People are coping with this pandemic in ways hard to believe, despite all kinds of frustrations.  I saw my home parish transmit a Mass on Youtube, and the sound was all but inaudible.  Yet when I went to the St. Edward Confessor parking lot, it was almost full for a Mass with proper spacing and masks.  It means humankind is still feisty.

Nevertheless predictions for what this pandemic will bring are not cheerful, and it warrants a good deal of supernatural help.  That kind of help is always unostentatious, and some people don’t even notice it.  But it is there for the discerning.

If we’re not now in the hands of God, what are we?  A hopeless lot, to be sure.  But history has proved otherwise for Western Civilization, and I believe we’ll come through again.  Say Amen.

You don’t know what it is to be human until you reach old age.  Not only does your hand become unsteady when dialing a telephone number, but the mistakes you thought the bank made on your checkbook account turn out to be yours.  It is a most humbling experience, and really the best (though not the first) knowledge of what it is to be human.

If you don’t turn to prayer then, you are really hopeless.  For prayer is an expression of hope, and those who really have hope are they, lucky in that aspect, who have contact with a greater power than they ever had.

If you pray  you don’t need proof that it works.  You don’t need the crutches and flowers displayed at Lourdes or Guadalupe, you just know either from your own patient experience or instinct.  There is a knowledge that is innate.

What?  Pro-life Evangelicals are for Biden?  They have betrayed the great Evangelical-Catholic block that defeated Hillary and brought prosperity.  Without ruling out the pandemic as an act of God, it is safe to say Trump, the business man, has done fine with the American economy.  His do-it-yourself reform outshines Biden’s hypocritical do-gooder.  (I judge a man by his actions, not his claimed adherence to a particular ideal.)

But did the Pro-life Evangelicals lose heart?  Are they dismayed by a man whose social (rhetorical) behavior is not that to which they are used?  Let them realize the kingdom of God contains an unaccustomed greater variety of people.  As a school teacher I can wait to see the leeway I give to students bear fruit.

In a world where all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds are learning to get along, the Pro-life Evangelicals appear backward.  I would prefer they had  a more  Samaritan attitude.

A researcher has a theory as to why Western Civilization advanced so quickly since the time of Christ.  He claims the Church Fathers came out with a rule forbidding marriage between first cousins.  Now up to that time this had been common in families, but that rule changed the course of Western evolution.  There was now more random blood in family bloodlines.

He says Western people became what is described by the acronym WEIRD:

                                                W estern

                                                E ducated

                                                I ndustrial

                                                R ich

                                                D emocratic

Well, that supports my contention that Christianity made the difference.  Or better said, the Holy Spirit.  By the way, the proponent of this new theory is Joseph Henrich, and his book, the Weirdest People in the World.

There was a millionaire who went to Tiffany’s to buy himself a Patek Philippe, a Swiss wristwatch that can cost over five thousand dollars.  He bought the watch and as he came out of the store, a vagrant accosted him, asking him for the price of a Big Mac.  The millionaire, whose name was Bull Marquet, sidestepped the vagrant and continued to his limo.

A few days later he was reading the morning papers, and noticed the obituary for his half-brother, illegitimate, as he always said, who had died outside a Manhattan jewelry store.  The cause of death was malnourishment, or starvation.  He recognized the picture, taken in a better day, as that of the vagrant.  He paused.

Life slips by, and the important things we never notice.  A watch is not worth five thousand when compared to a brother’s life.  I have many brothers.