They are a distinctly American phenomenon, born in the Nineteenth Century, and peaking in the mid Twentieth Century. Never has the world seen their like, and their legacy is an intelligent electorate and a tremendous collegiate and university presence in a country known for its higher education.

One of their special special projects was the education of the more than a million immigrants the U.S. accepted during that time, most of them from Christian Europe. The schools were made possible by the thousands of religious — nuns. brothers, and priests — who worked for subsistence wages as part of their calling.

Of course, there are those alumni who only remember that the nuns and brothers were tough, strict, using corporal punishment. I ask, how would you be if you had to control large classes? I personally knew a nun who had ninety (yes, 90) first graders in one classroom in Idaho.

That’s certainly not I.  If you don’t believe in a supernatural being, look at what God, the Father, made of the life of his purported Son.  Not only did four expert authors write up his life (not one, but four!) in the Four Gospels, but those biographies were spread throughout the Middle East by a ball of fire called Paul.  No human could have set that up.

And St. Paul even took it to Rome, from where it spread throughout Europe, and from there the world.  Who has not heard of Christ?  Even the lost tribes of the Amazon have heard from (and killed) messengers of the Gospels.

Truth be told, I wish the Holy Spirit would make sense of my life.  You might say I’ve tried, in a fallible human way.  But whether or not I made that grade as a teacher is too early to say.

The things we cannot change are not necessarily the will of the Almighty. When we pray “Thy will be done,” we do sometimes mean what we can’t change. When we’re adults, we have a fairly good idea what would be the will from on high. The Lord might want us to change some things we thought we couldn’t change.

The young could let us know what some of those things might be. Of course they’re often naive in those things, but they could give us ideas. The Wright brothers were right (pun intended), and they certainly weren’t that old, judging from their photos.

The world has changed indeed. In Western Civilization we no longer run around beheading infidels (with a hunting knife, yet), though that does not mean we are beyond correction. But we can behave beyond such primitive religiosity.

In the Early first centuries, when most Christians were still Jewish, they looked for the return of the Savior. It was always pending, and since then they’ve gone through some horrible times — the plagues, the influenza epidemics, two world wars, a holocaust, Stalinesque persecutions — but the day of resurrection never came. Is it finally here?

We now have the coronavirus, a split democracy, ISIS, refugees galore whom it is hard to assimilate, and a drug epidemic. What better time for a return?

Nobody knows. And those who do, are usually wrong. As for me, I have my own problems, and while I petition heaven for insights and wisdom, I can’t say I don’t get help. But as for the final day, who knows?

When Loretta and I were raising our three sons, I used the molusc known as the Nautilus to illustrate how the mind of the child goes through its stages (Jean Piaget) — the Nautilus has a different chamber for each year of its young life. I still have a ten or twelve chambered shell in my drawer, which my brother Rudy sent me. (The molusc is a denizen of California.)

There comes a time when the toddler now recognizes his father even though he’s wearing a hat, and I now have a son who recognizes my weak points (a great, generous son). The point of this is I recognize the patterns repeated by a mind greater than my own (something more fortunate minds still can’t acknowledge) in giving form and substance to various aspects of Nature. Of course, with humans there is still ego that has to be accounted for.

Let it be publicized henceforth and forever, the mind of a child develops the way it does because it has been tested and tried in a workshop known as Nature, and I don’t need some self-syled authority, no matter how many degree panels he has sat before, to tell me it’s due to chance.