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Showing posts from April, 2011

Purgatory and the Cubs

The church has created some goofy stuff in its 2000+ years but nothing is goofier than purgatory.  As I remember it from my best friend as a kid, who was scared to death of being sent there after he died, it's that place you go after you buy the farm if you weren't baptized, or you were a bad person or maybe if you masturbated too much (not sure on that one but if this was one of the qualifiers, he was in deep trouble).  In other words this was the place where you waited to go to heaven.  Kind of the Greyhound Terminal for dead people. People could actually pray you out of the place too.  If you had enough people praying for you to get out of purgatory, I guess some score keeper would determine just when you had enough pray-ers and presto you were out!  My friend was always worried not enough of us would pray for him...he was right. If his fate was left to the clowns I hung around with, he was going to be there a long time. Really, heaven is s...

I always read the names of the dead

Every other day or so the NY Times lists those killed in the wars we're fighting.  It's always kids, in their 20's, some in their 30's...all of them dead. I read them slowly.  It's the only part of  the paper I really concentrate on.  I try to see them, their faces, their smiles, their eyes.  I can't of course, but I try.  And I pray for them and thank them like I should, though my thank you  isn't for what all the war makers want  me to thank them for-for keeping me safe, because nobody fighting in Iraq, in a war that has taken hundreds of our kids for absolutely no reason at all isn't really making me safer.  In fact as that war goes on it makes more terrorists which can be argued makes me less safe. No I thank them for being willing to say yes to the war makers because it reduced the chances my son would have to go and fight.  Yup, there, I said it.    I thank these kids for their selflessness for sure.  But I ...

What would Thoreau say?

Through my 62 some years I have had many heros.  From Thomas Jefferson to Ron Santo to Jesus, so many people have influenced my life and helped create my approach to the world.  None has had more impact though than Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).  HDT, most famous for the book he wrote about living at Walden Pond in Concord, MA Walden, was in my mind America's most important philosopher who proposed a way of life designed to bring people happiness, which to some extent at least, I have followed.  Simplify, simplify, Thoreau said.  For this alone I am grateful for this has been my mantra for many many years. But he wrote much more than that.  He was a strict critic of 'politics as usual' and the stupidity of wealth dictating influence (uh, Trump anyone?).  Thoreau told us that life was to be lived mindfully, aware of each day and its being a gift. And he taught us that those in public life and culture that work to deprive us of those ...