Author: gwayland

HIS PASSION, OUR PASSION

It’s been a so-so Lent for me. Always falling behind in prayer, distracted by periodical reading, disorganized, lazy as ever, and, therefore, scatter-brained as ever in matters both material and spiritual, pestered by temptations and unworthy thoughts and angry bouts, and deeply worried to the point of agony and persistent anxiety about finances.

This morning, having fallen behind in my spiritual reading regimen in the several valumes called In Conversation with God by Francis Fernandez, I am called in today’s reading to meditate on Christ’s Agony in the Garden. What’s always driven home to me about that, the opening moment in Christ’s Passion, is how the disciples, despite their best efforts, fell asleep when Christ needed their comfort and support the most and for them to keep a vigil. He warns them to stay engaged with The Master unless they be put to the test. I don’t want to be put to the test. I better stay awake with Christ, keep a vigil, pray to be spared the useless agonies sin inflicts upon us, pray to the Holy Spirit for His gifts, especially Understanding, and especially over the coming Holy Week.

Today , 4/8/22, is neice Mary Beth’s 62nd birthday — she for whom I once served as babysitter. I must call her, chat with her, as well as entering the obligatory greeting in Facebook, along with the thread of other well-wishers. But I am ever-mindful, where my family is concerned, that just about all of them long ago abandoned the practice of the faith. I’ve got my own spiritual row to hoe and reparations to make….but I believe it is my role to pray for their conversion and perhaps, only with the greatest of subtlety, suggest that they consider the time of their lives, the short duration of this earthly pilgrimage — and all that stuff. (We’ve all heard it before, right?) And that goes especially for my brother Bill, caught up in his own emprisoning agony, confined to a bed in a rehabilitation center, angry, yearning to go home where, though he does not know it or, more likely, cannot accept it, he is unlikely to return — and perhaps now suffering from dimentia, as an added burden, and lashing out.

God help him. Let me help him. He is first born of Bill and Jo Wayland. Somehow, I want to help all of us.

But let me, finally, by urgently mending the broken state of my own scandelous life, speak to them with my actions, not so much with my few careful words.

The day is far spent….

The night is dark and we are far from home.

Amen.

AT A TIME LIKE THIS…

Just shy of a year ago, there were reports that Russia was amassing troops on its borders with Ukraine. There were other reports that China had sent its largest aerial incursion to that date into Taiwan’s air -defense zone. This was the moment President Biden chose to announce his decreased defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2022.

It came in at $715 billion, a hefty sum, but nonetheless a definite decrease from previoius budgets after accounting for inflation, which, a year ago wasn’t the devouring Pac Man monster it is now.

Why would the President decrease his defense budget at such a perilous time? And, of course, neither he nor anyone in his Administration was ready for the horrible war that was to come and that, all those months ago, was not entirely unforeseen (why else would troops be massing on Ukraine’s border?) Now, in these early April hours of 2022, the world is witnessing war’s atrocious outrages being perpetrated on innocent civilians by Russian soldiers, following days of massive death, destruction and persisent fears that World War III is at hand.

It’s likely, as with anything President Biden does, that he was trying to placade his Party’s Left Wing base which had been lobbying for steep military cuts in order to leave more money for their social agenda. As always happens when Presidents try to quiet a noisy flank of their own Party, Progressives weren’t satisfied. The cuts weren’t deep enough to their mind. Of course not.

At the same time, the final military budget figure contradicted recommendations of a 2018 panel to steadily rachet up defense spending. It was calling for annual increases 3 to 5 per cent above inflation.

Among those serving on that panel was Biden’s deputy secretary of defense, Kathleen Hicks. At the time, she and other experts had issued an ominous warning to Biden: if he failed adequatly to fund national defense, it would “be measured in American lives, American treasure, and American security and prosperity lost.”

I’d add that, combined with the manner of our appalling and shameful exit from Afghanistan, a reduction in U.S. military spending at that hour was sending the wrong message to NATO leaders and to Vladimir Putin, the man Biden and I and much of the world now feel comfortable calling a 21st Century war criminal.

Putin’s genocidal global confrere and war criminal-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, was watching and waiting, too. And he still has his eye on Taiwan.

RAGGED END OF MARCH

Last day of the month.

You will remember the minutes crowded with meaning, the moment of pain, the aimless hour;

You will remember the cities, and the plains, and the mountains, and the sea…

RESURRECTION

Kenneth Fearing, 1935

My brother Bill was born the year this poem was written. Bill is confined to bed, recovering from a broken hip, in a double occupancy room in a North Andover, MA rehabilitation center. He seems to have slipped into demensia and might speak to me or his wife in a kindly or a nasty manner, depending on his mentally variable mood. His prospects for ever getting out into the world again are thinner than he knows or can ackowledge. We three brothers, the twins and I, do our best to comfort him from afar. Two of us — Doug in Denver, I in Florida — are very far away;

We all wonder what earthly fate awaits us, with our beloved sister already five, going on six years gone. Have I ever fully registered (“processed”) or mourned that death?Bill’s two sons are in far-off Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay area. It is all so sad and so worrisome on this last day of March, 2022.

One morning in 1940, 5-year-old Bill, in the Boston subway with our mother, heading in-town for a shopping trip, standing apart from her, became momentarily frightened, crying, wondering where his mother went. The passengers, all certainly gone now, were warmly observing and ready to comfort and intervene in a small child’s moment alone in the world, the way every Ukrainian child refugee must feel now, staying close to their mothers, if their mothers have survived, in this catastrophic war that is taking the world back to 1939, 1940….

Mother of God, intercede for us, protect us.

The tragic sense of life is everywhere this last day of March. April hours away; what Eliot called the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire

And I will miss a deadline for an important writing project, desire beginning to fail me. Memory strong, but not necessarily of the events of recent years that are speeding by.

We must begin again, if we are able, at every moment of our lives. And may my brother Bill find some comfort where he lay at this hour, so helpless, the first-born of Bill and Joe Wayland on September 16, 1935. We’ve been raised to believe that we all have an angel watching over us, even when we are sinning, most especially when we are sick.

I did get a priest for him. And I got word back that he was grateful.

A DIRE POSSIBILITY

The following comes from NY Times writer German Lopez, writing in the March 27 on-line edition of the paper. But I think it’s a possibility and a prognosis any of us could make at this critical and worrisome juncture in the world’s history. We need to pray it does not come to pass.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could mark a troubling shift: the end of a relatively peaceful global era.
Though it has not always felt like it, the world has since the 1990s endured less war than any other period in recorded history. Wars and resulting deaths plummeted with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1991 — and the subsequent end of direct and proxy conflicts between the world’s great powers.
“The end of the Cold War was the greatest thing to happen to peace in a long time,” said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
But the world has since changed. After emerging from the Cold War as the lone superpower, the U.S. grew weaker, bogged down by failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Russia and China evolved into more formidable powers; they are now better positioned to challenge a world shaped by American norms and rules.

THE REAL GREEN NEW DEAL

(On the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day, 2022)

“Wherefore then in Ireland they who never had knowledge of God, but until now only worshiped idols and abominations — now there has lately been prepared a people of the Lord, and they are called children of God. The sons and daughters of Irish chieftains are seen to become monks and virgins in Christ.”

St. Patrick’s “Confessions”( first published in 425.)

THE TASTE OF ASHES

At the 1st Synod of Westminster held at Oscott, England in 1852, St. John Henry Newman preached his famous sermon called, The Second Spring. It was delivered during a period of rabid religious persecution and controversy. It was a beautiful appeal for peace and tolerance.

What follows are the sermon’s rhapsodic beginning lines:

We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, never-ceasing as are it changes, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, it is set up in unity; and, though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again….one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony, how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow.

So the subject here is obviously of a historical religious nature. But Newman’s words amount to a longing for spring, rebirth, peace and order — and they have an eternal ring and application. In 2022, we are ever so much in need of a Second Spring on every mortal front, from your house to the Ukraine.

It might seem a trite sentiment on the tongue — saying we long for spring. But, then, abiding natural truths when we voice them, or, if you will, taste them, in contrast to their evil opposite (like all spoken supernatural truths AND evils and ALL benevolent realities that struggle to life like spring blossoms despite threatening tangles of malign, poisonous vines) — yes, these, put into words, often DO sound trite. Yes, they do.

But forgive, please, me while I torture another metaphor and say, as this difficult winter in the world draws to a close, that we are longing for that old taste of spring. We fear it may have a stale taste. We like to think it would taste much better if we could only truly bite into it.

In the Ukraine, however, our fear is that it would taste like ashes.

OF THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong….I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.

–Socretes, as quoted by his student Plato in the Apology.

Socrates had been accused of “corrupting the youth” of Athens and was, as such, to become an ancient — and perhaps the first — victim of the “cancel culture”.

As to the calculation of whether he’d live or die — they killed him.

UKRAINE REQUIEM

One man and one government is perpetrating this civilizational enormity. It has already laid waste so much of Ukraine and destroyed so many lives that there is no clear point of return. Putin and his government will be judge by history. The Orthodox Patriarch must speak out in the name of God. All humanity must intervene, even if only with our prayers. China is the other half of the pincers of this monster, and it is all so frightening.

Tolstoy is weeping.

ASH WEDNESDAY, 2022

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

To turn our hearts towards God, to be converted, means that we must be prepared to use all means to live as He expects us to live.

–Francis Fernandez, In Conversation with God

A pure heart create in me, O God; put a steadfast spirit within me.

–Psalm 50

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto thee.

T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday