Dear Friends & Family -

We are innovators in a relatively new art form with a really ugly name: Blog. It's a sort of online journal and chat room - an electronic coffee shop existing in cyber-space. If we find within us the right words to say what we think and feel, the nature of the medium is such that we may be further published - forwarded...

And we may hear back via unintentional forward:

>RE: Farewell to Valentine's Day [A trio of Valentines from Rebecca, Bonnie, & Robin + my reflections.]

>For one thing, why would he forward this? Is he trying to impress? This sounds like a lot of theological babble to me.

>Thank God I am a plain person with plain speech.

The lady later sent a retraction - She was unfair, worried about her Mom, shouldn't have been rude, etc.

And we've all done that, fired off an e-mail... and later had second thoughts, Staircase Thoughts, as the French call them - You're on your way up the stairs to bed, when what you should have said, or shouldn't have said, comes to you.

Worse, your faithless Coffee editor, may God & you all forgive him, is infamous for publishing your paragraphs without clearing them with you first - with, for instance, one result that I need to go back and revise COFFEE WITH REBECCA. I'm sorry, I'll try to do better.

Sigh... Okay, you've heard that before, so I must be a schlemiel - one of those people who apologizes all over the place in order to buy the right to commit the same offense again. Guilty as charged. I'd like do do as Yoda directs - "Do or don't do, there is no 'try.'" And follow psychiatrist Eric Berne suggestion, "Don't apologize, change."

...

Re, GOOD AND EVIL COFFEE:

The next-to-last paragraph concluded, you may recall, ended with Don Hockady's saying:

"We can experience emotion great or small, but once we think about it, we think in terms we learned - a set of accepted concepts. Communication is enhanced by it; thought is restricted by it. There is little we can do about that but struggle with, or yield to, the chains."

That's pretty darn good , isn't it? There's a chunk of long, deep, costly thought under the suface of that passage. One simply knows it is there, just as one knows, yes, that's the tip of an iceburg, not a pile of floating soapsuds.

I'm going back over all the stuff we wrote on Theodicy, gathering all those paragraphs, yours and mine, and proofing them. They'll make a pair of website pages. Last call, if you want to add or change anything.

Considering that old cautionary note, not to attempt discussions of sex, politics, or religion in polite company, I think we've done remarkably well. You people have produced some beautiful prose.

***

The last time I taught freshman composition, one student arrived prepared by two semesters of non-credit English for those of little literacy, Bonehead English as it's sometimes called. She was a lovely young lady, and her first paper, an assigned essay on Honor - We had discussed the term at length in class - was clearly a struggle for her to write. Nor was her struggle made easier by her dealing with the verb, as in 'He honored me by asking for a date,' rather than the noun, as in 'The idea of honor has changed since Shakespeare's time." I and all her classmates had taken the latter approach for granted.

No less struggle for me. I wondered how to deal with the young lady's efforts, what to tell her in the clearly necessary upcoming student-teacher conference. Finally I dropped by Saint Francis Church, went in, sat down, stopped agonizing for a moment, and asked Jesus, "Show me this paper through your eyes." He did, and there was not one thing wrong with it. It made perfect sense. All the spelling was phonetically correct. You couldn't ask for a nicer paper. It was, like the woman herself, simple and lovely. And interesting. Then I returned to my hypercritical English teacher's consciousness, and the kid was once more clearly out of her depth.

I must have got that across to her in conference, because she soon found a more supportive teacher.

A friend of mine, Charles Brown, reminisced about staying at his grandmother's farm. "We'd draw water from the well," he said, "and carry it into the house. Then one day my grandmother took me up to the top of the hill, where the spring was that fed the well. Now that was water! Fresh and cold! Water from the source!"

I have not been to the mountain top, much less caught up to the seventh heaven, but I've been to the top of the hill with a bothersome student paper, and sipped enough cold clear spring water to conclude that God may indeed be, as the psalmist claims Him, "too pure to behold iniquity." Not that we are. No, we see all sorts of faults and flaws, problems and impediments, damns and hells. But God has felt the spine-thrill of slayer and slain alike, seen through both sets of eyes. Perhaps, as Don Hockaday said, he has yet to burn his first sinner. One has that hope.

"Now the regular water," my friend said, "the water from the well, of course that was good, too."

***

Dick Sandlin writes, Re. STAIRCASE COFFEE

Tom,

You won't let this go to your head, so I will just tell you. You and your computer-supported psychobabble penetrate my world. I manage to avoid reading the news ('sorry DMN), watching the news (just the history channel), or hearing the news (I listen to books on CD in the car), mostly through studied carelessness and intense apathy. You sneak in through a portal that most have dismissed as virus-ridden, spamified (there is no noun that can't be verbified), and unworthy of serious attention: my damned email. (not damned really, maybe just cursed.) I find myself facinated by the discussions that you so skillfully avoid managing, even if you do suggest incisive, tiny changes that might just make it publishable.

Most provocative lately are the various opinions and speculations about the nature of good and evil and just how much of our world should be credited to Holy ordering. I have often wondered if it works this well in Espiranto or Sanskrit, but clearly in English all you have to do is add a "D" to evil and subtract an "o" from good to get to God and the Devil. We are natural dualists, it's just black and white. That is probably the best reason that I know of to reject the idea that God is good and the Devil is evil: it just seems like common sense. Nothing hard is ever easy.

God is the person with the plan. He created time and motion for us to study. He created more than a googleplex of stars for us to discover, if we can get off of our butts and build a telescope big enough to find them. His plan is still unfolding. We may never know why, but it won't be for lack of trying. When you have a plan, things can happen. A flat tire is, to me, the most obvious natural expression of sin. When you are trying your best to get from Point A to that awesome Point B, a flat tire comes along and screws up the whole trip. Did Satan make that tire go flat? I don't honestly know, but I am sure that it is evil. Can the God who created worlds and time fail to protect us from flat tires and cancer and baldness? Sure He could. And I believe that He would, if it really mattered. That all sounds pretty smug to a young family watching their Mommy get buried because some fiend killed her for the fun of it. There is truly evil in the world. We don't have any trouble recognizing it. I believe that the truth is that it doesn't matter. God will make it all come out in the end. God made evil for His own reasons. Part of it is that you can't see without contrast. You can't appreciate good if everything is good. It's like that famous picture of the polar bear in the snow storm, it just looks like a sheet of white paper.

Another part is that free-will thing that many have mentioned. Look around at your friends. How many of them owe you their livelihood? How many always agree with you, even when you stretch a point for emphasis? Are your only friends the people who rely on you for everything? Those aren't friends and you need to get out more. Like the little framed needlepoint rectangle says, "If you really love it, let it go." Free will is probably the hardest thing for anyone to give away, but our God started with that. Yes, there is a Devil, but he made bad choices. He fell from Heaven like lightning into the lake of fire. God created him, just like He created us, and He created evil by allowing us to have free will, but He knew what He was doing and He was right to do so. The benefits more than justify the cost. We all have a natural fear and hatred of evil, that's why we don't want to think that our God made it, but the truth is that He made everything that was made. We have His Word on it.

Growing out of both of those ideas is the greatness of His good. Faith is something that He values in us. We are made Holy and grow in Faith by His power. The widow's mite that we can give Him is going to please Him just as much as Notre Dame cathedral because of the evil that we had to endure to produce it. More than any TV camera, or even writer's keyboard, God can see the true value of people and things. The evil makes the good stand out in crystal clarity without any need for packaging or spins.

Well, speaking of packaging, I am going to wrap this up. I remember that I used to hate to listen to such sermons, but now I can create them spontaniously. One thing that proves the existence of God to me more that anything is ironic humor. It is truely ironic that someone like me should attempt to be God's apologist. I pray fervently that our God has the sense of humor that I know full well that he has.

Yours in Christ, Dick

+++

Dick -

For some reason that opening chord from Milton's Paradise Lost became my first response to your essay - prefaced by, "But First a Word from Our Sponsor. Ladies and Gentlemen: Blind John Milton, the King of Rock and Roll!"

Thanks to Milton's blindness we have his meditation thereon with its thundering affirmation of God's self-sufficiency and power: God doth not need man's works nor His own gifts; thousands at His bidding speed and post o'er land and ocean without rest. Any writer knows what having such lines come out of one's soul is worth... Four good lines, Lord; just give me four good lines!

Again and again my ruminant mind returns to a phrase Father Allen tossed off in passing: "God's Economy." One becomes aware of it when one falls in love, and sees that all one's past - each pain and passing joy; each victory and every folly - have, like flagstones laid to make the way, led one to this present love. Where then was one's free will?

And right after one's conversion or coming to awareness - that falling in Love also brings such a view.

Re. our natural dualism and necessary skepticism toward it: Don Hockaday put that hitch in the getalong way back. "'The Problem of Evil' assumes without basis that Evil is the antithesis of Good, and that Good is the domain of religion."

Plato's Allegory of the Cave - and of the Real World beyond it, wherein essential Light blinds the eyes of the newly arrived soul - presents the Good as the Sun that illumines that Paradise. There is no corresponding archtypal Evil in the depths of the cave, no moral black hole swallowing all Light. There is only the ignorance of those whose light is the physical sun, and who are continually rapping on some void made resistant to their knuckles by tiny bundles of energy and saying, "I mean Real like this table is Real." Not that Plato's Republic lacks the notion of Bad Things. Government by tyrant is the Worst Possible Thing.

Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is more optimistic. "All men by nature desire the good." Wealth is a good, but to choose wealth above the greater good of Friendship, say, is wrong. One ought to desire the greatest good, that is to contemplate the Absolute that moves the sun and other stars, and to govern one's life accordingly.

As for tyrany: Hitler desired political power. Political power is a good. He wanted to benefit mankind by improving the gene pool, a laudible aim. He meant well.

The citizens of Athens meant well, too, when they decided Aristotle was too smart to live and ought to join Socrates in philosopher heaven. Or leave town. Aristotle chose the latter as the greater good, not wanting the Athenians to slander themselves a second time to history.

No - questions of Good and Evil are not the sole property of religion. But philosophers must create an alternative religion to deal with them.

One of the founders of the Unitarian faith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, dismissed evil as "merely privative," that is, evil is merely the absence of Good. I condensed Emerson's poem, "Brahma" a couple of Coffees ago:

Ah, the trick of pretending God's viewpoint.

Or an earthworm's. Ted Roethke made that one work well in "The Waking":

Til tomorrow, a Dios,

Tom

***

Today the table Dad and I built is dominated by a grand centerpiece composed by Carolyn - a starfest of red and white carnations and baby's breath, supported by fern and o'erspread by daisies, towered by gold gladiola spears reaching out and up. It's for tonight, a festal occasion at Saint Christopher's.

A great cloud of witnesses, we will gather amid pungent censer smoke; then the clergy will join us in collegial robes; and finally, led by the cross we bow to, the altar crew will process among us, trailed by the Bishop in miter, cope, and crozier, striding out the introit hymn intoned by congregation and choir - "God Himself is With Us," perhaps. The cause? We shall thus announce that our new priest, the Reverend Wylie Miller, and we of St. Christopher's Parish are making our relationship legal, churchwise. Didn't Jesus say the Kingdom of Heaven was a lot like a wedding celebration?

In honor of which I offer this tale told by a priest, one Father Carl Babcock - may God give him a good time in Heaven - a divorced and reformed alchoholic who consoled himself with a pipe loaded with tobacco soaked in Amaretto, and made an excellent raconteur.

Some thirty years before I met him, he said, back when he was fresh out of seminary, his first assignment had been to serve as chaplain at a halfway house for ex-convicts. Along with everyone else, he served his turn in the kitchen, and came to know - we'd call the man a Street Person; back then the word was Tramp - who came in every evening for a plate of leftovers, then quickly took it to the back steps to eat. Of course the new-made priest wanted to know, "Who's that." The old timers glanced at one another. "Why don't you go out and ask him?"

The tramp wore an age-slick brown suit belted with string, a shirt that had once been white gathered at the neck by a thin black tie, and shoes held together with frayed gaffing tape. He ate with relish and no apparent wish to turn his attention from his plate.

"Hello, I'm Father Carl Babcock. And you are...?"

"My name Star Vegas."

"Ah, yes... You were a star in Las Vegas?"

"No. I from the star Vegas." The man gestured vaguely toward the heavens.

"I see. Well. Pleased to meet you Star Vegas." And back to the kitchen went newly-initiated house tenderfoot, thinking about Vega, the lead star in the Harp constellation, nominated by astronomers to become the Pole-star in ten-thousand years or so.

Several times Star Vegas came for his evening meal and went wherever home might be, on nodding acquaintance with the young Padre of the place, who knew better than to ask, "What's the story on that guy, anyway?" only to hear the smiled response, "You'll be wanting to get that from him." Finally he did.

Star Vegas had through many life-times been sent all over the universe. But at last his travels and travails were nearly over; this stay on earth was to be his last life-time, his final journey. Then at last he would return to the star whence he had come at first. He would be home.

Father Carl then had fresh material for meditation, and meditated many times before he again engaged Star Vegas under the back porch light.

"So, Star Vegas, this is your last life-time, here on earth."

"Yessuh."

"How does this life-time compare with all the others?"

"Oh Father, this the wuss one. I tell you, sometimes this mutha bout to get me down."

"I've thought about Star Vegas often over the years," said Father Babcock. More so as I age. Of late, when I wake in the morning dark and face the long drive from Denton here, I sit on the edge of my bed and look down into my shoes - You know how you do that, just puzzle over the shape they've taken while sustaining you... And I say, 'How right you were, Star Vegas, how right you were: This the wuss one. Sometimes this mutha bout to get me down.'

"That's a way we all feel sometimes," Carl said, "and there's nothing for it. Still, it's nice to know a Star once felt that way too."

***