In my book, Raising Your Future, I advocate a spanking a year for the young child.  Now this may sit uncomfortably with those who are against any form of corporal punishment, and I don’t feel that’s bad.  The parent has to interpret what he  reads, and maybe he had a parent himself who abused this tool.  Why should he go against his instincts?

This teaching method was used by a supreme teacher, Jesus Christ, when he advised, “If thy hand scandalizes you, cut it off.”  Now nobody is going to cut off his hand, but he’ll get the idea of what to do with friends who lead him into sin.

I once had a teacher in college who advised, “You can’t keep your mouth open all the time.  Sometimes you have to shut it.”  He was speaking of the open mind.

On my desk are two, round, pronged seashells, beautiful structures that grow no more, because the living mollusk is no longer dwelling in them.  I’d compare that shell to a civilization, and the living mollusk to the people who make up that civilization.  As long as the people are balanced – healthy, moral, considerate and generous – the civilization grows.  When the spirit leaves them, we are left with ruins, shells.

Western Civilization, all civilizations, have been struck so that they must recoil, step back to see if they have fallen away from survival mode.  This coronavirus is a bigger enemy than the flu.  The past solutions of friendly mutual aid don’t seem to work with a virus that thrives on contact.  Hospitals, an invention of this civilization, are not succeeding as in the past. 

Must the mollusk cooperate with its creator?  Who ever heard of a mollusk that didn’t?  But that creature – Man – has free will! He also can be reasonable.

During this pandemic, there are those who do what the English call yeoman work, that is they bear the brunt of exposure to the coronavirus. I don’t mean the doctors and nurses in the ICU, who are working to exhaustion and emotional breakdown. There are those who have calm and regulated jobs, like the cashiers in the supermarket.

Today I was on line, waiting to be served by Kulwinder, an agreeable Indian woman, equipped with face mask and latex gloves and protected by a transparent screen. Besides the groceries, I needed two cards of twenty stamps each, and she only had one in the register. Do you know, she could have told me that was all she had, but knowing I now ration my visits to the supermarket, she walked the length of a football field to get me that second set.

In my average ways I appreciate the acts of human kindness evoked by the coronavirus. I don’t pretend to see behind God’s ways, but I do see an upgrade in human generosity.

At eighty-six you forget many things, the important and unimportant. But you don’t fight it; you ride with it as you ride the incoming tide on a sunny day at the beach. Why fight it? Comes a fine spring day and it will cease, it will all yield to brighter meadows, old friends, an uplifting of spirits.

I just got a call from my youngest brother–so cheerful, more so than for a year. It made my day. You can be sure I didn’t forget it. He’s an octogenarian now too, and I’m glad he’s found the good parts. There’s an old prayer that asks the Lord to change some of the things we cannot change, and for the grace to know the difference.

The sun came out this evening, and I watched it set through my living room window. Yes, I’m ecstatic that I have a living room, a one-and-a-half easy chair, and a lovely wife. Sunset can be the nicest time of the day.

Laboratory test after test has proved that the white man is NOT superior to the other races on planet earth.  So how has his civilization, called Western Civilization, proved superior to the other civilizations on earth?  I think the answer is in the man who left his mark on that civilization, namely Jesus Christ, whose conquering of death we celebrate today.

You might say Western Civilization is a Judeo-Christian civilization, acknowledging its source, and its tumultuous history acknowledges the origin of man from a wild denizen of South Africa to an enlightened follower of the Son of Man (that’s what Christ called himself).  Well, today we celebrate his rising from the dead.  Nobody else could have accomplished that kind of impact on a civilization.

So it wasn’t natural resources, the climate, or the water that aided Western Civilization.  It was access to something we call divine.  And we’ve spread it all around.