Grey Monday

I got a close up look at a loon in the bay in its winter colors.  It was an incredibly graceful bird and dived smoothly into the water when I stopped to stare at it.  I did not see it come back up.  It was a  still grey day and not too cold.  I walked the bridge and back at lunch time.

Among my father’s personal effects was set of rosary beads that had been given to him by an Englishman who had found them on the battlefield during World War I. My dad had been billeted with an English couple before he was sent to France during the war. When he told the story of the English couple, he always spoke with amazement that the English who he had been taught to hate could be so good to him. They would take him once a week to a neighbors house for a bath, they having no bathtub of their own. My dad told them of his Catholic faith and the man, not being Catholic himself and having no real use for them, and knowing that my Dad would soon be in the war, he gave him the rosary beads. They stayed in touch for many years after that.

A very high tide just going out, a breeze from the east, some crows, ducks, walkers. The temperature is mild, the sky clear. In the bay are a couple of trawlers and a large red tugboat anchored off of Green Harbor. It probably towed the large barge with a crane into the harbor.

Notes on My Father’s Death

The night I left after being with him all day, Sunday the 6th of September, I held him in my arms for a minute and looked deep into his eyes. He was still completely mentally aware although his body was slipping away. We were not physically close in my memory, but there is a picture of me hanging on his pant leg as a little boy and one of him holding me when I was a baby so I know at one time we must have been. That embrace was an impulsive act on my part but it is a connection with him I will never forget. The next day he was just suffering and unable to talk clearly, then on Tuesday he died. Pam, Cynthia, Caty and the nurse were with him when he died.

A few more observations about that time:
I lost an awareness of him being old. It seemed that I was relating to his spirit rather than to one who was old, or sick or dying. And I saw him clearly, no different than as if he was still a boy or a young man. His essential being that I knew so well had no reflection of decay or death although it seemed that he was depressed and afraid at times.

There is nothing beautiful about death. He suffered, especially those last few days, pain, thirst, fear, loss of basic abilities to even reach out and control the events and circumstances around him. He began to see things that weren’t there, to reach out for things, groping, frustrated.

That Sunday before he died, Pam and I, Scotty, Paige, Corinne and Sophie all came up to see him. He was still able to get up and walk a little, he sat outside for a while, he could talk but his voice had become hoarse. The girls were very affectionate with him and I am sure those final goodbyes meant a lot to him. They meant a lot to me.

Two weeks later I am still processing everything. I do not think he was a Christian in the sense of it that I have, putting my faith in Christ, his deity, his death and resurrection. He prayed the rosary all his life, but would not attend church. But he was kind to my mother to the end of her life. And Jesus said that anyone who offered a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because they are believers would not lose his reward, and Paul says that the unbelieving spouse shall be saved by the believing spouse.

It was a surprisingly warm day following a drenching rain. There was a flock of Eiders floating in the bay, two males and nine females, as well as a few gulls that seemed to be harassing them. Perhaps due to the rain there were few people on the beach and only one boat in sight on the ocean. It looked like a tugboat, moving slowly off of Green Harbor

On the Edge of Winter

I got a chance late this afternoon to walk out over the Duxbury bridge to the beach. Work is very slow and the winter looks to be a lean one. The air was surprisingly warm and the walking pleasant.

I saw several older couples walking the bridge, several young women walking or running their dogs, I saw a cormorant fishing in the bay, and sandpipers in their winter colors feeding between the beach stones and the surf. There were about five crows at the beach end of the bridge. A bright green grasshopper caused me to stop suddenly on the way back and stare into its oddly blank eye, the intensity of its greeness shining in the late afternoon sun.

Pumpkin Moon

I have been one aquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain-and back in rain
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Last night I walked my old route out to Cove street and back down Lover’s Lane in the dark. The moon was rising over the far beach a great orange globe suspended over the bathhouse. This evening I did it again and walked further around the circle of Cove street which is a hidden little neighborhood on a peninsula surrounded by the marshes of the back river. There was a football game in progress, the football field for Duxbury High School backs up on the marsh just off the little peninsula and in the dark the sounds of the game seemed to be not more than a backyard away.

In my father's color slides taken during the sixties, there are two photos; one my Dad took of me standing on a country road on a fall day with a shotgun across my arms, and another that I took of him in the same pose. That was a scene from one of the best times of my childhood. My Dad used to take me hunting in the fall to a place in Littleton, Massachusetts.
Leaving my mother and sisters behind, we would leave early in the morning from our house in Watertown and drive through Belmont, past McLean’s Hospital and onto Route 2, passing, each time, the familiar landmarks which were, for a boy, the opening up of the wide world, passing the granite walls of the road cuts oozing ice, stopping at Howard Johnson’s for coffee and doughnuts, going around the rotary at the Concord Reformatory and then driving west to the woods and farmland of the Nashoba valley.
We would always park the car at the same spot at a farm where there was a dirt access road through the fields leading to the woods beyond. We would take the guns out of the trunk of the car, careful to leave the shotgun unloaded and open and walk down the road between barbed wire fences and manure piles. We walked on cornstubble, crunching the stalks and frozen, half rotten apples, and fallen leaves, between juniper trees and under the great old pines into the wild to walk all day and see, as Thoreau said, what men who stay at home in parlors never dream of.
It was cold starting out but I would soon warm up from walking. The sun would rise up and the ice in the edge of the dirt road would melt. The little ponds would sometimes make whooping sounds like someone striking a large piece of sheet metal. When we stopped to rest, the chickadees would fill the branches in the pines near ground level calling chee dee dee to each other and the bluejays would call from higher up. I became attached to the sounds and sensations of the woods and to the easy measured pace of traveling by foot, fortified against the cold by an inner furnace. The woods were a place of escape, a place of freedom and peace. There were old stonewalls, overgrown gravel pits, rusty farm machinery; harrows and plows, and abandoned cars usually filled with rusty bullet holes. They were relics, to me, of a distant and mysterious past; these signs of a long history of people working the land gave me a sense of place in time no less than if we had walked through the ruins of Rome and Greece.
He was careful to teach me to carry and use a gun with great care and responsibility. He told me, never point a gun, loaded or unloaded at another person. The first time I shot it I aimed it at a little dead tree as he stood behind me to brace me. I still remember the copse of woods and the uneven ground under my feet and the feeling of dread and anticipation, the squeeze of the trigger, the leap of the barrel and bang of the gunstock against my shoulder, dead leaves fluttering, and the giddy feeling as my brain tried to piece together what had happened; the blast by my head exploded the world for a brief instant. It was a thrill I’ll never forget, I think I was seven years old.
He knew what gunshot wounds could do to the human body. He had served in Graves Registration in the army during the second world war, which meant that he had to take the bodies off the battlefield, prepare them for burial and bury them. The war to me was like those old cars from some lost age, but was, no doubt, hardly passed to him. The boots that he wore only on these trips were from the army; he had worn them in France and in Belgium. And his field glasses were a German officer’s, for they buried German as well as American dead, taken from the battlefield, an officer whose brothers and sons and parents were likely still living. Older men stack up decades in their memories like old newspapers but I had little perspective on time and place when I was scarcely ten.
By noon, we were pretty hungry and had walked probably for four hours, so we would make our way back to the car and drive into Littleton to an old time diner in a silver-bodied railroad car to have lunch. My dad's favorite was liver and onions, I would have a hamburg or a clam roll and a chocolate frappe. There is nothing like good food after working up an appetite.
After lunch, we would hunt on the other side of the road where we parked where there was an apple orchard. My dad explained to me how the pheasants would run ahead of you in the grass until they ran into an obstacle and then they would take flight. I remember many times scaring them up into the air with their loud drumming wings, and then the blast of the shotgun and my heart pounding. He sometimes came home with a pheasant or a duck when he went hunting with his friends, but I don't remember ever bringing one home when we went together, and I don't think I cared. We rarely, if ever, shot an animal just tin cans and dead trees.
We estimated we walked ten or twelve miles a day, so by the late afternoon, I was tired, the light and my energy fading rapidly. There are two things that mean a lot to children; one is routine or repetition because it creates anticipation and a sense of security, the other one is candy. My father knew how to provide both. A short way up the road heading home we always stopped at the country store. It had real cracker barrels and cheese wrapped in cheesecloth and it had a glass display counter filled with bins of different candies for a penny a piece. He would let me pick out what I wanted and I would eat it all on the way home. We sat quietly in the car and hardly said a word retracing our route to Watertown, looking out at a long line of red tail lights, going home to a smaller more confined world.
That was what we did each autumn, from the time I was 5 or 6 until I was in my teens. I scarcely think about it now, about how much that simple activity meant to me. About the age of fifteen I lost the ability to talk easily with my parents. I entered adulthood with mixed feelings of anger and love for my parents which took me years to sort out. But I had something I think many boys never had and that's a father who spent time with him and taught him about the world and his place in it and who taught him about himself. And who gave his son the things that boys need from their fathers and who really knew how to make him happy.

The Problem of Distinguishing Good from Evil.

to say all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds is to say we cannot distinguish good from evil. Quoted from the CED mailing list

I have trouble trying to understand why so many Christians support the war in Iraq, which, to me, seems unequivocably wrong. It is true that some good could come out of it, the fall of Saddam, the re-building of the country etc. And it may also be true that it is part of God’s plan, as in the book of Revelations we see Him visiting war on humanity as just punishment for evil. Can it be then that George Bush is God’s instrument of vengeance. On one hand I can see that possibility, however, for the most part, for the apparent motivation, and manner of the attack on Iraq, I do not see the hand of God at work myself, perhaps others do. Yet the possibility alone leaves me baffled and unsure of what is evil and what is good as the atheistic contributor to the mailing list uses just the same stumbling block to justify his atheism.

In an an attempt to reply and to clarify my own thinking I made the following notes.

All of us can innately distinguish good from evil. This is my first premise and what I actually believe to be true.

The question is, does it matter? If there is no God, it does not matter if we do evil or do good. Debate about the matter becomes irrelevant because good has no intrinsic worth and evil no intrinsic harm. If the rapist rapes, it does not matter that he is doing evil, at least from his perspective. We should say that without God, good and evil are irrelevant because the consequences are relative, and not say that good and evil themselves are relative because even the rapist will acknowledge that his actions are evil, although he might rationalize rather than admit.

If God punishes an evil world with evil, is God evil?

The world generally is about evil on evil.

Human beings innately know good from evil and they have an innate system of justice expressed as a craving for vengeance when evil is done.

My biblical reference for this is Deuteronomy 30:11-14

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.


And in Romans

8:28:

All things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

1:32

Although they know God’s righteous decree, that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.



Topic: The Distinction between Good and Evil

Thesis: We are all innately capable of distinguishing good from evil.

Discussion:


The argument that the contributor to CED gives for his conversion to atheism for stumbling on the block of Good versus Evil are:
1. In the Old Testament God occasionally commands men to kill, yet he also gives the general command, “Thou shalt not kill”.

2. Bad things happen to good people. And we say it was the Lord’s will or that all things will work together for good, apparently unable to distinguish good from evil. And then he says,

“But if we cannot distinguish good from evil, then all our moral judgments are
compromised -- including any trust in any so called covenant with the deity that created that condition”.
3. God has shown that he will break his promise because that is what is really good for us.

This man is saying that :

1. God is a hypocrite.
2. God is a shallow ingrate, not rewarding those who do his will or punishing those who do evil.
3. God is a liar.

These personal impressions are what lead him to state that we cannot distinguish good from evil, therefore we cannot know that there is a God, therefore he does not believe there is a God.

Or perhaps he is saying that if there is a God, based on his personal observations and reading of scripture, he is a hypocrite, an ingrate and a liar and he chooses to have nothing to do with him.

Questions:

Is the pain one experiences at the dentist or the doctor good because the end result is good?

Is pain good because it warns us forcefully of damage occurring to our bodies?

The real evil is the damage, the pain is symbolic.

…
In the case of the war in Iraq, either I am misinformed and my conclusion about the evil nature of our part in the war is wrong or I am not misinformed and my conclusion is correct. There is no possibility that Bush is doing good but disguising it as evil. In other words it is possible to distinguish good from evil.

My Dad has signed the hospice care papers and agreed to move into my sister's house. She does not expect him to live much longer because he is not eating. I know he does not want to live as an invalid, or have extreme procedures done to prolong his life. He has even stopped drinking Jack Daniels.

I bicycled out to the beach this evening, strong wet winds, heavy surf, there was seaweed all the way up to the snow fencing and it appeared that the last section of walkway had been swept away.

Old men ought to be explorers

T.S. Eliot

I stayed in town tonight and went to the beach for the first time in a long time. It is Spring finally and all the flowers are in bloom including the roses on the beach. There is fragrance in the air. There are not too many people out this evening. The guard shack has had a makeover. The upper beach has a solid bed of rocks, there is almost no sand at all above the high water line.

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh" Genesis 2:24.

This is something I wrote ten years ago to help clarify my own thinking before teaching a class for young people.

Our culture glorifies sex, we make it the center of our lives and its attainment our life's highest purpose. It is not related to intimacy, or commitment, or love. It is a light subject, like Bud Lite, another product to be consumed with much gusto but not much thought. Movies, songs and tabloids have discarded the concept of marriage. The magazines in the supermarket all feature on their covers women whose breasts virtually spill out into the checkout aisle and their lead articles focus on sex technique the same way that Bicycle magazine focuses on tightening spokes and waxing seat covers. The church, however, teaches that sex has transcendent meaning and commands us to refrain from immorality and remain abstinent until we are married. Sexual activity by the unmarried is sin. How then do we as Christians reconcile these two ideas in our lives, one from our culture and one from our faith, especially when we are likely to face long years of singleness?
The impulse to seek a wife or husband is a fundamental part of our nature. We all crave sexual contact with a suitable and permanent mate, and that is a natural and God given inclination and the very persistence of this drive is a clue to a mystery not to be understood in this life. It is more than a biological imperative to reproduce, although that is the simplest and easiest to understand explanation. Our bodies have a physical aspect that demands to be shared with another person through their body, but sexuality goes far beyond the physical differences and the wonder and mystery of romance and love go far beyond the mechanical act of coupling.
It is imperative that the unmarried Christian be able to live happily and independently because there are times in our lives when God will call us to be single and because only from a position of independence and contentment can we enter into a healthy marriage.
It is easy to see all of our needs met in someone of the other sex. After all, in our imagination, she or he can not only meet our sexual needs but provide us with affection, intimacy and purpose. But, we are to look to God, not another person to be the source of all the good things we want in this life. He says He "will meet all our needs according to His riches and glory". Now God's riches are not the world's riches and His standards are not the world's standards.
The desire for sex is not overwhelming in itself, it is only when it is mixed up with other feelings that it seems to be overwhelming and temptation impossible to control.
We all have a need for intimacy, which is the desire to share our deepest thoughts and feelings with another person. We have a need for affection and appreciation. We all have a need to fit in with our group and to measure up to the standards of society. When society puts such a high emphasis on sexual experience and physical appearance it swells our perception of our sexual needs far out of proportion to what they really are.
When we strive to walk in the Spirit and focus our attention on the Lord and not on self gratification, we find riches all around us. Riches, principally, of Him working in and through us and visible in the people he loves. He may give us close friends or one close friend, someone who is closer than a brother and who is around and faithful long after wives or husbands have come and gone. He may give us a warm loving family, brothers and sisters or people in the church who love us and appreciate us on a level that often is never achieved in marriage and seldom in a purely sexual relationship. And He gives us insight into reality far deeper than those who claim wisdom and experience with wordly things, so much deeper as to make their wisdom pure foolishness. And he gives us knowledge of the truth that sets us free from the enslaving standards of beauty and performance that the world sets.
So some practical suggestions to living the single life are; Cultivate friends of both sexes, take the time to get to know people really well, whether it leads to marriage or not it will be a treasure you will have for a long time. Don't believe the big lie the media tells you that looks and sex are the center of life. Be friendly, reach out to people, be interested in people, walk in the Spirit, consider the Lord in all you do and say. Do not forsake your family, don't forget to continue to build relationships with your parents and brothers and sisters. Get involved in things that challenge you and develop you and bring you into contact with people. You may have to wait and do without for a time, but you will have a much better chance that marriage will work when it comes.

The chief end of man is to glorify God
And to enjoy Him forever.

I walked the bridge to the beach this morning. The wind was out of the northeast blowing cold and damp. I am taking my father for radiation treatment again this afternoon. Work has completely dried up.

3/25/2009
I filled the truck with gas at Barney’s Gulf in Duxbury this morning. Barney’s is run by the man whose father and grandfather owned the lumber yard on railroad ave. His father also owned property throughout town most of which has been sold off to developers. The four buildings around the old train station are still in the family as is the Gulf station. He has one sister who lives in Ontario and a brother who died several years ago.
I asked him about one of the buildings that looked like it was having repairs done to the roof. The side of the building has the outlineof an old loading door that I knew was from the time when the railroad ran right next to it. He began to tell me a lot about the land and the buildings. The building that recently housed the fish market is basically a nondescript one story ranch, so I thought. But it is actually the old train station that has had the passenger platform filled in and been re-sided and painted white.
Walter Prince bought the building in 1940 after the rail lines were taken up in 1940 and remodeled it. The steel rails were sold to Japan, ironically just before the war.Their are still two steel rails under one of the buildings that the grandfather had kept. And there is a film from 1938 or 1939 of one of the last trains pulling into the station with the grandfather standing in the loading door of the old grain building.