Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, begins his book Teacher Man with a blanket pardon of those who helped make his childhood in Ireland miserable. He singles out Pope Pius XII, “the English in general and King George VI in particular,” bullying schoolmasters who hit him regularly with a stick, his alcoholic father, and assorted others.23 Let us hope that trumpeting his forgiveness to the world helped him forgive at a deeper level.
Each of us decides how to deal with past emotional pain. One person I know wrote her five worst memories on a paper towel and flushed it. There may be some power in ritualizing a resolution so that we do not allow traumatic events to dominate our lives.
Alice Roosevelt Longfellow advised: “Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.” Any time is the right time to burn up coddled grudges and dated emotions, or flush them, and move on.
January 30
Some call it Celtic spirituality. These days the term largely refers to the ancient Irish belief that there are certain places where the curtain separating this world from the other world is very thin, even sheer; places where the membrane separating secular from sacred, the ordinary from the numinous, is porous or permeable; thin places that are thick with the mysterious presence of God. It is as if the door between this world (time) and the next world (eternity) cracks open for a moment, enough to permit us to see the other side.
A friend told me about a trip he and his wife and their children and grandchildren made over the Christmas holidays to an island. At one point the family held something like a tribal council to discuss how they would celebrate Christmas in a tropical paradise. They decided they would send a message, not in a bottle released to the outgoing tide, but written in the sand in big, bold letters.
What message would they send to the universe, to God, to an airplane flying over? They settled on three words: joy, peace, and love. I saw a picture made of the kids standing in the O of JOY. The letters were probably big enough to be read from thirty-thousand feet without glasses.
Methinks when those kids are old and gray they will remember that island and that beach and those grandparents and that Christmas as a thin place where they experienced something bigger than themselves, bigger than life, something mysteriously better felt than told, what Rudolph Otto termed mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “the tremendous and fascinating mystery.”24
One of our primal needs is to spring ourselves occasionally from the humdrum—out of the rat race—and off to a thin place. Taking our little ones to a thin place may be the greatest gift parents and grandparents have to offer, far more precious and lasting than a gift card to an all-you-can-eat pizza place or one more video game.
January 31
The magazine Mother Jones made big news in 2012 because it released a surreptitiously recorded and damaging conversation presidential candidate Mitt Romney had with wealthy donors.25 One hundred years ago, what was newsworthy was Mother Jones herself. Cork, Ireland, even held a three-day festival in 2012 to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth.
When Mary Harris Jones was eighty-seven years old, Teddy Roosevelt called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Carl Sandburg once said that the “she” in “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” was a reference to Mother Jones’s unionizing work with Appalachian miners.
As a teenager, Mary moved with her family to North America. In 1867, yellow fever took the lives of her husband and four children. In 1871, she lost a successful dressmaking business to the Great Chicago Fire.
What do you do when twice you have lost everything? Mary Harris Jones became a passionate crusader on behalf of miners, including young children laboring in the mines. In 1903, she organized a Children’s March from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s house in Oyster Bay, New York. Hundreds of children carried banners proclaiming: “We Want to Go to School and Not the Mines!”26
In a meeting that Mother Jones negotiated with John D. Rockefeller Jr., she described conditions in Colorado mines. Rockefeller, a conservationist, was personally moved enough to visit the mines. Rockefeller proceeded to introduce long-needed reforms.
Mother Jones, tireless, indomitable organizer, once said in a labor union meeting: “I asked a man in prison how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.”
Mother Jones died at age ninety three and is buried at a miners’ cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois. She earned her epitaph the day she said, “Whatever the fight, don’t be ladylike.”27
January Notes
1. McClellan, “Lion Kings,” CBS 60 Minutes, no pages.
2. Matthew 6:21.
3. McClure, Pearl in the Storm, 289.
4. Genesis 3:19b.
5. Isaiah 1:18.
6. Detterman, “Worshipping the Triune God,” no pages.
7. Our Rabbi Jesus, “Our Image Stamped,” no pages.
8. Summit, Sum It Up, 369.
9. McDougall, “Hidden Cost of Heroism,” NBC News, no pages.
10. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 200.
11. Lawson, The Story of Ferdinand, no pages.
12. Shakespeare. Sonnet 116.
13. Unam Sanctam Catholicam, “History of Devil’s Advocate,” no pages.
14. Graves, “Dirk Willem Burned,” Christianity, no pages.
15. Matthew 5:43.
16. Historynet, “Seneca Falls Convention,” no pages.
17. The Doctor, directed by Randa Haines.
18. Blanko, “Carl Charles Roberts IV,” Murderpedia, no pages.
19. John 15:13.
20. KLTV, “Amish Grandfather,” no pages.
21. Vitello, “William Niehous Survived,” The Globe and Mail, no pages.
22. Lewis, “Burning the Evidence,” no pages.
23. McCourt, Teacher Man, 1–2.
24. Gooch, “The Numinous,” 113.
25. Mother Jones, “Secret Video,” no pages.
26. America Catholic History Classroom, “Mother Jones,” no pages.
27. AFL-CIO, “Mother Jones,” no pages.
February 1
“Why, what’s the matter, / That you have such a February face, / So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”—William Shakespeare28
Years ago, a part of my job was orienting student chaplains to the hospital world. One thing I did was to have them fill out their own death certificates. That was one way to plunge them into the reality of death in the hospital. Contemplating their own death, they had to fantasize things like how and when it would occur and the name of the next of kin to be notified.
To be a good sport, I also filled out my death certificate. After several years of doing this, it dawned on me that I always chose the first week of February for my death. Why not, I figured, if die I must, die in sync with nature at its coldest, bleakest, and most brutal?
Evidently Februaries across the big pond, at least in Shakespeare’s time, were much like Februaries where I live—“full of frost, of storm and cloudiness.” A February face is a pale face, deprived of Vitamin D, “full of frost.” A February