Happy!
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Thursday, April 14, 2005
The Bells I Hear
Scientists say that after a major earthquake, such as the one that caused the recent tsunami in South Asia, the Earth literally rings like a bell long after the earthquake is over. Sensitive equipment can detect reverberations coming from the Earth’s core for weeks after the event. Geologists studying ruptures in the landscape can easily calculate the magnitude of past earthquakes hundreds and even thousands of years after the quakes occurred.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
But O heart! heart! heart!
Here Captain! dear father!
* * *
One hundred and forty years ago tonight, a man shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of his head. He had been enjoying the theatrical comedy, My American Cousin, in Ford’s Theater.
As most Americans know, Lincoln died at dawn the next day. His death came less than a week after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and on the same day that General Johnston asked for terms from General Sherman in Raleigh.
One hundred and forty years ago tonight, a man shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of his head. He had been enjoying the theatrical comedy, My American Cousin, in Ford’s Theater.
As most Americans know, Lincoln died at dawn the next day. His death came less than a week after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and on the same day that General Johnston asked for terms from General Sherman in Raleigh.
Savoring the relief that victory brought after four desperately stressful years, Lincoln took a carriage ride with his wife that last morning. He remarked to her that he felt alive for the first time in many years. He talked of visiting Europe, California, and the Rocky Mountains after his Presidency. With the incredible weather we are having today, it is easy to imagine how he must have felt. A day like today makes a person want to make big, wonderful plans.
Around this time in April every year, I think more about the Civil War than I usually do. It was in this month that the conflict began and ended. Each year of the war, April marked the time when the roads were drying out, which meant that the summer campaign season was only weeks away. The armies would be busy striking their winter camps, refitting their equipment, and thousands of horses would be returning from their winter grazing lands, far from the front. Men would be preparing to die.
All this activity took place amidst the incredibly beauty and mild climate of Virginia in the springtime. When I visit the Civil War battlefields and historical markers, my imagination allows me to be feel connected to the events that happened there. There is nothing supernatural about what I am talking about. I read the stories, understand who was where and when, and then I orient myself to the present landscape. If you look close enough, you can often see the trenches and rifle pits. In certain locations throughout Virginia, bullet holes can still be seen on the sides of houses. The Crater in Petersburg is one of my favorite spots.
With the exception of minor skirmishes in five or six locations, Lincoln’s assassination was the last, violent lurch of the four year cataclysm that rocked the United States to its core. The reverberations are still with us, all throughout our society. I can hear the ringing well, especially in Virginia, and especially in April.
The Factual Dog does not go much for poetry. We leave that in more capable hands. So we urge our readers not to come to expect it too often. Today is different. We will end with something written long ago to mark the events of April 14-15, 1865.
O Captain! My Captain!
Around this time in April every year, I think more about the Civil War than I usually do. It was in this month that the conflict began and ended. Each year of the war, April marked the time when the roads were drying out, which meant that the summer campaign season was only weeks away. The armies would be busy striking their winter camps, refitting their equipment, and thousands of horses would be returning from their winter grazing lands, far from the front. Men would be preparing to die.
All this activity took place amidst the incredibly beauty and mild climate of Virginia in the springtime. When I visit the Civil War battlefields and historical markers, my imagination allows me to be feel connected to the events that happened there. There is nothing supernatural about what I am talking about. I read the stories, understand who was where and when, and then I orient myself to the present landscape. If you look close enough, you can often see the trenches and rifle pits. In certain locations throughout Virginia, bullet holes can still be seen on the sides of houses. The Crater in Petersburg is one of my favorite spots.
With the exception of minor skirmishes in five or six locations, Lincoln’s assassination was the last, violent lurch of the four year cataclysm that rocked the United States to its core. The reverberations are still with us, all throughout our society. I can hear the ringing well, especially in Virginia, and especially in April.
The Factual Dog does not go much for poetry. We leave that in more capable hands. So we urge our readers not to come to expect it too often. Today is different. We will end with something written long ago to mark the events of April 14-15, 1865.
O Captain! My Captain!
by Walt Whitman
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up - for you the flag is flung - for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths - for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Pope Musings
Driving to and from Baltimore with the Dog is getting to be a habit lately. She doesn’t enjoy traveling in cars very much. An accident in her puppyhood left her with a life-long aversion to sudden braking, which, as it happens, occurs often on I-95. On the bright side, the 90 minutes in the car does provide us some quality time to catch up and review the issues of the day.
The Pope is dead, and his passing warrants the Factual Dog’s commentary. I remember well the time when the papacy of Pope John Paul II began. It was the fall of 1978, two months into the 10th grade. I had been raised Catholic, and wore a small Pope Paul VI medal around my neck in those days. I was never a terribly devout Catholic, though. We had to go to CCD on Tuesday afternoons, and for some reason I remember Tuesdays in my youth as always being sunny and 75 degrees outside. By the ninth grade, after my Confirmation, I had persuaded my Mom to get me off the hook from having to go to CCD.
Actually, “persuaded” might be a bit misleading. To be more precise, I made a deal with her that I never delivered on. I told her that I would independently follow the lessons, as that was the only way I said would learn. She needed only to trust me to study by myself and not force me to forego my Tuesday afternoons. After enough of my haranguing, Mom gave in. As things turned out, I probably never performed a single minute of independent work once she released me from my CCD responsibility.
I have always felt bad about that breach of trust for two reasons. First, and foremost, I broke a deal I made with my Mom, and it was over something that was not trivial. Second, I deprived myself of the spiritual and moral education that I might have received if I had continued with CCD.
I say “might” because CCD, except when my Mom was teaching it when I was in the third grade, wasn’t all that great. After all, I don’t think we ever even learned what the acronym CCD stood for. I remember standing in the parking lot of St. James with my friends debating over what the letters represented, in a similar manner as my high school friends and I later attempted to decipher of the lyrics of “Louie, Louie”. Nobody was ever quite sure; but each person seemed to want everyone else to think that he, and he alone, knew.
My older brothers and sister stuck with CCD longer than I did, and I’m fairly sure they derived some benefit from it. If nothing else, they learned that they had the capability to stay on with something they didn’t like over the long haul. However, I doubt seriously that they could tell you that CCD stands for “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine”. That term didn’t come up during our parking lot debates. The real, innocuous lyrics to “Louie, Louie” never occurred to us either.
The net of the CCD deal with my Mom was that I learned a very bad lesson: you can take the easy way out, and get away with it – at least in the short term. This is a lesson I will be careful not to allow my son, or any future children, to learn on my watch. My Mom is not to be even slightly faulted for accepting the deal I offered. She had six kids and her own elderly, failing mother to take care of. The last thing she needed, or had the patience for, was my whining to her every Tuesday afternoon.
The Dog, who has been resting her snout on my shoulder from the back seat of the Volvo, chimes in with an impatient growl, “OK, enough of the self-flagellation. We all do things we regret later on. What about the Pope?”
Yes. What about the Pope?
He was one of the great men of my lifetime. Alongside Ronald Reagan, a greater or braver world leader hasn’t existed on this planet since the death of Winston Churchill. Moreover, he exhibited bravery on a personal level that perhaps Reagan never did. After all, Reagan was born into the Midwestern US during the early twentieth century; a place and time where corn and confidence stretched from horizon to horizon. Although he came from somewhat of a hardscrabble background, Reagan had a great deal going for him as well. He gets props for standing up to the Communists who ran the actors union; but Reagan’s WWII service was in a public relations role in the Army. He was a movie actor in Southern California at a time when Karol Wojtyla was performing forced labor in a limestone pit near Krakow and studying for the Priesthood in an underground seminary under the noses of the Nazi SS.
Yet many, many people exhibit personal bravery in combat situations, natural disasters, or simply doing the right thing when faced with a moral dilemma. The Pope’s bravery was unique. His bravery was worth noting in the same context that I write of Ronald Reagan because first, he stood for what he believed was the right thing; second, his values were based on love of all people, God, and the his “country” (the Church); and third, he was totally selfless when it came for standing for his principals. He simply did not care what his detractors had to say. I doubt he ever lost a night of sleep due the criticisms of his opponents (Sinead O’Connor, call your office).
I left the Catholic Church under John Paul II. This is true. I simply did not believe in the man-made dogma around certain issues central to the Church’s core DNA. I am talking about allowing priests to marry and allowing women to be priests. These are rules that came into place a thousand years after the Crucifixion. It is unnatural to forbid men to marry, and quite frankly this prohibition attracts a disproportionate number of homosexuals.
Now, I have nothing whatsoever against gay people, and I don’t have anything against gay priests. I just think it is counterproductive to have one rule against married priests, when most people understand that that same rule results in a Clergy that is somewhere between 10 and 30 percent gay, at least in the US. Married people seek relationship advice from Priests, and that advice, for me, must be discounted if it is from a person who has never been married, and further discounted if the person has neither been in nor desired a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. I don’t care if the Clergy has the same proportion of gays as the rest of the population, and if my Pastor were gay, that fact would not, in and of itself, bother me. It just gets a bit out of control when the proportion of gays is 10 to 20 times the proportion in the general population.
Second, and this is a completely separate issue, the US Church is far too liberal. The American Bishops are consistently in favor of socialism, against free market capitalism, and do not recognize that violence is needed to subdue determined, murderous foes of freedom. The Bishops actively campaigned against Reagan’s arms buildup and economic program which, alongside John Paul’s evangelism in Central Europe, were the chief causes of the downfall of the Soviet Union. The USSR was the most brutal government in world history (remember, Stalin killed 20 million of his own people – Pol Pot and Idi Amin were pikers compared to him and Hitler, as hard as he tried, could only kill half that many in the relatively short time he had). When the Bishops opposed Reagan’s struggle against Communism, they lost me. Finally, the American Bishops and the Vatican were against the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. We are up against pure evil in the world, and it is a sin to not stop it, using all means available. I pity the people who do not understand the threat that true evil really represents.
The Church is against abortion. Although I am opposed to third trimester and partial birth abortion, as I understand the procedure, first trimester abortions should be safe and legal. I have never been sure of where and when the line is drawn in the second trimester and don’t think many other people know where that line should be drawn. I also believe in parental notification. The Pope and I differed on this issue, and on birth control, but I respect him for sticking to his principles.
The Church in the pre-Reformation days was an abomination. It was run by wicked people who did wicked things. But one need not go that far back in the Church’s history to find institutional malevolence. The Catholic Church in the US was actively opposed to the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War, and they opposed Lincoln’s election in 1860. The Vatican stood by silently as the holocaust gathered strength and the Fascists gained control of most of Europe. They have acted against God, common sense, and their own self-interest in protecting pedophile priests in this country. By allowing Cardinal Law to lead a mass for John Paul II in front of thousands of people only a few days ago, the Church continues to show that just doesn’t get it.
As far as that scandal was concerned, John Paul II didn’t get it either. The Pope appointed Cardinal Law Archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, one of four basilicas under direct Vatican jurisdiction, after Law was forced to resign in Boston. Law intentionally transferred pedophile priests to new parishes without telling parents. Some of these same priests have been convicted of child molestation in those churches. This makes Bernard Law a very, very bad man. I can think of no more elegant way to say it. And the Pope, by all indications, did not have a problem with him.
Still, John Paul II may have not fully understood the issue. Perhaps he really was in his dotage, and as a younger man he might have taken a different approach. Not to be trite, but I will give him a mulligan on that issue because it is the only one where I did not respect his decisions.
I did respect his other positions, even though on many issues I disagreed with him. For instance, he did not seem to differentiate between free market capitalism, as generally practiced in the US, and the kleptocracy in Russia. I’m against stealing too, but I understand the difference between transparent capitalism under the rule of law, and what is going on in Russia, or China for that matter. He criticized capitalism using a very broad brush, and that was counterproductive.
But to those Catholics who criticize John Paul II for standing by his principals with respect to Priests marrying, abortion, women in the clergy, and birth control, I say that you are in the wrong Church. Religious beliefs are not the same as a political platform, in that the latter can be changed as public opinion evolves. The Pope is the protector of the Church, and the Church is one and the same as its principals. I may disagree with him, but if I do, I leave. It would be presumptuous for me to expect the Church to change to fit my view of the world, just as American liberal Catholics are presumptuous for criticizing Pope John Paul II. Of course, these are the same people who love to bash America for supposedly imposing its views on the world. The hypocrisy of the left just never ends.
American liberal Catholics want to have it both ways. They love the ceremony, traditions, cultural bonds and feeling of superiority among Christians that comes with membership. They just don’t like all that messy religious stuff that they really do not agree with. To them, the Factual Dog says, who do you think you are fooling? Not yourself and certainly not God. For me, the honest approach was to join the Episcopal Church. Each person must resolve that conflict as best as he can. But for those people who take an “a la carte” menu approach to their Catholic beliefs and criticize the Pope for defending the Church from contemporary political and social pressures, the Factual Dog thinks you need to do some serious soul searching about what church you really believe in.
The Dog is weary as we pull into the garage of the darkened house. Need to give her some dinner and let her out in the back yard. Big session tonight, and thank goodness, we got through all that without any sudden braking on the highway. She is grateful for that and I get an appreciative tail wag.
The Pope is dead, and his passing warrants the Factual Dog’s commentary. I remember well the time when the papacy of Pope John Paul II began. It was the fall of 1978, two months into the 10th grade. I had been raised Catholic, and wore a small Pope Paul VI medal around my neck in those days. I was never a terribly devout Catholic, though. We had to go to CCD on Tuesday afternoons, and for some reason I remember Tuesdays in my youth as always being sunny and 75 degrees outside. By the ninth grade, after my Confirmation, I had persuaded my Mom to get me off the hook from having to go to CCD.
Actually, “persuaded” might be a bit misleading. To be more precise, I made a deal with her that I never delivered on. I told her that I would independently follow the lessons, as that was the only way I said would learn. She needed only to trust me to study by myself and not force me to forego my Tuesday afternoons. After enough of my haranguing, Mom gave in. As things turned out, I probably never performed a single minute of independent work once she released me from my CCD responsibility.
I have always felt bad about that breach of trust for two reasons. First, and foremost, I broke a deal I made with my Mom, and it was over something that was not trivial. Second, I deprived myself of the spiritual and moral education that I might have received if I had continued with CCD.
I say “might” because CCD, except when my Mom was teaching it when I was in the third grade, wasn’t all that great. After all, I don’t think we ever even learned what the acronym CCD stood for. I remember standing in the parking lot of St. James with my friends debating over what the letters represented, in a similar manner as my high school friends and I later attempted to decipher of the lyrics of “Louie, Louie”. Nobody was ever quite sure; but each person seemed to want everyone else to think that he, and he alone, knew.
My older brothers and sister stuck with CCD longer than I did, and I’m fairly sure they derived some benefit from it. If nothing else, they learned that they had the capability to stay on with something they didn’t like over the long haul. However, I doubt seriously that they could tell you that CCD stands for “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine”. That term didn’t come up during our parking lot debates. The real, innocuous lyrics to “Louie, Louie” never occurred to us either.
The net of the CCD deal with my Mom was that I learned a very bad lesson: you can take the easy way out, and get away with it – at least in the short term. This is a lesson I will be careful not to allow my son, or any future children, to learn on my watch. My Mom is not to be even slightly faulted for accepting the deal I offered. She had six kids and her own elderly, failing mother to take care of. The last thing she needed, or had the patience for, was my whining to her every Tuesday afternoon.
The Dog, who has been resting her snout on my shoulder from the back seat of the Volvo, chimes in with an impatient growl, “OK, enough of the self-flagellation. We all do things we regret later on. What about the Pope?”
Yes. What about the Pope?
He was one of the great men of my lifetime. Alongside Ronald Reagan, a greater or braver world leader hasn’t existed on this planet since the death of Winston Churchill. Moreover, he exhibited bravery on a personal level that perhaps Reagan never did. After all, Reagan was born into the Midwestern US during the early twentieth century; a place and time where corn and confidence stretched from horizon to horizon. Although he came from somewhat of a hardscrabble background, Reagan had a great deal going for him as well. He gets props for standing up to the Communists who ran the actors union; but Reagan’s WWII service was in a public relations role in the Army. He was a movie actor in Southern California at a time when Karol Wojtyla was performing forced labor in a limestone pit near Krakow and studying for the Priesthood in an underground seminary under the noses of the Nazi SS.
Yet many, many people exhibit personal bravery in combat situations, natural disasters, or simply doing the right thing when faced with a moral dilemma. The Pope’s bravery was unique. His bravery was worth noting in the same context that I write of Ronald Reagan because first, he stood for what he believed was the right thing; second, his values were based on love of all people, God, and the his “country” (the Church); and third, he was totally selfless when it came for standing for his principals. He simply did not care what his detractors had to say. I doubt he ever lost a night of sleep due the criticisms of his opponents (Sinead O’Connor, call your office).
I left the Catholic Church under John Paul II. This is true. I simply did not believe in the man-made dogma around certain issues central to the Church’s core DNA. I am talking about allowing priests to marry and allowing women to be priests. These are rules that came into place a thousand years after the Crucifixion. It is unnatural to forbid men to marry, and quite frankly this prohibition attracts a disproportionate number of homosexuals.
Now, I have nothing whatsoever against gay people, and I don’t have anything against gay priests. I just think it is counterproductive to have one rule against married priests, when most people understand that that same rule results in a Clergy that is somewhere between 10 and 30 percent gay, at least in the US. Married people seek relationship advice from Priests, and that advice, for me, must be discounted if it is from a person who has never been married, and further discounted if the person has neither been in nor desired a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. I don’t care if the Clergy has the same proportion of gays as the rest of the population, and if my Pastor were gay, that fact would not, in and of itself, bother me. It just gets a bit out of control when the proportion of gays is 10 to 20 times the proportion in the general population.
Second, and this is a completely separate issue, the US Church is far too liberal. The American Bishops are consistently in favor of socialism, against free market capitalism, and do not recognize that violence is needed to subdue determined, murderous foes of freedom. The Bishops actively campaigned against Reagan’s arms buildup and economic program which, alongside John Paul’s evangelism in Central Europe, were the chief causes of the downfall of the Soviet Union. The USSR was the most brutal government in world history (remember, Stalin killed 20 million of his own people – Pol Pot and Idi Amin were pikers compared to him and Hitler, as hard as he tried, could only kill half that many in the relatively short time he had). When the Bishops opposed Reagan’s struggle against Communism, they lost me. Finally, the American Bishops and the Vatican were against the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. We are up against pure evil in the world, and it is a sin to not stop it, using all means available. I pity the people who do not understand the threat that true evil really represents.
The Church is against abortion. Although I am opposed to third trimester and partial birth abortion, as I understand the procedure, first trimester abortions should be safe and legal. I have never been sure of where and when the line is drawn in the second trimester and don’t think many other people know where that line should be drawn. I also believe in parental notification. The Pope and I differed on this issue, and on birth control, but I respect him for sticking to his principles.
The Church in the pre-Reformation days was an abomination. It was run by wicked people who did wicked things. But one need not go that far back in the Church’s history to find institutional malevolence. The Catholic Church in the US was actively opposed to the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War, and they opposed Lincoln’s election in 1860. The Vatican stood by silently as the holocaust gathered strength and the Fascists gained control of most of Europe. They have acted against God, common sense, and their own self-interest in protecting pedophile priests in this country. By allowing Cardinal Law to lead a mass for John Paul II in front of thousands of people only a few days ago, the Church continues to show that just doesn’t get it.
As far as that scandal was concerned, John Paul II didn’t get it either. The Pope appointed Cardinal Law Archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, one of four basilicas under direct Vatican jurisdiction, after Law was forced to resign in Boston. Law intentionally transferred pedophile priests to new parishes without telling parents. Some of these same priests have been convicted of child molestation in those churches. This makes Bernard Law a very, very bad man. I can think of no more elegant way to say it. And the Pope, by all indications, did not have a problem with him.
Still, John Paul II may have not fully understood the issue. Perhaps he really was in his dotage, and as a younger man he might have taken a different approach. Not to be trite, but I will give him a mulligan on that issue because it is the only one where I did not respect his decisions.
I did respect his other positions, even though on many issues I disagreed with him. For instance, he did not seem to differentiate between free market capitalism, as generally practiced in the US, and the kleptocracy in Russia. I’m against stealing too, but I understand the difference between transparent capitalism under the rule of law, and what is going on in Russia, or China for that matter. He criticized capitalism using a very broad brush, and that was counterproductive.
But to those Catholics who criticize John Paul II for standing by his principals with respect to Priests marrying, abortion, women in the clergy, and birth control, I say that you are in the wrong Church. Religious beliefs are not the same as a political platform, in that the latter can be changed as public opinion evolves. The Pope is the protector of the Church, and the Church is one and the same as its principals. I may disagree with him, but if I do, I leave. It would be presumptuous for me to expect the Church to change to fit my view of the world, just as American liberal Catholics are presumptuous for criticizing Pope John Paul II. Of course, these are the same people who love to bash America for supposedly imposing its views on the world. The hypocrisy of the left just never ends.
American liberal Catholics want to have it both ways. They love the ceremony, traditions, cultural bonds and feeling of superiority among Christians that comes with membership. They just don’t like all that messy religious stuff that they really do not agree with. To them, the Factual Dog says, who do you think you are fooling? Not yourself and certainly not God. For me, the honest approach was to join the Episcopal Church. Each person must resolve that conflict as best as he can. But for those people who take an “a la carte” menu approach to their Catholic beliefs and criticize the Pope for defending the Church from contemporary political and social pressures, the Factual Dog thinks you need to do some serious soul searching about what church you really believe in.
The Dog is weary as we pull into the garage of the darkened house. Need to give her some dinner and let her out in the back yard. Big session tonight, and thank goodness, we got through all that without any sudden braking on the highway. She is grateful for that and I get an appreciative tail wag.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
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