It’s not a nice feeling.  I’ve taught in two school districts, and one I was glad to leave because even my chairman hated me.  I couldn’t quite figure out the cause;  what I came up with is not worthy of America.  The chairman came in to observe my teaching the day after the Northeast Coast Blackout back in the sixties and noted that my kids had not done their homework.

I consoled myself with the fact that the greatest humanitarian was hated in some places; it is recorded that the people even tried to stone him.  He changed the face of our civilization.  He was the greatest teacher ever; his name was Jesus Christ.

I’m not going to compare myself to him, other than to say, “Hey, brother, I’m with you.”  He liked the term brother.  So do I, and I am grateful to be able to use it concerning him.

She was already a Christian. She was my mother, and had me baptized in the Catholic Church. And then, in Manhasset, she and Dad took me out of the Munsey Park School when a parent came into our class to bawl out the teacher (yes, in front of the students) and put me and my brothers in St. Mary’s. We grew up with a Protestant outlook in an Irish and Italian Catholic environment, and she listened with interest when we came home after school.

She spoke with the nuns about our education, and she liked what she heard. She realized they made things easier for her, and she heard about our preparation for our first Holy Communion. She watched when the bishop gave us our confirmation (in those days he gave you a ceremonial slap on the cheek), but I don’t know if it was she or we who first suggested she go to Fr. Concannon for instruction on becoming a Catholic.

It wasn’t an easy step. I saw how hard it was for her to explain her move to our Protestant relatives, who had the greatest respect for her. It was one of those big, hard to understand events in life.

There is something about a beautiful, talented woman giving up a career to raise a child, devoting her brain power to encouraging and providing the needs of a being still far from appreciating what she is doing. And there is no guarantee that it’ll turn out successfully. St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, watched horror stricken as he wasted all her input with loose women and bacchanalian weekends.

But that clever woman had one last resort — prayer. And she used it with a determination that must have been not iron, but steel. Augustine dropped his ways, wrote his confessions, and entered the priesthood. He became Bishop of the North African city of Hippo, and affected our Western Civilization almost as much as Jesus Christ himself. Talk about a happy ending!

St. Augustine is still quoted today. His sayings cut to the core of human existence, and having skirted the loss of his talent and soul, he was lucky to have lived long enough to change. Whenever I doubt the effectiveness of prayer, I turn my mind to this story.

I used to think that a paranoid thought was the sign of mental illness, but I soon found out through experience and a few conversations with my psych nurse wife that some such thoughts are normal for most people. Put in another way: we are all slightly crazy.

The formation of our brain is so complex we cannot help it. During the coronavirus quarantine I brought a cake to a fellow octogenarian I hadn’t seen in a while. I put it on the table outside his front door. I was wearing a mask, and when he answered my knock, he wasn’t wearing one and made some motions with his hand. I thought he didn’t want to see me (paranoia), but put such thoughts aside, for the good Lord had my wife waiting for me in the car.

I could already imagine her reaction if I later told her my thoughts. She’s a blessing from above; I am convinced.

Fr. O’Brien was our religion teacher at St. Mary’s High School back in 1950, and he tried to ease us into the realization that the Bible was not a science book. The story of the Garden of Eden, he told us, was allegorical, a literary device using symbols. And so we came to realize Darwin had made a great discovery which revealed God’s hidden modus operandi, or manner of creating humans.

It gave us a clue to recognizing the great literature that the Bible was, and so we went on to Shakespeare and Macbeth. Yes, humans tend to sin, part of their beastly evolution, you could say, and they have struggled with that ever since they fell upon good versus evil.

So do we plod on and risk failing as human beings? What is this, a trap? No, human mercy is by far outdone by divine mercy. No fellow human has ever forgiven me as many times as God. And forgiven for as grievous an offense.