5/12/2025

 Monday, May 12, 2025

D+186/111

I am out of sorts today.  I woke up with my right eye sore and puffy.  I entered a lot of text this morning, but managed to erase most of it by failing to update.  I am waiting to leave for Urgent Care appointments at the Eye Clinic to check on the cataract replacement and with the Gold Clinic for possible cellulitis on my left leg.

Lights out around 10  and up at 4:45.   

Prednisone, day 362; 1 mg., day 4/21; Kevzara, day 13/14; CGM, day 9/15; Trulicity, 4/7.   Prednisone at 5 a.m.  Other meds at 6 a.m.  Eye drops at 5 a.m.,  11 a.m., 4 p.m., and 9 p.m.

Fleeting (or not) thoughts yesterday.  While on a very short walk before dinner with my highboy rollator yesterday, I listened to a Greatest Hits album of Patsy Cline, including "She's Got You" and "Faded Love."  Those songs, and others like "I Fall to Pieces" and "Walkin' After Midnight", got me thinking of my First True Love, Charlene Wegge, who dumped me when I returned from active duty on a Navy destroyer in the summer of 1960.  I wasn't prepared for it; in fact, quite the opposite: I had been yearning to get back to her all summer.  The shock and hurt of being dumped put me into a funk that lasted a couple of years, and, as I thought while listening to Patsy,  maybe lasted much of my life in a subdued, back-of-the-mind-and-never-mentioned way,  I wonder whether this is just a weirdness or weakness peculiar to me, or if others have carried an invisible torch for a lost early love.  We were a couple when I was 17 and 18, she a year younger.  Now I'm 83, 65 years older, and I can still trigger the vestigial feelings of shock, disappointment, rejection, and anguish I felt when she told me we were finished.  My homecoming from Vietnam and Okinawa in 1966 was also shocking in different ways, and it had different effects on me, more numbing or deadening than depressing or desolate.  But together, the two homecomings contributed to my relating to the line attributed (incorrectly) to W. B. Yeats: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained him through temporary periods of joy." In any case, I suppose I'm not the only old coot for whom old songs trigger old memories and old, not yet dormant, feelings.  The Righteous Brothers' "Ebb Tide" and the Mamas and Papas' "California Dreamin'" always bring me back to Danang.  The Little River Band's "The Other Guy" brings me back to my separation and divorce, as do Jane Oliver's old songs.  

Another thought I had yesterday was triggered by news that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the talks with China in Geneva had 'made significant progress.'  Translation:  Trump now realizes he stepped into a massive pile of shit on "Liberation Day" when he announced his trade war on the rest of the world and has made major concessions to China in an attempt to salvage the U.S. and world economies and his standing with the American electorate, including his MAGA base.

Also, we received our federal income tax refund yesterday in the mail, with two oddities.  First, it came be mail, and not by direct deposit.  Secondly, the address was wrong, 9481 N. Wakefield Ct., rather than 9581 N. Wakefield Ct, where we live.  I wondered whether I had made mistakes on our tax return, but I checked the return and the address wa correct as was the information required for direct deposit.  Wazupwidat?  Elon Mush?  DOGE?  Is this kind of screw-up part of the campaign to get rid of "waste, fraud, and abuse"?

Thingking about thee pope, Quakers, and the Wisconsin Synod Luterans.  I've been wondering what Protestant Christians who was been watching all the hoopla and folderol about the death of one pope and the selection of his succesor think about it, all the pageantry, all the regimentation, all the formalities and traditions, the cardinals in their red uniforms, the bishops in their purple uniforms, the Swiss Guards in their medieval or renaissance uniforms.   It was all so reminiscent of the imperial pageantry that the UK produces for the head of their official church, the King or Queen, soldiers wearing tall bearskin hats, feathered bonnets, doublets, plumes and ostrich feathers, scarlet reds and deep blues, etc.  British royalty and the papacy have something else in common: they both put on a great show based on imperial power  that once was great but now is largely gone.  Nonethelss, neither the British swells nor the Catholic swells want to admit it.  They like 'the good old days' of 'Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves' and when the pope settled disputes among nations in Christendom.  And so they all pretend and play dress-up as if Britain still ruled a suservient empire and there still was a "Christendom."  The question you would think would be ask of the Catholic swells is what does all this hoooopla and folderol have to do with Jesus of Nazareth?  Did he or his followers wear expensive fancy uniforms or regalia?  Is that the sort of thing that Jesus encouraged? 

Matthew 19:21-23, King James Version

21 Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

23 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. 

and 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

and

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

I think of the simplicity of Quaker prayer gatherings, with no one in charge, all simply waiting to be touched by the Spirit.

I think of the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, one of whose doctrines is that the Papacy is the Anti-Christ spoken of in 2 Thess. 2 et seq.

As Martin Luther grew in his appreciation of the gospel, he also grew in his recognition that the Papacy is the Antichrist. A 1954 WELS pamphlet entitled Antichrist put it this way: “It was because Luther cherished the Gospel so dearly that his faith instinctively recoiled and protested in unmistakable terms when the Pope put himself in the place of Christ and declared His work insufficient and in vain. That is the use to which Luther’s faith put the prophecy of Scripture. For him the tenet that the Pope is the Antichrist was an article of faith.”

What I started writing this I wondered what Protestants thought of all the hoopla and folderol around the death of Francis and the election of Leo, but the better question is: what should Catholics think of all this stuff?  How does it fit in with what they think of Jesus and his teachings?  When I was a child in the Archdiocese of Chicago, one of the jobs of the Cardinal/Archbishop or of his auxiliary bishops was to  attend confirmation liturgies in the great many (then, not now) Catholic parishes in the archdiocese.  I remember learning that if we were ever to luck enough to be addressed by one of these luminaries, we were to bow or kneel in front of him and to kiss his ring.  How does that fit in with "all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."?

Just wondering.