Write for God

Kevin, my husband, is the most honest person I’ve ever known. If he doesn’t like my hairstyle, he tells me. Most spouses would just settle for a little white lie. A clerk at the convenience store near our house trusts my husband with the amount of gas he pumps because, as he says, Kevin is “straight.”

That being said, Kevin has a difficult time believing how people in the public eye can lie so glibly and so easily. When a psychopath kills his wife and there’s evidence that he did it, Kevin can’t fathom how the culprit can’t admit his guilt. Even a tiny lie about someone’s appearance trips up my husband, for whom lying about a mortal sin would be unthinkable.

Politicians who lie without a second thought flummox Kevin. The political candidate who “misspoke” about coming under sniper fire during an overseas jaunt apparently had no difficulty confusing an error in pronounciation or grammar, which would be a case of misspeaking, with an outright lie. There is a difference–a huge difference–Madam Candidate, between one and the other. As Mark Twain said about using the correct word, it’s the distance between the lightning and the lightning bug.

For as long as people have wanted power and money, they’ve lied to get them or to spare themselves retribution for their wrongs. St. Augustine of Hippo wrote about lying in De Mendacio, the Latin word for lying and the origin of “mendacity,” the word so identified with the patriarch Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Pinocchio is the only liar whose face betrayed his fibs; most liars in public life continue lying until they’re caught on video.

St. Augustine found lies in religious teaching the worst form of deceit; those that harm others and help no one are next on his list of eight types of lies. Lying to save a life ranked lower on his scale.  Yet, Jesus calls the Devil “the father of lies” and the Pauline letters have passages where St. Paul reminds us he is not lying, which I’ve always imagined was a response to the unbelief all around him about his message of salvation.

We live in an age when lying is the basis of how business is conducted–from phony deductions on taxes to stealing millions from pension funds. An honest man or woman can’t get elected these days, or doesn’t even try to. Elected officials lie about inside deals and about spending more money on prostitutes than many families will ever see in a year of hard work. Candidates only admit they “misspoke” when archival video footage positively proves they lied. That candidate must have learned from the spouse who dared to say he had not had sex with an intern whose dress had stains that proved otherwise.

No one dares to tell the truth for fear that their true selves will be exposed in all their flawed reality. The idea of owning up to a fault or a lie is beyond the courage of most people in the public eye. If God were to ask today for just 10 honest men before destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, he’d have a difficult time finding one if He didn’t knock on our front door first.

But Jesus is the Truth, as He said. Confession is good for the soul, but it has to begin with confession to the self that becoming closer to God means getting farther from our lies. It’s a lesson that our elected officials, candidates and neighbors alike should all heed. And that’s the truth.

When I was growing up in New York, March always meant the feast days of St. Patrick and St. Joseph. Many of the students in my parochial school were of Irish descent; in fact, one of my best friends had parents who were born in Ireland and had beautiful brogues. There were kids of Italian descent in our school, too, which made for some interesting school days.

March 17 was a big day for the Irish as everyone celebrated St. Paddy’s Day. The magnificent parade on Fifth Avenue and green coffee at the Irish deli across the street from our apartment building were sure signs that we could all be Irish for a day. When I was in sixth grade, our teacher, an imposing Dominican named Sister Joanne, took us on the subway to see the parade. We sat in the bleachers on a frozen New York mid-winter’s day watching the Fenians and the firemen march by.

Many of the other kids in class were of Italian descent and St. Joseph’s Day on March 19 was another big day. That was the day when we could all be Italian for a day and enjoy the San Giuseppe festivities in the city.

For two days out of the year, we New York kids could enjoy two beautiful cultures that are two of the strongest bases of Catholicism in America. Food, music and parties have no nationality, of course, so we could all enjoy soda bread and meatballs on either day without thinking much about where they came from.

Jigs, reels and tarantelle sound just as musical, regardless of who’s playing them. I was born in Cuba and spent my first nine years in Havana, but I love Celtic music nonetheless. I can enjoy Celia Cruz and the Clancy Brothers with as much joy.

The unique timing of Holy Week this year has moved the grand feasts of St. Patrick and St. Joseph to the week before their actual calendar days. The corned beef and cabbage are cold now, as are the spaghetti and meatballs, because it’s time to remember the Lord’s Passion. Here’s to 2009 and the chance to pay tribute to two great saints who always mean great food and great fun!

There’s spam and there’s Spam. The latter is the stomach-churning mystery meat on supermarket shelves and the former is the kind that shows up in your email box, uninvited and unread.

I have a friend who sends the best spam. Inspirational PowerPoints with spiritual themes, holiday cards with interactive games and every joke ever delivered ends up in my box from my friend Hendy. Occasionally, he’ll send the spooky Halloween gag that ends with someone shrieking on my computer screen to give me a near-heart attack, but usually his spam is pretty tasty.

He sent me spam recently that actually had facts worth pondering during this strange season when St. Joseph’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Palm Sunday, my son’s 22nd birthday and Easter all so incredibly intertwined. I’ve read that some Irish-Americans are going to give up their St. Paddy’s blowout in honor of Holy Week. My son’s birthday falls on Good Friday this year, which has never happened and, according to my friend’s spam, won’t happen again in our lifetimes. Read below:

Easter this year is Sunday March 23, 2008
As you may know, Easter is always the 1^st Sunday after the 1^st full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is March 20).
This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar.

Found out a couple of things you might be interested in!
Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) but that is pretty rare.
This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives. And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier!

Here’s the facts:
The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that.
The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year.

Confusing! No wonder I couldn’t believe my son’s birthday was almost here and that I haven’t thought about Easter cards yet. We’re in mid-March, for Heaven’s sake! When our son Dylan was little we could count on having an Easter outfit ready after his birthday had passed. This year, we’ll be commemorating Good Friday with prayer while he turns 22 on March 21.

It’s incredible that Sunday is Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week. The Easter eggs in the kids’ baskets may still have frost on them. I’m not even in the mood for a spring dress in the middle of March.  I have a beautiful peach suit I could wear, but I’d probably still be shivering from our Florida winters that are mild to the rest of the nation but cold to us hot-blooded tropical folks. (Yes, anything below 50 degrees F. is cold to me!)

Green beer superseded by Holy Week, my son’s birthday on Good Friday and a once-in-a-lifetime early Easter: let’s just blame it on global warming or, better yet, on Spam. The icky pink stuff in the blue can, that is, not the kind that has information you might actually use.

I spend most of my week at work doing communications for a not-for-profit foundation that researches osteoarthritis, the form of arthritis which is sometimes called the “wear and tear” type that affects us as we age. It’s been eye-opening to meet some of the study subjects who stop by our office for their periodic X rays and lifestyle questionnaires.

I met some septugenarians who are so spry they put much younger people to shame. One active retiree told me how he still paints houses now and then and how he and his wife begin their day with a walk outdoors or a session on the treadmill in their garage. Another told me how she got into square dancing some years ago and how it’s helping her stay fit. I also met some older folks who can barely move and who take a “handful of pills” a couple of times a day, as one of them explained. Aging wasn’t fun for them.

It’s easy to say that it’s only attitude that separates the seniors enjoying every minute of their retirement from those that are not, but there’s more to it than that. Many of the folks who were still active said they’d been active when they were younger, too. Activity–getting out on the roads, hitting the gym, doing manual work–seemed to be the magic pill among the research group participants I met this week.

Another patient told me she played tennis and taught water aerobics and she was in her 80s. A gentleman who had great posture even in his 70s spends a lot of time outdoors keeping fit. Most of the delightful folks I met were taking a very active role in maintaining their good health. During my gym workout this afternoon, there were younger people and many retirees using weights and aerobic machines to take care of their fitness. A lot of them seemed to be having fun doing it.

The lesson for me was that, yes, mental attitude plays a huge role in health, but movement does, too. I have been unfit and fit at different times in my life–from being a couch potato as a kid with asthma to running a marathon in my mid-30s. Through my change of life and attitude since late last year, worry and stress put exercise on the back burner, but I’m itching to get back to the gym this week. I love a hard, sweaty workout that leaves everything on the road or in the fitness room so that the rest of the day is worry-free and energized.

Meeting a very special group of retirees this week reminded me how precious good health and the ability to determine your activity level are. I’m not going to wait until it’s too late to decide that exercise is one of the keys to feeling great.

“If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

In Walden’s “What I Lived For” chapter, Henry David Thoreau elegantly expresses his frustration with the belief that well informed people are those who read newspapers. The cranky naturalist and philosopher had little tolerance for endless accounts of, as he says, “one cow run over on the Western Railroad.” According to Thoreau, if you’ve read one police-blotter account, you’ve read them all and can concentrate your energies on doing something more valuable than reading the newspaper. (Of course, Thoreau didn’t think much of the post office either; elsewhere he says that one or two important letters were it for the services that office had rendered him in his lifetime.)

I thought of his old women over their tea tonight as yet another cable news network barrage of nothing but Clinton/Obama news filled hours of programming while I made dinner, ate and then sat down to write. I asked my husband, “Isn’t there anything else going on the world?” We have both been frustrated that the coverage of the civilian murders of Palestinians, the incarcerations of civilians at Guantanamo, the signs of the coming recession and, closer to home, health care for the uninsured isn’t receiving the same overblown coverage as the race between the Democratic challengers. We know whom we’re supporting and the nonstop campaign coverage doesn’t serve us or the undecided voters well. If anything, voters will be sick of the issue by the time November 4 arrives.

Truthfully, I try to stay away from TV news as much as I can. I get most of my news by reading Web news sites and not watching cable news. Other than the very entertaining and sometimes unbridled Keith Olbermann on MSNBC or C-SPAN’s public affairs programming, there’s not much value in the rehashed reports and overdone graphics of network or cable news. My sister and I were amazed recently that millions of people rely on Katie Couric, of all people, for their news. If you’d told Americans in the 1950s that they’d be getting their nightly news from Betty Furness, they would have laughed.

Luckily, there’s more of what’s happening in the world on one Antiwar.com page than in a couple of hours of CNN. The pictures are prettier or more scary on cable, but there’s all the depth of a thimble in their coverage.

On Sunday, C-SPAN featured a Book Talk interview with journalist Anthony Lewis, who discussed his new book, Freedom for the Speech We Hate. Lewis’ subtitle claims his book is a biography of the First Amendment and his discussion of the implications of Supreme Court cases, privacy issues and the original intent of the framers of the Constitution was fascinating. That, to me, was good TV.

The same talking head commentators on CNN talking about every minute of the Presidential campaign say the same things every day. They dissect every action, every word and every square root of their ads. Meanwhile, terminally ill people in America don’t have access to health care, funding for education is in peril and civilians by the hundreds are dying in Palestine. Kevin, my husband, received a slide show a few days ago from a Palestinian friend who warned him that its images were graphic.

He was right. We could barely look at the human bodies turned into pieces of meat by bombs and bullets. Our daily newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, today “balanced” its coverage by showing two grieving families–one Palestinian and one Israeli. Both depicted children crying over their losses, but the cutlines told the story. The Palestinian girl’s relative was one of more than 100 dead civilians and the Israeli boy’s relative was one of two soldiers killed. Palestinian men and boys throw rocks like David, but this time Goliath has drones, mortars and missiles to take to the fight.

Our newspaper’s “equal” coverage was surely designed to avoid getting letters from the pro-Israeli lobby that refuses to acknowledge one iota of the suffering of Palestinians. As a joint letter from one of those groups pretty much stated in our paper recently, well, that’s what they get for their goal of wanting to destroy the Israeli state. I flashed back to that comment when I saw the faces of the children crying over dead relatives on the same newspaper page. “There is only one child in all the world, and that child’s name is All Children,” wrote Carl Sandburg in his text for the photo exhibit The Family of Man.

Unlike Thoreau, I love newspapers. I was trained as a journalist and there’s nothing like starting the day with print, even though I’m frustrated by the narrowness of the daily paper that arrives on our lawn each morning.  Thank God for Web access to a multitude of points of view in news sites and blogs that lessens our reliance of one newspaper or the three broadcast channels of the old days. At least now, C-SPAN and a selective viewing of cable news can provide some perspective on issues and trends.

It’s refreshing not to rely on old ladies over their tea for news anymore.