Lillian Gish in "The Night of the Hunter"

“It’s a hard world for little things.”

 

 Yesterday’s coverage on the 24/7 news channels was devoted to the search for the body of five-year-old Shaniya Davis in North Carolina. The kindergarten student had been reported missing a week ago by the same biological mother who has now been charged with human trafficking for pimping the little girl out for sex. The mother had taken the girl back from her biological father three weeks ago after making a case that she deserved a chance to raise Shaniya, too. The child’s body was found in a wooded area near some deer carcasses yesterday afternoon.

You have to wonder if Satan isn’t loose in the world when you hear about mothers selling their five-year-olds into prostitution in America, when 17,000 children die each day from hunger in a world where there’s enough food for all and when so-called “stars” rent hotel rooms for their luggage and people outside that hotel have no place to sleep.

It’s hard not to feel a chill when the cruelty in the world is what’s covered in the news. If it bleeds, it leads was the slogan in newspapers back when sensational “crimes of the century” came along less frequently than they do now. These days, each news cycle brings a “crime du jour” that wouldn’t make a dent in the totals for this month, much less in a year or a century.

 There much goodness in the world that is never covered in the evening news or the morning’s paper. Everywhere, people of all ages do small things with great love, to quote Mother Teresa, but no one notices or covers it. There are religious who give their lives to serve others and busy people who take the time to serve in many ministries and social-service networks. Mothers and fathers sacrifice for their children and older people take time to volunteer at food banks and hospitals. There’s a network of goodness underpinning our daily lives despite the sordid events that fill the TV news channels, but too often we forget it’s there.

 It’s easy to feel depressed when only the evil in the world makes headlines. It seems as if the world is getting colder and more vicious with each Shaniya Davis that is brutalized. No one dares to look beyond the gloom in the news to realize that each day a new generation of babies with infinite hope is born. The world is ever renewing itself and it has always been thus.

“It’s a hard world for little things,” says the brave old woman portrayed by Lillian Gish in the classic film The Night of the Hunter as she defends motherless children from a predatory villain. She is wise enough to recognize that, even in a hard world, “(Children) abide and they endure.”

(This film, more than any other, emphasizes the strength in children and the existence of good in a world that seems filled with evil. Robert Mitchum’s sadistic faux preacher meets a powerful foe in Gish’s character, an old woman who takes in children no one wants. She has a gun, but it’s her soul that battles him for the lives of the little ones. In a film filled with memorable imagery, it’s the tattoos on Mitchum’s hands that spell “love” and “hate” that most viewers remember.)

 To my three grandchildren younger than three, the world is still a mystery and happiness is as close as a bowl of ice cream or a tickle. The 10-month-old discovered watermelon this week and the mix of cold, juicy and sweet in her mouth lit up her face like fireworks on the Fourth. When was the last time we found delight in a piece of fruit?

 “Man runs down and confuses the world’s condition with his own,” wrote John Updike. We are battered by life and too many stories about dead five-year-olds and we think the world has run down, too. A 10-month-old can find joy in a chunk of watermelon, but we are defeated by what we lack instead of being thankful for what we have. Today, nothing is different in my circumstances, but I refused to give in to having 24/7 news on in my office. I’m listening to the monotony of the air handler’s hum, the rhythmic taps of my keyboard and the conversations all around me. The world didn’t change, but my focus on what occupies my mind is different today.

You can’t ignore the world and the injustices in it, but there’s a limit to how many times we can let endless bad news on TV color our reality. The world’s condition as portrayed on news shows that lead with something that bleeds can cause us to run down, too, until we imagine that all goodness has disappeared.

 I stepped away from my desk this afternoon to notice the blue sky and to get a fresh perspective on life. Across the street, there were still people who are unemployed and poor people sat in the waiting room of the social-service agency where I work. I saw poverty all around in a town where—a couple of miles from here—stores sell designer handbags for $800 and restaurants offer menu items that cost more than what feeds one of the folks in our waiting room for a whole week. Disparity and injustice? Yes. The end of the world? Not yet.

For each lost soul who commits an act of barbarity, there are many, many more helping others today. I had a chance to see someone who is uninsured pick up a prescription in our lobby. Another person is helping an elderly woman fill out a form she can’t see. A baby is tasting watermelon for the first time somewhere near here.

Real life is out there. Don’t let reel life that leads because it bleeds color your perspective on the world. Breathe, be a human and appreciate a blue sky today. Cut up a watermelon and taste it as if it were the first time. Feel good that you did something for someone. Find a way to make the world less hard for a little thing. Take a minute to see eternity in a grain of sand. There’s good in the world:  seek it.

Sister Dorothy Stang's shirt reads "The death of the forest is the end of our life" in Portuguese.

 How black must be the soul of someone who kills an elderly nun! Emptying seven bullets into a religious woman in her 70s and leaving her to die in the mud is a crime beyond belief, but it really happened in 2005 on a makeshift road in the Amazon. The victim’s name was Sister Dorothy Stang and the shooter was one of several pawns used by wealthy landowners in Brazil to get rid of an elderly nun who cared more about the poor of the earth than she did about their threats to shut her up permanently.

The murder of the nun and the judicial proceedings that have surrounded it since 2005 are the subject of They Killed Sister Dorothy, a fascinating documentary that aired on HBO after making the rounds of film festivals and is now on DVD.  It’s worth finding at a video store that can stock a few quality offerings in addition to a bazillion copies of the latest bloodfest. It’s narrated by actor Martin Sheen and features a moody theme song by Brazilian songstress Bebel Gilberto.

Sister Dorothy and her community of nuns worked in the jungles of Brazil’s Anapu region. The sisters were serving the poor and fighting to preserve the Amazon from ecological disaster. Twenty square miles of the rainforest are lost each day to logging and land-clearing that creates cattle ranches breeding meat the villagers can’t afford to buy. The sisters support a project called PDS that preserves the rainforest by alloting sustainable growth plots to the poor. It’s an equitable solution to save the rainforest and restore dignity to the poor. (The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur support the project and have a guide to the documentary that provides more information on the sustainability effort here.)

Before Sister Dorothy’s death, the Brazilian government seems to back the idea of the PDS, but landowners oppose it. Another arm of the govenment drags its feet on approving the projects and a land dispute develops over a plot in the very middle of the land set aside for the PDS. A wealthy rancher claims he owns the land in the rainforest and he produces a dubious document he says can prove it.

Ohio-born Sister Dorothy was tiny and elderly, but she was hardly a pushover. She speaks out in meetings and in media interviews about the need for the PDS and the tactics of the ranchers. She is walking on a mucky road when two men fire seven bullets into her body, which is later found on its stomach, wet and bloated. Sister Dorothy’s community in Brazil includes a friend, Sister Becky Spires. She joins Sister Dorothy’s brother, David Stang, in following the murder case and the trials that come after.

They Killed Sister Dorothy will make you angry while it restores your faith. It’s a reminder that there are still religious people who try to live the Gospel as it was written. Suffice it to say that the near-illiterate who pulled the trigger didn’t have a quarrel with Sister Dorothy, but those who promised him money to do it did. The trials of those the prosecutors tried to hold responsible are miscarriages of justice derailed by sleazy lawyers defending those with the means to pay their fees. The scuzziest of the lawyers is the nephew of a very good monsignor, as one of the sisters mentions later.

People of faith and people who work to protect the environment will find Sister Dorothy heroic. They Killed Sister Dorothy honors the work of a martyr who literally died for the poor of the earth. It’s worth seeking out in your video store.

My husband suggested that today was a good day to restart posting because I was saddened to see a former co-worker’s obit in the paper this morning. (For me,  the best way to sort out my thoughts is to hash them out with my husband and then to write.)  Seeing a familiar face in the obits is not the best way to start one’s day.

Until 2006, I had worked with Bob, a dear man who was very good at his job, but who was more successful as a human being.  Until I saw his obit, I had often thought of Bob when I read news articles about local families needing help. 

Bob, you see, had confidentially told me how he sometimes sent anonymous donations to families he read about who were homeless or hopeless. God had blessed him and he didn’t need much to be happy. He felt he had enough to share with others and couldn’t understand why others didn’t do the same if they had the means.

Matthew 6:3 is the mantra of the Bobs of the world who help others quietly, known only to God: “But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”  That’s how generosity works when it’s done right.

There are no buildings in the Tampa Bay area with Bob’s name on them, no endowments with his framed portrait in some hall, no tax-exempt foundation with an annual gala to honor his memory.  He wasn’t a rich man by any means, but he had a rich heart. A few times I saw tears well in his eyes when we spoke about someone who didn’t deserve whatever life had handed him or her.  Bob was emotional in his love of others and it always showed in his face, whether he was laughing or crying. He was short in stature and his job sometimes meant contact with hostile people, but I could never imagine anyone ever wanting to harm Bob.

There are bushes in our garden that he gave me one day when there were too many left in a shipment he had bought for work. He even wanted plants and bushes to find a loving home instead of ending up unwanted.

After he retired in his 50s and I found other jobs, I lost track of Bob until I saw his face in the obits today.  Whoever wrote the copy–his family or his partner–captured the essence of Bob in quoting one of his favorite sayings: “A true friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.”

Bob touched many hearts among those who knew him as well as among those who never knew he had changed their lives with his anonymous gifts through the years. If good deeds build dwellings in Heaven, he must be resting in a fabulous palace today.

Hundreds lined up for a health event in Appalachia (NPR.org)

My kids call me a book nerd because I love to read. As much as I enjoy reading, there are some genres I don’t cotton to. Mass romance novels and science fiction don’t do much for me unless they transcend all of the conventions that are the very qualities their followers want in these books. What turns me off about these mass genres is that keeps them coming back.

I used to work in a bookstore years ago and the large number of romance readers who had no idea if they had read a particular number always amazed me. Are they all that similar and disposable that they would run together in their minds? You would never confuse Of Mice and Men with Anna Karenina, for example, but that all-purpose cover illustration of a bare-chested man embracing a woman with cleavage might make you wonder if you’ve read that book before or if was one of the hundreds you’d read before.

Live and let live, so romance readers are entitled to their choice of books without my opinions. Read what you like, I say.

My problem with some genre readers today arose from a Facebook post by a romance author whose list I joined on a whim because I liked how she was able to write while living a normal life with her husband and kids. I would never read her books, but her small slices of life about the struggle to finish 10 pages while life intrudes were sometimes interesting to read. A woman who writes is very different from a man who writes, after all.

In her Facebook post, the author asked her readers to educate themselves about HR 676, the United States National Health Care Act. Immediately, readers posted horror stories backed by information from conservative sites with political agendas as bare as the chests of those guys on the cover of romance novels. One site was called RedState, for goodness’ sakes. Talk about objectivity!

Socialism, fascism, old people Soylent Green-ed…you name it and these romance readers who aren’t sure if they’ve read a particular, semi-sordid tale of ill-written sex between women with cleavage and bare-chested men were offering their scenarios of how our nation will cease to exist if everyone had access to doctors.

July 28 must have been  HR 676 D-Day. On many other Facebook posts, people calling themselves Christians were railing against those who won’t go to work, who need to show humility by taking menial jobs listed in classified sections and who don’t want to be told how their taxes are spent for health care. (Italics mine as actual quotes I glanced at today.) All well and good if you’re employed and have adequate health care you can afford. It’s easy to be pharisaical if all the folks you hang out with are your fellow Pharisees.

The truth is that there are millions who want to work and can’t find a job because jobs are non-existent. For every one of those classified ads, there are hundreds of applicants. The majority who apply for any job they see never hear anything in response to a well-crafted resume backed by years of experience. I know an unemployed real estate professional who works 18 hours a week for just above minimum wage. Because she is 58 and has some health problems, she has looked for jobs in three states and is lucky to have found those 18 hours in Florida, she says.

As for being humble, I know professionals who would take a $10-an-hour job if it came with health benefits. They can’t even find those $10-an-hour jobs because of their age or their health conditions.

In 2007-2008, I spent five months looking for any job that would allow me to support my family. I sent hundreds of resumes, networked and practiced interviewing tips daily. In the end, I found a job that was never listed in the classifieds and which came via a friend of a friend who was hiring. It paid $11,000 less than I’d been making, but it was a job and I needed it.

A friend who lost her job just last Friday joked that she would be selling any makeup or home decor line she could find to make a living while she looks for another job.  Despite her many health problems, she could be uninsured soon if she can’t afford the $507-a-month COBRA coverage she qualifies for.

Instead of spreading horror stories about socialized medicine (did anyone say Medicare?), it might behoove those Facebook romance fans to take the author’s tip and educate themselves about the health-care bill and any alternative plans. In fact, all of us should read the text of this house resolution for ourselves without a political filter.

It’s easy to call a plan socialist if you have private insurance you can afford or if you are still well enough not to need health care. It’s more difficult to put yourselves in the shoes of a family that is either uninsured or has to forego health care they can’t afford.

Would you like to meet one of those families? Allow me to present ours, a devout Catholic family with a father, mother, two children still at home and two adult children who care for themselves.

After I lost my job in October 2007, we didn’t have the money to continue COBRA for two adults and the two children still at home. We were all very healthy anyway, so it wasn’t a huge concern at the moment. For five months, no one in the family was insured and we just trusted God to take care of us.

I found another job five months later when I accepted the first position I was offered. I could then afford to cover myself for about $67 a month. Coverage for my husband and our two children would have added about $500 to our monthly health-insurance bill, so we turned down family coverage. 

Thanks to the State of Florida’s KidCare program, I was able to insure the children for $20 a month. This socialist program is part of the state’s Medicaid system and works like Medicare for seniors. My kids were finally able to see a pediatrician selected by the plan and to go to a dentist to have their teeth cleaned.

My husband was another story. Adding him to any health insurance plan was again beyond our means. He’s much too young for Medicare and we were just above the poverty line for Medicaid. He remained uninsured despite his hypertension. Again, we just trusted God to keep us healthy.

In July 2008, my husband fell in the middle of the night. We don’t know what happened, but I awoke to a thud outside our bedroom door. I found him on his back and couldn’t rouse him. Blood and tissue poured from his right ear, so I called 911 immediately.

My husband was transferred by helicopter to the nearest trauma center. He remained in the hospital for the next few days with a skull fracture — and no health insurance. After leaving the hospital, we couldn’t find a neurologist who would see him without insurance. When I called the office of the doctor who had asked us to follow up with him the week after discharge, I was told that he needed an MRI to be done before he would see my husband.

The hospital wouldn’t schedule him for an MRI unless we had some sort of insurance to cover the procedure and they suggested applying for Medicaid. After some months of huge medical bills, Medicaid finally covered him as a short-term patient for the month when he was injured. Again, we couldn’t find a neurosurgeon who would accept his particular kind of temporary Medicaid for a follow-up. While I was at work, I made dozens of calls that yielded no results. We found one ear, nose and throat specialist who accepted cash. For $75, he told my husband that he was acting like a “goofball” and that he couldn’t do anything for his symptoms.  

To make a long story very short, my husband never had medical care after his skull fracture. He continues to pray and has adjusted pretty well to having lost his sense of hearing in one ear, his sense of taste and some vision on the affected side. He cannot smell the food he eats or the flowers in our front yard.

We felt thankful that we had ridden out his health problems when another medical emergency almost destroyed us.

In September 2008, my children and I were in a devastating auto accident. My son and I were able to walk away with minor scrapes, but our daughter was badly injured. The worst affliction was a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left her in a coma for five weeks at a pediatric intensive care unit. The KidCare insurance that covered her paid for her care — thank God for socialized medicine there! Her additional five weeks of rehabilitation were paid by another form of state Medicaid which took over when KidCare would only cover two weeks of rehab. We are still receiving thousands of dollars of medical bills for expenses outside her KidCare coverage.

After our daughter’s injury, we strapped our belts even tighter and purchased health coverage for my husband at a cost of $177 out of every biweekly paycheck. We were living on a reduced income that was then cut 9 percent by my employer in January of this year.  At least I am still employed, which wasn’t the case for a co-worker whose job was downsized after our pay was cut.

My source of extra income, freelance writing, dried up during the months we spent caring for our daughter. Newspapers and magazines aren’t buying as much freelance as they used to, or so I’ve been told by editors.

We purchased private insurance for my husband and all seemed well. When we tried using it for checkups, but discovered that we had been misinformed when we purchased the coverage. Our plan had a high deductible that made any sort of medical visits other than emergency care out of reach on our budget.

The materials that we reviewed mentioned all the “well care” that was covered and the very tiny print we missed said that we had to pay $1,500 out of our own pockets before we could actually see a doctor to stay well. In essence, we had health insurance that we paid a lot for and couldn’t afford to use.

Because our family is struggling to put food on the table, we cancelled my husband’s health insurance this month and he is uninsured again. We are just praying that God keeps him in His care while we think of other options. Florida has a new adult program similar to the KidCare that covers our children and we are looking into that as an option for him as soon as he is eligible. Darn! There goes that socialized medicine again!

As it stands, I am covered by private insurance that I can’t afford to use to stay well, my husband is uninsured and our children are covered by Florida’s Medicaid-lite for children. Our son just had a checkup and his vaccines were updated; our daughter can see doctors that accept her brand of  Medicaid for TBI care. My husband is out on his own trusting in God only. In fact, sometimes all we seem to have left is God.

I love hearing all the complaints about HR 676 from people who actually consider RedState and groups like them viable sources of information. The rights and freedoms they tell themselves will be lost when everyone has access to health care are just so precious to hear about.

Never mind that a lot of working families can’t afford health insurance: It’s those lazy people who won’t work and those who can prove President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii who are trying to ruin this nation. In the end, it’s not as much about health care for the poor as it is about profits and the status quo for the rich.

The doctor who circulated that offensive picture of President Obama as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose happens to practice in our county. I recall seeing the good doctor at county commission meetings as he clamored for lower taxes. A fellow county employee used to call his tirades Neurosurgeons for Tax Relief.

The Tea Party folks who enjoyed seeing President Obama as a witch doctor with a hammer and sickle in the copy really think that they will hold back the tide on the national health care that is coming in some way or another. Their arguments against it are about as realistic as seeing the average romance reader in a clinch with a muscular, bare-chested man who wants to kiss her throbbing lips and whisk her away to his well-appointed ranch.  (Edwardian mansions are out now in those novels, I hear.)

NPR ran a report this week about hundreds of people who camped out to see doctors and dentists during a health event in Appalachia. They began arriving days in advance to wait in line for basic health complaints: pulling out aching teeth or having someone look at a suppurating sore. It’s a good thing they didn’t lose their freedom to suffer from rotting molars and cancer.

I have not gone through all of  HR 676 yet. The sections that I’ve read have contained good and bad points. I know this nation needs national health coverage for all, but I’m not sure that this resolution will provide the best option possible. It may be time to go back to the drawing board on some areas, but so many people are willing to dismiss the very idea of accessible health care just because they have theirs locked in via private insurance they’re lucky enough to afford or because their health care comes from socialized medicine that is part of their retirement package.

Many of us can see that the opposition to HR 676 is rooted more in political agendas than in a genuine concern for the fates of those who are less fortunate. A mishap here or there and those well insured folks could be on the other side. HR 676 is not a perfect plan, as I’ve gathered from a partial reading of it, but it shouldn’t deter this nation from formulating a national health care initiative that restores dignity to each American.

I can’t imagine that we’ll stand before God and have a good excuse why we didn’t care for the least of our brothers. I don’t think God will accept the arguments RedState offers. The Father may ask what we did with the talents He gave us and, if He gave us more than He gave others, why we buried them in the field instead of multiplying them.

In the past year, our family has both given food and money to our church’s Society of St. Vincent de Paul and accepted food and money from the same source. I would like to think that what we gave when we were more prosperous a year ago helped others who are where we are now and that we may be able to repay their generosity as we’re able. Thank God that others in our church community donated food for families like ours.

The blood that I donated a year ago may have been given to my daughter when she was in intensive care last fall.  The homeless man I gave my last dollar to on the street a few weeks ago may find the help he needs to pull himself out of his circumstances. I guess I could have told him he was lazy instead of giving him the dollar in my wallet. I could have been guided by RedState’s rhetoric instead of by Matthew 25 before I placed a dollar in his calloused hand:

Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

35

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,

36

naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

37

Then the righteous ¹⁶ will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

38

When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

39

When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’

40

And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

41

¹⁷ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

42

For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,

43

a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

44

¹⁸ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’

45

He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’

46

And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

The bond between a mother and a child is modeled on God's bond with us.

My sister likes to say that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. I think God must think I am Wonder Woman because I have chastened and severely tried during the past 18 months.

The latest trial was having a child in juvenile trouble this week. Since it’s our first experience in this area, every aspect of the process was new to us. Just as we were newbies in pediatric intensive care and traumatic brain injuries after the auto accident that changed our lives, we are now newbies in the court system and all of its ancillary services.

We sat in court for a hearing this week and saw a group of six or seven teens in handcuffs and jail uniforms coming before a very compassionate but also very no-nonsense  judge. Two of the teens were girls and the rest were boys in their mid-to-late teens. Their offenses ranged from robbery and assault to setting off a fire alarm while on probation. One girl was facing a long sentence for burglary with assault and one of the boys had battered a sibling.

Their stories seemed so similar: repeated offenses, a lack of real parental authority and surly attitudes. Seeing any child in handcuffs is the most heartbreaking sight for a parent, but hearing that these kids have been in these situations before other judges was even sadder.

I will always remember a young boy named Michael who was handcuffed and in court alone. Other children had mothers or two parents standing with them before the judge, but  Michael’s repeated offenses had taken their toll on his mother. As the judge explained, she had called him to say she was “fed up” and wouldn’t come to court with Michael any more. He would face his crimes alone.

I thought of what the future would hold for this teen who seemed to need support and discipline more than abandonment. If God abandoned us for our repeated offenses, our world would be bereft of mercy or salvation. I prayed that someone in his family or in the juvenile system would intervene on Michael’s behalf to save him before he became old enough to enter the adult correctional system.

Our oldest daughter told us that her neighbor’s teen son is in the same morass as Michael. Our daughter’s neighbor had kicked her son out of the house because she couldn’t deal with his criminal activities. The mother has asked the neighbors to turn him in if he appears in their apartment complex. When that mother first held her son as a newborn, could she have imagined the bonds between them would ever break? What would life be like for two teenagers whose mothers have given up on them? What would life hold for us if our Blessed Mother gave up on us?

In Psalm 27, there are words proclaiming God’s love: Even if my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me in. He will always take Michael and others like him even when their own mothers turn their backs on them.  God will rejoice when his lost sheep return to him:

If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray? And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.  In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.

A teen’s first offense could be a correction that sets his or her life in order or it could be the start of a pattern that ends in a mother’s desperation and abandonment. Within each young man or woman, there’s the potential to take either road and God will never give up on his or her capacity for salvation. St. Augustine’s life of sin and his conversion after years of prayers by his mother, St. Monica, are signs that God can always work miracles for those who seem beyond hope.

Father Donald Calloway

A few Sundays ago, the Catholic radio station in our market ran a testimony from Father Donald Calloway a priest of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception.  Before God called him to the priesthood, his life had been marked by drugs and crime but his mother never gave up praying for him. His profound conversion gives the families of the worst young sinner a lot of hope. We only heard the first part of Father Calloway’s story, so we will have to wait to find the second part at Lighthouse Catholic Media, a company that provides amazing testimonies and personal stories of God’s love on low-cost CDs.

Neither his earthly mother nor his Mother in Heaven gave up on Father Calloway. None of us Catholic women should give up on our children, either. If the Blessed Virgin is our model, then our sons have the potential to save the lives of others as Her Son did. God, after all, writes straight with crooked lines.

And, as Elvis Costello  says in The Crooked Line, “How I hope I’ll find you waiting/At the very end of this crooked line.”

La Virgen del Carmen (Our Lady of Mount Carmel) in Beniajan, Spain

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the beloved Virgen del Carmen of Spain and Latin America. (Think of how many Latinas and Spanish women are named Carmen or Maria del Carmen for an idea of how widespread the devotion to this appearance of Our Lady is.)

St. Simon Stock’s encounter with the Blessed Mother in 1251 is the source of the use of the scapular, which she placed in his hands in answer to his prayers. Many of us wear scapulars predicated on her promise that “whoever dies in this garment will not suffer everlasting fire.”

The scapular is a covenant between Heaven and ourselves that prayers will rise to God for our salvation. The special saints of the Carmelites — St. Therese of the Child Jesus, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila — are our intercessors during these prayers for ourselves and for the souls in Purgatory.

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello is one of my favorite artists, as a songwriter and as an interpreter. He’s had a long career marked by tremendous live performances and albums that always take chances. Born Declan Patrick McManus in England, but of Irish heritage, he is gifted with a facility for wordplay that makes him the perfect songwriter for writers to listen to.

Costello wrote the lyrics to Shipbuilding, an antiwar song from the perspective of working people who survive by working in defense industries but who also lose their children to the wars that employ their handiwork. (There’s a live performance here.)

He wrote Shipbuilding during the runup to the Falklands War  between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982 over possession of a group of islands in the Atlantic. In the midst of a struggling economy and high unemployment, politicians like Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used national pride and the prospect of shipyards reopening and bringing more jobs building weapons of war to rally the British. Costello still considers the lyrics some of his best, as he told Q magazine in March 2008:

“It’s a pretty good lyric, yeah. The key line for me is, ‘Diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls.’ That we should be doing something beautiful, better than this. I wrote the lyric before the Belgrano (Argentinean Navy cruiser sunk by British forces during the 1982 Falklands conflict in controversial circumstances). I’ve been to see the monument, stood and read the names of all the men… well, boys, who died. Whatever you say about the conflict of war, that crime alone will see Thatcher in hell.”

Here are Costello’s lyrics to Shipbuilding, a haunting song with music by British producer Clive Langer and separate interpretations by Costello himself and Soft Machine vocalist Robert Wyatt:

Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday.
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
By the women and children
Soon we’ll be shipbuilding.

Well I ask you
The boy said “Dad they’re going to take me to task, but I’ll be back by Christmas”
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
Somebody said that someone got filled in
For saying that people get killed in
The result of this shipbuilding.

With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls.

It’s just a rumour that was spread around town.

A telegram or a picture postcard
Within weeks they’ll be re-opening the shipyards
And notifying the next of kin.
Once again
It’s all we’re skilled in
We will be shipbuilding
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls.

A still from the film version of "The Road" with Viggo Mortensen as the father

Dante envisioned the lowest point of Hell as that which is furthest from God in the Inferno book of his Commedia. In Inferno, that point is called Dis and it is dominated by Satan partly encased in ice, Judas eternally being macerated in his mouth.

That’s a very grim description of Hell and so is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a celebrated novel whose film version will be released in October to compete during the Academy Awards nominations period. McCarthy’s apocalyptic work is more novella than novel–I read it in a day–but it paints a vivid picture of a barren future where the absence of people, life and God are a reality.

In McCarthy’s novel, the world has been decimated by an unnamed cataclysm. There are few human survivors, no animals, no plant life and an endless winter we might envision as a post-nuclear holocaust. A man and his son are on the road to the coast, where they imagine there’s a better chance to survive. Along the way, they encounter barbarity, depravity, cannibalism and the inevitable signs of the death of everything. They exist in a hopeless world where the few survivors literally consume each other. They hoard the few bullets in their gun for a time when they might have to use them to end their lives.

McCarthy, a reclusive author whose first TV appearance was with Oprah Winfrey when she anointed The Road as one of her book club choices,  was asked by daytime TV’s grande dame for his thoughts on God:

“It would depend on what day you ask me. I don’t think you have to have a great idea of who or what God is in order to pray … you can be quite doubtful about the whole business.”

To a Catholic reader, the world that McCarthy creates is all the more bleak because there’s no God. The man, his son and the few humans they meet are in Dis, their existence a literal Hell. The vision of a cult-like group that the father and son observe on the road is a violent alternative to a church congregation. The boy hears about God from one of the survivors, but he is too traumatized by the world to listen.

The novel’s saving grace is the love between the father and son, which is expressed simply, but poetically. The father lives to save his son from the world and the son learns how to survive in it from the father. Their bond is the core of the story and it’s the boy who retains his humanity even though he was born after the world fell apart.

The boy’s love for others and the father’s love for his son are beautifully expressed in The Road.  Considering the dreary, absent-God world created by McCarthy, they’re the only redeeming values in a story that is an allegory for how our world could end.

We exist on a planet where nuclear war is always a possibility, where global warming is wreaking havoc on polar ice caps and plant life, where the gap between the powerful and powerless grows each day. A future where God doesn’t exist and all of these man-made disasters are allowed to play out can only end in a barren world like McCarthy’s creation if we can’t redeem ourselves.

The Road is a sobering, difficult novel, but it is thought-provoking. Unless we can remain human beings with the capacity to love, says the author, we will descend to barbarism and the world will end. Hell, after all, is the furthest point from God.

Cutline from "Without Sanctuary": "The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, a large gathering of lynchers. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana"

Look at the photo above:  What is more repulsive, the sight of the battered and hanged bodies or the church-picnic smiles of the crowd that perpetrated the crime or just sat back and enjoyed it?

James Cameron was 16 years old when a mob in Marion, IN, came to lynch him and two other African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, on August 7, 1930. He tells the story in A Time of Terror and there’s a retelling of it here as well as in Without Sanctuary, the online exhibit on the shameful history of lynching in America:

The lynchers posed for photos under the limb that held the bodies of the two dead men. …Then the mob headed back for James Cameron and “mauled him all the way to the courthouse square,” shoving and kicking him to the tree, where the lynchers put a hanging rope around his neck. Cameron credited an unidentified woman’s voice with silencing the mob (Cameron, a devout Roman Catholic, believes that it was the voice of the Virgin Mary) and opening a path for his retreat to the county jail and, ultimately, for saving his life.

Photos of the lynched bodies were sold for 50 cents and the mob fought for pieces of the corpses’ clothing as souvenirs. The jovial mood of the Midwestern crowd that has just seen two other human beings beaten, hanged and tortured is the most shocking aspect of the photo that sold in the thousands. Cameron remembers looking at the mob and recognizing classmates, men whose shoes he had shined and others whose lawns he had mowed. The capacity for grisly violence and the desire to have a tidy yard can parodoxically coexist in the same human being.

Dr. James Cameron

Cameron devoted his life to teaching others about mob violence and racism with the NAACP and at the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, WI. He believed that the Blessed Mother saved his life and certainly no force other than divine intervention could have rescued a terrified teenager from death by mob justice. In his 80s, Cameron described the voice thus: “It was a voice from heaven. It was a miracle … God saved me for [what] I’m doing today.” Others who heard the voice described it as “an angelic voice” and as a “sweet, undefiled, and distinct voice, unlike any he had ever heard.”

Cameron and the lynched men had been accused of shooting a white man and raping his girlfriend. The victim was another of Cameron’s shoeshine clients and he never took part in shooting him, but one of his friends fired the gun and the man lay dead. After the lynching, the girlfriend’s testimony came to light and she denied that the young men had ever touched her, but it was irrelevant by then. Cameron spent four years in prison for being present during the robbery; he received a pardon in 1993. Cameron died at the age of 92 in 2006, still being moved to tears every time he told the story of his near-lynching and his salvation by Our Lady. His faith, and the rope burns around his neck, always remained with him.

The face on the Shroud of Turin

Either we go up together or we go down together. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

We are all busy during our workday and sometimes even a break or lunch eludes us, but we are always nestled in the hands of God and that He shows us His face in others. I had the blessing of experiencing that today.

A random post on a social networking group I joined recently led me to deep prayer for a stranger. A fellow communications professional asked for prayers for her nephew, who is in critical condition after a car accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Since last September, our family has been dealing with our 13-year-old daughter’s TBI and its aftermath. I’ve posted entries about our ordeal here before but, in short: Our beautiful daughter was in a coma for five weeks and in rehab for another five weeks before she joined us at home. Young people with similar injuries are very special to me now because I know the hell that their families endure when they see their child with a TBI in intensive care.

When I read about the young man accident on my social networking group, I contacted the family and we’ve been in touch all day today sorting out this terrible event.  The young man is 17 and today he was due to be anointed with a glove that belonged to St. Pio of Pietrelcina, the beloved Padre Pio whose intercession we sought during our daughter’s worst days.  Please pray for Daniel Perrino today. He is in God’s hands today and our prayers are desperately needed for his healing.

As Dr. King put it, we can either rise or fall together. After a busy morning working and praying for Daniel, I finally made it to the bank to make two deposits for my employer. I was thinking of TBIs and beating the rain as I walked the block to the bank. Ahead of me, there was an old woman in shabby clothing. She had a tote bag hooked to her walker as she laboriously walked the few steps from the bank’s parking lot to the main entrance. Seeing the face of God in her, I hurried to open the two bank doors and she thanked me for my “beautiful heart.”

I walked to the line in the lobby, still thinking of how quickly I could leave before the rain began. As I waited, the same woman eventually stood behind me. I gave her my place in line so she wouldn’t have to wait longer than I and, again, she thanked me.

My deposits in, I walked out and the same woman was walking to the two bank doors to leave. It was as if God had put her in my path today for some good. Again, I helped her out.

On the sidewalk, she told me that she had come in for cash to pay for her handicapped tag. A state employee had been thoughtful enough to tell her that Florida is raising its fees on September 1. Paying for her tag early would save her a little cash instead of waiting to renew on her birthday, she said. I mentioned that I wanted to do the same thing with my tag because my birthday was coming up in October.

She stopped and looked at me: Her birthday was in October, too, and she asked which day. The 17th, I told her and, with a big smile, she told me that was her birthday, too. It turns out that she was exactly 30 years older than me. She told me that her name was Georgietta and I told her mine. We shared a moment and I told her to be safe as she drove across the street to the registration office to get her tag.

The odds of walking in and out with this stranger who shared my birthday are astronomical. Most of the times that I make a deposit at this bank, I walk in and out without talking to anyone except the teller. It seems that Georgietta needed someone to be kind to her today, and a stranger who shared her birthday and just wanted to beat the rain was God’s instrument to do that. 

I could be Georgietta in 30 years walking into a bank and hoping that someone I don’t know will care enough to hold a door for me or to chat for a minute. This afternoon, God showed his face to me as a disabled woman without much money but with the capacity to let me be kind.

Praying for a boy I don’t know or holding a door for an elderly woman who shares my birthday showed me that we are always in the hands of God, ready to love his people as He commands us to do, and that those he puts in our path bear His face.