Wednesday, May 20, 2026
D+174/119
325 First ecumenical council of Christian bishops at Nicaea, Asia Minor
1969 US troop captured Hill 937/Hamburger Hill in Vietnam
1970 100,000 marched in NY supporting US policies in Vietnam
1980 710 families in Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, New York were evacuated due to the lingering effects of prior use as chemical waste disposal site
2017 President Donald Trump began his 1st foreign trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
2025 The United Kingdom suspended negotiations on a new free trade agreement with Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador amid the then-recent Israeli offensive in Gaza
In bed at 9, up at 4:15; 0430 151/68/E 130 205.2, 0445 126/74/54 110; 48/54/45. SEVERE WEATHER ALERT; BEACH HAZARDS, Life-threatening waves 3 to 5 feet and dangerous currents expected from 7 pm to 10 am Thursday.
Morning meds at 8 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:20 a.m.
"Barn Raising" is the heading of the chapter in Traveling Mercies in which Anne Lamott introduces her readers to her friends Sara and Adam who have a two-year old daughter Olivia who has cystic fibrosis.
I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked. They must live with the fact that their younger daughter has this disease that fills its victims' lungs with thick sludge that harbors infections. Two week hospital stays for nonstop IV antibiotics are common. Adulthood is rare. Twice a day, every day, her parents must pound her between the shoulder blades for forty-five minutes to dislodge the mucus from her lungs. . . .
This is, I think, her introduction to the problem theologians and philopsophers call theodicy, or the problem of how to understand, and justify, a God who voluntarily created a world - and us - that is so full of evil and suffering. How can a God who is supposedly simultaneously All-Good, All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and All-Just create innocent little Olivia with cystic fibrosis, along with countless other undeserved sufferings all over his world. He's got the whole world in his hands, right? His eye is on the sparrow, right? Anne Lamott writes:
I looked up at God, and thinking about Olivia, about how badly scarred her lungs are already, I said, "What on earth are you thinking?
She doesn't attempt to answer the question, at least not in this chapter, or in the first 170 pages of the book that I've read so far, but no one who has tried has done a very satisfactory job so far, and the list includes St. Augustine, St. Iranaeus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Rebbe Schneerson of Chabad Lubavitch. I remember sitting at the kitchen table in Geri's cousin Sue's house during a visit several years ago and suggesting that it's easier to make the argument that God is a mean prick than it is to argue that S/He/It is an all-powerful and all-loving Father to our species. Anne Lamott gave us a living example of the conundrum in the form of 2 year-old Olivia with cystic fibrosis. There are millions, perhaps billions, of other examples all over the world. The answer I learned in my Catholic education was that it's a mystery of Faith, like how what is bread and wine in one moment actually turns into human flesh and blood when certain words are spoken by certain persons who have been ordained to accomplish the feat.
An observant Jew would, I suppose, tell me to read the Book of Job, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, said the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9. Anne Lamott is smart; she leaves the 'splainin' to the prophets instead of taking on the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, and Christopher Hitchens. Most Christians are wise enough not to wrack their brains trying to figure out stuff like this. As my old pal Vicki Conti so wisely told me long ago, "It's a heart thing, Chuck, not a head thing."
I've watched a few of lamott's interviews and speeches on YouTube and she sings the same tunes in all the ones that I've watched. I can see why she is so popular because she popularizes Christianity. She is a kind of homespun, religious Will Rogers, or Herb Shriner, or non-cynical Mark Twain. She expresses her personal participation in the religion in everyday terms from everyday life, especially in metaphors and similes that are clever and catchy, but again I find myself wondering what she really believes about this God about whom she writes so familiarly, and as important, what the belief is based on. That said, I confess that I have shared some of the religious experiences she descibes. For example, she wrote a book I haven't read yet, titled Help, Thanks, Wow in which she says those three words in the title are the most essential forms of prayer. I agree with that and I've often been moved to engage in those very prayers. I'm reminded, as I am so often, of the 4th and 5th stanzas of W. B. Yeats' poem Vacillation
The fourth stanza seems a form of prayer of thanksgiving and of awe and wonder, of "thanks" and "wow," while the fifth is a prayer of loneliness, desperation, of "help." I've had all those feelings, sometimes all jumbled together almost simultaneously. I suspect that religous instinct or impulse is in all of us.IV
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.V
Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
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