saw someone live. Demonstrating passion. To somehow demonstrate passion. Over the inheritance. The inconvenience in bad weather to demonstrate passion. Or in just bad times. Over a pregnancy. Or over the tradition. With the resources depleted. Money spent. And the growing pain. In a tradition.

Philanthropy—that you might have what I have. The slow speed of absorbing things, about the world as your field lies fallow. To drag a body out. To accept death. To start all over. In weakness to continue to accept yourself as you are. To finally feel moved. And to keep moving.

That you might have, that you could have, what I have. With the wise sincerity in content, Abraham and philanthropy. When on the surface Isaac seemed so undeserving. Like I was. Reading or hearing the stories. Of Abraham and philanthropy. That you might have what I have.

When you were moved by stories. Reading or hearing or witnessing one. About real life, freshly pressed. When I was in the process of giving one life away. A life that I never had been deserving of.

Sacrifice. For the slow. And all of this knowledge. And belief. And love. Based upon hereditary, or environment. The slow speed of trying to move humanity forward. In institutions. Or in other vehicles. Learning how softly to hold. When I was in the process of giving this gift away.

The slow speed of understanding. For nomads. When you were born into all of this. When you came from this tradition. Seeking, taking, sanctuary. With so many people indifferent, in good times. In such a mobile world. And seeing the passions become inflamed. Again. Over giving alms.

Remember man, that thou art dust.

So, with your slow speed of understanding, remember that thou art dust. Remember everyone, so that you might have what I have. And that you might keep moving. In alms-giving.

That you might have what I have. When you were moved to give alms. After reading or hearing the stories. About a real way of life. In real life. After reading or hearing the stories or witnessing one. When on the surface we were all so undeserving.

That you might have, that you could have, what I have. Life. From this God who was always involved in life issues. Giving life. Sustaining life. All the various varieties of life which, on the surface, seemed to be a losing cause.

And unto dust thou shall return.

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In the Middle

Men who in the busy world did not understand women wanted company. Their company. There was a change in cognitive dissonance at my age. About feeling needed. After all of these years. And now a lot of young women were just as busy. And men and women understood each other less. If that was possible.

Primogenitor. In those romance novels, of princes and princesses. In a historical relationship like the House of Lords – that un-elected second chamber from the past. With the system in use at the time, from a time when the royal prerogative held rein, forever. Primogenitor. When only the first-born male was going to get the home loan. Historic primogenitor, to purchase a castle. Historic refers to what is important in history – what is interesting or famous because of its association in history with persons or events. Historical refers to anything concerned with whatever existed in the past or the study of the past, whether regarded as important or not. Such as historical novels, or the House of Lords.

Stories of power. As one man became a living being. Historical Power. Men who did not understand women wanted company. In a divine kind of way. Maybe as God did. In the power struggle of relationships. In a world where knowledge for many was turned into money. But at the end of life, as someone lost the breath of life, what happens to all the things that you have known? After all the things you spent time reading, the things you paid to be tutored in? When your mind dies, the patent was lost along with the chance to make profit. Unless you wrote it down. Unless you wrote it down, there was no guarantee you would be read by the next generation, if you made claim to the knowledge.

The journey from an existing present into a living past. Using words to try to move humanity forward. Using words to convey the most important parts about being alive. About the bonds which came out of stories. The bonds running through the story. About the breath of life and becoming a living being. The enthusiasm of youth, trying to figure out the meaning. For themselves. Being touched. Feeling touched. Likeness. Creating something out of deep feelings….images of passion. Like a romance novel.

In the middle…in the story about the apple….in the middle of the garden stood the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was this tree which would decide the rest of the story. Once the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew, into his nostrils, the breath of life. And so man became a living being, with nasal hair. And, soon, woman.

Bloodlines. Reproductive care. Creating something out of deep feelings. And heavy breathing. Passion. DNA. The blending of the DNA of two people. When other people make us. Confronting the other people who make us. Working in the field of interpretation, addressing the answer to the question: What is this bond of family? Translating feelings of a dance-like art?

Bodies. In the body business of dance. In the vehicle of life called “body.” Disposing of, transporting, the bodies. From one generation to the next. In the ordering of society. When bodies had to be certified in birth. In the first stage of identification. And one day to find a formal cause of death, to certify life and death.

Philanthropy—that you might have what I had. When a spark had been ignited. From a time so long ago. Before Eve presented the apple to Adam. “We need witnesses, to our fertility, to say we lived; the historians to record the deaths. The next generation to prove the difference fertility makes,” writes the poet Thomas Lynch.

And then the start of the relationship stories. Based upon tradition. Viewpoints, with all of the consciousness of transition, more from father to son. In a historical relationship like the House of Lord – that un-elected second chamber from the past. With the system in use at the time, from a time when the royal prerogative held reign: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Leah and Rachel, et al. And then Joseph. With no mention about what ever happened to THE TREE back in the garden. After the flood. But conscious of transition in the movement over land, with all the human construct, in words, in systems of male domination, between good or of evil in the story. The spirituality in transition, between the dry and the wet, in the ongoing story of creation.

About that time before Eve presented the apple to Adam – the apple which represented the different viewpoint of a man, of a woman, about God. Was the story any different than being in art appreciation class, hearing about the perspective of light used by artists? So, what was one bite? And then the forced migration. The two sons, of good people. The anger of the two sons over what they could have had for themselves. Without any sweat. In a world of just baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolets. Without a need for a bailout for GM. And then the floods, as the entire world became corrupt, and God lost his cool. Not unlike a divorce, from the first wife at an early age – then the second beginning, based upon the future movement of nomads. Semites in the dessert, like nomads in Russia, or in China, per the history. The movement in the story away, and then back home. In my tradition. Into civilization. After all the movement in the story, had you gotten any closer to God?

Once you know someone, once you loved someone, you somehow had to figure out how to respond. In your fertility? Like Sarah? And then the wives of Isaac and Jacob. Fertility was an important theme in such an underpopulated world. The same theme over and over, creating conflict for the ancestors of Israel: About that future movement of a nomad. Looking for fertile land. Looking for power.

Fertility. In the ordering of society, then came woman. With allegedly a noble male. In a relationship that took your breath away. With the insecurity about letting a man inside you. The fear over the self-destruction….of nomads who could leave at anytime. And reproductive care, or what would one day be called in the field of medicine, the old-fashioned method of sperm extraction, hopefully with relationship in some form.

It was a different world, when the world was so under-populated. With a different consciousness, especially among the women. Of ideals, and ideas….and, what seemed to be, your search for God. Because of animal-like desire from a historic — or was it historical — relationship, like the un-elected House of Lords in that second chamber? And so the human constructs, with the divine right of kings. Like in romance novels. It must have been so much easier for Adam. Adam who got to spend the original time alone with God. And then with Eve, who took his breath away.

Ah, the consciousness of nomads, over time. When sex led to union, but it disrupted the consciousness –so much. What was this power within? In the story about the Fall, and our many reproductions and replications, generation after generation. Was I just a perpetrator in another failed love story. With so many insecure people, how was it that I was so secure? About trust? With all of the variety of complications. With distance always a factor in a relationship, along with time and space. A woman with a goal to control her own fertility. And her children. With all of the variety of complications. And the fear which a young man carried around with him his entire life. In a modern democratic republic which mostly existed, seemingly in the age of media, to avoid the difficult issues. And hence, the borrowing against the future.

Translating feelings. Into kids. When neither I nor most of the audience had a clue. How astonishing life is day by day. Working in the field of interpretation. When you were young, bound by the family rules. Rules that started to look, oh, too confining. About the ordering of society, where families had been identified within a community. With rules about power. When busy men and busy women did not understand power. The power of just keeping company. And in the middle of the garden stood the tree. Still.

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Looking for Meaning in Art

Tying it all together. Art. The power of art. The stated beauty in art. Like in the Pieta. With an intent to pass something on. Without words. To somehow move humanity forward, without words.

When you lost a generation. The excitement in recognizing the conflict in the story. To recognize the anguish which came out of the search. Wrestling with identity. TO move humanity forward.

Using words to try and get your arms around something. With the power of art.

Books and language and the future. Trying to understand each other. Telling stories, with such great themes. Through books and language and spirit and wisdom. On Opening Day, I was standing in Barnes and Nobles, grasping at the combination of sounds, into sentences, into paragraphs. Surrounded by all these books, not unlike all the stars in the sky, in the promise made by God to Abraham. About his descendants, and the stories thereof. The stories about the children of prophets. Stories of fertility and infertility. The parents who always thought and worried over their children and the choices of their children. If they had been blessed with children. On issues of birth, death, and fertility by the descendants of nomads. Because those children would one day have to go in search themselves. The movement in each story. The effort and study habits. That conflict written about in Genesis, which started in Chapter 2. About knowing God. The new struggle to know God. Once Eve and Adam had bit the apple. The struggle to keep in touch with God. For each generation. To move humanity forward. When we all were essentially cave men and cave women, going though different stages of learning. With all the the different stages of eating devices, and fire, and language. While learning a common tongue, to pass on whatever mental sharpness we had come to recognize on earth.

Dealing with insignificance, in a world with 6 billion people and you did not really know anyone. Because of the language barrier. The world with six billion people, with one billion ideas per person. And the language of sex. The imperialism of the English language, imposed on another culture. Like the Irish. Or like Russian had been imposed in Czechoslovakia. Stealing something along the way. About the uniqueness about this part of the globe. Through the rag-and-bone shop of the heart. The emotions. Tying it all together.

Information. In the age of information, you could not get directory assistance at many companies. So more and more are headed in the wrong direction. In a world of domination and power. It was as if those alive had survived, based upon only their acuity and sharpness. Because of the greatness, for some, of the knowledge of past ancestors.

Language. Fertility and the future. The language of sex. Trying to understand each other. Trying to understand fertility, amid a population bubble. In the struggle to know someone. And the conflict in the story with other people and their one billion ideas.

Having to work to keep what your always had had. The artist taking something from the world outside, taking it to the deepest level within, and creating something out of it. When formal education was over. When my activity now, in my leisure or in my work, was somehow about finding my own goodness? To move humanity forward.

Attempting to grasp meaning. Over birthright and inheritance. Having sex. Again and again. When you were lucky, if you still were in a relationship. In a struggle of communication, with an authentic lover, over the deepest part of your being. Through the universal language of sex.

The choices of Chosen People. The anguish that came to those who spent time trying to know, taking it to the deepest level within, God. And then creating something out of it. To recognize the anguish which came out of the search for God. When you began, after a while, to recognize…God, beyond the beginnings and the ends.

The conflict in the story which started in Chapter 2. The excitement recognizing the conflict in the story. Over knowing God. Eve. Adam. Cain and Able. The conflict over who knew God the best. In a relationship. And the witnessing the same struggle in your kids.

To know, love, and serve. With passion. Measuring it all. Recognizing it all. When you poured your heart into everything, at a price.

The power of art. With an awareness of. The stated beauty, taking it to the deepest level, in art. When I prove my holiness through a medium. Like you. The descendants of Noah, these pastoral semitic-people with their related languages, dealing with significance, living in community. With all the ideas about immigration and population control. And global warming. Church and state, in union with my neighbor – or not – trying to maintain authority to regulate goodness and evil, in which everyone had a stake.

“I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you.”

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The Seder

Tuesday this goy was invited to a Seder dinner. When a family tries to comprehend their own tradition and its meaning in their own lives. In the reality show called daily life. With the movement in the story. The movement in the story of Passover and Jews. What did it mean, this Jewish identity? With your DNA, within this creation, you were related to Him, in your image and likeness.

How can you know God, without understanding Judaism? Tuesday night I learned about the customs of a Seder dinner, removing all leaven from a home – and maybe all the other things which inflate the egos in the rest of the year – in preparation for this day. When the preparation had taken the host’s father seven days, in the old days, removing the leaven from his home. Recognizing an underlying spirituality, about the ego in the story, about being Chosen People — perhaps because of the issues of inflation and bubbles of our times. Recognizing an underlying spirituality, about Chosen People, taming their egos, sharing so much with the rest of the world. Hearing of an origin of Jewish women and people “like us,” not, as told in Greek myth or like the story of Romulus and Remus in Rome, as a people descended from on high. With this sprinkled blood on the doorstep, when you let your God into your home, when you married within the culture. With the tradition of blood in animal sacrifice.

With the always present issue of blood, when you marry someone within your tradition and passed a tradition on. In a living arrangement, when you realized the continued existence of the tradition, your tradition, was up to you. When you made the discovery that the institution was somehow you. When you had somehow become the school, the temple….chosen. When you discovered the social meaning, in the age of social networking, when the conflict in the story was over more than shared belief, but shared blood.

The conflict in the story. With all of the movement in the stories comes the fear. And the primary fear was over fertility. Every fear concerning the next generation. About survival. And maybe the survival of tradition. Like the Passover story. When you go in Exodus, a bit uncertain when it came to your direction, after four hundred and some years in Egypt, and trying to get traction in the sand. In a certain involuntary cognitive state, and by with high emotions over the intense unfairness in a system. But commanded with your life to know your God. With all the unknowns about would happen to the tradition, being caught in the desert. And all the emotions over survival. In Exodus.

The emotions of life over survival. Over the Promise Land, and your loved ones. In the Age of Divorce. Surrounded by other clans, which had such difficulty with concepts of union, in the your present day lives. And the primary fear was over fertility. In the earlier chapter.

Sarai. The laughter of Sarai, who needed a new name after the circumcision of Abram, in a scene which only Bob Newhart could try to explain. Over the phone. So because I always wanted to be a comedy writer:

Abraham, coming home after a long day at work, explaining circumcision to Sarah, at the age of 99 or 100. Like a Bob Newhart script, as Abram undresses.

“Uh, Abram. What’s eating you? You are moving kinda slow.”

“Well, I had minor surgery for something that had been causing me some trouble. “

“What is this word ‘surgery?’

“Well, I went under the knife.’

“Where?”

“Just outside Hebron. Away from the crowd. In a need for privacy.”

“No…I mean WHERE. Oh my God…. who did this to you?”

“I… um…. got circumcised yesterday.”

“You did what?”

“I am calling it a circumcision.”

“Really? Are you crazy? And who exactly did this for you?”

“I did it myself.”

“You? You? You can’t even fix the latrine. Why, in God’s name, did you do that? You know, we are gonna need new names after this, Abram. Both of us. New names.”

There had to be a reason for Sarai’s infertilty…and Abram thought it was due to him? So with a certain pagan view of the world, he took extreme measures? Maybe to remove something that was coming between him and his wife. To live and communicate now unconditionally. When you knew something and wanted to leave to the world this knowledge. The knowledge that took a lifetime to acquire. When something had been missing. Maybe when you were fertile. Maybe missing in your own childhood, or in your own neighbors. When something had been missing, and the plan then was to try it over. This time with maybe some spiritual direction. And maybe change, Norman Borlaug-like, the world.

The developing bonds. The lifelong challenge in the bond of a relationship. With the anguish that came to those who spent time trying to know, taking it to the deepest level within. And then creating something out of that knowledge. Before you died. Stories about the different levels of comfort, in relationship. When you wake up one day and hear that your wife wanted more in the relationship? And you did not have a clue what the heck she meant.

The movement in the stories. About Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The stories about the different levels of comfort, in relationship. Emotional stories about life and death. Over the Promise Land, and your loved ones. Stories generation after generation about fertility, and death. Did you ever note the ages of Adam, Noah, or Seth? To recognize the anguish which came out of the search for God, and the attempt to get comfortable with each other. For eternity. With all of the emotions in a relationship. Or in one dimensional relationships. Over the quality of union. Or not. When perhaps God was not ready quite yet to be around Adam, Noah, Seth, forever.

Union. Enhancing connectedness. To this world. Developing a common point of view. Union. When there had been something missing in the union, if not my life. About an overall aim of the relationship, with a delicate balance between separate identity and a connectedness– when the going gets rough, to stay together.

Fertility. The emotions. Fear. Death. God. Coming to an acceptance of God, like the acceptance level a couple reaches with each other. “Lord, let me get on with my business. Because I am not fertile.”

Passover. The story really more about the descendants of Sarai. With all of the work that went into this commemoration. The pain in the story about fertility. With the developing concept of sacrifice, of the best animal of the flock. Concepts over shared blood. Maybe why the blood of animals had been used in worship. To hear the story in Exodus, one year later, where the lamb was sacrificed and the people were to eat, “in proportion to the number of persons who partake of it.”

Keeping kosher. The anguish of keeping kosher. To recall the time during those four hundred and some years when virtually every aspect of daily life was connected to your life being a slave. With the sprinkled blood on the doorstep, when you let your God into your home. When you tried to keep things somehow sacred. With the always present blood, and issues of orders, when you marry someone within your tradition. With an origin of Jewish people “like us,” not, as told in Greek myth or like the story of Romulus and Remus in Rome, as a people descended from on high. With the tradition of blood in animal sacrifice, the so very personal commemoration of Passover as a vehicle to celebrate the very nature of God, and His work in the world. Through fertility.

With all of the anguish. Maybe like childbirth. Or in the 613 orders related to keeping kosher. With all of the dishes and pots and pans. The sacrifice that comes trying to maintain a tradition. With a certain amount of pain. When you work all week and came home to prepare the Seder. The anguish in being Chosen People, generation after generation.

The work of deliverance of the next generation. Nietsche wrote that the meaning in life, the memory of loved ones, is conveyed only through real stories about palpable heart-beating pain. Stories of deep love, of deep hate, with layers of suffering that would lie in memory forever. Great literature of a civilization was based upon such stories carrying a people, somewhere.

The unstated part of Passover, in the setting, if you were lucky enough to have inherited a tradition.

The carrying, of a people, like the ones you were related to by blood. Measuring the progress, one generation to the next. Passover was the paramount generational thing, THE family thing, not just a family thing. In the beginning. The movement in the story. With all of the first born dead, and the blood on the doorstep saved you. On the original Passover. After Moses asked the the Pharaoh, at the Lord’s stated request. “Let my people go to worship me.” With all of the firstborn dead, concerned about the unraveling of the next generation – the one which seemed to be losing hope, or looking to the identity of the dominant culture, like in the Egyptian world.

For Chosen People, and the fertility part of the story. Generation after generation, in stories about this inheritance, carrying a family somewhere — with a way of life –not so much as protection from the plagues, but about the solemnity of worship. To be deeply moved by worship by this God to whom you somehow were related. When children ask questions, to get things moving. To try and do right, generation after generation. With a certain anguish over knowing God. And to then try and do right, in virtually every aspect of daily life. Somehow carrying a burden of God, in a living tradition, with food. With a degree of anguish in being Chosen People, in trying to remain kosher, in the ever changing world. Not a story of survival, Passover was the story of freedom and salvation: how a people, in a story of first-borns for a people whose identity was repeated in the story of the first born sons of Abraham, of Isaac, were saved for history.

Passover. “And you shall tell your child,” …..about Passover and then this issue of inheritance. The reason why this night is different. Looking for meaning in it all.

The underlying tempo of movement, in all of these sacred stories, of the movement toward a freedom potentially as vast as all the stars in the solar system, against a conspiracy of the systems of the world they were born into. Children gradually learning to recognize a shame in living unquestioning lives. With memory of Passover conveying only through the personal anguish, the reason your were different. At one home defining Passover, the significance of a visible God and the significance – in bloodlines- of a Chosen People, to their God.
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Inside Out

When you shared a heritage, or a culture. And then the attempt to pass on that culture. In the stories. The sense of belonging. The language which conveyed a sense of belonging. To a group of people. To pass on, in like the eggs.

The eggs had been forgotten at the Seder. I got a call from the hostess of the Seder dinner who mentioned one oversight last Tuesday. About the eggs.

The symbol of creation had been forgotten? Like a good teacher, she wanted me to know about the importance of the hard boiled eggs, at the Seder.

This week I had heard an author who was a winner of the 2009 National Book Award speak. The book was Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice. I never got to ask why the title, Twice Towards Justice. Phillip Hoose reminded me of the retired sixth grade teacher that I curl with. There was a sensitivity present in a voice that Hoose was trying to communicate. The morning after, I found an old interview where he told Willie Perdomo his purpose in writing is to go in search of a voice to be heard, which never really had been listened to before. Claudette Colvin, as a teen-ager was thrust into the spotlight of the “separate but equal” world of the American South. In an old interview, Hoose told a National Book Award interviewer, Willie Perdomo, that he had once heard complaints of a young student who objected that in the study of history there were no people her age in the stories which made her feel so “invisible,” as though she did not, would not, qualify as a real person.

As he discussed Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, I recognized a Southern perspective from those times about just another carpetbagger, this one from Yale one hundred years later, telling a society about what was wrong with it, as he tried to profit as an author. What good was it for someone from New England to preach about racial intolerance in a part of the world that he was never a part of?

There was a sensitivity present in a voice, but it was more the perspective that interested me. The subject of the book had turned down his request four consecutive years to sit down and tell her tale. With a developed sensitivity to preserve habitats from his job on staff at The Nature Conservancy, Hoose said in a National Book Award interviewer that extinction often was on my mind, as he writes books. In the National Book Award interview, Hoose said that his motivation to write about Claudette Colvin, a complete stranger, involved a danger of her story being totally erased from history. Well, I was not so sure that there was a need for an eraser, since most of the people alive more than fifty years later never had heard the story which “often is told incompletely in unflattering comparison to Rosa Parks.” A more honest appraisal of his motivation seemed to be found in Hoose’s description of his youth in Indiana, a state where he said the Klu Klux Klan dominated the Republican Party. And life in Indiana, in his perspective, was never much different in those day from Alabama.

When you shared a heritage, or a culture: He wrote to inspire an audience to forestall species extinctions. The one with the echo of an inner hollowness of death. Or the aching involved to get out –of an egg. When your freedom was restricted. Or in the pain of childbirth. And then the pain of getting what was inside out for any child. And species extinction always involved fertility.

One of Hoose’s first books was about his cousin, Don Larsen, who had pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series for the New York Yankees. I was aware that Larsen had died in the past 12 to 24 months. I was about to read a few of Hoose’s books. To find more about his attempt to pass on that culture. In the stories allegedly about dealing with loss, to forestall species extinctions. The Claudette Colvin story was about an imperfect world, man-made, about a system set up to forestall the extinction of a way of life, in one part of the country. In his attempt to pass on a culture, in the stories which conveyed a sense of belonging –in the language which conveyed a sense of belonging — I am not so sure that the author yet understood how this opus fit into the shelf with his other books. Except about being invisible in a world, when the subject seemed to revere an invisibility with her move to New York City after living in the spotlight during her teen-age years. After having sacrificed her invisibility, over a way of life, which put her own life in jeopardy. Over a cause, until her own young pregnancy, to forestall species extinctions. Gravida One, as one response. One strong response, about the injustice in the world. When Rosa Parks had a “natural gravitas” and was an “inherently impressive person,” said David Garrow, the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

About the eggs. Yeah, the eggs had been forgotten at the Seder. Maybe a bit like Claudette Colvin was forgotten. I am not sure the author grasped the whole story, with a bit of fear in his one quiet reference to her pregnancy, in the time after her arrest. About the subject not wanting this book written until after she had retired from her job at a Catholic hospital. The story which somehow involved the eggs. The woman who, nine months before Rosa Parks, had been the real incubator of the protest over segregation on the Montgomery bus system.
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The Never Ending Shock and Awe

It was a symptom of Post Traumatic Stress. After a great shameful event, everyone agreed to not talk about it. Everywhere. In post World War II, when the veterans came home.

Vanquished. As two lands are laid waste. Ten Years After. Like some kind of lingering song of a rock ‘n roll group, about the climatic effects of nuclear winter. As a generation loses its fertility. Yeah, and bin Laden was dead.

In war. Who do you believe in a war? The Church? A president? When crimes became immeasurable? With all the authentic post traumatic stress syndrome, in the aftermath. The irony of human justice, in a world laid with some kind of post-Nazi foundation of moral relativism to believe that a sovereign country has no right to judge the criminal who hurt its citizens. In a world, with so many young people who now felt that they should not be judged. When people no longer could believe in authority. For a generation which believes in no authority, what was to fill the vacuum of power? As no one went into politics, who I knew, with a well-formed conscious.

Global warming. Who do you believe about climate change? What do you believe about global authority? Long after an atomic bomb was dropped in war, like some kind of lingering song of a rock ‘n roll group, when invisible crimes became more measurable, when a force hits an immovable object, as the land is laid waste, in a western world laid without much of a foundation, and no one addresses the issue. When science forgot about nuclear winter?

In the physics of memory, in a world with so many grandchildren who felt that they should not be judged, comes global warming. The irony of human justice, about the climatic effects of nuclear winter.

War. Anger meeting anger. The powerlessness, as the aftermath of anger. In an unforgiving world of pierced tongues. With the distortions of power, even in the free world. Especially in the free world, reconstructed, in the dog eat dog world of capitalism. So what was worse, child pornography or torture? What if done in the name of Homeland Security?

When memory becomes a political issue. When vanquished.

How to use power?

The vacuum of power. When crimes became immeasurable? After the land is laid waste, in the physics of power and the abuse of power, comes nuclear winter. And Reconstruction, with the pain pills. For all the motherless children left behind.

War. Who do you believe in a war? It was a sad state of the world, when Russia becomes the spokesman for atrocities. Just as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov accused NATO of mounting an assassination attempt, illegal under international law, so had the Khaddafi government challenged the aims of the NATO mission, under international law. On the eve of bin Laden’s last day of life, the opponents of Colonel Khaddafi questioned whether Seif al-Arab al-Qaddafi, 29, and three unidentified grandchildren had actually been killed, or whether the announcement amounted to a ploy by Colonel Khaddafi to win sympathy and deflect blunt criticism of his own attacks on several rebel-held areas.

Issues not much different than the death of bin Laden.
In the aftermath, in the authentic post traumatic stress syndrome of war, who did you trust? When the American vision of justice, the irony of human justice, was one of vengeance and war. As the world lost its fertility. As a land is laid waste. Where once there seemed an universality in international law.

Sergey V. Lavrov said the NATO attack “arouses serious doubts about coalition members’ statement that the strikes in Libya do not have the goal of physically annihilating Mr. Khaddafi and members of his family.” Said the chairman of the international affairs committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, Konstantin I. Kosachev, “I am very surprised by the total silence of the presidents of the U.S., France, and some other Western countries.” If reports of the deaths of Qaddafi family members are confirmed, it would drive home that the Western operation “is unacceptable to the same degree as the attacks by Qaddafi and his forces on civilians.”

Power as a force in life. How to use your mastery, to defend the land? After thousands upon thousands are dead, how to use power? When the land, when the ocean, is laid waste, beyond measure.

With all the authentic post traumatic stress syndrome, living in the aftermath. Coming home, to figure out how to use power, to defend women and children.

In a world laid out with inviolate human rights, in a vacuum of power when leaders still sought vengeance making all life meaningless, how to use power?

In the aftermath of war, the sense of belonging. The human attempt set in motion to pass on a culture communicated, not by bellicose conquest, not by allocation or purchase of fluorocarbons, but through fertility. Human fertility. When fertility was the only language which conveyed the sense of belonging. When the invisible became visible.

With all the distortions of reality, in reconstruction of the land. About questions of belief. Over the reality of post traumatic stress and climatic effects of nuclear winter, with the administration of pain pills. Pills for fertility, pills for the pain, paid by a national health insurance policy. For those who could not cope, in a series of chemical reactions set in motion which was breaking down the stratospheric ozone layer protecting Earth. With all the distortions of reality, in reconstruction of the land, it was about the new perspective in such a world with the changing light—and tattoos. Light pollution, as a consequence of nuclear winter, from nuclear weapons.

When invisible crimes became more measurable, over time. To see all of the injustice in the world. And to somehow respond — rather quickly. Before forgetfulness sent in. Above the troposphere.

Before the next meaningless war, a response. About what you believed to be most true.

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Iran Helps Detain Another Journalist

Exile. Banishment. When journalist uncovered the truth, governments had a hard time distinguishing good from evil, in relation to their temporal powers. Amidst the chaos.

In a part of the world where torture was a way of life, one human rights group said Monday’s door-to-door cleanup operation in Syria was “to isolate anti-government sympathizers and render them incapable of organizing.” President Bashar al-Assad had blamed the uprising on foreign insurgents and “armed terrorist groups” operating in Homs, Banias and Dara’a, but while his security forces were using support from the Iranian Republican Guard.

Totalitarianism was back throughout the country of Syria, if it ever left. With phone and electricity lines cut in a number of cities, with the army going door to door, hundreds of Syrians were arrested in towns and cities and in the suburbs of Damascus. The military campaign to ferociously crush the seven-week uprising escalated in the city of Deir al-Zor and dozen cities on the Mediterranean coast and in the southern regions, as tanks occupied the cities of Tafas and strategically important Homs. There are more than 744 people dead, as women and children were arrested, in a campaign similar to that used to crush the “green revolution” in Iran in 2009. With mention in the Financial Times of one report that troops fired upon their own conscripts who would not fire upon protesters.

Syria, where precise details are hard to come by. About power and might. With half a million members of the Syrian army and other security forces attempting to quell the revolt. Everywhere but especially in the poor town of Dar’a, on the the border with Jordan.

Detailing the truth. Syrian’s state-run media almost daily reports on Islamists (Salafists) along with these foreign insurgents, without addressing why the growing hostility to Bashar al-Assad’s rule, as so many people were yet to be heard from – like Dorothy Parvaz.

As part of a “process of …media reforms,” President Bashar al-Assad had Al-Jazeera journalist Dorothy Parvaz detained on April 29th as she de-boarded from a Doha, Qatar flight at the airport in Damascus. Parvaz was leaving from the home base of the al-Jazeera English-language channel, with whom she worked with her United States, Iranian and Canadian citizenship. But her Canadian or U.S. passport alone would not work, going through Syrian customs.

And now as part of a “process of …media reforms,” precise details are hard to come by. Syria cunningly deported the Canadian journalist whose last Seattle newspaper employer had quit printing news and Al Jazeera was the only one hiring. Deported to Tehran, Al Jazeera reports, based upon that Iranian passport which Dorothy Parvaz had planned to use to enter Syria, since this manner of entry did not require a visa. Deported “perhaps,” only after Syria was able to get Iran’s assent. Which must not have taken long. To join the other 33 journalist in custody in Iran, which may or may not include Shane Bauer in that number, since he was on holiday when he was detained, with his two friends.

In a statement Al Jazeera was told Ms. Parvaz was “escorted by the Iranian consul to Caspian Airlines flight 7905, heading to Tehran.” The Syrian representative in Washington had told the network she had entered Syria on an expired Iranian visa, and was thus deported to Iran. An Iran where women did not move freely.

In April, White House officials asserted that Iran, a Shia-dominated ally, likely has been advising the government of Bashar al-Assad after its four decade rule from the Shia Muslim minority Alawite sect on how to crush dissent. Bashar al-Assad — nervous about appearing to crush protesters drawn from Syria’s 75% Sunni population, getting advice on intercepting or blocking internet, mobile phone and social media communications between the protesters and the outside world. White House official had pointed to a “significant” increase in the number of Iranian personnel in Syria — only a few hundred personnel — since mid-March.

With a lessening of world support, Turkey’s recent anger at Syria’s crackdown has fed feelings of betrayal in the Syrian government. In April White House officials suggested that Iran “has been worried about losing its most important ally (Syria) in the Arab world and important conduit for weapons to Hezbollah [in Lebanon],” a diplomat told The Guardian.

The anger over the unknown. When you had no reporters on the scene. To reports about the sound of torture. With Dorothy Parvaz perhaps in prison, in a nation where one person was killed every eight hours in Iran, with the start of the new year. Which had been BEFORE all these uprisings. In Iran where the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is responsible for restricting access in the Islamic Republic of Iran to any media of which the Islamic Regime in Tehran does not approve.

When journalist searched, in the name of a free press, for the truth. During a time when too many read the news at no cost, with no personal investment. As most tortured women in the Middle East remained in their homes, while males took to the streets. And citizens had a hard time, as Iran and Syrian governments tried to hold on to their temporal powers, finding the truth. Without a free press. Since 1992, in the information age, 861 journalists have been killed for heroically doing their jobs, with 145 journalists imprisoned, worldwide. Make that 146. With no indication yet if Shane Bauer — in Iran — is included within that number.

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When Your God Came Credentialed By the Authorities

You had to wonder, when called to prayer five times per day, about the content of the prayer. When prayer is really something that is not said, but an awareness kept, like keeping company, in an encounter.

To pray five times a day is to be available. To the Truth. How to exalt God? To confer a spirit….the slow patience while creating something in God’s image. A child. A story. The TRUTH. In the circle of revolutions. When revolutions are a process and not individual events. I know not why life is astir…in Iran. In the the torment of their God, and His people.

You had to wonder about the framework, the purpose, of the prayers in Iran, when called to pray five times per day, of those in power. With their prayers. Whether anyone truly wants to meet God. In their prayer encounter with a living God. In Iran.

With 62 percent of the vote, holding a seat in the United Nations, you were allowed to torture and murder – torture in the name of God– as part of the “security apparatus.”

The Islamists who since 1979 in Iran had morphed into elected autocrats once in office, exporting their tactics once sharpened by the neighbor to the north – Russia – to Syria and Lebanon and beyond. In a country without basic human rights of freedom of religion, or freedom of the press — where the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approves the Minister of Intelligence and the Minister of Defense – the Quds Force which reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and serves as the linchpin in Iran’s regional strategy, had been dispatched to Syria. To interfere with the airspace where satellite waves and prayer were transmitted.

Between November 1998 and February 1999, the brutal serial killings were carried out of leaders of the Iran Nation Party, including Mr. and Ms. Foruhar, brutally murdered in their house; the kidnapping and killing in December 1998 of Mohammad Ja’far Puyandeh, writer and translator of literature on women’s rights; and writer Mohammad Mokhtari. With the Grand Ayatollah attributed the murders to foreign powers, the state investigation and prosecution of the case of these four became known as the serial murders, and lasted several year before eighteen Ministry of Information employees were presented as scapegoats, admitting that suspects were under pressure to confess that they had links with foreign entities. Killed in Iran by “rogue elements” in the security services.

The National Union of Journalists had released the video, throwing light on a conspiracy of the Khatami government to conceal the truth. With ongoing variation on a theme over the ensuing twelve year. In 2009, there were, dressed in civilian clothing, the Basij — in the hands of those with Special Forces and a special force in an Islamist Republic — crushing the dissent over the reins of that power. When death sentences had lost meaning, to people without freedom.

Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, criticized this week the conduct of the Syrian government, while torture by the Iranian government had been long accepted as the status quo. The conduct of the Iranian government, blessed by, held above reproach.

UN High Commissioner Pillay said, “Resort to lethal or excessive force against peaceful demonstrators tends to not only breed a culture of violence, serves to exacerbate tensions, and violates fundamental rights, including the right to life.”

Meanwhile, when killings were approved at the highest level, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for unity among African nations, proclaiming “the UN decisions have always been against the interests of the African and Asian countries. Although the world’s independent countries comprise the majority of the United Nations member-states,” President Ahmadinejad in expressing his satisfaction with the formation of the African Union continued, “the UN has failed to defend the interests of independent states.”

Spinning the promotion of unity, with a people now repressed beyond a decade, you wondered if the locals ever interrogated their God. About power and might, and the use of earthly power. Over what was going on in their own world. And if this is how they treated their own, how did they treat their enemies?

Did the undefined interests of independent states include anything about independent belief, along with the freedom to freely pray? The spin on the Arab Spring from Iran is that these were not genuine popular movements in Syria but actually hostile outside intervention – perhaps too much like prayer – hostile to the Supreme Leader, directed at regime change. Called by Iran to be some kind of Western phenomenon.

Praying to the one True God, when killings were approved at the highest level. Connecting in praise and thanksgiving – in sacrifice – prayer is a process, an awarness kept, requiring tremendous freedom. No matter where you lived. When true revolutions are, not unlike prayer, processes, and not events. With God always at your side. When words do not truly articulate the truth. About the world. When silence – once used in the second half of prayer, to listen – had become, as in any dysfunctional relationship, the only weapon left. As leaders, while their Basij attack people and their Quds Force attack airspace, demonstrate exactly what it meant to take the name of the Lord Thy God in vain. And people kept praying five times per day.

When you lived in nations with illusion of power, even illusions about God-appointed leaders, to fight the counter-insurgencies of the soul sixty percent of Iranian homes and businesses, Reza Bagheri Asl, director of the telecommunication ministry’s research institute, told an Iranian news agency, would be soon on the new internal network.

When your God came credentialed by the authorities. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ‘s intranet, for the emerging conflict called the “soft war,” allegedly directed against the West. Ali Aghamohammadi, Iran’s head of economic affairs, said: that Iran’s national intranet would be “a genuinely halal network, aimed at Muslims on an ethical and moral level.”

Reza Taghipour, Iran’s communication minister, made mention of the coming new computer operating system to replace Microsoft Windows. In the national interest. For a nation where murder and torture of your own was approved, by the Supreme Leader. When the sons of Hagar mostly always showed perfect obedience to Allah. And the women on a normal day always felt so all alone.

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In What Direction to Take An Ark To Safety?

The view of those who run Europe is that the truth is that its single currency must be saved.

Before the time of Homer was a story of Noah, when the world was destroyed by flood. In the story of the second creation. In the book Sages and Dreamers, Elie Wiesal wrote of the world in which Noah was swimming in the polluted air of the earth which had resulted after ten generations of creation. In the story of Noah, God was still very conscious of the goings on in the world. The crimes of humanity, the corruption, which Noah was above, are never explained in the lines. Who did what to whom? Noah, who is all that others are not. Creation had become chaos. And the story of Noah, like most of the Genesis stories, dealt with the themes of fertility. Fertility and the pairing up — the fertility that you tried to control, just as your tried to plan your own future. It would be what you would leave behind, way beyond your control. All others die, yet Noah lives. There is a certain irony to read the perspective of a Jewish author who lost each and every one of his relatives in the Holocaust — a man who at war’s end tried returning to his hometown which had done nothing to help the Jewish population. What had Noah ever done to deserve his role, to save humanity? Little is ever said. All that the Good Book says is that Noah submits to God’s will and nothing more. God has chosen to talk to him. And he built an ark.

The NYU economics professor (former derivative trader) known as Dr. Doom, Nassim Taleb, who had predicted the 2008 crash, in a January 2009 speech about bailouts: “I want them poor. And they deserve to be poor. You cannot have capitalism without punishment.”

And so the stories about what the flood of money in our times has done. Where there were so many problems pairing up, to save humanity. About where to go with your money. For safety. When you shared a heritage, or a culture. And then the attempt to pass on that culture. With a sense of belonging, in the stories. Through a language which conveyed a sense of belonging. To a group of people. To pass on, in like the eggs.

“One reason the eurozone is tottering is that markets know that its members (by which they mean Germany) could produce the mere two trillion euros required to calm things down, but are refusing to do so.

In Europe “one crisis leads to another crisis unless you find a really effective circuit breaker,” said PIMCO’s El-Erian. The creation of the new government in Italy “is certainly not sufficient. You fundamentally have to convince the people that they have to sacrifice and come up with a set of policies that allows the economy to grow and not just austerity. Europe so far hasn’t come close.” PIMCO continues to favor sovereign debt of nations including the U.S. and U.K. where central banks are keeping interest rates low and embarking on monetary stimulus programs such as debt purchases, said Bill Gross during today’s interview. Canadian and German debt also remain attractive.

Nancy Lazar of Ed Hyman’s ISI Group makes it clear that the Germans are exhibiting an uneasy awareness of the limits of their own less-than-vibrant economy. Expressed as a percentage of Germany’s GDP, German bank exposure to debt from France is 6.1%; Spain, 4.8%; Italy, 4.4%; Ireland, 3%;Portugal, 1%; and Greece, 0.9%. As she comments, the total of German banks’ exposure to peripheral and French debt is equivalent to 20.2% of Germany’s GDP, “high by any standard.” About Germany, Lazar posits that even without capturing fully the fiscal drag and contagion from the crisis, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product, which in the September quarter rose 2.5% year-over-year, will head for zero growth next year. That rather glum prospect is in keeping with recent weak readings of, among other indicators, German business expectations and slowing consumer spending.

Since something like 70% of German exports go to the rest of Europe, German exports have softened. Paced by a 12.1% plunge in demand from the rest of the Continent, September German factory orders were off overall by 4.3%. Corporate earnings have begun to give, with a one-two punch of a weaker economy with the rise in unit labor costs. Retail sales, with diminished consumer confidence, are destined to suffer this holiday season and thereafter.

There was so much irony to read the quote of a French leader that the European Union was set up so that religion would not be the basis of war among nations again. And so the secular nature of Europe, in post war Europe. The EU as the defining instrument of the times, with the euro. When spokesmen for a system of government spent so much time disseminating illusion on issues of unity, if not union. What happens when the confidence is gone?

Nov 16 (Bloomberg) – Europe has as little as day or weeks to act to avoid a default by a euro-region country, Citigroup Inc. chief economist Willem Buiter said today, “Time is running out fast.” In an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance Midday” with Tom Keene, Buiter said, “I think we have maybe a few months – it could be weeks, it could be days – before there is a material risk of a fundamentally unnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which would be a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking system and North America with it. So they have to act now.”

The irony in the story of this flood of money and ancient Greece. And the mottled German leadership role in all of this, seventy-five years after the Third Reich. When money helps to create the illusion of grandeur in this life. When money was a DEFINING INSTRUMENT OF THE Culture. It was the language we communicated, in western civilization. It was how we exchanged things, beyond words. It was a way of understanding. Money reflected the values of a community. Systems of money were created. Capitalism. Communism. We fool ourselves with the systems of grandeur. By nationalism. Fascism. In castes. Or in Aryan supremacy. In the debates about theologies, and the defining instruments of communication, so often stifled by popes, or about radical authoritarianism, with a missing collegiality. With the missing debate not so much over valuations — about buzzcuts on those holding Greek debt, or just needed pruning back — but how to measure valuation. With a meaningful DEFINING INSTRUMENT of the culture.

You cannot have capitalism, the one size which is supposed to fit all, like really the one size that fits Germany. As people without their own currencies, or their own language, cannot correct their own errors, as their debt compounds. As Germans overvalue their currency and the remainder of the EU’s along with them. Without punishment.

Yeah, up until one month ago the view from Europe was that its single currency must be saved. At all costs. Was there an irony, a certain sense of satisfaction, to see the currency pain in Italy and in Germany at the same time, with their real pain in a devaluation in the use of dynamic equivalence. As old men from Italy led by a German, put in place this currency adjustment, at all costs, affecting the way I prayed? In English.

This devaluation, the change in translation, was not about just prayer but about the medium that I used, that all of us within these borders use. So now comes the change. It was a currency adjustment, a devaluation in the use of dynamic equivalence. As these things happened in international systems of exchange. And with it, a change in the spiritual lives of many in thess United States. Mindful of the intense suffering and pain which is part of fertility, it took more than 10 years for all of this to bear fruit. And after the translation comes the real life interpreting, as a church’s true mission has been in the field of interpreting and translating, just like in those services offered for interpreting and translating, to lawyers and court services. With my own ignominy watching the story of the euro play out, I had a certain response – like that found in Germany – that the pain in places all over Europe would not happen here. And I now understood the Occupy Wall Street protest which was now leading to a world-wide movement, about leaders who had no idea where or how they were leading people. The protest like the one over the leadership of the financially chosen people.

From the economic discussion of “Too Big to Save,” came me. Questioning who these leaders were and what they hoped to accomplish — who they thought they were really serving. I felt that somehow my prayer life was caught up in the European wholesale sovereign debt mess, and I was part of the write-downs. The size of Europe’s biggest cathedrals relative to their real life use was disproportionate and far smaller than in parts of the English-speaking world.

Before the time of Homer, when the world was destroyed by flood, except for the story of a man named Noah. When one man was responsible for carrying on. It was what happened in a world during a devaluation in the use of dynamic equivalence. This was the same story later played out in the past, among Chosen People. Like the perverted story eighty years ago with anti-semitism. And members of a church – the ones who see themselves as chosen people concerning issues of salvation – can, in discovering the subtleness of God, play a critical role. Or not. In interpreting the meaning of Creation. Like Noah. Like my own priest, who was above all the petty human politics. With his services carried out, like that by the seasoned and professionally trained interpretors far from the Holy See.

“In very ancient Greece, Homer tells us, the giants tried to scale Heaven by piling Mount Ossa on top of Mount Olympus, and then adding “wooded Pelion”, another mountain in those parts, on top of that. They failed, of course, and “piling Pelion on Ossa” became a by-word for reinforcing failure.” –Charles Moore in “The Left and Right Should Join Forces Against the Great Euro Take-over”
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On The Theology of Capitalism

A banking system is an act of faith: the system survives only for as long as people believe. In each other. With a face mottled by broken capillaries from working there, a Bank & Trust is an every day act of faith.

The BOND MARKET. The world is in unbelievable bad shape. And I do not hear many church people praying for a financial system on the brink of disaster.

In Russia, people who believed in the theology of communism saw their system collapse twenty years ago. The life of the ruble over ten years was a daily roller coaster ride, especially for people on pensions. In August 1998, when the U S Congress was voting to impeach Bill Clinton, the government of Russia defaulted on forty billion dollars of government bonds.

Credit is the air that business breathe. Bonds. That you should have what I have. When you wanted everyone to have what I had. And your job involved sharing bonds.

On February 11, 2009, I wrote a piece about the financial system crisis, more and more the DEFINING INSTRUMENT OF THE culture. Then and now this was a financial system crisis, not a sub prime mortgage crisis. It was not just the derivative market. It was the entire system. It was everybody. Here.

I understood that foreign governments were required to keep capital reserves for international trade, in US dollars. And it is my understanding that the United States went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, without ever raising taxes. The wars, even before the United States escalated things in Afghanistan, were projected to have a total economic impacted cost $3 trillion, according to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes in “The Three Trillion War” — or maybe $4 trillion. And every country in the world had no voice in the pursuit of these wars which was shared by all those who relied on the U S Dollar.

This now is a financial system crisis, not a sub prime mortgage crisis. It was not just the derivative market. It was the entire system. It was everybody. It was war and cheap money. Willem H. Buiter wrote on January 25, 2009, the impact of the bailout has been virtually nil in the market, which has continued to punish the banks in the stock market, and among the public, which has failed to find a clear message.

There was a lot of illusion in life today.  The illusion was about who we thought we were. Money helps create the illusions of grandeur in this life.  We fool ourselves.  With theologies based upon systems. Systems like capitalism and nationalism. Or systems based upon communism.

While living through the crisis in the financial system in 2008, I had lunch with a priest with part of a job description overseeing an endowment fund that would determine the future education of a lot of young people in college. After a touching on a lot of the fiscal concerns in the world, as to how much they might affect his job in fund-raising, at the end of lunch he asked me how much my identity was based upon money.

Money was a DEFINING INSTRUMENT OF THE culture. It was a language that we all communicated in.  It was how we exchanged things, beyond words.  It was a way of understanding.  Money reflected values of a community.  And values were always debated.  

The perils are all around us in America, especially today in Europe, as the banking system is again on the brink, with the value of all currency, of the things that help sustain illusion. Unetaneh Tokef is a prayer that the Jews recite during the High Holy Days about the perils of the year to come: 

How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die…
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low…

Those stocks in banks in Europe have been worthless for the past three years. “If drugs continue to be injected which mask symptoms rather than address the disease (medicine in the form of debt destruction), the likelihood of a seismic readjustment increases in kind,” writes Todd Harrison, about the dollar. “As governments take on more risk” as they price assets on behalf of the market and transfer debt from private to public, “the common denominator, or release valve, becomes the currency.”

And it has been. As the euro dies. Maybe because the Chinese did not want to adjust the value of their currency. In the game of liar’s poker, in the markets.

“In the UK, no bank is solvent. And if there is, I do not know,” said Jim Rogers in January 2009. The crisis in the banking system has been accompanied by the collapse of the pound sterling. “Interest rates are on the floor and is expected to fall further, the housing market remains in crisis, the current account deficit is through the roof, economic prospects are very bad, it was have triggered the red in the public accounts and banking turmoil of recent days have come to weaken the currency.”

“I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can’t have capitalism without punishment.”
–Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960–), NYY economics professor, former derivatives trader, at the World Economic Forum, January 2009, concerning the bailout. 

“There is an angry mob out there. Its shape is dimly perceived, but the terrifying shadows cast by its flaming torches are clear enough. This is the bond market in full cry. Its most aggressive participants even call themselves the “bond vigilantes.”” – Stephen Foley, British journalist 

“The US Federal government has taken on massive additional contingent liabilities through its bail out/underwriting of the US financial system (and possibly other bits of the US economic system that are too politically connected to fail). Together will the foreseeable increase in actual Federal government liabilities because of vastly increased future Federal deficits, this implies the need for a future private to public sector resource transfer that is most unlikely to be politically feasible without recourse to inflation. The only alternative is default on the Federal debt. There is little doubt, in my view, that the Federal authorities will choose the inflation and currency depreciation route over the default route,” Willem H. Buiter of the European Institute, then Professor of European Political Economy, London School of Economics and Political Science, wrote at the time.

“Although the US dollar and US Treasury Bills and Bonds are still viewed as a safe haven by many, there will, before long (my best guess is between 2 and 5 years from now) be a global dumping of US dollar assets, including US government assets. Old habits die hard.”  -Willem H. Buiter from his the naked capitalism blog, from three years ago.

We had lived through times when banks quit playing for the community.  When Citibank arrived.  And put that local banker out of business. The last twenty-five years have seen leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, as regulators ceased regulating. Because a lot of people got drunk on wealth.

Capitalism was on trial. Capitalism was in the news each day, with this world-wide Occupy Wall Street movement. After Communism had been tried and found guilty a generation ago. What now the system here? These were the days. When all those bankrupt banks were going to end up owning even more homes of financially bankrupt people. And there was anger at governments which bailed out bankrupt banks, on the back of taxpayers. If not for taxpayers, it would be the banks which were foreclosed.

There were saved banks….but banks still not fixed.  As a result of big banks in too many businesses, backed by worthless sovereign debt, this republic is threatened, as was the world. The scale of the problem – Bloomberg has reported the total bailout and loan guarantees, the stimulus, total $9.7 trillion now – would have been enough to pay 90% of all US home mortgages. And so the anger, over the choices, over the income of CEOs of banks and on Wall Street. The public concern over economic decay, not unlike the concern over cultural decay, as a political issue, with government over-reach, with the help of a military in international missions, at an economic and political price. On issues of power and might. On these weapons of mass destruction that so few people understood –called currency and bonds.

A calamity, when there was movement in the stories. Or not. When people were stuck. A calamity was a lot like fire. A raging fire, as people cannot buy homes and cars from a banking system where half of the banks are on the brink.  And the rest of us cannot sell. And there was the anger and disappointment. At the system.

Europe has as little as days or weeks to act to avoid a default by a euro-region country, Willem Buiter who is now the Chief Economist with CitiGroup, Inc, said today. In a banking system always an act of faith, on a continent where more and more, there is no there THERE, the system survives only for as long as people believe. Capitalism, as capital is lost, in an old society which cannot replicate itself. With falling birth rates, and independent contractors.

As the invisible becomes visible, over time. In the old stories where the fear and anger was not understood when invisible. It might be a good time to stop and pray — ironically on the last Sunday where the English-speaking Roman Catholic world can use the native language at Mass in rooted words which I have come to understand, before the language of English prayer is devalued — to pray like those in flight. In the way Passover was once commemorated, as the world once again looks at the old prayers, which have come down in the Jewish tradition, passing on, in relationship, in the DEFINING INSTRUMENT OF THE culture, the power in bonds which were believed in:

How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die…
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low…

Copyright © 2011.

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How the Change in the Mass in English Came to Be

AFTER a time, some of us learn that life comes down to some simple things – how we love, how alert we are, how curious we are. In ways mysterious and comforting comes the profundity of style, of stories, in language, by others more articulate than I. Layer by layer, we discover and peel away superstition, fantasies, ideas of grandeur, levels of confusion, of anger, of hate, in order to experience the people and the world around us – and our life in the world – as directly and clearly as possible. To have learned firsthand, through, with, in prayer.

When they come to take you away. The fear, the unsettling fear associated with power, like getting a letter from the IRS. The fear, like on Holy Thursday. There was a certain vintage of fear which came alive, not at all unlike if you had lived in Eastern Europe forty years ago. Over issues of trust. Of people with legal power. When you felt so powerless, as “they” took away my prayers.

In third grade geography, the teacher had discussed the things which made up a regional character. The mountain people seemed different, from the people of the plains. At least in the times when there was a lot less movement, and those people mostly looked alike. With a language which defined them, until the movement in the story changed the people. Language is the reference point for the subtleness of all relationships. Language was just a measure of what people think about worth. When valuation was so much only what was in a person’s mind, we all are just extrapolating and thinking – and that is perhaps what everyone thinks language is worth. A developed self-worth, when you were touched by the language.

Mindful of the subtleness, day in and day out, of language — the reference point for all human relationships was language. The significance was when people gathered to say together words which to people somehow connected had recognized meaning. Here! With a living language which defined us to each other, if not to God.

Poetry was a medium connecting the unconnected. And the language of the Mass was what connected us: not only to God but to each other – those graduates of the parochial school. Prayer best described as “when you reallly looked deeply at something, it becomes part of you.”

How alert we are about Divine worship – over power and might? Under John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger had been the Prefecct of the the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Get your programs and scorecards ready, concerning issues of power and might. Concerning who he had been surrounded by. Had there been plots about worldly power, concerning Divine worship? This was like watching the same plot found in The Caine Mutiny?

George Pell was a a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship and president of the Vox Clara Committee, which supervises for the Vatican on English translations of liturgical texts used at Mass. George Cardinal Pell had been a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when Cardinal Ratzinger was in charge. The son of a professional fighter,  his infamous remark was that he did not “think a Christian can say ‘I’m a lover, not a fighter’”.

William Joseph Levada, the current Prefecct of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith , had been a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. He is an American from Southern California.

The current Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments is Antonio Cañizares Llovera. Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera had formerly been a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when Cardinal Ratzinger was in charge, since 10 November 1996, and was named Archbishop of Granada on 10 December 1996.

The men from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had long focused upon punishment with those who disagreed with their perspective about shared belief. And now the men were scattered thoughout the Curia to implement their vision of a universal church throughout the world. IN ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, one more blow to episcopal collegiality.

In an all too politicized church over what groups can legitimately call themselves Catholic, today it is reported the Vatican was “extremely irritated” by the wording as the Irish foreign ministry was closing it Vatican embassy because “it yields no economic return”, particularly as the Vatican sees its diplomatic role as promoting human values. Maybe like in days of old, in the reign of monarchs, as in the Sport of Kings, in the breeding, not always noticeable or understandable by the unwashed, or those who are being pruned away who also are “extremely irritated” by the wording, in the revised English Order the Mass, affecting the intimate ability to pray with fervor. In our native tongue.

There was a noted difference between translators and interpretors. When all along the goal of a good translator, on a dead language, should be to promote quality services of its people – in union. And there was a lot more power and might in having a good interpreter, when you sent missionaries out to the savage world.

So why do languages die? Like Latin, or Irish? In Ireland, when your people had lived under a dominant culture….because English was a language forced upon the Irish… and you were supposed to reflect THEIR culture. To convey how you overcame anger, through stories of power and might. In song. There the people had come to know how to convey knowledge or understanding. “To be loyal to the church is to expose evil for the good of the church,” Paddy McCafferty said about Ireland’s Association of Catholic Priests who were complaining about the new translation, among other things, where the sentences were so long they could be seen from outer space. Yes, there was a storm in Ireland about the new translation, among other things. Where historically the people mindful of the subtleness, day in and day out, of language — the reference point for all human relationships — knew something about a dying language.

So why do languages die? Like Latin, or Irish. The significance was when people gathered to say together words with a living language which defined us to God. Words which to people somehow connected had recognized meaning. Here! When all along the goal of a good translator, on a dead language, should be to promote quality services of its people – in union.

The fallacy behind the call for language change in an English — which has NOT changed — is that you lose something when things change through the life of a living language. Simply what would be lost is union, layer by layer.

Language was just a measure of what leaders think about worth, and apparently the one-time members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith do not think much about the English speaking world and the manner of our prayers or the strength of the faith within the congregation, as expressed in the measure in language, since 1965.

It was if the chosen English words have not been valued by the English-speaking people in my country. The fallacy, as if these were just words. When the North American bishops who fought the change understood, until the command came down from Rome to “Just do it”. As if this just was the Nike Corporation.

This pope who as theologian had discussed the need to prune back in the universal Catholic Church — perhaps with his German obsession over clean exterior-dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content while losing sight though the human discussion, in a human perspective, over what would result in, who at the end of the story, exactly would be saved — over who exactly was Catholic? On the question of union, and human relationships, this everyday question was about union, where translations did have to be interpreted into every day life.

So why did people quit using or studying language? Was the death of a language just a result of, the victim of, a dominant culture, on issues of power and might? And when a dead language was revived, how could modern people pretend to explain how to translate for the world? When the real issue was the English words – ones like ‘ineffable,’ ‘consubstantial,’ ‘incarnate,’ ‘inviolate,’ ‘oblation,’ ‘ignominy,’ ‘precursor,’ ‘suffused’ and ‘unvanquished.’.

Read the following edited NCR column by Jamie L. Manson (with a Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School where she studied Catholic theology and sexual ethics), which recently appeared in the National Catholic Reporter.

”Anthony Ruff, OSB, is a monk of St. John’s Abbey and professor of liturgy, liturgical music and Gregorian chant atSt. John’s University in Minnesota.  In 2005, Ruff accepted an invitation to join the team of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL).  Ruff joined ICEL for reasons similar to those that led him to associate with the editors of First Things. He was committed to guarding and promoting faithfulness to church tradition. Back then, he believed that the current Missal used in the United States “was a symptom of a mistake: that VaticanII had implemented these texts in a way that was too liberal and too much a sell-out to the secular world.”

“ICEL is a translating agency formed in 1963 by English-speaking bishops at the Second Vatican Council in response to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’s decree calling for translations of the Missal into the vernacular. Article 22 of the constitution stated that these translations were to be “prepared and approved by territorial bodies of bishops,” such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

”But six weeks after the bishops approved the constitution, the Vatican sent out its first instruction stipulating that these translations would have to be sent to Rome and be approved by the Holy See. The bishops’ memories were long enough to recall that they did not agree to this arrangement.
”Assuming goodwill on the part of the Holy See, the bishops acquiesced.

“Ruff took pains to chronicle the history of the translation of the Missal beginning in 1963, and was careful to ensure that his portrait of its development was accurate and balanced. He read directly from a number of church documents and explained the theological implications of liturgical language.

“Ruff pointed out that Rome gave ICEL a remarkable amount of freedom as it embarked on translating the Latin into English. In a 1969 document, the Vatican reminded ICEL that it was ‘necessary to take into account not only the message to be conveyed, but also the speaker, the audience and the style.’ By providing this guideline, the hierarchy was working from their own theory of how Christianity ought to relate to local cultures.

“In 1969, the Vatican recognized that these translations would be somewhat loose, and that eventually translations from Latin would not be adequate. The ultimate goal was that all the texts of the Missal would be created in the original language rather than translated from the Latin.

“But history did not pan out that way. The bishops ‘did not know that in future years, further instructions would give more and more power to the center,’ Ruff said.

“By 2001, Rome’s primary emphasis had shifted from respect for receiving cultures to respect for, if not idolization of, the original Latin language of the Missal. This shift was made evident by the Vatican’s 2001 establishment of an advisory committee, known as Vox Clara, to oversee ICEL. Previously, ICEL was directly supervised by Rome. Under this new arrangement, Vox Clara’s power was upgraded, and ICEL’s authority was significantly downgraded.

“Vox Clara was a committee that met several times a year for three days at a time. ICEL was a high-functioning office staffed with full-time employees, consultants and translators. And yet, Vox Clara was suddenly entrusted with the power to override any of ICEL’s work.

“More than 7,000 consultants worked on various aspects of ICEL’s translation of the new Missal. Every translator was appointed by invitation only — and he was appointed by someone to whom he was ultimately obedient. Ruff himself was not appointed since, as a musician, his task was to set the new translations to melodies.

“The process was highly secretive. No progress reports were ever published, and no drafts were made available to those who requested them. This was a marked departure from the protocol followed by ICEL in the 1980s and 1990s.  Apparently, the Holy See tired — as older people often do — of the long struggle into twilight with first the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). This had been the main English liturgical translation body. The Holy See ordered the then body of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) restructured, with its bylaws changed, and then mandating a new philosophy concerning translations for the new edition of the Roman Missal.

“ICEL completed its translation of the new Missal in 2008, and the text was handed over to Vox Clara and the Vatican. Rome made more than 10,000 changes to ICEL’s text, many of them unexplainable. The resulting translations from the Latin were so literal that some of the renderings in English sounded convoluted, if not confusing.

“Worst of all, the Vatican’s version wasn’t based on the final draft submitted by ICEL.

“‘It was as if they pulled up the wrong file to work on. The last three years of consultation felt as if it was all for nothing,’ Ruff said. Even though more than 100 bishops approved ICEL’s work, Rome trumped them all.

“’The bishops would be critical of Rome’s translations over drinks at night, but the next day we would read that they were publicly defending the new Missal as a great moment of renewal. Our problem is that our structure doesn’t allow people to say what they believe for the good of the church.’

“Ruff said he doesn’t think all of the changes in the new Missal are bad. But because the process was so cloaked in secrecy, it necessarily became tainted.

“‘If there had been more collaboration at the table, those who are upset or confused by the new translations might have had the opportunity to see the reasons for the changes,’ Ruff said. ‘This lack of transparency leads us to automatically assume the worst of church leadership.’

“Beyond his objections as a liturgist, on a pastoral level this cumbersome wording worries Ruff. These are large problems that pervade the church, though in a church that Ruff intends to engage in and be a part of for the rest of his life. ‘Our system is not set up to tell the truth. It is not possible for those doing the work to say to those in charge “this isn’t working.” This,’ he said, ‘is not exactly a hot-button issue in the way issues of sexuality are. I would hope that we could at least have a variety of opinions about translation.’

“He has learned, however, that this new translation ‘reflects deeply problematic views of the relationship between the See of Peter and local church, the relationship between the church and culture, and the relationship between tradition and the ongoing need for renewal,’ he said.

“His own disillusionment with the institutional church has sparked a new kind of creative vision. He now dreams of a renewed church that honors the prophetic tradition while also celebrating the beauty of tradition. ‘I would love to belong to a community that was working for the transformation of unjust structures in church and society as well as offering direct outreach to the victims of oppression,’ he said.”

Forty-five years after the groundbreaking and liberating document on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium – that great Magna Carta which transcended ecclesiastical politics in an overwhelming consensus of the bishops of the world which had passed 2,147 to 4 – now comes this obscure 1960s-era strategy known as Operation Twist. Like in the strategy employed by the Federal Reserve Bank, in August 2011.

From the Latin, tyrannus

Officials of The Federal Reserve Bank want to know how investors might respond to changes in monetary policy and to avoid surprising markets. According to interviews and hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Nancy Lazar, an economist with International Strategy & Investment Group Inc., is among a group of well-connected investors and analysts “with access to top Federal Reserve officials who give them a chance at early clues to the central bank’s next policy moves. The access is part of a push by hedge funds and other traders to get more information about the inner workings of government. Developments in Washington have become more important, after the financial crisis in 2008 spawned new regulations and a stronger hand by lawmakers in businesses. … Conversations are important to both sides, making it difficult for the Fed to completely close its doors to traders and analysts,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

In ways mysterious and discomforting comes this change involving the foundation of the profundity of style, of stories, in language of the WORD ethic. Mindful of the subtleness of human language and its power, the subtleness of language is one reference point for what divides me and my community from outsiders. Those temporal rulers from far away had what interest to preserve our local language, when language was the outward sign, about things working deep within? Language was the communal means, before Geiger counters and seismographs, to find the Truth before upheaval. It was a relationship thing. Here.

This perspective of the institution – its connection of this community to the outside world as well as its own connection to communal sins – when inheritance and fertility seemed so personal. When a church attempted to address the issues but in a vernacular that was not readily understood here. When a church now wanted me to now pray if not live unquestioning. When a church was tring to pass on the old robes of authority, not recognized by my generation because of a recognition of what this approach had caused a prior generation.

When the decision to change the manner of prayer was about communal sins, like in Germany. Post-war, when there had once been the shame in such a nation. When the seat of Saint Peter now wanted me to now pray unquestioning, based upon the same mysterious foundation which had led to cover-ups and misunderstandings exposed throughout the world. When you obeyed rules based upon a relationship you were born into. When a child obeyed authority, without a developed interpreted perspective into every day life of power. When the best part of my prayer life was in the questioning of Creation.

About the continual movement in the story of communal sins. There was the affect on each and every relationship of the invisible communal sin. Whether just living unquestioning, or trying to figure the world outside. About acceptance, within a relationship, over past inheritance, and then over presenting that inheritance to the next generation. Why did I have all of this, and what was happening here in comparison to what once had happened here, to this community?

Did we have communal sin here? And the expiation? What were the causes? Language, nationality, ways of thinking?
There was just a banality of goodness and/or evil, or there were causes? To live unquestioning on issues of authority? What were we doing to change? About communal sins, like in Germany. Post-war, the shame of a nation. Did Israel now have some kind of communal sins of their own these days?

Yes, as the Seat of Saint Peter forces the biggest ‘stress test’ on the English speaking world, English sentences heard at the preface will be more than eighty words long. The fear, the unsettling fear associated with power on issues of infallibility over matters of faith if not morals – in the Church Too Big To Fail – on issues of unity, in the decade when there has been epic challenge to unity in the apostolic visits to nunneries, to the reality of those child abuse cases.

George Cardinal Kell, was the Australian bishop believed to have been a “campaign manager” behind Joseph Ratinzger’s 2005 election to the papal chair. This one time jock, educated abroad in Rome, was a force behind the scenes changing the rules of engagement. George Cardinal Pell had been chairman of the blue-ribbon Vox Clara Committee – think of it as some kind of supercommittee in Washington – which “consulted” the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments overseeing the text’s preparation, on the wholesale new translation of the Mass-book, soon to become the first vernacular text employed across the whole English-speaking world. When the enforcement of the existing rules seemed totally out of control, due to the existing apparatus, and the language of the Mass is now being used as a tool – some would even say as a weapon — to advance specific agendae with promises of unachievable historic fixes which could be approved by only paid staffers and blood relatives. Because we were such imperfect beings.

The continual movement in the story, when they come to take you away. Like within the Mount of Olives.

Giving Me Artistically the ‘Once Over’

The landscape of dating. Over the past 20 years or so, as town centers completely destroyed by bombs in World War II in Eastern Europe have been, over time, stone by stone, restored. In my lifetime, and in the lifetime like the contemporary artist I met, who was three years younger. Her family had left and had spent their time elsewhere during the Reconstruction.

In the sign of the times, the woman still looks like a a cheerful hippie, with a restlessness on display, over time perhaps becoming more visible. Getting perspective from an artist who liked to paint landscapes of the far off, and generally avoided the things up close. The divorced mother, now at war with her son, looking for a lasting relationship, talking with great honesty about her life on Yom Kippur. To me.

After being banished from the territories in the 1980s, with an art degree from the Universoty of illinois in Champagne, she had gone to San Francisco. She landed in Minnesota in 1982, where she remains. When she married in 1991, she knew she had made the wrong decision. Her marriage lasted until 1997, with six years of marriage counseling. Her husband, she said, was shocked when she asked for a divorce. At the time she had two kids, the youngest having been born in 1994.

Unsettled. To tackle the deeper problems, with perspective, after a deep sleep, of the daughter of Ukranian Jews who had never returned home to Chicago. The woman who seemed on Yom Kippur to want to come to grips with her sins. The main one concerning that she never really had loved the father of her kids. All the restlessness, in her story of detachment. At a time when clearly, with perspective of time, she had not really known herself.

People do not really say, to strangers, what is most true, like this. Living day to day, struggling economically ever since her divorce, making a living as a sign painter. Then the remark of a stranger recognizing her for her modeling for his art class, naked. This was, most likely, no big deal for an art major, though the stranger hovered over our table way too long.

The landscape artist who bared her soul to me in an Irish bar, owned by a Brit, about what she hopes to be building upon. Six years ago she had become Christian, with no mention on how that affected her relationship with her kids. Having gone to Guatamuela, building homes, the divorced mother with one daughter away at college, in her restlessness, with her church group. But now at war with her high school age son who lives with her – perhaps playing the game by something other than the official rules – but he would be ask to leave when he turns eighteen.

The divorced mother, hoping to build on a lasting relationship, talking with so much honesty about her life on Yom Kippur. Giving me the once over. Just once, in this Irish bar that was not really Irish, with bagpipe music airing. Despite her claim of being an artist, who now liked to take commercial jobs closer to home but with her free time she likes to paint landscapes of the far off, generally avoiding the things up close. Expecting pain in any relationship, expecting such little joy.

Life in Minnesota. People want to live here; they don’t want to leave. We don’t have high turnover.

After a provided quote from me by anoher landscape artist –“I have always worked and pulled my hair out simultaneously, but the higher motivation is the sheer pleasure and joy found in the depths of perceptual engagement.” — she then said she did not want to see me again. Perhaps coming to learn, in her continuing education that that you could not love others, until you settled first upon really a known self, before moving on. After giving me the once over, moving to the the art of loving yourself.

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Jesuit Inaugurations

September 30, 2011 speech of Christine M. Wiseman, J.D., president of Xavier University of Chicago, at the inauguration of the president of Creighton University: “It is a privilege to offer these greeting at this moment in time to a man who long ago captured my intellect, at an institution which long ago captured my heart. At an institution where scholars can gather to challenge the norms in science of the past; where students are free to challenge those who declare that Truth exists only in what has been and leads no room for what might be; at a place whose students are free to challenge the world over what is unjust. At an institution where the church does Her best thinking, where theologians continue to explore the meaning of Truth, but their theories and ideas are contextualized by a people of faith, unlike in the marketplace of ideas. At a place with an identity being Catholic whose people can challenge the Truth about what exists — in what has been — for what might be. At an institution whose identity is both Catholic and Jesuit, of greater complexity than any other Jesuit university in this country, in disciplines and majors where students will understand that learning must encounter human suffering. Where learning about human success involves learning about human pain. Where learning about conquerors must involve learning about the conquered, where learning about rule-makers must involve learning about the exploited, where learning about leaders and their ideas must involve learning about the marginalized and the poor. For this is the obligation of mercy and it will forever be necessary for students who must respond creatively with some idea to a world in need of healing. Just as it will be necessary to a world which must respond with the hopefulness described by Flannery O’Connnor as characterized through Jesus as one who looked at the world and saw it as a place worth dying for. In a catholic institution whose reach is global. Welcome to the challenge at this place, in these times. In this place it is one thing to educate women and men of all races and ethnicities and to lead each other, and it is another to afford them the opportunity. We who are here with you today come to offer our support.”

With a Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctorate from Marquette University, upon graduation Christine M. Wiseman went into the field of law, serving as a law clerk for the United States District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin, an Assistant Wisconsin Attorney General with the Criminal Appeals Division, prior to her academic career. Wiseman, in nearly 30 years in Catholic higher education, has served as a law professor and administrator at Marquette University, professor of law at Creighton University and then vice-president for Academic Affairs at the Jesuit University. Most recently she was Professor of Law and then the provost at Loyola University of Chicago before becoming the 19th president of Saint Xavier University.

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Days of Awe

An old scout born in Minnesota (Wes Westrum), on worship and baseball, once said: Many go, few understand. It was two years ago when I read a piece in America magazine about the Akedah, the strange story read on Rosh Hashanah about how to somehow keep this God alive, what has been haunting me ever since?

Rosh Hashanah. As Jews hear once again with the start of the High Holy Days, the account of the binding of Isaac. When it has always been tough to be in such an alliance, with the true believers. When the story, like all good stories, was about the future. At what point do you relinquish whatever identity you have inherited or seemed to have helped build yourself – with Abraham, prepared to give everything that was important away. In a sacrifice.

In the story about the interior system of belief, creating something out of nothing, for sons who followed fathers, generation after generation. Abraham, Isaac, and later Jacob, with their torturous relationships, in an under-populated world populated by mostly people living in denial, if not fear, of God. In the approach of fathers to sons, the comparative approach to the real God by fathers to sons, in themes of birthrights, of power and might, on life and death, with that identity commandment. Which started with the knife, at birth, as Abraham had used a knife on Isaac when he was born. And the conflict in this story was over the method that Abraham in the story used for “evangelization.” So again the knife in this story, like he had used on Ishmael when he was twelve or thirteen. And Ishmael could ever forget what his father had done? As somekind of punishment, for what he had done?

Crazy people, having to start all over, with God or without Him. Sons, when this was all over, wrestling with the unrecognized birthright question…and passing it on, with such emotion. To keep something alive with passion, on another Rosh Hashanah. This Abraham with a split family who wanted others to have the same powerful experience, as he had had. Except maybe not like between Hagar and Sarah. Abraham who had shown up at the same place at least a generation earlier with Ishmael, if you believed the Qoran, in the reading at the end of Ramadan, of Eid Al Fitr with the same scene played out, only between Abraham and Ishmael. And when it was tough to be in such an alliance, with the true believers over the truth…and what it was you were you going do with it, once you discovered how to pray? In these relationships arranged by your family, the torturous ones over fertility, for the father of faith to his sons and to his God – over God and the inheritance of God. Maybe with a craziness not unlike all the things that happened on September 11th, if you lost the proper perspective — considering how to communicate the ideas all about identity and who Abraham was – if not outright crazy, after circumcising sons and slaves with some kind of fertility vow, as part of the identity commandment which involved power and fertility? How so different than other men, in their day. No wonder the stories of Sarah’s laughter, when she recognized all of Abraham’s craziness.

Born with a pre-existing condition. This story was all about of Isaac as a son of Abraham who must have seemed so crazy. With an overall theme directed at intimations of attachment, like the attachment that I got at home from my parents and grandparents. To share that holiness that often was directed to a home. Or a neighborhood. Or a city. From a distinct sense of place in my life which had always been asserting itself, enfolding over time, staking a claim on a people. Before it was lost or overtaken. Or just taken anyway? When you had come to know something about a place.

That a nomad was supposed to resolve the crisis over belief, oy vey! Over shared belief. In a foreign land, outside the garden. When you wanted to share a heritage or a culture. In a quest to redeem society, and not just himself, to somehow – even when you seemed so old – confer a spirit about the past, in keeping this God alive. How can it be helped if a seed grows where it lands, once it’s been scattered, no matter from where your ancestors came.

Abraham dealing with inheritance, later to be spun as issues of birthright. No matter where you lived, the struggle, the anguish, in the comparative approach of fathers to sons. Sons who followed fathers, generation after generation.

The deepest part of Rosh Hashanah which came from stories about not just transporting a culture to a new place, but then somehow planting the culture. In a new place. People dealing with independence and multiculturalism, along with the changing roles of power.

When you came credentialed by the proper authorities, and you knew something about unrecognized painful sacrifices, and you desired to give your son up, for a brand new institution. Because you had fear over lost belief? Over your realization how much Hagar and Ishmael hated you — or about Sarah, who you had almost an incestral relationship as your wife— passing on everything that she had planned about your family. And what was the risk that her kid would be crazy? Or already was crazy, as Abraham. Was crazy Abraham, at the end, acting for Sarah, as he considers a honor killing, wondering if a sacrifice would ever be recognized.
To be blessed in the name of God, when your prayers were so alive, and you wanted others to have the same bigger than life experience. When the French “blesser,” means to wound. So was it Abraham or Isaac, wondering if he had even mattered, begging to have had mattered, begging to be blessed, so that God would never forget, NEVER forget Abraham, just like THE Holocaust. Somehow the movement in the common stories, like the physics in the Akedah, or Eid Al Fitr, creating something out of nothing — like in the beginning. So why not just end it all on Mount Moriah, Noah-like, without the ark? And God, if He let him kill Isaac, then surely understood.

And so another Rosh Hashanah, as the Jewish world considers again how to keep something authentic alive about shared belief, about painful human sacrifice even after anesthesia had been invented. With an intensity of the stories, like the Akedah … to communicate the idea about what Abraham knew. About himself, about his life, and then the risk that God took with Abraham, with his kin and his wife– with his split family, with Ishmael, in his second chance with Isaac, and the quality of all of his relationships. Or not. The movement in this father of faith story, to confer a spirit in the name of God, in relationship– in the end, never feeling worthy through perfect human sacrifice. With an Irish intuitive sense of what was happening, what Germans call fingerspitzengefuhl – the fingertip feel that maybe your baseball coach understood — for me the story was all about the Abraham’s plan. He was never coming back, you know. Home. To Sarah. Not after he killed her son. When neither of them were ever coming back. Originally. These guys afterall were nomads, for God sake. Can you imagine the shock of Sarah when she heard the story? Or the neighbors? About Abraham, the allegedly just man of his generation, who with his ego had a concept about only marrying within the tribe, marrying his father’s—but not his mother’s —daughter. Who would ever belief or forget this story? With the shame in the story, until the part about God’s intervention, as the past and the future on Mount Moriah at odds was reflected upon.

Stories about points of view, in a creator’s desire for perfection, in themes of birthrights, of power and might, in comparative approaches to God by fathers to sons on life and death, with all the tension in the story between those who were not good enough with those who seemed to be too good, there is this indescribable pain which creates memory in a culture. To discover in the story somewhat unexpectedly, for sons who followed fathers, a Living God– power without domination – through the unforgettable pain of father and son trying to understand the manner to pray, in the story that transcends boundaries.

To confer a spirit about shared belief, in the name of God, with all the tension in the forgiveness story, with post traumatic stress on issues of trust, for the young, unknowingly dealing with a tragic hero — wondering first about the genetic affect and then about the environmental affect on Isaac, after a father was ready to take a knife to you. How did the wounded, like Isaac, still believe in his father of faith, the tragic hero who had married his father’s daughter? Would he ever accept authority again, or find his own recognized leadership role— in the dénouement of the story? In the age of multi-culturalism, as Isaac moved outside the enclave of Abraham’s home into his own, how did Isaac hold onto such crazy belief? When belief about Abraham’s God had to be so painful, in the remainder of his life. As he clearly needed some direction, after this experience, to find his own personal God.

How did the wounded, like Isaac, still believe afterward not only in the God of Abraham, but in his father of faith – this crazy nomad taking people from the ancient Semitic population, descendants of Noah’s eldest son, to places where they never had been? And now what would you do with the the God of Abraham?

Abraham, who discovered at the end of the story of his tremendous human longevity, was in the dénouement — in the release of tension in the dénouement —coming back home in his lameduck days, with his great sense of shame after wounding his own fertility. When the most serious of the deadly sins for Chosen People was pride, involving a desire for power, to be more important than others? As the plot becomes untied, dealing with loss of mostly power in old age, and starting over – to recognize the developments after the Akedah story, as Isaac, not Abraham, becomes the protagonist by the time of the dénouement of the story?

When the power of a culture is based upon a shared literature. In stories. “Mostly they are the same lives, the same stories, over and over,” wrote David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. We endow our lives with stories, if the power in the ideals of a father – the bonds, the identity, and all the belief – is gonna survive. If the identity in a name is going to survive at another level. When you were forced to somehow start over. In new years, hearing the old stories which came out of Abraham-like relationships, and with all the unforgettable stories, in relationship. From our father in faith –the warriar sheik who in battle freed his nephew Lot – comes the story of people shamed by what they had to endure. The physics of blood of Abraham, telling things which a son had no capacity to imagine, with the long after-affects of war, on a surrounding society that celebrated war. Creating a lax atmosphere, around an old way of life. Watching torture. Without knowing the details, or the affects on home lives afterwards. And with the need for revival.

To find in stories an identity —your own identity— that you would one day find you really could not escape. In new beginning, circumcision based upon unconditional love, with the continuing themes of fertility and the Truth. Stories of crazy people—Chosen People— having to start all over. To recognize the shift by the end of the story that is now all about of Isaac, on Rosh Hashanah, if compounded belief is to stay with the descendants of Issac. After all of Abrahaam’s chances in life passing on that power in bonds, finally, like for Isaac, the return to the same place where he had started out as a young man, to begin again.

To gain access, in stories of discovery climbing mountains like Isaac, with divine intervention at the top of Mount Moriah — in a story about receiving strength and power in a crazy belief in this God today for daughters and sons who followed fathers — connecting with other critical thinkers, passing on in new years the power in bonds which had come out of the collective memory of the journeys of nomads.

Like in a dénouement of the story, passing on the power in bonds between your own people, passing on the Spirit in some kind of Abraham-like Crazy Glue,in a collective memory of forgiveness of others in the name of a forgiving God, on issues of inheritance and birth right. Accepting, like Isaac finally accepted his identity, as the son of the father of faith, as the ethnic enclaves broke apart and he needed a family to carry on the tradition. In another new year leading up to the Day of Atonement, this day was to commemorate a power in passing on the bonds of forgiveness.

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Show Trials During Ramadan

Citing unnamed sources in Iran’s judiciary, the website irinn.ir is reporting Shane Bauer and Josh Fattel, following closed-door court hearings on Feb. 6th and July 31st, were each sentenced to three years for illegal entry into Iran and five years for cooperating with American intelligence services and spying for the United States. Attorney Masoud Shafiee, representing in front of a branch of the country’s politically charged Iran’s Revolutionary Court both of these Americans, had yet to hear a verdict since the trial ended.

When you had been awaiting rulings on issues of power and might. On issues of life and death. Waiting and waiting in Iran, where the Revolutionary Court handles national security cases. And your case had become a bit of a Show Trial. In a place where you never had planned to be until a uniformed officer summoned you, in a place where you did not speak his language, to his side.

The place was Iran, overseen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There were branches of government with a judiciary and a president and a legislative branch, all under the power and might of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Did you believe in defendants’ rights, wherever they might have been born? When it comes to Show Trials. What did you believe in? In a part of the world where Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was fighting against another branch of believers, in Saudi Arabia. Over who knew God best. On issues of power and might. On earth. These sons of Abraham who had shown up with Ishmael, if you believed the Qoran, in the reading at the end of Ramadan, of Eid Al Fitr. With the same scene played out between Abraham and Ishmael, that the Judeo-Christian world knows from when Abraham took Isaac to the mountain top. To sacrifice his son.

Ramadan being the month in which the first verses of the Qoran were written, denoting intense heat, scorched ground and shortness of rations. The Revolutionary Court, working in an auspicious month of Ramadan when the revelations of God to humankind first came down. With bigger than life people, in bigger than life moments, on mountaintops. Like in the strange story of covenant on Eid Al Fitr, as Mohammed began to record stories of power and might. The stories shared by Persian people led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as Arabs in various tribes and nations.

All the things done in the name of God, over who knew best…crazy thing like a father thinking of killing his son, to confer a spirit, to somehow pass on a tradition, a point of view. About belief. Not much different than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who approves the Minister of Intelligence and the Minister of Defense. Or other crazy secular things done by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with his own Quds Force which reports directly to him, like some kind of Papal Guard.

Ramadan, as a name for the month, of Islamic origin. With an imagination connecting the real world of fear to sacrifice. Amidst all the dysfunction in the world, belief. When dysfunction was related to the depth of communication, in a relationship, and there was Muslim people showing God reverence. Especially during Ramadan. It was why there was still hope at the end of Ramadan that clemency might be given. Like God seemed to give clemency to Ishmael. As well as to Abraham. Because when it was all over, Abraham had to return to home.

Crazy people, with God or without Him. Abraham was never welcomed back. To Hagar. Not after he tried to kill her son. Or, as the prosecutors might have pointed out, just in trying to act upon his crazy belief. When neither of them were ever coming back. Originally. These guys after all were nomads, for God sake. Can you imagine the shock of Hagar when she heard the story? Or the neighbors?

It probably was not much different than the shock those of us in the West who heard the verdict from Iran’s Revolutionary Court had, whenever they got up enough courage to announce this verdict to the world, as well as the attorney for the defendant. And imagine the shock of that third hiker as she sat down today listening to the songs of Cat Stevens. Or depending on when you came to hear him,
Yusuf Islam. Or imagine the shock when you learned the verdict from your bare-faced prison guards, instead of your own lawyer.

Seeing a mirage. When you were caught on a sandbar, in some kind of never-ending sandstorm, and you lost any conception of recognized measure of depth which surrounded you. As the Arab Spring turned to desert heat in the neighboring countries, and you felt as suffocated as the Persian women who you saw only on occasion outside, mostly crying sometimes laughing inside their buqas. To hear the news today, when the air seemed as hard to breathe as the sand, was a lot like reading an obit. Too much like your own obituary, which addressed eight years of your young life. In a country that you never wanted to visit.

“Neither A Borrower Nor A Lender Be”

If you had never read Shakespeare, you might have missed his practical advice. About money. When a father tells his son, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Or the Great Dictum, so your life does not become one big lie. “This above all: to thine own self be true /And it must follow, as the night the day /Thou canst not be false to any man. ”

A female marriage counselor writes today an article about women, wondering why thirty percent of women in a relationship with the wrong guy, would come before God and knowingly exchange vows. In sharing the bonds of fidelity, these women were already being unfaithful to themselves. And their rationale for the hoodwinking:

- Because it was “the next logical step.” And no one else is coming. It’s my last chance.
- The ticks of the internal clock, the self-imposed movement of the biological clock, is ticking louder. If a woman desired kids.
- Because I have “invested too much time in the relationship.” And marriage might instantly make the relationship better. Like some kind of prayer.
- If it does not work out, I can always obtain a divorce. (Already seeking an escape route, as if divorce could be used without consequence.)

Tonight I was going to sit next to a relative at the Red Sox game, whose life had become a lie. Someone who has been wrestling with herself for too many months. And who was difficult to be around. And like a hitting coach, I waited for someone to come to me, before handing out advice.

In the way of full disclosure, I was another B student still trying to just get by, and not super achieve. Before grade inflation hit. Who used a library, despite the dictum, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” And I happen to be sitting next to a beautiful blonde in a bar who was a an out-of town friend of a woman I had met. And I then took in her life story. About a prevailing theme, her prevailing belief, that I am not lovable. Her every day belief which drives her. A woman who could not look you in the eyes.

Watching her wandering eyes, she told me that she had slept with 190 men in her life. And in hearing her life story, that she did not want to ever marry. But she loved sex. With an overall theme if I was listening, about a prevailing belief In relationships that “I am not worthy.” And where there was first no belief, and then no trust. In herself.

She had tried cocaine. And she could assure me that she could stop at any time. But she had to return to the restaurant where I had dinner, because she was going to return a phone to a couple who she had spent last Saturday night with. Though she did not know their names. But the guy was going to be there. And I heard second hand that she had done a line of cocaine with the couple last Saturday. And she was a single mom who lived with her three-year old son three hours from my city. And her son was teaching her a lot about life. I began to connect the dots, which were that she had been in the mortgage business which seemingly collapsed. And she had worked in New York and San Diego. And i somehow saw a line that suggested her statistics were related to what she was doing now.

In aiming for an acceptable relationship. Those women being unfaithful to themselves in bonds of fidelity, in that story in the Huntington Post, were at least trying at something. Another woman my age had witnessed my conversation. She told me the next night, before taking a call to give her own adult daughter some relationship advice, that the male bartender had told her I had been talking to a woman who seemed to sell out for a job in the escort business, and not for joy of regular sex.

There was a sense of guilt of having lost something having so many sex partners when you were young. So whatever was supposed to be communicated in union with someone was lost. When sex if used right was like a prayer.

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Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and London

Riot and civil commotion in the age of technology were referred to as the peril of Flash Mobs of marauding teenagers. The disturbances, the surprise disturbances, when warning signs long have been there. It was the story of the weekend in London, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

From Chicago to St. Louis, in Cleveland, in Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, in Milwaukee and Philadelphia, numerous metropolitan areas have been confronted in the summer of 2011 by violent flash mobs. The mayor of Philadelphia addressed the issue from the pulpit where he worships. After the July 29th random beatings in Center City, Mayor Michael Nutter said, “When [people] see that kind of behavior and activity, it is in fact damaging to all African Americans and all Philadelphians. That’s why I said what I said.”

Creation of gangs was a sign of major discontent, and I had lost track of how many generations that American urban areas were dealing with gang wars. Did not the movie “Westside Story” address the issue, in the 1960s? It was the second summer of flash mobs in Philadelphia. In Milwaukee, it was the second month of the same flash mob like incidents of race-related violence. Mob attacks occurred with the opening of the Wisconsin State Fair after a similar episode at Riverwest, with racially motivated beatings in July when seventy-five to one hundred black youths disturbed traffic crossed a bridge into the Riverwest neighborhood where two gas stations were robbed. And police were called to a disturbance at a Summerfest hip-hop show.

All of the signs perceived to be a black problem– black kids killing black kids, gang bangers– largely unheeded by wider society. About largely men who have given up all hope and possibly absolute belief. Young people with no stake any more in the neighborhood and, consequently, in the world. This disbelief is compounded when it becomes a reality over generations. With absolute belief in nothing. What was nihilism? Giving up all hope because of the injustice of money. This absolute nihilistic belief for those looting – born not only out of present day experiences but the experience of their parents’ too – is to behave in a manner these people have. Because the great truths we learn experientially…not cognitively.

So, if you cannot find justice, or get equality on your own, what should you do? All of these signs perceived to be about power, or feeling powerless. The discontent when you felt powerless, with no stake in the world. Alienated from the system that a society believed in. Though their mothers and sisters still loved them – unconditionally – what was the attitude of such men towards women? The ones who got a woman pregnant and left. Was it one of fear? Of being inadequate? Was it some kind of self-fear. There was a present day anger at Thomas Jefferson for having children out of wedlock with a slave. What would the present day feeling be if a white man got a black woman pregnant over and over and left?

When you cannot get equality and cannot expect justice, and it was unjust to loot? Without ever considering from whose past or whose present they were taking. And there were all these young people who asked not to be judged. Because for them there were no longer issues of right and wrong. When you never had had belief in institutions. Because when no one seemed to care about you, why should the young care about institutions?

The unrest. April in Venice. California that is. When hundreds of rival gang members congregated along the Los Angeles seafront. After some had posted on Twitter, shots rang out as police were strategizing a response to the crowd. People scattered, as pandemonium reigned.

Last week the National Retail Federation issued a report recommending how to prevent robberies in a flash attack, like the one last week at Water Tower Place in Chicago on Saturday night, as teens compete to knock out an unsuspecting victim with a single punch. Since February, student journalists at Loyola University’s Water Tower campus have been reporting on a rash of crimes committed by “flash mob offenders.” In April, the McDonald’s at Chicago Avenue and State Street, 70 youths descended and took over. The same scenes have occurred n Belleville, Missouri, mostly recently on July 9th.

In the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights up to one thousand teen youth at the July 4 fireworks display generated fights, general chaos, looting, and robberies. There was an unrest of the underemployed population, as 25 million people witness 2 percent of the population who are doing better than they ever have. When the world seemed so unfair.

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Pierced Lips

To create something out of nothing,

There was an astonishment. To create something out of nothing. There was an astonishment to discover the universal feeling, to know how lost most twenty-somethings feel. In the invisible wrestling match of youth, in the search for meaning in all the world. In a world filled so much with ideology.

Ideology. Ideology was the wrestling match. Presidents and presidential candidates got caught up in it. Popes did too. It was a result of a focus on law and order. Orthodoxy. Rules. Until the Obama Administration, the conservatives have ruled the era in the United States, for those who have come of age. And youth for the most part eventually rebelled over too much rigidity. Perhaps like the youth in the Arab Spring.

My view of the generation in their twenties in the United States was that there was a palpable sense of rebellion. American kids had been walked to the bus stop all of their lives. Their parents had attended all of their soccer games. In “organized” sport. Life had never, in human history, been like that for kids before. There was some underlying desire for revenge, an expression of grievance over too much attention which was seen by adults as only a reflection of love. And the world had never seen so many voluntary body piercings, tattoos, markings, on so many people. To make some kind of statement about freedom.

There was in each life some kind of battle between alienation and unity. Maybe that was why people went on pilgrimage. Mostly, alone. To find a direction. A personal direction. In reading a couple of old issue of Company, from 2008, there is a story of pilgrimage. Every day you met people from all over the world in a quest, along the path of St. James, at el Camino de Santiago de Compostela. In A Vanished World, Chris Lowney questions as he travels across Spain why three religions that worship the same God and deeply respect human dignity have so often turned on each other. It was a book really about spiritual direction? I had read an article about this pilgrimage in Spain. In any life, we all had a spiritual direction, though few talk about it. It was a lot like that teen-age feeling when you got you first zit.

When you are in your late twenties. And you have these burning questions inside. With the battle over your fertility. To create something out of nothing. Something everlasting, like your children’s children. That astonishment. Over and over again, in each generation. So what are you gonna do when you learn how to pray? Beyond the petitions? In a relationship? When it was time to change the world, and amend your own life.

In the life of any 22-year old after completing their formal education, the challenge was coming to the understanding that the change would be through what looked to be some fairly mundane things in everyday life. I re-read another article about being moved on pilgrimage – not all that different than retreat, in a search for God in all things, in all lives, which never changed. Briana Colton wrote about her World Youth Day experience in Australia, in search of clarity and perspective in her life. Ms. Colton, a graduate from Marquette University three years before, writes of then struggle of all 25-year olds, of “becoming” after all this formation.

Ms. Colton described what I always thought of as the mundane things in a day. In the course of her days in Sydney, she walked, she listened, she sang. At the end of the trip, she reflected and she prayed. Ms. Colton did not figure out in a matter of days, or so she says, who she was or who God wanted her to be. But she did discover the importance of her Catholicism and experiencing the Eucharist (going to Mass) in the ongoing formation process of her life. In a sense she seems to still be moved by hunger, looking for her own passion about life, to experience more things Catholic.

What to do after “becoming”? To realize that today was sacred. And I was sacred. If I tried to live a more reverent life, tilted in the direction of God. If time is sacred is to see that part of the GLORY BE prayer…. ‘As it was in the beginning, NOW, and ever shall be.’ And if I was sacred, if my wife shared the ideal, and we pointed our kids in a certain direction, then maybe the people who believed, as I had believed, would help to form a better world.

What are you gonna do when you learn how to pray? Now! ONCE YOUR PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED, THEN WHAT? To realize that today was sacred. That I was in the presence of God. Now! After you land your first job out of college. After you are married? How often will you pray? As you create something out of nothing. What will you ask for? Or will you do nothing?

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