Sometimes life just gangs up on you and hits you with a sequence of troubles which seem unfair. One wonders, “What did I ever do to deserve this?”
You probably don’t want to know. The actions and reactions which govern Creation are perfectly balanced, and obey laws far over our heads.
If we received an answer to our whining, it would likely be an answer along the lines of the answer Job got, when he questioned God a bit too stridently about all the bad things he had to go through. God silenced Job, basically by asking Job, “Were you there when I created all this?” Once Job got around to contemplating the intricate details of Creation, the actions and reactions involved in all things, even things as simple as sap rising in the spring, he was humbled by how minor his own concerns were, in comparison.
The same revelation appears in the movie “Casablanca“, when Rick Blaine states, “…the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
In other words, one must let go of their selfish concerns about their personal desires, and have faith they are part of something bigger, which they don’t understand.
I was hit by a triple whammy of hardships which were hard to take, as they insulted my sense of myself as a family man, with strong “family values”.
First, despite all our loving efforts, dementia made my mother-in-law impossible to care for, and we had to put her in a “memory care” institution. She knows she is “locked up” but can’t remember why, and resents everyone’s efforts to make her comfortable. She wants to get back to the life she remembers, but her memory is so weak she no longer has the capacity, but she doesn’t remember she constantly loses her keys and wallet, and only remembers being capable. It’s the saddest thing, and strange as well, for she was an extremely self-reliant and capable woman from her early teens on, for seventy years, before coming to this confusing end. Saddest is that she can’t sit back and enjoy people trying to make her comfortable. You can put the nicest cushions on her rocking chair, but she defines the expression, “off her rocker.”
The things she did when off her rocker were amusing, if you don’t mind a bull in your china shop. My customers at my childcare would arrive to pick up their children, and she would come storming up to them and demand they find me or (more usually) my wife immediately, because it was “urgent”. So my customers, who are often quite young, would tell their children to wait and would rush off to do the good deed. And we would thank them, blushing, because we knew damn well what was “urgent” was that old lady couldn’t find her wallet, and thought it might have been stolen, when she in fact had hidden it under her pillow, but forgot she hid it.
Someday I may be able to write a post titled “Dementia” full of funny stories, but the joke gets old when it is the present tense. The question arises, “Why would God allow this to happen to someone?”
It is not a happy-ever-after ending to a long life, and it is not a situation where the caregivers involved get gratitude, for the elderly victim of dementia is in no mood to thank anyone. In any case, that was a long and exhausting decline I had to weather, and was challenge number one.
Second, a daughter went through a rough divorse and a custody battle involving whether her two small children would/will be brought up speaking Portuguese in Brazil or English in New Hampshire. There is no solution which is acceptable to both sides, so far, (which is a prime ingredient to any divorse).
Divorce has always struck me as stupid, ever since my own parents succumbed to it when I was a boy. Love is beautiful, and when you turn away from beauty then of course things get ugly. Why do people prefer ugliness? It is so stupid it is actually a funny joke, if you are able to reduce things to absurdity, as Laurel and Hardy did with their movie “Big Business” nearly a hundred years ago. There is nothing all that funny about the human tendency to escalate, and make bad situations worse, but they let us see the absurdity. If you have fifteen minutes, it’s a masterpiece.
However, as patriarch of a large family, I could not manage a funny post about a meat-loving Brazilian wedding a vegan American. Too much pain was involved as they made a bad situation worse, and I was ashamed I couldn’t stop it. It is worst when little children are involved.
Lastly, to top off my sense life was completely out of my control, my wife broke her ankle in three places, and was unable to do much of anything for six weeks, so I had to do the work of two. It was a situation where you do everything, but do nothing well. Every job is a slapdash job, and you never get time off.
Mind you, I’m 71 years old, suffering from COPD, and was under a fond illusion I could resign from my position of runner-of-a-childcare, place the business in my wife’s name, and quietly fade away like old soldiers are suppose to do. I didn’t start collecting Social Security until age 70 so I could get the maximum amount, and, in theory, I could help my wife doing old-man stuff like paperwork, or riding around on a lawnmower, but spend most of my time doing what seems productive to me, namely growing good food in a down-sized garden, and writing poems, and lastly writing my memoirs, which will contain some remarkable adventures. However….
God did not accept my resignation. The only resignation God accepts is resignation to His will. Consequently I have spent little time pottering about in my garden, nor writing my memoirs. Instead I’ve needed to rush about dealing with an old lady off her rocker, with a young couple more interested in drama than peace, and with witnessing the sunshine of my life become bedridden.
What surprised me was how little time I wasted whining, “Whatever did I do to deserve this?”
Not that I didn’t roll my eyes to heaven and mutter things, as trouble followed trouble, but I just dealt with things as they came, one after another, until it occurred to me I was a changed man. I surprised myself. Usually I loose it. Usually I tirade. Maybe I was just so worn down that I lacked the available energy to throw a fit. But do you want to know something? I sort of liked the peace I felt. Rather than weak I felt strong. You have to have some sort of strength to be in the middle of a hurricane, and to just plod along saying, “Ho hum. Another day, another breeze.”
Not that I get a bit of credit for this. Believe me, it was not in my plans. To God goes the glory, for He shapes those who honor him.
But now I’m curious. Could I withstand a complete reversal of my fortunes, and be hit by three wonderful events, and not be swayed into the opposite of a tantrum? Would I become wildly manic, or could I keep the peace?
Suppose I wrote a sonnet that went viral, and, as swiftly as Oliver Anthony became famous, I went from being shadow-banned to having millions of views, and my website went from being unknown to huge. Suppose I went from having to pay people to help me, to having people offer to pay me for being my helper? Could I keep my poise, and say, “Ho hum, another day; another breeze.” ???
My conclusion, at age 71, is that the ups and downs of this world breed happiness that doesn’t last and sorrow that doesn’t last. Nothing of this world is lasting. To build on this world is like building an igloo on an iceberg that is melting away. When we die the billionaire leaves earth as naked as he came, just as the debtor does. So, what really matters?
I assert what matters is resignation to the will of the Creator. His love is infinite, His compassion towards us is infinite, His bliss is infinite, His joy does not end, He wants us to join Him, and He is everlasting and eternal.
My old goat, (the sad, final survivor Of my herd), hobbled out into spring's balm, And I'll be darned if spring didn't revive her. She refused to behave demure and calm But gamboled and frolicked, despite her age.
So too does mankind, when it has been spared A wintry death, go pursue the next rage And skip into quicksand. I have despaired From ever hoping we'll learn from mistakes.
God's mercy makes us so hugely joyous We forget discipline, and forget what it takes To be healed; we chase what will destroy us. Spring's a reminder we're all April fools And makes me most happy that God's mercy rules.
People who define “milling around” as “loitering” do not understand the process of milling, as it was once done. Back in the “modern” world of our great-grandfathers, power, usually supplied by a water wheel of some sort, turned a great granite disk atop a stationary great granite disk. The top disk had slots cut into it towards the axle, something like the spokes of a wheel. The grain or corn to be milled started down these slots, but seldom made it to the center without being overridden and crushed between the two stones, becoming flour or meal which exited at the center. (Or perhaps it went the other way, from center outwards, in some cases.) In either case, as the grain or corn was trickled in to this grinding process there were initially no high tech scoops that efficiently pushed it into the slots; rather it agitated and bounced about at the entrance to the slots until dumb luck popped it into the slot. In other words, before it was milled it “milled around.”
My point is that “milling around” was part of the process. If grains or kernels stood still they would never enter the slot and be ground. There was no “loitering” involved in “milling around” (or “milling about”). In fact the agitation of grains of wheat or kernels of corn at the entrance of slots was necessary, if those wonderfully simple mills were to work.
As I have been feeling agitated, yet seem to be far from becoming any sort of refined “flour”, I therefore I think “milling around” is a good description of my current state. I am not loitering. I am part of a process above my pay-grade, in God’s hands. I am troubled, agitated, outraged, but lack the power to influence those who trouble, agitate, and outrage me.
I am not alone. The so-called “swamp” in Washington DC has resorted to corruption, calling it “ways and means”, which just isn’t right. Everyone knows it. They themselves know it, which makes them increasingly take steps to oppress the backlash they know is brewing, because they know they deserve it. They hope to delay the backlash until after they have lived their glutted lives, and then, like the French King once stated, “After Us, the deluge.”
However the American Revolution was not like France’s. It definitely had an ugly side, but nothing like France’s. Loyalists did hang the young schoolteacher Nathan Hale, but then acted astonished when they themselves were not hung, but sent packing to Canada, after they lost the war. And as these poor refugees fled north they received food and shelter from the very patriots they had despised. This is different from what the French revolution would have given them: The guillotine.
Despite all the wars and bloodshed, compared to other lands there is something very nice about America. It seems almost too kind. And, whatever it is, it is currently “milling around.”
I don’t find milling around a comfortable place to be. To be so agitated is all wrong. The righteous are overruled by bribed judges, over and over, as if filthy lucre mattered more than God. But what can we do? We “mill around.”
If I were given the time and resources to debate, I could explain why what is wrong is wrong, but such debate is exactly what “they” want to prevent. Therefore I, and countless others, wind up shadow-banned, marginalized, cancelled, unheeded, and part of a population “milling around.”
This is part of a repetitive process which occurs and reoccurs and re-reoccurs in history until we get sick of it. Good gets established as the “Law”, (or Constitution, or Bill of Rights), but then some slime-bags come along and think only suckers follow such sissy, Sunday-school rules, and they briefly prosper by cheating. I say “briefly” because, in the long run, history teaches us that “cheaters never prosper.” However, for a while they think they are smarter than everyone else.
The concept of there being a “Law” we follow to our benefit (and break to our detriment) is very ancient, and predates Moses and the Torah. Through the mists of time, scrutinizing clay tablets, we can catch glimpses of a “God of Righteousness” with a name something like “Zedek”, and this animates the mysterious appearance of Melchizedek, a “high priest of God”, in the wanderings of Abraham, long before Moses wrote the “Law” down.
The “Law” was written or dictated (or perhaps recalled after-the-fact; there is much debate about this,) by Moses as the Torah, which is basically the first five books of the Bible. It is not merely the foundation of Judaism, but also Christianity and Islam. Islam? Yes, for, although I am no scholar of the Koran, in 5:44 It states,
Indeed, We sent down the Torah, in which was guidance and light. The prophets who submitted [to God] judged by it for the Jews, as did the rabbis and scholars by that with which they were entrusted of the Scripture of God, and they were witnesses thereto. So do not fear the people but fear Me, and do not exchange My verses for a small price [i.e., worldly gain]. And whoever does not judge by what God has revealed – then it is those who are the disbelievers
My personal reading of the above suggests that followers of Islam (and indeed everybody) had best be wary of hating Jews, lest in the process they hate those who are following the Torah, which would make the haters themselves, and not the Jews, the “disbelievers.”
Sadly Mohammedans, and Christians, and Jews, have all at times failed to “Judge by what God has revealed.” That is how religions founded on love are corrupted to hatred and horrible wars. The hypocrisy gives religion a bad name. The behavior of Catholics and Protestants towards each other, and Sunni and Shiite Moslem towards each other, has been barbaric. And that is between followers of the same dogma, who you would think could get along. If you can’t even get along in your own cult, how can you love your enemies? Consequently we see the mayhem of crusades. It is enough to turn anyone towards Atheism. However the fact of the matter is that this disgusting behavior is not proof religion is bad, but proof some don’t practice what they preach.
The sad fact (that we mortals are able to be seduced away from obedience to the “Law”) is ancient. One delightful thing about Judaism is that they don’t hide their failures, in their histories.
One thing that has always fascinated me is the political situation which is apparent in the time when Jews had no overlords, described in “Judges.” They were apparently what we now would call “Libertarian”. They needed no police, for they knew what the “Law” was, and obeyed it, until they got seduced and didn’t. Then all hell broke loose and they became terribly upset, and milled about, whereupon a “Judge” appeared to rescue them and get them back on track, in terms of obeying the “Law.”
Though this was occurring 3000 years ago, it seems suspiciously similar to our situation today, as we mill around. I am wondering if we are wishing for a modern day “judge”. Perhaps Donald Trump?
But the ancient scriptures also describe a time the Jews didn’t just want a “judge”, able to discern between good and evil, but rather wanted to abdicate their personal freedom and accept a “king”. I delight in how the prophet Samuel warned the Jews how costly such an abdication of freedom would be.
So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; 12 and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. 15 He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. 16 He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattleb and donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.
America’s founding fathers wanted presidents to be short term “judges” and not long term “kings.” The first furthers freedom, and the second ends it.
In any case, I have no such power, as we currently mill about.
In some ways I’m glad I have no power, for the burden of telling people the difference between judges and kings would be great, especially because as soon as you have power you face an onslaught of seductions. What sort of fool might I make of myself? Suppose some publisher (who actually gagged at my poetry) told me he wept reading it, or some nubile maiden (who actually found my decrepit body so loathsome she wanted to vomit) told me I was irresistibly attractive? There’s no fool like an old fool, and I confess I’m susceptible to flattery, and therefore it is a good thing I never get any. Instead, I’m just milling about, with all sorts of other people who never get flattered.
Of course, there is something dangerous, even explosive, in the “milling around”. To continue my millstone analogy, people don’t think of flour as being like gunpowder, but when flour dust in the air was ignited by a spark in the old mills, there could be amazing explosions.
Perhaps we saw such an “explosion” in my little town, in broad daylight, at the “big” intersection of Main Street with the “Turnpike”. I pass through that intersection on my way to work, but not on my way home, (because I take a one-way road going home). Therefore I saw nothing unusual when I headed out to feed the goat at the Childcare at 2:00 PM, but later, at 6:55 PM, as I headed out after supper to a Bible Study, the intersection bore a remarkable graffiti.
(I took the above pictures a week after the event. The “burn outs” were even blacker when fresh.)
Usually such “burn outs” are the result of rebellious teenagers going wild at two AM, when no one can see them and report them. What I found striking was the above vehicle did its screaming pirouettes in broad daylight. Also there are some rumors the rebel wasn’t a teenager.
At this point there tends to be discussion about the danger involved, and the foolishness of risk, but there can be little doubt the graffiti which the burn-outs left in the center of a small town expresses a certain contempt towards authority. Then the discussion moves on to which authority is the contempt directed at: The “Law”? Or the busybody ordinances of bureaucrats who themselves are contemptuous of the “Law”?
I can’t say. Maybe a little of both. But I will say that I sense a pent up tension in the air, as people “mill about.” Nor do I feel it is only experienced by a particular political party in the United States. It seems to be world wide. People are simply fed up with a leadership which is increasingly contemptuous of the the “Law”, and increasingly disdainful of ordinary people who simply want to be left alone, and to live ordinary lives, where two sexes have babies in a wholesome and natural way, and support, nourish and raise their children to be good citizens. The simple and ordinary, which the “Law” teaches us is noble and beautiful, is increasingly under attack as being “racist” and “sexist” and “exploitation”, while that which is deviant and criminal is mollycoddled and praised and released without bail after committing horrific crimes.
We are pitted against each other, rather than brought into the brotherhood of unity, when in fact we are all in the same boat. Americans are at odds with the leadership of Iran and China, but the people of Iran and even China are also “milling around.”
Do you think the hard working people of China are not well aware of their government’s shortcomings? They are perhaps more aware than anyone else on earth. They laugh at us for ever trusting those we are starting to distrust, for they have experienced a century of cruelty. They have developed their own way of whispering what the government wants unspoken, and they are well aware of awful deeds, such as organ harvesting from hapless Uighur imprisoned without cause. They are “milling around” too, you know, and their leaders are very worried about it.
And so are the ordinary people of Iran. They too know about the Uighur, and they are incredulous that their leadership, which is so high and mighty about upholding Islam’s “Law”, is friendly with China and says not a word about China oppressing people simply for being Islamic.
In fact the whole world knows about the Uighur, but the leaders do nothing. Inaction is just one more unlawful thing they do among all the rest of the unlawful things they do, laughing up their sleeves at people who try to obey the “Law.” However the “milling around” seems to be getting louder and louder.
For the moment the “Law” seems powerless, but in fact it has a power greater than any leader’s. The “Law” is based upon Truth, and Truth remains true even when dictators disallow It being spoken. Dictators can scream and rage all they want, but Truth silently keeps smiling at them, for Truth cannot be anything other than what it is. It is invulnerable, and there is no kryptonite that can harm such a Superman. Most amazingly of all, Truth is Love, which is unfathomable to greedy, lustful and hateful dictators, and Love has a power so far above the heads of those who sneer at the “Law” that they are like worms under rocks.
This is what I personally feel is building in the “milling around” which I notice more and more.
The founding fathers of the United States were well aware of how people in leadership, (even they themselves), could be seduced and corrupted by greed, lust and hate, and they tried their best to create a government which would prevent such moral failures from gaining control. One device was free and fair elections. Free elections allow the “milling around” of the public to manifest in a manner that avoids bloodshed. However our last election was not free and fair, because the scofflaws in the “Swamp” don’t care about what the Founding Fathers cared about. I can’t imagine the upcoming election will be any different. However in a way it will be different. The “milling about” is far greater.
Many are nervous about bloodshed, and I confess I worry about that myself. But I also have a strange hope that the United States is different. We are a kindly nation, founded on the “Law”, and there may be something in our make-up that skips the bloodshed, and allows Truth to manifest in a way we can’t even imagine.
This strange hope was supported by the fact that on three recent occasions my intellect was reduced to despair. The current nonsense where students chant “Destroy the Jews” an “Death to America” is typical. Intellect is useless when you are dealing with appalling ignorance. One is reduced to moaning.
What good is moaning and groaning? Well, it seems fairly useless, but I chanced on something that struck me as rather wonderful in the sixth Chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
“….the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”
My current woes are not worth recounting, but take my word for it: On three occasions my intellect felt as smart as the wrong side of a rock. I had no answers, and if I was younger I might have expressed myself by screeching tires on a road, and leaving burn-out graffiti of black rubber. Instead I expressed myself by writing three sonnets. In each case I began without any idea what the poem would be about, and in each case they began basically as a groan. Yet in each case I amazed myself. The groan flowed out easily, without correction, and when I was done I felt amazingly revived.
For what it’s worth, here they are:
After outrunning the wolves, the lone stag Stands on the hill, quietly contemplating Where to go next. Shall he climb yonder crag And watch the sunset, or graze lush grass, sating All hunger? Even beasts must make decisions.
I, too, must decide, but stand in a place With no paths, or perhaps my vision's Too weak to see them. Or maybe I face Many paths like the spokes of an old wheel, And I stand at the axle. Where to go? What to do? I wish I could hear God's will But my own logic's the poor guidance I know. I run from wolves like the stag on the hill, And then? I'm no shepherd. I'm a lost lamb. I am a not-ness in need of "I Am."
It's spring, but the yellow flowers seem sad. Sun's bright, but the north wind's crooner chills With his piercing song. The world has gone mad And the flowers all seem like a funeral's. Where has gone hope? Forsythia splashes Its yellow clowning, bobbing in the breeze, But I'm not amused. Something glum dashes The uplift, and If I wrote symphonies They'd sing of sadness. Someone is missing And the flowers remind me they're gone. My lips are cold. They want to be kissing As daffodils gleam their gold in the dawn. This ache in my heart makes it quite clear Love has not gone though love is not here.
I am hungry for that first drumming roll Of thunder in the spring, informing all We are under new management; the toll We paid is abolished; Winter's downfall Is accomplished; the wall that divided Is smashed like Berlin's. Yet today's rain Brought no lightning; it just provided The spring with more chill. I tire of the pain And look to the clouds for the longed-for shift. All the world seems awaiting. Where's the thunder? Wheres the glance of warmth that strangely uplifts Without words? All the world seems to wonder In a night so chilled the frogs cease their peeping. Though men go to bed, no one is sleeping.
(This being Sunday, I decided to go off on a esoteric tangent.)
It seems a cynical thing to say, but one thing I have learned in my time is that often the surest route to a complete debacle is to try to improve myself. My New Year’s Resolutions usually end in embarrassment.
Not that we should stop striving. I just had my seventy-first birthday, and I’m still striving to stop being such a moron. And I’m certain our efforts don’t go unnoticed in heaven: “No good deed goes unrewarded.” However we don’t live in heaven, which has led to the sardonic, earthy counter: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Often our punishment is self-inflicted. Our vision of a better way involves a degree of arrogance, and pride is a dirigible just begging for a pin. Many times, when I became aware that my vanity was getting out of hand, I resolved to stop being vain. I strove in vain.
It turns out that, while egotism may be selfishness, it is a sort of necessary evil. The wild winds of this world would disperse us like a puff of cigarette smoke in a gale if we didn’t have some way of standing our ground. So we become like turtles, and our ego is our shell.
Living in a shell gets old. For one thing, it gets lonely.
Long, long ago, when I was a teenager, men were very tough, but perhaps some began wondering if there might be some way to escape the lonely suit of turtle-armor they were clanking about in. “Peter and Gordon” had a hit song called, “The Knight In Rusty Armor,” back in 1967, which, though in some ways risque for it’s time, typified an unspoken restlessness men felt with being turtles, forever tough and “macho”.
Personally, I wasn’t all that macho to begin with, and my sensitivity was worsened by the fact I had skipped a grade and was the youngest boy in my class. Consequently I went to great lengths to prove I wasn’t a weenie, doing things I didn’t much want to do, to prove I wasn’t a coward. For example, at age fifteen I hitchhiked from the coast of Maine up into Quebec to Montreal, and then southwest to the far eastern suburbs of Toronto. While in Montreal I spent 25 cents to take pictures of myself in a “photo booth”, (the equivalent of a “selfie” in those departed days,) putting on my toughest face, but when the strip of four pictures came out I was slightly horrified. I didn’t look tough, but instead terrified. (I looked like a fifteen-year-old all alone in an alien city where many didn’t even speak the same language.) I think I invested a second 25 cents to do a better job of looking tough.
Experiences such as this made me aware, early on, that there was a gentler, kinder side of myself. I wrote a slightly absurd poem at age 16 describing myself as, “a peach, but a peach in a gravel pit. I bruise too easily.” I recognized I wasn’t as tough as I pretended, and even acted. I could crash five cars, just about kill myself with drugs, be involved with drug smugglers and thieves, but another side of me could sob like a baby, when I was hidden within the dark of a movie theater, watching a tearjerker. Which was the real me?
By age nineteen my life was wreckage. All my efforts at being “tough” were a miserable failure. Therefore I went the opposite direction, and became a miserable failure at becoming a “sensitive male.” I studied all sorts of psychologies and religions, and joined “men’s groups” where we deflated our toughness by punching pillows and weeping about how Mommy was mean, and Coach made us run an extra lap. Beyond doubt this put us in touch with a side of ourselves which being “Macho” denied, and even (somewhat accidentally) connected us to the lower echelon of some sort of spiritual hierarchy which had a vague idea of an Almighty, whom one couldn’t see, far above. But this involved an added humiliation, for I had started to see myself as “religious”, but swiftly also saw I failed to live up to my new, high standards. In fact, when push came to shove, I behaved in a downright unspiritual manner.
Perhaps the worst, and most humorous, failure involved a time I was preaching to an elder brother that “peace is the answer,” and he responded that I was only saying that because I was a prissy little mamma’s boy with wrists too limp to fight. I then attempted to punch his lights out, which wasn’t too peaceful of me, was it now?
Now it is fifty years later, and I seldom try to punch anyone’s lights out anymore, for two reasons. First, my withered testicles are failing to produce enough of the hormones which fuel blind fury, and second, if I got into a physical fight I’d very likely get knocked out in fifteen seconds.
I still do enjoy a good brawl on intellectual levels, but an odd detachment seems to have possessed me. I have the awareness that we mortals lack the brains to find our way out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into:
Yes, there is a difference between good and evil, but they are of the same coinage. They need each other to be defined. Good is “less evil” and evil is “less good”, but neither achieves the Absolute. The only way to the Absolute is through the Absolute, which is why Jesus said, “The only way to the Father is through Me,” which was the Christ’s way of declaring he was not a mere philosopher of this world, nor a particularly zealous idealist willing to sacrifice His life for His idealism, (which was how I was brought up to view Jesus), but instead Jesus was from Beyond this world.
Beyond this world? What is Beyond this world?
This world is creation. Beyond this world is the Creator.
The Creator didn’t just create small stuff like galaxies; the Creator created time. The Creator is beyond time.
Can any of us imagine what life is like is without time? I think not. And this is one reason we cannot escape the trickery of this world. We require help. Our own efforts are doomed to failure.
As an optimist, it is hard for me to say we are all doomed, but we are, as long as we insist we can do it on our own. We use creation’s standards to envision what the purpose of life is, but the purpose of life is join our Creator, who is utterly beyond worldly imagination. Our minds create many mental tools which are helpful within creation, but they are of no use when it comes to getting out of creation. In fact the mind itself, like time, is a creation, and something short of the Creator.
Artists, when inspired, gain hints of glory beyond ordinary imagination, and strive to share this amazing beauty with their fellow man, and quite often wind up in some way crucified. They are in some ways like small children copying their father. Their creations are nowhere near as grand as God’s; are like a cardboard box is when a child emulates his father’s truck; but this world has a nasty response, when you in any way, shape or form dare say creation is merely a road, a passageway you walk upon, and that the real goal is the Creator. In a sense you are daring to tell the world it is useful, but like a Kleenex is useful; in the end it will be wadded up and thrown away. And none of us likes being treated like a Kleenex.
I could embark on a long digression at this point, describing in intricate detail the various ways this world insists it matters, and its Creator does not. I’ll skip that, and just say whatever your worldly goal is, it is not the End. You may sweat and strain and strive to be world champion, and even if your dream comes true and you become world champion, it is not the End. Your achievement of the pinnacle is followed by a decline. You get old, as I am now, and then you point out (to people who want to be world champions) that such a worldly goal is not the End, and how do people respond? It is as if you have spoken blasphemy. How dare you! How dare you say being world champion doesn’t matter! Are you trying to discourage our youth?
No, but as an artist I see that what really reaches “the people” is not worldly, but otherworldly. Most artists can’t explain it. They just do it. And when they succeed it is glorious, but besides the ecstasy there is agony. “You gotta pay the dues if you’re gonna sing the blues.” If you take on the role of creator you must also accept the crucifixion.
You may say this world does reward it’s best artists, with millions of dollars, and appreciative audiences roaring approval, and adoring groupies, but in my life I’ve watched how such great men suffer. John Lennon got shot. John Baluchi died of debauchery. And the delightful Robin Williams hung himself. If that is the reward success gains you, I feel blessed to be unsuccessful. It seems even in the small world of art, people prefer the creation more than the Creator. People will spend millions for a painting by Van Gogh, but if they ever had met the agonized man, they likely would have found him weird, and wouldn’t give him the time of day. And, if that is true in the small world of art, is it any wonder that, in the giant world of Absolute Reality, the Creator himself got crucified?
However the Good Book states the Creator bounced right back. Jesus rose from the grave. Creation cannot obliterate its Creator, nor negate the reason for being created, which is to join the Creator in “timelessness”.
And what is the punishment for refusing the Creator’s compassionate invitation? It is to remain in time, which is called the “everlasting.”
In other words, we are given the choice to leave creation and join our Maker in the bliss of Timelessness, or of staying stuck in time. Most chose to stay stuck.
The fact we are given free will, and tend to prefer the known to the unknown, is frustrating to some preachers, who want people to Love God, and accept God’s invitation, and therefore they attempt to bully their congregations into submission. Rather than “everlasting” they like to add horror, and say “everlasting hell” and “everlasting lake of fire.” They desire to scare the bejeezes out of you, which makes them quite different from our compassionate Creator, (and in many cases makes they themselves become candidates for hell). Our Creator does not bully; he gave us free will; He wants us to follow His advice because we adore Him, not because we are cowering in dread.
As a person attempting to be a poet, I have blundered into some inspirations that can only be described as “heavenly.” However they did not last. They obeyed the Law of time, which is that nothing in creation is Eternal. All created things have beginnings and ends, in terms of time. “This too must pass.”
In other words, “everlasting heaven” would still be within the traps of time, and less than the bliss of joining our Creator outside of the trap of creation called time. Therefore, as attractive as such heaven might be, it would still hold the pangs of separation from the Creator. Even as one reaped the rewards which the virtuous deserve, one would know they were still on the road; they had not shed the shell of a turtle and become absorbed in What We Cannot Imagine.
Seen in this light, a person enjoying “everlasting heaven” is not that far removed from “everlasting hell.” The former are experiencing enjoyment as the latter experience suffering, but they are stuck in time.
One of the most intriguing statements in the Bible is where Saint Peter states what Jesus did during the time between when his body was “dead” and when his body was “resurrected”. Peter states Jesus went to hell to “preach to the sinners of Noah’s time.”
(If Christianity had the eraser of “cancel culture”, this statement would be scrubbed from scripture. It has caused problems. Why would Jesus preach to the damned? Were they not “everlastingly” damned? Or is there an escape from hell? Jesus would not preach just to rub it in that the damned were forever doomed, but rather to save them from doom. So there must be an escape hatch from hell, which led to the concept of “purgatory”, which is “derived but not mentioned” in Christian scripture, and has led to one heck of a row.)
Personally I’ve tended to retreat from all religious squabbling. It has gotten out of hand. I study history, and know “the Pope”, (actually many Popes over 2000 years), has authorized the deaths of roughly fifty million Christians. Hitler only killed six million Jews, and he could claim they were “not Christian”. As the “Pope” killed fifty million he knew they were fellow Christians, but didn’t agree with Rome. God may have given such free thinkers free will, but the “Papacy” did not approve of freedom. In response Protestants have killed millions of Catholics. Likely their numbers are less, but only because Protestants have only had five hundred years to butcher within. And the peculiar thing is both sides insist they are not aggressive, but merely “defending” their faith.
Islam is no different. Millions have died in wars between Sunni and Shiite. They are no different from Catholics and Protestants. They took otherworldly Love and made it dirty and worldly. They used scriptures of Love to make war.
And if Christians can’t even get along with Christians, and Muslims can’t even get along with Muslims, it is little wonder that when these two supposedly spiritual groups meet the sparks fly, and our planet sees all the pleasantries of crusades and jihads.
That is why I tend to retreat from all religious squabbling. The “experts” so obviously miss the point. I want to use the free will God has blessed me with to be a free thinker.
What I have concluded, with my puny intellect, is that there is a big difference between the “everlasting” and the “eternal.” The “everlasting” exists within time and space, but the “eternal” exists in timelessness and spacelessness. And, around the time my thinking gets this far, there is smoke and the reek of burning rubber, and my brains burn out. For even the perfected mind of a mastermind cannot comprehend God, and therefore my puny intellect hasn’t got a prayer, (yet, oddly, when you haven’t got a prayer tends to be when you pray most.)
The mind too is a creation. It is the most useful tool of all (when it properly integrates the heart) for traversing creation, but in the end it is shed, like a useful knapsack is shed at the end of a long, long journey. But who can imagine this? The very idea of losing our minds tends to fill us with dread.
(I warned you at the start this would be an esoteric tangent. The definition of “esoteric” is “a subject few understand.” I am not one of the few who understand. I am one of the many who don’t. But I do like to look at Infinity, and be humbled by wonder.)
When I can't find the words, nor hum the tune, Nor in any way say what I can't say, I shut up. Why should men howl at the moon When, basically, they are just blown away. Blown away. "Blown away". That's hippy slang For glimpsing, through telescopes, strewn stars; Smatters of galaxies after Big Bang, And understanding how tiny we are. We recoil from the vastness. We retreat Like snails into shells. The awe is too much For our fragile egos. We clutch defeat, For winning requires we accept the touch Of Love, dare forget how loneliness blinds By shedding the shell of space, time, and our minds.
“And then I saw a great white throne, and Him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from His presence, and there was no place for them.” Revelation 20:11
Thirty-two years ago, my wife and I ran a lunch counter and snack bar at a small local cross-country ski area, and weather like we’ve been having just about ruined us. Just about every penny we had was invested in food, and cocoa, and just about every bill possible for us to receive through the mail was unpaid. Sunshine has never filled me with such gloom, nor mild weather ever seemed so depressing. We had enough food to feed a small army, so I knew the kids would be fed, and I was young and strong and could cut firewood to keep the house warm, unless I ran out of gas for my chainsaw. I doubted the gas station would even sell me a gallon on credit. My pride was shredded. My faith was slumping.
Then we got snow, and skiers appeared in droves. And they get hungry. It then was such a wonder to me that people would pay a dollar fifty for a baked potato with a dab of sour cream that cost me about fifteen cents to make, and that they would smile and praise me for being so much more “reasonable” than other ski areas that charged three dollars for the same potato.
And we sold things much better than a baked potato. My wife’s chili could raise the dead, or at least the dead-tired skier. And people gladly paid a dollar for a single one of her cookies, which were big but not that big. We made money hand over fist. In a single day we made enough to pay off all our overdue utility bills and our rent. So, I know what it feels like to whiplash from abject poverty to well-being in twelve hours.
The thing that struck me was that I really could not take the credit for the fact that I went from feeling like a weasel to feeling like a responsible father. I did not control the snow. In fact, I was more or less a gambler, and for a while my luck was rotten, and then I hit a lucky streak. And gamblers who escape debt (and the wrath of loan sharks) through a lucky streak are notorious for speaking of “higher powers” who had mercy on them.
You can call such talk “superstition” all you want, but I have noticed that the people who do so tend to be financially secure. They are in a sense cursed, by safety. Where a businessman knows about “risk”, (which is, in a sense, a gamble), the financially secure only are involved with “safe” investments. They “never touch their capital” and “live off the interest”, until they have created a cold universe for themselves where they inure themselves from mercy. Or, they live that frosty way until some financial bubble pops, some market crashes, some thief plunders. Then they suddenly enter the world of “superstition”. Mercy only matters to those who need it.
This winter the mercy I, and others like me, needed was not snow. Rather it was a lack of snow. We did not need cold, but mildness. Why? Because the madness of “green” politics, and its foaming hatred of fossil fuels, was sending the price of staying warm through the roof. If the weather had been merciless, few could have fallen back on using firewood like I am able to do. If we had been hit by a weather pattern such as the winter of 1976-1977’s, things would have precipitated a crisis. The “power grid” would have been overwhelmed. There would have been rotating black outs and brown outs, and also the elderly on fixed incomes simply would not have been able to pay their bills. But did this happen? Not so far. Instead, there has been mercy.
Was it due to Global Warming? Not really. Global temperatures (according to UAH) last January were only a half degree warmer than they were during the ice-age-scare of the 1970’s:
If the weather patterns had taken the form of the winter of 1976-1977, it wouldn’t have mattered much if the temperatures of the frigid blasts were a half degree warmer. Misery would have been worse, in fact, due to the dunderheaded policy of “green” politicians. However, we (so far) have received mercy. The weather patterns have been benign.
Not that the pattern has been truly “zonal” and kept the cold air up at the Pole, for there have been some shots of very cold air to the south, indicative of a “meridenal” pattern, however largely these shots have been into the oceans, and largely have missed the poor people most likely to be harmed. (The poor Kurds freezing after their terrible earthquake being the exception and not the rule. They sure could use some mercy.)
As an example of how the shots miss my area, look at the “fisherman’s map” below:
What this map demonstrates is a pattern I’ve watched over and over this winter. Namely, a weak ripple passes over my neck of the woods but, when it gets out to sea, it explodes into a “DVLPG STORM”. To its north, at the very top of the map, by the west coast of Greenland, is “HEAVY FRZY SPRAY”, indicative of very cold air able to freeze the salt water which a fishing boat plunges through to the boat’s decks and rigging to such a degree the craft can capsize. That extremely cold air is sucked south behind the storm, but just far enough east of New England that we are spared all but a glancing blow.
In the above map the lobe of high pressure following the exploding storm has two sourses. The “H” over Labrador is arctic, and will largely miss us, while the “H” over Cape Hattaras is “polar” and very moderated and includes Pacific-warmed air. That is what we will be getting, in the southwest flow behind the high pressure. (Temperatures below are Fahrenheit, of course.)
Even Saturday’s temperatures are slightly “above normal” for us, so you can imagine the mercy of Wednesday’s and Thursday’s. It is destroying our Childcare’s igloo and many snowmen, but the slushy sledding continues, even without sleds, as if children were otters.
And youth can still walk on water:
In other words, due to mercy, the ordinary lives of simple people goes on. The inflation and higher energy bills haven’t ruined people in the area where I live, and it hasn’t been able to do so, at least partially, because the winter hasn’t been as cruel as it could have been. (So far.)
Now here’s the funny thing: Such mercy has no mercy on those who wanted there to be suffering. Some “green” ideologs really want people dependent on fossil fuels to “pay”. Their zeal is so ugly that they think a significant decrease in the world’s population would be a “good” thing, and not involve the ugliness of genocide. And therefore, they are likely very upset the weather has been kindly. They roll their eyes to heaven and cry out, “Have You no mercy!”
Or maybe not. I have a suspicion most are Atheists. It is sort of hard to roll your eyes to heaven when you don’t believe such beauty exists, or to ask for mercy when you believe mercy is a superstition.
As a poet, I have air-headed tendencies, which I have to rein in, in order to function in a responsible manner. I have to be down to earth, though earth can be a dreary place, and even be ungodly, when people assume being down-to-earth is all there is. It isn’t, which is why there is a need for poetry.
Dreary, down-to-earth, pragmatic people need to be reminded from time to time that there are such things as angels. We get plenty of reminders that we need to be more pragmatic. Life is good at that. Sometimes our less good attributes rise up as an evil so frightening we must descend to the crudity of war, where living is reduced to such a life-and-death level that lofty thoughts seem pointless, but even amidst crude violence people need to be reminded to think of God and his servants. (In fact, when it is least practical to muse of otherworldly things, people may be especially prone to do so.)
Evil people tend to curse the otherworldly, perhaps feeling it has failed them and therefore doesn’t exist, and that high thoughts are mere mush and slop, as childish as believing in Santa Claus, so they discount angels. Angels don’t vote, so politicians can ignore them, up and until it occurs to politicians that angels, even as a fairy tale, have power. Angels possess the power of poetry. While the word “poetry” is of little interest to perverted, power-mad money-grubbers, (beyond doggerel that might sell some cereal to rot children’s teeth with), the word “power” brings their Cadillac’s screeching to a stop. “What’s that? What’s that you say? Did you say ‘power’”? All of a sudden, politicians want to know about a world they basically believe is make-believe. However, because they don’t believe, they get it all wrong. They are like transvestites; no matter how perfectly they put on the make-up and pad their bodies and act the act, it is an act. It is make-believe and not the real thing.
What, then, it the real thing? Perhaps I should capitalize it: “the Real Thing.” Basically, it is what we are born for. However, when we come down to earth, something about being down-to-earth turns into thinking that being down-to-earth is the Real Thing. It isn’t.
I think everyone knows this on some level, but some are corrupted to a degree where, even when they believe in things beyond the down-to-earth, they somehow manage to corrupt the out-of-this-world with their perverted, power-mad money-grubbing. They don’t seek caring witch doctors who heal with kindly herbs, but prefer quacks given to hallucinogenic mushrooms and sexual stimulants; even back two-and-three-quarters millenniums ago the paranoid, power-mad King Saul sought out the Witch of Endor.
There is something creepy about the other-worldly souls one contacts via OUIGA boards, and people who get hooked by such seeking tend to become creeps. However it seems to be a phase some of us must pass through: Speaking only for myself, before I could believe in God I needed to first believe in ghosts; it was helpful to be persuaded such weirdness might exist, but also a big mistake. You shouldn’t believe in ghosts because ghosts lie. God, on the other hand, is Truth at Its purest and most beautiful.
Over the decades I’ve learned that in order to function in a responsible manner I need to make money, and I currently do so by running a Childcare. The youngest children are two or three years old, and give me ample opportunity to study the process of souls coming down to earth. The children really make me think. For example, if they are not fully down to earth yet, where are they?
To a certain degree they are still in heaven. This is especially true of children from happy homes, but even the unfortunate, traumatized children of drug-addicted parents are otherworldly. They are pleasantly mad, and optimistic, because they haven’t forgotten what we are born for. The Real Thing is still very real to them. Even if they have never heard the Lord’s Prayer, they seem to intuitively grasp the part about makings things “on earth, as they are in heaven.” This goal isn’t easy to achieve, which is why small children cry so much, but they haven’t forgotten the basic reason for being alive.
There are some who dislike the idea of anything so impractical as heaven invading our world. Many of these people do not see themselves as being the slightest bit ungodly. They see themselves as pragmatic. They believe they have common sense. And they furthermore believe children need to be whipped into shape. Children require some sort of indoctrination, some sort of brainwashing, to make them contribute to society in an acceptable manner, as cogs that fit “the machine”.
As a poet, I distain the entire concept of society as a machine, and people as cogs. In my view it is a disgusting idea from all angles, whether you are right wing or left wing. It degrades the value of individuals, who are beautiful in God’s eyes irrespective of what they “contribute”. One biblical hero was a thief being crucified on the cross next to Jesus. He contributed zilch to society, and in fact he stole. That was why society felt it was pragmatic to be rid of him. But was he banned from heaven? Apparently not, (but the fat bureaucrat who had the thief crucified may not have been so lucky).
In like manner a very small child contributes zilch to society, in the eyes of morons who can’t see how beautiful they are. They are small and cute thieves. They steal your heart. They make no sense economically until around age five, when they can be whipped into shape and do simple chores. Up until that point they are welfare recipients with an attitude of entitlement, or perhaps candidates for eugenics, or examples of overpopulation, or any number of other degrading ways of seeing small fellow men and women. I beg to differ. I hold a different view. A poetic view.
Not that I find it easy to live up to my own standards. This world has a pernicious way of forcing even idealists to be down-to-earth and pragmatic. I own a certain element of shame for even operating a Childcare. Sixty years ago, when I was young, a woman would have felt ashamed to have to work rather than to rule her household, whether she was wealthy and ruled a staff of servents, or poor and ruled a saucepan. For a mother to hand a child younger than six to another, for anything other than a brief period of baby-sitting, would have been a cause for deep, painful chagrin. So I am, in effect, profiteering off modern mother’s misfortune, a vulture on the carcass of happy homes. But I spread my palms. What can I do? It is the way things are.
(My wife and I have had talks with young mothers, distraught about leaving their wailing child in our care, where we have pointed out the young mother’s wages didn’t cover the cost of the Childcare, the car, the gasoline, the car insurance, and the spiffy clothing necessary for the job. We actually try to talk young mothers out of using our services. But the prospect of social isolation, home alone, is too daunting. The mother needs the job’s society more than she needs the paycheck.)
This world drags me down to such a degree that poetry feels impossible. I am like a little child, being whipped into shape. Left to my own devises, I slump into pragmatic functionality, and my heart feels squeezed. I need help from On High. It is time to pray fervently, or to do some zealous yoga.
Prayer and yoga is hard to do once pragmatism has a hold of you. Personally, I have never been very good at it. It never seems to make sense to get down on your knees and do nothing, or sit cross-legged and do nothing, when you should get off your butt and bust your butt. However, despair drives you to odd behavior. I confess I sometimes do confess my incapacity to God, and plead for help. Sometimes nothing seems to come of it. I then get up and hurry off to be pragmatic, but I always wonder if I should have persisted, and done nothing longer. And I must confess that, perhaps twice or thrice in my long life, my despair was so great I did persist, and then did seem to get visible help from On High.
But more often I persist in a different way, and the help from On High seems to be accidental. In such cases I persist at some physical activity past the norm. Perhaps this is why people climb Mount Everest. In pushing themselves past a certain limit they are like a person sitting cross legged doing Yoga past a certain limit. Walls in our minds, often walls we ourselves built with our own pragmatism, are peeked past, are peered over-the-tops-of, (even if they don’t actually fall down). And then we see as we usually don’t, (which we tend to call “a vision”.)
One such situation arose because as a teenager I was “the crew” of a 28-foot sailboat which had an engine that didn’t work and a self-sailor which sailed the boat in circles, and this required someone to sit and steer the tiller at all times. As the captain was busy elsewhere, holding the tiller was up to the “crew”, which was me.
To sit and hold a tiller may sound like a romantic and wonderful job, but we were on a haul around Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout and Cape Fear, and it took three days with the winds the way they were. The captain did give me some breaks, but most of the time I just sat and held a tiller. It got old. It got old halfway through the first day. The second day I was wracked by desires to go to MacDonald’s for a hamburger, to zone out watching a TV, to look at the weather maps in a New York Times, to do anything but hold the damn tiller of a damn boat. But that was my Yoga, and there was no escape (besides screaming and jumping overboard.) And under that duress I started to see angels in the clouds.
Most everyone at some point has seen a cloud that resembled something or another. On this occasion the clouds started out that way, but the faces and people became more and more numerous and commonplace and vivid, until the entire sky was full of portraits. By the third day it was ridiculous. The sky was one big mural. I’d look away, and then glance upward, and it took no imagination to see the masterpieces. They were the hues of Rembrandt’s work, by the late afternoon, and as gorgeous as his paintings. One I remember in particular, (as I was very hungry at the time), was a fat woman bringing a roast turkey to a table, a big smile on her face, and something beatific about her posture.
Now I look up, and the clouds are just clouds. I have to work to see a cloud come close to looking like a face. When no one is around, I ask the sky, “Couldn’t you do it again, just a little, just once?” But I guess you have to hold a tiller three days, to see such majesty. If you don’t do the yoga, don’t expect the samadhi.
Actually, one good thing about my current life is that I usually manage to avoid such situations. Pragmatism has paid off, and I seldom have to round Cape Hatteras the lone crew at the tiller of a malfunctioning boat with a malfunctioning captain. (Although being a citizen under the rule of Fraudulent Biden does give me a sense of Deja Vu). However, pragmatism has its penalty, in that the skies are not so amazing.
Yet this spring I have managed to bite off more than I can chew, as I always seem to do as days lengthen, in at least one area of my life. Usually it involves my vegetable garden. It is too big for an old geezer like me, but I have refused to age gracefully. I should turn 90% of the garden into a lawn, and have a little sissy garden, but some stubborn side of me has me out pottering away under the hot sun, hour after hour. It has been somewhat humiliating, as it takes so much longer to do simple jobs, but I have pushed myself and, hoping I might be a tortoise who beats the hare, I’ve kept working. And as I worked, and worked, and worked, I noticed, to my delight, the clouds were starting to change. The tedium of toil was becoming a sort of yoga, and I was being uplifted into a sort of heaven on earth.
Mind you, I didn’t sit and do nothing. Nor did I sit and do nothing, all those years ago, as I held the tiller of a sailboat during a long haul. You have to pay attention on a boat, or the sails start to flap, if you man a tiller, and in like manner you have to keep doing your pottering in a garden, or the weeds will win. But if you persist and do your job all of a sudden the world may become enchanted, even as you’re down-to-earth.
I was so struck by the enchantment that appeared as I pottered that I, being a writer, immediately pondered how I might share it to you, the reader. Sadly, it can’t be described to those who haven’t experienced it. It is like describing color to the color blind. The best I can do is compare it to some similar experience you might have experienced, perhaps assuming you have resorted to some socially inappropriate behavior in the mists of your past.
For example, one time as a teenager I purchased some pills in London with a pal and retreated to a nice country flower garden and ate them, and then we sat back expecting our minds to produce an animated Disney cartoon of some sort. The pills had tasted a lot like malted milk tablets, and around an hour later we decided they actually were malted milk tablets, and the salesman had made a fine profit by selling single malted milk tablets for six silver shillings apiece. Being young, we got a good laugh out of being such chumps and suckers, rather than becoming bitter and vengeful, and we then employed some whisky we liberated surreptitiously from my stepfather’s cupboard to produce more modest cartoons in our minds. But the point of my story is that we were able to identify the pills as fake by the enchantment which did not occur.
The negative aspect of enchantment caused by drugs is that it is not earned, and rather is brutally induced by a sort of maiming of the brain. Therefore it has a harsh quality more natural prayer and yoga does not have. Because it is unnaturally induced it has unnatural consequences which reverberate in life after the “trip”, but I don’t want to talk about that. I only bring up drugs because many of my generation were foolish when young. Despite the amnesia drugs induce, many have a vague recollection of how things went from normal to “high”. Natural enchantment occurs in much the same manner, but, because it is natural, it is possessed of a wholesomeness utterly unlike drugs, and also unlike the creepy quality of QUIGI boards. One suddenly becomes aware of what a gift life is. Like a little child, one sees the Real Thing.
The sense of beauty the Real Thing imparts is overpowering, which is likely why powerful people covet It, though they cannot grasp It. The sense of beauty involves a peculiar confidence and assuredness. It sounds silly to say, “Everything is going to be all right” when the world seems determined to go to hell in a hack, but when you see the Real Thing, worry limps away defeated.
As I pottered about, at around at a quarter mile an hour, pausing to lean on my shovel and huff and puff, I wondered if I might be killing myself with my foolish garden, and might be suffering delusions at death’s door. I’ve always said I wanted to die with my boots on; perhaps I was succeeding at that. Perhaps I was hallucinating, and about to collapse. However, I felt too healthy; too restored. In fact, I hadn’t felt so wholesome and healed in months. Apparently, heaven would have to wait a while longer for this old codger.
After a while my mind drifted to working on a sonnet, as well as the soil, because I wanted to share with you how wonderful we should feel, if we could remove the scales from our eyes. I looked around for details in the enchanted landscape I could use. What made everything so different; so ecstatic?
One thing I noticed was a big old crow, who lurks around the farm. There are several species in my area, and crows all look pretty much the same to me, but particular bird is so big that I suspect it is a raven. He or she is always alone, so I think it lost its mate. In any case, as I pottered, I noticed the raven kept bopping by, sometimes flying high overhead, sometimes hopping on a stone wall to the north, or pacing about at the far edge of a pasture to the south, or on a dead limb of an oak to the west, or on an electric line by the road to the east. Unlike smaller crows, he was silent, and often seemed to be watching me, leaning forward with his hands behind his back. I imagined he was muttering, “You still here? Don’t you think you should go indoors and write a poem?” But I kept up with my pottering, until the raven seemed to become disgusted and impatient, and simply flew down to the far end of the garden to strut around doing whatever it is ravens do, before I have planted my corn. The big black bird gave me the sense I was accepted, as part of the scenery, the same way my goats are accepted by that same crow. Then, as I glanced around, I saw other creatures were accepting me as part of the scenery. A brash chickadee pecked at a fencepost barely ten feet away. A chipmunk on a rock was far more interested in alerting the world to the fact a fox was trotting along the shaded far edge of the pasture, than in warning the world an old man feebly hoed close by. And the fox was more interested in fomenting a surprise attack on rats in the barn than in me. I was part of the landscape. And I really liked the sensation. It was very different from how I usually feel, which is to feel like every creature in creation is out to get my garden, and that a farmer is making a desperate last stand like Davey Crockett at the Alamo. Instead, I felt like a character in the old Uncle Remus tales I read to children at my Childcare. Along with Brer Fox and Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit, there was me, Brer Farmer. In the landscape of enchantment, we are not against each other, but with each other, (even when we eat each other).
Sorry, but that’s the best I can do, at this point, and surely my description fails to adequately describe the overpowering enchantment of the Real Thing to the uninitiated. But I will say this: There are powers about, which politicians woefully underestimate.
In “Lord of The Rings”, the wizard Saruman underestimated a tree’s ability to fight back, as he clear-cut beautiful groves to fuel the engines of his war of domination. Saruman’s plotting forgot to enter Ents into his calculations. He thought he had everything covered, but neglected to consider the Ents.
Ents may be fiction, but are perhaps Tolkien’s most brilliant creation, for those walking-trees are a perfect symbol of what the pragmatic lose sight of, when they become too down-to-earth. In like manner the perverted, power-mad money-grubbers in Washington D.C. forget they are stewards of a land like farmers are stewards of a land, and instead underestimate the land’s ability to fight back with powers given by enchantment. Most especially, they have forgotten the Real Thing, and that there are such things as angels.
I don't have a garden gate. Instead
I have a time warp. You will walk into
A different dimension. I've not the head
For the math, but I know this much is true:
If you're led down my garden path you'll see
Things that don't add up, and yet they all seem
Strangely true: The way you thought when three
When life was a wonder and you waltzed a dream.
Angels walked with you. Zephyrs and Dryads
Aren't allowed in science books. Their vote
Is not courted by politician's ads.
But they are there, not at all remote.
If you come work in my garden with me
You'll learn o a power the devils can't see.
Call it paranoia if you will, but I suspect my obscure website is experiencing some form of increased censorship. It is only a hunch, but for some time it was only my charmingly politically-incorrect posts (regarding the fact science becomes bunkum once politics becomes involved) which were made difficult to find, (by certain dullard search engines), but now even my bland posts seem effected. For example, a formerly slightly-popular post of mine (during the hunting season) which has little to do with politically correct topics, which usually receives twenty to forty views a day (during hunting season), today abruptly received only three. It was my post called, “Why We Don’t Domesticate Deer.”
Call it a delusion of grandeur if you will, but actually it is somewhat flattering to believe that this old post, dating from 2013, which has received some 25,000 views, might now be deemed worthy of oppressing. It demonstrates how deeply upsetting and disturbing a good, old boy can be, as he rambles away about obscure topics, sipping a beer. Somewhere someone in pajamas is panicking. Alarms are going off, simply because an old coot like me gets garrulous. Tired nerds must get out of bed to read my awful poetry, and then to ban it using deft, modern, computer technology. (Dullards like to keep their lives dull.) Yet it is all for little, old me! I am unworthy, and humbled by all the attention. (It is far more attention than I’d get if they ignored me.)
On the other hand, it seems sad geeks in pajamas may ban me, without even attempting to talk with non-dullards like myself. I am not such a bad guy. If others have opposing views, I am actually glad to be friendly, and swift to clasp their hands and be interested and to learn what their views are. In fact I may be more interested in geeks than their girlfriends are, if they have any.
After all, a sheet of paper viewed from the front may look fat, but when viewed from the side it looks as skinny as paper. In order to understand the true nature of paper two views are better than one. One view is worse than two, but this is precisely what some geeks do, when they censor.
I have the feeling that certain powerful geeks feel their views are so smart, so magnificent, and so clever that all other views don’t matter. Such people disobey spiritual principles, (involving honoring parents and loving neighbors), in favor of a view which basically states, “My way or the highway.” Even if the vast majority of Americans vote for Trump, power-mad geeks will fabricate a vaster majority of fraudulent votes, to elect a senile puppet. Why? Because they think their view is wise, and others don’t matter.
But there is an itty bitty problem with their view. Let me see if I can explain it.
If you defeat the majority of voters, you are in the minority to begin with. Yet the minority you are part of are the worst people you could have on your side. Why? Because they too believe it is good to be fraudulent. And this means, when they smile at you, their smiles may be fraudulent. You cannot trust them.
What this means is that fraudulent-elect Biden should not trust his “comrades”, the same way Stalin did not trust his “comrades”. Stalin felt he had to conduct purge after purge, removing comrade after comrade whom Stalin felt had “counter-revolutionary” tendencies. This included Russia’s finest military minds, and the consequence was that tiny Finland trashed the Russian army, when it invaded Finland in 1939. Stalin hid the numbers, but it seems likely over a million Russians died in the botched invasion. Stalin then had to purge even more people, who dared be critical.
Not that fraudulent-elect Biden has the wherewithal to survive even a tithe of what Stalin amazingly survived. Biden might not even survive until his inauguration. Already some of his trusted “comrades” are back-stabbing. The mainstream press, which wouldn’t mention so much as a whisper about Biden-family-corruption when he opposed Trump, is now surprisingly honest about his son Hunter’s corruption. Why allow such criticism? Could it be some want Biden himself purged, now that Trump has apparently been purged?
It seems possible some sort of infighting is occurring. Evil is eating its own. This is the main problem with thinking the views of others don’t matter. If you believe it is wrong to love and respect your neighbor, and is smart to disdain the views of others, you are living by a sword which may stab your own back.
Consternation must be occurring among those who had high (and selfish) hopes of Biden elevating their own positions, and you can expect at least some of these Biden-supporters to fight back. I suppose they will angrily denounce the mainstream press for reporting what they formerly refused to report about Hunter Biden. They will state they should continue to refuse to report, as supporters of Harris state they should report, (and Biden should not become president). The supporters of Biden will then pressure the mainstream press to report the truth about Harris. The supporters of Harris will pressure the mainstream press to censor that truth. I would not like to be a member of the mainstream press as this infighting grows, because, where they once faced sure paychecks simply by being anti-Trump, they now face being fired, if they support the “wrong” side.
The fix the mainstream press is in is so sad to watch. Our founding fathers never intended our press to be “supporters”, basically compliant purveyors of propaganda, but that is what they have allowed themselves to become. Intellectually speaking, they have become putty.
But now they are in trouble, as they are forced to be something other than compliant. They are faced with a choice. Horrors! What will they chose? Hmm. They will likely merely run to ask superiors, “Should I stand for Biden, or Harris?” They will do what they are told. Like putty, they are mindless.
If you chose to be mindless, you will not see the writing on the wall, for you cannot think for yourself. You will be taken by surprise when, although you are among “winners”, in-fighting causes the walls to come crashing down.
Roughly 2870 years ago the Israelites were apparently in a hopeless position, “losers” up against “winners” even before a big battle was fought, because the “winners” consisted of not one but three armies, the armies of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, and against such power there was no chance of victory. Then the unexpected happened, which involved in-fighting. The armies of Ammon and Moab took to quarrelling with the armies Mount Seir, which were trashed, and after that Ammon and Moab took to quarrelling with each other, and did such harm to each other that when the Israelites arrived to do battle they faced not three armies, but dead bodies “as far as the eye could see.”
The moral the Israelites took from the tale was that God will wipe out those who oppose God, and protect those who worship Truth. I actually think God was displaying compassion to the armies of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, by allowing them to see for themselves how thinking that only your views matter, and others don’t matter, is an unsuccessful strategy.
I think God gives us free will for a good reason. He doesn’t want people to love Him because they are forced to do it. What kind of love would that be? Rather God wants people to love Him because He is the only One worthy of worship. But first people have to check out some “alternative lifestyles”, and to see them explode in their faces. Then, maybe, if they survive, they check out the Alternative to the alternative, and discover beauty, majesty, wisdom and love.
(Of course, if they don’t survive, then the only way they could possibly learn would be through having to go through the bother of living and dying all over again, which is tantamount to eternal death, for even if you reincarnated 800,000 times it just amounts to dying 800,000 times, which is a bit of a drag. Reincarnation is no escape, especially when you consider you will have to endure Algebra classes all over again. Far better to seek the Alternative to the alternative right now, while we have the chance.)
In fact that is exactly what the American people chose, when they reelected Trump. It took hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of fraudulent ballots to negate the will of the heart of America. America in fact chose the deeply spiritual beliefs of its Founding Fathers, and it was a wise choice. For, if you respect neighbors in a society so inclined you have only two hands to give with, but many hands giving back to you. Conversely, if you selfishly grab with two hands, in a society so inclined, you have only two hands to grab with, but many hands snatching from you.
Now, in conclusion, suppose you have two armies facing each other, or two football teams for that matter. One side works together, loving each other, and the other side works against each other, snatching from each other. Which side will see victory?
We now must endure a time of darkness and doubt, when it seems geeks have used fraud to negate the will of the majority, and gloat about their sleazy triumph. But their victory is founded upon division, and the divided cannot stand.
I am not saying to pop corn and sit back and watch, though there may be times when that is all we can do. In the small spheres of influence we are granted we should go right on loving our neighbors. But few of us have the power to overthrow governments. But don’t worry. They will overthrow themselves. Sit back and watch.
And have hope, for when an entire nation votes as America has voted, it does not go unnoticed by the powers in paradise. Already such powers are on the move, and we may well see, arising like a phoenix from the rubble of geek’s demolished dreams, an astonishing rebirth of a society founded upon beauty, majesty, wisdom and love. During winter’s darkest days we may see a Great Light.
The fraudulent election has usurped the interest of nearly all; in the woods even the deer are puzzled, for hunters neglect to stalk them. Therefore I wondered if any would show up at a meeting of an odd collection of old fossils I belong to, called a “prayer group”, the days after the election.
This group consists of a small bunch of grumps past retirement age who still work every day, but who, one day a week, find time to gather before work, (during winter, long before dawn), to drink coffee and to talk, and then to pray.
Our talk tends to move along the lines you’d expect from grumpy old men: Mostly conservative, but sprinkled with tales that are usually very funny, though sometimes poignant, about what we did when we were not so conservative. But after the coffee comes the prayer, where, man by man, each prays aloud, and I find this creates something I wish I had discovered fifty years ago.
In some ways it reminds me of something which I did discover fifty years ago: The “men’s groups” which, back then, psychologists used to create for themselves, in a cultish sort of way, with the psychologist himself ensconced as the guru.
Back then the “men’s groups” I attended basically involved young, tough, lantern-jawed guys attempting to be wimps, and to cry their precious, little eyes out, about how their feelings got hurt, (in an effort to become more “sensitive”).
Hopefully we grumpy old men aren’t ever quite so absurd as that. For one thing, there is no cult-leader-psychologist in our grumpy-old-men prayer group, unless you call God the psychologist. Second, among old men a young man’s interest in self-improvement has largely faded away, replaced by an interest in slowing the process of self-deterioration.
I like being among men who are exposing deeper parts of themselves. Not that we are always deep. Partly our prayers involve the trivial; things such as a wife’s toothache or daughter’s speeding ticket, but prayers also move on to whatever the opposite of “trivial” is.
This makes me wonder about what the opposite of “trivial” actually is. So I use a search engine (never Google) and arrive at a long list of antonyms, none of which satisfies me. But perhaps the best opposite-of-trivial is not a word, but a string-of-words which admits there is no word; namely the string-of-words, “life-and-death”.
The problem is that “life-and-death” tends to be very subjective. For example, when a toothache is at its height, it seems very important, and you might resent very much anyone telling you it was “trivial”. However should you, in your desperation, rummage about in your kitchen, locate some clove oil, and administer that burning oil to the gums around the roots of the hurting tooth, the pain might swiftly shrink and fade, until what was “life-and-death” became “trivial”.
In like manner, on a hot day in a desert, water may become a true, honest-to-God matter of “life-and-death”, but, as soon as you arrive at a well and drink deeply, you don’t think so much of water. “Life-and-death” has become “trivial.”
Also in like manner, naming no names, lust can become a thirst, and one can write ardent sonnets about how gratification is a matter of “life-and-death”, however, should gratification occur, the object of desire may no longer be so desirable, and some mighty fine sonnets may be crumpled up and thrown away.
For these reasons I think a good opposite to the word “trivial” is the word “momentous”, because too often what seems important is a fleeting thing which soon, after a “moment”, becomes unimportant.
When young I often ran into people who scorned my suggestions that what I desired was “momentous”, and who were all too eager to inform me that what I cared about was “trivial.” In the face of such sneering, belittling and bullying I developed a sort of fax-humbleness wherein I felt my concerns were too trivial, too downright petty, to bring before God in prayer. In my mind God was the only truly “momentous” thing, and all things that I myself cared about, when analyzed, were “trivial”. I didn’t want to bother God with my petty banality, and in a sense I made God become like the elders I knew, an authority full of scorn. Then I was introduced to some gospel (which means “good news”): The gospel was, “God is Love.”
The idea that One as infinite as God is could be interested in a speck of dust like myself was beyond my comprehension. It seems such an outlandish proposition that I think God Himself doesn’t ask anyone to believe such a preposterous thing. Therefore, to the sincerely curious, God seems to offer proof He is Preposterous. It is not a scientific proof that can be replicated, but rather is an intimate and usually secretive kiss: Perhaps some inconsequential event, such as a passing butterfly swerving to land on the tip of one’s nose. It is hard to scientifically replicate such an occurrence, let alone describe the way that it happens at the perfect time and place, and dissolves even a stolid individual to tears.
Of course, while a butterfly landing on the tip of their nose may have meant a great deal to the individual, it will not do for that individual to share such intimacy with scoffers. They will roll their eyes and do what they always do, which is to call what you feel is “momentous”, “trivial.”
I am perfectly willing to admit I am trivial. However I have learned that, to have any sort of civil discussion, the person I am talking with must also confess they are to some degree trivial. Scoffers can seldom do so. Sadly, the reason they scoff at others is often to boost themselves, to puff up their own already-obese egos with further flatulence. They have the odd belief that, in dismissing others as trivial, they somehow assert that they themselves matter. Apparently they are very insecure, and fear they don’t matter, and fight this fear by proving they do matter, using a bizarre technique wherein they behave as if others don’t. To wit: A bully sees a happy sissy, walks up to him, and punches him in the nose.
If there is anyone who can say they matter, and the rest of us don’t, it would be God. He is the Creator, and we are merely the scribble on the pages of a novel He is writing. He is omniscient, which means He knows the end of the novel before He begins. Time itself is His creation, an unwritten book He pulped wood to make the paper of, and bound, even before writing the first Word. He is also omnipotent, which means He is both sides of His pencil; besides creating us He can erase us, which is disconcerting to contemplate, for it emphasizes how trivial we are: Besides creating us He can rub us out.
I imagine what matters to God is that his novel arrives at the happy-ending He sees, and we can’t imagine; all we call momentous is trivial compared to the infinite Bliss He aims his creation towards. From time to time, to people as witless as sheep, God appears cruel, like a stern shepherd with a prodding, hooking crook. But God is Truth which is Love, sometimes soft as butter, but other times steel, a stern Love that must be tough: Pushing us away from bad water and poisonous herbs towards crystal streams and greener pastures may involve driving us across parched deserts.
Sometimes beautiful people enter our lives and we want them to be with us every day, but it cannot be. This seems cruel; it seems life would be so much better if it went as we wished. But perhaps in such situations God, who knows the happy-ending, needs to rub out a character who distracts us from His plot, the way Shakespeare rubs out the dazzling, scene-stealer Mercutio, when he threatens to turn “Romeo and Juliet” into a play called “Mercutio.”
(And yes, to reply to scoffers, even a tear-jerking tragedy like “Romeo and Juliet” does have a “happy-ending”, because the Montagues and Capulets come to understand the monstrous futility and stupidity of their feuding.)
Sometimes I think God snatches beautiful people from our lives to increase our thirst for beauty. If life was too pleasant we’d lose our desire to move on. Where even turtles and snails know their houses must be portable, we might stagnate, basking on some perfect Polynesian island, immobile to our dying day, unaware we were marooned. Therefore God sends us a tsunami.
This thought is emphasized by the fact that the people who tend to be most sensitive to beauty are those who have suffered loss. The wealthy like to think that it is they who create beauty, when they patronize art, but you very seldom see a wealthy man write a symphony, nor grow a single rose in their gardener’s gardens. The wealthy are incapable. In fact they all too often serve the purpose of making the misery which makes the art. The wealthy have no cause for vainglory when they look in a mirror and (perhaps) see they sometimes make the ugly wounds which make the beauty of healing possible.
It is a glorious defiance, (to the so-called logic of many wealthy men and women), to accept loss the way a starving poet accepts it. The wealthy scoff that loss is for losers. Their mindset makes them incapable of seeing beyond the material stuff they accumulate, until they are “given” to behavior which actually blinds them to the doorway to richness beyond riches. Where a poet will “pay the dues to sing the blues”, the wealthy think, “I’ll avoid the blues and pay no dues,” and the wealthy sadly then live nasal, tone-deaf lives with little music, (which may explain their sense of emptiness and thirst, which often causes a few wealthy people to patronize musicians. Such patrons tend to straddle a fence, seeking to gain the benefits of poetry without enduring the suffering.)
In the end we are all basically faced with a choice. What matters to us? Things of this world? Or things beyond this world? To try to have both is like standing with one foot in a rowboat and one on a dock. Eventually one needs to chose; otherwise one is all wet.
Sometimes the choice comes through circumstances. Beethoven lost his hearing, which was a thing of this world, without losing his music, which was otherworldly. He stated something along the lines of, “Those who understand my music are not troubled by the woes of this world.” Yet he himself had trouble enduring a woe of the world called “royalty”, a wealthy elite who felt he should consider them his “betters”, and accept their patronizing attitudes.
Too often the so-called “elite” were prone to inflating their own importance, while putting the gifts of others down, saying things such as, “Without me there would be no Beethoven,” which belittled Beethoven. It did not do for such royalty to brag; even deafness could say the same: “Without me there would be no Beethoven.”
For me the puffed egos of the elite seem absurd, for, when I look about, there is plenty to be humble about: Without farmers I’d starve; without garbage men I’d live in filth; without garment-makers working in Asian sweat-shops I’d be naked. It would take a certain sort of hutzpah for me to put on airs, and, rather than gratitude, to call myself a “better” who was “in charge”, and who deserved the credit for other’s gifts. (This is not to say “administration” is not also a gift, but it is no reason to put on airs.)
I believe God has blessed all of us with gifts, which are likely as varied as our fingerprints, and I also believe that, if we could only think, speak and act according to His will, our path towards the happy-ending of creation would be heaven on earth. Sadly, speaking only for myself, I have a problem with keeping the path smooth, due to the fact I also have a gift called “free will”, which causes me to be deaf to God’s will. I may preach that we should all appreciate each other’s gifts, but some people…….well, I have trouble appreciating them. Be this as it may be, I still believe we all have gifts, and that we should respect others even if we have no clue what the heck their gift is, and even if they appear utterly worthless.
In order to achieve a heaven-on-earth, God has given us handy rules which allow us be more harmonious and to evolve away from discord. Such laws are woven into the very tapestry of creation. We may not like such laws, but there is no way around them. I myself love freedom, and bristle at the slightest whiff of bossiness, but even I have to admit that, as much as I would like to levitate, I’m bossed by the Law Of Gravity (so far). In like manner there are all sorts of other laws concerning action and reaction, called Karma, basically stating that if you sow thistles you shouldn’t expect to reap oats. The only one independent of such law is God, who is above the law because He created it.
Therefore, because God is enthroned above the law, it follows that grumpy old men should go to God, if we find ourselves in trouble with the law, (which is trouble we mortals tend to find ourselves in, on a daily basis, as we are all imperfect). Despite the fact we are mere specks of dust, God’s omniscience allows Him to know us better than we know ourselves, and to see our path out of discord and towards harmony more clearly than we ourselves can envision. Furthermore God apparently likes seeing specks of dust turn towards Him, perhaps because it is a sign specks of His creation are moving in the right direction, to arrive at the happy-ending He has planned. (And even crooked lawyers, with sleazy flattery, have the good sense to attempt to please any judge they approach, and therefore grumpy old men should do the same.)
Yet mortals display an ambiguity when they approach God in prayer: In seeking escape from the law, they often ask for further laws. The simple question, “What should I do?” is a request for an order. We ask for a boss. Then, if we are given any sort of commandment, we mortals tend to complain worse than children do, when told to do a task, but there can be no getting around the fact we do ask.
When Jesus was asked, concerning the subject of rules and laws, what the most important rule of all was, He stated it was to love God with all your might. (Therefore approaching God in a prayerful way seems a good place to start.) But then Jesus went on. He stated the second-greatest commandment was to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself (which admittedly is not very much, in some cases.)
This steers me back to the start of this essay, when I was discussing the word “trivial”, and whatever its opposite might be. Seen in the context of the greatest and second-greatest commandments, the opposite of “trivial” seems to be the mysterious word “love”, especially when used in the context of “love thy neighbor”, which in the case of some neighbors involves “loving thy enemy.”
How important is this? Jesus stated it was the firm foundation upon which all other natural laws were built. Any lawyer’s law that strays from such a firm foundation is in essence founded on shifting sand, and is heading towards collapse.
Mortals usually want a firm foundation, and something they can count on. Even wild-eyed pirates upon pitching decks on the bounding sea count on a ship that won’t sink. Even vicious communists, while killing millions, dream of the stability of the strange utopia they never achieve.
Gentler individuals seek procedures more civil than piracy and killing, and one such group of individuals, very mortal and flawed, thought long and hard, argued long and hard, researched every example they could find in history books of how civilizations sought to create situations where neighbors loved neighbors, and discussed why such civilizations succeeded and why they failed. We call this group of individuals the “Founding Fathers” of the United States, and the documents they produced include the “Declaration of Independence”, “Constitution” and “Bill of Rights”. They themselves admitted what they were proposing was an experiment, and that they were in essence stating, “We know tyranny sucks; let’s give this other, experimental way a try.” In many ways many outsiders, onlooking, (the politically-correct “experts” of that time), were full of scorn, and quite certain the experiment would never work.
The democratic experiment the Founding Fathers came up with involved each responsible citizen having the same one vote every other responsible citizen had. (There was a lot of discussion about the definition of the word “responsible”. There always is. For example, why should a man, as head of a household, go to jail for debts; shouldn’t his wife and kids go to jail if they were responsible for the debt?) Over the years the definition of “responsible” has changed so that women and former slaves could vote, but one principle has endured: One person gets one vote. No man is deemed more responsible and more gifted than any other, to a degree where he gets ten votes to his neighbor’s one.
This is very much aligned with the second-greatest commandment of loving-thy-neighbor-as-thyself. We are not to stand in judgement of who is superior and who is inferior. Just because we are tone-deaf while Beethoven is a musical genius is no reason for him to get ten votes while we only get one. In like manner, you would not have to be very good at managing money to be superior to Beethoven; (he wrote an excellent piece called, “Rage Over A Misplaced Penny”), but just because you are gifted in a way that lets you manage money better than Beethoven, and results in you being richer where Beethoven was poorer, is no reason for you to get ten votes while Beethoven only gets one.
And this brings me to the subject of the fraudulent election.
In my view even a single fraudulent vote spits in the face of a neighbor. In negating their vote with a fake voter, it disenfranchises them. It takes away their right to vote, which is not loving your neighbor. Therefore it is also spitting on God, if He truly advises us to love our neighbors and even our enemies.
Personally, just guessing, I don’t think it is all that wise to spit on God, even if you are an Atheist. Anyway, if you are an Atheist you don’t believe in God, so what are you spitting on? If you are an Atheist it’s likely best to just not spit, just in case you’re wrong.
If Atheists are wrong, and if Jesus actually was God’s infinity taking physical form, then He has already been spat upon, as well as brutally beaten and crucified and punctured with a spear, and He is said to have arisen unharmed. I doubt God feels any need to prove his authority the same way twice. Been there; done that. Next time will be different.
It seems very clear (to me at least) the last election didn’t involve a few nasty people spitting on their neighbors by casting a few fraudulent votes, but a concerted effort to cast absurd numbers of fraudulent votes, numbers exceeding a hundred thousand in a few cities, which would change the outcome of the entire election. A landslide majority might approve of Donald Trump, but the minority that detest him would “win”.
The people behind this effort are in essence spitting on all that the United States stands for. And this includes God, and the motto “In God We Trust.” The effort is so bald-faced, and done with such a smug assurance that it cannot be stopped, that it it utterly appalls most Americans. Many are stunned stupid. It is utterly horrific, as if a Madonna’s nipple turned into a snake that ate the baby.
This brings me back to where I began, which, in case you have forgotten, was describing a group of grumpy old men gathering to drink coffee, chat, and then pray. How do old men pray, when everything they have stood for their entire lives has been befouled by cheats and thieves?
Would you believe me if I told you there were prayers for Joe and Hunter Biden? Those two are up to their necks in corruption, and dealing with corrupt people is like dealing with gangsters; chit-chat is not a nice experience; the people who grin at you may slit your pretty, little throat. (Some beer steins have glass bottoms so you can watch the pirates you drink with, for in raising the stein you expose your throat.) In such a society even to “win” is not a nice thing, and may even be a death warrant.
It is said, “Cheaters never prosper”, and, “Evil eats it’s own”, and history is full of examples: Stalin was a “comrade” to many when communists were “winners” of the Russian Revolution, but nearly every single one of Stalin’s contemporary “comrades” was “liquidated” by Stalin, within nineteen years. Those who live by the sword die by the sword, and most of Stalin’s communist, “winner” “comrades” saw this was true, but did not live to tell us about it. (And in the end Stalin himself may have been poisoned.)
For some perverse reason Stalin extracted signed “confessions” from those he purged, to provide evidence for “show trials”. No one dared point out that the signed confession of one of his best generals, during a show trial, was spattered with blood. (Last I knew, that blood-spattered document still exists in Russian archives.) Such a horrible society is nothing we should wish on anyone, and we should pray to God it doesn’t happen here in the United States.
One of the saddest elements of the Russian Revolution was the bewilderment of those Russians with an entrepreneurial nature, who had worked hard to improve their lot in life and, in the process, to make Russia a better place. For example, former slaves (called “serfs”) worked hard to improve their soil’s fertility, and their little farm’s productivity, and had succeeded, to a small degree. They were called the Kulak, and Stalin despised them, as they suggested something besides central authority might be good. He accused the Kulak of “hoarding” the grain they themselves grew, and “purged” between a quarter and half million small farmers, sending them off to “reeducation” in Siberia. A suspiciously large number of the Kulak, roughly 50,000, died before they even got to the reeducation camps in Siberia.
But what is saddest to see, through the fog of history books, is how baffled such people were to be facing such wrath, when all they had ever done was to work hard. Is hard work a sin? If so, it was a sin seldom seen in the government “collectives”, the utopian state-run farms which replaced the Kulak on the land the Kulak cherished and suffered to improve. The collectives produced far less than the Kulak had, and the famine Russia then experienced was horrific, and only exceeded by the famine China experienced, when Mao “reformed” China’s farmers.
How communist leaders can do such horrible things to their people, (people they claim they love), is beyond me. As best as I can tell, they convince themselves they are removing some sort of societal “cancer” for the betterment of all. The problem is that the “betterment” never appears, except for a few people in power, and even those powerful people live degraded lives of eating pork with the grease dripping from their mustache down their jowls, lives which lacks the music Beethoven heard in his head while eating plain, black bread, while going deaf, yet which manifested (in the Ninth Symphony) as “kissing the whole world”, (words from the Ninth Symphony).
Admittedly my summation of who is happier, a hungry Beethoven or a slobbering Stalin, is subjective, and likely offensive to some. But if I am going to be offensive I might as well go the whole mile, and subjectively summarize which women are happier, those who have babies or those who have abortions.
For women the “neighbor” they should love is sometimes a unwelcome proliferation of cells in their own womb. Some women deem such cells a “cancer” which must be aborted for the “betterment” of their own life, while others call the pregnancy a gift from God, and accept all the sacrifice involved.
After fifty years of watching from afar, (as I’m male and can’t imagine the level of responsibility that femininity entails), I am very subjective when I state the women who chose personal “betterment” appear worse off, in the long run of fifty years, whereas the women who chose to “love their neighbor” and raise babies, (often as impoverished single Moms, and often seeing cute babies turn into ungrateful brats), in the end look richer. Mind you, they are not richer in terms of coins, but in terms of richness beyond riches. Why? Well, they now fondle grandchildren, whereas the women who chose personal “betterment” seem to live in plush mansions with plush carpets even in the hallways, but the carpets seem just a bit musty and spongey, and the hallways seem haunted by the voices of small ghosts who wonder, “What might I now be, if you had not decided I was better off never suffering the experience of life?”
One problem I have, when it comes to my faith in God, is that He allows our failures, (such as the extermination of innocents), to occur. Why doesn’t He step in to save the unborn babies? Why didn’t He step in to save the Kulak from Stalin? Why didn’t He step in to save six million Jews and a million Roma and millions of Slavs and others from Hitler? And will He step in to save the people of the United States from the minority now using election-fraud to bully the majority of Americans? If this God is a God who can care to a degree where He may direct a butterfly to land on your nose, why doesn’t He zap bad people with thunderbolts and leave them as a pile of ashes?
Stop. What did I just say? Did I just wish my neighbor be reduced to a heap of ashes? Hmm. Is that loving my neighbor?
Perhaps I am not as loving as God. Perhaps His love sees in ways I can’t. Where I only see six million Jews going into gas chambers, and six million corpses, he sees beyond the corpses and sees six million souls rejoicing on the streets of heaven. And perhaps He understands Karma in ways I can’t: Prior generations sowed thistles, so we must reap thorns.
OK, OK. I confess I’m not God. But the fact of the matter is I do not intend to be exiled to Siberia like the Kulak or herded into gas chambers like the Jews, just because some harebrained leftist has the crackpot desire to improve the “herd” by “culling”. And they have made it quite clear they think I should be culled: I’m a “deplorable” and a “bitter clinger”, and even this obscure blog you are now reading is (rather splendid) writing they itch to see censored.
Where I have been loving, seeing them as my neighbor, they have been nasty. In terms of “science”, I have patiently explained the science that refutes Global Warming, the Ozone Hole, the “Arctic Death Spiral”, and even the uselessness of using masks to halt the spread of coronavirus, but they refuse the pleasantries of civil discourse, as well as the goodly sharing involved in scientific debate (basically excited observers exchanging differing (and seemingly conflicting) wonders they’ve witnessed). In essence they refuse to respond, to even talk, and spurn my friendship, basically stonewalling all discussion with insults, such as calling me a “denier”. Such people are one of the main reasons that, rather than a kindly old man, I am a grumpy old man.
So what do I do with them? I pray for them, and for their enlightenment. They need not do the evil they do. Even a person committing genocide against spiritual people can be redeemed. After all, one of the worst persecutors of the first Christians, (a people who had actually seen Jesus), was Saul, a man ardent in his belief Christians were evil and that all good Jews should seek to eradicate Christians from the face of the earth, but then Saul got knocked off his high horse on the road to Damascus, and became Saint Paul, one of the most effective promoters of Christianity ever.
It is interesting to compare Saul with Stalin, considering they started on the same page, seeking to overpower those with differing views. In some ways Stalin was loyal, while Saul was a traitor to his original power-centric cause. Stalin accumulated power, while Saul renounced overpowering. People bowed and scraped, walking on eggs, around Stalin, while Saul, as Saint Paul, wrote letters wearing chains, down in the sewers of Rome (where the prisoners were kept). Stalin saw the city of Tsaritsyn renamed Stalingrad, as Saint Paul received no such honor, nor Pulitzers for his letters. If towns were to be renamed around Rome they would be named for the emperor Nero, and when Nero (who killed his own mother) decided Saint Paul should be executed, (basically for saying Someone besides Nero should be worshipped), Saint Paul had no indication his letters ( a major part of the New Testament) would be remembered, and likely felt his death would not mean much to the world and the worldly, yet, as the preacher Andy Stanley points out, ” ‘Saint Paul’s‘ is now the name of a huge cathedral in Rome, whereas ‘Nero‘ and ‘Caesar‘ are names we give to our dogs “.
And Stalingrad? Very quickly after Stalin died it became “Volgograd.”
As a person who will likely never have a city named for me, or a statue raised, or a statue later torn down, the whole business of how people remember us seems ludicrous. What a worthless sidetrack! What a fluff of ego! How did it help the citizens of Tsaritsyn to change their name to Stalingrad and then Volgograd? Did it make burdens lighter, work less hard, winter less biting, summer less hot, water less wet? Of course not. Such name-changing is the idiocy of intellectuals who would not know what actual work was if it bit them on the leg. God forbid that I ever live in a land like Russia, where such lunacy was (for a time) allowed to reign.
But my own homeland now seems willing to fall to such a disgraceful state! This past summer saw statues torn down and places renamed.
As a grumpy old man I am currently depressed, outraged, upset, angry, and in some ways terrified (which is what terrorists want), and for the life of me can’t understand why President Trump hasn’t declared a State Of Emergency. An insurrection is occurring! We need to stand up and fight back! (Good thing I’m not President, because, if I was, the battle would be begun, and there might be slaughter in the streets.) However instead President Trump has retreated into a thing he is not known for: relative Silence.
The silence is unnerving. I have the sense we are amidst a calm before a great storm. A sort of distant rumbling trembles on the horizon. The shit is about to hit the fan.
The most aggravating (to me) thing about the current situation is that grumpy old men like myself are made so powerless. Google has “disappeared” my writings about Arctic Sea-ice, which not only violates the commandment about loving your neighbor, (me), but violates the commandment about honoring grumpy old fathers. I am in essence gagged. Even my vote doesn’t matter, if hundreds of fraudulent votes are created out of thin air by evil people, to negate my voice. I feel distained, cast down, even a bit like the prophet Jerimiah must have felt when all his efforts to spare the inhabitants of Jerusalem got him thrown into a city-cistern, where he sank into the mud at the bottom, up to his armpits. He couldn’t move, and when they put the cover back on the cistern he was in complete darkness. Later he was rescued, but for a time things must have looked pretty black.
Things also looked very bleak for the United States when it was only five months old. The British had sent a huge fleet and landed a huge army, and Washington had lost battle after battle, and had been driven from New York and battered clear across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. His army of 20,000 had been reduced to barely 2,000 under his direct control, and most of these men were only enlisted for a time period which would end in a couple weeks. It was at that time Thomas Paine wrote “The Crisis”, which began,
“These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman…”
Paine was a journalist who spent time with the troops, and Washington asked that Paine’s freshly printed pamphlet “The Crisis” be read to his troops, before he himself pleaded that they commit themselves to the cause just a little longer. But there can be little doubt that, right then, prospects did not look good. Now we know about the two electrifying victories Washington won just afterwards, but at the time electricity seemed in short supply. Words were mere words, and talk is cheap.
Any words I now write are the same; mere words. In the end grumpy old men do what Washington did:
And in the current situation, we are similar to Washington’s troops, in a situation very unlike the palm trees of Polynesia.
Things do not look good, and indeed these again are times that try men’s souls. I may not be in the position to judge my homeland’s soul, or even the souls of a group of grumpy old men, but I can tell you many are praying in the desperate manner Washington prayed.
One gift I lack is the gift of prophesy. (This seems to be a shortcoming common to all who study meteorology.) For all I know I may be an American version of Russia’s Kulak, and will end up despised for being honest and for working hard. If so, I will likely wind up like one of the 50,000 Kulak who the heartless “disappeared” between the time they were torn from their farms, and the time they were scheduled to arrive in Siberia. The motto of New Hampshire is “Live free or Die”, and there is certain treatment I feel cannot be borne. Maybe fifty years ago I could have endured with the tenacious will of a Solzhenitsyn, (and, in my own way, I did), but when you get old, endurance is in short supply. Not that you are not tenacious, but some days your tenacity get used up just getting out of bed.
Though I lack the gift of prophesy, one gift I have is the ability to create tales, which can be absurd but which make people laugh. Among the grumpy old men of my “prayer group” I confess my lack of spirituality, by telling them what impossible things I daydream I might do. I tell them that if someone slapped my cheek I might fail to be spiritual, and fail to turn the other cheek. Instead I’d brawl like I was twenty, (which is absurd, when you consider carrying an armload of wood up the front steps leaves me winded). In an actual brawl I might throw one or two punches, but then swiftly sue for peace. That is reality. But my fantasies ignore reality.
Surely my fantasies qualify as delusions of grandeur. An old fossil like myself would be unwise to take on a mob ruled by Antifa, but when I see video of such a mob assaulting a elderly woman sipping a tea at a sidewalk restaurant, I’m infuriated, and my imagination seems to automatically put myself into that situation, and I see myself, an old man with a long white beard and a cane, leap to the lady’s defense. I become a super-hero, “The Ninja Fossil”, and teach those Antifa whippersnappers to mind their manners, wading into the mob with a flailing cane. I create many versions of my heroics, and all are unlikely, but speaking such a fantasy aloud does seem to have benefits; it expresses my indignation, and also makes the other grouchy old men sipping coffee with me chuckle.
In one version my trick is to dodder into a position between two big thugs, offend both, and then, just when they throw a punch, to duck, so they punch each other. Then I nimbly back out of the escalating brawl, as Antifa fights Antifa. (This is not an original delusion of grandeur. I read of it in the Old Testament, 3000 years old, which describes a time three kings brought three big armies to crush a small Jewish force, but the the night before the battle the three armies fought among themselves to such a degree that when the small Jewish force set out to do battle at dawn all they found were heaps of corpses). (God knows evil eats its own, and can arrange such events.)
Such daydreams may entertain grumpy old men, but the fact of the matter is that such a confrontations are unlikely in my old age. I am powerless, beyond the lone vote I cast. And my vote is negated by fraudulent ballots. I, and perhaps a majority of other Americans, have been “disappeared”, by evil. So we turn to prayer.
The scoffers sneer. What power has prayer?
We are about to find out.
I wonder what God will do. Despite all our mistakes and shortcomings, America is not entirely a fallen people who has chosen evil, and who deserve the tough love Jerimiah warned the Jews they’d earn, which later manifested in the destruction of their holy temple and their exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Instead America consists of a people who (I believe) by a landslide chose a praying president over a party which has mocked God, but the mockers mocked fair play to such a degree that they have stolen an election from the people who believe in fair play. And now God sees the good people turn to him in prayer. Not a few good people; apparently it is millions.
I have faith God won’t stand idly by. Nor do other grumpy old men, who I listen to in my prayer groups, and also listen to on other obscure sites on the internet. There seems to be a sort of consensus that we have done all that frail mortals can do, yet evil is out to get us, and in such situations God helps the hapless, especially when they turn to him in prayer. He will manifest His might.
One way God formerly manifested His will was through free and fair elections. True democracy has God in its guts. This seems true despite the fact we, as mortals, do make mistakes, and democracy has been called, “the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others”.
The reason democracy bungles to better results than other forms of government is because flawed mortals, despite making mistakes, learn from their mistakes. And replace them. Which people in power don’t like. They don’t like being replaced.
The working people of America have created all the money politicians play with. People, as voters, have approved of their tax-dollars being sent by their elected politicians to third world countries, and to the children in inner city schools, because Americans are generous people with good hearts. But then Americans saw the results of their generosity were fat dictators in third world countries, as the third world poor remained poor, and Americans also saw fat schoolmarms in the inner city, as schoolchildren became more illiterate than ever before. Seeing such evidence, people suspected the money was not being wisely spent, which the politicians playing with the money didn’t like. Politicians were enamored with dealing with shuffling money, and with dealing with other politicians shuffling money, even if they were dictators and wicked schoolmarms, even when such dictators and schoolmarms bullied and exploited the poor. American generosity felt especially abused, when it witnessed schoolmarms send their own children to private schools as poor, inner city children went without. The generous American tax-payers knew that having politicians and schoolmarms act in this way was a form of madness, as it can only come to a very bad end.
How so? Allow me to use a baseball analogy, where the pitcher symbolizes the politician, and the manager symbolizes the voters who send the pitcher to the mound.
Now suppose it was the seventh game of the World Series, the most important baseball game of the entire year, and a pitcher was sent to the mound. It would be a great honor. But, supposing he did a bad job, the manager would want to replace the pitcher with a relief-pitcher. But suppose the pitcher refused to obey the manager, and instead insisted upon keeping the position of great honor, even though he did a bad job. Would it help his team win, or would it guarantee loss?
Perhaps it is because they want to keep receiving the tax dollars, and to continue misusing them, and also to continue hobnobbing with dictators and sending their children to private schools as inner city children are left illiterate, that some politicians corrupt a free and fair election with fraudulent votes. They are like a pitcher who so delights in being the center of attention that they tell their manager (the voters) to go to hell.
At some point such a selfish pitcher starts to notice the crowd has stopped cheering, and that even teammates have started to glower. But this only makes him increasingly desperate to retain his position, and increasingly desperate to resort to desperate deeds.
This seems to be the corner the Washington elite have painted themselves into. With increasing desperation they violate the American code of honor, a code for which they once placed their hand on the Bible for, and swore to uphold.
No good can come of this. They have already seen the backlash manifest in the votes of the American people, but now they are seeking to ignore the voters, which leaves God no alternative but to seek a different way of manifesting.
Actually, I think we have something to look forward to, in these dark days. God is not called the “Almighty” without reason, and the different way of manifesting, which he now may be forced to employ, could be an utterly amazing manifestation and knock our socks off.
The funny thing is that the scoffers, who ordinarily dismiss all I call “momentous” as being “trivial”, seem to be expecting the same thing. Not that they have renounced Atheism, but they seem to be looking over their shoulders in an odd manner, as if they are wondering, “Are we actually going to get away with this?” They think what they are “getting away with” is a small thing, “stealing an election”, and they have no idea of the magnitude of the affairs they are involved with. The unease in their hearts bothers them, for it doesn’t fit in with their idea that they are “winners”. They are like a wealthy man sitting down to a delicious dinner, assured he is a winner, who is made uneasy by a faint crunching noise he has just heard in the background, and the way the crystal chandeliers have tinkled slightly, (as he happens to be aboard the winner’s ship, called the “Titanic”). Some inner voice is whispering to him that he will not get to gratify his gluttony and finish his dinner, and instead soon will be treading water.
The Titanic is a good analogy, for the politically correct were assured in 1912 the Titanic was “unsinkable.” This pseudofact was proven by “authorities” who spoke what they called “science.” And everyone nodded and agreed. Then God stepped in, taking the unlikely form of an iceberg.
Currently we are under the oppression of those who believe they are the “authorities” who understand better than we do what they call “science”, but I fear they are about to be greatly humbled.
When envisioning God stepping in to fix the messes we have made, people tend to envision God as a warrior king abruptly manifesting in darkness and riding down from above the midnight stars on a white horse. As much as I enjoy envisioning that, I also sometimes fret such an image is the power-centric thinking of the power-mad. God is equally able to manifest in other ways, even as an iceberg.
In the current situation, I do not think God will manifest as an iceberg that will sink the United States, but rather as an iceberg that will sink those who seek to destroy the United States.
Of course, when I use the word “iceberg” I am not talking about an actual iceberg. It is a symbol of however God choses to manifest, to sink an unsinkable Titanic of evil. God is above all law, and utterly amazing in the ways He works.
Personally I feel Donald Trump was an iceberg sent by God to sink the Titanic of “The Swamp.” But this only makes Trump an instrument of God, not God. If The Swamp throws all its energy into destroying Trump, they are too occupied to notice God is uplifting another individual, another “iceburg”, which will puncture the “Titanic Swamp” from astern, as it backs away from the Trumpian iceberg dead ahead.
Also, personally, as a person who has lived among the gruff sorts who feed, clothe and shelter the effete elite, I was never all that bothered by Trump’s “political-incorrectness”, and even enjoyed his unorthodox honesty, and I think the majority of America felt the same way. It was a nasty flock of shrill swamp-harpies who attacked him non-stop, from day one. Therefore I would very much like to see God grant him the power to defeat the fraud, and somehow legally contest and win the election he in fact has already won.
However, even if Trump can’t overcome the screeching harpies, he has already forced “The Swamp” to show its true nature. Before he appeared, many still felt the harpies of “The Swamp” were fellow Americans, who carefully considered both sides of an issue. This delusion has been shattered. Trump has exposed the selfish and one-sided and downright Unamerican behavior of The Swamp’s “elite.” And, if that was what God intended, I think Trump has done his job superbly, and deserves a retirement in some safe space, free from those who smolder revenge.
But even if that were the case, I believe another Donald would promptly appear. Why? Because God opposes the proud, the elite, the “Swamp”. Why? Because He is the only One worthy of worship, and knows that worship of the Swamp is a distraction from the happy-ending He aims His creation towards. Therefore he constantly undermines the efforts of the Swamp’s elite to set themselves up as gods.
This has been a quiet and private conviction of mine for a long time. Some people are simply “cruising for a bruising”. I don’t have to supply the bruising with my knuckles, they will find it all by themselves. I don’t have to supply the bruising with my eloquent pen, though my pen is mightier than their sword. They will get the point, for those who live by the sword get the point in the end. Even if I am gagged and can’t utter a peep, I’ve got an invisible Power on my side.
Some chose selfishness over Love, lying over Truth, darkness over Light, but in the end can’t avoid a tidbit of common sense. The common sense is this: We can project a beam of light with a flashlight, but there is no such thing as a “darklight”, which can project a beam of darkness. Light can do what darkness cannot.
Therefore all darkness can do is to put up umbrellas to create shadows, so it can hide from the Light like a worm under a rock. In the shadows it spins webs of doubt, as doubt is its only defense; it has no positive arguments against the existence of Light, so it merely does a lot of doubting in the shade, digging a hole for itself deeper and deeper, seeking to herd all humanity into a bunker miles underground, where darkness could rule and feel safe from Light, but even in such a enormous cavern, filled with ultimately inky darkness, a tiny scratch could defeat darkness: The scratch of a match being struck. With the flaring of that single match the entire cavern’s darkness would be defeated. And if darkness can’t even stand up to a tiny match, how can it stand up to God?
This assuredness is something I smiled at hearing, in the prayers of other grumpy old men. Somehow they have learned over the years, through bangs and bruises in the School of Hard Knocks, that resistance to the Light is futile, and that certain behavior is “cruising for a bruising.”
Sitting about with these grumpy, old men I reminisce about how I myself suffered bruises, learning in the School of Hard Knocks. One series of tales involves a time I actually quit being fully self-employed, and instead worked for an amazing, record-setting two entire years at a Real Job. I had a wife and five kids, and bills were through the roof, so I had to sacrifice my independence, and punch a timeclock day after day, week after week, month after month. I felt I deserved a chapter in the next “Profiles In Courage.”
The pay was good as it was a Union Job. We made nails and pins and also those copper rivets you sometimes see on blue jeans. It was incredibly noisy, but I could handle that. I found it far harder to endure the strange babble you hear in union-shops, where workers consider their employer their enemy. I felt grateful my employer gave me such high pay, and was constantly overstepping the union rules, innocently and accidentally, by doing things which might help the boss, such as working too hard or innovating improvements or suggesting changes which might elevate our efficiency. When rebuked, I constantly felt like telling people to shove impossibly large objects into impossibly small orifices, but managed to bite my tongue because I had a wife and five kids, and needed the job. I had to kowtow to the Union as much as the boss. But observing silence was like salt on a wound, at times.
I found a strange ally in an old man I worked with, who was mere months away from his retirement. I had the sense he had been biting his tongue for decades. Not that he ever said a word in opposition to the younger worker’s ravings. But he did sigh, and look away at the sky out the window, when they backbit the boss. Only once did he confide to me.
It occurred before second shift one grim Monday evening, as I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and forced myself to approach the awful entrance and yet again punch in. Others were crowding in to punch in, and one hungover, young redhead was ventilating about the boss’s outrages and how revolution now simply had to happen. (I think he was offended that the stripes painted in the employee’s parking lot were too close together, and that it was Monday, and also that his wife had told him he drank too much and he’d better shape up or ship out.) What I remember is the redhead pointed east and, with great drama, stated, “Look at those purple storm clouds rising! The moment is upon us! The time is at hand!”
Due to my interest in meteorology, and the fact there was no forecast for storm, I paused to look east, as did the old man approaching retirement age, who happened to be beside me. More to myself than to the old man, I muttered, “That isn’t storm clouds. That is the earth’s shadow, rising as the sun sinks below the horizon. I think they call it the ‘twilight wedge’. Folk have seen that forever. The Romans called it ‘The girdle of Jove’ and that pink band of sky above it was called ‘The belt of Venus.'”
To my surprise the old man actually responded. He chuckled, heaved his shoulders in an exaggerated manner, and then sighed, “These young fellows! They simply will have to learn.” And then he stepped inside to punch in.
What struck me at the time was that the old man apparently felt no obligation to teach the young whippersnappers they were in error. He was perfectly willing to let them be fools and learn the hard way. Perhaps he long ago had attempted to offer advice, but was told to shut up, so now he no longer had the slightest desire to reform society. At the same time, he seemed very aware they would be reformed. The statement, “They simply will have to learn”, implies they were “cruising for a bruising”.
(As an aside, I’ll mention that young fellow did get bruised. Roughly two months later, shortly after the old man retired, when I had at long last paid off my debts and was relatively solvent, I was offered a chance to work in a non-union position at the nail-factory, but at the same time I received roughly two-years-income from my mother’s estate. After prayer and long talks with my wife, I chose to bail out from further involvement with the nail-factory, though I lost benefits and received no unemployment because I was quitting voluntarily. (I’m not certain it was a financially wise choice, for within weeks after I quit the union went on strike; even though my promotion would have meant I would have lost my union strike-benefits, I might have collected unemployment at a higher rate of pay.)
The Union went on strike because the boss had dared ask them to pay part of their health insurance, stating he could no longer afford to pay for it all. When the workers were outraged and went on strike the boss responded by closing the factory. Why run a place if you couldn’t make money? That noisy, bustling building, once a thriving part of a small community, stood silent. The derelict building still stands empty, twenty years later. That is the sort of bruising that Union cruising can get you.) (The Union did seek to find new Union jobs for its members, but in some cases the jobs were hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and some of the workers at the nail factory were “local boys” who didn’t like driving even five miles to work, let alone uprooting their family and transplanting to Texas or California, where nobody knew them.)
I think I brought this story up to my “prayer group” of grumpy old men to emphasis this point: You don’t have to be rich to fail to love your neighbor. You don’t have to drink tea in the day and champagne at night. Union beer-drinkers can manifest a hoity-toity attitude, smearing and backstabbing the best bosses, or even ordinary bosses who are not always the best, and such people are “cruising for a bruising.”
In more ordinary times we tend to learn from our mistakes. The old song sings, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till its gone.” The job at the noisy factory in your home town doesn’t look so bad, when the alternative is moving to a town with reeking air near a refinery in Louisiana. Hindsight is 20-20, and all too often we learn to love our neighbors in the small window of a rear view mirror. This happens over and over, until, when you get to be a grumpy old man, you are far less liable to denounce your boss, or employees, or anyone at all. It is for this reason old fossils like myself should be respected, even honored, for we have done the cruising and endured the bruising, and know better.
But these are not ordinary times. Creatures of “The Swamp” have not the slightest desire to know better. They already think they know better, and call better, “it all.” They imagine they have “it all” and want to keep “it all,” and even that they know “it all”.
Sadly, they have neglected to think deeply about what the “it all” they cling to actually is. Often it is an illusion, a wraith they eventually find out is mere mist, a bridge made of vapor that cannot support them when they attempt to cross it, and which always lets them down.
“It all” tends to be an illusion of power. You think you can swagger, but the carpet gets yanked out from under your feet. You may be a boss who thinks he has power over his employees, or a union which thinks it has power over the boss, but the boss discovers he is powerless when his workers all leave, and the union discovers it is powerless when the boss choses the shop.
The business of yanking the carpet from under another’s feet is prevalent among those caught up by the illusion of power, but is most definitely not an example of loving your neighbor. It is the antithesis. Sadly, too often people see “winning” as, in some way, shape or form, causing their neighbor to fall. Bosses sometimes want their employees to fall, and employees sometimes want their bosses to fall, In the end both sides discover a greater truth: “Divided we fall”, as the entire business goes belly-up.
The illusion of power is seen in its most naked form in communism, which worships power on the level of pigs. One of the saddest things to see is people seduced by such craven ignorance, renouncing religion for what will eventually turn on them like wheedling wolves do the day the leader of their pack has a limp.
This is especially sad to witness in the case of schoolmarms, who are essential to the promotion of communism, yet who history shows are among the first to be purged. If you believe in toppling statues and burning the books, can the schoolmarms be far behind? Look what happened to the educators under Stalin, or what Mao did to all teachers and professors during the “Cultural Revolution”. To free themselves of “old, outdated ideas” even teachers were sent to farms to learn “new ideas,” and many never returned. In Cambodia, Pol Pot skipped the bother of “reeducation”: If you had a writer’s callus on your middle finger you were were summarily executed.
As a young writer I collided with such schoolmarms on a regular, even daily, basis. I confess it was difficult to love my neighbor. It was even more difficult for them to love me, and some loathed me, for I would expose their ignorance, their idea they had “it all” and could keep “it all”, with innocent questions. Some would have whipped me for asking, but whipping had just gone out of fashion, and these same schoolmarms would have drugged me, but drugging children hadn’t come into fashion yet. I was spared in an eddy of time called by some “permissiveness”, but I assure you, even without whips or drugs, I caught hell just the same. For what? For asking questions.
What sort of schoolmarm would not invite the questions of an inquisitive child? Only a Leninist, or Stalinist, or Maoist, or Pol-Pot-ist. Yet what happens to children in our schools if they question Global Warming?
In like manner, what sort of public would not invite the questions asked by grumpy old men, (instead censoring obscure blogs like this one?) Only Leninists, Stalinists. Maoists, or Pol-Pot-ists. After all, grumpy old men represent no great threat, for they are declining into their second childhoods.
What is it about childhood, whether it be the first or the second, that threatens people in power? Can it be a reality hidden in the statement, “Unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven?”
In other words, in my first childhood I could go places the schoolmarms were banned from going, and now, in my second childhood, I get to wander heavenly realms of thought the politically-correct are banned from entering. But it is not my fault I am rich and they are poor. They chose to live in the filthy slum they abide within, called by common people, “The Swamp.”
I think one of the chief delights of my life has been to gain first-hand experience that the poor are rich, and the rich are impoverished. Rather than making me get political and angry, it makes me chuckle. I may not be a kindly old man, but one reason I’m merely a grumpy old man, but not a truly nasty old man, is due to the ability to chuckle.
It is such a joke! That those who think they are so rich live in a filthy slum!
But what will happen if those in the slum wake up? Even if they don’t open their eyes they may open their nostrils. What if they suddenly understand the mire they are in stinks?
I like to think that might be the way God manifests. That might be the “iceberg” that sinks the Swamp-Titanic. People would simply get “sick of it.” Even Atheists could handle that sort of revelation.
What would be nice is that it need not involve riots and bloodshed, and all the ugliness of civil war. Listening to the prayers of grumpy old men, I note a lot of hope that slaughter and purges are averted. And behavior can be changed when people are “sick of it.” Even those who live for the adulation of others, such as Hollywood stars, change when in the eyes of others they see others are “sick of it.” So the revelation that changes mankind might not be thunder and aurora in the midnight skies, but rather a quiet and simple dawning of understanding.
I sure hope so. It beats being struck by a thunderbolt and turned to ashes!
This being Sunday, it likely would be a good thing to confess. I’d rather confess about all the things you do wrong, but apparently it is better to confess about my own spiritual blunders. So I’ll get on with it.
It might be fun to sheepishly admit some of my behavior as a lusty young man was not entirely ethical, but the problem with that is: I am not what I once was, so such confession is no longer very applicable. Also you might become suspicious that rather than feeling remorse I was bragging.
Instead I’ll confess a couple of events which recently confronted me with how I put things of this world ahead of That Which Is Lasting. The first was that my yearly chest X-ray, delayed six months due to the corona virus, reveled a suspicious “spot”, (actually a shaded area), and I was advised to immediately schedule an MRI. If I thought I might be able to milk some sympathy from my wife (and I confess I was playing the violin’s of self-pity a bit) such thinking came to an abrupt, screeCHing halt. She too had a virus-delayed physical, a lump was discovered in her right breast, and she was told to schedule an immediate mammogram.
We looked each other in disbelief. Could we be at our end?
As much as I’d like to draw out the suspense and make a good story of this event, I’ll cut the fortnight of anxiety short and state the tests came back negative for both of us.
We could go right back to our ordinary fretting about incidental concerns, but in a way it was difficult to do. It was like walking from a church after a funeral. One wants to forget all about the confrontation with mortality they have just experienced, (and one usually does a fairly good job of developing amnesia), however one can’t quite do it; one pauses, at least briefly, and considers the fact all the material stuff we think matters is stuff we can’t take with us, and that, embarrassing as it may be, we depart this veil of tears as butt naked as we entered it.
So I did some considering. It was rather good fun, as I could do it with a wife who was equally considerate. Also we are not Atheists, and are able to wonder about an afterlife poor Atheists can’t. And then I felt thankful, in a strange way, that we had our socks scared off by the prospect of cancer, and grateful I was made aware of how I am perhaps too attached to some things of this world, and too neglectful of That Which Will Last.
But wouldn’t you know it? I went and got a little bit smug about how I had learned my lesson, and was now a new and improved version of myself. Maybe I wasn’t detached two weeks ago, but I had made the right adjustments. And then?
And then I misplaced my wallet during a family camping trip. I’ll cut this long story short by stating I found it in the pocket of a sweatshirt I’d worn briefly during the morning chill, but that was only after three hours searching everywhere else. (I’d forgotten I wore that sweatshirt briefly, and then hung it over the back of a camp-chair.) The areas under the seats of both my and my wife’s vehicles are now far cleaner than usual. I discovered my memory still works, as I retraced every step I took. And during those three hours I discovered there are some mutterings and curses I am capable of, which seldom escape the lips of true saints.
After I had looked everywhere I was forced to contemplate the unthinkable, and that there was the possibility an unscrupulous person had taken advantage of my idiotic carelessness. I didn’t mind the loss of thirty dollars in cash as much as minded the loss of my license and credit cards. It would be such a (-bleeping-) nuisance to report their loss and replace them. And there was nothing I could do until Monday. What sort of mess could be made of my credit rating before then? Was there someone I should call immediately?
Another question drifted across my mind. Was I going to ruin the weekend for everyone else, just because I had been a careless dunderhead? No. I sucked in my gut and decided to be merry.
Interestingly, as soon as I made that decision I felt calmer. I suppose I was in some way refusing to allow things of this world to rule me, and was to some degree behaving in a manner more faithful to That Which Is Lasting.
It was only then, as I sat by the campfire and joking and laughing, that a thought drifted to the tip of my tongue, “You can feel the coming heat wave starting to build. We won’t need our sweatshirts tonight….sweatshirts…hey!”
I’ll conclude this Sunday Sermon by simply saying the same sort of fears and worries are applicable to the Corona Virus. Some have died; some have lost money; but in the case of many death and poverty were sheer imagination.
Panics occur to many all at once. People come to their senses one by one.
I watch faces through windshields. I suppose it is a habit I picked up back in the 1960’s, when hitchhiking was a form of public transport. I’d scrutinize faces within approaching cars to see if they showed any sign of mercy. Sometimes I could achieve a split second of eye-contact, and felt that made the difference between a car stopping or passing me by. Now I do it to see if a person is waving, in which case I wave back, even if I’m not sure who it is. (I live in a small town, and kids I coached in little league a quarter century ago now have graying temples, and I can’t recognize them), (beyond returning a wave.)
The last three months, since the “corona virus crisis” began, I’ve seen a change in the faces in passing cars.
At first people largely looked excited: At first I witnessed some worried, but most looked as if they were enjoying a “snow day” and enjoying a break from hard work. Then only something like ten people in town actually caught the virus, and nobody died (that I heard of, though some may have had elders in far-away old-age-homes pass away.) After that reality set in, then faces gradually began to change. Last week I told my wife, “I get the feeling people aren’t going to put up with this bullshit much longer.”
At first I think people felt they were doing something noble by staying home, for it kept the hospitals from being overwhelmed. That succeeded, for the hospitals weren’t overwhelmed, and then people felt we could get back to normal. When petty politicians refused to relinquish their power as tin-pot dictators, and things didn’t revert to normal, people’s faces began to change.
There were also murmurings at the local market, but I couldn’t attend to various conspiracy-theories as much as I’d like. I am always busy at my Farm-Childcare in the spring, both with planting and with rambunctious, spring-fevered children, and this spring’s derangement of the local economy made things harder. At first we had too much staff as children were kept home, and then we had too many children as some staff stayed home even though all the kids came back. However I did hear some local-market-theorists propose that the very reality of the virus as a National Danger was “Fake News” which fooled even President Trump, and the virus was actually quite ordinary, but used as part of a nefarious plot to destroy the economy and keep President Trump from being reelected.
If it was such a plot, it proved we are a nation of kind people willing to sacrifice. The danger of such conspiracy-theories is that they tend to blame people for natural disasters; in the middle ages they blamed Jews for the Bubonic plague.
I was then glad I wasn’t young, for I wouldn’t have handled being pent up in “self isolation” well. Spring used to make me more deranged than it now does. In fact my “senior summer” was one of the wildest times of my life, (and I thank God I survived). However the teenagers in my town, this year, did not seem unusually disturbed, perhaps because they lived in the country. They could “socially distance” hiking and fishing and roaming the fields. They didn’t have to play hooky from school to blow off steam rambling (as I once did). Also they faced less stress in school, facing “finals”, for they were able to take such tests under less pressure “on line”. They conducted their senior year vandalism (painting their names on the streets) with humor and some art, and I was glad to see it. (Indeed such graffiti has become such a town-tradition that it is only still illegal because making it legal would spoil the fun, for both the teenagers and the police.) Instead, it was the older people who looked increasingly stressed and even angry, as I peered through windshields as they drove by.
I am sure it was not so easy for other teenagers, in far away cities and suburbs, who had sand dumped into their skateboard parks, and the hoops taken down in their basketball courts, in the name of “social distancing”. I had a sort of sense a bomb was going to go off, which was why I made my comment to my wife.
Therefore I was not surprised when things exploded. I could go on at length, but received a link to a piece by a conservative called John Nolte, who sardonically and bitterly expresses what politicians have done to our young, far better than I could:
Meanwhile, among the murmurers at the local market, there is talk that the riots were orchestrated to bring down President Trump. I can’t entirely scoff, (for so much “Fake News” has had exactly that aim), and also I receive links to proof of odd “coincidences”, (such as pallets of bricks delivered to city sidewalks where no construction was going on, just before the riots began).
The local-market-murmurers mutter the “Swamp” of “Washington Elite” is getting desperate, because FBI big-shots are facing repercussions, regarding the “Russian Hoax”, and the threat posed by such investigations endanger the secure livelihoods of many wealthy “Swamp Creatures”, and therefore they are willing to bring the nation to the brink of Civil War to keep President Trump from “Draining The Swamp.”
I instinctively veer away from such conspiracy theories, if only because I doubt politicians are capable of such coordination. (Whatever they attempt seems to wind up utterly screwed up.) However I have to confess I haven’t felt this way since the riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democrat convention. Now, as then, “The Whole World Is Watching.”
Authority took too much control with the virus, but authority is afraid to take control with the rioters. In Proverbs, the authoritarian King Salomon states,
“When a country is rebellious, it has many rulers, but a ruler with discernment and knowledge maintains order.”
But what can an old geezer like me do? I wear no crown nor badge. I run a Farm-Childcare, and the only rioters I control are four-years-old.
I do what I’ve always done, which is to enact the survivalist strategy of planning for the markets be empty next fall. I attempt to grow enough food to keep myself and my wife alive, and cut enough firewood to keep us warm next winter. Usually folk laugh at me, and deem me an old crank who has been preparing for The End Of The World every spring for going on fifty years.
Funny thing is, this year fewer laugh at me, and I’ve had a hard time finding baby chicks for my Farm-Childcare. I even had a hard time finding seeds for butternut squash. Apparently more people are gardening. Perhaps it is only only because the virus-restrictions allow people time to garden, but perhaps I’m not the only one worried that the shelves in the market may be empty of more than toilet paper, come next autumn.
In the end, should we stumble into the monstrous stupidity of Civil War, all that a small person can do it be on the side of Love. Be a peaceful demonstrator and not a violent one. Love neighbors and don’t hate. Give, and don’t loot. Sustain justice, rather than enact injustice. Even if, in the short term, you lose, in the longer term you please God, and in the end that is best.
Sunrise's Swansong 