ST. Gertrude’s Abbey – an at Home Monastic Practice

Tag: Make America Beautiful Again

  • Reclaiming Christianity

    By The Abbott

    Christians and Christianity have gotten a bad reputation in the last several…thousand years. And with good reason! From the frightening Crusades of the Middle Ages that brought with them pestilence and death (and apparently cinnamon and pepper…how gay were the Crusades?) to the most recent walking Christian carbuncle, Kim Davis the four-time married, hillbilly hooker from Kentucky who is now bringing a challenge to gay marriage because her legal fees have forced her to sell off her entire Beanie baby collection and her momma’s Elvis memorabilia. Christians deserve their bad rap. The fact is that there are among the Christian world those of us who think and feel differently…about all of it.

    I am a gay Catholic. Openly. Without apologies to the gays or to the Catholics. Despite my faith, I am also not what one might call traditional or conservative. Some might call me a “cafeteria Catholic” – one who likes to pick and choose from a buffet of beliefs which ones they will follow and which they will pass on. I don’t see that as an insult. If that means that I choose to use the good sense God gave me as a reasoning and logical creature rather than blindly follow a group of fussy old men in dresses and custom millinery over the precipice? Fine. However, I do choose to follow those teachings that: 1) make at least a little sense to me, and 2) do not negate, in any way, the Jesus of the Gospels. Some might even call me a heretic. I like that word. It’s not one heard much anymore. (Like “facts” or “hypocrite” or “Nazi sympathizer”)

    Conservative Christians have polluted the faith in a way that should, to a sensible person, shock them. They have taken a brown man from the Middle East who taught as his central teaching to love your neighbor as you would love yourself and turned him into a fusion of WWE wrestling, a monster truck rally, a 4th of July fireworks display and a gun show. And these people have no shame in it. They produce men like Pete Hegseth who do not bat an eye when they use religion as a club to beat down gay people or, as of lately, women. Or J.D. Vance who twists the words of Christ to fit the putrid narrative emanating from America’s Hitler. Then there is the cowardice of the supposed Christian Right. They would rather pander to a power hungry, megalomaniac in a full diaper than put the breaks on it all and stand up for real Christian principles. These include compassion, kindness, understanding, generosity and hospitality. You cannot go to your megachurch’s bake sale and praise Jesus on Sunday and then send your fellow humans to a concentration camp or take away their basic rights the next and still call yourself a Christian. There is nothing Christian or divine about cruelty, or oppression.

    I am, like every human born before and after me, a sinner. Sin is a word that has become synonymous with judgment and condemnation. Like nobody ever has made a mistake before. Sin is used in a strange way by Christians who I believe may have forgotten what that word really entails. It is not saying “shit, or fuck or damn.” It is not drinking too much at a party. It isn’t being gay. It isn’t baking a cake for a lesbian wedding. To sin is to ignore our relationship with creation. When we imprison someone for being gay, or discriminate against them for being trans, or black or Puerto Rican or judge someone…for any reason…that is sinning. To sin is to clear cut a forest for cattle grazing, or cause a wildfire in order to have a gender reveal party, or to pollute the air and water for profit. Sin is to cause offense to God and to others by forgetting them and doing whatever we want. At its root, sin is selfishness, cowardice and hubris all rolled into one.  

    Sin is a wound. But if we know anything at all about the Jesus from the Gospels, he really enjoyed healing people. Those wounds only drew him closer to the people. When we call to mind our shortcomings and our moments of failure, even our moments of darkness, it does not need to be shameful or painful. It is when we bring these dark gifts to God that he delights the most. Recognizing our failure and endeavoring to do better is at the root of what real Christianity is all about. Redemption is not some end times ticket to heaven. It happens right now. When we say we’re sorry for doing something thoughtless and then make up for it, that is redemption. When we make billions of dollars from the poor but then seek to give it all back in ways that augment their lives, that is redemption. I ask God not just for forgiveness, because he gives that willingly and at all times and for all things. I ask him for the strength to bear it all. I ask for wisdom. Sometimes I ask to just keep my head above water.

    Noticing that you are in the presence of God should be something one constantly tries to do because whether you take note of it or not, you are always in his presence. Churches. Temples. The Holy Land, Mecca. Bodh Gaya. Varanasi. Rome. All holy places. All places where God’s presence dwells. But none of these places have more or less presence than where you are right now. Your shower. Your bed. Your favorite chair. Your least favorite chair. The bus stop. Your doctor’s waiting room. On the toilet. In a park. In your office. Each of these places also hold within them the entirety of God’s presence. The difference between St. Peter’s Basilica and your bathroom-aside from several billion dollars worth of priceless art and architecture and the fact that you can’t roam around St. Peters naked- is the perception that it is holier. But God is not more or less present in either place. While a beautiful church, temple, synagogue, or mosque might more easily invite prayer and meditation, they are not more full of God. To deny that is to negate the very nature of God.

    The seasons are reminders of the awesomeness of God. Not awesome like in an old Keanu Reeves’ movie but rather “full of awe.” The wisdom present and on full display for anyone to witness during these times of year truly reminds me that existence itself is the greatest miracle. Trees during springtime know precisely when to flower and bud. Birds know the right day to start their migration. Bees know when to stretch their little wings, do some dusting in the hive and get back to work. Animals know when to come out of hibernation. No one reminds them. They don’t get a text alert. In the summer, these creatures all continue in the vein of the miraculous. Just glance at any leaf- really, any leaf. And the workings of just that one leaf should silence you in amazement and gratitude. And that’s just the one leaf.

    I once had an astronomy professor who told our class that, “There is no way to know how many universes have existed before this one and no way to know how many more will come after it.” The miracle of this universe unfolds before us in every moment of our lives. “The Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth yet people do not see it.” (The Gospel of Thomas). Instead, we see commodities. We see money. We see opportunities to sell crap. We see QVC and Facebook Marketplace. When we have re-learned the sacredness of all things, maybe then we might feel and witness the presence of God everywhere again and not constantly demand signs and wonders.

    As a gay Catholic, the reclamation of Christianity for the sacred, for the contemplative, for the meditative, for compassion, for Christ, is an endeavor that is possibly a losing one. But God takes great delight in his little ones and it is in the underdog, the true David’s of this world, where the glory of God is made manifest. The Beatitudes, Christ’s message to the exhausted people of the 1st century begin with happy are the poor and continue with a litany of weakness as the dwelling place of true blessedness. Christ is not present in the rich. He is not present in the powerful. He is not present in the oppressor. He is not present in the bigot. He is not present in the violent. Christ is present in the smallest of people and in the tiniest of spaces. And always where one least expects him.

  • Sr. FBI

    by Sr. Organza Pettingfield, OLBQ

    I am not known to be a nosy nun. I may have a pocketbook-sized telescope, a pair of listening devices that fit into a hollowed-out Bible and I once correctly guessed Pam Bondi’s Ulta Beauty account login. (It was BLooDoftheLamb69). But I would never say I was nosy. I was recently in Washington D.C. this weekend for a conference at Georgetown University for former alumni of the school. No. I didn’t actually attend Georgetown, my mom Chiffon Pettingfield couldn’t afford it but she did pay for me to attend a correspondence course in calligraphy. Now I can “get” a degree from anywhere. As a nun, it wasn’t much trouble getting into the conference. A little guilt, my dress habit and a yardstick and the Jesuits roll out the red carpet.

    I have to confess, I didn’t go all the way to D.C. for a conference with a free buffet. I was most interested in a show at the Charles Freer Gallery on rare Japanese rocking chairs. The Freer Gallery is a little hidden jewel box. No tourists. No children. All the Asian art you can handle. I do love a quick trip to D.C. But after paying for the roundtrip airfare, I was a little strapped for cash and was forced to seek alternate accommodations while in Washington. I ended up staying with a delightful gay couple that I’ve never met at their elegant Dupont Circle townhome. They didn’t even know I was there. Quite literally as I couldn’t afford an AirBnB either. So I frogged it. This brings me to the point of my story. I followed Karoline Leavitt home from the White House on Friday afternoon. I borrowed a bike I found leaning against a tree and she never noticed me. What could be more inconspicuous than a six-foot tall nun, on a bright pink, floral children’s bicycle with a banana seat.

    Karoline lives in a beautiful part of Alexandria, Virginia. She pulled into her circular drive and still didn’t see me as I waited in the shadow of an old sycamore across the street and managed to conceal myself using a tactical army-issue ghillie suit I just happened to have on hand. I grabbed my telescope and peered across the way hoping she made an appearance. I didn’t have to wait long. Karoline came out rolling a giant plastic bin. That was certainly something to see. Who would have thought that princess took out her own trash. I suppose when you shovel bullshit for a living, trash on wheels is easy.

    After the sun went down, and I knew Karoline had gone to bed- as I stopped hearing her bay at the moon, I ventured across the street. I had to remain unassuming and the cover of night was perfect. I decided to go through Karoline’s trash and write down everything I found. A light suddenly went on in her house, so rather than abort the mission since even a whiff of abortion on the air can send Justice Thomas into apoplexy, I wheeled the trash bin all the way back to the house I was staying in. I know what you’re thinking, “Sr. Organza, isn’t Alexandria completely across the Potomac from DuPont Circle?” Yes, my child. It is. But I was discreet. I still had my dress habit on under my ghillie suit and would you think anything of a nun dressed half in her habit and half in a ghillie suit wheeling a five foot tall trash can across a bridge at 2am with a children’s bicycle tied to her waist?

    When I finally made it back, I just heave-hoed and dumped the contents of the bin onto the front lawn and started to inventory everything. Here’s the list, make of it what you will:

    • Two carry-out containers from Taco Burrito Palace
    • Several broken “personal massagers” with the words “The Rabbit” barely visible
    • Three negative pregnancy tests
    • The rind of a watermelon with a small hole cut out on one side
    • Half of a lemon, unused
    • a tattered copy of a 2023 Vogue September Issue
    • a VCR with the tape of “Fievel Goes West” still in the player
    • a half-eaten raw turkey, with the neck still attached
    • a box from Amazon labeled “Bedazzled Jesus Sign- 24 pack” -empty
    • several crumpled and torn sheets of personalized stationery, scented with Nina Ricci perfume and addressed to several unknown men. (I managed to make out some of the names – D, Don, Man Missile, and curiously enough Stephen. The letter addressed to the Man Missile opened with “My silo sits empty.”)
    • a 500-page scrapbook filled with Cathy cartoons from 1998 until now.
    • An empty box of Plan-B
    • A bag of pennies
    • A receipt from Starbucks for 4 macchiatos and 1 Americano
    • A receipt from McDonalds totaling $287.56 for an assortment of items but mostly baskets of French fries and some discarded food wrappers
    • An autographed copy of Jeanine Pirro’s book with the personalized inscription –“Hang in there Kare Bear…He’s 79 – Jeanie”
    • A wallet size picture of Barack Obama photoshopped onto Michael B. Jordan’s body.
    • A Bible, and finally
    • An entire bag of used condoms.

    I’m not sure what any of it really means. I had to quickly leave there and get back to St. Gertrude’s so I could pass this on. I’m astonished at how quick I can be on a banana seat bicycle. I made it all the way to Scranton when I realized –“Dummy! You left all of your underwear and lingerie in the downstairs powder room of the home I had been staying in!” Too late now. Serves me right for never wearing it anyway.

  • Kill Big Bird

    by The Abbot

    My mother used to joke with others that my first word was “agua.” It wasn’t that I was obsessed with water or that I grew up in a Hispanic or Spanish-speaking household. We were a poor white family living in a working-class suburb of Detroit. When I was a child, I only watched a handful of television shows –Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Mr. Dressup, The Barabara Mandrel Show, The Incredible Hulk. But my mornings started off with Sesame Street.

    Those familiar with Sesame Street know they covered the basics in counting, and the alphabet, and mixed them in with songs and lessons on what it meant to share, be a good kid, and how it’s okay to be a little different. It’s Not Easy Being Green was a Kermit the Frog staple. Sesame Street, being located near the very diverse and multicultural Alphabet City in lower Manhattan was home to all sorts of people, puppets and monsters. There were the ambiguous roommates Bert and Ernie who lived below Luis and Maria, the Latino owners of the neighborhood Fix-It Shop. It’s not that they exclusively spoke Spanish but on occasion they spoke it. Telly the Monster and Grover were often curious when they heard it and neither Luis nor Maria minded explaining a little of their mother tongue. One of the words they focused on a lot was “agua.” I don’t know why. Sesame Street was not aquatic. Big Bird was not a giant duck. Cookie Monster did not list among his many hobbies – water skiing. Still I picked up agua joyfully pointing out agua to the adults in my life no matter where I encountered it.

    It should now come as no surprise that neoconservatives went after public broadcasting again. They’ve been trying to get rid of it since Nixon was in office. Mr. Roger’s himself, in a last-ditch effort to save public television testified before Congress not only extolling the virtues of public TV but also admonishing lawmakers who found more value in bombs and less in kindness and curiosity. Programming on public TV is everything that conservatives and Republicans hate. It makes no money. It features no violence. It rarely references religion or Jesus through talking cucumbers. What it does have are diverse puppet monsters living together, caring about one another and curious about the world they live in. They focus on avoiding littering, being a good citizen, the value of protecting the environment, the importance of being open-minded, and the crucial need to preserve factual history. Children might learn to be nice to someone who is different than they are. They might want to learn more about the Great Migration or the New Deal. They might even want to learn to read – a frightening prospect indeed for a culture bent on controlling the collective mind of the nation. It’s almost comical that the same people who believe their government is trying to manipulate them through chemicals in the air or water or through microchips in vaccines are already completely controlled by nothing more than planned blissful ignorance and broadcasting in an echo chamber on Fox News. No need for harsh chemicals at all! All natural mind control.

    I haven’t watch Sessame Street in many years. I like to think that I had the privilege of growing up during the golden age of Sesame Street. We had Bob, the local music teacher, one of the longest serving cast members who appeared on the show in 1969 and did not leave until 2016. His girlfriend Linda, who was deaf and communicated with others through American Sign Language. Olivia, the fabulous black woman photographer who was also the singing powerhouse. Her brother Gordon, a science teacher, and his wife Susan, a nurse, owned the apartment building at 123 Sesame Street. Mr. Hooper owned the local bodega until he passed away and David, the eccentric hat wearer man took over. There were always children around as the street was kid friendly. Of course there were the Muppets who each represented an aspect of human emotion and experience and were every color of the rainbow. The show also featured a cast of guest stars that rivaled even SNL’s. I had the chance as a 5-year-old boy to see Arthur Ashe talk about tennis and near and far with Grover. James Taylor sang with his guitar and so did Judy Collins. Yo-Yo Ma appeared with his cello. Gregory Hines tap danced in the streets. Madeline Khan famously sang “Sing. Sing a Song.” Don’t worry if it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing. Sing a song.

    I cannot imagine the kind of person I would be today if I did not have access to public TV as my second parent. Sesame Street made me curious about a bigger world that I would never have thought existed outside of the suburban street I lived on. How many 5-year-olds are running around singing because Madeline Kahn inspired them or dance because Gregory Hines suggested they do so or to learn more about art and theater because a group of puppet monsters made it fun.

    Republicans hate public television because it dares to suggest that “normal” is something other than white, nationalist, and Christian. PBS portrays a normal that could be just about anything. Sesame Street is the idealized dream of what happens when people stop caring about “what” you are and are rather more concerned with who you are. Children raised on PBS might actually not care that their neighbor is a pigeon hoarding gay man but might care if they’re unkind or bad at sharing. Even Oscar the Grouch, as nasty as he could be, still was loved and even loved others. His best friend in the world was a 4” worm named Slimy.

    PBS is likely a nightmare for Republican parents. I can see it now, Chad a closeted gay man who works every day repairing copiers and his wife Rebecca, a stay at home mom who spends most of the day trying to get her kids to become YouTube celebrities so she can spend more time with her Pilates instructor Reggie, are hosting the local mega church’s bloated pastor and his wife, Sharon, a morbidly obese Tupperware collecting, behemoth in the living room of their modest home in Someplace, Ohio but definitely not Columbus. Suddenly, after Rebecca has served a second cup of coffee and her extremely dry homemade almond roll, little Dallas barges in and proudly asks “Why can’t I tap dance”? or “Why are there no black people in our church?” or “Mommy, what’s diversity?” Rebecca faints immediately. Chad laughs nervously and tries his best to shoo Dallas out of the room while winking at the pastor and saying that kids say the darndest things. The lecherous, sweaty pastor and his blank stare of a wife politely laugh into their lace-trimmed linen napkins but think “Damn PBS.”

    The danger that public broadcasting poses to the conservative establishment is significant. It is no coincidence that ridding the country of both PBS and NPR are part of their party’s life’s work. When you can inspire, at no cost to parents, curiosity, kindness, creativity, and acceptance, you represent a grave threat to a party line that it is better to be rich or rich adjacent than to be kind to someone who is different than you, or to be powerful rather than merciful, or to be a bully when you can be someone’s friend. I feel sorry for Republicans. I really do. Imagine the bland, empty, two-dimensional worlds they inhabit. No depth. No real purpose. No Make-Believe. Just raw, unfiltered ignorance and fear.

  • God’s Will

    by Sr. Organza

    You hear it often from some on the right – it’s God’s will. The right like to use the term like an old kitchen chair. Today it’s a seat – tomorrow a ladder. They invoked God’s will when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans claiming that hosting Southern Decadence was the reason God did not spare the city. Ironically enough, the neighborhood where the festival was held was virtually untouched. They also use it whenever an inexplicable national tragedy occurs to explain the pain away as divinely ordained. Like using a controversial image of white Jesus welcoming freshly drowned little girls from Camp Mystic into heaven. The most prominent use of the phrase occurred last year at this time while Donald Trump was on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania and he survived an assassination attempt miraculously without any scars or damage to his ear. The bold claim was made that God wanted Trump to survive the attack to save America from the dastardly deeds of the liberals who wanted to destroy America by making it freer.

    Whenever someone invokes “the will of God” I laugh a little. It is one thing if you are religious and acknowledge divine providence. However, it does not suggest in any way what God’s endgame might be. It is incredibly arrogant and just this side of blasphemous to claim to know what God’s will is, especially for a human being. Trump did survive a shoddy attempt at his life. But saying that God’s reason for this happening was so that Trump could save us from trans drag queen story hour is another level of heretical stupidity. The truth, the undeniable truth, is that we do not know why things happen – good or bad. God is eternal, so time and space mean very little to him. The Hebrews were enslaved for 400 years in Egypt and it took Moses several more decades to get it together and help out. If God took his merry old time in saving his chosen people from indescribable toil and abuse why would he suddenly peek over at America and immediately want to intervene in our political structure? He’s a big fan of baseball? He like hot dogs? He cannot resist the smell of apple pie cooling?

    It is one thing to say it was God’s will that it rained today. It is an entirely different ball of wax to say that it was God’s will that it rained today to flood a lesbian’s basement. How the hell would anyone know that? This is no different from claiming that Trump getting shot and surviving to save America is God’s will. We cannot possibly know his goals in doing the things that he does. We know this to be true because it happened before with another dictator of unusually small endowment and bad hair.

    On November 8, 1939, a German carpenter planted a bomb at the venue where Adolf Hitler was to give a speech. The assassin timed his mechanism perfectly so the bomb would detonate moments before he ended his speech. But, by some act of God, Hitler, a normally pompous windbag known for ranting and roving speeches that eventually made no sense left that venue earlier than anticipated due to his travel schedule.

    Only minutes after Hitler had left the building, the bomb exploded killing 8 people and injuring 62. There is no way Hitler would have survived that attack and World War II would likely have been over much more quickly. This is a perfectly analogous situation. Beloved leader narrowly escapes an attempt on his life by what appears to be a miracle. The propaganda machine then billed it as God’s will that Hitler should live so he could make Germany great again and lead his people on to victory in war. We obviously know NOW that this was not the outcome. Adolf Hitler slowly devolved into madness bringing the countries of Germany and Austria into calamitous ruin before finally killing himself and his bride and then having their bodies set on fire.

    But in 1939 when the Nazi spin machine said that it was God’s will that Hitler survived, nobody knew that Germany was headed for disaster. Ultimately, we know the results of the war. Germany was not made great. Millions of people around the world died. Hitler was not the savior of the Aryan race. Hitler was not saved to make Germany great again. He was kept alive so that eventually all of humanity would recall the depraved depths to which we as a species were capable of sinking and how close we came to our self-annihilation. As an added bonus, Hitler’s death also showed us what becomes of those who would proclaim themselves tyrants.

    God abhors any unnatural or selfishly imposed limitation on the potential of humankind. His answer to making any nation great is not a demented, bloated, megalomanic with terrible hair and makeup to lead America into some kind of weird golden age. But I don’t know God’s will either. That’s the point. We just do not know nor can we know what his purpose for something happening might be. God’s creative work can span weeks, months, decades, eons, ages. Earth has been undergoing constant renovation since it was created billions of years ago. I am sure it came as a big surprise to the dinosaurs when an asteroid wiped them all out. Up until that point, it had been God’s will that they should dominate earth – until it wasn’t. God’s brush strokes are broad and long.

    It is prideful and greedy indeed to claim that God saved one person for whatever purpose is invoked. Aside from knowing that Trump did in fact survive the attempt on his life, we know nothing more. It is just as plausible, especially knowing what we know about Hitler, that Trump was spared for reasons probably not as savory to his supporters. Perhaps he was kept alive as a grand example of the downfall of humans when greed and ignorance combine. One more example of the folly of invoking God’s will – the Civil War. Both the North and the South said that they were instruments of God in God’s holy purpose. Oddly enough they were both right just not in the way they thought.

    Faith is trusting that all things that happen do so for some purpose and that whatever that is, it will ultimately be good for us. But that’s where it ends. It is not possible to know what that future will look like. When God saved the Jewish nation, and led them out of Egypt, could they have possibly known what was going to happen to them? They had faith and followed. They wandered for 40 years in a barely hospitable desert and finally reached their goal. But the Jewish people still have no idea where it is they are being led- only that they ARE being led.

    When we live in a world of spiritual certainty we breed violence, hatred, and oppression. We live out lives in an obnoxious circus, pretending to be our own ringmasters. Yet much to our surprise, humans are just the clowns. The so-called Christians in this country have abandoned faith and replaced it with a perverted idolatry of personality.

    Our futures are not a promise. Your next breath is not a guarantee. The moment you are living in is an immeasurable gift. So, the question is, how did we spend this divine gift? Did we honor our creator and his creation by protecting it and responsibly partaking in the wonder of life? Did you maybe repay that gift and do something kind for someone? Did you remember the miracle that is your next moment and be merciful and generous as a mirror to what you yourself have been given? Or did you spend that moment devouring the earth’s resources? Bullying someone you do not know and who has done nothing to you because you disagree with their gender or sexuality? Your displeasure at another’s existence is only YOUR displeasure – not God’s. God willed that every gay, lesbian, trans and queer kid should be born and live just as much as he willed it that some orange asshole should be born and live.

    It is the height of hypocrisy to claim to know God’s will when you can barely figure out your own damn life. Maybe spend some time thinking about that instead of peeping into someone else’s bedroom window and making their lives hell.

  • Finding Comfort in a Collapsing Country

    by Sr. Organza

    Americans are collectively idiotic. We have elected a man and a Congress bent on ending the United States and replacing it with something more like a collection of warlord-run states. We’ve been given ample opportunity to stop all of this and for whatever reason- we have decided not to. Perhaps it was Trump’s classic good looks, his virility, his vitality, his youth or his dashing sense of style that got him elected then re-elected. For many of us, these times seem “unprecedented” but they are not.

    Picture it. Rome, 410 A.D. A group of disheveled, rather ragamuffin, men and women from the north invaded the Roman provinces and sacked the eternal city itself. But, alas, they were too stupid and decided to destroy the city, take their bounty of gold and marble statues of naked people and left, leaving the Romans to uncertainty and poverty. You might compare this with a similar group of fur-clad imbeciles who sacked the Capitol on January 6th making off with such treasures as Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, a half-eaten orange from the Capitol cafeteria and the last shreds of dignity left in DC. The difference being that the ravaging Goths of the 5th century were led by an red-haired dynamo while the caravan of gullible tarts were led by an orange-faced, morbidly obese, man-baby who had just shit himself and needed a changing. Just like today, the writing was seemingly on the wall. Roman civilization was ending. But the Romans didn’t do a fucking thing. They spent time pointing fingers and blaming every cause available- much like the Democrats have been doing since 2016. So why were any Democrats remotely surprised that the Goths returned in 2024?

    For the next two decades, the Romans watched in horror as their empire fell around them. Imagine being an olive oil merchant living in or near Rome at that time. Actually, you probably can. All you want to do is make olive oil and sell it at a profit to a merchant from Genoa. Think of a band of wandering brigands the same as laughably high tariffs. The same fear, uncertainty and exploding cost of groceries you are witnessing today was exactly the same 1600 years ago. We may not have a bunch of hulking, fur-clad, sword-wielding men roaming around. But we do have a fat-ass, South African billionaire with all of our personal data. Finally, after years of terrible leadership, disease, and famine, Rome itself fell in 476. The last Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed- partly because of his ridiculous name but mostly because he was an inept pussy. He was swiftly replaced by a Germanic warlord named Odacer.

    But that wasn’t precisely the end of Roman civilization. The Roman empire was still populated by mostly Roman people who lived Roman lives and were used to Roman roads, plumbing, orgies, and safety. Undoing all of that immediately was not a smart thing to do and Odacer knew it. So, he tried as best he could to keep things just as they were. King Odacer learned very quickly that economic stability and a strong, stable imperial trade network were worth more than perhaps a roasted turkey leg and a wench to call his own.

    Unto Us a Son is Given

    During this time of relative post-Roman stability, a man was born to a wealthy and noble Roman family – Boethius. He was kind of the “last Roman” in the way that most of us would understand an ancient Roman to be. In other words, he was smart, wore a toga, and was in a bathhouse every day. He spoke Latin, Greek and whatever bumbfuck language Odacer spoke and he ended up serving in this new Ostrogothic kingdom as a senator at the ripe old age of 25. Only 8-years later, Odacer was deposed by another German named Theodoric and being impressed by Boethius’s intelligence and his ability to keep himself clean for 24-hours with soap, appointed him consul of Rome.

    Despite the perceived intelligence and class of the gothic overlords of the remnants of Rome, they were still relatively uneducated, illiterate nincompoops and really needed men like Boethius to help them out. Theodoric himself was illiterate. It was these men who kept the government and the trade network running. But, uneducated gothic trash is still what it is and it did not take long before these guys fell victim to greed and corruption. Boethius, who I imagine was much like a single daycare worker in a feces-covered, urine-soaked daycare facility, was beside himself and decided he would speak up. Tsk. Stupid man. King Theodoric threw him in prison for treason in 523. This too should seem familiar. Imagine another fat idiot on a throne of his own making, pouting because someone smart said he was dumb and ruining everything. Boethius cared about his remaining Romans more than some petty king’s pocketbook and ego.

    While in prison and while Theodoric decided just what to do with the guy, Boethius wrote the self-soothingest of self-soothing tomes ever written – The Consolation of Philosophy. In it, Boethius is visited by the personification of philosophy- who was a woman in the fantasies of the young, imprisoned, and lonely former consul of Rome. So it was a wily woman who represented the last bits of logic and reason left in the world. And they talked. Well, Philosophy talked- or yelled as it were- while Boethius listened and agreed with everything she said. I suppose if a magical personification of all you held most dear just showed up in your house, that’s probably what you would do too.

    And what is it that they discussed? First, they started talking about fame, wealth and power and how these are all fickle things and none can compare with the only good thing in one’s life – one’s well cultivated mind. In essence, Boethius is accepting the state of affairs around him and recognizing that stability and surety are not extrinsic but rather intrinsic to oneself. The book goes on a bit about divine providence and the idea of predestination. Christians of the time REALLY liked this book. But so did a lot of other people who were definitely not Christian. It was a smash hit read for well over 1500 years. Alas, Boethius would never get to see the success of his book or go on that book tour to Alexandria as he was executed shortly after he finished the work a year later in 524. (Yet somehow George RR Martin keeps the world in thrall for decades waiting on another shitty book of dragon porn.) But it was Boethius who many scholars credit with the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. A little poet by the name of Dante in Florence, Italy rediscovered the work. He described Boethius as “the blessed soul who exposes the deceptive world to anyone who gives ear to him.” I’m sure that sounds way cooler in Italian.

    Misty Watercolor Memories

    So how does this jaunt down memory lane help any of us today as a modern Odacer and Theodoric pillage our nation? First, it is worth noting that tyrants do not typically last all that long. Whether the constant stress of being one or other would-be tyrants lurking about trying to kill you, these men did not make a significant historic mark and were usually dead fairly quickly. And that is a prevailing theme of Boethius – The Wheel of Fortune. I’m not talking about the crappy game show of the same name. I mean the ancient concept of fortune being a very cranky lady turning a giant wheel and where it lands for you is what you get. She doesn’t really care what you’ve done or whether you’ve been a good little boy or girl. She just turns the wheel. Maybe today you land on getting your head stuck in a staircase, but perhaps tomorrow you get to finally see that obituary you’ve been waiting to see on the front page for the last decade. Boethius took great solace in that this was just how life was. The turning of the wheel, although seemingly by chance, was divinely ordained. People in the Middle Ages loved the idea of the Wheel of Fortune. It was their version of Goop.

    The other lesson of Boethius is what happens when there are too many corrupt idiots running the circus and no one speaks out against it. Luckily, we do have some people speaking out today. Unluckily, most of them are comedians and not the opposing political party. But there is a second prong – action. People can yell, and scream, and post heady bullshit on Instagram all day long and it’s not going to do a damn bit of good if there aren’t also people trying to do something about the injustices. Boethius was unfortunately a one-man band. He had no problem speaking up and doing something, but no one else did.

    Alas, Cholesterol

    Because what is happening now is not permanent no matter how much they want you to think it is. There are still more of us Romans left than there are rich, oligarchy Ostrogoths. As long as we continue to persist and demand from our leaders those rights they cannot and should not ever take from us – we do not need to suffer the same fate as Rome. This will pass as all things eventually do. And history will not look kindly on those who sought America’s implosion and their collaborators.

    No matter how clever the Trump turd factory think it is being, there is always someone more clever waiting in the weeds or a wrench will end up in their cog that they could not have planned for. In the case of the Goths – it was Charlemagne. In the face of King George III, it was George Washington. In the face of Richard Nixon, it was Bob Woodward. And in the face of Donald Trump, there will be someone or something that not even the thinkiest thinktank could ever have predicted. That was perhaps the greatest lesson of Boethius – men in their feeble and petty ways have no control over anything but what goes on in between their two ears. Maybe we won’t get a Charlemagne to wield his mighty sword, but decades of McDonalds for three meals a day is probably just as effective.

  • Make America Beautiful Again

    By The Abbot

    We have upon us a new American Crisis; larger in scale than our war of independence and greater in scope than the Second World War. Has the American promise of democracy and liberty been a lie? Why have we fought and died as a nation for the last 250 years if not for freedom and equality for not just ourselves but ultimately for every free man, woman and child that has walked or will walk this earth.

    Thomas Paine wrote that, “Tyranny, like hell is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” As Americans, whether liberal, moderate, or conservative, we face a grave threat. An amoral would-be-tyrant with his cowardly sycophants have taken it upon themselves to re-interpret our Constitution as a document of oppression and authoritarianism rather than one of personal liberty and self-government as our founders intended. The fault for this strange and dangerous relativism of law lies with all of us.

    Fear

    Many Americans are frightened and feel forgotten by their government. We are all afraid. Fear is a base emotion for humans. Fear is conceived in ignorance and brings forth her children hatred, arrogance and greed. Fear has always been the most destructive power on earth. Not even the great might of the entire American nuclear arsenal can compare to the collective desolation a terrified humanity can bring to our world and upon one another.

    One unfortunate sadness of Make America Great Again is that nothing great has ever been born from fear. This country’s greatest achievements and its golden eras arise during times of collective national fearlessness. Our founding fathers brought forth this new nation despite incredible fear of death and the British Empire. This nation, when torn in two in 1861, was mended because of brave leadership and the virtue to condemn the great evil of slavery. Our country strove headlong into the first World War and came out the other side of pestilence and death into the august roaring 20s and the prosperity and exuberant joy of that decade. We banded together as an American family to wage war against the most destructive tyranny then known to humankind and fiercely confronted all the terror and evil of Nazi tyranny.

    When our country is not afraid; when our leaders stoke brotherhood instead of discord and understanding instead of ignorance – it is then we become great. We went to the moon. We defeated polio. We dominated world art, music and literature. We made the greatest achievements in science, engineering and technology ever seen in our species and we did it together through brave determination. Any promise to make America great through fear, hate and anger is an empty one.

    Americans have long been known and admired for our ingenuity, our creativity, and our conception of what free people are truly capable of when we help and support one another – no matter what. We have allowed a rogue group of men and women to take our rights, and to distort our freedom. Since the great hope of 1776 and our fledgling experiment of self-government, we have slowly allowed that hope and our power to slip slowly through our own fingers. We have grown lazy and fat in our blissful ignorance. We have relied on others to make up our minds because some have taken it upon themselves to encourage us to fear our own reason- our own mind – our own eyes. We have forfeited our democracy to billionaires and rich corporations. Fear is only displaced by knowledge, wisdom and reason and unlike fear, these virtues require hard work to gain and maintain.

    We find ourselves caught in the jaws of civil discord not seen on this continent since the turbulent years of the 1960s. Then, as now, political leadership was dependent on fear to maintain power. Fear of other races, fear of integration, fear of newly out of the closet gays and lesbians, fear of women defining their own destinies, fear of science, fear of communism.

    A Perilous Ship of State

    The world turns and still we find ourselves stagnant and stuck in the same place. As long as fear rather than reason rules our choices, the great ship of our nation shall remain in the doldrums of democracy. Without the wind of knowledge to billow our sails, we stay stuck in a wide sargasso sea of our own making. We hunger and thirst for direction from our captains and rather than tell us to hoist the main sails, empty the ballast, swab the deck and follow the star to lead us ahead- our captains point their fingers at each other, or worse, their own crew, as the cause of our immobile ship of state.

    “It’s immigrants and refugees taking our jobs and our resources!” shouts our captains. And we rush to throw the immigrants and refugees overboard, but our sails do not billow, our rudder does not move.

    “It’s the gays and the trans and the drag queens!” cries the captains. And we again clamor to throw them into the sea, and again, we do not budge.

    “It’s the left…it’s the right…it’s the socialists…it’s the nationalists!” scream those captains. And still, we rush to throw them overboard too. But what we have all now failed to realize is we are now all in the sea looking up at our ship as our captains look down upon us -all drowning.

    The great sadness in the American debate is not only have we all been thrown overboard by our own family, friends, and neighbors at the insistence of those who care only for power and money, but we have also been doing it consistently and unknowingly for decades. We have lost sight of our purpose together. It was the most fervent wish of the first Americans that we work together to build this great American dream.

    The Preamble Revisited

    The preamble to our Constitution, a document that has in recent years, become the rallying cry of many people who have never read it, can leave no doubt of the kind of country envisioned for us and our children.

    “We the people of the United States”- This was not we the white Protestant men, or we the rich men with land, or we the corporations, or we the billionaires or we the Republicans or we the Democrats. It was we, the people. You. Me. Your liberal gay neighbor. Your conservative straight cousin. Your atheist nephew. Your extra Christian aunt. All of us. Together. Working through a life that does not promise happiness or prosperity without our collective cooperation and recognition of what is required for a good life or in other words-

    “In order to form a more perfect union”- define those things necessary for almost everyone to enjoy a good, peaceful, quiet, just and prosperous life as we work together to: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

    The great and delicate gift of democracy requires our constant vigilance and care, and it is only together we can end this tide of subjugation to an ultra-conservative elite whose sole aim is to deprive the poor, the working class and the remainder of the middle class of our fundamental and inalienable freedoms.

    We are all indeed on the very brink of forever losing our country. It matters not whether you do or do not support Donald Trump. A nation that has lost its purpose for existence, its essence, its soul transforms into something that only appears to be America. It is a plastic idol of Jesus strewn with star-spangled, red, white and blue bunting who cradles a flag-draped bald eagle in a basket made from machine guns. This is not a country for everyone but only some of us. And that is not good enough.

    America the Beautiful

    Another unfortunate irony of “Make America Great Again” is that those who believe in it do not understand that in addition to fearlessness, a dedicated cultivation of its beauty is required for its greatness. I do not mean solely our majestic, purple mountains or amber waves of grain. I mean the beauty of all our people and our way of life now endangered. Being and staying beautiful is not easy. Ask any woman who spent two-hours getting ready for a date, or any man who worked out for years to compete at the Olympics. Ask any artist how much time went in to learning drawing and painting or a pianist how many hours of practice went in to playing a piece of music in a manner that seemed effortless. Every single one of them would tell you that it took significant work. And now a group of our American brothers and sisters are blindly following a man who has promised “greatness” through fear and without work by following a wide road of populism and scapegoating rather than the hard truth that greatness, and our nation’s beauty is dependent on our collective wisdom, hard work and sacrifice.

    We, unlike the French, or the Swedes or the Chinese, do not need to be tied to a nationality but can create our own. Celebrating and honoring the many wonderful cultures, countries, religions, and creeds that make up our nation can still be done under an umbrella of one American culture. The political group that most clearly defines that culture wins and right now, this is a group of men and women who have chosen an easy, wide road towards how we define America. According to their platform, we are supposed to be white, straight, only one of two genders, Christian, English-speaking, pseudo-patriotic in that we wear the flag as underwear, or a bikini or idolize it by hugging it, and buy into the lie that everyone can be a billionaire with enough hard work. One of the greatest hoodwinks thus far perpetrated on the American people has been convincing all of us who have already worked hard our whole lives long that supporting tax cuts for rich, entitled, “self-made” millionaires, and corporate and banking deregulation are great ideas and that unions, and tax cuts for the poor and middle class are bad ideas. Allowing corporations and financial giants any say in the governing of our country or themselves is like allowing the residents of a prison mental hospital to define the criteria needed for parole.

    Our national message must remind all Americans what this country is supposed to be about. It is time for the remaining men and women of reason stuck in a cataclysmic tug of war take back what is ours – the American ethos.

    Any attempt to reclaim that ethos will require significant effort to make all of us understand how hard and narrow the road to greatness really is. America is multi-colored and multi-cultural, and we take great pride in this vast spectrum. We honor one another’s right to their opinion, their own mind, and their own heart. We delight in self-expression- whether that be in a cowboy hat, a police officer’s uniform, a tutu, a football helmet, a Dior gown or a fabulous wig. We respect the right and liberty of any citizen of this country to practice whatever religion or non-religion they want, so long as they do not attempt to indoctrinate and infiltrate our mechanisms of governance and public education. We are a nation that dozens of cultures, all with their own languages and livelihoods, have colonized and governed. From 20,000 years ago when the first humans trekked across a now-vanished land bridge from Siberia, until today’s migrant workers, the North American continent has been one filled with beautiful civilizations.

    Reclaiming the Dignity of Work

    We are a nation who takes the best of every other nation and augments it through our fearlessness, and our freedom. We believe in the dignity of work – all work and all workers- and acknowledge that no man or woman, no matter how hard they worked ever did it alone. It is about both blue-collar and white-collar workers since both owe their paychecks to someone else and both spend 40 or more hours a week in the employ of another, and in a job they hate. Distinguishing between these workers has done nothing but divide a people who all share the same joys, the same dreams and the same sorrows. It does not matter if you build bridges, do someone’s taxes, clean bathrooms, perform open heart surgery, work on an assembly line, write legal briefs, or drive a truck across country. We each bring something – big or small to a nation that needs every single one of us to contribute something good.  Despite how much the super-rich claim their wealth to be self-made, they quickly forget the institutional vehicles that allowed them to build that wealth. This includes a stable country of laws and regulations. What would Elon Musk be if not for patents to protect his property or where would Jeff Bezos be without safe roads, the internet, or airports? The American people have paid for, built, and maintained all of our infrastructure. Most importantly, America has a middle class capable of consuming enough to make these men and women super rich by paying for those vehicles of civilization in the first place.

    What makes us great is our ingenuity, our “can-do” spirit, and most of all, our ability to lead the world in science, technology, education, art, literature, music, and athletics. I would like to ask this now of all Americans but most especially to those who felt determined to vote once again for Donald Trump – Can we be a nation fostering the greatest culture on earth, with the greatest scientists on earth and with the most abundant food and renewable fuels on earth and do so without having to limit one another? Is taking away the rights of other Americans needed to create and keep America as the leading ideal in our world? Ask yourselves, is it worth destroying half our country to allow only one mind, one culture, and one man to rule it indefinitely? When you think of American greatness is it cowering behind the massive red tie of Trump and the petticoats of his progeny or is it out in front leading, and shaping the world and not succumbing to it? When America was “great”, we were fearless and did not shrink from that responsibility.  

    The road ahead is hard and the way narrow but in order to build a lasting nation, a nation worth fighting and dying for, a nation that will in the centuries to come be the leader in what is to be the human race’s expansion beyond this planet and farther- we must stop our fighting, halt our angry rhetoric, cease these destructive principles and bravely determine together whether we want to live as a nation of free, enlightened people as our founders dreamed or die by the suicide that Lincoln feared.