I’m sorry. (not really)

Matthew 5:37 Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’  Anything more is from the evil one.

Close to the top of my list of pet peeves is the current vogue of the “apology” that is not really an apology.  You’ve heard it: “I am sorry if what I said offended you or hurt your feelings….” pseudo-apology.  The latest example comes from Joe Biden.  Now I’m not picking on Joe Biden to be picking on Joe Biden; it’s just that this one should be fresh in everyone’s memory.

Mr. Biden has been taken to task by his Democratic rivals for the Presidency – most notably Kamala Harris and Cory Booker – for his comments regarding his working with segregationists to effect civil rights legislation.  Now no matter your opinion of Joe Biden, his civil rights record is indisputable.  The man doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.  And his initial “They need to apologize to me!” reaction was warranted.  But he just couldn’t help himself, two weeks later issuing the “I’m sorry if…” apology, which really isn’t an apology.  The gist remains “I didn’t do anything wrong, but because I’m a sensitive and caring person I feel bad about your bad but misplaced feelings.”  I feel like a modern Diogenes, only I’m taking my lamp and trying to find anyone in the political landscape with a scintilla of moral courage.

I would say we all have common ground in a desire for the truth.  But it seems the Alinsky-ites are proliferating, for whom the end justifies the means, even if the means is bald-faced lying and Orwellian double-speak.  For me any hope in politicians is badly misplaced; the only solid hope one can cling to is the infinite love and mercy of Jesus Christ.

Just Askin’….

God be praised, sanity prevailed and that judge’s decision to force a handicapped woman in England – when she, her mother, and her grandmother all wanted her to have the baby – to have an abortion was overturned.  Where were all the “pro-choice” voices supporting this woman’s choice to have the baby?  Right, they were silent.  Proof that “pro-choice” is a euphemism for “right to kill my unborn child”.  These activists don’t give a rat’s patootie about actual choice, both sides of the coin.

Have a blessed feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Denial of Reality

I am a huge fan of Fr. George Rutler.  If you are not familiar with him, here’s a bio: https://stmichaelnyc.org/biography-of-fr-rutler.  I’m currently reading his most recent book, “Grace and Truth”: highly recommended.  But I was watching one of his “Christ in the City” episodes on EWTN and he told a brief story that just struck me how bizarre our culture is becoming.

He baptized a premature infant in a New York city hospital recently. He was amazed at the technology – the PICU (Premature Infant Care Unit) was like a air traffic control room – and the devoted attention the nurses were giving this two-pound baby.  And it was a fully-formed living human baby: arm, legs, ten fingers, ten toes.  The baby survived, its survival being the product of the best of the human mind.  A happy story. At the same time, older babies than this child’s twenty-six weeks were being aborted down the hall, a denial of the reality of those babies’ humanity.

Without the Holy Spirit operating in us we inevitably deny reality.  In that spiritual vacuum the prince of lies will have his way.  Relativism is a favorite lie of his.  My truth is my truth, your truth is your truth – there are no absolute truths.  Yet I have yet to hear a relativist say it is okay to rob a convenience store and gun down the clerk, that that action is the perpetrator’s truth, his good.  So there are some truths we can agree on it seems, that there are some absolutes.  Nietzsche might say it was okay to rob and murder, that there truly are no absolutes, but the Nietzsche was a total nut-bag, which is why he’s deified on college campuses today and Chesterton and Belloc are ignored, but I digress. Where do these absolutes come from, if we are living in a cosmic accident?

Think about it.

Suffering

I lead a men’s spirituality group on Tuesday nights at our church, which is an offshoot of our men’s club.  At 62 I think I’m the young buck of the group, and how I became the leader, not sure that happened.  With my ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certification, I’m certainly qualified.  But that aside, something that really struck me after the last meeting was how much concern and suffering it seemed everyone has in their lives, either themselves or loved ones.  One friend who is a decade older than me but has the vigor of a teenager (tennis, race walking, swimming, does 2,000 crunches every day – I think I did a crunch in 2002) found out suddenly that he needs open-heart surgery next week.  Another friend’s wife just discovered a mass on her pancreas – this person has stage 4 liver cancer, this other is having a hip replacement.  There are children with addictions, children who have left the church.  When I was young and energetic, all of this went over my head, or if I caught wind of it, I didn’t give it much mind.  Christ’s words to Peter in John 21 are ever on my mind, where he said “When you were young you dressed yourself and went where you willed, but another will come to dress you and take you where you do not want to go.”  In the wake of the seasons of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, it’s easy to see how our lives fit that same blueprint: we work, we suffer, and then comes the Light.  O Lord, thank you for your gift of suffering, that leads us to become more like you, worthy of spending eternity with you. Amen.

Star Weird?

My kids put on the full court press from me to see “Star Wars: the Force Awakens” when it came out, saying what a great movie it was.  I loved the first three films, the next three not so much, and forty years later the Star Wars phenomenon had passed me by.  But Episode 7 was finally showing on cable, a 3-hour recording I could watch for free along with an hour of commercials, so since I’d recently bled my water heater, and it was raining heavily all weekend, I said “What the heck”, put on my Roger Ebert “Make Movies Great Again” hat, and watched it.

Digressing momentarily, the greatest thing about DVR is fast-forwarding through the ads, although I hit the play button and watch the drug ads.  My age I guess: I just enjoy watching happy seniors with potentially lethal ailments playing paint ball with their grandchildren (“Ha HA – gotcha ya, ya little bastich!”), painting seascapes, eating piles of gourmet food that would gag a lumberjack, and making passionate monkey-love with blonde, leggy millennials.  And the advisories are a hoot. “Do not take Erecticum if you have recently visited a foreign country with rampant Ebola, bubonic plague, or hay fever.  But talk to your doctor about Erecticum.”  Yeah, I’ll talk to my doctor, in whom I’m supremely confident is totally focused on the welfare of mankind, and is not in the pocket of Big Pharma.  But back to the movie.

Meh.  It all felt painfully familiar. Yeah “The Force be with you”, sure.  I wonder how many people have died trying to cross busy urban streets thinking they could hold back traffic using the power of the Force?  And Carrie Fisher, didn’t really need to see what she had turned into, her voice two octaves lower and gravelly from smoking three packs a day.  And what kind of childhood do you have to have to turn into somebody who can blow up entire planets and sleep peacefully at night, like that red-haired General Hitler Wannabe?  But my major beef is the planet-destroying thing.  It doesn’t make a lick of common sense.  And the First Order, the Empire, the Republican Party, whatever – took out 5 or 6 of them at one time!  The first movie only took out one at least.  First, when you blow up a planet, all their exports and imports are history – major impact on the galactic economy, and stocks on the Milky Way Exchange plummet.  Second, kill several billion people and you are shrinking your tax base in a major way.  Third, and most of all, if your driving motivation is power and domination over the peoples of the galaxy, when you kill them you are shrinking your power base, less people you can dominate.  If someone could explain how planet-destroying – and we haven’t even touched on the ecological side effects – makes sense I would appreciate it.  But (spoiler alert), there were no Ewoks, so I give the film one thumb up.

 

 

 

mo

O What a Beautiful Morning…

…O what a beautiful day, I’ve got a beautiful feeling, lots of caffeine is coming my way.

I woke up early even by my standards this morning, so I changed my routine, which of late has been a changed routine, with my wife and I both having medical interruptions in our lives.  My beloved had day surgery last Tuesday, and has gone from Peppermint Patty to Percocet Patty, sleeping downstairs in the recliner.  So my thought was to do my Rosary walk first, and my morning prayers afterwards upstairs while I’m cooling off before taking a shower.  So I’m coming down the home stretch towards my house at zero dark 4-30 and there there is almost complete silence except for one bird making the most amazing racket in a tree in from of the house where the Sikhs live, apparently attracted by the never-ending wafts of pungent spices.  As I have the good fortune to know some of the sparrow dialects and recognized this one, as I got near his ululations were clearly – translated to English – “Come any closer and I will kick your ass.” As I passed the house and started creating distance, the mellower yet taunting tones of “Yeah, keep on walking big man!” echoed through the neighborhood.

This episode of near-experiencing songbird whup-kitty strangely led me to an interlude of contemplation on the beauty of God and the marvelous gift of existence He’s bestowed on us.  And how odd that people much more intelligent than me can espouse a purely material and non-transcendental philosophy, that somehow 16ish billion years ago the cosmic egg ignited and initiated the expanding universe, and out of this chaos of insentient always-existing matter eventually resulted a potential confrontation between a shambling gooberish human and a sparrow doing steroids.  Assuming it’s all random, what are the odds of that?  Probably greater than the Cleveland Browns winning a Super Bowl in my lifetime.  But thank you Jesus for the odd yet unique amalgamation that is me, and giving me the opportunity to adore you in the Eucharist, and have the hope of being with you in eternity in Heaven.

Culture of …?

Culture of Death, Culture of Life – looks like a “High Noon” showdown is looming between the two.  The states like New York and Vermont, and state like Alabama and Georgia have declared “This country ain’t big enough for the both of us….now draw!”  My church has already had its first planning meeting for the March for Life in D.C. in January; fortunately our pastor has Catholic ninja skills (he knows 75 different ways to kill you with a rosary), as the provocateurs – like the Chief Dan George wannabe with the drum – will be out in full force.  There will be blood, I predict.

I mourn us ever reaching a logical and good-hearted consensus on life issues, even among Catholics.  The spirit of Aristotle is not exactly inspiring discourse in this country.  I have Catholic friends, for example, who see abortion, the death penalty, and immigration as all morally equivalent issues.  Our President – proudly “pro-life” – decries Alabama’s failure to provide exemptions for rape and incest as “overreach”.  The ignorance of any solid philosophical foundation of that view allows sentimentalism to undercut the pro-life argument.  So a child conceived in legal consensus has the right to life, but one conceived otherwise has no protections?  Most illogical, as Spock would say, with an arch of an eyebrow.  But how do I, a Catholic who buys into the Church’s position of life needing to be protected from conception to natural death, find common ground with an environmentalist who sincerely believes the world would be a happier place if a virus wiped out the human race?  Our Pope loves dialogue, but it may be challenging in that case.

These ramblings come on the heels of last Sunday’s Gospel, where Christ exhorts the Apostles to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34).  Seems straightforward, but so hard to do.  Bear with me, as I took the death of Grumpy Cat hard.

Luther? I hardly even knew her!

Good morning dear friends…or friend – I know my wife sometimes reads these posts.  Coming to a fork in the road with my scribblings.  I am in the inquiry phase of becoming a lay Dominican, and naturally part of that is getting more intimately acquainted with the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.  The Angelic Doctor had a vision not long before he died of what Heaven was really like, and all he would say about it was “My writings are so much straw!”, and he didn’t write another word.  If his writings are really so much straw, then what ate my witless meanderings regarding Scripture?  Time to go in a new direction, which I hope doesn’t lead me off a cliff.

My life has become greatly simplified: I no longer care about the Green Deal, the Mueller report, the wall, or Kim Jong Un’s haircut.  I have one vote: which candidate is on the side of the Culture of Life, and which is on the side of the Culture of Death?  To vote for the latter is a mortal sin.  Many would react – some vehemently – that I would be a one-issue voter, and a threat to the American Way.  So be it.  If you don’t have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness don’t follow.

My wife this week went to pray the Rosary with friends at the local Planned Parenthood for the first time, and it was just like the beginning of the movie “Unplanned”.  There was the Catholic group praying, and there was a fundamentalist Christian group shouting “Baby killers” and “Planned Parenthood is racist!”, even at women going next door to PP to get a hair weave or to eat at Five Guys.  One of their group apparently was an anti-Catholic provocateur, stirring up cries of “Heathens!” and “Mary worshipers!” directed at the Catholics. “Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat.” (Luke 22:31) .  The devil delights in division, and sows it whenever the opportunity is ripe.  A first principle for all Christians (yes, Catholics are Christians) is a belief in a loving God our Father and the redeeming sacrifice of His Son.  If we agree on that first principle, despite our doctrinal differences we should be able to engage in fruitful dialogue.  We are all on the same team here.

Further abortion musings: I have a dear Episcopalian friend who bluntly says “It should be up to the decision of the woman.”  And that opens up the opportunity for lot of potentially fruitful discussion.  For example, where does the man figure into this?  God designed each sex to have only half a reproductive system.  If there’s a decision, does the man not have any input?  And what would Jesus say about it?  “Your circumstances are difficult, I understand – do what you think is best.”  That doesn’t seem simpatico with “Take up your cross and follow me.”  But here I go again, so much straw…

He is Risen!

Running the gauntlet of Lent and recovering from surgery has kept me away for a while.  In the meantime lots of shi’ite has happened, like the cathedral fire and the latest Islamic expression of love for mankind in Sri Lanka.  All I can tell you in this world of wordly Catholic prelates and Congress-persons who never heard of what happened in the 20th century with socialism, I am more than ever convinced of God’s unconditional and infinite love for us.  We got that going for us, which is nice.

Lent

I hope everyone is having a fruitful Lent.  For me, prayer (check!), almsgiving (check!), fasting (oops!).  I don’t do hungry well.  Loaves of bread? I would have turned those stones into Red Baron 5-Cheese Pizzas.  But Lent’s not over until the fat guy sings.

I was sitting in a restaurant last night, and CNN was on.  I couldn’t hear it, but the important news of the day seemed to be two things: President Trump’s Twitter spat with Kelly Anne Conway’s husband, and Trump’s Twitter spat with John McCain.  Since John McCain is dead, I assume our President is getting the best of the argument.  During Lent I have tried to turn down that noise, and amp up prayer and reflection.  It’s so easy to feel like one is living in 5th-century Rome: the Visigoths are coming!  No they’re not – fake news!  I just try to keep focusing on the positives, like the Browns trading for Odell Beckham Jr., and that Baker Mayfield hasn’t been arrested yet at 3 AM in a cocaine haze with a hooker on each arm.  I encourage you too to also focus on the positives in your life, and to pray each day, even if it’s just five minutes.  Ask Jesus to have your back: he does, but it doesn’t hurt to ask anyway.

God bless!

Tom