4/6/2026

 Monday, April 6, 2026

1830 Joseph Smith and others organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 

1934 418 Lutheran ministers were arrested in Germany

1994 The plane carrying the Rwandan President and Burundian President was shot down by surface-to-air missiles,  sparking the Rwandan Genocide. 

2016 US primary elections: Wisconsin was won by Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz

2021 Jeff Bezos, worth $177 billion, tops Forbes Billionaires list of 2,755 people, including new entry Kim Kardashian

2022 New Mexico's largest wildfire started as a supposedly controlled burn off by US Forest Service. It went on to displace 100 people, burn 341,000 acres, 62 million trees 

2022 Scientists in North Dakota claimed to have found dinosaur remains killed on the very day a giant asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago beginning their extinction 

In bed at 8:45, up at 2.  126/75/63. 98. 206.2.  38/32/43/29  More wind and rain later.

Morning meds at  a.m.  Ranolazine at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.

Random thoughts at 3 a.m.:  (1). I seem to follow in the footsteps of my beloved sister Kitty, i.e., I'm developing insomnia.  When I would visit her in Phoenix, her husband Jim and I would smile at each other as we watched her doze off during the evening's television shows, long before we all retired for the night.  Then she would be up in the middle of the night, reading or watching Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, and very probably praying for Jim, their children, me, and so many others.  In her last years, she probably also talked to Jesus about the Church in which we grew up and were formed, and about the men (always men, of course) who wielded authority within it - priests, bishops, cardinals, Rome. and her disappointment in them.  She probably reflected on her own sins, as well.   Perhaps she talked to Jesus's mother, called Mary, and to our own mother, our own Mary.  As day broke, she would shart doing her work, cleaning, cooking, getting ready to do the Good Works she did every day of her life.  When I wasn't in Phoenix visiting her, we texted each other every morning, long before sun-up for I was also an early-riser, though not nearly as early as she was.  We had long text-message conversations on our phones, preparing ourselves for the day ahead and reflecting on current events, our troubled childhood experiences, whatever.  She's been gone for more than 3 years now, and a light has gone out in my life.  I regularly light 'Catholic candles' early in the morning thinking of her, as we did in her last years.  Such a treasure.

(2) David French has an essay in yesterday's New York Times, which he or the copy editor, titled "The Light That Changed My Life."  It was about some of his personal religious history growing up in an evangelical Protestant home, and about how affected he was when he attended an Easter Vigil service.

It began in darkness — symbolizing the darkness of death during the days after Christ’s crucifixion — and then the pastor lit a candle. High church Christians — Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, for example — may recognize this as the paschal candle, the symbol of Christ’s resurrection.

For a time, only the paschal candle penetrated the gloom, but then — as we sang hymns of praise — we picked up our own candles and one by one lit them with the flame from the paschal candle. Christ’s light became our light. Christ’s life became our life. By the end of the service, the entire church was ablaze with light.

French is a believer, a Christian, and so, he wrote:

If we truly are created in the image of God, then his life becomes our life. We are not gods, of course, but we are eternal beings. The curse of Adam — “for dust you are and to dust you will return” — is broken by the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ.

Or, as C.S. Lewis wrote, Christ “has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.”

Before that service, I had always recognized this theological reality in personal terms: Christ’s sacrifice gave me the hope of eternal life. But there was something about that roomful of candles that touched my heart. It elevated the dignity and worth of every person in that room.

When you interact with a friend, with a neighbor, even an enemy, you are meeting a person who possesses an eternal soul. We are not meeting a talking animal, a person who is here today and gone tomorrow.

This is one reason I’m as stricken as I am when I see cruelty in the name of Christ. It’s one reason that, of all the sins I regret, I regret my own cruelty the most.

 I don't share French's faith - or do I?  How often I have said, or written, "You can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy."  There's a lot of truth to the notion of "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic."  It may be especially true of those of us who grew up in the Irish American Catholic Church, pre-Vatican II, which was dominated by Irish Catholic prelates.  My maternal grandparents were both Irish immigrants, my mother a first generation Irish American, as was our parish pastor, Patrick J. Malloy, and our cardinal archbiship, Samuel Stritch.  I attended only Catholic schools, 19 years of them from grade school through law school.  Every year I was asked in grade school and high school, we were told to pray for "a vocation" to the priesthood.  My high school group consisted of four of us, all Irish: Johnny Flynn, Jack O'Keefe, Larry Stack, and me.  Johnny and Jack both joined the Irish Christian Brothers and I considered it.  I don't know whether Larry did.  He went off to DePaul University run by the Vincentian priests and I to Marquette University run by Jesuits.  Can it be a surprise that my interest in religion and theology has been lifelong?  I didn't mean to write about this, when I started writing, but rather about my memory of attending the Easter Vigil at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1998 or perhaps about contemporary evangelicalism and the Hegsethian view of Christianity, but I'm a bit loopy and incoherent after getting up at 2 a.m.

A startling event.  I took my early Ranolazine by 10 this morning, before leaving to drop off my Holton monitor at the VA.  At 11:30, on my way back, I coughed up the Ranolazine tablet.  It had lodged in my throat for about an hour and a half without my awareness. ` I hadn't swallowed the tablet with enough water.  My swallowing challenges are getting worse, creating greater risks of choking.

DJT and JDF.  I've been watching Trump's press conference, with him making of kinds of untrue statements, many of them simply gross exagerations.  It struck me that, when he gets talking, he says many things that are completely untrue, but he believes what he says.  He makes things up, reminding me of a colleague I had in the law practice who would relate what happened at a meeting or a deposition.  Even when talking to two of us who had been at the meeting or deposition with him, he would make up stuff that we knew to be untrue, pure fantasy, but he believed what he was saying.  He couldn't help it.  I think Trump is like that.  Once he gets talking, some strange part of his strange brain takes over and feeds him information which to him is true.  He can't help himself.  It's a form of delusion, hallucination, or fantasy.  Harry G. Frankfurt, who wrote the celebrated essay "On Bullshit" in 1986, might say it's just bullshit, rather than lying.  The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false, only that it serves his purpose.  But for guys like DJT and JDF, it's not just that they don't care whether what they say is true or false, but rather that they believe, at least temporarily, what they say is true.