February 5: The Game is Open, Carnival Barkers, Free Will

 Merton takes a gamble . . . 

A carnival came to Bradford. To us that meant a couple of Ferris wheels and a bingo game and the “Whip” and a man wearing a white uniform and a crash helmet being fired out of a cannon into a net. We got into the car and started out along the Rock City road, through the dark woods alive with the drumming of the oil-pumps. 

It was a big carnival. It seemed to fill the bottom of a narrow valley, one of the zig-zag valleys in which Bradford is hidden, and the place blazed with lights. The stacks of the oil refinery stood up, beyond the lights, like the guardians of hell. We walked into the white glare and the noise of crazy electric music and the thick sweet smell of candy. 

“Hey, fellows, come over this way if you please.” 

We turned our beards shyly towards the man in shirt sleeves, hatted with a felt hat, leaning out of his booth. We could see the colored board, the numbers. We approached. He began to explain to us that, out of the kindness of his big foolish heart, he was conducting this game of chance which was so easy and simple that it really amounted to a kind of public charity, a means for endowing intelligent and honest young men like ourselves with a handsome patrimony. 

We listened to his explanation. It was not one of those games where you won a box of popcorn, that was evident. In fact, although it started at a quarter, the ante doubled at every throw: of course, so did the prize, and the prize was in dollars. 

“All you have to do is roll the little ball into these holes and...” 

And he explained just what holes you had to roll the little ball into. Each time you had to get a new and different combination of numbers. 

“You put down a quarter,” said our benefactor, “and you are about to win two dollars and fifty cents. If you should happen to miss it the first time, it will be all the better for you, because for fifty cents you’ll win five dollars —for one dollar you’ll take ten—for two you’ll take twenty.” 

We put down our quarters, and rolled the little balls into the wrong holes. 

“Good for you,” said the man, “now you stand a chance of winning twice as much.” And we all put down fifty cents. 

“Fine, keep it up, you’re getting ready to win more and more each time— you can’t miss, it’s in-ev-i-table!” 

He pocketed a dollar bill from each of us. 

“That’s the way, men, that’s the way,” he exclaimed, as we all rolled the little ball into the wrong holes again. 

I paused and asked him to go over the rules of the game a second time. He did, and I listened closely. It was as I thought. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about. You had to get certain combinations of numbers, and for my own part I was completely unable to figure out what the combinations were. He simply told us what to shoot for, and then rapidly added up all the numbers and announced: 

“You just missed it. Try again, you’re so close you can’t fail.” And the combination changed again. 

In about two and a half minutes he had taken all our money except for a dollar which I was earnestly saving for the rest of the carnival and for beer. How, he asked us, could we have the heart to quit now? Here we were right on the point of cleaning up, getting back all our losses, and winning a sum that made us dizzy: three hundred and fifty dollars. 

“Men,” he said, “you can’t quit now, you’re just throwing away your money if you quit. It doesn’t make sense, does it? You didn’t come all the way out here just to throw away your dough? Use your heads, boys. Can’t you see you’ve got to win?” 

Rice got that big grin on his face that meant “Let’s get out of here.” 

“We haven’t any more money,” someone said. 

“Have you any traveler’s checks?” the philanthropist inquired. 

“No.” 

But I never saw anyone so absorbed and solemn as Lax was, at that moment, in his black beard, with his head bowed over all those incomprehensible numbers. So he looked at me and I looked at him, and the man said: 

“If you want to run home and get a little more money, I’ll hold the game open for you—how’s that?”

 We said: “Hold the game open, we’ll be back.” 

We got into the car and drove, in the most intense silence, fifteen miles or whatever the distance was to the cottage, and fifteen miles back, with thirty-five dollars and all the rest of the money we had: but the thirty-five alone were for the game. 

When the benefactor of the poor saw the three of us come through that gate again, he really looked surprised and a little scared. The expressions on our faces must have been rather frightening, and perhaps he imagined that we had gone home not only to get our money but our guns. 

We walked up to the booth. 

“You held this game open for us, huh?” 

“Yes, indeed, men, the game is open.” 

“Explain it over again.” 

He explained it over again. He told us what we had to get to win—it seemed impossible to miss. We put the money down on the counter and Lax rolled the little ball—into the wrong holes. 

“Is that all, boys?” said the prince of charity. 

“That’s all.” We turned on our heels and went away. 

Merton the gullible.  He and his friends fall victim to two things:  a grifter and their own prides.  I've been to many of those carnival midways--as most people have--where people bark at you from inside their booths, trying, by hook or by crook, to get you to stop and lay down some cash.  And the results are pretty much what Merton describes here:  you shell twenty dollars for a sickly goldfish in a plastic bag of water.  Or you walk away empty-handed.

When I was younger, I allowed myself to get lured in by these barkers.  Walking along with my girlfriend, a man chewing a cigar shouting at me, "Hey, lover boy, want to win something for that pretty girl of yours?"  Trying to rush my children past the booths, a tattooed woman calling out, "Hey, kids, don't you want to take home a unicorn as big as you?"  The messages are always different, tailored to the situation and carnival goers.  But it's all about temptation--the game runners size you up for your weaknesses and then go to work.

As a kid, going to Catholic catechism, I would hear the story of Christ being tempted by the devil in the desert after 40 days of fasting.  I always pictured the devil as a carnival barker, offering Jesus the biggest stuffed animal on the sandy midway.  Of course, Jesus doesn't surrender to this conman.  Because . . . well, He's God.  Christ recognizes that the game is rigged.  There is literally no human way to win.

Every day is like that for humans.  We  make choices, from the time we climb out of bed in the morning to the time we crawl back in at night.  The carnival barkers are all there, vying for our attentions.  We make good choices (an apple and oatmeal for breakfast) and bad choices (a bottle of watermelon wine and Little Caesar's pizza for dinner).  It's all about free will.

I'm not a big fan of free will a lot of the time.  Because many of the people who I love make terrible choices, every day, all day.  It's so easy, as Merton learns in the passage above, to get suckered by the lights and smells and excitements of the carnival games.  In the end, however, most of us leave the fairgrounds broke and broken.

Yet, free will is what makes life interesting, I suppose.  The world would be pretty boring if everyone ate the same things, dressed the same way, read the same books, listened to the same music, liked the same movies.  Without free will, I wouldn't be a poet.  Because the world doesn't put a high value on poetry, unless you happen to be Amanda Gorman or Joy Harjo.  Instead, I'd be an accountant or doctor or plumber.  Something utilitarian.  

So, free will is a double-edged sword.  It allows abusers to be abusers.  Saints to be saints.  Trump supporters to be Trump supporters.  Poets to be poets.  You have to take the good with the not-so-good.  I'm not saying that poetry is the equivalent of losing all your money at a carnival ring toss game.  What I'm saying is that free will leaves room for poetry, but it also for porn addiction.

I chose to ask my wife to marry me.  She chose to marry me.  We chose to have children.  I chose to be a poet and contingent university professor.  I chose to have three glasses of Bailey's Irish Cream mixed with eggnog tonight.  And to watch The Man Who Invented Christmas because Christopher Plummer died today.

Like I said, every day is about possibilities, with very few opportunities for do-overs.  I'm lucky because I wouldn't change a whole lot about my life.  I would still marry my wife, despite all of the struggles we've faced because of mental illness and addiction.  I would still be a father, regardless of the fact that my son seems headed for a repeat of seventh grade.  And I would still be a poet, though it will never buy groceries or pay the water bill.  All of these choices were winning hands for me.

Saint Marty knows when to hold 'em, and knows when to fold 'em. 

July 24: Metaphysicians in Hell, Substance, Free Will

Merton takes a walking tour in Germany with the philosopher Spinoza . . .

Fortunately, this was one of the matters in which I decided to ignore his advice.  Anyway, I went ahead and tried to read some philosophy by myself.  People who are immersed in sensual appetites and desires are not very well prepared to handle abstract ideas.  Even in the purely natural order, a certain amount of purity of heart is required before an intellect can get sufficiently detached and clear to work out the problems of metaphysics.  I say a certain amount, however, because I am sure that no one needs to be a saint to be a clever metaphysician.  I dare say there are plenty of metaphysicians in hell.

However, the philosophers to whom I was attracted were not the best.  For the most part, I used to take their books out of libraries, and return them without ever having opened them.  It was just as well.  Nevertheless during the Easter vacation, when I was seventeen, I earnestly and zealously set about trying to figure out Spinoza.

I had gone to Germany, by myself as usual, for the vacation.  In Cologne I had bought a big rucksack and slung it over my shoulders and started up the Rhine valley on foot, in a blue jersey and an old pair of flannel bags, so that people in the inns along the road asked me if I was a Dutch sailor off one of the river barges.  In the rucksack, which was already heavy enough, I had a couple of immoral novels and the Everyman Library edition of Spinoza.  Spinoza and the Rhine valley!  I certainly had a fine sense of appropriateness.  The two go very well together.  However, I was about eighty years too late.  And the only thing that was lacking was that I was not an English or American student at Heidelberg:  then the mixture would have been perfect in all its mid-nineteenth century ingredients.

I picked up more, on this journey, than a few intellectual errors, half understood.  Before I got to Koblenz, I had trouble in one foot.  Some kind of an infection seemed to be developing under one of the toenails.  But it was not especially painful, and I ignored it.  However, it made walking unpleasant, and so, after going on as far as St. Goar, I gave up in disgust.  Besides, the weather had turned bad, and I had got lost in the forest, trying to follow the imaginary biker's trail called the Rheinhohenweg.

I went back to Koblenz, and sat in a room over a big beer hall called the Neuer Franziskaner and continued my desultory study of Spinoza and my modern novelists.  Since I understood the latter much better than the philosopher, I soon gave him up and concentrated on the novels.

After a few days, I returned to England, passing through Paris, where Pop and Bonnemaman were.  There I picked up some more and even worse books, and went back to school.

I had not been back for more than a few days when I began to feel ill.  At first, I thought I was only out of sorts because of the sore foot and a bad toothache, which had suddenly begun to afflict me.  

Spinoza was considered one of the most radical atheist heretics of his time, although his ideas have always struck me as fully centered on a belief in God.  His metaphysics is made of one thing--"Substance"--which Spinoza called "God" or "Nature."  He saw the universe as simply two attributes (thought and extension) that are part of infinite divine attributes radiating from God.

Pretty heady stuff for 17-year-old Merton to get his brain around.  And, not surprisingly, he fails.  Thinking abstractly about God (or Nature or Substance) is no easy feat.  People spend lifetimes studying, writing, and arguing about subjects like this.  I, for one, took a long time in coming to any kind of understanding of Spinoza that makes sense to my views of spirituality and the natural world.

The idea of everything in the universe being an extension of God makes sense.  Spinoza's universe is all divinely interconnected, one thing affecting the other, with everything playing out in a pretty deterministic way.  All things occur exactly as planned.  Thus, free will doesn't play a big part in the unfolding of events.  (That is the part, I think, that really bugged the Catholic Church, which puts a lot of stock in human free will.)

I, for one, am not a big fan of free will.  It creates too many problems.  Note:  I didn't say that free will doesn't exist.  It does.  Spinoza and I part ways here.  Free will is that thing that lets people fuck up their lives in huge ways.  If free will didn't exist, then marriages wouldn't fail, addiction wouldn't destroy lives, and Donald Trump wouldn't be President of the United States.

Yet, I know people who find new and creative way to break themselves daily, and, in the process, leave a trail of broken hearts in their wakes.  I'm thinking of one person I know, in particular, tonight.  He has been making terrible choices for a couple years, and now he is on the brink of walking out on his kids and spouse.  Addiction is playing a huge part in this decision.  He knows he's an addict, and he just doesn't care.

If I were Spinoza, I would say that this is exactly the way things are supposed to play out.  Everything is working toward a specific end that is predetermined.  I'm not Spinoza.  I think that this person is being selfish, stupid, and arrogant.  In short, he's choosing to be an addict over everything else in his life.  And he is going to destroy the lives of everyone in his family.  Especially his young son.  Free will in action, folks.

Yet, where there is free will, there's always a chance for redemption.  This person could turn things around before driving his car off the cliff.  He could.  It's possible.  He's been at this point before in his life, a few times, and he's come back.  The question is whether his spouse and children will accept him, forgive him, take him back.  That'a big question.  Free will in action again.

So, you see why I'm not a big fan of free will.  It can be a curse.  Hiroshima leveling a city.  Or it can be a miracle.  Jesus Christ rising from the tomb.

Saint Marty is hoping for a resurrection, but preparing for an apocalypse.

July 12: Disreputable and Wild, Free Will, Rainbows and the Promised Land

Thomas Merton returns to England after his first summer of independence . . .

At the end of the summer I started back for England on the same boat on which I had come.  This time the passenger list included some girls from Bryn Mawr and some from Vassar and some from somewhere else, all of whom were going to a finishing school in France.  It seems as if all the rest of the people on board were detectives.  Some of them were professional detectives.  Others were amateurs, all of them made me and the Bryn Mawr girls the object of their untiring investigations.  But in any case the ship was divided into these two groups:  on the one hand the young people, on the other the elders.  We sat in the smoking room all the rainy days playing Duke Ellington records on the portable vic that belonged to one of the girls.  When we got tired of that we wandered all over the ship looking for funny things to do.  The hold was full of cattle, and there was also a pack of fox-hounds down there.  We used to go down and play with the dogs.  At Le Havre, when the cattle were unloaded, one of the cows broke loose and ran all over the dock in a frenzy.  One night three of us got up in the crow's nest on the foremast with the radio operators and I got into a big argument about Communism.

That was another thing that had happened that summer:  I had begun to get the idea that I was a Communist, although I wasn't quite sure what Communism was.  There are a lot of people like that.  They do no little harm by virtue of their sheer, stupid inertia, lost in between all camps, in the no-man's-land of their own confusion.  They are fair game for anybody.  They can be turned into fascists just as quickly as they can be pulled into line with those who are really Reds.

The other group was made up of the middle-aged people.  At their core were the red-faced, hard-boiled cops who spent their time drinking and gambling and fighting among themselves and spreading scandal all over the boat about the young ones who were so disreputable and wild.

Here is the young, wild Merton.  On a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with a bunch of Bryn Mawr girls, playing Ellington on a record player, wandering around, getting into arguments about Communism, and giving the older passengers something to talk about.  In short, being a teenage boy.  The only difference between him and any other teenage boy on ship:  Merton will grow up to be one of the most influential religious figures of the twentieth century.  Of course, the Bryn Mawr girls are a little more interesting to him at this point in his life than God.

I often wonder at what point in a holy person's life God steps in and takes over.  Of course, it's probably more like a surrender than a coup.  In everything I've read and learned, God doesn't get in the way of free will.  That's the one ingredient in the human soul that fucks things up for most people.  If it weren't for free will, the streets would be crowded with Mother Teresas and Francises of Assisi and Thomas Mertons.  The high school football teams would be quarterbacked by a kid with stigmata.  And the valedictorian would change the punch into wine at the all-night graduation party.

Of course, that's not the way it works.  Don't get me wrong:  God is pretty relentless.  You can turn your back on him your whole life, write books about his non-existence, join the Church of Latter Day Atheists.  In the end, he will get you, one way or the other.  It's a matter of answering the door when he knocks.  You can keep on ignoring that knocking, or you can surrender. 

Human beings don't like to surrender.  I'm just as guilty as the next person when it comes to this.  I like to think that I, through my own actions, can solve everything that's fucked-up in my life.  If I were talking about Greek tragedy right now, the term I would use here is "hubris"--overweening pride.  One of the most difficult things to do is . . . nothing.  Simply stepping aside and letting God take over.  I've done that several times in my life, and I can say that each time was incredibly freeing and terrifying at the same time.  I did it when my sister was dying of lymphoma of the brain.  When my marriage was crumbling.  And when I struggle with depression and anxiety.  There always comes that moment where I throw my hands in the air and say to God, "That's it!  I'm done!  You think you can do better?  Be my guest!" 

And, every time, God steps in, rolls up his sleeves, and goes to work.  The results are usually miraculous.

Yet, before the miracle is the struggle.  The days or weeks or months or years when you think you are alone in the universe, master of your own destiny.  Think about the children of Israel wandering through the desert for 40 years to complete a trip that should have only taken only a couple weeks, at most.  Jesus Christ wandered in the desert, too, for 40 days.  Noah floated on the ark for 150 days before hitting dry land.  There's times of drought and flood, and then times of rainbows and the Promised Land.

By this time in my adulthood, I should have learned to surrender early, but I don't.  There's a sense of powerlessness in surrender, and I find it very uncomfortable.  I'm a person who loves routines and habits.  I like to know who committed the murder before I even pick up the mystery novel.  God, however, doesn't give a whole lot of clues as to when the miracle is coming.  Instead, it just sort of appears, like an unexpected comet or star in the sky.

Saint Marty just has to remember to look up and give thanks.

August 25: Peter Paul Mound Bar, Always Has, Always Will

Billy Pilgrim got onto a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years after that.  He knew it was going to crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so.  It was supposed to carry Billy and twenty-eight other optometrists to a convention in Montreal.

His wife, Valencia, was outside, and his father-in-law, Lionel Merble, was strapped to the seat beside him.

Lionel Merble was a machine.  Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine.  It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.

Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating a Peter Paul Mound Bar and waving bye-bye.

There's something in this passage that makes me a little anxious and sad.  Billy knows his plane is going to crash.  He knows that the people who are with him on the airplane are going to die and that he himself is going to be severely injured.  Yet, he doesn't do anything to prevent the crash.  He straps himself into his seat and waits for the moment.  As the Tralfamadorians say, it has happened this way, and it will always happen this way. 

If I applied Vonnegut's line of thought to my own life, I suppose I would be a lot calmer about the future, since I can't do anything to affect change.  If I'm going to die tomorrow, I'm not going to be able to avoid the car that's going to hit me, so I might as well just go about my life as normal.  Somehow, that car will find me.  It always has and always will.

Of course, this leaves no room for human free will to alter the course of events.  That means that Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States, and he always will be elected.  James Dean will always die in a car crash at the age of 24, and Abraham Lincoln will always be assassinated at Ford Theater.  Most speculative fiction enforces this idea.  Changing the past is a bad idea.  It harms the future in terrible ways. 

That doesn't mean that, if I had the opportunity, I wouldn't travel into the past and buy as many shares of Apple as I could.  It also doesn't mean that I wouldn't kill Adolf Hitler as a child if I could.  But, if doing these things would mean that I wouldn't meet and fall in love with my wife, or that my kids wouldn't be born, I would probably be just like Billy.  I would strap myself into my airplane seat, sit back, close my eyes, and wait for the plane to fall out of the sky.

Saint Marty is thankful for his past and present and future tonight.  Airplane crash or no airplane crash.

May 8: Great Millipedes, Last Batch of Papers, String Theory

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfmadore.  The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.  And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either.  They see them as great millipedes--"with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.

It's a very Salvador Dali view of the universe that Vonnegut presents here.  All times seen at once by the residents of Tralfamadore.  No beginning or middle or end.  Just a spectrum of whens.  When Billy was born.  When he was captured in Germany.  When he was in an airplane crash.  When he took his first flying saucer ride.  Everything is a big pile of luminous pasta.  Maybe Vonnegut had string theory figured out before there was string theory.

My when right now is in my office at the university.  Correcting my last batch of papers, getting ready to do the final math after that.  Of course, if I were from Tralfamadore, or saw the universe as a Tralfamadorian does, I would already know the grades on these papers AND my students' final grades.  I would exist before the papers were written and after they sat on a pile in my office for a semester or two.

Of course, that's not the way human experience works.  We are chronological creatures, slowly limping toward our ends second-by-second, minute-by-minute.  Currently, my human vision is clouded with a headache.  I have not had any caffeine today, and so there is pressure building behind my eyes.  A dull ache that is steadily building.  After I am done blogging, I will most certainly walk down the hallway to the pop machine.  (For my readers from Wisconsin, pop = soda.)

I have not received any news about the status of my brother today.  I know he is in a Grand Rapids hospital.  I know that that he is undergoing tests and procedures.  Aside from that, I am without information.  Again, if I were Tralfamadorian, I would already know the results of those tests and procedures, his prognosis of recovery.  But, again, I am not Tralfamadorian.

So, in my humanness, I will grade papers tonight.  I will punch numbers and letters into a computer.  And I will wait for some kind of report about my brother.  Perhaps being human isn't all that bad.  In an earlier passage in Slaughterhouse, a Tralfamadorian says to Billy that free will is a foreign concept everywhere in the universe except Earth.  That would probably mean that hope is also alien to aliens.  Right now, hope is all I got, and it makes the grading and waiting bearable.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for being human.

May 6: Free Will, Good and Bad, Naked Gardening Day

"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.'  I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more.  Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

Billy has just commented to his alien abductor that it sounds as if Tralfamadorians don't believe in free will--the ability to make choices and change the future.  The Tralfamadorian explains that free will is indigenous to human beings on Earth.  Like the white rhinoceros or the mountain gorilla.  And if free will exists only on our planet, then the concept of good and bad exists only on this planet, as well.

The Tralfamadorian take on the universe doesn't make a lot of sense to Billy at this point in Slaughterhouse, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, either.  Every person is brought up to believe in free will--choosing what path of life to follow.  Making hard or easy choices.  My brother made a choice many years ago not to take his diabetic medications.  Now, he is in a hospital bed, struggling for breath as a result of his choice.

I also believe in the concept of good and bad.  No one would argue with me if I say that Adolf Hitler was a bad person.  Or Josef Stalin.  The Holocaust was evil.  Disenfranchising millions of people from healthcare in the United States, not good.  Goodness is the result of a person/people making choices that are beneficial to others--family, friends, neighbors, refugees, strangers, Mother Nature.  When someone makes a choice that harms others, that is bad.  That's what ethics and morality and religion are built upon.

I suppose that I do make neutral choices in a day.  Cheerios or Lucky Charms for breakfast.  Mountain Dew or Coke Zero.  Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen on the radio.  Gardening naked on Naked Gardening Day.  These decisions don't really hurt anything or anyone.  Okay, maybe me planting tulip bulbs in my backyard naked might be a little traumatizing to some people.  You get the idea, though.

The difficult choices in life, however, have consequences.  Sometimes personal.  Sometimes far-reaching.  If I were an addict and did not seek help for my addiction, I would be making a choice that would negatively impact my wife and kids and loved ones.  I would lose my job and my family and, eventually, my life.  Bad choice leading to bad consequences.

Free will can be a wonderful thing.  Free will can be a bitch, too.

Saint Marty is thankful for the free will to take a nap this afternoon.

March 31: You Are God, Free Will, Donald Trump

You are God.  You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen.  Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

Dillard imagines herself as God.  Creating a forest, in all its green complexity.  Dillard wrote this passage before global warming became the inspiration of Republican denial.  (Despite what Sarah Palin says, global warming is not a big, warm hug for God.)  She wrote it in 1974, when Richard Nixon was knee-deep in another kind of denial and Jimmy Carter was still a peanut farmer from Georgia.

It is the last day of March.  Now, thanks to El Nino and global warming, I saw snowflakes the size of golf balls falling from the heavens this afternoon.  I'm not kidding.  It lasted around five or ten minutes.  Looking out the window this afternoon and seeing those snowflakes reminded me of some scene from a bad science fiction movie.  The Day of the Triffids or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, with weird nuclear fallout raining from the clouds.

I know that global warming is a little controversial.  Some people don't want to believe that we are killing our planet burning coal and oil and gasoline and what-not.  Some people don't want to believe that the polar icecap is receding, that the human race is headed toward an episode of The Twilight Zone where the sun is turning everything into ash and baked clay.  Some people prefer to raise their right hands in a Donald Trump pledge of loyalty (or neo-Nazi salute, whichever you prefer).

If I were God, I'm not sure how different the world would be.  There's this little thing called free will that gets in the way.  The human race is allowed to make choices, good or bad.  Shall we eat the apple or not?  Shall we cut down trees in the Amazonian rain forest or not?  Shall we drill for oil or not?  Shall we end world hunger or not?  God permits us to make these kinds of decisions. 

Unfortunately, the human race often fucks it up.  We cut down rain forests.  We drill for oil.  We allow people to starve.  We eat the apple.  That's the way it has been since almost the beginning of time.  We want to control our destinies, be gods.  Time and again, we learn that we aren't divine.  We are made in God's image.  We aren't God.

The best we can do, when faced with a difficult choice, is to reflect on it, pray about it, and then do the exact opposite of what Donald Trump would do.

Saint Marty is not being political.  He's just pointing out that Donald Trump is a serpent with bad hair.

Are you going to vote for this guy?

January 28: Men's Courses, Free Will, New Member, New Cartoon

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge.  "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.  Say it is thus with what you show me!"

Scrooge is in a panic at this point in the book.  The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has just brought Scrooge to his neglected grave, shown him his headstone.  After his travels in the spirit world, Scrooge knows he's screwed if he continues to live his life in the same manner.  He wants assurance from the Ghost that he can change the future, that he isn't doomed for eternity.

This passage touches upon the subject of free will.  It's about choices.  If Scrooge chooses to remain a "covetous, old sinner," he's going to die a lonely, hated old miser.  If he chooses to embrace mankind, share his material and spiritual abundance with the world, his heart and life will open.  He will save himself and, at the same time, Tiny Tim and the Cratchits and countless others.  The choice is his.

It's one of the oldest stories in the world.  Adam and Eve have free will in the book of Genesis, and they choose to eat the apple.  Romeo and Juliet have free will, and they choose to love each other.  SpongeBob has free will, and he chooses to work for Mr. Krabs.  If Adam and Eve had chosen a fig instead of the apple, we may all still be living in the Garden of Eden.  If Juliet had had the hots for Joe Blowtini down the lane, she and Romeo would have lived long, unhappy lives.  If SpongeBob worked for Plankton at the Chum Bucket instead...Who am I kidding?  SpongeBob would never work for Plankton.

My point is that we all have choices.  Our lives are a result of our choices.  That's one of the big lessons of A Christmas Carol.  I chose to move back to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with my wife over ten years ago.  I chose to pursue degrees in writing and poetry.  I chose to start this blog.  Who I am, what I am, where I am, that's all a result of my choices.

Free will can be a gift or a curse.  It saves Scrooge.  It made Adolf Hitler one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century instead of a struggling artist.  It gave me a job as an adjunct English professor and made me a husband and father.  It may make me a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Pulitzer Prize, depending on my choices and a lot of luck.

Speaking of choices, a new person has chosen to be a disciple of Saint Marty.  I extend a warm welcome to Felipe.

Saint Marty is now going to exercise his free will.  He's going to end this post.

Confessions of Saint Marty