Jane Goodall, the woman famous for her work with chimpanzees in Africa, had doubts about the existence of a God of Love (John’s Gospel) with all the evil going on in the world today.  My question: Can God get angry, or is he condemned to the same attitude for the rest of His existence?  Is there not cause for anger with a people (Christians and Jews) for whose sake He suffered and died?

Anthropomorphism is the act of attributing human qualities to an object, animal, or deity.  Your three-year-old displays it when he kicks his tricycle for overturning.  But we can’t do that with God, because as Genesis tells us, we are made in “the image and likeness of God.”  We are created that way; it is not God who is thought of as made like man.

We just might deserve what we’re getting.  I mean what about the murder, genocide, adultery, pedophilia, loose living that goes on in our cultures today?  When was the last Bing Crosby film?  Did Going My Way? die with him?

Mike Horan, now gone, is a past neighbor and friend to whom I owe a spiritual bouquet of Masses, rosaries, prayers and thoughts for all that he did for me.  First he let me practice for hours on his basketball hoop over his garage.  (Mike was not as avid about basketball as I was.)  And then he invited me for fishing expeditions aboard his parents’ cabin cruiser in Manhasset Bay.  I found out that Porgies were not only fun to catch, but quite edible fried.

He moved to Bethpage, and we made a golfing date, which for some unexplainable reason I never kept.  Shame on me.  But his cheerful memory and that of his family, especially Danny, who loved my stash of process Swiss cheese, regale my memory.  His sister Pat, though older, was a breath of convivial air.  And so we meet, and lose, God’s chosen ones.

Sometimes we do a good deed without knowing it.  A friend of Loretta visits us yearly, so I do the right thing by Loretta and take them all out for dinner.  One of the members of the party is a ninety-year-old spinster, and last year I took them all to the Milleridge Inn.  My wife had a telephone conversation with the spinster shortly thereafter.

They talked about sundry topics, and toward the end, the ninety-year-old said she hadn’t had such fun in a year-and-a-half as at our dinner outing.  I like to do things in the Messiah’s name, and this hit the spot.  It’s a kind of payback for Jesus’ gifts.

At times it has bothered me what parents who have a Down Syndrome child must feel like.  (Who am I to take up this subject?)  I realize that those parents I know all had other children to bring them joy.  And the afflicted child brings joy too.  God is no killjoy.

Parenting is no guaranteed road to happiness.  Nor is life.  We take the good with the bad and make the most of it.  We have a wonderful potential outcome, depending on how we listen to the Son of Man, who formed our civilization.  Promises like that deserve our looking into.

I don’t know about you, but I want to look into eternal life, and not cryonics, or freezing, at that.  I want to hear from someone who has a trackable record.

My first school on these shores was Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs in Forest Hills, NY.  And my first love was a first-grader named Mary.  She had her desk in a row next to mine, and when we went to the blackboard (as was the custom in those days), I’d be next to her and I could copy from her (Don’t forget, I was still the Swiss immigrant).

She took a liking to me, so our days at the blackboard were for me a thrill.  I still couldn’t figure out everything the teacher said, so she’d give me gentle hints.  After class, I’d resort to my new pastime of scouring the floor for cast off crayons.  (They were new to me; Swiss schools had colored pencils.)  It was a beautiful relationship, but then we moved to Long Island.

We moved to a town where the parochial school had the same order of nuns as Queen of Martyrs.  They took up where the Forest Hills teachers left off, and I became an expert in English Grammar.  Sometimes I longed to have Mary beside me at the blackboard again.