We thought we were safe with the health care bill, but in fact it was just out of the skillet and into the frying pan.  More suspense, more waiting, more tension to come.  All because of a hapless Mass. atorney general who insulted Boston Red Sox fans twice. 

I learned in a letter that my Mom considered for a while being a nun.  I didn’t know that.  I had no way of knowing, for as long as I kept gawking at the wife of my boys, that she had a mystical streak in her that goes a long toward explaining how those boys finally emerged out of adolescence, instead of leaving their souls there.  I participate in all of this, with a weak need to come clean on the God question.

When I look back on my life, I see someone who, at one point, would have done anything to rub out each and every trace of his American past.  Ashamed of myself, and ashamed of what had happened “over there.”  Then, slowly, ashamed of the shame.  Till the good things started to occur.  For example, I now smile, the housework done, to have uncovered no less than three copies of the French translation of Moby Dick.  The only way to read Moby Dick was to read it in translation.  (During the same time period, my friend Brian was trying to figure out a way of answering the challenge of this big book.)  Recently, I read it in English, and of course was blown away.  Incomparable language.  No language like Melville’s anywhere in the world!  One of the good things that has started happening.  Here’s a sample, just for the joy of writing it out,like in a copybook.

There is no steady unreracing progress in this life: we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt … then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If.  But once gone through, we trace the round again: and as infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.  Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?

That was Ishmael, contemplating a ceaseless tide.  And summing up much of what has taken place here.  Every American ought to answer Ishmael’s question.  Without having to pander to sensibilities or worry about hurting feelings.  Where lies the final harbor?  In death, or in something else?  Some afterlife?  How do we justify the amazing religious practices that still characterize us as a nation?  What goes on during those trips to church?  What kinds of prayers do we say? 

My answer is that we need a sense of adventure.  And danger.  And risk.  There is no retirement from that.  We trace the round again.  As infants, boys, and men.  I added here, “and as old men.”  And old women.  (Don’t expect Melville to be very informative about women.)  Up to a certain point, my adventure, and danger, and risk takes the shape of what occurs between the covers of books.  But not only.  The difference between books and Books makes things happen.  Make children be conceived.  An adventure, a trap, something to be assimilated and metabolized, to be taken in, then thrown out.  Easy to say, except when you see that it’s going on in reverse too: your children are doing precisely the same thing.  Pondering repose?  Yes indeed, however shameful that may feel.  There are moments when you can engage in pondering repose.  (Not the same thing as vacation.  Closer to prayer than vacation.)

It takes practice and the ability to get up off your ass to stay tuned to adventure.  That’s why women are so fascinated by the Don Juan type.  He’s got so much energy, and never takes no for an answer!  But energy for us, as Americans, is at a low ebb right now.  Trust in the future is low, community activities rarer than ever before, friends fewer.  We distrust more now than in the fifties and sixties.  We have communcation technologies to help us along on this fateful path. 

Where does the energy come from?  Diotima told Socrates it comes from your own personal devil.  Or demon.  Or spirit.  That was mythological, but eternally true nevertheless.  People keep getting fired up, before they get scared and start to retreat.  Then the round begins again.  (That has been the rhythm of these posts, too.)  I don’t think there is a final harbor.  I don’t think there is an afterlife.  We have an infinite distance to traverse before catching up with the Jews.  With the most faithful and the most devout amongst them.  Who don’t place much credence in the afterlife.  But who see all of its attributes and caracteristics present in the round of life and death and life rising from the ashes of destruction, not triumphant, but present. 

I continue to go to Church because it’s my family.  Like here: I come back, again and again, to this post idea because of the title: families do matter, and you don’t have a choice in the matter.  And that’s good.   Not to have a choice.  Not having a choice comes from the same place as being able to count on pondering repose.  We must survive death, and we have been taught that this involves loving one’s neighbor as oneself.  The stangest neighbor of all is the brother or sister, the son or daughter, the father or mother.  That’s the first and last laboratory of this commandment’s effectiveness and effective shape.  Because all of these people are arbitrary others to oneself.  As strange as strange gets. 

Perhaps I’m crazy, but I think there are people present to these posts.  Intermittently.  Because you become present wherever and whenever (Shakira!) human beings are present.  I’ve been present here.  Kilroy was here.  As one living in the onward rush of humankind, who acquires a new face with every newborn child.  And with every approaching death that is so close to that newborn child on the other side of the spectrum. 

I wrote an essay criticizing John Stuart Mill at Notre Dame.   I’d gladly delete it now.  I can’t see anyone not going along with what the man says below. 

I am now speaking of the unselfish.  Those who are so wraped up in self that they are unable to identify their feelings with anything which will survive them, or to feel their life prolonged in their younger contemporaries and in all who help to carry on the progressive movement of human affairs, require the notion of another selfish life beyond the grave, to enable them to keep up any interest in existence, since the present life, as its termination approches, dwindles into something too insignificant to worth caring about. 

The ugliest thing I heard last year was during the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.  Sarah threw out, a parting shot, concerning his wife’s profession (teaching) that her reward was waiting for her in heaven.  That’s the visage of selfishness today, selfishness, and fear: the curving inward of life.  I’m waiting for my daughter and grand-daughter to tell me, and to show me, to what extent all the books and posts and letters and papers and essays and translations have been a part of this inward curve.  I’m waiting too to imagine them surprised that I be so sprightly at such a moment on life’s curve from birth to death.