Faith + Reason = Truth

A year ago today, I posted on this blog. My first post in 4 years. I noted how I was struck that inspiration always (and only?) strikes in January, through no planning or effort of my own, and here we are yet again. Full disclosure: 2024 was unusual: I doubled my post count for the year by composing a June review of the Battle of Pavia Tapestries exhibit at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum (which subsequently moved on to San Francisco; this was a MAGNIFICENT exhibit!).

The new year is perfect for reflecting after the holidays when things finally settle down and give way to normalcy. Not so much this year, however. After losing my wife’s sister’s husband to cancer 4 weeks ago, my wife’s mother passed away on Friday. She was 81. It can be said of her passing that she is truly in a better place, having been in a hospice bed in the bedroom of her own home for the past 13 months. Something kept her hanging on, until she no longer could.

It seems to be a common thing, people getting through the holidays and then letting go, and there are obvious reasons for why this happens. With Jane, she was a fighter with seemingly nothing left to fight for, who proceeded to fight for 13 months after being sent home in early December 2023 with no hope to live. Christmas 2023 was a long shot; really, looking back, she was given no shot at all. But as she continued to live and we continued to care for her, knowing she would never be able to sit up on her own, let alone get out of the bed, each day became a gift. If we are honest, we can say that we did not always look at it in those exact terms, at least not every minute of every day that we spent with her. It’s hard. It’s inconvenient. It’s hopeless. It puts the lives of the caregivers on hold, be it for a week or a month or a year.

And then, slowly then suddenly, it happens. Then, and only then, are we afforded the luxury of looking back with nothing but thanks, feeling above all, grateful. Grateful for her life, grateful for her death, and grateful for her renewed life with her Lord and Savior.

Thank you, Nana.

The mercy of the Father is infinite. We know this. But WHY is it infinite? Why does it exist at all?

No, I do not claim to know the mind of God. But I do know that people have reasons for doing things. People may reasonably disagree about those reasons, but it seems that all action is undertaken because of . . . something. That thing can range from fending off starvation to seeking shelter from something harmful to wanting something to happen. The cause could also be nothing more than a desire to be entertained, occupied, or otherwise distracted from a present circumstance.

God knows this, and so should you. When the Roman soldiers arrested Jesus in the Garden, he forgave them. When Peter cut off the ear of one of the aggressors, Jesus forgave Peter. Jesus forgives. He understood that the soldiers did what they believed they should have done, and he understood that Peter did what he felt he had to do. The Lord instructed us to turn the other cheek not out of masochism, but out of understanding. Understand the other, see things as they do. Do not retaliate. Perhaps the thing has been done out of pure cruelty, perhaps not. It is even quite possible that the person does not want forgiveness at all, believing that either he or she has done nothing wrong, or that the wrong was somehow justified. We will most likely never understand the full, true motivation of an action, but we can make an effort to do so.

God, on the other hand, does in fact know the whole story. He knows what we have been through, and he understands why we do the things we choose to do. Jesus went so far as to ask his Father to forgive people who did not even ask for it, people who "knew not what they did." Think about that! It is a hard, hard thing to do. In my own life, I am about the furthest from being persecuted as a person could be, as far as I am aware. And yet . . . I struggle with harboring ill will towards a perceived slight. I know I should not, I know people did things they felt they had to do. I know that I am largely at fault for what led to the thing, by not trying harder to either handle or escape a difficult set of circumstances.

Do I focus on mea culpa though? Or do I instead choose to look at what they could have or should have done differently? Most of the time, it's the former, but occasionally the latter creeps in. The fact is, everyone should have acted differently than we did, and it is up to me to make my peace and forgive, even though no one is asking for it. Easier said than done, this business of forgiving; Jesus is indeed an impossible act to follow.

The main takeaway, for me, is that of all the reasons to do something to another person, the fact that they first did something to you is not acceptable. Do not strike someone simply because they struck you. Do not help someone simply because they helped you. Do not hate someone, or even love someone, simply because they first hated or loved you. Hate no one, love everyone. I believe the purpose of this instruction is to instill personal responsibility for one's actions, rather than making them dependent upon the actions of another. It leads us, as does so much of what God teaches and provides, on an expansive path to empowerment and freedom. If we can actually do it, then we can break the chains of limiting, self-destructive tendencies like revenge and retaliation. It is daunting when we are down here in the weeds, rather than in Heaven with our Father. But Christ was down here with us, and his trust in God that there is more to this story than being tortured and murdered is what enabled him to live that brief earthly existence walking among us. He understood that, yes, he himself would suffer. But the gift he gave us through that suffering and ensuing forgiveness would save billions of people, which is the REAL story.

Bongiorno, and prego!

In my 48th year here on earth (which actually makes me 47, no doubt coming as a bit of a surprise to some people), the dream of visiting Europe was finally realized. Two cities have always been at the top of my list, and the first destination on this trip with my family was one of them:  Rome. Paris will have to wait.

For two glorious weeks, there was an endless stream of places, objects, and human remains that were many hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years old. This is not the case in America. The palpable sense of awe within each of us will stay with me for what I can only hope will be the rest of my days. As one who believes that travel is always worth it, no matter the cost or inconvenience or locale, seeing places such as these has instilled a sense of completeness within me that I didn't see coming. Let me explain...

Life is change, and change is life. When one finds a soulmate, the feeling that an irrevocable change has taken place is very real. That alteration, however, continues. The change keeps changing. It's the same with the birth of your child, or in our case, children. Yes, everything changes in that moment, but the changes keep on coming for the rest of their, and our, lives. In the ancient places that we experienced, some more ancient than others, there was an inescapable separation of "then" vs. "now," with the process of change somehow absent in the things themselves. The artifacts are still there (allowing for some decay and erosion) just as they have been for centuries.

The ruins, or objets d'art, or often still-beautiful and fully functional structures such as they were, had very obviously been created by people who are no longer here, and in that sense, they are creations that are frozen in time. They do not change. The Arch of Constantine remains largely, if not completely, as it was when it was created 1,702 years ago in the year 315. When I stood a short distance away, aware of the perfect late afternoon/early evening rays of sunlight that fell upon it, the only thing to do was to contemplate the countless others throughout the ages who had done the very same thing. Their clothing may have been different, as would the backdrop of other structures and surfaces, but the thing was the same, as were the people. Those people could have been us, but for being born in a different time, and we them. Our souls were created for eternity, while our experience in that physical space and moment in time is so fleeting as to seem almost non-existent. Somehow though, the memory persists forever.

This rumination has a point. Other people may be about to embark on similar journeys, if not tomorrow or next week, then maybe some years down the road, so in the hopes of providing some useful information to you and them, the plan for the coming days is to post something about each town we visited. I'll share details about the trip itself, what worked and what didn't, touching on our mostly positive but not perfect first experience with airbnb, traveling through Italy, France, and Spain on planes, trains, and automobiles (including rental cars and buses), phone usage for navigation and social media while relying on the cheap and awesome Google Project Fi wherever we were, the things we did and did not do...ok, I can start to see why so many people do travel blogs.

Arrivederci!

A recent Catholic Stuff You Should Know podcast (I believe it was this one, but they are all worth listening to!) referenced the importance of the bond of marriage, the ultimate commitment of one's life to another. They beautifully express the benefits of such a commitment, in the face of the obvious "downsides" that many young people focus on. Only when one fully commits to something can he or she realize the fruits of its full development. Not until you walk through a door, by definition eliminating the other doors as options, can you experience the exhilaration, joy, and sometimes scariness of whatever awaits on the other side.

The U.S. immigration issue has been suddenly thrust into the limelight. It is not a new problem, but the manner in which we treat existing immigrants seems poised to fundamentally change. It is a matter of one person, President Obama, committing to a course of action and thereby forcing others to react, rather than keeping his options open. Robert Rubin would be appalled, which brings us to the subject at hand.

Important people, or at least people in positions of power and/or authority, often beget proteges. For better or for worse, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (an extremely powerful and influential woman in her own right) was heavily influenced by her former boss Larry Summers, who was in turn influenced by former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin.

Here is what Summers had to say about Rubin in a 1998 New York Times article:

“What so many people have a tendency to do is to lock into a scenario,” Summers says. “What Rubin will say, at times to the frustration of others, is that some questions don’t have answers – which is to say that just because a problem is terrible, we don’t have to act. It may not be the right time.”

Rubin believes that if you wait long enough, a better option will present itself. Perhaps many young men and women who are currently in relationships with the loves of their lives have the same thought in mind. Rubin did wait, in the example in the article, for a third option to the problem he faced, and he then acted on that third option. After which point, the crisis resolved.

To him, and to Summers, and to Sandberg, the lesson was and is, "wait, you don't have to act." But to me, the lesson is, "you must act if the situation is one that will not simply resolve itself; after all, the crisis was not averted until he acted, and there is no way to know that the course he eventually took was any better or worse than the others which were also available to him, while the problem continued to worsen until he acted."

It should be obvious that rushing blindly, headlong, uninformed, into a course of action is never advisable. To the contrary:  make every effort to inform yourself of the causes of the problem and the available options to deal with it.  Then, exert equal or greater effort on improvising possible alternatives. But recognize that waiting indefinitely, month after month, year after year, to resolve a purely political impasse that has real human consequences every day for millions of people is not a reasonable option.

President Obama, for all of his deplorable and despicable abortion support and dishonesty with the American people in regards to getting the Affordable Care Act passed in the manner in which it was, not to mention his co-leading role in the partisan chasm that has opened between the Executive and Legislative branches, has acted to force Congress to deal with the issue of how to treat the millions of illegal immigrants in America. Again, the manner in which he has done so is suspect. In this case, however, it does not appear that "waiting for another option" is viable, at least not when the lives of all of the families of these immigrants are at stake. To his credit, whether one agrees with him or not, he is a President that commits (and as a result, keeps no other options open). Sometimes, that is what is required. I believe this is one of those moments.