The pain of watching a loved-one degenerate

To read the latest blog entry by my wife LaRee, go to http://humanlifematters.org

MP

Thoughts about Mother Teresa and Barack Obama

To read my blog for January 30th 2010, go to http://humanlifematters.blogspot.com/

MP

Baby Isaiah

Go to - http://humanlifematters.blogspot.com/ to read the latest about Baby Isaiah and how to show your support to him and his his parents.

MP

Saint Clement I, on Divine love, from 1 Corinthians

"Let the man truly possessed by the love of Christ keep his commandments. Who can express the binding power of divine love? Who can find words for the spendor of its beauty? Beyond all description are the heights to which it lifts us. Love unites us to God; it cancels innumerable sins, it has no limit to its endurance, bears everything patiently. Love is neither servile or arrogant. ... By it all God's chosen ones have been sanctified; without it, it is impossible to please Him. Out of love God took us to himself; because He loved us and it was God's will, our Lord Jesus Christ gave His blood for us -- He gave his body for our body, his soul for our soul.

See then, beloved, what a great and wonderful thing love is, and how inexpressible its perfection. Who is worthy to possess it unless God makes them so? To Him therefore we must turn, begging of His mercy that there may be found in us a love free from human partiality and beyond reproach. Every generation from Adam's time to ours has passed away; but those who by God's grace were made perfect in love have a dwelling place among the saints, and when at last the kingdom of Christ appears, they will be revealed."

(Saint Clement I, pope, was a disciple of Saint Peter and possibly Saint Paul and the first of the Apostolic Fathers. Some Biblical scholars believe he is the Clement mentioned in Saint Paul's letter to the Philippians 4.3)

HLM

Three pillars of truth for secular minds

Read my latest post "Three pillars of truth for secular minds" at http://humanlifematters.blogspot.com/

MP

This song is for you, far away

James Taylor is singing a sweet melody

This is a song for you,
Far away, far away,
This is a song for you,
Far away,
from me.

It makes me think that on January 18th it will be 40 years since I last saw my father.

He died on a ski hill while the two of us were skiing. It was 1970. He was 52 years old and I was sixteen. He took a heart attack in front of me, fell face down in the snow and promptly died. It seems like yesterday. I took off his skiis, rolled him onto his back, but he was gone. The memory is indelibly burned into my memory of sitting in the snow beside his corpse that winter day while an off-duty doctor, by fluke, happened upon us and tried valiantly but unsuccesfully to revive him.

My father passed into the ages. We became me.

DEATH DOES NOT KILL LOVE

I keep a small room of memories of him in my mind. (I keep little memory rooms in my little grey cells for all the people I love.) His room is filled with mental pictures, things he said and did, various places we went and certain music that reminds of him. I usually keep the door gentle closed to that memory room because, after all, life carries on.

But I'm sitting here on this Saturday morning so far away from that terrible day; it all comes back again. I'm the only person awake in the house. Yes, I've been thinking and reminiscing. On January 18th at 3:30 pm it will be exactly forty years since I saw Dad's manly and beloved face. Yet his venerable face is smiling right in front of me.

Sitting here all alone
Is bringing it on again
I'm gone again,
thinking of you,
Sitting here thinking you
Is driving it home again. ...

His room, deep in my little grey cells, is filled with his words and his devotion to God and family, his love of children, his commitment to community and education -- in other words, the very essence what made him him. (After he died the small town where we lived named a school after him. See Http://www.wrsd.ca/hwpickup/about.htm). The epitaph on my Dad's tombstone reads, "He served God and man."

James Taylor's song continues on my stereo,

Open the door it takes me back,
Mention you name and I'm gone again,
Ahh, I'm gone again.

Today the door to his room in my mind is opening easily. Peeking in I can smell old books and his pipe tobacco. His reading lamp is on and and his Bible is laying open on the family's heavy, over-stuffed and worn burgundy 1940s style chesterfield. (Dad wasn't the type to discard something just because it was old.) His reading glasses are sitting on the Bible's pages waiting for him to return from somewhere far away. I look down to see Psalm 139. (The first 10 verses were read at his funeral.)

It's strange that later, much later, years after my first child was aborted in 1971, Psalm 139.13-16 broke my heart and was a major influence in my own repentance and becoming involved in the Pro-Life movement.

And so as I approach the 40th anniversary of my father's death I imagine my child sitting on his lap, in the light of Christ's love. They are waiting for me.

This is a song for you,
Far away, so far away,
from me.

Mark

An Internal Voice: A Forever Moment

The Sunday after Christmas I awoke with a deep sense of inconsolable longing that has often visited me at unexpected moments since early childhood. (I've written about this before.) C.S. Lewis referred to this longing as a desire for our own far-off country. I suspect that in your heart of hearts you have the same inconsolable longing that hurts with such primordial sweetness that it breaks your heart.

Lewis described this longing like a desire for our own past, though this description falls short. He said this longing or desire is like "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." (The Weight of Glory). Such was my yearning that Sunday morning.

And so I transferred from bed to wheelchair and made my way to the kitchen of my house to look out the window. There before me lay a fresh blanket of snow and a frigid Canadian December morning. Thick hoarfrost bedecked every limb of every tree in white: God's Christmas card to all who would accept it. It was magical! Nature's concert to the soul played a tribute to purity and holiness -- like a divine music box resonating across the ages -- for all who stop to listen.

An internal voice whispered to me Get dressed. Go to Mass. The Eucharist awaits. And so I drove my electric wheelchair up the Beaumont hill toward the church. A wintry fog hung low in the cold air obscuring my view of the church, except for the bell-tower that could be faintly seen rising through the white fog. That same voice whispered again, "He waits to bless you."

Inside the old red-brick church, four Advent candles flickered to announce the arrival of the Christ-child. God made man. A Nativity scene at the front of the sanctuary welcomed all. A choir sang familiar carols. The magic of the Christmas Season continued as Mass began leading us inexorably to its climax with the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist which is "the source and summit of the Christian life." In the Eucharist is Christ himself by which we unite ourselves with Him and anticipate eternal life. I basked in this union.

When Mass ended I made my way back out into the crisp, cold, clean winter air and started back down the hill to my little house at the bottom of the hill. At one point on my way home, a canopy of evergreen trees arches over the sidewalk; a slight wind shook hoarfrost from the branches which fell around me like confetti. Something of Him told me to turn around and look back up the hill. And so I did.

As hoarfrost floated to the ground around me I saw the old church at the crest of the hill, where I had just been. The church-bell began to ring. God was blessing me and filling my heart with His peace and joy. It was a forever moment. I knew I'm loved by the Author of love and life.

In his book entitled Miracles, C.S. Lewis said that the Incarnation is the central miracle asserted by Christians. God became a man. He wrote, "Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this."

Christ was among us. He remains with us even to the end of the age.

MP