Christine Sunderland

Beware and be aware of the desire to be squeaky clean, to cleanse our culture of people we don’t like. Beware and be aware of the desire to cleanse history of facts, to rewrite the American story.

They say this election is the year that reflects the rebellion of the middle class against the elites of our country: Washington bureaucrats, Hollywood stars, New York publishers, and anyone who graduated from an Ivy League college.

Elites are self-perpetuating. They make sure their family and friends continue to be elites. They hide in clubs and behind secure gates and go to safe schools. They sometimes rig the game, but most of the time the game is theirs already. Elites make the rules, pass the laws, lobby their cause in Congress.

But there are and always will be (I hope) Horatio Alger heroes in our great nation, those men and women who build upon their lower and middle class backgrounds and climb the ladder into the upper class, rung by rung, hour by hour, breaking through a gender-neutral glassy, caste and class, ceiling. They work hard, they sacrifice, they sleep little, and they win the prize. They earn it the old fashioned way, inching from rags to riches.

And there are and always will be voters who have had enough of big anything, be it government, stars, companies, unions, egos. These voters say, I want my freedom back. I want the chance to be a Horatio Alger hero, the hero of my own story. I want peace in my neighborhood, police who fearlessly police to ensure that peace. They say, I want disturbing the peace to be a crime once again. I cannot move up the ladder if anarchy reigns and martial law follows suit. I cannot climb if I am crushed and enslaved by big government.

And so as we begin our national conversation, in the living rooms of our national conventions, Mr. Trump doesn’t look half bad. Mr. Trump gets it. We want peace and freedom and we want to be protected from violence and slavery. We want peace so that we can pursue happiness, worship as we wish, educate and raise our children as we choose.

Our culture seems to be one of escalating violence, a violence often caused by a creed of cleansing. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century was attractive to those who desired to cleanse the population, to allow only “people like us,” Nordic Europeans. Built upon Darwinian thought, the movement led to Hitler, its high priest. It was embraced by the Left, claiming that blacks, eastern Europeans, and southern Europeans, were genetically inferior to northerners. As Thomas Sowell writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Progressives spearheaded the eugenics movement, dedicated to reducing the reproduction of supposedly ‘inferior’ individuals and races. The eugenics movement spawned Planned Parenthood… in academia there were 376 courses devoted to eugenics in 1920.” Southern whites were Democrat, southern blacks Republican. Republicans sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Somehow in the cleansing of history, these facts are seldom mentioned.

It has been said that if a culture treats life as disposable, violence will be commonplace. Having made killing the unborn legal, killing the elderly is next, both groups considered unwanted, messy burdens. With echoes of Hitler, the handicapped will be cleansed as well. The belief that all life is sacred will be whitewashed, as a religion of death supplants the Jewish and Christian religions of life.

We must recall the history of Western Civilization, how we got here, who we are, what we stand for, so we can choose the national road to take. The image of cleansing the populace is not new, but one repeated throughout history, in “purges.” The iconoclastic Protestants of the sixteenth-century Reformation were sickened to the point of rage when they saw religious images in the churches of France. They believed Catholics worshiped images and “polluted” Christianity with heresy and superstition. They entered the churches and destroyed images, whitewashing frescoes and toppling statuary. They saw themselves as cleansing their culture.

Radical Islam desires to cleanse the world of infidels and set up a caliphate of true believers, instituting sharia law, which will punish dissent and enslave women. In many communities in Europe and the U.S., such law is already observed.

Western culture is also obsessed with clean. The cleansers appear to come from upper classes, folks who own too much and have too much time. Guilty as charged, they desire to rein in their own materialism, to boast self-denial through simplicity, to re-order their unproductive lives. They are repenting and seek redemption, desiring not only people but ideas to be clean too. As Laura Freeman writes in the British Spectator, the desire to cleanse often leads students “to approve only one point of view and to [not allow] any speaker who dissents. Anyone not on message about trans issues, the migrant crisis or abortion will find themselves summarily [rejected] from the campus. What is a ‘safe space’ if not somewhere white, tidy, clean and antiseptic, with nothing on the walls to offend a delicate sensibility?” Sounds familiar.

Cleansers are also active cleansing the environment and demanding programs that hurt the poor, that raise the cost of living with large government programs, that use bad science to support “man-made” global warming.

Cleansers deny the global south genetically modified crops (GMO’s) needed to survive, crops that have nearly banished world hunger.  Folks in Uganda and Zimbabwe cannot afford to worry about genetic modifications, deemed safe by good science. Anti-GMO protesters have destroyed fields and hampered research. As Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said in a speech quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “We are dealing… with the most blatant anti-science of the age. But it is worse than that. It is inhumane and it must be countered on that basis… this is an indulgence of the rich and it is not just scientifically indefensible, it is morally indefensible.”

A friend said recently that democracy is messy. She protested in the sixties so that the issues “would be on the table.” Certainly we are allowed to speak, to have a voice. But we must speak civilly as many in our history have done, as Martin Luther King did. We can tolerate messy as long as we respect one another. We can welcome diverse views. We don’t need to have everything clean and perfect and orderly. We don’t need to be Stepford citizens with lockstep opinions. But we need to follow the rule of law we have all agreed upon, not a rule imposed by self-perpetuating elites, be it the Supreme Court or the White House or Ivy Leaguers destroying third-world food supplies.

So beware and be aware of those who cleanse speech, those who cleanse history, those who cleanse the culture of the unwanted. As we begin our great national conversations in Cleveland and Philadelphia, let us listen carefully, listen to reasoned argument, listen to the bells of peace and freedom ringing across our great land once again.

The heat wave in the Bay Area is browning and burning our California grasses. We hide from the cruel sun, the thirsty sun, the killing sun. Our fragile systems can only take so much heat, so much cold. We thrive in a narrow temperate zone, our human comfort zone.  I’ve heard a lot lately about moving out of your comfort zone. And yet, too far out of that zone and we die. 

This week Christians worldwide celebrate the Feasts of Saints Peter and Paul, two giants in first-century Christianity. Peter is often portrayed as the heart, and Paul, the mind of Christianity. But both of them – the emotional, intuitive, forthright fisherman and the brilliant, poetic, focused theologian – knew the eternal nature of the soul, and the saving grace of Jesus of Nazareth. Both traveled outside their comfort zones. 

Saint Peter walked on the water. He stepped out of the safety of the fishing boat and toward Christ in the midst of a storm. Matthew records: 

²⁴ But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. ²⁵ And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. ²⁶ And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. ²⁷ But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. ²⁸ And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. ²⁹ And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. ³⁰ But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.³¹ And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him… (Matthew 14, KJV)

When we begin to sink, whose hand do we reach for? Whose God? Whose truth? Or do we simply sink into our own depths, since in our pride, we consider ourselves all-sufficient. 

The image of Peter reaching for the hand of God reminds me of Michelangelo’s painting of Creation, God touching Adam and breathing life into him. And so in the Incarnation, God touches us. And we can touch him today through the Church, in the Eucharist. 

Peter is someone we identify with. He is fallible but bighearted. He believes but sometimes doubts. He is brave but sometimes terrified. Yet he is gifted with holy intuition, suddenly seeing the truth. It is Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, who explains what it all means with words and ideas in his letters to the to the newly formed churches. But Paul was blinded before he could see, as Luke records in Acts:

And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, ² and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem. ³ And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: ⁴ and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? ⁵ And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. ⁶ And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do… ⁹ And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. (Acts 9, KJV)

Both Peter and Paul sought the truth. In our world where truth is ridiculed and slander lauded, where words are twisted and innuendos esteemed, where things are not as they appear, full of half-truths and half-lies, we grope like the blind trying to see a way forward as individuals, as a community, as a nation, as a world.

But truth be told, we need not fear stepping onto the storm-tossed sea. We need not fear if we reach for Christ when we begin to sink. We need not fear the light if it is God’s light. But we must never lose sight of who is calling us to walk on the water or to change our ways: the only one who claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

We live in a time of confusion and increasing chaos, as traditional gender roles come into question. And so on this day when we honor our fathers I wonder who and what they are, were, and should be.

The animal kingdom has been busy this last spring, giving birth, and baby deer cross our front lawn. We humans share some of their generative biology – the male unites with the female to give life. Some animals form a kind of family, with a male taking on the protective role of father, at least for a time. Other animals don’t and the male moves on. Humans throughout history have formed families, having reasoned that society works better that way. Early families were often polygamous, the male having many wives to produce many children for the tribe. More people was good, not evil. More meant safety and better defense. More meant productivity and wealth. More meant a future for the community and nation. 

Judaism and its child Christianity define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, united sexually and by vows of love and commitment before God. Marriage is considered generative, meant to produce children. Throughout Holy Scripture this relationship is replayed, as God the Father creates his people, God the Son unites with his Bride the Church, and God the Holy Spirit weaves them together in Love. God creates us not because he is lonely, but because he is Love. That’s what Love does. 

And thus Love is sung to us throughout the centuries through the Church. It dances and weaves through her liturgies, reflecting light like a many-faceted jewel. Love calls us to love one another, the other, one who is not our self. The ultimate expression of love is marriage, where two different people love one another – different genders and different genes. They unite to generate life, to bring children into the world to love and be loved. 

There are times when fathers take on mothering roles. And there are times when mothers must act as fathers. But in the Christian family, our bodies, our genders, define our primary purpose under God, the role that nature has given us. When this purpose is denied, chaos results. 

Mothers are the inner home of love, for they carry in the womb the new life created. They then bear the child and create an outer home of love. Fathers beget this new life, determining it’s gender, and initiating its conception. And so two become one, generating a unique human being, one never repeated before or after. A mystery and a miracle.

This miracle of life is often taken for granted. And yet so sacred a union, so mysterious a bond, this bond between husband and wife, and between parents and children, that it is the foundation of our culture. As we see today the traditional family threatened and torn apart, we must work to protect and mend it, to heal its brokenness.

At the least fathers must be present, both in body and spirit. We don’t hear a great deal about St. Joseph in Scripture. He is a good man, we are told. He listens to God. He trusts God. He takes Mary as his wife. He shelters her and the Holy Child growing within her. He provides a living so the boy can become a man. St. Joseph is powerfully present. This is what fathers do, even stepfathers. 

And so we honor stepfathers as well, and all those who have stepped into the silent absence with their presence and their love, and all of those uncles and cousins and friends who have acted as fathers to those children bereft, all priestly fathers, parish fathers, community fathers. I was once a single parent, and I am so grateful for the many fathers of our local church who were quietly present, strong in their faithful support.

When the traditional family is threatened, fatherhood is threatened. When marriage is no longer valued, fathers abandon their children. When fathers abandon their children, families are wounded, and civilization collapses. 

I believe we are seeing signs of such collapse: children raised by one parent, usually the mother; children denied the bonding security of family love; children unable to create such bonds of family in the future, having no models.

Cult creates culture, and without Judeo-Christian institutions of temple and church, the traditional family will disintegrate. Fathers and mothers, united in matrimony, committed to love, are key to the institution of the traditional family. Today they are encouraged to abandon one another and their offspring to look out for themselves alone. 

And so I honor true fathers who do what needs doing, silently, lovingly, sometimes unsung and even unloved. You sacrifice, you shelter, you make it possible for mothers to mother and children to grow up. We need you, for our children, our grandchildren, and the very future of civilization.

Thank you.

I returned home Sunday after a lovely time at the Presentation High Alumnae Luncheon in Berkeley to hear of another mass shooting, this time in Orlando, Florida. In the name of ISIS a gunman entered a gay bar and opened fire. 

It is odd that the liberal press isn’t more concerned about ISIS in our country, that they don’t seem to connect the dots, that Muslim extremists desire to destroy Jews, Christians, and gays, probably in that order. They desire to cleanse our world of what they consider blasphemy. Those of us who defend our right to exist, to speak, to worship, to live as we choose freely within the borders of law and order, are targets of radical Islam, be it homegrown or ordered by foreign terrorists. 

We freedom-loving Americans are in this together. We have a national election coming soon. Let us vote for the person who understands the threats to our country from within and from without. Let us vote for the candidate who will support our right to practice our religion and to speak freely, who values life from womb to grave. 

The Presentation luncheon was a reunion of ladies from many backgrounds. They were the lucky ones who attended an all girls’ school in the fifties, sixties, seventies, early eighties. I have long been impressed with the cross-section of society represented by Catholicism, a faith for all peoples everywhere in all times. I am not an alumna but wish I was. I went to public schools, co-ed, and often wondered what it would have been like to have the experience of an all-girls school and one that taught a code of ethics and hard work. 

The history of Berkeley, the Presentation Sisters, and Presentation High is considered in my newly released novel, The Fire Trail, and so the ladies had a unique interest in the story. But they were also appreciative of other themes, the fires of our culture jumping our borders of law and order, devouring liberty and silencing speech. It is a story that considers how we can keep barbarians on the other side of our borders, how we might define, encourage, and safeguard our precious and disappearing civilization. For even definitions seem to have been forgotten. The Fire Trail is a tale that takes a second look at church-state issues, issues of persecution (yes, in the twenty-first century), re-examining the value of religious schools that teach right and wrong and the dignity of every person, what it means to be civilized.

I was glad to chat with the lovely ladies of Presentation High Berkeley, over sandwiches and fruit, wine and sparking water, about their experiences in a Catholic high school. Some said they worried about today’s crime, the inability to walk the streets of San Francisco to get to the office without fear. Some said they didn’t understand what was happening to our culture. 

It made me think of a recent article that asked once again (how many times is this asked?) what was the appeal of Donald Trump? Joseph Epstein writes that folks feel they’ve lost their country they want it back. They don’t embrace the agenda that progressives have slipped into their world through a back door. The Trumpistas aren’t haters or bigots, but they would like to see the rule of law applied equally. They would like public safety. They would like their sons and daughters to be safe on campus and given better role models than pornographic novels and violent movies enshrine. They would like their grandchildren to survive the womb to breathe the air of freedom. 

Indeed. I would too. 

And as I pray for the victims of the Orlando massacre, I pray that we tell the truth about what is happening in America. I pray that the media correctly reports the words of our candidates so that I don’t have to verify every speech on YouTube. Mr. Trump said something quite different about the judge that is presiding over his trial than what was reported by the media. At least as far as I could tell by listening and watching his speech, with real words coming from his lips. His phrases were conflated by both the right and the left, inferences underlined, truth abandoned.

I am waiting to see the media accuse Mr. Trump of the Florida shootings. The culture of violence is not caused by Mr. Trump’s free speech or even his simple diction. It is caused by the silence of good men and women, and the rabble who are allowed to set fires in public forums. 

Each of us must do our homework and sort truth from lies. Each of us must vote for the candidate that will prevent the next massacre on American soil. The truth is there, under the media rubble, in the ashes left by the press, and hopefully in The Fire Trail, carried home by the lovely ladies from Presentation High.

EVENT coming up: I will be reading from THE FIRE TRAIL along with six other adventurous ladies tomorrow at 11 a.m. (Tuesday the 14th) at Curves Walnut Creek, 1848 Tice Valley Blvd. (near Rossmoor). There is a chapter set at a facility similar to Curves. For a $10 donation to Blue Star Moms receive a copy of THE FIRE TRAIL. Come on by!

Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy 

We are staying a couple of days in Bellagio, a village perched on a peninsula reaching into the center of Lake Como. Ocher roofs nest against green, forested mountains, and you can see in three directions from our hotel’s gardens, south toward Como, across the lake to Menaggio and Tremezzo, and north to the snowcapped Alps. Most Italian villages have churches, and this basilica’s belltower chimes the time in the misty air.

Today being Santissima Trinita, Holy Trinity Sunday, I looked forward to visiting the basilica for Mass and seeing what our Heavenly Father would show me. The stone basilica (12^th century, Romanesque) is nearly next door and we planned to attend the 11:30 Mass, following the Italian as best we could. I have found that the liturgy of the Divine Office, the Holy Eucharist, is the same everywhere – Scripture, Sermon, Offering, Consecration, and Communion with Our Lord and one another. As we stepped across the threshold I opened my heart and mind, waiting and watching, to see what I might see, to see what our Heavenly Father might show me. It was 11:15 and we were the first to arrive, but it was soon packed.

The church itself is a work of art. The tabernacle and high altar are golden and gleaming against the dark stone of the vaults and pillars. There is a large stone pulpit that the preacher used to full advantage, high above us, gesturing with bright-eyed enthusiasm. The pews are the expected hard wood and the kneelers even harder slats. Folks stood to pray more than they knelt. Kneeling was saved for the Consecration. The nave flooring was uneven, sloping down from the chancel to the entry, as though the church were indeed an ark parting the seas.

While I understand the structure of the Mass and many of the liturgical prayers, Italian being close to Latin, I usually struggle with the sermon in a foreign tongue. In this case the pastor had kindly provided an English translation in a leaflet. I scanned it as he spoke from his marbled loft.

The mystery of the Trinity is one that has long been debated and prayerfully considered. Analogies are given: St. Patrick’s three leaf shamrock is one and three; a tree has trunk, branches, and leaves, one and three; H2O can be solid, liquid, and gaseous, one and three. There has been an assumption that the Trinity is a difficult concept, those three Persons of God: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

My late bishop often said the Holy Spirit was the love between God the Father and God the Son.

But today, it seemed clear, after reading the little leaflet in the Basilica of St. James (San Giacomo) in Bellagio. “All liturgical celebration, indeed all Christian prayer,” it read, “is Trinitarian: to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.”

Growing up Presbyterian I was told to pray to the Son, to Jesus. Nothing wrong there, of course, except, I always wondered where the Father came in, and assumed He was watching from above, distant. As I grew in the Anglo-Catholic faith, I came to understand that prayer is addressed to God the Father, but in the name of Jesus Christ His Son, for we are told by Christ to pray in His name not to Him but to His Father. All prayers end with “in the name of…” and this is why. And all Anglican prayers (or most) address God the Father. For, I came to understand, Jesus is the Way to the Father. We pray through Jesus. They are both the same person, in this sense. Christ is the fleshly form of God on earth, and it is His humanity, this incarnation, that allows us to touch God. This is the only Way to God.

But what about the Holy Spirit. While I understood that the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, today a new dimension entered my soul. In prayer, the Spirit is where we are dwelling. We are in the Spirit, as we pray through the Son, to the Father. And so in prayer we enter another state, a cloud of knowing rather than unknowing as the mystics like to say, for we are on the way to God, being in God, and traveling through God.

St. Benedict said that life is a pilgrimage into God with God. Yes. A pilgrimage into God the Father, within God the Spirit, and through the name (and Eucharistic union) of God the Son.

And so I left the gilded stone sanctuary a different being than the one I was when I entered. I was given a gift today, this Trinity Sunday 2016 in this village on the shores of Lake Como. I have been given many gifts, over many years of Sunday Eucharists, but this one I will not forget. Now each time I pray I shall think of that golden tabernacle and the true nature of the Santissima Trinita. I shall realize that as I enter my prayer with those first words, “Our Father who art in Heaven…” I enter into the Holy Spirit of God. He prompts me, He leads me, and He gives me the words to say, the desires to express. I am in the Holy Spirit, in Heaven on earth already.  This the magnificent gift of the Santissima Trinita.