Tag Archives: civilization

Americans for Life

Posted on January 24, 2016 | Leave a comment

voteThey marched in freezing temperatures with a blizzard fast approaching. Washington D.C. was closed down – transportation systems crippled. There were fewer valiant witnesses to the Pro-Life plea than in previous years, yet their hearts burned with the love of life and of God. 

And it was perhaps the fire within them that I saw in the photos of the tens of thousands gathered in our nation’s capitol, to march to the steps of the Supreme Court. In the dark of winter they carried their flaming hearts, lighting the way, reminding the world to see what we have done and are doing to our nation. 

It is difficult to see in a storm, and a blizzard is blinding. But these valiant marchers represented the majority of Americans who do not believe abortion on demand should be the law of the land. They represented the forty-three million unborn children murdered, a massive genocide. Their crime, these little ones? Wanting to live. 

I am thankful these protesters gave witness. Abortion is like the elephant in the room, only it is an elephant in our nation, avoided, not spoken of in polite society. Those of us who can see the elephant can no longer turn away and pretend it’s not there. We cannot say that taking innocent human life is a choice, a right, in a civilized world. Recently it seems that our laws protect those who break them, yet do not protect the innocent, the least of us, the most vulnerable, the unborn. 

There will be a judgment one day, a day when each of us will stand before God in His brilliant all-seeing light. We shall answer for our lives. We will be judged, essentially, on how well we have loved one another, on whether we loved life more than death, loved others more than ourselves. God does win in the end, and he is a loving God, desiring us to love, commanding us to love. 

The annual March for Life is held on or near January 22, the day of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade. It is a wintry time, when light is less. But the days are lengthening, and soon we will enter the Lenten Season to prepare our hearts for Easter. Lent means lengthening, a stretching of the light to shrink the dark. And so our nation, in the cold of winter, tries to see a way forward in today’s blizzard of choice. Our nation needs to lengthen the light and shrink the dark.

January 22 borders deep winter and early spring. In the Church we have been celebrating Epiphany, a starry season of light and seeing, of manifestations of God become man, when Eternity intersected Time. Epiphanytide is short this year, two Sundays, so that today we suddenly find ourselves in Pre-Lent, three Sundays before Ash Wednesday. We prepare our hearts for Easter, and in the discipline of fast, prayer, and sacrifice, we shed light on our own lives so that we can repent and move toward the light of God’s love once again, so that we can truly see the resurrected Christ and partake of his resurrection. During Lent we confess our unlove, the selfishness that hardens our own hearts, and that hardens the heart of America. 

Our nation, in this election year, is also called to choose light over darkness, life over death. Our country is called to repent, to change. As we cast our votes we become part of our culture, be it one of life or death, and we become responsible for its law. Each of us will one day account for the vote we cast, the part we played in creating those laws. As a conservative in California, my vote doesn’t seem to make a difference in the electoral system. But I know it does. God counts my vote, and it lessens my culpability in the ongoing genocide of our next generation, a genocide that averages a million babies a year, forty-three million lives in the last forty-three years. 

We hear that women want to “own” their bodies. They want to fulfill their dreams. Such ownership of another person is slavery. Dreams are not fulfilled through such ownership. Such dreams, built on such a lie, are nightmares. President Lincoln and Dr. King knew this. Such nightmares lead to suicide; such lies will kill America.

We must pray for our country, for this lie lives in our law. It is said the tide is turning, that eighty percent of Americans now favor restrictions on abortion; two-thirds of those are “pro-choice.” As we enter this time of choosing our leaders let us choose those who will work to redeem our culture, so that America can once again be a beacon of light to a darkening world. 

As we step into Lent, we must pray for light and life. We must fan the flames of love in order to see our way to Easter.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Heroes on a Train to Paris

Posted on August 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

flagAs news came of the heroic actions of three Americans aboard an Amsterdam-Paris train last week, many voiced admiration and relief that yes, heroes still exist in today’s world. Granted two of the men were off-duty military. Still, civilians also braved the danger, risking their lives. We are proud to be Americans once again, proud to do the right thing at the right time, proud to be heroic, risking all. We wonder if, after all, virtue does exist and might even be alive and breathing. Virtue might even be something we should teach our children. Are ideals making a comeback?

Perhaps the antihero of the last fifty years is not such a wise role model.

The antihero has formed today’s sensibilities through the arts, literature, and media. In real life he has banded together with other antiheroes to form collectives, grievance groups quick to take offense and to demand entitlements. In stories, these characters are often morose, turned inward, bored with life, and anti-authority on principle. They are narcissistic, nihilistic, without direction. They do not possess moral qualities once called “virtues.” These victims blame the system and society, never themselves. Publishers have promoted the antihero, finding readers desiring validation.

The intent to produce and market antiheroes is actually a noble one, ironically, even perhaps a heroic one, encouraging one to empathize with the least in our society – those hurt by race, crime, drugs, divorce, poverty. We want our children to care (and rightly),  but we give them dark novels with stories of rape, incest, and pederasty. In time, literature’s antiheroes, instead of becoming nobler and overcoming adversity, became darker, more ignoble. Novels must increase the terror and degradation, so that sexual sadism and violence towards women spans fifty shades of grey, with relative degrees of darkness, legitimizing the prurient experience.

Without ideals, standards of virtue, even right and wrong, the bar of civilized culture plummets. Civilization fragments and spills into a bestial world we call barbarism.

I was thinking about heroes and their welcome return to the public square when I came across Bret Stephens’ lovely column this week in the Wall Street Journal, “The Gifts of a Teacher.” In this tribute to Mrs. Amy Kass, his Literature professor at the University of Chicago, he describes how we have too many choices in our modern world. Mrs. Kass could see this and saw her vocation as one giving structure and direction to the chaos of those choices. In the past society supplemented law, adding morality, manners, and tradition. Today, we have no such rules, or few of them, so that students in those formative years of schooling that should move them from adolescence into adulthood often flail about undirected.

It was Mrs. Kass’s role to provide a framework of living through the great stories of an earlier time. As Mr. Stephens writes, “Jane Austen still offers the best advice on dating. Aristotle still has the last word on friendship.” The stories considered how to ennoble life, what and how to dream, how to grow a great heart and soul. Simply pondering how others answered, “What is the good life?”, a question I recall from my own two years of Western Civilization, is a start.

We need to train our children to be heroes in all walks of life, to be self-sacrificial rather than self-aggrandizing. We used to do this, assuming it was a necessary education for adulthood. Perhaps we should return to the old ways.

There is a morning prayer in our Anglican Book of Common Prayer that speaks of God’s service as “perfect freedom.” God gives us rules, a framework in which to live. He provides a recipe for happiness, rules for the road as it were. When we serve him we follow those rules, or try to. Once we learn the rules (like riding a bike perhaps) we have plenty of freedom, many choices within the frame of God’s law (we can ride all over the place). That is what we call free will: God… whose service is perfect freedom.

Just so, a culture (through government, schools, churches, temples), to survive, must provide a framework of ideals in which we can live our best lives, pursue our greatest happiness. Mr. Stephens describes the problem of choices without limit:

“We can satisfy our desires, but we have trouble recognizing our longings. We can do as we please but find it difficult to figure out what truly pleases us, or what we really ought to do. Limitless choice dissipates the possibility of fully realizing the choices we make, whether in our careers or communities or marriages. There’s always the chance that something (or someplace, or someone) better is lurking around the corner.”

The heroes on the train knew immediately what they needed to do and they did it. I pray that America’s teachers embrace the honorable and heroic role with which they are entrusted, just as Mrs. Kass did, giving students a framework for figuring out life, how to choose what’s right and what’s wrong, what to do and what not to do, when and where. Such an education will put our culture back on track.

Thank you, Mrs. Kass, and thank you, Mr. Stephens. Thank you, National Guard Specialist Alek Skarlatos, Airman First Class Spencer Stone, and Mr. Anthony Sadler. It is good to remember who we are and who we can become.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Civilizing Civilization

Posted on August 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

booksThis last week I packaged my latest version of The Fire Trail, my sixth novel, and put it in the mail to one of several publishers. It felt like sending a child out into the great wide world. 

Much of my work has revolved around the idea of truth, how we find it, how we recognize it, how we know it’s opposite, falsity. And so the search for what is real and true is a theme of The Fire Trail. It is a search that many have made before me, explorations recorded in the literature of mankind, going back to the first scrolls. 

The mind of man has long journeyed into and through the great questions: What is right and what is wrong? What is love? What is goodness and beauty? How do we live together peaceably, respecting one another’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We call the result, our effort at creating a civilized culture, a civilization. We have come to realize that man is not born civil or civilized, but must be taught and trained and encouraged in the art of selfless love for his neighbor. He must proffer this hope to his world, offer a way forward. 

With the ebbing of religious faith and thus the ebbing of hope in a future, a tsunami of despair has flooded our culture. We are doomed, many say. So it was with great satisfaction that I noticed this last week several optimists, those hope-sayers, who countered the pessimists, those doomsayers. 

Lord Lawson, Chairman of the Global Warming Foundation, writes encouragingly in his recent review in the Wall Street Journal of Ronald Bailey’s The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. He describes Mr. Bailey’s list of current scares: overpopulation, the end of natural resources, global warming, genetic modification. Mr. Bailey challenges such scares by pointing out that global living standards are higher than ever and population trends will actually be reversing; genetically modified grain (a GMO), produced by a better breeding technique, feeds the hungry worldwide; fossil fuels are far better for the poor than wood fires, and the contribution to climate change minimal. These visions of hope have triumphed, he notes, because of free market capitalism. 

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, weighs in with “The Green Scare Problem” (Wall Street Journal): “Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a living… they exaggerate… Pesticides were not causing a cancer epidemic…, acid rain was not devastating German forests…, the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind.” Remedies for scares can be costly and lethal, particularly in regards to GMOs, climate change, and nuclear power, the current fears. 

The truth is that mankind throughout the Western tradition has been inspired and driven to solve problems as they arise. We have used our minds to help one another live better lives, to survive poverty and cure disease. The fears of doomsayers Paul Ehrlich (over-population) and Al Gore (global warming) are without substance and even harmful with their necessary policies, especially hurting the world’s poor. We have every reason to believe that we may be hopeful about the future, not only of the planet, but of human survival. 

That is, if we continue to be inspired and driven to solve problems, if we continue to search for truth and recognize it when we see and hear it, if we continue to teach the rich tapestry of the history of the Western world to the next generation, that tradition of civilizing inquiry. But with the loss of this “civil” education in high schools and colleges, we may have every reason for unease. With the loss of religious faith – and mystery and wonder – we may have reason to lose faith in mankind. We must equip the next generation with what works and what doesn’t (history) and with inspiration to create (the arts). 

John Agresto writes in the Journal about “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts.” While he recognizes the value of an education that will train the student for the workplace, he believes the student must also be trained to think, to ponder the meaning of life, the pursuit of truth, the definitions of beauty and goodness. The classic liberal arts curricula aimed to do this, to inspire us and “teach us how to marvel.” And when we marvel, we admit we are less than marvel-ous, we are not gods, that we have something to reach for outside ourselves. We become creative. We use our minds to help others. Mr. Agresto writes: 

“Some (literature) holds up mirrors labeled ‘courage’ or ‘friendship’ or ‘smallness of soul’ to see if we can see ourselves there… books… can show us and lead us to examine creativity and desire, love and treachery, giddiness and joy, hope and fear, and facing death… (we) ponder law and justice, the nature of innocence and causes of moral culpability, forms of government and the ordering of societies that can preserve and refine our civilization.”

And so as I handed my weighty manuscript, sleeping in its slick Priority envelope, to the postal clerk, I said goodbye and wished it well. I prayed it would find a home, that it would be midwifed into the world of readers, birthed onto white pages or tablet screens. I prayed that my little novel, a (suspenseful) love story set in Berkeley in September 2014, would be my small offering to our culture of despair, a way forward on a path to a more civilized society, one of truth, beauty, and goodness, and one of safety and sanity.

I prayed that we keep well tended that fire trail protecting civilization from the wilderness.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Woods of Words, a Forest of Phrases

Posted on February 8, 2015 | 4 comments

FT YelpMy novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, has left home for a few weeks. I finished up the first draft and sent it out into the great wide world to see how it would fare. But I miss the characters. Zachary left his music and poetry with me, so I have that. I go to Anna’s exercise class on a regular basis and often think of her. Jessica introduced me to the history of Berkeley, coloring my weekly visit to my Berkeley office. And Father Nate left me his old prayer book to thumb through.

The Fire Trail first flew away to my local editor. Another copy has nested with the Sisters of the Presentation in San Francisco, and a third manuscript found a home with my bishop who understands people and thus character. Later, when the manuscripts come home, I shall incorporate their suggestions and shall send it out once again, a final draft, to visit proofreaders familiar with Berkeley and the University of California.

It is a miraculous thing, how a story can grow like a living creature.

I read recently that our brains are always changing, constantly being remolded by experience and use. Tissue is repaired, damaged cells healed. I marveled at this vision of life itself, the changing nature of our cells, our bodies, our minds, as we age and interact with our world. Nothing stays the same. We are ever-moving, ever-growing, ever-dying, amorphous.

And so I considered the power of choice, of free will, of my own ability to govern that moving, growing, and dying so that instead of drunkenly swerving down the road of life, my span of time might take on a certain shape, might follow a rational, reasonable course. As I pass each crossroads, I must choose. I can stop, turn around, and go back. I can turn; I can go forward, crossing the road. I can repent; I can deny there is a choice. I must choose, again and again, for there are many, many crossroads.

But all of these choices are informed by knowledge. I must know where I am going, and perhaps more importantly, where I have come from. The ability to choose wisely assumes also that I live in a culture of freedom, either in the West or in a place imbued with Western ideals of freedom and democracy. Choosing the right road  assumes I was raised to choose and cherish liberty and justice. It assumes I have been taught self-control and responsibility, the pillars of freedom. It assumes I have been taught the history of Western culture, from Abraham to Greece to Europe to America and the West’s many flowerings worldwide.

I was fortunate to receive my public school education in the fifties and early sixties, just in time. I don’t recall feeling unsafe. There were no bullies or knives or guns. Teachers were allowed to discipline, for self-esteem was achieved through hard work. America-bashing was not yet fashionable, but would be soon. The flag flew high and proud. It was neither worn as clothing, nor burned in hatred. I was taught symbols matter, language matters, and all lives matter, not just some. Our political leaders spoke of America as precious and exceptional, necessary to world peace. I was also blessed with growing up in the beating heart of the Church, so that where I came from and where I was going was clear and comforting and inspiring, all three. I strayed for a time, but, to paraphrase Waugh and Chesterton, God pulled me back with a “twitch upon the thread” and help from C. S. Lewis. The twitch would have been more difficult without the thread already in place. It appeared God had pulled Lewis back in a similar way.

And so as I witness the foundations of Western culture crumble, that is, the education of the next generation through social ideals as well as classroom texts, I take some comfort in my little novel of ideals and text, The Fire Trail. I pray that I make the right choices in the next few months with regard to the novel’s sculpting and firing, so that the pages glow like amber embers. My attempt may be too little too late, but I’m glad, as I traveled my my own trail, that I chose to write these words, to breathe life into Jessica and Zachary, Anna and Nate, so that they could turn their own pages, make their own choices as they journey on the trail through my woods of words, my forest of phrases.

4 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Running the Race

Posted on February 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

Ash WednesdayToday is Septuagesima Sunday. I have read many confusing explanations for the term Septuagesima Sunday. The simplest one I have found comes from the classic work, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Eds. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1957, 1997):

“Septuagesima (Latin for ‘the seventieth [day before Easter]”). The third Sunday before Lent and hence the ninth before Easter. The name, which first occurs in the Gelasian Sacramentary [mid-8th century], seems not very appropriate, as the Sunday indicated is in fact only 64, and not 70, days before Easter; but perhaps it was coined by reckoning back the series ‘septuagesima’, ‘sexagesima’, ‘quinquagesima’, from Quinquagesima Sunday, which is exactly 50 days from Easter.”

Simple? One way or another, I find the three weeks preceding the beginning of Lent a fascinating tradition. I’m grateful that a few Anglicans still observe this little season, at least those that follow the traditional 1928 Book of Common Prayer, dating to 1662, which in turn translates missals dating to the eleventh-century Sarum (Salisbury) rite and even earlier monastic hours.

Often called Pre-Lent, these three weeks bridge Epiphanytide and Lent. They help us focus on what is coming, to consider how we might observe Lent in this year of 2015. And of course Lent prepares us for Easter. So we enter the deep heart of Christianity in these weeks. We travel from Christmas to Easter, from birth to death to resurrection, mirroring our own journeys of birth to death to resurrection.

I have been focusing intensely this last week on finishing up my early draft of The Fire Trail. And I did indeed finish it. I printed it and boxed it and put it in the mail to a local editor who will help me improve the story from many perspectives, using many writers’ tools. We will sculpt the manuscript, adding and deleting, journeying to final submission to my publisher. I have been running a race to the finish, ignoring phone calls and putting off the dentist (that one was easy).

The Epistle assigned to Septuagesima is St. Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. Paul says to run a race to receive the price by striving for mastery of the body. Every athlete knows this prescription to be true, that the mind must train and direct the body to do its will, must educate the “muscle memory.” The Super Bowl athletes running down the field at this moment know this to be true. Concentration and subjection of the flesh lead to winning the crown.

Corinth was known for the Olympic games; Paul uses an apt metaphor. But he is speaking of Heaven of course, not so much a competition as a preparation for seeing God face-to-face. Will we be ready at the end of the course assigned to each of us? 

C. S. Lewis writes of the divide between Heaven and Hell in his brilliant fantasy-parable, The Great Divorce. He describes Heaven as being painfully real to the wraiths visiting from Hell on their tour bus. They have little substance to them. The blades of grass in Heaven cut into their ghostly feet. Most want to return to Hell. They do not choose to stay in Heaven.

At the end of our earthly race, we want to be so real that we can see in Heaven’s light, walk on the so-real grass, join in the joyous songs of praise. But how do we run this race? Septuagesima helps us, by calling us to train our minds to discipline our bodies, to order our wills. In such discipline lies freedom to do more, love more, to live the life that God intends each one of us to live.

I’m a little winded from my own race this week. But then The Fire Trail is about such discipline, about what defines our humanity as opposed to our bestiality, about the jungle versus the civilized, about the wild versus the tame. It is about the place for custom and tradition in a free society, and the vital role that history plays in the conscience of a nation. It is about the sexual revolution and its destruction of marriage and family. It is, in the end, about what makes a civilization civil, and how we choose to live with one another, charitably and safely, freely and respectfully.

The course to Easter is set before us. We begin to consider considering our own hearts and minds and bodies. What to add, what to take away. What to permit, what to deny. In this way one day we will become strong enough to walk on real grass in blinding light with glorious song. In this way we will learn how to love.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saints and Heroes

Posted on April 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

With the canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII this Sunday morning, many have written about sanctity and what it means not only to the Church but to the world, both secular and sacred.

As Peggy Noonan wrote in her Saturday “Declarations” (Wall Street Journal, April 26-27, 2014):

Saints are not perfect, they’re human. A saint is recognized for heroic virtue in the service of Christ, but saints have flaws, failings and eccentricities. It is because they are not perfect that they are inspiring (italics mine). They remind you what you could become.

So these two priests, elevated to the papacy, had their failings like all of us. But they impacted our world in powerful ways, good ways, ways that made the world safer, better. Pope John presided over Vatican II, saying he “wanted to throw open the windows of the Church,” and soon reform followed, freshening spirits and opening hearts. Pope John Paul presided over the fall of communism embodied in the Soviet regime responsible for the slaughter of over twenty million people of faith and freedom.

Daniel Henninger, also in the Wall Street Journal, observed that institutions are the pillars of society, holding the parts together. These institutions, I would add, such as the Catholic Church, are able to raise up and nurture heroes, men and women who become the face of social goodness, cultural cohesion. We ordinary folks need tangible images, icons, to understand our world and our place in it, who we are, who we are meant to be. The Church gives us those images in her saints. We learn through the saints how to practice our faith, how to be truly human.

Other institutions – governments and schools – once gave us heroes to emulate; not so much today with the decline of the study of history, the decline in the ideal of charity, the decline in giving of oneself for another. Despair works to replace hope, nihilism tries to destroy faith, selfishness seeks to banish selflessness. Anarchy threatens the rule of law as every man looks out for number one and the resulting disorder trumps order. When we lose the stories of goodness, these good icons, these holy heroes, these great men and women of the past, we become smaller for it, we slowly lose ourselves. As W. B. Yeats wrote after the horrors of World War I, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What would this great poet write today?

This is not to say that there are not islands of faith and practice, of law and order, communities of belief where heroes sacrifice for others.  It is good when our world recognizes these lives of love, and even better when we do not forget these saints as we travel in our own journeys through time.

And so history holds civilization in its palm, protecting it by telling its stories again and again to its children, stories about who we are and who we are meant to be. It is difficult but hopefully not impossible to put things back together in a world disdainful of Judeo-Christian belief, faith, and freedom. It is difficult but hopefully not impossible to create a public square where the pillars of civilization may once again hold things together, may once again rise from strong historical foundations to build a house not of sand but of stone, build a strong future together as a free and good society.

So I am so very thankful for the sanctity of these two popes. I am thankful for their heroic contributions to our time and culture. I am thankful that millions streamed into St. Peter’s Square this morning to witness this event, to this island of sanity in Rome, in Italy, in Europe, in the world. I am thankful that the center is still  holding.

To see some ring-side photos of the canonization, visit the Facebook page of my friend in Rome, Sister Emanuela of the Missionaries of Divine Revelation: https://www.facebook.com/missionariesdivine.revelation?fref=photo

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Bobcat in My Yard

Posted on March 24, 2014 | Leave a comment

The Fire Trail, my novel-in-progress, is about the borders between civilization and the wilderness, so it has been with some interest that I witnessed a bobcat appear in our backyard three times in the last two weeks. He shows up around four to five o’clock in the afternoon, slipping silently up the hill below our house, through the rosemary and lavender, where he pauses on the edge of the patio and stares at me.

He is small, not much larger than a big cat, and I hoped that he was a cub and could not fit through our iron fence once he was older. But after Googling (hooray for the Internet), I have learned his full size is about twice the size of a cat, which means the fence will not bar him, will not protect us. We have not fenced out the wilderness.

I love animals and especially cats, so I was intrigued with the catlike face as our eyes locked. He had substantial whiskers, powerful hind legs. He loped confidently across our patio into the bushes on the opposite side, a graceful animal. But we have domestic cats, Lady Jane and Laddie, and we fear this wildcat would make short work of either of them. I saw the bobcat’s photo online, spotted in Mt. Diablo State Park nearby last week. The comments were all about how cute he was. Cute?

He is wild and he is hunting in my backyard. The wilderness has encroached upon the small space of safety we call home. The bobcat, I reflected, is a timely reminder of our helplessness in the face of nature. I recalled reading that Canadian wolves re-introduced to the northwest have multiplied beyond desire and safety. We cannot control the natural world.

In The Fire Trail, set in Berkeley, a trail runs east of the university between the town and the high dry grass and the flammable eucalyptus. Fire trails, like fences, are designed to keep the wild of the wilderness away from our domesticated and safe communities. They create a break between death and life. Fire, like the bobcat, has uses. Bobcats are excellent pest controls. Fire is useful too: it warms us, lights our way, cooks our food, runs our industries. Yet it burns, maims, devours, kills when not held in check.

And so it is a short way from the border between wilderness and civilization and the border between freedom and responsibility. How does a culture set its boundaries of behavior? How does an individual limit his own actions, impulses, desires? What are the limits, if any, in a democracy that cherishes the individual over the community, the minority over the majority, and oddly enough, those who cross the boundaries of accepted mores and suffer for doing so. These last – those who see freedom as the right to self-fulfillment at any cost – are lauded in our culture, as though our commonly held assumptions mean nothing. How do we protect free speech and the practice of religion in an orderly and civil manner?

Civil society has long looked to history to draw its boundaries, to tame the wild, to define its very self. It has long looked to its institutions – churches, temples, schools, community organizations – to tame the beast in each of us. Within the church, structured rituals tame our raging hearts, our untamed desires, our envy, anger, greed, gluttony, pride. We follow the Church Year faithfully, Christmas incarnation through Easter resurrection and see that we are fallen creatures who need help to rise from the earth, to stand. We cannot pull ourselves up on our own.

The bobcat paused and stared at me. I do not think he reflected, considered, that he was trespassing. He was hungry and thirsty. He hunted to survive. He was deadly.

It is Lent. It is a time to consider, like St. Therese of Lisieux, the “little flower,” our littleness, our helpless selfishness, our incivility, without God. In the still small moments of quiet that appear without warning during the day, in the sudden wakefulness that touches us in the dark of night, we pray, Our Father who art in heaven… We embrace little denials, here and there, unseen and unknown, and we pray, You are all I need… We learn to discipline our hearts so that we can truly love.

This week we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, that remarkable and glorious moment when the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary that God had chosen her to bear his son. Mary sings a song of praise, My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour… God used her littleness to enter our world. He can use yours and he can use mine.

Our world is slip-sliding, it seems, backwards, away from the way forwards as the jungle encroaches upon us like a roaring lion. But like Mary we can say, Be it unto me according to thy will. Through sacrament and worship, through little gestures of listening and love, through our own self-denials, God magnifies us and strengthens us. We fall again and again. He reaches for us and pulls us up so that we can stand. He shows us the way.

And the bobcats will return to the wilderness as we rebuild civilization.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

True Love

Posted on February 16, 2014 | 1 comment

It rained this last week, alleviating only slightly the California drought. More rain is promised for later this week, more watering our dryness, the ground drinking thirstily and thankfully.

But the sun broke through today, Sunday, bluing the sky and glistening the land, and a hesitant, wondering, breeze nudges the silvery leaves of the olive tree outside my window as I write. The oaks are greening too and the grassy hills are waking up to new life hesitantly here and there. The cherry trees in our neighborhood blossomed their Valentine’s gift of big pink bouquets, giving us far greater hope than any February groundhog. 

The incredible beauty and the horrible devastation of nature continues to astound  me. Blizzards kill in the East as sun shines in the West. Yet the four seasons repeat regularly, we count on them, and we assume spring will one day replace winter. Just so we yearn that the darkness in our hearts will be enlightened, that hate will turn to love, that judgment will be banished with forgiveness. We yearn for peace, yet we cannot pacify ourselves.

We look to spring and we hope for love, and perhaps this is why we embrace Saint Valentine’s festival in mid-February, a season of reaching for the greater light of Easter, the longer daylight of April. It is thought that Valentine did truly exist, that he suffered martyrdom for his witness to the love of God. But the many legends of the many Valentines woven into present day are not as verifiable. The medieval court of love loved St. Valentine, defining this love as the romantic sort, and it is this Valentine that we recall with hearts and flowers and romantic dinners. 

The secular has adopted the sacred, for all people recognize truth, the core and kernel of truth, of who we are. We desire to love; we desire to be loved. Courtly love, with its rituals of honoring and respecting the woman for her womanhood, for her ability to carry and birth life, for her female beauty as dazzlingly different from rough masculinity, tried to tame the bestial nature of mating. Courtly love grew and flourished through the years, fed by Shakespeare and sonnets and the Romantic poets. It has faded in our time and our world, but still we yearn to celebrate the love between a man and a woman, to celebrate something more than the power of lust, to remember true love on St. Valentine’s Day.

It is fitting that such a day in February points to spring, to hope, to love. Such a day reminds us to honor one another, regardless of race, gender, creed, handicap, temperament, age, whether in the womb or near death. Such a day points to Easter, for resurrection day is the ultimate holiday of love, when God the Son, the crucified one, gives us the grace, indeed the ability, to love one another.

This last week I wrote another scene in my novel-in-progress, a story about the coarsening of love in our culture, the jungle encroaching upon the civilized world. Mankind has striven for centuries to civilize the jungle, to tame his own animal within as well as the wilderness without, but we seem to be undoing all that has been done. The working title is The Fire Trail, that boundary between the civil and the uncivil, between safety and danger. It is a love story searching for a way to love in a world of un-love. My recently released novel, The Magdalene Mystery, sought the truth that Mary Magdalene saw in the garden that first Easter morning two thousand years ago. The Fire Trail considers what that vision means to us today.

Today is Septuagesima Sunday, three weeks before the beginning of Lent, the forty days in which we prepare for Easter, April 20, 2014. Today we look into our hearts to root out all un-love. We pray, “Lord, show me every sin, every particle of un-love, that darkens my heart. Show me each time I dishonored or disrespected others, when I coveted, lied, stole, killed, in thought, in word, and in deed. Lighten my dark places, so that I may see, repent, and learn to love.”

Like the breeze nudging the leaves outside my window, my heart is nudged too. With Lent and its lengthening of days, I shall grow towards the light, toward the sun. The dry places shall be watered and my heart shall blossom.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Shadowy Borderlands

Posted on January 19, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m setting my next novel in Berkeley, California. Folks ask me, “What is it about?” and I am challenged to give a coherent, short answer. “It’s a story about a girl who witnesses a murder…” I begin. But then, of course, it is so much more, and where do I truly begin, I wonder.

In some ways the theme is about borderlands, the edges of civilization. I believe our own culture is slowly returning to a wilderness state, with the borders of law, manners, social behavior redrawn each day, shrinking. We have been living in a darkening age for some time, a twilight time, but the night seems to be falling swiftly.

Berkeley is a perfect setting for a discussion about borders, for it sits between parkland wilderness and bay waters. Fire trails protect the townspeople from the dry hills above and hopefully break a wildfire’s path. The hills have known devastating blazes that devoured communities, so fire is no small threat. But other threats lurk as well, with a rise in crime in the civilized cities that form a necklace around the San Francisco Bay. Berkeley shelters its share of crime with lenient laws that encourage drug use, theft, and other violent means of self-expression.

Berkeley is also set in a landscape of intellect and passion, of mind and matter. Here the University of California, one of the greatest schools in the world, has birthed major scientific discoveries. The arts thrive as well, those expressions of our thoughts and beliefs and deepest desires. And yet traditional core curriculum is crumbling, no longer requiring a study of the past to understand the present. Gender and racial studies replace history, as though a narcissistic self-examination of skin and sexuality will throw light on civilization and what it means to create and foster civil society.

Berkeley’s early beginnings were Ohlone Indian, then Spanish, then Irish Catholic, having been settled by an Irish farmer (James McGee) who gave land to the Catholic Presentation Sisters for a convent and school. The city was named  in 1866 after an Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685-1753) because of a line in the following poem:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

from Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America

The first line became shortened later to the cry “Westward ho!”  The line also became the title and subject of a mural by Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutz (1861), which can be found in the House of Representatives behind the western staircase. The phrase and painting represent the idea of manifest destiny.

The “course of empire,” of course, was thought to be at one with the advancement of civilization. The British Empire was and is a civilization built upon classical and Christian traditions, laws and values. As these authorities lose their power and persuasion, civilization loses as well, and cracks and fissures give way to a crumbling.

This week is the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, when “time’s noblest offspring” – America – legalized the killing of unborn children. Since that day, 41 years ago, 56,662,169 unborn babies have been killed by abortion. And we continue the killing, with 1,382 lives – daughters and sons, nieces and nephews – lost yearly. January 22, 1973 was a watershed moment in our history, a time when we turned in upon our own people, to feed upon our own humanity.

It has been said that when we do not respect human life – the unborn or the aged, the infirm or the ugly or the handicapped – we encourage a culture of crime. We look out for ourselves, not others. We take what we can when we can as long as we can. Moral parameters become defined by legal boundaries; individual conscience does not matter. Soon it does not exist.

January 22 hits me by surprise each year, like a slap in the face, and I join in the crying of those who march upon the capitols of our land. I cry with them to return civilization to our once great and generous and loving country. I suppose the surprise comes to me each year because this memorial anniversary arrives so soon after the birth of the Christ Child in the humble manger, the child that would love us no matter our abilities, looks, health, age, no matter if we breathed outside the womb or not.

So we are as a nation in a shadowy borderland, a shadowland, between civilization and the jungle. A fire trail runs around our cities, but can’t always protect us from the blaze, the inferno of self. When such a trail becomes God’s fire of purgation, a cleansing of these sins through repentance and forgiveness, only then can we love as we are meant to love – love even the unborn, even our neighbors, even, even, even…

May God have mercy on our people, and may all victims of violence be comforted and redeemed by his great love.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,