No writing today -- Our 35th wedding anniversary!

Ande & Mike June 24, 1978 --potluck reception in her parent's backyard

WHAT’S FATHER’S DAY LIKE IN IRAQ AND SYRIA?

Iraqi father and child at Abu Graib --early in Iraq War

 

A gentlemanly member of our church choir and I exchanged Father’s Day greetings yesterday before mass, and he then asked me the originator of the national holiday in the USA {he knew I’d not guess}—President Richard Nixon.  A leading proponent of the Vietnam War had promoted this day honoring fathers.

Yet war is history’s leading quick cause of orphans and widows—most injurious to fathers.  What deep dichotomy.   We want to honor, but instead, through the institutions of violence, we destroy.  Our heroes are our warriors, but this traditionally male work of war ends inevitably in suffering and loss to our families at home, and in the foreign lands where we fight.

A series of bombings in Shiite-majority areas of Iraq killed at least 30 people on Sunday-- A blast in Najaf struck a produce market---Haider Alaa-Reuters

The Father’s Day, 6-16-13, New York Times reported, “Dozens of Casualties in String of Attacks Across Iraq.”   If you read the international news, articles like this appear almost daily.  “Nearly 2,000 Iraqis have been killed since April, according to the Interior Ministry, making it the country’s most violent period since 2008.”  We left Iraq a little over a year ago, saying our job was done.  A probable million people died violent deaths there in our decade of Iraq War.  Nobody ever counted {a most reliable count was ignored, and this less than half way through the war}.  Hundreds of thousands of fathers? 

ow we are poised to replicate the fight which made Iraq a failed state, in Syria.  Already 90,000 have died there, our headlines proclaim, as an attempt is made to ready the U.S. public [this link changed by NYT on 6-18-13, found similar article to original] to go to war again.  The enemy Sunnis of Saddam that we chased out of Iraq [where we helped install a Shiite government], we now employ covertly to attack the Shiite government of Syria.  We continue to stir the pot of ancient animosities.

The international forces that trust only in guns and bombs to solve conflict, have turned the nonviolent change of Arab Spring, back into an Arab Fall of death-dealing weapons.  A string of hollow victories for violence—Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Bahrain, Libya, Mali, now Syria.  How many fathers, mothers, and their children must die?

Yesterday I sat in my backyard garden with two of the fathers I’ve known longest and respect most.  We talked of our beliefs, of our wives, of our children—our success and failures as fathers.  We each have different perspectives, but we gave common voice to the hope that our children, and their generation worldwide, will be given the grace of so much greater opportunity for eye-opening service and creative work—peacemaking, the final remedy for war. 

 

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

 

 

 

OVERDOSE ON HOMELAND SECURITY—INJURIOUS TO OUR SPIRITUAL PUBLIC HEALTH

 

If you think about it, it’s hard to live “big” under an impenetrable military shield—shut out from meaningful contact with the rest of humanity.  If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t seem to matter.  We can continue to live our privileged garrisoned lives, cut off, sheltered from, a whole world of wisdom.

Embracing the Gospel nonviolent truth, solves every political and spirtual problem, heals all society’s wounds.  Lord, that we may see with both eyes, walk with both legs, use all our faculties to fully exercise our faith.  Nothing protects us from death, except eternal life—given us in accepting the saving all-merciful love of Jesus, for friend and enemy alike.

 The Good Shepherd can bring back even the lost 1% into the fold

Why throw this away by tying ever-tightly instead, the heavy millstone around the neck, that is Homeland Security?

2011-04-05-ice-training-using-armored-vehicles

Photo from over-the-top website on DHS preparations to control U.S. populace

 

Hopefully this is not our question for God on judgment day, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and not give you to eat, thirsty and not give you to drink…..?    Mt 25: 44

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/us/politics/rethinking-an-open-checkbook-for-a-security-colossus.html?ref=world&_r=1&  This article points to government spying on our citizens as an increased problem post-911, and the long term dilemma—how much do we want to shackle / isolate ourselves to preserve supposed freedom?

“The two-year investigation found that the centers [a Dept. of Homeland Security program] had failed to help disrupt a single terrorist plot, even as they spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and infringed on civil liberties.”

 

The cover of Senator Coburn's actual report  uses the Lego toys motif

PORT HURON -- POVERTY MAGNET, OR BEACON OF HOPE?

Recently there have been articles in our local press that complain our fair city has become a destination point for those seeking supportive social services.  Our city manager cited “liberal social programs in the city” as one of the three biggest problems that drag us down.  It’s implied that those who just want a low income welfare life are encouraged to make Port Huron their home, because so much is done for them here.  A social worker in Sault Ste. Marie sends an alcoholic on a bus Port Huron bound, because those caught in the welfare social strata have it so good in our town?  Could it be that this woman had family here also?  What’s the rest of her story?

Perhaps, as a few reported anecdotes have suggested, some people do move here because we take care of those in need.  We certainly have many programs, agencies, people and churches that readily give a helping hand.  I know a great number of community volunteers involved in various aspects of this effort.    But people at loose ends tend to move most to where they have friends and family.  Many volunteers elsewhere also work to serve the poor and relieve poverty--in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and throughout the state.  We are not unique, and we are not a poverty magnet.

he skyrocketing poverty rate--up to 26%--we’ve experienced, is not because we invite it, or certain people like to wallow in it, but because our community, even more than many across the state, has been battered by withering job loss.  Since my family moved here [from Sanilac Co.] in 1993 to work in the medical community, there has been a constant stream of factories shuttering, closing up shop, or moving south to Mexico, the sunbelt and overseas—to where bigger profits could be made.  The number one cause of our poverty is job loss.

 

Words of Pope Paul VI  -- And if you want true progress, work for justice

 

ur poor are primarily our own people, who used to have jobs with a livable wage.   We’re not a dumping ground for the poor. We’re a Blue Water skeleton crew abandoned by manufacturers who’ve jumped ship for greener cash horizons.  I’d like to see an account of how many have lost jobs in our town in the past 40 years, how many jobs have taken their place, and how smaller or larger their pay scale.  There must be plenty of workers who moved from here when their jobs died, and not finding any elsewhere, have returned.  Do we call this an influx of the poor?

Yes, we have too much rental [instead of resident owned] housing.  Yes, our schools are stressed.  Yes homelessness, joblessness, and poverty are big problems in Port Huron.  Let’s not respond by becoming tight-fisted.   Taking money away from heating system repairs in two of our homeless shelters is not a sign of Port Huron progress.  Our good history of generosity towards those in need is the Gospel way to achieve a better way of life for the community as a whole.

Port Huron should be proud to be called a beacon of hope for the poor.  The hope is that we will again become a powerhouse of creative work and resourcefulness--and that those with the power and wealth will also see the light, share the investment.  We are one of the fresh water capitols of the world.  Our unique geographic location and abundant natural resources gives us a history of being one of the most inventive areas in the nation—cars, boats and homes—and a breadbasket of agriculture as well.  It will happen again, if we maintain and nourish a spirit of generosity and ingenuity.
 

Photo by Dawn Dasharion --Port Huron

 

What makes you think I want all your sacrifices?" says the LORD. "I am sick of your burnt offerings [of excess $ money] of rams and the fat of fattened cattle.  Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of orphans. Fight for the rights of widows.   Isaiah I: 11, 17

 

http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20130518/OPINION02/305180009/Mike-Connell-Don-t-give-up-Port-Huron

Illuminations by Kathy Brahney

ON MEMORIAL DAY WHAT DO WE REMEMBER?

 

WAR -- REST IN PEACE  -- "WAR NO MORE"

Pope John Paul II

  

Jesus Blesses the Children - by Pacecco De Rosa 1630

 

On Memorial Day what do we remember?   Do we remember those we’ve known who’ve died on war’s bloody battlefield?  Those of us who were born after 1945 don’t have much recognition.  How many Americans have been in the hellish firefight?   There sure have been those who’ve died for country, in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan.  We back home are more likely to know those wounded in body and spirit returning—eventually 500,000 of those from Vietnam {50,000 U.S. soldiers killed there} died early stateside, drugs or suicide, as lingering effect of the death they’d been part of.

The vast majority of us don’t know war, only get brief shallow glimpses, patriotic portraits provided by our media.  War is hell.  Certainly soldiers, and some civilians, have courageously given their lives for others.  And this is true on both sides of every war.  Meanwhile modern war kills multitudes of civilians who just get in the way.  The carnage civilian & soldier, since the Civil War all on foreign soil except for 911, has been horrific to the relatively few in our country who’ve witnessed it.

Listen to the words of Chris Hedges Pulitzer prize correspondent who’s been one of the closest to our soldiers in recent wars. {from Murder Is not an Anomaly in War}.

“The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. … Robert Bales, a U.S. Army staff sergeant who {on a personal shooting rampage in Mar. 2012} allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat.”

What should Christian people, who want to follow Jesus, remember about war, the fight for God and country?   War is a morass of many murders.  We cannot judge the individual acts, but killing in God’s name is not of Jesus, nor is paying for others to do so.  When a country makes a call to war there is a choice to be made, between God and country.  These are hard words in our society, in any society, but this is the Gospel truth.  We need to continually read and pray the Gospels, asking Jesus to inspire in us the truth of His nonviolent merciful love.

o kill in God’s name, as if God desires or wills it, is serious sin, counter to the very nature of God revealed by Jesus the Son of God.  To kill for nation or self-preservation is blasphemy, takes the name of God the all-merciful in vain.  In the service of God and country, for the Christian—God always comes first.  [I wrote this paragraph a couple weeks ago—with great encouragement now received in the paragraph below.]

 Pope Francis, new pope of the Catholic Church, issued thepast week a fundamental challenge to the faithful.
“This ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God,” Francis said Wednesday (May 22) in remarks at the informal morning Mass that he celebrates in the chapel at the Vatican guesthouse where he lives.

“And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”
The pope speaks of a heretical blasphemy, dishonoring God by saying something is God’s nature, that isn’t.

Let’s remember who God is this Memorial Day, the God of Peace Eternal Love and Mercy, and become blessed as peacemakers, God’s son and daughters.

 
Illumination by Kathy Brahney


http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/pope-francis-god-redeemed-everyone-not-just-catholics/2013/05/22/f90da324-c311-11e2-9642-a56177f1cdf7_story.html

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02595a.htm

 

 

NEW EVANGELIZATION NEEDS THE GOSPEL TRUTH -- AND A MOTHER'S DAY PAX CHRISTI

 

I am a member of Pax Christi USA because it means Peace of Christ, not war of Christ, and we as a church must follow this faith in its full gospel, no matter how difficult, in a violent war-dedicated society.  We are given the call and grace to do this by the resurrected Jesus, who breaths on us, “Peace be with you.”

As we look forward as a church to a new evangelization of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the first step is to fully proclaim that Good News.  Every person on the planet, no matter culture or background, churched or un-churched, must answer two primary questions—Is there a God? – And if there is a God, what does that creator and perfect being want me to do with my life?  Christians have been blessed with the answer of Jesus. 

If we believe Jesus is the Son of God, then it’s crucial to follow the advice of his human mother Mary, “Do whatever he tells you.” [Jn 2:5] The account of his life, death, and resurrection is truly Good News—there is life after death for those who trust in his way.  He has shown us how to live and die, and live again.  He never sanctioned taking another’s life as the way to salvation, but taught and did the opposite, giving his own life.

 

So there is a dilemma for those of us who want to evangelize others to follow the all-merciful all-loving nonviolent Jesus who loved even the enemy.  What are we to do about our support of a “just war theory”—war which kills on a massive scale.  How will they know we are Christian’s by our love?  We reject a just abortion theory, but we maintain the justified violence of war.  This is just a theory, and not an original dogma of our faith, yet it has caused immeasurable havoc and suffering.

Image by Tom Gauld of the Guardian

 

Who revealed to us the “just war theory”?  It was not Christ, God’s only Son.  Cicero, a B.C. orator and senator of the Roman Empire, was its first formulator.   Be willing to kill for the kingdom, take up your sword—give this a framework of ethical principles.  We find this thinking nowhere in Christ’s Gospel, only in a secularized script—materialism dressed up as religion.  For the first 300 years of Christianity, you could not be a Christian and be a soldier.  For more on this please view Fr. E.C. McCarthy’s presentation Introduction to the History,Theology and Spirituality of Gospel Nonviolence.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and we have words of inspiration from its founder, a more  contemporary Christian, Julia Ward Howe in 1870 – "Our sons [and daughters] shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
to allow our sons [and daughters] to be trained to injure theirs."
Another Mother's Day is celebrated without taking this proclamation seriously.

o do so, and to follow Christ, we must stop sending our children off to war, mortgaging their future by funding war instead of their education.  We must send them into service as peacemakers, to battle the triple evils-- racism, poverty, and war itself-- that plague our world.  Then on that judgment day we’ll hear God say, -- Blessed are you peacemakers, My sons and daughters.  All of us Catholics, Christians, young and old, are called to be active witnesses, risking everything for this truth.  Violence is never the way.  God is unconditional love.  There is no place for violence in the Holy of Holies, God’s heart of hearts.

 

A conservative's belief

 

 

 

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

 

 

EXPAND MICHIGAN MEDICAID---AS STEP TOWARDS MEDICARE FOR ALL

 

 Let's follow the better medical instincts of this southern state representative & physician -- expand Medicaid to more of those in need of healthcare.  Someday soon,in this world's richest most blest country, a fully funded Medicare sysem should be available to all.

 

This week our local paper gave its editorial support to Medicaid Expansion-- health coverage for more low income Michigan citizens. On the same opinion page, the CEO’s of our three county hospitals wrote an op-ed arguing also that our Michigan legislature should pass a budget that will accept the federal funds for this expansion. The problem is, as State Rep. Paul Muxlow wrote me in recent correspondence,

 

“Unfortunately, Medicaid Expansion was not contained in the House of Representatives Omnibus budget for this year. However, there is still a possibility that Medicaid Expansion could find its way in the budget.  Unfortunately, Medicaid Expansion was not contained in the House of Representatives Omnibus budget for this year. However, there is still a possibility that Medicaid Expansion could find its way in the budget, following a conference committee, which will form to address differences contained in both the Senate's budget bill, and the House of Representatives' bill. ”   Doesn’t sound too hopeful.

 

Why wouldn’t our representatives want this federal money, to help in our state’s healthcare needs? They cite the eventual obligation that the state pay for 10% of the increased coverage [the feds still to pay the remaining 90%].  Let’s hope aversion to federal ObamaCare by our state’s Republican controlled legislature doesn’t cut off this access to healthcare for our less fortunate.

 

’ve worked twenty years as a healthcare provider in our Port Huron community, and have seen both doctors and patients struggle with cost of healthcare and ability to pay issues. We need to give low income people better access, and physicians more consistent reimbursement for care given {Medicaid routinely pays only about 50% of what the other insurers do}. My email response to Rep. Muxlow, who has been one who can put aside partisanship, is as follows.

Do you have any conference committee influence to put Medicaid expansion back in the MI budget? It would be good to see some Republican support for the common good--this increased access to Medicaid. It’s also consistent with the Right to Life we both support. Our Medicaid does not pay for abortion, and does pay for the pregnancy needs of the low income people we see in our Blue Water Pregnancy Care Center where I volunteer as a male advocate. I feel the budget should not pass until this Medicaid expansion is included. How will you vote?   I hope you, and your colleagues Rep. Andrea LaFontaine, Dan Lauwers, and Sen. Phil Pavlov also, along with all legislators, will find a way to vote positive for healthcare in St. Clair County, and Michigan as a whole.  As a scriptural incentive, it would be a good time for us all to read the Gospel account [Lk 16: 19-31] of the rich man and Lazarus at the Gate {whose sores never received care in his lifetime, except by licking dogs}.  The consequences for the the rich man never taking notice, were eternal.   Yours truly, Michael McCarthy PA-C

 

Lazarus and the Rich Man ---        Before 

and After
 

 

 

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” -- Dr. Martin Luther King

 

"The truth is that it is impossible to interpret Jesus as violent. Violence is contrary to the Kingdom of God. It is an instrument of the Antichrist. Violence never serves man, but dehumanizes him.”

--Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, Sunday, March 11, 2012

"Apathy, in the face of relievable human misery, is radical evil."
        -- Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy


Illumination by Kathy Brahney