For this 100th CatholicCatholic, as so often, thinking of a topic isn’t easy, so I’ll take the opportunity to revisit the original concept.

I apologize for the name. Years ago, in a light-hearted, San Francisco moment, Aimee and I thought we could write a travel column, but for who? Maybe if we had information about local churches, we could run it in a Catholic publication, for observant Catholics who, like us, are interested in everything, Catholics with a universalistic world view who are not sheltered, fearful, insecure.

At the time, a trend was fully afoot for bands to give themselves a double name, i.e., Speaker Speaker. My distaste for that concept notwithstanding, we named our idea “CatholicCatholic.”

A brother of mine and I often discuss religious matters, and he said I should write a blog, so I started this. As always, I had no thought for publicity, so out goes the blog, and nobody knows about it except Aimee and my brother. Have to put it on Facebook, I guessed, so I did that with the lukewarm enthusiasm of a most reluctant evangelist.

Am I the guy to turn people’s hearts toward God, and faith in Jesus? I sympathize with Kierkegaard, who used pseudonyms because he thought no one would take his writing seriously if they knew he wrote it.

Religious faith is a touchy, touchy thing. The idea that this one ancient book is true, and all it says is true, is so far-fetched. I remember someone said, first people believe in communism, then they read Marx. Christianity is like that, I think. Some people have that inclination, and the Bible is compatible with their intuition and sensitivities.

If The Bible is true, and God exists, and Jesus is just like the Bible tells it, I thought, doesn’t that have to be the be-all and end-all of life? What is more important than making sure this tiny grain of sand of a life winds up on the right eternal beach? That should be the entire focus of one’s life. I should totally be a monk.

As a great admirer of Archbishop Hunthausen, I tried out for the local priesthood instead, because of the great need for local priests. I took the tests, and failed them. Didn’t get much of a an explanation; didn’t find out which questions I didn’t answer well. Just a short letter in the mail. Ever since, I wonder, how common is it to flunk that test?

A local Dominican priest said I should be a Dominican. Even knowing my dreary personal history, he said that, and flattery gets you everywhere with me, so I bit, and interviewed with their people, but that dreary personal history condemned me. The vocations director did write me a really nice letter, saying their rejection of me probably said more about them than about me. Thank you! It is so true that why can’t people just tell a nice little fib sometimes and spare a guy’s feelings, especially when nobody is really fooled, but the gesture will really make the guy feel a lot less worse than he could be made to feel?

“I’m just telling the truth,” people say. I hate those people.

I wanted to be a monk anyway– the more quiet, the more secluded, the better. Someone gave me “The Seven-Storey Mountain,” and I was off to see the Snowmass, Colorado Cistercians for three one-week visits. A fabulous place! So beautiful to be in their candle-lit church at 4am, listening to the men recite and chant, looking outside at the stars and trees in the snow.

As part of that process, I visited Cistercians in Utah and California for a week each too– the quonset huts of the Utah monastery; the grapefruit trees and 100-degree heat of Sacramento. Either place, I would have signed off on for the rest of my life in a heartbeat, although Snowmass was my first choice.

Driving back to the airport at the end of my final one-week visit to Snowmass, the monk said they had a vote the day before: 7 yes, 7 no. The abbot cast the tiebreaker: no. After I’d mowed the lawn of their guest house the day before, steep slopes, an old lawnmower, a hot day, thinking, they wouldn’t ask me to do this if they weren’t having me back.

To be told that on the drive to the airport– that hurt with the kind of pain that takes a long time to register. One sees one’s spirit being crushed as if it’s happening to someone else, because the heart and soul are too sensitive to be fully present to that kind of emphatic rejection.

All these things that happen in life, all these misadventures and distractions– an odd fact of life is that I am the same physical height I was in high school. It’s impossible to think that when I was a miserable, hypersensitive, neurotic, depressed, suicidal teenager, I was the same size I am now, the same person I am now. I was thrilled to listen to music that still thrills me today. I laughed. I had friends. I told jokes and had good times anyway, just like today, the same 5’6″, the same person, and I still think, if that book is true, then that has the secrets of the be-all and end-all.

Despite all the weird and sick baggage He’s been saddled with by this church and that church, Jesus abides in my heart as the one who speaks the truth, and I can no more walk away from that than I can walk away from myself.

With that reassurance, I can go anywhere in the world, because this is all my world, as it belongs to every one of us. That is the idea behind CatholicCatholic.

Thanks for reading!

Finding a plumber and getting the kitchen sink fixed; getting a new computer; raising a 3-year-old boy and a newborn boy: “togetherness projects,” Aimee and I call them.

That was July. August is our month, at Aimee’s instigation, to do a “Whole 30:” a 30-day dietary regimen that focuses on the elimination of processed foods and grains. One can imagine the complications subsequent upon such guidelines.

What about…. Beer? Rice? Jelly beans? Ice cream? Coke? Lemonade? Bourbon?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Do you even have to ask? No. Do you know the answer already? Yes. But should whoever’s idea this was have to come right out and tell you that you can’t have those things because that person should have to concretely reckon with the woeful face of the one corralled into this? Yes, that person should have to look you right in the eye and say, “No, you cannot have that cold soda pop on a 95-degree day after you’ve been working outside for two hours.” That person then has the opportunity to say, “Instead, have this delicious cold lime water in a glass filled with ice cubes!”

Thirty days is all. On the 31st day, one can have a nice bowl of ramen with a few slices of bread and a cold soda and think, “I miss the days when I was exalted by that higher mission.”

A sense of mission is a glorious thing.

A diet is such a mission, as is training for a marathon and undergoing a spiritual trial such as Lent and Ramadan. After the Seattle Marathon of Thanksgiving weekend, December arrives with its absence of training runs and its laments over quickly falling out of shape.

How to recapture that sense of mission? What to do next?

A mission requires commitment, sacrifice, effort, a deadline, and a concrete result. One cannot say, “Live your life as well as you can,” because there’s no deadline.

A New Year’s resolution can work, because it is limited by that one year.

A poetry project works because a commitment is there to write the poetry on a schedule.

The Whole 30 involves the sacrifice of abstaining from the ice cream one suddenly remembers is still buried in the freezer.

Marathon training includes the effort to always run that final lap around the track, although one knows one can do it. One still has to follow through and run that last, most important lap.

Afterward, one has the memory of the exaltation of that sense of mission, and motivation to seek out new challenges.

A newspaper article detailed the high numbers of men in their 40s having their first children, and how Seattle and Portland, Oregon have some of the highest rates of such men in the country.

The article focused on one such man. He only wanted one kid, he said, because he didn’t want other kids making fun of how old he was to his kids.

Being a newspaper article, this point was presented without an opposing viewpoint, with every indication that this is a common and respectable viewpoint. So, is it? So, it is.

But so it so, so isn’t!

As someone who just had a second child in his 50s, here’s my meandering reasoning as to why.

How old was your Dad when you were born?

As one’s mind consults the archives and lays the groundwork for the math…. As one’s face registers the immediate emotions entailed by the implications of such a question…. As you try to anticipate where this line of questioning is leading, one is distracted by the instantaneous assertion that such a question is not terribly relevant to who you are and what type of relationship you have had with your Dad.

Although it’s true that one day you stumbled across the enlightening exercise of ascertaining how old was your father when you were born, and how does that inform your sense of self as you approach or pass that same age?

Took a long time to get to that question in my case. I was in my 20s when I began to wonder how old my Mom and Dad were when my siblings and I were forced kicking and screaming into this vale of tears.

Anyway, it was a long time ago. Was it like we were using the same technology, like we wanted the same things from life, and expected the same future for the world? Not really.

We had the bedrock belief that, since the ’60s, the world had changed and it had become much harder for the twain of the first half of the century (i.e., our parents) and the twain of the ’50s onward to meet.

Now, the ’60s and ’70s– that had nothing on the ’00s and ’10s we’re witnessing nowadays.

The gap between my parents and their children was a pothole compared to the washed-out bridge between the likes of newspaper-reading, 6:00 evening news-watching, CD-playing, letter-writing, used bookstore-shopping me and people just a little (say, 20 years) younger who do not read newspapers, watch TV shows when they come on without a thought to taping them, and read e-books.

Twenty years, nowadays, is far more than long enough to establish a decisive difference between the world I have lived in and the world my kids will live in. I will know that from experience, as a fact, but my kids will recognize that in their bones and blood as a deep existential reality, a deeper level even than experience.

They will know how old I am, and, as children, in their childish minds, they will find it hilarious and ridiculous. If I was 30, it would be all that. If I am 50 or 60, it couldn’t be much more humorous, on the same level of humor as my old-fashioned hair and clothes and the bizarre stories I’ll tell.

Trivia– that’s all. Being 50 sometimes seems like a big deal to me, because I know where I’ve been and I know what it means, but my kids aren’t going to be interested in that for a long, long time.

Why should they be the first kids to take a keen interest from a young age in the individual lives of their parents?

The age of the father is just another minor piece of trivia to a child, not a decisive factor as to whether someone should ever have been born or not.

They will have their own lives and their own world to preoccupy them first and foremost. Then, maybe someday, in a quiet moment, they’ll think about what it might have been like for their parents to have reached the point where they decided the time had come to take their place between generations and place their hope and trust in their children who would be as unique as they are, as uncannily the same, as unimaginably different.

The exact age differences in a family might have seemed important once, to someone, but as the years go by, the trivial numbers fade and disappear.

If it’s a good group of people, nine will make the messes and one will clean up. That’s in a good group, and most groups are good, but sometimes that one in ten becomes the one in twenty or the one who never showed up.

Rooming houses, apartment buildings, offices: all the same.

The one in ten often doesn’t like it, but cannot do otherwise than clean up after the nine who seem oblivious to the mess, the role they play in it, the injustice felt by that one, who most likely was the person in the triplex who week after week took out the common trash bins to the curb. And put them back– sometimes after four days, when no one else would.

If someone went up to one of the nine and asked, “What about the idea of ‘the one in ten?’ Are you ever that person?”

“Oh yeah! The guy who has to buy the birthday card for my dad because my brothers and sisters won’t?” he says. “I’ve known some other people in the exact same boat.”

It’s the greatest stretch I ever have to make, the idea that other people are more like me than I would think. As someone who does rare and special things, I am constantly aghast at the lack of recognition and tormented by the insignificance of those very things that are obviously of little to no import or significance.

But the nine need the one in ten.

For every one, there might well be another nine. To look at the other nine and not know how each is one in ten is to confront that fundamental ignorance in my own self that I so readily seem to see in others who are oblivious to the unique and esteemed vocation I have as a one in ten to them.

A husband, a wife, a three-year-old boy, a 2-week-old boy. a year-old dog: four agents of chaos, one agent of order.

The self-described agent of order has the self-appointed charge of trying to keep everything in reasonable order– wash the dishes, do the laundry, spot clean, manage the yard, put things away.

The other adult does most of the cooking and direct child care: dressing, undressing, cleaning, washing.

The three-year-old tears through everything and scatters it to every corner of the house and yard.

The latter two do so without complaint.

“If I didn’t pull these pots and pans out of the cupboard, they would stay there. If I didn’t wear all these clothes, nobody would.” I never hear that.

“If I didn’t dump these toys out in the living room, no one would ever put them away.” Never hear that.

“Why do I have to wash all the dishes, and collect the trash and put it outside in the bins?” I could ask, but that would negate the value of the job.

The value of the job is not so much in keeping a somewhat clean house, or staying busy, or having two presentable kids. The real value of the job is to contribute in the ways I’m naturally inclined, doing my thing as it is beneficial without it being any kind of deal, without pretending I shouldn’t have to do it, being grateful for the chance to be “a really useful engine,” helping the rest of the household to live their natural lives without stress, guilt, or apology.

Having a baby can really light a fire under a person.

We must fix things! Our children shouldn’t have to live in a world with blah blah blah blah blah.

Maybe I’ve got some kind of problem, but that hasn’t happened to me. It’s impossible to get emotionally invested in every ongoing calamity and future disaster, every nation imperiled by ISIS and climate change, every Mariner stranded on base.

Two sons: George and Oliver, who, I assume, will reach my current age and surpass it and every milestone along the way. Days and nights will come when they struggle in the world, alone, and pause to remember their folks, after I’m gone, after both of us are gone. That’s poignant.

I think of my folks that way, sad that Aimee and G. and O. will never know them. Maybe they’ll have grandkids who will never know them, but I remember visiting my family for Christmas, leaving them at the airport– sad scenes! Walking down the ramp onto the plane, elated to be my single solitary self again.

We took G. and O. to a local coffee shop the other day– O.’s first family walk– and got to talking about what, it seems to us, will be some of the dominant issues of life for a 21st century Seattle kid.

Changing technology. Not for me it wasn’t, but is it? Hardly a day goes by that a device doesn’t baffle me and remind me that my own software is inadequate for the challenges, tasks, and opportunities at hand for the digital native.

Safe to assume that G. and O. are going to see some crazy technology.

Changing demography. I didn’t grow up among people from every populated continent, but they will. I see people from all over the place, everywhere, every day, except maybe one place– Canada. What are they waiting for? What is their plan? When I see the Coast Guard ships and helicopters, I wonder…. Who are they looking for? Are we under threat? From where?

Canada?!?

I’ve been to Canada. Do not underestimate these people. They’re nice, but…. What if they snap?

Changing economy. Maybe Social Security isn’t going to survive much longer. As someone not far from collecting my share of that pie, I desperately hope to get that. I fully expect them to string me along and try to keep me waiting until I’m senile.

How G. and O. will be able to afford an education or a home or a weekly trip to PCC is beyond me.

Changing environment. The dry season began more than a month early this year– a MONTH. Good luck, Washington state flower, the rhododendron. Good luck, Mt. Rainier glaciers, Olympic rain forest.

Changing technology, changing demography, changing economy, changing environment, I wrote on a piece of paper.

I asked Aimee, how do you cut those 8 words in half? “Cross out ‘changing,'” she said.

Or, how do you reduce those 8 words by about 85%? Change “changing” to “change.”

The same things that have always been changing.

The rainbows have been nagging at me, because I did not deal with the gay marriage issue at all adequately in my last post.

With such a huge issue, it’s not enough to be in favor of something just because one wants to be in favor of it, because it seems like the right opinion. If other people have powerful and dissenting opinions, one cannot simply walk away from their arguments as if one cannot articulate an appropriately complex and sound counterargument.

Is it enough to say, “Jesus never talked about gays.” No, it’s not. Is it enough to say, “Sex wasn’t that important to Jesus, because He didn’t talk about it much.” No, it’s not.  He did tell that woman, “Don’t sin anymore.” (As He said to everyone.)

“Why not decide for yourselves what is right?” He said. There we have a decisive endorsement of the concept that one ought not be afraid to think for one’s self and come to one’s own conclusions. And if Jesus says, “Joe, explain yourself,” I’ll have the opportunity to explain myself and my argument will be judged on its merits. If my argument is insufficiently persuasive compared to another argument, let the better argument prevail.

Opponents of gay marriage and gayness in general have their arguments, and what pains me, as a Catholic, is that many visible and powerful Catholics are making flawed arguments.

As an American, and a Catholic, I take government seriously. In one of His more memorable episodes, Jesus looked at the coin and said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” As we give to the government what belongs to the government.

The government is entitled to legitimacy, to our respect for it as the legitimate governing body of our nation, and to our demands that it uphold its and our principles.

One of my demands on our government is that it protect and promote the welfare of everyone subject to its laws. On that basis, the government is obligated to allow and facilitate gay marriage. Clearly and simply, this is a civil rights issue. Complicate it however much, whoever wants to, it still comes back to that.

That the Catholic Church has opposed laws advocating civil protections for gays against discrimination has been incomprehensible and embarrassing to me.

One cannot wish away the sexual issues, though.

The beginning and end of this aspect of the issue is this: sex is meant for procreation.

Yes, it is.

Is that truly the beginning and end of this issue?

Oh no.

Sex might be an individual’s primary and most primal expression of individuality. (If it’s not, it’s near the top of the list.)

To use dichotomies for the sake of discussion, sex is a constructive force within one’s life, or a destructive force. Selfless vs. selfish.

If not a means of procreation, it is an ultimate expression of intimacy, acceptance, and trust that a human being is compelled toward as an essential part of the human experience. In such a case, sex is a positive and creative force expressive of the highest human dignity as experienced by that individual.

There is the letter of the law, and the spirit of the law, and in the spirit of human dignity, sexuality is one of the aspects of the human experience that is as much about soul as about body, soul and body being not two halves of a false dichotomy, but a whole.

The rainbow flag is everywhere. I thought, “What can I say about that? I’m not going to write about that, I guess,” but even here on WordPress the rainbow stripes are up there.

I accept the rainbow stripes. Down the street, some neighbors fly a rainbow flag. Past the house walk our Muslim neighbors. People walk past, walking dogs, walking each other. We ride bikes around the neighborhood, down to the Thursday night Pasar Malam (“night market,” as Malaysians say). People generally find all this acceptable.

Maybe that person passing by is gay. Maybe that person is a conservative Muslim, a conservative Jew, a conservative Christian, a conservative Buddhist. Maybe that person was 16 when the Beatles played at the Seattle Center. Maybe that person lives in that house with those weird gigantic plants in the front yard.

Hard as it can be, as loath as one is to have his motives questioned, one can smile and say “Hello” if your paths cross as you walk down the street. Neighborliness can be contagious. It’s a simple expression of acceptance, a way to express that one is content to live amidst the complexity of human experience as we increasingly know it.

As someone who everyday expects to be banished from society because of my social awkwardness and clumsiness, I say, if I’m a certain way, it’s just because, and why should anyone necessarily be the boss of anyone just because he is louder, or more simple-minded, or stronger, because he has the gun?

Why should a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or a Democrat, or a Republican, or a vegetarian, or a carnivore, or a Sounder or a Canuck or a Trailblazer hate somebody else? Every person is a variation on the same theme. What we know about another person is never enough to render judgment, but it should be enough that one can have compassion and acceptance that every person struggles with circumstances and not always as gracefully as one would hope.

We are lucky to be alive, lucky to live in a universe of infinite varieties of beauty and consciousness.

“By their fruits you shall know them,” He said. That bodes well for those who embrace the peaceful flag of the rainbow!

Eighteen years ago this week I started my first major poetry project: Leviathan (about the Mercer Slough). Since then I’ve done two others (Clam Dreamtime City, about Seward Park; and Pentecost, about Discovery Park). A new one is 75% of the way through the first half (they’re two-year projects).
So, here are excerpts from haikus written in the third week of June.
Happy Summer!

Above the green grass
rises a glade of green trees
beneath a dark sky.

Arachnids move their
limbs too fast to see them well
loosened by the heat.

Dogs bark people walk
eagles attract attention
to poplar treetops.

One reckons here not
just with seasons but with one’s
personal context.

A 358
spills passengers out into
a westlake raincloud.

Canadian geese
totaling 76
graze a lakeside lawn

east up the shoreline
away from crows ducks and one
wading blue heron.

Bus shelter dimness
gently softens old faces
inside light more harsh.

The foot on the gas
suffers toes poked by sharp grains
buried in the socks

grasses gone to seed
a hillside’s bad company
hard for ferns to breathe.

Byproducts of this
rounded watery planet
all these winged insects.

One sees the heatwave
(green leaves already fallen)
and the damage done.

Mounds of blackberries
reach for each other across
pedestrian trails.

Can released their album “Delay” when Malcolm Mooney was still their lead singer, before the Damo Suzuki era.
One song goes on about Frog and Toad, two characters, once mysterious and meaningless to me, but I know them well now.
In two books, each a collection of short stories for the youngest readers, I have come to know these individuals: Frog And Toad All Year, and Frog And Toad Are Friends.
Frog And Toad Are Friends contains five stories.
“Spring” dwells upon a subject familiar to residents of the Northwest: SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Toad is in a state of utter paralysis– house all shuttered, the “November” page still on his calendar. Frog looks for Toad inside his tiny two-story cottage. “Blah.” “I am not here.” “Go away.” Frog literally drags Toad outdoors into the Sun. “It’s Spring! We can begin a whole new year together,” he encourages Toad.
See? So many people think of Spring as the first season of a year. Toad tells Frog to come back “about half past May.”
“But I will be lonely until then,” Frog says, and that explains why he tears off every page of the calendar until he gets to May. He wakes Toad, who sees the May page on his calendar and climbs out of bed.
The story ends with Frog and Toad gesticulating together along a road of green grass sprouting through snow.
“The Story” illustrates the combination of selflessness and masochism often present in the case of a writer, an artist– a storyteller, in this story.
Toad visits Frog, who is in bed, feeling ill. “Tell me a story while I am resting,” Frog requests.
“Let me think of a story to tell you,” says Toad. He could have told Frog any story, but, as any true creative type will appreciate, Toad likes nothing better than the challenge to recreate the wheel. He wants to tell a new story, so he walks around the porch, but found no inspiration. He stood on his head– no story. He poured glasses of water over his head– no story. He banged his head against the wall. No story.
Frog is feeling better. Never mind the story, he says. “I feel terrible,” Toad says, and gets into the bed himself. “Would you like me to tell you a story?” Frog asks. “Yes.” Toad falls asleep as Frog tells the story of what Toad had just done.
Frog wanted a story, and now he has one.
“A Lost Button” begins with a familiar experience– after a long walk, Toad discovers that, somewhere along the way, he lost a button.
Despite Toad’s hurting feet, they retrace their steps to look for the button. Maybe they will find it right away; maybe not at all. Frog finds a button, but it is not Toad’s. A sparrow brings Toad a button he found, but it is not Toad’s. A raccoon brings him a button, but it is not Toad’s. In the meadow, the woods, the river, the mud, they search, to no avail. Toad screams at the world, runs home, and slams the door. On the floor, there is his button.
Toad sewed all the buttons he was given onto his jacket and gave it to Frog, who dances for joy.
When a button is lost, no other button will do. Out of confusion, clarity and creativity.
“A Swim” highlights a difference between Frog and Toad: Toad wears a bathing suit. Frog does not. Toad tells Frog that after he puts on his bathing suit, he must not look at him until he gets in the water, because he looks funny in his bathing suit.
When the two friends are ready to leave the water, a turtle comes along. Frog explains to the turtle why he should please go away. Some lizards nearby are curious. A snake overhears and says he wants to see Toad looking funny in his bathing suit. So do two dragonflies and a field mouse.
Frog tells Toad everyone wants to see how funny he looks in his bathing suit. Toad resolves to wait them out. Finally he begins to catch a cold, and climbs out of the water. Everyone, even Frog, laughs. Toad says “Of course I look funny,” picks up his clothes, and, head high, eyes closed, walks home.
After all, he had told them he looks funny in his bathing suit. He has the satisfaction of having been right about himself, his bathing suit, and his audience.
“The Letter” ends the book on a hopeful note. Toad sits on his porch at his “sad time of day.” He waits for the mail, but he never gets any.
Frog hurries home and writes Toad a letter. He instructs a snail to deliver it. He returns to Toad’s house, but Toad has given up.
Frog spills the beans. He tells Toad he has written him a letter, and even tells him what the letter says.
Four days later, the snail arrives with the letter.
Toad could have complained that he had had to virtually ask for a letter from Frog, but he has the insight to recognize that, what he had wanted, he got– a letter. He was grateful for that.