God can't help it

Let’s have a quick look at the dusty surface of life:

We choose prison terms as the best response to antisocial behavior, although they don’t work.

We continue capital punishment, but we often kill innocent persons.

We have contempt for Congress but do virtually nothing to reform it.

Christians believe in one God but thousands of churches.

Muslims of competing traditions show little mercy toward each other.

Tolerance, an American ideal that empowered the civil rights movement and rooted out anti-semitic restrictions, dissolved into intolerance of religious customs and holidays.

Equal justice under the law is elusive, because counsel and appeals are not affordable by all.

Underneath that dusty surface is the shiny reality of a world alive in the everlasting present. There is life everywhere. It is being shaped, as a sculpture is shaped, and being reshaped by earthquakes, floods, disease and other strikes of fate.

As my 87th birthday rushes toward me I think maybe it is time to get organized. Can anyone organize all the mistakes? If I made only one a day, that’s 31,755 mistakes. If I made just one humdinger of a mistake every year, even then I’m way over quota. Most of the people I offended have preceded me, as they say, into the next life. I apologize to them wherever they are. My prayer is for mercy, not necessarily justice.

God is merciful. In fairness, God should be merciful toward all who are afflicted with miserable diseases and impulses, and those who are hungry, cold and sad. Life is so huge that a lifetime is not enough to figure it out. God permits speculation on why the infinite love of God surrounds every person, yet gives everybody space to be unloving and hateful if they choose.

The Great Prayer lays it on the line: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others. Some people do this. Some prefer the death penalty, long mandatory prison terms and other love-challenged behavior.

A friend once said that there are no sins—only mistakes. It was a wisecrack rather than a theological declaration, but wisecracks begin wisely.

Confidence in the constant love of God includes an understanding that the Eternal is not concerned with time in the way 87-year-olds are. God is, after all, the instigator of evolution. It took a long time for the Magna Carta to influence the American Bill of Rights. It was a long, stumbling step from the slaughter at Gettysburg to the Civil Rights Act.

In God’s good time it will be seen whether time means a lot or does not mean a lot. The movement of time enables us to grow in mind and spirit, to encounter sin and try to correct it. God can’t help forgiving, can’t help loving, can’t help providing the frosting on everybody’s birthday cake.

A minority sickness seeks attention

Our world spends so much of its energy and talent on wars and prisons that overcoming the numerous destructive diseases gets a low priority. God gave us this beautiful planet, and all we do is squeeze it.

 About the time I was starting kindergarten, President Calvin Coolidge was telling the nation that “the business of America is business.” His term ended in 1929, which one of his successors might have described as a year that will live in business infamy.

 In the years that followed, the disease that placed Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair was overcome. A heart was transplanted, and thousands of transplant surgeries followed. Medical nightmares yielded, slowly, to medical science, and science is just getting started.

 Calvin Coolidge today might say that the business of America is divided between health care and the military. “Civilization and profits,” he once said, “go hand in hand.” Someone else might have said that civilization and prophets go hand in hand.

 Health care has changed as radically as travel. The era of horse manure in the streets has phased into the era of oil spills and global warming, even as penicillin and 21st century microsurgery have extended life. What has not changed is the science of economics, or the will to apply it, from one depression to the next.

 When my neurologist made it official that there was a respectable reason for my dizziness, and that the reason was a first cousin of parkinson’s once removed, called parkinsonism, I became an instant advocate of research to heal olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple systems atrophy (OPCA/MSA).

 This is a minority disease, its victims numbered in the tens of thousands while millions are stricken by cancer or AIDS. Even so, some highly dedicated medical professionals and their equally dedicated lay supporters are searching for a way to treat OPCA/MSA.  There is no cure.

 The disease is so peculiar that it is not easily recognized. My diagnosis was made nearly a decade ago, after more than a year of examinations and tests. That’s not uncommon, nor is the likelihood that the disease was becoming active long before that. Doctors call it progressive. It is on the move, and I began following with a walking stick, then a cane, eventually a rollator and now a power chair.

 At first there was dizziness, which became more vigorous, along with other symptoms. Some of them are especially bemusing. For example, after I write an article I proof it methodically in order to insert dozens of missing a’s. OPCA/MSA has taken custody of the little finger on my left hand.

 It even blacks out wonderful sentences which I haven’t  written yet. Sometimes I begin typing a thoughtful sentence but never finish, because the process of punching keys erases my thoughts before I can write them down. As a reader, you may have noticed that.

 I always have had, and still have, a lot to say. It takes much longer to say it than it did when I was a rewrite man on a Hearst newspaper in a three-paper town. I’ve forgotten what year that was, but one of my assignments was to write about the campaign to nominate Douglas MacArthur for president.

 When my 87th birthday arrives in March I expect to be at this same keyboard, even if it takes longer to punch each key, something like learning to set type by hand in the 1930s.

 God is classier than Calvin Coolidge in describing the nature of civilization and profits. “For what will it profit a man,” asks Christ Jesus, “if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” And the letter of James asks “if a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?”

Eighty-plus years is a quick flick in the timeline of God’s universe. Cures, profits and wonders are alive in that universe, awaiting discovery, even as  evolution awaited discovery. I’ll write more words, but the Word itself goes on and on without a period.

This disease is progressive? So is life

Written for Sharing Magazine

International Order of St. Luke

            If volunteers were awarded medals, my friend and neighbor Joe would have trouble standing up under the weight of them all. He’s a retiree who volunteers for long-term duties with organized charities, while still reaching out to friends and strangers who need help with one thing or another.

            For years Joe has been driving me to my favorite barber shop several miles from where we live. He steers us to restaurants afterward, each one memorable, dozens of them in two counties. As soon as he walks in Joe knows the restaurant staff, and as soon as he sits down he knows diners at the next table. Joe smiles a lot, the way generous people do.

            So, when Joe phoned on Tuesday to offer me a haircut outing I didn’t like turning him down, but another constant companion, dizziness with internal fog, kept me home. After Joe repeated the invitation a couple of times I had to admit that the barbering expeditions are over, and for the same reason that I have a new power chair to accomplish indoors what my power scooter does for me outdoors.

            The ailment neurologists call olivopontocerebellar atrophy, aka multiple system atrophy, is said to be a progressive disease because its mischief enlarges over time. When it began I could still drive a car or go to a movie. With a walker I could still manage a church aisle. After I turned in my car keys on my 81st birthday, I still had a couple of years to shop at the supermarket and watch my grandchildren win trophies with their teams and perform on school stages.

            So far I have not figured out what causes this disease, but neither have the medical specialists. Philosophers and theologians work at it, but so far their results have been sort of Congressional. God makes people, not automatons or puppets. God permits every kind of condition, personality and thought. Prayer brings healing, especially healing of isolation and self consciousness.

            Healing of OPCA/MSA will be sensational, but meanwhile any spiritual triage would suggest that prayer and dedication are also needed elsewhere. Consider that last month alone Chicago recorded 55 homicides, and sanctioned killing on a large scale was reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, here and there around Africa. Cancer, AIDS, accidents and disasters brought death in wholesale lots. There’s plenty to pray about. There’s plenty to do.

             

When E. F. Hutton tried to buy the post office

Edward F. Hutton was one of the wealthiest men of his time, serious in occupation but with a fine sense of humor. One example of that was his invitation to me to visit him and his wife at their home in Palm Beach in the late 1940s.

            By that time he and Marjorie Merriweather Post had divorced, but he was chairman of General Foods and was active in companies he founded, including Wall Street’s E. F. Hutton.

            I was a young labor reporter at the time, and Hutton enjoyed showing me off to his friends as a curiosity, a suspected Democrat whose personal heroes included Eleanor Roosevelt and that crowd.

            When I arrived he apologized for the staffing of his mansion. It was the week of shifting 40 servants from his home in Long Island to his home in Palm Beach, and only a dozen were yet on the job in Florida.

            One who was on the premises was the butler. I was given a four-room suite, which included a direct phone line to New York. In that suite, to my embarrassed horror, I found my suitcase open and empty. I should have known. The butler did it! He had unpacked my clothes, ink stains and all.

            Hutton was solicitous of his untested guest the first day, when he told me that dinner with him and his wife would be informal—just black tie. Inasmuch as he was stripped down to a dozen servants, he may have appreciated my confession that I lacked a black tie and all the fabric that goes with it.

            In fact, Ed Hutton and his wife were considerate hosts who told entertaining stories about life among the very rich while making me quite comfortable. Hutton told me that any yacht brochures I might come across would have been placed by his wife, who was signaling what she’d like to have for a birthday present.

            He told me he had written President Roosevelt, offering to buy the U.S. Post Office from the government and run it as a profitable tax-paying entity. Good management, he said, was needed. FDR did not accept that offer. I remembered it when today’s Postal Service reported financial stress, and proposed further cuts in service.

            Today the mail delivered to my home mailbox included two copies of America magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 19; two copies of Time magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 26; two copies of The Nation dated Sept. 19 and Sept. 26. In a single mail delivery there were three weekly magazines more than a week late.

            Newspapers and magazines will almost inevitably complete a shift from print to online publishing. The mail service, which made it possible for publishers to turn out national periodicals in the first place, still gives identity to small communities all over the country while its own identity fades.

           

           

Preachers don't work on Sundays only

Preachers don’t work on Sundays

and let others do the leading 
the rest of the week

            President Obama offered another elegant address to Congress, although journalists hired because of their muscular mouths had begun chomping on it even before they heard it.

             Speeches are part of leadership, but leadership has to inspire between speeches.

We remember the Gettysburg Address because Lincoln was a full-time leader, not because he was a talented speechmaker.

            Poor Barack Obama, like Woodrow Wilson, sees Congress as academia--but Congress sees him as academic. He attracts some of the same kinds of hostility Wilson did, but Wilson was spared prejudices that survived the defeat at Appomattox Court House. The sort who couldn’t abide John F.Kennedy because of his religion bent their knees and their conscience in false witness against Obama, claiming against abundant evidence that he belongs to one of the religions they despise. Such things matter if you’re a bigot.

            Capitalism, the religion of Congress, courts and campaign funds, sustains millionaires and creates billionaires. U.S. and European banks, beneficiaries of government favors treasured by all whose business is business, have so far announced personnel cuts numbering 70,000. If you are not a capitalist, you will have to wonder why bankers have had 70,000 employees they did not need.

            Their religion relives them of the familial behavior Christianity and other faiths require of their believers, the notion of brotherhood and sisterhood, of emulating the Good Samaritan. There’s no convincing way to unhire 70,000 employees in the name of Christ, or to pray for tax breaks not available to everybody.

             Meanwhile, the talking journalists await the next presidential address. Any day now they’ll start telling what’s wrong with it.

             

St. Peter and the heavenly facebook

By A. E. P. Wall

            At age 4, newly enrolled in Sunday school, I learned about the crucifixion and about graham crackers and milk. My parents and I had just moved to Coudersport, Pennsylvania, 104 miles from Jamestown, N.Y., where my life began in 1925.

            That Sunday night my mom and I were in the living room of our apartment, over the Gates Brothers grocery and shoe store. Windows were open, lights were on and moths were winging it around the lamps. Remembering the morning lesson I made paper crosses, bonded with homemade paste. I could have stopped there, with my plain Protestant crosses, but I found that my paste would hold a moth, with white wings almost like the ones angels wore, on the cross. This lasted until my mom noticed what I was doing, and gave me further religious instruction briefly and in a very loud voice.

            It was a pretty good instruction, and maybe it is why water-boarding and other tortures seem satanic, like first century Romans killing Jesus slowly and painfully because he wouldn’t say what they wanted him to say.

            That was the year I learned to read. We were strangers in town, and my parents thought I’d find playmates if they signed me up for a kindergarten operated by a remarkable educator named Rose Crane. That lady could teach. The next year I started first grade at the public school at age 5, and after a few days I was put in second grade. I was not smart, but Rose Crane was.

             Something I learned was that in general kids ought not to skip grades, but be grouped by age, so they are all in synch, all ready for Little League at the same time. I also learned that a theology of moths on paper crosses would not do after age 4. But more than 80 years later I’m moved by the cross, whether it is a paper cutout, ink printed on paper, whittled from wood or crafted in precious metal. It is a pattern of wonder.

             Coudersport had a population of about 3,000 when we went back to Jamestown, home to about 40,000 then, 30,000 today. I was 6, and I went to live with my grandparents, the Olmsteads, in Celoron, which is curled up next to Jamestown on Chautauqua Lake. Celoron’s population was about 700, one of whom was to become more popular than the other 699 combined. That was Lucille Ball, the I Love Lucy television superstar.

            The Great Depression had walloped the whole country. My mom and dad had to take jobs where they could get them, and I was lucky in grandparents. They lived diagonally across the street from Celoron’s community church, Methodist Episcopal by denomination, and served on Sundays by a circuit riding minister who had two other congregations. My grandma prepared the communion bread, and my grandpa pulled the rope on the church bell. The minister came to our house to use the facilities. I marveled that my grandma didn’t seem to mind who heard her puffing tremulously through The Old Rugged Cross.

              I was given a kids’ Bible, which was kept on a bedside table. It had lots of pictures. My favorite showed David poised to fire his slingshot at Goliath. Another favorite showed Daniel holding his own in the lions’ den. Each night when I was encouraged to read a Bible story I stared for a while at the book, wondering what was being written about me in St. Peter’s book. My Sunday school teacher had alerted me that angels kept track of everyone, and at the end of the day wrote down everything, good or bad. In 1930 nobody had yet dreamed of a Kindle or an iPad.

             When I was 20 I married a Catholic girl, and after we divorced I married another Catholic girl. This was enabled by the languid process of anulment. I chaired the board of a Catholic college in Honolulu while editing a daily newspaper in Hilo, Hawaii, where I came to know many Buddhists, and to speak at Buddhist events. The president of a Mormon college on Oahu gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon, and I wrote about Jewish-Christian relations.  

             The little Protestant church in Celoron, the Catholic cathedral on Oahu, the Buddhist temples in Hawaii were different from each other in worship and conviction, but the people were pretty much the same. One person’s karma may be another person’s cause and effect. We all smile alike, but we don’t smile enough.

             I try to remember: Don’t forget to smile. We all may be on St. Peter’s candid camera, Facebook Central.

           

           

           

              

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.