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Eighty years ago I watched my grandpa as he read the Jamestown Post. My grandma read Street and Smith’s Love Story magazine, while my mom was immersed in the CLSC – the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Society. I still have the diploma she was awarded at the Chautauqua Institution sometime around 1930. My dad went for detective stories.

I thought my grandpa’s choice was the best, because newspapers had comic strips. It was like learning how to play the game when, at age 4, I was enrolled in kindergarten, where Rose Crane taught me to read. Since then I’ve read every word that’s passed my eyes, beginning with signs posted in the streetcars warning that spitting was awful. It took me a while to learn that spitting may be awful, but the sign really said it was unlawful. So many words. So little time to learn them all.

Maybe it was genes, maybe it was destiny or maybe it was just plain luck that I became a newspaper reporter and editor. Maybe it was a blessing from God, like my children and grandchildren.

My life has been wrapped in newsprint.

So how come I’ve just cancelled my subscriptions to four daily newspapers?

Before that, things happened. Newspapers stopped using lead type and Linotype machines. They stopped using zinc for pictures. They even stopped using typewriters. Ways to publish the news have changed since Ben Franklin printed a page at a time.

The online newspaper editions are pretty good, and getting better. The arrival of an Amazon Kindle book machine at my house this week stirred things up. I stopped home delivery of countless pounds of paper and subscribed to two of the dailies via Kindle. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune are ready for me by 5 in the morning, and dozens of papers are reachable through Kindle and my computer.

My dad earned his living playing the pipe organ during silent movies, providing the “bells and whistles” for the celluloid dramas. As a boy I learned how to set type by hand, reaching into the right compartment for each letter without a glance. Movie and publishing methods have gotten a lot better. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Gutenberg.

What does God care?

　
Religion is an ongoing investigation of the unfairness of life.

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

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Does God not care very much about the world and its inhabitants, or can religion discover purpose in the lapses and deficiencies of creation?

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 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 deadly torture on the cross

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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 lock up their scrolls after writing about the first day.

Some dispute the notion of God. Sometimes folks disbelieve in the same god, as in the gimme god of creedal capitalism, or the god who sanctions hatred, or the god whose followers have buried him in deserts past. I never figured out what God looks like, but I pray to the same Lord I've known for eight and a half decades, the Lord of all. I began those decades in a country that allowed legal discrimination against Jews, African Americans and others, discrimination which repudiated much that an earlier generation, including some of my ancestors, had fought for in a civil war. When I was young, some states prohibited interracial marriage, even as many now 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 advanced age is its gift of perspective, of eyes that have seen members of a majority race battle in war, in legislatures and in courts to assure equal rights for all races and all persons, without reference to the gender, to the sexuality given them at birth.

Prayers never seem to get answered all at once, especially all of the "whereas" motions of the person at prayer, but somebody seems to be listening.

　

If the church looks hopeless...

The Roman Catholic Church is the gold-and-myrrh standard by which all Christian churches are evaluated, to the considerable exasperation of those churches and to the confusion of the Romans, who have no idea where anemia comes from.

Today’s Catholic Church is not the church of your grandma, especially in the United States. Around 1960 your mom might throw out Friday’s dinner because she inadvertently dropped a forbidden meatball into the spaghetti. She may have worn herself out shopping around neighboring parishes to find a confessional with a laid-back priest who would grant absolution from the sin of birth control.

Mom sat with the kids at Sunday Mass. Dad mingled with other men just outside the church, smoking and keeping within the prescribed number of feet of the building required for technical attendance at Mass. The priest was reciting the words in Latin, with his back to the congregation, while some of the faithful were reciting the rosary and others were reading English translations in their missals.

Faith was not complicated. Folks attended Mass and avoided meat on Fridays, dropped coins into the poor box, supported the school kids who sold subscriptions to the Catholic paper. People followed the rules most of the time. Everybody knew that on the day of his ordination, Father became God’s agent, able to bring Jesus to the altar and to forgive sins, a super-person respected fervently whether anybody liked him or not. Catholics did not compliment him on his sermons because everyone knew it was presumptuous to do so, inasmuch as all sermons were worthy of praise and did not need any comment from laity. When I was a young police reporter in the 1940s I was told not to report the arrest of priests charged with something called crimes against nature. To do so would be unsuitable in a family newspaper. Just the other day a cardinal said in an interview that, after all, only a tiny percentage of clergy is convicted of crimes against children.

The Church is the world’s oldest continuous institution, older than any government, so it is surprising how quickly it changed. All of a sudden the Mass was celebrated in English and other languages familiar to worshipers. Polls revealed that Catholic reliance on birth control was about the same as the rest of the population. Priests were arrested for sex crimes against children, even in Ireland, along with bishops, archbishops, cardinals and nuns. Seminaries and convents drew fewer young men and women. It is said that the Catholic press has never had less influence. Commonweal, one of the most distinguished Catholic magazines in a country of 70 million Catholics, reported a circulation of less than 20,000.

There are still more than a billion Catholics, but after a couple of thousand years some wonder what difference a billion Catholics have made in the world. Are countries formed in the Catholic culture – Italy, Spain, Haiti, Argentina – evangelizing the world? Has Europe, like the salt Jesus mentions, lost its savor?

Why, given such questions, is the Church still the most tenacious of all institutions? Its priests are the most giving of men, surrendering themselves not to bomb people in crowded markets but to show them how to live. Some, gifted politically, become bishops, only their faces visible among yards of decorated ceremonial fabric, a so-there to gowned secular princes and Pharisees. No matter how hopeless circumstances may appear, hope is the nature of Church.

Wondering about the game

In 1929, when I was four years old, carpet golf was as popular as the new talking picture shows and Lucky Strikes sold in flat-fifty cigarette tins.

My mom and dad took me to an indoor golf course, where the idea was to play a series of holes until reaching the most intriguing one, the final hole, which called for a sharp eye and determined swing. It was more interesting to a four-year-old than all the others combined, and that’s where I wanted to start.

This agitated my parents. Once a player popped a ball into the last hole it disappeared into a box. Game over, nickel spent, no refund. How interesting. I wondered what happened to the ball when it vanished, and remained more focused than my parents. While they were distracted with hole number one I managed to steer my ball into the last hole, where I heard it thump into invisibility.

I did not understand the despair of my mom and dad, because I had gone straight for the science of the game, the mystery of the vanishing ball.

The gift of life goes on for everybody until the gift of death arrives. I scarcely thought about it in a personal way until something reminded me of that disappearing golf ball, and I wondered about the next game.

Where did all the helpers come from?

Yesterday my beautiful daughter drove me to the supermarket, as she does every week. We each do our shopping, then she drives me home, whisks my packages into my kitchen and then goes home with her own groceries. Marie always makes me feel that life begins at 84, and that a rather exclusive ailment called olivopontocerebellar atrophy is something to be lived and explored.

Yesterday I learned a couple of things about my supermarketing. Marie acknowledged that she sometimes drops me at the store after her own busy day at work, then goes home for a shower, returns to the store and finishes her shopping just ahead of me. I had not noticed how much time I was spending in those aisles, and I was glad there was no taxi meter running.

The other thing I noticed yesterday was that other customers, strangers, occasionally offered to help me find something on the shelves or to load something from shelf to shopping cart. Why were they doing this? What was I doing to draw their friendly attention? I still have a pretty good grip on the shopping cart, which is a first class substitute for a rollator, and the supermarket is where I do my weekly walking marathon.

I guess that most life changes are as subtle as that, one day unknowingly drawing the attention of generous strangers, and realizing that your daughter’s love includes a lot of patience.

–Ed

Did you say something?

I remember almost everything that happened to me during the past 80 years, with the exception of whatever happened today. My Dad had been playing pipe organs to set the mood for silent movies, and then he installed sound systems for the new talkies. Almost everybody listened to the radio in those days. Radio announcers and actors were invisible. Their audience could not see what they were doing, or whether they were frightened or smiling. What they said was it. Enunciation was in, ear-strain was out.

Sometimes I don’t hear what’s being said. People amuse themselves by watching their words go in one of my ears and come out the other. This has little to do with how loudly or gently the words are spoken, but with olivopontocerebellar atrophy, the exclusive ailment I live with, known, if not very well-known, as OPCA. My OPCA experience now includes constant and intrusive dizziness. You’ve heard of taffy pulls, and probably seen the machines that pull strands of sticky salt water taffy in amusement parks. OPCA imitates that process. I walk around as though my head is stuffed with salt water taffy.

That taffy-pull makes me pay attention when I’m walking, or reaching for things, or taking a shower. This concentration often blots out other things going on at the same time. If someone is telling me something while I’m thinking about my next step or lifting my coffee cup, there’s a chance I will listen but not hear.

On the other hand, I sometimes miss what’s being said on TV or radio because of what historians may someday record as The Great 21st Century Lip Lapse. Even some of the pros drop syllables and merge words into each other, and some directors permit actors to dissolve their most fascinating words into a whisper understood only by alert lip readers. Could this difficulty in shaping words be a consequence of advanced styles of romance? Movies and TV dramas become more competitive, shootings become more bloody, car crashes more crumpling and kisses more aggressive. The Hoover kiss has emerged, its brief vacuum perhaps reshaping the lips, tongue and voice box.

Politicians and retirement brochures speak of golden years, sometimes seeming closer rust than gold. Every year is golden, but all is not gold that Twitters.

Coming clean about grime and punishment

Words were a pleasure the Victorians could display in public, an exercise of pure mind rather than impure limbs. Thus countless letters concluded with the words Your obedient servant, signed with whatever flourish could be managed without blotting the watery ink.

When I question my brain I’m always the obedient servant, obeying brain’s directions because I have no choice. Brain is in charge. It originates or vetoes all decisions. It doesn’t appear to think about them. The heart beats, a wound bleeds, the eyes blink, a lie is told, forbidden chocolate is swallowed, an angry punch is delivered, a smile appears and lunch digests without much of a thought, obedient to the brain and whatever instructions have been carried from brain stem to lower back stern by the body’s own Ma Bell network.

Talking to my brain is not like praying to God. I love God and really want to do God’s will. That requires choices. It is hard to know God’s will about killing people in a just war versus an unjust war, or even about killing prisoners when the robed priests of the judiciary turn their thumbs down versus killings authorized by government secret agents, gang bosses or other practitioners of organized grime.

This problem has been around for a long time

The apostle Paul had a problem with this, too. In his letter to the Romans, chapter 7, verses 19 and 20, he tells it this way: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

“Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

For Christians, sin is a technical word, the way heart is a technical word for surgeons and something else for Hallmark. Preachers sometimes call for punishing the sin and not the sinner, a view seldom applied to fellow preachers who are sex offenders. Paul once cited deference given to an unknown god, but if there’s an unknown devil its name is Sex, baffling and threatening to believers from the time of Eve. It is a religious mystery, but its experience is denied to the Roman priesthood. It lives on in an undercovers sort of way, especially among the laity. Some look to scientists, some to clergy, for answers.

Believers of all religions and of none feel an urge to live good lives while also, like St. Paul, pondering urges that may be disturbing. Systems of justice have no consistent way to deal with bad behavior beyond punishing the guilty in the same old ways. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work.

What does matter is strengthening the search for justice and its lesser-known twin, mercy, particularly in protecting children from sexual violence. Ireland, which not long ago was a model for religious devotions, has imploded in sex scandals of historic concern. The victims were children and most of the accused were priests, brothers and nuns.

These and hundreds of similar crimes are reported day by day, but little is understood about preventing them. Apprehending the perpetrators, who include men and women of every description and occupation, is only a beginning. It should trigger heavy-duty programs to find out what makes otherwise ordinary men and women prey on children, programs comparable to campaigns against AIDS, polio, TB and other threats.

Does anyone choose to be a despised molester of little kids? So how do they get that way? Can they be identified and helped, or will they prey on the young until they’re sent to prison and their victims live on with the horror of it?

All we know for certain is that the prospect of prison does not deter the folks who commit these crimes. That’s not enough to know about this monster behavior.