Considering the alternatives, it’s hard to think how “sustainability” could be an idea needing a time to come. Common sense isn’t always common, though.

The pitfall is that the short-term interest can run counter to the long-term interest. I just ate a candy bar, mindful that it’s bad for my weight, but, well. I can do things to mitigate that, so the abstract future is dealt with in the abstract, and the concrete moment is met with direct action and instant gratification.

To burn oil and coal now is the obvious choice, and we hope the future will be dealt with in ways we don’t have awareness of as yet. We trust that, future times, smarter people will invent better methods that will minimize the consequences of our current lifestyles.

Sustainability requires that we behave in ways such that all concerned participants can endorse the arrangement. 

In a house live Mom and Dad and two children. Everyone plays a part in ensuring peaceful coexistence, in creating a culture accommodating of each so all can endorse the arrangement as one in which each plays a constructive part.

The husband has to be the husband and the father. He has to accept his role as one who sets an example of selflessness, benevolence, and restraint, mindful of the teaching that one should be the servant of all. That simply means using all his resources and abilities for the good of everyone. He has to work with his wife so they are a unified, inseparable team that the children can unconditionally rely on for love, acceptance, support, and guidance. Husbands and wives have traditional roles in providing income and doing housework, but the days are long gone when a responsible husband could expect to come home and do nothing materially constructive.

The wife has to be the wife and the mother. Wives and mothers need no advice from me. But she should be quick to step in and assist the husband who wants to help, but doesn’t do so good at it. A kind word and an unspoken understanding of a father’s frustrations at not being able to do everything and solve every problem are most appreciated. And we all know that’s a two-way street!

Kids need to be respected and appreciated. It’s not their place to do the things we wanted to and weren’t able to. Kids deal with a far more complex world than we did at their age. As adults deal with things their kids couldn’t imagine, so do kids.

Parents need to have faith in their kids, and be patient. They have to live their own lives. A kid has to be himself or herself, and figure that out on the fly, under duress. He or she needs to know he has a safe place at home where he or she will be, if not always understood, at least loved and appreciated.

Parents need to set good examples and trust that, someday, the kids will remember, understand, and emulate behavior worthy of that.

When the short term plan prepares the best possible scenario for the long term, that’s sustainable behavior.

People can run out of patience, just as a field can run out of nutrients because of short-sighted agricultural practices.

People can get overheated when someone keeps polluting the atmosphere with abuse and deception.

But the waves of the oceans roll as they always have, winds blow as they always have, the Sun shines on, upon good and bad alike, as it always has– sustainably, until the end of the age– clean power we’ve always had in abundance all around us.

Gardening our inherited property is an ongoing process of discovery and revelation.

My Bible has Genesis’ second sentence saying that the Earth was a formless void. Faced with a formless void, what is one to do? The possibilities would be endless. I would be reluctant to tangle with a formless void. Left alone, it would be fine, but once I tried to improve upon it, I’d soon be in way over my head.

But after looking at a formless void long enough, one might gain a vision.

If you have a bonsai tree, you know that you don’t rush into a project like that. What exactly is one to do with a bonsai tree? How are you going to trim it, and train it? Once you prune away a branch, the branch is gone, and all the options one would have had with it are gone. First, one contemplates the entirety of the tree, and all its parts. One figures out the role each piece plays in the entirety, then, knowing exactly what one is doing, acts with certainty.

The yard we have was not a formless void when we moved in, but it might as well have been. The only unchangeable thing about it is the property line, but within that, our freedom and creativity have enormous leeway. We could cut down all the trees, bulldoze the raised beds, and dig up the lawn.

Instead, we decide we like the trees, and the raised beds, and all the abundance of stuff growing without our assistance.

Flowers grow, but in such abundance, they take over large sections of the yard. The flowers die, and nothing is left but a sticky type of plant spreading billions of seeds. That stuff is pulled up, and another plant just like it takes over, so, in turn, it is pulled up. Big plants with lots of flowers brighten the garden, but the flowers die, and nothing is left but an unattractive plant that apparently does nothing but take up space.

I’m reluctant to remove this stuff, because there’s so much of it, and at least it’s something in the garden, and what would remain if I removed it? Maybe a desolate patch of brown would be all that’s left. But pulling up all that stuff, one finds other plants that have been lurking and struggling underneath. The Summer garden has been waiting for the Spring garden to get out of its way.

Winter has its flowers that must make way for the flowers of Spring, and those must be removed for the flowers of Summer. Then the tomatoes and other vegetables of Summer can linger as long as they want into Autumn. When those are done, one is left with the empty spaces that had been so quickly and completely filled by the flowers of Winter.

Maybe instead of waiting for that, one can fill those spaces with blueberries, raspberries, huckleberries, and salmonberries, maybe some nice little trees, and not have so much work to do in coming years merely to accommodate plants one sees everywhere when one instead can fulfill a vision of a garden full of the types of special plants one has realized would be a perfect fit for the yard.

One can have not just a formless void, but one’s very own colorful, fragrant, nutritious, photogenic, doted-upon formless void!

You can learn a lot about someone from the World Cup.

Which do you prefer: vengeance, or justice?

Notwithstanding the complexities of the particular teams that might be involved in any given situation, if a team beats your team, do you want that team to lose its next game, or keep winning? If they lose their next game, one can say, “Now they’re losers too,” whereas if they win the competition, at least we lost to the best team.

I realized recently that it’s hard to dislike a baseball team.

It’s hard to dislike a particular city, too. If I say I hate some city, I’m exposing myself as someone lacking the insight to appreciate the charms and characters of a given city. I don’t have to want to live there, or even visit, but humans live there, and humans always have their positive sides so that one can benefit from their acquaintance.

All the more impossible, then, to dislike an entire country. Certainly one can appreciate the histories of nations, and how much mud can be thrown because of that?

When Mexico plays the US, when Ireland plays England, when England plays Germany, when Argentina plays Brazil, it’s easy to appreciate how hotly contested are such matches, and how keenly the fans feel about a win or a loss against their ancient enemies.

These feelings aren’t hard to understand. As the Seattle Sounders fell behind to our great rival, the Portland Timbers, in a match earlier this season, as I sulked over my beer, if it was up to me, I said, the coach should be fired if our team was going to be humiliated like that.

But as someone fond of all things Portland, it’s just silly and weird to think that I’d think that the only thing I don’t like about Portland is their soccer team. Their fans, perhaps? Well, if there’s really a difference between Seattle and Portland fans, or Husky and Ducks fans, or Red Sox and Yankees fans, or German and English fans, I haven’t seen it.

Then there are Brazilian fans– different! No complaints from me about that! On the contrary.

I’m lucky to live in Seattle during the World Cup. We have stores that sell food and drink from all around the world.

The Netherlands plays Spain: an excellent opportunity to drink Spanish wine and eat Dutch cheese.

As the matches line up, it’s fun to think of meals for those games that feature food and drink from the various countries.

Brazil, this Cup’s host, takes pride of place, so one can spotlight the vast world of Brazilian music and play that at every opportunity.

Ireland is not in the World Cup, and as my favorite, after the US, they deserve some recognition, so during games played on Bloomsday, some Irish drink will be had.

Why do I like the Netherlands? I’ve read about the “Total Football” concept the team used, I think during the ’70s. I don’t know exactly how it actually worked, but in my mind, the myth is that every player on the team has the freedom to roam at will, to attack, to defend, to cover the midfield. All 11 players would function as a smooth, cohesive, selfless unit, every player capable of playing every position with intelligence, sophistication, and skill. Such a team would run circles around other teams, who would never know what to expect.

If I ever coach junior soccer, we’re totally going Total Football.

When I am frustrated by rigid hierarchies and protocols, by rigidly defined roles that thwart the effectiveness of an organization, I think of Total Football.

In my house, when my wife and I are each cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, shopping, watching the kid and the dog, watering the plants, working, paying the bills, each of us doing everything without getting in each other’s way (except in our tiny kitchen), that’s Total Football.

May the officiating be fair, and may the best team win!

Our son George is a Seattleite, and his mother and I like that a lot, although neither she nor I, are, strictly speaking, Seattleites, though in our minds, we are, because Seattle is our home.

In this, the Space Age, humans have come to think of planet Earth as our home. On a personal level, to me this means that everything of Earth is mine: culture, religion, weather, history, flora and fauna, the future: all mine. Ours. And if I wind up at the other end of a wormhole, someone might ask, “Of all the infinite universes in the multiverse, which is your home?” “The one that has the Horse Nebula and planet Earth, the planet with Porter Wagoner,” I’ll say.

At the age of 2, George has had two homes: the condo we lived in when he was born, and the house we now have. Seeing that I live there, and all my stuff is there, it’s my home, but I’ve had many homes. So has my wife.

I lived in one house in Lake Hills from the age of 9 to the age of 20. That was my planet Earth in my universe of life. To get home, I drive up a hill to a cul-de-sac, and I can walk up some stairs to the front door, or walk through the gate beside the carport into the backyard and go in through the sliding glass door into the kitchen.

My house now has a driveway on the same side of the front door. The front door is just about in a straight line with the back sliding glass door, which is to the right of the kitchen. I noticed this straightaway when we first checked out our Olympic Hills house, because it aligns with the floor plan of my old Lake Hills home. Those similarities help me feel at home.

But in that house, the front door faced south. In our house, the house is right on the compass: the front faces west, the back faces east, south is to the left of the front door, north is to the right. Perfectly sensible.

George will have those intuitive rock-solid bearings. Someday he will probably live someplace where the setting Sun does not shine through the living room, nor the rising Sun shine through the kitchen windows and his bedroom window. He’ll be disoriented, the same way I’m disoriented when I go to Portland, Oregon, or Vancouver, B.C. and struggle to figure out which way is north, even when the Sun is out.

When adult George smells mint, and woodsmoke, he’ll feel at home. Our property abounds in wild mint, and when he falls off his hobby horse, he lands in mint. In the non-Summer, woodsmoke from neighbors’ chimneys is thick and ever present.

If George moves someplace not surrounded by trees, that absence will remind him that he once lived in a lusher, greener place.

If he lives in a house with multiple floors and staircases, and has kids, he’ll think, “We never had to deal with these kinds of things when I was a kid.”

In all the different rooms, he’ll think, “My house was never this quiet.”

In a studio apartment, he’ll think, “When I was a kid, my room was perfectly dark and perfectly quiet at night.”

Maybe he’ll drive by the house in 50 years, point to the intertwined copper and spearmint beech trees in the front yard, and say, “My dad always talked about how he brought those home as saplings from Volunteer Park, because they were some of his favorite trees in Seattle, and that was his choice to take the place of the fountain that used to be there, but my Mom didn’t like it, so we took it out back to grow strawberries in. Those two Douglas firs my parents got as saplings from the Portland Marathon, and that chestnut tree is from a chestnut tree also in Volunteer Park. All trees my folks planted as seeds and saplings right after we moved here way back in 2013! ”

Home is also a place of primordial fear. A house is a place of isolation. Only a few doors and windows come between a family and the thousands of bloodthirsty Orcs of the outside world.

A child gradually comes to realize that anything can sneak in through an open window, and no one might ever know what became of him. A child learns that even in the family, the older, the stronger, the smarter, victimize the younger, the weaker, the dumber.

In the family home, a child can learn what it means to have a family. But one can also learn what it means to be all alone, with no support from the very people he needs most.

When I die, I’ll instantly be someplace I’ll immediately recognize, I’ve long thought. I’ll realize that this life has ended, and I’ll feel at home where I wind up next. Perhaps it’ll be a place where I’ve lived for ages, among beings I’ll recognize as on-again, off-again eternal friends.

Maybe it’ll be a place where my mom and dad, and my brothers, and my wife and her family, our kids and relatives, will have barbecues in a backyard with trees and flowers, dogs and cats, sunlight and shade. It’s hard to imagine anyplace being more like home than a place like that!

Sometimes, you don’t really know what you know until you have to explain it to someone, and then you struggle to articulate what you’ve known for yourself in a way that makes sense to someone else. In so doing, one is forced to fill in the gaps, and what had been somewhat fuzzy becomes more clear.

Another approach is to observe the work of others and interpret it in a way that explains a process that could be used to achieve a similar result. Music critics analyze musical compositions by explaining the structure of a piece, which leads to the idea that the composer actually composed the music through that very process. That the composer used such a process might be news to the composer, but that the interpretation is valid on that level remains true. A songwriter can read such a critique and realize that, intuitively, he does the same thing, and in so doing, is among the best company.

Otherwise, a non-musical person who wants to compose music but doesn’t know how can read that critique and, being the right person to read that critique, being the person with the exact questions that have the exact answers in that critique, he’ll have the intuition that here is the process he’s been looking for.

How does one write a song? A baffling question, but, in fact, there is an answer. I have a little 25-cent booklet of daily Lent meditations I’ve read every Lent for decades, so some its wisdom is ingrained in my mind. “Try to catch yourself unawares,” it says. “How do your thoughts naturally run?” Sometimes you say something and think, “I should write that down!” The late Captain Beefheart would order his wife to write down things he said, even things apparently only he found profound.

Our minds are overrun with verbiage, with vowels that have their different sounds and frequencies, consonants that have their own percussive signatures. Phrases run through the head, one overhears conversations, always with beats and rhythms, sometimes with melodies, and the inner musician spots a line and declares, “That’s a song!”

“Where are you going?” “Where are” both are the same note, “you” is emphasized and is up a tone, and “going” is the lowest note in the line, with an emphatic character that communicates that the phrase is complete. Spoken, it has elements of melody. When one focuses on that, he can repeat the line four or so times, conscientiously singing it. You can sing it into your phone, so you don’t have to immediately, permanently remember it.

One remembers reviews of classical pieces in concert programs. A certain piece begins with a single note, or a sequence of two, three, four or more notes, in a certain key, on a certain instrument. Those notes are then played in other keys on other instruments, sometimes not all of the notes, sometimes with those notes used as the basis for a more complex series of notes. Perhaps one or two of the notes are singled out as the building blocks of alternative blocks of music. The gist is that one starts with a little thing, and conscientiously explores and works with that until a whole composition has been built. This is a process a musician can use.

Another process is to start with that one line one has seized upon, and recite that over and over in one’s mind until the next development in the piece naturally occurs. Sometimes this doesn’t work.

If one has a lyric, one can simply follow the practice of composing four lines for a verse. My problem has been that when I absent-mindedly come up with a line and proclaim that it’s a song, I’ll write out the whole verse, and three more verses, and all 16 lines have the same melody, in the same key. It’s a song, but instead of verses and a chorus, it’s just four choruses, and I’d rather have the verses too.

This is where the classical music concert programs come in handy. I can take my initial line of fourteen syllables and break the melody down into three segments: beginning, middle, end. One verse’s first line will work with the three notes in the middle of the melody, the second line works with the two notes at the beginning of the melody, the third line works with the four notes in the end of the melody, and the final line is, finally, the whole melody. In the second verse, I can start with the end, move to the beginning, go to the middle, and finish with the whole. In the third verse, I can begin with the whole, go to the middle, then to the beginning, then to the end. The listener gets glimpses of the whole, and the whole itself at some point in each verse, wondering all the while how the culmination of the melody will finally appear. To provide that catharsis, which the composer himself is the most anxious of all to achieve, the chorus will be the whole melody repeated with each of the four lines, but sung an octave higher.

What to do with the bass, guitar, and keyboards? They can follow the example of the singer, and play around with the elements of the melody, playing the notes in different combinations, in different keys, playing off what the other instruments are doing, taking turns playing different parts. As one rehearses it all in one’s head, certain elements will become predominant, and one can emphasize those. The different characters of the different instruments will suggest departures particular to that particular instrument.

It can all begin with a simple beat, a simple rhythm, a simple melody. Tinkering provides additional material, and the whole mind brings it all together into a finished song, and with a little help from one’s friends– the critics– the world gains a neat little tune about the pleasures of watching a beetle crawl across a sidewalk.

If we woke up someday and our pet chinchilla Qyx was gone, we’d know it was The Rapture. That was a joke in our family. But it wasn’t The Rapture that took Qyx– it was a buildup of gas, and she died during an extended stay at a veterinary clinic.
Somewhere between a goldfish and a dog is a chinchilla. A goldfish can be buried in the yard without a permanent memorial, and a dog or cat is too big for that. We wanted to bury Qyx in our yard with dignity and grace, as a beloved member of our family.
The question often arises about the spiritual status of animals. A common answer is that reincarnation explains the role of all life forms, human and non-human. If that’s the case, I’m fine with that, because if it is, God has decreed that it be so. I’m not threatened by the possibility that Christianity does not have all of the most correct answers. A “Tales Of The Hasidim” story relates that a wedding party was short one person, so they enlisted a poor passer-by. “So be it,” he said. After replying to every request with that answer, someone asked him why. He quoted the Scripture, “Blessed are the people with whom it is so.”
Do animals have souls? A Zen story has someone asking, “Does a dog have a Buddha nature?” In reply, the Zen Master said, “Mu!”
Asking a Catholic to explain a Zen concept is the same as asking a Zen adherent to explain a Catholic concept. I’ll simply say, hoping I’m not too far off the mark, that the Master was telling the student that there was an nswer to the question the student should have asked, but didn’t, and if he didn’t know the right question, he couldn’t tell him the question, or the answer, but, regardless, truth prevails.
Maybe the answer is that we share our souls with animals. Not literally, not metaphysically– simply to say, when a beloved pet dies, a part of us dies, too.
I dug a deep hole in our backyard in front of our big statue of Our Lady Of Guadalupe. (I found it by a Dumpster at our old condominium.) I sprinkled holy water in the hole, lit a candle in the lantern above Our Lady, and lit three long sticks of Vietnamese incense.
Aimee came outside after she put George to bed. We took Qyx out of the box she was in, out of the plastic bag she was in. It was our Qyx all right, eyes closed forever, our sweet, pure, innocent Qyx. I sprinkled holy water on her. We stroked and kissed her, shedding many tears. I played the song “Afterglow,” by Genesis, from “WInd & Wuthering.” After the song, I read the 4th day of creation from the book of Genesis, a passage from Ecclesiastes (“A time to mourn,” etc.) and the account of The Rapture from First Thessalonians. We said our final farewells, wrapped her up in a little red blanket, and lowered her into the ground. We sprinkled more holy water into the hole, and as we gently filled the hole, played two more songs from WInd & Wuthering: “Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers” and “In That Quiet Earth.”
Elaborate, yes, but befitting the love we have for our beloved companion of the last almost five years, and for those we love, nothing is too extravagant.
All life has dignity and honor as part of God’s creation, and all beings have dignity and honor. As Christians, we do well to remember that all life is dear to God, and we do well to prayerfully place our pets in His Hands, Who is aware when even a sparrow falls to the Earth. Who knows what might come of our prayers after God takes them into consideration? All things are possible.

Greetings, poetry lovers!

Here’s a poem I wrote during my family’s Easter weekend visit to the lodge at Longmire, Washington, up on a flank of Tahoma (Mount Rainier). Clumsy and ungainly, not really edited, but I’m not sure I want to change it all.

LONGMIRE

I belong with the trees

that I don’t come up to their knees

and I don’t give a toss

with my toes walking in the thick moss.

I find a branch for a walking stick–

that’s the kind of thing that makes me tick.

How I love to take walks

among glacial deposits of rocks.

When I hear a raven croak

I laugh at the private joke.

I hear the frogs call at dusk

by the pond that smells of sour musk.

What a noise the river makes!

My teeth chatter, my whole body aches.

Eye to eye with a cloud

and my heart beats loud.

“Adam named her Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.”

Maybe they didn’t entirely live happily ever after– Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain, all the way down to us– but that Genesis 3:20 line always gives me a warm feeling toward Eve. Adam and Eve made some mistakes, but who hasn’t? Why wouldn’t they have?

Easy for us to say they shouldn’t have made mistakes, but that’s always the case. We are hard on others who make mistakes, and hard on ourselves even when we think we might have made a mistake, fallen short somehow, disappointed our mothers.

I was thinking about my own mother a week ago, and realized that I can’t remember a single time, a single moment, when she really seemed happy.

When she was near death, one day in the hospital, broken down by emphysema, she took great pains to dress herself because she had gotten the idea that she was going home. She wasn’t. Maybe for a few moments, amidst the pain of trying to dress herself, she was happy, and that merely served to deepen her pain when she realized she’d been mistaken.

For some, happiness in life is always paid for in suffering. Things turn out bad, and one wishes he had never been happy at all because the cost was way too high. One looks askance at the happy, at happiness.

I saw a floral arrangement paid for by an endowment from the estate of a great society lady. The plaque reads that this lady was always surrounded by beauty. I can’t help but be reminded, by that, of all the others whose lives are surrrounded by anything and everything but that sort of “beauty.”

My mother wouldn’t have thought of herself as one of those people. She loved the ballet, The Man of La Mancha, Frank Sinatra, sports, gardening, cooking, traveling, beer, wine, and her children. She was loved by her friends and family, and cared deeply that her sons be raised as people of good character. We four went to Catholic grade schools and high schools.

Like herself, my mother’s own mother had not been lucky in family life.

Because of men, women suffer: that was a clear lesson in my life. And because of girls, boys suffer: a clear lesson of my younger days. But who runs away from wives and kids? Men. Who gets a trophy wife? A man. How often does one read about the homeless father and his kids? The rich woman who abandons her husband of decades for the college quarterback?

Mother’s Day was perfunctory in my life with my mother. It takes a long time before a person grows up and out of the self-absorption of youth sufficiently to have any insight into the experience of his parents. One might wish to go back and treat one’s parents differently after he’s lived long enough to have a deep appreciation of them as persons, on a personal level, but that’s the beauty of living as we do, as children of Eve, children of God.

A father looks at any child with the intuition that that little kid is the most precious kid in the world to a father who is much like himself. Older people of a certain age– the mothers, the fathers. If they are not, maybe they are those one would never describe as always being surrounded by beauty.

Brothers, sisters, cousins, mothers, fathers, children: all of us are sons and daughters. In this life, of our own mothers; in history, Eve’s children; in eternity, God’s own.

“In Heaven, volunteers will be seated on couches, and others will cater to their wants and desires while the volunteers relax and enjoy themselves.”

Years ago, in the kitchen of a local church, I saw a poster that said something like that. Whoever wrote that didn’t understand volunteers! Volunteer work isn’t always a means to an end– more often, it’s an end in itself.

People want to be useful. People want to use their talents, skills, and resources effectively. We want our enthusiasm and good intentions channeled constructively.

“Enter through the narrow door,” Jesus said. I think He was referring to the small, simple door used by servants who are in a place to work there. Family and guests have the nice door. The servant just needs to get inside and get busy.

Not everybody wants to use that door. Not everybody wants to be defined by their actions, but if someone honestly endeavors to do his best, he has the consolation of knowing he’s done what has been so often encouraged by Therese of Lisieux, John a Kempis, and countless others of all walks of life.

The Feast of St. Joseph The Worker is still new to the Catholic Church. A Catholic is long used to hearing how Christmas and Easter are versions of pagan holidays, so to see the church conspicuously take that exact approach to May Day is heartwarming.

St. Joseph was a carpenter, and a family man. When angels appeared in his dreams and told him what was really happening with Mary, he accepted it and worked with it. He took a clear look at the circumstances of his life and accepted them as the tools he would work with: a wife, pregnant with a baby he did not father. That they were his responsibility was the demanding work of his life. He had to get his family to Bethlehem for the census. When the life of the child Jesus was threatened, he kept them safe. That was the work of his life, along with carpentry.

Most every type of social cause is welcome at a May Day parade. People understand that labor is work, and every type of constructive social and political activity is work. Social justice is ongoing hard work.

“Labor” is toil. The unfortunate get sentenced to years of hard labor. “Work” is the constructive use of one’s time.

Much of life can be labor. One can work at a job he has no love for, that he must have to obtain the necessary means of shelter and sustenance. In that everyday struggle, one has the opportunity to work at one’s character.

Pope Francis recently described the “concrete, humble, lowly service” of St. Joseph. I read that as a splash of cold water in the face, because so much of my workplace work is of a concrete, humble, lowly nature. In the context of the economy and the workplace, it’s often nothing more than toil.

But life is complicated, and the story of how I wound up doing what I’ve so long done is a long story.

Life includes the option that one can make of one’s life what he will. My job in this work, with my jobs, with all my activities, is to somehow interpret all the circumstances and responsibilities in the most enlightened manner possible, so that I see the drudgery of life not as mere drudgery, but as opportunities to put my highest values– compassion, honesty, empathy, justice, fair play– uniquely and creatively into practice, and so transform the drudgery into positive, rewarding work.

We all come into this world through that narrow door, and in all the labor and work we do, we continually work on being better people and building a better world, even if it has to be one menial, otherwise pointless, task at a time.

Kierkegaard was right when he said we are lucky we don’t have to understand what we believe.

Easter is the most profound of Christian holidays, but also the most difficult.

Nothing in life is more exasperating and frustrating than the simple reality that nobody can prove what happens after death. All we know is this life, which, by faith, we place in the context of our most cherished and elaborate frameworks.

We are souls, spiritual beings having this physical experience, physical beings having this spiritual experience. But the soul predates the body, and will survive it, to inhabit a glorified body in the afterlife.

Easter gives us the resurrected Christ, but the Bible doesn’t give us much detail.

“What did He look like?” would be the first question many of us would have asked Mary Magdalene. The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus looked like before or after the resurrection. I know the explanations of why those details weren’t included, but I maintain that the narrative suffers from the lack of details.

I figure, once the Messiah appears, that’s an indication that humanity has evolved about as much as it ever will, so it’s hard to say those writers were simple fellows with crude literary technique. We assume the scriptures were guided by the Holy Spirit, and that what we have is what’s best suited to the intent and purpose.

Who knows? We spend our lives wondering about these things, figuring, if we ask these questions, everybody must, but is everybody the same as us nowadays? No. We are an argumentative and contentious people, quick to pick a hole in an inconsistent argument, quick to question the authority, credibility, and arrogance of bossy know-it-alls.

The Biblical authors lived in a much smaller world. Why describe Jesus when eveybody back then would have had a really good idea of what He looked like, given the scarcity of ethnic types?

I wish sometimes Christians were more reluctant to depict Jesus. Where did the long hair come from? The perfect beard and skin? I have a “photo” of the image on the Shroud of Turin. That person looks, not classically handsome, but strong and charismatic, as I would hope.

Easter is a frustration. The idea is mesmerizing that this singular event in history took place as simply as a man would awake, sit up, take off his pajamas, stand up, get the stone blocking the tomb’s entrance out of the way, and go for a walk in the predawn twilight. There might have been angels, and terrified guards running away. Maybe Jesus had a flag, or a stick, for a prop. Maybe there were only a few women on their way to the tomb, and they thought they met Jesus, then knew they really had when they got to the tomb and He wasn’t there.

What happened to his burial clothes? What happened to the cross?

It’s hard to imagine that we don’t know these things. That we don’t know what happens after we die.

What happened to Mom and Dad after they died.

Were their guardian angels there to lead them to Heaven? Did they see their parents, brothers and sisters? Did they see God, and Mary, and Jesus? Were they threatened by demons? Are they in Purgatory, and what is that like? Are their souls residing in other persons, other beings, another multiverse? Did their souls get just that one chance, and Jesus has already judged them?

Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know.

Good thing we don’t really have to!