Is it a lifetime pass, or the pass to a lifetime?

              Jim O’Neill and I were walking past the Trevi fountain on our way to the Rome bureau of the National Catholic News Service, now called the Catholic News Service. It was my first Rome trip there since my appointment as director and editor in chief. Jim, the bureau chief, was telling me about visiting a friend in a Roman hospital.

              So I asked Jim, “Where do you go for treatment when you get sick?”

              “To the TWA ticket counter,” he said with a smile.

              TWA was the airline of choice for many American bishops, and for some folks who worked for the bishops. Like me. I have a life membership card for the TWA Ambassador Club, along with another for Pan American. I thought they would be good for my life, not the airlines’ lives.

              Life is a gift from God, according to preachers and poets. All of us are created equal, according to patriots and philosophers. Life is a gift that keeps on giving, prompting some to ask What gives?

              One day I read an article in Catholic Mind, a magazine published for many years by Jesuits in New York. The author was Bishop John Wright of Worcester, Massachusetts. I wrote him a note about his article, he replied, and eventually I went to work on the Worcester Telegram copy desk. That was a long time ago.

              About the time Sally and I left Worcester for Honolulu, Bishop Wright left to become the Bishop of Pittsburgh. Our friendship flourished. When our first son was born in Hawaii we named him John Wright Wall. It was at the bishop’s home in Pittsburgh, years later, that I met a gifted young priest, Donald Wuerl, newly-chosen secretary to the bishop.

              Wright became a cardinal when he was named prefect of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Clergy, and Wuerl became a cardinal decades later after he was named Archbishop of Washington. It really is a small world.

              Honolulu was the center of the world for lots of transplants like Sally and me, with three children born in Hawaii. I was managing editor of the morning newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser, when a long-time friend asked me to meet secretly with him in Washington’s Watergate hotel. Bishop Joseph Bernardin was general secretary of the  conference of U.S. bishops when he invited me to become head of the news service with two major objectives. The news service budget was blotched in red ink, and losses were mounting as clients cancelled their orders. Objective number one was to regain the lost clients and pull the budget into black ink.

The news service prepared bundles of mimeographed news reports each day for mailing to clients. My job, objective number two, was to find a way to send the daily news report to clients everywhere via leased wire. The service had been negotiating with a domestic news agency that was better than nothing, but it was an answer to prayer when negotiations began with Reuters instead. Our contract gave us hours of transmission to anyplace in the world served by the giant news agency, plus the guarantee that news reports written by our correspondents would be wired to us in Washington within 20 minutes of being presented at any Reuters office. It was a suspenseful time for me, because Bernardin had told me I had to make all of the decisions and be responsible for the consequences.

              I don’t suppose that left you in much suspense, but in case it did, both objectives were met. I kept my job, not aware that an incurable neurological disease was already sampling some of my brain cells. Bernardin departed to become Archbishop of Cincinnati and eventually the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago. And I wrote a book about him.

              That neurological disease was eventually given a name, olivopontocerebellar atrophy or OPCA, later renamed multiple system atrophy (MSA). Somebody told me there can be as many as 100 billion neurons in the brain, and the brain controls thinking, memory, talking, walking. Anyone with MSA may be subject to zoom-speed dizziness, sudden falls, shocking headaches, gagging, distorted vision and so on – and not necessarily be aware of it.

              Awkward behavior is part of the package. I’m glad I have friends who overlook promises I forget to keep, and conversations that skid right through my neurons, sliding out through my pores, never to be remembered. Friends know that MSA and arthritis coexist, gout is part of it, sometimes a shirt is easy to button, sometimes touch typing is still possible. The give and take of friendship, the giving and forgiving, is part of the mystery. Friendship is medicinal, prescribed by the usual folks, like Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Francis of Assisi, the other Francis in Rome.

              A few years ago I gave up my drivers license because I could see highways swaying like hula dancers, and other dizzy distractions of MSA. One of these days MSA will revoke my touch typing license and etch my dizziness into the hard drive. After I stopped driving I had my pick of what to do next, read some lively murder mysteries, listen to music accumulating on my i-pod, buy things from Amazon, watch movies on TV, notice all the stars I never heard of who have become famous since James Cagney, Mae West, Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead, whatever.

              Slowing myself down on my two active  computers is as simple as deleting more commercial emails without reading them, enjoying hours of Jamestown photos and other Internet nostalgia, and savoring endless action via online newspapers, broadcasters, social scans and such. Everything gets older, including the bottled grains of Scotland and jokes via email. People get older and the luckiest of them are nudged, nagged and nurtured by family and friends. Thanks, nudgers. Thanks nurturers. Thanks naggers. Thanks proofreaders.

Why pray?

             So, how come someone with a disease called incurable prays for healing?

              Why am I a life member of the International Order of St. Luke the Physician, a worldwide healing ministry, even though I still have multiple system atrophy a dozen years after my neurologist diagnosed it? Good questions.

              Someday medical specialists will find out what MSA and other rare diseases are, but they are semi-mysteries today, much like prayer and the Eternal.

 

              Physicians and theologians have examined healings of the sick at Lourdes and in other places and circumstances. Sometimes science seems to be in remission along with the sickness, but science keeps at it.

              Prayers for healing have something to do with overcoming MSA, but that’s just part of it. Prayers reach out for healing of cynicism in politics and business, healing of greed and murder, healing of warfare and person-to-person nastiness. Prayers embrace family, friends and others who are not friends.

              The consequences of prayer are often, maybe usually, overlooked. People tend to define healing in terms of perfection. Either the disease is gone or it isn’t. But this is not the way it works. Most gains in reality are incremental, not instantaneous as in magic

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              Paul the apostle writes in his second letter to the Corinthians that his prayers did not succeed in relieving him from a “thorn in the flesh,” but he kept on praying. Who knows what was healed in Paul’s life and in the lives of his friends? Luke the physician, close friend of Paul, may have been one of the beneficiaries even as he prayed for his own health and clarity.

              Some modern Christians hesitate before repeating an ancient affirmation, beginning “I believe in God…” They may pause before they acknowledge the Eternal, necessarily described in the relatively primitive language of many religious texts. There simply were no words to express concepts awaiting discovery. A limited vocabulary, at a time when few persons were able to read and write, was made to serve. The prose of scripture was expressed in poetry, the language of the mystics. It may be condensed into one word. Amen.

Opinions expressed in this essay are my own and do not necessarily reflect opinions of other persons, publications or organizations.

Ouch! Confession of a barefoot writer

            All kind of things were going on. Frank Sinatra made his singing debut, Finland surrendered to the invading Soviets and Benito Mussolini joined his buddy Adolph Hitler in going to war against Britain and France. It was a lively year, 1940, and the U.S. census folks counted more than 131 million Americans. That included nearly 13 million African Americans.

            In 1940 I heard a talk by a middle-aged Georgia teacher who smiled a lot when she talked about growing up in the heart of the old Confederacy. She was born about 30 years after Sherman’s Union Army burned Atlanta, which 1940 moviegoers were watching in blazing Technicolor.  “Gone with the Wind” swept the Academy Awards.

            This lady, who began absorbing racism with her first breath, and didn’t seem to know it, was an up-front volunteer when the needy of any race needed anything. In her talk she described a visit to Tuskegee with a group of white teachers, invited to lunch at the famous black school in Alabama. The white guests were seated, she said, while the black hosts remained standing. “They knew their place,” she said.

            Of course they knew their place, but it took decades for many Americans to recognize that dismal place. Union soldiers by the thousands had given everything they had to destroy slavery; their victory was diluted by racial segregation, a dissimulation invented by the defeated. Many remember the signs marking “white” and “colored” drinking fountains and rest rooms, laws requiring separate seating in buses and, the greatest scandal of all, in churches. Blacks did not often make it into newspaper stories, except an occasional piece by a police reporter. A major newspaper declined to identify any black woman as married; there were no Mrs. John Smiths—just Jane Smith—in stories about black citizens.

            I admit a certain bias. I’m a life member of NAACP. I’m also a life member of the USA. I believe in what they both stand for, but I do not agree with everything either one does. It is easy to be a card-carrying automaton, allowing the outfit to make all the decisions, and lots of people carry those cards. Judgments are swift and impersonal.

I make another admission. I’m writing this while hosting gout in one entire foot. Occasional gout visits are part of the mystery of multiple system atrophy (MSA).  Just because the writer is barefoot he is not Gandhi. Gandhi spun with a wheel. This writer just spins.

            Now consider the case of Rachel Dolezal in Spokane, Washington, a nifty city in one of the most beautiful parts of the country, home to Gonzaga University and a lot more. Maybe you, too, were lucky enough to be there for Expo ’74. Rachel was president of the NAACP chapter. Her long-time claim to be African American was challenged by her parents, then by others who did not know her and had never seen her. Here was an opportunity to extend an arm of comfort to a troubled person, of trying to understand a woman’s need and confusion. But critics scolded her, sent her back to where she came from.

            We Christians do that in our churches. We commonly pray for the Eternal to forgive us in precisely the way we forgive others, a state of mind and heart demonstrated so powerfully by African American Christians following the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. But we do not always respond in the way of Jesus and his Charleston disciples.