Retrospective

I note this week the exasperated lines of Samantha, from 16 Candles, "I can't believe it. They forgot my @#$%^&* birthday." Best not forget our own sweet 16th. We'll look back together and re-tie some threads left dangling.

Do you recall when someone painted an eye over a coffee pot and those who hadn't been honoring the honor system began to act honorably? We've learned since that an eye in the sky isn't always effective. Kent Parker, blind deli owner, Cincinnati, tells tales of customers who pay with smaller bills than charged despite the obvious presence of cameras over the register. No conscience, no guilt, no faith? No conscience, no guilt, faith? If conscience is indeed evolutionary, perhaps we've peaked, and are devolving? If conscience is a matter of free will, that's another story, but it does speak towards the real existence of original sin in all of us.

Remember the Congressional resolution naming the early 20th century massacre of Armenians as genocide? Even though a massive loss of life is acknowledged as a historical fact, today's leaders won't call it for what it is for modern geo-political reasons. I note the same process being repeated on another resolution that calls for the Japanese government to confess and apologize for its country's role in forcing women in the occupied lands of World War II to serve as sex slaves for their army. Though language is employed to soften the horror by naming the victims 'comfort women,' the crime is still denied or 'forgiven,' without consequence. Geo-political factors may turn more favorably here since current realpolitik favors Chinese and South Korean relations as valuable, or more, than the Japanese, yet it's still a matter of politics rather than justice. Can the retroactive application of justice ever be free of self-interest?

It happened to me. One of our shelter guests was found dead in the woods. The police named it 'unattended,' which is common in these circumstances. There was scuttlebutt it was murder. The police indicated they'd rely on toxicology tests to determine the cause of death. I argued this wouldn't be effective since they would no doubt find high toxicity levels in this person whether he was dead or alive. I asked they look for other causes but didn't expect that to occur since unattended deaths are not investigated with the same amount of time and resources devoted to other cases in busy suburban police departments.

Although I brought it up, I didn't persevere. If murder was proven, the woods would have been swept. It happened before after a homeless man was beaten to death by two inebriated teenagers. All the homeless became victims as if it were their fault. I can only imagine how worse it would have been had it been a homeless upon homeless crime.

Is pursuing justice for the long dead, like the Armenians, or Asian sex slaves from World War II, or our own homeless who've passed, more important than guarding the self interests of the living today? I instictively lean towards the former, regardless of the cost, but it's not always that simple.

We turn now to more 'Heroes of the Book,' like that Director of the Iraqi National Library who opens his doors every day at risk of his life. I give you, Matt DeSalvo, rookie pitcher, Yankees, who's just made his major league debut. Before the game, he was spotted in front of his locker reading a small red book with gilt edges. It wasn't a scouting report; it was Confucious, one of 400 books on his essentials list to read before he dies. How about that?

Lest we forget, there's Leonard Cohn from Silver Springs, Maryland, who died on April 12 at age 82. Mr. Cohn owned Lerner's Books for 40 years. He opened shop across the street from Georgetown Law only to find the University opening a shop of their own shortly thereafter. Loyal customers affirmed the Cohn competitive advantage: 'tomes and fringe materials,' not found in the University store, or anywhere else.

Ah, fringe materials; buried treasure, sleeping, calling to be exposed to the light. I noted last week how strange it was that materials always mysteriously appear after I choose a topic (or the topic chooses me). Come to find, there are names for it (which perpetuates the wierdness since I found the name in a book I'd just bought, called Esalen, by Jeffrey Kripal, right after I wrote about the phenomenon). While the magic of it all carries the name, sychronicity,' coined by psychiatrist C.G. Jung, an Hungarian author, Arthur Koestler, names the specific agent, the Library Angel: where "those otherwise inexplicable moments when a book passage appears, as if out of nowhere, to provide the next insight," occur again and again wihtout fail.

The Legend of the Library Angel is an ancient one. When the pagan Augustine sat, crying, in the garden, lost, confused, he heard a child sing, "Tolle, lege (take and read) over and over. He reached for his Bible, read Paul, and was born unto Christ.

Our angel is ecumenical: when Debendranath Tagore, a 19th century Hindu, was out walking one day, a page of Sanskrit floated down into the street. Within it, he found answers he'd been seeking on how to reconcile life in the world to God. Kripal confirms, "A writer does not find a truly great subject, a truly great subject finds the writer." Amen to that.

Earlier, we speculated on a figurative visit to China by the Pope. I note this week, he literally visited Brazil to canonize a saint. The NY TImes writes, it "was a way of marking traditional Catholic territory and differentiating the church from its rivals, " like the faster growing Pentecostals who abhor saints as idolatrous. The 18th century super model of the ad campaign, Friar Antonio Sant 'Anna Galvvao, "earned his reputation for defending the poor."

Prior to his promotion from Cardinal, the Pope orchestrated the demise of the South American liberation theology movement. while Benedict did not similarly abandon the poor on this visit, citing the Church's 'preferential option for the poor,' as a secondary concern, he primarily emphasized "meeting people's needs with a back-to-basics Catholicism."

This thread circles to our old stand-by, Universalism, Again, as in the words of Romana Coutinho, a 25-year old student, who "while pleased by the canonization of a Brazilian," and not attracted to the Pentecostals due to their "constant calls for donations," (I heard that) still wanted the Catholic Church "to be more flexible on questions of doctrine and liturgy."

Maria Salent Simoes, a 70-year old retired school teacher, said, "I've been in one-room houses in the slums where parents are trying to raise a dozen kids, and so I think his position on abortion is much too rigid." Perhaps, if the Pope had raised the idea he'd earlier very quietly floated that condoms might be permissable when a spouse has AIDS, he might have signaled the desired flexibility of his target demographic consumers rather than to proclaim 'back-to-basics,' as the one universal remedy for all their real life concerns.

At what point do any of the Pope's promising whispers become audible, or is that never possible without an accompanying unlikely institutional admission of error reaching back 2000 years? Is it implied without saying, by a nod and a wink, that Catholics really aren't doctrinally bound? If that's so, someone needs to tell the Romana's and Maria's, otherwise, the new marketing blitz can't and won't work.

The world beyond Catholicism doesn't appear to be growing any more flexible and any less universal. I note our present local election season in Virginia. Half of one party's candidates have taken the 'no new taxes, really, forever,' pledge, and a pledge to support the eventual nominee, even it it's not him (they're all male here). Pledges are also required attesting to one's theological purity for members of Virginia Anglican seccessionist parishes.

Pledges signify a closed mind, not subject to change. Why then should the Heroes of the Book take such risks? As far as pledge signers are concerned, the buried treasures of fringe (especially fringe) materials may lie forever lost. Resolutions to rectify injustices aren't likely if you never read about or studied the original crime. If you'd signed a pledge, and in spite of yourself, stumbled upon something new, you'd be honor bound to ignore it.

I hereby pledge, on our sweet 16th, never to sign a pledge.