An electric chair of my own

On sunny days you can see me whirring around the neighborhood, wherever the sidewalks go, on my racy red scooter with the American flag on the front and a Chicago White Sox tag on the back.

A couple of years ago my son David and my daughter-in-law Toni bought me a four-wheel battery-powered scooter that bounces along at 5 miles an hour. It can travel up to 20 miles or so on a single battery charge.

Now my doctor has determined that I can continue to live in my own condo – even at age 86 and with an incurable disease that makes walking a risky adventure, like skating on melted ice. I can keep on preparing meals, doing laundry, using my computer and TV, writing articles and reading other people’s articles. I can do all that because I’m getting a power chair, which will get me around indoors the way my scooter does outdoors.

A power chair is more compact than a scooter. It is engineered to make narrow turns, to zig and zag. It can be pulled up to a desk or a dining table. It extends life in a way no medicine can.

My scooter came from the Scooter Store, and I’m so happy with it that I went back to the Scooter Store for a power chair. If you’re interested in a power chair for yourself or someone else, you can talk to the man who helped me. He is William Kaiser, and his phone is 800-723-4535, ext. 9465.

My only anxiety is about Tom, the cat who has shared my premises with me ever since Sally, my wife, died nine years ago. Tom is sometimes slow to yield to my rollator, a feline fault that can lead to a tall tail tale.

Do we let others pre-think our thoughts?

How can I ask questions about some of the things my church does, or doesn’t, and still be a believer? Some church leaders demand total obedience, and excommunicate anyone who won’t let guardians of dogma pre-think all thoughts.

God is mind, scriptures say, but some believers answer that God no longer thinks out loud. God is love, scripture says, but some believers reply that God expels worshippers who keep raising their hands to ask questions.

Like many, I have two identifying memberships, one religious and the other secular. I’m a Christian and an American. I disagree with friends who say church rules and regulations should be accepted with head bowed, eyes closed and lips joined like a self-seal envelope -- but I agree when they say it is good to ask questions about the rules and regulations of government. Americans seldom get excommunicated from their U.S. citizenship if they ask questions, and that’s because they do ask questions.

Most of God’s human creatures do not choose their religions or nationalities, although choices are possible. Where a person is born usually establishes nationality and, typically, religion. There is one God, who permits more than one religion and more than one nation.

Like other Americans, I believe in my country even when I disagree with some of its officials, laws, courts and diplomats. I believe in my religion; when I explore its grandeur I remember how little I know, how many questions there are to ask.

Discovery is the way of life. Long-ago ancestors never heard of gravity, knew nothing of oxygen or radio waves. Some asked questions, some hushed them, fearing what they might come to know about the unknown. Thousands of centuries of discovery and questions have brought i-phones, but individual peace of mind and peace among people and nations remain as elusive as at the beginning. God is still there, but we are like the 49ers of the Old West, searching for something more negotiable than God.

Separation of Church and Sex

The Bible tells what God said to favored men and women long ago, some of it repeated around campfires from one generation to the next, finally engraved in clay or written on scrolls. These inspired accounts survived the centuries, while disputes about what they mean have put thousands of religions, denominations and communities into competition with one another.

When I was a boy I liked Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, and had a simple choice between but not among them. How the world has evolved. Now I’m offered Coke, Tab, Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke and Cherry Coke, regular or diet, with or without caffeine, in bottles or in cans.

Now there are regular and diet Episcopalian churches, caffeine-free Lutherans, a choice of traditional, evangelical, liberal theologies and liturgies.

Sexuality is a common issue in all religions, no surprise because it is a fundamental mystery of human life, foundation of all emotions. Sexual practices are catalogued in creeds and laws, with severe consequences or sublime. Disregard of sex rules may, like murder, be a capital offense. These concerns, ancient as they are, remain unsolved and divisive.

Millions believe that sex crimes involving children will result in savage and brutal eternal punishment. Countless clerics and laity who believe this are found, nevertheless, to engage repeatedly in such crimes. Sigmund, where are you when we need you? Will humankind search for the causes of such self-defeating crimes with the fervor of searches for the cure of cancer and polio, or will it just let new victims suffer and build more prisons?

Sexual misbehavior is revealed as a plague in the Roman Catholic Church, and solutions have not been found in scripture or liturgy. The Catholic Church which practically invented hospitals and universities has the power if not the purpose to lead a global search for a way to heal destructive compulsions. Some observers, however, might find it curious that men speak for greater sensitivity while dressed up in lace skirts and hats as fancy as Queen Elizabeth’s.

These men of huge spiritual commitment are required to renounce personal experience with sex, like a chef who has read recipes but never entered the kitchen.

God still speaks to those who listen and those who don’t. Prayers are conversations with God, in any language, even Latin. Coming to grips with three-letter word, Sex, leads to a four-letter word some spell Hell and some spell Heal.

Atheists and other fundamentalists

Atheists are secular fundamentalists who share the notion of certainty with religious fundamentalists. Declaring that something does not exist, never existed, and cannot exist requires absolute self-confidence, if not faith. Rigid positions observed by fundamentalists, whether they are practitioners of science or religion, close the door to further investigation and speculation.

Millions of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, along with uncounted secular fundamentalists, believe they know all there is to know about god.

Atheistic scientists who claim to know it all insist that the case is closed. They attack folks who believe in a deity, including scientists who are church members and ordained clerics. Religious fundamentalists bristle under these jibes, while less rigid believers and non-believers shrug their shoulders.

Damien and Jack in Hawaii

It was not my plan to spend the night in the Molokai leper colony, especially not to spend it on a rectory sofa presided over by a grandfather’s clock that chimed the passage of each quarter-hour.

It was a blessing, in fact, to be grounded by a storm that prevented a return flight to Honolulu aboard a small prop plane. The settlement in the late 1950s had no accommodations for overnight visitors, but it had a hospitable Catholic priest.

I was there to write about Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts who began a memorable ministry to lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in 1873. Leprosy became known as Hansen’s Disease
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The blessing to me was to have a sense of the jet-black stillness of the night, once the generators had been turned off, and to reflect on the contrasts of waves and chimes. It was a blessing to have a few extra hours with the people who lived there and with the Sisters of St. Francis of Syracuse who lived with them, and loved them.

On May 10 the Roman Catholic Church celebrates a Mass memorial for Father Damien, now St. Damien.

I was writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at that time. It was an exciting place to work. Then I became editor of the Hilo Tribune-Herald, a daily newspaper owned by the Star-Bulletin, and eventually managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. One of the pleasures of journalism is getting to know lots of people in every kind of work. When statehood came to Hawaii on Aug. 21, 1959, the Territory of Hawaii had a non-voting delegate to Congress named John A. Burns.

Democrat Jack Burns had defeated my boss, Republican publisher Elizabeth (Betty) Farrington, for the Congressional post. Burns ran for governor in 1959 but lost to William Quinn. Burns won in 1962 and served three terms as governor. We were pretty good friends, often meeting for breakfast.

We were meeting in my office at the Tribune-Herald on the Big Island when a desperate phone call told me that Betty Farrington, no fan of Burns, was unexpectedly entering the front door. Burns dashed out through the composing room and left by a back door. He was a quicker politician than I was.

We sometimes met at an early weekday Mass in Honolulu’s downtown cathedral, and we shared an enthusiasm for social justice. When Burns named me chairman of the Hawaii State Educational Television Committee, charged with creating a TV system and drafting the legislation to get it going, we made certain its use would be available to all children, whether in public or private schools. Another Burns enthusiasm was for making Father Damien one of Hawaii’s two choices for Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Both of those projects came to pass.

Jack Burns was a gifted politician, and a great man. He and Father Damien make a good team.

They both knew the agonies of sickness, the pains of others, and they knew that some issues are beyond the understanding of saints and governors.

I know I haven’t forgotten the car keys;
I don’t have a car!

Not even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew for certain whether Cairo, the southernmost town in Illinois, would survive the great Mississippi flood of 2011. Cairo is positioned at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, its survival depending on the skill of the Army Corps of Engineers in diverting water through levees deliberately breached.

Anyone flooded just below that point wouldn’t know whether the water came from one river or the other. That’s the feeling that came to me when I realized just a few moments ago that I had written a very similar story about Father Damien and Governor Burns several years ago.

Which of my rivers washed away my memory of telling that story at least once before? Was it the Ohio River of Advancing Age, or the Mississippi River of my progressing brain disease? Memory thins out at age 86, and it takes a beating from my type of parkinsonism.

If you’ve read this story before, please forgive an absent-minded journalist. My hope is that if you’ve read it before you have forgotten that you did.

Memory was not invented by Bill Gates

Even though I have a brain ailment, I think my mind works the way it is supposed to most of the time. Sometimes signals get short circuited, and what started out as a step turns into a stagger. Maybe my gait controller drops off to sleep, like those air controllers in the news.

For years I've ordered things from L. L. Bean, so I was surprised to discover that this time I ordered things in the wrong size. Most mornings I brew coffee, but once in a while I feel too clumsy for it. Sometimes thoughts evaporate before I’m finished with them. This can be embarrassing, because I live with a cat, and who wants a cat to seem smarter than he is? It should be enough that he has eight more lives than I have. He never forgets the rock music of a can opener opening tuna or the crinkle of plastic being peeled off a deli sandwich pack.

Creation gave us plants and trees and other living things for sustenance, along with herbs and chemicals for treating ailments, letting them evolve with skills to apply them. Like many others with OPCA/MSA, I see it as a prod for learning about it and maybe about myself. Its meaning is still to be learned, and there’s lots of time for that.

What was I going to say next?

74 seconds of Challenger in the sky

The space shuttle Challenger streaked into the Atlantic sky, then burst into a flaming flash. My wife and I were watching from the lawn in front of our home in Titusville, Florida. We looked in stunned wonder, not wanting to believe what we saw on that 28th day of January, 1986.

The pastor of Holy Spirit Church in the nearby town of Mims, where many space workers worshipped, asked me to write something to be read by the lectors at Mass on Sunday. This is it.

The Exploding Conquest

A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

From almost any point in our parish --from the lawns in front of our homes, from the windows of classrooms, from the asphalt surface of parking lots --we were able to watch the shuttle Challenger head for a new conquest of space. But just 74 seconds later the conquest exploded before our eyes, the lives of seven very special Americans disintegrated in a horror of flame.

From that moment our parish was not the same, our lawns and classrooms and even our parking lots were not the same, because the words of St. Peter's First Epistle moved out of the pages of Scripture and into our lives on a chilly January morning: "Do not be surprised, beloved, that a trial by fire is occurring in your midst."

Our Catholic faith is a religion of the future. We can understand the convictions, scientific and philosophical and perhaps religious, which inspired the seven space heroes to board the Challenger shuttle for a flight into the future. They were explorers for all of us, just as they were neighbors to all of us.

We Christians, blessed by a God of eternal life, know that we have a proper role in the world, a role that encourages us to understand the nature of the universe and to enter into that universe with confidence. We understand that even as we live each day we are dying a bit each day until we reach the final goal, which comes so unexpectedly and never quite in the manner of our own choosing, comes as it did to our neighbors Gregory B. Jarvis, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith and the shuttle commander Francis "Dick" Scobee.

It is part of our role in this world to respond to God's many gifts, using those gifts to establish within the world a measure of love, of dignity, of simple goodness. Here where we live and pray, in this part of the world known as the Space Coast, we enjoy a profound sense of the awesome power of the Almighty to engage the men and women of his creation in a course of growth, a course that leads to new horizons. We live life fully because we know that there are great wonders ahead.

Cheers for those who walk the walk

From the chair in front of my computer I can see him park his car on the street. He gets out, carrying a book, and begins the long walk to my front door. Almost every Sunday Deacon Joseph Truesdale drives over from Orland Park’s St. Francis of Assisi Church to bring the Eucharist and morning prayer.

Like all Roman Catholic deacons, Joe is an ordained cleric. He’s a successful engineer, recently retired. His wife is an artist who shares his vision of service.

So many Catholic clerics have been accused of predatory crimes that the whole church is in turmoil. The energy of the church comes from the tens of thousands who serve faithfully as priests, deacons, and religious, supported by the prayers and encouragement of church members who seek forgiveness for themselves and others.

I can’t get to church, but a gifted pastor sees to it that nobody is left out. I see the same headlines you do about the misery some priests have brought upon themselves and others. The rest of the story is that the church points to heaven, but it is not heaven. When it stumbles it needs the support of all its members, the kind that’s shown by Father Edward F. Upton, my pastor, and Deacon Truesdale and many, many others.

You may have seen the television programs that feature disorder in courtrooms and legislative halls, with judges getting smacked and elected officials punching each other. Misconduct and corruption in government are disgusting, but people don’t give up their citizenship in protest. Yet some people do give up their Catholic citizenship because they think it is up to somebody else to do the work. Jesus didn’t found an institution. He established a family.

[The Church is nothing other than “the family of God.” –Catechism of the Catholic Church]