Whose storm is it?

          Take a look at the folks coming out of church when the service is over. There may be lots of smiles. There may be frowns. There may be blank faces.

          Not all of those people on their knees were feeling the wonder of God from their posture of worship, surrender and subservience.

          Many embrace religion because they want God’s mercy. Their compulsion is to feel the comfort of God’s love and to pass it on. Their gossip is benign. They keep the promise they make in the Lord’s Prayer to forgive others precisely the way they want God to forgive them.

          You’ll find these people disputing the death penalty as an intrusion into the realm of the giver of life. You’ll find them favoring good schools and good health. They embrace police and military as incorruptible instruments of peace. They see Congress and the courts, city halls and the White House as agencies to make the common good honest and efficient.

          So much for the merciful, called blessed in a famous sermon.

          Some find religion to be a confirmation of their personal value as guardians of truth and behavior. They see little need to beseech God for mercy in their own exemplary lives, but the world clearly needs wardens, instructors, judges, guards, enforcers of ordinances word by word. The log in one’s own eye expands the gaze, better to see the speck of failure in others.

          These folks are at ease with their religion, protecting its purity and their own with shunning and decrees of excommunication. They remember selected words of scripture, such as “the poor you will always have with you.” So, perhaps, it is unbiblical to try to do anything about that.

          There are those who see the deadly storm called Sandy, imposing death and mayhem from the Caribbean to the coast of New England, as a punishment from the Almighty. Other pray that humankind will try harder to understand nature and how to shield it from human assaults above and below Earth’s surface.

          The religion of Jesus is tough to live. It depends upon the Christian Church to provide worship communities, to preserve and authenticate its scriptures and to tell its story. Yet the Jesus of scripture teaches prayers and practices for all circumstances, with particular caution about the behavior of organized groups. After all, his death was legal.

          After all this time, some who worship in churches are reminded of their spiritual frailty, seeking mercy for themselves and everyone else.

          Some others are reminded of their spiritual security, enjoying reassurance for themselves and punishment for those unlike themselves.

          Some of us lack the purity of definition, and share the flaws of both personalities.

         

When newspapers are just out of reach

 

A souvenir dish preserves an image of the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on March 12, 1959, the birthday of the State of Hawaii. 

 

 

 

I love newspapers the way other addicts love different pursuits in sensuality. I am aroused by front page headlines in 144 point type, especially when they shout in red ink, the kind I used to write.

 

Traveling friends have long brought me gifts from faraway places, crinkly copies of the Jerusalem Post or the Moscow Times, Le Monde or The Scotsman or maybe the Times of India, PM, or Washington Star. At age 12 I had my own subscription to the Manchester Guardian Weekly, printed on lightweight paper for transport from Britain.

 

A year or so ago I decided to go cold turkey. After all, I had managed to stop smoking a couple of decades before that, so I cancelled home delivery of four daily newspapers. The papers were reachable online, something unimagined when I was an 18-year-old police reporter. The switch from home delivery to computer screen was like changing from gourmet meals to a feeding tube, doable if not recommendable.

 

Spring arrived this year with temptations. The New York Times offered weekend delivery, Friday through Sunday, at a special rate. The Chicago Tribune had an even better weekend offer, four days including Sunday, all at a low, low cost. There were other offers, like the aroma of whiskey in the nostrils of a 12-stepper taking  step number 1, from the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Southtown. These were offers nobody with black ink in the veins could refuse. I signed up for all four.

 

It was a summer of slow breakfasts and the accumulation of facts useful for a Jeopardy watcher, a summer of newsprint stacks on flat surfaces all over my home. My companion, OPCA/MSA, has let me gather the newspapers early in the morning by opening my garage door, gently steering my rollator while using a gripper mounted on a cane, like a hockey stick with a claw at the end, to pick up each paper and plunk it into the rollator basket.

 

This is no longer working very well and it won’t work at all when Chicagoland’s season becomes more Chicagolike, with snow, ice and maybe a White Christmas. Once more I’m cancelling all the newspaper deliveries, and thanking God for computers, and for the gift of evolution that carried us all from quills to Windows.

 

ArthurOchs Sulberger

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, retired publisher of The New York Times, has died at age 86. The one-time Marine Corps corporal won the hearts of countless journalists when he decided, at risk of possible arrest and fines, to publish the Pentagon Papers.

 

I had the good luck to be invited to his office, along with other members of an American Press Institute seminar at Columbia University, for a give-and-take session on journalism’s future.

 

It was the week of my 40th birthday, making me one year older than Mr. Sulzberger. He told of plans to redesign his famous newspaper, creating new sections and changing from eight narrow columns to six wider columns.

 

Times readers would not accept sudden changes, he said. So his 1965 plan was to take about a dozen years of gradual moves. Sure enough, the change was completed in 1976. Home delivery of his newspaper is one of the happy satisfactions of my retirement. God bless him and the institution he guided for more than three decades.

 

   

When the doctor's news is scary

By Ed Wall

 

The celebration is almost a secret, compared to Halloween and the Fourth of July, and I wouldn’t want you to miss it. October is the time for World MSA Day. Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) is a rare disease, experienced by fewer than 15,000 persons in the whole USA.

Given the fact that there are nearly 700,000 doctors in the USA, you might think the handful of MSA patients have hit the statistical jackpot. Not true, because not even one of those doctors has a cure for it. Not yet.

It is painful enough that the disease is progressive, but so is its name. Specialists and researchers now agree to call it MSA, but when I was diagnosed more than a decade ago my neurologist told me I had olivopontocerebellar atrophy, which he called a form of Parkinsonism. Not your grandpa’s Parkinson’s, but Parkinsonism.

Now it is known as multiple system atrophy. Nobody knows the cause, but it is usually diagnosed in men in their 50s or 60s. My diagnosis came when I was about 75. By then I had been dealing with some of the symptoms for many years, but formal diagnosis is not easy. Most doctors devote a lifetime to medical practice without ever encountering a case.

I had trouble walking straight, and began using a walking stick when I was 55 or so.

Dizziness and a Charlie Chaplin gait nudged me into using a cane, followed by a walker and a rollator, and finally a power chair.

When MSA begins to attack the nervous system, one or several symptoms appear. Victims may find it hard to chew or swallow. They develop strategies to try to avoid falls. They may stop sweating. It can be hard to keep forks and coffee cups steady, hard to talk clearly, especially on the phone. There may be tremors, aches, sleep disruption, disobedient bladders, trouble bending arms and legs and blurred vision. There may be episodes of confusion or depression.

Getting MSA is bad luck, but I’ve had the good luck of an outstanding neurologist and fine primary care doctors, all pulled together by a supportive family, friends and neighbors.

Thus, at age 87 I still enjoy life among my computers and books in a condo shared now with a feline who thinks my shuffling is just a game.

I gave up driving when I realized that if I couldn’t see straight I might not drive straight.  My nearby family includes half a dozen licensed drivers, who see to it that have everything I need. Beyond that, Orland Township provides low-cost door-to-door transportation for citizens of a certain age – beyond the age of consent into the age of the content.

I think God encourages people work out some things for themselves, so my prayer is that a smart person is close to finding a cure right now.

Meanwhile, I’d like you to know how much your relaxed and ordinary support means to a person trying to absorb the scary news about any demanding disease.

Your support for medical research is important, too, and not just on World MSA Day.

Olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple system atrophy is hard to spell and hard to pronounce. So let’s find a cure.

 

 

 

 

 

         

           

         

What makes terrorists terrifying?

Even before the Colorado movie terrorist could be arraigned in court, new laws were being explored.  Laws already outnumber prisoners maybe 1,000 to 1, but new laws will be advanced.

American justice is 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.

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. Last year 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 became in recent times 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 quietly, 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.

The Myth America Pageant in Sanford, Florida

The development of a Jesus mythology, and fierce arguments about the details, interests today’s public opinion experts who observe the way news is told. Information was relayed by word of mouth in the days of Jesus, and the news anchors of the day were political and religious leaders and story-tellers, social ancestors of today’s journalists and authors.

What did Jesus say about himself? Where was he born? Did he really walk on water?

Even people who knew him well did not remember all of his words and movements the same way.

Public opinion specialists today have no trouble understanding the conflicting stories about Jesus and the earliest Christians, who had no printing presses or word processors or ball point pens, because they also track disagreements about where the president of the United States was born. They study the intellectual and religious feuds of the computer era: does global warming threaten Earth itself? Are scientists right about evolution?

Big and small, facts of the day for some are false for others. How will people a couple of thousand years from now decide between today’s true and false, right and wrong, assuming that people are still here?

The story of Jesus and his followers is accepted by hundreds of millions as a matter of faith. They accept the proofs selected by one of the thousands of Christian church denominations, and shun the claims of others. Should infants be baptized, or only adults? Is Jesus present in the Eucharist? May women be ordained?

Churches are far apart on matters of ministry. They disagree whether ministers should emulate Jesus in simplicity of dress, or project his royal power by wearing princely robes. Did Jesus tell his followers to heal the sick and visit prisoners century after century and day after day, or only while he taught?

Among the great mysteries of the human experience are the limits of communication. When everyone has access to the same information , why does one person fervently believe that a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer was unjustly arrested for the murder of an unarmed teenager, while another person is equally convinced that the arrest was just? A curious world is fascinated by this Myth America Pageant in Sanford, Florida. How the good news and the bad are communicated may be examined for bias, but the prejudice, or pre-judgment, of people hearing or reading the news is more elusive. It separates fundamentalist certainty from the detachment of the shoulder-shruggers.

Keyboard out of control

A. E. P. Wall

Bible used by my great grandparents.

             The Christian church has changed since the time of Jesus, and the Christian church has not changed.

            Those first Christians were not able to email their epistles. They knew nothing about a printing press or the great book it would someday produce, sponsored by the king of an island off the coast of France.

            They knew how to agree and they knew how to disagree. They disagreed about how much of their Jewish inheritance could be adapted. They argued about dietary laws. They argued about circumcision. Argument became an undeclared sacrament, still vigorous in the hundreds of Christian churches, traditions and denominations, which continue to divide like melting icebergs.

            Still unsettled is the question of who’s at the center of worship. Some say it is God, and the object of worship is to become more like God. That is a challenge, once you ponder what God allowed Job, Eve and any number of innocents executed in American prisons to endure.

            Others think the center of worship is the worshiper, asking favors of prosperity and health from God, who at first glance might seem to have distributed those favors randomly, with some Christians winning an impersonal game of chance and some losing. Scholars have rejected any reference to this as the bingo myth.

            I suspect that I was born with a vibrant God gene, because I have always believed in God, despite gaps in acting out that belief.

            I’ve sat in on computer chats about the name of God. I’ve heard lots of suggestions, such as the Divine, Creator, Love, Higher Power, Father, Mother, Father-Mother, a few others.  God is Just, but I pray to God as Mercy. During most of my life I have known God by familiar names, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the blessed Trinity, one God.

            My grandpa had a bunch of names. Friends called him Bill, teachers called him William, kids called him Mr. Olmstead. They were all good names, and correct, but he’s Grandpa to me. Same thing about the many names of God, who’s still God to me.

            My bingo gene card gave me loving parents of Victorian persuasion, children and grandchildren of shining character and intellect, friends with a high capacity for tolerance, all of the childhood diseases of the late 1920s, pleasure in reading and writing, a rare disease of the brain which I’ve discussed excessively elsewhere, and a belief in God which has evolved only as I’ve begun to grasp the infinity of the Infinite. God is never surprised, but God has surprises for the rest of us. Father John Loftus, an Irish Columban and close friend, was ejected from China by the Communists back in the last century. He recommended living in terms of Catholic beliefs because "even if they turn out not to be correct in all details, it is still a great way to spend your life." 

            God’s gifts to each of us include an amount of time for this life. If there’s a formula, nobody knows what it is. I appreciate most of the 87 years I’ve been given so far, and I accept changes that come with age and experience, even though I would get out of them if I could. Ever since I bought my first typewriter at age 12 I have done a lot of my thinking through my fingertips. Now there’s a coordination problem when I punch the letters on my computer keyboard. More and more my fingers touch a key I did not choose, or touch no key at all. More and more my thoughts flicker out like candles in the wind before I get them written down. So I’m cutting back my blogs. Thank you for staying with me this far, and please don't go away.

© A. E. P. Wall