Look who's praying for you now

The everlasting engine of life is rich in names — God, Father, Father/Mother, Love, Spirit,  terms of instinct in a vocabulary almost extinct. Such are passwords, easily remembered, lifting lids and opening books, raising curtains and unlocking gates. Try Jesus, try Mary, try holy men and women from any continent or contingent, and hear the rewarding click as the doors open, and we’re in heaven. It looks familiar. It is where we were and where we are.

God is a parent who does not do our homework or rig games for us. When I was a little kid I used to visit my pal Harold Lind at his house, and sometimes his dad would haul me into a game of checkers while Harold completed his chores. Chores he set for himself ranged from writing in his diary to reading a short story published in our daily newspaper. His dad beat me time after time. He never let me win. He didn’t think his own kids or a visiting kid could learn how to live if somebody cheated on their behalf.

So, I think, with God, whose answer to a prayer may be, “I love you too much to do your exercises for you while you just watch, wither and weaken.” God’s ratings do not always measure up to expectations, and that is an odd blessing for agnosticism.

One of the first books I owned was called the Bible Story Book, and it was on my bedside table when I was six years old. I was supposed to read one story each night before turning in. I was also supposed to fill in the blanks on a Lifebuoy Soap calendar to affirm fulfillment of hygiene. I was more faithful to Lifebuoy than to the Bible Story Book, but I read some of the stories. This was before television, and there was no radio in my bedroom, and there were some stirring pictures in the book. There were David and his slingshot, Goliath and his grimace, the Egyptians being drowned, a lion’s den and a fiery furnace. What happened to Jesus was uglier than anything in a Saturday matinee serial.

The Christmas story is one that everyone knows and loves, a story that affirms the presence of God in a savage and brutal world in need of mercy, forgiveness and love. How many of us look to God for mercy, forgiveness and love? But, it is God who looks to us to practice mercy, forgiveness and love. God’s prayer is that we will confess, convert and consecrate our minds and bodies.

That’s one of the inexhaustible messages of Christmas, one that like most of the others enlivens the dream of Merry Christmases.

          

So long, New Republic

I can’t remember the last time I cancelled a magazine subscription. Readers sometimes cancel because they’re angry. I cancelled a lifetime connection today when I asked The New Republic to erase my mailing label and send me a refund. I was paid up until July 2016.

You’ve probably read about management decisions which led the editor and staff to resign. It was one of my comfort magazines for 60 or 70 years, predating the comfort food industry by a generation. Atlantic and Harper’s are still in my mailbox regularly. The New Yorker remains one of my favorites, but magazines do change with the times. When I was 10 or 11 years old The Reader’s Digest was sold in my school. the price was 15 cents and there were no ads. A few years after that the Wallaces, husband and wife founders of the Digest, invited me to lunch at their Pleasantville, N.Y., offices.  I went to work for them, but moved on before later managers added advertising and a more impersonal corporate atmosphere.

My favorite New Republic column was ascribed to a journalist with initials, T.R.B., but no name.  During my Hawaii years the writer was Richard Strout, and I felt like a lottery winner when one day he was in town and called on me for help . I wrote a Sunday column of foreign news and comment. Stout had never heard of me, but he spotted my byline and I happily provided whatever he needed. He was happy, too, and invited me to call on him next time I’d be in Washington. We were both members of the National Press Club, so it would be simple to meet.

Soon after that I became director and editor-in-chief of the National Catholic News Service, now known as CNS, just a short walk from the National Press Club. I got in touch with my pal, but when he heard about my new job he backed off. Journalists are not immune to religious concerns, and it seemed to me that Catholics were not his favorite journalists. But he had the convictions and assurance of a towering journalist whose opinions were highly valued, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who graduated from Harvard six years before I was born. He wrote for The Christian Science Monitor for 60 years, and for The New Republic for about 40 of those years. At age 92 he died at Georgetown University Medical Center.

He was one of my favorites, and not just because he was an FDR enthusiast. At least he was spared the apparent vaporization of much of the spirit he knew at The New Republic.

Manhood cut short

A man at 18...

Is there really anything more to say about the horror of Michael Brown’s untimely, unnecessary death?

Journalists of all ages write zillions of words datelined Ferguson, Missouri, and the handiest of those words appear to be “black teenager.” Hundreds of news accounts include those words in the opening paragraph, as though journalists don’t know what to make of an 18-year-old.

Journalists often describe a rape victim who is 19 as a girl, but they’ll call an 18-year-old Army private a young woman. A boy of 19 may fall into a lake, while a man of 18 rescues him. Nobody knows, or wants to say, why this is. When I was 17 I was a copy boy, but a year later I was the man who covered the police beat.

William “Willie” Johnson won the Medal of Honor in the Civil War when he was just a kid, and David killed Goliath when he was in his teens. A Marine named Jacklyn H. Lucas fought so hard on Iwo Jima that he was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was 17 at the time

.

Babe Ruth was 19 when he started with the Boston Red Sox. Bill Gates was 19 when he co-founded Microsoft.

At 18 an American is an adult and can vote. At 17 a teenager can serve in the armed forces. So why are so many journalists stuck on describing Michael Brown as a teenager in virtually every story they write about his tragic death? Reporters know three things about Michael Brown. These can be written and rewritten without even googling the victim. But Michael Brown’s birthdays are not his identity, and do not alter the injustices of his life and death.

Peace could use a birthday

Sally once asked me how I managed to remember our wedding anniversary. I told her it was easy. It was five days before the Marine Corps birthday. She smiled, I think. Our wedding was almost 60 years ago, but the Marine Corps celebrates 239 years on November 10, 2014.

The Marines once transported my rigid body over Hawaii’s Big Island. The pilot and I shared a helicopter so we could watch napalm explosions below. My blood turned to snow like the frozen cap on Mauna Kea, just to our left. (Measured from its foundation at the bottom of the Pacific, Mauna Kea is the world’s tallest mountain.) In my headphones I heard the pilot soothing me with words about how many other wimps were also paralyzed when they looked down. That’s when they discovered there was no floor under them to obscure the heights and depths below. I think we had a nifty landing. I could tell you more about it if I’d kept my eyes open. I’d been zapped-aphobia by acrophobia.

I never saw written evidence of this, but the publisher of the Big Island daily newspaper told me that in the early days of World War II a Marine officer was so angry about something in the Hilo Tribune-Herald that he ordered it closed. By the time I became editor of the paper in the late 1950s the story was thought to suggest bad taste, a social blip, on the part of that anonymous Marine, and it wasn’t in the spirit of aloha to talk about it. The closing was brief, anyway, according to the legend.

I was newspapering in Honolulu during much of the Vietnam war, and there I met Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, an early advocate of using helicopters for attacks. He became commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. He thought he might be named commandant of the Marine Corps, but Lyndon Johnson had someone else in mind. It was said that Johnson smoldered over Vietnam issues raised by Krulak. Krulak retired in 1968 and became an executive of Copley Newspapers in San Diego. Eventually his son, Charles C. Krulak, became the USMC’s 31st commandant.

Today’s commandant is Gen. J. F. Dunford, Jr.

Not everyone understands the Marine Corps’ enormous contribution to world peace and American stability. A world without any need for police departments or military forces has been elusive from the beginning of history. This country celebrates Veterans Day every November 11, saluting all who wear the uniforms of distinction, Americans who have the strength to stand against Nazis of one generation and terrorists of another.

My son John, a man of many talents and a dedication to justice and peace, served aboard a Navy aircraft carrier. I met my brother-in-law, Frank Petrine, when he returned from the Korean War. Too many of my boyhood friends lost their lives in World War II, and most of the veterans I knew from those days have moved on. As a kid standing near the corner of Main and Third in Jamestown, I waved to Civil War vets in what was then called the Armistice Day parade. I’ve lost count of the wars since then. A newspaper friend once told me he had spent his entire working life covering wars. Even so, civilization is still possible.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Too bad there aren’t enough of them in civilian clothes.

         

What happened to Chicago's Catholic Church?

My genius friend Ed Upton is now retired, and living in a condo that’s an architectural dupe of the one I occupied for a dozen years. He was the founding pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Orland Park, leading it step by prayerful step from a storefront to memorable buildings and grounds that serve more than 3,000 families.

 One of Father Upton’s talents is churchmanship, and part of his genius is the kind of leadership you read about in the New Testament.

He’s one of six priests who met as boys attending Quigley Prep Seminary, ordained in the Class of 1969 and friends today. The different lives of those men are brought together in a book that tells about massive change in the Catholic Church and how it happened.

“Catholic Watershed: The Chicago Ordination Class of 1969 and How They Helped Change the Church” is an engrossing 394-page book by Michael P. Cahill, a history PhD from the University of Chicago who has taught at Mundelein seminary and chaired Chicago’s Archdiocesan Pastoral Council. There’s a foreword by Martin Marty. The publisher is ACTA, www.actapublications.com.

The six priests who propel this eyewitness account of a large archdiocese shaken by the Second Vatican Council are Fathers Mike Ahlstrom, Larry Duris, Bob Heidenreich, Tom Libera, Ed Upton and Bill Zavaski. The Council was more revolutionary than it may seem 50 years afterward, and less revolutionary than some reformers hoped.

In some respects it is still an experiment in progress, resisted by some elderly Catholics caught in ecclesial quicksand of the past, and by some young Catholics whose unease with the present glues them to a past that didn’t happen.
These six men were ordained by Cardinal John Cody. He was secretive about his health, and about most things. He didn’t always tell the truth. He asked me to accompany him to Mundelein when he retired, to help him write his autobiography. I spent hundreds of hours talking with him at his Chicago residence, but the book was never written. Cody died in office, less liked than when he was appointed to Chicago. The thoughts about Cody in this book are accurate and interesting and probably would not have been included in Cody’s own book.

There was a different spirit when Cody’s successor, newly-appointed Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, began his homily at a Mass attended by hundreds of priests : “I am Joseph, your brother.”

“He clearly distanced himself from Cody, Ed Upton said. Cahill observed that “the contrast in tone and style to Cody could not have been more striking.” I was there, and remember the springtime atmosphere on that August evening.

I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser when Bernardin asked me to become director and the first editor-in-chief of the National Catholic News Service, now known as CNS. We remained friends, and I visited him several times while he was Archbishop of Cincinnati. He slipped into my Chicago condo for dinner as anonymously as we could arrange, while Cody was still the archbishop and not a Bernardin  fan.

At the suggestion of Dan Herr, I wrote a book for Thomas More publishers. My first title was “The Mind of Cardinal Bernardin,” but it went to press (three times) as “The Spirit of  Cardinal Bernardin.”

Tom Libera spoke of Bernardin’s final years, his battle with pancreatic cancer and his death in 1996: “Bernardin wound up being a man of deep faith who met death in a way that became an incredible pastoral ministry…a priest who says by his life, ‘Things aren’t set in stone. You can change.’”

His successor, a Chicago native soon to be given a red hat, was the man we know as Cardinal  Francis George. He is on the edge of retirement. His highly regarded successor, Archbishop Blasé Cupich, is in town.

Bernardin was a tough act to follow, Cahill observes, and “many priests’ initial impressions of George were not positive. George arrived in Chicago, however, under different circumstances than did his predecessor. The profound grief Chicagoans felt at the loss of Bernardin muted George’s early days. ‘It wasn’t like after Cody,’ Upton explains, “where people were happy to get a new archbishop—people were sad.’”

Cahill explains that “a presbyterate whose pride in the Chicago priesthood Bernardin had largely restored, their new archbishop’s complaints about perceived errors and abuses, mostly liturgical in nature, stung.”

While the six young men were students at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary at Mundelein, President Kennedy was assassinated, and there was non-stop coverage by newspapers, television and radio. Schools were closed. But not at Mundelein.

“It was,” Bill Zavaski says in the book, “the most historic thing that happened in this country in my life and we were not told. We weren’t allowed to watch TV. It was crazy.”

“No radio, no nothing,” said Ed Upton.

Michael Cahill spent hours interviewing each of the priests and quotes them extensively. Priests really are human. Most of them, especially these six, are exceptional humans. The anecdotes recalled by six priests with six personalities are gems, and the entire book is a treat.

Suffer fools gladly: St. Paul and Bl. Paul

My wife and I were admiring  Michelangelo’s celebration of pity and compassion, his marble sculpture of the most favored of moms caressing her dead son, just inside the doors of St. Peter’s. In an instant we were ducking back from a swaying sedia  gestatoria, man-powered predecessor of the horsepower Popemobile. Pope Paul VI was aboard this Vatican sedan chair.  It was close, but Sally and I were spared the embarrassment of being sideswiped by a chair.

Many journalists did not like Paul VI. I did like him, even though I did not like Humanae Vitae, his controversial  encyclical on human sexuality. I had served on what Lawrence Cardinal Shehan called the Abortion Committee. Other members included highly regarded experts in theology and medicine.  Our job was to explore the issues with Cardinal Shehan, who was a member of the committee appointed by the Pope to advise him before the encyclical was written.

I learned later that Cardinal Shehan had voted against the position taken by Paul VI, as had a majority of the committee. The encyclical stopped the church pendulum on its way up.

Cardinals are still stressed by human life concerns, as they revealed during  the October synod in Rome. They disagreed on matters of marriage and divorce, which none of them has experienced, and matters affecting gay life for Catholics, which if experienced would be in academic terms of celibacy, chastity and abstention.

The struggle for wisdom is constant. The cardinals and the pope certainly prayed daily for understanding, for knowing how to apply God’s mercy and justice. This was time for the beatification of Pope Paul VI, the saintly pontiff who years before had denied Italian newspaper reports that his personal views of homosexuality were inconsistent with church teaching. Popes, like presidents, are respected by many and despised by haters. “All  the world is full of suffering,” said Helen Keller. “It is also full of overcoming.”

I am eligible to place a Disabled marker on my car. The catch is that the disability that entitles me to the parking  spaces prevents me, along with my high regard for pedestrians, from driving a car. This devaluation of my driver’s license occurred in the fourth year of a progressive disease coveted only by spelling bee hosts.

“The whole Christian life,” said the progressive Thomas Merton, “is a life in which the further a person progresses, the more he has to depend directly on God. The more we progress, the less we are self-sufficient. The more we progress, the poorer we get so that the man who has progressed most, is totally poor—he has to depend directly on God. He’s got nothing left in himself.”

The same amazing Thomas Merton also said, “The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.”

Suffering is one of the favorite topics in the Bible and on television shows of all sorts, hospital shows, shooting and siren shows, painful pratfall shows, sports bone-crunching shows and of course the news shows, where facts can be smashed and enriched with sound effects.

Pope John Paul II wrote about it in an apostolic letter, Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering).  He said, “We could say that suffering…is present in order to unleash love in the human person…”

It is easy to cause suffering, and many defy Christ by harming others on purpose, by confounding  trespasses instead of forgiving them as Someone suggests in a famous prayer. Suffering is part of every human experience, but causing it in anger or carelessness is to pound a nail into real flesh. My own sledgehammer always misses the nail and nails me in the foot.

Elsewhere in his letter John Paul II wrote, “…in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. To this grace many saints, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and others, owe their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering but above all that he becomes a completely new person.”

I’m a Catholic Christian, even though a fundamentalist pal says there’s no such thing, and I have many Buddhist friends who seek Nirvana. Most of my Buddhist friends are smarter than I am in one important respect. They stayed in Hawaii.

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Second letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, NRSV, Chapter 11: Verse 16 I repeat, let no one think me foolish; but even if you do, accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little. 17* (What I am saying I say not with the Lord's authority but as a fool, in this boastful confidence; 18 since many boast of worldly things, I too will boast.) 19* For you gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves! 20 For you bear it if a man makes slaves of you, or preys upon you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face. 21 To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!

When the locomotive is loco

Yesterday morning I rode the B&K Railway from my hunker bunker up to to the kitchen, and there the vehicle stuck. It just won't move. We await a service call.

There I was, up on the first floor while my laptop, Kindle, headphones, TV, La-Z-Boy chair, books and bathroom were on the floor below. That’s where my daughter and son-in-law created a bedroom and den for me, big enough for hockey. But I’ve lost my pucks.

We have no photos of my daring descent, via derriere loco motion, one step at a time, with daughter Marie one step ahead of me and granddaughter Kristen one step behind. For Kristen, this was a procedure that may not be taught in her P.A. school.

So it is possible to keep one step ahead of multiple system atrophy, MSA, which science so far finds incurable.

Brilliant scientists explore the universe, extend life expectancy, even merge the dreams of George Eastman, Alexander Graham Bell and Ma Bell so that telephones can take snapshots. One of these days men and women of science will discover a master tool for the cure of all the incurables. This will be followed by a decline in the amount of time humanity devotes to prayer.

© A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

  

Religion with an attitude?

Religion is an ongoing investigation of the unfairness of life.

Edward Stasack

Religion looks at heroic humans who rescue strangers from floods and fires. It looks at others who murder, rape, steal and take pleasure in the pains of their victims. It looks at the brilliant and gifted, and at children born troubled. It sees the well-nourished and the starving and tries to understand why God’s standards sometimes seem to be lower than human standards.

Christians celebrate centuries of sermons, liturgies, sacrifices and praise by eliminating poor boxes because they attract thieves, and spending sums of congressional dimensions to pay off victims of abuse in churches, orphanages and schools.

Those who believe that God is Love are certain that God is not Hate, even though love and hate are both evident in the world. Christians famously denounce each other for thinking outside of catechisms and tenets. Christian homes are not always the cheerful centers of cooperation and forgiveness that faith might encourage. Churches have been known to explode in angry confrontations between people, lay and clerical, who despise each other in the name of God. What can be more chilling than that? It was people of religious faith who favored the death penalty for Jesus, crying out for capital punishment on the cross.

Scripture scholars, such as the late Father Raymond E. Brown, the brilliant Sulpician priest, have liberated venerable writings from some of the restraints imposed upon them by well-meaning guardians. They guarded the past, dragging their sandals as the past became the present. Customs changed, cultures developed, languages took on new meanings, but religion’s guardians kept it separate from life and froze it solid, right where it was many cultures ago. Although that attitude is described today as fundamentalist, it has little in common with fundamental, ongoing creation, symbolized as seven days by long-ago scribes, who did not copyright and lock up their scrolls after writing about the first day.

There are folks who think faith is a bad habit, like smoking. They dream of replacing No Smoking signs with No Faith warnings. Sometimes folks disbelieve in the same god, maybe the gimme god of creedal capitalism, or the god who permits waterboarding and decapitation, or the god kept in retirement. I began life in a country that “restricted” some clubs and neighborhoods from Jews and African Americans. Catholic priests risked being tarred and feathered. 

Some states prohibited interracial marriage, even as many still prohibit gay marriage. Only five years before I was born, and one year after my mother and father were married, the U.S. Constitution was amended to say: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States of by any state on account of sex.”

One blessing of advancing age is its gift of interior sight, which is beyond the need for bifocals. I’ve seen members of a majority race battle in legislatures and in courts to assure equal rights for everybody, without reference to ethnicity or gender, or the sexuality given them at birth. These battles are not over. No effort for freedom of conscience is ever over.

God is more than father and mother. The scribes who wrote about Adam and Eve could not imagine them watching TV in an air conditioned home. Scribes are not the only ones who cannot imagine what remains to be learned.

Edited 10/9/14

Don't forget Aunt Addie

My Aunt Addie was born on October 18, 126 years ago in Jamestown, N.Y., where I was born 89 years ago. Aunt Addie Vaughn taught me to tie my shoes, gave me rides in the rumble seat of her car, took me to movies, from time to time led me down the stairs into the basement of Clark’s Drug Store, where books were sold. I could pick out any one of them to take home.

She was Addie Olmstead, named for her grandfather, Addison Olmstead of Gerry, N.Y. Sixteen years after her birth in 1888, her sister Doris was born and Doris became my mother in 1925. Addie loved her husband very much. Artimus (Archie) Vaughn died of an anonymous and mysterious disease in 1955. It might have been Alzheimer’s. For many years Addie and Archie lived on their farm in Sinclairsville, N.Y.

   

In her teens Addie played the piano in McCrory’s five and dime store, where she sold popular sheet music at a time when lots of people had pianos in the parlor, and radios were just catching on. Later she went to work selling women’s apparel at Nelson’s department store. One of her regular customers was a long-time friend and neighbor, Lucille Ball.

Years later she became a master seamstress for a maker of women’s clothing. She had no children, but she had lots of love to share with my kids. Aunt Addie used to worry that they would not remember her. She was cheerful and friendly. She played the piano for her Methodist church longer than she did for McCrory’s.

As she approached her 90th birthday, Aunt Addie was pruning some plants when a neighbor warned that she could drop dead working in the heat. She said, “I can’t think of a better place than here among my flowers.” She’ll appreciate it if you remember her today.

               

A Secretary of Neurology for the president's cabinet?

If this sounds crazy it is because some elements of craziness float around in olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple system atrophy, which begins to appear in some persons not long after their 50th birthdays.  Like many others, I acquired the neurological disease without knowing it. In my mid-50s I had to use a walking stick to keep from tripping and tipping, and I began making a few goofy decisions while holding responsible positions, but doctors failed to identify the disease for many years.

Neurological ailments can move in on anyone, silently at first, and hard to recognize. Even the most responsible officials and leaders can be affected. The very positions they hold may shield them from diagnosis and drape a blanket of privacy over their ailments. Changes in the goals and behavior of a president may be watered down in anybody’s White House. Think of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and the concealment of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s deteriorating health. Remember Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six years after he left the White House. His son Ron said he saw early signs of the devastating disease while his dad was president. He recalled that in an interview with ABC and in his book, My Father at 100: A Memoir.

Psychiatrists at Duke University Medical Center wrote, in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, that 49 percent of presidents from 1776 to 1974 were touched by mental ailments. This was reported by Haley Hoffman in Duke’s The Chronicle in 2006. The study of 37 presidents found that 18 suffered mental illness in some form. Depression was the most common ailment.

One problem leads to another, sometimes, and the problem of invisible health issues in government leads to this problem: Questionable claims of mental disease have been used to discredit political figures, even to confine them against their will in mental institutions. Although this was commonly associated with Stalin’s USSR, it is not unknown in the land of waterboarding.  Establishing controls for testing and diagnosis may not be possible. Ask Congress to legislate a system of mental examinations? Supply your own punch line to that.

My prejudices have supported Barack Obama ever since , not long after the 2004 Democratic convention, I wrote an Orlando Sentinel op-ed column beginning like this: “When Barack Obama was a schoolboy in Hawaii, I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, unaware that a major figure of the next century might have been surfing nearby.” That boy, I wrote, had the soul of a Martin Luther King and the heart of an Abraham Lincoln. And by the time I wrote it he had been elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois, serving in Washington alongside Hawaii’s venerable Daniel  K. Inouye. Believe it or not, a half-century ago I wrote an editorial proposing Inouye for vice president. I am not singling out Obama in suggesting that all presidents are susceptible to depression, the flu, to anything that might afflict anyone.

There’s no more demanding job than president of the United States, whose every move is disputed by someone — millions of someones — somewhere. In some respects the demands are inhuman, but the president is human no matter what Fox News says.

Terse verse

    © A. E. P. (Ed) Wall, 17333 Deer Point Drive, Orland Park, IL 60467-7821           aepwall@gmail.com

Two heads abetter of one

I’m living a double life. I was talking with my daughter when I noticed how intently I was trying to pay attention. My duplex head was giving half of its focus to our conversation, while the other half was dealing with MSA, the multiple system atrophy that short circuits my attempts to stand more than briefly, or to walk more than a few yards with my rollator.

While one half of my apparatus is happily punching the computer keys or reading a timely mystery novel, another half is occupied by MSA spinoffs, literally a pain in the neck, some hammering on the inside of my skull (who’s trying to get out?), a punch in the shoulder or the sudden weakening of an arm, like a pricked balloon.

It is as though every 24-hour day comes in a 12-hour capsule. Time is always short. Actions often leave no trace.

Why am I telling you this? Partly because I was born this way, a journalist whose story-telling affliction is as old as the hieroglyphics. Partly because the more people know about MSA, a rare and incurable disease, the more likely is support for research. And partly as my excuse for being slow. My chow hound fame was wiped out, like gravy with a napkin, and I’m now the slowest eater at any table. I’m slow to answer letters and sometimes MSA wipes out my memory of a letter that needs answering or a promise made. This is a disease of falling and then getting up again.

Thanks for being one of the reasons to get back up.

     --Notes in an OPCA/MSA Diary

Losing Robin Williams

Worldwide affection for Robin Williams, his professional success and personal wealth seemed like dreams fulfilled. His apparent suicide before he was old enough for regular Social Security checks was linked to his long-time struggles with depression, along with his misuse of alcohol and other seductive drugs.

The world has changed inside and out during my lifetime, which began when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. When I was in kindergarten my dad was installing sound systems for movie theaters making the switch from silent films. Crippling diseases have been cured, travel has been reinvented with jet planes and interstate highways, television,  computers  and the Internet are here—but there’s  no cure so far for the deadly afflictions of Robin Williams.

Troublesome in a special way is the visibility of those afflictions, painfully evident, and the lottery effect of treatment for them. Many who apply AA principles in struggles with alcohol and narcotics are winners. Many are not. Nobody has figured out why one person gets a winning ticket and another crashes. Prayer is one response to tragic conditions, and the understanding of prayer may increase right along with the understanding of atoms,  cells and heartbeats. The evolution of spirituality may not be as slow as it seems. I was already in my crib in Jamestown, N.Y., when John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in Tennessee.

Life has evolved since then, conspicuously in the material realm of camera phones and air conditioners, less plainly in the spiritual realm of loving, giving and forgiving. People still kill each other, still let people go to sleep without food, suffer illness without care. Changes are coming. Watch for the time when defects and ailments will be identified at birth, and the sneaky diseases will no longer wait for decades before showing themselves as limps, dimmed eyes, cancers, neurological short circuits or painful disfigurements. They will be healed at birth.  And that will be one answer to prayer.

My own OPCA/MSA has been with me for such a long time that we understand each other, even though we are not friends. It has been a dozen years since I was diagnosed, but the disease was present long before that. When I was 63, as Robin Williams was when he died, I was already using a walking stick. But 12-step programs had no influence on the disease I did not know I had.

Politicians and moms and buyers of aspirin tablets think sometimes that all of the world’s problems would end if each person were given a new house, car and bank account. The unhappy premature departure of everybody’s friend, Robin, reminds us that a person’s security is fundamentally spiritual and less fundamentally material. Men and women of wealth and fame are not immune to suicide or crime.

Thanks to my kids and grandkids, and to friends, I enjoy the sweet life and get to remember most of it. Getting old is one thing, embracing personal evolution makes it more interesting. So far, so good.

  

Man Wanted: Ability to walk on water preferred

Chicago newspapers are reminding Catholics that their archbishop, Francis Cardinal George, is a very sick man. He is ready to retire. The search for a new archbishop is on.

The search for a successor to John Cardinal Cody in 1983 was pure theater. With dignified fanfare the church proclaimed that a search had begun, and bishops here and there around the country submitted their resumes. They were  misled. Long before he died, Cardinal Cody told me that Pope John Paul II wanted to make Archbishop Joseph Bernardin a cardinal, and to move him from Cincinnati to Chicago. Cody vigorously resisted a Vatican attempt to appoint Bernardin as Cody’s coadjutor archbishop.

I was working for Cardinal Cody at the time, editing his newspaper, serving on the Archdiocesan Finance Committee and spending several hundred hours interviewing him about the autobiography he wanted me to ghost-write. When Bernardin headed the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. Bernardin hired me as director of the National Catholic News Service, and its first editor-in-chief.

We became close friends. I was the first person he called when his Chicago appointment became official, and I wrote the first book about him, The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin. They say no man is a hero to his valet, but Bernardin remains heroic to me after years as his journalistic valet, even though we split infinites from time to time.

Neither he nor Cody was troubled by the pretense of an open search for the new archbishop of Chicago. Some politics are sacred.

Toward the end of Vatican II Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, the Archbishop of Baltimore, named me editor of The Catholic Review. I had been chairman of the Hawaii Governor’s Committee on Educational Television, and Cardinal Shehan thought he might want to create an educational TV network to serve his archdiocese and the new prep seminary he expected to build. Almost instantly Shehan’s TV plan came apart in the ecclesial earthquake of the mid-1960s, the shifting ground of Catholic certainties as Vatican II wound up. The new seminary was never built.

The certainties go on evaporating. Shehan one morning, upset by the pressures of discontent when Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirmed beliefs many thought were obsolete, said, “Oh to be a bishop in Ireland.” Nobody knew that half a century later the bishops of Ireland would be squirming. The church of Shehan and Cody and Bernardin keeps moving, but nobody know where it is going.

The choice of an enthusiastic Latin American Jesuit of Italian ancestry to be pope somehow stirs expectations of good choices for appointments in Chicago and elsewhere. If you’ve been thinking about prayers for Cardinal George and his successor, this is the time.

Believe it . . . or not

 

 

We humans feel superior to other animal and plant life, although we don’t even know whether life exists on distant planets or in different dimensions or in the unimaginable.

The idea of one god in three persons is a heady product of worship, prayer and scholarship. It recognizes god as the starting place, with attributes of a divine parent, child and community.

Humans have a craving for details, especially about themselves. Consider the millions who check their horoscopes before deciding what movie to see, others looking for excitement in séances, reassurance from palm readers and fortune tellers, sense, nonsense and incense.

Inasmuch as nothing is established in fact about god, seekers generally rely on what someone else has said about god, having no recourse to the kind of fact recorded in laboratories and encyclopedias.

There are believers, wonderers and deniers, also known as the faithful, agnostic and atheist. I lack the spontaneous faith of the atheist. There is no proof that there is no god, but atheists accept that claim as a certainty. Does that seem incredible?

Some people scold religion for causing wars, even though most wars are fought by secular governments. The popular cause with the heaviest firepower is democracy. Secular troops, tanks, triggers and torpedoes went to war but failed to establish democracy in Vietnam or Afghanistan, Iraq or parts of Africa. Nobody builds aircraft carriers or missiles with the proceeds of collection plates and begging bowls.

All religions, even atheism, are true to believers. Jesus, his mother and disciples, Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha are teachers to millions and more than teachers to other millions.

 

Divinity has many descriptions, with physicists and theologians, prophets and pragmatists testing their poetic thesaurus for the meaning of Eternal, Almighty, I Am, Love, Mind, Lord God, Spirit, Creator, Truth.

My work as a journalist gave me interviews with Billy Graham,Roman Catholic cardinals, Zen genius D. T. Suzuki, an Archbishop of Canterbury, a college president who gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon, and conversations with a couple of popes, scholars, rabbis, Episcopal bishops, clergy of many faiths. I respect them all and ponder the generosity of god. There is an abundance of belief.

Justice is in no hurry

 

American justice is about as good as it gets. It is shaped by centuries of crime and punishment. From earliest times lawbreakers have known they would be punished by confinement, stoning, being drawn and quartered or whipped. Yet they went right on breaking laws, generation after generation.

Governors still go to prison, and so do wealthy leaders of commerce and finance.

Candidates for public office sometimes boast that they are not politicians, but practitioners of business. “After all, the chief business of the American people is business,” according to the fellow who was president when I was born. Business supports government with taxes and influences government by giving money to politicians.

But enforcement of high ethical standards in both business and politics is less than total, as any number of convicted figures in both fields can testify. Politicians and business operators may ensnare themselves in fraud, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, forgery, embezzlement, bribery, cybercrime and anything else that has a dollar sign attached.   

It is said that American taxpayers spend more per year to keep a prisoner locked up than they spend on sending a person to college. Not long ago The Atlantic reported that one year at Princeton cost $37,000 and one year in a New Jersey state prison cost $44,000.

Why do some cops and lawyers break laws? Why do the wealthy steal? Why do spouses stab and shoot each other? Why do some clergy defy the laws of church and state? Why do lawbreakers break the same laws, knowing the penalties, century after century?

Why are penalties for scurrilous behavior so uneven? The government shaped by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson has been made a sponsor of torture and assassination. Across the face of the Supreme Court appear the words Equal Justice Under Law, words which are mocked in Guantanamo.

Nobody knows all of the answers. Criminal studies will have to become less traditional and more scientific to find out. The best way to protect victims of crime may be to find out why the perpetrators perp. Do they get satisfaction from outwitting others? Is the attraction similar to gambling, taking a chance, betting on luck? Are there treatable sexual and emotional issues that draw otherwise ordinary people into creepy acts?

In the cities killings day by day add up quickly, sometimes without the flow of headline ink that makes mass murders so indelible. We grieve for the victims and despise the aggressors, the monsters, and we ponder ways to punish them. That’s the system. From the beginning it has neglected adequate study of criminals to find out why they do it, what’s in it for them, how prevention might be shaped.

In a world of cause and effect we search for causes of cancer and establish causes of polio. The search for cures of physical ailments is properly intense, but it is not matched in intensity by a search for causes that might lead to an easing, if not a cure, of criminal misbehavior.

Humans have the means to do this. But so far, not the will.

 

 

 

First the competition, then the trophies

 

 

            Spring break and other happy inventions have lured family and friends out of town, except for my granddaughter Kristen. Her classes move her closer to her goal to become a physician assistant. A tough grad school program prepares students to “conduct physical exams, diagnose and treat illnesses, order and interpret tests, prescribe medications, counsel on preventive health care and…assist in surgery.”

            She was up and out early this morning, but left briskly-brewed coffee to help her grandpa float into the day. It could not have been more mellow in its bright red Liverpool Football Club mug. It is the morning after a 2-1 encounter with Sunderland.

            All of a sudden everybody will be back home. Matt will return to the University of Chicago with three national swim meet trophies. Out in the state of Washington, Jacob and his high school team returned home to Kirkland with first place honors in a mind-boggling robotics competition. The next competition will be for Mike and fellow gymnasts, and not long after that will be his MIT graduation. While all this is going on, Katie prepares to be the fifth Veldman to graduate from Sandburg High School. She’ll follow Dan, now a regional general insurance adjuster, and Kristen into the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

            One reason I believe in God is that I don’t know how else to account for the favors I’ve been granted, especially Sally, my wife of constant memory, our children and their spouses, our grandchildren and my choice kinship with moms, dads, siblings and other in-laws. To believe in God, I might add, is to be hopeful.

            Every once in a while I update you about the progress of the rare disease I first acquired as OPCA, olivopontocerebellar atrophy, a form of parkinsonism. It is now known as MSA, multiple system atrophy, which is easier to spell but otherwise the same thing.

            Less than a month ago I moved out of my condo and into the cheerful home of my daughter and son-in-law, to which they added a sturdy stair riser, a spacious bedroom and bath for the stair riser rider, and plenty of space for my computer and its gadgets. Computers are treasures for folks who seldom leave home. They enable imaginations to go anywhere.

            All the while that I become slower and flimsier, I find that I have more time to be slow and more leisure to be flimsy. Not the best deal, maybe, but a deal. I tell people that I’m dizzy, but that’s because dizzy is the closest word I can think of to describe a complex feeling of being dazed, confused while spinning in a whirligig and occasionally tumbling. Bruises, yes, but nothing broken for the well padded.

            Even headaches  can be taken for granted, but some caution is called for to reduce choking. There are ways to communicate when lips sag into mumbling or the vocal cords freeze up, such as waving arms, rolling eyes or scribbling notes. There are things to do when eyes won’t process printed words for a while, or when a chapter just read vanishes.

            People with incurable diseases are not the only ones who deal with challenges. Everybody does, and everybody has satisfactions . We don’t get to make all the choices.

We don’t always know we’re making them.

 

 

           

           

             

Time to strip

 

 

 

This is the morning I’m supposed to strip my bed. The sheets and pillow cases are to go into the sturdy wooden hamper I made in shop class in 1936. Later today the bed and mattress will be hauled to my new address.

 

I’m not going with it. I’ll spend a few more days here in the condo Sally and I moved into more than a dozen years ago. The bedrooms will have no beds in them, so I’ll get to use the foldaway sofa bed in the family room.

 

The huge change here happened when Sally left for the hospital and didn’t come back. That was in 2002, not long after Tom became our cat.

 

Yesterday there was a different kind of change when two brothers came from the monastery to choose hundreds of books for transfer to their Benedictine library. It took me a while to figure out that the great Mind of all creation, the one Paul refers to in his the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians, provided those addictive shelves for nearly a lifetime of pleasure. Now I’m returning them, and there’s pleasure in knowing they won’t get dusty in their new place.

 

I still have some books on religion, reference books for writers, even some very old Perry Mason hardcovers, but anybody who’s interested in having any of them should get in touch with me very soon. I expect to complete my move into the loving lively home of my daughter and son-in-law within a few days. One of the first things I’ll do is locate fresh sheets for that bed. I can think and change sheets at the same time, so I’ll be thinking how blessed I am by family and friends.

 

               *Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Philippians 2:5.