And the hype was worth it. I loved this book. My own pithy elevator pitch for it? – an intelligent beach book full of 21st century ethical dilemmas. Too many beach books are full of lots of romance and fashion and jet-setting and those features have their place including on a beach under a colorful umbrella with a glass of chardonnay at hand. But give me a good story that moves quickly with the added web of 21^st century technology woven in. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger does not disappoint.

We are all grappling with how AI is going to take over our lives or not, in what ways we can benefit, in what ways it can hurt us and those we love. But this book gives us a gripping family drama overlaid with baked-in technology and not in a sci-fi way. It is real and it is happening now. What do you ask yourself every time you pass a Waymo on the street?

Bare bones – a family is on their way in their self-driving minivan to their teenage son’s lacrosse tournament. Lorelei the mom (a technical AI whiz,) Noah the dad (a lawyer,) Charlie (the 17-year-old athlete,) Alice (the thirteen-year-old nerd with a Chatbot friend) and Izzy (the nine-year-old cheerful youngest.) They have a catastrophic wreck which sets in motion the rest of the tale. Nearly every chapter has a new revelation about how the wreck affects their lives and those around them and how current technology works to influence their decisions.

Ethical philosophy plays a major role in the book - the branch of philosophy that systematically studies concepts of right and wrong behavior, virtue, and vice. It examines how humans should live, what constitutes a good life, and the justification for moral principles. What is morally good and what is morally right or wrong? And to bring it specifically into the 21^st century – where is Artificial Intelligence on the continuum of moral decision-making? AI is programmed to behave as it is programmed to behave but will it ever try to go beyond its programming? (Think HAL the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” which was released almost 60 years ago.) How do humans in creating and tweaking AI seek to impose decision-making on a machine? How does using AI for our good sometimes result in bad outcomes? How can we teach AI to behave in morally acceptable ways? Or can we?

There are a variety of tests for the morality and ethics of certain situations – the Trolley test asks if we should kill one person to save five by flipping a switch to divert a runaway trolley, or the Peter Singer problem where a man in a thousand-dollar suit sees a drowning child. Should he ruin the suit and save the child? But part two of that one is watching TV and seeing an ad asking for $1000 to save a starving child on the other side of the world. Which would you do, if either one, and why?

Culpability tells the story of a happy family with everyday problems and relationships who has to consider these problems in one way or another throughout the book. Their roles in the family change, their decisions are affected by their middle and upper class learned behaviors, their futures turn on split second behaviors seemingly out of their control. In this book, everybody has something to be sorry about and everybody has a right to be happy and not be ruined for life by their perhaps cavalier and technologically infused decisions.

On top of all that, Bruce Holsinger is a very good, really funny and interesting writer. Every day I picked up the book, thinking about what I had read yesterday and wanting to read on to find out what happens next. AI is a definite character in the book and Lorelei the Mom is the architect of much that happens with her complex knowledge and expertise. But then so is Noah, and so is Charlie and so is Alice and so is Izzy – plus the other characters in their orbit with their equally compelling parts.

I am always on the lookout for a good story and for a story that teaches me something. That is why thrillers and mysteries and historical fiction draw me. I want to learn something new but I also want to learn it in the form of stories about interesting people exploring the world and discovering new concepts and ideas that are intrinsic to daily life. Culpability checks all the boxes. It is a highly readable book about a contemporary family and I want to find others to read and discuss it with individually or in a group. – all of it - the story, the characters, the decisions and the ethical dilemmas on almost every page that the Cassidy-Shaw family encounters.

This family is just like mine and likely like yours - regular people with quirks and hopes and dreams who are suddenly and decisively changed by a catastrophic event and then challenged throughout the rest of the story with obstacles that must be faced to move ahead into their futures – and ours - saturated with Artificial Intelligence and 21^st century technology.

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As it happened, CNN2 was getting ready to launch and the systems were being tested in an “as if” way. The station was in simulation mode practicing “as if” we were already on the air for the big moment which was to be New Year’s Eve 1981. I was hired as a re-typist. It was exactly like it sounds – there were no computers then, just a row of IBM Selectric typewriters with special ball fonts that typed in VERY LARGE CAPITAL LETTERS on six carbon copies. No typing mistakes allowed on the scripts. There were three or four of us assigned to this glorious job each shift. I guess they hired me because I could type fast and I was already acquainted with the television busines having graduated from UGA with a degree in Radio-TV-Film just eight years before.

I was on the 4-midnight shift having worked all day with Fran trying to bring in new business. The CNN2 job was to take the paper scripts from the previous half hour and “re-type” them with any changes made by the director, the editor, and the news anchors. Then we’d distribute the paper copies to all the parties for the next half-hour segment - two anchors, director, technical director, floor manager and editor. It was a constant flurry of typing, twice each hour. The editors had it even worse. They had to construct visuals for the words the anchors were reading and then re-edit each half hour for changes and better visuals. Then for new stories they had to edit 30-second to one minute accompaniement for the copy being read.

The only down time was toward the end of the hour when we could see if anything interesting had come in on the teletype machine and then write and type up a short news story in case the anchors needed filler at the end of the hour. It was a real coup to find a story, type it up and hear it read by an anchor!

CNN2 ran short format news with segments from A-E in the first half hour and then F-J in the second half hour. It was a much more rapid-fire news format than regular CNN which was operating from a much bigger control room and studio down the hall. We were the compact operation.

One night around 11pm when we were in a commercial break, the door to the studio burst open and in came Ted Turner smoking a big cigar. He was accompanied by a small bevy of very pretty young women following him like ducklings. Ted breezed his way through the room shaking hands with people and calling out “Keep up the good work, keep up the good work” all the while waving the cigar around and trailing foul-smelling smoke. Then out the back door of the studio he went and was gone.

I worked at CNN2 that autumn and into the winter and was there on New Year’s Eve 1981 when at midnight January 1, 1982, someone flipped a master switch in the control room and we went live seamlessly onto the airwaves with a new concept of news, up to the minute, 24 hours a day. Nothing changed about the way we operated. We were a well-run spaceship having practiced for months for that moment. CNN2 later became what we now know as CNN Headline News.

My CNN2 days ended early in 1982 when Fran and I got a big contract for a six-part educational video series for the Presbyterian Church which required travel across the US and Canada. I was sorry to leave CNN2 but the hours were grueling and the stress was enormous. Working behind the scenes was exciting and I learned a lot about TV news on a big scale. It also affirmed my college decision not to work in local television after a summer internship at a big station in Atlanta. It was clear that advertising ran the station and it was all about eyeballs and ratings. I still have my CNN2 badge.

One other small memory from CNN2. We had a break room and late into my shift I would go there for a short dinner break with my lunchbox. The days of microwaves were young and I did not have one at home. So I put something metal in the machine and it blew up! The inside was burnt to a crisp. Apparently I was not the first one to commit that sin in those days and it was replaced by the station. I am sure they had a room full of them for occasions such as that one. After that I stuck to cheese sandwiches. “Keep up the good work,” said Ted cheerfully and I did.

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My Uncle Bill grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1930’s and 40’s in a rough and tumble Polish Catholic neighborhood. He and his brother Cliff came to Atlanta to train as electricians after a stint as Marines in the Korean War.

He and Aunt Betty (my mother’s sister) met in a bar in Atlanta – likely the Clairmont Lounge on Ponce de Leon Ave. Their wedding was at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in downtown Atlanta in 1954. I was the little flower girl in a yellow dress, dropping rose petals one at a time down the aisle. “Keep moving, Cheryl,” my Aunt Betty whispered as she walked behind me on my father’s arm.

He and Aunt Betty were the same age and they were true Sinatra-era young adults with booze and cigarettes and poker and loud dance parties every weekend on the parquet floor in their basement rec room. He was also a brilliant roller-skater and I rode around our town rink sitting on his foot as we blasted by my terrified mother on the sidelines.

My Uncle Bill was always the first to try new things, from skiing to boating to flying to computers to video production. He bought a little Cessna airplane when we lived in Toccoa and would fly up from Atlanta and buzz the house so our entire family could hop in the car and drive out to the grass airfield there. Once he took us flying; it was my first airplane ride at nine or ten. He worked on the Alaska pipeline for a year. “Not much to do but work, sleep, eat steak and send money home.” A lot of it. They moved to Florida for a year and lived on a boat.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill lived in a series of apartments at first but like us, they joined the ranch house boom in 1960 and bought a little house in Gresham Park in southeast Atlanta. We loved going there to visit. Much later when I was a real estate agent, I was down on Belleau Lane and found the house again. Houses there were selling for $25,000 during the Recession which is probably what Uncle Bill paid for it in 1960.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill both loved children, but none more so than Uncle Bill. He claimed that he proudly taught me the deck of cards when I was three and reveled in being with me and my brother. Uncle Bill was a jokester and once he talked Mama into allowing Morris and me to ride the train to Atlanta from Toccoa. She put us on the train and the conductor promised to look after us. It was a straight shot south to Atlanta. I was ten and Morris was eight. It was great fun watching the towns go by and being on a grownup trip, just the two of us. When we got to Atlanta to Brookwood Station, Uncle Bill was there to meet us. I saw him on the platform smoking and waiting in his jacket and work pants. He was a union electrician and we knew we were safe with him. We walked to the car and drove to their house in Gresham Park. When we got there and greeted Aunt Betty, Uncle Bill called Mama as he had promised, only when she answered he said, “I thought Cheryl and Morris were coming today but I didn’t see them at the station.” We could hear her through the phone in a panic, shouting for Daddy. Uncle Bill laughed and said “They’re fine, they are right here. Say hi to your Mama, Cheryl.”

The big draw for going to Atlanta (since Daddy hated to drive a long way) was that when we walked in the front door Uncle Bill would call out, “Rex, how about a highball?” To which he would reply “I’d love it.” My brother and my cousins and I would circle the room sipping whatever was on offer and turning up our noses at beer, Scotch and Bourbon. Everybody laughed and consequently liquor had no real allure for us for a long time. Above their basement bar was a revolving Pabst Blue Ribbon bar light and it went with them to their next house in Gwinnett County as part of the 1970’s white flight, and fifty years later when I sold the house, I took the PBR light down and gave it to a friend in Chastain Park with a similar bar in his basement. I can still go and visit it. Sociable does not begin to describe Uncle Bill. He loved to grill on the back deck and nothing pleased him more than cooking steaks and burgers and serving them to his family and friends. “Who wants rare and who wants burnt?” Everyone was welcome at their table and Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and summertime barbeques were usually raucous events with a dozen people or more around the table as Uncle Bill held court on whatever topic interested him that day.

My father and Uncle Bill disagreed about many things, especially unions. My father was management and Uncle Bill was a union foreman. He often laughed and bragged about sleeping on the job and it irritated my father no end. Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty drank every weekend until Aunt Betty called a halt for herself but both of them chained smoked throughout their lives. Everybody knew that if you went to their house, you had to change clothes when you got home and throw everything in the washing machine to get the smoke smell out.

Uncle Bill was loud and opinionated but he laughed a lot, too, and he loved me and my brother, Morris, like we were his own. Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill tried and tried to have a baby and once they had a little girl who only lived a day or so. She had Hyaline Membrane Disease, like JFK’s baby and like Aunt Betty’s baby brother who died at age two. We never discussed it but once but Aunt Betty said that during his Korean War year, Uncle Bill was a radio man and had to relay an order to wipe out an entire Korean village, including the women and children. He felt guilty about it for the rest of his life, she said, and worried that God was punishing him for that action by not allowing them to have a child of their own.

Uncle Bill was larger than life and ordered his family around constantly including their adopted son, Donnie. Aunt Betty resisted the control because she was strong in her own right. She was a survivor like him and they constantly tussled but stuck together for sixty-two years. Donnie did whatever Uncle Bill said, including joining the Army which was not a success. Uncle Bill set Donnie up in a picture- framing business but that failed, too, during the recession of 2008. Uncle Bill refused to accept that Donnie had learning disabilities, that he was not perfect. Not surprisingly, after Uncle Bill died of cancer, Donnie lasted only two more years before committing suicide so he could be with Uncle Bill again.

By the time they died and Aunt Betty was living in an Assisted Living facility, I listed their house and was there one day in the empty den with the big fireplace, the scene of so much happiness through the years but now a shell that still smelled of smoke and sadness. I had a clear impression of Donnie and Uncle Bill standing there with their hands in their pockets, together but waiting for Aunt Betty to join them. She did, soon enough, during Covid – not of Covid but of old age at 89.

After Uncle Bill died, she called me and asked exactly where in the Bible it said that she would see Uncle Bill again in heaven. I said I’d call her back and looked over the most likely passages like the one where Jesus tells the thief on the cross next to him that he would be with him that day in paradise. I did not think Aunt Betty would be impressed with that one!

I finally told her that the Biblical record while not specific about people being reunited with their loved ones in heaven, was very clear that now we see through a mirror darkly but then face to face. And that other passages point to fellowship with the Lord and all the saints in heaven. Blah blah blah, she said.

After he retired Uncle Bill volunteered at his Catholic church and was always available to help those in need. He was exasperating, funny, angry, helpful, kind, loving, opinionated and arrogant, a father and a faithful husband, a grand uncle. Happy birthday, Uncle Bill!

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I’m reading Mary Trump’s book “Too Much and Never Enough.” She speaks of the psychological diagnosis of Empathetic Dysfunction which is a hallmark of Uncle DJT’s personality – a sometimes debilitating response to an overload of impersonal but negative information - an inability to recognize, understand, or share the emotions of others, leading to strained relationships, self-centeredness, and emotional detachment.

But ironically, by turning the prism 180 degrees and looking back at ourselves, I believe we are all in danger of displaying similar pathology, a kind of numbing in the face of a similar overload resulting in strained relationships and emotional detachment. Under the barrage of disinformation, lies and unbelievable news, death and destruction, the sadness that would cause us never to go out the door threatens to disrupt our lives in ways that we do not yet fully understand.

One more terrible meme, one more ALL CAPS post on Truth Social, one more call for billions more in our taxpayer dollars for ridiculous projects, one story that is clearly a lie, leads us inevitably to lives that are distorted, disoriented and diminished. We are in peril of losing our humanity not to mention our friends and family as we sink deeper and deeper into the chaos that when all is said and done, is not real life. Our day to day lives move at a steady pace whether we are watching TV or not. If we don’t restrict our intake of bad and false news, we risk a detachment that is inhuman. If your TV suddenly went away, if you no longer could get to the newspaper or your phone or email, how would your life be different? It wouldn’t be a catastrophic loss, I maintain. The flowers would still bloom, the tomatoes would ripen, the sun would still rise and set, our children and grandchildren would still go to school and to Scouts and to teams and to music class, our dogs and cats would still need attention, our books could still be read, our music players could still sooth us.

Without the counterbalance of compassionate acts, good news, poetry, music and time with friends and family watching sunsets and eating out, we will lose ourselves in the madness of others. Just because DJT does not sleep more than three hours a night does not mean we are compelled to do likewise. Just because he eats cheeseburgers and drinks Diet Cokes all day does not mean we should neglect our health. Just because he never walks, even on the golf course, but rides everywhere, does not mean that we are chained to our own Barca-Loungers because we cannot miss a minute of the chaos around us.

Journalists have an obligation to tell us what we need to know but even they have to go home and play with their children! Even the most workaholic White House staffer has to go home and walk their dog or pat their cat lest they lose their minds in the edginess of their working lives.

Empathic disfunction works both ways – DJT is no different than we are if we don’t resist being sucked into emotional detachment. We cannot help but display “debilitating responses to an overload of impersonal but negative information” if we do not hold ourselves back and stop the intake of dark negativity that surrounds us. We are no better than he is unless we find a better way to live our days. If we find ourselves in any way heating up like a frog in slowly coming-to-a-boil water, it is our own fault if we don’t jump out of that pot and cool ourselves off in the most beautiful setting we can find this summer – the beach, the mountains, a river, a garden, a train trip, an outdoor coffee shop, a cool movie theater, our favorite bookstore. Save yourself! No one else can! Certainly not DJT.

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Though I try not to pay to see new movies on TV, I broke down and paid to see the new “Wuthering Heights” because I like Jacob Elordi (he was the monster in last year’s “Frankenstein” ) and Margot Robbie’s Cathy Earnshaw is wild and passionate and beautiful - every Heathcliff’s dream!

I also like the director - Emerald Fennell – she was on “Call the Midwife” in the one of the early years of the series. She also starred as Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown.” Now she’s an accomplished director. She has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, and nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards.Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is dark and showy. My prediction is Oscar nominations for Costumes, Production Design and Musical Score. Very dramatic and intense, Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s passion for each other was right out there on display, their lifelong obsession with each other evident every moment they are onscreen together despite their squabbles and deeply obsessive relationship.

There are many creative moments, Bridgerton-like in décor and musical background. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi do their part at sucking us into the dysfunction of Cathy and Heathcliff. I read a bit about reactions to the movie and the strongest one was that it didn’t follow the book closely enough but that was not enough to change my opinion. After all, I barely remembered the story anyway so what was missing was not relevant to me.

I confess that I don’t remember reading the book or if I did it was in high school and I was not impressed. Mostly what we know about the book is the cultural references to Heathcliff as a moody, broody, dark, handsome guy on the moors in Northern England. I downloaded the book on Kindle and read the first part but it was slow going. Yes, the book was written in 1847, the one and only book by Emily Bronte, and yes, Gothic romances were not as heart-pounding as the current onslaught of them in bookstores today – some sci-fi and futuristic, many in the fantasy realm. But Bronte’s version takes time to read in a heavy form – not breezy, not a page-turner, but a methodical Victorian telling of a dark dark story.

After I saw the 2026 version, I went looking for the previous one to compare – the 1992 film with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes. Completely different. This one apparently did a much better job of following Bronte’s book. But it was dull by comparison to 2026’s Fennell version. The power of this version was in the acting by Binoche and Fiennes which shone through the dull landscape and plodding telling of the story which is baffling and confusing. We are people in this century used to short bites of story-telling, even if the story is a saga! Binoche and Fiennes as actors come with such obvious power that even while it was much slower in pace and harder to follow, they kept me engaged. I suppose if you love the book you’d like this version better.

Having seen the most recent two versions now, I might or might not go back and watch the 1939 version with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier which many movie connoisseurs think was the very best. I don’t see the point of seeking it out though except for curiosity. The book was not my compelling reason to watch the new one anyway. As I said I am an admirer of Elordi and Fennell. I would rather watch this new one again than go seeking another version. It is a 21^st century rendering of an unforgettable story. Clearly Fennell is going for the younger audience who has likely not read the book and by adding in very creative elements such as the a la Bridgerton musical score, the splashes of red in a very dark Yorkshire landscape, Elordi’s black hair and very good looks, Robbie’s long blond hair, Isabella’s silly outfits, over-the-top depictions of sexual energy – it’s pretty clean but the implications are intense - she will gain a new audience for an old book. Wuthering Heights, the towering mansion itself, is very dark and weather beaten with flashes of hearth fire and lightning, dust and crumbling gravestones, horses ridden fast against a red sunset.

One story line that captured me before I even read any reviews was about the all-purpose lady’s maid who follows Cathy everywhere in both films. Her name is Nelly and she pulls more strings in the story than either Heathcliff or Cathy! She is likely responsible for everything that goes wrong. The 2026 version’s Nelly is played by Hong Chau who is the White House Chief of Staff in “The Night Agent.” I spotted her and recognized her by her voice. I love finding cast members that I remember from other shows. Nelly’s part is one of subterfuge and allegiances and treason, as Cathy memorably screams at her!

To be fair, by following closely the book’s complicated plot, the 1992 film provides more insight into Heathcliff’s obsession than the newer film does. It is worth watching more than one version - as I said there are almost a dozen – to appreciate what Emerald Fennell has created for a new generation of Bronte fans. The new film moves quickly and the intensity infuses the cast, the setting, the music, the colors, the symbols, and the passion of youth and age. It is easy to see why the book caused such a flutter in 1847 – it was unlike anything anyone had ever read.

The novel explores themes of obsession, social class, cruelty and revenge. It was initially criticized as savage and crude before being recognized as a classic of English literature.

Emily died in 1848, a year after publication, at the age of 30, never knowing the massive success of her only novel - long before cinema was invented!

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And let no flower of spring pass us by

Wisdom 2:6-7

For those Roman Catholics who were raised in pre-Vatican II parochial schools, there are apparently good memories related to May Day when all girls hoped to be chosen Queen of the May in the yearly processional. There’s even a hymn to Mary that I bet they can all still sing. “O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today - Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.”

May has been celebrated throughout history as a happy and joyous time. The Celts called it Beltane, the season of Light, the first day of summer. This was a time of mystical union, when the plants were in full growth and in harmony with their environment. It was the custom to extinguish all of the neighborhood’s fires at sunset on the eve of May Day so the element of fire would be absent through the night. At sunrise, a new fire was made from nine kinds of trees. People would jump through the flames to be purified. Each household would take fire from the Beltane Fire and relight their hearth from it. There are pictures from Turkey, of people jumping through spring fires in much the same way.

On this day in England, Morris dancers begin their summer dancing by dancing up the sun at sunrise. It is traditional to decorate houses with blossom and branches around the doors to bring good fortune in summer, and to set up May bushes or maypoles, around which people dance.

The earth and the creatures that inhabit it are in a cooperative venture of mutual support. At this time of the year, the world is so beautiful that we cannot help but be aware of the glories that God has provided us. It is our responsibility to see that future generations also enjoy this kind of glorious spring.

Liturgically we echo the joy of spring and of Christ’s resurrection by singing and saying “alleluia’s” in church and standing tall in our new lie. A sixteenth century Easter carol combines the natural and religious spirit of May.

All the world has come alive

All the earth is budding.

Bees are humming round the hive,

Done with winter’s brooding.

Snow and frost have been undone,

Winds are soft and tender.

High above, the regal sun

Shines in all its splendor!

And I cannot let spring go by without Luci Shaw’s take on what we see and do not see as spring and summer come to us.

What word informs the world,

And moves the worm along in his blind tunnel?

What secret purple wisdom tells the iris edges

To unfold in frills? What juiced and emerald thrill

Urges the sap until the bud resolves

Its tight riddle? What irresistible command

Unfurls this cloud above this greening hill

Of one more wave – its spreading foam and foil –

Across the flats of sand? What minor thrust

Of energy issues up from humus in a froth

Of ferns? Delicate as a laser, it filigrees

The snow the stars. Listen close – What silver sound

Thaws winter into spring? Speaks clamor into

Singing?

Gives love for loneliness? It is this

Unterrestrial pulse, deep as heaven, that folds you

In its tingling embrace, gongs in your echo heart.

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Christianity, however, asks us to be in relationship with others, with God and within ourselves. That is a paradox. We are made to relate to each other but we each have an individual life.

Solitude is a necessary part of spirituality. Only when we are alone and quiet cam we listen to our hearts and to the whispers of God. It is true that God speaks among a crowd on in music or in a movie, but inside our individual souls, we either are or are not open to hearing the voices we need to hear to guide us through life.

The challenge then is to welcome solitude when we feel compelled to be in relationship. Unfortunately, sometimes relationship is entered to avoid the call to solitude rather than to learn more about ourselves, another person and God. If we surround ourselves with enough people and enough noise, we do not have to hear the loneliness that threatens to overwhelm us and we are not led to transform it into the kind of solitude that is never lonely. If we long to have a particular relationship and that is absent, we feel lonely. When we are in relationship and happen to be by ourselves, that is being alone.

I have found the Atlanta airport to be a metaphor for our culture’s loneliness as well as its sense of relationship. The old airport was much smaller, of course, than the new Hartfield-Jackson International. I remember when the old airport closed in 1980 after twenty years of service and I walked it one last time thinking about it alone and silent waiting to be demolished. So many people and so many stories, so much agony and sadness and joy bound up in the walls and windows.

The new airport had an open house in 1980 before it opened and I remember riding out to the D concourse (the last one in those days) and walking all the way out to the end where not one person was in sight, and only the sound of Musak and the gleam of empty shiny new chairs waiting for the people to arrive and animate the empty structure could be seen or heard.

The first time I flew commercially I was nineteen and went to California to see my uncle and his family. I had never met them.. When I returned to Atlanta I remember the plane putting up to the terminal and my mother running out to wait for the plane’s door to open. In those days, you got off the plane and walked into the terminal across the tarmac. And greeters could walk out there at will, too. I remember her joy that I had returned safely. It is hard to imagine that kind of freedom anymore at the world’s busiest airport.

When I was young and still alone, I would go to the airport and walk around by myself. The stress of loneliness was relieved because everybody was alone and aonymous, scurrying around those vast concourses so purposefully. I could walk or sit and nobody suspected that I was lonely. I was one of many who was merely an individual on the way somewhere else.

Since I was in the habit to going to the airport I taught airport skills to my daughter Elizabeth. We would go out on Saturday night (this was in the 1990’s) and ride the train and the moving sidewalks and she learned that people tended to be in such a hurry that often they would leave quarters behind in the pay phones (such a long time ago.) One Saturday evening we had spaghetti and then drove out to Hartsfield. I can still hear the glee in her voice as we drove – “this is a perfect day, Mom,” she beamed. What more could a seven-year-old ask on a Saturday night but to be with Mom after spaghetti dinner and the prospect of all that fun at the airport, not the least of which was the dollar or two in found quarters. When we were ready to go home, I said, “Get us to the car, Elizabeth,” and she learned that airport and got us all the way back to the parking deck to our car. If you can navigate the vast and complex Atlanta airport, you can manage any airport in the world. A life skill, to be sure.

Solitude has its place in the spiritual life as does relationship. The balance of the two keeps loneliness and being alone in perspective and lets us know when we have neglected an important part of our existence as human beings. We commit ourselves to others and we can commit some time to ourselves in order to maintain our commitment to the God who made us individually and in harmony with others.

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–

I happen to like the words sparkle, glitter, and emerald. I have long identified those words as ones that I like to say or hear, plus I love their meaning! I just like words and the way they sound and even now when I encounter sparkle, glitter or emerald, I smile. Others I like include encrusted, frosty, liriope, and starlight. What about you?

Poets are especially good at using words that sound beautiful or harsh or dull to suit their purposes. The master poet who used the sound of words especially well was the Victorian English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Sometimes his poetry is opaque and incomprehensible but he sure knew how to choose words for their sound and energy.

“Myrrhy-threaded golden folds.”

“Into the flat blue mist the sun drops out and all our day is done.”

“A sudden silver shower has drench’d the molten sunset hour.”

We live in stressful times and we look for ways to slow down and let go of the anxious news cycle and the confusing rhetoric spewing from the TV and the email and the radio. One way I have found is in comforting words and I don’t just mean the Bible though it is quite a means of calm. I am thinking of words like Cellar Door, and Glitter, and Sudden Silver Showers.

And comfort comes not only from words, but often from songs that are twentieth century lyrical answers to Hopkins.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
Silver-white winters that melt into springs

Your list may not be the same as Julie Andrews’ but look for poems or hymns or songs or psalms or just simple words that make your heartrate slow down. Robert Hubbell is a writer I read every morning in his “Today’s Edition” posts – he’s a true cheerleader for never giving up these days. This morning amid the cacophony of political stories and general craziness he said this: “We are in a supercharged environment for political writing and commentary—an environment that will continue through the midterms. If you read an article that frightens or alarms you, set it aside, take a breath…”

Take a breath, think of your favorite things, your favorite words, your favorite places, your favorite poems…. When things get to be too much for me I watch “Out of Africa” or “On Golden Pond.” Or I go out in the garden just to see what is blooming. We live on a 14-acre campus of trees and flowers and pathways. I also like to iron – not kidding!

There’s nothing wrong with comfort words, comfort songs, comfort movies. Like mashed potatoes and ice cream and popcorn and macaroni and cheese we need things that make us happy. And we need them close at hand so we can refer to them in times fraught with worry. Write them down, paste them in a notebook. I think about people around me and their mental health these days. Everyone needs to have a retreat, even if it is a piece of music or a spiral notebook of sayings and words and lyrics and pictures.

One piece of music I love is John Rutter’s contemporary choral setting of “A Gaelic Blessing.” You can find it on YouTube.

Deep peace of the running wave to you
Deep peace of the flowing air to you
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you
Deep peace of the shining stars to you
Deep peace of the gentle night to you
Moon and stars pour their healing light on you
Deep peace of Christ, of Christ
The light of the world to you
Deep peace of Christ to you

We can take comfort, too, from Julian of Norwich a 14^th century mystic who famously comforted us with

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut,

lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball.

I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’

And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ ….

In this little thing I saw three properties.

The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it…

All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

We need to look after ourselves so that we can see to others. Deep peace and deep comfort are up to us to find – the words and music and movies that speak to our hearts. Yours might not be mine but everyone can find what helps them every morning, every night and throughout the days ahead.

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By all accounts she was the best of her siblings, their family’s hopes for the future. She should have lived well into my lifespan until close to the millennium when I was a mother myself. But she didn’t. I miss her and from the scraps my mother and aunt told us about her I wish I had known her. I knew my other grandmother but Daisy is a ghost known to me only in the memory of her daughters. My mother loved her very much despite only knowing her for sixteen years. Aunt Betty loved her, too, but lost her when she was only seven. Some of their memories differ which I learned after my mother had gone to join Daisy in heaven and Aunt Betty and I compared the stories. Aunt Betty remembered her mother at a sewing machine and singing. Mama remembered her with all her relatives and how they were all in and out of each other’s houses in what amounted to a compound on a Southwest Georgia river.

Daisy was wise, too, sending her first child off to school a mile away from home and then allowing my mother, a year younger, to tag along at age five after she begged to go to school with Billy. The teacher sent a note home at the end of the day saying Sara had come to her at lunch and said she heard her mama calling. The teacher said maybe Sara should wait til next year. Daisy was wise enough to let Mama go to school with Billy and wise enough to help her wait another year to go every day. Daisy was a leader in her church’s women’s group and I have a diary she kept of notes in her own handwriting telling about “doings” at the church.

Most people have relationships with their grandmothers. My own daughter loved Grandma, my mother, and they were constant companions in the years I worked and traveled. In fact, Elizabeth was who my mother called for in her last days. My daughter has memories and stories about Grandma that we laugh about today. For me, grandmothers lived at a distance - in South Georgia and in heaven! I was grateful for parents and aunts and uncles and blessed that my own mother lived until I was 57. It would have been nice to have a grandmother to talk to and learn from and hear stories about my mother as a child but our families are not usually not chosen by us! The configuration of relatives is a given that we accept as how families are meant to be.

Daisy was born the 15^th of September in 1899 the youngest of five children in her family. Her oldest sibling was twelve at the time of her birth. I knew three of the siblings (one had died earlier) and they were all old then in the 1950’s when I knew them. Her oldest sister, Jessie, looms large in our story - she was nine when Daisy was born.

Daisy was meant to be a teacher, the brightest of the lot, but instead she married my grandfather, Clyde, when she was 21 in what her family must have considered a colossal mistake. No one can remember why she chose him. He was four years older than Daisy and there’s not much to say about him except he loved to play baseball, he loved my mother who was his first daughter, he was a barber and a farmer, and he was very weak. He died in Macon of tuberculosis in 1957 at the age of 61. I remember seeing him after he was dead but Mama said she took me to meet him as a baby. My Uncle Bob did not like Clyde – surely Daisy could have done better, and he babysat me when the others went to Clyde’s funeral so he wouldn’t have to go.

Daisy had her first child in 1921, my Uncle Billy. My mother, Sara, followed the next year. The third child, a boy called Robert, came in short order and then a baby, Owen, who died after a year or so from “Blue Baby Syndrome.” Next came Aunt Betty in 1931. And then the world fell apart.

When Billy was 14, Daisy was chaperone on a school trip to a nearby town for a basketball game. Betty was three, perched on Daisy’s lap on the front seat of the bus behind the driver. My mother stayed home with her dad because she had a cold. Uncle Bob was driving the bus and a lumber truck veered into their lane and sheared the bus in half. Daisy tried to help injured children all the while calling for Billy. Everybody told her he was fine but when she finally found him by the side of the road in the dark, he was dead. She never recovered.

Suddenly my mother was the oldest child at thirteen. The happy years were gone though somehow her happy childhood had inculcated in her an optimism and a faith that were never shaken through the rest of her life. Aunt Betty was not so lucky. Her faith was shaken to the core - if your mother is snatched away when you are very young, something in you doubts life itself.

When Betty was six Daisy got pregnant again at age 39, old for a rural woman in the 1930’s. In August of 1939 she went into labor, a hard one, and my 16-year-old mother held her hand in the lamplit dark room as she labored with a country doctor standing by. “It isn’t supposed to be like this,” she told her daughter and sent Mama outside for the last part of the ordeal. Mama sat outside on the ground under the open window that hot August night as her mother was working to bring her sixth baby into the world. She waited and prayed fervently for her mother not to die. Daisy had preeclampsia resulting in a stroke during the dark hours after midnight. The country doctor hesitated and did not take the baby even when it was clear there was no oxygen flowing to him. By the time the doctor finally delivered the baby, Daisy was gone at the age of 40.

Aunt Betty was out in the country with her father when they got word that Daisy was in labor and they eventually rode on the wagon to get home but they were too late. The whole family hoped the small and sickly baby would die, too, so they could be buried together but he didn’t. He was called Dale for no apparent reason. As he grew they knew that he was brain-damaged and Great Aunt Jessie took him home to raise when she was nearly 50. Clyde was in no shape to even think about him.

There are no photographs of the Morris family together. In fact, there is only one photo remaining of my mother with her mother. In that picture she is out in a field with Daisy along with two of her brothers - Billy and Owen. Robert, Betty and Dale were not yet born. Daisy looks utterly exhausted. There are only a couple of pictures of Clyde and they are after Daisy was gone. I guess my mother took the pictures because in them Clyde holds baby Dale and Aunt Betty smiles next to them.

Daisy is buried in a dusty church cemetery across the road from a church that no longer exists in Baker County in Southwest Georgia, not far from Plains. I have seen her headstone which is hand-carved but aside from a few photographs showing her in her worst light since all the good ones were burned by the subsequent wicked stepmother, Mae – widow of my grandfather’s brother – the remaining photographs show her to be exhausted and haughty. Mama said that they are nothing like who she really was. Mae wanted no one to remember Daisy as the bright and beautiful and funny person she always was until Billy died. She wanted everybody’s memory of Daisy to be as sour and bitter as Mae was. I never met Mae but Aunt Betty had stories to tell about her, none of them happy, all of them about abuse. She and Uncle Robert were locked out of the house, neglected. Robert ran away but Betty was too young. Eventually Mae sent her to Mama on the bus, dirty and sad. Betty never went back and Mama sent her to the long-suffering Auntie to help raise. World War II was raging and my mother worked for the army. She was 19.

Pillar to post, Betty lived many places before she was grown. Daisy’s death was the end of her childhood and she was fearful and cynical. Her salvation as an adult was meeting and marrying Uncle Bill. I knew Aunt Betty as sharp, funny, skeptical, sad, wild and yet always loving. Pieces of her mother lived in her until she died of old age at 89 during the Covid pandemic. Mama kept her optimism and spirit the rest of her 86 years and when I think of what I know about Daisy, Mama carried her beauty, her humor, her intelligence and strength and the faith of both her grandmothers. She survived whatever life threw at her and made a better choice of a husband!

Robert ran away in the end to California and never looked back. I met him a few times but he never spoke of Daisy or Clyde or Mae for that matter. His children, my cousins, didn’t know the first thing about their father’s childhood. He was an aerospace engineer . He was gentle and kind and did his best as a provider. He loved his wife, Mary, and all five of his children. He died of cancer at the age of 63.

Dale lived to the age of 69 and died a few months after my mother, also of cancer. He had been in state care for decades after Daisy’s sister, Jessie, who we called Auntie, could no longer care for him. We knew Dale as a kind and sweet man whose mental age was about 8. He was just Dale to us and he was always there at Christmas and Thanksgiving at Aunt Betty’s house. When he died, my Aunt Betty took his ashes to the cemetery in Milford and scattered them on Daisy’s grave. He and his mother were together again at last.

Daisy Morris was 40 when she died. I was born 12 years later. The tragedy of Daisy’s life was in its brevity but she was no different from many who suffered in the early twentieth century from lack of health care and the exhaustion of women whose job was to have and raise children. Daisy’s intelligence and spirit were no match for the expectations of her family. Her cousin, Jack, told me once that Daisy was all that anyone could hope for in a wife and mother and that she was destined for great things, despite the small south Georgia backwater that she called home. I wish I had known her in person. She comes to me sometimes, flashing brightly and glowing intensely, a deep shadow reflected in my mother’s goodness and optimism and in Aunt Betty’s sarcasm and wit, a real person who lived a brief time and left a legacy of good children deeply loved.

I like to think that my own ambitions and sometimes off the wall interests and projects are also a reflection of the best of Daisy that lives in me. I like to think that her hopes and dreams were realized in some way in her children and her grandchildren and now her great-grandchildren. Daisy Morris lives on one hundred and twenty-six years after she was born and eighty-seven years after her untimely and premature death. But she was a grandmother largely unknown.

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It is outside my memory how those of us who played in the band managed to change from band uniforms to dancing clothes those football Friday nights – maybe in the band room? Presto chango. But it was a race to get to Teen Town asap and not miss a beat. In the 8^th grade I lived a block away – several of us lived nearby so maybe that was where we changed. And we may have gone to one of the girls’ house to change clothes and then spend the night after the dance.

I have memories of mothers and fathers selling cokes in a side room. It was loud and sweaty but not smoky. It was dark and thumping. I asked my friends for their memories because Teen Town was iconic for Dalton High in the late 60’s. We had several county high schools and I don’t remember if those students could come into the sacred space – maybe with a DHS date. Best intelligence is that the mothers of the Junior Women’s Club ran the events – my mother was a member as were my friends’ mothers. When we weren’t dancing we were having Girl Scout meetings there (and some of my friends remember Brownies, too, though that was before my time. I was busy being a Blue Bird and a Camp Fire Girl in Toccoa before we moved to Dalton in 8^th grade.)

There was a recurring band who played Teen Town that went on to some degree of fame. They were called “The Swinging Medallions.” Their biggest hit was “Double Shot (of My Baby’s Love Hey Hey Hey)” but their versions of “Louie, Louie,” “Satisfaction,” “Midnight Hour,” “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “Brown-Eyed Gurl,” “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Wooly Booly” were popular, too, and imminently danceable. “My Girl,” the best slow song every time, got everybody off the wall and onto the dance floor, along with “House of the Rising Sun.” The fast songs were for jumping around, dancing to your own internal beat but you had to be asked to slow dance and it was up close and personal even if you just held on and swayed to the beat. A perilous moment hoping to be chosen or a supremely confident one if you had a boyfriend by your side.

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” played well as did “Unchained Melody.” We liked fast dances – all that energy – but there was nothing like jockeying for a cute boy’s ask for a slow dance.

When it got too hot inside you could go outside in front of Teen Town and chat and hold hands. I guess some of the boys and a few girls grabbed a smoke around the corner but mostly we stayed inside and reveled in the noise and hormones. And if we had designs on another special someone we’d try to dance close by. I remember hot sweaty shirts and sweaters and no room to move your feet really it was so crowded which only added to the allure.

British Sterling was the boys’ best smell that I remember at Teen Town and at school. Or English Leather, Brute, Hai Karate. By that time, Old Spice was what your dad wore! For the girls it was Muguet de Bois, White Shoulders, Emeraude, Youth Dew, Jade, Chantilly, Wind Song, Shalimar.

Now mix them all altogether and heat everything up to about 85 degrees with thumping music and darkness and testosterone and estrogen and you have Teen Town!

When Teen Town wasn’t open we went to the only fast food there was to be had in Dalton – The DQ/Brazier - especially on summer nights after we could drive, or on Sunday afternoons, too, after cruising the downtown streets looking for that special boy’s car – for me it was Dean’s yellow Jeep. My friend Marti’s dad owned the Pontiac dealership and so every year she drove a demo Firebird convertible around town - yellow, blue, jade green. We’d pile in and go looking for that Jeep, up and down Hamilton Street until we spotted it, or not – we were just cruising and we’d end up at DQ or somebody’s house.

I was the proud owner of a red 1959 VW Bug – straight shift - that my father bought for $150. I taught my brother to shift gears on the way to school so I didnt have to talk and all I had to do was steer and operate the brake, clutch and gas. It did have a radio but there was only one station it could get that played “our” music – from Chattanooga thirty miles away.

Being a small-town teenager was special in the late 60’s – just safe enough and also big enough to be entertaining and freeing. Plenty of anxiety to go around but plenty of fun, too! There is some debate among us as to when Teen Town quit operating and we moved to the Rec Center which had more room. I don’t remember that. Teen Town is gone – there are apartments there now but the ghosts remain and when I visit my brother who has moved back to Dalton, and I drive down Valley Drive, I always look left just before Walnut Ave and remember Teen Town and the happy, tense, exultant hours on Friday nights in the late 1960’s when anything was possible.

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There’s also brown noise, like thunder rumbling, and blue noise which is like hissing water from a spout. Some people prefer lower tones like brown or white noise but some people prefer crisp high-frequency sounds like blue noise, water hissing.

Pink noise sounds less abrasive and leads to a better night’s sleep. Less like radio static, and more like leaves rustling. You may have tried out a noise machine or app or you may come by your preferences naturally.

These days we need all the help we can get. The poet Luci Shaw has encapsulated this phenomenon in a poem. Luci died in December 2025 at almost age 97. I discovered her back in the 1990’s and have several of her books. They have been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for such a day as this when we are overwhelmed by news and anxiety and fear of what lies ahead – enough to make us lose sleep and have a hard time conking out!

Luci’s poem “Going to Sleep in the Country – Brigham Farm” from her book Postcard From the Shore is a good way to understand what we experience after lights out and before we succumb in exhaustion to actual sleep.

Ten minutes after the light

Is out, the silence – deep as the sky

at night, is broken – the dog in

the yard begins a series of howls

at a siren in the valley. My body

Is prone but my mind is bolt upright.

Mentally I pace the square room

from bed to corner fireplace, from

uncurtained window to bookcase

where a hundred volumes hold collected

pages and words, the focus of

a chronology of readers. Book titles

pair off with snatches of dinner

conversation. A character from

Dickens starts a new novel in my head.

The wide floor-boards squeak

under the invisibility of waltzing

partners. The treadle of the old

Singer moves to a slippered foot.

Then a beginning of rain surrounds

the room, the house, until its

steady purpose washes out the other

sounds. Like a candle-stump

whose flame is snuffed, my visions

shrink, settle; like its thin

signature of smoke, restlessness

moves away out the door and down

the passage. Body and mind lie down

at last, together in the dark.

Many years ago, after a series of weekends in hotels in Atlanta just for a change of scenery so I could write and order room service and get out of my usual routine, I decided to go to Saint Simons Island on Georgia’s coast instead. I had not been in a while – not since college when my roommate invited us to her in-laws’ house on East Beach in the winter – a trip that began my decades-long love affair with Saint Simons Island. I called my old friend and minister, John Law, who lived on the island and asked if he knew anyone with a house on the beach where I could retreat for a long weekend of writing. I was all of 30. In short order he found a house owned by a parishioner and the details were arranged. The house was called Tillandsia, or Spanish Moss, of which there is an abundance on Saint Simons. I arrived and picked up the keys and let myself in. It was very old, a little musty, perched right on the beach with the deck out in the water at high tide. I unpacked and sat outside. But before I did I found a guest book and signed in. I was surprised to see that my CPA at the time had also added her name at some point in the past.

After cooking my dinner and eating out on the deck I went to find the bedroom where I would sleep. I picked out one I liked (there were many) and I admit I was scared – the house was big and old and unfamiliar and it creaked and I was alone. I made it through the weekend with great happiness and a sense of accomplishment. When I got home to Atlanta and called my CPA to chat about the house she said “Did you hear the ghosts? It’s haunted.” I had not heard any ghosts but had a real sense of a kind of haunting aside from my general fear of a new (old) place. It was like white noise behind the surface anxiety; it was the pink noise of the sea through the uncurtained windows; it was the brown noise of distant thunder one of the nights.

The last time I was in Saint Simons I looked for the house in the bend of the road but it was gone, victim to the shifting sands, I suppose – the sea may have taken it enough for it to be demolished by the owners and something else built. I could not find it but I remember the noises and the feelings.

Luci Shaw like poets throughout history have found ways to evoke feelings and inspire us to think about life in more than the daily humdrum ways. Tillandsia, like Brigham Farm for her, helped me to see and feel beyond the everyday and gave me a sense of calm and peace that I try to replicate whenever I can. Where we live now has a similar city mixture of night noises of all colors – sirens, drag racers on Peachtree street, a yapping dog long after dark, crickets in the dark, birds as dawn breaks. Anything to help us sleep. Anything to lighten the days to come.

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Yesterday we re-watched “Titanic” in honor of its sinking next week, one hundred and fourteen years ago. The film is almost thirty years old - Leonardo DiCaprio was 22 when it was made and Kate Winslet 21. It was brilliant from the first minutes. I will try to note any movies I see this year that look like Oscar candidates for next year by my tried-and-true intuitive sense of filmmaking.

Books are the same way. How could I not have been stunned by the first pages of “To Kill a Mockingbird?” Especially now that Robert Duvall is gone. Yes, I know he was in the movie not the book but he was the perfect Boo Radley.

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the weltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

Sometimes you just know when you are looking at or reading greatness, something that will endure.

I saw “Gone With the Wind” for the first time in the fifth grade and read it much later. For so many reasons, Southern girls want to be like Scarlett O’Hara even after we have grown up and see Scarlett in all her true colors at her time in history. When I first read the book there was no way I could picture Scarlett as anybody other than Vivien Leigh and Rhett as anybody but Clark Gable.

The book opens by declaring that “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm… “ Spoiled by the movie, anybody could see that Vivien Leigh was so absolutely beautiful we could not imagine Scarlett as “not beautiful!”

My mother says that her mother, my grandmother, Daisy Morris, so loved the book published in 1936 and was looking so forward to seeing the movie in early 1940, that her death in childbirth in August of 1939 (that’s a story for another time) at the age of 39 only added to the lore and the lure of the book and movie for me. I have her copy of Gone With the Wind. I think of it as an ancient book but it was published only 15 years before I was born! William Faulkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” That is true for most of us as we live more and more years.

When I was in the sixth grade our school library was in Mrs. Harrison’s fifth grade room. It covered one whole wall opposite the windows. The shelves sagged a bit and many of the books were old and musty but it was a library and libraries were my favorite place. Every Friday the children in our building were allowed to check out one book. I decided one rainy Friday to find a book at the beginning of the shelves, maybe planning to work my way through the whole lot. There was a book up there on the left of the top shelf without a spine, without a title and without even a title page. The pages were a little brown and brittle. It was mysteriously irresistible. I chose this disaster of a volume and took it home to read over the weekend. It was the most wonderful book I had ever read.

When I took it back on Monday I told Mrs. Harrison as much and asked what the name of the book was. Rather stunned, she took it and turned to what should have been the title page but it was missing of course. “Why, it’s The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett,” she said. “Did you like it?” Like it did not begin to describe what I had experienced. It is still my favorite book of all time and every movie version is equally enchanting, charming, enriching and inspiring. But like many books, the opening lines are revealing and promising in unexpected ways.

“ When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.”

Mary Lennox, goes on to be a delightful child transformed by love and fresh air and flowers and friends and a loving uncle.

Today I started a new book which seems after a couple of chapters to be a candidate for greatness. I suppose it was a New York Times Book Review selection and I ordered it on a whim (kind of like choosing the spineless, title page-less Secret Garden!) I had not read her previous works but Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark is a really bright and well-crafted look at two women who have been friends for 80 years, one of whom – Agnes - is an accomplished writer. As I said to someone the other day “80 feels way less distant to me now than it did when I was 30.” Except for “On Golden Pond,” movies and books about old people have not charmed me in the past but now they do! A way of dipping my toe in, of sampling what lies ahead, the feeling of being 80 when I am only 74!

Scraps of description captured me in the book – “with what diamond cutter’s tools she’d refined the facets of the paragraphs and made her characters glint under particular lights…”

Agnes’ friend Polly is a more traditional wife devoted to her professor husband and her children.

“She and Dick were not young, not young at all, eighty and eighty-two, but had stayed trim and neat and seemed to their three sons to still be their parents rather than a prompt for tours of retirement communities and discussions about how to split up the sticks of good furniture.”

I haven’t gotten to their annual decades-long summer residencies in their coastal island homes in Maine which in a very long book promises to make up the bulk of the novel. Alice Dark is a professor at Rutgers and is in her 70’s by all accounts, like many of us looking squarely at what it means to be “getting on in years.”

The writing is rich and reminds me of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn",” another favorite that is worth a second read. I can already tell I am reading “Fellowship Point” very slowly and deliberately in order not to miss the more-than-once-read turn of phrase in the unveiling of a story that is sure to take my breath away …

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In an entire week you’d think if you were part of the conservative cause (and one of the 500 readers) and you wanted to be or stay in DJT’s good graces like King Solomon or King David you could find a few minutes to get down to the Museum and humbly read a passage from the Bible. Not more than five minutes. Note to those who are wondering: King David’s “Mighty Men” were known for their unwavering dedication, at times risking their lives to bring him water, and King Solomon demanded loyalty from his court and officials, with those conspiring against his throne facing severe punishment.

BTW – DJT’s picture in the rogues’ gallery on the website does NOT say he is appearing by video. He does say the Bible is his favorite book so who knows. Maybe he will change his mind and show up where he can interpret II Chronicles for himself. Let’s hope not.

The event’s organizer says this is a sacred opportunity to call our nation back to its spiritual foundations. I had the idea of trying to guess which passage Trump would read in II Chronicles but America Reads the Bible chose for him – not surprisingly. I’m not sure he knows where II Chronicles is in the Bible or what it even says. To be fair, it isn’t the easiest book to find for any of us. Not like Psalms or Matthew. So I looked up the schedule and found the exact verses DJT will be reading. Here is his passage in the NIV translation. Not sure but I would guess they will be reading from King Jimmy or maybe The Message:

2 Chronicles 7:11-22 New International Version¹¹

When Solomon had finished the temple of the Lord and the royal palace, and had succeeded in carrying out all he had in mind to do in the temple of the Lord and in his own palace, ¹² the Lord appeared to him at night and said: “I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices. ¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. ¹⁵ Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. ¹⁶ I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.

¹⁷ “As for you, if you walk before me faithfully as David your father did, and do all I command, and observe my decrees and laws, ¹⁸ I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to rule over Israel.’ ¹⁹ “But if you^[a] turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you^[b] and go off to serve other gods and worship them, ²⁰ then I will uproot Israel from my land, which I have given them, and will reject this temple I have consecrated for my Name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all peoples. ²¹ This temple will become a heap of rubble. All^[c] who pass by will be appalled and say, ‘Why has the Lord done such a thing to this land and to this temple?’ ²² People will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who brought them out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them—that is why he brought all this disaster on them.

No hard words to say, to be sure, but this is a mind-boggling passage to interpret if you are DJT. This is not to say he will interpret his passage – he’s just going to read it – and if he stays on script his is only one of many voices to read the entire Bible. He likely thinks he is the wise king Solomon, if not the shooting star King David, but there are messy episodes in each king’s history that could give him pause – or not. And God’s words to Solomon are pretty clear whether you are re-designing the White House, uh the temple, or not. I have a handy little book – Know Your Bible - that explains each book of the Bible in ten words or less. This is what it says about II Chronicles: “The history of Israel from Solomon to division to destruction.” Uh oh.

And if he tries to change the words as he reads at the Oval office on video, there are always editors to make sure he keeps to the script. After all, it is the word of God, not subject to cavalier translation. But if he shows up in person at the Museum, all bets are off. It could become a marathon press conference…

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The most frequent users among the 26,000 people who work at the Pentagon are Catholics who attend daily mass and Muslims who pray several times a day.

There are three full-time Protestant military chaplains stationed at the Pentagon. I wonder how they see Pete’s prayer meetings in the much bigger official auditorium and how they compare or contrast with the regular Pentagon religious services and Bible studies in the much smaller chapel? I doubt they’d be allowed to comment on the prayer meetings.

The Pentagon chapel begs the question of why Pete feels compelled to host his prayer meetings in the Pentagon auditorium instead? Possibly because…

1, The chapel is too small – only seats 80 people

2. The chapel welcomes all faiths

3. The chapel is scheduled wall-to-wall so there isn’t a time slot for a big prayer meeting

4. Perhaps live streaming isn’t available in the chapel?

During Holy Week the Pentagon faced scrutiny and criticism for hosting a Protestant-only Good Friday service somehow seeming to deliberately exclude Roman Catholics, with reports noting it was the first time no Catholic Mass was held that day – but, of course, there is no Catholic mass on Good Friday liturgically so there should not have been a controversy. Looks like Mr. A.I. Google was not aware of Roman Catholic liturgical schedules nor were the writers of the articles criticizing the Pentagon. They could have called the Catholic chaplain at the Pentagon for further information.

I also talked about Pete’s prayer at the auditorium which he attributed to an unnamed “chaplain” before the Venezuela invasion to capture their president. (As an aside, last week the President teased a run for president of Venezuela (“I will quickly learn Spanish.”)

Brian Kaylor of “A Public Witness” SubStack broke down that prayer that Pete prayed with its scripture references which are all over the map from the Bible. This is not the “Pulp Fiction” prayer from Ezekiel quoted by Samuel L. Jackson and composed by the Quentin Tarantino but the earlier one whose publicity got the ball rolling as the war in Iran began.

The muddled nature of Easter Territory this year with crosses and bunnies and colored eggs and death and destruction and Jesus and Pope Leo and downed airmen and Trump’s take on the meaning of Easter - “what he did on the cross” - make religion, politics and the military a real murky stew of American life these days. There will be more to come with yet another “negotiation” deadline ticking down in the US-Israeli-Iran War…

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One of the first songs my mother ever taught me was “Daisy, Daisy.” It didn’t hurt that Daisy was her mother’s name though that did not impress me as a preschooler, or that Daisy was one of the names she considered for me. When I was young I thought it would have been a terrible idea but later in life the name has made a comeback. I remember singing “Daisy, Daisy” with her in the car on the way to and from kindergarten.

She bought a set of classical music albums at the grocery store – one at a time – that were more or less the greatest hits of classical music. I still have those LP’s. She would put them on the big turntable in our living room in its cabinet which also included a radio and my brother and I would dance to the music. We didn’t know the difference between classical and pop but we liked the music and laughed and laughed as we danced.

In the third grade we had singing class – I remember the room in the old Band Building as we called it with its risers and a piano on the floor where we also learned to square dance and do folk dances. We learned “Over the River and Through the Woods,” “The Erie Canal”, “Jump Down Turn Around, Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River,” “This Old Man,” “The Grandfather’s Clock,” “Clementine.”

That was the year I announced I wanted to learn to play the piano so my mother got a job to save up the $300 for our upright grand and my music-making life began. I kept the piano until a couple of years ago. I have high hopes that it wound up in the Outdoor Public Piano project somewhere like I saw in the train stations of England not long ago, or the pianos in public places in Atlanta. It was a grand instrument with a venerable history!

Later when I was ten we all had to take the Seashore Rhythm and Pitch test to assess whether we were band material. I wanted to play the trumpet but Mr. Sharretts deemed me clarinet material. Toccoa High School was so small at that time that 7^th graders played in the high school marching band (I had the purple and gray uniform to prove it.)

When I was 11 I thought I was pretty sophisticated and started tuning in while I did my homework to the local radio station’s 30-minute teenage music show at 4:30 in the afternoon. It was called Teen Time and was DJ’d by a high school kid named Barry Westbrook. This was before the Beatles so we listened to “Teen Angel,” “Where the Boys Are,” “Travelin’ Man,” “Blue Moon,” “Big Bad John.” Morris and I had a cousin, Lloyd, who was several years older than we were and when we went to South Georgia in the summer to visit our relatives, he had a record collection of ‘45’s that he allowed us to play on pain of death if we scratched one. Our favorite songs were “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” “Please Pass the Biscuits,” and “Witch Doctor.”

When I was in the 7^th grade the Beatles exploded onto the music scene. I saved up $5.00 to buy “Meet the Beatles” at Belks Department Store. I still have that album and can’t even begin to describe how I feel when I hear one of those original songs playing anywhere I hear it. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Do You Wanna Know a Secret,””All My Lovin,’” “Til There was You.” I played it incessantly on our record player (still the original one in the cabinet from my pre-school days) and dreamed and dreamed about George (mostly) and Paul. I had no idea what I would do with any of them if they were to show up in Toccoa and take an interest in me but I was beginning to feel the first stirrings of something that they inspired and it fueled my junior high days and nights and saw me through the sadness and loneliness of a move to another town when I was almost thirteen.

When we moved to Dalton the 8^th graders played in the marching band and we were a fabulous outfit winning marching contests and traveling to New Orleans and Chicago and Myrtle Beach to demonstrate our prowess. In January of 1965 the winter after we moved to Dalton, our band was invited to march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural parade. We traveled to the capital by train and stayed in a downtown hotel. The song of the hour on the radio was “Downtown” by Petula Clark which had hit the charts in the US in November 1964. It still makes me cry to hear it – it fueled all my hopes and dreams about growing up and moving to New York City.

“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
you can always go downtown.
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown.

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown
Things will be great when you’re downtown
No finer place for sure, downtown
Everything’s waiting for you.”

In the summer in high school, I would take home a musical instrument and teach myself to play it. Tenor saxophone, French horn. I bought a trumpet for $10 at a pawn shop in Chattanooga and learned to play that and my senior year I marched in the trumpet section on the field. I finally got to play the trumpet - a solo on “Light My Fire.” I asked for a snare drum for Christmas and it arrived. I saved my baby-sitting money and bought a big Zildjian cymbal. I tried out for and made the All-State Chorus.

My life took another musical turn my senior year in high school when the glee club from Florida State University came to sing in our town. This group of very good-looking boys sang an arrangement of “Windy” by The Association. I was totally inspired and went home and wrote an arrangement of “Cherish” for our high school chorus. Our teacher, Mrs. Grizzell, helped me with a couple of the difficult chords and we sang my arrangement in our spring concert. It was recorded and I have that LP with my arrangement on it – I played the piano accompaniment; my 8^th grade boyfriend Bobby played the drums and my friend Gloria conducted. It was an incredible high – mostly what we sang in chorus were classics or traditional SATB songs but this was right off the radio and we all felt like a rocket ship about to take off when I started the intro. I was so excited my hands shook. It was all I could do not to race through it at breakneck speed. It was all Gloria could do to keep us from flying and it was Bobby’s job to keep us in some kind of dteady rhythm. It was truly a high point of my musical life. The room exploded in applause when we finished!

At the University of Georgia, I sang in the chorus, played in the Redcoat Band, minored in music, talked the band director, Roger Dancz, into letting me take his class in Band Arranging, had two radio shows on the brand-new campus radio station – a morning show in the early 1970’s with featured tunes like “Stairway to Heaven,” ‘Inna Godda Da Vida,” “War! (What is it Good For),” “Sweet Melissa,” “Stop - Hey What’s That Sound,“One Toke Over the Line,” “Let It Be,” “Me and My Molly McGhee,” “25 or 6 to 4,” Rolling Stones, Beatles - and a Sunday afternoon semi-jazz show featuring Dionne Warwick, the Carpenters, Burt Bacharach, Barbara Streisand, Marvin Hamlisch.

I got the bright idea when I was in seminary that it would be so amazing to make movies that showed what a song was about – Johnny Mathis’ “Yellow Roses on Her Gown” was the song that made me think of doing it. I never got around to it but I was ahead of my time – it was a music video, an idea that did not happen for another ten years with the advent of MTV. I did make a music video of a Swingle Singers song - it took a very long time to edit and cut by hand.

So, the singing and the playing, the arranging and the listening, have been a life-long thing for me. And it has not stopped. Now I write Sub Stack articles with musical titles and play the viola in a classical orchestra and a fiddling group…

(That’s me on the first row of marchers - fourth from the left)

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We struggle to get through the day as we wait for the next outrage. I read Mary Trump’s postings and as his niece, Mary grew up watching this clearly declining man in action. Every day she struggles to say over and over in different words that DJT is obsessed with power and money, can’t stand to be criticized, nothing is worse than being a loser, he can’t get enough love and attention, he bullies everybody, he pushes to the limit, he is failing mentally. And yet here he is still is!

If you are a life-long Christian of whatever stripe you probably grew up singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” a hymn that is mostly out of favor with mainline denominations at this moment in time but likely still sung often in more conservative churches. Some theologians and church leaders find the “Jesus as buddy” imagery to be an inadequate, shallow expression of Christ’s role as Lord and Savior. Also “friendship” in contemporary culture implies equal status, which can diminish the necessary theological focus on reverence, holiness, and obedience to Christ. We are not Jesus’ equal and neither is DJT, in spite of what he believes.

There is one verse of the hymn that seems to be illustrative of what it looks like DJT seems to be feeling in the AI image he posted.

Are we weak and heavy-laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge—
Take it to the Lord in prayer;
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer;
In His arms He’ll take and shield thee,
Thou wilt find a solace there.

We cannot presume to know DJT’s relationship with Jesus. All we can do is infer based on outside evidence. But by all accounts DJT does not believe he is weak; in fact, he may not even feel heavy-laden in his hubris. Which makes the AI image all the more false and hypocritical. How can we be Jesus’ friend anyway? What does he want from us? Jesus wants us to love him completely, be loyal to his message and stay in touch with him. Alas, DJT just wants Jesus there for him. The irony is that he can’t fire Jesus like a crony who has let him down and failed to do his bidding.

Won’t you be my neighbor?

When I was in college, UGA was a big school – 22,000 strong in the early 1970’s. You almost had to find a little group to join or you would be lost. The Vietnam War was raging and we were looking for friends. I found my tribe at the Wesley Foundation. A mixture of Methodists ad Presbyterians with a couple of Baptists thrown in we met together every afternoon at headquarters and watched “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” together. Not far from being children ourselves we found solace in watching this gentle man reassure us about how the world could be.

The Wesley Foundation ran a coffeehouse on the weekends – the New Departure – in an old house (circa 1920’s) with a big front porch. The comforting drink of choice was Hot Dr Pepper – heat up some Dr Pepper and add a lemon slice. Mmmm mmm good! While guitarists strummed Beatles tunes and Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, we chatted and drank hot Dr Pepper and had our Tarot cards read in a back room lit by a lava lamp and phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling with paste made of Tide detergent.

Somewhere along the way we formed our own little rock band – guitar, piano, singers…and we played at youth group meetings in churches around Athens. Our best song was what musicians call a “partner song” or two songs that fit together musically. Our greatest hit was a rendition of “You’ve Got a Friend” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” They were perfect juxtaposed together.

When you’re down and troubled
And you need some lovin’ care
And nothin’, nothin’ is goin’ right
Close your eyes and think of me
And soon I will be there
To brighten up even your darkest night

Who knows whether DJT even wants a friend – in Jesus or anyone else? He certainly wants Jesus to be seen as siding with him in all things on earth including foreign policy. Friends appear to be for DJT those who are loyal, offer the possibility of making money, who prop up his ego, who do his bidding, who only tell him good news. None of those figure into any theology I know about Jesus.

The funniest thing I heard this week was JD Vance saying the Pope should not opine on theology! That’s like saying Paul McCartney should not opine on pop music! This from a recent convert to Catholicism who presumably has been schooled on the power and authority of the Pope in his life and the life of the Roman Catholic Church.

Muddy, murky images usurping the power of God for human ends. It’s an old old story, of course, and one that can only end badly! We do have a friend in Jesus and he will come to us and help us but our part of the job is to heed his call to make the world a better place, not to kill, not to rob, or lie or take the Lord’s name in vain! Grace is a gift, of course, but gratitude and doing our best to emulate Jesus’ teachings is our part of the bargain, a bargain that DJT does not appear to see as a good enough “deal!”

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Today I read a post from a GenX writer and photographer, Ben Von Klemperer, about his experience with the space program and the impact of Artemis II on his consciousness. Gen X Comes right after the Baby Boom (1965-1980)and before the Millenials. Even the oldest Gen X’er was too young to remember the first space flights or even the first moon landing. The oldest Gen X’er missed out on all of Apollo moon landings. It made me think through my Baby Boomer experience with the space program from ancient history until now.

I was in the 4^th grade and nine years old when the US manned space program took off – as it were. Our homeroom, Mrs. Whitlow’s, had the only TV in the school – a big one on a stand that could be wheeled from room to room. On the day of Alan Shepherd’s flight all of the fourth and fifth grade classes crowded into our room to watch. It was May 5, 1961 when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, piloting the Freedom 7 capsule on a 15-minute and 22 second, 300-mile suborbital flight. Launched by a Mercury-Redstone rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida he reached an altitude of roughly 116 miles and experienced weightlessness. “Light this candle,” he exclaimed before liftoff.

We watched in awe the countdown to liftoff as we would learn to watch countless times after that first flight. It was over almost before it began but the power of the rockets and the fact that a person was on board was awe-inspiring even for nine and ten-year-olds watching wide-eyed from small-town Georgia.

Fast forward to Sunday night July 20, 1969. Now I am a terrified but excited 17-year-old almost freshman at the University of Georgia. It was late at night and my parents were asleep. My brother was in Idaho at a Boy Scout Jamboree. The next morning my parents would be driving me to orientation at UGA but for now I was determined to stay up to see Americans land and walk on the moon. It was 11pm in our den and I had the sound down low since my parents’ bedroom was just across the hall. I remember the Lunar Lander had made it to the moon in the afternoon and when Neil Armstrong proclaimed “The Eagle has landed” we did not know how long we would have to wait before he took a walk on the lunar surface. It took another six hours for that magic moment.

When Armstrong finally stepped on the moon and made his “One small step…” announcement, I couldn’t understand a word he said and was concentrating on looking through the snow on our TV screen to see him actually step off the Lunar Lander. I saw his boot step off the last rung of the lander ladder and heard him talking. The astonishingly crisp images we see now were far in the future. It looked like 1958 on a bad night for reception on aluminum foil rabbit ears. (Ask somebody older if you are GenX or GenZ or Gen A for a definition of aluminum foil rabbit ears!)

Fast forward another seventeen years. I was a young adult in Atlanta running a small video production company and my business partner was married and had a two-year-old son when on January 28, 1986 the Challenger blew up 78 seconds after takeoff. Joseph, her two-year-old, was in a playpen in our urban storefront office and we all watched in horror on TV. America’s confidence was shaken and everything went silent for many years.

Fast forward again to April 1, 2026. Never mind that the International Space Station and a host of other launches had happened in the meantime; my child - a Millennial - had grown up knowing about the International Space Station but nothing about plans for another moon landing. By accident the TV was on that afternoon and the US was counting down to launch Artemis II. Never mind that I was unaware of Artemis I or NASA’s plans, so caught up was I in national politics that did not feature space exploration beyond Elon Musk’s Space X. But I was excited to be watching when a new era of space travel was about to start. I did not even know what the mission was! We watched live the 10-day mission launch and then ten days later we happened to be at dinner at the home of friends on Friday night, April 10, and together we watched the re-entry and splashdown of Artemis II. A picture-perfect mission. It took a long time to get the astronauts out of the capsule but once they did, the resilient astronauts walked across the rescue warship under their own steam after a short helicopter ride. Previous flights found astronauts less agile and wobblier after returning to earth and gravity. Science progresses! The footage of the space capsule visible as soon as it entered earth’s camera range was amazing and watching the parachutes deploy and the actual ripple of the water as the capsule spashed down in the Pacific Ocean was as awesome for me as Alan Shepherd’s short flight in 1960.

Hopefully a new generation of kids will be inspired to be astronauts and help us go even farther into deep space.

So, after a pause of 57 years, Americans have returned to the moon. I never thought I would live to see the day. And Artemis III is scheduled for 2027 and Artemis IV for 2028 with a moon landing as part of the mission. God willing and the creek don’t rise, that still leaves me twenty years to watch launches and splashdowns (or another kind of recovery – soft landing?) Maybe it was the time when I was born – to be 10 when we blasted Alan Shepherd 116 miles above earth, or to the moon when I was 17 or a spectacular tragedy when I was 34 or a return to the moon when I was 74 – but it seems there is a great deal of exploration still to be done. Or as an astronaut’s wife that I happen to know said last week – “when we focus on what we do best it is so amazing – Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Exploration.” The best of America – now all we have to do is get that spirit back, that positive, can-do, optimistic, honorable national spirit of America and take it as far as we can go despite the negativity of the news and current events!!

This afternoon in the New York Times Book Review there was an interview with Andy Weir, the author of “The Martian” and “Hail Mary”. Andy is a Gen X’er born in 1972. His dad - a Baby Boomer - collected sci-fi paperbacks which Andy read one after the other. Andy said this about those sci-fi books -

“Those boomer era sci-fi books had a real positive view of the future. I mean, the people of the future had their problems,, but the future wasn’t bleak, it was exciting. We’re going into space, we’re exploring the stars, we’re encountering aliens, this is all real cool. ..But a weird thing happened in the intervening time. Science fiction has become this gloomy, dour misery-scape. The future is horrible, technology is bad, every government tends towward fascism…I tend to write positive feel- good stories. I am inherently optimistic, especially when it comes to humanity.”

And as long as we have government officials spewing dark quotations from the Bible (and sci-fi writers other than Andy Weir writing doom-filled novels,) I will contribute a full-of-light hymn to combat that darkness and snarling aggression that threatens to undo us.

Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving
To God the Creator triumphantly raise;
Who fashioned and made us, protected and stayed us,
Who guideth us on to the end of our days.
God’s banners are o’er us; God’s light goes before us--
A pillar of fire shining forth in the night--
Till shadows have vanished and darkness is banished,
As forward we travel from light into light.

God’s law He enforces, the stars in their courses,
The sun in his orbit, obediently shine.
The hills and the mountains, the rivers and fountains,
The deeps of the ocean proclaim God divine.
We, too, should be voicing our love and rejoicing;
With glad adoration a song let us raise
Till all things now living unite in thanksgiving
To God in the highest, hosanna and praise!

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“You see, shot down on a Friday, Good Friday; hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday; and rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn, , all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good,” was Pete Hegseth’s take on the mission to rescue the colonel Easter weekend. Pete even has a tattoo on his arm that says “Deus Vult” – God wills it. This metaphor of airman as Jesus the Christ smacks of something tasteless and cheap.

But those remarks do not hold a candle to the blasphemy of the image posted on Trump’s Social Media over the weekend on Orthodox Easter Sunday of himself as Jesus healing an old man. Trump looks decades younger than his actual nearly 80 and is backed up by celestial combat soldiers, jet fighters, a monster, eagles and national symbols. The image disappeared quickly but not before many saw it and captured it. Trump says it was a picture of him as a doctor “making people better.” A doctor in a presumably Jesus-like robe holding a globe of light.

The President and the Pope are in the middle of a back-and-forth in which the president is trying to bully the Pope. The Pope is not cowed and condemned the President’s “delusion of omnipotence.” Apparently in a swipe at the President and Hegseth, the Pope went on to say that “even the Holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death…profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business.” Go, Leo! Best not to tangle with an American Pope from the streets of Chicago!

I don’t think Pete and the President decided to rescue the colonel on Easter Sunday to make a great story and yet it does somehow make a good story. I am sure the colonel was thankful for his rescue no matter what day it was but why would Pete need to equate the rescue with Easter morning except as a matter of gratuitous convenience? Perhaps an appeal to the MAGA base?

Blasphemy is a perilous game. By definition Blasphemy includes mocking God, claiming to be God or cursing God. In the Old Testament it was punishable by death. In the New Testament it was considered a sin against the Holy Spirit. In either case, Pete should know better. Trump - not so much. He isn’t even sure what happened on Easter and he says he is a Christian, a baptized and confirmed Presbyterian one no less.

Pete is a devout Christian and knows as well as anyone that, as Pope Leo put it, “the Christian mission has often been distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” But does he? These days he sems hellbent on Old Testament crushing and obliteration with maximum suffering rather than emulating his Savior who was all about love, mercy, forgiveness, peace and goodwill towards all.

Louisiana Republican Representative Clay Higgins encouraged Trump and Hegseth by blasting “I’ll support a ceasefire in Iran when … their lustful dreams of world domination have been pounded into the dust of history,” Higgins said in his post. “Wipe. Them. Out. Until then… hit them harder than ever Mr. President. Hit them so hard, the Angels in Heaven nod in wonder.”

More like weep in shame. Angels are not known to suffer fools gladly.

One more incredibly gauche image appeared as well, as a coda to Artemis II. Maybe Trump will move there!!!

Will the troubled times never end? Will it ever get better, our sad sad world? What’s the use of Easter anyway if we must keep hearing about everything from crime against persons and deranged wannabe kings to the mystery of elected officials asleep at the wheel?

Well, that’s why God gave us Isaiah 25. In a cynical mood I guess we could call it a carrot dangling always just ahead of us that we’ll never reach but in the spirit of Easter I propose that we see it positively as evidence that all will be well one fine day and that we can live today as if it were already here.

⁶ On this mountain God
will prepare for all nations
a feast of the finest foods.
Choice wines and the best meats
will be served.
⁷ Here the Lord will strip away
the burial clothes
that cover the nations.
⁸ God will destroy the power of death
and wipe away all tears.
No longer will God’s people
be insulted everywhere.
The Lord has spoken!

⁹ At that time, people will say,
“God has saved us!
Let’s celebrate.
We waited and hoped—
now our God is here.”
Isaiah 25:6-9

The ultimate fine day will take place on a mountaintop and the feast there will be the finest you’ve ever seen - all your favorite foods. I always joke that if I go to hell, all there’ll be to eat is egg white, sardines and tomato aspic. But if you happen to like those foods, your hell will contain a different menu. On the other hand, if I make it to heaven, to that magic mountain of Isaiah 25 the table will be spread with boiled peanuts, fried okra, smoked oysters, Johnny cakes, real mashed potatoes and perfect peaches. What will the banquet table hold for you on that fine day?

And on that mountain God will have destroyed the shroud of fear and cynicism and greed and apathy that is spread over this world this week and next week not to mention last week. God has swallowed up death forever, of course. That is what we celebrated last Sunday. Death has no hold on us now – but life continues to disappoint.

And God will wipe away our tears. It doesn’t say in this passage that there will be no more tears – not yet, but that God will be with us to hold us and dry the tears as we struggle to help our world. And it is God’s world, too, that we have made a mess of! And we will all stand on that mountain saying, “this is our God, the one we have waited for!” We will rejoice and be glad!

To make it to the top of that mountain is a matter of time and patience. We can’t gauge the height of the mountain or how long it will take to get to the top, but as we climb I believe we will see damaged children in grownup bodies spewing hate and there will be women not knowing their power and men who well know theirs. And we know that we can’t just keep walking resolute in our purpose ignoring these tragedies strewn along the path. It is our calling to lend a hand to the women and to the damaged men, to pick up the child and carry her a while, to stop a scrabble over a bit of bread, to stand up for justice and truth, to speak out for a halt to corruption and disgusting shows of power, to speak up for people being ridiculed and wronged and bombed and forced to flee life as they have known it. But at the top of the mountain, we must believe, will be laid a feast the likes of which we cannot know. Our only clue to this truth, our only taste of its possibility is that which we receive in our hearts and among our neighbors as we share the moments, the open windows of fellowship that cause us to glimpse the feast just for a moment.

In the moments of life where God causes us to have hope, in the moments when we open ourselves to receive the faith and grace that are gifts, and which sustain us for the climb - we can find courage to keep walking. This is Easter time and for fifty days we are instructed to walk with joy and hope. And after Pentecost comes Ordinary Time when we will walk again, as Greek Orthodox scholar Alexander Schneemann puts it, “in the night of time and history, of the daily effort, of the fatigue and temptations, of the whole inescapable burden of life.” The Good News is that we will be able to carry that daily burden because of the joy which is ours now, knowing that one fine day we’ll make it to the top of the mountain and find some peace at last.

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After a time Daddy would call “let’s head for the Dairy Queen!”

On the way to our chocolate-dipped cones, we passed our little church, First Presbyterian, a stately 20^th century red brick edifice on a downtown corner with an education building in the back. We lived just down the street and could walk to church on Sunday mornings – all four of us together - me clutching a handful of powdery pink crepe myrtle blossoms from the tree in our front yard. My Sunday School teacher always loved crepe myrtle blossoms and put them in a little jar on her table. I enjoyed Sunday School and church and sometimes my mother would take me with her to Sunday evening church –very different from Sunday morning – quiet and dim and a little bit mysterious. I thought the best hymns were the night ones.

My father had his ups and downs when it came to religion. He went in cycles of being involved and active and then other times of being aloof or even opposed when it came to God. During those times, I remember him watching us go out the door on Sunday morning with Mama while he stayed home and read the “Atlanta Journal.”

“Bye, see you for lunch,” he’d call distractedly. Mama said nothing. I felt angry but now I believe I was feeling Mama’s anger with him, not my own.

My mother had grown up with one grandmother who was a Southern Baptist and the other one a Seventh Day Adventist so she had gone to church all weekend long – with the Adventists on Saturday and the Baptists on Sunday. Daddy didn’t seem to have grown up as a churchgoer anywhere. I imagine my grandfather Will had other things he wanted my grandmother Nettie to do on Sunday mornings. When Mama and Daddy got married in 1944, they church shopped and chose the Presbyterians. Neither one of them had any experience with Reformed Theology but they liked the people and the preacher and so they joined in with enthusiasm – at least she did.

After Morris and I were born Mama started talking to Daddy about having us baptized like all the other new church babies. Not only that, she said, “but I want you to be baptized, too.” He was not enthusiastic.”

“We belonged to a Methodist church,” he said. “And I was baptized in a river during a revival.”

Mama was not convinced. She wanted proof. Of course, there was no proof so she gave him an ultimatum. “Cheryl and Morris will not be baptized until you are, too.” It was neither here nor there to him. But then by some miracle after a while, apparently he began to want to fit in more fully in the eyes of the congregation and more importantly the eyes of the community.

In due time one Sunday morning we were all in church together. I was minding my own four-year-old business scribbling on the bulletin and counting Mama’s fingers during the boring parts when suddenly Mama leaned down to me and whispered, “Get up, Cheryl, we are going down front.”

Completely confused I stood up. This was entirely unprecedented. All four of us - Daddy carrying Morris - marched down the aisle to the baptismal font where the minister proceeded to baptize all three of us. I was four, Morris was two and Daddy was 42. Mama had proof of her Baptist baptism so she just stood by and beamed as she watched us become duly recognized as part of the community of faith. I don’t remember Daddy doing anything, saying anything, but it just so happened that about that time he became a Deacon which in the Presbyterian church was the group who took care of the property and looked after the wellbeing of the members. It wasn’t about anything theological, his baptism, but he recognized that it would not have “done” to have an unbaptized Deacon so he did it with his own brand of enthusiasm.

During the times he was “off” God though – and they went in multi-year waves - Mama was not happy.

He said, “I’ll go to church when I get good and ready and you can wait for that or you can go ahead and go by yourself.” She always went, taking us with her, though she believed a family should attend church together. She always had to make an excuse about why he wasn’t there – “oh, the phone lines are out in Eastanollee and Rex has to see to it. He’ll be here next week.” It was a good excuse in winter but more difficult in summer.

Eventually Daddy would get back on the church wagon and the time came when he became an Elder, a step up in the Presbyterian ecclesiastical pecking order and ultimately he rose to be the Clerk of Session, the highest -ranking lay person in a Presbyterian Church. He was proud to have achieved that pinnacle.

I am not sure what made him cycle through positive feelings for God and then ebb in interest but it was always a source of tension in our house. Neither waxing nor waning, my mother was constantly faithful for 86 years – through thick and thin, through trauma and trouble, through triumphs and successes in life. She never faltered. It must have been irritating for Daddy who struggled to find a faith that worked for him even some of the time!

We never talked about religion, Daddy and me. But Mama and I had very specific and lengthy talks along the way. When I grew up and announced that I was going to be a Presbyterian minister, however, I got opposing reactions. Daddy was all for it and told me I could be anything I wanted to be. Mama was less enthusiastic. Until she died she always told people I was in “full-time Christian service,” the role generally assigned to female missionaries and Christian Educators. She could not bring herself to see me as an ordained minister. Saint Paul told her it was not right but she was proud of me. She just could not reconcile my call with her Bible.

When Daddy died, we took him home to Toccoa to bury him in the Stephens Memorial Gardens, just down the hill from the now-silenced, gray and dry fountain.

I know they must have argued about God over the years because Mama told me about their “discussions.” I know she wanted fervently for him to be included among the saints in heaven. I know how she believed with all her heart that she would be in heaven and she wanted him there, too. She had faith enough and to spare and in the end she never doubted that there would be room for him.

Daddy was his own man to the end and always said “ I’ll deal with God at the pearly gates.”

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