You want a message from your Creator? Go out on your porch, sit down and drink in the noon sun filtered by the white pine (fine needles) and the mock pear (shiny green leaves). Direct your wandering mind to what we call the higher things, and you’ll surely get a message from God.

You live in the city? You can get the same effect in a visit to a church, usually open, with stained glass windows and an altar light glowing in the front. The sun comes through the colors in red and yellow and blue gules, and the silence is pregnant with the coming birth of an enlightening moment.

As Einstein hinted, life is fecund with the simple moments, many of them regenerative, and if you want the key to life, get used to it.

With COVID-19 still rampant, many people thought the final days predicted by Jesus Christ had finally come, but that’s presumption.  They won’t be here until you see it for sure.

But I’m ready for them.  I want to see some vindication of faith.  I don’t really need that because I have lived almost my whole life among people who never questioned my beliefs, with the exception of a brief interlude among the political, at Boys’ State, sponsored close to my graduation from high school by the American Legion.  That was a long time ago, but I still remember one boy’s sarcastic question: “You still believe in Santa Claus?”

Yet I know the thrill of vindication already.  There were those who questioned my becoming an English teacher, without a surname like Shakespeare.  Well, I showed them by authoring eleven books, novels, nonfiction books on science and faith, and a how-to book, publishing some of them myself, and marketing some of them.  They’re all on Amazon, the world’s biggest book store, and publisher of some of my books.

The feeling of vindication is good.  I hope you have it on the final day.

You’d never suspect it was my younger brother, Sylvan, from his civilized behavior today, but our friends once numbered a medieval Count among them.  Our family had just moved to Manhasset, when we boys faced a challenge never before faced in those environs.  The Quaker Ridge gang.  We were about eleven or twelve years old.

The boys from Quaker Ridge Rd. soon found out we came from a foreign place (Forest Hills) and spoke a foreign language (Swiss-accented Queens County talk) and laid their conditions before us: join us or be bullied.

Now my mother had long been in the habit of raising our self-esteem by telling us stories of the early Swiss, forerunners of the Swiss Guard.  She described their battles and medieval weaponry.  Forgive her, she mixed up the weaponry and said they carried Morning Stars instead of halberds. 

Well, about that time a hurricane had left excess lumber on Great Oak Rd., and so we made Morning Stars by hammering nails into wooden cudgels.  Came the face off: the Quaker Ridge gang versus us with Morning Stars.  Sylvan took off after Patrick, a boy older than he, and we heard Patrick’s “Ows” and “Yikes” as the Count took his  measure with the Morning Star.

But the medieval warfare soon came to a halt.  We all attended St. Mary’s elementary school, and when my father brought to the attention of Mother Catherine that gangs existed in her school, it stopped, period.

“Love your enemies” has to be the toughest proposition ever.  Trump fired the Inspector General for bringing up the subject of who walked Pompeo’s dog.  Obviously the Inspector General was an enemy of Trump if he wanted to make something out of something so trivial.  So fire him.  But the New Testament takes the long shot.

The Inspector General could be an ally in some distant future.  Can he be put aside in some inconsequential spot until he comes to see the light?  I mean without firing him?  The New Testament expects us to take such long shots.

The New Testament is aptly named.   It looks into a future so far away we have no idea yet what it’s about.  I am not quite a dreamer yet, but I do see a future so far that I have not the faintest inkling of what it will be when it’s present.

The pandemic may even have good news, if we follow the human tendency to find good from evil.  See what you think of the following:

1. People are seeing, by the process of elimination, the good things in their lives, like family, friends, the kindness of strangers, the kindness of healthcare workers;
2. Faced with the seeming unsolvable, people are admitting there may be an extraterrestrial solution – God  (even those who think electrons have consciousness);
3. People are turning to self-correction: if you’re going to leave this life early, why not play safe?
4. Maybe the view that life is hell and then you die has shortcomings;
5. Some people now want to leave something besides money and bad example; we do want some purpose in life;
6. The world is still beautiful; the bluebird still sings;
7. The pandemic shows some politicians’ idea of the common good;
8. Prisoners see the pandemic as a way out;
9. We are more conscious of good hygiene – wash those hands;
10. We’re not alone; we’re all in this together.