Why ?
Its September 24, mid afternoon, and 90 degrees. According to the calendar it is Fall but you’d never know. It has been a while since an adequate rain, and the grass is fading from green to tan. I do not expect to become accustomed to these predicted unseasonal extreme-weather events. There will be no “new normal” for me.
The news feed reports near apocalyptic conditions in Puerto Rico, in the aftermath cat 4 hurricane Maria. Communications are out, no electricity island-wide. It has been days since the storm and the extent of damage is not yet known.
Over the weekend, the bombastic autocrat that we elected to the White House said that professional athletes who choose to “take a knee” during the national anthem ought to be fired or 
suspended.
So much for a report on my state of mind/heart on this Sunday afternoon.
I asked a good friend to have a look at the words of Father Thomas Merton that I posted several days ago. His comments received in reply were stimulating. I was provoked to ask myself why I chose to post a lengthy quotation from Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander. Merton was a Trappist Monk who passed in 1968. Though I never met him, he was of my generation. He was a contemplative soul, with a passionate commitment to the notion that we must do the work of forging community if we are to survive as a species. Perhaps more to the point, the survival of the earth depends upon our success or failure to achieve community, a belonging that transcends race, class, and ethnic background.
I was unable to add my voice to the civil rights struggle, and the opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. At that time I was entangled in the thicket of Evangelical fundamentalism. Merton was a happy warrior contending for sanity in those great national issues. The Vietnam War came to a conclusion, only to be succeeded by a series of continuing conflicts, arising from the same poisonous root. Oppression of race and class continues in the form of voter suppression, and a growing deportation of Hispanic immigrants to this country.
It just seemed right to offer Thomas Merton’s wise words of historical assessment of the American experiment. What else am I to do?
