Lift Up Your Hearts!

Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard (Henry Holt, 2012)
Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault that Changed a Presidency by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard (Henry Holt, 2015)

As I said about the book, Killing Lincoln, to open any of Bill O'Reilly's books one must to put aside one's prejudices, as he is quite a controversial figure. It's well worth the effort: these are fascinating books. I'd say it's my ignorance of history that makes them so interesting to me, but my history-buff husband enjoyed them as well.

O'Reilly's book on Lincoln treated the man as a saint; Kennedy and Reagan don't get the same courtesy, nor do any of the other presidents touched upon (Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter); even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is treated with blunt honesty. The books are neither exposés nor hagiographies, but appear to be well-researched efforts to paint accurate pictures of the men and their times.

The more I learn about our past presidents, the more normal Donald Trump appears. It was a great advantage to serve in the days before Twitter and incessant media coverage.

Both Killing Kennedy and Killing Reagan are easy to read and hard to put down, and I'd highly recommend them for our oldest grandchildren and one of their friends who is a great history buff—with the warning that O'Reilly pulls no punches when revealing that most of these folks (Carter being the exception) would make a tomcat blush. And because Reagan began as an actor, the cesspool nature of Hollywood high society is also revealed. You know those TV and movie actors whose characters you so admire? The Ten Commandments' prohibition of idolatry was never more pertinent.

It's not so much about sex as it is about power—sex is just one part of how the powerful get what they want. Still, as I've said before, many of the same character traits that enable people to become rich and powerful also enable them to be the high achievers we depend on. I'm learning more and more that wheat and tares grow in the same heart, and that one can be grateful for the good that people do without countenancing the harm.

Idolizing any human being is worse than futile.

I became acquainted with some of the dark underside of the Kennedy family while living in Massachusetts, but I was still shocked at what I learned through Killing Kennedy. Of Reagan I had expected less, and therefore was the more pleasantly surprised that many of his offenses diminished once he attained the White House. He seemed to rise to the occasion. Apparently one of his strengths was knowing how to surround himself with good advisors—and listening to them. Kennedy also grew noticeably during his presidency, though he was harmed by nepotism and being surrounded by too many "yes men."

I was more sparse than usual with my quotations for these books, which are better read as a whole than in snippets. Or maybe I was just lazy.

From Killing Kennedy I marked only one, which stood out because you would think it came from the book about Reagan. I cannot imagine any Democratic president or presidential candidate advocating this position now.

The president, without consulting notes, then rattles off a long list of statistics. He presses for a tax cut, to ward off a recession, he says, and backs it up with detailed financial specifics about the way in which cutting taxes would stimulate the economy. (p. 208)

The rest of the quotes are from Killing Reagan.

[Reagan's children Michael and Maureen] will long remember their father as loving but also absent from their lives for long periods of time—as was their mother. Both children are sent away to boarding school by the time they enter the second grade. "There's a distinct difference between the care provided by a parent and the care provided by a paid caretaker," Maureen will say years later. "It was simply one of the prices all of us had to pay for their success." (p. 30, emphasis mine)

Yes.

"Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind," wrote novelist and screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing the ideological tension in Hollywood. (p. 37)

Plus ça change....

Reagan's hatred of communism has not abated one bit since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild. If anything, his convictions have become more intense: "I think it would be very admirable if the Berlin Wall, which was built in direct contravention to a treaty, should disappear. I think this would be a step toward peace and toward self-determination for all people, if it were." (p. 80)

Reagan said that in 1967, as governor of California, just six years after the Wall's construction. Twenty-two years later the Wall will fall—due to many converging factors, but in no small part to his efforts as president of the United States.

[Reagan's] first real battle [as governor of California] came when the members of a radical group of African-Americans known as the Black Panther Party occupied the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento. In accordance with the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allows citizens the right to bear arms, these twenty-four men and six women openly displayed the .357 Magnum pistols and 12-gauge shotguns they carried. California law states that carrying weapons openly in public is legal, and the Panthers were in Sacramento to argue against impending legislation that would revoke this right. The protest ended peacefully, but not before Republicans in the state legislature pushed through a bill that made gun control in California a reality. And it is the gun-loving Reagan himself who gladly signed the bill into law. (p. 82)

See the above quote about John F. Kennedy pushing for tax cuts!

Four years ago, Jimmy Carter did not feel it appropriate to celebrate his inauguration with even one formal ball, let alone ten. No partying for the man from Plains. Instead, Carter's 1977 inaugural address was somber, pointing out America's limitations as a nation. The tone of pessimism and defeat that marked Carter's first day in office came to define his entire presidency. If Ronald Reagan's first day in office is any indication of what is to come, the United States of America is in for a far more upbeat presidency. (p. 145)

And indeed it was true. Unlike with the other presidents, O'Reilly has a hard time finding anything negative to say about Carter as a person—though I get the impression that he did not find Carter's sexual fidelity, church attendance, and teetotal White House something to be particularly admired. But he's right about the pessimism of Carter's years in office. Carter seems to have missed what Reagan used to his advantage: both pessimism and optimism are contagious, and a good leader sets the tone for his followers. As C. S. Lewis said in The Horse and His Boy,

"For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land."

[Jack Hinkley sits down with his son John, who will add this to his long list of sins and failures: he will attempt to assassinate President Reagan.] Jack is direct, telling his son that he is no longer welcome in their home. "You've broken every promise you've made to your mother and me. Our part of the agreement was to provide you with a home and an allowance while you've worked at becoming independent. I don't know what you've been doing these past months, but it hasn't been that. And we've reached the end of our rope."

John Hinckley is shocked. Even at age twenty-five, he is so accustomed to having his parents solve his problems that his father's words stun him. (p. 156, emphasis mine)

Even at age twenty-five. Clearly that was a different century, when it was considered shocking for someone to reach the age of 25 without acquiring adult skills and taking on adult responsibilities.

In defiance of Reagan, more than eleven thousand air traffic controllers ignore his warning and continue to walk the picket lines. Forty-four hours later, Reagan makes good on his promise.

They are fired.

All of them.

"I'm sorry," Reagan tells the press. "I'm sorry for them. I certainly take no joy out of this."

Later, Reagan will reflect on this day with a sense of justification. "I think it convinced people who thought otherwise that I meant what I said."

Especially the Soviets.

George Schultz, who will one day serve as Reagan's secretary of state, will call this "the most important foreign policy decision Reagan has ever made." (p. 198)

Next up? Killing Jesus. I've been hesitating over this one, the subject being far dearer to my heart than any of our presidents. Plus, the work is bound to be somewhat speculative, and therefore somewhat inaccurate, the source documents not being as plentiful as those O'Reilly has had to work with for his other books.

But it is, after all, the right time of year.

On this unusual Good Friday, in an unusual Holy Week, in an unusual year, I'm reviving a post I wrote ten years ago.

Is there anything worse than excruciating physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual torture and death?

Maybe, just maybe, it would be watching your child endure that.

It takes nothing from the sufferings of Christ commemorated this Holy Week to pause and consider a couple of other important persons in the drama.

I find the following hymn to be one of the most powerful and moving of the season. For obvious reasons, it is usually sung on Palm Sunday, but the verses reach all the way through to Easter. [Cue WINCHESTER NEW]

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
Hark! all the tribes hosanna cry;
Thy humble beast pursues his road
With palms and scatter'd garments strowed.

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
O Christ, thy triumphs now begin
O'er captive death and conquer'd sin.

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
The wingèd squadrons of the sky
Look down with sad and wond'ring eyes
To see th'approaching sacrifice.

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
Thy last and fiercest strife is nigh;
The Father on his sapphire throne
Awaits his own anointed Son.

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, thy pow'r, and reign!

"The Father on his sapphire throne awaits his own anointed Son." For millennia, good fathers have encouraged, led, or forced their children into suffering, from primitive coming-of-age rites to chemotherapy. Even when they know it is for the best, and that all will be well in the end, the terrible suffering of the fathers is imaginable only by someone who has been in that position himself.

And mothers?

The Protestant Church doesn't talk much about Mary. The ostensible reason is to avoid what they see as the idolatry of the Catholic Church, though given the adoration heaped upon male saints and church notables by many Protestants, I'm inclined to suspect a little sexism, too. In any case, Mary is generally ignored, except for a little bit around Christmas, where she is unavoidable. 

On Wednesday I attended, for the second time in my life, a Stations of the Cross service. Besides being a very moving service as a whole, it brought my attention to the agony of Mary. Did she recall then the prophetic word of Simeon, "a sword shall pierce through your own soul also"? Did she find the image of being impaled by a sword far too mild to do justice to the searing, tearing torture of watching her firstborn son wrongly convicted, whipped, beaten, mocked, crucified, in an agony of pain and thirst, and finally abandoned to death? Did she find a tiny bit of comfort in the thought that death had at least ended the ordeal? Did she cling to the hope of what she knew in her heart about her most unusual son, that even then the story was not over? Whatever she may have believed, she could not have had the Father's knowledge, and even if she had, would that have penetrated the blinding agony of the moment?

In my head I know that the sufferings of Christ, in taking on the sins of the world, were unimaginably greater than the physical pain of injustice and crucifixion, which, terrible as they are, were shared by many others in those days. But in my heart, it's the sufferings of God his Father and Mary his mother that hit home most strongly this Holy Week.

Hey, Boomer! Would you process my unemployment claim, please?

At first I thought the headline was a joke: Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims.

On top of ventilators, face masks and health care workers, you can now add COBOL programmers to the list of what several states urgently need as they battle the coronavirus pandemic.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy has put out a call for volunteers who know how to code the decades-old computer programming language called COBOL because many of the state's systems still run on older mainframes.

My programming languages from back in the day inluded FORTRAN, PL/1, ALGOL, LISP, BASIC, and assembly language for Linc-8, PDP-12 (machine language for these two as well), and PDP-11. I didn't learn COBOL because that was considered a business language (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and I worked on the scientific side of things. But it appears to have had remarkable staying power, and Porter knew it well. Not that I see him going to New Jersey anytime soon.

"The general population of COBOL programmers is generally much older than the average age of a coder... Many American universities have not taught COBOL in their computer science programs since the 1980s."

So, Boomers to the rescue. It pays to keep people with arcane knowledge around.

I predict that someday we will regret letting our amateur radio network fall apart.

I haven't actually put this sign on our front door—yet. At the best of times I don't like solicitors coming to our house, and this is not the best of times for strangers to come breathe on us and touch our doorknobs. Not to mention the risk to themselves, going door to door.  Yet still they come.

For many years I kept a journal. I quit for a several reasons, one of which was this blog. It is unquestionably true that I must write, but the pressure is not sufficient to keep all streams active. Sometimes I regret not having that intimate documentation of our lives, though some of it does end up here. Even in my journaling heyday, however, I often missed documenting significant parts of our lives. It seems that at the most important times it's hard to find time and energy to write about them.

Nonetheless, I think it may be interesting in the future to have some documentation of our day-to-day lives in the Era of COVID-19. That's why you're seeing more, and sometimes shorter, blog posts. They're under the "Hurricanes and Such" category; I started that category in 2004—the Year of Four Hurricanes—when I posted, primarily for distant family, our everyday news while "in the midst."

Sadly, I've missed already many important days and events of this extraordinary season of our lives, which is why you'll occasionally see posts popping up for past days, as I try to remember what led up to this moment.

'Twas Porter who went out today, as one of the earpieces on his glasses broke. It was a bit more of an adventure than we expected.

First, the street where the office is was blocked off because of an accident on the other end. There was no reason he couldn't have driven to the office, which is practically right on the corner, but the police were adamant. He had to park in the bank parking lot across the street and walk over. Which means he wasn't quite following protocol, which was to remain in the car when he got to the office—instead he just stood in the parking lot.

Porter was wearing a mask, as per CDC guidelines, which insist that even a poor mask is better than none for this purpose. At least it helps contain large particles—like the dust it was made to exclude. And it looks impressive. He had put both his glasses and a piece of paper with the credit card number in a plastic bag, and the hostage hand-off was executed safely in the parking lot. When he returned later for his repaired glasses, the transaction was reversed. This means there was no fitting done of the glasses to his head, but it turned out all right. We are grateful the office is remaining open for emergencies, and I think they are handling it well.

On the negative side, he observed that there seemed to be more cars on the streets than a few days ago, and the grocery store parking lots were packed. I hope people aren't tiring of this social distancing already ... we have a long way to go.

How different today is from what we expected just a month ago. Our house should be bursting with family: all six of Janet's family from Switzerland, and another eight extended family come to see them. The Palm Sunday service this morning should have been bursting with joy: lots of people, a procession with palms, glorious music, Janet and Stephan singing with us in the choir. A day filled with people and love.

Instead, we exchanged greetings with far-away family via WhatsApp. Choir members shared photos of palm decorations at home. 

At 10:30 we settled down for our church service—live-streamed on Facebook. I put on a red shirt in honor of the occasion, and gave a wave of my tambourine. But there's something too weird about church online. I suppose that in a church where the sermon is the focus and there's not much congregational participation, watching the service makes more sense. And don't get me wrong: I'm massively grateful that our service is online for us! But it will take some getting used to, with Fr. Trey doing everyone else's part as well as his own. Everyone's part but the music director's, that is. :)  Thank you, Tim.  And our COVID-19 Concert Series trumpet player.

Actually, we didn't see the whole service until later, as Facebook could not handle the great number of churches livestreaming their services at the same time. We gave up and watched the recording a little later.

Unfortunately, that means the Swiss part of today's congregation had to give up, too. Here's a shot of what we had in common, while it lasted. As Janet said, "It was great worshipping together, if only for a short time."

Next time it will be better! And it's still Palm Sunday, and the beginning of Holy Week. The first Holy Week wasn't exactly a picnic, either.

Since we can't dine with friends, there's not much point in visiting restaurants.  However, our local Chick-fil-A sent a coupon for a free chicken sandwich, so today I placed my first mobile pick-up order. All went smoothly: I prepaid through my phone, and we'd brought a disposable grocery store bag into which they neatly dropped the paper bag with our order. At home Porter deftly extracted our food without touching the bag.

The workers were not wearing masks, but expect to have them by Monday.

Crazy times, but it worked.

I was not at first happy that Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor, issued an executive "stay-at-home" order. It is not as if Florida had been without them before: they had been issued at the county level, allowing each county to tailor them for their individual, very different needs. I saw no need for state-level action, and concluded the governor was merely caving to pressure to flex his gubernatorial muscle.

However, it turns out that this order has done at least one thing that is very important. Not that I've read it in detail—it's full of legalese and unexplained references to other documents—but this part was abundantly clear (emphasis mine):

Section 3 Essential Activities

A. For the purposes of this Order and the conduct it limits, "essential activities" means and encompasses the following

1. Attending religious services conducted in churches, synagogues and houses of worship; and
2. Participating in recreational activities (consistent with social distancing guidelines) such as walking, biking, hiking, fishing, hunting, running, or swimming; and
3. Taking care of pets; and
4. Caring for or otherwise assisting a loved one or friend.

As I wrote to the Governor this morning,

Dear Governor DeSantis:

First, let me be clear that our church is continuing to be creative in meeting both the spiritual and the physical needs of our people in this time of crisis: cancelling, postponing, and moving activities online wherever possible.

However, I have been very concerned, seeing other examples of stay-home orders, to note that church services are not usually considered essential activities. It is true that not all people see them that way, just as not all people consider day care centers or laundromats to be essential. But for a significant part of the population each of these is vital, and it is a very dangerous precedent to make rules as if a worship service were merely a social gathering.

You are to be highly commended for taking a stand against this trend, and in your recent Executive Order making the clear point that "Attending religious services conducted in churches, synagogues and houses of worship" is considered an essential activity for the purposes of compliance with the order.

This doesn't mean it is wise to continue with "church services as usual" at such a time as this, and most churches, like ours, are voluntarily complying with health recommendations. We must not abuse any freedom, including religious freedom. But it is vital that it be confirmed as the essential activity that it is.

Thank you very much, Governor DeSantis. I pray for you daily.

As for ourselves, we did skip Monday's church service, on the grounds that the in-place County order enjoined gatherings of more than 10 people, and we didn't want to be responsible for contributing to the delinquency of a priest. As it turns out, we would have been fine. But we didn't know that.

The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960)

Of all the Lewis books I've read so far, this is the one I've had the hardest time relating to—even more so than to An Experiment in Criticism.  It's still an excellent book, but the world in which Lewis lived is very different from my own, and that shows up strongly in his analysis of what he designates as the Four Loves:  Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity.

I should have known we were on different wavelengths when I encountered, very early in the book, this statement:

[A drink of water] is a pleasure if you are thirsty and a great one if you are very thirsty. But probably no one in the world, except in obedience to thirst or to a doctor’s orders, ever poured himself out a glass of water and drank it just for the fun of the thing. (p. 11)

I most certainly have done just that, and do so frequently.  While other drinks (e.g. milk, unpasteurized orange juice or apple cider, and of course tea) also bring me delight, water is by far my favorite drink.  I wonder what the water in Lewis's life tasted like—I know for certain it couldn't have been like the incomparable Adirondack Mountain water from my childhood.  But even most tap water is better to me than most other drinks.  By the second page of the first chapter, I was already feeling alienated.

But of course that is trivial.  More difficult was realizing that my experience of his categories of love has been so different from his.  Especially when he speaks of differences between men and women.  ("Lewis and Women" is a blog topic in its own right.)  I don't deny his experiences—but they're not mine.

Nonetheless, there was enough to relate to in this book, and I had no trouble finding quotes to pull.

Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition; ... she will help to show what it means. (p. 20)

As love of family is the first step beyond self-love, love of home comes next.  Lewis sees proper patriotism in this light, and I think he is spot-on.

First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds, and smells. ... With this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language. As Chesterton says, a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he "could not even begin" to enumerate all the things he would miss. It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned. ... Those who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving "Man" whom they have not.

Of course patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs—why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different. (pp. 23-24, emphasis mine)

Another aspect of patriotism is not quite so harmless, but still beneficial.

The second ingredient is a particular attitude to our country’s past. I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination.... This past is felt both to impose an obligation and to hold out an assurance; we must not fall below the standard our fathers set us, and because we are their sons there is good hope we shall not.

This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism. .... But who can condemn what clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help?

I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true). But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. ... What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts ... is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history—the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes.  (pp. 24-26, emphasis mine)

Lewis goes on to cover the dangerous forms of patriotism, but I've quoted enough.  What I appreciate, in this day when any patriotism at all is thought to be dangerous, is the recognition that the special love of one's own home (town, state, country) is actually a necessary condition for fully appreciating other peoples and cultures.

[Affection] is indeed the least discriminating of loves. There are women for whom we can predict few wooers and men who are likely to have few friends. They have nothing to offer. But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There need be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites. I have seen it felt for an imbecile not only by his parents but by his brothers. It ignores the barriers of age, sex, class, and education. (p. 32)

This is an example of where I feel such a disconnect with Lewis's world.  The implied assumption that women want wooers while men want (male) friends makes me wince.  Ditto his apparent surprise that a handicapped child has nothing important in common with his siblings and has "nothing to offer." 

Affection at its best can say whatever Affection at its best wishes to say, regardless of the rules that govern public courtesy.... You may address the wife of your bosom as "Pig!" when she has inadvertently drunk your cocktail as well as her own. You may roar down the story which your father is telling once too often. You may tease and hoax and banter. You can say, "Shut up. I want to read." You can do anything in the right tone and at the right moment—the tone and moment which are not intended to, and will not, hurt. (p. 44)

Uh, no.  Memo to family and friends:  Do not call me a pig, do not shout me down, do not tell me to shut up.  No matter what your intentions are, it will hurt.

Mrs Fidget, as she so often said, would "work her fingers to the bone" for her family. They couldn’t stop her. Nor could they—being decent people—quite sit still and watch her do it. They had to help. Indeed they were always having to help. That is, they did things for her to help her to do things for them which they didn’t want done. As for the dear dog, it was to her, she said, "just like one of the children." It was in fact as like one of them as she could make it. But since it had no scruples it got on rather better than they, and though vetted, dieted, and guarded within an inch of its life, contrived sometimes to reach the dustbin or the dog next door. The Vicar says Mrs Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family are. (p. 50)

The story of which this is the final paragraph gives, I think, a little insight into some of Lewis's more distressing domestic experiences.

The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching. Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. (p. 50)

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. (p. 57)

I feel the lack intensely.  Eros has become the lord of our world, and other loves reduced to very minor roles.  We desperately need not only Charity, the supernatural love, but both Affection and Friendship that have no sexual element—loves the modern world considers essentially impossible.  I agree heartily with Lewis on that.  The following, however, shows that if we have lost much, we have gained as well.  I quote at length because snippets would not show enough, I think.  (And, to be honest, because I can copy it from my Kindle book, rather than typing it out by hand.)

From what has been said it will be clear that in most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men or between women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about. But we can easily see that it is this lack, rather than anything in their natures, which excludes Friendship; for where they can be companions they can also become Friends. Hence in a profession (like my own) where men and women work side by side, or in the mission field, or among authors and artists, such Friendship is common.

In one respect our own society is unfortunate. A world where men and women never have common work or a common education can probably get along comfortably enough. In it men turn to each other, and only to each other, for Friendship, and they enjoy it very much. I hope the women enjoy their feminine Friends equally. Again, a world where all men and women had sufficient common ground for this relationship could also be comfortable. At present, however, we fall between two stools. The necessary common ground, the matrix, exists between the sexes in some groups but not in others. It is notably lacking in many residential suburbs. In a plutocratic neighbourhood where the men have spent their whole lives in acquiring money some at least of the women have used their leisure to develop an intellectual life—have become musical or literary. In such places the men appear among the women as barbarians among civilised people. In another neighbourhood you will find the situation reversed. Both sexes have, indeed, "been to school." But since then the men have had a much more serious education; they have become doctors, lawyers, clergymen, architects, engineers, or men of letters. The women are to them as children to adults. In neither neighbourhood is real Friendship between the sexes at all probable. But this, though an impoverishment, would be tolerable if it were admitted and accepted. The peculiar trouble of our own age is that men and women in this situation, haunted by rumours and glimpses of happier groups where no such chasm between the sexes exists, and bedevilled by the egalitarian idea that what is possible for some ought to be (and therefore is) possible to all, refuse to acquiesce in it. Hence, on the one hand, we get the wife as school-marm, the "cultivated" woman who is always trying to bring her husband "up to her level." She drags him to concerts and would like him to learn morris-dancing and invites "cultivated" people to the house. It often does surprisingly little harm. The middle-aged male has great powers of passive resistance and (if she but knew) of indulgence; "women will have their fads." Something much more painful happens when it is the men who are civilised and the women not, and when all the women, and many of the men too, simply refuse to recognise the fact. When this happens we get a kind, polite, laborious, and pitiful pretence. The women are "deemed" (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle. The fact—in itself not important—that they now smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are. No stag-parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come too. The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what discussion, proof, and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of "culture" they gave her—whose reading is the Women’s Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative—cannot really enter such a circle. She can be locally and physically present with it in the same room. What of that? If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation which means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her: people try to sublimate her irrelevant and blundering observations into some kind of sense. But the efforts soon fail and, for manners’ sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes, and jokes. Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it—as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there. By learning to drink and smoke and perhaps to tell risqué stories, she has not, for this purpose, drawn an inch nearer to the men than her grandmother. But her grandmother was far happier and more realistic. She was at home talking real women’s talk to other women and perhaps doing so with great charm, sense, and even wit. She herself might be able to do the same. She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, nor mistress of the same methods. (We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.) The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male Friendship, from whole neighbourhoods. In the only world they know, an endless prattling "Jolly" replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men they meet talk like women while women are present....

All these, of course, are silly women. The sensible women who, if they wanted, would certainly be able to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and ideas, are precisely those who, if they are not qualified, never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the room and talk women’s talk to one another. They don’t want us, for this sort of purpose, any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other. Live and let live. They laugh at us a good deal. That is just as it should be. Where the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection and Eros—cannot be Friends—it is healthy that each should have a lively sense of the other’s absurdity. (pp. 72-77)

<Shudder> I am left speechless.

Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People. In each knot of Friends there is a sectional "public opinion" which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general. Each therefore is a pocket of potential resistance. Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage or "get at"; harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt. Hence if our masters, by force or by propaganda about "Togetherness" or by unobtrusively making privacy and unplanned leisure impossible, ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude.

But the dangers are perfectly real. Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. (p. 80)

A Christian—a somewhat too vocally Christian—circle or family ... can make a show, in their overt behaviour and especially in their words ... an elaborate, fussy, embarrassing, and intolerable show. Such people make every trifle a matter of explicitly spiritual importance—out loud and to one another (to God, on their knees, behind a closed door, it would be another matter).  They are always unnecessarily asking, or insufferably offering, forgiveness.  Who would not rather live with those ordinary people who get over their tantrums (and ours) unemphatically, letting a meal, a night's sleep, or a joke mend all?

Kindle tells me I've quoted too much.  They're probably right.  Bottom line?  The Four Loves was worth reading, even though the cultural differences made it difficult at times.

Having not been out of the house, except for short, solitary walks around the neighborhood, since last Sunday, I was glad to be able to go to church again this week without violating any rules. With most of our congregation watching the service on Facebook, it was easy to keep a respectable distance from others. We come in the back entrance just before the service, wear gloves, and leave right afterwards. It's weird, but better than not being there at all.

In contrast with last week, today's church service was more uplifting than not. It had its moments of grief, such as saying goodbye to a good friend who is moving far away, and not being able to give her a hug. But this time I was prepared for a service stripped of much of its music, and it even seemed fitting, somehow, for Lent.

Last week we grieved. Today we moved on.

After the (diminished) procession, Father Trey set the tone of the service with this pronouncement:

When the church finds itself in a time of great need, we typically break out the strongest thing we have in our arsenal, and that is the Great Litany.

I love the Great Litany, so even though I would have preferred to sing it, it was a powerful way to begin. We also continued our COVID-19 Concert Series, which simultaneously fills in for a greatly reduced choir and provides employment in a time of great need for local musicians. This time we were joined by a violinist.

It was a good service.

On the way home we stopped at Publix; Porter stayed in the car and I shopped, having donned a new pair of gloves. There were plenty of cars in the parking lot, but the store was not particularly crowded, and it was not hard to keep a decent distance, except during checkout. The cashiers have been promised Plexiglas shields, but there are not yet in place.

We could have managed a while longer without shopping, but I decided it was better to go sooner rather than later. Our most urgent need was milk, and I had planned on getting some extra gallons to put in the freezer so that we would not have to shop again for at least two or three weeks. That plan was foiled, however, because milk purchases were limited to one gallon. That was odd, and frustrating, because the milk section was chock full of gallon jugs. I did mange to pick up several other things for which our supplies were low. Even if I spend this quarantine time baking, we will not run out of sugar for a while, as it was only available in 10-pound bags. Except for toilet paper, sugar, and eggs, I noticed no particular shortages. I couldn't find my favorite whole wheat hamburger buns, but bread was available and will do the job in a pinch.

Unpacking at home was interesting, to say the least. Someone had sent me a video by a doctor in Michigan showing "sterile technique" for bringing food from the store into your home. When I watched it, my reaction was "that's not happening." But I decided to try it. It's doable, if you are a small household. I pretty much guarantee it will not happen in our daughters' households, with their large families.

One piece of his advice I took to heart was the one-touch rule when shopping, That is not me at all: I typically look at my groceries carefully, to make sure they are not out of date, that the package hasn't been slashed by a box cutter, etc. But that often involves touching several packages and leaving my fingerprints behind, so this time I practiced grab-and-go.

The advice I did not take from this doctor is that which revealed that he really was talking from Michigan: Keep your groceries outside for three days before bringing them into the house. Maybe in Michigan, or Minnesota, or New Hampshire. But in Florida, pretty much anything other than canned goods would in three days be rotten, moldy, or eaten by creatures.

So I worked with his second best practices. One of his good points was that many items have both and outer and an inner wrapper, so that, for example, I could open and discard the graham cracker box, and put away the clean inner packages. Bread I took out of its wrapper and put into smaller zip-lock bags to freeze. Plastic and glass I wiped down with a disinfecting solution. The only thing that stumped me was the bunch of bananas. The commercial disinfectant said only to use on surfaces that didn't touch food, so I figured that using it on a banana would not be a good idea. The doctor's solution for fruit was to wash it all in a sink full of soapy water. I didn't think that would work for bananas, either. I know, you peel the banana and the fruit inside is clean—but you really don't want to peel bananas until you're ready to eat them. My final solution was a gentle rubdown with an alcohol solution, figuring the alcohol would have evaporated long before we touched the bananas again.

Of course, in and around and between, over and under all this process, I washed my hands a gazillion times.

In the end, I concluded that this is an excellent protocol if one wants to encourage shoppers to buy as little as possible.

And that—plus writing this post—pretty much took up the whole day. Now I'm violating a clear health rule: staying up long past bedtime. Adequate sleep is as important as clean hands.  Good night, all!

When the church finds itself in a time of great need, we typically break out the strongest thing we have in our arsenal, and that is the Great Litany. — Fr. Trey Garland

When writing about today's church service, I referenced the Great Litany from the Book of Common Prayer.  Not finding anything online in a format I liked to link to, I've created my own here.

The Great Litany is better when sung, but powerful in any form.  There's not much it doesn't cover.

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
Have mercy upon us.

O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
Have mercy upon us.

O God the Holy Spirit, Sanctifier of the faithful,
Have mercy upon us.

O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, one God,
Have mercy upon us.

Remember not, Lord Christ, our offenses, nor the offenses
of our forefathers; neither reward us according to our sins.
Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast
redeemed with thy most precious blood, and by thy mercy
preserve us, for ever.
Spare us, good Lord.

From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts
and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory,
and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all want
of charity,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all inordinate and sinful affections; and from all the
deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness
of heart, and contempt of thy Word and commandment,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and
flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from
violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and
unprepared,
Good Lord, deliver us.

By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity
and submission to the Law; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and
Temptation,
Good Lord, deliver us.

By thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion;
by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection
and Ascension; and by the Coming of the Holy Ghost,
Good Lord, deliver us.

In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our prosperity; in
the hour of death, and in the day of judgment,
Good Lord, deliver us.

We sinners do beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God; and that
it may please thee to rule and govern thy holy Church
Universal in the right way,
We beesech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to illumine all bishops, priests, and
deacons, with true knowledge and understanding of thy
Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may
set it forth, and show it accordingly,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to bless and keep all thy people,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to send forth laborers into thy
harvest, and to draw all mankind into thy kingdom,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to give to all people increase of grace
to hear and receive thy Word, and to bring forth the fruits of
the Spirit,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to bring into the way of truth all such
as have erred, and are deceived,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to give us a heart to love and fear
thee, and diligently to live after thy commandments,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee so to rule the hearts of thy servants,
the President of the United States (or of this nation), and all
others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy,
and walk in the ways of truth,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world;
to give to all nations unity, peace, and concord; and to
bestow freedom upon all peoples,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to show thy pity upon all prisoners
and captives, the homeless and the hungry, and all who are
desolate and oppressed,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to give and preserve to our use the
bountiful fruits of the earth, so that in due time all may enjoy
them,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to inspire us, in our several callings,
to do the work which thou givest us to do with singleness of
heart as thy servants, and for the common good,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to preserve all who are in danger by
reason of their labor or their travel,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to preserve, and provide for, all
women in childbirth, young children and orphans, the
widowed, and all whose homes are broken or torn by strife,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to visit the lonely; to strengthen all
who suffer in mind, body, and spirit; and to comfort with thy
presence those who are failing and infirm,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to support, help, and comfort all who
are in danger, necessity, and tribulation,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to have mercy upon all mankind,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to give us true repentance; to forgive
us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances; and to endue
us with the grace of thy Holy Spirit to amend our lives
according to thy holy Word,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors,
and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; to
comfort and help the weak-hearted; to raise up those who
fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to grant to all the faithful departed
eternal life and peace,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to grant that, in the fellowship of
all the saints, we may attain to thy
heavenly kingdom,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us.
Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
Have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
Have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
Grant us thy peace.

O Christ, hear us.
O Christ, hear us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.
Christ, have mercy upon us.
Lord, have mercy upon us.

It is almost a cliché these days to see someone in the military or emergency services, and say, "Thank you for your service."  (What a contrast to the Vietnam years of my vivid memory!)

These days it is naturally being extended to all medical personnel.

But there are also many others on the front lines in this war, endangering themselves for our sakes.  To name just three:  pastors and other church workers, all who work for delivery services, and those who keep grocery stores open and functioning.  In the case of the last, I especially honor my nephew and pray for his continued health.

Thank you all!

One of Porter's favorite board game partners self-quarantined well before most of us even thought about it.

Not that it was exactly self-quarantine. At the insistence of his father, the whole family was among the first to practice the social distancing now recommended for all of us. It's a good thing it's possible to play board games using the Internet!

Although he's not old enough to be in college, this young man has a passion for history and a good deal more sense than many college students. With his permission, I'm sharing some of his thoughts on current events.

The year 2020 will be remembered as a benchmark year in history. Many things are happening, and the Coronavirus will bring them all to a head. I think that the greatest result will be the government’s increasing authority. This is because we have come to a point where it is almost simply rights vs. lives.

My dad suggests that I should write a book, titled: Rights vs. Life: Coronavirus, the People, and the Government.

It would be quite the book.

We now find an astonishing number of people who are incapable of enjoying their liberties safely. People refuse to practice social distancing, even though it is obviously in their best interest.

There are many reasons for this, I think. First, people generally despise the major media outlets. Thus, when these said that the Coronavirus could be bad, people were inclined to think that they were wrong—because they usually are. Next, the alternative media pundits decided that it was a smart idea for them to say that the mainstream media was wrong, as a way of boosting their own popularity. Thus, the people’s idea that the Coronavirus was going to be a minor disease was confirmed in their minds.

We find now that same inclination towards the government. 

The only reason my dad had us quarantine was that he works online with Chinese children, and he saw first hand what this disease did to China. If he was still in his previous job, I’m sure that we would soon be catching the virus ourselves.

Another reason that people are inclined to believe that the Coronavirus is not a problem is that people are very social. The family has fallen apart in too many places, and this has led to people becoming especially dependent on relationships outside of the family. Thus, people are more inclined than ever to underplay the risks of gathering together.

If it doesn't take too much time from the gaming that is keeping Porter from going stir crazy here, I would love to feature more guest posts from this young man. (And I'm certain that one of these days he will actually beat Porter in Afrika Korps.)

I lost it in church today.

Our family has been through a lot of loss and grief in the past week. Week? How can it possibly have been only a week? But the world is turned so thoroughly upside down that the shock enabled me to hold myself together. Until now.

Oh, I'm still okay. Unless you count being touchy and frazzled and unproductive and unable to focus on anything for more than a few minutes "not okay." Other than that, I'm doing fine.

But I'm highly sensitive to the power of music to bring forth emotions. Joy, sorrow, determination, tenderness ... music opens floodgates. There are songs that to this day reduce me to tears because of events that happened nearly 20 years ago.

I'm not surprised that I sometimes find it difficult to sing; the throat is not designed to handle sobs and songs at the same time. But this time it was not singing that did me in.

We were two of maybe a dozen people in church today, and we went into the service knowing it was going to be hard. We were spread well apart from one another, we'd already suspended the "passing of the peace," and made changes to the way we offer the Eucharist. (Quote of the week from our rector: I've used so much hand sanitizer today I'm afraid to go near an open flame.) Porter and I went further, wearing gloves, and—most heartbreaking of all—deciding not to take Communion. I doubt the latter was necessary, but out of an abundance of caution we took that step for the sake of others, in order to maintain distance. In an Anglican church, where Eucharist is the heart of worship and definitely not "just a memorial," that really hurt.

But we had counted on having the music.

We did, sort of. I'm rather proud of our "COVID-19 Concert Series" in which local musicians, who now find themselves unemployed as all their jobs have been cancelled, are hired to provide music for the service, even if everyone is watching the live stream instead of being in church. Today we had a young man who played clarinet, flute, and oboe, and we really enjoyed talking with him (from a distance) before the service about life as a professional musician, the dangers of air conditioning to wooden instruments, and the fickleness of oboe reeds.

It was lovely, but it was not enough. We are accustomed to a "sung service" with chants and music throughout. Today, for reasons I don't understand, it was instead a "said service." (That's "said," not "sad," but if I'd made that typo it would not have been inappropriate.) We had a few hymns, but we didn't sing the Psalm, and we didn't sing the Trisagion; we hardly sang at all.

Where it really hit me was during the Offertory. We had planned to sing one of our favorite anthems, and were thrilled to have flute accompaniment for it. But there weren't enough choir members present to make it work. Instead, we just had the piano and flute part together, which turned out to be very beautiful, but not singing along ripped me apart, exposing me to all the pent-up grief of the week (which would have been more than enough for a year).

Still, I know that if that's the worst of the grief this year brings, we are very blessed.

I also know why churches should not close any more than hospitals, grocery stores, and post offices should close. We must adapt as needed to minimize risk, and be patient with each other as we figure it all out. But this is not a social club. It's a life-and-death essential service.