Paperlessworld’s Weblog

It was never supposed to happen.  But now I see it just the way the world was moving.  I had inadvertently lost the July posts.  When it was all over, when there was nothing from the past few weeks to read, I realized this was what it would be like to wake up one morning without a local newspaper. 

I went to bed tonight reading a novel by Colin Dexter.  He wrote that as a man grew older, the sights, the sound of the natural world grew even more important.   Life would be ever more impoverished if the birds quit singing.  His citation about birds could just as well apply to newspapers.  

“You holy Art when all my hope is shaken,

And through life’s raging tempest I am drawn,

You make my heart with warmest love to waken,

As if into a better world reborn.” 

(From An Die Musik, translated by Basil Swift)   

Victor Frankl wrote a book about his own experience in Germany in the period of World War II.  He was a psychiatrist.  In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he talked about his dilemma trying to save his life masterpiece that he was creating as he himself was taken to the concentration camp.  I never finished reading his book, but early on he called the question, “What would you save?”  Or what was the most important thing that you have been taught, that you wanted the next generation to have? 

Teachers probably have given this some thought when they elected a career in teaching.  But Frankl really called the question, “What are you doing about the thing worth saving?”  

Suffering.  It was everywhere.  At the end of World War II, there had been silence about the suffering that the people of Europe had been through.  To discuss fresh wounds when everyone had suffered, until they had been healed by time, just was not done.  To hear the stories of what they had been through, beyond comprehension, was left for another age. Or maybe there was silence because the pain was everywhere and people who saw it did not want to hear about suffering.  

Earlier this year, I had heard a piece on NPR’s The StoryCorps from a veteran of WWI.  He never discussed with anyone that in his dreams since he returned home he frequently saw one moment of his life over and over.  He spoke in his 5 minutes on StoryCorps about seeing into the eyes of a German moments before he killed this soldier.  These were the eyes that he saw over and over for the remainder of his life.   He could not forget what had happened. 

Negro spirituals, it was said, were never heard for about 50 years from the start of the 20^th century.  That is, until the beginning of the civil rights movement.  It made me think of the stories of the Old Testament, of the wandering, suffering Jews.  And then in the stories from the Acts of the Apostles, those early days, the same suffering continued.  The growth of Christianity was all about suffering. 

Dysfunction: Most people did not want to hear about suffering.   Old people loved to discuss their current medical status, maybe just marveling at what their doctors could do to keep them functioning in a normal life.  But they also knew the young did not want to hear about the aches, the pain. 

God was to be found in current times in the suffering of others.  That was the theme of the Old Testament and the New Testament –suffering.   Now there were more than 6 billion people in the world and it was said 3 billion people lived in poverty.  The appeal of religion was to those who suffered.  Notice the lack of appeal in religion currently in Europe, where little suffering was visible to tourists. The growth potential in religion was to be found in Asia and the republics of what had been the Soviet Union.   There were a billion people in poverty of the 1.5 billion in Asia.  The ration in Asia was two out of three.  Most people did not want to hear about it. 

The response from God to the stories of the Old Testament was found in the suffering of the New Testament.  God had taken on the suffering, identified it as His, and tried to do something about it.  He died.  It was Sunday, and it was in the words found the Agnus Dei that stirred me again and again.  And then He rose. 

It was Father’s Day 2008.  And somewhere between a song sung in church and a reminiscence,something about my dad struck me for the very first time. 

It had been spring training in 1985.  And we drove over to Winter Haven that morning.  I was introduced to a lot of old Red Sox.  Johnny Pesky.  The best dressed ballplayer of his age who became a coach and whose name I temporarily forget.  I think even Sam Mele.  Then Haywood Sullivan.  I have no idea why I was thinking about that day in the course of this homily.  But the song that soon followed had the words, “We are His People.”  And suddenly it struck me for the first time ––the incredible pride a father had for his son.  Having worked in minor league baeball, I was meeting a lot of people he knew when he had then been clsoe to my age.   There was something holy in the moment that I had missed.  But today I had listen to a story from Exodus.  The Israelites were getting ready to get handed the law.  And there was an incredible pride that God had for His people.  And suddenly I felt something from a great March day 23 years ago. 

After a good night’s sleep, I woke up recalling more between the connection of what I wrote and the homily that acted like a sail for the sailboat of my thoughts.  The homily that carried me to 1985 was about gifts that were given and gifts that were received.  And I was still in the process of measuring the ones that I had been given, like some kind of after-meal Grace.  “We give Thee thanks.  For all Thy benefits.”  It was followed by a Father’s Day blessing.  I had already received mine by that point in the worship service. And in my life. 

Do you trust in God, even when health and safety are threatened?  That was what the news stories were about:  How in realities, health and safety were threatened.  Money was the financial security in life.  In Iowa and Wisconsin this week, properties not insured against flooding were threatened. And if people were complaining about the cost of food and oil, well, the affects of these uninsured losses to crops will be felt by all of us.  The middle class would soon be sharing in the suffering of the majority of the invisible poor the world over.  Watch the futures this week on corn and grain prices.

Suffering challenged the complacent.  When more people began to suffer, it began to challenge public policy.  With the affluence of the last ten or fifteen years, was it little wonder why public policy in the U.S. favored the rich?  Suffering did teach people to view their neighbor.  And when I was more like my suffering neighbor, acts of compassion grew.

For those who were willing to worship with the sacrament that reconciled, there one day was a realization that those sins that were forgiven seemed to repeat themselves over time.  Greed.  Lust.  Avarice.  It was why we were all like Galdys Kravitz, looking through the venetian blinds at our neighbors.  It was why we read the news. 

The story of history was that the same lesson applied to the human race.  The realization that those past wars, atrocities, crimes that were supposed to be forgotten, seldom forgiven, seemed to repeat themselves over. Reconciliation was directed at the hearts of the people, one by one, to change. 

In the first reading at Mass yesterday Elijah has the power to prevent and produce rain at the time there was a drought in Israel. The reigning king  had turned to false gods when Elijah relented and restored rain to Israel.  ”In the Gospel reading Jesus asks us to perform the miracle —to reconcile ourselves to our brothers, sisters and opponents,” according to the priest at Mass. 

Essentially what Jesus taught us, to use our prayers to cure the sick, to comfort the afflicted, to change the world.  He called us as the Messiah to have the courage to act on our beliefs.  He called us to give alms, to dedicate ourselves in our lifetime to the radical Christian mission.  Through our lives, Jesus asks us to perform the miracle, to ignore the realities of the impossible, to reconcile our talents to the world.  Life was for many people, like a prayer, and the prayer over time turned out to be many miracles. 

Hey you!

There must be an incredible amount of self-hated for a man to commit a rape, to turn an act of love, of creation, into one of violence and hatred.  And along the same line, that must be the etiology of the sexual abuse crisis that occurred.  These priests must have really hated themselves.  Self-destruction of themselves, their church did reflect poorly on their God. 

The irony is how much we respect those who successfully recover from chemical addiction yet society refuses to show any compassion to a sexual offender, whether 48 or 18.   Fear conquers everything, perhaps because of the gasoline poured on it by politicians and media. 

So is there any amount of forgiveness for such a man filled with self-hate?  Will any form of treatment change a man?  I always thought that the reason prisons were built was to have a locale for punishment that fit the crime.  If the punishment was just in the first place, why were there now registries?  At what point did society change the philosphy that punishment should be left to prisons. If these people still needed to register for past offenses, why were they being release..  

Are these unforgivable sins?  What other sins are unforgivable on earth?  Is it because of the frequency that murder follows rape?  What does it say about a society that punished without trying to change a criminal?  And if the convicted sex offender has to register for the remainder of his life, even after serving his punishment, why not just execute them?  Why must only sexual offenders register after release from jail?  Why single out only those convicted sex criminals?  Is it cruel and unusual punishment to make anyone register after serving time?

Did those constitutional lawyers with courage either die, go into mergers and acquisitions, or retire to their yachts and second homes?    Did these changes in the law result from television?

Did you ever notice how active a woman was in her home?  A woman had her biological clock, while men slumbered.  Her clock however moved her, motivated her activity, regulated  her sleep.  Most women did more than men. 

Did you ever notice how busy ants were in June?  They seemed to recognize their limited life cycle. Men considered ants to be pests.  And bosses who made people work faster were pests too. 

There was a need of carrots in my life to keep me moving and my horse moving.  In career.  In my intellectual and spiritual life.  I should have come with the label like I saw on the can of soup today:  Best if used by February 2011.  I had been leading a life lately as if I would never expire.  I was starting to pay more attention to those ants.

What a mess we were in. All of us. It was on the basis of extreme memory impairment, current psychiatric state, cognitive deficits, the lack of insight and self-understanding. To answer to a larger audience the questions how it was that this country got into the situation it was now in?  Subprime mortgages, with rising food prices would make the issue of the cost of oil soon seem small. 

Before leaving for Slovenia on Monday George Bush promised that he would stress “our nation’s commitment to a strong dollar.” According to the New York Times, this was “a signal that, with rising oil prices and worrisome inflation, the White House was joining with the Fed in calling for an end to the dollar’s slump.”  He was getting ready to face European leaders increasingly upset about the dollar’s decline against the euro. 

This Bush promise to “our nation’s commitment to a strong dollar” was as a dramatic a change as any announcement that we would be pulling out of Iraq.  There seemed little attention paid that the devaluation of the dollar was his administration’s way to fund the war without raising taxes. 

So what was the value of the currency, compared to other nations? Why were some currencies worth more? Why were there currency fluctuations?

How come my house was worth more than when I bought it?  Or not?  Was it based upon the desires of others of what I had? What were there worries over inflation, deflation? How would they affect my life? And what about tax policy that now ignored the reality of American government spending?  How can you hide a $2 trillion if not $3 trillion dollar cost?  The investigation of the answer seemed a lot like what was going on in France to how many were complicit in Societe Generale nearly 5 billion euro dollar loss, originally alleged against one man, Jerome Kerviel, 31, who was charged with breach of trust, fabricating documents and illegally accessing computers in the Societe Generale scandal.  Coming into heavy criticism for failing to adequately control interns who helped Jerome Kerviel in taking and concealing massive huge-making positions, on June 3, 2008 it was announced that the current boss at the Finance and Investment Bank of the Societe Generale, Jean-Pierre Mustier, would be leaving his duties during the third quarter of 2008.  In private corporations, you did not need to await an election to change the course.  When would the American press begin to pose the question of the financial cost of war?

In another story this week, I lived in the state with the worst high school graduation rate of African-American students in the nation.  Poor graduations did not just happen.  There had to be some communal indifference.  Educators were quick to point out this represented a societal problem.  Yet how was it that we led the nation?  What had Abraham Herscehl been quoted as saying about indifference that I had heard of Minnesota Public Radio?  It was something along the line that the God found in the Bible is the parent of humanity and cannot stand viewing the sufferings of others, or letting his well off children view this suffering with indifference. 

Minnesotans prided themselves in being progressive.  But now the DFL Party, the Democratic-Farmer Labor Party , had nominated a professional comic to be our voice in the United States Senate.  (Full disclosure:  I will not be voting for many Republicans come November 2008.)  I am not sure what Mr. Franken had done to show some form of public service in his life?  I wondered this as I heard a show this morning on Minnesota Public Radio on the state of public education.  One of the speakers mentioned meeting a former governor, Al Quie who, after he left the governor’s mansion, went into prison ministries.  And there he found out how many people in prison were illiterate. There he found people who had been recipients of communal indifference, who had come out of school systems somewhere.  Was this now a lapse of pluralism into relativism where there were no rights and no wrongs? 

There seemed a connection between Franken’s endorsement and the graduation rate story.  He wrote an article in Playboy that was not now supposed to reflect his beliefs.  It was all about relativism, trying to earn an income yet not pay state income taxes.  And move the kids along.  They are getting big, and bigger, in some cases, than the teachers.  There was no right, there was no wrong.    

In a world of merging identities, leveraged buyouts, changing identities, a new relativism in a plural society, how could a person, an institution, retain identity with the encroachment of the mass media into a child’s life? How was public policy affecting valuations, financial, moral ones?  How were those with money affecting who got political nominations.  Hillary Clinton was trying to recoup $11 million of her own money before she gets focused again on her Senate career. 

On the journey how was I changing with all of this?  So what was the difference between actual cash value and replacement cost?  Why did valuations change?

SInce politics in the new American culture were now just about opinions, not moral judgments, Al would be a great leader.  He is a man for his times, these days of relativism and money. 

I heard a discussion on race relations on public radio today.  I could not tell until the show’s end that one of the two women in the discussion was an African-American, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune.  She addressed briefly the issue of inter marriage in revealing the depth of prejudice with great insight. 

The concerns of inter marriage, if it reflected my own prejudice, if I was honest, was not so much about skin color as it was about identity.  What was your identity?  The religious tradition, if there was one, led to intimacy.  And men and women struggled, no matter what backgorund, with matters of intimacy.  The real issue of intermarriage in a secular nation called the question how deep you were intellectually, spiritually.  Everyone had a different dimension.  And family history influenced the formation of identity.   How well developed were these 2 young people?

The popular world, formed by media, was so surface oriented.  But one day people all suffered internal quakes.  What would be down below?  What would be shown as having been deep within all along but often unrecognized even by the the spouse you married.  What had history left her/him, whatever the color?  Without similar intellectual background, without a shared belief system, the chances of failure were increased.  It had nothing to do with skin color but everything that was located below the skin.  Though too often, the history of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, had been cruel beyond comprehension and had left a pressure below the surface, unidentified.  It was not the unidentified flying objects that was to be feared but those unidentified objects buried below the surface.  The earth was not just spinning each day but always moving.  My fear was of sinkholes and former toxic waste disposal left behind, internally unknown, through no fault of a spouse. 

There was an excitement of God.  That was what I learned through worship.  I came alive inside again with worship.  The world and all of its trouble, what I had done, what I had failed to do, they were all a downer.  It was the secular world and all of its trouble that seemed a summit not worth the climb that affected whether I was an optimist or a pessimist.  It was another cold May morning in the land of 10,000 lakes but one nice day would bring back the excitement of creation.  The lilacs were finally in full bloom.

Feeling incomplete, feeling broken:  there was a certain theme to my morning as I reflected on my “career.”  I was feeling incomplete, wondering what I had to do to complete the stage of the journey.  Financially.   This feeling of being incomplete was a form of broken-ness.  I had joined the world.  I thought of my circumstances in lieu of the world’s.  Was God throughout history feeling incomplete, without union of his people?  The offering I had accepted was of union through His son to all people, beyond the original Chosen People, with union by participation in His life called Church.