7/13/2025

 Sunday, July 13, 2025

D+2477/175/1286

1949 Pope Pius XII excommunicated communist Catholics

1960 US Democratic convention nominated Catholic JFK for presidency

1967 Riots broke out in Newark, New Jersey; 27 died

2018 Outline of 5,000-year-old henge was discovered at Newgrange, Ireland, through drought and drone footage

2024 Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt in rural Butler, Pennsylvania

In bed at 9, up at 6:15, body all achin' and a-wracked wid pain.  Roughly hourly overnight pit stops are now the norm.  6?  7?

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9:30 a.m.  

Blasphemy.  6th grade was a rough year for me.  We were still living in the basement apartment where in 1947 a devastating crime had been committed against my mother, my sister, and me.  My Dad was still a mess from his experiences on Iwo Jima.  I was seriously depressed, even at age 11.  Among my big problems that year was my belief that I was condemned to Hell.  From my memoir:

" . . , most of my elementary school days are a blur to me.  I do remember, however, being completely miserable in the 6th grade and wanting to leave home.  I was often miserable at school and miserable at home.  I remember walking home along Emerald Avenue and passing through the 75th viaduct, under the train tracks, and wishing I could run away.  It seems melodramatic to describe an 11 year old as profoundly and persistently unhappy, but so I was.  My Dad was still a heavy drinker, chronically crabby and living with his own demons.  My mother was waiting on tables and struggling to keep my Dad from going further over the edge, the family together, food on the table, a roof (and hot water pipes) over our heads, and the tuition paid at St. Leo’s.  When my father would act particularly badly, my mother would “let him have it,” and the air in our semi-subterranean abode would be charged with anger and vitriol.  This must have been the year when I started consciously longing for my mother to leave my father, to take Kitty and me away from the drunkenness, the chronic crabbiness, the fighting and unhappiness.  This was also the year in which I had to consciously deal with the notion of Sinning Against Faith, of the need to confess religious Doubt.  Some of what I was taught at St. Leo’s seemed to be to be unbelievable, bullshit, but it came from adult authority figures I had been taught to revere: nuns in black robes and priests who wore laces and brocades and spoke a mysterious language at Mass.  This was also about the time that my Temple of the Holy Ghost was developing a mind of its own.  There was no one to talk to about these matters.  Discussing it with a priest or nun was unthinkable.  My father was no help.  Kitty was too little and she had her own sadness to deal with.  My mother would have told me to listen to the priests and nuns about the religious stuff and about my father, she would have reminded me, as she often had occasion to, that my father loved Kitty and me, “he just didn’t know how to show it.”  That she had to assure us of his undemonstrated love so often in those years was evidence of the shakiness of the assurances.  Even without using magic words, however, love can shown with a kiss, a hug, a smile, a twinkle in the eye, a wink, a pat on the back, a handshake, a thumbs up, an arm around the shoulder.  It can be shown by reading or telling a story, singing a song, rocking to sleep, a trip to the park, a piggyback ride,  a fishing or baseball outing, a game of catch, a sharing of humor or in any of a million other ways.  Kitty and I saw none of that.  One who has little love for himself has little love to share, even with his children.

. . .

Growing up Irish American Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago was a schizophrenic experience.  While we received occasional infusions of “God so loved the world . . .” the main teaching of the Church, which is to say the professional God-guys, was fear of eternal damnation.  The Church touted the Little Flower and St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds when it needed a little romanticism and sentimentalism, but its regular indoctrination came right from the same Calvinistic hellhole that Jonathan Edwards drew from when he wrote his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon.  The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. There was precious little difference between 16th and 17th century Puritan moral theology and the Irish Catholic moral theology of the mid-20th century.  Damn near every sin more grievous than disobeying your mother was a mortal sin and if you died with one mortal sin on your soul, the eternal fires of Hell awaited you.  Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?  Imagine holding a lighted match under your finger for one second.  For ten seconds.  For ten minutes!  Ten hours!! TEN THOUSAND MILLION GAZILLION YEARS!!!!!   And that’s not one one trillionth of one one trillionth of ETERNITY!    And, to make growing up more interesting, any boy or girl could get into this kind of trouble as soon as they reach “the age of reason” which the God-guys decided was 7 years old.  This teaching was enough to keep a pubescent boy awake at night praying for no wet dreams, especially before he fell asleep. 

  . . . . 

At least if one did slip into a sin of the flesh meriting burning in Hell for all eternity, the sin could be forgiven by coming alongside Father Devereaux and being grappled.  One sin and only one sin was unforgivable: hating the Holy Ghost.  I believe I learned this in the 5th or 6th grade from one of the Sisters of Providence who had it on the highest authority:

"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."-- (Matt. 12:31-32)

As soon as I learned of this unforgivable sin and that I must never say “I hate the Holy Ghost”, I was constantly pursued by the Evil One tempting me to say “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  I was a 10 or 11 year old neurotic haunted by the soft siren call “Go on, say it.  Say you hate the Holy Ghost.  Go on, say it.”  I still remember the terrible day I was dispatched by my teacher, Sister Mary Chalkdust, to take the wastebasket downstairs and empty it.  All the way down the back steps at St. Leo Grammar School I struggled against my obsessive wrestling against thinking the words “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  No.  Don’t say it.  It’s unforgivable!  No use.  I thought the words in a complete sentence: “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  I was done for and I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet. 

I refer to these partly-painful. partly-embarassing memories recorded several years ago because the "unforgiveable sin" I thought I comitted at age 11 or so was BLASPHEMY,  which, according to Merriam-Webster,  is “the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God; and/or the act of claiming the attributes of a deity.”   I was reminded of these memories by the posting of the "Mission from God" message on the official White House social media account by @realDonaldTrump.  It made me wonder whether the concept of "blasphemy" has lost its cogency in our era of politicized religion and religified politics.

 From My Friends Are Immortal to Me, op-ed by Roger Rosenblatt in today's NY Times 

 At my age (85 this year), one cannot help thinking of mortality. Immortality, if considered at all, is less important than more easily achieved goals. Pleasure in the work itself. Usefulness. Kindness. An eagerness and readiness to be of help. These are the same things I remember about my friends. What matters to me is what mattered to them, which is probably why we were friends in the first place, and these things are subsumed in the realm of general feeling.

My jottings on this journal one year ago today are somewhat apropos:

 The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman.

Death:  I am Death.

The knight:  Have you come for me?

Death:  I've been at your side for some time.

The knight:  I've been aware of that. 

What happens when I die?  I started out writing "when we die" but realized that it's my own death I'm thinking about and I know at least some of the answers, or at least I think I do.  Depending on the circumstances of my death, my inert body, i.e., corpse, will be taken to Schmidt & Bartelt funeral home for preparation for burial in a cardboard box in the green burial lot at Forest Home Cemetery.  With no embalming or preservatives applied to it to deter decomposition, its burial will happen relatively soon after I die.  It's what will happen after that rapid burial that I'm thinking of.  What happens to all the stuff with which I have surrounded myself over 83 or 84 or however many years I will have lived?  I think I know the answer of course but perhaps it's good to think about it.  Or perhaps not.  In any event, I should leave some disposition wishes.

My clothing will be given away, mostly to Repairers of the Breach on Vliet Street, the balance probably to Goodwill, SVDP, or the House of Peace.  Some will simply be trashed.

My car should be offered to Andy.

My books are a challenge.  Who would want them?  I collected the leatherbound and boxed sets over many years and read many though not all of them, starting with the elegantly bound, black Moby Dick.  I used to read the opening paragraph from that volume to my 1L Property classes in November when first-year students were getting nervous about upcoming exams.   I have a little collection of poetry books that I suspect no one will be interested in and perhaps the same is true of all the books.  I'm thinking I would like the books to go to Peter, Lizzie, Drew, and Ellis, but I am probably being foolish about this as I imagine there will be little if any interest in them, even the great classics to which I was introduced as part of a liberal arts education.  Will any of the kids seek or get such an education in the world they are entering?  Perhaps Geri should first select any books that she wants to keep, then give Sarah and Andy 'first dibs', then Steve and David.  Micaela used to say she wanted my Elie Wiesel collection, but we haven't heard from her in months now; are we 'ghosted'?  Anything left over should be offered to a library.

My paintings and drawings.  I suppose that Geri will hold on to any she wants to keep and then give "first dibs" to Sarah and Andy and then to Steve and David.  Are there any friends who would want any of them as a keepsake?  Probably not.  Realistically, there will probably be few takers and most of my artwork will be trashed.

My memoir.  Sarah and Andy were each given a copy of the memoir and neither showed any interest in it.  I gave one to Kitty also years ago and she too was silent about it.  It reminded her of our childhood at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue in Chicago, of her strained relationship with our father throughout much of her life, and of a traumatic occurrence with our maternal grandfather early in her life.   It took me years to research and compose it and, although it contains some interesting history of the years I have lived through, at 279 double-sided pages, it suffers from TMI for any reader other than me.  I'm glad that I wrote it even though I am its only reader.  I keep the bound copy on the end table next to my TV room recliner and have frequently referred to it, often for entries in this journal.   I have one bound copy left plus the original looseleaf pages.  Geri has shown no interest in reading it, but I should leave the bound copy for her.  Should I have the looseleaf pages bound at Kinko's?  For whom and to what end?

I'm coming up on the 2nd anniversary of starting my journal and it's all published online as my blog as well as sitting on my downstairs desk as a hard copy.  Not surprisingly and I guess gratefully, the blog has no followers.  No one has ever asked to read it.  I print off each day's entries and save them on a pile atop my desk in the basement.  Will anyone look at it after I'm gone or does it go directly to trash?  Eventually of course it will be trashed along with all of most of my drawings and paintings.  Memento, homo, quia pulvis es . . .

Memorabilia.  I still have the baby book my mother kept about me during my infancy.  I have old family photos, the program from my high school graduation, my father's discharge papers from the Marines in World War II, my entire official record from my years in the Marines, photos from my law firm, and photos of kids and grandchildren.  For a long time, I had my Uncle Bud's and Aunt Mary's mimeographed living quarters regulations from when Bud worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. but somehow I discarded it with some other stuff.  In any case, I have a lot of memorabilia that I suspect will end up following those Manhattan Project regs.

My 61 years old Marine uniforms, my academic robe, trash.

Is it good to think about such matters now?  I suppose I should start trashing some of this abundant "stuff" now to save Geri from some work, the stuff in the basement, some of the stuff in my closets, Swedish death cleaning chores.  Even the process of just thinking about it is a vivid reminder of Memento, homo, quia pulvis es . . .

It's mighty clear that I had a lot more energy for thinking and writing a year ago than I have today.  I'm doing a lot more 'copy and paste'ing these last few months than I used to do.  Loss of energy, loss of focus, loss of life.