Pitiful Appeal Chain Letter

My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can't. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I'm so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn't hurt, except when I try to breathe.

The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or insurance.

I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn't work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, "Don't cry, Mommy," and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she's allergic to leaves and the burlap. I make her sneeze and my body chafes her real bad. She can't afford Sudafed and Calamine lotion and that makes me sad.

I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you dn't know, too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and they will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball like the normal kids. Right now I can only be the third base.

Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad, and I want a body. I don't want my leaves to rot and my body turn into mulch before I turn ten. If you can only send it to a few people at least maybe we can get a new bigger burlap bag for me as I get older.

If you don't forward this email, that's okay, I'll understand. But my Mommy says you're a mean and heartless bastard who doesn't care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don't stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of self centered cruel person are you that you can't take five FREAKIN' minutes out of your happy day to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy too?

Please help me. I try to be happy, but it's hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn't scratch and claw and chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.

Thank You,
Billy "Smiles" Evans

54: A Retraction and Reflection

It has been a year since I changed my identity from pastel yellow to well...pastel yellow, except my daughter commented I looked like a catfish now. That is how I looked a year ago, this is what I'm shooting for.
I can't explain it, but I conciously remember ever since I was a child I wanted to be old. I thought it was cool to look really old. When I was in my thirties and many of my friends were going bald, I was not. I realized I may never be completely bald. I was disappointed. I was actually jealous of my best friend who went bald when he was mid twenties. With all the hair restoration programs out there playing on men's fear of age, and me getting carded for the last time in my life at age 47 in a restaurant with my daughter, I've concluded there is no justice in the universe. But I knew that a long time ago.

So, I'm chronologically another year older and not anywhere near another year wiser. I've concluded God created a set amount of wisdom to go around when He created the world and it has gotten spread thinner and thinner as the human race multiplies. It is hard to not believe that when the last TV I used to watch regularly was Donna Reed, Lunch with Soupy Sales, Ed Sullivan Show and Father Knows Best. In recent years, I've seen a few minutes of programs like CSI, Jackass, ummmm... and one of those psychic crime shows where the stars look like they are zoned out on Thorazine... Anyway, I cannot grasp why these programs are entertaining. Seriously. What happens to the human soul when it is filled with images of grisly death, absolute stupidity and supernatural stories with no clear dogma attached. It is difficult to not take the "world is going to hell in a handbasket" bunker mentality when I percieve that the vast majority of the people in this country actually mindlessly accept this assault on their humanity (its tantamount to inviting a serial rapist to attack your mind and soul), and the media keeps pushing the envelope of brutality and dehumanizing and sells soap, real estate and male performance enhancing drugs every 6 minutes during the assaults.

OK... so that's my "old man" rant. Sorry, just had to get it off my chest.

So, my kids did in fact take ME out for my birthday to celebrate what my oldest daughter called my "slow march to death". Yeah, it is funny, we can say stuff like that in our family and laugh. I seriously have the coolest kids on earth (step kids, god kids and all). No, they aren't all Opie and Beaver Cleaver and they've all had their seasons of flying out of orbit in one way or another, but I'm never ashamed to introduce them to anyone as my kids. It is not until you get old enough to have kids this age that you understand the true parental meaningfulness of the Psalm verse "your children will rise up and call you blessed".

Anyway, no, I'm not moving into the senior trailer park I found in Apache Junction... I'd have to give up my women. Actually I'd have to give up my library to fit into it too, and I'm not sure I can do that either.

All in all, life at 54 is good. Mortality looms larger and larger. The body grows more and more feeble and weary and breaks and creaks more easily. Yes, when you are young it is a slow march to death but it seems that as we get older we somehow break into a sprint. We can only hope to wake up to one more gray hair, one more brown spot, one more wrinkle of flesh and pray we live long enough to at least look as wise as we should be.

Happy Birthday to me....

Actually my birthday was on Wednesday and I got a box of Cinnamon Roll and S'mores Poptarts from some friends. I'm sitting here waiting for my college aged kids to arrive so I can take them all out for dinner for my birthday. (Take note parents....)

It occurred to me that in 362 days I can move into a "Senior Trailer Park" in Apache Junction.


Imagine, living large for 3,000.00. Heck, I could charge my house on a VISA card! .... and I can order from the "Senior Menu" at Denny's. The thing I'm living for is the twenty five cent coffee at McDonalds. Of course those aren't the only benefits of surviving the 60's, EST, and 80's music. I'm trying to remember what they are....

You know what... I'm going to have to think about that, the kids are here and I'm going to have the experience that all parents live for: sharing a pitcher of beer with your kids.

The Last Chapter

The Last Chapter of "Life, Death and Love"

"…and boy gets girl."

"Let us rejoice and be glad and give glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready. Come, and I shall show you the Bride of the Lamb. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, and made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. 'And I heard a loud voice say, 'Behold, the very presence of God is with his people, and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying or pain: the first things have passed away.” The Revelation of John

This is the whole of The Book. It is a story of love, surely, but of a love like all true loves, one that suffers greatly for the sake of finally and eternally possessing the beloved. It is the divine romance, the story of God's passionate pursuit of his beloved through Hell and high water to have her for Himself. And the heart of sorrows is the heart touched by this True Love, it is the heart that longs for the ending of the story.

The Revelation of John is at the end of the story, an epilogue of sorts, told in huge images of such cataclysmic epic proportions that the message cannot be missed if we will stand back from the movie screen instead of standing with our noses to it. It is simply a retelling of The Love Story in ghastly and beautifully awesome images in case we did not understand when it was told in the terrifying human drama in which it actually happened: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl both suffer greatly, insurmountable odds are overcome, boy gets girl in the end and they live happily ever after. This is the plot of every date flick romance ever written and filmed.

And this is the end of the matter for the heart of sorrows, the one bruised and beaten by and for the sake of Love. This thing all lovers know, to this all lovers will say it is so: In the end, in love, nothing, but nothing, matters except the presence of our beloved. If that presence is ours we at once lose everything and possess all creation. This is Truth: When I finally sit in the presence of my beloved, embraced in her unconditional passion and love for me, all the pain and sorrows of the joining of our hearts, the hell of the fear of rejection, all of my longings for her in her absence, all of my doubts about her love, all of the darkness of being abandoned by her because of doubts and fears, all of our unbelief, lack of faith, all of it is consumed, all is swallowed up in our love. None of it matters, none of it is of any consequence, none of it is even remembered, all the first things have passed away, all things are new. There is now only my beloved; no belief or unbelief, no fear, no doubts, no past, no future, no sense of the passing of the present moment, only the two now one in a mystery and the eternal sense that it is now as it was intended from the beginning. For that moment love reigns supreme, the world, the two of us, God himself and all his creation is a seamless tapestry; everything is woven together by the bright threads of romance and passion. This is the final and best mystery, the hope to which all we know about human and divine love, and that to which St. John finally points us.

This is the eternal moment I long for most desperately. To rest in the arms of my True Beloved, to sit in the presence of His divine passion for my heart and soul, to be lost in Him, to be one with Him, finally and completely. It is then that I know all of life with its tears and desperations, hopelessness and fears and sorrows will be swallowed up in His holy and fearless love. It is then I will know that I am, but it is truly more than knowing: I will be, yes I will BE my Beloved's and He will be mine.

"Arise my darling, my beautiful one. For behold the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers have appeared in the land. Who is this that grows like the dawn, as beautiful as the full moon, as pure as the sun? I am my beloved's and his desire is for me. Come my beloved, let us go out into the country. Let us spend the night in the villages. Let us rise early and go to the vineyard, let us see whether the vine has budded and its blossoms have opened, and whether the pomegranates have bloomed. There I will give you my love."

"The Spirit and the Bride say come.”

My Latest Cool Construction Project

I'm slowly remodelling a 70's Tudor style house for a family in Phoenix. Great clients and I'm resisting being a name dropper...you'd recognize the family pedigree if I did. They took the kiddo's on vacation for a month while I took out the two inch oak spindle style bannister on the upstairs landing (where the kids live) and this is what we put in. I forgot my camera the first few days of demolition and setting the bottom rail and posts, but here it is "in process".



This is Thomas, my helper, on the ladder. He's afraid of heights too, but I'm the boss and he doesn't get paid if I fall off.

One of the issues was anchoring the system together with a 50 foot span. We ran the rails to the walls then anchored them and "buried" the rail in a newell post we built around it for structural integrity.

This is Thomas on the ladder.... again and again let us pray to the Lord!

This is the newell post drywalled.

...and finished.
And a view from below. We remodeled the entryway with this type of railing about 3 years ago. They decided the upstairs thin rails looked goofy, so we did this. I might post some pictures of the entry remodel in another post.

The Consuming Fire

"And the glory you have given me I have given to them; that they may be one, just as we are one; I in them, and you in me, that have made you known to them, that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them." Jesus

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live I live by faith in the son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me." St. Paul

"Many waters cannot quench love, it is the very fire of the Lord." Song of Songs

Love is a consuming fire. This I know as certainly as I know my own name. When the flame of reckless passion is kindled I will give all I have, I will throw all that I am into the heart and hands of my beloved to keep our joyful bonfires burning furiously and brightly. I am lost in her; I no longer live except in her only, and she in me. In a mystery our hearts have been ravaged by some eternal and magnificent power that has moved the boundaries of our very souls and we are now a singularity, embodied one in another, they may be perfected in union, that the world may know that you sent me and loved them, even as you have loved me .... and I somehow we are one another; without her I know am nothing, I cannot exist apart from her. It is only in falling headlong into the mysterious abyss of love that we know the absolute peace of union with another and absolute fear of abandonment. It is only in love that we know the acute joy of completion and the torment of the hopelessness of fulfilling this true and complete union of spirits and hearts in this flesh. It is easy to find the Spirit in the bright joys of love yet it is in the torments of love when we are lost in its darkness that we find the true inextinguishable light that breaks from some unknown and joyful place in the deep waters of the abyss. That light is the fire of Love, the presence of God, that the many dark and deep waters of our sorrows could not quench. It is here finally, when we are truly lost in love that the dawn begins to break on the dark night of the soul and we find ourselves.

The lost and found of love is in passion and romance. Passion has been called untrue, unreal. Romance is called a short-lived fiction, infatuation a temporary insanity. It has been named pathological to feel so intertwined, to lose the boundaries of self and the ego so completely that we feel our very selves in one another, that we truly live and die in the heart and soul of one another. Yet it is this very pathology that poets extol, it is this insanity that the human heart longs for in the dark nights spent grieving the absence of the beloved. It is this loss that is gladly sought and embraced for the sake of gaining the sense of lostness in another that somehow fills and completes who I am. It seems this psychopathology is the best and truest of theologies because this is what Jesus and the apostle tell us the Christ is about. God is love. He is this fierce and consuming passion, and we are created in His image. To be one with our beloved, to find our soul's true companion, to lose all we possess and are for the sake of one moment of union that breaks into eternity within our hearts: This is the holy place within us all where God still dwells and calls us to Himself.

As it is with all holy places, it is a great risk to enter it and stand in the presence of the one who inhabits it. There, if we risk entering, we might be killed or we might be blessed beyond comprehension. It is most certainly a greater risk to enter the innermost court of love than to hazard mere physical death. To love is itself The Absolute Risk. Love is never a rehearsed trapeze act, a calculated stunt; there is no circus bravado, there is no net. The risk of the utter destruction of our hearts and perhaps our lives because of love is the most fearful of all things human and divine. It is fearful because love is the giving our very selves, the entrusting of all we are to another, laying ourselves open, naked, unguarded, without apology, without our peculiar armors, and trusting our beloved will welcome us in, that we will be one, that we will not be rejected. It is the most terrible and reckless risk both God and human beings can take, it was the very risk the Immanuel took. Behold the Incarnation of Love. "He came to His own and His own rejected him," Saint John says. The Eternal Lover himself is not exempt from the reckless foolishness of a Quixotic love affair and the risk of the devastation of His heart because of His passionate pursuit of His beloved who spurned His romancing, wWhich is the oldest and best romance ever told, the story that God himself has deemed holy: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl and….

Love and Abandonment

On my bed night after night I sought him Whom my soul loves; I sought him but did not find him.

I must arise now and go search the city; In the streets and in the squares I must seek him whom my soul loves.

I sought him but did not find him. I opened to my beloved

But my beloved had turned away and gone! My heart went out to him as he spoke. I searched for him but did not find him; I called to him but he did not answer me. Song of Solomon 3:1,2; 5:6

This is love, its bright hope and its dark despair.

Yes, there is a dark side to love, and that darkness is not an evil that will end love, but it is a true witness to the presence of love. There are times that the joy I feel in the arms of my beloved affirms the depths of our love. But there are times that the pit of desperation deep in the night at the absence of my beloved bears greater witness to the strength of the love we share than the joy we feel in one another's presence. Night after night I fall into the darkness within and my heart goes somewhere into the darkness without, hoping I will find my beloved's heart searching me out in some spiritual, some mystical way. My desire is to find we are thinking of each other at the same moment, with the same passion, with the same longings; but my heart comes back empty, I need the living, warm touch of flesh and blood. I call out for my beloved, sometimes in a gentle sigh, sometimes in tears barely held back and sometimes in anger at the blessed closeness and the cursed distance between us. But my beloved does not answer. There is silence. I am alone.

I may be filled with the knowledge I am loved by her, I know in my mind that my beloved, somewhere, longs for me deep in the same night. But when all the promises of everlasting love are remembered, when all the joys of yesterday's embraces and touching are recalled, when hope reminds me there will be tomorrow's meeting, I still find myself staring into the night, broken hearted, wishing the silence would be broken by the sound of my beloved breathing beside me. There is a deep hollow and holy place within me that only the presence of my beloved will fill. And until I am with my beloved nothing will take away that holy longing and desperation.

Who is a lover of God who has not desperately longed for His presence? Who has a heart for God and has not gone out into the black night? Who has not fallen into the darkest of despairs because we are not with Him, because we cannot see His face, feel His touch, hear His voice speak our name. Who has not at some time, night after night curled up in bed, face buried in the pillows, sought Him out in sighs and curses and tears? Who has not opened to God and found that He had turned away? There are times we think we have heard His voice call our names, our hearts go out in joy and gladness but we turn to where we think we might find Him and He is gone, or perhaps was never there. And we wonder what lover's game He is playing with us, or is it a game? Perhaps our Beloved has abandoned us. Perhaps He has gone away and does not desire our presence, He no longer finds us lovely. We callout to Him, we cry out for Him. But He does not answer. There is silence as deep as the stars. We don't know if He will return, we don't know if He hears us calling. We wonder if He cares at all that we are calling.

Sometimes it is not enough to just know intellectually that we are loved by Him. "God loves you" rings hollow to the heart ravaged by despair at the absence of God. All His promises of love deep and eternal, all of the remembrances of His presence with us in times past, all the hopes of being with Him tomorrow, none of these will dull the edge of pain when we callout for God and He does not answer now, this moment. There are times when His promises are assurance enough to hold back the darkness, but there are times when nothing but His very presence will lift us from the pit.

To be ravaged by despair at the absence of God is the greatest witness to love for God. It is not lack of faith that brings this despair but the depths of passion. It is not that we are wanting in faith but that we truly want only Him; He is our beloved and our desire is for Him, fully, completely and eternally yet we know we cannot have Him thus while constrained by this life. Yes, faith is sometimes bold confidence, and sometimes it is hope against hope that He loves us and is there but silent and invisible. Love, unlike the confidence and assurance of faith, is the holy joy at His presence and the consuming darkness when He is silent and answers us not when we call out to Him. “Faith” may be the knowledge He is still out there somewhere when we open to Him and He is not present, but “love” is the pit in our stomach as we stare into the void where we once found Him standing. To love God is to suffer this holy longing for Him.

Only those who love Him desperately know the forsakenness of missing Him. Be comforted in this, all you who face the nights with dread, who seek His face through eyes clouded with tears of loneliness, you are not far from Him. Have faith, He has not forsaken you, He has not abandoned you. And though your own heart breaks with doubt and fears you cannot name at His absence it is because of love that your heart is afire with pain. This is the truest witness to love, the hardest to bear, surely, but to have a great love is to suffer greatly for it. To this all lovers will say "Amen", it is so.

What's Up With Death?

It is interesting that you should ask that. The reality is that it is not new or just lately that I've thought about death. I've ruminated and philosphized and theologized and contemplated death since I was a teenager. It is not a popular subject to be sure. It is one of the few realities of life that no one has made a reality show about. We'd much rather watch people engage in their lowest, grossest and evil inclinations as entertainment than contemplate the end of life and perhaps be forced to contemplate the fact that all of that was indeed a waste of a human life that, instead of being honorable, loving and worthwhile was degraded and lowered to less than shameless dogs and pigs in public sight. Ah, but that is another rant.....

But death IS the end of our life, and how we spend our life will determine how we die. If we live in depravity and degradation, we will die hopeless and angry and regretful. If we live in Love, we live in hope. I'm going to post some "Chapters on Death and Love" from an old book I was working on. (The opening chapters are in the link "Life, Death and Love" in my sidebar.) Perhaps this will explain my facination with death... which is not a facination with death, but a facination with true Life. Here's Chapter One.

Romeo and Juliet

"Ah. dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous; and that the lean abhorred monster keeps thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that I still will stay with thee, and never depart from this palace of dim night again: here, here will I remain (here with worms that are thy chambermaids; 0, will I set up my everlasting rest; and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world wearied flesh.) Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, a the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death! Come bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide! Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark! Here's to my love! 0 true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die." Romeo

"What's here? a cup, clos'd in my true love's hand? Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end: 0, churl! drink all, and leave no friendly drop to help me after? I will kiss thy lips; haply some poison yet doth hang on them, to make me die with a restorative. Thy lips are warm! Yea, noise! then I'll be brief - 0 happy dagger this is thy sheath, thet'e rest and let me die." Juliet

"We know love by this, that He laid down His life for, us ... the one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." St. John the Theologian

Romeo and Juliet. Love and death. I am the incurable romantic; I am drawn to death because I am drawn to God.

I wish to die because I am desperately in love with my Beloved. This is the heartbreaking joy of passion, it is the Divine Romance.

All lovers know that love bids us die for the sake of our beloved. This is the beautiful tragedy of love. The romantic amalgam of love and death is the highest, the simplest and most profound of all mysteries held tenaciously by the human heart. This is Truth: Death is the final witness to the true depth of passion of the lover for the beloved. It is not when, at the end of the story, the lovers finally make love that touches our very souls. The most captivating and romantic of all endings is when two lovers willingly and gladly die for the sake of eternity in one another's arms.

Death for the sake of love is simply the gospel according to Romeo and Juliet. Death is embraced by lovers because they know in death they will shed all the limits of the world and hindrances of this flesh to the final and complete union of their hearts. In death for the sake of love there is a trust as deep as their love that there will be a resurrection of the two as one, inseparable, complete and eternally bound. This is Truth, eternal, inescapable.

The heart of love knows that love and death are indeed a single substance. There has never been a lover who has not sworn he would forsake his very life for his beloved; every lover offers to his beloved his willingness to die for the sake of his love, for the sake of her love, as evidence of the passion in his heart. Love lays down its life for the beloved, sometimes in a single act, more often in acts done singlemindedly over the years for the sake of the beloved. Whether a life is sacrificed in a moment or over a lifetime, it is laid down for the sake of possessing the heart and soul of the beloved, it is gladly and willingly given to the one desired above all others.

But it is when we hear of two lovers choosing the moment, the single act with hope for some eternal certainty of one another's presence that our hearts are touched in a place that is sometimes too fearful and holy for even ourselves to enter and seek its blessing. Our reasonable, calculating minds will tell us the lovers' suicide pact was a waste of life, an eternal mistake, an unthinking and terribly short sighted solution to traverse the barriers of loving in a world that seems hostile to their romance. In our world-bounded humanity we resist touching the holy sorrow deep within us that envies them. We try to reason away the inexorable logic of love that, in our hearts, understands the reasonings of the heart broken by the desire for unhindered union with the beloved. We do this perhaps because in our humanity we fear death, and sometimes truly fear love more than death; but somewhere deep in our humanity we know death for the sake of love is what life is truly about, that it is an anchor of hope cast into the unfathomable depths of eternity itself. If we will, and we must, set aside our fears and open wide the door to the mystery of love and death we will find the One to Whom both love and death belong, in Whose image we are created, Whose nature we share. The door opens to the very dwelling place of our eternal Lover, God who gladly died for the sake of becoming one with us, His beloved, for all eternity.

This is, thus far, the end of my pilgrimage in my search for the meaning of my desire for death. I can go no further or deeper than the very love of God himself. This is the place I rest, this is where I am content to dwell for now: My desire for death is a witness to the very passion of God that has won my heart and mind and soul and strength. It is a manifestation of my desire dwell forever in the heart of my Beloved; in death alone can I truly know the depth of love that loves unto death.

In death alone I know that in love there is resurrection, that the love I share with my Beloved is stronger than death, a flame of passion many waters cannot quench. In death alone I know life is a burden gladly shed for the sake of eternity with my Beloved; all that keeps us apart, all our adversaries, the limitations of my flesh and heart are rendered powerless by death. In death sought for the sake of the Beloved, love alone is sovereign, our true union is consummated, finally and completely, and we will never be lost to one another again.

Mortality

There's something about watching someone die over the course of 3 years that brings a certain sobriety to your life. The Monastics speak of "the constant remembrance of death" as a spiritual discipline, that is, remembering that we are one heartbeat away from facing judgment. We drive, walk, eat, shop and sleep usually without a thought for the fact that we could be instantly killed by a sleeping driver, a random act of violence, a freak accident or a physical anamoly that no one knew existed in our bodies. No one is exempt from death, but we live as if we are immortal in THIS flesh. Not the flesh of our resurrection but the flesh that we feed, cater to, submit to and pamper. Even though it will eventually go into a hole in the earth and be eaten by the lowly worms, our flesh rules our immortal soul in this life. At nearly 54 now, every new and unidentifiable pain, every new spot and wrinkle, every weakness is a harbinger of death, a fleshly "post it" reminding me I am indeed fragile, failing, slowly rotting away within and without.

So what is the response of the human being to the self awareness of our own corruptibility? Join a spa, get a tan, get cut, tucked, rolled and lifted? Deny death and its messengers? No. I choose to look in the mirror and face reality, then thank God for and heed the warning that my "days are as grass; as a flower of the field so I flourished, but the wind is passing over me and soon I will be gone and the place thereof shall know me no more. " My days to repent are limited...they always have been, but tomorrow was always an assumed promise. I see the godliness I have yet to attain to and I know I don't have enough years left to reach my own vision much less God's vision for my life. It is not so much that I fear God as much as I sorrow that I am after all these years, still an adulterer in and with my own flesh, and I continue to grieve the One who is Faithful and True.

How then shall I live? As one who is dying. But I will not succumb to the classic "living in death mode": suddenly throwing aside all normalcy and doing life artificially, frenetically and extraordinarily, trying one last immoral tryst, taking exotic vacations and buying the frivilous things I denied myself in my responsible days, but by taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ as St. Paul said. Every thought, not only the great ones, the clever and spiritual, the ambitious and enlightened ones. Every thought...no matter how ordinary, mundane, repetitive, and unremarkable, because every one is precious to God my Beloved if offered to Him.

Why Did We....

go to the Native New Yorker on Brown Road instead of the one we always go to on Gilbert Road?

God knows. What I know is that we were driving down Brown Road and a young blonde girl with a baby in each arm walked in front of our van. I slowed down and she stood there and stared at us. Then instead of walking back to the sidewalk, she walked into the middle of the street, cars dodging her. I told my wife to go get her. I pulled into a driveway and called 911. My wife dodged traffic and caught up to her and tried to guide her to the sidewalk. They walked down the middle of the road, my wife trying to talk to her and guide her toward the sidewalk. She waved her arms at oncoming traffic, some swerved around them, some stopped and gawked and drove on. Another woman got out of her car and helped guide her to the side of the road. We were able to get the babies out of the girl's arms. She tried to walk back into the traffic. We got her to stay on the sidewalk and she stood with tears welling in her eyes. The police arrived about a minute later. The policeman asked "What's your name, so we can help you..." She stood, a vacant stare then more tears. "I...I can't...remember... I think it's... Julie.......I need help, I just want to come down...I don't like pain." She held out her arm. It looked like someone had taken an icepick to the inside of her arm. By that time two more squad cars had pulled up with a woman officer. We handed the babies over to the police. I instinctively reached over to touch Julie on the arm and was going to say something, but she cringed. The policeman was saying, "You have to talk to me so we can help you..." I knew there was nothing else we could do but watch and I'd seen that kind of thing so many times before. So I motioned to my wife and we walked away and went and ate wings and drank beer. God have mercy on Julie and her beautiful children.

06-06-06

Well, here it is 3:33pm (really!), half the mark of the beast (Mountain Standard Time, no Daylight Savings) on June 6, 2006 and the Apocalypse still has not arrived. Maybe the Beast is on Eastern Time, or Greenwich Mean....

Anyway, I scoured Daniel and Revelation for what time zone the Beast works out of but it must be buried in the Bible Code somewhere I can't find it. Maybe its because I'm using the NIV and not KJV. Damn Protestant "modern dynamic equivalency paraphrase translations"! No wonder no one knows diddly about the end times any more. If DaVinci had used the "Good News For Modern Man" Bible we might have had to cast Adam Sandler and Roseanne as the leads in "The DaVinci Code". BUT, that's not what I'm blogging about. Here are some things I DID manage to find hidden deep within the codes of the Biblical text using the latest number/letter crunching software that dredges up every permutation of numerical/alphabetical assignments in Hebrew, Greek, English, Latin, Aramaic and "Dude"
(yes, there IS a "Dude Bible"....) Here are the Marks of the Beast that I have discovered:


660
Approximate number of the Beast

DCLXVI
Roman numeral of the Beast

666.0000
Number of the High Precision Beast

0.666
Number of the Millibeast

/ 666
Beast Common Denominator

(-666) ^ (1/2)
Imaginary number of the Beast

6.66 e3
Floating point Beast

1010011010
Binary of the Beast

6, uh... what was that number again?
Number of the Blonde Beast

1-666
Area code of the Beast

00666
Zip code of the Beast

666 mph
The speed limit of the Beast

$665.95
Retail price of the Beast

$699.25
Price of the Beast plus 5% state sales tax

$769.95
Price of the Beast with all accessories and replacement soul

$656.66
Walmart price of the Beast

$646.66
Next week's Walmart price of the Beast

Phillips 666
Gasoline of the Beast

Route 666
Way of the Beast

666 F
Oven temperature for roast Beast

666k
Retirement plan of the Beast

666 mg
Recommended Minimum Daily Requirement of Beast

6.66 %
5 year CD interest rate at First Beast of Hell National Bank, $666 minimum
deposit.

$666/hr
Beast's lawyer's billing rate

Lotus 6-6-6
Spreadsheet of the Beast

Word 6.66
Word Processor of the Beast

i66686
CPU of the Beast

666i
BMW of the Beast

DSM-666 (revised)
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Beast

1232 Octal, Apt. 29A
Beast's hexed address (programmers' joke)

668
Next-door neighbor of the Beast

333
The semi-Christ

665.9997856
The Number of the Beast on a Pentium

And yeah, dude, this IS REAL!!! Don't try to prove me wrong, 'cuz, like I KNOW this stuff and no one else does because the Catholic Church is suppressing me, man...and like, I'll probably be assassinated by Papal Vatican Secret Police for publishing this............If I don't post on my blog within 48 hours of 6:66pm tonight, send the FBI looking for my body.

Grandpa Fell Alseep

Philip Gilbert Henry Paulton fell asleep in the Lord Tuesday night, the Leavetaking of Pascha, at 10:30pm. Those who have been following my blog for a long time know I basically started blogging about this journey with his Parkinson's-like degenerative neurological disease that began in Fuddrucker's Bathroom . We've been taking care of him in our home for the past three years and had to move him to a nursing facility a month or so ago. My wife sat with him at the home his last four days.

I got the call from her as my young daughter and I were sitting down for dinner at 10:30pm Tuesday. Although she wasn't fond of him, she went with me to the home. She sat and watched as we prepared him for burial. She looked on without emotion. We washed him, annointed his body with myhrr, cardamon, frankincense and olive oil. We prayed the Psalter in the process. We had finished building his coffin, and the funeral home put him in it without embalming or cosmetics. We packed the coffin with dry ice and drove him to St. Paisius Monastery . We put him in the Church and prayed the Psalter all night until his funeral the following morning on the third day.

It is a relief and a blessing and a grief that he is gone. Suffering and death bring the realities of our finiteness and failure to light, it also brings to light love and compassion and healing if we will be open to learning from it. Lessons in life are hard as my daughter has discovered at such a young age.

It will take a few more days to decompress from this past week. We still have rooms to clean, belongings to sort, ceilings and walls to repair, and bathrooms to restore to normal usage. In a few weeks (hopefully...my wife is reading this going "yeah, right...try 3 years...) the last vestiges of three years of Philip's disease will disappear under new paint and drywall and tile.
While Philip was destroying the house, he was building a spiritual home within us all.

May his memory be eternal.

The Odd Couple

Walter died last week. He was 84. My father in law is dying as I type this. It is probably a matter of hours Hospice says. I met Walter about nine years ago when we became Orthodox and he and his wife became a part of our Mission. Walter was a cradle Russian Orthodox and a WWII veteran. I know that because one day at coffee hour we were sitting at a table and one of our young men was slumped in a chair and yawning loudly. It is a small room, mind you, no private conversations can happen here. Walter says, "What's wrong with you??" The kid says, "I'm tired...I was up late last night." Walter says, "TIRED? What the hell do you have to be tired about? When I was your age I spent all night in a trench in France with a Nazi with a bayonet up my ass! That'll make you tired!" Quintessential Walter as I got to know him. He came off crusty and crude. I talked to him over the years. He told me, "The Army fucked me up, you know." He fought from Normandy to Berlin. He told me he puked when they liberated the death camps. He told me there were things he did in the war he dared not confess to a priest because they'd send him to hell. When Berlin fell he got sent back Stateside. He stayed at a base for 4 weeks then was sent to the South Seas and fought to the fall of Japan. He couldn't talk about the things he'd seen and done because he'd choke up and tears would start welling in his eyes and he'd just say, "Fuck it..." When my father in law became Orthodox Walter was his sponsor. My father in law is a genteel man, very proper and dignified. He also served in WWII but in an office capacity in Europe. Walter came back with wounds too deep for words. Gil came back with antiques and art. After his chrismation Walter says, "Let's celebrate, c'mon, let's go to the tit bar!" Quintessential Walter. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two months ago, the doctor gave him 6 months, he made it almost three. I visited him a couple weeks ago. I walked in and said, "Walter, how are you?" He looked at me and said, "Don't ask me how I am, you know how the hell I am...I'm dying, that's how I am. Everyone asks me that, what the hell am I supposed to say?" Then he half smirks. He loves to do that to people. We talk for a while. I change the oxygen bottle for him. He has my wife go in his back yard and pick some oranges and he gives me a half a gallon of antifreeze that he had left over out of his shed. I told him I'd come by and see him again. We left and I never got back. Somehow recording radio shows, work, kid's concerts, wedding showers and basketball playoffs were more important than Walter while he was living. We'll make it to his funeral though. I know he'd probably say, "What are you doing here? I'm dead...go watch the fuckin' basketball game, its a hell of a lot more fun than a funeral!" We'll toast to his memory with orange juice from his tree, with a shot of Russian vodka.

My father in law's breathing is shallow. His eyes don't focus. He hasn't eaten much the last 4 days. I finished staining his coffin and put the handles on it. I visited him last night and told him it was done and all the arrangements have been made with St. Paisius Monastery where he will be buried. They are making the cross for his grave. I tell him we are ready when he is ready. His son and one of the grandsons are also there for a last visit. My wife spent the night with him at the nursing home last night. She asked if he was hungry this morning. Communicating through hand squeezes and blinks, he wanted mint chocolate chip ice cream. Fry's Private Selection brand. I pick some up and take it to him. My wife finally comes home. She calls the people Gil asked to be pall bearers. All agree. She'll return tonight and sit with him again and wait. Wait to hear his last sigh. Then she'll probably cry for her father, the self sufficient, proud and arrogant man she resented for years. The man whose catheters and diapers she has changed, who she fed, cleaned and carried, who has consumed her life for 3 years. She has learned to love him, he has been humbled before her. He will be glad to no longer be a burden. She will be glad he is gone, but also at peace. Both, I think, will be eternally grateful for a disease called progressive supra-neural palsy. In God's brutal providence it has forged love out of the ruins of two shattered human hearts.

The "No More Dogs" Dogs

Tuesday night (my wife on the phone to our kids in college): "I know you and McKenzie want another dog. She'll be gone in 4 years. Then we'll have them for another eleven years. I don't want any more pets. I want a clean house for a change. No more dogs."
Wednesday: "OK. I'll go to the pound and look with you."
Thursday at the Dog Pound with the black Lab: "Ohhhhhh...he's so sweet. He really likes McKenzie..."
15 Minutes later with the Australian Shepherd: "Ohhhh...she's so sweet. I REALLY like her...."
5 Minutes later: "Would you think I'm crazy....What do you think about getting them both?"
10 Minutes later with both dogs introduced to each other: "Oh look how well they get along!"
Meet Duke (Black Lab mix) and Maggie (White Australian Shepherd mix) and their pushover new "Mom".

Random Images of Holy Week at St. John Mission

Keeping vigil.


The newly illumined Elizabeth and Gabriel.

Paschal iconostasis.

Women of the choir at the kliros.

Preparing for baptisms.





All night vigil at the tomb.


The nave and altar of our Mission.

Me with the Cross I made for Holy Thursday.


Holy Friday night prayers before the epitaphios at our Mission.

What I Learned from Pontius Pilate

At the reading of the Gospel this morning this jumped out at me:
Jesus is before Pilate. The Jews tell him He deserves death because He made Himself to be the Son of God. And Pilate becomes even more troubled....

Pilate had the good sense to be fearful of a man who claimed to be God. In this age no one is troubled at the claim of Christ, sometimes not even me. How did it become so easy to dismiss offhand someone who says he is God? It doesn't even occur to people to ask themselves, "What if He really IS....?" If He did the things they said He did, and said the things they claimed He said... Then if we even dare to ask the question we must answer one way or the other and either way face the most outrageous reality the earth has known.

Tom Cruise and Scientology

Since not everyone on earth goes to Grace's blog, I have to put this on mine....

Tom Cruise's new wife, contrary to Scientology's spiritual disciplines, will get to make noise during childbirth, thanks to his magnanimousity.

Personally, I think someone should take a copy of "Dianetics" and push it through Tom Cruise's penis and see if he can keep quiet. Sheesh....

What's a Nice...

What's a nice turtle like you doing in a place like this? I went out to feed my fish this morning and found our turtle (which shows up about twice a year) shmoozing the plaster turtle next to our pond. Must be mating season. Just goes to show that even turtles are like human beings who are "on the make": Bad breath is better than no breath at all...

A Best Friend Dies

Ray Ray was nearly 15 we suspect. We got her from the pound, my wife instantly connected with her because my wife instantly connects with things and people that have been abused and neglected. She eventually became comfortable and wouldn't cower and pee when someone made a sudden move or raised a voice or told her to get off the couch. Her guilty concience never went away, however. We would come home and we could tell by the way she greeted us if she had eaten the bread off the counter, been in the trash or slept on the couch.

She was a beautiful dog and so gentle and intuitive, but also very protective and even aggressive if someone threatened a family member. She once fought off a neighbor dog that attacked my father in law in our driveway while they were on a walk.

She was lying on the dining room floor in front of my daughter's room like she often was when I left for work. She wagged her tail, but didn't get up. She had arthritis, so we knew she wasn't going to be much longer able to walk, it was a matter of time before we'd have to put her to sleep. My wife called a couple hours later, she had something seriously wrong. I came home and .... well, my daughter says it better than I can on her blog.

I miss my dogs.

FOB

...that's Fall Out Boy to you who don't have a young teenager in your house. I took my daughter and her friend to her first "rock concert" last week. FOB, All American Rejects, Hawthorne Heights and First to Last. And yes, 25 year old band lead singers are still saying "mother-f---er" every other word, and junior high kids still think it is cool and shriek with glee. My daughter asked if it bothered me, because it didn't bother her because she hears that all day long in 7th grade. I told her it didn't bother me...if 25 year old men think its cool to talk like 7th graders, that's a personal problem,.... but it did bother me that 55 year old men like Ozzy Osborne think it is still cool (I took our Japanese exchange student to the Ozzfest a few years ago... it was his opportunity of a lifetime: $9.79 lawn seats or 125.00US to see him in Japan). Anyway, SOME ancient rock stars have aged gracefully.... and actually the kiddos put on a decent show. I told my daughter that the Hawthorne Heights guitarist needs to go back to Jack Black's School of Rock and learn some new poses. She said "NO KIDDING! He did the SAME POSE SOOOO many times!!!"

I just have to wonder what parents let their 12 year old daughters out of the house looking hotter than an East Van Buren hooker. Sad.