Leon in Winter

Catholic childhood indoctrination is strong. For a number of reasons, adult attachment can be very strong, too.

I haven't gone to a Catholic Mass in four years, feel no need to do, quite the contrary. Still, I follow the shenanigans at the Vatican and in the American hierarchy, for which I used to work, much like Trotsky watching from Mexico the revolution in the Kremlin gone Stalinist -- without Leon's cachet or his famous mistresses.

People ask why I care and I don't have a easy answer. Perhaps the old Loyola epigram is true: "give me a boy at the age of seven and I give you the man." My strongest formative influences were celibate, vowed men.

For others, there's also cultural Catholicism, which is more or less the notion that one's grandparents were Catholic and in one's family "we've always done this." This is limited to baptisms, first communions, confirmation, weddings and burials; to manners and genteel words and even the occasional charity.

This never exerted much of a pull for me. Celibate vowed men leave family traditions behind. "Let the dead bury the dead," Jesus told a would-be follower who wanted to bury his father before following him.

For me there was always a truth kernel in the gospel that resonated, indeed resonates. What must be done is very clear and simple, if only I would dare: feed the hungry, give to drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison. Tell the truth, respect what belongs to others, ignore other people's wealth, nurture and protect life. Little or nothing about churchgoing or Bible reading.

Most of us complicate it with theologies, exceptions and fancy dancing that allow us to temporize while we enjoy our dollar-driven, consumption-directed lives and pretend that we are really taking the gospel's simple imperatives seriously.

What's specifically Catholic about this? That I am not the arbiter, the interpreter or much less the transmitter. That the truth is the truth, whether I like it or not. That even the pope can't unsay it.

I am a philosophical absolutist with all the doubts and scant few certitudes of an agnostic. If there is a God, it's not up to me to define God or agree with what God wants done.

There probably isn't a God. Here all of us who temporize and avoid what God wants of us can sign on the dotted line: we're unbelievers. If there were a God and we believed that, we would be seriously concerned about what God wants (and how little of it we fulfill).

Yet something keeps tugging, something keeps urging: somewhere there is a good that has my name on it for me to do. And I had nothing to do with it being there. All I can do is find it and embrace it, or find it and walk away.

A Path of My Own

Recent debates and personal discussions bring home to me how hard it is to try to forge one's own unusual, if not necessarily unique, path.

It's not that I want to be different.

From childhood I yearned to be in a family like the Andersons in TV's Father Knows Best. In my youth I aspired to have a normal name and a normal place of origin, to be, say, Douglas, a Methodist from Lincoln, Nebraska. In my adult life, I tried to work in a regular newspaper, in a regular newsroom where rudeness and stupidity got you ahead. At some point I wanted a station wagon, a house and a dog.

I wondered what it would be like to see Paris for the first time at 25 or 35. To speak one language and only one. To have so fixed a sense of identity that I could not fathom Italian humor or Swedish epithets. What if I had grown up a Republican and inherited a seat at the local Rotary Club? Or married someone who grew up in more or less the same way I did and shared ethnicity and religion?

By now you've guessed -- I am and have been none of these.

There isn't a label for me and I won't try to invent one. To give you an idea, without getting tedious, until 2003 I had spent 25 years in a household without a car or a television: people of whom the same could be said represent less than 1 percent of the American population. And I'm only scratching the surface.

This gets expressed in ideas, beliefs, styles of life. I find myself at odds with the flavors available and I want to make myself a double-dip philosophy in a little sugar cone all my own.

Take the economic ideas of the day. In France they're protesting the first timid step toward dismantling a cradle-to-grave system of labor and social security. The step itself is a no-brainer in the USA: under a new French law young workers can be laid off more easily than experienced, proven workers.

My Menshevik instincts -- which I certanily did not get from my monarchist mother or similarly traditionalist father -- tell me the protesting Europeans are on the right track: give up one benefit and the entire house of social protections comes tumbling down. On the other hand, my American entrepreneurial experience tells me that in the world of work no good deed goes unpunished: employees treated generously cheat you and laugh at you behind your back.

The more I consider the great questions, the less certain I am that the major Answers are right. Socialism and capitalism both have flaws.

The same applies to the God questions.

In March 2002 I finally reached the conclusion that the vast majority of Catholics, among whom I counted myself, did not really believe -- a circumstance in which I included a fellow by the name of Karol Wojtyla, who was then pope, and another named Joseph Ratzinger, elected (was it the distribution of hallucinogens at the conclave of 2005?) to succeed him. Had any of these august men or their fellow bishops, let alone all the Joe and Jane Pews sitting in the churches, really believed in God and really taken the gospels the least bit seriously, they would have been quaking in their boots.

Yet there they were, appearing on television with mealymouthed press releases after U.S. courts forced them to acknowledge they had conspired to cover up the massive rape of children. And here we laypeople were trying to pretend that we didn't notice, after witnessing decades of every kind of equivocation and hypocrisy available. It wasn't just that scandal. Really.

In the accumulation of unthinkable and improbable developments, I decided I'd had enough: I would at least proclaim my unbelief openly. So sue me Papa Ratzinger. The pope is naked.

And yet ... I can't discount the notion that truth is more likely than not absolute. Truth, if it is A, cannot also be X, merely because I like A and my neighbor Emily likes X. (Note: I am right, no? Of course, I am right! Why would I believe she is right? If I did, I'd have to believe what she believes, right?)

Or, rubber hit the road, I do believe that guilt is good. Not the kind of guilt that immobilizes you and keeps you from doing the right or the wrong thing. Just the kind of guilt that makes you say, "Whoa, Nelly! I really screwed someone over here." Guilt when you've done something wrong is like pain when you're sick; it tells you that you need to get involved in some healing. Then after you're healed (and you've healed the one you screwed over), then, sure, get rid of that guilt.

These are Catholic answers right out of the textbook. But I'm an atheist, remember? I even wrote a whole godless ethic (see my blogs here and here).

Then there's the love question (I mean, besides "What do women really want?").

Is love a relationship bound by a set of rules and laws, such as I often feel should be avoided like the plague? (See my blog here.)

If so, why am I not satisfied with the Latin gentleman's lifestyle? You don't know the Latin gentleman? Here's how my father, who was a Latin gentleman, described him:

The Latin gentleman had seven sons.
The first was lawyer,
the second was a thief, too.
The third was a doctor,
and the fourth was a butcher, too.
The fifth was a priest,
and the sixth was a drunk, too.
The seventh, like their father,
was a bachelor.

Ha, ha! Isn't that a knee-slapper? No. It isn't. A priapic man devoted to fooling women is merely a waste, not to mention a scoundrel to his seven sons.

So here's the thing: I would rather find a path that's neither socialist nor capitalist, that's neither Catholic nor atheist, that's neither priapic nor hidebound. A path of my own.

Western Spirit

We are out of truly useful Western empirical facts, the building blocks of science and technology, when confronted with pain, death and the need to change.

A common recourse is to seek out the East.

Life, the Vedas say, is a spiritual existence that undergoes a series of birth and death cycles until reaching a high consciousness and salvation. To live means to suffer, stemming from craving and clinging; freedom from want is Nirvana, says Buddha, and it can be achieved though an eightfold path. Everything exists within a grand cosmic harmony, Lao Tsu tells us, the Great Tao. We must conform to "Li," or honesty in relationships, Confucius teaches.

We fall into a new Manichean error in thinking everything Eastern is spiritual and everything Western material.

In 1832, John Henry Newman was crossing a tempest-tossed English channel and from his fear, in the distance he saw a light:

"Lead, Kindly Light,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me."

And around the year 500 an anonymous Carthusian monk in England who chose the pen name Dionysius the Areopagite, wrote in his Cloud of Unknowing that "in the time of this word all the creatures that ever have been, be now, or ever shall be, and all the works of those same creatures, should be hid under the cloud of forgetting."

Yet if our own William Butler Yeats fretted in his 20th century poem that "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," from long ago Julian of Norwich in her calming voice reassures us: "All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well."

We may be out of useful facts, but not of hopeful wisdom.

Chain or char?

Interesting what people will fasten onto when they read a blog.

• My doubt of my doubt.
• My use of "Christian agnostic."
• The color of the type.

I'm not sure I can explain these, or that I should. Certain ideas are recursive and paradoxical and explaining is akin to cutting the Gordian Knot.

As to color, I like it and, for the moment, I'll keep it.

One last thought: I went to the National Cathedral (aka Washington's Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul) and in the sermon I heard that love involves mundane things, like washing, ironing, preparing meals and all sorts of unpleasant chores. I thought love involved dancing in the streets to music. Not sure I'm ready for this chore-bound love.

Strange Warming

Like Charles Wesley, who spoke of his conversion as "I felt my heart strangely warmed," a friend's piercing declaration that I believe has left me in doubt of my doubting.

She was in pain from a prolongued double mourning and from searching and from finding prayer inadequate to the task. Out of nowhere I said that she might want to consider varying her prayers with adoration and thanksgiving and contrition, in addition to supplication.

"You do believe!" she exclaimed.

Out of nowhere I proclaim to another friend that she is godly. Out of nowhere I reassure yet another a believer that what some preacher's wife is trying to do, convince her that her particular take on Christianity is wrong, need not trouble her.

Yet I am an agnostic. A Christian agnostic with too much theology in my head. It all comes tumbling out without thinking. It all comforts. I can't help myself.

Approaching Twilight

Fall approaching in the northern hemisphere, along with a recent personal experience, bring to mind the proximity of death and the human struggle with the end of life, particularly our own or that of members of our own species.
Leaves will fall to the ground dead. Various crops will be harvested, that is, fruits of various plants will be killed. The temperature will drop and a vast array of insects and microscopic creatures will die.
In this season of reaping, the Grim Reaper reaps most. In nursing homes and hospices, fall chills are known to bring on the illnesses that finish off the dying.
People of all opinions, persuasions and scientific theories can agree that the cessation of human life as we know it has at least several common characteristics. Death is irreversible, unavoidable and it renders null and void all ideas, states of being, relationships, possibilities, fears and joys connected with the life of the person who has died.
In vain religious people argue that life continues. Whatever life there is, if there is one, is idealized: heavens and hells are clearly quite unlike life as we know it. When we die, we are all dead as door nails to this life.
No one comes back from death to life as we know it to tell its tale. We don't hear that even Jesus or Odin or any other allegedly resurrected figure went on living as those who knew them lived, anchored to this earth and its limitations.
It is understandable, however, that there should be religious complaints against death. The mind rebels against the notion.
Elizabeth Kübler Ross made famous the five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- all of which show how hard death is. Indeed, the mind can hardly define what death is and when it happens.
Historically, we said that someone was dead when the heartbeat and breathing stopped. The Victorians put bells on coffins, however, due to the common fear of mistakenly burying people who were cold, motionless, and unresponsive for some period of time due to a medical condition. Today, the definition of death hinges around brain death, or cessation of electrical activity in the brain.
Then there's the matter of death being unavoidable -- along with taxes, quipped Ben Franklin.
In the United States, the federal government lists the following as the top ten causes of death: heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease, nephritis and nephrosis, septicemia.
Some amount of healthy eating and exercise may prevent heart disease. Not smoking may prevent cancer, although non-smokers do get it. There are also possible preventions for stroke, respiratory disease and diabetes -- although many of these are genetic.
The flu is not a killer, it's just like the wind in the fall, it pulls off those who hold on the tree of life is loose, almost dead.
The others are not killers, they are simply conditions of degeneration. The body, like all machines, breaks down and ceases working until it can work no more.
While we're at it with killers, there's sudden accidental death, brought on by human killers, which evokes revulsion in all sane people. Too much of it is allowed to happen.
Watching death, mostly from a distance, my observation is that the process of death is very much like the process of birth and infancy -- just in reverse.
A baby begins to recognize people and its environs, begins to communicate, eventually to walk, talk, feed itself and take care of it excretions. A dying person loses control of the bowels and the ability to eat unaided, to walk or talk, to communicate, to recognize and eventually stops breathing and the electric waves in the brain cease.
Do not mourn for them, we are all dying.
As rendering things null and void, I'd like to end with my favorite quote from Scott Peck's "The Road Less Traveled":

... let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:
The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
The fantasy of omnipotence
The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one's parent(s)
The dependency of childhood
Distorted images of one's parents
The omnipotentiality of adolescence
The 'freedom' of uncommitment
The agility of youth
The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
The fantasy of immortality
Authority over one's children
Various forms of temporal power
The independence of physical health
And, ultimately, the self and life itself.

In Isabel's Wake

Hurricane Isabel brought me four days and nights without electricity that, now ended, prompt a few thoughts concerning the ethical issues, political, social and personal, that electric power and other conveniences common to the 21st century city pose to the first few billion humans trying to survive on this planet.

The political is personal, the women's movement has taught us, and here there is no exception. My first encounter with blackouts in a Latin American country linked the two. The power grid of the part of city in which I lived, I later learned, was no weaker, no less well cared for, than that of my native New York. The reason for my first and rather frightening encounters with candles and flashlights and stumbling in the dark, many nights at a time, was instead political.

The electric power unions were quarrelling with the military government's attempt to roll the socioeconomic order back to the 1940s, to put the genie of worker rights, then added to the constitution, back into the bottle. So they struck. Again and again. Each time they made sure they darkened the neighborhoods where high military officers, diplomats, executives and other professionals lived.

In the New York of the 1950s in which I had lived blackouts were unknown -- at least to me. Perhaps it was a function of living in Sutton Place, perhaps it was luck, perhaps -- as nostalgia sometimes suggests -- the United States really was different, the work ethic stronger, the managerial talents sharper and more equitable.

At least, clearly the latter. We have as president a lazy man who has spent his life squandering the privilege that came with the silver spoon in his mouth at birth. A man who takes month-long vacations in a country where they are rare, a man who is careless with facts, a man who knows no realities other than that of those whom he would like to think of as his peers -- oil entrepreneurs, military men, and others. He inherited surplus, he reigns over deficit as far as the eye can see. He inherited a carefully groomed global system of alliances -- he trashed them all to the point that our nation is feared as a dangerous, whimsical predator.

Is it any surprise, then, that the managers of electric power companies allowed the power grid of the capital of the most powerful nation in the world to rot until a strong wind came and blew it apart? Is it surprising that they paraded scores of trucks and personnel waiting in readiness to respond and took days to do what used to be accomplished in hours? There was a letter in the Washington Post from someone who lives in my neighborhood. Like my apartment building, he lost power at about 2:30 on Thursday, many hours before the hurricane struck.

This isn't a matter of whining, but of observing entropy in high places. Yes, I remember that two days after we have had electricity restored, some areas do not. More importantly, I know perfectly well that there are billions in the corrugated tin huts of "villa miserias" or "favelas" around the globe to whom electricity is something either stolen from a nearby pole -- or totally unknown.

The conveniences we take for granted in our 21st century modern cities -- New York, London, Hong Kong and the expanding clones in the USA -- are fragile and still quite the global luxury. Freezers and in them days of food enough to feed African villages are still quite unusual for most of humanity, let alone the electricity to support that style of living.

More to the point. To most Afghanis the idea of buildings tens of stories high -- let alone the notion of an airplane crashing into them -- is a sheer fantasy that has no parallel experience in their television-less lives.

For four days I lived a little like them. It was intolerably uncomfortable. I didn't know how to survive, how to amuse myself. I could not work on my computer. But, OK, I could get out and drive to areas with juice; I even drove to teach a class on computer hardware in an project designed to bridge the digital divide.

I have acquired a learned dependence on systems that are fragile and luxurious -- and I know how to bring at least a few others on board. Yet, can the planet sustain a whole world of countries operating at the level of consumption of Ohio?

For 25 years I lived without a television and without a car -- entirely by choice. This year, due to personal transformations irrelevant to this topic, I throttled those choices. I was amazed to have a color television. I was uncertain about parking lot etiquette at suburban malls to which I now had access by car, after years of walking to smaller stores in the city and buying only what my arms could carry.

Still, I thought I didn't take consumption as a given, that I hadn't become part of American normality -- until Isabel struck.

We have too much. We are dependent on fragile systems run by lazy and unscrupulous people. We are wasting resources to which we have no reasonable claim. We are failing to use our good fortune for the benefit of our entire global neighborhood. We are trapped.

Unless ... unless perhaps Isabel is like Queen Isabel of Spain, sending Christopher Columbus to America. The continent was not really a new world, it was not unpopulated, it was not even discovered. Yet to Columbus it was really new.

Perhaps there is a new way of thinking, living and politicking that can come from even just a little painless adversity.