On Tuesday, voters here in Ohio will decide several ballot initiatives, including Issue 2, which will, by  constitutional amendment, establish a state board to oversee livestock production. At first, what I heard sounded good, a lot of talk about family farms, local food, and humane husbandry. One group promoting the initiative calls itself “Ohioans for Livestock Care”, which evokes images of herdsmen tending their flocks. The group’s website is www.safelocalohiofood.com.

But then I started noticing things, like the fact that the big stinky dairy farm I pass on the way to work sports a “Yes on 2″ sign out front. This is a farm that confines cattle to feedlots. That is, the cows eat from their troughs while standing in their own shit. And I noticed that huge amounts of money were pouring into the campaign for 2: mailings several times a week, billboards, radio commercials, ubiquitous mass-produced signs.

If there is an organized opposition to Issue 2 I haven’t seen it, only a few letters to the editor and a hand-lettered sign in front of a small organic farm south of town.

Then I saw a list of sponsors of the bill, which includes every agribusiness organization in the state: the pork producers, the egg factories, the beef and dairy “industries.” Plus the Chamber of Commerce and the Republican and Democratic parties. And weirdly, the Catholic bishops of Ohio. Agriculture in Ohio is big business, and apparently no one wants to cross it.

One flier was particularly telling. It said that the proposed board would protect Ohio farmers from outside animal rights groups that want to impose strict controls and even eventually outlaw livestock production in the state. Of course only a tiny percentage of Ohioans are vegans, and the odds of this are about as likely as a group of Manichees outlawing sex. And what is the source of this scary prospect? Well, it seems the Humane Society is trying to get a referendum on the ballot for the next election which would insure that confined animals would have room to stand up and turn around in their cages. That’s it; a pretty modest proposal, but such a threat to Big Farm Inc that they are striving to get a constitutional amendment passed to protect themselves from it. And exactly how does allowing animals to turn around in their cages make Ohio livestock any less safe or local? It doesn’t, obviously,but no matter. Hirsute PETA types serve here as the Scary Outsider, a staple in modern American politics, and the Industry has latched onto buzzwords that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. How can anyone be against safe local food?

Now, I am no vegetarian. Indeed, as a member of a Church whose central rite is rooted in Jewish Temple worship, in which the priest and people consume a Lamb after sacrificing Him, I think any moral objection to meat-eating highly problematic. Monks and ascetics, and the faithful during fasting times, may abstain from meat as an act of penance, but that is entirely different. It is giving up a good thing, like the celibate foregoing the joys of the marital embrace for the sake of something greater.

That said, there is something deeply wrong with industrial livestock production. In domesticating animals there is forged a sort of primal covenant. Yes, the advantages for humankind are evident: the stronger muscles of the ox or draft horse, the concentrated (and tasty) protein of eggs, milk, and meat.

But there is something in it for the animal as well: protection from predators, foods like cultivated grain which are not found in the wild, a secure source of sustenance in the winter, warmer and sturdier shelters than it can construct on its own. When man respects the nature of the domesticate animal, its life is more secure -and arguably happier- than that of its wild cousin.

But when  beasts are subjected to standing in their own excrement, or living in the crowded hovel of the egg factory, where chickens never see the sun or feel the earth beneath their feet, or breathe anything but the toxic ammonia-ridden air of their own waste, where instead of tender grain and succulent clover God’s creatures are fed offal and garbage, the farmer has drastically broken the covenant. These animals are living a life infinitely worse than they would in the wild.

Clearly Issue 2, with its supporting roster of agribusiness organizations, is designed to protect factory farms. Cloaking its true intent with slogans about safe and local food, on animal care, is cynical and Orwellian.

So Tuesday will be Opposite Day in Ohio, and it is not unlikely that most Ohioans will be duped, lulled by the nice words, and Issue 2 will pass, blown in on a wind of lies.

—Daniel Nichols

A friend at work recently returned from a trip to California. He had spent an afternoon in the redwoods and had been most impressed by the magical beauty of the place, surely one of the spots the Celts called “thin places”, where the veil between the worlds is translucent. That got me thinking of the afternoon I had spent in the redwood forest, nearly thirty years ago. It was in the middle of a long cross-country hitchhiking trip, from Virginia to Arkansas to Minnesota to Washington, then down the coast to California. I spent my redwoods afternoon in the company of a barefoot young woman who had picked me up, one of the two rides in my long history as a thumb gypsy that ended with a goodbye kiss.

Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, thirty years ago pretty young women stopped for hitchhikers. So did little old ladies, couples and families. It was not unusual to be taken home by drivers, fed and given a place for the night. True, the typical ride was a solitary male, but these other rides were not unusual.

Which is not to say that travel by thumb was perfectly safe even then. I had a few rides that scared me badly. One of the worst was when I was violating my own hitching code: I was on a freeway and it was after dark. It was in western Massachusetts, around two in the morning, there was a foot of snow on the ground and there were few cars. I didn’t think my sleeping bag would keep me warm, so I was going to hitch all night. A car finally pulled over and I got in. The driver was a huge man and I immediately sensed danger. It is uncanny, but peril is perceived quickly when hitchhiking. Sure enough, he started right in, talking about his homosexual exploits and the gun he had under the seat. The road was deserted and I sincerely worried that I would not survive this ride, but in the end he let me out when I told him to. Apparently terrifying me was a sufficient kick for him.

There were several other scary rides and some very unpleasant experiences. Once in Wyoming- again at night- a pickup truck full of drunken cowboys passed and a beer bottle was hurled at me. When the brake lights lit up and the truck did a U-turn I headed off into the sagebrush. They drove back and forth a while, cursing out threats, but eventually gave up and left. The next morning, my thumb out again, a truck slowed. My relief turned to alarm when I recognized the cowboy hats inside, but they were apologetic: “Sorry about last night. We was drunk”.

But the scary moments were few, while the benign were many. Indeed, as any experienced hitchhiker will tell you the very act of sticking out your thumb renders you wide open to what I now know as grace. You are really putting yourself at the mercy of whatever happens, what I now call divine providence. Especially if you are traveling alone, which after a while was the only way I would hitch. It is much easier to get a ride solo, and hitchhiking can strain a friendship like little else. Further, you can learn a lot about someone -often way too much- by hitchhiking with them. I had a Zen-like, gospel approach to that mode of travel, even before I had a clearly defined faith in anything else. First, no one owes you a ride. Second, never complain about anything; it doesn’t help. Third, never ask a driver for anything. He or she has already given you a gift. Nothing like being stuck on the side of the rode with someone cursing every car that passes, bitching and moaning about the weather or the scarce traffic or the gnats. The very last time I traveled with anyone else it was a hometown friend, someone I thought I knew well. We set out hitchhiking to Maine and I quickly realized that not only was he an impatient whiner, but something of a con man as well: he would try to get drivers to give him cigarettes and money, and would  try to talk them into taking us further than their destination. The final straw was when I returned to our campsite on Mount Desert Island to find that he had been in town and had spent all of his money on drugs and junk food, leaving me -who only carried lightweight and nutritious dried fruit and nuts- to support him the rest of the trip, which ended our friendship.

It wasn’t long before I discovered the greatest benefit to solo thumbing: people will open up to a stranger while rolling down the road in a car. Perhaps it is the anonymity of it, perhaps because the driver has to watch the road and the strain of eye contact is reduced, but it is amazing how honest and open people will be with a perfect stranger, whom they will probably never see again. Particularly when one has surrendered to Christ, as I had a year before my afternoon in the redwoods, the hand of the Holy Spirit is evident. There were too many rides to count when I felt that the lives of the driver and I had intersected at the precise time of need. There was the pretty young Christian girl in West Virginia whose uncle had just died of a heroin overdose, the college student in Ohio, going home for the funeral of her father, the confused young man in Washington who had just left the Moonies. Or even one of the scary rides, a young man in Alabama fleeing a murder warrant. He had come from a remarkably violent background. His mother, father and a brother had all died by gunfire, and he had already killed. I realized, talking to him, that he could kill me with no more thought than if he had swatted a fly. I decided that if I was going to die I would die a martyr and go straight to heaven, so I began preaching the gospel to him, which he received meekly.

Today, of course, it is rare to see hitchhikers in the U.S., though I am told they are still common in Europe, which is the last place I hitchhiked, in 1988. The few hitchers you see here look pretty worn down and desperate. I made a vow once, when I was stuck at a  turnpike entrance ramp for 12 hours, that I would always pick up hitchhikers, no matter what, a vow I kept for many years, until the late 80s, when I stopped for a series of scary riders. The most memorable was in New England. He looked okay; long haired and carrying a guitar case. He was German, and soon began querying me in a thick accent. Did I think some zings were always wrong? What if zat was just a social convention? Maybe killing someone eez a morally indifferent act? The sun was getting lower in the sky and I came to the fork in the road where our ways parted. As I stopped the car he asked what my plans were for the night. I told him I was going to camp a few miles up the road. Can I camp viz you? No, I don’t think so. “I vill leaf my knife in zah car”. NO I DON’T THINK SO.

I rarely see a hitchhiker today, and I doubt very much if a young woman or a family or an old lady would stop for one. In the 70s the road was full of young people with backpacks, off to see the world. Most of us were harmless, and in spite of the stories I have told here, most of the drivers were benevolent. I reckon that I hitchhiked many tens of thousands of miles and met countless drivers, only a very few of whom were memorably bad. Of course I know it only takes one; Jeffrey Dahmer’s first victim was a hitchhiker, in Ohio in the 70s, around the time I was often traveling the same roads. But over all, unlike today, a young man could stick out his thumb, accept a ride from a stranger, and nearly always have a good experience. Of course it never was a good idea for a young woman to hitchhike, though I knew a few who crossed the country safely by thumb. I am grateful that I lived in an era where this was possible; at one point in the 70s, when I was thoroughly disgusted with America, a cross-country trip on the back roads restored my love of coutry, meeting good hearted rednecks in Mississippi, solid Midwestern farmers, old WWII veterans and the rest of Old America. As a mode of travel it was free, exhilarating, and a great way to get to know the country in all its local variants.

It is truly a sign of the decline of our culture that I would never recommend hitchhiking the U.S. to my sons. We as a people have grown too scared, and too scary, for that.

An era ended, somewhere in the 80s, when hitchhiking was a relatively safe way to see the country, when it was (again relatively) safe for a pretty young woman to pick up a hitchhiker and give him an innocent goodbye kiss, or for old ladies to bring a stranger home for a meal.

It will probably not be mentioned when some future historian chronicles the Decline and Fall of America, but the loss of hitchhiking as a viable way of travel says more about the loss of trust and solidarity of a culture than mere economic statistics of political facts.

—Daniel Nichols

I have not written anything here for two months. Without going into detail, it is enough to say that my melancholy self has been afflicted on nearly every side by travail: my mother’s cancer, added stresses at work, financial strain, growing alienation. The bright spots in all this have been the Divine Liturgy, my bride and my children. If it were not for the harbor of worship, love, and family I would be overcome.

And I have been devoting what spare time I have to iconography. After a long dry spell I have a backlog of commissions, enough to keep me busy for a good while.

But there is another reason I have not written: the world is increasingly filling me with dismay. Actually, “dismay” is too weak a word. “Horror” and “disgust” are more accurate.

While I have long argued for a new populism, what has emerged is not at all what I had in mind. I’m glad I am not a conservative, for I would be absolutely appalled that the Dumb Ugly Right has come to dominate the yelling match that passes for discourse in this country. From the crowds who consider it a great victory to shout down speakers in town hall meetings- you know, the sort of behavior they denounced when the Left did it- to marchers carrying signs calling Mr Obama a Hitler, a Mao, or a Stalin, I perceive that the level of fear and hatred has reached a new level. I saw a piece of political junk mail the other day which read, on the outside of the envelope, “Obama preparing a jihad through IRS audits”. And my sister reports receiving emails “proving” that Obama is the Antichrist (!). Oh, I know, as the culprits never fail to remind us, that the Left called Bush a Hitler and were hardly free of inflammatory rhetoric during his presidency. I even remember a “Bush is the Antichrist” website, but the tone was clearly tongue-in-cheek.

But there are a couple of distinctions to be made. First, objectively, the Bush administration, in reaction to the horror of 9/11, did act to erode the traditional rights and decencies that have marked our history: warrantless wiretaps, holding suspects for years without charges, torturing our enemies, and the rest of it. And secondly, the more extreme language was to be found only on the fringes, even when Bush’s poll numbers dropped dramatically. It was not bellowing from the radio and shouted out in the streets (and halls of Congress).

I am not great fan of the President’s, but I am concerned about where this is heading. Violence is beginning to emerge, and it seems only a matter of time before some unbalanced person reasons that if Obama really is a Marxist Nazi Islamic terrorist bent on turning the nation into a totalitarian state, if the country really has been “hijacked by a Marxist gang from Chicago”, as I heard a talk show host say last week, then it would be a patriotic act to assassinate him. The consequences of that are too horrific to contemplate.

The hyperbolic rhetoric would be comical, were it not so potentially tragic. I mean Mr Obama is a communist? Why? Because he has given billions of dollars to bankers and industrialists? What in the world would they call him if he had given all that money to the poor and middle class (where it might actually have stimulated the economy)?

The claims about the rather modest proposals to reform health care are equally silly. That these folks don’t think there is a problem in a nation where the majority of bankruptcies are from medical debt, which is in fact the only developed country where people go bankrupt because of such debt, and where people die because they lack medical insurance boggles the mind. Again, demagogues raise the specter of Communism, as if by enacting some sort of national health service we would be transformed into a totalitarian state. Like England or Australia, perhaps? Or the rest of our Western, democratic allies?

I only hope that those who are so hostile to state programs are willing to voluntarily relinquish any claims to Social Security, Medicare and VA benefits, just to show the rest of us they are sincere and consistent.

But far more than the content of the shouted accusations it is the tone that worries me. There is in the air pure hatred. The winds of fear are blowing hard.

I think of the aforementioned radio talk show. It is called “Quinn and Rose: the War Room”, which I sometimes listen to on the way to work. The program combines the civility of Michael Savage with the intellectual rigor of Sean Hannity, if you get my drift. Jim Quinn is an apparently lapsed Irish Catholic, sixty something, and a former rock dj. The woman who goes by the single name of Rose is fiftiesh and looks Italian, but is a fervent Protestant of the American evangelical persuasion. She combines hate speech with insufferable piety, at one moment saying of Obama “Can I hate him, Jimmy? Why can’t I hate him?”, or telling us that she coats her bullets with lard to prepare for the day when she shoots Muslims, and at the next talking about God’s holy will, answered prayers, or her devotion to the Bible.

It probably is not good for me to listen to them, especially as over the years I have become pretty sick of right wing American Protestants. Don’t worry, I am sick of right wing American Catholics as well. If they were so many and vocal I’m sure I’d be sick of left wing Christians, too.

Which is why the other day I experienced a singular providential meeting, a moment of grace. I was in Michigan, visiting my ailing mother. My sister, Monica, was there, and her friend Kim stopped by to go out to lunch with us. I met Kim a couple of times over the years in passing, had never talked much with her. She looks Mediterranean (Monica says she is of French ancestry) and is vivacious and talkative.

My mom had chemotherapy the day before, and I had to run her up to the clinic for a follow-up injection. When we got back Monica and Kim were downstairs. Some paperwork on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was a copy of a report from the Arizona Department of Corrections with a photo of an inmate. I wondered at this but said nothing.

At lunch Kim did most of the talking and was animated and entertaining. She made several devout-sounding comments in the conventional American evangelical mode, which surprise me, as Monica had never mentioned that Kim was religious. I asked my sister, in a lull in the conversation, about the prison report on Mom’s table. Kim said it was a man she had hired to do some repair work at come rental properties she owned. And she told the story: she had met a homeless man with a drug and alcohol problem and a prison record who was looking for work. She had just heard a sermon at church on Matthew 25- “Whatsoever you do to the least of these you do unto me”- so she took pity on him and let him stay in an empty apartment and put him to work. He was a good worker, is kicking his habits, and is very grateful for the opportunity Kim has extended  to him. Of course, there is a good chance that his good intentions will not endure, but the last I heard the demand for mercy was not based on the odds of success.

I was tremendously moved by this story and by Kim’s simplicity in responding to the Gospel. And it got me reflecting. While Kim is not political- we only touched on the topic and she expressed the same sympathy for Mr Obama that she had for the homeless man- I realized that in writing off whole categories of people I was guilty of the very thing that appalled me in others. Hearing Kim’s story was a much-needed antidote to the negative perceptions of American evangelicals that had grown in me over the years.

It had not always been like that. I spent a couple of years with a more or less evangelical worldview before returning to the Church, and for a long time I had felt great affinity with those Christians. But that had eventually been eroded by a lot of things, and by the middle of the Bush years I had had enough. The true religion of most Americans, Protestant and Catholic, is America. They embrace the message of Christ only insofar as it does not contradict this One True Faith.

But I had allowed that to blind me to the undoubtable goodness of many evangelicals, no matter their blind spots. And when I thought about it I remembered that most of the right wing Catholics I knew were very generous in the face of human need, however deplorable I find their politics. Perhaps the problem is that while people will respond charitably to the needs of people they know or who are standing in front of them, other people- Palestinians, Iraqis, uninsured Americans, “the enemy”- exist as abstractions, as statistics. They simply don’t seem real and are rendered invisible by fear.

It gives me no comfort to realize that mine is the opposite vice: I have always found it easy to sympathize with the outcast and the underdog and the lost soul, but I love “the average American”, the regular person, my neighbor, hardly at all. Not good, when the only commandment Our Lord gave us was to love one another.And He didn’t qualify that at all.

I am tempted to political quietism; after all there is no place at all for me in the current shouting match. I do pray for this country. And I pray that my own heart will be more tender, kinder, more cognizant of the goodness of my fellow pilgrims, that seeking mercy I will be merciful.

Kyrie Eleison. Hospodi Pomiliu. Lord have Mercy

—Daniel Nichols

My family that I grew up in was not Christian in its beliefs.  My father, who definitely set the religious tone for the family, called himself a Unitarian, so although we almost always went to church, I was not expected to conform to any creed, quite the opposite really.  But culturally our home was decidedly Protestant.  One result of that was that we didn’t drink much alcohol.  Not that my parents were abstainers on principle – it just wasn’t something they did much.  When I was in junior high they began to drink wine occasionally, but beer never.  I think the unspoken attitude toward beer was that it was slightly declassé.

I drank beer a little as an undergraduate and afterwards, but not regularly until after I’d become a Catholic, when I encountered more people for whom it was an ordinary part of life.  And then I discovered beers that tasted better than the watery mainstream beers that manage to get sold to Americans.  I suppose Guinness – the real Guinness that you can sometimes get here but which in Ireland tastes so incredibly creamy – is my all-time favorite.  (The best Guinness that I ever had in Ireland, by the way, was in Knock.  I think that our Lady especially blesses it there.)

Eventually I found some affordable American beers I liked.  And so for quite a few years I drank different beers made by Yuengling.  Yuengling calls itself the oldest American brewery, and is located in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.  It’s an independent business, which also is nice.

Over the years I drank their Old German Beer, very tasty, but which for some reason they discontinued.  They I drank their Porter, then their Black and Tan when I couldn’t get their Porter anymore.

Unfortunately a few weeks ago I ran across this story on Counterpunch, about how the Yuengling management pressured their workers to decertify their union, telling them “that if they didn’t get rid of the union he would close the brewery and open up shop in a location in the southern US where labor was cheaper.”

Though it’s true unions have not always been reasonable in their demands, in a capitalist economy they are necessary, because management is rarely reasonable either – quite the contrary, they can be as greedy as pigs and in the last two or three decades generally have been.  The Church understands the necessity for unions and  has always supported them.  In his latest encyclical Benedict XVI notes that they “have always been encouraged and supported by the Church” (no. 64).  And much earlier Pius XI, in Divini Redemptoris (no. 50), complained of “those Catholic industrialists who even to this day have shown themselves hostile to a labor movement that We Ourselves recommended.”

So – it seemed clear that a Catholic should not patronize Yuengling anymore since they had “shown themselves hostile to a labor movement” that Christ’s Vicars had recommended.  It’s no excuse to say that times are hard.  Generally they’re especially hard for the workers themselves.  And if Yuengling is having difficulty surviving in this economy, then let them bring their union in as a genuine collaborator – not in an effort to coopt the union as sometimes happens in such efforts, but as a genuine partner, a practice also recommended by popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

Yuengling employees have at least as much stake in keeping the business open as do the owners.  It’s ridiculous to say that employees should just do their jobs and allow the owners or managers to do whatever they want to a company.  Companies are more than profit-machines, but share a context of place and common effort with their workers, and with everyone who lives near or interacts with the firm.  That’s why Pope Benedict, also in Caritas in Veritate, said “that business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers of various elements of production, the community of reference” (no. 40).  A company depends not only on its workers, but on the entire surrounding community – for roads, electricity, food, all the multitude of things, some free, some not, that make life possible for us humans, whether considered alone or collectively.  So it’s wrong for a company to assume that it owes nothing to those “stakeholders,” nothing to that community which has made the company’s existence and operation possible.  This attitude, which seems to be especially widespread in our own country, is one result of the spirit of capitalism, the result of that fatal separation of ownership and work which is the keynote of capitalism.

But what of my beer drinking?  I’ve begun to drink Dundee’s Honey Brown Lager, an ok beer, but nothing as flavorful as Yuengling’s Black and Tan.  But at least I can drink it with a clear conscience.

—Thomas Storck

Some of you may remember that last April 4 at Nassau Community College on Long Island I participated in a debate on economics, representing distributism against Charles Clark (socialism) and Michael Novak (capitalism). Recently the video of the debate has been posted on the web. This link contains each speaker’s presentation, but does not seem to have the question and answer period, during which each speaker asked two or three questions of the other speakers. There may be better links than this one, but this one was clear and opened easily: http://www.4marks.com/articles/details.html?article_id=3849

—Thomas Storck

I had been planning on writing at length on Benedict XVI’s new social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, but Stuart Reid has written so well on it in The American Conservative that I will just link to his succinct and eloquent essay here .

I will only add that I am much gratified and not a little bewildered by the Catholic neoconservatives’ reaction to it. Gratified, because I have been saying for years that they are not interested in conforming their thought to the mind of the Church, but only in bending it to fit their ideology, a sort of romantic free market fundamentalism wedded to belligerent nationalism. Conservative Catholics have generally taken issue or even mocked that contention, but here are Novak and Weigel proving my point beyond dispute. I heard Novak on the radio dismissing Populorum Progressio- Paul VI’s encyclical, which Benedict was commemorating- as the Church’s “pinkest encyclical”. And he has since criticized the Pope for putting “too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice and good intentions and not nearly enough on defeating human sin”. A vicar of Christ is overemphasizing Divine Love? That sort of leaves one speechless, and never mind that Mr Novak’s strategy for “defeating human sin” in the past has included preemptive war. And never mind that the market controls which the neocons find so offensive are precisely geared to defeating the human sins engendered by the market.

And Weigel really went  overboard in attacking the encyclical, which he “respectfully” likened to a “duck-billed platypus”. He then proceeded to instruct the faithful on what parts of Caritas they should ignore.

Which is bewildering. The strategy of co-opting the Church’s social teaching, in selecting isolated passages from isolated encyclicals to prove their contentions while ignoring all that counters them, has served the neoconservatives so well in the past that one can only wonder what has changed them. Not that an honest reading of the Church’s teachings did not contradict them at nearly every point; I suspect that only the willing were deceived. But once again it is evident that, as Mr Reid says, the Pope is not a capitalist. Nor is he a socialist or a liberal or a conservative. Surprise, the Pope is Catholic.

I hope I will be excused for enjoying my intellectual opponents making fools of themselves. I will try not to take inordinate pleasure in the spectacle. But it will be a struggle.

—Daniel Nichols

I realized a while back that there was no contact info here and have finally gotten around to adding a page for that—you should be seeing a “Contact” tab above the main graphic now.

As we noted a while back, we are actively soliciting posts from other people. Please contact Daniel if you would like to contribute something.

I don’t expect to be writing posts here, but I’m still looking after the blog technically, posting what Daniel sends me, deleting the occasional spam comment that gets through, etc. Contact me if you run into a technical problem.

—Maclin Horton

 p.s. I will not be involved in deciding what gets posted, so don’t let that discourage you if you’re interested in writing something. :-)

One of the many delightful things about small children is when they reach for a word, get it wrong, but come up with one that is even more evocative than the one they missed.

My niece, Wendy, when she was small wonderfully called serpents “sneaks” and I still find myself thinking of the phrase “like a sneak in the grass” to describe a particularly untrustworthy person.

And when my son, Patric, was little he called rabbits “bobbies” instead of “bunnies”, which I still think of when I see one bobbing up and down, hopping across a field.

I’m going to tell you one of our family’s favorite Patric stories, but first I must set the stage. While he is now a trim and muscular twelve year old, when he was two he was fat. Picture a round face with big blue-grey eyes under a shock of blond hair. His nickname was “Sweet-sweet”, and he had a lisp.

We were at my mother’s, and she has a large field behind her house, hopping with rabbits. Patric announced “Me going to hunt bobbieth.”

“What are you going to do if you catch them?”, I asked.

“Me hug ‘em, me kith em.”

While that is cute, often children will go beyond cute into the profound. The other day I was talking with Maria, who is now six. We were at the dinner table and she had asked me if I believed in ghosts. I said yes, but that I didn’t think they were conscious beings, but more of an imprint left by a soul in a particular place. I said it was like an after-image, like when you stare at something, then look away and see the shape of the thing for a moment. Maria said she didn’t understand. I held up my hand and told her to stare at it, then look at the wall. She did so, and for whatever reason said she saw nothing. “But Maria”, I teased her, “Everyone can do this. Maybe you are not really a human being.”

“No”, she said, “I am a human being. I am made in the vision of God.”

The word she was looking for, of course, was “image”, but the one she stumbled upon is a vivid one, and as true as the one she missed. We are made in the image- the icon- of God, and an image is by definition a thing that is seen. Creation is usually understood in reference to the act of speaking, but can it not as easily be viewed as an act of seeing?

I suspect that along with sneaks and bobbies, “made in the vision of God” will be with me for a very long time.

—Daniel Nichols

I assume that anyone who visits this site is familiar with Maclin Horton’s blog, Light on Dark Water, which is linked here. It is consistently good; Maclin in recent years has moved out into the depths, and between his meditative posts and the ensuing conversations- among the most erudite and witty I have encountered on the web- he seems to have staked out a unique presence on the internet. A light on dark water, indeed.

He recently posted an essay called “I Hate Death”, a typically Hortonian musing, inspired by the discovery of a dead possum and the deep unease that any manifestation of death sparks in a reasonably healthy soul.

It got me thinking about a recent experience of my own, not with a dead possum, but with the corpse of a man I had never met.

He was the husband of a lady in my parish, Joanne, who had taken my iconography course a few years ago. The funeral was on my day off, and to show support for my friend in her grief and to supply a couple of altar servers two of my sons and I attended.

The Byzantine funeral liturgy, like all Byzantine liturgies, is very beautiful, with repeated pleas for mercy and reminders to God- or really, to ourselves- that everyone sins, but that God is good and loves mankind. And there are prayers for the forgiveness of sins committed “knowingly and unknowingly”, that I find particularly comforting. Of course we know that no subjective guilt is imputed for a sin committed in ignorance, but these prayers acknowledge the utter transcendent perfection which no man can attain. I suspect that even our virtues are tainted in the light of this perfection.

Between the repeated prayers for mercy and the beauty of the liturgy, I know this is the way I want to be dispatched.

The casket was open before and during the service. When I entered the church, after bowing to and kissing the icons, I approached the coffin and prayed briefly for the dead man’s soul. Later, in line to receive communion, I again passed the body and prayed. Both times, and whenever I looked at the casket during the liturgy, I was stunned by the incomprehensibility of the thing. The absence of the vivifying soul was tangible, and I marveled that anyone could believe death a physical thing, the mere disruption of a material process. I have always been struck by a sense of unreality when seeing a lifeless body, but this time I had a unique perception of the reality of the soul, made vivid by its absence.

The materialist is a great mystery to me. He would describe death as the equivalent of an irreparable mechanical breakdown. But I have had a couple of cars blow their engines. They were goners, that was it, the end of the line. But I did not have the sense that they were no longer automobiles, that something essential had departed. They didn’t seem suddenly unreal.

I have only been present at the death of one person, my father, some ten years ago. I was there with my mother and my sisters. After that last desperate breath had left him they fled the room crying. My instinct was quite other and I dropped to my knees and pulled the rosary from my pocket. But as I prayed I was acutely aware that my father was no longer present, that he had gone far away. It was nothing like when the Toyota blew its engine on the way home from work. It was still my car, hopelessly broken down, but my car. But this was not my father; this was a husk, an empty shell. The person I was praying for was no longer in the room.

But just as the body without the soul seems unreal, if we had the ability to perceive it the disembodied soul would itself seem incomplete, despite retaining consciousness and will.

And so we await in faith the reuniting of soul and body in the mystery of resurrection. And we cling to our Pioneer, our Pathfinder, the God-man who, in the words of the Divine Liturgy, by death conquered death and granted life to those in the tombs.

—Daniel Nichols

The telephone rang the other evening. Joey, who is nine, answered it. He listened in silence for a moment, then handed the phone to me: “It’s for you. It’s political.”

“Hello?”, I said.

A woman’s voice said “Good evening, sir. Could I ask you a few questions on the abortion issue?”

“Sure.”

“Do you consider yourself prolife, prochoice, or undecided?”

“Strongly prolife.”

Her relief was audible and she began talking about the Freedom of Choice Act. Now, while President Obama has said, contrary to his pre-election rhetoric, that promoting FOCA is not a priority for him there is little doubt that he would sign the bill should it make its way through Congress to his desk. “I agree that we must fight that legislation if it reappears”, I said, “But at the same time we should remember that any restrictions of abortion enacted by the Republicans have been symbolic or cosmetic.”

“What do you mean?”, she asked.

“Take the partial birth abortion ban. It did not save the life of a single baby.”

“Why yes it did”, she said.

“No, it did not ban late term abortions, only one way of doing them. It is still legal to inject saline solution into a mother’s womb, which is probably even more painful to the baby. Or take the ban on federal funding for overseas organizations that promote abortion. There were loopholes for rape, incest and the health of the mother. Now, if someone is evil enough to kill a baby would they really balk at lying about the circumstances of the conception or the health of the mother?”

“Oh”, she said, “I see you are not really prolife.”

“What?!” I said, “What on earth did I just say that could possibly lead you to that conclusion?” But there was only silence on the other end. She had hung up on me.

I have long felt alienated from the so-called prolife movement in this country, which too often seems blind to the value of any but embryonic American life. A few days before this conversation I heard Fr Frank Pavone, president of Priests for Life, on EWTN radio denouncing “left wing kooks” who implied that Bush and Cheney were war criminals. And now here I was, being called proabortion because I didn’t think the Republicans were prolife enough. I shouldn’t be surprised; there is nothing new here. I have been a victim of mistaken identity more times than I can count, denounced as a liberal, a reactionary, an anti-Semite, a schismatic, a communist, an anarchist, and I don’t know what all. I’m sure anyone who attempts a consistent moral vision can say the same.

But what can we expect, striving for elusive wholeness in such a fractured world?

—Daniel Nichols