My Ongoing Slow Motion Conversion to Catholicism

I have always had a soft spot for the Catholic Church.

Well, not always, but anyway ever since I became interested in Christian things. My first serious interest is Christian things of any kind arose from a desire to refute my second wife's new found convictions (which I did not like at the time because they did not seem very much fun). As it happened, however, the harder I tried at this, the more I failed.

It seemed, in short, ridiculously enough, that she was right--not about everything, of course, but at least about Christ. I could not refute him. Moreover, far from being refuted, or even chipped, or even dinged, Christ took hold of me--and he had no intention (though I did not know it then) of ever letting go.

It was my mind then, my thought processes that had suddenly been commandeered by the truth, but not my spirit, which yet lay dead, quite immune to the musings in my head. My wife would drag me along--me and my thoughts--to various Charismatic churches, and I found quite instantly that the better part of my brain would need to be checked at the door in order for the remainder of my person to endure service within the sanctuary.

It's all about worship, she would say, we are here to worship the Lord.

But didn't you hear? He just now said to burn my copy of Catcher in the Rye!

Catcher in the who?

And here comes the collection plate again? How many times has it come around now? Three? Four? I've lost count.

May the Lord forgive your greediness.

And so on.

It was the strangest sort of feeling. I came to feel by and by that the church was the loneliest place in the world. He who had so captured my attention was somehow absent from these proceedings which declared his name.

What did this mean? Why did I care.

I missed him.

(to be continued)

The End

This is the end just barely begun This is where we come to surrender Full of shame Full of sorrow to face the glint in the enemy's eye to acquiesce to his pitiless terms This is the end This is the end where the flags of hope are folded and buried Here is where we come to fail and eat the enemy's pompous communion to drink the wine of wasted blood Our hearts have been the fountain Our bones make up the bread Here is the end that would never come as final now as the Biblical flood The end of life the end of love This is the end of every work of every word of every kiss where love's embrace is swallowed in the maw of hatred's last hurrah And laughter peels like bells ding-dong and summons the beak of the bitter crow (comment on this)

Networking

Today my wife is networking. I guess when you network, you meet with other people and give them money or some other form of exchange so that they can grow their own business, whilst they give you money or some other form of exchange so that you can grow yours. It is an arrangement of mutual support, an I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine sort of scenario. The accomplished networker, I suppose, will come out with more scratches than he gives. It is an investment for gain.

So it happens that we now have three or four medical insurance policies along with a couple life insurance investments. If either I or my wife get sick and/or die soon, we will be sitting pretty. Well, one of us will be. Admittedly, the odds are against my striking the gold, given age and illness versus youth and good health--but you never know. Accidents happen, right? In a certain way, one seems safer in betting on the accidental than on the expected. That, anyway, has been my experience in life.

In any case, I am included today, as I have a week off work anyway and obviously nothing better to do. Nonetheless, the coffee shop chosen for the networking meet was way too hot for most life forms, and so I excused myself in favor of a table at the Starbucks a mere block away. When it comes to decent air conditioning, Starbucks knows their stuff.

Another day of triple digit temperatures. I wonder why we didn't go to river instead. Oh well, business is business and play is play--and time is money, whether it is going in or out.

Confounding Stuff

It seems that if you have two stars of equal brightness, the star that is furthest away in space (even hundreds of light years further) will yet appear brighter than the one that is closer to earth.

Go figure.

As always, I look for a moral to the story.

It seems, at least according to science, that a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear, will in fact make a sound. This is somehow scientifically demonstrable. I have always believed the opposite (and still do).

I remember one time when my son's psychiatrist was testing him on his responses to familiar proverbs, I myself offered the 'wrong answer' to one scenario. For the rest of the interview, the guy devoted his attention to me. Later on he prescribed pills for my son that had some small chance of paralyzing his throat and causing death. These he prescribed as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

If it don't kill ya, it'll cure ya. But of course it wouldn't have.

These pills are no longer prescribed in psychiatry. Nor anywhere else.

It Just Occurred to Me . . .

One of the most wonderful things in life as I have found it is that beautiful young Asian women are often attracted to ugly, old white men, such as myself--even to the point of marriage.

One of the most unfortunate things is that, apart from being Asian, they are no different than any other woman.

Satan explained to Jesus, in The Last Temptation of Christ, that there is only one woman in the world--one woman who merely comes with different faces.

Sometimes that guy comes dangerously close to making a point.

But then I guess that's what he's all about.

The Demon of Gluttony from Yokohama

Speaking of spiritual matters, I think our Japanese exchange student may be possessed by a demon of gluttony. I should not really have thought so had his eating habits been anything less than supernatural, and yet, given that they are so, I have had to look for other worldly answers to an unworldly capacity to stow away a week's worth of groceries in a single day. How is it possible, I have wondered? Seeking a natural conclusion, some sort of explicable scenario, I have yet found none. The evidence leads me only to extravagant theories.

How is it possible? How? He is short, he is thin, and yet I have seen him swallow entire refrigerators. Again and again he emerges from his room, fills another plate, and returns to his lair of culinary frenzy. Six hotdogs, two hamburgers, a package of garlic potatoes, mixed greens, milk, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, cheese, Chinese noodles.

How can it be? It is quite clearly impossible. And yet . . . and yet . . . the plates come out and go in, come out and go in. My mind has become disjointed in trying to grasp the thing.

The Last Temptation of Christ

Just finished reading The Last Temptation of Christ. Curious experience. At first I disliked the book, not on the basis of ideology or any perceived sense of blasphemy in the content, but merely because I did not like the style of the writing. Of course one has to keep in mind that this is a translation from Greek and no doubt loses as much in the process as any other translation. The vernacular in language, in conversation seemed to suffer the most, as it seemed archaic to the point of being a bit funny. At some points the disciples sounded more like Irishmen arguing in a bar room than first century Jews. I suppose I should take a peak at another translation in the future (one of the many, many things I will never get around to, I'm certain).

Frankly, I was teetering on the edge of putting the book down and re-reading Mark Twain's Puddin' Head Wilson instead, when a providential (in hindsight) set of accidents occurred; to whit, the dog ran into the table in the yard, the table fell over, the book bounced through the grass, ejected its marker on the way, and when I retrieved it I could only hazard a rough guess as to where I had been in my reading.

What I found was that in the space of what cannot have been too very many pages, Jesus himself had transformed, between this reading and the last, from a cowardly, tormented, self-absorbed youth to Christ--and the sight of Him, the Christ I know, was like strength and sweetness admixed, refreshing, reviving, reassuring.

How very hard it is, I realized, to look upon Jesus yet undiscovered, yet unfinished, still struggling through all the weaknesses of life, of the flesh, of the ego, of fear and pain and desire. There is as little comfort to be had in this as in watching another man suffer a seizure, or in hearing the rantings of a schizophrenic in response to his invisible voices.

Power gone awry, power unfocused, power uncomprehending is terror itself.

Yet here, having passed through the scourging and crucifixion of life in the flesh, was Jesus the Christ, suddenly comprehending all things and all mankind, leading now, serenely confident, God Himself, the good shepherd, on the road to peace unto death and forever after, world without end.

As I understand it, Kazantzakis, after The Temptation appeared in print, was excommunicated from the orthodox church. This in itself seems odder by leaps and bounds than his flights of imagination and invention as set down in his book--for the content is, if nothing else, astoundingly and unapologetically orthodox in its conclusions--even to the point of having Matthew himself write his gospel while actually in the company of Jesus. This is a notion rejected nowadays by many churches, and most certainly rejected by most scholars and seminarians. No, they say--it cannot have been so--the gospel could not have been written earlier than 60 years after the crucifixion.

Blasphemy? No. The blasphemy lies s in not thinking, not challenging oneself, not struggling to comprehend, not searching the heart--and Kazantzakis was guilty of none of these.