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The dance and the dancer are one. That energy permeates everything that is in our world, which is why you cannot despoil our world and then say you love God. But, but… that’s still to much of an abstraction, too impersonal. We need our metaphors because they make the invisible visible to us as Peter Brook said when describing the function of art. Just because they are imagined does not mean they are not real. God may be a power that is inclusive of and greater than all our metaphors, but Sister Katerina is right; we still need to be hugged by the Universe.
After a few articles in which I have published the letters of Brother Jeremiah of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS). It occurs to me that you might like to know a little more about him. So I persuaded him, with some difficulty, to sit for an interview. We spoke for the first time last November, and for the second time in December just after the Christmas holiday.
The Monastery of the Order of Buile Suibhne is set in the Ozark Mountains about twenty miles East of the little village of Crawford’s Notch. About thirty years ago, the monks and nuns of the order purchased an old 1930’s era Tourist Court just off of Route 66 and converted into their monastery.
 When last we spoke, Brother Jeremiah talked about the nature of salvation and forgiveness as a way to God. He has mentioned God several times as a non-anthropomorphic, which is to say a non-theistic, deity. In this interview I ask him to be more specific. What, indeed, does a Celtic Christian Universalist believe regarding the Supreme Being?
M: So, what do you perceive as God?
BJ: I don’t know.
M: Isn’t it too easy to cop a plea of ignorance?
BJ: Well, If I knew, it wouldn’t be God, would it? As the boundaries of our knowledge get wider and wider, so does our consciousness of God. It’s that old saw, “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” No matter how much we learn, we will never, ever gain such a breadth and depth of knowledge that it encompasses God.
M: He keeps moving the goal-posts.
BJ: In a way, yes. But we do have helpful metaphors that help us in a small way, access the power. It was Sister Katerina of Värrnsgarth who put me straight about that with a simple statement. I was explaining to her the non-theistic principle behind my concept of God,
M: Run through that again briefly, just to catch us up.
BJ: It is as much a mistake to say that God thinks or feels as a human being does as it is to say God sits or stands or spits. All of these are human qualities and are not applicable to the Deity.
M: And when you explained that to Sister Katerina…?
BJ: She just shrugged her shoulders and said, “You can’t cuddle up to an equation.” You see? That’s why, were there no God, humans would have to invent him. In that play Hegemon you had Jesus say something like, “I went to the deserts and found”… you know, what was it?
M: “In the desert of my soul I sought power and found the Father, in the wilderness of my heart I sought wisdom and found the Mother, and when I had both in great abundance they brought forth the Divine Child, all encompassing universal love.”
BJ: Yes, yes, now you see you’ve done something extraordinary there, you have made universals, that is, abstractions very specific through metaphor. You have expressed the Trinity. The inevitable result of the marriage of Wisdom and Power is Universal, Unconditional Love. Not emotional love, that’s far too human. Universal Love and absolute acceptance. By the way, when are you going to finish that play?
M: Soon.
BJ: Ah.
M: Really. Soon.
BJ: Ah.
M: We were talking about the Trinity?
BJ: Yes, well, we know masculine and feminine are complimentary powers and we know that between the two of them they can, if their heads are on straight, bring forth something that is very close to the divine.
M: Rarely.
BJ: Rarely, of course rarely, if it was easy, everybody’d do it.
M: God is a metaphor for God?
BJ: I heard that once when I was in college and I dismissed it at the time as just too glib by half, but there is a kernel of truth in it. I wondered at one time what the need for metaphor was? Perhaps God is a metaphor, but as a species we need metaphors. Metaphors feed our souls! We are the only creatures capable of abstract thought, of imagination. This is not to be despised, but reveled in! This is where the atheists make their biggest mistake, you see. They dismiss the metaphor as an “imaginary friend,” and think by doing so that they are dismissing the referent, God. Not so.
M: They say since God is imaginary, He cannot be real.
BJ: My answer to that would be, “of course!” But God, you see, is greater than and inclusive of all the imaginary constructs we have ever invented to express God.
M: That includes our old friend, Yahweh?
BJ: Yahweh, Jehova, Elohim… Odin, Ahura Mazda, yes. These are imaginary cultural constructs that point to God but are not themselves God. If we stop with the metaphor and worship that, then we are in error. Joseph Campbell was quite correct about that. He says, “All religions are true…in a sense!” That sense is that they are all extended poems celebrating the power that moves the universe and is accessible to us all in the smallest blade of grass. It moves in us, through us and around us and binds us all together.
M: Yes, Virginia, it’s “The Force.”
BJ: Well… I guess you can say so, yes. The dance and the dancer are one. That energy permeates everything that is in our world, which is why you cannot despoil our world and then say you love God. But, but… that’s still to much of an abstraction, too impersonal. We need our metaphors because they make the invisible visible to us as Peter Brook said when describing the function of art. Just because they are imagined does not mean they are not real. God may be a power that is inclusive of and greater than all our metaphors, but Sister Katerina is right; we still need to be hugged by the Universe. She has a ritual that she performs in her cabin each morning that she says, “sets her clock” for the day. It is a prayer to Sophia, the Semitic metaphor for wisdom. I have it here in my wallet. She has given me permission to share it with you, “If it will help,” she says.
“Lady Wisdom, my sweet Sophia,
I greet you this morning
I come before you to renew my commitment to you,
May each step I take be an honor to you,
And a prayer of thanks for your gifts.
With this water, I cleanse myself of all that is useless
And all that does me harm.
With this oil I charge myself with the wonder of Life,
of your love and the protection of truth.
Mother of Life, your child stands before you
With love and respect. Sophia!
I embrace you in my heart and in my soul.
Trusted counselor, I offer myself to you as a vessel.
These eyes, these lips, these hands are yours.
Guide me to do your work.
Help me to nurture understanding and connection,
In my community and among all life
And may your Wisdom grow within me.”
BJ: Is that marvelous? By extracting from the abstract “Universe” the figure of Sophia, Lady Wisdom, she has created in her imagination a concrete vision she can relate to as a friend, even though she knows it’s her own creation, as much as is the painting she made and uses as a point of focus. It’s all theatre, of course, but it has great personal meaning.
M: I sometimes feel the same way about the characters in my books; I love every one of them even the less admirable ones, although I know they aren’t real…
BJ: Who says they’re not real? They certainly are! They have their own reality, much like Sophia is real to Sister Katerina.
M: What does Brother Seamus think about it?
BJ: He doesn’t know. She shared it with me only. But, now I suppose everyone will know, and that’s all right with her. She doesn’t mind. Brother Seamus, she understands, is pig-headed and much invested in his own metaphors which he has given the aura of inviolable and exclusive truth. He will probably reach into his bag of labels or extract an adjective from a column in his Ecclesiastical Ledger Book and call her a “pagan” or “heathen” or some other such nonsense. Some people simply cannot or will not understand that imagination is the gateway to God.
M: I sometimes wonder why Brother Seamus became a monk, especially here?
BJ: I sometimes wonder that myself. We don’t discriminate, though. We recognize that we are all at different points in the journey, and if he wants to come among us, who are we to say no?
M: Have you ever said no?
BJ: As contradictory as it may seem, yes, we have. The dark ones, the ones with no light in them. I’ve described them to you before, but let me repeat, if I may, they are the self-absorbed, the ones who out of fear or anger, hoard the energy they get from the Universe. They would come among us as vampires, you see? I do believe there is evil even among believers, and we must be able to recognize that. The health of the community is important to us.
M: Brother Seamus is not…
BJ: Oh, Heavens no! I do apologize if I gave you that impression! He is a very good man; it’s just that I find him a bit obtuse. No, he is not one of the dark ones. But, the point I was making, the point brought home to me by Sister Katerina, is that people need poetry. We need metaphor, and the trick is to not mistake, as Brother Seamus does, the metaphor for the referent. It makes them vulnerable, and when people attack the metaphor it is wise to be able to say, “Okay, deny God if you will, it doesn’t affect God.” The atheists miss the point entirely, but, as I said before, they are still children of God whether they recognize the metaphor or not, and we are all headed in the same direction ultimately. The Universe wants us to succeed, if I may personify it so far as giving it motive. But there does seem to be a forward movement to it all that I have a hard time dismissing. We’re all going to get to Heaven whatever that may be.
M: Even the dark ones?
BJ: Yes, even they.
 M: Hence Universalism.
BJ: Of a Celtic and Christian variety yes.
M; So, why are you a monk?
BJ: Simplicity.
M: Really? That’s it? Haven’t you criticized that in people who practice Christianity?
BJ: I have criticized puerile and primitive thought, not simplicity. The baby who cannot distinguish between the toy and himself is in a state of Infantile simplicity, and when we are older we come to that simplicity again, but through a long and variable complex process that involves questioning all of our assumptions. We begin to understand once more that we are part of all we see, and all we see is part of us. I am not diminished by the grandeur of the universe, I am expanded by it because I am One with it. See? Now, What I term primitives are those who, lacking resources or courage, get stuck in the primary grades with the childish concept of God.
M: Like Brother Seamus?
BJ: Don’t do that. I have to live with him. Most of the greatest truths can be stated very simply, and if taken on their surface value become quite silly maxims. Their truth can only be unlocked when the metaphors are extended and their full implications are known. Usually, the statements expressing them sound simple.
M: How do we do that?
BJ: By a very crooked road, one that has no signage and cannot be found on any one map, only oblique hints on many maps that point to its existence. As TS Elliott said, “After all our explorations, we arrive where we began and know the place for the first time.”
M: The closest distance between two points is a rather fullish circle?
BJ: Ha. Yes, it does seem that way. I’ll give you an example of mature simplicity: the Creation story in the Bible tells of our leaving the Eden of our childhood and making of the thorns and brambles of the world our own garden and that is the real import of that story.
M: Seems to me that Eve got a bad rap for that. After all, wasn’t it through her that we got the knowledge we needed to make our own gardens?
BJ: If not for her, humanity would have dried up and blown away like the sands of the desert.
M: You sound like a feminist.
BJ: On this point, yes, though there are others…
M: What you call a primitive, of course, would understand that story as literal truth.
BJ: Indeed, and insist upon it in the face of all but certain scientific evidence. But, you see, that insistence on material reality strips it of all its spiritual power in favor of mere historical fact. They spend an inordinate amount of time and energy proving the material reality of every nail and splinter In the cart, quite ignoring the cargo. They can get quite violent about it.
M: So you ended up as a monk after a complex process leading to simplicity. That seems quite Buddhist.
BJ: Ha, ha. I drew much from that tradition, but not everything. I couldn’t. It’s not mine, you know? I can’t really plumb the depths of that faith without having been born to it. There are so many cultural nuances that, as a Westerner, I must inevitably miss. I would end up a hyphenate at best and at worst a cartoon.
M: So, what is your metaphor? How do you perceive God?
BJ: Father Duddleswell.
M: Who?
BJ: From that old BBC series, “Bless Me Father.” I always see God as that old Irish priest. We’re good, you know, we’re tight, God and I. We have a deal.
M: A deal? What kind of a deal?
BJ: As you know I was reared as a strict primitive Christian of the type you see on the extreme right today. As I began to move further away from that, as any thinking man would, it became a tremendous burden to my family who prayed for me constantly. Well, one day I was sitting in a food court having a cuppa and who should sit across from me but God.
M: Father Duddleswell?
BJ: God, yes. Well, he saw that I was conflicted and he said, “I geve ye an inquirin’ moind; dan’t be afred o’ that. Fallah wh’re it laids. If ye thrust me t’ knoow what Oi was doin’ whin Oi gev it t’ya, d’ya tink, thin, that Oi’ll let y’ doown?” and he sat there stirring his coffee. He takes it, you know, with a dollop of heavy cream and two — TWO spoons of sugar! Well, He’s God, he doesn’t have to worry about it. Then he winked and smiled and said, “Dun’t wurra. Y’ jist kape stroivin’ f’r wisdom ‘n’ onderstandin’, and Oi’ll kape ya sefe fr’m the fondamint’lists.” And then he was gone. Disappeared after the manner of gods everywhere.
The Interviews with Br Jeremy will continue.
I use the word “illustrator” because I really do hesitate the use the word, “artist;” a word that has gotten such a aura of Divine Revelation in the past few centuries aided, no doubt, by Academia, which does tend to tear off our fool’s cloaks and anoint us “Artists” in Gothic script and illuminated letters.
 The Author as Nickles in Archibald MacLiesh's J.B., Ft Bragg Playhouse, David Keyte, Director. I should have listened to Robert Benedetti much sooner. His marvelous book, Acting Professionally, was presented to me by David Keyte, the director of the Fort Bragg Playhouse and I read it voraciously. In it, Benedetti said, that if you can do anything else, you should not go into acting. It took me many years to discover that, yes, he actually WAS talking to me. I wish to thank him for eventually dissuading me from pursuing an acting career, for had I followed it, I would have been the most miserable of creatures. Besides, I hated auditions; I hated looking for work, and that’s really what actors do for most of their lives. They look for work. In fact, it is sometimes a toss-up whether they are most accurately called professional actors or professional seekers of employment.
Mind you, I was accounted a good actor, good enough, at least to keep going, but I wasn’t great, either. One director said that I was “able to get up a role with efficiency and dispatch.” Well, that was almost as ringing an endorsement as “competent.” The word that was never used, however, to describe my work was “passionate.” That was probably because it wasn’t.
See, acting is immediate and I’m far too reserved a person; I much prefer the distance of third person narrative. If I am to bleed, I prefer to do it in the privacy of my own studio rather than on a stage in front of 300 strangers.
So I write books and I draw pictures. I have always done so. When I was an actor there were two things I invariably did upon getting a role; I wrote a biography of the character and drew a portrait. So, in a way, I was telling myself even back then that I was really a writer/illustrator and I’d best get about it.
I use the word “illustrator” because I really do hesitate the use the word, “artist;” a word that has gotten such a aura of Divine Revelation in the past few centuries aided, no doubt, by Academia, which does tend to tear off our fool’s cloaks and anoint us “Artists” in Gothic script and illuminated letters. It is incumbent upon university Departments of Art, Music and Theatre to maintain high student counts, and many incipient artists are encouraged who probably should not be. Some academics do have the good grace to feel twinges of guilt about dumping so many graduates, who naively believe the degrees in their hip pockets make them artists, onto the unsuspecting public, but they carry on doing it, anyway.
I was one of those students. Oh, yes. And, following the fashion of the day, I did think that to be a real artist you had to be gritty, you had to be outré, you had to shock the public out of its complacency, you had to push against the boundaries of form. I longed for edginess and felt quite inadequate because try though I might, I could not be edgy enough. All my contemporaries were edgy, remarkable edgy. It was a wonder to behold just how edgy they were!
I knew a playwriting student, and I’m not making this up, who called one of her plays “Onionskin” simply because that’s the kind of paper she typed it on. Student poets would write verse by picking words on scraps of paper out of a bowl like the Dadaists.
“Doorknob, thights, floor, doo-dah.”
They could not be understood because nothing could be understood and isn’t that the whole point? Except that these same people complained bitterly that the audiences didn’t “get it.” I suspect their complaints were due to a certain longing for superiority. If they wrote poems that were so personal that no one “got” them, then they could pretend the audience just wasn’t as enlightened as they.
It’s not that I have a problem with experimentation. Oh, no. But, having been a critic, I do believe that experimentation may just best be left in the classroom or the workshop and not inflicted on an unsuspecting public, who spend their good money for tickets, until some conclusive results have been achieved.
I tried, in my cherubim twenties, to write an absurdist play like Beckett or Ionesco! You know, plays influenced by Albert Camu’s Existentialism that seemed to go nowhere and that was the whole point, that nobody goes anywhere and the perception that they do is purely illusionary. Others could do it, why not me. I watched them romping and reveling in pure unabashed meaninglessness, but me? Nah, not so much.
 My first play, Lady Jane, produced in the Illinois State University Process Theatre. Thankfully, it has not been produced since.
There I was duller than Quixote’s lance just writing stories with proper beginnings, middles and ends. Bo-ring!
“Jaysus!” I said, “Whattsamatta witcha?” I said. “Ya gotta fin’ meaning in everthing? Does everything gotta make sense?”
I’m afraid so, yes.
Y’see, the plays of Beckett and Ionesco were complex and convoluted because their minds and ideas were complex and convoluted. They were trying (and this is what some of my fellow students back in the day did not understand) to be as clear as possible. They were not working for obscurity; they were trying to be understood. (Except for the Dadaists, and that’s another story.)
I wish to write beautiful books. That is the height and breadth of my ambition.
Do you know who I think wrote beautiful books? J.D. Salinger. I have never read anything of his that I do not put it down refreshed as if I had just walked in a spring rain. They are cathartic books that are beautifully written and one cannot help but feel cleansed by them. Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof-Beams, Carpenters, and of course, The Catcher in the Rye. I am not putting myself on quite that level, but I want to write books that refresh and renew audiences in the same way.
I have long ago accepted that I am a rather conventional writer. I tell stories. I fully expect that when the reader puts down the book they will never have to ask what happened. They might wonder what it all means, but that’s another thing altogether. Aristotle would be proud. It is somewhat comforting to have found one’s niche . I am to writing what Norman Rockwell was to painting. In his autobiography he said that he tried to paint ugliness, but it never felt right. It wasn’t who he was and the vision was not his. Like Rockwell, I find that gritty and ugly seem artificial to me. I don’t try to do it anymore.
I love my characters, all of my characters, even the ones I don’t like, and I have never written a female character that I have not on some level fallen in love with. Do I idealize them? A little. I can’t write unexceptional characters. I’ve tried. Every one of them is above average in some way. Either they are exceedingly smart or very clever or cunning or beautiful or vibrant… something that sets them apart and above the common herd. Were that not true I would become bored with them very soon because I am not interested in unexceptional people.
Margaret, in The Faerie Circle, for example is the “brightest pupil in the intermediate class at the La Madelienne Academy for (Exceptional) Young Ladies.” As a small boy, her father, Bobby Mahoney is “a rare mortal.”
Fr. Emile Bergeron in From All Things Evil is an outstanding scholar and theologian and his young lover Sr. Constance Granatiere is a lively and intelligent woman just breaking out of the confines of her convent life. The Reverend Mother Philip is a resourceful and cunning woman and the Inquisitor, the Moor Rashad Al Assir, is an uncommon reasoner, a devout humanist. Their clash is one of giants and it is the only kind of conflict that I find at all interesting.
And if it is more Norman Rockwell than Marcel Duchamp, I will consider than a great honor. I only hope that, as each reader finishes my books, they will say, “Ah!” as if they’d just walked in the spring rain..
“But, Doctor, you’re a scientist; surely you don’t believe that superstitious nonsense!”
What can be patented is profitable; what cannot be patented is often dismissed as quackery by the western scientistic medical establishment. Saputo pillories the entire system of testing and certification as more political and economic than truly effective in identifying the best healthcare options.
 Very often, while reading Dr. Len Saputo’s important book, A Return to Healing, I imagined the modern scientistic medical establishment as those frock-coated and monocled gents deriding Louis Pasteur’s “invisible bugs” in the same way that non-western, unscientific medicines are derided by today’s medical establishment.
What Michael Pollan did to the Industrial Food Chain, Saputo does to the Medical Industrial Complex. He he not only points out the failures of the current American healthcare industry, tracing, from the locus of a medical practitioner within that system, the many steps by which it became 39th in the world in terms of quality, but he also offers a blueprint for its survival through a complete restructuring of what health-care means and how it is delivered. It is not only a well thought out manifesto, but one that is imminently doable with the financial and systemic resources currently available. The difficulty, the only reason the system resists reformation, is the large number of associated industries that make huge profits from our illnesses, whether actual or imaginary: the frock-coated and monocled gents of today.
In a profession such as medicine, the mission of the practitioner is to work him or her self out of a job, or failing that, at least to reduce the need for services by facilitating a healthy population. Industry, on the other hand, which has as its primary mission the creation of profits, must increase the need for its products and services. Saputo says introducing the profit motive into medicine negates the healing profession’s overarching mission. Industrial medicine is, in short, an oxymoron.
What is the core problem? Along with many other observers, I believe the central flaw is that business and economics now dominate the industry, What was once the practice of healing based on the precepts of Hippocrates has turned into a business commodity that doles out standardized “treatments” dictated by the requirements of patentability and profit. This domination of business values over our health care combined with medicine’s obsessive attention to treating symptoms rather than to prevention and genuine healing, has led to a general crisis in the health status of Americans
Saputo says patentability determines the value of medicine, not effectiveness. What cannot be patented is often dismissed as quackery by the western scientistic medical establishment. Saputo pillories the entire system of testing and certification as more political and economic than truly effective in identifying the best healthcare options. What will years of clinical trials accomplish that thousands of years of practical application will not? Remember, he says, it was only a few years ago that nutrition was dismissed as having no relationship to illness by those in the industry who were only concerned with diseases and symptoms, not prevention.
Today, 70 percent of all funding for clinical trials originates from the pharmaceutical industry itself…It is not uncommon for drug companies to ‘supervise” the studies they fund at universities, giving them the right to determine what gets published.
As the Industrial Food Chain seeks to increase the amount of patentable food Americans eat, according to Michael Pollan, so industrialized healthcare seeks to increase our demand for patentable treatment and drugs. That limits healthcare to after-the-fact disease care. There are plenty of arenas where an increase in demand is useful in a society, but medicine is not one of those. Increased demand in medicine means more sick people. In other words, big insurance, big healthcare systems and big pharma are killing us. Hand in glove with the industrial food chain, they are making us less healthy with every passing decade because “Modern Medicine is at war with nature.”
Why haven’t we fully addressed the obvious fact that these opportunistic infections usually attack us when our immunity is depressed? Instead we pursue pharmaceutical and other strategies that are akin to scorched earth warfare – engaging in battles that destroy both the “enemy” and cause collateral damage to innocent “civilians” — while ignoring the possibility of creating conditions of well being in the first place through trade, cultural exchange, negotiation and conflict resolution.
In other words, we should approach healthcare from a position of internal wellness rather than by attacking the body with external treatments which is the crux of disease care.
In the early days, doctors made house calls and much treatment was handled in the home or in the doctor’s private office. But, as treatments and testing became more complex with the invention of sophisticated machinery,they moved from the home or private office into the clinic or hospital. Hospitals, which at one time were non-profit entities, went public like any other business. Like any other business they needed not only to earn enough to support their missions but also to make a profit.
There was a time when insurance companies were essentially third party payers in the health care industry. A health policy provided payment in a family straightforward manner: A $200 deductable, for example, after which 80% of the bill would be picked up by the insurer. The post war population explosion put additional pressure on the health care resources. Since insurance paid for most of the care, demand for services was unconnected to the patient’s ability to pay. If there is no such downward pressure, costs continue to rise unrestrained by the reality of the marketplace. It is hard for us to imagine, but insurance companies really faced the possibility of running short of the reserves needed to pay all possible claims, which they must by law have on hand, but that is what they faced. Ultimately, that downward pressure had to be artificially introduced and enforced. Voila! Managed care. The dreaded HMO and PPO. Healthcare rationing. Managed care is rationed care, make no mistake, and often it is care denied.
In short, people are paying more for less care and have been for almost half a century.
The answer? Saputo is unequivocal. It is nothing short of a revolution, a complete upending of the current way we deliver healthcare Completely remove the profit motive from the delivery of healthcare through a Government sponsored single payer system that includes everyone. Government subsidized healthcare only needs to break even, not to profit. Yes, it will require taxes. So what? Whether we call it a premium or we call it a tax it’s still our money and we have to decide which system will take less of it while providing the best payment for essential services.
Doctors and patients’ make all the decisions, not a board of insurance adjustors with an eye toward the corporate bottom line. A national system would be able to share information, unlike private corporations who are in competition with each other, making repetition of unnecessary testing and treatments, less of a burden. Will care still be denied? Yes, if it’s not needed. Will patients get angry if the latest thing they saw on television is not deemed by their doctor as unnecessary? Yes. But the decision would be in the hands of the doctors; government would not be able to refuse payment.
Many critics will bring up the risk of fraud under these conditions. There is that risk in any system, public or private. Resources will be lost to fraud. We have to accept that we will not be able to catch it all, but with a national medical computer network, we might catch a good deal of it.
There is an old English jingle that farmers used to determine how much seed to plant. It went:
One for the rook
One for the crow
One to rot
And one to grow.
Almost three quarters of the farmers’ seed would be lost and the losses were built into the system; he planted enough to get a good crop from one quarter of his investment.
Losses to fraud in a government financed health care system would not run nearly as high as that farmer experienced on a regular bases. We have to allow that there will be some fraud and build into the system a way to cover the losses in addition to catching and prosecuting offenders, but the possibility, even the probability, of fraud should not be a stumbling block to doing what needs to be done.
Saputo proposes an integral approach that is more effective because it takes advantage of nutritional science, behavioral changes, healthier living, and the many healing practices that have withstood thousands of years of trials, but what the “scientistic” frock-coated and monocled medical community dismisses as “quackery.”
Saputo is part of the Integral Spirituality that is championed by philosopher Ken Wilber. I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of that philosophy, but Saputo brings it into play in his healing circles. It is not a lot of New Age mumbo jumbo but effective heath care that rises in each human being from the inside outward into ever expanding circles that eventually encompass the universe.
In medicine, the central issue we face is the utter uniqueness of each individual person amid the dynamic nature of his health challenges in the moment – and all this is best seen within the larger context of his specific family commitments, social roles and cultural predispositions. This inherent condition of clinical practice guarantees that the same set of facts often does not lead to the same treatment plan. And that’s why we must be fully present with our patients…healing is a process that can occur only in a sacred space shared by two authentic human beings…committed to understanding and supporting one another as they explore options for transforming illness into optimal health.
If the term “sacred space” turns you off, it shouldn’t. Any healing will have a spiritual element, and this is becoming more and more well documented as Medicine turns its attention to it. It has been dismissed in the past simply because the profession wasn’t paying attention or asking the right questions.
Included in Saputo’s Healing Circles are, in addition to a licensed physician, practitioners from appropriate non-western medical traditions such as acupuncture. By drawing on all these disciplines, some thousands of years old, the proper diagnoses are more likely with treatments and life changes more appropriate to the specific individual.
It is not symptom treatment, is is engaging with and healing the whole person.
And, it is probably decades in coming.
A Return to Healing by Dr. Len Saputo
Origin Press 2009
The Celtic people believe that the soul is not in the body; rather the body is in the soul, which is an energy field emanating from us, enveloping us and reaching out to everyone within our circles, so, before I take your hand, We have shared with each other a piece of our souls; before we embrace, I know you.
 After a few articles in which I have published the letters of Brother Jeremiah of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS). It occurs to me that you might like to know a little more about him. So I persuaded him, with some difficulty, to sit for an interview. His natural diffidence would at first now allow him to think he was worthy, such things being reserved to mostly men of some accomplishment, but after much cajolery and the promise that I would make him my signature chili with southern corn bread, he agreed, but only if I replaced the southern cornbread with northern corncake. I may be from the south, but Brother Jeremiah is quick to point out that he is a native of New Jersey, southern New Jersey to be sure, but still decidedly above the Mason/Dixon Line.
People have remarked that we strongly resemble each other, some going so far as to suggest that I have a “costume closet” in my house. I can’t see it myself. I wear glasses; he doesn’t.
The Monastery of the Order of Buile Suibhne is set in the Ozark Mountains about twenty miles East of the little village of Crawford’s Notch. About thirty years ago, the monks and nuns of the order purchased an old 1930’s era Tourist Court from the people who built it and converted the cabins, about thirty in number, into the present monastery, thus saving the vintage structure from the fate that has befallen so many others on the “Mother Road.”
I first sat with Brother Jeremiah in November just prior to Thanksgiving. The second time was in December just around the Winter Solstice. A heavy snowstorm kept us confined in the buildings for several days during which time we spoke of both abstract universals such as the nature of sin and hell as well what salvation really is. His answers might surprise you. But, we also spoke of the monastery itself and some of the people who had chosen to live and study there, Sister Katerina of Värrnsgarth and the sour and surly Brother Seamus, but most curious of all was the Abbott of the order himself.
M: Is the Abbot the man who blessed us as we were coming in?
BJ: Hard to tell. It might just as easily have been a gesture of dismissal. If Brother Abbott impresses you as a bit gruff sometimes it’s because he really doesn’t want the job.
M: Did he have to take it?
BJ: He feels it is his duty. The election of the Order fell on him, much to the chagrin of Brother Seamus who, I do believe, coveted it for himself. It was Brother Abbott who found the motel as a young man and arranged for its renovation into a monastery, but he really isn’t good at being in charge.
M: He found it? How?
BJ: Well he was riding his Harley on Old Route 66, and…
M: His Harley?
BJ: Brother Abbot — actually his name is Brother Gregor — is quite fond of Harleys; the 1948 Hydra-Glide is his favorite and he keeps it in mint condition. He’s often seen with his cassock kilted to his knees riding off to do battle against the twin evils of ignorance and indifference. You cannot be blamed for not correcting what you are unaware of, but you are responsible for what you do know and choose to ignore. He has no patience with those religious who do not serve humankind and can be quite harsh with them. To him, Love is not an emotion, it has nothing to do with good feelings on Sunday morning or a sense of ecstasy in the Divine Presence. If love is anything at all it is an action. You cannot sit on your bum and do nothing to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and then say you love God, he says. That kind of passive love is next to worthless…he says.
M: He’d rather be out serving mankind than administering the monastery, then.
BJ: Tilting at windmills, absolutely. Between you and me, I have nick-named his Harley “Rocinante.” Ha! Don’t tell him.
M: So, he didn’t want to be the Abbott.
BJ: Brother Gregor felt he had to take the job two years ago after Sister Abbess quite suddenly ran off to Oregon with a Russian flautist.
M: Ran off with a…
BJ: Heh-heh. With a Russian flautist, yes. Well, perhaps “ran off” isn’t precisely correct, but it sounds good. She asked to be relieved of her duties first, but she’s still in the order and still comes for our annual retreat.
M: And the Russian flautist?
BJ: Loves her desperately. But that left us without and administrator and Brother Gregor was experienced and convenient so he was pressed into service. You know, he has a halo painted on his motorcycle helmet.
M: You’re kidding!
BJ: Yes, he does. And yet the halo has a crown of thorns twined about it. He has the same symbol tattooed around his right arm, his working arm. Holiness, he maintains, requires suffering…or rather sharing the suffering of all people who come within his circle, working to lighten it and bring them a degree of happiness. He’s a good man, is Brother Abbott, more suited to his job than he thinks.
M: You mentioned his circle. What do you mean by that?
BJ: A circle of awareness and concern. We all have them: family circles, social circles and the like. I think that people come into our circles for a reason.
M: Synchronicity?
BJ: Of a kind, yes. We can either choose to ignore what comes into our circle, resist it or find out why it has come and strive to meet whatever need may present itself. The beggar on the street may only be in your circle for a brief moment, but may not be dismissed. Others may re-enter our circles after a long absence, still others may be constantly with us. Whatever. We have to deal with everything that is in our circle. Brother Abbott is there to serve them. Service is a kind of salvation to him, you know. I’ve often thought that there is a darkness in his past … but that’s speculation.
M: What is salvation, anyway? We mentioned it in our last interview. You said that the modern church with its emphasis on “soul-winning” …
BJ: Green Stamps in the book that is turned in on “too late day” for a Heavenly prize, yes. Industrial religion and salesmanship.
M: You say that quite misses the point. What is salvation to a Celtic Christian Universalist?
BJ: Well, think about it. What is the only sin?
M: Self absorption.
BJ: And why is that?
M: Because all others are rooted in it.
BJ: And the opposite of self absorption is?
M: Is this a chatechism?
BJ: Ha. Sounds rather like it, doesn’t it? Okay, let me tell you. We all receive power from somewhere, from God, from the Universe, from the sun, somewhere. We also receive energy from the landscape and from the people in it. What we do with that power shapes us and defines us. The Celtic people believe that the soul is not in the body; rather the body is in the soul, which is an energy field emanating from us, enveloping us and reaching out to everyone within our circles, so, before I take your hand, We have shared with each other a piece of our souls; before we embrace, I know you; in a sense, I am part of you.
M: Would that be like an Aura?
BJ: Oh, that’s far too New Agey and much too precious. It’s just about the flow of energy in us, through us, and around us. Period. I use the old-fashioned word, “soul” because I am really about converting misconceptions into a usable spiritual vocabulary that is accessible to the largest number of people.
M: Redefining the words to make them more universal.
BJ: Well, I am a universalist, after all.
M: Okay, soul it is.
BJ: The Divine Power that we absorb from the numinous landscape moves through us and takes on our individual imprint as we focus it for our own purposes. It becomes very specific to us as individuals, taking on our unique physical and mental forms. But, the focus must be outward, like Brother Abbot’s service to the poor. If we give in to fear and anger, we suck the power in and do not let it go. Our focus turns inward. The energy doesn’t move through us and emanate from us as it should but builds up in us becoming more and more dense until it is like an impenetrable shell around us locking us inside and all others out. We are safe, to be sure, and we are in full possession of all that is ours, but we are in prison. We generate no light. We are dark souls. It is a self imposed prison of loneliness, despair and bitterness.
M: That is hell?
BJ: Hell more torturous than any lake of fire and brimstone. God does not create hell, we do. We live in it while we are alive and we take it with us when we die. There is nothing mysterious about it. It works on both spiritual and psychological levels. And it is not everlasting. As I’ve said before, C.S.Lewis maintains, and I do agree, that we can walk out of hell any time we want to, but it is the wanting to that is the problem. Most of us, and I do include myself, would rather endure a familiar hell than risk an unfamiliar heaven.
M: And salvation?
BJ: Just the opposite. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? Move the power though you into the universe instead of hoarding it. We see this in people who are moved by faith to do good, like Brother Abbott and so many more. The more they empty themselves the more they are filled and they become a conduit for positive energy in a continuing and ever growing cycle; they are true servants of God. They are fearless and truly happy. Voila! Salvation.
M: And it is accomplished with love.
BJ: Yes, all embracing, unconditional, universal love, not cheap love, not emotional love; that’s still based on our own needs as individuals. The kind of love I mean is summed up in the statement. “I love you not because you are anything, but because you are. I serve you expecting nothing in return but the joy of serving.” It is no more complicated than that. The only way out of the many hells we create for ourselves, in t his life and possibly the next, is that kind of love and it requires forgiveness, plain, simple, old fashioned forgiveness. We can’t help what happens to us but we are all defined by our response to it, what we do.
M: Seems simple enough.
BJ: It isn’t. If it were…
M: Everybody’d be doing it. We sometimes think that forgiveness is merely shaking our head and saying it doesn’t matter. We perceive it as a feeling of charitableness that washes over us like a warm shower.
BJ: Everything matters and saying it doesn’t only gives it more power over us, for what we fail to acknowledge will control everything we do.
M: How do you define forgiveness, then?
BJ: Rendering past hurts powerless to affect us in the present, ALL past hurts. I’ll give you an extreme example. If a woman is raped and from that time on she refuses to go out after dark, refuses to let anyone into her house, and refuses ever to trust another man, she is crippled. Her attacker raped her once, but she repeats it in her mind every time she lets it keep her locked inside, keep her from forming relationships, and keep her from having a normal life. The only way out for her is to render that hurt incapable of affecting her actions. That is the power of forgiveness. It takes time and it takes effort, sometimes a super human effort, but she must do it if she is not to be raped mentally and emotionally over and over again for the rest of her life. You see? It is forgiveness that frees us.
M: He doesn’t deserve forgiveness.
BJ: No, of course he doesn’t, but that’s not the point. We don’t forgive for the benefit of those who hurt us — in many cases they couldn’t care less — nor do we forgive to excuse the act that hurt us. We forgive to unbind us. That’s what Jesus meant when he admonished us to pray for our enemies, pray for those who have harmed us. Do not pray for justice; that often masks self-satisfying revenge. No, pray for the strength to forgive. In forgiveness we are free. I mentioned my suspicions about the darkness in Brother Abbott’s past. If it is so, then his love manifesting in service is his way to forgiveness. You see? Forgiveness is the pathway to our greater power; one might say forgiveness is the way to God.
In our next interview we approach the Celtic Christian Universalist take on God.
Incomprehensibly, the names and visages of the Founding Fathers are now being usurped by the latest secessionist impulse, that of the so called Tea Party. Every scholar of the colonial era must groan when the names of Adams, Washington and particularly Jefferson, who was nothing if not out of step with his Southern neighbors, are thrown around to justify active rebellion against the Federal government.
 On Sunday I will be indulging in my annual July 4 ritual. No, it is not the barbecue, although that is definitely in the works. It is not fireworks at Lake Michigan, although I will be “attending” via television. No, this ritual is the yearly playing of the film version of the stage musical, 1776.
Having played John Adams in a production of 1776 at the old (sadly defunct) Fort Bragg Playhouse with the inimitable Tom Savini as Benjamin Franklin, way back in July of 1972, I was in great anticipation of the film release.
Comparisons with the stage play are inevitable and I do recall being disappointed in the film version not because of any of the performances, which were impeccable, nor the production values which were astounding but because for some unfathomable reason , a key song had been cut in the theatrical release. Surprising too, because it had been prominently featured in the pre-publicity campaign, I refer,of course, to “Cool Cool Conservative Men.”
“To the right, ever to the right
Never to the left, forever to the right.”
There has been some speculation as to why it was cut, the least plausible of which is pressure from the Nixon White House, but I am happy to say that in the DVD version, the song has been restored. John Dickinson is back in all his acerbic, obstructionist glory. (Historically accurate, no; dramatically necessary, yes.)
We sometimes forget how very unlikely an event it was, this founding of a new nation in so extraordinary a manner.
“Think of it, “ Franklin opines, “It’s never been done before.” And indeed it had not. Never in history a nation been created out of whole cloth based upon a set of ideas rather than by conquest and personality, the pattern of monarchies and dictatorships. The Roman Republic developed over time as did the Greek democracies. Only the United States was created in one fell swoop based on the principles set down by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
The remarkable thing about this treatment of the events leading up to the signing of that document is the way in which the audience is pulled into the drama. Even though we know the outcome from history, during the play we are incredibly in a great deal of doubt about it. It never quite seems the sure thing that hindsight tells is it is. When the whole enterprise hinges on a single Pennsylvania vote in Congress, we hang on the uncertainty of it all. This is very good writing.
Performances are crisp, the pacing is superb, and ,with the restoration of the entire score, the music is stirring.
But, this is not just a review of one of my all time favorite musicals. When preparing for the role of Adams, I was drawn more and more deeply into Colonial history, reading as much as I could both before and after the performances, about just how we defined ourselves as a people apart from the mother country.
 Edward Rutledge (SC) threatens to walk out of Congress over the issue of slavery.
The most stirring and complex song in the score is Edward Rutledge’s rendition of “Molasses and Rum and Slaves,” illustrating the major bit of unfinished business that the Declaration failed to definitively address. Adams knew, as did most of the northern delegates, that if the issue were not resolved, “In a hundred years there will be another major war.” That projection never made it into the finished script because the writers felt, if such insight were given to Adams on stage, “The audience would never forgive us.” Perhaps they were right. We don’t like to believe that any politician could have had so much foresight, but knowing Adams, it is not hard to imagine.
The song also illustrates how the South has from the very beginning been a most tentative part of the union. Legally, they are one with all other states (The Civil War pretty much determined that) but socially and philosophically they are not. Their definition of patriotism is markedly different, perhaps more passionate, but still different. The South’s relationship with the rest of the country has from the beginning had the aspect of a marriage of convenience in which the partners stay together for the sake of the children.
Incomprehensibly, the names and visages of the Founding Fathers are now being usurped by the latest secessionist impulse, that of the so called Tea Party. Every scholar of the colonial era must groan when the names of Adams, Washington and particularly Jefferson, who was nothing if not out of step with his Southern neighbors, are thrown around to justify active rebellion against the Federal government.
The founders, though, tried everything to keep from separating from England because they knew the cost such a move would require in both blood and treasure and there was no guarantee that they would not all be hanged for treason. Only when they failed did they move for independence. President of the Second Continental Congress John Hancock knew that if they did not have all the thirteen colonies in agreement, independence would fail, so he cast the tie-breaking vote for unanimity over the objection of Adams even though a unanimous vote on the Declaration was all but impossible to achieve.
Compromise with the south over slavery was necessary to get the Declaration approved at all. As Franklin admonished Adams in the second act of 1776, “The issue here is independence! Without that, nothing else matters.”
The founders did not see the Declaration and the Constitution as finished and complete. Rather, they were promissory notes which they would have to wait to have redeemed in a future time when the Union could be made more perfect.
In Thomas L. Krannawitter’s marvelous book, Vindicating Lincoln, he quotes the 16th President, saying, “The assertion that all men are created equal was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself.”
Compared to the Founders these latest Tea Party secessionists, rooted in that same southern confederacy that has never felt comfortable with Union, seem like petulant children, high-chair tyrants, who hold their breaths and turn blue whenever they lose.
I assert that there were two Presidents of the United States, and only two, who define this nation: Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. The one presented the challenge that was accepted by the latter with much agony and sacrifice.
It is possible that Barack Obama may be just such another defining figure; he has the intellect, the imperative to invite even his opponents to sit at the bargaining table*, and the “grace under pressure” that is truly statesman-like. He desires to move this country away from the power-driven antagonisms born in the cold war and into a relationship with the rest of the world that is indeed a “community of nations,” what Jefferson spoke of when he wrote in the Declaration :
”When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (Emphasis mine)
So, every year, as part of my celebration of Independence Day, I slip 1776 into the DVD player and sit back to enjoy, to remember and quite possibly to remind myself of just how impossible a thing the founding, and perfecting of this Union continues to be.
*A famous and profound Lincoln quote is: “If I make a friend of my enemy, do I not then destroy my enemy?” And he had a lot more dissension to deal with than Obama.
The twenty was over and above, unasked for, completely voluntary. It made, by association, the other items that he had asked for also voluntary. Not bilked, not scammed, not dodged, but rather a convergence of his need and my charitableness.
 I left the Sears Tower in a bit of a rush. I was already running late for the 5:15 out of the LaSalle Street Station, and I wanted to get home. I was certainly in no mood for conversation.
“Can you help me find a church?” He asked.
At first, I didn’t hear him, occupied as I was with thoughts of home and hearth, and he repeated the question.
“Can you help me find a church?”
Okay, that was novel. I lifted my finger and pointed toward the north. Above, on the elevated tracks, a train noisily screeched around the corner. “Well, there’s one…”
“I’ve tried the Catholic and the Methodist; I been to three churches and they can’t help me because I’m not homeless. I have a place and people with me.”
It sounded kind of fishy to me, but I was intrigued by the uniqueness of his story. I don’t pay for blatant and unimaginative requests for “spare change” or more precisely, “a quarter,” but I have been known to be very generous in response to a good story. At any rate this was a different approach than I had heard before.
“You’re the only one who has even stopped,” he said. “Can you get me some food?”
I was annoyed, I do confess it. I was trying to make the train, but there was something in his tone and the expression on his face that arrested me. He didn’t seem world-weary or resigned to his fate as so many other street people I have encountered; there was urgency and hopefulness in his expression. Of course, that could be because he was a good actor as many beggars are.
“Sure Okay.” I said reaching for my wallet.
“I don’t want money,” he said. “If you can just get me some food…”
“Okay,” I looked around. We were standing outside a Mexican restaurant. “You like Mexican? I can…”
“Naw, what would really be good is some cereal and milk.”
“”No, really, I can get you a meal…”
“Just cereal and milk, that’s all I want, There’s a CVS up the block, I just need cereal and milk.”
I knew I was going to miss my train. This was the worst possible time to be caught by a beggar. I would that he’d just take a ten dollar bill and be done with it, but he asked me to go with him to the store. I sighed, but I also knew there would be another train and I consented to follow him.
I know.
I know.
Some of the biggest scams have such innocuous beginnings and I was wary, I really was.
When I was new to Chicago, freshly arrived from North Dakota, I was a sucker for every sad story and I was bilked out of some major change before I realized that not every beggar on the street whose baby needed diapers or whose boyfriend just threw her out or whose father was trying to kill him was genuinely in need of my help.
But what if this man’s request wasn’t such a scam? I went with him.
When in the store we went directly to the cereal shelf and got two boxes: Lucky Charms and Trix. We also got a half-gallon of milk. And it was then he started upping the ante. There was toilet paper, (“The 24 pack is cheaper,”) a six pack of soap, disposable diapers, baby powder and deodorant, two of each item. (Maybe he’s going to sell one,” I thought. “Hell, maybe he’s going to sell everything.”). He asked each time if I wouldn’t mind…if I could… if I’d see my way clear? And each time, I answered, with increasing resignation “Sure… why not?… go for it…What’s, it gonna kill me?”
If I was being dodged, I was being dodged by a master, and I was beginning to enjoy it. Besides, the items he was throwing into the basket were very specific and bespoke of a man living with a baby who needed the basic necessaries and who had no means of getting them. Am I able to get inside another man’s head to see what his intents are? Can I guess what another man may think? So I consented to each new purchase because, “He may need it and, as I said, it won’t kill me.”
When the basket was full and we went to the check-out, he thanked me profusely and placed the items on the counter. I took out my card, swiped it and keyed in the pin. Then the question came up on the scanner: “Do you want cash back?”
I smiled.
I looked at the items now being packed in the abominable plastic shopping bags and answered “Yes.”
I would take out an extra twenty dollars and give that to him on top of what I had already purchased.
Why? What could possibly have moved me to do that?
There were of course, two reasons, only one of them altruistic. Sure I wanted to help him with any other necessary he might have forgotten or perhaps to get a hot meal for his family, but also I just wanted to let him know that I was no fool.
The twenty was over and above, unasked for, completely voluntary. It made, by association, the other items that he had asked for also voluntary, not bilked, not scammed, not dodged, but rather a convergence of his need and my willing charitableness.
On the other hand, if he was simply trying as best he could to provide a few things for his family, then the twenty was an over and above donation to that end and nothing more.
I did not wait for his response. I handed him the money and made for the door, never looking back.
I made the 5:30 train.
The entire encounter cost me nothing but a little time and about a hundred dollars, neither of which would, as I said, kill me or send me to the poor-house.
Sometimes, you just have to put the ego aside and allow yourself to be swindled if it is clear that the need is real. Yes, I suppose I could have gotten all huffy and said, “Whom do you think I am, a fool, a mark, a patsy? Begone, ruffian before I take my umbrella to you!”
And what good would that have done? Would it have made me feel superior, gratified that I had not been taken in? Would I have chortled on the way to the train, or perhaps, would that man’s face have haunted me all the way home.
“I just need some food. I don’t want money, just food.”
My friend and persona Brother Jeremiah says that people come into your circles for a reason and they may not be dismissed. It is for us, he says, to determine why they are there and meet whatever need may be presented by them.
This I also believe.
I am no angel, mind you, I have ignored beggars before, particularly the career beggars. I have dismissed people quite often when it was readily apparent that they were hustling drug money. I do believe in Darwin, and it seems (sorry, Br. J) that some people are simply destined to fall between the cracks. We can’t save them all, nor in my mind should we. Unlike that dear monk, I am a firm believer in the principle that, barring the presence of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death, we all choose the lives we lead, which is not the same thing as wanting them. Sometimes our fates are fixed by one big decision we make, but more often it is by a succession of small choices, what we do and what we fail to do, that have a seemingly inevitable and cumulative effect. In most instances, that beggar on the street chose to be there.
Even believing that, I yet see the need for charity and a generous heart, but there are still limits.
Rather than giving every one of them a little bit which would be “death by a thousand cuts” to my own personal economy, I have selected “favorites.” Giving ten dollars a week to only one beggar, hoping that others will also have favorites and take care of the rest.
I am particularly defensive about scams by professional, if not so artful, dodgers.
But, sometimes, you have to let the guard down; sometimes you have to allow yourself be “taken” if that is what is in store. It’s not about ego, after all. It’s about need.
Had I not stopped to listen to that man’s request to locate a church that would help the needy which elevated to “can you get me some food” and peaked with a full basket at the CVS counter, my question is, would anyone else have stopped? Would his children have gone without even the simplest of dinners, a bowl of Trix and milk?
I am in no position to answer, but on the off-chance that he was legitimate, I opted for the charitable act.
I could have done no other. I am, after all, most lately from North Dakota.
It cost me so little and probably meant so much to people I will never meet.
Maybe because I actually took the time to learn how to do it right. Maybe it was because when I was dancing with Sharon I wasn’t looking about to see if I couldn’t do better. No! When I was with Sharon, she was the only girl in the world. In the next dance Rose was the only girl. And so it went. I think they like that. They don’t particularly care how many dances you have so long as, when you’re with them, you are really with them one hundred percent an’ ain’t thinking of no one else, see?
 Ignatius P. Kelly outside the Cork and Kerry pub in Chicago. I must say that I am very grateful to Kelly for the things he did for me in college. I was a judgmental fundamentalist prig when we first met. He drank far too much and I didn’t drink at all. He was a notorious charmer and inveterate womanizer while I could barely squeeze out a “hello” in their presence. Kelly took me by the hand and introduced me to the ineffable pleasures of sin, for which I will be eternally in his debt.
It is easy to judge when you do so from the sidelines of life. Kelly threw me into the pool and, although I almost drowned, I didn’t and am better for it.
I have always considered him to be, as Henry Higgins said of Alfred Doolittle, a “most original moralist.” He is apparently amoral but exceedingly ethical. If that makes your head explode, read on. I have asked him to write an occasional article from his perspective and he has agreed. I do, however, have to edit him rather severely. What follows then is an entry from his diaries which he has extracted to explain his views on his relationship(s) with the opposite sex.
So there I was in the Cork & Kerry the other day as usual, sippin’ a pint, and looking over to the loo, contemplating the ultimate fate of all pints, which is about as far into the future as I’m willin’ t’ think about, when my eye was filled with a sight to wake the dead. An incredibly lovely girl walks by me dressed, I swear to St. Bridget, so to inflict upon a man the sweetest of tortures! I mean, she wore this loose-fitting sundress of the most exquisitely flimsy stuff that knocked about her thighs and clung to her body so it woulda warmed the heart of a bishop! Gave me a right proper testosterone rush, that let me tell you!
Of course she was with a fella twice my size and as they say, you should never cut another man’s turf, especially if he can pound you into a bog with just his one free hand. But, that did not keep me from lifting my glass, nodding and smiling at her because, well, it’s what you do and you just never know; there’s always tomorrow. She caught the smile and returned it. I noticed that it was genuine in the way it started in her eyes and then moved down to her mouth. I appreciated the recognition because at my age such smiles are rare from any lass younger than thirty. Aw, I suppose she might have thought me a dirty old man or something, but what of that? You should never miss a chance to appreciate the wonders God put on this earth for our enjoyment and edification; that’s what I think. And, oh Saint Brendan, she was a wonder!
Ah but I do love those of the female persuasion. It has always been so even when I was a tyke in diapers. My first girlfriend was one who shared a sandbox with me when I was two and she could not quite pronounce the word “spoon.” She said “’Poon” in the cutest damned way! I remember wondering just how old she was? She was walking, I thought, so she had to be about a year. Well, that was old enough for me, I’ll tell you. I drew the line at crawlers; other than that I had no preferences or taboos.
As I grew, I had many more girlfriends, at least they were girlfriends in my own mind, Their consent was not forthcoming, so it was a good thing that my imagination did not require it. While other lads were playing football, talking about comic books and generally avoiding “girl germs” I longed to be infected. I loved the way they walked, the rustle of their crisply starched dresses, the graceful curves of their bodies, the glint in their eyes, the way their hair floated on the breeze and flashed golden in the sun, and I especially loved the way they smelled! Ah, sweet Jaysus! I have been known to be carried off into paroxysms of rapture by a hint of perfume. So I sought ways to be near them and touch them and, oh Sweet Mary, smell them!
I learned to dance. Oh I’m not talking about this jumping up and down like a gorilla to the beat of tribal drums, oh no. I learned to take a girl in my arms, press her body into mine and slowly glide her around the floor, eyes locked into hers, for I do believe that the eyes do not lie and there are wonders and eternal mysteries embedded there.
The nuns, of course, stood about guarding their charges’ virtue with their damnable rulers, placed between them and the boys to make sure no real contact was made, but as soon as the ruler was gone I was back, captivated by the movement of her body and the warmth and the feel of her waist beneath my hand.
She knew. She got it, and soon they all did. Girls have this marvelously subtle way of communicating with each other that is a total mystery to men. Pretty soon most of them wanted to dance with me. Why? I dunno. Maybe because I actually took the time to learn how to do it right. Maybe it was because when I was dancing with Sharon I wasn’t looking about to see if I couldn’t do better. No! When I was with Sharon, she was the only girl in the world. In the next dance Rose was the only girl. And so it went. I think they like that. They don’t particularly care how many dances you have so long as, when you’re with them, you are really with them one hundred percent an’ ain’t thinking of no one else, see? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.
 Ignatiuis P. Kelly, bounder.
It was then I learned the dangers of the word, “should.”
“Kelly” I said to myself, “There will always be flesh-bags pumping wind and telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. Don’t listen to them, Mate. Their minds are all filled up with no. I, on the other hand, am filled to overflowing with yes! Yes! Eternally Yes!
One thing I will agree with that pasty moralist Brother Jeremiah on is that everything comes into your circle for a reason. For him, finding that reason is a complex process. Not for me. Whatever comes into my circle, I say Yes! This moment is all I’ve got and I have to say Yes to it or die of regret for the all my days. The sheer joy of a woman’s presence is a delight not to be despised. So Yes, my lovely, I will. Yes, my darling girl, I do. Yes, my dear love, we must! Should a woman offer me her love, is it not the vilest sin to refuse? If God in his or her infinite wisdom lays out such a cornucopia of delights before me, is it not the greatest ingratitude to reject it? I say it is!
Can I get an amen
Can I get a damn straight
Can I get a thanks be to God!
All right then, I suppose that makes me a bounder. Lots a folks say I’m a cad, some may call me a player others call me a lad, but I say life is a banquet what was meant to be explored, sensed, touched and relished. They don’t want a place at the table? Fine, who needs ‘em? Me, I’m tuckin’ in. I ain’t gonna be eighty years old regrettin’ all the things I was too timid or too moralistic to do. Anyone don’t like it, they can just leave me alone. I ain’t for them.
See, there’s women I hear, for some reason or another, who don’t like a man taking such delight in them. I’ll tell you what: A woman of my acquaintance once carried on about an old man at the bar we was in looking at her butt.
“Look here,” I said, “It’s all well and good for you to get your knickers in a twist, but take another look at him. Naw, really look at him. He’s old. The disappointments and failed dreams of a lifetime are chiseled on his face. I ask you, what else has he got left him but his dreams? If he wants to look at you and go home and lay abed with his dreams, how does that harm you?”
Here’s the thing. When I’m eighty and got nothing but dreams, I hope to have filled my brain with enough memories to sustain me all the rest of my days. If anyone should wake me from my dreams and bring me back to my present reality out of some damned notion of its being good for me, I swear I shall be horribly wroth with them, and that surely. Let the old fella look at you and be grateful that you have sufficient charms to fill his dreams.”
I say if God in his or her infinite wisdom has bestowed upon you such wondrous and fleeting treasures that men ache for you and would give all they have for the chance to nibble on your ear lobe for half a minute, is it not the height of ingratitude, the vilest sin to despise the admiration you attract? I say it is!
Can I get an amen
Can I get a damned straight
Can I get a thanks be to god!
Ha! Take that, Sister Sarcophagus with your eight inch ruler.
 Ignatius P. Kelly and friend.
When I was a young man, I only had eyes for the younger girls, and I still get a thrill every spring when they come outa their winter coats like cherry blossoms from their buds. None get offended by my admiring glances anymore because quite frankly I have become invisible to them. It’s just as well, ‘cause although I would not say no to any of them were they to sit in my lap and wrap their arms around my neck, the chances of that happening are next to zero, you know? So, I just look.
I did mourn my lost youth for a bit, but then I said, “Kelly, m’ boy, what is it you always say? “Yes to everything!” Yes, even to wrinkles, bulges and pouches. And the closing of one door has opened another. Y’see, when I was young and feckless, I never noticed older women. I was as blind to them as the young girls are now blind to me. I am delighted to inform you I have found in them a cornucopia of delights even greater than those I tasted in my youth.
Oh, how marvelous it is to moulder!*
The skin may not be as fresh, but is still thrilling to the touch, The hair is a lustrous silver, and I love the way it flashes in the sun. But, mostly it is the eyes, the eyes that never lie. There the greatest treasures lodge. There is wisdom found, to embrace what comes with little or no judgment. There is passion born of hard experience and the certain knowledge that love need not be forever to be enjoyed in the moment. In truth it is so very rare, and so many do without it altogether, that it should never be denied. Most of all there is the certain knowledge that time is a thief and that the chances for bliss may be limited, so it is best to say yes. Yes, my lovely, I will. Yes, my darling, I do. Yes, my dearest love, we must! Always yes, ecstatically yes, eternally yes.
So, I say Yes to them all. Tall, short, lean, plump, all are part of the sumptuous banquet that God in his or her infinite wisdom has laid out before me. Would it not be the height of ingratitude to turn it aside? I say it would!
Can I get an amen
Can I get a damned straight
Can I get a thanks be to god.
* Duke of Argon’s line, said to his friend Reedbeck in the wonderful Christopher Fry play, Venus Observed, “
For, long has he tormented me, this priest, long has he used the powers of earth against me. So shall he endure not, so shall he be obsessed, so suffer, so be tormented. Go thou then, and all those who are without you. Hold a mirror to his face so he can see himself as he is and not as he presumes to be. I conjure you by the Great Living Pan to accomplish my will. So mote it be!
I am at the present time working on transforming an early stage play of mine, which took place in the fourteenth century in France, into a novel, the dialogue of which can be lifted directly from the text and staged as a play. It is a form that John Steinbeck pioneered with mixed results and to which I am, for some unaccountable reason, also drawn. The results are yet to be determined. What follows is an edited version of the prologue:
 The Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was finished at last! It had, of course, been in use for decades, but the final detailing had only been completed within the past year. It was somewhat ironic that the cathedral should be completed at the very time that the influence of the Catholic Church was on the wane throughout Europe and particularly in France. Begun generations before, it seemed, by the time of its completion, almost an anachronism.
By the mid-Fourteenth Century, a new humanism was sweeping out of Cordova Spain across the continent. The age of the great monasteries was over. The rise of the Merchant Class had given the sons of the wealthy more options, and those families were increasingly reluctant to give their children to God, except for the girls, of course.
Father Emile Bergeron tucked his text under his arm and shifted his cassock so it rested more evenly across his shoulders. He lifted the hem and climbed the stairs into the pulpit, not acknowledging the assembled crowd of students until he had laid his carefully copied text in the exact center of the lectern, neither too high nor too low. Brushing a few stray filaments of hair off the paper, he listened as the chaotic roar of hundreds of voices lowered to an uneasy silence, a vacuum which he would fill, after an appropriately dramatic pause, with his powerful tenor voice.
This was his last lecture in a series of six, and anticipation was high. He had, while a guest lecturer at the cathedral, gained something of a reputation for passion and devotion, specifically a devotion to the time honored traditions of the Church in direct opposition to that very humanism which was, he considered, a mortal threat.
“On the Defense of the Holy Office,” he began.
A stir rolled through the hall. Everyone knew what that meant in this most troubled time. This obscure diocesan priest was mounting a direct challenge to the King!
King Phillip thought little of the Inquisition, until one mass burning in the center of Paris. A pestilence had led to rumors that the Jews, the ever-present and often convenient “other” in medieval society, had poisoned the wells. A mob had raided the Jewish quarter and emptied it dragging men, women and children to the Cathedral where every one of them was burned alive.
The Pope disavowed the action saying that it was not officially sanctioned by the Holy Office, but no one believed it and the King didn’t credit it. Even if the Church did not directly condone the burnings, the Inquisition opened the door for them, and it was the influence of the Church the King most desired to curtail. The burning of the Jews gave him just the leverage he needed. Philip reasserted royal power and restricted the Holy Office to those Dominican brothers he trusted and licensed.
From that point on, the Church had to be exceedingly circumspect. Books were published cataloging signs of witchcraft, differentiating them from purely normal phenomena and, most importantly, dictating the methods and procedures to be followed in seeking out heretics and bringing them to justice. Having cataloged the signs of witchcraft, overly zealous inquisitors found those signs everywhere.
Under this cloud, it is easy to see why the Church was reluctant to advance a firebrand like Bergeron. It was enough to give him a temporary lectureship as a sop to his reading public and then send him packing.
Father Bergeron began his lecture slowly, briefly giving a history of the Inquisition, how it was initiated to stamp out the Cathars in the southern regions around the Languedoc. He also talked of the justice of the Inquisition, and the theology behind it, being an earthly reflection of the ongoing War in Heaven between the angels of darkness and the angels of light. Then, having masterfully swept his audience along with him, he came to the main point.
“We find ourselves,” he said, “on the threshold of a new age. Never before, since the birth of our Savior, have the distinctions between the godly and the ungodly, the righteous and the perverse, the virtuous and the evil, been so clearly drawn. We have at our disposal the means to destroy the Devil and his minions forever.
“The horsemen are mounting their steeds, the seven seals are broken and the book of the apocalypse stands open. What power on earth or in Hell can hold us back? All of Europe is answering the trumpet call of the Most High God — save for France.”
And, here was the crux of his argument, one sure to attract attention in the highest circles, for well or ill. It did, whichever, mark him as a man of either tremendous courage or unforgivable foolishness.
Eventually, it could also mark him as a prophet, for in only a few more years, the Black Death would sweep through France, leading many to believe that the Apocalypse was indeed upon them. In those times, he might well have become a flagellant, had circumstances not intervened.
“Our King holds the Inquisition in check, but is he not subject to the King of Kings? Shall all of our sister states earn their rightful place in the Kingdom of Heaven while only France, like unto the foolish virgins in the parable, is found sleeping? Forbid it, almighty God!”
He raised his hands in supplication to the vaulted ceiling. “The time is come for us, here in France, like our brothers in The Holy Roman Empire, to put on the whole armor of God and join in the battle that engulfs all the rest of Europe. We cannot stand idly by while the forces of evil, the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers, heretics, foul practitioners of the black arts, born of pagan gods, remain free to desecrate the very foundations of Mother Church.”
* * * * *
Little light penetrated the depths of this forest, even in the middle of the day, except for here in this clearing. The canopy of Oaks was too thick elsewhere to allow any low-growing bushes or grasses to survive, so the trunks of the trees vaulted, uninhibited, upward like the columns of a cathedral. In fact, the locals had taken to calling this clearing, their “Cathedral of the Seven Oaks,” because of the way the grove of seven venerable white oak trees stood in a large, uneven circle around it and largely defined its boundaries.
 Prologue: From All Things Evil, Illinois State University Theatre, John Kirk, Director.
Here, in a small grotto formed from an outcropping of rock on the Western edge of the clearing, a small fire burned. The woman tending it was disheveled; her hair, which was knotted and tangled with oak leaves and twigs, fell in oily strings around her face and shoulders. Her dress and exposed skin were smeared with the loam of the forest floor. From a distance, it would have been difficult for a casual observer to distinguish her from the forest itself, but there were no casual observers. There never were.
This cathedral belonged, as much as it could belong to anyone, being by virtue of custom a sacred space, to Genevive DeVries, for that was the name of the woman who tended the fire, feeding it with yew and rowan wood and throwing in the incense of rosemary, sage and furze and as she slowly, rhythmically hobbled around the fire in a grotesque kind of dance that would, to that nonexistent casual observer, have seemed more like the loping of a wolf than the movements of a woman.
As she danced, she sang, not loudly as for an audience, but low, like a moan, as for an auditor deep within herself or one hovering close around and above the fire, perhaps hidden in the billows of grey smoke.
“Yod Hey Vo Hey Pentagramaton. Elohim. Adonai. Elohim. Adonai. Spirits above me, spirits below me, spirits encompassing me round about here in this forest, here in this Cathedral of Seven Oaks, attend to me!”
With a small hazel wand, she drew a circle, sun-wise, around the fire and dropped small stones at all the cardinal points: quartz for west, garnet for south, aquamarine for east and granite for north. Then, standing in the southern quadrant of the circle, she drew a small, double edged dagger from her belt and held it high.
“I salute you and conjure you by the air I breathe, by the breath that is within me, by the earth which I touch, and by all the names of the spirits who are residing in you, I conjure you by all the divine names of God, that you send down to obsess, torment and harass the body, soul, spirit and five senses of Emile Bergeron in such a way as he will come to me and do my will.”
She cut herself in the center of her left hand and let the blood drip into the fire. As she sang, repeating the chant over and over to herself, in a tone barely above a whisper, and rocking back and forth, breathing in the incense, a shadow emerged from the darkness outside the eastern quadrant of the circle. The shadow gained form as it approached until it seemed to become a monk, cloaked and hooded in homespun of a peculiar rust color, who stood outside the circle as if awaiting instructions.
“For, long has he tormented me, this priest, long has he used the powers of earth against me. So shall he endure not, so shall he be obsessed, so suffer, so be tormented. Go thou then, and all those who are without you. Hold a mirror to his face so he can see himself as he is and not as he presumes to be. I conjure you by the Great Living Pan to accomplish my will. So mote it be!”
She stopped singing. Raising her eyes, for the briefest of moments, she beheld the figure, now fully illuminated by the fire, nod and walk back into the darkness.
* * * * *
Bergeron paused. He felt he was being watched, which seemed absurd to him, standing as he was in a pulpit in front of hundreds of eager eyes, but this feeling was different. Searching the crowd, he picked out a figure in the back that stood out from the rest. He wore the robes of a Dominican, but also the insignia of an Inquisitor, especially licensed by the King, and it is to be assumed, under the authority of the King.
“The day of atonement is at hand. The Lord shall come in glory to judge the living and the dead, and all the gods of the earth shall be cast into the eternal fire that is prepared for Satan and all his angels. What shall we carry to the Judgment Seat? What words will we speak that will justify our empty hands while the Fathers in all other countries of Europe lay at the feet of the Almighty Judge the fruits of their labors? Shall we not appear like the foolish servant who, when given a good and perfect gift, buried it in the ground? If we allow these Devil’s disciples to practice their blasphemies, must we not share in their damnation?
“I cannot speak for my king, or for my fellow countrymen, but for myself, I am ready to take up arms in the great battle that will cast these heathen gods into the bottomless pit, and prepare the earth for the establishment of God’s holy and everlasting kingdom. I urge you, the students of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, future ministers of Our Lord, to join me in that apocalyptic struggle.”
After the lecture, as he was receiving the deserved adulation of the young men, Bergeron’s eyes searched the hall for that figure he had seen while in the pulpit. He most earnestly wanted to know what the Inquisitor thought, but he was nowhere to be found. Bergeron shrugged. “Another time,” he thought, but it rankled him none-the-less. It was exceedingly important to him to be impressive, to have someone with connections to the Council of the Holy Office in Avignon speak highly of him, perhaps even recommend him.
He shook his head and determined to think on it no more. He had other things to think about, like the long journey back to the Convent of St. Jean Baptiste where he was confessor, and to the small village where he acted as pastor and was the most educated man in the parish.
Father Emile Bergeron was proud. He was an obedient man of God, and so he went where he was assigned, but still, he knew it was in Paris he belonged, at the Cathedral, not just for a week, but permanently. He longed for learned discourse which he knew floated in the air around Notre Dame like a sweet and heady perfume and was there for the breathing.
Ruefully, he packed his few belongings and headed back to the parish of St. Jean Baptiste.
***
Genevive DeVries remained at the altar of the Cathedral of the Seven Oaks, sitting in silence, watching the fire slowly die as the night moved toward morning.
I would advocate that whatever society may define as a marriage, it is really an agreement negotiated entirely by the two people involved. No expectation that is external to that relationship may in any way define that relationship. Society may expect what it chooses; partners may expect only what has been agreed to between them.
 The recent decision by federal judge Vaughn Walker striking down California’s Proposition 8, which sought to limit the definition of marriage to that between a man and a woman, all but requires us to take a long look at what marriage is as well as what it is not in the modern world, particularly in America. Walker concluded that no compelling reason exists to deny marriage to any person because of sexual identification. Well and good. The decision was the correct one.
In the United States, any right not specifically proscribed by law must be assumed. This is the main feature of our constitutional republic that, at its founding, differentiated us from all other earthy powers and regimes. The state cannot grant rights, which are pre-existent; it can only removed or limit them. We need not petition the state for our rights; we need only work to strike down laws that limit them without compelling reasons.
It is argued, by persons on the religious right, that allowing gays to marry will redefine marriage. They maintain there is something sacred about marriage that would be defiled if it involves any union other than that between a man and a woman.
Balderdash! For the present, I maintain, allowing gay marriage will actually strengthen the institution and do far less damage in the short run than heterosexuals have done for millennia. I have addressed this issue before in an article called “What About Marriage Needs Defending?” on this site but perhaps I must revisit at least the conclusions drawn there
1. There is nothing about gay marriage that would in any way make anyone love their spouses less and if it would, then the problem is not one that can be addressed by law. Counseling would be the best course.
2. While it is believed that children thrive best in homes where the marriage is between a man and a woman, the evidence does not bear that out. But, even were it true, there are many situations in which children are not optimally reared, among them are single parent households, households that are in poverty where the basic necessities like medical care and nutritious food are dear, and children reared in dysfunctional homes due to substance abuse. So far, however, having only one parent, poverty and dysfunction are not illegal and these less than optimal marriages are still recognized by law.
3. Among the most egregious arguments is the religious one, that homosexuality is an abomination and gays should not have any rights whatsoever. This is an argument that the law simply cannot address because it is religious in nature and, quite rightly, should be laughed out of court. Religion, like emotion, has no place in the law. Even the proponents of Prop 8 seem to recognize that because this argument was not placed into evidence.
So, how exactly will gay marriage really change how marriage as we know it is defined? We must avoid the tendency to solipsistically assume that the definition of anything is limited only to our experience of it. We may experience marriage as one thing, but if we get past our own narrow worlds, we will see that it is and has been exceedingly malleable as a concept. The institution of marriage has been redefined over the centuries. Heterosexuals have been defining and redefining it like mad architects, adding a wall here an arch there a window over there until the original structure can no longer be detected for all the modifications.
The Christian Science Monitor has an excellent article on the subject. Ostensibly the article is about our changing attitudes toward infidelity, but in exploring that subject, author Stephanie Hanes is compelled to examine our evolving (some would say devolving) notions about the institution of marriage itself.
Traditionally, the single most dominant tenet of marriage is that of exclusivity. “Forsaking all others” is the most compelling of the marriage vows. It does for many couples, in fact, differentiate all other relationships from that of marriage. The key element of marriage is faithfulness.
That’s the ideal.
The article concludes that this most sacred of vows is, and has through time, been more honored in the breech than in the observance. So, if you really want to perceive a threat to marriage, you need look no farther than heterosexuals since, so far, they have had an all but exclusive right to it.
Marriage, as we all know, was instituted as, and has traditionally been, about property; it is most importantly a legally binding contract that entitles the parties to certain economic benefits. Love has traditionally been of secondary importance.
Eleanore of Aquitaine, the wife of England’s Henry II in the 13th century concluded in one of her famous ”Love Courts” that love never survives in marriage if it is ever there in the first place and is, in fact, not essential.
Again, the CSMonitor article rightly states that adultery was defined as sex with a married woman because of the need, under primogeniture, to pass titles and property to one’s genetic offspring. Adultery had no other proscription. In matrilineal societies there is no such thing as illegitimacy because property and tribal identification pass through the mother, not the father. (Note: I do not say matriarchal; there is a difference.)
Victorian men of a certain class, the article goes on to say, also married mostly for economic reasons and, being moralistic gentlemen who didn’t want to taint their wives by having carnal relations with them, were, commonly seen in the company of prostitutes. It was not considered adultery if it was paid for.
That singular custom resulted in some very frustrated women who exhibited symptoms of what came to be called “hysteria” and which was frequently treated by quack “specialists in women’s problems.” The treatment consisted, as has been portrayed in the wonderful film, “The Road to Wellville” as a simple manipulation causing orgasm. Since the treatment was paid for it also was not considered adultery. Obviously, heterosexuals are adept at doing end runs around the seventh commandment.
The proscription against adultery shares space with another interesting admonition in the Ten Commandments, one that may also have a bearing on faithfulness, in general, as an issue. Faithfulness to one’s spouse is equated with faithfulness to God, but there is an interesting incongruity there.
The first commandment says “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Now look at that statement. If exclusivity were demanded, the last two words would be superfluous. He could have simply left it at “Thou shalt have no other Gods!” Period. No wiggle room. But no, the final two words imply “Thou canst have other Gods, see, but none before me. I am the numero uno head honcho Deity and don’t you forget it. Your first loyalty is to me! Got it?”
Well, that seems to be how faithfulness in marriage is being redefined, too. The vow seems to have morphed into a variation of the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no others before me,” as opposed to “Thou shalt have no others.”
So, what would be the ramifications of that sea change in our interpretation of marriage? Hard to say. We have been so long acculturated with marriage as an exclusive bond that it would be hard for us to turn our heads around in only one generation. The article concludes, though, that many in the current generation have an entirely different understanding of marriage than the previous one. In fact, to those acculturated after the 1970’s, marriage no longer implies exclusivity, and is therefore, not quite the compulsion that it was. Many simply eschew the institution altogether favoring more informal promises to each other, to love, cherish and forsake all others by implication rather than by taking a formal vow or creating a legally binding contract.
It may be debated whether such abandonment of marriage is a good thing or not and I don’t plan to address the question here. I only illustrate that marriage is a flexible institution capable of great change and that most changes in it have been effected, for well or ill, not by homosexuals, but by straights.
I would advocate that whatever society may define as a marriage, it is really an agreement negotiated entirely by the two people involved. No expectation that is external to that relationship may in any way define that relationship. Society may expect what it chooses; partners may expect only what has been agreed to between them.
Based on some personal observation and anecdotal evidence, I conclude that gay persons are much more likely to be traditionalists about marriage, it being a brand new “right” for them, than are heterosexuals who have themselves done so much damage to the institution.
So , what argument is left? I will venture to guess that it has far more to do with the territorial imperative than anything else. Heterosexuals have claimed marriage as their exclusive domain for thousands of years and they just don’t want to share their toys. Every other argument such as child welfare or religious proscription, are bogus and should not be credited.
Any law limiting or restricting an inherent right without compelling reasons should, as in the case of Proposition 8, be struck down.
The book is formatted as a series of short stories, each with its own beginning and end loosely related by subject. In fact, the book resembles nothing so much as a shelf filled with photograph albums labeled with the chapter headings and containing old photos, each with its own story.
 Kevin O’Hara’s richly evocative and delightful memoir about growing up in the 1950’s, A Lucky Irish Lad, is pure nostalgia for baby boomers and for others an often hilarious and sometimes heart-rending coming of age story that cannot be confined to any one decade. There are things about childhood, after all, that are pretty Universal.
O’Hara was an immigrant child from Ireland in 1953 when he was “a month shy of my fourth birthday.” His parents, James and Ellen, came to America seeking a better life, and like many immigrants, they found life in America not everything they expected. Intensely religious, his parents insisted on daily rosaries and masses and on keeping every religios feast day, no matter how minor. The simplicity of their faith has a sweetness about it for to them, Jesus, Mary and all the saints were immediate and continuing presences, sources of help in even the smallest of matters. When Ellen put a medal on her son’s cap, there was no doubt at all in her mind that the Blessed Mother would protect him from harm. It would be easy to be cynical about that simplicity, but, while reveling in the humor arising from the foibles of its practitioners O’Hara is never irreverent toward the Catholic faith.
He is also painfully honest about himself growing up as a geeky, awkward kid with a horrible home-made haircut, a phobia of buttons ( which he got over with the help of his high school girlfriend) and a trio of plastic soldiers he called his “martians” that he kept in his pocket for good luck right up until he went off to Air Force boot camp. He was not, admittedly, a good student. His mind simply would not stay in the classroom long enough to get good grades. In spite of his failures as a scholar, he views his career in the Catholic school with great affection and respect for the nuns (well, okay for most of them) who were his primary teachers.
The book is formatted as a series of short stories, each with its own beginning and end loosely related by subject. In fact, the book resembles nothing so much as a shelf filled with photograph albums labeled with the chapter headings and containing old photos, each with its own story. O’Hara points to one of them and out jumps the curious case of the “Shoe-Tongued Glove.” He turns the page and points again and we are treated to the affair of the “Summer Runaways.” Or the one that was pivotal in his young life, “Apparition at the Rail.”
It seems that during one Mass, the priest placed the Host on his tongue rather clumsily and it threatened to fall off onto the floor. Young Kevin knew he couldn’t touch it with his fingers, so he tried to manipulate it into his mouth using his tongue only.
Minutes seemed to go by, as I tried to flip the wafer into my mouth, my head quivering back and forth. Everyone had left the rail and returned to their seats. Behind me I could hear the rustle of whispers from the multitudes, but no one came to check on the spastic gyrations of my noggin … I finally secured the host with my tongue just as Father turned to his flock for the Last Blessing. Startled by my kneeling presence, he stalled a moment so I could turn and make my red-faced way down the center aisle to my pew. But rather than the muffled laughter I expected, I passed through admiring glances and murmuring prayers as I passed. Why, one old woman even reached out and touched the cuff of my pants.”
Yes, as far as the parishioners were concerned, Kevin, lad that he was, had experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin and on the Feast of the Assumption, no less. It was a misapprehension that would haunt him for the rest of his childhood.
His education was typical for Catholic children in the 1950’s; he went to parochial school, which at that time was mostly taught by nuns. There were, of course the usual compliment of ill-tempered sisters who received unkind nick-names from the students. There was “Froggy” with the croaking voice and quick ruler, and “Squeaky.” But, the one nun that stands out in his memory is the one he most admired and the one who never got a nick-name.
Other nuns might make us hear and fear the cloven clatter of the devil’s hooves , but Sister Theresa Gabriel taught us to listen for the whiper of angel wings. In everything.
Sister Theresa Gabriel ”radiated grace” and “long before the Age of Aquarius spoke of auras.” It is she who provides one of the most poignant moments in the book. A good friend of Kevin’s, Alice Stanley, had died some three years before, and one Easter as the nun was leading them in a ritual that consisted in writing wishes on paper and burning them to send their prayers to heaven in the smoke, the nun asked if he missed her.
“I do, Sister.”
“You were good friends, weren’t you?”
“Oh, yes, Sister! I used to call her Alice Palace.”
Sister handed me a second sheet of paper. “Why don’t you write to her as well? She’s surely an angel by now, and the Blessed Mother will certainly forward your message.”
“The Blessed Mother won’t mind?”
“Mind? You of all children asking if Mary would mind!” She rubbed my head playfully. “You might even ask Alice to be your guardian angel. Would you like that?”
“I would, Sister.”…
..One evening soon after, I was rambling down to my grotto by the falls when I had the feeling of being followed. I whirled about but saw no one. “Is that you, Alice Palace?” I called out. No answer… The leaves stirred more vigorously in the light of the setting sun and this light pierced my heart like the memory of my little friend. But there was joy in the wound and the whisper of angel wings all around me.”
I do confess that passage moved me to tears.
Another album he opens is called “Young Loves” and is about the girls in his life. First his best friend Sue Rupinski, who he called Su-Ru, who was the first girl he ever kissed, clumsily, when they were eight and sitting in her plastic wading pool. She laughed at his clumsiness and then taught him how to do it right based on what she’d learned from the television and movies. They later decided that it was best to not complicate their friendship with more kissing and that kind of stuff. There were other girls, of course: “The Radiant Soprano” who he lost due to a little problem he had with faithfulness, and Lily Bridgeford the Baptist who helped him overcome his fear of buttons. But, it was Su-Ru who was his truest pal, who wrote to him when he was a soldier in Vietnam, and was the first to greet him upon his homecoming.
By far the funniest moments are his high school years working as a caddy which introduced him to a life-ling love of golf and to the bumpkins, vagabonds, ne’r do wells and misfits that make up the charming society of caddis who had their own rituals, nicknames and other raucous pursuits. A nick-name given in such fraternities as these will stick for life, and to this day O’Hara is known in some circles as “Shirts.”
I have often maintained that one of the better ways to learn history is through private journals or their more public manifestation, the published memo\ir. O’Hara’s gentle, honest and funny memoir, “A Lucky Irish Lad, is nostalgia for those who were his contemporaries and a delightful window into the past for their children and grandchildren.
Mother Phillip of St. Jean Baptiste sometimes astonished even herself. Almost unconsciously, she had happened upon an argument that would, she thought, affect him. “She won’t reveal who the father is; why, for all we know, she might have been seduced by Asmodeus himself, or any of his demi-devils.
Submitted for your approval is an excerpt from Chapter One of my dramanovella about the Inquisition in 14th Century France. A dramanovella is a short novel the dialogue of which can be pulled from the text and staged without further adaptation.
 Paula McGlasson as the Reverend Mother Phillip from the I.S.U. production directed by John Kirk. The Convent of St. Jean Baptiste was small by almost any standards, its nuns and novices drawn almost exclusively from the surrounding villages, mostly youngest daughters or the homeliest ones who were considered unmarriageable, girls of questionable virtue or those deemed too headstrong and in need of divine discipline…
..Theresa Renault was not one of the headstrong ones, not an orphan and certainly not ugly. It has been said that the young men in the village went into a period of the most profound mourning when she decided, on her own, at the age of thirteen, and with no coaxing from nurse or mother, to take the veil.
The novice, dressed in the dull gray and shapeless smock of her rank tied about the waist with a hempen rope, was busy in the dining chamber of Father Bergeron’s house arranging daffodils on the table, polishing the silver and doing other such domestic duties as were part of her discipline….
.. Theresa absently sang disconnected phrases of old folk melodies, switching from one to another as she worked with no thought at all to continuity. The songs were not nearly as important to her as the singing.
She was interrupted by Mother Phillip, the Superior of St. Jean Baptiste who had come by to check on her progress. “Has Father Bergeron finished confession?” Mother Phillip asked.
The sharpness and suddenness of the question startled Theresa. She was embarrassed to have been caught singing when she ought to have been praying. She was of an age when she believed there was a difference.
“Yes, Reverend Mother,” she stuttered
“Have his things been unpacked and put away?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother.”
‘Good. He has had a long journey back from Paris, and I know he’s exhausted.”
Mother Phillip ran her finger along the table and inspected it for dust, not that she thought she would find any, Theresa was a diligent and thorough worker, more to let the young girl know that she was watching. She allowed herself to smile at the child. “I told him he should postpone his duties until he’d rested, but, of course, he would not,” she said.
Theresa warmed at the attention. Any sign of friendliness from Mother Phillip was golden. “He has the dedication of a saint, doesn’t he, Reverend Mother?”
“You admire Father a great deal, don’t you?”
Theresa was again cautious. One never knew what to make of such a question. “Oh, we all do, Reverend Mother.”
“Is that the reason for the muffled giggling I sometimes hear in the novitiate’s chamber after prayers when you are supposed to be sleeping?” She raised an eyebrow and looked sternly, but not without humor, at the girl.
“Reverend Mother, I…I didn’t know you could hear… I mean…” 
“Oh, Theresa,” Mother Phillip laughed, “I was once a novice, too; and a young girl. Hard to believe, I know. You must remember, though, that Father Bergeron has devoted his life to the service of God. Don’t let your thoughts take you too far, hmm?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. I mean, no Reverend Mother.”
“Oh, I share your admiration for him, my dear,” Mother Phillip laughed. “He is a striking man, for all his years; he wears his age as well as any man and better than most. Would you agree?”
“He has the bearing of a Pericles and the tongue of a Cicero,” Theresa exclaimed, then thought better of it.
Again, Mother Phillip of St. Jean Baptiste laughed. “Well, I’m so glad you are current with your classical studies. I agree, but, for all that, he is a man of God and his dedication to the Church is unassailable. You would do well to keep that in mind, my girl.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother.” And Theresa Renault re-dusted the bookshelf.
Mother Phillip smiled, “However, if he is not more careful with his health, his dedication may earn him an early grave.”
“At this point, Reverend Mother,” Bergeron said entering from the church, “even the sleep of the tomb sounds inviting.”
The Confessor of the Convent of St. Jean Baptiste was no longer the imposing figure that stood above the crowds at Notre Dame. No, in these environs, he looked far more fragile; tall, and exceedingly thin and pale, dressed in a simple black robe pulled over the head and girded at the waist…
…Bergeron was not one of those fortunate few who were educated in the university; his learning had been hard won. He had curried favor with the nobleman for whom his father worked as an overseer. After a long hard day in the vineyard, his father would bring him books borrowed from his Lord’s small but diverse library. His father knew that education was his son’s road out of the poverty into which he had been born, and groomed him for a life in the church…
..Mother Phillip pulled a chair from the table and beckoned him to sit. “Oh. Father! I told you, you should have rested before confession. Three days traveling with a mule train would tax anyone’s constitution. Sit down; I’ll pour you some wine.”
“No wine, for me,” he said as he sat, “I have less than an hour before Mass, and…”
“The fast must be kept, I know. Well, rest then. You really shouldn’t drive yourself so hard.”
“Wars are won by diligence, Reverend Mother, not by indolence,” he said, more to the young novice he’d just noticed in the room than to Mother Phillip. She was a lovely young girl, dark-haired, with smooth olive skin and the palest of gray eyes, charmingly shifting her weight from foot to foot as though dancing.
“I suppose,” he continued to Mother Phillip, “I shouldn’t even have taken the time to go to Paris. My duties here…”
“Nonsense,” Mother Phillip said.
“But, to be invited to lecture at the Cathedral,” Bergeron continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard her, “was an opportunity I simply couldn’t resist.”
Although not looking at Theresa any more, his attention was still on her. To be invited to lecture at Notre Dame was indeed an honor most priests dreamed of, and he hoped the novice was aware of that.
“It means your writings are finally gaining the attention they deserve. How were your lectures received?
“Reverend Mother, I couldn’t begin to describe it! I get down on my knees every day and thank God for the enthusiasm of the young.” He hazarded a glance toward the Theresa. “They may be unschooled and impulsive, but if the future of the Church is in their hands, then I do not fear for its prosperity.”
Mother Phillip crossed her arms and smiled at the priest. “Liked you, then, did they?”
‘I had them spellbound. Ha!” Bergeron clapped his hands and turned his attention back to the old woman. He had focused on the girl as much as he had dared. “I spoke for hours on my defense of the Inquisition alone. I shouldn’t speculate, but I think that lecture may provide the final push to secure my acceptance into the Dominican Order and my appointment as an Inquisitor.”
In fact, part of the reason for his invitation to Paris was the attention he was getting in all quarters. When a man begins to have influence, especially outside the usual channels, the Dominicans take note.
“You will be leaving us, then?”
“If I am accepted, yes.”
“We’ll miss you.”
“The Bishop will send you another confessor.”
“It would be difficult to replace you. The sisters adore you.”
Bergeron was startled. It was almost as if the woman had read his mind. If so, then she must know he was trying to impress Theresa. For what reason, he himself didn’t know, but, he was boasting for her benefit none-the-less and he was ashamed. “Ah. Yes, I heard. Reverend Mother, I needn’t remind you that adoration is due only to God. If I have become a distraction in my parish, perhaps it is time to leave.”
“Come now, you can’t tell me it doesn’t please you…just a little?”
Caught.
“A little, yes.” he laughed. “But then I know its best that I leave.”
“I will pray for you, Father,” Mother Phillip said as she patted his shoulder with a familiarity that made him wince. “It must be difficult for a man of your talents to find himself wasted in a small parish like this one. I do not begrudge you your ambition.”
“Thank you,” he said.
He never knew quite what to make of her. Although seeming to be a friend, there was an ambiguity about her; everything she said could be taken two ways, at the very least. That he always chose the less trusting interpretation said more about him than it did her. Why would she begrudge him anything? She had no hold on him.
“Come, Theresa, she said. “We must leave Father Bergeron alone to prepare for mass.”
Bergeron watched the girl empty the bucket of dirty water out the window and gather up the cleaning cloths. She was graceful, in an awkward, adolescent way, both self conscious and sure of herself, knowing yet ignoring that his eyes were fixed on her every move.
Bergeron spun languidly in his chair toward the older woman. “Reverend Mother,” he said, “I missed one of our nuns at confession.”
“You know their voices so well?”
“There aren’t that many and I have been pastor here for twelve years. Is Sister Constance no longer with us?
She had been expecting the question and was surprised that it still caught her off-guard. “Sister Constance is ill, Father. I have confined her to a cell in the infirmary.”
“Ill? What’s wrong with the child? Nothing serious, I hope.”
“I decided to take no chances. Illness spreads so quickly in a convent…”
“She shouldn’t be denied the confessional. Take me to her.”
Mother Phillip knew it would be unwise for Bergeron to enter the Convent, although, as confessor, it was his right and his duty to minister to the nuns, even when they were indisposed. “You…are tired, Father. Is it wise to expose yourself to…”
“I have administered extreme unction to people dying of the sweat, Reverend Mother. Take me to her.”
It was hard for Mother Phillip to trust. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but something in her soul told her that Sister Constance should be left alone. Yet this priest was insistent, and he had the right.
“Theresa, go on ahead,” she said.
The young girl gathered her things and curtseyed, charmingly, before skipping out the door.
“Why did you dismiss her,” Bergeron asked?
“There is something you should know before you see Sister Constance, something that must not be generally known. She is not ill; that’s the story I have spread about. She is going to have a child.”
“Are you certain?”
“I know the symptoms, Father. She was sick every morning; that first raised my suspicions. Then, when I questioned her about it she confided more to me. Yes, I am reasonably certain.”
“How is it possible?”
“Perhaps it’s easy to forget, but beneath these habits, we are still women, Father.”
“Of course, but … Sister Constance…”
“Has always been …unmanageable; you know that. I have often thought she is, perhaps, ill suited for her vocation.”
“Why?”
“Far too high spirited, asks too many questions. Rules are not sufficient for her; she must have reasons. A proclivity that, while admirable for a theologian or philosopher, is inappropriate for us.”
Mother Phillip was being coy. Of course she believed that questions should be asked, and answered, and that girls, particularly nuns, should be educated, but, there was only so much of her mission she was willing to share with the priests. In her experience, most of them would resent an educated woman in the church. This one might be different, but she doubted it.
Bergeron was moved, deeply moved to hear of the young nun’s condition. He tried not to show it, but he was moved none-the-less. Mother Phillip took note of it. Not that she could make anything of it yet, but she did docket it away as was her custom. Bergeron poured himself a glass of wine, and she took note of that as well.
“Who is the man,” Bergeron asked? “Did she say?”
“No. No matter how much I…questioned her, she wouldn’t tell me.”
Bergeron drank deeply and poured himself another. “Well,” he said, “of course something will have to be done. She can’t remain here as if …”
“Father, I ask you to let me handle this in my own way.”
“What do you intend to do?”
Blast these meddlesome priests! These were women’s matters, didn’t he know that? Mother Phillip walked quickly toward the door. “It is not necessary for you to know. You are, after all, a man, and…”
“And you are of an age that is long past blushes. I know what you’re talking about, I’m not naïve, and I cannot permit it.”
“Then don’t permit it,” she said, turning on him. “Forget it.”
“I will not! Tell me what you intend to do. If you’re thinking of taking the child before…”
“No.” Mother Phillip of St. Jean Baptiste gathered her wits and spoke slowly, hoping to impress upon him that she knew what she was doing. Quite against her intention, she spoke to him as to a child. “The problem is more common, especially among novices, than most laymen, even most churchmen, believe or are willing to allow. Indeed, if I had not known that Constance would surely confess it, I would have never told you. She can remain in her cell until her time comes. I will minister to her myself.“
“And then?”
“Do not press me. If you would not know the answer, do not ask the question.”
“On your vows, tell me the truth.”
“Unfortunately,” she said, “the child will be born dead, and will be quickly and quietly buried.”
“You would kill it?
‘It will be born dead.”
She was prevaricating, of course; it would be born dead, but sooner than was usual. Such are the benefits of Asian Angelica in skilled hands.
“Father, it is the best possible solution. She has no family outside of the convent…no money. She came here a desperate little girl. Perhaps this life doesn’t suit her, but it’s the only life she has, the only life she knows. If there is a child … Where will we say it came from? Did some gypsy pass by the convent in the night and leave it on our doorstep? This is a small village, Father. There will be talk. The cobbler’s apprentice is a particularly close friend of hers and he would not be untouched by rumor. It’s one thing to give a wink and nod to one of the farm girls, quite another … She couldn’t take that.” She paused, hoping for some response. There was none. His face had turned to stone. She straightened her back and said, almost like a challenge, “I have promised to protect her.”
Bergeron looked at her long and hard. “You are talking about a human soul.”
“It can be baptized, if you wish. I can’t turn her out to certain starvation on the outside. Here, at least, she is secure and loved.” She could see she was getting nowhere with him; perhaps, if she tilted on his field. “Besides, how many Templars were killed in Paris, Father?
“They were convicted sorcerers. You are talking about an innocent child.”
“Innocence has nothing to do with it.” She slammed her hand on the table and leaned toward him, eyes blazing. “We are talking about a bastard child born of an illicit union with a bride of Christ!”
Mother Phillip of St. Jean Baptiste sometimes astonished even herself. Almost unconsciously, she had happened upon an argument that would, she thought, affect him. “She won’t reveal who the father is; why, for all we know, she might have been seduced by Asmodeus himself, or any of his demi-devils. Even if that were not so,” and she didn’t believe for a moment it was, “there is enough doubt of its paternity that… In a world made by men, what kind of a life would it have? The child is better off dead.”
“The subject is closed, Reverend Mother.” He saw the light flare in her eyes, but, dutiful child of the Church, she dropped the subject, submitting, at least publicly, to his authority, at least for now.
“Now, take me to Sister Constance.”
Acting Versions of From All Things Evil are available from the author.
I’m not going to be drawn into politics, no matter how hard you try, but as to so called false religions I can tell you with some certainty that there is no such thing. All religions are true, differing only in the cultures that birthed them and the symbols used to express them. The failure to accept that, no, to embrace that is the cause of much pain and suffering today.
After a few articles in which I have published the letters of Brother Jeremiah of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS) I persuaded him, with some difficulty, to sit for an interview. It actually spread out into two interviews. One was conducted in November as the monastery was preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving and the second was in December as preparations for Christmas were underway. A sudden blizzard kept us snowbound for several days during which we passed the time playing dominoes and talking on a variety of subjects. This week he describes Celtic Christian Universalism in as much detail as time and space allow.
 Br. Jeremiah and me outside the cabin he shares with Br. Seamus at the monastery of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS). M: So how would you describe Celtic Christian Universalism?
BJ: With a minimum of furrowed brow. The first word modifies the second and the second the third so the primary description is Universalist. The primary belief is that we are all moving inexorably in the direction of unity, harmony and balance. becoming one with the universe. All the things in the material world that seem to divide us are illusionary.
M: Pardon me but that seems a bit naive. It certainly doesn’t seem unity is the main thrust of civilization.
BJ: Then you’re thinking too small. The greater arc of history bears it out. Practices that were acceptable, even celebrated four hundred years ago are now seen as abominations.
M: Such as?
BJ: Drawing and quartering, for one. And it was just a little more than a hundred years ago that wars of conquest were still the norm. Not so much now. They have to be sold as wars of liberation. See?
M: But even Christianity is divided against itself.
BJ: True. That I identify myself as a Christian is a cultural influence more than anything else. All religion is, after all, cultural, not universal. I was reared as one and that is the cultural imprint I will apply to all of my subsequent experience, using the language and metaphors I’m familiar with. I don’t think I could get away from it if I tried.
M: But you are not a typical Christian?
BJ: No, I guess not typical, certainly not evangelical. Christian Universalism believes that we are all destined to enter Heaven and here I do not mean the infantile Heaven of the primitive religionists.
M: You have said that heaven and hell are created by us, here in this life and we take them with us when we die.
BJ: Our spiritual journey does not end with our temporal life, and it may take some longer than others to get there, some much longer, but we are all destined to get there. We will all eventually break out of the individual hells into which we confine ourselves out of fear and its associated self-absorption and be one with the Universe. “God is One and I am One with God,” you see? It’s a process, not a single “Moment of Decision,” as some maintain. In a marvelous book called “ Conversations With God,” author Neale Donald Walsch puts these words in God’s mouth: “Hitler is in heaven; if you understand that, you understand me.”
M: It’ll take a lot for me to wrap my mind around that. These days even secularists, are quite certain Hitler is in Hell. His name is used to demonize people almost as much as Satan’s.
BJ: Quite wrongly, too.
M: The thought of Hitler’s being in heaven doesn’t seem just considering the evil he did.
BJ: Not justice, revenge motivates that thinking. I think God is bigger than all that.
M: As you say -I have it here- “God is greater than, and inclusive of, all the imaginary constructs humans have ever devised to express God.”
BJ: Yes. You take good notes.
M: The Bible says there will be a division between the elect and the damned for all time; there is no way Hitler is in Heaven! Many Christians honestly believe that they are the only ones who will get there.
BJ: Well, I’m going to say something very controversial here …
M: What, you?
BJ: ..and I hope it doesn’t result in the monastery being attacked by people with torches and pitchforks, but the Bible is the product of a specific culture. It contains the truth, but only after the cultural filters have been made transparent. God does not speak French to the Japanese, nor would Jesus speak to a first century fisherman in the language of the computer age
M: You, a Man of God, attacking the Bible?
BJ: Not at all, I have far too much respect for it, for what it is. I object only the puerile interpretations of it. The greatest attack on the Bible, if you want to know, comes from those who reduce the sublime mytho-poetic truth of the Holy Scriptures to the profane level of mundane fact, mere history. But, poor dears, they are limited by their unwillingness to see. I can’t judge them nor would I take their faith from them. Everyone gets the religion they need.
M: They don’t have the same scruple, do they? The Christian Right condemns other faiths as false religions, even some denominations of Christianity they deem to be false.
BJ: I’m not going to be drawn into politics, no matter how hard you try, but as to so called false religions I can tell you with some certainty that there is no such thing. All religions are true, differing only in the cultures that birthed them and the symbols used to express them. The failure to accept that, no, to embrace that is the cause of much pain and suffering today.
M: At one time in this country it was the Catholics who were the enemy, or the Godless Communists.
BJ: Now it is the Muslims.
M: Where will it all end?
BJ: I fear that if we don’t come to some understanding of each other and an acknowledgement that all these cultural divisions are illusionary we will destroy ourselves from fear and hate. It is all so useless and it must stop.
M: They won’t stop. They are intractable and fortified against any attack by reason and fact. Muslims are being targeted every day, you know that, and it’s getting worse. You yourself are likely to be condemned as a heretic if you don’t toe their line.
BJ: Ha! Light the torches! Prepare the instruments! No, no, I tell you they act out of their own insecurity and lack of real faith. They are revealing nothing so much as their own weakness. Were it not so, would they be so loud?
M: You feel no need to answer them in kind?
BJ: Not at all. I notice that you are goading me into some condemnation of them. The questions you ask seem rooted in your own antipathy toward them than from any real desire to know the truth. But, I won’t condemn them. I won’t return evil for evil, for if I do, I advance the very divisiveness I oppose! Let them rail! I ask you, how in all of Heaven do their actions affect the way we conduct ourselves? If I blame them for my conduct, if I react to them in kind, I give them far too much power over me. I cannot use their bad behavior to excuse my own. This community…
M: You mean the monastery?
BJ: The monastery, yes, this community doesn’t believe in creating or encouraging such division. Unity is the continual focus of our prayers. That’s where my action is, that and the services I provide to the community.
M: Why is a community like this one needed? Isn’t it an anachronism? These days many believe the individual’s spirituality is sufficient and they don’t need communal worship.
BJ: Then for them that is the correct path, but prayer is cumulative in its effect. One may pray alone and direct the universe’s energies in small way, but many people praying together for a shared purpose will be more powerful.
M: If your God is non-theistic, that is having no anthropomorphic qualities either of body or of mind, to whom do you pray?
BJ: Not whom, what. God has no gender or any human quality. The universe has energies, all kinds of energies, moving about doing what energies do. But, these energies may be gathered, focused and directed. If I am filled with this energy, I must find a place to put it if I am not to hoard it and become one of the dark ones. So I focus my mind and spirit toward a certain end, such as creating harmony in a family, peace among ethnic groups, and the like. Those energies move through me, and through us as a community, and are shaped and modified to accomplish those specific ends. Very powerful.
M: Whether your God is anthropomorphic or non-theistic, the effect is the same?
BJ: Absolutely. Prayer works. Communal prayer works better. But, I must say, prayer should never be used to cause harm. Not ever! It works too well.
M: Speaking of group prayer, do your monks and nuns keep the hours as the Benedictines do?
BJ: We used to follow the Rule of St. Benedict rather rigorously.
M: No more?
BJ: No. We were standing in the Commons at three in the morning , singing for Lauds … I forgot what we  The Book of Hours written and illustrated by Sr. Katerina of Varnsgarth, OBS. were singing; it was terrible!. All these bleary-eyed half-dead middle aged croakers barely able to stand much less sing. Well, Brother Abbot stops us and says… he growled actually, “Oh, this is iniquitous! What the hell are we doing here?” And he walked out. and went back to bed! We stood around for about ten minutes wondering what to do and if he’d come back and finally Sister Hermione grunted, “I’m off, then,” and she shuffled back to her bed. Then we all did. From then on we have kept a sixteen hour vigil and have been all the better for it. Look here, Sister. Katerina has worked up a whole new Book of Hours for us. She did the paintings, the illuminations and wrote the meditations. There are eight in total based on the eight annual celtic festivals. Every two hours, the bell rings and we take out our books and read the appropriate meditation.
M: Sister Katerina seems to be the guiding spirit of the monastery.
BJ: Ah, she may well be, and I must say, it causes no end of grief to Brother Seamus, who fancies himself a scholar, you know. Been to the university, he has, Ah,but God does not often lay his hands on those who think themselves most worthy. Sometimes the election rests on the shoulders of a retiring, self taught, hermitic woman with a gift for painting the invisible.
M: Okay, you’ve explained Christian Universalism, how is that modified by the word Celtic?
BJ: You know, so much nonsense has been written about Celtic Spirituality that I hardly know where to begin. Much like all tribal peoples who evolved their societies in the forests amid greenery and abundant wildlife, a world quite unlike the deserts of southwest Asia, as Joseph Campbell quite accurately points out, the Celts grew with the sure notion that the entire landscape, far from being a threat to their existence, was imbued with a divine energy that moves in over under around and through them.
The desert religions developed where the landscape was more hostile and are more likely to view the material world as evil or profane, something to be conquered and overcome rather than lived in harmony with. That may be why those of us rooted in the faiths of the desert, seem not to mind things like strip-mining, pollution, oil spills and greenhouse gas. But to us of the Celtic tradition the creation and the creator are one; you cannot, you can not say you worship the creator and then despoil the land. It’s spitting in the face of God.
A mosque in New York may or may not be a good thing – whatever – it can’t bring anyone back. What we can do is generate understanding by reaching out from where we live. You might be met with distrust or you might be met with relief. You do not know!
Leave that to God.
I must beg your indulgence. I rarely, never in my memory, place two similar articles back-to-back, but I have received another letter from my friend and persona Brother Jeremiah of the of the Order of the Buile Suibhe. He would like me to publish it even though I just published an installment of our interviews last week because he says it clarifies the issue of the Muslim cultural center near ground zero marvelously well for him. So here is his letter, as usual at his request, unedited.
 I greet you my brothers and sisters by the power of that Universal Spirit that is in us and around us this day and for all our days.
I am moved to write yet another letter and I hope you will indulge me. I have been meaning to somehow put together a response from a spiritual perspective to the controversy surrounding the building of an Islamic Cultural Center two blocks from Ground Zero. I was trying to see the points made by both sides and somehow draw to a conclusion that those who oppose the center are really not accomplishing anything more than exacerbating the divisions between all of God’s people. It was a shame, I concluded that the name Cordoba House had been abandoned, for it, together with sister city Toledo, according to author Richard E. Rubenstein in his marvelous book, Aristotle’s Children, was under Arab rule an oasis of reason in a divided and hostile world where Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars met and discussed their ideas freely in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
That was my plan, but something happened that knocked me quite off my message.
I was walking in the garden going over my notes when I noticed Sister Katerina of Värrnsgarth over by her grotto apparently praying. But there was something wrong. She was rocking back and forth as though in the throes of supreme agony or indecision. Whichever it was, I determined I would find out if there was anything I could do.
When I approached her she rose and turned to face me. There were tears in her eyes and her hand shook. That was when I noticed the paper. She held it out to me and I took it.
“Here, read this,” she said. “It’s from my brother and his wife.”
It was a a copy of Newt Gingrich’s article on the Cultural Center and on what it means to Islam. I will not present Gingrich’s argument; it is available elsewhere if anyone wishes to read it. Scrawled across the top of the article were the words, “This is the most clearly stated, sensible, and historically accurate statement that I’ve read on this issue.”
“Well, I said, “it is an opinion…”
“And that one simple sentence impies agreement with everything he said! I read the unfortunate article and was cut to the core! There is nothing in that statement that Mr. Gingrich wrote that is at all useful. I don’t care if the facts bear out his conclusions or not! That’s not the point! It is mean spirited and divisive. It is Un-Christian. It does no good! Oh, it hurts my heart,” she said, shaking her head. She handed me another paper, historian Carl Pyrdum’s response to Gingrich’s distorted history. “It can be so easily disproved. Why does he say such things? Does he not know history?”
“He knows the history, but he is a cynic, he is a politician; he will say what his audience wants to hear to gain political points. He doesn’t actually have to believe it as long as his audience does.”
“Sometimes I despair that we will ever find our way. Even my brother, who I know is more intelligent than that, who I know has so much good in him, is so unaware…..Here. I have written him a letter. Could you help me clean it up? You’re a writer.”
I took the letter from her outstretched hand and read it. I was impressed. There was more passion in it that I would have thought possible from the reclusive nun. I said, “This fine the way it is.”
“No, I don’t want to seem angry and I am angry. Please? Just take a look at it and see what you can do.”
“Of course.”
And she turned back to her grotto. I read her letter again and was ashamed. Here I was setting out all kinds of theological and philosophical arguments pro and con for the Center and Sister Katerina had nailed the real issue in only a few short paragraphs. “When I’ve finished with it,” I asked, “May I send it to my friend in Chicago?” She turned back to me and nodded curtly before continuing her prayers.
Here then, edited for style and tone is the letter she wrote to her siblings:
My dear brother, my good sister,  The hermitic Sr. Katerina can be seen in this photo taken last November in the background filling the bird-feeder. This saddens me so deeply!
This statement by one of our country’s leaders is neither accurate nor is it useful.
How does this propagandized (from both sides) debate really impact our lives except to sow seeds of hatred and fear and diminish our capacity to let God’s Love flow freely.
If I had only one idea that I could suggest, it would be to beg you and your church, and then churches all across America, to contact a mosque in their area and organize a picnic together – share the Love of God together, share different foods, stories and traditions. Everything goes better with food. Discover what there is to love, if not respect, in each other and lessen the fears. Many of their stories would surprise you.
I would urge you, my brother, to discover first hand, not through the all-knowing, self-serving agendas of the media, (again, both sides) why the vast majority of people came here in the first place. They came to these shores, just as Jews, Protestants and Catholics before them. to escape repression and persecution in the Old World. The vast majority did not come here to destroy us. They came for the religious freedom and tolerance that they could not find at home. They came to live in peace and raise families, just like you, without bombs and bullets and fanatics destroying and dictating their lives
We can’t change the past and it’s repercussions. But we can help mold the future through what we do. We must create a dialog with those we fear in the present. I know so many peaceful and grace-filled Muslims. It is pitiful to watch this parroting promulgation of distrust if not downright persecution of them because we fear a few fanatics.
A mosque in New York may or may not be a good thing – whatever – it can’t bring anyone back. What we can do is generate understanding by reaching out from where we live. You might be met with distrust or you might be met with relief. You do not know!
Leave that to God.
I believe that to make the effort would be Jesus’ Love in practice. Yes, it’s difficult and scary. Jesus’ disciples thought His instructions were pretty difficult and scary, too, but they persevered.
If we continue to pass along and give weight to the negativism, it only makes the fanatics right about our intolerance, makes our fanaticism just as bad as theirs. They win.
Prove them wrong.
Your loving sister,
Sr. Katerina of Värrnsgarth, OBS
And there it was. Sister Katerina’s solution. It may seem naïve to some, the simplistic wish of an hermitic mystic, but on closer examination, she may just have something here.
“Come to the table” is a traditional greeting, a gesture of welcome and friendship. We in the church share a communion meal as a sign of our unity. Families gather around the table to express their affection and caring for one another. All the religious rituals ever devised center around the simple act of sharing food. There need be no grand gesture, no treaty or edict, these things mean little to you and me. Let the politicians posture. Let the pundits rail. It touches us not at all. “Come” we say, “Share my bread.”
At the feasting table there are no divisions and insularity is near to impossible.
It is our insularity, after all, that breeds such hatred and distrust as we have seen of late. It breeds narrow mindedness and contempt for that which is “other.” In a wonderful book called Black Spark White Fire author Richard Poe argues that the civilizations from the pillars of Hercules to the Island of Japan prospered primarily because of trade with other cultures, communication with and dependence on the interactions between those cultures. Meanwhile, those tribes in central and northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa were still in the stone ages because they had little or no commerce with anyone but their own kind.
It is not exposure to other cultures, religions and philosophies that corrupts, it is the very insularity, geographical, social and ideological, that truly corrupts through its primitivism.
Sister Katerina is right. Let the politicians do what they will, change happens in small ways. It’s time we all sat down and broke bread together.
Until my next letter I remain ever your humble servant,
Brother Jeremiah,OBS
Every great fortune was made on the backs of the workers, but that same moneyed elite that now owns both political parties needed to insure that the working class did not rise up against them and take their stuff. They did it, ironically, by enlisting the aid of those very workers who were most oppressed by them. Wasn’t that clever?
 When I was heading out to Viet Nam on Christmas of 1971, an Army sergeant told me, “What we are doing over there doesn’t really matter, you know. The villager doesn’t care who runs things in Hanoi or Saigon. “As long as they have their bowl of rice and fish heads, a roof over their heads and work to do, they’re happy.”
At first, I thought that insulting to the villager until I realized that’s what everyone really wants. In the old television series Kung Fu, Kwai Chang Caine says, “A place to be and work to do; what else does a man need?”
It occurs to me that, far from being a slur, regardless of what that sergeant intended, the insight was really a description of Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” in practical terms. We all want a place to be and work to do. It helps if we are able to provide those things for ourselves and our families, and as we celebrate Labor Day 2010, it is good to remember the labor activists of a century ago and the sacrifices they made to ensure that workers were able to provide them through the vehicle of collective bargaining and labor unions. They did it in spite of violent resistance by the moneyed class who really did not want to share the wealth with the “little people.” Today, those little people are protected by Federal law, but I fear there are movements afoot to weaken or dismantle the protections those labor organizers like my great uncle Peter McGuire went to the barricades to achieve.
Whenever I hear one of the working class, from which I came and to which I still belong, fling the charge of socialism at anyone who says the government has a role in serving the people’s greatest needs, I have to wonder what they are really saying? Certainly, given their distrust of Wall Street and the corrupt “Captains of Industry” it would seem illogical for the working classes to oppose taxing them more to provide services to the little guy. How did it happen that they are so willing to work against their best interests and for the interests of the moneyed class?
 John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil magnate and who was at one time considered the wealthiest man in the world.
In struggling to provide the means of a decent standard of living for the workers during the labor disputes of the early half of the 20th Century, union organizers inevitably ran afoul of the “tycoons” who ran corporate America, but the wealthy industrialists could not oppose them on the grounds of redistribution of wealth; most working class people would have agreed with that principle! “By God, it is unfair that John D. Rockefeller is so insanely rich while I am just getting by. Yeah, tax the bastards!”
Well, the said bastards needed to find another way to get the workers on their side against the unions. There was no doubt that many union activists were at least socialist, often communist in their leanings, so the moneyed elite landed on the axiom, espoused by Marx and codified by Engles, that “religion is the opiate of the people,” which in the 19th century was absolutely true of the cozy relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsar, who had their hands so deeply in each others pockets they could tickle each others’ toes. The official churches in the European Monarchies were no less complicit in their fostering the class system. Marx was correct in his diagnosis, although his prescription was seriously flawed.
In America there was no class system per se, but we did have a hierarchy based on the extent of one’s fortune accumulated through ambition, hard work and ability as well as no small amount of guile, avarice and in most cases, ruthlessness. Every great fortune was made on the backs of the workers, but that same moneyed elite that now owns both political parties needed to insure that the working class did not rise up against them and take their stuff. They did it, ironically, by enlisting the aid of those very workers who were most oppressed by them. Wasn’t that clever?
Why did the have nots join the struggle to keep the haves in full possession of their wealth? How did the Robber Barons persuade the poor to betray themselves? I can tell you in two words: Godless Communism
I’ve often maintained that the worst thing that happened to Christianity was Constantine. As soon as he made it the official religion it began to corrupt and serve the ruling nobility and the status quo. The Emperor adapted it’s premices in favor of Rome’s governmental structure, which depended on the very hierarchy and patronage that Jesus most despised. Jesus may have said to the rich young ruler, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor,” (Luke 18:18-23) but the ruling classes translated that as a figurative test of the young man’s resolve and not as a direct order. When Jesus followed that up with “It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdomn of Heaven, they heard that as a literal “needle’s eye” and dismissed it as a figure of speech. (In actuality, some scholars suggest that the “needle’s eye” was a smaller door in a city gate that was used whenever the gate was closed. A caravan camel could not get through it without the cargo it was carrying being unloaded.) Ergo, a man could not get into Heaven unless he was willing to unload all his stuff. See? Everywhere in the gospels, Jesus was admonishing the powerful and comforting the poor. The early church was also highly socialist, a phenomenon I wrote about elsewhere.
If the established churches in Europe and Russia served their countries’ aristocracies, could it also be true that the religious institutions in America served (and continue to serve) the uncrowned royalty that ruled with the pocket-book, buying as many congressmen as they could afford? Oh, absolutely! The moneyed class put it out that Communism/socialism and by extension the Labor Movement, was “Godless.” That message was picked up and carried by most religious leaders.
The seed was sown, Now they could oppose Labor Unions not only on the basis of preserving their wealth but more importantly as a way of defending God, a God they themselves probably didn’t really worship (“You cannot worship both God and Mammon.”) but that was beside the point; the workers did.
From that time to this, it is “Godless Communism” that makes the workers speak out so vehemently against their own best interests. “Redistribution of wealth” and the government’s role in serving the people, which would be supported under any other guise, is vehemently opposed when linked to “Godlessness.”
By the 1950′s it had become part of the American mythos. The television host Bishop Fulton Sheen was adamantly opposed to communism because of its denial of God, and that message was carried into living rooms all across the country. Communism was rarely spoken of without the word, “Godless.”
The beauty of it all is that the people don’t even have to know what socialism and communism is. They don’t. All they have to know is, they’re “Godless.”
The ruse worked. The conflation of Capitalism and Christianity has today become the mantra of the Christian Right. That is why you see so many Christians in the Tea Party brandishing Bibles. If you look behind the façade of the Tea Party you can see there is nothing grass-roots about it; corporate fingerprints are all over it. The Tea Party foot-soldiers are blind to how social programs would actually improve their lives; they are willing to live in abject poverty rather than give an inch to “Godlessness.”
If you ever wondered why their opposition is so entrenched, it is because the tycoons of previous generations did their job so well. Opposing government regulation and federal programs is akin to defending the faith of our fathers. There is and always has been a false conflation of Capitalism and Christianity in their rant. Wealthy industrialists = Godliness; Socialism = Atheism
I shake my head in wonder. Christianity was better when they were being eaten by lions. At least it was pure then, it was genuine then.
It is important that those who are struggling to make life better for everyone and not only for the very wealthy remember that and soldier on regardless of their opposition’ which has always been based on a lie. As far as I can recall, Jesus was all about helping the poor, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and had a great deal of contempt for the wealthy and privileged. “As ye have done it to the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:35, 37, 40)
So, while eating hot dogs and sipping beer this weekend, give a tip of the hat and lift your glass to all those who did not participate in their own oppression, who did defy the American class system, who did march, organize and protest, and who got their heads cloven and lost their lives to provide their grandchildren the standard of living we now enjoy. I also ask that we resist any attempts by the modern day Robber Barons to dismantle our ancestors’ achievements on false and cynical religious grounds. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
I attend fully to the woman right next to me and no other from the top of her crown to the tip of her toes and all points between. For me, there is no world out there apart from her. She has all of myself for as long as she wants it. I watch her. I listen to her. For me there ain’t no one but her. Now, that’s some kind of commitment, ain’t it?
I have received another correspondence from my old friend from Bradley university in the late 1960′s, Ignatius P.Kelly, known simply as “Kelly.”
I was an insufferable prig when we first met with “too many rules.” Kelly took me by the hand and introduced me to the ineffable pleasures of sin, for which I will be eternally in his debt.
I have always considered him to be, as Henry Higgins said of Alfred Doolittle, a “most original moralist.” He is apparently amoral but exceedingly ethical. If that makes your head explode, read on. I have asked him to pull an occasional entry from his diaries covering a variety of topics and and he has agreed. I do, however, have to edit him rather severely. What follows then is an entry from twenty-seven years ago when he was thirty-six, explaining his singular views on commitment in relationships. —– J.Mcguire
 Igntius P. Kelly, Bounder. A recent photo of him at his usual occupation. July 23, 1983
I don’t write in this diary much unless I’m either much moved or very pissed. Today, I’m both.
Y’see, I was in the Cork & Kerry Pub chatting up this incredible looking littlebit last night and was making good headway, if you know what I mean, when all of a sudden like she turns cold and says, “You men are all alike,” she says, “You only want one thing” she says.
“Here now,” I say, “That’s not entirely true. I want a lot of things, that’s only one. Mind you, its right up there in the top ten…five…two…well, okay it’s chief among equals if you want to know. But certainly not the only thing.
Now, up until this point, I thought I was doing okay. She liked me, you know? I know she liked me because of the way she brushed her hair with her fingers and pressed her knee oh so very accidentally against mine. She had this round face with large green eyes and a little dimple on her chin, and her eyes crinkled when she smiled like to drive me quite mad, you know?
So what happened to make her so suddenly cold? I don’t know for sure, but I think it was her girlfriend what was standing right behind her as the girl was turned to face me. But, it was after her girlfriend whispered in her ear that she swiveled on her stool and faced back to the bar.
“What’s my name?” she asked, creasing her eyebrows prettily.
All right, she had me. I hadn’t gotten her name. Well, I figured that would come later. I can’t tell you how many girls I’ve talked with, some all evening, and never gotten around to asking their names. What’s a name, anyway? I had to shake my head.
“And how many girls like me have you chatted up this week?” she says.
So, that was it. I guess, among some types, I have a smarmy reputation. And, I suppose a case could be made for that; I am what some call, “a player.” Not all of ‘em mind it though, you know what I mean?. There’s some what kinda like what my reputation. Not this one.
“How many?”
Well now that was a stumper, let me tell you, and it was really hard to think with her looking at me with those gorgeous eyes and her small mouth with perfect teeth all pulled back into a smile that would make a libertine of the Pope. Now there are blokes who can count on one had the girls they’ve chatted up. Me? I’d be hard pressed to give you a number. I mean it’s not as though I’m keeping a ledger, you know? That would be sick. I started to say, “None like you, darlin’; you’re one of a kind,” but I checked that. Somehow, I don’t think it would’a work on this one. “I dunno”, I answer. A few, a few.”
“Men!” she says with that kind of sniff they have. “Why can’t you just make a commitment to one girl and be done?” She goes off with her knickers in a twist, and later I see her sitting at a table with some boring bean-counter type and him chewing on her neck, clumsily I might say, with no charm or attentiveness to it at all, just kinda slurping like he’s eating sliced melon. And I thought with a smirk, “Whew, she’s in for a night of it, mate and that surely!”
I swear to St. Brendan, there ain’t nothing so annoying as a newly politicized young woman. Be they ever so privileged yet they will find some way to be oppressed ‘cause somebody like this one’s friend told them they should be. Now,this one here looked to be entirely too posh for words, you know. Don’t make a bit if differenc. She’s oppressed. Then somebody writes somewhere that men can’t commit and pretty soon all the young girls are parroting that, and then, what’s worse, they start seeing it in all the men they know. Well, who says commitment means only one thing? Who says it’s only about having one girl and one girl only, I put it to you and I ask it of you?
Look here, I see men committing all the time, can’t help themselves, you know? Most men do become committed husbands and fathers, committed churchmen, committed soldiers, committed baseball fans…you couldn’t stop them from committing if you tried. Ain’t for everyone, but most do.
Instead of saying right out like you were on some mountaintop braying Divine Truth that “men can’t commit,” the right way to say that is “In my experience, men I have known, have chosen not to commit …TO ME.” See the difference, love?
When it comes right down to it, ya gotta ask what exactly is it they’re asking a fella to commit to. Well, if you want to get inside my head and slosh about and throw out whatever it is in there you don’t like, and generally take control of my life like most girls do, well damn! What man in his right mind wouldn’t want to commit to that, right? HA! Not in this life, lovely.
Then there are the issues. Oh, but you do love your issues, darlin’. You got so many issues your issues got issues, you know? And if you can’t find any issues, you bleedin’ make them up! I see a girl with issues, I go the other way. I’m not completely indiscriminate, you know. I have standards!
But, this whole thing with … what’s ‘er name, it got me thinking, you know? What is this commitment? It has something to do with this whole female ego thing if you ask me. Girls like to believe they’re the only ones, you know. Like when you spot them across the room they like to think it is the only time you have ever spotted anyone before and you are so taken by her beauty, grace and charm and all that you will never ever so spot another girl across any other room ever again. They know it ain’t true, but they like to feel it is. I know that.
So, look here, When I’m with a woman, I am committed! I am one-hundred percent committed to her and to no other. One hundred percent present and accounted for. I never think of Charlotte when I’m with Sharon and never think about Sharon when I’m with Rose. Nor, as far as that goes, am I thinking about my day at the office or the film I just saw. I’m not thinking about the kids college tuition or the drain that needs clearing. NO. I attend fully to the woman right next to me and no other from the top of her crown to the tip of her toes and all points between. For me, there is no world out there apart from her. She has all of myself for as long as she wants it. I watch her. I listen to her. For me there ain’t no one but her. For now. For as long as I’m with her. Now, that’s some kind of commitment, ain’t it?
Can I get an amen? Can I get a damned straight?
And I ask you, how many of you well-married girls can say the same thing about your husbands and them all reeking of the kind of commitment what you’re talking about? Are they with you when they’re with you, or are they somewhere else or with someone else or closing their eyes and thinking about some fancy woman? Think about it. Are they?
I am, I suppose, that dangerous boyfriend most girls have in their past and that’s fine with me. Come to think of it, with some of them it ain’t so much in the past, you know. That littlebit sitting at that table might end up marrying the bean-counter what’s licking her ears now (my god! What an amateur!) but, after she’s settled in with him, she’s just as likely to find a dangerous man like me as not. And then she ain’t gonna care a whit for his kinda commitment, you know what I mean?
No, I’ll take my commitment straight on. One girl at a time, an’ each one a queen! And there ain’t nothing to be ashamed about in that.
I.P.K.
Eyeballs to television screens is the name of the game and you do what is necessary to get those eyeballs on you and not the other guy. Ratings, then are slightly misleading and any TV news network bragging about its ratings should not be taken nearly as seriously as they take themselves. I would go so far as to say that truth has an inverse relationship to ratings.
 Host of Comedy Central's Daily Show, John Stewart. On October 30, Comedy Central is organizing a Rally in Washington DC to Restore Sanity to America.
What a wonderful idea! It has been… let’s see, I recall a time…Oh! It must have been some 50 years ago the last time sanity really reigned in America with time out for such aberrations as Joseph McCarthy. Yeah, I remember that time! People disagreed, but they didn’t demonize each other. After 1968, reason seems to have dropped off the charts and polarized politics based on such amorphous terms as “left, right, liberal and conservative” began to dominate the discourse.
This is not to say these concepts were new. No, they date back to Cicero and Cato, and beyond, nor were the arguments and actions lacking in passion and dirty deeds. (Remember Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr? Now there was an argument!) The polarization of these concepts, which are really points on a socio-political continuum and not labels to stick on to individual human beings like name tags, is largely a media phenomenon. I’m mostly amused by the media accounts of the culture wars. To hear them tell it, the country is divided in to armed camps just waiting the word from their leaders to charge into battle against the infidel whatever.
The media particularly electronic media, feeds off of drama, we know that. From the inception of network radio drama has driven them Every television news story is a mini-movie with an antagonist, a protagonist and a strong conflict and it is to the benefit of the “producer” of the story, which is to say the reporter, to make sure the story is dramatic enough to be repeated and not turned into a one-off played at midnight and forgotten. When I was a television reporter I swear I could make a flower show look like a battle for the future of mankind. If that were not so, no one would watch.
Eyeballs to television screens is the name of the game and you do what is necessary to get those eyeballs on you and not the other guy. Ratings, then are slightly misleading and any TV news network bragging about its ratings should not be taken nearly as seriously as they take themselves. I would go so far as to say that truth has an inverse relationship to ratings. The more truthful a station is the fewer people will be watching. Truth is rarely as interesting as high drama and so will not be all that attractive to a population addicted to drama whether in our entertainments or our personal relationships.
That is not to say that they accept what is dramatic as necessarily  Glenn Beck at his media-generated and sponsored rally to Restore America in Washington DC. truthful or reliable.
Seeing it this way, one can say that Public Television and National Public Radio are probably the most truthful because nobody listens and watches except eggheads. In print media, The Christian Science Monitor is the most truthful and its audience is also relatively small. At the same time, the audiences for both Fox News and MSNBC continue to grow among their respective party faithful.
That the national media love to heighten the conflict between the Left and the Right is a given, but it is a mistake to think that the conflict is as intense as the media make it out to me. It never is. The left failed in the 60’s and 70’s because it was all done very badly. Neither the left nor the right should repeat those mistakes. Those of the so called “New Left” (the old left of the 1930’s American Communist party in hippy clothing) opposed the establishment with threats and intimidation, They told their parents their time was over now that the Revolution had come.. The young radicals told the WWII Generation that they would outlive them so they essentially were obsolete. The radicals were a minority, but they were a media phenomenon.
Even so, they had an impact. The New Left expected the conservatives to…what? Pull their forelocks and retreat into a corner? No, surprisingly enough they came roaring back on the coat-tails of Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlaftly. The defeat of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment for those too young to remember or those who have forgotten) was the first shot in the ongoing revival of the right. How did they get so strong? The New Left made them so; it created the Christian Right and now must amend its ways or it will only strengthen it.
Most Americans, regardless of the solipsistic posturing of politicians on both the left and the right, are independent minded and do not care if President Obama is a Muslim or a Christian. The oft cited “American People” believe that the president’s birthplace is a settled fact. What they do care about is their paycheck, their home and their work. The terms “left” and “right” seem almost quaint and anachronistic to the independent, who thinks and decides on issues, not liberal issues or conservative issues, just issues. These people will not be swayed by heightened emotional rhetoric or angry denunciation. To the independent, even the Two Party System we in the media are so enamored of seems antiquated and unable to solve the real problems of the twenty-first century and the new global economy if not the global village. The independent will let the parties fight it out in that little television sand-box of theirs while they themselves go off to another part of the playground.
The independent is liberal on some issues but conservative on others, may be in favor of abortion rights but will also advocate for abstinence in spite of the certainty that it may not be “realistic.” The independent will work for a more responsible public ethos. See? A combination of liberal and conservative opinion.
The independent may favor government supported health care but will demand that it be paid for and will approve it only if it can be proven more efficient than private health care. The independent will not label opposing positions as either conservative or liberal but will be guided by pragmatism.
The independent may favor aid to dependent children but will draw the line when it seems having children as a source of government income is a viable life-choice. In several apocryphal and anecdotal instances, it has been said that very often a father cannot live with the mother of his children because he does not make as much as she can get from the government. One baby is a mistake, they say, two is stupidity, three or more is a lifestyle. The left will disagree. So what? The independent resents paying for that life-style. That is a huge flaw in the system and the independent thinker knows it needs a solution.
These are the people the Left and the Right are fighting over. They are not moved by the Tea Party’s charges because the Tea Party is perceived as a bunch of nut-jobs. To be frank, they are not all that impressed with the left either because the left has been singularly unable to deliver. They are indifferent to ObamaCare because it has yet to affect them either positively or negatively. They are in favor of the Wall Street regulations because they suspect that the brokers are a bunch of crooks who are responsible for their diminishing 401k accounts.
There are many other issues in which the independent will decide not on whether the solution is “Capitalist” or “Socialist,” but rather whether or not it will work.
It has been postulated that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party must come out swinging and use the same nefarious tactics the Republicans are using against them. It has been advocated by people whom I respect, that the Democratic party should use the same dirty tricks and outright lies that the radical right is using to defeat them. Nothing could be further from the truth. To the independent, who is courted by both left and right, it’s just so much showmanship with little substance.
What the Progressives fail to understand it that to the radical right it has never been about truth; it has been about winning, about letting the left know that they are not going away and they will not be dismissed, and they will use whatever means necessary to drive home that point. Should the left adopt the same strategy, the right will be strengthened.
We do not need to silence those with whom we disagree with anything resembling ridicule or dismissal. As Dr. Evangeline Drysdale says in my book The Faerie Circle, You answer bad ideas with better ideas, you counter weak arguments with better arguments and if you do not prevail the fault lies not with your opposition but with you. Retreat. Hone your arguments and try again. What you cannot do, what you must not do, is get down on the same level as those who play dirty. The independent will not be able to tell you apart.
The independent, upon whom both polarities rely, will be most likely to say “a plague on both your houses” and stay home on election day. The Republic is not well served. The independent is most engaged by reason. If there is a flaw in the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party, it is their singular inability to communicate effectively the reasonableness of their policies and so the field is left to the emotionally gratifying but ultimately destructive ranting of the two extremes.
This is why I do hope the rally in Washington DC lead by John Steward and Steven Colbert is indeed a return to reason and not merely a platform for the rantings of the left. If it is such a platform it might be highly entertaining, but not very useful.
In this article I once again return to my faerie tale for early teens, O’Shaughnessey: the Faerie Circle. In this chapter, twelve year old skeptic Margaret McNiell Mahoney, whose father has foolishly stepped into a faerie circle and been swept away, Rip Van Winkle like, to the hill fort ruled by the faerie king Finvarra, walks to her hostess and mentor’s hilltop to think. While not believing the story that her father was taken my faeries, yet she has been taught by her school’s Headmistress, Evangeline Drysdale, to despise no form of knowledge. “I have never known anyone to be corrupted by too much knowledge,” Headmistress said, “but I have known them to be positively polluted by ignorance.” And so the girl is intrigued while still reserving her right to a typically American skepticism. Her mentor, Moira McCarthy, has slipped a steel needle into Margaret’s collar to protect her from faerie mischief.
 No idea too outlandish? No idea too dangerous? What would happen then, if the girl just let herself go, gave herself to her fanciful imagination? “Imagination is the gateway,” Moira had said. Gateway to what?
As she walked toward the hilltop, she removed her glasses and intentionally blurred her vision. To the young girl’s mind, the tree trunks and twisted limbs looked like ancient warriors dressed for battle. The fallen limbs and stones did resemble misshapen creatures and it occurred to her that perhaps these natural formations suggested to her the things she saw in her dreams, much the same way that the shape of a stone formation high above the port of Sligo gave rise to hundreds of stories about an old woman sitting there looking out to sea, in the popular imagination became the Watcher on the Rock.
From some small remote corner of her came the irresistible impulse to dance. She started slowly, stepping lightly through the mist-covered grasses and waving her arms like tree branches over her head and around her shoulders. She thought she heard music rather like the sound of a violin welling up inside her; it had to be from inside her because she could not otherwise place its origin. She began to sway her shoulders and back to the strange rhythm of that music, which rose from her, seemed to be inside her and around her all at once and she gladly gave herself to it. She jumped about, her arms waved, her hair whipped around her face and down along her body as she whirled, leaped lightly and kicked her feet out in front of her. She had danced before, of course, but always hesitantly as though afraid to make the wrong step or an awkward move. This was the first time she felt herself one with the dance, felt the power grow from her center where the heart lies, up through her shoulders and arms, and down through her hips, knees, and toes, and she understood how Fionna Donnelly felt. “They couldn’t tell the dancer from the dance.” She didn’t know how long she danced. Here was no time, here was no place. Here she was alone and free, and touching eternity. A voice said, “The moment had to have been born in Faerie!”
And she stopped dancing. The world came back to her as she knew it and she looked around to find if anyone had seen her acting so foolishly.
After assuring herself that she was indeed alone, that Moira McCarthy was nowhere in sight, she continued walking toward the stump where Moira had sat earlier in the day and where Bobby had sat the night he disappeared. Curious, she gazed at the stump, which seemed to her not at all unusual. It had been carved into a chair by Liam McCarthy and polished smooth over the years by a number of well fed backsides. The tree had fallen in such a way as to leave a tall bit of bark, about three feet high, which formed a kind of back to the seat which had been carved into intricate patterns of circles and intertwined lines, and now that she looked closer, she saw that there were scorch marks in the wood. Reasoning it out as she was taught to do at school, she dismissed a forest fire as no other trees were similarly burned. The fraying of some wood fibers suggested a sudden trauma like an explosion, and the most likely cause was lightening. She nodded her head in satisfaction, having reasoned out the origin of the peculiar stump.
She wanted to sit in it, but was hesitant, afraid of being herself taken away to the underground court of Knockmaa.
“Oh, piffle!” she said, shaking her head. “It’s just an old hunk of wood, nothing to be afraid of.” She turned and sat, holding her breath, scooting back until she sank into the embrace of the hard wood. It occurred to her, looking at it from the inside, that is was rather like a throne, and she allowed herself to pretend, for a moment, that she was a queen. “Off with her head,” she said, remembering the Queen of Hearts’ favorite phrase. She laughed and leaned further back into the stump.
A light breeze blew the mist around her and she watched as it encircled her ever closer until  Margaret is almost taken by faeries in The Faerie Circle by Jeremy McGuire. she thought she heard in the wind the sound of a voice … no, voices, whispering to her, or to each other, she couldn’t tell.
“Pretty human child.”
“So young and sound.”
“Just right for a King.”
“Pity she’s bound.”
“Pretty child, take the bar of iron from off your neck and come with us.”
“Pretty Margaret of the auburn curls, come.”
“See the delights awaiting you in the forest.”
“Follow us under the lake, into the earth.”
“Lord Finvarra wants to speak with you.”
“Come away, oh human child.”
Margaret was startled. She remembered that line from the William Butler Yeats poem she’d read before the trip, an assignment from Mrs. Crumb, the librarian at school, “to prepare you for Ireland.” And, now, Margaret wondered if the poem she’d read suggested those words to her, or did Yeats, having heard the voices himself, put them into the poem in the first place? It was a puzzle, and Margaret did love puzzles. She began to recite it:
Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand.”
And, that was all she could remember.
She wondered why, of all poems, Mrs. Crumb had shown her that one. Margaret had told her she was going to visit a shenache in Ireland, and the librarian had gotten a strange mischievous glint in her eye and took from her shelf a book of Yeats poems.
“Then, you’ll want these,” she’d said with a giggle and a wink, “and, pay attention when you’re there.”
Then Mrs. Crumb had read her the poem very dramatically in a voice that sang while she’d gestured wildly with her hand as though clearing away cob-webs and almost knocked her glasses off her nose:
Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild,
With a faerie, hand in hand…
And Margaret finished it out loud. “…For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…” The breeze stirred the hazel trees and she sank further into the oak stump.
Yes, she was tired of weeping, tired of understanding, tired of her parents unreasonable expectations of her, of La Madeleine Academy for (Exceptional) Young Ladies and its rigid standards and its constant pushing to “compete in a man’s world,” tired of Aunt Maggie’s flakey friends and their pressures on her to “free yourself from conventional and patriarchal linear thinking.” She was tired of everything. If only she could just go away like Daddy.
The voices still called to her and she felt herself dozing. Her head nodded and her hand lifted to the collar where she had placed Moira McCarthy’s steel needle.
“Come away, O human child … for the world’s more full of weeping … weeping … weeping …”
She started to pull the pin out.
“Come away …”
Her eyes closed, a sweet smell of jasmine and sage floated to her nostrils, and she smiled contentedly. She felt the damp mist closing in on her. She heard a buzzing in her ears and gentle music like reeds and bells and the sound of tinkling laughter. “Come away.” In all her life, she had never felt so peaceful. She didn’t know how long she’d sat there; time seemed to stand still. No, it disappeared altogether. “With a faerie hand in hand.” She felt the gentle pull of hands, soft and subtle as a kiss, stroking her shoulders and arms, lifting her out of the chair, and she was glad to go with them wherever they led. Her head was filled with color and light and the sweet sounds of unearthly music, and she laughed with the sheer delight of it. Tears of pure joy squeezed from between her closed eyelids. “Come away, oh human child.”
She started to slip the needle out of her collar,
 One is at first impressed with the very ordinariness of it all. The characters and situations in Chris Binchy’s novel of contemporary Ireland’s young college and professional set , Five Days Apart, seem so commonplace, but then one realizes that it is the very commonness of it all that is the novel’s greatest asset.
The novel succeeds for many reasons, not the least of which is the author’s spot on evocation of a specific time and place: Dublin, Ireland in the nineties. David, the first person narrator, recently graduated from college with a degree in mathematics, is ready to take advantage of Ireland’s new prosperity, while his life-long best mate Alex, still in his final year, can’t quite decide if he even wants to finish college given his poor performance on the exams, or go off and become a film-maker.
Alex is from a well-off family, but is unlikely to add to the family fortune. He is feckless and undisciplined. There are many projects that he begins well and then loses interest in and abandons. This pattern extends to every aspect of his life, including his relationships with women. He falls deeply in love with a succession of them, proclaiming each the love of his life, but he stays with none of them.
The characters appear at first glance to be downright stereotypes. The narrator is an intellectual who has the devil’s own time chatting up women, even those who seem to be interested in him, such as Camille, a girl he meets at a party and simply cannot work up the nerve start a conversation. The problem is, he thinks too much. Quite frankly, for all his smarts, where girls are concerned David is a nebbish.
I had to go after her. I couldn’t let it end there. But she was with other people and what was I going to do? Go up and say, “Hi, I’m David, I couldn’t help noticing you, you’re very beautiful?” “You’re a great looking lady.” “I think we had a real connection?” I’m not an idiot.
Alex, however, doesn’t have the same problem. He doesn’t mind looking like an idiot as long as it works. David observes:
It seemed like it should be a simple thing, the ability to meet somebody and say something normal. To smile and be friendly and maybe even funny. I saw it in Alex from when I met him first. He was fluent, and it didn’t seem to cost him a thought.
That has to be one of the best lines in the book.
David enlists Alex’s help in approaching Camille, and perhaps even putting in a good word, but his friend completely misapprehends the situation and ends up coming on to her himself, edging David out without giving it a thought.
Alex and Camille become “an item.”. David is understandably put out, but good sport that he is, he accepts their invitation to be a fifth wheel in all their adventures and they become quite the threesome., It’s better than never seeing her again, right? Alas, their proximity to him only serves to torment him more.
It was as if I was being taunted by circumstance, as if I was being shown that however much I thought I wanted her, there was room for more. My desire could still be ratcheted up. This is what happened to people who wouldn’t move quickly and say what they wanted. It was how fate showed the indecisive the damage they were inflicting on themselves…
The theme of any book is going to be trite, it can’t be helped, What lifts it out of triteness is the way it’s treated by the author: the form, the language, the intellectual and emotional underpinnings, the texture and detail of the mise en scene and the uniqueness of the otherwise stereotypical characters that make us want to like them. And we do like them, even the charming bounder Alex.
The narrative voice is intimate, excruciatingly so. It whispers in your ear. It gets under your skin and before you know it, you are living David’s his life with him. He describes his dilemma regarding women in words that are as lyrical as a T.S. Eliot poem.
How many others? Beautiful girls or girls that only I seemed to notice. Girls who nearly and almost and might just have, but never did. I never said. I never stopped and asked or told. It might have worked out if I had. I could have been transformed.
We have all been there. David is in a sense representative of everyone who has been ham-strung by his own internal monologues, fears of possible antagonists leaping from possible shadows, haunted by “what-ifs. That’s what makes David’s narration so personal. It is our lives we see in the hapless David. It would be tragic if it weren’t so blasted funny.
In other aspects of his life, quite apart from his failure with Camille, he is far more successful than Alex. He lands a steady job, that suits his risk-averse temperament right down to the ground, and he’s happy to have it This passage reflects with ironic humor the way he defines his situation and, not coincidentally, that of “the new Ireland:”
I felt the joy of the suit. It made me one of a group. An office boy. A date monkey. Nothing to distinguish me from anybody else with an ID on a chain around my neck. I saw my tie on other guys every day, people I have had something in common with to choose the same thing. A shade away from absolute conformity… this new part of town that could be anywhere, with all the languages and the gyms and the coffee cups and juice bars, international short-hand for nowhere.
And this is one of the Binchy’s minor themes. These young people are caught between the traditional Ireland with its; folklore, and its love of words, and the new, more cosmopolitan Ireland, the Americanized Ireland.
Even as Alex rises in the corporate world, enjoying a successful life as a worker-bee, Alex and Camille are not so content. Alex is impossibly centerless and Camille is tired of his free-wheeling attitude. He’s just too much of a lad for her. She wants more. Their relationship is on-again, off-again, and it is during an off moment, with David completely misapprehending the situation, they make a huge mistake that threatens to end their friendships entirely. They sleep together. It is a betrayal that Alex will not soon forget and Camille is not ready to cut him loose. So David is the odd man out.
David throws himself into his work. New business opportunities mean he learns to take more risks, at least professionally and as a result is rewarded with even better opportunities. He is really quite flush. He tries to get away, vacationing in Brazil, hoping to rid his mind of Camille. It doesn’t work. No matter what he accomplishes, he thinks of everything in terms of how it would impress her.
The thing about these love triangles, though, is, they are incredibly dynamic and while relationships might be redefined, they are never really ended. These three people do genuinely love each other and so are willing to put up with, even revel in the complexity, the heartache, the frustrations the frank betrayals and the joys. Chris Binchy has taken what might have been boilerplate and turned it into an honest and compelling portrait of contemporary friendship.
A preview copy of this book was provided to this reviewer by the publisher.
Five Days Apart
Chris Binchy
Harper Collins
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0758229291
ISBN-13: 978-0758229298
I am probably going to anger a lot of people because I am going to point out that the Pro-Life faction and the Pro-Choice faction are each correct ON POINTS but that neither of them is entirely correct. Most of the time we ignore or violently condemn facts that don’t support us and that is ultimately dishonest.
 Brother Jremiah and the author at the monastery last autumn during the first of our interviews. M: Touching upon social questions, you mentioned in your rather harsh article…
BJ: I hope I won’t regret that one, I call it my pressure-cooker letter.
M: A certain amount of indignation is forgivable, given the incitement…
BJ: Forgivable yes, but never ideal.
M: Well, the issue I am about to bring up may require all the restraint you can muster.
BJ: Oh?
M: It is delicate and volatile and one you may wish not to comment on so early in our association…
BJ: You’re going to ask me about abortion, aren’t you?
M: How did you know?
BJ: The preparation. It’s as though you are sliding into the question obliquely, wanting to bring it up and yet not wanting to put me on the spot.
M: Well, you’ve mentioned that you are uncomfortable with politics.
BJ: If I didn’t want to be put on the spot I wouldn’t have become a cleric. And moral issues are often political and where there is a spiritual question to be addressed, I don’t mind.
M: There is perhaps no other issue in American Life that more requires the application of pure reason over emotion than this. Whenever we feel anger, resentment, hurt, fear, vituperation, frustration, angst, fury, choler, or any of a number of feelings that put us automatically into the attack mode, it is wise to perceive these as not useful and set them aside. This issue has become a lightning rod in American Politics precisely because we have allowed it to become primarily an emotional one and have allowed reason to wither into dust. It cannot be an emotional issue.
BJ: But it is. To women, there is no more personal issue than this. I don’t see how you can avoid the emotional. You can’t. It would be unreasonable to expect.
M: But not primarily emotional.
BJ: We have to set emotions aside but we cannot deny them. You are correct, though, that the solution, if there is one, and I’m not all that sure there is, must be rational and include the arguments from both sides.
M: A dialectic.
BJ: If you say so.
M: Well, you know there are in literature three basic forms of conflict resolution: The Zero Sum Resolution in which one side claims absolute victory and the other goes down to defeat, the Disengagement when both sides decide to chuck it all and go have a beer, and the Dialectic where both sides win and both sides lose and in the process create a different thing altogether. The Dialectic is the most satisfying and the most lasting. That takes sound reasoning from people who are not too emotionally invested in the outcome.
BJ: Yes, and to that point let me say up front that I am probably going to anger a lot of people because I am going to point out that the Pro-Life faction and the Pro-Choice faction are each correct ON POINTS but that neither of them is entirely correct. Most of the time we ignore or violently condemn facts that don’t support us and that is ultimately dishonest.
M: The triumph of inductive reasoning.
BJ: Oh if it were only that!
M: There are those of course who maintain that as men we have no right to an opinion…
BJ: Oh, I hear that all the time, and the contention really doesn’t bear up to scrutiny. It is an attempt to close the question without answering it. Ad hominum. It implies that we can have no opinion in any matter that does not directly involve or affect us, and that’s nonsense. The same people who dismiss our opinions on this issue do actively solicit them in any number of other issues that do not directly affect us; that’s hypocrisy. All that is required of a legitimate opinion is that it be researched as objectively as possible and the resulting interpretation account for all of the facts
M: Whew! Have you managed to do that?
BJ: To a point, and after speaking at great length with Sister Katerina of Värrnsgarth, I am satisfied that I have a position that is reasonably valid. Of course, opinion can always be altered when new facts emerge.
M: It may be wise up front to say where you stand and you can illuminate your position later.
BJ; I am not in favor of abortion, and neither is any woman I have spoken to who has had one. It is an emotionally traumatic time for them and they know on some level that it’s homicide. One of these women of my acquaintance, even lights a candle every year on what she believes would have been her child’s birthday in remembrance. Even so, these decisions are not, at least in the early stages of pregnancy matters of state; they should be left to the individual, her physician and her god.
M: Only the early stages?
BJ: In all honesty, the decision cannot be put off until after the last possible moment, which many on the Pro-Choice side seem to desire, because at some point in the pregnancy the state does have a stake in the well-being of the infant, and it has to do, I think, with self-awareness. Birth is not a magical process instantaneously conferring human life; it is quite simply the movement of the child from one “room” to another. At some point the rights of the woman have to be weighed against the rights of the sentient being in her womb. If the pre-born infant has awareness, if it is sentient, then it has to be protected. Now, that is not political; that is a matter of undeniable fact, and you cannot let emotions lead you to embrace the findings of science in one sphere and reject them in another. You cannot deride the Christian Right for ignoring the evidence on evolution and then ignore the evidence regarding human sentience. WHEN the state gains some authority over the infant, and to what degree at each stage in its development, is the sticky wicket. Both sides need to come to an understanding that legal abortion is not to be infringed upon but the Pro-Choice people need to concede that there is a point at which it is no longer abortion but infanticide. The Pro-Life faction, for its part, will have to concede that abortion is not infanticide from the point of conception. As soon as both sides make those concessions then real negotiation can begin.
M: How likely is that? Radicals on both sides are intractable.
BJ: Then, they have marginalized themselves. They have essentially denied themselves a place in the debate. Let them scream ad infinatum; we are fully justified in not listening to them.
M: Wow. Put up your shields, you’re likely to get lambasted.
BJ: Most likely. But, I think if I’m making extremists on both sides angry, then I am very likely approaching the truth. The fact is that it is a genetic human being from the moment of conception. It will never, if permitted to develop, become a newt, or a koala, or a water buffalo. Age is irrelevant to its status as a human being. But, that said, the Religious Right should take no comfort in that concession. Let me set a context here. You told me once about your mother’s choice of hospitals to bear her children.
M: She refused to go to a Catholic hospital because she believed, I have no idea whether or not it was true, but she believed that they would opt to save the baby’s life if if came down to a choice between the mother and the child.
BJ: So the implication was that your mother, who was a very religious woman, would rather the hospital opt to save her over her child. This was when?
M: 1946.
BJ: Way before Roe v. Wade! See, therapeutic abortion even in late term was never fully prohibited when the life of the mother was at risk or on the rare occasions where the infant was so grossly defective that it probably wouldn’t survive. In medical texts of the period exact and detailed procedures were provided for the killing of the full-term infant in such extreme situations. I have seen them. I won’t go into detail here…
M: I’d have to edit it out if you did.
BJ: But it was common knowledge, little spoken of, that such things were done and it was acceptable.
M: Even desirable; the most dangerous thing a woman could do in those days, was give birth. The infant mortality rate was already high, and that gave the unborn a certain expendability in the public’s perception. Unfortunate, even lamentable, but an inevitable cost of being mortal.
BJ: You see, the first thing we have to establish is that these issues are never, and have never been, as absolute as some would imagine or wish. Abortion, in some circumstances has always been acceptable even to the very religious.
M: You’ll never hear that from the Pro-Life groups.
BJ: That kind of absolutism is nearly always wrong
M: You’re sure?
BJ: Absolutely. HA!
M: But, you are talking about an extreme situation. Roe v. Wade opened it up to even non-life-threatening situations.
BJ: Yes, the criteria became more a question of “the greater good.”
M: Greater good?
BJ: Emotional and physical health of the mother, ability to provide for the child, circumstances of conception, any number of reasons why not bringing the child to full term might be desirable.
M: But. these reasons are far too frivolous for the Pro-Life side. What are the points you spoke of on which both sides must agree if the debate is to go forward?
BJ: One: That from conception it is a human life. Two: That we have, on either side, never been averse to sacrificing human life for what we perceive to be the greater good. Three: What is that “greater good “ that is worth the sacrifice?
M: “We have never been averse to sacrificing human life for the greater good?”
BJ: For what is perceived to be the greater good.
M: So, in sum, abortion is the necessary ending of a human life.
BJ: Yes.
M: But, the Pro-Life movement is not correct in calling it murder?
BJ: No. It is the killing of a human being but it is not murder. Unfortunately for them, they have one glaring inconsistency. Many of them, while opposing the sacrifice of fetal life, are quite supportive of sacrificing human life in other arenas as I mentioned before.
M: Human sacrifice?
BJ: What would you call it if you are willing to see your young men and women killed in wartime for some perceived greater good? What would you call it if you are willing to see a convicted criminal executed for another perceived greater good? Is it any different from the Celtic priest sacrificing a human life for a good harvest? In essence, no. there is no difference.
Br Jeremiah will continue on the subject of the acceptable ending of human life, taking into account such things as innocence, suffering and the greater good in a future interview.
I have been called something of an iconoclast. The dictionary defines the word as 1) A breaker or destroyer of images, particularly religious ones that have been set up for veneration, and 2) a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, as being based on error or superstition. Really? Me?
 The author in a disputatious mood. I must confess I am astounded and it is not a common occurrence with me to be so. There are two somewhat related items in the October 15 issue of “The Week,” however, that managed to astound me. At first it may seem that the two articles are unrelated, but bear with me. In concert, they speak to the kind of ignorance that allows ideological solipsism, the belief that everyone in the known universe believes, or should believe, the same things. It is no surprise to me that in our contemporary environment, social and political, that such extremism is not only allowed but highly praised in some circles. I am not speaking of the right, nor am I confining my observations to the left, but to all who would willingly avoid learning what they will not know. On the right it may involve a refusal to learn about the scientific evidence for evolution; on the left it may involve a refusal to learn about the social and ethical impact of religion and its value in the modern world. My position is: ignorance is ignorance and should not be allowed to influence debate.
The first item that caught my attention is drawn from USA Today and alludes to the ignorance that most Americans have regarding the world’s major religions.
Americans are religiously illiterate, said Stephen Prothero. A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has confirmed just how little people in this supposedly pious nation know about the Bible and the tenets of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or any of the world’s major faiths. Of 32 simple questions on world religion, questions as basic as naming the first book in the Bible (genesis), the nation as a whole got only 50 percent correct. That’s an “F” in any school.. Does it matter? It sure does. “Even if religion doesn’t make any sense to you, you can’t make sense of the world without knowing something about the world’s religions … Children who leave school knowing nothing about the world’s religions are not truly educated.”
I agree. I can state unequivocally that ignorance of religion impedes the interpretation and understanding, not only of history but of some of the world’s greatest literature. Who would know the real meaning of Hamlet’s admonition to Polonius, “O Jeptha, Judge of Israel,’ what a treasure hadst thou!…One faire daughter and no more, The which he loved passing well,” without knowing that Jeptha was a Hebrew war lord who promised to sacrifice the first thing that greeted him upon his return from battle if only God would grant him victory. As fate would have it, the first thing that greeted him was his daughter, dancing in celebration of that victory. Upon hearing of Jeptha’s pledge, she mourned her virginity with her friends before submitting to the knife. The power of Hamlet’s insult would be lost upon the reader if that little tid-bit of Biblical knowledge were unknown. Sure, the play might be enjoyed without religious literacy, but would be infinitely richer with it. The works of the greatest nineteenth century novelists like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy would be similarly impeded. It was that, more than anything, that prompted me in my youth to read the Bible all the way through, a thing I did seven times just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
It is not just in the areas of literature and history that ignorance of religion is problematic, but also in the area of contemporary politics. As is evidenced by several in the so-called “Tea-Party” movement, there is a tremendous amount of ignorance among certain Christians regarding their own religion, much less those of other cultures. This is the kind of ignorance that allows the religious right such supremacy over the political landscape. Conversely, the ignorance of skeptics regarding religion makes them impotent in the face of such religious sophistry as is practiced by the right.
I challenge Christians to do as I have done and see if they can come away from the experience still believing in the primitive and puerile form of Christianity that fuels the religious right. I mean reading it straight through, not pausing to cherry-pick what will and what will not be credited like most official denominational “Bible-study” programs do and are less about finding out what is actually in the scriptures than they are about defending a specific established, and in many cases very lucrative, theology. Until they do that, they cannot expect to be taken seriously. Not by me, anyway.
Such selective education among the religious is not purely American, however, as is evidenced by the following extract, also published in “The Week,” about the acceptance of Druidry as a legitimate religion in the United Kingdom”
Official recognition “is but the latest example of how the bedrock creed of this country is being undermined said Melanie Phillips in The Daily Mail. This week the British government decided that self-proclaimed Druids, a “bunch of eccentrics who like to dress up in robes and prance about at Stonehenge, chanting at the sun, belong to a full fledged religion, ,deserving of the “tax exemptions and other advantages that follow.” Why does it bother me? Because what is really being embraced is “the fanatical religious creed of the Left, the worship of equality.” Druidry is simply not a religion. It recognizes no Supreme Being or code of practice. Yet is now accorded the same status in British society as Christianity… If all creeds, however absurd, have equal meaning, then every belief is equally meaningless.”
Okay, there are two points there I want to discuss briefly. The first is that she assumes that to be a religion a system of faith has to have a Supreme Being as a focal point and it also has to have a “code of practice.” Assuming that by “code of practice” she means a set ritual, then it betrays a high level of self-absorbed solipsism regarding her own belief system as well as a profound ignorance of others. To be classified as a religion, she seems to say, a faith has to resemble Christianity in its theology and its rituals.
What then do we do with Buddhism? Is Phillips really suggesting that we deny religious status to the millions of people who practice a religion that has no God? Is she also denying the status of religion to the many Quakers who have no set ritual?
There is also that pesky “zero-sum” assumption that “If all creeds, however absurd, have equal meaning, then every belief is equally meaningless.” Really? Christianity is not very strong if the existence of a bunch of Druids having the same rights can render it meaningless. Is that what she really intends to say? Preposterous!
This is the kind of ignorance that fuels so very much of modern discourse. I am not saying that Ms. Phillips herself is ignorant, but she is at least playing to the ignorance of her readers, those adherents of one religion who accept its tenets without question and will accept no other forms of religious faith as valid.
I have been called something of an iconoclast, which I suppose puts me in good company: Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, Bernard Shaw, and Henry L. Menkin. The dictionary defines the word as 1) A breaker or destroyer of images, particularly religious ones that have been set up for veneration, and 2) a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, as being based on error or superstition. (e.g. a rebel, a radical.) Really? Me?
I take exception to that on one level. I am no rebel. My iconoclasm is of a gentler sort. I have often held that the rebellious heart will never find enlightenment There are, however, ideas and forms of behavior that I have grown beyond. I recognize those ideas as having been useful at one time and I put them on the shelf reverently and with gratitude for their service to me.. An ignorant and childish view of religion is one of those. That they are no longer useful does not mean I have to smash them against the wall.
I rarely take any idea I am told at face value. I take it apart, peel away its layers, extend its implications and evaluate the results of its adoption. (I talk to myself a lot.) Many disastrous errors have resulted from ideas and policies that were good-hearted but wrongheaded. One of these is the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill which I present only as an example but will not go into at any great depth in this article. Had there been more questioning of the party line in that instance, a great deal of personal tragedy might have been avoided.
All I really ask is that we gain some knowledge before we take positions, and that we don’t limit our explorations to what we already believe to be true. My favorite question when confronted with an undeniable truth is “what if it isn’t?” Once taken, a position tends to ossify, to be self perpetuating and defended at all costs. I want a return to reasoned discourse that is rooted in solid learning rather than anecdotal evidence and emotional proclivities. We cannot allow ignorance to lead us.
There are far too many people these days who to not question what they are told but will follow their leaders like lemmings off the cliff. Somehow, we have to regain our ability to first define ourselves as thinking individuals and only afterward take on the labels we are so fond of: Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, etc.
Above all, we have to stop listening to any crackpot with a public forum be it print or broadcast. There are so many ideologues that demand absolute agreement with all their assertions and will not suffer any dissent. Because they have large audiences of similar crackpots, those in power fear them. This is not democracy. We have to question everything, for if we fail to do so, we abdicate our right to be full citizens of this republic.
I am a life-long Democrat,. But even so, I have voted Republican when the Democrat was clearly not the better choice, in direct opposition to the majority of my friends and colleagues. Even though I opposed the Viet-Nam War, I could not bring myself to vote for McGovern in 1968. I held my nose and voted for the better statesman. When Nixon resigned, there were some of my friends who wore tee-shirts with McGovern’s picture on them and the caption: “We were right.” No. They weren’t. McGovern would still have been a disaster regardless of Nixon’s culpability for Watergate. The two were unrelated.
What we need in our discourse today are people who will similarly defy the party line, crash through the established assumptions, break free of the fears that keep them in the political fold. As the Democratic Party lost its moorings in the sixties and seventies, so the Republican Party has lost its moorings today. We need Republicans who will be iconoclasts and abandon their party this one time and vote Democratic. What we do not need are lemmings. We need more iconoclasts.
The rally itself was the real story of course; how 250-thousand reasonably sane people all came together for a party and were courteous and solicitous of each other throughout. Jon Stewart made a powerful statement with his rally and his speech. We do desire that people be civil to each other and aware of when they fall short. We have to know that apology is not weakness and intractability, pig-headedness, is not a sign of strength.
 John Stewart's Ralley to Restore Sanity on the National mall in Washington DC , October 30, 2010. Last week, a group of four old college mates stowed their gear into the back of a Toyota mini SUV and headed down the Interstate to Washington DC to attend Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity which took place October 30, 2010 on the National Mall. Michelle organized it, Gretchen volunteered her car and Tom and I tagged along.
Others have spoken of the size of the crowd, lately estimated at nearly a quarter of a million, its demographic make-up and its demeanor, all of which are astounding. I will speak briefly about that, but I would like also to mention the personal impact of the rally as well as that of the road-trip that got us there.
Why we went is just as telling as the actual event. We are all quite annoyed with the level of debate nationally in this country and welcome any expression of civility as an antidote to the vituperation so much in evidence in politics.
The day began early. On Friday October 29 I was picked up at 6:30 in the morning and we headed out. Virtually everyone in the car was directionally challenged and so we stuck pretty closely to the map. Tom was navigator and Gretchen drove. The plan was to rotate drivers every few hours so nobody felt put upon. That didn’t last long. Gretchen is a marathon runner and quickly got into marathon driver mode. Halfway there, after being asked several times if she wanted to trade off, she determined to drive all the way.
In preparation for the trip, Michelle had put together hours of “road shorteners” on her recorder, I don’t know what kind it was. Fossil that I am, I still call them all “tapes.” But aside from a brief interval listening to a Lewis Black concert, the conversation never lagged. We spoke of current events, our shared college histories in the Theatre Department at Illinois State University, our classes and our teachers, and of our individual lives since college, of careers and marriage, of divorces and deaths, and births.
We got pretty much all the way to DC without a noticeable break in the conversation. In short, we managed to shorten the road for ourselves quite nicely without the aid of electronic entertainments. There were a few annoyances as will happen whenever you put four people together, two male and two female, for a total of sixty four hours, twenty six of which were spent in a space no larger than four by seven feet, but that only served to point out how difficult it is sometimes to keep that whole, you know, civility and sanity thing going on a constant basis. Some things ought not to be expected. We pulled in about twelve hours after we left Chicago, weary but elated, checked into the room and headed out, anxious to explore whatever Washington had to offer.
 Tom. Michelle, Gretchen and me in Chinatown.
DC at night is a wondrous place. We went to the National Mall where the rally was to be held the next day, encountered several others who were also there for the event and taking the opportunity to do a bit of exploring in the quiet of the night before. We were, to quote my wife when she saw our pictures, “like a bunch of kids.” Yes we were – impetuous, frivolous, joyful, flirtatious, fun-loving kids. I cannot remember the last time I did something so impulsive and crazy and it felt really, really good. I don’t think I could have chosen a better group of traveling companions than these four.
The rally itself was the real story of course; how 250-thousand reasonably sane people all came together for a party and were courteous and solicitous of each other throughout. Jon Stewart made a powerful statement with his rally and his speech. We do desire that people be civil to each other and aware of when they fall short. We have to know that apology is not weakness and intractability, pig-headedness, is not a sign of strength. Much has been written about the rally itself, the entertainment, the agenda, and the message, but as I said the real story was the crowd, not Stewart. In many ways, Stewart was a catalyst; he made it happen, but what exactly happened was up to them.
There were the usual anti-right wing posters (“Glenn Beck, show us your high school diploma,” “Ruly Crowd,”) and a few snarky jabs at Sarah Palin, as well as general humor (“My comedy channel is Fox News; my news channel is Comedy Central”) but Stewart never picked up on that rhetoric, much to the disappointment of some media observers; he was way too savvy. Had he called out Beck or Palin, or any other specific entity, that would have been the story on the six o’clock news, and he knew it. He wanted the story to be “We are all Americans and it’s about time we began to treat each other with respect.” In other words, stop the insanity.
And about 215-thousand people came out to agree.
Stewart asked the crowd not to litter, and on the way out after the rally many people were seen policing the area of even week’s-old trash and depositing it in cans. Not only did they not litter, they cleaned up Glenn Beck’s mess. (Not really. His rally was at the Lincoln Memorial a mile away, but I can’t resist a good metaphor.)
After the rally, we college mates did what everyone does when they come to Washington DC. They go to the Lincoln Memorial. I don’t care how many times I see that statue and read the words carved on the sides of the building, I still choke back a tear. Here was a man who, in the face of a wrenching Civil War was able to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all,”a warrior who was able, once the enemy was vanquished, to heal where he had wounded. There is a lesson for us all. It was Lincoln, after all, who said in answer to all those who wanted vengeance, “If I make a friend of my enemy, do I not destroy my enemy?” As punctuation to the festivities, I could have come up with nothing better.
 I finally visit The Wall.
Then I finally, after several decades, got to do what I came to Washington for. I went to The Wall.
I served in the Army during the Viet Nam War. I lost friends in the Viet Nam War. I had been to Washington several times but had never been to the Viet Nam War Memorial commonly known as The Wall. As we left the Lincoln Memorial, I slowed my pace. I knew there was a reason I had never been here. I didn’t really know how I would react. I was preparing myself for what I knew would be a difficult encounter for me. I first saw the statue of three soldiers that faced the wall and as I studied them, so many memories of friends and comrades came to my mind. Then I walked to the wall and started to read the names, randomly, for it didn’t really matter whether I knew them or not; it didn’t really matter if I found my friends or not. In this place they were all my friends. Each name was an individual with hopes and dreams and a life unfulfilled. The words of Wilfred Owen’s poem came to mind:
For of my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now, I mean the truth untold
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will grow content with what we spoiled
Or, discontent, boil bloody and be spilled.
They will be swift with the swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks though nations trek from progress.
I choked up several times but I did not weep. Mostly, I felt sad. “What a waste!” I said to Gretchen who stood beside me as I touched the granite. “For what? For an illusion of fear.”
 Memorial to the Viet Nam War Nursing Corps.
I ended up by myself looking at the statue of the nurses which I found most poignant. One was looking toward incoming medevac choppers, another was tending to a wounded soldier, but it was the third who arrested me most. She was looking down at a steel pot helmet that she held in her hands, symbolic of all the soldiers who never made it home. What was in her face? Certainly nothing so transient as mourning. No, there was something else. I knelt to look more closely at her face and would have stayed for hours there but my companions were getting restless and I knew I could not be self-indulgent. It wasn’t their war; it wasn’t their experience. And so I left, promising to come back at a later date when I could stay in her company a little longer and perhaps thank her more appropriately for her mysterious response to that empty helmet.
We went on to see more sights, but those three things burned deeply into my mind. Stewart’s speech, Lincoln’s admonition, and the Wall. They are related. Truth be told, we make far too many enemies and our fear keeps us from making of them our allies and friends. Blind, unreasoning, yes, insane fear. And we send our children to war because of it. I can understand a war being fought for oil; wars have always been fought over resources whether land or gold or seaports. But a war fought over something so amorphous and insubstantial as fear? Oh, that is iniquitous!
We came to Washington for a rally to restore sanity because if we don’t there will be other wars and other sacrifices to our illusions. And we must be mindful that it is not just the responsibility of our leaders to be civil, courteous and solicitous of each other, it is our responsibility as well. Incivility is only possible if the culture supports it, so on all levels, we have to strive to be aware of what we do, how our actions affect others, how our words may be hurtful. It has often been said that we get the government we deserve; I would maintain that we get the politics that we allow.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind being married someday except for that phrase, “forsaking all others.” Now, I bet you most blokes say that with their fingers crossed … What if, instead, the phrase was “above all others?” Ah! Now there’s a vow I can live with.
An old friend of mine from my youthful days at Bradley University in the late 1960’s has recently reconnected with me. His name is Ignatius P. Kelly. I am very grateful to Kelly for what he did for me. I was a judgmental fundamentalist prig when we first met. He drank far too much and I didn’t drink at all. He was a notorious charmer and inveterate womanizer while I could barely squeeze out a “hello” in their presence. Kelly took me by the hand and introduced me to the ineffable pleasures of sin, for which I will be eternally in his debt.
I have always considered him to be, as Henry Higgins said of Alfred Doolittle, a “most original moralist.” Although he seems amoral to the casual observer, he is exceedingly ethical. What follows is an entry from his diaries which he has extracted to explain his views on fidelity.
February 15, 1975 Snow and cold. Very cold.
 Alter ego Ignatius Kelly, Bounder. Some days it ain’t easy bein’ me.
A little more than a decade ago, the Rat Pack was in Vegas, Bond was on the big screen, and Kennedy was in the White House; it was a great time to be a guy! Ah, those were the days! Women didn’t have so many bleedin’ issues. Thing about issues and women is, if they don’t have any they’ll dig deep until they find them and if they can’t find them they’ll make ‘em up! Ain’t worth a fig, I say! Those issues keep you from living your life to its fullest and life is way too short for them, especially the made up ones.
See, I approached a particularly lovely girl yesterday at the Cork & Kerry long toward nightfall and told her that even across the room I was quite taken by the “delicate molding of her lovely face, like a porcelain doll, and the grace of her hands.” That’s just how I said it, too, all poetic and stuff.
Now, some blokes say they notice the eyes first, a pleasant enough lie, but with me it’s the hands. Perfectly sculpted hands she had, gently tapering into the most exquisitely formed fingertips held up just so, with a gentle curve like she was resting her arm on a pillow; she was grace personified, and I was struck. Well, anyway, I says to her…well, I just told you what I said to her … and her back gets all stiff and her eyebrows meet and she says, “You can’t say anything about me except how I look? What a superficial pig!”
Well, okay, maybe she didn’t have as much grace as I thought – a classic case of false advertising.
Well, excuse me, but what am I gonna say to her, “From all the way across the room I could see what a deucedly attractive little brain you’ve got?” Sorry, Luv, but your looks is the first thing I notice and if you get put off by someone commenting on them, then I’m not sure I want to spend a lot of time with you anyway. Too bloody many issues.
Now, if they was real issues, I might understand it, but I tell you there is nothing more annoying than a newly politicized young woman. See, what all those outside issues will get you is small minds and pinched faces and far too much harrumph in your voice.
Then she says, “I know about you, Ignatius Kelly. Not only are you shallow and conceited but you’re a player, a bounder, all charm and smooth talk, but you can’t be trusted farther than tomorrow, completely unable to commit or be faithful.”
I see the FemNet has been active.
You know, as much as I love them, I have to admit that I find women, in the main, to be meddlesome, quarrelsome, arrogant and judgmental and that’s a fact. How men act is judged by how women act, and that’s not quite right, you know.
Now, I do admit that I’ve always had a problem with what they call faithfulness. I learned early on that if I commit to any one girl, it ain’t going to last very long. Another one comes along with a dazzling smile and flirty eyes and I’m gone. I can’t help myself. So, I don’t make any such commitments. See, I am in many ways, about the most faithful fella you’d ever want to meet, I really am, the way I use the word. Keeping faith means you keep your promises, pure and simple. It don’t mean nothing else. Now, I’ll never make a pledge I can’t fulfill one-hundred percent, paragraph and line. That’s faithfulness, isn’t it? ‘Course it is.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind being married someday except for that phrase, “forsaking all others.” Now, I bet you most blokes say that with their fingers crossed. I guarantee it because the truth is three quarters of them ain’t gonna live up to it and they know it going in. An’ about half of the women don’t stick to it, either. Yet they still promise it right there in front of God and everybody. Now, me? I know that’s a promise I ain’t gonna keep, so I ain’t gonna make it in the first place. Now, ain’t that some kind of faithfulness? What if, instead, the phrase was “above all others?” Ah! Now there’s a vow I can live with. But realistically, I doubt that any woman would agree to it.
And what gripes me is the ones who think just chatting them up and taking them home for a little snugger is the same thing as a promise even though nothing like a promise has passed my lips. Or, they think that if you’ve taken them out a few times they have rights. They start having these relationships in their heads that they forget to tell you about. I say, “Look here, girl, as much as you can hold me to any promise I make, you can’t expect what I’ve not agreed to. That’s the way it is with me.”
Well, this girl puts her nose in the air and puckers her lips like this, see? And she says in that whiney voice they have, “I’ll bet you get slapped a lot.”
“Never,” I say, “Because I slap back.”
“You pig!” she says.
Look here, women sometimes think they have a right to slap a man for any reason whatever. Girl gets offended? Slap! Man says something she don’t like? Slap! Man doesn’t keep a promise he never made? Slap! And men have been taught to just take it, like it’s normal, you know? You see it all the time in the movies and on the telly and nobody says a word about it, yet men may not strike a woman under any circumstance. Well, I think that’s rubbish. Men don’t deserve it any more than women do and no one has the right to hit another person and that’s that. So, don’t slap me unless you want to be slapped back and that’s all I’ll say in the subject.”
“Oink, oink!” she says wrinkling her nose and sneering.
“You know what?” I say, “I don’t believe in that word, ‘Pig.’ It’s a politically motivated slur that only the female half of the population believes. So I suppose you could say it’s only half true. Then again, it’s an insult, not a compliment, one half of two possibilities so the truth of it is cut in half again. Now it’s only a quarter true. I’m just one-fourth of a pig and I can live with that. Right you are! I revel in my one quarter swinishness.”
She rolls her eyes and excuses herself to go to the loo. I don’t see her again. It’s all right. No big loss. Her issues will get in her way every time.
Y’see, I have one rule. Just one: “Have fun and don’t hurt anybody.” Of course sometimes people get hurt, but you ain’t responsible for that even if you cause it. Everybody’s responsible for their own feelings, I say. Main thing is you got to fill each and every one of your moments because they never come around again; life’s too short to let your issues hold you back. When you’re on your deathbed you are going to say one of two things, it seems to me. You’re either going to say, “Damn! That was a good time,” or “Jaysus, my life sucked!” Now, who but a ravin’ lunatic would pick the second one?
The story line is a simple hero’s quest. Having heard the Ban-Shee wail in the middle of the night, Bobby seeks to save the life of his little sister who has fallen ill with the scarlet fever. To do so, he must accomplish several tasks. O’Shaughnessey is both facilitator and opponent of the quest. “It is refreshing,” says one reader, “that the leprechaun isn’t always right, not even about his own faerie world. Sometimes, Bobby proves him wrong.”
 “Bobby Mahoney awoke one morning to find a leprechaun sitting on his bedpost. Now, to you or me the sight of a leprechaun on our bedposts might be a little disconcerting, but you understand Bobby had just awakened from a dream in which he’d been sucked down the bathtub drain and attacked by the evil green creatures with large noses that lived there. He had just gotten up enough courage to smack one of them sharply on the nose when he woke up.
“It is easy to see, then, why the sight of a leprechaun on his bedpost did not at first concern him much.”
There is high flying adventure in the children’s novel by Chicago’s Jeremy McGuire, O’Shaughnesey: A Boy and his Leprechaun, but there are also important lessons about love, courage, truth, self awareness, the value of material things and the importance of family, even when that family is broken by divorce. The Story is precipitated by the divorce of young Bobby Mahoney’s parents. Everything seems to bother the seven-year-old, especially his creepy five-year-old sister, Maggie. Early on in the story we see clearly how the divorce has affected the boy when his father comes to take them to the State Fair. In a remarkable feat of verisimilitude, McGuire captures, as one reader put it, “The way people really fight.”
Daddy knocked on the front door. It seemed strange for him to knock. Only four months ago, he would have just opened it and walked in.
“Bobby, would you get that?” Mother said, still wiping Maggie’s chin.
Bobby ran to the door and opened it. There stood the tall, skinny man that once had been as familiar to the boy as a soft, faded pair of jeans. Now he was quickly becoming a stranger with the same forced enthusiasm as an uncle.
“Hey, how’s my boy?” Daddy said, reaching down and hoisting Bobby into the air. “Wow, are you ever getting big!” Daddy always said that. “Gonna be a match for your old man someday soon.” Bobby hugged  Bobby's father arrives to take his children to the State Fair in this pen and ink illustration by the author.
“Hello, Del,” Daddy said flatly.
“Bob.” Mother smiled, but it wasn’t real. Mother and Daddy weren’t ever real anymore when they were together. “Here they are, all scrubbed and fed and raring to go.”
“Good,” Daddy responded. There was an awkward pause. “How you been?”
“Fine,” Mother answered. “The check came just in time. Thank you.”
“There’ll be bigger ones, and more regular, now that I’ve got a new job.”
Bobby felt uneasy, and Maggie tugged at Daddy’s pants-leg. “Let’s go,” Bobby said.
Daddy looked down at Maggie. “And, here’s Maggie,” he said as he lifted her to his shoulder.
Bobby wondered why Daddy was so surprised. “Of course it’s Maggie,” he thought. “Who’d he expect, Daisy Duck?”
“Now, I’ve fed them a good breakfast,” said Mother, “Don’t go stuffing them with a lot of junk at the fair.”
“I think I still know how to take care of children, Del.”
Bobby mumbled, “Daddy, let’s go.”
“You children have a good time with your father,” Mother said, “And Bob, make sure you have them home by six o’clock.”
“I know the rules.”
Mother huffed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “I just meant I didn’t want them late for dinner.”
It is on this very morning that a leprechaun appears, sitting on Bobby’s bed post. In the ensuing action, the boy learns that he really does love his sister, he doesn’t have to take sides between his parents, and that he has more power over his destiny than he ever could have imagined. It is a power that the leprechaun, O’Shaughnessey, calls, “the gift.”
“Not everyone can see leprechauns,” the little fellow tells the boy, “and not everyone can see the good in everything no matter how ugly a face it wears.”
Although the story does teach, it is primarily and entertaining read. Children from ages eight to fourteen, and adults as well, have thrilled to the adventure of the little boy who flies in the leprechaun’s magic tricorn hat to the deep woods where the crusty, anti-social O’Sullivan lives with his hoard of gold, to the cave of the Ban-Shees and the Mountain of Shadows where is housed the dreaded Coach-a-Bower, the Deathchoach. McGuire weaves the invisible world of the leprechauns seamlessly with Bobby’s real world, each influencing and being influenced by the other.
McGuire does take a few liberties with traditional Irish lore surrounding leprechauns. They are solitary creatures eschewing any commerce with humans, while O’Shaughnessey is a rather dapper fellow who actually seeks them out. O’Sullivan, though, is a much more dour fellow who wants little or nothing to do with “the creatures,” no not the best of them.
Some have said that “O’Shaughnessey is an imaginary friend dreamed up to help Bobby cope with the stresses of his situation. Others just as adamantly assert that the leprechaun is real. McGuire is happy with the ambiguity of it and won’t say one way or the other.
“All I will say is that the leprechaun only appears to Bobby in the half-light times, at dawn or at twilight, when Bobby is either waking or going to sleep. Make of that what you will.” But, he adds, puckishly, “No Irishman would ever say that what is imagined is not real.”
The story line is a simple hero’s quest. Having heard the Ban-Shee wail in the middle of the night, Bobby  Bobby Mahoney flies in O'Shaughnessey's magic tri-corn hat to the cave where the ban-shee's dwell. seeks to save the life of his little sister who has fallen ill with the scarlet fever. To do so, he must accomplish several tasks. O’Shaughnessey is both facilitator and opponent of the quest. “It is refreshing,” says one reader, “that the leprechaun isn’t always right, not even about his own faerie world. Sometimes, Bobby proves him wrong.”
At one point, the leprechaun, frustrated with Bobby’s ignorance of what is and is not possible, yells, “If we were to meddle with the laws of nature like that, the whole fabric of the universe would unravel by the pulling of that single thread. Stars’d fall from the sky, mountains’d plunge into oceans, planets and moons’d tumble and turn over each other like the potatoes in one of Kelsey’s stews, and isn’t he the worst cook ever to set spoon to kettle?”
Bobby eventually has his way, though, and those laws of nature are shown not to be so intractable after all. Fate can be altered. It’s a pretty good lesson in how much power the individual, even one as small as Bobby, has when faced with all but insurmountable challenges.
As is true with most writers, McGuire put a great deal of his own life into the story of O’Shaughnessey. His own father left his family when he was two years old and he never saw him again. “Oh, I definitely felt the absence, there’s no use pretending otherwise,” he says. “It would have been nice if my parents had been able to be friends, but it was not to be.” When asked if the story is entirely autobiographical, he grins, “Oh, absolutely. There’s not a false thing in it.” Then he pauses and cocks an eyebrow. “Well, okay, except for the leprechauns, the Ban-Shee and the Death Coach. Other than that, it is all true, every sentence of it. Mostly.”
The story does have a definite period feel to it. It is firmly rooted in the 1950’s when McGuire grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. Bobby and his sister Maggie, however, are modeled on his own children. “I draw from all over,” he says.
McGuire wrote the book while teaching at North Dakota State University in Fargo. He had conducted several workshops in children’s literature and creative drama with his wife, Linda, who taught in the public schools. After crafting puppet shows, a children’s television program and several short stories, he decided to try his hand at a novel for children. For his subject, he chose a leprechaun he had invented while a student at Lenape High School in Medford, New Jersey.
“I was known,” he says, “not only as the guy who drew cartoons for the school newspaper, but also as the guy who has a personal leprechaun names O’Shaughnessey. He was modeled on Barry Fitzgerald. I’d say, ‘Don’t sit there, you’ll squash O’Shaughnessey.’ I was such a nerd! They were very kind to me and I didn’t get beat up nearly as much as I could have.”
Writing for children wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. “Oh, the story went down many, many false paths,” he says. “It wasn’t until I found the ‘voice’ of the story teller, it wasn’t until I ‘heard’ him tell the story in my head that it really started to happen. In this case, the voice was that of Father Duddleswell from the BBC series, Bless Me Father. When the voice fell into place, the story wrote itself.” Then began the part that McGuire finds most exciting: “Re-writing!”
McGuire also drew the pen and ink illustrations for O’Shaughnessey. It took so long to complete the book because he had to teach himself the rather unforgiving medium. For inspiration, he looked to the Nineteenth Century work of artists like Sidney Paget and Sir John Tenniel, both of whom he considers “gods.” He is also inspired by Edward Gorey. “Pen and ink is a natural medium for me,” he says, “I love the tedium, the meticulous cross-hatching and the detail. It’s kind of meditative; the world has to slow down for it.”
O’Shaughnessey: A Boy and His Leprechaun is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and for bookstores, Baker & Taylor
The name of the Chicago store was in the beginning is now and ever shall be in my mind Marshall Field’s. I swore when they changed the name that I would never shop there again and I have not. Not only have I not bought anything there, I have not even entered the door for fear of “M”-word contamination. As far as I am concerned, Macy’s Chicago does not exist.
 An old and venerable Chicago instutution, Marshall Field's, which will never ever be Macy's! The Friday after Thanksgiving is reputed to be the busiest shopping day of the year because everyone starts their holiday gift-buying. Last year at about this time I wrote about how our family has opted out of the Christmas shopping madness in an article called “Broke-A** Christmas.” But the beginning of the commercial frenzy leads us principled Chicagoans of a certain purist bent to wonder once again, “What are we going to do with that foreign body, that canker on the bosom of Chicago commerce, the M-word store that occupies the building that once housed that venerable Chicago landmark and indivisible part of Chicago history, Marshall Field’s?”
They said I would get used to the M-word. They said that like a step-parent I would grow to accept it and love it. They said that eventually it would become as beloved a part of the Chicago cityscape as was its predecessor.
They were wrong. They were horribly wrong. I have not gotten used to it. I will not accept the reality of it. Marshall Fields is not Macy’s. It never will be.
Ever.
In any universe.
Now, I realize that some people have gotten over it and have no qualms about spending their money in Mac …er…the M-word. They are practical, pragmatic and decidedly unromantic. Well and good. That’s their decision and God bless them for it.
I won’t.
Ever.
See, I just took a walk down to State Street and looked at what passes for a holiday display in the store’s windows. Totally lame. Not at all what they were long ago when the Chicago company owned it. You know, the Chicago company, Marshall Field’s? Remember them? The hub of Chicago’s renaissance after the Great Fire, a Chicago landmark owned by one of Chicago’s own historic giants? Yeah, that store, the one that people seem to have forgotten, relegating it to the moldy dust-bin of history as if it were not true that all we are today is the result of all that we have been. Our history matters!
Walking along the sidewalk looking at the Marshall Field’s window displays used to be a family affair, a greatly anticipated part of the holiday experience. You would bring your children to see marvelously mechanized depictions of stories like “A Christmas Carol” or “The Night Before Christmas” beautifully designed and meticulously wrought, calculated to bring “oooh’s” and “aaah’s” from both children and adults alike.
Now, that’s all gone. It’s all so “Ho-Hum!” And a bit of Chicago’s traditions and its heritage are gone with it.
These displays mounted by the M-word by contrast, look like a collection of weebles. Like I said, totally lame.
 The M-Word window display. Why bother?
“What’s the big deal?” you ask. “Hardly noticeable,” you say. Well, they rarely are noticeable, are they, these little bites taken from our civic body over time, but before you know it we aren’t Chicago any more.
I shopped at Marshall Fields, but I refuse to shop at the “M” word. That’s a New York company. Marshall Fields is Chicago. Period. They could have kept the name, but Nooooooo. They had to put their New York stamp on it.
“We are the borg; resistence is futile.”
I absolutely and unequivocally reject the New Yorkization of Chicago. Chicago is not New York. For those unaware of the differences, let me point out that Chicago is a Midwestern city, a working class city for the most part a friendly and inviting city, an unpretentious and approachable city. New York is the city with no foreplay.
You see, I think it was the M-word’s corporate arrogance I most objected to. I understand that had it not been for that New York store Marshall Field’s would have, Like Carson’s, gone out of business. I can appreciate that. But even so, they did not have to be so aggressive, tactless , dismissive, disrespectful and …well, New Yorkish! Had they kept the name as “Marshall Field’s, a Macy company” that would have been all hunkey-dorey. That would have been respectful of an honored past. But, they didn’t. They thought that just because they had lots of money to throw around they could stomp on the historical landscape of Chicago with impunity. They obliterated a good bit of Chicago’s heritage, and the name of one of the foundational figures of the city without blinking an eye and that I will not forgive.
Corporate arrogance is corporate arrogance and I don’t distinguish between the different manifestations of it. It is, in many ways just like the attitude that fuels the creeping Wal-Martization of the American Landscape. A corporation with enough money thinking it can go into any region or any city and change everything from its character to its economy, swallowing up local businesses like a malignant cancer, forcing residents who used to own their own shops work at Wal-Mart for slave wages, and changing forever the identity of the towns they infect. Corporate arrogance. Resistance to it is a principle I will not give up.
Also, more locally, there’s US Cellular buying the naming rights to that huge toilet bowl that was built on the south side to house the White Sox. What hubris! I could have accepted it if they had named the park after someone who had something, anything, even the remotest connection to Chicago baseball like, you know, Charles Comiskey who actually owned the White Sox! But no. U.S. Cellular came prancing up with baskets filled with cash and had its way with a Chicago tradition. And the Sox were perfectly willing to let it. Again, it was a case of stomping on the historical landscape of the city with impunity. (Well, at least we don’t have to endure the indignity of playing in Minute Maid Park!) To me, it is not US Cellular Field. It is and ever shall be Comiskey Park.
Wrigley Field was named for William Wrigley Jr. who actually owned the Cubs, and if they ever, EVER sell the naming rights and change it to, I don’t know, Macy’s Field, I will finally, at last and irrevocably give up on the Cubs as well. It’s the same principle that makes me dismiss any notion of Macy’s ever replacing Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I must say here, though, that I hold nothing against New York as a city. It is a magnificent city. I love it. Only this amoral New York corporation is the villain in this. Some say that they loved shopping at Macy’s when they lived in New York and didn’t find them at all offensive. Yes, well shopping at Macy’s ISN’T offensive and can be a pleasurable experience … if you live in NEW YORK! That’s where it rightfully belongs, not on State Street in Chicago, thank you. It’s presence in the Marshall Field’s store is an abomination rivaling the seven plagues of Egypt, one of which, you may recall, was a swarm of ravenous New Yorkers.
With briefcases.
The name of the Chicago store was in the beginning is now and ever shall be in my mind Marshall Field’s. I swore when they changed the name that I would never shop there again and I have not. Not only have I not bought anything there, I have not even entered the door for fear of “M”-word contamination. As far as I am concerned, Macy’s Chicago does not exist.
For me.
And never will.
This might conceivably lead to some awkward moments. A friend and I might be walking down State Street in front of the M-word some day when the following exchange would occur:
“So I’m going to stop in here for a minute.”
“In there?” I say. “Okay, I’ll just go across the street to that other store, you know, the one that actually exists and meet you there.”
“Really? Seriously? You’re not going to come in with me?”
“Where?”
“Macy’s.”
“Macy’s? Macy’s? Macy’s? Well, I’d love to, darling, but I’m afraid we wouldn’t get back before sundown. It’s a long way to NEW YORK.”
At which point I will be accounted either an incurable romantic longing to restore the glorious past of a great city or a hopeless, unrealistic and impractical wacko. I can live with either.
Until that villainous and arrogant New York corporation sees the error of its ways and changes the name back to Marshall Fields, Macy’s will still be to me the black, slimy, oily behemoth blob, the malignant leviathan, rising from the east to descend upon Chicago and absorb and devour a piece of our soul.
Happy Holidays.
Laureen had begun to notice something in her daughter that disturbed her. She seemed to have forgotten how to play. Headmistress Evangeline Drysdale was first to notice. “It isn’t easy being a Golden Child” she’d said to Laureen, “When you are as smart as Margaret is, accomplishments are taken for granted that would be praised in other girls. Much is expected of her. She is afraid of being wrong, takes getting less that an ‘A’ on her assignments personally and that makes her less able to take chances. She needs to take it all less seriously. She needs to play.”
 The Faerie Circle cover illustration by the author. by author/illustrator Jeremy McGuire about the intrepid leprechaun, O’Shaughnessey, takes up where the first left off, that is, with the young protagonist Bobby Mahoney grown up and with children of his own. As is usual in the growing up, Bobby has lost the ability to see leprechauns and is only faintly aware of ever having had it.
McGuire says he didn’t intend to write a sequel to the successful “O’Shaughnessey: A Boy and His Leprechaun” but people kept asking about it. “I believe that if a sequel cannot be as good or better than the original, it’s best to leave it alone.” But despite his protestations the contrary, there was obviously the nagging suspicion that there might be more to the story. He knew that it would involve the children of the seven year old boy from the first book, and eventually he settled on only one of them, twelve-year-old Margaret McNiell Mahoney. “I Knew this much,” McGuire said, “Bobby had lost the gift of seeing leprechauns and I knew he would get it back but if he did, it would be through his own children.”
The title of The Faerie Circle comes from the main action of the story. Bobby, desperate to regain the Sight and having been told not to step into a circle of mushrooms, does, and is whisked away to the Court of the Faerie King, Finvarra, where he is kept as a husband for the princess. Circles of mushrooms, called Faerie Circles or Faerie Rings, have long been reputed to be gateways into Faerie.
McGuire says that If you were to substitute “The Sight” for something like “hopes, dreams, and the childlike ecstasy of discovering the world as if for the first time, of finding out who we are and what we were put on this planet to do, then you might get some idea of the main theme of this book. Bobby has lost it in the growing up and takes a trip to Ireland with his daughter, to study folklore and to get it back if only he can put his finger on what that is he’s lost.
 Margaret travels to the farm owned by the Shenache Morira McCarthy in a traditioinal jaunting car.
“Margaret will have none of it.” McGuire says, “She is, after all “the brightest pupil at the La Madeliene Academy for (Exceptional) young Ladies and has no room in her life for such silliness as leprechauns and faeries’ The leprechaun O’Shaughnessey has persuaded a reclusive shenache (storyteller) named Moira McCarthy to take the visitors in, hoping that Bobby may eventually be able to see him again. Moira however, is, also, a “guardian of the Invisible World.” Many there are who want to have commerce with the faeries and it is she who either allows it or sends them on their way depending on their motives. This is another of the themes in the story, McGuire says, how improper it is to demand what is not given. “It’s the difference between the American and the European way of thinking. Americans tend to be more commercial, even in the realms of the imaginative, the emotional or the spiritual. If they take the time, trouble and expense to go to Ireland to see faeries, then the faeries had darn well better show up or they’re going to want their money back. They might even sue.”
Moira is suspicious of the visitors…until, that is, she is introduced to Margaret. She recognizes in the young girl a kindred spirit with a latent Sight that is greater even than her father’s, for once having given up the Second Sight, it never comes back entirely. While Bobby is engaged in gathering folk tales in the town, Moira and Margaret tend to the farm. Margaret quickly adapts to the hard work and the total lack of modern conveniences like running water, electric lights and television. As time slows down, she is at first bored to death, and then intrigued as she begins to notice things that she had always been too distracted to see before.
McGuire says that is another point of the story. “How we distract ourselves with external entertainments, how we schedule and plan all our children’s time so they don’t have the freedom to explore who they are.” This theme is exemplified in a portion of the book that addresses Margaret’s status as the brightest pupil in the intermediate class at her school: “Laureen had begun to notice something in her daughter that disturbed her. She seemed to have forgotten how to play. Headmistress Evangeline Drysdale was first to notice. ‘It isn’t easy being a Golden Child’ she’d said to Laureen, ‘When you are as smart as Margaret is, accomplishments are taken for granted that would be praised in other girls. Much is expected of her. She is afraid of being wrong, takes getting less that an ‘A’ on her assignments personally and that makes her less able to take chances. She needs to take it all less seriously. She needs to play.”
 Moira tells the stoy of The Watcher on the Rock Above the Sea on Margaret's first noght at the farm.
All the while they are working, whether hoeing cabbages, gathering eggs, or washing laundry in a hand cranked machine fashioned from a whiskey barrel, Moira McCarthy entertains the girl from her stock of faerie stories. Margaret is intrigued by the old woman who is constantly muttering prayers for everything from baking bread to making butter, and holds daily commerce, she says, with Maeve, the Faerie Queen for whom the McCarthy family has preserved a large area of woodland.
When Margaret expresses skepticism Moira laughs, “The Five-Senses-World is a small island in a vast ocean of all we cannot see and do not know. In that ocean, there may be faeries.”
As the two women, one near the end of her adult life and the other just at the beginning, grow to trust each other more, Margaret gains much understanding not only about the world of Faerie, but also about the troubles of her own life, the growing distancing between herself and her parents, their fighting over their diminished hopes and disappointed expectations. “Darlin’ girl,” the shenache tells her, “People fight because they have not chosen well. It’s not your burden.” Under Moira’s tutelage, Margaret learns the value of choice. “The marvelous thing about being a grown up is you get to choose what you want and what you don’t want in your life.”
And how about the title character, where in this story does O’Shaughnessey fit in? McGuire says, “O’Shaughnessey, has a little less to do in this book; it really is about the growing relationship between Margaret and her mentor, but what he does do is critical. He takes her, as he did her father before her, into the land of Faerie, but only in twilight dreams, half-sleep dreams, the ones that occur only at the point that no one remembers the next morning, the exact moment of falling asleep, and shows her the world the way the shenache sees it.”
The leprechaun comes to Margaret in dreams because her rational mind refuses to believe in faeries so she can’t see him otherwise, which is one form of faerie glamour. O’Shaughnessey’s mission is to get humans to believe again, for, as he tells his friend O’Sullivan, “We need them to believe in us…It’s their belief in us that sustains us, protects us – yes I would go so far – protects us from the poisoning of our world.”
“Yes,” McGuire laughs, “O’Sullivan, the cranky misanthropic, shabby leprechaun is back in this adventure…reluctantly.”
In addition to writing the story, McGuire also drew the 24 pencil illustrations that are inserted throughout the narrative. In the previous book, he adopted the pen and ink styles of nineteenth century illustrators that he most admires. In this one, he went to pencil drawings. “I thought the subject a little more nuanced than what I was capable of in ink. So I reverted to the softness of graphite.
“O’Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle” is available on Amazon, as either a hard copy or Kindle, and Barnes & Noble. Booksellers may purchase it through Ingraham and Baker & Taylor.
There was between Tonia and Yuri, of course, great friendship and undying love and devotion. What there was not was passion, and for a man like Yuri Zhivago a life without passion was a wasteland, not devoid of delights and comforts, but barren of the energy that made his life mean something and could result in great poetry.
 Every winter I celebrate the first big snow by popping a big tub of corn (extra butter as this is a special occasion) and settling back with a hot chocolate to watch my favorite movie of all time: David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago.”
Yes, I know there are probably better movies out there, but I’m content that this is the one that most gets me right where I live. I am unabashedly plebeian when it comes to movies and I revel in this epic early twentieth century Russian love story between the aristocratic physician/poet Yuri Zhivago and the earthy and sensual Lara Antipov, a romance that is nothing short of a force of nature. Academics and critics may turn their noses up every time composer Maurice Jarre’s haunting “Lara’s Theme” plays but I don’t care. I like what I like.
I have a confession to make. I have no appreciation for what those academics dub the “Greatest Film Ever Made.” I can’t sit through it. I have started watching it many, many… okay not so many times, and I have to tell you that I find myself snoozing before the end of the second quarter. Oh, I’m sure that at one time it was considered “edgy” and “relevant” or whatever hyperbolic adjectives critics were using at the time to describe “timely and innovative experiments in the cinematic art,” but I suspect that the high praise accredited to “The Greatest Film Ever Made” was largely the result of its being a recognizable and somewhat unflattering portrait of the man the artistic community of the time loved to revile: William Randolph Hearst. Yes, I do confess it. I have never seen the end of “Citizen Kane.”
I have, however, had something of an obsession with Doctor Zhivago since first viewing the film when it came out in 1965. I immediately bought and poured through the Boris Pasternak novel, even wading through the arcane political dialogues (which still didn’t bore me as much The Greatest Film Ever Made) and I loved it.
 Hans Matheson as Zhivago and Keira Knightly as Lara in the Granada production for BBC.
In recent years I have been able to obtain a collection of all the treatments of the novel. I have, of course, the David Lean version with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, but I also have the television miniseries with Keira Knightly and Hans Matheson as well as the rather hard to get Russian version, with English sub-titles. Each of these versions have their merits and comparing and contrasting them would take far too long, so I will only say that, while Knightly makes a radiant Lara in the more gritty and realistic Masterpiece Theatre version, Matheson is a lunk as Zhivago. One really does wonder whatever Lara could see in him? The Russian version is very well done and is the most faithful to the rather sprawling novel and is exceedingly rich in detail. But still, there is something about the Lean film that stands head and shoulders above them all. It has to do with the directorial vision and the character of Yuri Zhivago.
For those unfamiliar with either the novel or the film, let me recap as briefly as possible:
(Take a deep breath.) Yuri Zhivago’s father committed suicide after being swindled out of his fortune by the powerful lawyer Victor Komarovsky and the orphaned boy went to live with the aristocratic Gromyko family who were friends of his dead mother. There he met their daughter Tonia and they grew up as brother and sister but it was always assumed that they would eventually marry as indeed they did as soon as he was made Doctor.
On the other side of town that same Komarovsky took the young schoolgirl Lara’s mother as one of his mistresses but soon turned his attentions to Lara who gave herself to him to save her mother’s finances. When her boyfriend, the revolutionary Pasha, got wind of it he at first condemned her but forgave and married her anyway and off they went to the west country to teach school.
Then comes World War I and Pasha goes off to war, turns up missing in action and is presumed killed, which is believed by one and all except Lara who goes looking for him at the front and ends up nursing wounded soldiers with, as luck would have it, Doctor Yuri Zhivago. They fall in love but don’t do anything about it. “So far,” she says, “We have done nothing that you have to lie to Tonia about.
 Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara in David Lean's epic romance. When the war ends they go their separate ways but, what with the revolution and all the inconveniences attendant upon it, everybody is forced to leave Moscow and take up farming west of the Ural mountains. They end up near the city of Yuriatin where Lara lives with her daughter and very soon after arriving, Yuri and she start the adulterous affair that is the whole’ point of the movie in the first place! David Lean made the politics surrounding the Russian Revolution merely a backdrop for their epic passion and we love it! But still, we have to admit, however reluctantly because we are really pulling for them all the way, that it is still adultery. No getting around it. Zhivago is married, you see, to a woman he adores.
There was between Tonia and Yuri, of course, great friendship and undying love and devotion. What there was not was passion, and for a man like Yuri Zhivago a life without passion was a wasteland, not devoid of delights and comforts, but barren of the energy that made his life mean something and could result in great poetry. One might say that until he met and loved Lara his poetry was immature, although workman-like and critically successful and well loved by the reading public, enough so that it had earned him a certain reputation among elite circles both in Russia and in the country to which Russia looked for culture, France, but it was not pushing the boundaries of acceptability and tolerance; it was not courageous. With Lara he discovered his passion and his courage and wrote poems that would inevitably bring him to the attention of the authorities and would also seal his doom. Where before he had celebrated the individual and passionately lived life, in the Lara poems he worshiped it!
But, we’re still talking about adultery. How can an otherwise moral audience celebrate on the screen what they would never condone in real life? Do we have to concentrate only on the lovers and kind of forget that Tonia and Pasha are even there … somewhere? Or is there something more to it. Are we in fact fudging our morals a little bit?
Yes, I know. It is a work of fiction but I don’t think I need remind many people that fiction is the best way we can tell the truth to each other. It is Eugene O’Niell’s “mask that reveals more than it hides.” How we respond to the fiction with its enforced distancing from reality, tells us more about ourselves than we would even admit to our therapists. And what does our response to Zhivago tell us?
Back in 1965, an older friend from my parent’s generation, who was by the way a most faithful Christian of the Congregationalist persuasion, said to me right there in the church pew, “You can understand and forgive what he did because of who he was.”
Really? Did he really mean to say that? Are we to believe there are people for whom the normal rules do not apply, those who even otherwise moral and righteous men would proclaim “exceptional?” The answer seems to be an emphatic albeit whispered “Yes.”
And who is this Yuri Zhivago that would make him exceptional? I think it is his generosity of spirit. Throughout the most devastating and treacherous times, he never loses his gift for living life and serving others. His affair with Lara is no mere selfishness; he is a lover in the best sense of the word, in the way Walt Whitman was a lover. There was nothing in his world that he failed to love and the cruelties of men are rooted in their failure to love. To Yuri Zhivago that failure is the sin that God will not forgive. He loves Tonia and he loves Lara both equally and for different reasons. Love, being infinite, cannot be expressed in terms of ledgers, balance sheets, percentages or any other means of measuring what is finite.
 Geraldine Chaplin as Tonia
But, what about Tonia? Would she be as accepting as we? Casting Geraldine Chaplin was a stroke of genius. We first get to know her as a seemingly frail aristocratic princess. During the course of the film, however, we learn she is not nearly so frail as we imagined. She adapts, first to the loss of her home and the deprivations imposed by the revolution, then to life as a Russian peasant. She sees things as they are and does what is needed.
She discovers Yuri’s affair after he is captured by the partisans and she travels to Yutiatin to find him and is directed to Lara’s apartment. Some time afterward they leave Russia and she leaves a letter to Yuri with Lara. In the letter she tells him that they are moving to Paris and he can join them there, “or not.” Then she adds something completely unnecessary but quite telling. “I must admit that Antipova (Lara) is a good person.”
Tonia also seems to forgive him because of who he is and recognizes in Lara a kind of “sister.” She may have been hurt, but ultimately, as in all things, she adapts. She is above all a survivor.
Audiences seem to be saying that all people are not created equal and there are those who can be trusted to think through and develop a responsible morality that has little to do with the rigid moralism that governs those who either cannot or will not think. Perhaps it would have been more wrong for Zhivago not to have loved Lara and slavishly conformed to convention rather than follow that undeniable and powerful passion. Well, had Zhivago and Lara never gotten together it is quite certain he would not have written his more mature poems, and even more importantly, it would have made for a boring movie.
Not as boring as the “G.F.E.M.” but certainly close.
But of course, it is for the snow that I watch it every year. David Lean’s Zhivago has the bluest snow in film history and in such abundance that even in a heated room one shivers. So I celebrate the first snowfall of each year by sitting in my warm theatre, sipping hot chocolate, eating popcorn and contemplating, no, reveling in the highly epic and romantic adultery going on right before my eyes.
Love, unconditional and all embracing love is eternal and is immeasurable. The more we give of it the more we are filled; it grows within us, makes us bigger and better than we were and the more a part of this Universe we become.
I am in possession of another correspondence from my friend and persona Brother Jeremiah of the Order of the Buile Suibhe. He has sent me the text of a sermon he will be preaching at his monastery in the Ozark Mountains. Brother Jeremiah does not like to preach; he is not a public person and is really rather shy in front groups even of his own congregants, but he is nothing if not dutiful and so when his turn comes around he acquits himself as best he can. He asked for my opinion of it, as he did with his Easter Sermon last spring, which I was glad to provide, and I also asked again if he would mind if I posted it as one of his Letters. With some hesitation, he agreed, but by now I know enough about him to suspect he is secretly pleased.
So, I now I present for your consideration the Christmas sermon of Brother Jeremiah.
 Brother Jeremiah during one of his many Monastery Walks during which he meditates. I greet you my brothers and sisters by the power of that Universal Spirit that is in us and around us this day and for all our days.
It is the Winter Solstice, the return of the sun. But more than that, it is the time of year when we anticipate the birth or rebirth of the Divine Child, born of the Eternal Masculine, which is Power, and the Eternal Feminine, which is Wisdom. The union of these two must inevitably result in the third part of this particular Trinity, All-Embracing, Universal and Unconditional Love, the Divine Child of the Solstice.
This Divine Child has had many expressions, many metaphors throughout our history, but each of these, whether Osiris, Apollo, Mithras, Moses or Jesus all point to one inescapable truth: The return of the sun is a return of hope, the return of the sun is the return of light, the return of the sun is the return of love. Each of these Deliverers spoke a message that would be heard by their own people and in their own time but that message was not limited to their own people and time. And every year at this time we are reminded that no matter how dark the world may appear, no matter how cold and desolate, no matter how hopeless, the universe is indeed unfolding as it should. I do believe that the Arc of History is moving in the direction of Unity, harmony and balance in spite of all the evidence that would seem to deny it. I suppose one might call that faith.
I have faith that the tribal divisions that have caused us to hate and fear each other for thousands of years are waning. I do believe, in spite of the actions of many of my fellow religious, that the Spirit of that Divine Child, the Messiah, the Kristos, is moving in our world and it is a power that the forces of darkness and hate simply cannot defeat. This is not exclusively a Christian message because every prophet has promised redemption. Even the Arthurian legends, probably adapted from previous myths of the Celts, promise a return of the King.
But, this Second Coming is not so much an event as it is a process, and it is occurring now. I would be the first to admit, though, that it is not traveling on a smooth road. The Dark Ones are still among us, in our governments, in our businesses and even in our churches, synagogues and mosques where they hide in plain sight and pervert the message of the Divine Child from within the very institutions created to honor him. Hatred, greed, envy and distrust, however, are self-consuming, feeding on the very ones who hold these things in their hearts until they are completely dead, morally, spiritually and physically, for do not doubt that hate kills the hater more than the hated. So yes, I have faith.
Love, unconditional and all embracing love is eternal and is immeasurable. The more we give of it the more we are filled; it grows within us, makes us bigger and better than we were and the more a part of this Universe we become. This is not the kind of love that distinguishes between the acceptable and the unacceptable, between this person and that, between the physical and the spiritual. Such divisions are illusionary; I tell you there are no such divisions. In the Celtic Tradition, the Creator and the Creation are one and inseparable, you cannot tell the dancer from the dance.
Be of good cheer, for there is indeed no force that is more potent.
It saddens me that the powerful and greedy have usurped the religions of their people to teach the exact opposite of what the Prophets brought us. The modern day Pharisees and Sadducees build their mega-churches and boast of their vast memberships and media outlets while by their actions they deny comfort to the poor, the sick and the naked. They treat them as though they deserved their lot and should not complain about it or expect any help from the community.
How absurd! Did not the hero Jesus preach, “As you have done it to the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto me?” By “my brethren,” he did not mean his followers only, although I have heard it argued. No, he meant the lowest of the low, those most wracked in body and spirit by wasting diseases and dispair, the sinner, the drug-addict, the prostitute, the beggar, the pick-pocket, the welfare mother, the pimp, the murder… All of these are his ”brethren.” Ours, too. If God is all, if there is no distinction between the Creator and the Creation, then these also share in His Divinity. They are, as much as you are, a part of God.
Jesus said that before you pray before you even bow your head and bend your knee, if you can think of any of your brethren whom you may have harmed by word or deed, leave the altar immediately, seek out whom you have harmed and ask forgiveness so that your prayer will be heard. So I ask you as you celebrate the mystery of Christmas: is there anyone you have hurt, intentionally or not, any person you have thought ill of or judged ungraciously, any one you have neglected or rejected? If so, go to them; ask for their forgiveness. Only then will your celebration be pure and untainted by hatred or contempt. Do not in this season of Love, call yourself virtuous if you withhold from any of the “least of these” what would give them comfort simply because you, in your self-righteousness, don’t think they deserve or have not earned it.
You may not greedily horde your wealth in investments or property, nor take every tax-dodge available just to boost your personal fortune, withholding your wealth from your brothers and sisters who need it. If you do that, I don’t care how sentimental you get over the Baby Jesus lying seraphic in his manger, I don’t care how loudly you sing the carols or how weepy you get over the faces of your children on Christmas Morning bathed in the light from your hearth fire; I don’t care what you call yourself, you are not Christian! You have no share in this Christmas Season! You do not follow the will of the Divine Child; you do not follow the call to Universal Love. You do not follow the call to Grace.
Grace is after all, by its very nature, our giving precisely those unearned and undeserved blessings to any and all who are within our circles. It is the call, the exhortation of he who would deliver us from madness to do so. Jesus the Divine Child teaches us generosity of spirit over and above any other precept. Nothing is more unchristian than distrust, hatred and exclusion. Do not, therefore, seek for salvation in the heavens, my friends; it is found in the space between you and the least of these, your brethren. It is found in Grace.
By the power of that Universal Spirit that is in us and around us this day and for all our days, be it ever so.
Brother Jeremiah, OBS
He is focused and precise. He is obsessively ambitious and disciplined, and has little patience with people who are not. Celebrations and the human relationships they foster he finds just so much unreliable “Humbug.” Everyone in his life has left him: his father, his sister and his fiancé, so human beings are not to be trusted. Only wealth is reliable. His life is ordered. He doesn’t understand why others’ lives are not and he has little sympathy for them. If he can do it, why not they?
 The author as Ebenezer Scrooge, FMCT 1990. I had the great privilege to play the role of Ebenezer Scrooge at the Fargo Moorehead Community Theatre one year, and I loved it! I mean, who wouldn’t? What a hoot! What an iconic character! But, you see, that was the main problem, the same as that when an actor plays Jesus or Superman or, to a lesser degree, Hamlet; it is the character’s familiarity that makes it challenging.
One wonders why the story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s conversion has so much staying-power given that everyone knows it and many are so familiar that they can quote the lines. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” “If I could work my will, everyone who goes around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on their lips would be boiled in their own pudding…!” and of course, “BAH! HUMBUG!” In fact, the character has become so familiar that he risks being a cartoon. (Okay, I know. The latest version is a cartoon, a CG cartoon to be sure but still a cartoon.) He has become so iconic that we imagine him to be this quaint figure of fun and we have ceased seeing ourselves in him. Come on now, no actor can resist the challenge.
One can only imagine the impact old Ebenezer Scrooge had on the mid-to-upper classes when A Christmas Carol was first published on December 19, 1843. Just about everyone either knew a Scrooge or was one. The business of government was business. If a man was poor, it was because he deserved to be so. If a man was rich it was because of his innate God-given superiority
 A Christmas Carol and other Christmas books by Charles Dickens.
One can imagine the shock and indignation when they not only recognized themselves in Scrooge but when their assumption of superiority was so roundly challenged.
Sad to say, the character of Scrooge has not aged well as much fun as it may be to play the old scoundrel on stage. All too often he is played as an over-the-top crotchety and slightly comical curmudgeon. He’s used to sell everything from used cars to cereal and he’s become such a dear old fellow, so much a symbol of Christmas that the model of Jolly Old Victorian England has been sanctified as the ideal Christmas celebration. Every year you see Christmas carolers in top hats and cutaway coats, bonnets and bustles crooning away in nostalgic rapture.
I chose not to play type. Gone was the scraggly white mane and long mutton-chop whiskers. Gone was the screeching and villainous bad temper. I played him as a man who could very well be anybody’s boss: cool, businesslike and unsympathetic, but not intentionally cruel. One might even say that he considered himself an exceedingly virtuous man, frugality being one of the seven virtues. I played him as an honorable man, even a charming man, and a man I might say, who from the beginning of the story desperately longed for the human contact he so vigorously eschewed as “Humbug!” Ill temper stems from sadness and hurt. It has always been so and it was so in Scrooge. His transformation could not have happened were the seeds of it not planted in the beginning
He is not villainous, not a crook. He’s not Bernie Madoff, nor is he the CEO of a major insurance company wallowing in bonuses at the expense of his clients. No, Scrooge is far more moral than they. He does not allow himself to be so wasteful or corrupt.. He could be expected to squeeze from his clients and debtors every sovereign he was owed, but not a penny more. He was no thief. He needed to be trusted, if he wanted to be successful in business, if not by the general public, then at least by his clients and colleagues at the Stock Exchange. He is by all accounts, an honorable man of business however mean and miserly. In that sense he is one of us.
In another he was not, for although he would never cheat you, he couldn’t be counted on to help you out of a jam, either. He didn’t need help himself and he saw no reason to help others; his credo might have been “survival of the fittest,” which was a principle that some forty years later would gain traction as “Social Darwinism.”
And, what was his business? The director of the play and I settled on Maritime Broker. He dealt in cargo, futures, investments, speculation and loans to maritime merchants. He had warehouses and, living in London before the train and the paved highway, when the horse drawn coach was the main means of travel, it would have been sea and river transport that moved goods the most.
He was a self made man. He did not come into his fortune, but started out as a, apprentice for another broker, Fezziwig. He succeeded though his own initiative and ambition and saw no reason why everyone couldn’t do the same. That kind of spirit, after all, was what made Ameri… er…that is to say, the Empire great.
That Scrooge is a notable miser is not in question. Scrooge wastes nothing, not money nor time nor words nor energy. He is focused and precise. He is obsessively ambitious and disciplined, and has little patience with people who are not. Celebrations and the human relationships they foster he finds just so much unreliable “Humbug.” Everyone in his life has left him: his father, his sister and his fiancé, so human beings are not to be trusted. Only wealth is reliable. His life is ordered. He doesn’t understand why others’ lives are not and he has little sympathy for them. If he can do it, why not they?
I played him as a respectable man of business in a time when respect and reputation were everything. He could laugh and he could be affable when it profited him. When he greets two visitors to his office he does so with the greatest of pleasure and continues smiling right up until he finds that they want a donation to make the poor happy at Christmas. He then dismisses them, not rudely, but merely as two men who have just gone off is radar screen. He only becomes angry when he is pressed. “I don’t make merry at Christmas myself,” he says, as if speaking to the village idiot, “and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.” In that we see the character in microcosm.
Think of the implication in the words “idle people.” In that phrase we can see the sum total of Scrooge’s ethic. Poverty is not circumstantial, it is indicative of a lack of character. There is a moral deficiency in the poor that he cannot justify encouraging with alms. It is no wonder that he praises the utility of the workhouse, where the poor must perform difficult, meaningless and repetitive tasks just so they earn the gruel and bread they eat, or the prisons into which ignorance and want force most of them. In prisons and in the workhouse, the poor can be redeemed, if they are not too depraved, and may learn the virtue of work.
In the book, the Ghost of Christmas Present, representing the kindness and charity of the season, is allowed to chastise Scrooge more harshly and one of his chastisements involves the twin children hidden under his robe, “yellow, meager, ragged, scowling.” The entire exchange bears setting down as it is in the book for it applies as much to today’s America as it did Dickens’ England.
 Ghost of Christmas Present with the twin evils, Ignorance and Want. “They are Man’s” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and of all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow see that written which is doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching its hand toward the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for our factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
If we want to find the Scrooge in ourselves, we need look no farther than that. Do we walk past the beggar on the street? Do we resent the person on food stamps or on welfare? Do we think providing services for the poor just so much socialism, redistribution of wealth, Liberal politics? There is Scrooge.
Do we move to a neighborhood with good schools and feel no need to support schools in the inner city? There also is Scrooge.
Do we object when the poor might get healthcare for free and cut into corporate profits? There too is Scrooge, an honorable man, a trusted man, a dispassionate man, a man who is charming and gregarious when it profits him and dismissive when it isn’t, “a good man of business.”
And, where might we find Scrooge’s redemption?
That also is in us. After all, a society is not judged by history on the basis of how it treats the well off, the well fed, the leaders of government and the masters of business and industry. No, throughout history, societies have been judged by how they treat the poor and the ignorant. If we would embrace the Christmas Season we cannot be miserly. We cannot be the unrepentant Scrooge. We must embrace the converted, generous and Charitable Scrooge and truly care for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We have to be more like the true “Founder of the Feast” whose Advent we celebrate.
Here’s to a happy and prosperous 2011. Happiness is not a shallow goal, but we cannot stop with our own happiness. We must strive to make it possible for the greatest number of us to share in that happiness; we must find misery, the opposite of happiness, wherever it exists and stamp it out. We must, in short, be kinder.
 The author at his favorite spot, pontificating next to his hearthfire. It is another turning of the year. Another time for making resolutions that are certain to be broken and promises that while good intentioned are facile and meaningless.
How about this one. “I will in this year accept the inevitable.”
Once, that is, we perceive a thing to be an inevitable evolutionary step. I may be able to help here. There are several things that seem to me to have that aura of inevitability.
We will educate our children regardless of the cost. This is a big one. It is not inevitable, but the consequences of our failure to educate the next generation are. And by education, I do not mean skills training. If we graduate classes of students with only the skills they need to get a job, then we have failed them. We have not educated them. We have not taught them how to think. That is not the same as teaching them what to think, that would be horrible, but teaching them how to think is essential if they are not to be as “tenderly led by the nose as asses are.” We must bear in mind that the default position of any governmental body is to keep the electorate as ignorant as possible. I want to say it is the province only of conservatives, but the liberals also have a problem with it. Governments do not want the populace to know how their governments are supposed to work nor do they particularly want critical thinking. They want people who can respond to advertising not to ideas. The consequence of taking this short-term option for a small bit of political gain is that our children will not be able to compete on the world stage; their ideas will not be flexible enough to compromise and they will be left behind. Our economy will inevitably suffer. We must understand that an educated person is well rounded, conversant in literature, music and art as well as skilled in Math and Science. These disciplines augment and illuminate each other; they are not mutually exclusive. We must put more resources into education if The United States is not to become a Third World Country, voluntarily left behind in the 21st Century.
Economic Patriotism. Put Americans to work in American industries. Everybody has to give something up if costs are prohibitive, but if Americans are not working, then the market will collapse. No one in America will be able to afford what American manufacturers produce overseas. Punish companies for moving offshore with financial penalties. If they have an American business license them a large portion of their workforce must be American. No hedging. No exceptions. Sink more money into research and development of energy and transportation, jobs that can’t be moved offshore. Yes, this includes rail, not just air. Forget the naysayers. They’re wrong. Trains, particularly electric trains, are the wave of the future for the majority of transportation, which is short-run or commuter transit. Go there first. Do it the same way Ike did the Interstate. It worked then and it will work now.
Vice President Joe Biden is correct; Gay marriage, in fact equal rights for all persons regardless of sexual orientation , is one of those inevitabilities. Just shut up and do the right thing. It is an issue of civil rights for all Americans. That is the only issue We should not take our eyes off it. It is not a religious one. Not at all Never has been. If anyone wishes to argue it as another issue, do not listen to them. If anyone wishes to base their opinion on the Bible, tell them the government may not decide religious issues and dismiss them. This is not a theocracy. Get back to the issue. Equal rights today, equal rights tomorrow, equal rights forever.
National Health. It can and should be done. Enormous profits be damned. Medicare for everybody. Will it be perfect? No. Will healthcare still be rationed? It always has been. The rich have always been able to afford whatever they want. That will not change. Under national health the doctor decides on treatment not a profit driven middle manager. Will there be fraud? Yes, but severe penalties (such as the loss of a medical license nationwide) should curtail that. If a patient fraudulently gets money from the health program, he or she will have to pay it back plus a hefty, bankrupting fine. No one is exempt. Will this affect how the wealthy get healthcare? No, as always, the well-off will do exactly what they want; it is the poor we have to care about. What will change is they will have access to basic healthcare which, as of now, they do not. Children born in poverty will be healthier, able to concentrate on their education, and able to better themselves which is good for the whole country.
Alternative energy. A must do. Petroleum is dead. It just hasn’t fallen down, yet. It will, inevitably. Time to tell the oil industry to retool or it will die as well. The automobile was a clean alternative to the horse, and with its advent, blacksmiths faced a choice: become mechanics or lose their occupation. Most turned their skills as smiths to making parts for cars. Today there are clean alternatives to the petroleum fueled internal combustion engine and the same choice faces the auto and petroleum industries. There is only one energy source, according to several reputable studies, that has the capacity to replace one hundred percent of our petroleum. It is Solar. It is time to put money behind it. Every wall separating every interstate from every community, every rooftop, every vehicle, and many other flat surfaces that I can’t think of at the moment, should be covered with solar panels. Just shut up and do it.
Establish True Religious Freedom. That should be a no-brainer. It was in the first sentence of the first amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Obviously the founders thought it fairly important. It does not mean that government cannot support religious entities, it means that government cannot choose one over all others. We have the freedom to worship unhindered and we have the freedom not to worship unhindered. I don’t care what you think of religious people. I don’t care what you think if irreligious people. To the government is does not matter what you think. Government must allow for all of them and none of them at one and the same time. If Christians want to put up a tree and a crèche in the public square, they have the right to do so under their own sponsorship. If Jews want to put up a menorah on the public square, they also have every right to do so under the same terms. And, if the Wiccans want to put up an effigy of the Oak and Holly Kings for the Solstice, they also are free to do so. This amendment did not ever imply that government must have nothing to do with religion, only that it cannot discriminate between them. In truth, if Atheists want to put up a display expressing the non-existence of God, they also have that right and it would have the added benefit of being exceedingly cheap, consisting, as it no doubt would, of nothing.
These are but a few suggestions for New Year’s Resolutions on a national level. I’m sure you can all think of more, but I have run out of space.
Here’s to a happy and prosperous 2011. Happiness is not a shallow goal, but we cannot stop with our own happiness. We must strive to make it possible for the greatest number of us to share in that happiness; we must find misery, the opposite of happiness, wherever it exists and stamp it out. We must, in short, be kinder.
Why would the federal government devote an entire department to annoying us? Why, diversion, of course! If they can keep us distracted by the many little things in our lives that annoy us, but are not so annoying that we actually complain, it is less likely that we will see all the stuff they are doing that would really hack us off.
 The Department of Commerce in Washington DC wherein, in the deepest and darkest bowels of the building, the Department of Annoyance does it's nefarious work. Recent events have made it imperative that I warn everyone of a dangerous yet virtually unknown conspiracy that has been threatening our emotional welfare for decades, perhaps centuries. I present, therefore, a re-print of a column I wrote in 2009 with several modifications.
I just recently I had an encounter with my High Speed Internet (?) service involving extreme slowness in the connection. Ironic, huh? Yeah, I’m sure we’ve all been there at one time or another. High speed becomes a sick joke as we wait ten minutes just to open e-mail.
I called the service center in a right proper huff to demand that they do something about it. We-e-e-e-ell, this sweet young female voice with a delightful Texas accent told me to “check the back of the modem for the reset button, sugar!”
I was disarmed. All my righteous indignation dissipated. I do confess have always been a sucker for young sweet females with Texas accents, so I did as she said and pulled the modem out from the shelf as far as the cables would allow, but still couldn’t find it. “It’s a teeny little hole on the end where the plugs are,” she crooned. I still couldn’t see it. I had to get a flashlight from the utility closet and shine it on the back of the modem … and behold! There was the little hole just where she said it would be. Then she told me to “get a paper clip, bend it straight and insert it gently into the hole making sure that it hits the button, which would be right there near the entrance.” Feeling only slightly dirty, I did what she asked.
Then I had to ask why anyone would put that tiny pin-hole wherein the reset button was found so far out of sight and out of reach in the back of the modem box in the first place. “Surely,” I said, “this idea handily passed muster with the Federal Department of Annoyance!”
She laughed. Sweetest little Texas laugh. Obviously she had not heard of the Federal Department of Annoyance, so I enlightened her in full flirtation mode.
“What? Do you mean to tell me you have never heard of the Federal Department of Annoyance? Well, I shouldn’t wonder. It is the most secretive of the many secretive divisions operating under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce. It is so secret that I doubt even the Secretary of Commerce knows about it.”
Yes, that’s what passes for flirting in Geektown.
The function of the Department of Annoyance is to insure that no product comes to market that doesn’t have at least one thing about it that will be highly annoying to the general public. Obviously, it is not in the best interests of any manufacturer to let the public know about it, but there are standards that have to be met with the DOA or the product or service will not be approved for retail sale within the borders of the United States. (We are currently in negotiations with other countries to spread the regulations farther than our borders.)
Why would the federal government devote an entire department to annoying us? Why, diversion, of course! If they can keep us distracted by the many little things in our lives that annoy us, but are not so annoying that we actually complain, it is less likely that we will see all the stuff they are doing that would really hack us off.
I purchased a pair of jeans the other day that was labeled 36-29 but when I got them home, they were too large around the waist and too long of leg. I know older people get smaller, but not THAT much smaller. They slid over my hips and I am constantly stepping on the hems. Now I realize that the fashion these days is to make the pants so long that in a day or two the bottoms fray and tear, but (I have to say this loudly) I AM NOT TWENTY! To me, ragged cuffs are just plain ugly. I’m an old fart and I like my pants to fit. Whoever sized those jeans obviously had an in with the DOA. Clothing sizes are their greatest achievement and a source of their greatest pride.
Also worth mentioning is the new shirt with so many clips, pins, card-boards, plastic collar supports and other underpinnings that make them look spiffy on the store shelf that just getting a shirt on your back is a major operation worthy of the Corps of Engineers. You never, no matter how much you try, get them all out leaving one sneaky devil of a pin to jab you as soon as you have gotten the last button closed.
But it is the advent of plastic packaging that has raised the bar considerably for retail products. There was a time when packaging was simple cardboard and manufacturers of, oh say aspirin, had to depend on crushing a few pills to powder to get DOA approval. Plastic packaging changed all that. Now, anything that is enclosed in a plastic bubble will automatically get a pass. The packaging for anything from a tape measure to a meat thermometer could be used as body armor for our troops. And don’t even get me started on how much petroleum we could save by not using so much plastic in packaging!
Particularly pernicious are the plastic bubbles labeled “easy open,” virtually always a contemptible lie calculated to make us feel stupid. No matter how closely you follow the instructions, you still will tear your fingers to bloody shreds. I am always reduced to ripping the thing apart with a chain saw. Okay, not a chain saw, but, I have taken to carrying a pocket knife and don’t even read easy-open directions any more. All this just to get at a rubber spatula!
It’s enough to drive one to extreme kitchen rage.
A close friend of mine is a police officer and she tells the sad story of a young man who offed himself one evening by stabbing himself some 27 times. He just turned to his friend and said, “Well, good-bye, then.” and began puncturing himself with a serrated steak-knife. He was obviously serious about it. People just don’t go to such lengths unless they are intent upon their own demise. No evidence was found of any motive, but I suspect it had something to do with easy open plastic packaging. Either that or he had been forced to listen to Sarah Palin one too many times. (She is the darling of the D.O.A.)
Now, I have to tell you this. The management of the firm in which I earn the mortgage has invested in a coffee machine that is a marvel of technology and carries the endorsement and brand of a very reputable chef whose name you would immediately recognize were I so foolish to risk lawsuits and tell it. Here’s the process: after selecting a coffee “pod” from dozens of varieties (most of which aren’t worth washing the floors with) you simply place the pod in the drawer, push the drawer in and push a button for light, medium or bold, or any number of other options. The machine will make you a latte or a cappuccino and put a frothy topping on it, all at the punch of a button. It might even drink it for you if you are just too busy.
Problem is, like most marvels of technology, it is also one of the Department of Annoyance’s greatest achievements. Every week, it breaks down. Every week we have people standing in line, empty coffee mugs dangling helplessly from their index fingers, waiting for the repair guy to show up. The DOA is ecstatic!
Fortunately, there is a back-up plan. It’s (Shhhh!) a drip coffee maker down the hall in a darkened snack room, an old fashioned Bunn coffee maker like the dive on the corner uses, a plain and simple coffeemaker that has a glass carafe that you operate by just tipping it up and pouring the black nectar into your mug. Uncomplicated, not technical at all. If you want cream and sugar, you just (get this!) pour it yourself from little paper envelopes and a carton from the ‘fridge. Brilliant!
Of course, if you want a double mocha latte with whipped cream and a squiggle of chocolate and a dash of cinnamon, you do what all right thinking people do: you go downstairs and buy it from Starbucks!
Obviously the simple carafe it hasn’t come to the attention of the D.O.A. Or, perhaps it has, which is why we now have far fewer of them and we have to hide them in the snack room. (What do I have at home, you might ask? A very uncomplicated French Coffee Press!)
While we’re on the subject of coffee, let me assert with no equivocation that deep roasted is burned. Period.
I’m sure the invention of deep roasted coffee fell out rather like this: Someone forgot to set the timer on the roaster and turned the beans into charcoal. Unwilling to absorb the loss, some MBA in the Marketing Department said, “We can still sell it! All we have to do is convince the fashion conscious young urban professionals that burned coffee is ‘COOL’ and that anyone who drinks it any other way is just oh so quaint and rustic and not… well not COOL!”
“But,” says the grizzled old-timer, the Head of Quality Control who, quite unlike the MBA, worries about things like the product, “what if they don’t like the way it tastes?”
“Of course they’ll like the way it tastes; fashion dictates that they like the way it tastes!” The MBA said, smacking the Head of Quality Control on the crown of his head, “And who dictates fashion? We Do!”
“But, if they like it,” sniffs the Vice President of Government Regulations, “will it pass muster with the Department of Annoyance?”
“Pass?” the MBA says, “Hell, they’ll shove it through! Nothing thrills them more than annoying people who are willing accomplices in their own annoyance!” He laughed gleefully. “And, I even know what we’ll call the vile brew: ‘Deep-roast!’ How’s that? Will that serve?”
“Brilliant!” the Vice President of Sales and Marketing says, heading off to the Art Department to gather clip art of fashionistas drinking coffee.
And so it happened that we have burned coffee being sold on nearly every street corner in America, much to the delight of the Federal Department of Annoyance.
In fact, the more I look about the world, I can see evidence of the invisible hand of the D.O.A everywhere. But, I have to limit this article to a manageable size and so cannot go into them all. I understand that there is an annual award given to that company that shows the most contempt for the general public while being most solicitous of its welfare. I will leave you to add your own candidates. I’m sure you can find many now that you are aware of the conspiracy. You only have to know where to look. The evidence is everywhere.
The things I have seen! The lives I have witnessed ruined by a simple mistake. It is difficult if not impossible for the law to dictate one thing or another. Each case is different and should be weighed compassionately and only in terms of its own circumstances aside from any pre-conceived ideologies from either side. Ideology is a sanctuary for the simple minded.
 Br. Jeremiah and the author outside the cabin he shares with Br. Seamus at the monastery in the ozark mountains near Crawford's Notch, MO. M: Abortion opponents will object to your equating the killing of an unborn child to the execution of criminals or the sacrifice of soldiers in battle. With abortion, you are talking about an innocent life.
BJ: Innocence has nothing to do with it; that’s a blind and an inconsistent argument on three counts.
M: What are they?
BJ: One: Conviction of a capital crime does not equate with guilt. There have been many instances of innocents being convicted and executed, yet it only takes conviction in many people’s minds to justify taking that human life for the good of society and the preservation of justice.
M: Or revenge if you want to be honest about it
BJ: Absolutely! I oppose capital punishment in all cases because I know it’s really about revenge and, apart from anything else, I don’t like what that does to me.
M: What is the second count?
BJ: War. We sacrifice innocent lives all the time in war, and it doesn’t seem to bother us. It’s a given that a certain percentage of fatalities will be innocent men, women and children, who die as a result of battle. Such “collateral damage” is supported by many of the same people who oppose abortion on the grounds of innocence! It seems the American Pre-born baby has more value than these foreign children. How absurd!
M: How does innocence apply to our soldiers, though? Don’t they voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way?
BJ: I don’t think anyone volunteers for service actually thinking it’s a death sentence. Most do so out of a profound sense of duty and patriotism, but many of them do so to get an education or because there are no other options for employment. None of them have death-wishes.
M: But, as much as we wish to preserve our soldiers’ lives, we still build into any battle plan and estimated percentage of casualties.
BJ: Yes, acceptable human sacrifices for the perceived greater good which we then celebrate and honor with medals and statues, which brings us to another point which is a bit of a digression but needs to be said. When our government decides to sacrifice human life for what is perceived to be the greater good, it had best be damned sure it actually is for the greater good and not just a whim or to boost corporate profits.
M: I thought you weren’t political.
BJ: It’s a moral issue that speaks to a spiritual bankruptcy; that’s well within my purview.
M: Fair enough. Okay, that’s two counts where you think innocence is a bogus argument. What’s the third?
BJ: Are you familiar with the play J.B. by Archibald MacLiesh? It’s a modern re-telling of the story of Job in the Bible and deals with these very questions of the suffering of the innocent. J.B. is a wealthy banker, one of the “Masters of the Universe” who loses not only his considerable fortune but also all of his children to crimes, accidents and war. Sarah, his wife and mother to those children, speaks a line near the end where she says something like, let me see if I remember, oh yes, she says, “If God is just then our dead children stank of sin, were rotten with it. I will not sacrifice their innocence to make God just.”
M: If God is just, then none are innocent. Not even the unborn.
BJ: The opponents of abortion don’t believe so, either. Most subscribe to the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin from which, you are right, none of us is innocent.
M: What about suffering? Even if innocence can’t be the issue…
BJ: Suffering is not the issue for them, either. They argue that we must stop abortion because the unborn suffers excruciating pain. But, is suffering sufficient reason to oppose abortion when we are so very willing to accept it in other areas? Who suffers most, I ask you, the twenty year old soldier in Afghanistan who knows, who is aware of the extent of the sacrifice, who has a life all planned out ahead of him, who may have a wife and children whom he adores and longs to be with, or the four month fetus in the womb who is aware, if it may even be called that, only of its bodily functioning and sensory impressions? Yet we are willing to accept and even praise the soldier’s sacrifice as necessary for the greater good.
M: I have to ask because it will be asked: What greater good comes from abortion?  In the garden of the monastery during the first of out interviews, Autumn 2009.
BJ: Defining the “Greater Good,” now there’s the conundrum. There are many circumstances, mostly involving poverty, where bringing another child into the world is not advisable.
M: Not even if adoption is an option?
BJ: It is a pleasant fantasy that there are many loving homes willing to take any child from any circumstance. Of course, adoption should be offered as an option but in reality, if we are honest, not every baby is adoptable. Not every pregnant girl has the options that seem so clear to the well off religious people carrying signs.
M: Religious people carrying signs?
BJ: Ah yes. The largest percentage of the Pro-Life movement is motivated by religious faith. Understandable, and that is their right, but if the Bible is their authority, they have defined the argument as a religious one and the government is constitutionally prohibited from deciding religious issues. It seems, then, they have shot themselves in the foot. And yet, they have no other substantial argument against it!
M: You seem to be coming down heavily against the Pro-Lifers. So, what do the Pro-Choice people give up in the negotiation?
BJ: The convenient notion that it is not a human being they are killing, the belief that abortion in the third trimester is not infanticide. If it is a question of sentience and awareness, then it is obvious that in the third trimester, there is a great deal more of it than in the first, and at some point, the state does have a stake in protecting that sentient human being.
M: You may get smacked on that one. What about parental notification?
BJ: In the case of minor girls? You were saving that one up, weren’t you?
M: Is it something else that the Pro-Choice people may have to relent on for entirely practical and legal reasons? To hear them, you would think letting a parent know that his minor child is pregnant and has sought an abortion is an assault on a woman’s right to choose. Do they really believe there all these monstrous parents out there who will commit unspeakable atrocities on the girls?
BJ: Some will. There are very good reasons why such knowledge would be kept confidential. Some parents will be abusive to the girl, and there are many cultures where even honor killing is accepted…
M: Well, then we would be having another conversation entirely. I would then ask why the girl is still under their roof. Child abuse is very serious and cultural differences can’t shield it.
BJ: It is not always detected. We don’t have the resources…
M: One cannot have responsibility without authority. As a parent, I am responsible by law for health and welfare of my children as long as they are minors. I think the real fear is that parents might exert undue pressure on the girl to carry the child to term. But, realistically, is that such a great tragedy?
BJ: Sometimes!
M: And if her conditioning is such that her parents would so influence her, might she not eventually regret her choice and feel guilty the rest of her life?
BJ: You may get smacked yourself! My friend, I believe you are a good parent. Possibly even an exemplary one. But you must not be naïve. The great majority of unwanted pregnancies do not occur in comfortable middle class households. Where you might sit with your daughter and talk reasonably about her options, there are many who would not be so charitable, and it’s not always an obvious case of abuse. You say the parents are responsible for their minor children and must have authority over them. Well and good. Fair point. But, that authority also gives them the right to make the girl have the child. They can make her keep it. They can make her care for it as long as she is a minor. Some girls are not meant to be mothers and would harm the child in their care and be jailed for that offense. The things I have seen! The lives I have witnessed ruined by a simple mistake. It is difficult if not impossible for the law to dictate one thing or another. Each case is different and should be weighed compassionately and only in terms of its own circumstances aside from any pre-conceived ideologies from either side. Ideology is a sanctuary for the simple minded.
M: So, you have dispensed with many arguments on both sides. We know that the fact that it is a human being is irrelevant since we as a people routinely accept and even celebrate the sacrifice of human life. Innocence is not the issue since no one really believe in it, and suffering is not the issue either since we are quite willing to put up with great suffering for the greater good. Well then. What’s left?
BJ: Think.
M: If we eliminate their main arguments the only thing left … is sex.
BJ: Precisely. Whatever else they may say, whatever other arguments they may present, for the Pro-Life bunch it is really about their objection to sex.
M: Outside the marriage bond. But, conversely, for the Pro-Choice people, well they’re being a little dishonest about that, too. You never hear them say they are fighting for the right to have sex. that would be bad P.R.
BJ: But, I’m afraid it comes down to that, yes; the two things are inexorably linked. I’m not saying that’s good or bad; it’s not for me to judge and sexuality is a completely different aspect of the subject.
M: Immaculate Conception only happened once and there is some doubt about that.
BJ: Now, I do allow that often pregnancy is the result of circumstances outside the girl’s control, but in most cases that isn’t the case; it’s mostly carelessness and that can be remedied, and in so doing reduce the need for abortion. It is a wonder to me that we will teach children about every other aspect of their world that might impact their lives but will leave out human sexuality, which has possibly the greatest impact. If young people are aware of their impulses and know how to channel them in ways that will keep them safe, if they, in short, know that sex is not a right but a privilege and as such should be approached responsibly, where is the harm in that?
M: So in essence, the crux of the opposition surrounds the desire to control sexuality.
BJ: Yes, it comes down to that, particularly, I’m afraid, women’s sexuality.
M: Why just women?
BJ: That is another whole subject and you would need someone wiser than I to explore it. But, I think, like marriage itself, it comes down to questions of property: its acquisition, maintenance and disposition. This is particularly true in patrilineal societies like the Romans, but not in more tribal matrilineal societies like the Celts or the Native Americans. In patrilineal cultures, the man has more of a proprietary interest in the woman.
M: Can we get into that?
BJ: Oh, you are evil.
*The Monastery of the Order of Buile Suibhne is set in the Ozark Mountains about twenty miles East of the little village of Crawford’s Notch. About thirty years ago, the monks and nuns of the order purchased an old 1930’s era Tourist Court from the people who built it and converted the cabins, about thirty in number, into the present monastery, thus saving the vintage structure from the fate that has befallen so many others on the “Mother Road.”
Interviews with Brother Jeremiah will continue.
I say that as long as there is football there will be war. Football is a microcosm. The two appeal to the same primitive and puerile impulses; they go right to the reptilian brain without stopping at the pre-frontal cortex to ask directions. I can appreciate baseball. Baseball is about finesse and strategy; the pitcher tries to outsmart the batter and the batter tries to overcome the strategy of the pitcher. Everyone in the field supports that effort. In baseball, full body contact is incidental. In football, however, full body contact is the strategy. If baseball can be likened to The Shawshank Redemption, football would be Rambo.
 Just the finest players in any league. This weekend millions of people will be attending to their Sunday ritual: faced painted, jerseys washed and properly worn, gastronomic time-bombs carefully laid out on the coffee table within easy reach, and the 66 inch flat-screen altar tuned and ready. I mean of course, preparations for services of the dominant religion in America: Football.
I wish them well, but I cannot join them in their ritual. I am a football atheist.
I do not acknowledge football. For me it does not exist. Oh, I know it does exist somewhere out there on the periphery of my awareness. I have seen images of grown men in full body armor bumping into each other and falling down to the ecstatic screams of the hysterical mob, but I refuse to acknowledge it. I mean it isn’t even football, is it? The word “football” is a misnomer. The players only kick the ball under two conditions, both so rare that they have their own names: The “Kick-off”, and the “Field Goal.” Other than that nobody’s foot ever touches the ball. So at least on that count alone, the fraudulent name, football doesn’t really exist.
So when there is a football game, particularly if it is a big one, I will do “anti football.” I will either go to a movie because there isn’t likely to be a crowd or watch yet another chapter in “The Elegant Universe” an exploration of the fascinating and impenetrable concepts of String Theory. Time better spent, I say.
It might baffle people, especially football fans, why I am so dismissive of a game that has come to dominate so much of the national imagination, energy and focus? Well there you have it. I dismiss it simply because it has come to dominate far too much of the national imagination, energy and focus. As a card-carrying iconoclast, I maintain that if it’s popular I will demur. If it is considered cool by the “cool people,” I will opt out. If the great majority of the population embraces it, I will throw it off the nearest cliff, and if it comes to dominate the culture as football has, I will dismiss it. Once I dismiss a thing, it stays dismissed. There is no appeal. I am, after all, a Scorpio with five planets in Scorpio. (At least I was until they mucked around with the zodiac and made me a Virgo. What th…?)
So, I protest.
When I was in high school, the administration, all of whom had the nick-name “coach,” by the way, appropriated revenues from the Theatre Club’s ticket sales to purchase football equipment while the theatre was left to produce its plays on a shoestring. I was seventeen years old at the time and was actively involved in the theatre. I swore, I took a holy vow, never to watch another football game. That was fifty years ago and I have never broken that vow. That act was, to me, metaphoric. I have yet to watch football and I will not.
I protest.
I protest that high schools are known by their mascot names more than for the lofty persons for whom the schools may be named or the academic achievements of the students. I protest that if a college wants continued alumni support, the football team had damn well better win games. I mostly protest that programs in Art, Music, Dance, Theatre and other “non-essentials” are cut while a school’s resources are diverted into the football team. This even though it is proven that arts programs aid the students’ academic achievement and better prepare them to be creative, contributing members of society after they graduate. We are screwed up! Our priorities are backward. I want our schools to be known for their academics and their arts programs which benefit all students as much if not more than for the athletic prowess of a few…A VERY FEW … fortunate students. School pride should not revolve around a silly game. (Nor should a city’s pride, but I’ll get to that later.) The tail should not continue to wag the dog.
A sportscaster with whom I worked while a television reporter once summed up Americans’ attitudes: “Ever try to rally around a math class?” He didn’t even get the irony. It’s a school, dammit! It’s not a talent pool for the N.F.L. Why don’t we rally around the school’s academic reputation? Are we so puerile as a society that we count that as nothing compared to the elegant war-game of football?
I say that as long as there is football there will be war. Football is a microcosm. The two appeal to the same primitive and puerile impulses; they go right to the reptilian brain without stopping at the pre-frontal cortex to ask directions. I can appreciate baseball. Baseball is about finesse and strategy; the pitcher tries to outsmart the batter and the batter tries to overcome the strategy of the pitcher. Everyone in the field supports that effort. In baseball, full body contact is incidental. In football, however, full body contact is the strategy. If baseball can be likened to The Shawshank Redemption, football would be Rambo. The mission is to break through enemy lines and capture their territory by spiking the ball in the end zone, a very warlike game indeed. The objective of said enemy, who is charged with defending its territory, is to throw the ball carrier to the ground and prevent him from taking the hill …er I mean the goal. Football is brute force. It is combat. I do think that whatever portion of the brain gets the most exercise is the one that will grow to dominate, and so I say again, as long as there is football there will be war. Can one be a pacifist and a football fan? I don’t know, but it looks doubtful from my point of view.
And since football so dominates the culture, I particularly do not get why artists should so actively participate in their own demise. Many of the most rabid football fans are artists, but make no mistake, painters, authors, musicians, dancers and all other arts suffer when football so dominates the culture. What did people do before they had football? They read books, went to art galleries, the theatre, the opera, the music hall. They gave a lot of artists work. Enough said.
I protest.
A minister of the gospel who headed a church in Texas once told me that he had to learn to talk football because it he didn’t become conversant in that most dominant cultural icon he would have no credibility or authority with his congregants. Well, that goes to prove that in Texas, in spite of what we might have assumed, the primary religion is not Christianity. It is football. Entire communities define themselves in reference to the high school football team. Not only in Texas; that pattern repeats in small town after small town all across this vast country.
I protest.
I was once asked why I protest so much when it is obvious that it will do no good and people will still blithely go on planting themselves on their couches Sunday after Sunday to watch the national anesthetic regardless of what I do. I answer that my protest is perhaps more true simply because it is ineffective. I have no other agenda except protest. I refuse to acknowledge the existence of football and will continue to do so.
Football is predicated on a solipsistic illusion.
Let’s say a team with which you have an affinity wins what is essentially a child’s game. (Let’s face it, it isn’t really all that complicated. Run the ball to the goal and knock everybody out of the way to get there). How is that your accomplishment? Why the religious fervor over what is essentially a small victory by a few trained individuals. How is that your victory? I don’t think I will ever figure it out other than it is an accessible vicarious victory for people who otherwise have few victories. It makes them feel like winners, even though all they have done is yell.
It is, I suppose, a way to take pride in one’s city, to “bring people together,” so to speak. I suppose so, but I fail to see the benefit in bringing people together by tapping into their inner neanderthal, by reducing them to the lowest common denominator for the sake of unity. I only lasts for a day or two, anyway, until the illusionary anesthetic wears off and they start shooting, beating and cheating each other again. It isn’t lasting, you know. It’s phony pride, accessible to even the moron sitting in the corner tap with nothing between his ears except an alcohol induced fog as much as to the astro-physicist. Highly democratic in that way, I guess. But it is ephemeral, this leveling out of the culture. The next morning the astro-physicist will go back to his astro-physics work and the moron will still be a moron, the two separated by a gulf as large as Galway Bay.
Mark Twain once said that “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” Well, I paused. I reflected. I refuse to go along with the mass hysteria that is football fandom. It is a colossal waste of time and energy. I know that few will agree. Well, nothing convinces me of the rightness of my opinion more than that almost no one agrees with it.
Someone once asked me if there is any sport that I like at all and I answered, quite glibly, “Yes, Mudwrestling.”
Now let’s think about that. Mudwrestling is simple uncomplicated one on one combat between two mostly naked women in a pool of slimy mud, no frills, no bands playing, no fireworks, no opening ceremonies, no fan tee-shirts or hoopla, just plain wrestling in the mud. It is what it is and nothing more than it is with none of the commercial pretentiousness that attends most other professional sports. There is no merchandising. There is purity in Mudwrestling which is quite commendable. Nobody is ever tempted to make a religion of it. It is taken as a serious sport by almost nobody which to my iconoclastic mind is the best reason to be a fan.
Every one of us knew that at any moment we could be called to a kind of service from which we might not emerge whole. Some would not emerge at all. There is no doubt that the names of many fellow draftees, very talented actors and designers who went through the Playhouse during its years of operation, appear engraved on The Wall.
 The Fort Bragg Playhouse on Knox Street, Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 1969. This article was to have been a review of the most seminal book that I read as a young man, Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. I was in the process of describing how I came to acquire it, how it was recommended to me by my friend and fellow actor Joe Fredoz, who pressed it into my hand one evening during a rehearsal of The Skin of Our Teeth at the Fort Bragg Playhouse, saying, “Jer, you gotta read this book! It’ll change your life!”
But, as I wrote the words, “Fort Bragg Playhouse” such a wave of nostalgia and good feeling washed over me! Herman Hesse could wait. I had to follow wherever that feeling led me. I followed it to a time and place nearly four decades ago.
This column then, if you will indulge me, is a memoir of a refuge that pretty much saved my sanity when I was a soldier during the Vietnam conflict from 1968 to 1971.
 The author as a newly minted soldier, 1968, sans hair.
I was drafted into the army in February of 1968. I was, as student at Bradley University, a pacifist. I even wrote on my induction papers that I could not conceive of a situation in which I could point a weapon at another human being and fire it. Yes, I was young and idealistic. But on that airplane to Fort Leonard Wood, I essentially gave myself to my “ultimate friendly death” as Thomas Mendip put it. I would not kill even if it meant I would not survive.
I endured basic training and all the indignities involved and graduated not the best, but also not the least among my peers, and got my orders to Fort Bragg. “Oh, man!” one of my bunkmates commiserated, “That’s where the Airborne is, that’s where the Special Forces are, that’s where the snake-eaters live. Man, you are S-O-L.”
Fortunately, his prognostication was not entirely accurate, for it was not long after arriving in B Company, 12th Support Brigade as a Surveyor Trainee (what else would an actor do in the Army?) that fellow soldier Bill Knapp told me about the Fort Bragg Playhouse and offered to take me over.
 The barracks at Ft Bragg from which I escaped to the Playhouse every evening after work. “Is he an actor feller?” Playhouse NCO and actor Dennis Rogers asked when Bill introduced us. “Yep,” I said trying to look as arty as I could with a bald basic training head and wearing fatigues. And that was how it started.
The Fort Bragg Playhouse was built during World War the Second as a movie theatre. In the early sixties it was converted into a venue for live theatre as a way to give the soldiers something creative to do in their off-time and “build morale” making them, it can only be presumed, better fighters. (Huh?) Of course there were problems such as would attend working in any structure that old and that “temporary.” All of those wooden barracks, NCO Clubs and theatres were deemed temporary when built and therefore not intended for the long haul, as ’twere. The coal fired furnace would sometimes belch black acrid smoke into the audience during performances and the wooden beams and braces were something of a firetrap. The Fire Marshall was always writing us up for exposed cables, not of course realizing, being ill-educated and unsympathetic to the conventions of the theatre, that you can’t hang stage lights without exposed cables. The Playhouse also served as temporary residence to a large number of fauna from pigeons to a mama cat who appropriated the orchestra pit to have kittens and decided to meow most loudly during a performance of Handel’s Messiah, leaving orchestra, chorus and audience in gales of uncontrollable laughter for half an hour until the cat could be removed and the performance could continue. But, these were only things to be cautious of or to work around and that was part of the fun.
For three years, I was one of the lead actors among a steady stream of trained actors, scene, lighting, sound and costume designers who had the same ill fortune as to be also drafted into their country’s service. Such a plethora of talent, including some who have gone on to make quite a name for themselves professionally, made the Fort Bragg Playhouse the best theatre in the Army and even the best theatre in the region. Audiences drove all the way from Winston Salem, Raleigh, and Greenville to attend plays there.
The first play I was in was Othello. The actor who played Roderigo received orders to Vietnam half way through the rehearsal process and I was commandeered to fill in. This was one of the most hazardous things about producing plays in the Army Special Services theatres: One never knew if the person cast would still be around for the play’s opening. This was also the case when I stepped into the role of Noah Claypole, the undertaker’s apprentice, in Oliver. The same uncertainty plagued the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when our Oberon was lost to service in Vietnam and had to be replaced. But for all that, the plays we did at the Playhouse were, in the estimation of most people, audience and press alike, the best.
 Actor and fellow draftee Joe Fredoz on the unfinished set of The Skin of Our Teeth. Joe played Antrobus; I his son, Henry.
I had been a student of Speech and Theatre at Bradley for three years, and I did learn some of what it meant to be an actor, but resources were tight and the productions were pretty much on par with any other amateur theatre in Peoria Illinois. But at the Playhouse, all the resources of the United States Army were behind the efforts, and while we couldn’t mount a full Broadway production, we were never lacking in materials or manpower. This led to some interesting encounters because some of the manpower came from the post detention center, or the jail if you will. Let us say that some of our cleaning crew were somewhat less than socially evolved. Many could have used lots of therapy to overcome the effects of the war, but at that time Post Traumatic Stress or “Shell Shock” was just being recognized as a treatable syndrome and not the result of a lack of character and courage. So they ended up in jail.
The threat of getting orders to Vietnam hung over all of us at the Playhouse like the sword of Damocles, but we acted as if it didn’t. I joked that when my children asked what I did in the war, I could tell them, “Well, I was on the Venetian campaign with Othello and I laid waste to most of the civilized world in Skin of Our Teeth.”
Looking back, I have to say that the best roles I have ever played were at the Playhouse, and some of the best experiences I have had with theatre people were at the Playhouse. Nothing else before or since has been able to match it. I was Puck in Midsummer, Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, Nickles in J.B. – oh, there were so many!
I learned more about theatre at the Playhouse than I did in three years of college before and three years of college, including graduate work, after. In college settings, so much ego gets in the way, so much empire building that pull students toward one or another of the Ph.D.’s in charge of their fates. I had to “thread the needle” pretty carefully so as not to be claimed as a disciple by any of them while assuring all of them that I could be. In the Army there was none of that. We were all in the same situation. It was a kind of “foxhole mentality” that equaled us out, officers and enlisted soldiers alike. There was no rank when on stage.
 As Nickles in JB, 1970. Every one of us knew that at any moment we could be called to a kind of service from which we might not emerge whole. Some would not emerge at all. There is no doubt that the names of many fellow draftees, very talented actors and designers who went through the Playhouse during its years of operation, appear engraved on The Wall.
For all of us, The Fort Bragg Playhouse was not only the finest theatre experience we have ever had, largely due to the brilliant Director, David Keyte, but was also our only island of sanity, creativity and society in an otherwise gloomy and alien world of smart salutes, espri de corps, rifle qualification, marching and the ever present threat of death. We even had our own salute. Usually, when meeting an Airborne officer, one salutes and barks, “All the WAY, SIR!” to which said officer responds, “Air-BOHN!” With us, the soldiers who frequented the Playhouse, it was a little different. When we saluted an Airborne officer, we barked, “Other WAY, SUH!” They rarely got it until they’d passed us by some twenty feet and by then it was too late for a reprimand. We had great fun, we actors.
My last performances in the Playhouse were also ones that I considered my best: Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and my swan song, John Adams in 1776, described as an “almost perfect” show. I was mustered out in 1972 and returned to college.
The Playhouse is no more. Indeed, its decline was precipitated by the end of the draft. When actors, directors and designers were no longer being forced into the service, the talent pool dried up. Also, Fort Bragg is no longer an open post, so no civilian audience had free access to the performances. The Playhouse was demolished to make room for a parking lot.
But there will always be the memories.
I’ll get to Herman Hesse later.
And there she hit on the crux of his dilemma. It was his humanity that was the cause of all his anguish. That was his curse. He had taken seriously the command to be in the world but not of it. How can one take joy in the things of this world and the things of Heaven at one and the same time? One “must love the one and hate the other.” One cannot, the Lord said, “serve two masters.” As with many learned men he understood nothing.
 On occasion I use this space to post excerpts from my upcoming novels. This is from my dramanovella, From All Things Evil, a psychological horror story set in 14th century France, with witches and demons and a few questions about the nature of love and the demands of faith. Father Emile Bergeron, as with many rigid men of virtue, has come under the quite human spell of a young nun in his care and she is pregnant by him. How he responds to that is the point of the story and the effects of his choices are far reaching indeed.
Odd how varied are the images in a candle flame if you stare at it long enough. Sister Constance Granetiere knew them all. They spoke to her and comforted her. It mattered not at all to her that the voices were in her imagination.
What is imagination, anyway? They were as real to her as the dark robe she wore or the crucifix tied about her waist. She did know, however, she had learned early, that she had to keep these things secret from the others. They wouldn’t understand, and the Reverend Mother had warned her that outside these convent walls were forces that would misinterpret them and seek to violently suppress them. This was not a world fit for dreamers.
Shadows made by the dancing flame moved around the walls of her cell like dark clouds, and there were shapes in them as well, though they didn’t speak.
She closed her eyes and tried to focus her mind on the prayer she had been given to say over and over again until it beat on her brain like a hammer. It had become, through repetition, mere sound without meaning, and as such, seemed rather silly and made her laugh.
“Oh, no, enough,” she thought as she tried to stifle her laughter
It was not an easy task for a girl of seventeen to concentrate on prayer when her mind was so easily distracted by other things: the hard cold stone against her knees, the scratching of wool across her breasts, oh yes, many things. These sensations led her thoughts away from her devotions and, try though she might, she could not guide them back.
Girls her age in the outside world were already wed, some had begun families, while she bided her time in this unadorned cell with nothing in it to stimulate or satisfy a mind so hungry for both except the books Reverend Mother lent her and questioned her about.
She decided to give herself over to the images and the voices, to give herself to her waking dream. It was far too powerful for her to resist, anyway, and she felt justified in a little indulgence.
She felt a breathing on her neck and the delicate touch of fingers down her shoulders. Her friend was back. She called him her shadow lover for his face was always hidden in the shadow of a hood. She tossed her head back allowing her veil to slip and her long brown hair to cascade down her back.
The Sisters of the Convent of St. Jean Baptiste did not, as some other orders did, cut their hair. It was considered a gift from God and, like their patron saint, they would suffer no razor to touch it any more than they would allow an outsider to gaze upon it. Rather, they braided it and covered it with a wimple and veil when in public, but, in the infirmary, Sister Constance wore it loose, covered only with a simple veil tied at the nape of the neck.
She swayed side to side as the shadow’s hands moved up and down her body, stopping here, pressing there, and proceeding on and on …
So caught up in her dream was she that she almost didn’t hear the footsteps in the corridor.
She quickly came back to herself and repositioned the veil just as the door creaked open.
Her friend was gone.
She bowed her head and began again to pray. “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God…”
“Sister Constance?” Mother Phillip whispered, touching the girl gently on the shoulder. “Father Bergeron has come to hear your confession.”
Constance clasped her hands more tightly and focused her eyes intently on the icon of the Virgin standing in the alcove before her. She dared not move. She barely breathed. From some far off place, she heard Bergeron’s voice saying, “You may leave us, Reverend Mother.”
Mother Phillip looked from Constance to Bergeron. It was forbidden for a man, even a priest, to be left alone with a woman in her cell, even in the infirmary. It was a rule of the convent that dated back to its founding, yet, the confessional was a sacred trust, and since she herself had put it out that Constance was sick and could not leave the cell, she could hardly protest. Rules must be flexible. She gave Bergeron a hard look and left.
Bergeron stood, observing the small, trembling figure bent before the icon of St. Mary. He knew she was no longer praying, but he wouldn’t interrupt her. He waited for her to speak first.
“You know,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“She shouldn’t have told you.” Mother Phillip was wrong. Sister Constance had had no intention of confessing it.
“I would have found out, anyway, eventually.”
He moved around and leaned against the wall to get a better look at her face. Her cheeks were sunken, or perhaps that was the effect of the sparse light. Her head was bowed still, and her eyes were closed. The skin of her forehead seemed translucent in the candlelight. She had a thin aquiline face with a long, narrow nose that fell to a small, oval mouth and a round chin. A few wisps of hair had fallen across her cheek. Barely turning her head, she opened her eyes and looked up at him as she spoke. “Liquid eyes of smoky jade,” he thought.
“I wanted it to be beyond your conscience.”
Bergeron caught himself staring at her face and turned, walking to the center of the room to avoid her gaze. “Its better this way,” he said.
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“You are a priest, Emile,” she said to the icon.
“And you are a nun.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“I haven’t taken final vows.” She turned to face him but his back was turned. “It’s not my life.”
Bergeron stared at the door as if wishing to escape and it occurred to him that Mother Phillip may be listening. He opened the door and satisfied himself that she was not, then turning back to the nun, he asked, “What do you plan to do?”
She had planned to ask him what he wanted her to do, what he wanted of himself, but, she could read nothing in his face so she grasped at what she had been told. “Have the child. Reverend Mother says it can be given away
“I see,” he said. Still there was nothing in his face. “Is that what you want?”
“You know what I want.”
Indeed he did, but the cost would be too great, and so he fell back on his theology. “It is a mortal sin.”
“Not to me. Even when Reverend Mother gave me penance, I couldn’t think of it as a sin.”
She sat on the cot. It was not the reaction from him that she expected. But then, she had had many weeks to think about it, to dream about it as young girls are prone to do. It was all still a surprise to him, and not entirely a welcome one. This she understood. She must tell him of her dreams. “Emile, the love between a man and a woman was ordained by God at the creation.”
“It is a sin for us. The Church commands us to deny the flesh.”
“Then, why did God place us on earth in bodies of flesh? The Church must be wrong.”
“Ah! Just like that. Revise a thousand years of Church tradition. If it were left to you, you might change everything to suit your whims.” Bergeron couldn’t help but laugh at the recklessness of the young. They thought of nothing except their own desires, and if something didn’t agree, well, it had to go, that was all. “But, it’s heresy, Constance.”
“Which is the greater heresy, denying God’s design or accepting it? I have accepted it. I love you, Emile.”
“Don’t say that!” He turned from her and pushed his forehead against the door. His eyes were closed, yet still he saw the curve of her neck, the way her robe, shapeless though it was, yet draped over her firm young body, and, her smell. The sweet smell of her hair, her skin, it all came back to him. He fought it, but could not escape the memory of her. “Oh God, I would rather a thousand devils rose up to face me, that, I could resist; but when you speak to me of love…when the devil cloaks himself in so pure and sweet a form …”
“You speak of devils? I spoke only of love.”
“Yes, the Devil can take on even so pleasing a shape as love to ensnare us.” He turned back to her, if for no other reason than to allow present reality to banish from his mind the addictive memory of the past.
Her eyes narrowed and the brows met over the bridge of her nose. “Why do you deny as shameful what I gave you with a pure heart, that which if what I see in your face is true, I will still give you?” She risked a move, ever so slight, toward him. She saw that he was in pain, and wanted to reassure him. “There is no guilt in that! And, even if there were, wouldn’t a loving God forgive all?”
“Don’t.…”
“Will you tell me here and now that what happened between us means nothing to you?” She could see a softening in his face, the man behind the priest, the man she had known, however briefly, before he was enclosed in the cassock again. “Look at me and say you do not love me, and I will let the matter rest and never speak of it to you again. Can you do that?”
“No. Fool that I was, I thought I could rid myself of you while I was In Paris. But you followed me everywhere, in the street, in the classroom, and at night…alone on my cot… how I ached for you!”
That was what she wanted to hear. That was her dream. And so she went to him and put her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest.
“Then leave with me. We’ll live someplace far away where no one has ever heard the name, Emile Bergeron. We’ll say good-bye to musty old brick cells and moldy old thoughts. I’ll have our child…”
“Would that it were possible.” His hands closed on her back and he felt again the softness of her skin beneath the habit. He pressed her close to him. As much as he willed it otherwise, he could not pull away from her.
“I’ve thought it out,” she continued. “We’ll have our own cottage somewhere in the North country. Maybe we’ll run an Inn and be constantly in the company of travelers from faraway places.
“You paint such a lovely pastoral picture, who wouldn’t be tempted by it? But, we can’t.”
“We can.” She held him tighter. “What is there to prevent us?”
“Oh Constance, be sensible,” he said, though he knew sense had little to do with it. He grasped her arms and pulled them from around his waist. ‘Look at me. I am a scholar, a forty-three year old scholar! For a man like me, there is no life outside of the Church.” He looked directly into her eyes, trying to make her understand. “Oh, I might be happy for awhile, but a man can run from his true self for only a short time. In a few years I would grow to resent the life I chose.”
“And me? Would you resent me?” She was hurt. He felt her pull away from him, but her eyes remained locked on his
“To live in a place where no one has ever heard of Emile Bergeron,” he asked? “Never heard of my work, the work I have been called by God to do, work that cannot be done outside the church as long as the church governs all? Yes, I would resent you for that, and what about you? Could you watch me decline into my dotage and still love, when there is so much of your youth left to you? You must see that it is impossible.”
“Then you don’t love me?”
“It is only the obsession of a foolish old man, not love.”  You're starting at shadows, Emile.
Seventeen year old girls are given to extremes, and Sister Constance Granetiere was no exception. No one feels love, loyalty or betrayal more than at seventeen. It is not unheard of to die of heart-break at seventeen; there have been accounts. And so, she could not understand.
“All right then. I will speak of it no more. Return to your books. Find comfort in them, if you can.” And she turned away from him.
He wanted to comfort her, to make up for the hurt he had caused her, or perhaps he was just reluctant to so completely let her go. The memory of her was still strong. He placed the palm of his hand against her back. “Constance…”
“No. Don’t touch me. You have made your choice.” And, so it is with the young, so sure, so absolute.
“Can’t you understand…”
“No, I can’t. I won’t! Please leave me now.”
Bergeron didn’t want to go. There was still the question.
“What about the child?”
“That is no longer your concern.” And, as completely as she had embraced him a moment before, now she shut him out.
“What I mean is…does anyone know who the father is?”
The question surprised her, for she was still too inexperienced to know the ways of men. “No, Emile. No one knows except you and me … and God.” And then, as if to prove that she could be as true as he was false, she added, “You needn’t worry, no one will. You’ve chosen your life, as we all do, and I won’t get in the way of it. I can’t make you love me, but, because I love you, I won’t hurt you.”
And, there it was; her final, sacred vow.
But, he needed more assurance than her word. “Will you swear to that?”
“What?”
“Will you swear by all the saints you will never betray me?”
“Betray you? I betray you? Haven’t I already sworn by my love for you that I will not? That’s enough. The saints are no more real to me than that.”
“They are more real to me.”
“Then, you swear by them.”
She stood facing him, her arms folded under her breasts, holding her head haughty and high, balanced on her slender neck, her lips puckered and her eyes heavy lidded and defiant, daring him to fault her. It was to him utterly entrancing.
“Oh, why…why did you ever lay out your lustful passions before me? Why didn’t you keep them to yourself?”
She was not about to let him get away with that. “The purpose of the confessional is to reveal our sinful thoughts, for so they were to me then, and receive penance. Why didn’t you give me penance and forget?”
“I couldn’t forget!” The memory was as fresh to him as if it had happened an hour ago. “I couldn’t pass you in the corridor on the way to vespers, or catch a glimpse of you at prayers, or even place the Host in your mouth without hearing once again the words that passed between us.”
“That’s because you are a man, Emile.”
“A man of God.”
“A man in priest’s robes.”
‘A consecrated man.”
“A living man, a breathing man, a man of flesh. Emile, why can’t you accept that? Your robes don’t make up the whole of you any more than this habit makes up the whole of me.”
And there she hit on the crux of his dilemma. It was his humanity that was the cause of all his anguish. That was his curse. He had taken seriously the command to be in the world but not of it. How can one take joy in the things of this world and the things of Heaven at one and the same time? One “must love the one and hate the other.” One cannot, the Lord said, “serve two masters.” As with many learned men he understood nothing.
She did not wish to be buried here before she’d even had the chance to live, and she would tell him so. But, he had turned from her and seemed to be listening to a noise outside the door.
“Emile, what’s wrong? Emile?”
“Quiet!”
In the shadows of the hallway outside Constance’s cell, a spectral figure, cloaked and hooded in a rust colored monk’s habit, walked silently to the door and stood, waiting.
“Emile, what is it?”
“For God’s sake, be quiet!” Bergeron pressed is ear against the door but heard nothing. He opened it slowly and looked into the hallway. He saw nothing. The spectre moved on.
“I thought…I had the feeling that someone was out there…listening,” he said as he closed the door.
“You’re starting at shadows, Emile. Like a guilty child at the voice of a stern and unforgiving father. Is that the life you want, living only to avoid punishment? I’m sorry for you.”
There was some truth in what she said, but it was a truth that Bergeron felt no shame over. After all, the fear of punishment is what makes us virtuous, or so he thought. “Attend to your prayers, Sister,” he said. “Ask the Blessed Mother to forgive you your heresies.”
“There is no need for forgiveness where there is no sin.”
Still she was defiant. Still she was rebellious. He would remember that. “Attend to your prayers.” He opened the door and went out into the darkness.
Sister Constance Granetiere of the Convent of St. Jean Baptiste had never felt more alone. She had allowed herself to dream, and that dream, improbable though it was, had comforted her. Now, she had nothing except the power of the vow she’d made to love. If she broke that, then she was lost indeed.
History is full of men who were more intimate with their mistresses than with their wives and almost as many women who find more satisfaction with their lovers than with their husbands. Some of these are the stuff of legend! Obviously, marriage isn’t the only place where it’s likely. I got a few stories I could tell you myself from my own experience, but like I said before, it would be immodest.
 Kelly outside his living room, the Cork and Kerry Pub.
February 15, 1981
Valentine’s Day. What is that rubbish? Ran into several of my lady friends this morning who berated me quite handily over my neglect of them yesterday. What’s that all about?
Who says I gotta go out and buy flowers and candy and get all gooey about my lady loves? Ain’t you supposed to be doing that all the rest of the days of the year instead of saving up all that good feeling for the one day when it’s expected and when blokes try to make up for takin’ ‘em for granted the other 364? I have never gotten a valentine card and I don’t want one No sir, I don’t!
It ain’t that I object to people having fun, mind, just so long as it ain’t coercive, you see, kind of like blackmail? But, I got a feelin’ it ain’t possible for a bloke to do it right, you know what I mean? I see their faces in the florist’s shops, all strained and anxious, making sure they get just the right thing or there’ll be hell to pay and don’t you doubt it. Look here, do we have to make affection so commercial with gaudy red hearts and flowers and all that, make such a big deal out of being a person’s “valentine”, unless we’re trying to convince ourselves that what ain’t true is true: that there is for everyone a “one and only.”
My observation is that’s a bald faced lie and it ain’t natural. I, myself, am a man who follows natural law, at least I try to, not these paltry things that priests and politicians dream up to control us and have done for thousands of years, because nothing frightens them more than Human Nature.
Look, we , that is the human being, ain’t made for monogamy, no sense saying we are. I could tell you stories, but then you’d think I was bragging. It ain’t our natural state, you know? It’s natural for lots of creatures but not us. The wolf, y’see, mates for life. The chimpanzee doesn’t, neither does the deer and neither do we. The wolf, unlike the human, will when its mate dies, never take up with another. It never enters its canine mind to do so. Why? Because it is not in its nature, that’s why.
But mating for life is not in the nature of the human being. Indeed, his nature has to be forced into it by means of artificial social institutions and laws. How do we know? Well, ain’t it obvious? Because these artificial social institutions and laws exist! The wolf is never ever tempted take anyone other than his life mate, so he don’t need any laws. But people do it all the time. If it wasn’t in our nature to do so, it would like with the wolf never occur to us and there would be no need for laws and customs like marriage to restrain us.
All right, I’ll grant you, marriage is needed for the legal niceties of property rights and legitimacy of offspring, which is still about the inheritance of property. It seems to me that love and devotion, even loyalty can get along quite nicely without it. Marriage is about property, make no mistake. I say if it wasn’t for us owning stuff it might never have been dreamed up in the first place and that’s a fact.
But it was.
And here we are, thousands of years later still trying to make sense of it, still trying to figure out why?
What’s it all about? Thing is, all those laws and contracts are dishonest. 75% of marriages are visited by the dreaded “infidelity germ” yet we all try to deny it could ever happen to us. We all still believe that the law, custom and the prohibitions of conscience will prevent it, and we spend a whole day convincing ourselves of that with paper hearts and other gaudy trappings. Well, I say if it takes that much effort to keep us restrained then it’s obvious that our every instinct strains at the traces.
But I hear people say, “If monogamy is not in our nature, why do we believe in it so much?” I suppose we think it’s the only way that we will ever have a strong relationship with someone who understands us and loves us anyway. We tell ourselves that it is only in marriage that true intimacy with another human being is possible. We convince ourselves that we really, really don’t want to find love outside it and we celebrate things like Anniversaries and Valentine’s Day to help us nail down the five thousand year-old deception.
If only the evidence did not fly in the face of it.
History is full of men who were more intimate with their mistresses than with their wives and almost as many women who find more satisfaction with their lovers than with their husbands. Some of these are the stuff of legend! Obviously, marriage isn’t the only place where it’s likely. I got a few stories I could tell you myself from my own experience, but like I said before, it would be immodest.
I feel sorry for the blokes whose wives end up going out with me; they feel all hurt and betrayed or something like that. What for? We’ve got so crazy that we fall back on needlessly demeaning words like, “cheating,” Jealousy is part of that whole deception because it treats people like property and is always destructive. Always. We are sore distressed when we discover to our horror that our one-and-only has followed the call of Human Nature instead. It’s mostly because we’ve all been snookered into the monogamy myth. What for? It’s ridiculous.
Rather than condemn that restlessness, we should applaud it as part of our evolutionary heritage! If it hadn’t evolved in us as a survival trait, we wouldn’t have it. We would be like the wolf. But we are humans and humans are not monogamous; multiple marriages and divorces are commonplace, as are so called “affairs.” We are obviously more restless than our brother the wolf ever will be and rightfully so.
What do I want? Only what’s possible, you know. I’m not unrealistic. I don’t expect a wholesale revision of our culture to better conform to Human Nature. My goals are more modest. I just want us to realize, first of all, that what is not natural is probably not moral, and that there is nothing wrong with following the dictates of our natures.
Stop treating love like any other commodity that can be traded. Time and money, these things are finite and can be counted, subtracted and divided. But to me, love is infinite. It is immeasurable. The only way we can count it and divide it like a pound of beans is to contain it, restrict it and measure it with moralisms, laws and contracts. Property. It takes what is sublime and brings it down to the material level of commerce where it might be more easily understood and parceled out in fractions to whomever might desire it. But oh my word, it is profaned in the process. Love should not be given over to the bean-counters
A good first step is to stop expecting monogamy. It ain’t realistic. The expectation of it has caused more mental anguish than war famine pestilence and death and that’s no lie. A fancy dinner, a gaudy card, and an expensive gift one day out of the year ain’t gonna make it otherwise.
And that’s the way I see it. That no one, not even the most liberal, will agree with me confirms in my mind that I am right. I may live outside of cultural expectations, but you gotta live what you believe. There’s a cost, I suppose, but if I were afraid of the consequences, then I’d just follow the rules like most people and go to my grave filled with regret over what I didn’t do. Well, not me. They can bury me when I’m dead and not a second sooner.
Ignatius P. Kelly
Comment: I worry about my friend. If he has a fault it is that his heart is too big and he loves too much and too passionately, unconfined and unrestricted by custom. I fear he will end up an old man sitting at the end of the bar staring straight ahead at nothing, abandoned by everyone, for the world will neither accept nor condone a man who loves as much, as often, as easily or as joyfully as Kelly.
—JM
There is an arc to history, even though, as Dr. Crane pointed out, there are no real patterns. History bends toward tolerance and understanding between people. It hasn’t gotten there yet and there are many set-backs and reversals as we go around and around the concentric spiral of historical events, but we are evolving in that direction. Those who attempt to hold back the tide are doomed to failure.
 Protests in Madison Wisconsin over the right to collective bargaining. Every one hundred years, it seems, we have to slap down the robber barons and restore some equity in our economic system. What is happening between the public workers and Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin is one of our slaps. There will be more. But those who want to draw direct parallels to the Labor struggles of the past century are mistaken. It is the same in some ways but not in others.
I was once told by a very good professor of History, Doctor Philip Crane when he taught at Bradley University, that there are no patterns in history. I do tend to agree. What appear as patterns are, in retrospect, essentially similar actions taken by people who are of a similar temperament. History never repeats itself despite dire warnings that those who do not know it are condemned to repeat it. Neither is history linear, progressing in an unbroken line toward some conclusion that we know not of and can never predict. Rather, history is a concentric circle. What appears to be repetition is no such thing because time moves continually forward, and now it appears that the concentric circle is expanded forward to form a spiral rather more like a slinky. If it appears we have been here before, it is an illusion.
Some of these illusions are obvious.
What was acceptable behavior a hundred years ago is no longer acceptable. Wars of conquest were, at the beginning of World War One, not only acceptable but glorious in the popular imagination. It was once acceptable to colonize poorer regions of the world and divide them up between the European powers, creating artificial states. This is no longer acceptable; Europe relinquished its last colonies in 1954 when the French left what was once French Indo-China and is now Vietnam. The consequences of European colonization are still with us, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that no power will accept the principle of colonization, not militarily, anyway. Economics is another story.
It was acceptable a hundred years ago to marginalize an entire race based solely on their color. That also is no longer acceptable. It would be naive to think it is not still done, but it is no longer acceptable to the society at large, no longer expected, and that is a sea-change in our thinking. Displays of such behavior appall us and we shrink from them in horror.
So, while it might appear that we are repeating patterns of history, we are not. Time moves continually forward and although it may seem we have been here before, in actuality we have not. We are evolving individually and socially.
There is an arc to history. History bends toward tolerance and understanding between people. It hasn’t gotten there yet and there are many set-backs and reversals as we go around and around the concentric spiral of historical events, but we are evolving in that direction. Those who attempt to hold back the tide are doomed to failure. Conservatives never ultimately win, and Governor Walker, or those akin to him, will not win. They may gain a temporary victory legislatively, but even that victory will be hollow and ultimately doomed.
To see the arc of history we have to get beyond our own small “world” for make no mistake, the vision we have of our world is infinitesimally small. We do need perspective that only a study of history can give us and an ability to interpret events that is best given to us by education in the arts.
 Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Which brings us to the immediate story of the conflict now unfolding in Madison Wisconsin between those business interests working through Governor Walker who would dismantle the gains made by Labor over the past century and those who wish to strengthen them. It would seem that we have been here before. But in reality we have not.
It was a vastly different world in the twenties and thirties. Most people lived on the farm. The major industries were so called “smokestack” industries. It required little or no education to find and keep a job. People were no more than parts of the industrial machine. The bosses were dismissive, even contemptuous of them and their needs. The attitude was that if you paid them more they would fall into sin. George Pullman even built a model city outside Chicago for his working people because he did not trust them to manage their own affairs wisely. In other words, management believed the working class was ignorant, brutal and drunken.
Not to say there wasn’t some truth in management’s assessment. The labor force in cities was largely made up of immigrants from Europe. One does not travel across the ocean to another world if one is well off at home. Those who came to America were indeed the “tired, poor huddled masses.” In the ca
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