Boomapox Diary: October 5, 2008

Little did I dream when I woke up this morning that I would be having a day found worthy of describing for posterity...

First time in a year and a half, too.

It is no great mystery. Reflection on the recent death of someone I once knew after coincidence placed me in front of the house he lived in when I knew him was behind my having these Immortal Thoughts and Feelings. And it was a sunny Sunday afternoon... That always helps when it comes to getting into Immortal mode.

I was out buying a Sunday newspaper for someone. I was in a big parking lot between the backs of the stores on Main Street and the Roman Catholic church on Conklin Street which was mine before the Romish Antichrist of the New Pentecost struck me personally. I was just sitting in my car looking around. The store had sold its last newspaper. It was now past four.

I thought of the dead guy. He had not been young. But he had not been quite old enough to be my father. He was not a Boomer. But he seemed to belong to my generation. He was in my crowd and he had not stood out as seeming much older. He had had a certain chronic ailment going back to the cradle. But it wasn't one that you think of anyone's dying from in this day and age.

Just a bit to the south of this vast parking lot dotted with sycamores was the house he had lived in when I used to hang out with him. He was not a friend of mine. He was the friend of a friend. He was the salt of the earth. But he was surly. He was almost always more surly than salt of the earthy with me. He disapproved of the way in which I was constantly moving around the Island and the State and switching jobs. He thought that people had an obligation to stay near their family and friends unless something really great opened up somewhere far away. He didn't think that my prospects away from our own village were ever that great. He razzed me about it. Some of his witticisms about my tumbleweed MO were pretty funny.

This crowd I was in. Our main things were bowling, diners, and cook-outs. Just once I seemed to impress the dead guy favorably. I was never a great bowler. Usually I knocked down four or five pins and then two or three. Once I was getting strike after strike after strike. He sat there with his mouth open. "This man..." he kept intoning. "Where has this man been hiding?"

I passed the Methodist church at the end of Rose Street, the street on which the dead guy had lived. He had been a devout Methodist. It's a distinctive building. So many of the outstanding edifices in my little suburban village five miles east of Levittown are. It's made of granite blocks and has a green copper steeple.

But I abominate Vatican II and Catholic Liberalism. Don't you go to Hell if you go to the church at the wrong end of Rose Street? (The schoolyard of the Catholic parish school is diagonally across the parking lot from the other end of Rose Street.)

I went to the big suburban supermarket on Main Street. They sell newspapers. But probably not the one I wanted. They had a lot left of the others. I went back to my car. I thought of the dead guy again. I thought of something he had done which really touched me. I have to be vague in relating what it was. He had insisted that someone who wasn't doing right by me at an extremely difficult time start doing so. He had insisted in a colorfully dire tough guy way. Only someone who knew the dead guy could understand how and why the party who had not been doing right by me told me all about how the dead guy had harangued and threatened him into doing better and why that made for peace instead of further hard feelings. This guy was a force to be reckoned when it came to seeing that you took proper care of family and friends the way he did. He had little patience with social deadbeats.

I went to a third place. A convenience store. One of a chain. (Not everything in my village is quaint.) The dead guy was a school security guard who rode around town from school to school in a Jeep. He spent a lot of time in that convenience store over the decades. All that coffee... All those chili dogs... All those Fritos... They had the paper I wanted.

I decided to take a spin over to the State Park. The one I went to on that Sunday afternoon last February when I last made an entry into my Boomapox Diary and wrote some of the most horrible and shocking things (about sexual blasphemy as regards Jesus) ever written by someone who was trying to serve the turn of the King of the Kingdom of Light. I had a stray thought about the dead guy. We had been in a diner with the friend we had in common. A French fry had fallen into a fold in the front of the dead guy's security jacket. The friend starting having a fit of laughter. The fry was wedged in there in such a way that it bobbed around like a little tongue or finger when the guy moved or spoke. The guy looked at the fry and then at the friend with his usual dry surliness. But I'm sure that he figured out a way to make the fry bob about even more comically...

The State Park. A few red leaves but still no autumn. I was in much, much better health on that last Boomapox Sunday... The dead guy... had not been dead.

Back at home. I opened the car door in the driveway. But I just sat there. One has these moments in Life - I won't say that one enjoys these moments in Life, even though they impart a certain light and peace- when one feels that one could account for years, for decades, for generations of one's life in this world to any captious or dubious angel of judgment...

The old nuns who taught me at that school on the right end of Rose Street would not have had damned to Hell the Methodist heretics at the wrong end of Rose Street. Invincible Ignorance and all. Better than Precious Blood to guarantee salvation. Pope Pius IX was shocked, shocked that some laxist Catholics, overeager to placate modern sentimentalism, were saying that the salvation of those outside the Roman Church was likely, when some rigorist Catholics were saying that he was being lax when he suggested that it was even possible!

But then we got the new nuns. They said that you didn't have to go to Mass if you didn't dig going to Mass. They said that the things you are liable to read in the Bible ain't necessarily so. The catechisms that they forced on us over the fulminations of our orthodox hold-out pastor had a huge blow-up of a picture of the demented Antichristian apostate Teilhard de Chardin.

So if it was not on either end of Rose Street where was salvation then?

I was also raised on the Little Flower of the Baby Jesus. She taught us to trust God as our Papa in Heaven. She taught us to be as little children. She said that Hell and damnation are not for little children.

The Sovereign Pontiffs were at pains to vet her.

But right now I am engaged in a cyberspace religious controversy in which I am denouncing Pope Saint Pius X - Pope Saint Pius X! - for having vetted in a fallible private letter the execrable Liberal troublemaker Cardinal Newman.

I was born and baptized in the year of Grace 1957. I was born during the last twelve months of the reign of the last True Pope of Rome. I may have said one Our Father in the Kingdom of Light. Then the Popes of Rome unleashed on the world the Kingdom of Hell.

One is not left without God in this world because the Christ is dissolved into Tartarus. One lives. One breathes. One walks in the sunshine. One can be a fairly good person. One has family. One has friends.

One bowls.

But advancing age and finally the spectre of Death bring us face to face with that Christ, Who no matter what happened to His Church in this world is our only Hope for happiness in the world to come and is set up to cause us unhappiness if we are not on His right side. (It is a Certain Theological Conclusion that a Good Jew living in, say, Trachonitis who never heard of Jesus of Galilee would have been saved if he had died in March of AD 30? and damned, even though he was still good, if he died in April of AD 30?.) And whether we like it or not the Prophet of the Kingdom of Heaven preached Hell and damnation for those outside His Kingdom. Which, we must now understand as His Church. His kind of Roman Church.

I know that a large part of the Catholicism that I learned as a kid growing up in the early and middle 1960s, before the Kingdom of Hell took hold of the Roman church in my suburban village, was an abomination of accomodating Americanist Liberalism. Traditionalism taught me that. But a large part of that Catholicism was also a holy and a vast improvement on what had come before in the Church. Traditionalism shrivels the soul by dragging it willy-nilly back into the 1780s. Or the 1560s. Drag the Jews back to the Ghetto! The Jesus and Mary I knew as a Catholic child were friends. I could count on them to help me out and pull me through in the end. They were very nice people. The rules were the rules. But there was a way in which they might work with them in Mercy... One could lay oneself down to sleep in the hope that all would be well.

The fallacy of Liberal Catholicism is to choose to think that all will be saved, that a Merciful God could not have created Hell, and so forth. Our choosing to think things doesn't change the way things are. And the teaching of God Incarnate is a good clue as to the way things really are in the unseen realms. There is a Hell. And despite what the phony pope Wojtyla said, it is more than a "tragic possibility" when the God of Truth preaches on it.

But I want to believe that everyone for whom I have known and for whom I have prayed, will come to a place of light, happiness and peace. And that one day, though not too soon, I will be there with them.

The way to both presumption and despair as one contemplates Sin and Death and Judgment -one's own and those of one's loved ones, or even those of those with whom one walked under the sun that shines upon the just and the unjust- is to keep on contemplating Sin and Death and Judgment. It is the Face of Jesus of Nazareth which we should be contemplating. It is His sacred heart. It is His beautiful, beautiful Mind. We must not reason away or sentimentalize away His hard sayings. We should accept them like little children in our hearts. We should insist on them in the theological forum as though to out-Augustine Augustine. And then, like little children we should run into His arms and ask Him to do the opposite of what He said in those hard sayings just because we asked Him to...

It's funny. A lot of what I have of Jesus of Nazareth I got all on my own once I had all on my own lived down my unspeakably horrific dealings with the church of the New Pentecost. I worked out my own way of being devoted to Jesus' mother Mary. (Hard to be saved with no special devotion to her, they say.) But Saint Therese has been with me all my life as she is in herself without my having to think my own brilliant and novel thoughts about her. And there is no fear, no darkness in her. She is all Love. But she is also all Truth. Which gives you confidence that she is being Truthful, and not reductionist, when she makes the Christian thing all about Love...

What a Long and Winding Road.

But...

He who perseveres to the end will be saved...