You Never Know

You never know until it happens.

You can plan for it, think it over, and think it over some more. But it's just speculation. A brain simulation of your best (or worst) what-ifs.

You can panic about it, you can be stoic about it, or you can put it out of your mind with a distraction.

None of it matters until you're actually there.

Like when you're a passenger in a car on a slushy highway, with the snow coming down on an early winter evening in North Idaho. You feel the car fishtail a little bit, and you immediately stiffen up and feel a ball of anxiety rising in your belly. But then the driver gets control of the car, and your worst fears subside.

But then, moments later, it happens for real. The car fishtails again, and then it spins out of control.

This is the what-if moment you've played out in your head for years. Do you fly into a panic?

Well, maybe some do. The point is, you never know until it happens.

I've lived most of my life playing out anxiety-inducing worst-case scenarios like this in my head, even though I should know by now that the real thing is scarcely ever the way you play it out in your interior cinema.

In your imaginary scenarios, you have control over the outcome, even if you don't like what happens. But in real life, you have no choice but to surrender control.

I heard my wife at the wheel. Whatever she was saying, she sounded urgent and scared. But I'm not sure what exactly she said. It seems like a scene from a dream. It was as if I was hearing her from faraway, as if through a tunnel, or secondhand, as if watching everything play out on a movie screen.

The car spun, facing the wrong way. I could see two headlights through the snow, bearing down on us. I felt the blast of the collision. I remember spinning back the opposite way and coming to a rest in the snow-covered grassy median between the eastbound and westbound lanes.

I remember my kiddo sitting next to me in the back seat, crying and scared.

I remember seeing my wife, whose glasses had been flung off her face, reaching for her phone to dial 911, and announcing to the operator in a shaking voice that we'd just been in an accident.

I remember the police, the paramedics, the tow truck, and our friend who arrived to drive us home.

But what I don't remember is any sense of fear. Yet fear is what drives my worst what-ifs, all the time.

You never know until it happens.

If I'd seen the headlights of the box truck racing toward us in one of those what-if feature presentations in my interior cinema, I would have been sweating, screaming, stiffening my body and preparing for the worst.

But when it really happened, I strangely didn't feel scared at all. Not a bit.

The only thought that went through my head was... "Well, this could be the end."

I actually felt strangely at peace. I knew that if this was it, there was not a single thing I could do about it. Despite all those what-ifs in my head where I tried to exert control over the situation, when I actually found myself in that situation in real life, I immediately let go. I didn't need to be in control any more. I guess because I knew I couldn't.

Maybe I feel so physically awful every day of my life that, deep down, I didn't mind if those oncoming headlights might mean the end of my story. Maybe my brain was telling my body, "Finally, no more suffering. You'll be at peace."

But that didn't happen. We walked away from the crash. My wife got some bruises. My back stiffened up later that evening. My daughter was fine, at least physically. The car took it far worse than we did. In fact, the frame got bent so badly that it's going to be totaled. And we only had five or six more payments to make on it.

And what's so odd to me, in the aftermath of the crash, is that I now feel, of all things, a deep sense of sadness. We went to look at our car at the body shop, and I felt like crying. Over a hunk of metal that I never liked in the first place. I always thought it was an ugly car.

Maybe it was because of all the memories made inside the car -- going places together as a family, moving to our new house, playing CDs, playing pretend with my kiddo as we drove.

Or maybe it's the fact that the car had just reached a milestone, having gone over 100,000 miles. When I mentioned that to a guy last week, he said, "It's a Subaru. You're just breaking it in."

I wish. Now I'll always have to think that the last time we sat in that car was when we spun out of control and got knocked off the highway, like a Tilt-a-Whirl combined with a game of bumper cars.

What an ignominious ending. It almost feels like a betrayal of a car that had reliably taken us all over the place, while we took it for granted.

So, sadness, but never any fear. Strange, right?

You never know until it happens.

But also a sense of relief and gratitude. Because a million things could have gone wrong to make the crash a lot worse.

Because of the way we spun around, the box truck hit the front passenger-side corner of the car, which was the only part of the car not occupied. I usually drive, but I was sitting in the back, helping my kiddo with an assignment for the class we were driving her to. If I'd been driving, my wife would have been next to me in that front passenger seat, with a bull's-eye painted on her.

The car could have easily flipped, but the collision snapped the front passenger-side axle, leaving the tire dragging at an awkward angle against the road like a rubber anchor, so that we essentially scraped our way into the median.

There could have been a car in the left lane to hit us again, but there wasn't.

We could have kept skidding all the way over to the other side of the highway, but we didn't.

My wife joked that I must have racked up some Catholic-boy merit points. When I countered that anyone who kept the crash from being worse could have actually prevented the crash altogether, she joked again that maybe we were given some kind of lesson to learn.

Well, who knows? Maybe.

And maybe the lesson was... you never know until it happens.

For Want of an Authentic Culture of Life

"You can't be a Christian and a Democrat."

If you've spent any time in online forums, or around evangelical Christians in real life, you've probably heard this.

My first reaction is generally, "You can't be a Republican either."

Here's a report card on the 2020 presidential candidates that The Catholic Worker recently released. Notice who gets the higher overall grades.

Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang are among those with the best scores, while Donald Trump comes in the lowest of all, with a D-minus.

And yet, once again, spend any amount of time online and you'll hear Christians thanking God for Donald Trump and berating his Democratic opponents as the face of evil.

Why?

Because far too many Christians have reduced their Christianity to two overriding issues: opposition to homosexuality, and opposition to abortion.

I see the latter all the time in Catholic culture, while it's the evangelical Protestants who tend to be more vocal about the former.

Take another look at the Catholic Worker report card and you'll see why right-wingers love Trump. In a world where abortion overrides everything else, Trump trounces his opponents. That's why this year's March for Life essentially turned into a Trump re-election rally when the president, who regularly exposes his disdain and contempt for the most vulnerable members of society, showed up to proclaim his solidarity with the pro-life movement.

The problem is, following in the way of Christ involves far more than just opposing abortion. As the report card reminds us, it also entails fighting poverty, opposing capital punishment, and welcoming the stranger. That's the essence of Catholic social teaching and the heart of the Catholic church's seven Corporal Works of Mercy.

But what do we see among so many Christian Trump supporters? Do we see them promoting values rooted in compassion and mercy? No. We see them defending policies that demonize migrants and rationalize the caged separation of mothers from their children. We see them supporting the eye-for-an-eye vengeance of the death penalty. We see them cheering on the U.S. assassination of another nation's political leader and longing for war with Iran. We see them applauding when the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a Trump administration policy allowing the denial of green cards to anyone who may be likely to need public assistance.

I'll believe that the pro-life movement is truly pro-life when its members pour as much energy and passion into defending the human rights of refugees, supporting the social safety net, and opposing the death penalty as they do taking a stand against abortion.

Moreover, I'd love for a Trump-supporting Christian to show me where he or she sees the president upholding the values of the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the poor and meek, do unto others, love your enemies, turn the other cheek), or how his policies square up with the pronouncement of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 ("whatsoever you did for the least of these, my brethren, you did for me"). I'd also love them to point out which fruits of the spirit Trump embodies -- love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

At this point, Trump-loving Christians will be ready to smear me as an America-hating communist. But that's the problem with our binary politics. Disliking what one "side" does is not an automatic endorsement of the other "side."

When it comes to social justice, the Democratic Party indeed does a better overall job, in terms of its support for social programs that help the poor and needy. But the left also has a gaping blind spot when it comes to abortion, which is reflected in the Catholic Worker scores. Just as the right dehumanizes migrants coming to our border as animals, thieves, freeloaders, and criminals, so the left dehumanizes the unborn as clumps of cells or parasites or "products of conception."

The establishment left, moreover, is just as complicit as the right in its support for American empire. If you criticize our endless wars, and the massive amounts of money we waste every year on supporting militarized violence and death, you'll be slandered and smeared as an enemy of freedom, a Russian bot, or worse. Just ask Tulsi Gabbard.

And then bring up the spiraling cost of our profit-driven healthcare system that drives Americans into bankruptcy and forces people to choose sickness and death over care they can't afford, and the left will pay lip service to the idea of a universal single-payer system. But when push comes to shove -- i.e., when the lobbyists push back -- suddenly healthcare reform becomes just too big a hurdle to overcome. Sorry to all those who are suffering and dying under our current predatory system.

And so we end up with a situation that's an affront to all humanity and decency, whereby we can spend three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year on the military and no one bats an eye, but when it comes to ensuring access to affordable healthcare for every American, the conversation invariably centers on asking "how are we going to pay for that?"

Moreover, the left has an unfortunate tendency to sort people into collectives based around immutable characteristics like sex and race, with the inevitable end result of ostracizing anyone from those identity groups who challenges the political ideologies that prop them up. Diversity of appearance is great; diversity of thought, not so much. This is why censorship is de rigeur among the "tolerant" left these days.

It's not hard to see, of course, how such a rigid ideology demands scapegoats -- someone to blame for every identity group's problems. Hence, cancel culture, with its thoughtcrimes and its blanket demonization of certain elements of society -- typically, straight white males who play the role of the devil in this worldview.

Indeed, as religion loses its grip on society, it's obvious that cancel culture has become its own substitute religion, complete with dogmas, heretics, original sin, and blasphemies, and with transgressors expected to recant on bended knee. And don't even get me started on the weird Gnostic-like trend that sees humans as sexless blank slates, flipping the very notion of being created male and female in the image of God on its head.

And so the witch hunts and inquisitions of old have been repackaged for the 21st century, under the banner of being "woke." It's essentially Christianity with no chance of redemption.

And that's no laughing matter, because as Christianity wanes and becomes replaced with a dangerous Frankenstein-ish imitation of itself, we're also casting aside the very ethics and values that were the cornerstone of Western civilization.

If it feels like the fabric of our society is being torn apart, that's because it is. A diverse and democratic society will ultimately splinter if it no longer has a firm set of beliefs and ideals at its core that its citizens can all agree on.

And so neither "side" in American politics reflects Christ much, if at all. Yet each "side" continues to try to fit Jesus into its political paradigm, from the most liberal Christians to the most right-wing evangelicals.

And that's the whole problem. We try to make Jesus conform to us rather than allow ourselves to be challenged out of our paradigms, our certainty, the comfort of our political echo chambers that see "us" as the good guys and "them" as the bad guys.

The thing is, Jesus doesn't care about your political allegiances. But he does care about how we do unto others, with a special concern for the most vulnerable members of society. So Republicans oppose abortion and Democrats support the social safety net for the needy. That's great. But what else do they do? How do they otherwise reflect or oppose Christ? That's a question all Christians need to examine when they decide to hand over their allegiance to a political party. Do you fit Christ into your politics, or your politics into Christ?

The only U.S. political party I've found that genuinely strives to do the latter is the American Solidarity Party. The two major parties certainly don't.

I've always wished I could feel an allegiance with the pro-life movement, but I never have. And it's because of how the people who make up the movement so rarely show themselves to be "pro-life" outside of one issue, and on that issue they seem to have a distressingly naive notion that abortion can simply be banned. Or, worse, there's a significant contingent of the movement that reveals its deficiency of compassion by thinking it's appropriate to either shame a woman out of an abortion or to even hold her criminally liable for her actions.

It's essentially the right's version of the gun-control crusade. Both groups think the thing they dislike can somehow be legislated out of existence. It's magical thinking in both cases. If people want to get a gun, they'll get one. If women want to get an abortion, they'll get one. To get to the root of either issue, you have to persuade people to see a different point of view. You have to change hearts, not laws.

But our society craves simple solutions to complex problems, so we look for the easy fix -- legislative restrictions -- rather than encourage a true culture of life in which violence becomes unthinkable. A world that embraced the radical love and hospitality of Christ would reject death as a first-line solution to its problems, as our society so often does. 

I wish I could say that the disconnect on life issues that I see in this movement is the exception and not the rule. But no. These are the folks who cheered for Donald Trump when he showed up at their rally, and who so often reveal their true colors when it comes to war, the death penalty, care for pregnant women and young mothers, aid for children, life-saving affordable healthcare, and so much more.

Just bring up the issue of detention of migrants and refugees, for example, and you'll eventually hear someone ask, "Are you going to feed and house all these illegals?" The irony, of course, is that this is precisely the same question pro-choicers point at the pro-life movement: "Are you going to adopt all the unwanted babies?" It all circles back to which people you choose to dehumanize. Put aside for a moment that Christians are charged to help the "least of these" and that the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that anyone in need is your neighbor: You simply can't say things like this and call yourself pro-life.

After this year's Trump-adoring March for Life, I'm afraid the movement has sacrificed any credibility it had left. It's no wonder the world sees Christians as hypocrites. Principles and integrity matter, and sometimes the truth hurts.

We can do so much better. As the hands and feet of Christ in this world, we have to do better.

I'll close with a prayer for peace to Our Lady that I'm quite fond of -- one that if, taken to heart, can surely help us build an authentic culture of life.

Mary, Queen of Peace,
we entrust our lives to you.
Shelter us from war, hatred, and oppression.
Teach us to live in peace,
to educate ourselves for peace.
Inspire us to act justly,
to revere all God has made.
Root peace firmly in our hearts and in our world.
Amen.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers, and the Families

Blessed Are the Peacemakers, George Bellows.

Recent events involving American Christianity have served as a somber reminder of the current state of the faith.

First came the editorial from the centrist Christianity Today, calling for Donald Trump to be removed from office. That piece brought howls of derision from the evangelical wing of American Christianity, along with ludicrous claims that CT, founded by the esteemed late Billy Graham, is a far-left journal. The reaction to the even-handed piece certainly said a lot more about the critics than it did about the magazine.

Then there was the regrettable church shooting in Texas, in which two people died before an armed parishioner killed the assailant. The church member who shot the gunman dead has been hailed as a hero and an example of why the Second Amendment is necessary for defending lives.

But the question has to be asked: Why are Christians defending a president who couldn't be any less Christ-like if he tried, and why are we making a hero out of a follower of the Prince of Peace who was packing heat in a church building?

On the first point, it's notable that CT, and many of its current critics, were both telling us during Bill Clinton's impeachment that character mattered in our elected leaders. CT has remained consistent in its criticisms, leaving its current detractors looking like crass political opportunists who cast their principles aside when a moral degenerate happens to be pushing a political agenda they approve of.

On the second point, I find it tragic that we have so much gun violence in America, that someone would come into a sacred place and start shooting people, and that Christians would be carrying lethal weapons in that same sacred place. You can argue that the quick reaction of the armed parishioner saved even more lives from being lost, but is this what Jesus called us to do in the face of conflict? To meet violence with violence?

Well, in fact, he said quite the opposite. He called on us to love our enemies, to do to others what we would want done to us, and to turn the other cheek to an assailant who has just struck us on the opposite cheek. "Blessed are the peacemakers," he reminds us in the Beatitudes. He saved a woman from being stoned to death even though she was eligible under the law to be killed. He didn't fight back when the Roman soldiers were beating him to a pulp. He didn't resist being nailed to the cross. He didn't ask his disciples to avenge his death. The only thing he did was to ask God to forgive those who put him to death. To the very end, he remained humble and merciful.

But Jesus said to sell your cloak and buy a sword!

Yes, he did, to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah that he would be "counted among the transgressors" and arrested when in the presence of the soldiers. He never intended to go into battle with a sword. That's why he told the disciples that two swords were enough, when that never would have been sufficient for a fight. It's also why, when Peter actually used his sword to cut off the ear of the high priest's servant, Jesus healed the man and rebuked Peter. "Put your sword away," he said, "for all who live by the sword shall die by the sword."

But he said he came not to bring peace but a sword!

Yes, he did, but context matters. Again, he said this to fulfill prophecy that he would cause division among friends and family members. He wanted his followers to be all in behind him, not lukewarm. Accordingly, people would take sides for and against him. That was the meaning of the sword in this context. Likewise, when Jesus appears in the Book of Revelation with a sword protruding from his mouth, it's to be seen as his words laying waste to the nations of the earth.

But he whipped the moneychangers in the temple!

Actually, scripture only says that he fashioned a whip and drove the moneychangers out. It never says that he struck them with the whip. Only the Gospel of John mentions the whip, and only John and Mark make mention of Jesus' flipping over the tables. Matthew and Luke say only that he drove the moneychangers out.

The Gospels paint a consistent picture of a man who resisted violence and loved his enemies. The early church also understood this, in the days before Christianity allied with Constantine and empire. "Christians, instead of arming themselves with swords, extend their hands in prayer," St. Athanasius wrote. "The Christian does not even hurt his enemy," wrote Tertullian. "Christians are not allowed to correct by violence sinful wrongdoings," wrote Clement of Alexandria. Christians were even expected to renounce military service. Quakers and Anabaptists still hold this ancient view of Christian nonviolence today.

That all sounds great in theory, but when you have an active shooter, you need another gun, not prayers.

Gosh, now you sound just like all the atheists who mock the pointlessness of prayer.

The thing is, if your religious principles fall apart when the rubber hits the road, then your principles were pretty flimsy to begin with.

Well, Jesus wouldn't have just sat there and done nothing while innocent people were being mowed down!

You know what Jesus would have done? He would have placed himself between the gunman and his targets. Because that's how much Jesus loves us. If you really believe that Jesus is who he said he was, then you believe that he essentially took a bullet for all of us.

Now, how many of us would lay down our lives like that for those we love?

I don't know what I would have done in that situation, but I also acknowledge that Thou shalt not kill isn't just a bunch of hot air. Nonviolence and pacifism, after all, don't mean that you refrain from action in the face of evil. They simply mean that when confronted with violence, you find ways to counter the violence that doesn't result in death. In the case of the church shooting, the parishioner could have done any number of things besides taking the gunman out with a head shot. He could have been tasered, pepper-sprayed, shot in a place that would incapacitate but not kill him, tackled, had the gun wrested away from him.

This isn't a question of gun control. Our society tends to want simple answers to complex problems, and rather than do the hard work of understanding why so many people are angry, hateful, and despondent enough to carry out mass shootings, we think we can fix the problem with "just a few more" gun laws. And so we never get to the root of the problem and never address the behavior that gives rise to the violent action in the first place.

Guns are not the problem -- but for Christians, they're also not the answer. Carrying a weapon comes from a place of fear. I ought to know, because when we lived in Seattle, I eventually bought some pepper spray and a taser to add to the family survival bag. My wife had had some close encounters with violent and mentally unstable people when she worked in Seattle, and I thought it would be best for the family to have some kind of weapon at hand in case of a violent conflict. And why did I make that decision? Out of fear for my and my family's well-being. Fear. I'd never entertained the idea of owning a weapon of any kind, yet there I was.

But should followers of Christ do such things? We're told that perfect love casts out all fear. If we say it's unrealistic or naive to engage with the world in such a manner today, then again we're left to ask whether we really do follow and trust in Christ. For Jesus asked, point blank, "Why do you call me Lord and not do as I say?" Either we trust in his way of nonviolent enemy-love or we don't. And in a country that immerses itself in the idolatry of nationalism, that wraps the cross in a flag, that spends a quarter-trillion dollars annually to wage war on the rest of the world but claims there's no money for universal healthcare, and that's bombing Iraq and assassinating Iranians as I write this, it seems as if we're a Christian people in name only.

And so once again, I'm left to ponder why I hang in there -- why I continue to call myself a Christian when Christianity has become so tainted by those who call themselves followers of Christ. And I suppose my answer, as usual, is that I have yet to find so perfect and convincing of an ethical treatise as Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus isn't the problem. It's his followers.

And I think in some sense that in siding with the church, I'm also siding with Western civilization. Because the church built our civilization, and it's painfully obvious that our society is crumbling into madness as our shared Christian values begin to wane in the face of postmodern narcissism that lets every person become his own god, redefining himself in his own image as he sees fit.

To that end, I was very happy to hear an excellent homily from the priest at our church on the Feast of the Holy Family. The readings included Paul's infamous decree for wives to be submissive to their husbands, and I wondered how the priest was going to rescue that one from the flaming Dumpster. To his credit, he spoke lovingly of the importance of honoring the different roles, including the different strengths, of both sexes. In a country where almost a quarter of our kids live in single-parent homes, the highest rate in the world, it's obvious that something has gone wrong with the family unit, and our kids suffer for it. My wife and I always felt one of us should be able to stay home when we had a child, and my work has allowed me to do that for our daughter. Now we're both home with her, hopefully for a long time.

But sadly, a lot of people don't have that option in our late-capitalist society that keeps people working to the bone at multiple jobs just to scrape by. I feel fortunate that we've avoided that fate so far.

Our priest used to be married, so he knows a thing or two about married life, and the compromises you need to undertake to make the marriage work, not to mention the complementary roles that mother and father take in raising their kids. To that end, our priest noted that the liberties our society has taken with relationships and the roles of the sexes has not been to the benefit of the family or the culture. Men need to be men and women need to be women, he said, and you can read quite a bit into that statement, especially when we have an aggressive minority of people trying to forcefully redefine what male and female even mean. Always love others, for certain, but don't throw your common sense out the window in the process.

He also spoke of the importance of not pumping the garbage that passes for entertainment into our houses, as that also has a degrading effect on people and families. I think we have a fairly good handle on that in our house, as we don't watch TV, and I've long been appalled at what people -- again, even self-proclaimed Christians -- extol as good entertainment. When we praise the most graphic and vulgar actions as enjoyable things to talk about around the water cooler, again, can we be surprised at the state our society is in?

But as much as I despair for our society, I sure am glad we have people like our priest standing up for family, faith, and goodness. I don't know his views on guns, and given that he's ex-Marine, I probably don't want to know. But I doubt he'll ever make favorable comments about our current administration. Catholics aren't evangelicals, and although we have our Trump-loving rad-trads, I would like to think that most of us are at least dimly aware of Catholic social teaching -- including workers' rights, the preferential option for the poor, the opposition to capital punishment, and the need to care for God's creation -- and realize that our national leaders aren't even close to living up to the ideals that the church wants us, as followers of Christ, to strive toward.

May we do better, as Christians and Americans, before it's too late.

Pre-Christmas Musings: Encouragement in Unlikely Places

So here we are, a few days before Christmas, and I'm in the midst of a flare-up of my mysterious health episodes that always leave me wondering which parts of my body will feel out of sorts tomorrow. The GI problems and general fatigue and malaise are more or less always with me, but now I'm getting, in addition to that, throbbing pains in my lower back, tingling fingers, a recurring sharp pain in my left heel, blurry vision, neck pains, dizziness, and insomnia.

For years I've struggled to find out what's causing all this. Sometimes the symptoms will stick around for days, sometimes for weeks or months, and then they'll mostly go away. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it, and no amount of blood work, abdominal CT scans, back MRIs, brain scans, pharmaceuticals, and visits to one specialist after another has made any difference. One doctor pushes me off to the next, and inevitably someone will tell me to make sure I eat enough fiber. Thanks. Hadn't thought of that.

The common denominator seems to be a malfunctioning autonomic nervous system, at least from what I've been able to piece together on my own. But the medical community has been unable to give me any kind of answer, or relief.

So with not a lot of energy and with things to do before the big day, this will probably be my last post before Christmas. I had every intention of journaling all through Advent, until that one scripture reading a while back tripped me up. I was struggling to think of something profound to say for each day's readings anyway, but I suddenly had to sit with the problem of reconciling an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity with human suffering -- something I've wrestled with for a long time, as, I know, have many.

I haven't come any closer to a satisfactory answer. At first I entertained the idea that maybe the Gnostics had it right all along, that maybe the God of this universe was something of a mistake -- a deity that was either malevolent or stupid, or both, while the higher God, the true God, was unknowable, locked away from us so long as we remain trapped in this material world. Christ, according to the Gnostics, was sent from the higher God to show us how to break free from this material prison and reunite our spirits with the God who does not take a form and does not create but is a pure emanation of love, incorruption, perfection, a pure, unchanging, eternal light -- a First Cause or Unmoved Mover, not terribly different from the Tao, or the Kabbalistic concept of Ein Sof.

The Gnostic view is a tempting one to adopt, but at the same time it seems to overcomplicate things in search of a satisfactory answer. Buddhism gets at the same answer of suffering in this life and breaking free from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and it does so with a lot more level-headedness. Maybe the gods exist, the Buddha said, and maybe they don't, but they're irrelevant to your personal journey toward enlightenment. You suffer, he taught, because of desire -- you want things you don't have, and you have things you don't want. Fair enough, but that still doesn't crack the nut of why innocent people must endure suffering in the first place. Why do children get cancer? It's not because they desired something. They just got it. Some Buddhists would say the child is living out his karmic debt from a past existence, which, frankly, is just a lame excuse to blame innocent people for their own illness. In the end, Buddhism has no satisfactory answer either.

The most obvious and logical answer, of course, is that nature just does what nature does. Trees fall, floods happen, kids get cancer. No punishment involved; no lesson to learn. Stuff happens. Of course, that removes the idea of a loving creator from the picture entirely, or at the best it leaves us with the indifferent God of the Deists who set the universe in motion and then went off on a permanent holiday.

So if that's the case, and if my logical brain tells me that's the most reasonable answer, why the heck do I still feel drawn to the religious stories I was brought up with? I can only assume it's because I still find deep wisdom in the ethical teachings of Jesus and I feel the unconditional maternal love of his Blessed Mother. I feel safe in her care.

Is my childhood conditioning just telling me all this? I have no idea. But I know I never felt quite settled when I was journeying through the religious traditions of the East -- save for Taoism, whose teachings I found deep, illuminating, and beautiful. But nothing else satisfied. When I was trying to be Buddhist, I was long perplexed at why so many of its teachers actually encouraged its Western followers to return to the faith traditions they were raised in. Do you not want us here? I often wondered.

But I don't think that was it at all. In hindsight, I think those teachers understood that we all seek a single metaphysical truth and that we all take different paths to make that quest. If you were raised on one path, it becomes difficult, once you've worn a deep and familiar trail into the ground and gotten accustomed to the terrain, to then switch to another path that may seem wholly unfamiliar. In the words of author Richard Smoley, who also never felt at home in Buddhism: "Christianity is not software. You can't clear it out of your head as you clear a program from your computer. It sinks in deep, and it stays. And it is hard to install another system on top of that."

I always felt like a foreigner of sorts on the Buddhist path, as if I was treading someplace that belonged not to me but to others. This was their native territory, and I could never hope to assimilate myself into it the way someone raised in that spiritual environment could. Likewise, Smoley said that when he was trying to assimilate himself into Tibetan Buddhism, it was as if he needed to "install another, equally elaborate but completely alien, theological contraption in my head besides the one I had gotten from Christianity." And in the end, he said, "There was no point in that: One contraption was quite enough."

So, like Smoley, I went home, albeit with a new appreciation for the teachings that I once found confusing, judgmental, and archaic, thanks to a shallow surface reading that was the only thing I was ever told I could believe in. I had to take everything at face value growing up. I couldn't question the literal interpretations of scripture or look for deeper meanings. I couldn't ask why. Now I felt comfortable doing so. And with the confusing and fear-based religion of my youth behind me, I was now free to find hope, truth, beauty, wisdom, love, and goodness in the teachings.

And yet the core problem of suffering in a universe with a loving and all-powerful God remains. What the heck am I supposed to do with that? And if it continues to be a problem for me, then why can't I just put the whole of the Christian story behind me and get on with life?

Well, I guess it's because of the deeply embedded nature of religion that Smoley talked about. Moreover, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, "There is a God-shaped hole in the heart of each man" -- something that innately makes us seek out meaning in the universe and find our place within it. Just look at the fanatical stridency of woke leftist politics -- people might be abandoning traditional religion, but they just can't shake that primal religious impulse.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that the Christian story scratches that "God-shaped" itch for me, at least more satisfactorily than any other religious contraption I've come across -- though Taoism comes awfully close.

Also, I've had too many inexplicable experiences in my life to let myself become a pure materialist. I do think there's more to this universe than meets the eye, and I think it would be arrogant to simply assume that what we can perceive with our senses and calculate with our rational minds is all there is.

And I guess that, like a lot of people, I just need that spiritual grounding to check myself once in a while. I need the reminder, in a world that tells you to get what you can with little regard for anyone else, that we're all in this together, and that love and humility go a lot further than hatred and pride do. Other people can be in it for whatever reason they choose, whether it's to fulfill some kind of legal transaction between themselves and God, or to stay out of hell, or to use the Bible to condemn others, or whatever. I just want to focus to the best of my ability on the love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness that Jesus taught. I want to follow his example the best I can. I need the reminder to love my neighbor, pray for my enemy, turn the other cheek, help the less fortunate, and do to others what we want done to us.

I also feel the need to cultivate the kind of faith and humility his Mother Mary exemplified. And I desire a God who looks like the reconciling, forgiving father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. I don't know if he's out there, but I sure hope he is. Otherwise, this universe would be a pretty sad joke indeed.

And so I keep on going to church every week, and I continue to find comfort in the rituals and the beauty of the Mass and the comforting words. I feel a peaceful buzz after leaving a good service. It's hard to explain, but I feel calmed and renewed and reassured.

It helps that my wife is willing to go to Mass with me now. She said today that she finds it meditative. She's never going to become a believing Catholic, and I'm OK with that. I'm just thrilled to have someone supporting me on my ongoing journey -- as I've always tried my best to do for her. I find her pagan interests pretty darn cool and inspiring, especially as they illuminate for me a sense of the divine in the natural world and help me connect more deeply to the Sacred Feminine -- that, and the Tao Te Ching is seriously the most amazing book I've ever read. We still complement each other spiritually, and I hope we always do. Mary and Jesus are my spiritual yin and yang.

And I heartily believe that people often come into your life just when you need an answer to something. Case in point: The church we've been attending is home to a priest in his late 50s who was just ordained earlier this year. And I love his homilies. He has a very personable touch, and he makes the stories of the scriptures come to life, in a dynamic way that makes them very relevant to modern life. I think a large part of what makes him so personable is that he led the life of an everyday person before he joined the priesthood. He was married, for one thing. Taking marriage advice from a celibate man who was never married has always been a hard pill to swallow when it comes to Catholic priests, yet here's a guy who actually lived the married life in the real world, just like so many of us sitting out in the pews. Turns out he wanted to be a priest when he was young, but his life took another turn, and he ended up marrying. Then his wife died from cancer, and before her time came she encouraged him to follow the dreams of his younger days.

That part of his story has stuck with me as I've tried to work through the problem of suffering in a universe with a loving God. Our priest could have grown bitter when he lost his wife, wondering the same things about where God's love and mercy went. But instead of abandoning his religion, he threw himself headlong into it and became a priest! Now if he can do that, then surely I can work through my own doubts and questions.

And wouldn't you know it -- in today's homily, Father made the point that we gather together at church so we can have a place to work out our faith together. He's not the kind of fire-and-brimstone priest who rages about what's wrong with the world and will remind you of why you're going to hell if you don't do this or that. Not at all. To the contrary, today he made the point that no one expects any of us to have all the answers. And that's why we come to church -- so we can lean on each other and explore our beliefs and press deeper into the questions we have even as we wrestle with them, all in a supportive environment that will lift us up when we need it.

I nearly broke into tears when he was saying all this, because it seemed that once again the universe was giving me just what I needed to hear, when I needed to hear it. I don't need to have all the answers, and in fact it's OK not to. The point, Father said, is to have faith anyway, trusting that things will work out the way they're supposed to.

It's funny, too, that I consider myself a pacifist, and here I am admiring the spiritual leadership of a priest who was also a Marine before he became a priest. I bristle at the very thought of militarism, and yet here I am. If God is out there, he sure does have a good sense of humor -- and quite a knack for cultivating humility in the parts of our lives that need it the most.

I don't have a clever Christmas analogy to work into any of this. I guess I could say that it's nice to be able to hold on to some much-needed spiritual illumination at a time when the Christ child is soon to bring light into a world filled with darkness. That would be a sort of cheesy thing to say, wouldn't it?

And yet there it is.

A blessed Christmas to one and all.

Advent Journal: An Uncomfortable Reflection in the Mirror

In the years my wife and I were vegetarians, we received frequent unsolicited opinions about our diet.

Humans are designed to eat meat. 

You won't get enough protein. 

Surely you eat fish, right? How about chicken? 

I could never give up meat.

How do you find enough to eat?

Those were the more innocuous comments. They got worse:

You know, plants have feelings too. A carrot screams when you rip it out of the ground.

Do you wear leather shoes?

Mmm, look how good this steak is. Want a bite? Cows are delicious!

After a while, you get numb to the mockery. But you also realize that the rudeness comes from a place of vulnerability, because your dietary choices hold up a mirror to the food other people consume without thinking about it. And it's easy not to think about what's on your plate, because we're disconnected from our food. We no longer hunt and process our own meat. We don't see the inside of a slaughterhouse. We only see the nice, neatly packaged burgers and T-bones in the cooler at the grocery store. So after a while, I (mostly) stopped taking offense at such comments and realized that, even though I was never an in-your-face vegetarian, the things I chose to eat -- and not to eat -- uncomfortably pricked at the consciences of some onlookers. And sometimes people lash out when you make them uncomfortable about their choices.

Those old comments came rushing back to me yesterday when I saw a Facebook post about a church that had taken its Mary, Joseph, and infant Jesus nativity figures and placed them in metal cages, all separated from each other -- an obviously pointed commentary on the nature of ICE detentions of migrants at the southern U.S. border. The comments spoke volumes about just how uncomfortable the display made a lot of people.

This is blasphemy! Don't politicize Jesus!

Let these people come back legally. If they break the law, they get what they deserve.

Jesus and his family didn't enter Egypt illegally. It was part of the Roman Empire.

The Holy Family weren't refugees! They were going to Bethlehem for the census! [Yes, I'm aware Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The flight to Egypt came later, when Herod sent out an order to kill all male children. Are you telling me you're not aware of this scripture passage?]

The people at our borders are drug runners and violent criminals. 

These people just want to come over here and get free handouts. 

What kind of irresponsible parent would endanger their kids to get to our border?

Let them go back home and fix up their own countries. 

And on and on. From self-proclaimed Christians, mind you.

When I see so many "Christians" acting so un-Christ-like toward their fellow human beings, I think about my dilemma of faith I talked about in my last post, and I wonder why I even bother to stick around. Because let's be very clear about this: Scripture abounds with passages exhorting the people of God to care for the strangers in their midst, not to dehumanize them and find excuses for why we shouldn't have to tend to their needs. Jesus himself says that those who welcome the stranger will be among those he gathers up as his saved flock, and of course the entire point of the parable of the Good Samaritan was to impress on the person challenging him that your neighbor is anyone in need, not just people of your own tribe or nation. Jesus deliberately chose a Samaritan to be the good guy in his story, as that choice would have shocked his listeners in his time, since the Jews hated the Samaritans -- almost as much as some people today hate, say, migrants, or Muslims. Yet the hated Samaritan was the one who selflessly stopped to help the man lying along the road, while the good, pious priests and Levites walked right on by. No doubt they may have been thinking "What kind of irresponsible idiot would walk this dangerous road alone from Jericho? He should have expected he'd get mugged." Or "Let someone else take care of him."

That hits home. The nativity figures in cages hold up an uncomfortable mirror to what many American Christians support and defend. And when they lash out and ask if you're going to take care of all the people at our border, their anger leaves them unable to see that that's the exact same argument pro-choicers use against them when they rally against abortion -- "are you going to adopt and feed all those unwanted babies?" For I can assure you that many of the most vociferous anti-migrant voices, ironically, also consider themselves part of the "pro-life" community. Actions always speak louder than words, of course, and if "pro-life" doesn't mean all life, then it really doesn't mean very much.

I say things like this, of course, and right-wing Christians accuse me of being a hardcore liberal -- when all I'm doing is trying to follow the example Jesus set for his followers. In fact, truth be told, I have just as little patience for progressive Christians who constantly let contemporary culture shape their churches, as they try to turn Jesus into some kind of anything-goes hippie. Jesus did preach love of neighbor and enemy alike, of course, but loving doesn't necessarily equal permissive. Feeling out of place in right-leaning churches that had too much anger and too little empathy, I quickly grew weary of left-leaning churches that almost seemed embarrassed to talk about Jesus except as some sort of vague avatar for wokeness, with the result that progressive churches often feel bereft of spirituality and instead sound like some kind of NPR coffee klatch. I don't go to church to hear woke political harangues and endless virtue-signaling. I go for spiritual enrichment. And that's sorely lacking among progressive churches.

Catholic author Peter Kreeft helped me understand my unease with both sides when I read an article of his recently. I've always said that the right has no empathy and the left has no common sense -- and while that's certainly painting in broad strokes, I find it generally to be true. Mr. Kreeft said much the same thing, albeit in nicer terms, when he opined that the challenge for Catholics, and indeed all Christians, is to have a hard head and a soft heart -- for those on the right often have a hard heart to match their hard heads, while those on the left often have a soft head to match their soft hearts. Think of someone like Mother Teresa -- an old, withered lady who was as tough as nails yet would pour her heart into helping anyone in need of aid. When Jesus said we should be wise as serpents yet harmless as a dove, that's what he had in mind.

We can see this more clearly when we stop trying to re-create Jesus in our political image and let his words lead the way instead. That's a tall order for a culture that fits Jesus into its politics rather than the other way around.  But it's the only way we can ever hope to walk in his footsteps and be the light of Christ that the world needs.

Advent Pause: "Do You Believe That I Can Do This?"

You never know what you're going to run across that might dredge up old wounds. For me, it happened during the keeping of my daily Advent journal this year.

In the reading from Friday's lectionary, we come across a Gospel passage that has Jesus healing the sick and even raising the dead. Central to the passage are two blind men who follow him and call out, "Have mercy on us!" Jesus turns to the men and asks them -- and this part is important -- "Do you believe that I can do this?"

"Yes, Lord," they affirm.

In response, he touches their eyes and says, "Let it be done to you according to your faith." And with that, their sight was restored.

Do you believe that I can do this? That's a heavy line, because it places the responsibility for the healing on the person receiving it. There's no question in the story that Jesus can restore sight to the blind if he wants to, but with this statement, Jesus implicitly tells them that he can't heal them unless they first believe he can heal them.

But if all it takes is for us to say we have faith, then if we continue to suffer, does that mean our faith is lacking? Jesus once said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. So if a person fails to achieve the miraculous, does that mean we lack even the smallest semblance of faith?

In that sense, this is a very demoralizing verse, especially as it implicitly blames us for lacking faith if we don't receive the healing we seek. Of course, I'm not the first person to wrestle with the problem of suffering in a world with a supposedly loving God, and I won't be the last. But it's an idea that I continue to struggle with mightily, even as I've tried to deepen my faith and let the teachings I was raised with enrich my life and make me a better person.

Why are some people of faith healed and others not? Why is healing not offered to the innocent suffering? Perhaps my expectations were skewed from having grown up with parents who watched faith healers on the local religious TV station, or from having had a father who attended charismatic prayer services with laying on of hands, or from having had a girlfriend whose parents were Pentecostals who staunchly believed in miracles from the hand of God. I've even been to a few tent revival-type services with other people where folks were streaming down to the stage to receive their healings, throwing their suddenly useless wheelchairs and crutches away and bounding back down the aisles with their hands waving in the air, joyously offering their praises to God.

So why would God heal these people, seemingly at random, but deny healing to others? Why would he let children suffer? Why heal something as relatively minor as a limp for someone who comes before a faith-healing evangelist, while a 5-year-old child lay dying in a children's hospital, ravaged by cancer, suffering through the pain of the disease and the treatments, and the fear of death that no child should ever have to think about?

I know all the theological answers.

The Catholic answer to my dilemma is that suffering is redemptive.

The evangelical answer is that suffering came into the world through Original Sin, and now we all suffer its consequences.

Others would remind us that God always answers our prayers, but that sometimes his answer to our request is "no," and we can't always understand why. "God works in mysterious ways," and all that.

Some say that God gives us free will, and to intervene would be to take away our freedom to choose.

I think, too, of the movie The Shack, in which God reminds the dad whose daughter was kidnapped and killed that God is always with us in our times of suffering.

The problem is, all those answers feel like bullshit cop-outs from people who know they have no good answer to the question.

OK, great, God sits with us in our time of suffering. If he can do that, why can't he just end the suffering?

The "free will" answer doesn't cut it, because scripture tells us that God does intervene in human lives by performing miracles.

Original Sin is predicated on a mythological story that was meant to impart lessons about life's struggles. Original Sin didn't bring about sickness and death, as the theologians like to say. We get sick and die not because of the Fall, but because we have organic bodies that malfunction and eventually wear out.

And really, appealing to Original Sin in any of this has to be the worst cop-out of all, as it implies that innocent children suffer because of something their ancestors did. In more fundamentalist circles, this view actually leads to the justification of casual abuse against children -- when the baby won't stop crying, it's OK to smack the "little sinner" into silence.

Moreover, equating Original Sin with the suffering of children undermines the very argument so many theologians, especially in Catholic circles, try to make. When you say it's unjust that we should carry the guilt of our ancestors' transgressions, the theologians will be quick to correct you that we don't bear the "sin of Adam," only a mysterious "stain" on the soul that has to be removed in baptism, lest a child be sent to hell. But for what reason would the child be sent to hell, if indeed the child is not guilty of anything? And if they're not guilty of anything, why would they be allowed to suffer?

When I hear stories of children being sexually abused, starving to death, or slowly and painfully dying of a terrible illness, I have a hard time finding any redeeming qualities in their suffering. What greater good could possibly come from a child's suffering? Why allow an innocent child to come to harm to prove some kind of divine point? And if even the tiniest bit of faith can move mountains, yet even the prayers of the faithful parents of these suffering children don't change a child's fate, then is Jesus implying in today's reading that it's the parents' fault for not having enough faith? It sure seems like it.

The same applies, of course, to all who suffer. What lesson are we to learn from the fact that a God of love allows hunger, homelessness, rape, and murder? What lesson were we to take from the murder of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany? Why allow innocents to die in terrorist attacks and natural disasters?

Likewise, what lesson was I to take when I was physically and emotionally abused by my birth mother before my grandparents adopted me away? Why did God tell me no when I begged on my hands and knees, tears streaming down my face, to please take away the debilitating panic attacks that would roll on for days, sometimes weeks, from my teens into my early twenties? Where was God's love when I was pacing the floor during sleepless nights, feeling like a nervous wreck, when my health started to fail a few years ago and no one could tell me what was wrong? I was terrified for the well-being of my wife and daughter in my absence, for I was convinced I was going to die. It was that bad.

And still, no miracles for me. Two blind men were given back their sight simply for saying they believed Jesus could heal them. What about the rest of us who have offered up our faith? Was it worth nothing? Is God love, or isn't he? Because, as a parent, I couldn't sit back and watch my own daughter suffer. I would intervene. I would help her in any way I could. Because that's what a loving parent does. He doesn't sit back and watch his child suffer. That's not love.

It's not a sign of love when a little girl is being molested by her father and calls out for God to help her as she cries herself to sleep every night, despairing of the nightmare that seems to have no end. Knowing that God is with her in her suffering, as The Shack would remind us, doesn't make me feel a whole lot better about what seems like divine capriciousness at best, and divine negligence at worst. If someone were sexually assaulting my daughter, I wouldn't just sit there with her and hold her hand, letting her know I still loved her and everything was going to be OK. That's ludicrous.

This is where the philosophy of Taoism holds a massive advantage over the idea of a benevolent God that paradoxically allows suffering. Taoism, as seen in the symbolism of the tai chi symbol representing the interplay of yin and yang, simply observes that there can be no good without evil, no sickness without health. The opposites define each other, and one could not exist without the other. This is the opposite of a dualistic mindset that would have us believe the pursuit of good can somehow eliminate evil. It may indeed be beneficial to pursue the good, but perhaps true peace comes not from defeating evil but from the acceptance of the idea that even if I pursue good to the end of my days, it will never make bad go away -- and, more to the point, that bad even can be eradicated.

Maybe it's worth considering that people just get sick because they get sick. Not so God can remind us that he's in charge. Not because someone is suffering the results of their karma from a past life. But just because this is how nature operates. Maybe it's enough to simply say that some people do terrible things to other people. We may say it's because they're not in harmony with the Tao, or we may look for other answers, or none at all.

I love the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. But there are other teachings and beliefs that I'm just not sure I can reconcile. "Do you believe that I can do this?" Yes, I do, but my belief has never brought me any healing. As for the implication that if I don't receive healing it's my own fault, well, that's just too much of a guilt trip for a chronically ill person to deal with. It just seems cruel and mean. I find no divine love in those words. And as a result, I am left adrift with some questions to explore and some serious soul-searching to do as this Advent season unfolds.

Advent Journal, Day 5: The Will of the Father

Readings: Isaiah 26:1-6, Matthew 7:21, 24-27.

Today's Gospel reading picks up at the tail end of the Sermon on the Mount. Just after telling the assembled crowd to be on guard for false prophets who come as wolves dressed in sheep's clothing, Jesus warns that "not all who say to me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven."

The obvious question the reader is left to ponder is, what is the Father's will?

Let's start by looking back at today's first reading, from Isaiah. It concludes in this manner:

"Trust in the Lord forever! For the Lord is an eternal rock. He humbles those in high places, and the lofty city he brings down; he tumbles it to the ground, levels it with the dust. It is trampled underfoot by the needy, by the footsteps of the poor."

Now, if that doesn't mirror Mary's Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke, I don't know what does. In a passage so socially subversive that its public recitation has been banned more than once, for fear that it could spark revolt, Mary proclaims of that same God:

Ben Wildflower

"He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He has filled the hungry with good things and has sent the rich away empty."

Do you see a theme here? God takes the side of the lowly over the powerful, and that was the message Christ came to deliver to the world. He even lived out that message, by embracing the poor, the sick, the hated, the forgotten, the powerless -- everyone on the margins of society.

This is the point the scriptures try to drive home to us, over and over. We're less than a week into Advent, and already I feel like a broken record. This is how followers of Christ set themselves apart from the world. Not by condemning people for living imperfect lives. Not by giving comfort to those in power. Not by supporting vengeance and violence. Not by oppressing the poor. Not by demonizing the homeless and the migrant. No. Instead, "they will know us by our love for one another."

Indeed, Jesus tells us that we'll be able to pick out those false prophets, the wolves in sheep's clothing, by what comes out of their mouths. "By their fruits you will know them," he promised. I don't think I need to point out just how many so-called Christians you meet in the world today who talk of how in love with Jesus they are but then fail to act the least bit Christ-like. While certain corners of Christianity obsess over other people's private sex lives, support cuts to social programs and services, or praise war and the vengeance of capital punishment, God must surely be looking down and asking, "What have you done for the poor lately?"

Lest there be any lingering doubt, let's step for a moment into the book of Micah. This is a gem of the Old Testament, wherein we find the author reproaching leaders for their unjust actions while embracing the outcasts and the afflicted and defending the poor against the rich and powerful -- much like a certain Jesus of Nazareth some 700 years later.

In Chapter 6, God chides his people for falling short after all he's done for them. Micah, in turn, wonders what the people can do to make things right with the Lord. Is it sacrifice he wants? No. He's not going to let the people get off that easily. He wants not burnt offerings but a transformation of the heart. And what does that look like? Micah tells us:

"And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."

That's it. That is the will of the Father. To dispense humility, mercy, and justice -- not the justice of retribution, but social justice for "the least of these."

This should not surprise us. That God will pull down the powerful and raise up the lowly was a theme that ran straight through Jesus' ministry. "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last," he promised. And so it should be for us -- speaking truth to oppressive power structures through acts of quiet subversion that lift up those who have been exploited, who have fallen through the cracks, who have nothing. They are Christ in our midst. Not the powerful. Not the political leaders or captains of industry. Everyone already sings their praises. But who will be the voice for those who have none? That's where Christ comes in, with all of us following faithfully in his footsteps.