A regrettable thing happened once at a place where I worked. One of those things that causes everyone to wonder exactly what happened and why it had happened, something that defied a ready explanation, and this profoundly frustrated the boss.
“Blame has to be fixed,” she said. I countered that if she insisted upon that without knowing for sure exactly what caused the problem, then “fixing the blame” on someone wouldn’t do any good at all. She would be able to explain it away to her boss as being the fault of so-and-so, but it would be a lie, and how would she like it if it happened to her?
In another scenario, she would say, “Those dead children? Those dead farm animals? The house that burned down? All your fault, Job. You should have had police watching the neighborhood, and better fences around your fields, and you shouldn’t have built your house in such a windy place. None of those things has ever happened to me because I haven’t made mistakes like you’ve made, Job. I’m really sorry for your problems, Job, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you the truth, and the truth is, all that was your fault.”
“Is it my fault,” Job reflects, “that I live in a cruel world with cruel people and unimaginable misfortune?”
Some people insist on fixing blame, even on themselves, because that’s preferable to admitting that they don’t know why something went wrong. Something goes wrong, and there has to be an explanation, with the idea that the mistake can be avoided next time.
An employee is laid off because the board of directors decrees budget cuts, so the last person hired is the first person fired, and even this person thinks, “If only I was more attractive. If only I’d been nicer to the boss. If only I’d moved more product. If only I’d done better, I wouldn’t have been fired.” Blame has been fixed by the friends of Job who live inside her head. The worst of it is, maybe they’re right!
When a corporation earns profits, often it doesn’t matter how, or why. Credit must be fixed, so the CEO is rewarded with a bonus equal to the combined salaries of half his workforce, with bonuses also allocated to the vice presidents and such. Maybe the company has been relocated to another country with much lower operating costs and labor wages, so the local workers are fired and left destitute, but the stockholders profit.
“This is actually all for your own good,” the stockholders tell the unemployed peasants at the food bank. “Now you can get retraining at the local college and learn new jobs so you can get better jobs in the modern economy.”
But college is too expensive and financial aid isn’t available. “It’s the government’s fault,” say the college administrators.
“It’s the voter’s fault,” say the politicians.
“It’s the politicians fault,” say the unemployed workers.
“It’s the union’s fault,” say the board of directors and the executives.
“It’s our fault,” say the hungry children, “that my parents can’t put enough food on the table.”
“It’s God’s fault,” say the bitter parents.
Was it Job’s fault that he suffered, and was he responsible for the good fortune he enjoyed later? I don’t know. That’s the story, and we accept it on its own terms, and try to learn something from it.
“Where did it all go wrong?” I’ve been known to ask. “When did it all begin to turn around for the better?” is a question I ask that is equally difficult to answer, because there’s no knowing the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.
Sometimes we think we are at fault, when we are not, and sometimes we think we are not, but we are.
We all have friends who could have been the friends of Job, and with such friends, we don’t need enemies, but we all have them all the same. Having such friends and enemies, we should have empathy enough to simply, quietly suffer with those who suffer that we might share in their joy when at last we know the truth, and when, at last, the righteous are rewarded.

I said I wanted to know everything about everything when I took a new job as a gardener. Discovering I know little about anything has been embarrassing.
What is in the gardens that make up the garden?
Dirt. But what kind of dirt? Where does one get that dirt, and when and how does one apply it? What does one add to the dirt to fortify the plants one puts in it? Is there adequate drainage, sunlight, shade, for the garden one wishes to grow in a certain place?
There are places in Ballard and West Seattle to buy certain types of rocks and dirt. We have a giant diesel truck. To be a gardener, one has to be able to drive this giant truck and park it without crashing into and crushing other vehicles and buildings.
At the garden, one has to drive the John Deere E-Gator, maneuvering it through tight spots and dodging in and out of street traffic and pedestrians, without crashing into the bollard lights that line the pathways of the gardens.
A gardener needs the right clothes. Gardener pants have extra pockets rightly sized for gardening tools, with padded knees for all the time kneeling in gravel and dirt. His shirt should be expendable, with pockets, and long sleeves to protect against sunburn, thorns and venomous insects.
Boots should be at least somewhat waterproof, light enough to leave little trace and not weigh one down after a long day of walking around carrying heavy stuff.
Don’t forget sunscreen, a hat, and a water bottle.
Look at the whole garden, and discern the intent of the architects and the caretakers of the institution. The garden you have is the garden they want. Maybe they don’t want elaborate topiary or the meticulous precision of a Japanese garden.
What are the trees and plants in the garden? Each has a name– more than one name– and much splitting of hairs has been done among so many plants that look so similar in the shapes of their leaves, the shades of their greens, the deployment of their branches.
Which are natives, and which are invasives? What exactly are they doing in which parts of the garden?
Growing up between concrete steps that descend an immaculate green lawn, horsetail will not be tolerated, but in the bioswale along the waterfront, eradication is not an option. There, it will be watched, as we watch the fireweed, willows, and blackberries, lest any one plant become, in an unseemly way, dominant.
Dandelions proliferate in the aspen grove. One has a vision of a forest floor pocked with ugly holes after the dandelions have been uprooted, but the gardener takes care to tend to each dandelion so that the only surface disturbed is as small as the size of the root where it passes from the air into the earth.
Above one’s head, a branch from one tree has somehow tangled itself with a branch of a neighbor, so one can separate the two so there is no conflict and each tree can proceed unimpeded, the way a galaxy has its own space, though sometimes collisions are inevitable.
No one can tell that a gardener has been at work, but the trees are at peace, and dandelions and other blemishes have been removed. A cheerfully robust patch of moss springs up, no longer weighed down by dandelion leaves, and a fern is seen in its full glory, no longer crowded by faded dandelion heads.
Gravel has been raked out of the shallow dirt bowls where the grass hasn’t uniformly grown. Weeds, in their groups of three and four, have been lifted, roots and all, out of the gravel path. With a hand rake, a slight disturbance of the gravel suffices to loosen the root. Unless one knew those weeds had been there, they wouldn’t be missed. No one would know a gardener had been at work.
Unless one had seen that blackberry vine up in that Douglas fir, no one would know that a gardener had climbed into the lower tree branches and traced that vine all the way to the root, then carefully pulled it, tip first, through the tree, so as to minimize the tearing of the thorns through the fir branches.
In a green wall of snowberry, a tourist sees some lovely bright purple fireweed flowers abuzz with bumblebees, a scenario approved and left alone by a gardener who wrestles with the scorched earth policy often preached against fireweed and other invasive plants.
Late in the afternoon, a visitor notices a long steel gardening implement among a thick groundcover of kinnikinnick. “Looks like a gardener forgot his tool,” she observes. “A gardener in a garden like this must have a lot on his mind, I would think!”

Not exactly the Nobel Prize or the Academy Awards, but August 10th is the day of the year I begin a new year of saying the daily Rosary, with a new intention.
The choice was easier in simpler times of days gone by.
With no immediate family nearby and no apparent prospects for the future, sometimes the intention was obvious. I would look within myself, and around at the world, and decide.
With both parents dead, I should pray for them. Certain desperate places in the world cry out for prayer. I’d wonder if my heart need forever remain a moribund thing of stone. How could I not pray for my own flesh and blood?
After reciting the Rosary, I recall every intention I’ve had and remain mindful of the work that remains toward accomplishing the results my prayers were meant to help achieve.
Not so simple anymore, life.
As today approached, weeks away, days away, hours away, I tried to listen closely to my conscience, to the most urgent whispers, to decide what this year to focus upon.
Which of three things: something my wife and I hope for, or for a change of circumstances for someone in dire need of positive changes and good luck, or for the establishment of a lasting foundation for myself in a new field I’ve just entered into which could settle the details of the remaining 20 years of my work life?
Obviously, the first thing cannot be dismissed, because it’s not just me, it’s my wife and I, and our child, and a possible sister or brother for our firstborn. But the second option isn’t speculative, or meant to supplement positive factors already in place– it’s meant possibly to divert disaster and radically change someone’s course for the better, possibly with exponentially positive, self-perpetuating offshoots that would be a boon to a wide circle of people. And the third option would be a prayer of thanksgiving and also somewhat of desperation from one who cannot take anything for granted, who knows full well that any good fortune that falls into my hands, might, in a forgetful moment, drop.
The solution is in the Rosary: the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, the Glorious Mysteries. Sunrise is a joyful mystery, the excessive heat of the Summer midday Sun in these days of global warming is a sorrowful mystery, and a cool, beautiful sunset can be a glorious mystery, especially when the full Sturgeon Moon rises during the Perseids meteor shower. One life, with many aspects, one year of prayer, one Rosary, of many aspects.
My wife and I hope to experience a new joyful mystery, so I will pray for that during those five decades. For my friend undergoing severe trials, I will pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, and to celebrate my personal good fortune and emphasize my need to work hard toward a positive judgment upon my efforts, I will pray the Glorious Mysteries.
Maybe next year, the choice will be easier!

Hypersensitivity leads to problems for the especially delicate youth in our schools, even Catholic schools. I blew my top when my younger brother brought home a letter from his Catholic school that requested parental help in the project to shape the kids into “Christ-like” kids. The kids would be graded. I brandished this form in the face of our long-suffering mother and demanded she protest! She didn’t. I defended my brother against this insane doomsday weapon our school was about to launch at him and his little band of hellions. (They were hellions. They did things I won’t publish 30 years later. Worse things than my little band of delinquents did, which involved potatoes, cars, fast little legs, hiding places, a backyard chicken coop, and the darkness of night. Chuckle!)
“Christ-like” has always mystified me, the same way I’m puzzled as to exactly how I can be harsh on myself, but easy on others; how I should pray all the time, but not jabber “like the pagans do.”
How can we love the God we cannot see when we cannot love the person we do see? John says, impossible. I’m not sure it is impossible. A friend once said it’s easy to love the rain when you’re inside, and it’s easy to say you love people when you’re home by yourself. That’s more realistic than disingenuous. We all have our ideals we struggle to live up to.
When we see the poor, the homeless, the suffering faces, we see the Christ Who hungered, Who had the food (and therefore the hunger) His disciples didn’t know about, the Christ Who relied on the kindness of a Samaritan lady at a well, the Christ Who allowed the legion of demons to infest a field full of pigs so they ran off a cliff, and then was Himself run out of town.
When we see the misunderstood, we see the Christ Who was without honor among His own family, in His hometown.
At Mass this morning, the priest mentioned that Christ was beloved of God, and that we are all Christ-like because we are all beloved of God. That’s the best explanation I’ve heard of that idea.
A paradox of love is its blindness. People do horrible things, and their parents can’t believe it. “We made little Graham promise us he’d be a good boy,” XTC sings in “No Thugs In Our House.”
Love seems close-minded that way. One has a vision of who someone is, and interprets everything the beloved person does from that bias.
Love can also survive the eventual intrusion of reality into the picture, so that one can hate the sin, but love the sinner.
To love as God loves, as this priest explained that God loves each of us, is to be open-minded and generous, to accept in faith that any person is worthy (if not apparently deserving) of being treated with the dignity that God gives us and never takes away.
Once, a great rabbi visited a school. Some skeptical students wanted to test him. “Recite the 3rd chapter of Deuteronomy while standing on one foot with your hands behind your back!” they demanded.
“Fools!” the rabbi rebuked. “You haven’t even learned that you shouldn’t treat someone in a way you wouldn’t want to be treated. How can anyone teach you anything?”
Back in school, we kids, of course, were harsh critics of our teachers, as they were of us.
United in failure, united in struggle, may we have mercy on each other, and may God have mercy on us all!