MaybeToday.org

This year sucked. It began with my little sister’s funeral, and ended with a malaise lingering on from my mother’s funeral.

For my sister, Mary, death came quickly, and then it came slowly. She was very busy living a vibrant life, when she was suddenly smitten with a terminal cancer. Then she spent a year and a half dying. She tried to keep up the appearances of optimism, but everyone around her knew how the dance was going to end; we just didn’t know quite when. When it came, death came slowly, bleeding her life away as her ministering aunt and other loved ones waited in vigil for the end, which came in the third watch of the night after Christmas Day. She was 49, and left no children to carry her line forward on the Earth.

For my mother, Edna, death came slowly, and then it came quickly. Dying at 79, she had lived a good and full life, touching the lives of many, and leaving a legacy of kindness that, pray God, will redound to her name for generations, even when she herself is forgotten. Having been born with a collapsed lung, her breathing organ was never quite right, and she’d been living with a progressive case of acute Pulmonary Fibrosis for some time, before she up and died on us. Of course, we knew it was coming sooner or later, and she had gotten “old” recently, but still it seemed to come almost out of the blue. True, she had given us a scare the day before, and the family spent Sunday afternoon in the emergency room, wondering if she’d perhaps had a stroke, but she seemed fine by afternoon, had checked out OK medically, and was sent home in the evening. On Monday morning, she died. Just like that. It was October 3rd, the original feast day of St Therese of Lisieux, the saint credited by the family with saving Mom’s life as a newborn, and whose name she was thus given in tribute.

Whatever else may have happened this year seems almost lost in the shadows of these two bookends of death & grief. I’ve looked upon the sorrowful , resigned faces of yet a couple more friends who have had their verdicts of terminal cancer pronounced to them. I’ve watched dozens of co-workers jettisoned from their source of material well-being, as the business world atrophies under corporate & government mismanagement and corruption. I’ve seen the U.S. government run up a debt of unprecedented magnitude – one poised to crush the commonweal of my children and their peers – for the sake of a filched political placidity, while the ruling party successfully smeared the opposition as extremist and non-cooperative for the sin of (futilely) demanding a roadmap to fiscal sanity as the price for complicity in the mortgaging of the futures of those we have a moral duty to protect & defend. Shameful.

As for myself, I can’t get out of my own way: I had targeted early December for completion of my prerequisite course work at Franciscan University, but have been scuffling badly since mid-October, and don’t even know how to get back on track at this point.

On the bright side, this was the year that Joyce leveraged her imposed unemployment into an opportunity to pursue her long-time desire to get into professional dog grooming. The Boston Bruins are suddenly the best hockey team in the world for the first time since I could sing alto, and last spring they gave us one of the greatest hockey games I’ve ever seen (Game 7 of the Conference Finals against Tampa Bay).

Furthermore, as of yet at least, no crowd of self-entitled, self-righteous, unemployed ne’er-do-wells have converged to “occupy” my backyard, demanding that I succor them by paying off their insane student loans for stupidly bloated college tuitions I could never afford for either myself or my own kids (we found other ways to achieve what we needed to achieve). That’s a plus. And I still have my own job; my kids are all healthy and safe; we’re coming up on a leap-year – which means a “real” anniversary for Joyce and I on Feb 29th; Congress reversed the moronic ban on incandescent light bulbs; and Rick Santorum actually appears to have an outside shot at winning the Iowa caucuses, putting the only candidate I actually like from the Republican field in a position to at least temporarily receive some media attention before the big-money candidates get around to burying him under a torrent of glitzy drivel (OK, I also really like and admire Michelle Bachmann, but I’m afraid she would be almost as out-of-her-league in that job as Obama is, speaking of torrents of glitzy drivel from big-money candidates…).

And, lastly, the garage ceiling light bulb is still burning faithfully, almost 40 years after being installed. Yes, the very same light bulb that greeted my mother and father the first time they illuminated their new garage with electricity in June of 1972 continues to shine its light every time I flip the switch. To me, it’s become a symbol of faithfulness and perseverance, and it reminds me unfailingly of my dad. Would that we all could be relied upon so faithfully, as that bulb, to shine forth the light entrusted to us for the sake of others’ seeing their way in the world! I dread the day that bulb blows; I pray it’s not in 2012.

Happy New Year, planet Earth. Choose carefully; choose well. Peace, from here.

I’ve been in an intellectual vapor lock since my mom passed away, on October 3rd. I almost called it an intellectual constipation, but, regardless of how apropos it may be, I didn’t think that would reflect very well on my typical output.

Nonetheless, it’s been very difficult for me to get anything done. No surprise, I suppose, that I’d become depressed in my grief. But even when I’m feeling relatively well, I’m having a hard time pulling the trigger on anything. I’m barely keeping my head above water staying prepared for teaching an 8th-grade CCD class on morality, and my own course work schedule with FUS has fallen hopelessly behind plan for the semester, as I find myself unable to clearly recall what I’ve read even as I’m reading it. Even modest writing assignments – such as a short theological reflection on Veritatis Splendor – have become titanic chores for which I cannot even find a starting point.

But it’s a new year now, as of yesterday, on the Church’s calendar. And so it’s time to pick up the pieces and move on. 2011 was a year of profound loss for me, but it’s also left me with a much more penetrating sense of how short life is, how little time any of us really have to set and accomplish meaningful goals, and how frail and tenuous is our part in the legacy of civilization’s march. More than ever, I see that personal influence – especially upon children – will bear the most significant legacy for most of us, whether for good or for ill.

It’s Advent now, and an appropriate time to be aware that the time is short; that the end is coming – in one way or another – and that the wise will be prepared. That’s easier said than done – but saying it is at least some kind of start.

Rummaging through some old journals this week while taking a measure of introspection, I came across the following in an entry from March 29th, 1990. I’ve cleaned it up a bit for publication, but it remains essentially the thought of my 29 year-old self. Reading old journals is a fascinating exercise in self-awareness, but I’m throwing them out, anyway…

Who has time to listen? Running around in hectic disarray, death edges closer to each of us by the minute, yet who has time to stop to listen? What would we hear if we did?

Common wisdom has it that we lead such frantic lives on account of a constant, oppressive sense that time is so short. I can no longer believe that. It seems to me these harried ways of ours reflect feeble and vain attempts to dissuade the inevitable. We busy ourselves in order to defy the inevitable, like a man fleeing from the sunset: he knows the sun is setting in the west, so he flees to the east to escape it, only to be caught all the more by surprise.

A man who takes the time, now, to slow down and enjoy the moment, which is our life as we live it now, must realize that he he may not have the time to do so later; whereas a man who won’t take the time now appears to be foolishly assuming that he will certainly have the time later. We’re not this frantically busy because life is so short, it would seem; rather we act like this because we want to believe we’ll go on forever, because we are so afraid of death.

But isn’t it quite strange to be so afraid of death? Death is the universal constant. All living beings – even those never born – suffer death. This death, physical death, is therefore more synonymous with life than is birth. Death’s singular inevitability makes it a rather strange object for our deepest fears. When we fear death, we fear certainty; when we fear certainty, we fear truth; when we fear truth, surely we fear God.

The psalmist said that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and certainly nobody suggests that we should leap willy-nilly to our own destruction, or pretend that death does not involve the demise of the self on some important level.

All the same, fearing the inevitable, and acting as if it were not knocking on our doors every moment, seems a futile exercise in self-delusion – it is as if we fear life itself, or at least the process of life. Better, it seems, to embrace death – not as a tool of destruction to inflict on oneself or those whose existence one finds intolerable, but as an enemy who surely will win the battle, yet not the war.

The way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. The great modern activists of non-violence have demonstrated this clearly. If we allow it, death will terrorize us into failing to embrace life in the moment, although our busyness will never stay the executioners hand. But I suppose the steadiness necessary to look death in the eye without flinching or trying to hide from it requires a certain confidence that death will not have the last word, despite all appearances. So be it.

Having reached the end of my second Franciscan University course a couple weeks ago following a mad rush of activity, I’ve found myself wandering a bit aimlessly, contemplating my next move. Over the weekend, I ended up rummaging through a series of old journal entries from the mid-90’s, and came across a handful of comments I’d like to save from the dustbin:

I was able to drive more sanely today. I have many such improvements in mind.
3/5/96

It’s important to make your life worth living; it’s important to live for something worth dying for.
3/5/96

A prayer life is the essential difference between living a truly human life, and living a charade.
9/2/96

The problem with me and drinking is that they’re mutually exclusive.
9/13/96

Once upon a time, I stood up firmly for my beliefs. But that was when I was a rebel: it’s easy to be staunchly egotistical.
9/22/96

I was thinking about change, about repentance, about awareness of sin, and humility. It dawned on me that repentance, or change for the better, is nothing more than being open to a movement toward truth which one already possesses – or apprehends. Repentance, which is spiritual growth, never comes about (never?) as from an outside force, but rather is nothing more than allowing oneself to be convicted of the truth one already apprehends – and which is generally apprehended apprehensively!

This movement brings one closer to the real source of truth, Christ, and consequently opens one up to yet new apprehension of truth – which yet again demands either conversion or aversion. To avert the truth is to refuse and deny repentance. Contrariwise, to confront the truth is to be constantly faced with the perceived need for conversion. Anyone with any experience in that genuine change for the good becomes, as it were, immune to that type of pride which is oblivious of humility. For the one who knows repentance, and who lives a life of spiritual growth, humility is a no-brainer. It is not so much that humility makes repentance possible, as that repentance makes the lack of humility downright impossible. Hence humility grows with repentance, not vice-versa. And spiritual growth is growth in humility.
12/2/96

So begins what is perhaps the toughest week of the year for me. The annual screwing up of the clocks began yesterday, and if history is any teacher, it will take me a week or so to regain my equilibrium. Until then, I pay the price. And I’m not the only one: my early-morning-bird daughter Rebecca did not get out of bed until 9:00 (pretend time) this morning, having become obviously discombobulated over the weekend (and not being able to get to sleep until after 10:00 PM last night). In either a stroke of good luck or of insightful planning, her school had no session today, in order to hold a staff development day, so she was able to sleep in.

There has always been something inherently absurd in this collective pretending that it is a different time than it actually is, but the practice took on Markeyesque inanity a few years ago, when pretend time was extended in duration in the U.S. – not long, I might add, after parts of the rest of the world adopted the silliness. The cost in IT conformance of this clever boondoggle was ridiculous – and many systems still don’t work right for a few weeks. But, now the beginning of this formerly springtime ritual has been pushed back into the last couple weeks of winter – and hence into Lent.

I guess it was four years ago when I decided to make a Lenten commitment to attending Mass daily. My parish was offering an early-morning Mass at 6:30 AM for the season during the work week, and it seemed like a good discipline. I was completely exhausted by the end of Lent, but I soon missed daily Mass so much that I figured out a more sustainable means of participating regularly, and have gratefully done so ever since. But I’d also volunteered to read one morning each week during that 2006 Lenten season, and now I continue to be asked each year to read, though I otherwise rarely attend the early Mass now. I’m reading on Thursdays this year. So when Thursday morning comes around this week, at 6:30 Pretend Time (5:30 AM, in reality), I will ascend the two short steps toward the altar, and approach the ambo to proclaim the Word… if I can see straight. I’ll need toothpicks to keep my eyelids open on my homeward commute, twelve hours or so later.

I can understand why lots of people like to get up earlier in the summertime to get their work done early, so they can relax in the late daylight. But why do we need to collectively agree to pretend it’s actually later than it really is when we do so? And why do we need the government essentially forcing it on us – especially in the winter (as if it really matters what time of year it is when the government decides that it’s not what time of day it is).

I understand that any attempt to fit time into a taxonomy is an exercise in practicality that necessarily involves some level of hubris, but the traditional division of the day – even including the timezone concept – reflects a pragmatism of cooperation, a kind of common framework or language that allows people to understand each other. Daylight Saving Time, by contrast, reflects not a pragmatism of cooperation, but a manipulative capitalization on the dependence such cooperation has created across society. It’s an abuse of the taxonomy of time. I really think people can work out their own schedules – whether individually or in groups – without Congress declaring that Noontime will henceforth and until further notice occur at precisely one hour past Noon.

MaybeToday.org turned two years old last Monday (March 1st). The occasion passed with little notice. Considering how much I had planned to write and post last month, and how much I actually produced (oops), I suppose I’m not surprised.

I spent the evening out with my wife, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. Having been married on Feb 29th, we usually get our choice of dates on which to celebrate the remembrance, but we very rarely wait until the 1st. I guess I launched the site the day after our anniversary in 2008 – I don’t recall being cognizant of the proximity of the dates, though I surely must have been (March 2nd is a birthday in our house, as well).

We had a nice dinner at Restaurant 45 in Medway, and as is customary on the occasion, it served as a quiet opportunity for recollection, reflection on the past, and a taking stock of how things are going. On the drive home up Rt. 16, while passing a road in Holliston which I used to travel daily to Framingham when we were living in Milford and I was working at General Chemical, it struck me how life experiences very often seem to have an import amplified in proportion to how early in life they occur.

In other words, it seemed like that left onto Brook Street, picking up Western Ave through Sherborn to the southeastern outskirts of Framingham, led to a road so many times traveled that I should be able to find my tire marks worn into the pavement – like an old friend with whom I share so many stories. Likewise, the whole experience of working at General Chemical looms rather largely in the scope of my composite memory of the path my life has taken to the present. But I worked there for only about three years, back in my early twenties. In contrast, I’ve sat a year longer than that in my current office, which is merely the most recent of five offices I’ve occupied in my current building, which is the fourth building I’ve worked out of for my present employer (in some permutation or another) over the past fourteen years. Yet, in terms of being a perceived life episode, I’d have a hard time not seeing the earlier experience as more life-defining.

The high school experience is another glaring example of what I’m referring to. The four years I spent in high school can almost be viewed as four distinct episodes in my life, each imparting a major impact on my life’s journey (or development, if you prefer) in numerous ways. Even the summers back then seem like they were so much longer, so much more decisive. I hesitate to say that time just doesn’t seem as interesting anymore – Lord knows I’d be somewhere between bored stiff and embarrassed to death if I had to relive a day of the inanity that was my adolescent life – but it might have something to do with the relative lack of crises in my life these days. The occasional heart attack notwithstanding, I lead a pretty crisis-free existence these days, and perhaps that equanimity just lends itself to a general dialing-down of the memory-experience meter. Perhaps our memory is a drama that, lacking dramatics, tends toward quietude and stillness. 

Or maybe I’m just stumbling upon another angle to the age-old truism that life seems to accelerate as we age. But I’ve never heard of anyone trying to recapture their forties or fifties, no matter how old they get. One needn’t look far to find people aching to recover their lost adolescence, though. I don’t believe youth offers the vitality we tend to ascribe to it – at least not beyond the physical robustness that aging breaks down. In the life of the mind – in the living-ness of life, in our relationships, our imagining and thinking, and our willing, both loving and sinning – youthfulness is such a crude exactor of purpose, crying out for perfection to wisdom and prudence. And yet, time flies…

Today was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I’ve been fittingly pensive and reflective lately, almost to the point of feeling haunted. This is a time of year that used to fill me with energy, but these days seems more likely to leave me thinking about lost opportunities. I became starkly aware last night, while driving downtown to teach my CCD class, of how short a fuse I was on, and how much stress I was feeling. That’s not a good thing for me, and I quickly had to coax myself back off the ledge.

Thinking about how to go about lowering my stress level, I considered how helpful it might be to tune out the political environment, and focus on matters of a less agitated character. As tempting as that may be, it hardly seems the responsible thing to do, and would be easier said than done anyhow. At the end of the day, I have to live in the middle of it all, as does everyone I care about. I may be powerless to effect any real change in the world, but within my tiny little circle of influence, I am not free of the obligation to shed whatever light I may be able to on the greater or lesser questions of the day.

And so I’m left to confront the daily anxiety of backwards-looking regrets and forward-looking resignations. It dawns on me that I’ve never quite come to peace with myself following the crisis of my second coronary stent procedure, almost two years ago to the day. The first one, in May, had almost killed me, but I walked away from it with a sense of relief, feeling I had dodged a bullet, and ready to work my way back to health. But the prospect of the second one, several months later, felt like the bullet I’d dodged had, like a heat-seeking missile, turned around to come back for me. It was a humbling experience: half-expecting to die, unwilling to let anyone know how pessimistic I was, and dumbstruck at the profound chasm between what my life had been, and what it should have been.

And yet the ensuing two years have found me, in many ways, digging the same grave I was working on before: burning the candle at both ends, and allowing busy-ness to trump my need for quiet reflection and reconciliation. But that is hardly the whole story.

Five years ago, on Yom Kippur in 2004, I was spending some time in preparation for my first assignment, the following morning, as a reader in the Sunday Liturgy. As I sat in the basement, browsing my reading assignment for the nth time, and listening to some music, the seriousness of what I was about to embark upon hit me with full force. I realized, with full conviction, that justice demanded that, if I were going to proclaim the Word of God to His congregation in the sacred liturgy, my life needed to likewise proclaim the Word, outside of the liturgy. This was a sobering recognition that I needed to give up the shortcuts and compromises I had become accustomed to, and it was a little unnerving. The song that was playing at the time was a perky and heartfelt piece by Margaret Becker called “I Testify.”

Now, I am a quiet and reserved man, not much given to things like testimony, and I had to smile at the irony of the moment. True to my character, I started wondering what difference it would really make what I did with my life, and how it could possibly be important. At that point, the song changed, and as I looked down at my MP3 program to see what was next, I saw it was Joanne Hogg’s rendition of “My Song is Love Unknown.” I had to smile again at the irony, and said to myself something like: ‘Yes, indeed, and that is a glorious truth hidden from so many souls, so much in need of being told. I admit it.” Driven then by what felt like a silly curiosity, my eyes glanced down at the playlist to see what was next: a song called “One More Reason,” followed by “The Lord Reigns.” Sometimes, the Lord just won’t let us miss the point – either of His purpose, or of His lordship. After having a good laugh, I snapped a screenshot of the MP3 player, and said: “You win, Lord, but the ball’s in Your court.”

Despite my continuing foibles, I can hardly deny that the Lord has truly worked a gradual but profound personal transformation in me over these past five years. It’s not that I wasn’t serious about my vocation before that, and hadn’t in many ways been even more profoundly transformed a decade and a half prior, but I learned to let go just a bit more that night. I certainly can’t claim to have realized that imperative to give up all my shortcuts and compromises, but at least I am constantly aware of its imperativeness, and I can truly point to identifiable areas in my life where I have been able to be both more sensitive to Gospel demands, and more responsive, as well. My personality has both hardened and softened in different ways as my tolerance for moral and spiritual compromise has diminished. And while I’m grateful for the growth in wisdom and piety, I’m even more grateful for the grounding such spiritual life gives to the hope I must cling to so tightly on these autumn days, when I survey that terrible, battle-scarred landscape of my life, which won’t let me forget how very much I need the redemption of that Song of Unknown Love. More hope, less stress: better living.

Just prior to the arrival of our two guests from the Chernobyl area in June, I was reading Pedro Arrupe’s memoir of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. Of course, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl has certain things in common with the devastation of Hiroshima, even though the purposes of the human endeavor manifested in each case are radically different. Both the accidental explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and the intentional exploding of the first atomic bomb in the skies over Hiroshima were products of the modern technology of nuclear fission, and produced not only immediate damage due to explosion and fire, but also various health problems due to the resulting radiation.

At just about the same time, my sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and was – at that point – waiting a therapy of radiation to battle the tumor. This created in my mind a juxtaposition of three very different manifestations of the human condition flowing out from the development of the inherently destructive technology of nuclear fission: the willful leveraging of its destructive power for violent and malicious ends; the failure of human effort and management to contain its destructive force in well-intentioned applications; and the potential for its destructiveness to be harnessed and directed toward achieving human good, when it can be willfully contained.

It was hard not to be struck by the irony that the technology which was deployed to such brutal ends in 1945, and the mismanagement of which in 1986 had caused such human suffering, could be a key contributor in potentially saving the life of my sister, among so many others, today. It’s a commonplace that technological advancements tend to be developed for military application, and only later leveraged for constructive purposes, but there’s also quite a bit of work that goes on to develop technologies, or at least technological applications, for commercial purposes. Today is a good day to reflect on the too little-noticed fact that we have very little control over how technologies we develop today will be applied and advanced tomorrow. And if the devastating craft of 1945 can manage to be repurposed for beneficent ends, how also can our best and brightest work today be turned against us by an adequately powerful malfeasant will – and ask: Why are we so disinclined to concern ourselves about genies being let out of bottles?

What a whirlwind! Nasta & Yulia have returned to Belarus after a whirlwind month of activity. These girls were very much like other girls I’ve known, but they possessed a truly remarkable courage. They were just little kids, of course, but they really impressed me in how they handled themselves. There was much more bustle in the house than I am accustomed to, while they were here. There was a constant chatter going on in Russian, which at first seemed out of place in the home – as if the house were a train station or airport, and not my sanctuary and refuge – but which quickly became just another background element of the domestic fabric. I miss it.

Being with and around the girls added an interesting contextual layer to my thinking about some issues that have rapidly come to the foreground of my thought these days; issues around technology & medicine, sickness & dying, etc. A number of public and private concerns have had me reflecting yet again on these matters, which seemingly have never been far from the surface since my own brush with death two years ago.

I think the train of thought got started just a day or two before welcoming these two young kids, whose lives are part of the sad legacy of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, when I coincidentally picked up a small book that I had been uncertain how to classify in my library, and began to read it. It was by Pedro Arrupe, who at the time of writing it was the Superior General of the Jesuits. Roughly the first half of the book was a recollection of his experiences on the ground in Hiroshima in 1945, where he was stationed as a missionary when the first atomic bomb was dropped. Arrupe had studied medicine for five years before entering the seminary, and he had to call upon every thread of his experience in dealing with the crisis. It was a sobering read, to put it gently. My intellectual circumstances snowballed from there, and I soon had several thematically related posts sketched out in my mind, but have been so strapped for time that I’ve little more to show for it than a couple of drafts, and a bucket-full of good intentions.

I’ve had so little time to write that the idea of publishing a blog is beginning to look a bit silly, and I’ve been finding myself (again) tempted to use the blog for publishing blurts & blurbs, instead of somewhat longer pieces, though that’s really not what I launched the site to do – I wanted to use it as a vehicle for stretching out my thinking. I almost always find the idea of publishing blurts uncomfortable when I’m working on more substantial things, even though the majority of articles I at least mentally sketch out never see the light of day, eventually ending up in the dustbin of good intentions. In my saner moments, I continue to think I should be able to strike a better balance here. My preference would be to find more time to write!

  As January comes to a merciful end, I slump back in my easy chair and wonder how things may change this year. I’m waiting for the last of my recommendation letters to reach Franciscan University at Steubenville, so that I can begin my studies with them. That program will surely dominate my reading list – and my writing, I suppose – for as long as it takes me to complete it. The chair I’m sitting in will soon be moving upstairs, as I’ll be abandoning my basement bunker in favor of a reworked 2nd floor bedroom, for which I have been overly busy building bookcases.

With the economy in the tank, and my employer having just agreed to be purchased by a competitor, I can’t be very certain where 2009 is going to lead me professionally – or financially. I’m going to revive my PMP certification, just in case. We refinanced the house last week, in part to reduce monthly outlay in order to help pay the increased cost of sending Abby to Montrose School beginning next year, but also to mitigate the risk of having a high mortgage payment in times of uncertainty. So many things seem like they’re one false move away from coming apart at the seams.

Around here, winter runs from the beginning of December until almost the end of March, so it is about half over at this point. The end can’t come soon enough for me. I spent a couple hours in the driveway today, trying to break up and remove a covering of more than an inch of ice, which has been treacherous underfoot for perhaps two weeks, but nearly impossible to deal with prior to today due to bitter cold temperatures and/or the lack of sunlight. Remind me never to buy a north-facing house in New England again.

A year ago this time, I had just established the maybetoday.org domain, and was installing WordPress on my hosting server, trying to figure out how to make this all happen, and doing initial design work. I’ve accomplished only a small fraction of what I’d intended to accomplish with this web site, but that’s the story of my life. Perhaps I can take some small comfort in knowing that, as uncertain as many things may be in my life right now, some things never change.