Write for God

I start my mornings with our local daily in a methodical way. News first, then lifestyle sections and finally comics and puzzles. Yesterday, that meant that I had two opportunities to be offended by the poverty of both the body and spirit in our world.

The headline in the world news section put it plainly: Survival on dirt cookies. The subhead was what really caught my eye, though:  Rising costs take food out of mouths in Haiti, where most people live on less than $2 a day.  

People on our hemisphere, within distance of cruise ships ferrying vast quantities of midnight buffet dishes for passengers to eat after a day of gorging, are resorting to eating dirt mixed with salt and a little shortening to ease their hunger pangs. Dirt.

With food prices rising, Haity’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

They are eating dirt.

The photos accompanying the online text showed a scrawny 11-year-old sticking out his tongue to show the clay color from the cookie he had eaten. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingers, wrote the reporter. Dirt.

A college newspaper in the Tampa Bay area ran an editorial this week mentioning the death of actor Heath Ledger. The students wondered why there was so much coverage of the passing of a movie star, but not of the 100,000 children who died of malnutrition around the world that week and every week. In a world where hunger kills, we don’t have to far to find demeaning poverty. According to Feed the Children, 12 million kids in America will go to bed hungry tonight.

While I was working in county government, I used to write news releases for a government program that provided breakfasts and lunches to children during the summer. Not all children, of course, just the ones getting free or reduced lunches because their caregivers weren’t making enough to feed them properly. One of the social workers used to tell me that, without the summer food program, children in my large Florida county–site of million-dollar-condos on the beach and malls with jewelry stores galore–wouldn’t get enough to eat if school wasn’t in session.

Children in Haiti eating dirt and children in America having to rely on federally-funded meal programs to get enough to eat during the summer. Here is what Mother Teresa so aptly called our poverty of spirit. In the midst of plans for Super Bowl XLII parties and the restaurant reviews in food sections that pooh-pooh eateries for a slightly soggy appetizer, we have children and adults who don’t have the most basic access to nutrition. We are indeed spiritually poor when, as Gandhi said, we are not the change we want to see in the world.

Feed the Children, Food for the Poor, Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services. Pick one and make a donation that can ease the hunger pangs of children who might be eating dirt tonight. I sometimes make small donations to the Christian Appalachian Project that provides relief in one of the most deprived regions of our nation. They perform a valuable service to Americans who are so often forgotten when we think of dire poverty.

I went to bed last night wondering why people in any part of the world have to resort to eating dirt to fill their stomachs, but especially in a country so near to this nation of plenty. What really nauseated me after reading about the Haitian diet was the cutesy item in the food section’s recipes that provided various ways to make Mississippi Mud Pie, a fatty, totally decadent dessert made with chocolate.

In the same newspaper, well-fed readers are debating the best ingredients for a trifle that winks at being called a mud pie and a reporter is writing about malnourished people resorting to really eating mud cookies to kill the pain of hunger.

It makes you wonder which nation is really the poorest, as least when it comes to its collective soul.

Some days are more difficult than others. For those times when do not see the road ahead, Thomas Merton’s prayer from Thoughts in Solitude is appropriate:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road although I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

The notion of Mardi Gras, the Fat Tuesday celebration that arrives on February 5 to herald Ash Wednesday, has always been curious to me. Starting the Lenten season with a hangover from eating, drinking and partying too much doesn’t seem like a fruitful way to begin the weeks that lead us to the Paschal season. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we shall return, which is a good notion to carry with us all year.

Other than watching the brassy Carnival from a balcony in Havana once when I was little, I’ve never wanted to celebrate Mardi Gras. Sharing a King Cake with co-workers is as far as I’ve gone, and that’s because our boss always received one as a gift from a friend who had moved to Louisiana. The colorful pastry ring with sweet dough would arrive a few days before and we would gather in the break room on Mardi Gras to snack.

King Cakes are baked with a figure of a baby that signifies Jesus in some traditions. Whoever finds the baby is supposed to be crowned king or queen of Mardi Gras. Some years, it was funny when one of the guys had to wear the office tiara. One year, our secretary almost swallowed our Savior while she was noshing on the King Cake.

Many of us focus on doing without during the 40 days from Ash Wednesday to the glory of Easter. Excess is packed into Fat Tuesday in anticipation of self-mortification during Lent. (When our 12-year-old daughter was younger, she used to confuse Lent and Advent. One November, she asked if she was supposed to give up chewing gum for Christmas.)

A priest at our former parish once put Lent in perspective when he asked why we were so focused on taking away when we should adding. He suggested adding more kindness, more prayer, more spiritual readings and more forgiveness to Lent rather than taking away sweets or chips. Abstinence and fasting aren’t punishments, he said, but rather opportunities to think about those in our world who do without every day.  It’s a practice I’ve adopted every Lent as I journey to the Cross.

Rather than beginning Lent hung over and begrudging the treats we’ll be doing without, it would do us more good to think about the many opportunities we’ll have to move closer to Christ by adding prayer to the season.

I’m only 50, but I used to watch my grandmother scrub laundry in a tub with a washboard and now I’m sending emails at Panera’s using Wi-Fi. In five decades, I’ve traveled through centuries when it comes to technology.

I grew up in Havana during the 1960s, but time had stopped there in the 1950s when Fidel Castro’s takeover fooled the populace into giving up its ideals for a better society. The clothing, the cars and the movies playing in our neighborhood were pre-1960s if they were made in Hollywood.

New foreign films came from nations behind the Iron Curtain, Europe and Asia. I got to see more Czech romantic comedies, Bulgarian cartoons and Japanese samurai films that any other child might have tolerated outside of Cuba. The cartoons were clunky and the Czech comedies fluffy, but the Akira Kurosawa epics with Toshiro Mifune in kimono and sword are still great.  (Many years later, I happened to find a movie poster from Yojimbo, my favorite Mifune movie, in Spanish–just the way I had originally seen the movie. I couldn’t pass up a poster in Spanish for a Japanese movie I now own with English subtitles.)

It was ironic that, during the first years after arriving in the United States, I was laughed at in class because I had never heard of Topo Gigio. I hadn’t been living here when the puppet mouse was on the Ed Sullivan Show, but I had seen comedies by Jacques Tati and masterpieces by Kurosawa by the time I was nine. There are TV shows that my husband watched as a boy that I had no idea existed. Kevin tells me how he used to watch Combat!, Andy’s Gang and Circus Boy when he was a boy in New York. They’re all still mysteries to me.

In 50 years, I’ve lived part of my life without a telephone in the house; helped my grandparents shuck corn; eaten a chicken that pecked in our yard before I watched my grandmother de-feather it and cook it; used a privy and taken a ride in a beautiful 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible that my mother’s half-brother had bought new.  I’ve worn handmade clothes and hand-crocheted socks, taken a bath with castile soap, brushed with baking soda because there was no toothpaste and helped the older folks cook on a coal stove. I spent my first nine years in another century, even while kids in other nations were living in the 1960s with the British Invasion, Mercury capsules orbiting the Earth and, yes, Topo Gigio.

Today, our 12-year-olds have email, a laptop, cell phones and mp3 players that pack endless music into appliances as small as my thumb. Time has traveled at warp speed since I was a child. I think nothing of complaining about my laptop’s RAM, the speed of my broadband connection or how long it takes to reheat my coffee in the microwave. Seconds are suddenly too long to wait.

Our oldest son used to say that I had grown up in the “boony days,” his expression for the boondocks of time before his first real memories in the 1990s. To any child, his or her parents always belong to an inexorably distant time, but my son was partly right about my living in a past that was beyond the experiences of my classmates in parochial school during the late 1960s.

From the washtub to Wi-Fi, I’ve had to adjust to life with one foot in a past lacking in necessities and another firmly in a present when technology zooms at quantum speed. To my one-year-old grandson, I’ll probably be a dinosaur as soon as he begins developing his view of the world. I’ll have to tell him how his grandma had a grandma who actually used a washboard.

“Only the person who renounces self-importance, who no longer struggles to defend or assert himself, can be large enough for God’s boundless action.”

–St. Edith Stein, (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), from a 1935 essay on St. Teresa of Avila

We who were born Roman Catholic have had our faith since the cradle. Converts come to our Mother the Church through their own volition. Perhaps they’ve heard the call or perhaps someone brought them. RCIA programs turn our new Catholics each year with the new-found fervor of a new enterprise of great magnitude.

Some of the most faithful and admired Catholics have been converts. My spiritual guide, Thomas Merton, and our most inspiring Catholic activist, Dorothy Day, both came to the Church as adults. John Henry Cardinal Newman, St. Edith Stein, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha and a host of great Catholics have recognized the Lord on their own road to Emmaus to come home to the Catholic Church.

There’s a story that’s probably not true, but is entertaining nonetheless. Clare Boothe Luce, author, diplomat and wife of media mogul Henry Luce, was an adult convert to Catholicism. With her usual spunk and outspokeness, Mrs. Luce set out embrace her new religion with a passion. There’s a tale that she was describing the joys of being Catholic during a meeting with Pope Pius XII when someone heard His Holiness say, “But, Mrs. Luce, I’m Catholic, too!”

I like to think of myself as a cradle who is also a convert. The first stop that my mother made after my birth was our parish church so that I could be baptized. The family didn’t arrive home until after I’d been welcomed in the Church. It took my own epiphany to bring me back to the Church as a converted spirit when I was an adult.

After four children, I had been seeking an authentic religious experience. I had tried Buddhist meditation, but had gotten to the point where my meditation was leading me nowhere. I kept reaching nothingness. My belief in God never wavered, but I didn’t think an earthly Church had any answers for me.

As I kept meditating, reading and seeking in my heart, I began having bizarre visions that seemed to be scenes in a movie. I would be driving or reading and a scene would flood my consciousness. I was a child standing outside in the darkness before a door with warmth and a bustling kitchen behind it. The voices of my late grandmother and great-aunt would call me to come in to eat. That would be the extent of my little reverie. Each time, I would be outside in the dark and the women in the kitchen would call me in to eat.

I couldn’t interpret what this waking dream meant, but I wondered if it was an omen of death. Why would two of the people I had loved the most and who had passed on be calling me to eat? Gradually, my husband and I began to reconsider Catholicism. Kevin and I were both cradle Catholics who found ourselves heading home as we spent more time married and raising children.

One Sunday, I attended my first Mass in many years with the kids. We sat in the back of the Church because I didn’t feel I belonged anywhere near the sanctuary. The celebrant of the Mass was an older priest whom I would later come to know as a quiet saint in the parish we joined.

During his homily, he said, “God serves a banquet and he calls us to share it during the Eucharist.” I was being called to come in and eat at God’s banquet! The persistent images of my grandmother and great-aunt calling me in from the darkness had to be a divine invitation to once again share the Body and Blood of Jesus.

Like Paul on the road to Damascus, I was struck by the call to serve God more fully. In the years since, my faith has deepened to levels I could not have imagined if I’d not been seeking God. I had to heed His invitation to partake of the Eucharist. Each time I step up to receive Communion under both species, I am humbled and awed by the miracle of the gift I am receiving.

For a few years, I served as an extraordinary minister at Communion. A fellow minister mentioned to me that I went about my duties with extreme reverence. It did me good to hear that I was indeed demonstrating how privileged I felt sharing the Eucharist with others.

God calls each of us in our own time. Some at birth, some later in life. When you are called twice, His voice is louder.

Future saint Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, died in 1980. There are photos, film interviews and living witnesses who worked with her to spread the message of voluntary poverty.

Don’t Call Me A Saint is a remarkable new documentary biography of Day.  (Director Claudia Larson took the title from Day’s often-quoted remark that she “didn’t want to be dismissed that easily” by being called a saint.) Eileen Egan, biographer of both Day and Mother Teresa and friend to both, is on video talking about two of the most remarkable women of the past 100 years. Peace movement veterans Fr. Daniel Berrigan and Deacon Tom Cornell are there, too, as is Day’s daughter Tamar Henessey and present-day Catholic Workers.

The documentary is an unvarnished look at Dorothy Day, who exemplified love for the least of God’s creatures. The Houses of Hospitality, by accounts in the film itself, were sometimes noisy, chaotic places where guests suffered from schizophrenia, knife-fights erupted and prayer was interrupted by the constant clean-up of vomit or blood. These weren’t pristine monasteries where hours were regular and silence was observed. The film quotes one of Day’s favorite authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky, in describing the reality of the Catholic Worker houses:  “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

The harsh and dreadful love that Dorothy Day offered God is evident in Larson’s emotionally direct film. The documentary footage of the times Day lived are evocative and the subjects who provide different aspects of her character speak from the heart. Don’t Call Me A Saint should be part of the documentation that the Vatican must consider as Dorothy Day moves toward canonization. Larson is selling copies of the documentary on DVD to raise funds for a comprehensive project to preserve years of documentary interviews with Day’s contemporaries. It would make an extraordinary gift for anyone who wants to see love at its most exalted under the harshest and most dreadful of conditions.

Here, we meet a woman who wasn’t perfect, but who was perfectly in love with the Works of Mercy as a way to love God. It’s a rare treat and a spiritually satisfying work.

When I was majoring in mass comm/journalism at the University of South Florida in Tampa, there were many adjunct professors from the local dailies in our classrooms. Reporters and editors from The Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times taught a class or two and kept their day jobs. I used to think it was awful that we didn’t have “real” professors, but it didn’t take me long after I’d graduated to realize we had been blessed with teachers who were actually practicing what they were preaching in the classroom.

One of those adjuncts was a features editor who remembered my work in class and called me a few years later to see if I wanted to work for him as a correspondent. That gig lasted eight years and combined fun with a second income. Two other adjuncts were working reporters who brought in wisdom from the newsroom and didn’t rely too much on textbook exercises.

One afternoon, our assignment was to spend half an hour finding a story on campus and the other half hour writing it to submit as the day’s work. I was fortunate enough to be on staff at the university’s daily paper and I ran up to our office a floor above to interview whomever I happened to find. The editor was at his desk and I wrote a profile of how he had found rock ‘n’ roll and decided to become a music critic. The piece turned out surprisingly well.

Those classroom adjuncts were more memorable than the tenured professors in our journalism program. Charles Reid, the Tribune’s investigative reporter, turned out to be a major influence on my writing. Everything I’ve created for publication–from newsletters to news releases to columns–has passed the Charlie Reid Test.

Charlie was a no-nonsense, hardboiled reporter who didn’t tolerate factual errors. “If you’re gonna be in the newsroom, you gotta get it right,” he used to tell us.

I learned that during an in-class assignment when we were given an obituary to complete. The facts were on a handout and we had to write about someone we didn’t know. The subject had attended the University of Florida and I included that in my piece. In a lapse of judgment, I didn’t proofread the copy as closely as I should have. Somehow, my familiarity with the University of South Florida made its way to the obit instead.

My assignment went up on the overhead projector with a big red circle on my error. I received a pretty good class drubbing from Charlie about accuracy, proofreading and sloppiness. Every assignment I turned in after that was proofed twice before it was handed in to Charlie. That’s part one of the Charlie Reid Test.

The second part was more difficult to manage. He was big on leads, those first sentences that hook a reader and convince him or her to keep reading. “If you do it right, you got ‘em,” was a Charlie-ism.  All of us in Advanced Reporting under Charlie struggled to finesse our leads so he would read them to the rest of the class. There was nothing better than knowing he approved of our writing. Writing solid leads is a skill I still work on.

Another assignment during the semester when we learned how to be reporters with Charlie involved critical writing. We had to turn in a book review of an assigned text: veteran NBC reporter Edwin Newman’s Strictly Speaking. Our only instructions were to make the review readable. When our assignments came back graded, Charlie said that one review was exceptional and he read it to the class. It was mine and he had given me a 96. After he finished reading it, he took out a red pen and added two points to my score. I think it was my proudest moment as a student writer.

One of my most lasting memories of Charlie was the morning he didn’t show up for class. There’s a tradition on college campuses that, if a professor doesn’t show up in 15 minutes, it’s time for the students to call the class a wash. Someone ticked off the minutes and we scattered when the quarter hour passed.

The next time we had class, a bedraggled, tired Charlie walked in with an incredible story for us. Our previous class had been on May 9, 1980, the morning of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge tragedy that veteran residents of the Tampa Bay area still remember.

A freighter navigating in heavy rain had struck the southbound span of the bridge over Tampa Bay. Much of the span collapsed into the bay and 35 travelers died; many of them had been aboard a Greyhound bus.  Two survived, including a driver who stopped his car about a foot from the missing span. Had he not slammed on his brakes, both he and his car would have tumbled 150 feet into the bay.

Charlie had had a good reason for not teaching class that morning. He was covering the tragedy on scene and in the newsroom. He told us how he had lived on sodas and peanut-butter crackers from vending machines for two days and how he hadn’t left his post to sleep. We learned how reporters covered disasters, how teamwork in the newsroom filled in gaps, how everyone had to pitch in to make sure that there were no errors in the copy. I don’t recall what the syllabus said we were supposed to be learning that day, but it turned out to be the best lesson in news coverage any of us had received.

The lead in The Tampa Tribune on the day after the Skyway had been Charlie’s. I can still remember it:  “Some were lucky and some were damned.” You couldn’t “hook ‘em” better than that.

I heard from a reporter many years after I graduated that Charlie had died of cancer. I felt sorry that other journalism students weren’t going to learn the Charlie Reid Test when they wrote copy. Today, I was reminiscing about Charlie with a Tribune reporter who used to cover the same beat he did, but for a different edition.

“We would cover the same meetings and our stories would be different. People would tell him things that never ended up in mine,” she said. “I wrote about what had gone on during the meeting and he wrote all the things going on around it.”

Working reporters like Charlie Reid and the others who taught our classes as adjuncts gave us a priceless education in journalism. I think of him whenever I refine copy and I’m grateful that he shared his knowledge with my generation of reporters.

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
 

The first time I read Emily Dickinson’s celebration of the power of books I had to look up most of the words in the poem. I must have been in middle school when I read it and perhaps older when I finally understood it.

I’ve been a reader since I was four.  My mother said I was precocious and begged to be taught to read. When I was a child in Havana, Cuba, I spent days with my grandparents, aunt and great-aunt while my parents worked. Afternoons after our midday dinner were spent napping or discussing the events in the newspaper or the Voice of America broadcasts furtively picked up from U.S. stations. I wanted to be part of the news discussions going on and being able to read the paper seemed like the quickest way to be included.

Books have always been a part of my life. More than 45 years after I learned to read, I’ve ridden many of Dickinson’s frigates to far-off lands in my mind. When a book becomes one of my favorites, I’ll read it every year or every other year to experience the original pleasure I found there. Every now and then, I’ll read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience; George Orwell’s 1984; the Gospel According to St. John in the New American Bible; Thomas Merton’s Fire Watch essay and John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, which is probably the funniest book ever written.

Without a new book to read, I’m bored. When I was in parochial school, I made my way through a beautiful series of fairy tales with books that had colored covers. I spent hours curled up by the window reading them. Novels, history, biographies, memoirs: the genre doesn’t matter as long as the author tells a compelling tale.

I like to read as my mood dictates, so there are always several books going near my reading chair. Depending on my state of mind, I’ll pick up one where I left it off and enter the world created by the writer. Reading just one book at a time would be too normal.

Right now, I’m reading six books that are intriguing for different reasons. The newest one in the stack is Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories From a Fading Empire by veteran community organizer Bruce Gagnon. I’m always drawn to stories about people whose epiphanies spin them into another direction. Gagnon, who is now the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, began as a Republican serving in the Air Force and transformed himself into a organizer with the United Farm Workers Union and eventually to fighting the military empire that wants to militarize space.

I’m also reading the newly arrived Collected Poems by the late Robert Hayden, the gifted poet I discovered this month and whom I wrote about in my January 12 entry. As the kids were getting haircuts today, I savored Hayden’s vivid images.

For inspiration, I’m reading William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well, which I’ve read regularly since I was in high school. There’s no better book to cut the chaff from sentences and to whittle bulging phrases. 

There’s also The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which is one of the best books on plotting novels and screenplays. It dissects the conventions of myths to come up with stories that speak to everyone.

Just for fun, I’m reading Rip-Offs: a Writer’s Guide to Crimes of Deception by Fay Faron. If you’ve ever wondered about scams such as the Spanish Prisoner and Bible Bunco, this book explains what they are and how they’re perpetrated by those who’ll do anything for an illegal buck.

I’m still working my way through the bilingual edition of Dante’s Paradiso, the most mystical of the three books in the Commedia. As Dante ascends to the highest heavens with Beatrice, his language and the cosmology becomes more sophisticated. It’s a work that can’t be rushed.

The collection that contains The Light Over the Scaffold and Cell 18, prison letters by Jacques Fesch, is also on my reading pile. Fesch, who was executed on the month I was born in 1957, killed a policeman after a failed robbery attempt. He went to prison and spent months in isolation, where he found God. His spiritual growth was assisted by the prison chaplain and a monk with whom he corresponded. The letters are remarkable testaments to the power of Jesus to bring sinners to new life. One day, Fesch may be canonized.

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is the droll apocalyptic “Time Enough at Last.” Henry Beemis, a meek, bespectacled bank teller played by Burgess Meredith, escapes his boss and his shrewish wife by locking himself in the vault at work to read. When a nuclear explosion destroys the planet, he’s safe in his reinforced reading place. He emerges to an empty world with no harping bosses or wives, but with a library full of books for his enjoyment. As he settles in to read, his coke-bottom glasses fall and break. Suddenly, the meek little man experiences his own Armageddon.

I’ve always thought that was the saddest of the Twilight Zones. A world without books would be barren for me and I’m grateful that I can make time enough to read and lose myself in the voyages I’ve taken on those frigates that have taken me lands away without leaving my reading chair.

We had just gotten in from a bike ride when my husband, Kevin, gasped as he checked the latest news on his computer. Heath Ledger, the 28-year-old Australian actor we had seen in a few films, was dead.

The week before, I had been checking YouTube clips of the upcoming Batman sequel titled The Dark Knight. Ledger played a frightening, demented Joker who certainly wasn’t related to the cheesy, jocular Cesar Romero version we used to watch in the TV series based on the adventures of the Caped Crusader in the 1960s. Ledger’s performance in the few clips I saw seemed to have a sadistic, dark edge that seemed steeped in blood and madness. The clownish red mouth was smeared and the whiteface covering a scarred face made Ledger look otherwordly. Having been pleasantly surprised by the previous Batman Begins with the same team of Christian Bale and director Christopher Nolan, I was looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight this summer.

A commentator on Headline News mentioned that Ledger had told some of his acquaintances that the role of the Joker had haunted him and that he had found it “demonic.” Newsweek used the same adjective to describe his performance. That was close to what I had felt watching the YouTube videos of his performance. There seemed to be something evil about his character beyond the comic-book heroics of the Batman series. The TV show had been a hoot. There was much more humor in the series than there was suspense, although some of the episodes were two-parters where Batman and Robin looked like they were done for. I had particularly liked the episodes where Mr. Freeze had trapped them in giant ice-cream cones.

Ledger’s performance seemed closer to the gory Saw series than to the ersatz adventures in the TV series. We had first seen Health Ledger in The Patriot, Mel Gibson’s Revolutionary War family drama. Ledger had given a terrific performance in Monster’s Ball, where he disappears before the film is half over as his character suddenly and violently commits suicide. I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain for several reasons, but he was nominated for an Academy Award based on the strength of his performance. He was talented and certainly had many more roles ahead than behind him.

Young public figures who die violently always leave a mystique, like James Dean and his Porsche or Janis Joplin dying alone of an overdose. According to the national news, Ledger left behind a two-year-old daughter who may live haunted by the weight of that mystique.

It’s time to say a prayer for all who feel lost and trapped in demonic situations beyond their control. It may be Heath Ledger’s saddest legacy that his last major role as the Joker, a dark turn that may have been too much to master, may define his short career.