Easter!

 It is Easter! 

I've written about my religiously ignorant childhood before, about how little I knew of Christmas (but not as little as my younger cousin, who thought it was the birthday of Santa Claus). I was so ignorant of Easter that I don't even know if I had any guesses as to its significance. Maybe I just thought it was one of those inscrutable adult things, like banks and insurance. I knew the Easter Bunny brought baskets of cheap chocolate and jellybeans that tasted of nothing but sugar, and those were fine by me. Years later I would learn two important things: 

1) What Easter really means.

2) That even poor chocolate can be coated with peanut butter and made into a tasty mock-Reese's treat. 

About eggs, I had no idea. The association with new life is obvious, but spring less so. Chickens don't just lay eggs in the spring, as other animals have their young in the spring; they pop out eggs all the time. Not a great symbol, but I guess we're stuck with it. 

I'm going to turn to Robert Lynd (1879-1949), an Irish writer who lived in London and wrote reviews, light ephemera, and pieces in favor of Irish nationalism. His 1921 collection The Pleasures of Ignorance contains an article on Easter eggs. It includes some wisdom on the topic that could have been written today, or at least before the Internet removed the necessity to go to actual books to look things up. Nevertheless, just as today, the author begins his search (in the Encyclopedia Britannica) and immediately becomes distracted:

The egg I was looking for was the Easter egg, and it seemed to be the only egg that was not mentioned. There were birds' eggs, and reptiles' eggs, and fishes' eggs, and molluscs' eggs, and crustaceans' eggs, and insects' eggs, and frogs' eggs, and Augustus Egg, and the eggs of the duck-billed platypus, which is the only mammal (except the spiny ant-eater) whose eggs are "provided with a large store of yolk, enclosed within a shell, and extruded to undergo development apart from the maternal tissues." I do not know whether it is evidence of the irrelevance of the workings of the human mind or of our implacable greed of knowledge, but within five minutes I was deep in the subject of eggs in general, and had forgotten all about the Easter variety.

But does he lose hope of finding out anything? He does not:

In order to learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to some such work as The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which tells us that "the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian or Persian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things." ... Next Easter, I feel sure, I shall look it up again. I shall have forgotten all about the mundane egg, even if Ormuzd and Ahriman have not. I shall be thinking more about my breakfast egg. What a piece of work is a man! And yet many profound things might be said about eggs, mundane or otherwise. I wish I could have thought of them.

To be fair, the modern online Britannica has much more to say about Easter eggs, some of which you can find in this essay. Personally, like Mr. Lynd, I'm not very much interested in Easter eggs, and not just because, as when I was a child, I am much more interested in Easter chocolate. 

Now I focus on the true significance of Easter -- which, if I believe it, must be the most important thing to have ever happened on this Earth; and if I don't, is of no significance whatever. (But I do.)

Still, there's nothing wrong with Easter chocolate. Even the cheap stuff can be brought around with a little Jif. 

Quite the chat.

Atheist explaining to God why He is not real.

 

Smell like the King.

A few years back I told you how you can smell like the Boss. And I've even told you how you can smell like the President. But now we're going far beyond that -- how to smell like the King.

Today is the last Sunday of Ordinary Time in the Catholic church, the end of the Liturgical Year, and on this day we celebrate the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. And today I have his soap. Sort of. Not really.

Indigo Wild sells a variety of goat milk soaps in the Zum Bar line, in weird scents that include Juniper-Fir, Clove-Orange, and the inevitable Patchouli-Ylang Ylang. But they also sell this, the Frankincense-Myrrh.

Myrrh is mentioned several times in the Bible, sixteen times in the New American Bible (rev. ed.), reflecting its importance as a valuable resin, used for medicinal purposes and also as incense and a means of anointing the dead. Frankincense is similarly used for incense. Matthew 2:11, relating Jesus's birth, states

and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Thus, the gifts of the Magi are forever joined with the narrative of the Nativity.

Now, I've been curious about these gifts since I was a boy and learned all five verses to "We Three Kings." I knew what gold was, but what were these other substances? The verses explain their threefold purpose in the threefold purpose of Jesus, as king (gold), deity (frankincense), and sacrifice (myrrh). But what did these two weird nouns refer to? And how did they smell? You can't get that out of an encyclopedia.

Well, I still can't tell you how they smell individually, although I wanted to at least get a clue. I winced and paid the price to buy the Zum Bar, which cost more than a bundle of Zest bars. And before I got home, I can tell you this: As substances refined for burial of the dead, who famously do not smell like a bed of roses, they work pretty darn good.

Not that I had any dead with me, but that little bar of soap, way in the hatch of the car, could be detected from the driver's seat. It's not unpleasant, but it is powerful. Pungent is one word. "Deep, sweet, and woodsy aromas" is how Indigo Wild describes it. I'd say it is a woodsy, peppery scent, spicy, sugary the way maple is, but rich and fruity. It put me in mind of the resin in logs when Dad and I would cut up the ol' firewood, but a billion times stronger. As I write it is wrapped in the plastic bag from the store, and you can still smell it when you walk by. Try that with a bar of Yardley.

Frankly, I'm afraid to use it. I don't think people would smell me go by and think, There's one biblical dude! I think they might think I was dead. Or that I'm a serious dead head, trying to cover up the Mary Jane stink. When I was a teenager, that's the only thing I ever saw incense used for. The Zum Bar Web site doesn't really assure me that potheads with money are not their primary customers.

So maybe I'll actually try a shower with it one day that I'm not leaving the house. Even then I'm afraid the dogs will not recognize my smell under all that and go for my throat. Then I might be dead! And I'd be pre-anointed, so I'd have that going for me.

One last note: Jesus did not use myrrh as soap, or perhaps at all. It's suggested by some that the gifts Mary and Joseph received from the Magi were used for money, for the years in which they hid from Herod in Egypt, but we don't know. Also, there's not a lot of descriptions of bathing in the New Testament (not counting baptism), but the one time we see Jesus anointed with expensive oil during his ministry, it contains nard (according to Mark 14); nard, or spikenard, is said to come from the plant Nardostachys jatamansi, not Commiphora abyssinica like myrrh or Boswellia like frankincense. When Jesus had died, the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) say nothing about his body being anointed, and in fact that's why the women who found the empty tomb on Sunday were going there. But John 19 says "Nicodemus, the one who had first come to him at night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about one hundred pounds," and Jesus was bound "with burial cloths along with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom." Just FYI.

Trust.

I've been thinking a lot since the beginning of Easter -- Easter is still going, of course; it runs until Pentecost (this year on June 9) -- about trust. It has been an issue for me since I started to claw my way out of paganism and agnosticism many years ago.

Can one be a pagan and an agnostic? Well, I gave it my best shot.

The advantage of both paganism and atheism is this: that they answer the question "If God is good, why do bad things happen?" The pagan may be pantheistic (seeing bad things as the result of bad spirits or gods) and feel that bad things may be countered by getting power for oneself; the atheist simply says that God is not good because he does not exist. The Christian is the one who must square this circle, and it hardly needs to be said that I'm not the first one to run against this stumbling block. It doesn't help that I'm naturally pessimistic and that faith is like a second language to me.

The early Christians, and saints throughout the ages, did not find the bad things in life to be bad. They found the harshest persecutions to be nothing compared to the glory yet to come; they found lessons and endurance in the most difficult of life's circumstances. The average cradle Christian on the street may look at that and say, "I think I'll go see what the pagans and atheists have to offer instead."

When one is not blessed with an extraordinarily powerful faith, but does believe in a good and loving God, how does he fill the gap between the bad things that can happen and the belief in a merciful and loving God? God did not spare His own Son the Cross. How much more will He let happen to me? Doesn't he know how weak I am?

People would tell me to simply trust in God. Christian writers who informed my budding belief knew that trust in God was crucial. But how I could I trust God when he allows typhoons, earthquakes, birth defects, volcanoes, etc. etc. etc.?

A friend of mine told me that trusting in God just meant saying, "Whatever happens, it's going to be okay." And he could speak with some authority, having buried his teenage daughter a few years earlier -- she had died suddenly of natural causes. If he could survive that and still have faith, that at least told me it could be done.

I came to think eventually that my problem was that I was treating trust passively rather than actively. That may work with people, but not with God. I trust you because I lent you fifty bucks and you paid me back last week. I don't trust Joe because he made a pass at my wife. My trust is a reaction to others' actions.

But trusting God is different. It requires me to take an active approach. I have to make the decision that whatever happens, I am going to trust in God and not go back on it. This requires effort, at least for me.

So I've tried to adopt this attitude and so far I think it's going okay. I have my dark days, where nothing seems to be going right; you have probably heard my whining from wherever you live. You certainly can find it on this blog. But I have enough faith to believe this is ultimately a destructive and unhelpful attitude, and that I can find a better one if I put in the effort.

What the heck; I've come this far.

The perfect sign.

I've long thought that the perfect symbol for something momentous has got to be the cross, which Christians think is the perfect sign of the most momentous sacrifice in history. It works out so well that it's easy to see God's hand in it.

1) It's simple.

A small child can make a cross. It's even easier to draw than the ichthus, the fish symbol composed of two arcs, because you have to make curved lines -- straight lines are easier to draw. The cross is simpler than any sign of a supernatural faith -- the Star of David, the pentacle, the star and crescent, and surely every motif associated with Hinduism. It's simpler than secular signs like the hammer and sickle. It's even simpler than the Bass Ale triangle. Simplicity helps a message spread.

2) Its essence and scope are in the design.

It's not hard to understand the principles of the public torture and murder method known as crucifixion; once we do, we see it in those simple lines. It is also the post and beam that holds up the roof to shield us, the sail to move us. The cross also means a crossroads, a change of direction, and believers find that the cross is the ultimate change of direction for humanity. The cross is sturdy, as faith must be. In other words, the sign expresses so many things within its two lines, many that require no prior knowledge of crucifixion. G. K. Chesterton has a lot to say on this topic in his novel The Ball and the Cross. 

3) It speaks history.

The public nature of the cross is vital to the story; Jesus's death was a public event, witnessed by many. He did not go sneaking off somewhere before he died. You can't go sneaking off the cross; even if you could get off, the Romans would stick you right back up there. It is crucial (if you will) that we know that Jesus died, because when He was seen later, that was pretty significant. It goes to the faith as being tied to a definite event that happened in a definite time and place, unlike the legends of gods in other cultures. For all its cruelty, though, the cross leaves a body that is recognizable and not in pieces; not that God cannot reassemble pieces, but it would have just made Jesus seem more like a ghost on His return than the One who had defeated death. (As it was, He had to prove to the Apostles twice that He was not a ghost.)

The cross teaches us about cultures that used (and sometimes still use) the evil of crucifixion, meant to be a shameful as well as cruel means of death; in it we also remember the triumph of the faith. The cross was not used commonly as a Christian symbol until after Constantine. After that, it was seen on all the structures of Christianity through the march of the centuries. 

4) It works better than any other sacrificial sign you can think of.

Think of saints who were tortured to death or otherwise murdered in the course of God's work. Do we symbolize St. Paul or St. John the Baptist with the headman's ax? The answer is not usually. These would not put one immediately in mind of the victim. You might think St. Paul was a Viking if we used the ax. St. Lawrence, famously grilled to death, is often symbolized by the gridiron, but that's not a device normally associated with torture as the cross is. The Catherine Wheel is the closest sacrificial sign I can think of, and St. Catherine of Alexandria did not die on it; the spiked wheel shattered at her touch.

5) It works better than any other simple sign you can think of.

Think of other very simple things to draw -- line, square, circle, scribble. Do any of these suggest a means of fatal torture, let alone a high public one, let alone one that tells the story of God's sacrifice to reconcile the world to Himself?

6) It is easily embellished for related uses.

Catholics display the cross as a crucifix, with the body of the Victim on it. Most Protestants just leave the cross unadorned. Some saints have different crosses; the upside-down cross is a sign of evil in Hollywood and among other ignoramuses, but in truth it is St. Peter's cross, as tradition says Peter did not think himself worthy to be crucified in the same way as Jesus. St. George, St. Andrew, St. Brigid and others have variations on the cross. St. Florian's is well known as a symbol of fire departments. At its heart, it remains the cross.

7) It spells agony, and holiness.

And sometimes it appears as such in the most appropriate times.

Big G is watching you.

One thing that I see from time to time in copyediting and proofreading work is that some writers and editors insist on lowercasing the G in God, referring to the Supreme Being. I object on two grounds, theological and pedantic, which I shall touch on below.

The first one is theological, and that is because I believe in God. There, I said it. Thus, I believe in an intelligent -- in fact, all-intelligent -- being, in whose image we are created. You may believe that or not, but when I find Someone that requires worship, I find the need to break out the Initial Caps.

The pedantic reason, though, is the one that's being run over by the Ford Pinto of aggressive atheism, and that's just this: In English, proper nouns are capitalized. Period.

So when you talk about Thor, the god of thunder, "god" is a job description and should be lowercased, but the proper noun "Thor" is uppercased. When you talk about God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen, you are using a proper noun that should be capped.

I grant plenty of leeway in this regard. If an author doesn't believe in God, that's up to the author. Some of these authors, or book editors, really hate the whole idea of God and want to lowercase god all the time to show contempt for it. But there are expressions in which the name God is used as a proper noun, and others in which it is not, and that brings us to the pedantic problem. And believe me, copyediting is nothing but a series of pedantic problems.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

"Thank God!" Makes no sense lowercased -- only works as a proper noun. Try it with other ordinary nouns ("Thank tree!" "Thank rock!").

"For the love of god." Could be lowercased; would still seem to need a possessive pronoun or article though ("our god" "the god" etc.).

"The god's honest truth." Works all right lowercased.

"As God is my witness..." A witness must be a person, and a person has a name. If "god" is supposed to be a job description instead or a name, then you're a pagan and you need an article ("As the god is my witness...").

Let's appeal to a higher authority to sort this out. No, not the Lord, not here; I mean the Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition, the lowercase-B bible for copy cats:

I also have the 14th, 15th, and 16th editions
on my desk. I am not fooling around.

Like the Bible, CMoS is arranged by chapter and verse -- really.

Thou shalt not suffer a participle to dangle.

Here are some quotes on this topic from the 17th edition:

8.91: "Names of deities, whether in monotheistic or polytheistic religions, are capitalized."

8.92: "Alternative or descriptive names for God as supreme being are capitalized."

The nomenclature is settled. Even if God does not smite you himself, the copy editor's guide is ready to smite away on its own. This has nothing to do with faith but everything to do with proper English.

And if that doesn't get the message across, I'll drop a copy of the 17th edition on you. That sucker weighs six or seven pounds easy. Smite!

Woofer.

Hoo boy. Well, remember yesterday, when I sort of mentioned that today I would have an entry today that doesn't suck? Probably not after all.

Why? Because I was sitting in the vet's office after work yesterday, waiting for Nipper to get treated in a last-minute appointment. And the treatment resulted in this.

Nipper had a skin infection on his face that came to our attention a couple of weeks ago. He's super fuzzy and God knows how long he had it before we even noticed it. Initially the vet said he couldn't tell if it was allergic or fungal or bacterial, so he gave it a shot of cortisone and recommended bacitracin. A week later it had gotten worse, so we saw another vet in the same office who ratcheted it to 11 immediately -- powerful capsules of antibiotics, 2 per meal, plus an antibiotic ointment, for 14 days.

This seemed to go okay at first, as we were able to trick Nipper into taking his meds with soft food or cheese or Greenies Pill Pockets. But that ended suddenly on Tuesday, after a week of pills, when we couldn't get him to eat anything. His appetite had dwindled to nothing, and even his favorite treats went uneaten. So, back to the vet.

The vet agreed that it sounded like the drugs were upsetting his stomach, and since he has to eat, other steps must be taken. It appeared that Nipper had been scratching at the patch more than we'd even thought (and we thought: a lot) because it hadn't healed as it should have. No amount of antibiotics, the vet said, would make the hot spot go away if he kept reinfecting it. (I didn't tell him that big dog Tralfaz had kept licking Nipper's wound this whole time, because Tralfaz causes enough disruption at the vet's office without being thought of as an idiot.) So the answer was to stop the antibiotic and get the Elizabethan collar, or E-collar, or Cone of Shame.

And here we are.

Nipper HATES THIS CONE, of course. And he's scared of it. He couldn't figure out how to jump into the car with it, so I had to lift him in, all 101 pounds of him. He bonked into every %#$*@! thing he got near all the way home. And all the way into the home. And all the way through it. He couldn't go down stairs. He couldn't eat or drink. He couldn't figure out how to sit or lie down. If not for my wife's boundless compassion and patience with him, I think he'd have been standing in the same place all night, panting, whimpering to be set free from this horrible head-prison.

No way could he sleep in his crate, because he wouldn't be able to move in there with the cone on, so we left him downstairs and I slept on the sofa next to him. He whimpered from about 12:30 to 1:30, despite my efforts to console him. I think he was trying to get on his side, because he would move about an inch at a time, and slowly turned so he was pointing at me, and the cone magnified the whimpers like a speaker. I eventually crashed on the floor next to him, which helped for a while, but then we had to go outside. I guess he peed but he can neither move well nor properly sniff the ground in the cone, so I'm not sure. It was a bad night. 

Is there a takeaway from all this? Maybe just: Sometimes you just have to do things that the ones you love will despise for their own good. And it really can hurt you more than it hurts them, even if it's just the pet. Maybe God feels as I did when he knows we have trials we must go through that we can't understand, but His heart bleeds for us as we do.

Or maybe it's just this: Remember when Mom told you not to pick at your scabs? She was right. 

Not just a fish story.

I didn't grow up in a Bible culture. We didn't go to church. We didn’t read the Book, but we had a couple of copies around. When I was a shallow, dumb kid, the Bible seemed to be an impossible combination of mysterious and boring. I've learned a lot since then.

I say that to explain, not excuse, the fact that my ignorance has remained so strong for so long. 

When I was a kid, all I knew about Jonah was that he was an Old Testament guy who got swallowed by a whale, then got out. Like that was the whole story. I had no idea or interest in what put the prophet in this sorrowful condition. Later I found out that it was because God wanted him to get the residents of Nineveh to repent, and Jonah refused to do it. He tried to escape God every way he could, even by ship. When God sent a storm to wreck the ship, Jonah manned up. He told the sailors that they should throw him overboard before God destroyed them (they had cast lots anyway and all signs pointed to him). So throw him overboard they did.

gulp!

The book of Jonah is only four chapters long, one of the shortest in the Bible, and is exceptionally concise. Jonah's in the fish's belly by chapter 2, verse 1.

Finally, Jonah agrees to do God's will even though he hates the people of Nineveh (key fact!), and is released from the giant fish (not a whale). I didn't know that Nineveh was the biggest city in the world at one point, but the Bible says it took three days just to walk through it. For comparison: If you're in okay condition you can walk the length of Manhattan in one day and still stop for lunch. Nineveh is also an enemy of Israel, so Jonah really doesn't want the Lord to spare his wrath. And yet he agrees to go talk to the city of jerks and get them to repent. And they do.

But I didn't know about the end of the story -- chapter 4 never came up at Mass. (As Kathleen Madigan says, "Protestants read the Bible, Catholics read the bulletin. Who died and what's for lunch?" Well, not really, but there's truth to it.) And when I read chapter 4, Jonah became my new favorite Old Testament prophet.

Jonah sits on a hill to watch God destroy Nineveh, and nothing happens. God forgave them and will not destroy them. Jonah is SO MAD that the Ninevehens (Ninevians?) have repented and been spared that he wants to die. He just can't STAND it. He just sits there and seethes. God even asks him, "Are you right to be angry?" For which he has no answer. He doesn't care if he's right, I guess.

God grows a plant to shade Jonah where he sits seething. Jonah likes that. But then God destroys the plant, which makes Jonah mad again. Now God asks if he's right to be angry about the plant dying.

Jonah answered, “I have a right to be angry—angry enough to die.”

And God replies:

“You are concerned over the gourd plant which cost you no effort and which you did not grow; it came up in one night and in one night it perished. And should I not be concerned over the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot know their right hand from their left, not to mention all the animals?”

And... and that's it! That's the end of the book. As far as we know Jonah just continued to sit there, furious, wishing an earthquake would swallow Nineveh.

This is outstanding.

Now, my pastor would probably tell me that Jonah must have repented again, because how would we otherwise know the end of the story? He must have told someone. God explained that the people of Nineveh didn't even know right from wrong until Jonah told them, but He loved them anyway, and that's why he needed Jonah to help save them. And then Jonah probably told God he was sorry for his anger and then told his story to the Israelites and became one of the minor prophets.

But I find the ambiguity of the ending fascinating. I can't help but identify with Jonah, furious that this city of lowlifes has been saved after all they'd done to his people, so furious that he wanted to die because this is intolerable. And I can imagine God loving Jonah all the same.

I can't imagine being as brave as most of the other prophets. I can certainly imagine being as angry as Jonah. His God is the God of love and forgiveness, so he cannot take a hand against Nineveh himself. For some reason he is the only man of God whom the Ninevehans (? oh, whatever) will listen to, because God spares no effort to get Jonah to do his will. But it doesn't stop Jonah from being mad.

Maybe I'm nuts, but there's something in that image of Jonah watching Nineveh with fury in his heart I find appealing. It's sad, sure, but there's nobility in someone doing his duty when it's the last thing he wants to do. I hope he did find peace. My burdens are a lot lighter, but I'd like some peace myself.

The quality of mercy.

Happy Easter to our Orthodox brethren!

Meanwhile, on the Roman side of things, today is Divine Mercy Sunday, which is a very helpful day indeed.

Celebrated the first Sunday after Easter Sunday since AD 2000, this day is a chance for Catholics to really set things right. For some, it is a glorious example of the boundless mercy of God, as revealed by Jesus to St. Faustina. For others, it's a makeup exam after flunking Lent.

How does it work? Well, at my parish there will be a celebration this afternoon featuring veneration of the famous picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart (the Divine Mercy Image), with Reconciliation (Confession to you old-timers), exposition and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and recitation of the Divine Mercy Chaplet.

I'll just pop down to the neighborhood chapel.

The Chaplet of the Divine Mercy is particularly potent, as Jesus has promised mercy even to hardened sinners who pray it. A chaplet sounds like an olde-tyme cape, or a little teeny church, or a short British gentleman, but it is defined as a "part of a rosary featuring five decades." And as a wreath worn around the head. And "a small molding carved with small decorative forms." English is weird.

Anyway, sounds like a good deal, right? It's even better than that. Because we don't just pray for ourselves, but for every human being on the planet. In the rosary, in place of the 50 Hail Marys, we pray, "For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world." That means all of us palookas, every one. And we need it.

Of course I have a commitment I must attend to during our parish ceremony, so I'm going to miss it. It's a pity, because that mercy sounds like something I could definitely use. For the times I've been cross and angry and yelling at my dogs or at people (the dogs, at least, usually don't deserve it), for the times I have gotten mad at parishioners driving the wrong way in the church parking lot (it's not that hard, folks!), for the times I have asked St. Celestinia, patron of asteroids, to send just a couple of wee little meteorites down on the heads of mine enemies, for these things and others I could use me some mercy. It doesn't even have to be totally divine; just, like, 80 proof divine would be great.

And I could use some divine education. Imagine how embarrassed I was to find out there's no St. Celestinia! No wonder I got no meteorites.

Prayer and meditation.

And I'm a toddler.

This is sad but true. It takes me probably three times as long to do a rosary as any other Catholic you will ever meet, because I have to estimate how many beads I missed while planning the menu for the week, wondering if you can pray for the Mets, wondering when that big Visa bill is due, wondering why there's a perception of weakness in men who pray considering how difficult it can be, wondering if even divine intervention can help the Mets... I am the king of distraction, in that I don't even need anything outside my own stupid head to distract me. I can do it myself. 

Also, meditation puts me to sleep. I actually used to go to a meditation group on Mondays and fully expected to be awakened one day and sent back to the office with a cup of coffee paid for by the pitying members of the group. I don't go there anymore. 

People complain about formal, memorized prayers, but to tell you the truth I don't do much better with casual prayer. I'll be thinking about the people I want to pray for (like those who read this blog) and I'll be wondering how bad the Giants will be this fall, whether I can work out the plot of the mystery I'm trying to write, whether God will mind if I ask Him to smite the rulers of North Korea, whether I can get the grass cut before it's too long for my lawn mower...

Toddler time.

So I'll just meditate instead. Wake me in an hour, okay?

Box o' problems.

But what fun is that?

Happy! Easter!

Things are better today, thanks, now that Easter is here. Hooray!

Here's some Easter thoughts for you:

1) Remember on January SECOND, when I was going berserk because the local supermarket was selling Easter candy? Yes, that was three and a half months ago, or more than a quarter of the year. Well, it's okay now; eat your Easter candy. The Halloween candy will be on the racks tomorrow.

2) Speaking of Easter candy, if you like jelly beans, or if you don't but you like Jolly Rancher hard candy, get down to the store for the sales tomorrow and get some Jolly Rancher Jelly Beans. These things made a jelly bean queen out of the tasteful and talented Mrs. Key and will make a believer out of you. (I told y'all about these last year; hope you remembered to get some!)

3) Does anyone know the second verse to "Here Comes Peter Cottontail"? Sure, it's easy to look up, but as far as I know everyone when freesinging gets as far as the "Hippity Hoppity Easter's on its waaa-yay" and just peters (ha!) out. The lyrics are here: for the record, the next verse is:

Bringin' every girl and boy
Baskets full of Easter joy
Things to make your Easter bright and gay

So now you know.

Contrary to common belief, Gene Autry, who wrote "Here Comes Santa Claus," did not write "Peter Cottontail"; Wikipedia tells us Steven Nelson and Jack Rollins wrote it and asked Autry if he'd sing it, which he did. Rankin and Bass made an animated film based on the song in 1971, but they seldom run it on TV. Featuring the voices of Casey Kasem (really!), Vincent Price, and Danny Kaye, this is one of the most bizarre Rankin-Bass productions you'll ever see, and they gave us the Island of Misfit Toys, the Archipelago of Last Years, The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians, and Mad Monster Party--and, for those of you who grew up watching WPIX in New York, Rankin and Bass did the horrifying six-finger hand for the opening of Chiller Theatre. I would run from the room.

Anyway, since Freeform (formerly the Family Channel, back when it didn't suck) has not done any Easter programming (shocker!), you can watch it on YouTube:

4) In other news, Jesus Christ is risen today. As St. Paul says,

Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

Scoffers may use to this say that the only reason people believe in Christ is because they fear death, and let's face it, being fearful of death is a powerful motivator. But that's not what brought me into the fold in adulthood. (For a young healthy adult in peaceful times, death is pretty much an abstract concept with little power to scare, unlike Chiller Theatre.) I came to understand how empty life was if there was no creator; that tracing the origins of everything and finding no Prime Mover, no Uncreated Creator, was illogical; how (in my experience) life lived with no guiding God tended to turn selfish, hedonistic, and sick. It's more complicated than that, of course, but that led me to the long road that I'm still trudging. This Easter I suspect that I may be heading someplace good, and I am glad.

May God bless you, also.

Smash Wednesday.

Here comes that old man Lent again, ruining everybody's fun.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent in many (not all) Christian churches. (My Eastern Orthodox pals actually started the Great Lent on Monday.) I usually look forward to Lent; I could use a chance to catch a breath, try to start off on a good spiritual footing.

Last year I wrote about forgiveness during Lent; instead of giving up chocolate or alcohol, why not give up holding a grudge? And it's still a good idea, although perhaps impossible for my more, shall we say, Irish friends. I'd often heard that Irish Alzheimer's is when you forget everything but the grudge; recently I learned of a sweet Irish lady who's suffering from dementia, who still is sore at the friend who shot her in the rear end during a paintball match a generation ago.

So: Forgiveness. Perhaps I ought to take some time each day this season to think of those who -- hard to believe, I know! -- bear some grudge against me, hate me, or just don't like me. Say a prayer for each one. Say, "God, if you would, please bless this person. Please watch over this person, please keep this person in your heart, please press that smite button that Gary Larson said you have right there on your keyboard..."

Or perhaps that's not exactly what I ought to be saying.

I can't recall a time when I faced Lent with less enthusiasm. I'm not real rah-rah on myself right now -- Christianity, when exercised properly, is an excellent means of stripping away pleasant illusions about ourselves -- and I seem to be facing a number of problems for which I have no solutions. At times like that you only want someone (or Someone) to hand you an answer; everything else is just noise.

That's where I am today. God, perhaps you could give me some direction here? Or maybe just do a little smiting on my behalf...?

Happy Thanksgiving!

I love Thanksgiving, I truly do. Not everyone does, I know.

Turkey.

Gratitude is important to me every day of my life. Anyone who's had some kind of close call with death---I mean, more than the "Whoa! Almost skidded out there!" type, which is important but easily forgotten---knows that every day is a day to be thankful for.

Am I actually grateful every day? What are you, crazy? Of course not. I'm either working on some dumb editing project, or my new book is going poorly, or I've got a cold, or my knee hurts, or I'm feeling old, or underappreciated, or someone I love is unhappy, or I'm tired, or feeling very old, or missing someone, or the bus is late, or it's raining, or snowing (Gaaah! like yesterday), or too hot, or I'm wondering why Stephen King can fart out a piece of toilet paper and it makes the best-seller lists while I... And no, I'm not very grateful.

But I know I ought to be. I'm usually pretty well, and the bills are paid, and no one's found the bodies (kidding!), and I have people who love me, eyes to see, ears to hear, plenty to eat, a warm home, and a dog that brings me a lot of laughs and a ton of blog entries. I live in the greatest country in the history of the world. I'm not in the hospital today, or in the gutter, but if I was, I'd still have things for which to be grateful. Every day I could make a gratitude list, and every day it would say "Continued on next page."

In our cynical age, when someone survives a friendly hello from Mr. Death, we think That's great and we follow it with But it's not like you're not going to die someday anyhow. At least that's the culture as I read it; not surprising that Mr. & Mrs. Smith, one of our many films that cheapen our idea of human life, contains lines like "Happy endings are stories that just haven't finished yet." (And yet---spoiler alert!---the filmmakers felt obliged to give the heroes a happy ending.)

As for that quote. When you decide life is worth fighting for, even though you know you'll have to relinquish it one day, you realize that the story is more than just the ending anyway. And if you have faith, you believe in very, very happy endings, that are themselves just beginnings.

In my life, basically nothing is how I would have asked for it, but everything is better than I deserve. And if I can't take a moment to be thankful for God's blessings on my nation and my life, then I'm a lesser creature than that turkey in the oven.

For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

Okay, that's enough; I'll be back to my whiny self tomorrow. But today, there's pie.

All Saints' Day (or, Halloween: The Recap).

It was a lousy Halloween. And I don't say that because the kids cleaned us out of candy. I say that because there were hardly any kids and I got stuck with all kinds of candy.

What's the matter with you, kids? Have you no sense of decency? Do you really want to see poor Mr. Key get fatter and lose all his teeth? Do you? Where's the love of community? Where's the support for your local novelist?

It was a bit cold, almost Decembery weather, and then around seven it started to rain. Just a little; just enough. That seemed to put the kibosh on it. Normally we get hit late by teenagers costumed as teenagers wearing hoodies and carrying Mom's spare pillowcases, but even though it was a Friday night, they apparently found better things to do than run around in cold rain and try to hit as many houses as possible before town curfew. Loser teenagers! We saved the better stuff for last, you know!

On this All Saints' Day, surrounded by leftover candy I overbought, haunted by my resentment about being invited to a Halloween party (which I complained about like King Baby the other day), it's pretty clear that the obvious sins of pride, anger, and gluttony are going to keep me from being a saint if nothing else. The lack of any notable good deeds might also have an effect on the decision. No, relics of Fred are never going to cure anyone's blindness, stop anyone's hemorrhage, or get you past the driver's exam. On the other hand, that means people won't be ringing the bell asking for bits of my bones. So there's an upside.

Peter, Paul: Great saints, unpopular Halloween costumes.

Halloween/All Saints' Day does over two days what Christmas does all by itself: provide a popular children's holiday and a day you have to go and be sullen in church. (Relax; when All Saints' Day falls on a Saturday, like this year, or a Monday, the obligation is abrogated.) (Meaning, you don't have to go.) On one hand there's the candy and costumes; on the other there's sitting in an uncomfortable pew, focusing on people who are much better than you would ever want to be. Which is more popular, again? Western culture has taken solemn and important holy days, made them more palatable for children by adding fun traditions and foods, and blown up the children's side to titanic portions while jettisoning the rest.

Once again we are forced to confront our national refusal to grow up---except that you have to have grown up a little for the argument to have any impact. Otherwise you just roll over and have another Snickers.

As for me, I take my responsibility as a churchman seriously, but someone has to eat all this candy, you know. It's not going to eat itself. Other things may, but not candy.

God's vengeful Charley Horse.

Yesterday I expected to be awakened from slumber by the dog whining to go out, as often happens, but it didn't happen. Instead I woke up a good deal later, realized the lovely Mrs. Key was gone, peeked out the bedroom door, and found that she was up and had taken care of the dog and all. I'd been allowed to sleep in!

"Great!" I said. "Well, back to bed."

"NO WAY," said God, or I assume He did, since no sooner did my face hit the pillow when the Vengeful Charley Horse of God smited me.

Smitey smite smite!

It felt like a mighty hand (hoof?) had nailed my calf and dragged me onto the floor. It's been many years since I had one of those, and I had forgotten how crippling they are. Such pain! And even if they didn't hurt like a mother, they render the affected leg motionless as your muscle bunches up as tight as sailors' knots.

What a doggone mean trick for a muscle to play. After all I've done to let them have a life of ease.

Now, I know there were entirely mundane reasons for me to have one of these out of the blue. Not drinking enough water in my active Saturday; not getting proper electrolytes.

Still, the timing, and the way I was essentially thrown out of bed, reminded me of C. S. Lewis's admonition about praying and dishes from Mere Christianity:

Now, the moment you realise ‘Here I am, dressing up as Christ,’ it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretence and more of a reality. You will find several things going on in your mind which would not be going there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them. Or you may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go and do it.

Not that I was praying, but the point is taken: Sleeping is good, but helping is gooder. And it may keep St. Charley the Horse from pounding you.

(Thanks to the blog Mere C. S. Lewis for helping me find the quote I was thinking about!)

What hath God wrought.

Some Sundays ago at Mass, we celebrated the Solemnity of St. Peter and St. Paul---Peter the axle of the early church, Paul the far rim of the wheel.

Our pastor is a fellow who has the heart of a lion and the hide of a lamb. He also has a wicked sense of humor. He can do a fiery homily about the need for evangelizing and building up of the faith and make the congregation laugh like a good after-dinner speaker can. He has the gift.

During the prayers I wondered what I can to build up the faith. It's not a natural urge or talent. I came to the church in middle age (early middle age, thank you) and it's still like speaking a second language to me much of the time. I have the instincts of a totemic barbarian, I think, inclined to burn effigies or run to the pagan temple and burn oxen, asking my gods to smite my enemies for me. That's behind me now, but the old trodden paths are still in my mind. I wish my conversion could have wiped it all out, paved those paths and bent them toward new and better destinations, but while that may be the case for other converts, including St. Paul, it was not for me. The kind of ground that the seed fell on in my case is yet uncertain.

The thought came to me during prayers, though: Tell them what God has done for you.

But I'm still a loser and possibly the biggest sinner I know, I said; I get depressed and full of self-pity and I still sin like a well-oiled sinning machine, and I put off writing this blog entry for weeks.

Today is the day, though.

All right. Brief version.

God created me although He didn't have to, although in my dark moments I think He used resources better spent on other things.

God tried to put me on right paths many times, but I chose to escape from reality by every means available to me. It made me a book lover and a writer, for better or worse, but it led to other paths that were unquestionably worse.

God did not strike me sober, but He led me to sobriety and it was made clear that I would have to embrace it if I wanted it. Most of my life I have waffled my way into things, and by falling this way and that I have made terrible decisions. But sometimes two opposing directions are obvious. I have made two stark choices in my life, and both times I'm glad to say I made the right choice. One was asking to marry the lovely Mrs. Key. The other was taking God up on His offer.

I have flailed and failed at faith over the years, but it sustains me, and I pray every day. On two occasions of great stress I have been praying and suddenly felt uplifted in a way I have never known and don't understand. Both times it was like I'd gone dying of thirst to a water fountain and someone turned on a fire hose. I had to turn away because it was too much for me. Too exceptional for me. More recently I was in mental and spiritual agony when a friend of mine died suddenly, so I went into a chapel to pray. The agony left me suddenly, in a speed I didn't think was possible---I'd always heard it took twenty minutes at least for the body to recover from a state of agitation, but this was instantaneous. The pain and grief that remained was hard, but manageable. I'm not sure these things can be explained, but they could certainly be explained away.

Anyway, these are some of the things God has done for me, and I wanted to focus on things that did not lend themselves easily to responses of "And why you and not Joe X?" Because I don't know why. But I do know that even though I remain a miserable sinner, God has been kind to me, and there's no reason to think He would not be kind to you, too, if you're willing to make the right choice and seek the right paths.