Why did I purchase a television set yesterday, I who don’t watch television? Because it was in a nice cabinet, and across the street from where I live with a sign upon it which read “five dollars, to good home only,” and because I cannot resist giving a home to things that others have discarded, and because I had two strapping young men here with me to help me carry it – my sons. Well, the device is not to blame for the fact that it is often used by the devil and his earthly minions to poison the minds of men with his propaganda. The poor thing looked so lonely out there on the curb.

 

And well, since I no longer have the hook-up to receive anything on a television set other than fuzz, and I stream the only program which I think is worth watching here on my computer every Monday night, I sat down at last with great satisfaction to watch one of my favorite old movies on that rescued piece of furniture last night – with the help of a DVD player which had been a gift I have kept in its box for two years – and I must say the picture quality, not to mention the immense picture size, was really rather good. Yesterday the boys were able to play their video games on it.

 

So we know it isn’t our tools that are to blame for our misuse of them. A person may bludgeon you with a hammer or shoot you with a gun, but it is not the hammer or the gun that is to blame. Over a decade ago, when I moved to this area from the place where I had been living – and I shook the very dust of that place off the soles of my feet, - I thought – it turns out quite mistakenly – that I would never again have to endure witnessing another person’s cell phone communication, little knowing that the devices were not solely an urban phenomenon. But of course it was not the devices that were the cause of people’s slavish worship of them. The fault is not the hammer’s. The fault is not the gun’s.

 

Now, as I make my way through traffic in the village, which is in itself something of an intolerable and unexpected event, I routinely witness hundreds of morbidly obese Baseball tourists crossing the streets without regard apparently for life and limb whilst engaged in conversation with their own hands, oblivious to everything and everyone around them.

 

I have a cell phone. Or, I used to. That’s a story within a story. When I was living in Babylon I held a position of much responsibility at the newspaper publishers where I was employed. My boss – that would be the publisher himself – gave me a cell phone. They were big, klunky affairs at that time, nothing like the slim Star Trek communicator devices of today. It was a novelty. But he gave it to me – just as he had given one to all his managers – so that he could reach me wherever I happened to be, provided I was within range of the then less sophisticated network of orbiting satellites and reception towers. I don’t believe I ever felt it necessary to make a call from the device, and I may have answered it three or four times in a year to find that it was invariably my boss calling me.

 

After moving to this area, many years passed without my ever finding it necessary to have a cell phone. Then, a few years ago, when I went into business for myself, and knowing that the nature of the business has me out and about all the long day instead of being fixed in one location, I got a cell phone so that my customers could reach me when I was hither and yon. It made a great deal more sense that I should be able to make a call, if necessary, without driving all the way back to my home. Perhaps if I happened to be in Rhubarb Valley and a customer required my services somewhere in between, or on my way, I could save myself the trouble of going all the way home and then doubling back.

 

Ah good. Except that the few times such a situation ever came up I happened to be in an area where cell phone reception was completely impossible, and there I was - paying for a service that it turns out I hardly ever had reason to use. So, naturally I cancelled the service when the time came that I could do so without incurring additional expense. My business has grown to a point, moreover, from which I have no intention of growing it more. I make all the money I could possibly desire without even taking the trouble to advertise. (I advertised at first, to build a base. Now word-of-mouth suffices, and I do have a waiting list.)

 

Anyhooooo…

 

Soon I may leave the daily operation of my flagship business to the inestimable White Tornado and concentrate on other endeavors. I had thought to write that novel of the family Darkly of Rhubarb Valley, as you may recall. I would continue in properties management, but that is quite part-time though quite lucrative, considering.

 

Later this week – maybe tomorrow, maybe Thursday or Friday – I will be meeting Dad at a camp site in the mountains, and there we will entertain ourselves with starting fires and staring into them, or be entertained by the ceaseless whining of my sons deprived of their computer and video games. We shall see. I will be incommunicado, thank God. I don’t know how long. It may be only a few days we can endure the whining, or we may decide not to return until the boys are due once again to report to school. Or perhaps, we will decide to drop the boys off with their mother and take off for… anywhere. During this time Elizabeth will hire whomever she deems suitable, and she’ll have the client list, the equipment, access to the house, and so on. No doubt she will miss my company, as I will miss hers, but otherwise she’s every bit up to the task.

 

I may be back on Monday. I may be back in September. I may never come back at all. Who cares? The freedom is to be relished. We work hard, binding ourselves to this obligation and that obligation, for no other reason ultimately than to be free. Or – at least I do. Obviously, many people have no desire to be free. But when I say free I guess I must mean we who create money – with or without hammers, guns, television sets, or cell phones, as whatever the needs require.

 

And isn’t that the point of a tool – either technologically advanced or technologically simple? To be used whenever necessary. But one would hardly pick up a hammer if he has no nail to hit with it. No, with televisions it is somewhat different. Television can be used in a passive way, but when passively using it becomes indispensable to a person’s well-being then he is no longer using it as a tool. The tool is using him, and he is now a useless person who is no longer in control of his own life.

 

Paradoxically, in the case of amazing communications advances such as cell phones, having the freedom to communicate any time from any where with anybody can have the negative double effect of a depriving a person of privacy and ultimately of the very freedom he may think he has gained by having it. I think it may be like this with any tool that may be used in a passive way. When it is used passively, or unnecessarily, it is the root of much trouble. Especially when a person tries to use devices that are a thousand times smarter than he is there’s bound to be a reversal of roles at some point. 

    

Awakened by myphets.

 

Here’s a look at a young Nick Cave recording “Swampland” for his old band, The Birthday Party. Apparently, there’s a DVD. You can’t hear the music tracks here, though we may assume he has it in those headphones. Hearing the breathtaking energy he puts into it is interesting.

 

How the heck does Nick Cave become Mr. Swanky Party Dude? He shows up at Doctor Who events with Kylie Minogue. Red carpet stuff. What a wonderful world. I keep hearing he is the heir apparent to Leonard Cohen. You wouldn’t guess it to hear The Birthday Party, but oh what the heck, we all gotta grow up sometime.

 

Alright, we don’t all have to do it. But Nick Cave has been my favorite songwriter all along, through the years, not because he stays the same but because he changes. He gets older. He does different things. And well, so do I. The things I think today I did not think when I was 25. The things that interest me – some of them – would not have held my attention for very long in days past.

 

I wasn’t introduced to this fellow’s music until 1990-91. At that point the newest release from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds was The Good Son. It was a completely original album, and “The Ship Song” I thought was the most beautiful love song ever written. I still think that today.

 

Come sail your ships around me

And burn your bridges down

We make a little history, baby

Every time you come around

 

Well, it’s quite the contrast to the content of “Swampland,” but I think many people get so hung up on the sound of music that they can’t hear the music. Music is man’s oldest language. Do you think our earliest ancestors didn’t hear the birds singing in the morning? Surely they did. And they tried to imitate them, and then they tried to do it better because that’s what people do. The angels listened, and learned. We taught them how to sing. They do it in an angelic way. But we taught them how to sing.

 

To be sure, a choir of angels sounds absolutely nothing like Nick Cave having an apoplectic fit recording “Swampland,” but so what?

 

Ah – great fun. Good day to you.

 

The ending of this Suspense! program is priceless. John Dickson Carr's script is as klunky as an old Buick. It's nice to have him back.

 

So, a fellow goes to a priest for advice because his life isn’t going too terribly well and he wonders if something may be missing. Perhaps he is struggling with uncertainty about the future. Perhaps he is disquieted about the present. Perhaps he cannot for the life of him make sense of the past. Perhaps it is all of the above. The priest may say to him, “You must have faith in these things,” offering him a list of concepts which should, if he could believe in them, give him hope and comfort.

 

Well, this won’t work on somebody who doesn’t believe in God, or even on somebody who merely says that he does – perhaps in order to fit in with others, perhaps because it is a thing one says, like “It’s not the heat so much as the humidity.” – because without belief faith isn’t possible. How can the fellow have faith in something he cannot believe?

 

The position of the theoretical Atheist – that is, somebody who refuses to believe in God – is particularly dodgy because he is placing an expectation on faith that it should come before belief, and that isn’t possible. It is the same with the one who calls himself Agnostic, or literally “without knowledge” because the knowledge he seeks, (and which he admits he is without), will remain forever unattainable unless he first believes. It may seem like a “Catch-22” to people like this.

 

Of course, there are those cases, albeit rare, when God Himself intervenes in some dramatic, miraculous, supernatural way to change the mind of such a person, but honestly, most of us trudge the road of life without ever encountering that sort of thing, and if one predicates his belief on it happening to him it is likely that he will be disappointed. He will forever ask the question, “Where is the evidence?” He will be seeing the same evidence for the existence of God that a believer sees, but he will be interpreting it a different way. In the case of the person who refuses to believe there is no amount of evidence, short of the appearance of Mary or of an Heavenly Host, that will persuade him.

 

Belief is related to faith just like in this example: Let’s say that I have just moved into town and I know very few people, but I have met you – my neighbor - and we have become friendly. My car breaks down. Not knowing anybody else, I ask you to recommend a good mechanic. You tell me Luigi is a good mechanic, that he will do a good job on my car and give me a fair price. So I take my car to Luigi the mechanic based on your recommendation of him. I do this because I am willing to believe what you have told me about him.

 

OK, so Luigi the mechanic does indeed do a good job repairing my car, and he gives me a fair price. It is just as you told me. A year later, when my car breaks down again – which it probably will do since things fall apart in nature – I will return to Luigi the mechanic. But this time I will bring my car to Luigi based on faith.

 

I could not possibly have had faith in Luigi before I knew him. And I would never have gotten to know him unless I was first willing to believe what I was told – that he would do a good job on my car and give me a fair price. Faith is the proof. Faith is the evidence.

 

Belief must come before faith. If one is expecting to somehow sprout an instant faith, as if from nowhere, he is sure to be disappointed. The willingness to believe is the key. We always hear people of faith talking about what God has done in their lives, and it is just exactly the same as if they were talking about what Luigi has done for their cars. Really, it can’t start with a belief in Luigi but rather a belief in what people have said about him, and the Atheist is like the person who says, “I will never take my car to Luigi no matter how many people have told me about him because Luigi is Italian and I hate Italians.”

 

In other words, the Atheist is practicing something we may call “contempt prior to investigation,” and it is always a prejudice of some kind which is making him unwilling to investigate. He will remain unwilling to investigate unless something comes along to break through his prejudice. It may also be called “having a closed mind.” Obviously, faith will remain forever unattainable to such a person, and the tragedy of it is that secretly he seeks it. Every Atheist I have known desires in his heart what people of faith seem to possess. The greater his secret desire the more he may come to hate people of faith.

 

We witness this hatred all the time – in Hollywood movies, on television, and out of the mouths of presidential candidates. Religious people are despised and ridiculed by those who are not. Religious people keep talking about this faith that they have, and that is very threatening.

 

Back during the time when I was a more frequent “sponsor” in Alcoholics Anonymous I used to specialize (in a sense – though it was probably accidental) in sponsoring the Atheist or Agnostic. In fact, it was often easier to sponsor people who didn’t have an established religious idea of God to overcome. I’ll not go into the reasons for that in this post except to say that non-religious people have not cornered the market on prejudice. It’s something that must be broken through in order to come to a realization of the truth of anything.

 

People in that situation – having come to AA – have been given a great gift, (although it may certainly not seem that way to them at the beginning), because a tempestuous and even traumatic set of experiences has very recently broken down their belief system, whatever it may be, and if they suffer from prejudices they are more easily overcome at that point. In other words, it can more easily be shown to them that whatever they have believed all their lives doesn’t work – obviously, or they would not be in the terrible situation they are in. This creates a condition of willingness to investigate something different, and in the case of the Atheist it is quite easy for him to determine what sort of idea he must investigate. It will be the one idea that he has rejected right along. His atheism has defined his entire life.

 

Now, if we are creations of a Creator then the only way we can approach an understanding of that Creator is through an understanding of ourselves. We can’t see things from God’s point-of-view, only our own. So it follows that we must come to an understanding of God by imagining certain attributes which God must have. If He is to be a Creator it follows that He must be all-powerful, and so on. But this proposition, though perfectly logical, will mean nothing without the willingness to believe, and the belief must be in something which is intimately personal rather than a theoretical abstraction.

 

The Atheist “sponsee” will say to me something along these lines: “I cannot bring myself to believe in God.”

 

I will say in reply, “Then here is $20,” (handing him a $20 bill), “so you can go out and buy yourself a few drinks on me.”

 

He may then say: “But there must be a way to recover rationally.”

 

“There is,” I would say, “Belief in God is perfectly rational and I will prove it. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there is no God. But I say the only way to get out of your current predicament is to believe in Him – to believe in something that doesn’t exist. OK, so we have a problem. We shall have to create a God for you to believe in, otherwise you will die.”

 

“Do you mean I must have a Higher Power who is a table or a tree?”

 

“No, that’s utter rubbish. How can you pray to a table? What you must do is take a sheet of paper and a pencil, and write out on the paper whatever you think God should be if He existed. Even though God doesn’t exist, try to imagine that He did. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And, if He did, write down what you think He should be.”

 

So, assuming I have gotten this far with him – (and it happened just this way, with some variations, several times) – he will go home and do as I asked him to do: create a God out of his imagination. He will usually approach it as an academic exercise. He will often try to be funny with some of the attributes he assigns to his imaginary God, which is fine. I have a good sense of humor, as you know if you’ve been reading right along. But somewhere in that list of attributes that he believes God should have, if there were a God, there will invariably be a statement which he means in earnest and which also happens to be true. Because deep in his heart he is like every other human being. He wants to believe in God.

 

Usually this one earnest and true idea is something along the lines of “Eternal” or “Enduring” Love - a love that can never be taken away from him, a love that will never abandon him. Indeed, everything that he has loved has been taken from him, and everybody he has loved has probably abandoned him, and disappointed him. The situation can become quite weepy when we discover that fact together, but I am then able to posit the following idea and to make the following suggestion: “What you have written down is, in fact, precisely what God is. Now, for the next two weeks every morning when you arise and every evening before you retire pray to that idea of God that you have come up with. And all you have to do is say ‘Thank you, God, for keeping me sober another day.’”

 

He may then say, “But I’ll feel ridiculous talking to something I don’t believe in.”

 

“Yes, and you’ll probably look ridiculous too. So what? You have looked far more ridiculous falling over drunk. You have felt far more ridiculous waking up in the jail house. Do it. Humor me.”

 

Now, if he sincerely tries it something will indeed happen to him. He may not believe at first that there is a God, but it just so happens that there is one, regardless. And so, once he begins communicating with Him, He will answer. No, it is not likely that he will hear a voice from Heaven, but if he does this for two weeks without fail at the end of that time, or some time before, he will know with absolute certainty that there is a God.

 

In other words, God will give him the proof he requires; he will have faith. The Creator has been waiting all this time to be created by His creation, waiting with patience and with joyful anticipation to be believed in. It isn’t rational to believe in something you have never experienced, but it is perfectly rational to believe in something you have experienced. Faith is perfectly rational.

 

This method doesn’t always work, and the results are not always happy ones. A few years ago, while a fellow was (or should have been) in the midst of trying this method during that two week period as per my suggestion, he suddenly – and without giving any prior warning – stood in the driveway of his father’s house and in his father’s presence, with a shotgun, blew his head off.              

We sang this hymn - ("The Battle Hymn of the Republic" - if it has not yet been replaced by Suspense!) - at mass yesterday morning, though not with a Russian accent and not in such excellent voice. The line is actually, “let us die to make men free,” but at some point in the not-too-distant past it was changed to “let us live to make men free,” apparently under the delusion that death no longer exists. But when we celebrate a death that has happened in the service of defending our nation we celebrate a life that was worth the bother. In the case of Our Lord Jesus, there would be no resurrection unless He had first died, and in our case, in which we may do no better in this life than to imitate Him, the avoidance of the subject of death for whatever fuzzy sentimental reason brings us farther from an understanding of life’s purpose rather than closer to it.

 

In other words, don’t mess with our hymns. They are supposed to mean something. Goodness – what a concept.

 

Well, it was good to re-post our Declaration because it gave me an opportunity to read it again. I think if one does nothing else on the Fourth of July re-reading this document is essential. I say this as someone who did nothing else of the Fourth of July, so I know whereof I speak. Oh, poor lonely me! But of course it is by my own choice, or choices, that holidays tend to be a bit of a drag. I was grateful for the opportunity to work for at least half the day, and I am grateful for having a small job to do today as well. It gets me out of my head for a little while.

 

“Out of my head” – yes. That’s an interesting turn of phrase. What must it be like “inside of my head?” you may be wondering. I’ll tell you: it is roomy.

 

Fear of death.

 

I have heard that we fear death because we fear the Unknown. This makes little sense to me. How is that possible? We do not fear the Unknown. We fear what little we do know. The little we do know gives rise to speculation. The true Atheist, (a specie I am not sure can actually exist), must fear nothing at all from death because he would try to believe that death is an utter cessation of… well, everything. As a dead man he could have no pain, no regrets, no desire to return to life. He wouldn’t “miss” his life. He wouldn’t wish he had lived it a little differently. Or a lot differently. Nothingness is merely nothingness. The Atheist must try to believe that it will be as if he had never lived at all. Of course the problem he faces is that such a thing is impossible to believe. It requires a mind to believe a thing, and a mind cannot believe in nothing lest it not believe in itself. It requires a theoretical “faith” entirely beyond reason, and faith cannot exist beyond reason.

 

What we really fear is judgment. We cannot fear a loss of awareness. We fear what may happen to us after death because deep in our subconscious minds is planted the knowledge that awareness of some sort will continue. If this were not the case we could have no fear of it, nor indeed fear of anything.

 

Nothingness is therefore a comforting thought, a fairy tale told not amongst those of us who fear death, (for we all do), but for those of us who fear life. Obviously we cannot be judged as people who have never lived, and so it is not our death that is judged but our life that is judged. Of course the manner of our death – if, for instance, we should die heroically as a soldier does – really has nothing to do with death and everything to do with living. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword is a statement of fact, but one cannot be said to be “living by the sword” who offers his life in the service of others, in the defense of innocence, anymore than all the innocent people who have been slain by violence who never once held a sword in their hands.

 

Adolph Hitler’s suicide was his most successful attack on all humanity. It was a sin more grievous than the murder of millions for we know that the taking of life is something God can forgive but the taking of one’s own life is something God cannot forgive. There is a reason for that which seems not to suit us while we are wearing our suits of life, but a life which is lived merely to suit itself is really nothing more than a slow suicide, and it is a tragic death that comes at the end of a life lived in avoidance of it. In the symbolic language of the Apocalypse this may be called riding the Pale Horse. Indeed, to live one’s life constantly devoted to maintaining and satisfying one’s body is not only to live a meaningless life but to never have truly lived life at all.

 

No, we cannot fear what is unknown; we fear what we do know - Or what we suspect.

 

I hope that isn’t too esoteric for a Saturday morning following a holiday.

 

Well, my older son (who is 15, and only just) has been invited to a graduation party. I’ve told him that 15 is not 18 and there’s no way he’s spending the night. Moreover, if I don’t shake the hands of a parent once we get there his attendance at the event will be measured in minutes. Of course when I was his age I was boozing pretty hard, smoking marijuana on a daily basis, and occasionally trying LSD. I started reading at age 4, skipping from Dick and Jane to Faulkner in Grammar School. My prodigy may not have extended to my progeny, but let us hope my predilections have not as well. For, despite the best guidance one may possibly receive from one’s parents, clever boys will find a way to do what they will do, and the hardest roads look easy until one is already upon them.

 

Ah, to be 15 again… I’d rather jump naked into a swimming pool filled with broken glass and razor blades, come to think of it. Perhaps such a thing can be arranged.