Green Travel

Are you racked with guilt over your carbon footprint on mother Earth? Well, for tree-huggers and recovering Catholics (for whom guilt never fully recedes), United Airlines (whom I used for at least half of my recent trip west) has set up an online confessional of sorts. You can visit their Carbon Offset Program, and there you'll find a convenient Carbon Offset Calculator to quantify just how much guilt is appropriate. You can then decide whether bearing it is something you can live with, or you can select from a variety of available indulgences, allowing you to travel guilt-free, or at least as nearly so as possible.

For my recent roundtrip from ATL to COS, for instance, the suggested donation to International Reforestation to offset 0.4927 metric tons was $5.91. Instead, I rented a Prius and drove nearly 300 miles on less than five gallons of gas. I found the overall effect of the Prius rental to be so environmentally sound that I felt compelled to offset my carbon offset by spending the $5.91 on a Venti Iced Mocha Latte at Starbucks just to take the self-congratulatory edge off. Thing is though, the buzz from coffee grown using environmentally sound methods is only serving to make me even more smug. I may just have to go out and crush a dandelion before anyone can stand to be around me. I can barely even stand myself.

Quote for the Day: Barbara Kingsolver

Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly you will blame yourself. . . . Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen; and if you are bad, you can still be lucky. --Barbara Kingsolver

I recognize that even the premise of the first sentence will offend the righteous, believing there can be no such place, but putting that aside, I like this. Nothing new about the sentiment, but I like the arrangement of the words. I'm listening to The Poisonwood Bible at the moment, so if the punctuation isn't right, please forgive. Beautiful book. I'll warn you though, it is as much a woman's book as Blood Meridian is a man's (and if that distinction doesn't make sense to you, read the two and you will never need to ask again).

A Conversation: "Where More Credit Is Due"

Over at The Archer Pelican, blog buddy Phil posted the following thought provoking proposition three days ago under the title, "Where More Credit is Due":

An emerging thought:

In America it seems to me that we often give too little respect to how hard things can be: whether the length of time it takes to mourn a lost relative, or how difficult it is to find the courage to apologize, or how scary it is to leave a job or a relationship.

That said, it also seems that we have to little faith in how strong we can be: whether in the ability to keep functioning while taking the time to cry, or the resolve to push our way through to saying what needs to be said, or the will to walk out a door and to keep walking while everything tries to pull you back.

I could be wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.

To which, a couple days later, I mustered the following response:

Phil, I'm gonna object to just one thing here. Well, not "object" so much as "recast." Among the things you think people don't credit the difficulty of is how scary it is to leave a job or a relationship. You're right, those things are scary, and sometimes one needs to summon the courage to do just that: leave. However . . .

A worse thing, I think (and recent experience of course makes this personal) is the corollary of that failure to respect the difficulty of a thing, i.e., the expectation people have that something should require little effort in the first place. This applies especially to relationships. If I understand you, you are saying that, in this country, we expect everything to come easily. And worse yet, we expect those things to be perfect. A good relationship is almost always the result of hard work, and even the best relationship is never perfect. Some relationships need to end, and the worst ones often take the most courage to leave. But our failure to respect the difficulty and complexity of human relationships sometimes means that people bail without really trying.

And trying to endure is not the same as trying to make a thing better. Better to bail than throw up one's hands and embrace martyrdom. But that false expectation of ease, I think, too often leads people to the martyr label before they have made an effort to make a thing better. Be it job or relationship. Again, some things are unfixable. I know that. But a corollary of your observation is that too many people don't think they should need to try.

I offer both here as an example of the reason I write or read blogs at all. They are, the ones I treasure most, like an ongoing seminar with people who are not only smart, they're my friends. When Susan Jacoby indicts blogs on the whole as anonymous venting by semi-literate, anti-rationalists in her book The Age of American Unreason (which I finished over the holidays and will have more to say about later and elsewhere), I can't help but think she lives in a different blogosphere than I.

Heaven Help Us

Over at Enrevanche, Barry's post today struck a nerve. What follows is my comment, posted over at his place.

See? See, Buck especially? See? This is why I'm fed up with my former party. This is the same BS as claiming that Obama wants to teach kindergartners about sex. Low, dirty, shameful lies. Anyone who allows, "I'm (insert name here), and I approved this message," to go on the air with something like that can't be trusted to wash windshields at a stoplight, let alone serve in public office.

What shall I do? I dislike Obama's policies just slightly less than I despise McCain's, and now Dole's, tactics. Sitting on my file cabinet is a flag flown over the capital for me by Dole. Like Tommy Lee Jones's character from In the Valley of Elah I am tempted to fly it . . . upside down.

God help us all.

Why I'm Leaning Toward Obama

Leaning, mind you. Much can change in the next few weeks.

There is an axiom that goes, “Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” (And it was not Winston Churchill who said it, though he’s frequently given credit.) If it’s true, that axiom, then like most of my life, my politics are backwards.

I’ve been a lifelong Republican. I think, for the most part, I still agree with most Republican principles, though these days, I consider myself an Independent, sick to death of the false dichotomies which rule two-party politics. Politicians of either major party I find to be a lot like too many evangelical Christians I know, backed by a philosophy and principles I can understand and appreciate, but that have too little effect on their daily conduct.

I know that some people stress that a vote for party rather than person is, in effect, a proper vote for those principles. I’ve bellied up and bought into that in the past. I don’t think I can this year. As much as I find myself on the side of Republican principles, I don’t think I can find myself on the side of Senator John McCain. I think that probably, once upon a time, there was a man and warrior named John McCain who would say exactly the same thing about the person the politician has become.

The reason an ad hominem argument is considered a logical fallacy is that it substitutes attacks on an opponent’s character for worthwhile disputation on the issue(s). Admittedly, in a presidential race, character is an issue. Sadly though, every attack I’ve seen thus far (in mainstream ads or chain mails) on Obama’s character has done more to turn me against the attacker than against Obama. The end result has been to make me a somewhat reluctant Obama defender. And in those instances where the attacks have come from the official McCain campaign apparatus—the ones that finish with “I’m John McCain, and I approved this message”—those have convinced me, in the end, that McCain made a conscious decision at some point that honor was a thing he could dispense with in order to win the White House.

Earlier today, I got a link to a video from a good friend. I’ve not hyperlinked the foregoing phrase because I want to qualify the video before anyone heads off to it. About the most insightful thing you’ll find on the page with the video may be this comment left by someone who had seen the video earlier: “Just one more proof that racist, idiotic ideas are not the province of one race or gender. This guy is a nutcase and his momma was a nutcase if she instilled vicious racism into her son. Sickening.” I couldn't have said it better. While certain historical facts contained in the video rant you’ll find there may be truthful, the interpretation of them, laden with prejudice, name calling, and utterly despicable inferences about the character of a woman the speaker never knew, are worse than sickening.

And, as near as I can tell, a number of the historical assertions made about specific events are true, but the conclusions one draws from those events can vary widely. I don’t recommend watching the video, but if you do, and if you’re curious to know more about the facts behind it, I would suggest going here, to a January 2007 article in the Daily Mail. The gist of that article is that most of the assertions in the more recent video are true. So? (Of course, the Daily Mail itself deserves some qualification as a source. I had thought of lamenting that journalism is not what it used to be, but then I decided, more likely, it is exactly what it has always been. See here for information on the Daily Mail, including details of more than one episode of its having been sued for running stories that were less than factual. So it goes.)

I can hear some of my friends already protesting a double standard. “How can I take McCain to task,” they ask, “for furthering falsehoods about Obama, and yet let Obama off the hook for being less than truthful about his father?” Well, how shall I answer? Like so: In the one case the falsehoods are designed to make a political opponent appear a less decent, less admirable person than he probably is, and to attribute to him actions he didn’t take and views he doesn’t hold; in the other, the falsehoods are designed to cast a family member, the teller’s own father, in a better light than he probably deserves. Can you seriously question the difference in degree of these two falsehoods? For me, they are telling.

The argument can also be made that, in some ways, the somewhat mythical construct of father that Obama has offered to the public has more relevance to his character than does his true sire with all of his human flaws. Obama appears to have had a loving mother who, for whatever temptation she may have had to give Obama the brutal truth about the man who sired him (and I’m sure there were moments when she was tempted), gave him instead an image of a father that gave us the Obama whose fate voters will decide in November. The truth is that both are relevant: the real Barack Sr. and the maternally constructed absent-but-better man each had a role to play in the creation of Barack II.

The Daily Mail article offers two good reasons to suspect this, both equally related to the roots of Obama’s ambition:

A family friend said: "He is haunted by his father's failures. He grew up thinking of his father as a brilliant intellectual and pioneer of African independence only to learn that in Western terms he was basically a drunken lecher."

This ugly truth, say friends, has made Mr Obama ruthlessly determined to use every weapon that he has to succeed, including the glossily edited version of his father's story.

And the article's observation on a passage from The Audacity of Hope:

This tome contains one telling paragraph, in a section in which he fumbles to try to justify his abrupt leap into the national political arena: he is, he says, chronically 'restless'.

"Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady."

So, bottom line, while I might be a Republican at heart, in another month, I’m likely to cast a vote for character, and I find Obama’s more admirable, in the end, than McCain’s, or, more accurately, less suspect than what McCain, whatever he may once have been, has become. Because let’s face it, American politics of late has become even more a science of what to vote against than what to vote for.

Perhaps it was always so.

Betrayal, Free Will, and Cormac McCarthy

Over on The Extended Table, there was a conversation I missed back in April. My life lately has been a blur. I've commented little in the blogosphere and actually posted here even less. But the thread on this blog generated by the post on mercy below, led Piper to point out the earlier exchange over at his place. I eventually left a comment there, but rather than get long-winded on Piper's site, I decided to bring the bulk of my remarks here.

The aspect of his thread that generated the most thought for me was the assertion of one commenter that the why of "betrayal" wasn't necessarily important. That she had done something with good intention but bad result that left a friend feeling betrayed. For that commenter, as I understood her, this meant that she had betrayed that person. I disagree. Here's why.

I wrote an entire dissertation on Cormac McCarthy. Really, it was a very personal exploration of McCarthy's concept of God and man's relationship to him. I chose McCarthy because he seemed to put most of what I believed into words with far better skill than I could hope for. When I read that thread over at Piper's place, and that commenter's opinion on the seeming precedence of result over intent, I couldn't help but think back to my own work on McCarthy, his ideas, his fictional world, and how it applied.

Bottom line: intent is the important thing in truly establishing the character of an act.

But here, if you're interested, is the expanded version, extracted from my earlier writing:

Beginning with Judge Holden in Blood Meridian and continuing through Cities of the Plain with a varied cast of outspoken and occasionally somewhat unlikely philosophers, McCarthy gives voice to a system in which destiny is both real and immutable, a system which has governed events in McCarthy’s fictional worlds even before he gave voice to it through such spokespersons.

One important facet of such a system is a very Catholic belief that God (or Ben Telfair’s “something”) does know all that will be and has been, as well as every alternative that never was nor will be. While this system effectively negates man’s capacity to choose or control the course of events in actuality, it nevertheless preserves his illusion of choice. The key difference between man’s belief in choice and the fact of choice’s non-existence rests in the difference between consequence and intent. In this system, man can only intend. In such a system, the consequence of any act is destined before the act itself even takes place; therefore, the act is destined as well. But because man cannot foresee that consequence, the illusion of choice remains bright for him, and he believes that he chooses one path over another based on the consequence he intends to bring about. That the said consequence may or may not ever come to pass is beside the point. Intention is all. In intention rests free will. God has determined outcome. Man is nonetheless left free to intend what he will. This is the philosophy of McCarthy’s metaphysical spokespersons, and this is the reality of McCarthy’s fictional world.

When I wrote that, McCarthy wasn't still an unknown--he'd won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses. But he had still granted only one interview, ever. This was pre-Oprah, pre-Pulitzer. Maybe it's time to get to work on publishing that dissertation as a book. I've been a little distracted of late, but this "year of change" is half over. By Christmas, I should be settled into new routines. God only knows whether that will be the case or not, but I intend to be. ;-)

(I love the point in the interview where Oprah asks him, "You haven't worked out 'the God thing' or not, yet?" His reply: "Well," chuckling, "it would depend on what day you asked me." Ain't it the truth.)

Mercy Is Wasted on the Unremorseful

At dinner tonight, we played a few cards from a game called Table Topics. One of the questions to come up was, "Which is more important, justice or forgiveness?" My answer: it depends.

Why? Because sometimes, justice precludes forgiveness; and sometimes, forgiveness is justice.

An example: I knew a family once, shattered by the perfidy of someone in a position of trust. To this day, one member of that family thinks that another member of the family is "unforgiving" because of the grudge they bear the betrayer. I happen to disagree. The particular wolf in shepherd's clothing in question not only failed to show any regret for his actions, but as nearly as I can tell, has since moved on to even richer pastures for the plunder of innocents.

Asked for my opinion on the matter, I offered this: even God demands that we ask forgiveness, because even God understands that mercy is wasted on the unremorseful.

Constantine's Sword

An interesting article in today's Gazette opens with a single line, "Here we go again."

Well, yes and no. In so much as a new film, Constantine's Sword, can't help but put the USAF Academy and Colorado Springs in the national spotlight, yes, there is an inescapable sense of déjà vu. But in the sense of, "we've handled this and all is well so why won't people leave us alone now," I can only offer my favorite line in all of Hemingway as an answer: "Isn't it pretty to think so."

A separate article in the Gazette, makes much of the Academy's Superintendent's decision on Wednesday not to allow the showing of clips from the film at a "seminar" presentation by Mikey Weinstein, Ambassador Joe Wilson, and scholar Reza Aslan. The superintendent's decision becomes more understandable though when one considers that he had not seen the clips in question, and there can be little doubt that his inbox was inundated with e-mail following a press release by the Catholic League which announced, erroneously, that viewing the clips was mandatory for cadets and staff alike.

Yesterday, we issued a news release regarding the anti-Catholic movie ‘Constantine’s Sword,’ clips of which are being shown today at the Air Force Academy to some faculty and students; attendance is mandatory. Two new developments have convinced us that nothing less than a full-blown investigation of events on this campus will resolve this problem. That is why I am writing to the Board of Visitors of the USAFA to launch a probe of what is occurring; copies of this letter are being sent to their superiors on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. (Source)

Maybe Catholic League president Bill Donahue is a nice guy, but he's clearly a careless guy when it comes to the facts, and easily excitable, and the kind of person who keeps already strained staffs busy answering congressional questions about things that never really happened. The panel presentation at which the clips had been scheduled to air was never mandatory for anyone that I'm aware of. There is a tendency on the part of many to forget that while the military academies are military, they are also colleges, institutions of higher learning where the exchange of ideas is at least one of the primary objectives.

People who are going to wage electronic guerrilla warfare to suppress that exchange of ideas (in addition to the press release from which the quote above comes and which concluded with the e-mail address of the Academy's Director of Communications, the previous day's press release concluded with the e-mail address of the Superintendent himself) should take the time to get their facts straight. Given that the clips were subsequently suppressed (yes, I did in fact attend the seminar, freely and of my own volition, which began after a 20 minute delay rumored to be caused by the debate over showing or not showing the clips), I suppose one must congratulate Mr. Donahue on his success. And one can only hope that he follows through on his promise (in yet another press release) to write yet more letters to those same authorities above and tell them he considers the matter closed. Right. Like that ever works.

But back to that opening of the Gazette article, "Here we go again," and its implied weariness with an issue it implies is behind us. It gets even better. To be completely fair (and to put the deconstructionist's scapel to good use), what the opening paragraph really implies is that the issue ("religious discrimination and overt Christian proselytizing at the Air Force Academy from 2003 to 2005") never actually existed. Instead, Mark Barna writes for the Gazette that, "Nearly one-third of 'Constantine’s Sword' is devoted to a scandal over reports of" those things. Not the fact of those things, or even the scandal over those things, but "a scandal over reports of." Meaning to or not, I think Barna just one-upped Plato's shadows on the wall of the cave. It's a crafty castration (and I recognize that in saying so I may be giving Barna more credit for skill and intent than he deserves), but it's a castration nonetheless, subtly diminishing the point that the film's Oscar-nominated director and the book's National-Book-Award-winning author are trying to make.

So why am I even bringing this issue up here, having not yet even seen the film myself. Two reasons.

First, I believe that if there is any single element of the human condition which should possess the capability of drawing tears from the eyes of God Himself, it should be the relentless slaughter of one human by another that is constantly taking place in His holy name, however those on either side choose to conceive Him.

Second, I believe that better than 90% of what Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have to say is dead right, despite the fact that Mikey is utterly offensive in his promotion of it 90% of the time.

And I could say more about either of those things, but I'm out of time for today.

"The Friend of Your Youth," Revisited

Back on 30 August, the seventh anniversary of the passing of the best friend I made during three years of high school, my post was primarily a meditation on friendship, but it also included the text of the eulogy I read at my friend's funeral. Only two paragraphs into that remembrance, I leaned on a quote from All the Kings Men, by Robert Penn Warren, to help me explain the special bond that we shared:

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will every have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist any more, speaks a name--Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave--which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night . . . the Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you any more.

I find myself now forced to reconsider the appropriateness of those words. I pointed out, even then, that they were only partly true--that Randall and I never really became strangers to one another. I now recognize that the phenomenon I have in mind when I consider Randall, and a grand total of about three other men I know (and two women), is a thing completely different from Warren's "Friend of Your Youth." What it shares with Warren's concept is that backdrop of shared youthful experiences, trials, and growth that no later bonds can encompass or sometimes even comprehend. Where it departs from Warren is in the depth of connection I have in mind. A better explanation of that facet was captured in one of my favorite quotes from Richard Bach's, Illusions: "Your friend will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintance will know you in a thousand years." Occasionally, rarely, for some even never, one finds those two concepts conflating. I have had a blessed life. Oh, there have been trials, disasters even, nearly always of my own causing, but I have friends, more than one, where those two descriptions meet.

Perhaps the best way of explaining what that means is to dwell for a moment on the principal quality of reunions with such friends. The predominant theme of Warren's concept seems to be a sort of tolerance--a polite humoring of "the drooling doddering confusion of the universe." And, now that I recognize that, I find myself feeling sad for Warren, especially if he believed what he wrote (and all the "unreliable narrators" in the world can never fully enable one to do otherwise). Bach, on the other hand, seems to recognize that your true friend is that person from whom estrangement is never really possible, even before you have met. That is the sort of friend Randall was.

The hallmark of such a friendship is that polite tolerance never enters the picture, nor would the words "boring," nor "not too happily met" ever come into play. Reunion with such a friend is more like coming back together with a piece of yourself that you had forgotten was missing. You feel suddenly whole again. These are the friends who, from the moment you met, at whatever age, saw within you some essential self that transcends all the masks we wear for the world: father, lover, spouse, commander, teacher, student, citizen. We all are many different people at different times, but within us all is something that infuses, informs and animates all those other selves.

Essentially, what occurs with such friends is an inversion of Ahab's mission in his quest for Moby Dick. In chapter 36, Ahab explains, somewhat, his hatred of Moby Dick to Starbuck, the Pequod’s first mate: “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.” (Melville was not happy with God, in whatever form he conceived Him, and Ahab here is Melville's spokesman.) The friendships I have in mind, turn this entire dynamic on its head. Perhaps the first requirement for such a friendship is that both parties begin with a more charitable view of the Almighty Himself, or of whatever Force they credit for pervading the universe and all life in it. Because what such friends see in us, celebrate in us, treasure in us is that thing which is inscrutable to others, but which they see clearly, without needing to strike through any mask. And that thing is unchanging, even when we ourselves lose touch with it or forget its nature. The joy that we feel in the company of our true friends originates in the role they play in facilitating the emergence of that best self. And the overwhelming joy we feel in reunion with those friends after lengthy separation is, in some ways, as much a joy at reunion with ourselves as with them.

In its literal translation, the Sanskrit word Namasté means, "I bow to you," but in its widely accepted and richer connotations, the expression has come to encompass much more, one version of which is, "The Divinity within me perceives and adores the Divinity within you." That is a lot to claim of most instances when it is passed between people on meeting or parting, as it is frequently in some communities, especially those who practice yoga for instance. It is then, I think, more a statement of an idealized goal, an aspiration, than a statement of fact. But between the sort of friends I have in mind, it is more or less the perfect word, for it captures, I think, exactly the essence of that bond.

And so, to my friends as a statement of fact, and to my acquaintances as a longed for goal . . . Namasté.

Postscript: As with every really decent contemplation I post here, this one too is inspired by life. I spent the last few days in Montgomery, Alabama. We flew there with the intention of parachuting into the graduation parade for a class of freshly minted Air Force lieutenants, but on both the day of the practice and the day of the parade, a cloud layer less than a thousand feet thick from top to bottom parked itself over the intended drop zone. At 2000 ft above the ground, we were just below the clouds, but too low to exit and safely open. At 3000 ft above the ground, the sky was blue for miles as we skimmed along the tops of that cloud layer, unable to see more than brief glimpses of the ground. So, a couple of hours in the air, all dressed up, and no place to go. But the trip was far from a total loss. We pinned a medal on the graduate for whom we had made the trip--a former enlisted staff member of our squadron. And I spent two evenings, the first in 16 years, in the company of one of those rarest of friends, in whose company I have always had the honor of truly perceiving the Divinity in another, and through him, within myself.

"It Ain't Conceit If It's True"

Way back in high school, in the Old North State, where Driver's Ed was (and still is) a required course and paid for through your taxes, I had a teacher who said basically two things that have stuck through all these years. One was, "I'll let you know when I quit rockin'," always said in response to, "All clear," at an intersection following a stop in which too heavy a foot on the brake caused too sudden a stop. Sarcasm, you see, is a tool in almost every teacher's bag. It stuck. Thirty-two years later, I remember Mr. Stikeleather as I patiently wait for my own daughter to master the gentle lessening of pressure on the brake that produces a smooth stop.

The other thing he was fond of saying whenever we young bucks gave him a hard time for his surplus of self-confidence was, simply, "It's not conceit if it's true." That stuck too, and oddly enough, I've had occasion to use it once or twice in my life.

It comes to mind tonight though, in a corollary form.

This is going to be, without a doubt, the most profoundly sad Christmas of my life thus far. (I'll not say "ever," because I know better than to tempt fate in that way.) I've been a little worried about myself lately, and about one of my very closest and dearest friends. I think, though, that Stikeleather's Maxim should serve to put my mind somewhat at rest, and likewise, the minds of my friends. I think that my cigar-chewing, Old Spice-wearing driver's ed teacher would argue that it ain't clinical depression if there's an acute external cause for it. We are entitled to our sadness, that close friend and I, even more thoroughly than our normally abundant self-confidence. She even more than I, on both counts.

I have held this post for days, wondering about the propriety of revelations so personal, both to myself and to, quite probably, the best friend of the opposite gender I am ever likely to know in this lifetime. But I am a great believer in the power of (insert your own word for it here). For some, the word is prayer--they credit the intensity of one person's supplications or the overwhelming volume of many simultaneous pleas with somehow bending the will of the Almighty to give divine attention to a mortal purpose that He might otherwise not have deigned to notice. I choose not to believe His purpose so malleable nor Him so needful of our efforts to direct His attention where most required. I choose, instead, to believe that our own wills and attention have power we are unaware of, and that our lack of awareness lessens that power not one whit. I believe that when many of us are concentrating on a single outcome--as when many people pray (genuinely, with great focus and earnestness) for someone's deliverance from a thing, be it sickness, addiction, or grief--that very real energies are contributed to bringing that outcome about. Call me a flake if you wish, but I will point out that no good Christian, Muslim, or Jew doubts the power of prayer to bring these things about through such efforts. The primary difference between my view of how it works and theirs is that I give both God and Man more credit than those who believe He can be thus bargained with. The result is the same, only the conception of the mechanism differs. I explain all of this because I am going to share what I do for a reason I will explain at the end.

In my case, the sadness to which Stikeleather's Maxim entitles me is grief for the end of a 20-year marriage. Even more than the disintegration of romance that causes my own heart to ache, I grieve the disintegration of stability and concurrent uncertainty about the future that weighs on my children's hearts. Every single thing in this holiday season that should be a source of joy is become a heavy thing instead, bathed in a finality that partakes of every memory back through two decades and shrouds each event or task in a pall far more bitter than sweet. Only one thing lessens that effect: because I knew a year ago that my oldest daughter would be leaving for school this past summer, I was aware even then of a certain finality about most events a full season ago--last time choosing a tree together as a family; last Thanksgiving all at the same table, for years at least. But I did not expect last year's yule to be even the penultimate Christmas morning waking under one roof. That, I expected to fend off a few more years yet, until marriage or engagement drug one or both of my children to some other hearth hung with stockings. But, it was that penultimate thing nonetheless, and that makes this one . . . sad.

But my grief pales, even in my own mind, next to my friend's. In a span of mere months--a span far, far too short--her healthy, active mother was diagnosed with a disease that my friend, the real doctor, knew would end her life. But used to being exceptional in every way, in no small part by virtue of coming from exceptional stock, my friend expected her mother, I know, to enjoy the generous end of that range oncologists give in answer to the inevitable, "How long?" But this time, it wasn't to be.

And because it came suddenly and in stark contrast to what I know she had expected, my friend is lost now, stuck in a place between worlds like Neo at the beginning of the final installment of The Matrix. There is the world that was but is no more. That world included a mother's comforting touch and voice and assurances--things even we nearly-half-century-old folk still need to lean on from time to time. And there is the world that will be, eventually, where my friend embraces her own assumption of that role, and recognizes that in every kind word or deed however small, in every child's injury attended, in every young mother's doubts assuaged, in every fine thing that she does for her husband that makes him aware of and grateful for her love, in every quiet secret, unrecognized as such, passed to her daughter or her sons about what it is to be a woman or a man, in every moment of considerate counsel, gracefully given or received with friends--in all these actions and moments, her mother lives on through her, and will live on through every life she touches. That world and her embracing of it, will be, but it is not now, not yet.

Now is the dark time, the lost time, the time of grief and inward wandering where all the things that she will one day recognize as her mother's continued presence are now the sharp and painful reminders of her too sudden and too new absence. This dark time, this place between worlds is a boundary that must be crossed. Even those who seem to deal with the loss of a beloved parent without passing through this valley eventually come back to it. The danger is in stopping, in looking back with such intensity and regret that one ceases to move forward to that brighter place where the person we loved so much and miss so much becomes, finally, a quality of the light in our smile, an overtone or harmonic in our laughter, and the breeze that rejuvenates our soul in our silences. Sometimes, making it through that valley requires more strength than we think we possess. It's those times when the prayers of all our religious friends and the concentrated attention of all our spiritual ones sustains us.

And that is why I'm sharing all of this here. For my religious friends, this amounts to a prayer request. For my spiritual friends, this is an invitation to focus your meditations on a heart that needs them. For my friends who are neither, this is an invitation to practice a new skill you may not have known you had. And it is not for myself I ask. There are gullies in my path these days, but few that I can't see over the edge of. My friend, though, is journeying through a darker vale with tall, steep sides, and I'm not sure the light at the other end is visible yet. Pray for her. Think of her. Send energy her way.

There was an episode of the original Star Trek titled "Requiem for Methuselah," which ended with Spock easing Kirk's grief through a mind meld and a single word, "Forget." I would not wish forgetfulness on my friend. What I would pray for, visualize, will into existence is not forgetfulness, but a different character of remembrance--one in which joy is the dominant emotion, in which the bitter no longer overwhelms the sweet, but serves as foil to deepen it. One which recognizes that remembering with joy is the greatest honor we can do those we loved and the greatest lesson we can teach to those we love still, for in doing so we school them on how to remember us, because our time will come, and sooner than we think.

Don't hesitate in this holiday season to reach out and touch one another. And I mean that literally. Shake a hand, wrap a friend in a full-bodied bear hug, hold a face in your palm while you tell someone that you love them. Life is short, and the only immortality we can be certain of is woven from the lives we touch.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I have never been so grateful for my friends as I am just now. Thank you all.

"Things can always get worse." -- Cormac McCarthy, in Suttree

I had drafted a post on a very personal sadness today, but I think I will defer to a more public and profound one that unfolded only two and a quarter miles from where I sit typing this in my home:

Sun Dec 9, 9:28 PM ET
DENVER (Reuters) - Three people were shot to death and six were wounded in Colorado on Sunday in two church-related shootings in the U.S. Christian heartland.

More Conroy

I'm two thirds of the way through The Lords of Discipline, and just needed to share the following quote, which is like much in McCarthy, and expressive of a concept around which Kevin McColley fashioned an entire novel, called Praying to a Laughing God. From Conroy:

"I have read too much history, Mr. McLean," he said, moving past Vanderhorst Row. "And it has depressed me about my fellow man."

"Why has it depressed you, sir?" I asked.

"Because the single theme of human existence is atrocity, sir. Even the most casual perusal of the subject would tell you that. Anything that man can do that will irreparably harm his fellow man, he will certainly do. I can close my eyes, Mr. McLean, close them this instant on this very pleasant walk, and my brain will come alive with horrendous, unspeakable images of heinous crimes men have performed against other men. Nothing surprisese me anymore. Nothing shocks me. I have reached the point in my life when I am seized with an utter hopelessness about the human race. And you, sir," he said, fixing his gaze on me, "how do you feel about the race that violates this lovely planet?"

"I like human beings all right, Colonel," I said, "better than wart hogs or sting rays, anyway."

"I assure you, cad, that you would receive far more justice and mercy from a wart hog than from one of the monstrous chimps who wears a black robe and sits in judgment against his fellow man. The God that created man in his own image, Mr. McLean, must be a vile, unconscionable being. Or he must be highly amused by depravity." --p. 395

Mother Teresa: Doubts of a Saint

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? --Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

I first came to Blood Meridian, at a time when the doubts in my own soul were at their darkest. Actually, I misspoke. I came to that book at a time when doubt had yielded to darker certainty. That, as much as anything, drew me to McCarthy. By the time I got to The Crossing, and the heretic of Caborca, it was as though I was reading about myself.

It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him. --The Crossing p. 149

It has been a long slow recovery from certainty to the more optimistic condition of mere doubt.

So it was with some sense of kinship (make no mistake--I'm well aware that I am no saint) that I read today's news about the darkness which haunted Mother Teresa.

It began, she said, soon after she set up her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in the late 1940s to succor India’s poor. And it lasted, with only a joyous five-week respite in 1959 when she refound God, until her death at age 87, a decade ago.

“There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work,’” she wrote in 1953.

What is one to do, then, laboring under such a burden? Where find some solace? If we are to judge from the life of Mother Teresa, there is something to be said for doing what one can for others. I understand that drive too. In 1982, smarting from the disintegration of a marriage, the brevity of which set a standard that Britney Spears only barely surpassed, I decided that the best way to move my focus from my own pathetic self-pity was to volunteer for a community crisis hotline in the small town where I bought my first house. It worked. I heard things, and talked people through things, that pretty quickly reminded me that my life was pretty damned good, all-in-all.

Which brings me to my questions for today: how does one one-up a mere hotline? How resist the urge to call down the lightning as does Ahab, haunted by equally dark certainties? How strike through the mask, and at what? Where does one find answers to the questions Suttree asks? That McCarthy asks through Suttree?

It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me? --Suttree, p. 366

Where seek the confidence to answer in the affirmative the boy's question in The Road, "Are we still the good guys?" Where?

And in the meantime, while we seek?

Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones. --Suttree, p. 29

Edmund Ladouceur, one of my heroes

The last news article to attract my attention in today's Gazette announced the retirement, again, of one of the true heroes from my youth.

Edmund Ladouceur was the director of the Cadet Catholic Choir at the USAF Academy and probably one of the reasons I survived that four years. Every Sunday morning, and one night during the week when we would practice between the evening meal and Academic Call to Quarters, I shared the pleasure of his company with the rest of us who were fortunate enough to call him, simply, "Mr. L."

I came late to Mr. L's fold, having been reared a Lutheran in a part of North Carolina where there may have been one Catholic church in the whole county. I sang in choir from the time I was seven until I left for Colorado. Once there, I immediately joined the Protestant choir. I spent two years in that choir, singing every Sunday for a "non-denominational" Protestant service that didn't really much resemble what I was used to. But the setting was beautiful (the Cadet Chapel was once the most visited architectural landmark in all of Colorado; pictures here) and singing was my chosen mode of worship back then, so I was happy enough.

Then, during one evening rehearsal, the Protestant choir director threw a mini-temper tantrum not much worse than many others we'd learned to take in stride. The difference this time was that a particularly gentle-spirited soprano--on whom I had the kind of crush that just watching her elfin face from a distance was enough to make another week at The Blue Zoo tolerable--did not take that tantrum in stride. She walked out of the rehearsal. She didn't come back. Not to Protestant service and not to choir. In a supporting action, the exact motivation of which we won't begin to dissect here, I quit as well. But, for us both I suspect, choir was, as I said above, the way we worshipped. A couple of weeks later, I learned that she had joined the Catholic choir. "Why don't you?"

Catholic? Me? Uh, isn't that in Latin? It seems funny now, but remember, I wasn't yet even 20, and I don't know if I'd ever been within five hundred yards of a Catholic church before arriving in Colorado Springs.

So, one Sunday, I sort of snuck in the back to see what a service was like, fearing at the time, I think, that I might be captured and sacrificed before the service was over. It was like coming home. The service was much more like the Lutheran service I had grown up with than anything I'd seen in almost two years upstairs (the Catholic population at the Academy being smaller, the Catholic chapel is one floor below the much larger Protestant space). Having made that first step, I next found the courage to ask the Catholic Choir Director, Edmund Ladouceur, a man my father's age, if, perhaps, I might be allowed to audition for the Catholic choir. The rest, as they say, is history.

But it is history that literally mists my eyes even as I type this. I have never known a kinder man in my entire life. He was like my own father in that regard. And for the next two years, if I needed a fatherly ear in that era when a call from Colorado to North Carolina cost enough that I only made them every other week, Mr. L. was always happy to provide it--for me or for any of the hundreds of us who, through the years, have found ourselves so fortunate to owe him so much.

The happiest moments of my four-year career as a cadet were spent in his company in one way or another. I suspect most of us who knew him would say the same. From my first taste of Bailey's Irish Cream after a dinner with his family at his home to opening our road show with my best Neil Diamond impersonation, that choir and its director were the only things I ever missed about life at that place. He says in the article that his years at the academy were so busy that he "sort of neglected" his own kids. I hope they didn't feel that way. He seemed to me then, and now, like a man whose heart was more bountiful than the loaves and fish.

There are rare people you meet who touch your heart and make you a better person, the world a better place, and your life a richer experience in every way. Edmund Ladouceur is one of those people. I'll be surprised if there's room for everyone to get in the door at his final service next Sunday.

I'll let you know.

Purely physical prayers.

In the "How's that again?" category, last weekend our local fishwrapper, The Gazette, ran an article on a new Christian-acceptable version of yoga, called "Praise Moves." Now, my spouse is a certified yoga instructor and takes great pains to insure that her classes not offend any religion, for she has students that run the gamut. Yoga, per se, is not a "religion," but I can understand why some fundamentalist churches are frightened by it. So I don't mind that they feel a need to set up and advertise classes for Christians that are hyper-sensitive to the spiritual aspects of such a practice. But tell me, am I the only one that notices a conflict between the closing two sentences in the following quote:

Second Baptist’s fitness center in west Houston offers 'flexible strength' classes as an alternative. Teachers make sure that it’s understood the class is purely physical, he said. Bible passages and prayers are generally used.

Run that by me one more time.