"Death Day" was 31 years ago

I remember it clearly. I was sleeping in southern California. I'd been to a farmworker camp the day before and planned to discuss my moving experience with my father when I got back to Washington. Persistent ringing. Who in hell ...? It's 6:30 am! I was awake. 

I had to go to the rectory ASAP. I was staying at a church facility in San Bernardino. Only nuns and priests would call me out of my slumber at six-effing-thirty. I was told to call home.

No answer. My wife was pregnant: had anything gone wrong? Because "wrong" was beginning to be the word rising up in my mind. Something was ... um ... askew. But it was six-effing-thirty, maybe 6:45 by then.

Called my mother-in-law. "Your father is dead."

The priest and a nun were looking at me as my face crumpled and I set down the phone. Everyone seemed to be speaking to me at once and I just ran out of the building and out to an avenue and lit a cigarette.

Nobody walks on sidewalks in California. Certainly not that early in the morning.

I returned, let me be sleepwalked to the airport and to an all-day cross-country odyssey to ... what? To confront the debris of my father's life, ended at 59 years of age and nearly 10 months. Five months older than my age today, 31 years later.

No more stasis

There's a time for everything under the heavens, wrote the much-quoted and little-known Qoheleth. This time is the time to break out of stasis, to do something about the lingering global economic toothache, to speak up one's frustrations, act on needs, think of solutions.

I've been studiously avoiding saying a word about the Occupy movement and the various bits of startling economic news, in part for professional reasons, in part because I have so very little to say that others aren't already saying.

I don't think it's too sectarian to see in all of them signs that the reign of God is "at hand." Although I borrow from the New Testament, when I say "God," I mean the unimaginably wondrous one who is the ground of all being. Of whom I can say next to nothing otherwise. Similarly, her reign is as unfathomable as herself, except that it is exceptionally different from everything as we know it and would be as much of a surprise as meeting her face to face.

I think this is the message of the Occupy movement: the order of things wants changing. To what, ask the pundits?

We are slouching toward something that reaches out to all and in some way gathers us all in the folds of God's robe and the warmth of her breast. The new arrangement calls for a world of loving, caring, respecting, life giving, all flowing from us with abandon without thought for tomorrow, for efficiency or for gain.

We just need to begin to live in it, like OWS, ready to weather weather, cops, anything, all with the expectation that everyone will be provided for and fed.

I don't believe to get to Heaven

"Profit," probably "benefit" in the original French, is the most common reason given by Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century Carmelite, for living "in the presence of God" (or roughly in utter contemplation and obedience). It's a common theological transaction.

You believe in God to get saved or to get to heaven or experience blessings, or whatever -- all of it by and by, because everything here and now remains as nasty and brutish as ever, and you are no better. "Primitive" people (unlike those about to destroy the planet today) danced to the gods for rain and ate the flesh of others.

In my many years of religious belief I never believed for that reason. Nor do I now, when I find religion highly questionable and at heart ignorant of God's unimaginable wonder.

A believer I know says this is my, and her, arrogance. Probably it is.

I probably think myself above the salvation crap that satisfies the religious rabble. The hoi polloi can pray to get a parking space, a good grade, a good job, a spouse, a house with a white picket fence, a painless death and the 70 virgins in Islamic heaven. Not me.

I don't think God is a reality "for me," in the relativist sense that things can be true for me, but not others. This is the same as saying there are 7 billion unique universes with entirely different laws of gravity, each depending on the personality of the human being at its center.

Nor do I think that God wastes too much time on whether I get a convenient parking spot. I usually do ... people say I have "parking karma." Or maybe, to borrow from Justine Labalestier, I have a parking fairy.

One would think that's not God lavishing her bounty on me. God has better things to do, or not do (she hasn't told me which) ... that do not include monitoring whether I masturbate, lie, steal, cheat, etc., all of which I surely have done at one time or another.

The truth I find plausible isn't so because I find it convenient, indeed downright profitable. Just a right and wrong aren't determined by what I choose, or are biochemically impelled, to do.

To my mind the truth I posit as true and the good I propose as good is quite independent of where I "go" after death, other than, say, the crematorium. Or where I park my car.