Aaron D. Wolf, R.I.P.

This is the text of the eulogy for Aaron D. Wolf, my longtime colleague at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and my best friend, that I delivered at his funeral on April 29, 2019, at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. Aaron passed into eternal life on Easter Sunday 2019, a day that he had told his family earlier was the happiest day of his life.

Lorrie, Gus, Kati, Carl, Nora, Josie, and Peter; Don and Carol—as we come together in this Easter season to celebrate Aaron’s life and his faith in our Risen Lord, we thank you for sharing your husband, your father, your son with us.

And share him you did, not just in the sense that we all knew him and benefited from his wisdom and work, but in the reality that much of the time that he spent building up the best magazine in the United States was time taken away from you.

I say “much of the time,” because some of it will return to you in the weeks and months and years ahead. Every word Aaron wrote captured not only his insights but his voice, his humor, his faith, and his love for his fellow man. He wrote for all of us, but as we discussed often, everything either of us wrote was written with our families in mind. Those words are a part of his bequest to you. Treasure them, return to them often, and feel his presence with us still.

Editing Chronicles was always rewarding, sometimes enjoyable, but rarely easy. I reacted too often to our daily trials with frustration and anger; Aaron almost always reacted with humor. His wit kept both of us sane through many dark times. The humorous exchanges we inserted in each manuscript as we edited the text electronically formed a running commentary on our life together at Chronicles. A future historian—or better yet, a novelist with an appreciation for the absurd—may someday mine those notes to great effect.

But that’s a story for another day. Today, I want to share two brief anecdotes that illustrate not only how much Chronicles meant to Aaron but how much Aaron meant to Chronicles.

In late 2006 or early 2007, Aaron received a submission—a “Letter From Texas”—from Egon Tausch, a lawyer and longtime Chronicles reader and contributor who passed away last year. Entitled “Gott mit uns” (“God be with us”), it was an amateur historian’s account of the history and culture of the Texas Germans. Aaron immediately recognized it as a quintessential Chronicles article, a story of local culture that illustrated universal truths, and he fought doggedly for it, until Tom Fleming finally relented and agreed to publish it.

Shortly after that article appeared in the August 2007 issue, Chronicles received a donation from a woman named Hannelore Schwindt, a native German who had married a Texas German and moved to Texas. That was the only donation we ever received from her—the only one, that is, until her death a year and a half later, when she bequeathed a quarter of her nearly $30 million estate to the magazine.

That bequest became the endowment that kept Chronicles alive during the early years of this decade, a period when donations to nonprofits—The Rockford Institute included—were declining dramatically.

An investment banker who brought in an account worth seven times’ the firm’s annual budget would have received a promotion and a healthy bonus, but even though the article that Aaron had fought for had resulted in this bequest, he never asked for a raise. As far as I know, he never even told this story to the members of the board of directors who will, in the coming days, consider how to do justice to Lorrie and their children. He was simply happy to have published a great article; everything that flowed from it was, for him, an added grace.

Then there was the night of February 1, 2011. As Aaron described it in introducing my Ides of March Lecture in 2017, that was the night “we slept together”—though, he hastened to add, just “for warmth.”

The March issue was scheduled to go to press on Groundhog Day, but over the night of January 31, a storm had been brewing. When we arrived at the office on the morning of the first, we weighed our options. With projections of up to two feet of snow, we knew that we might not be able to make it back into the office the next day. We could work from home, but we had no guarantee that either of us would have power or internet access.

That, Aaron said, left us with only one option: “We’re going to stay here until this issue is finished.”

By noon, we’d sent the support staff home, and by 5 P.M. the snow was coming down at close to two inches per hour. By 9 P.M., with the end of our efforts in sight, we thought it was odd that we hadn’t seen a snowplow on North Main for a couple of hours. At 10:50, we uploaded the final PDFs to our printer in Midland, Michigan; and we approved the proofs of the entire issue by 11 o’clock.

And then we tried to leave.

Now Aaron, as you know, was a big man, and I’m not so small myself, but even with our combined bulk, we couldn’t force the door of the Institute open by more than a couple of inches, and neither of us was going to be able to squeeze through that opening. So we went back up to the second floor, out the door onto the deck, and cautiously made our way down the icy, snow-covered steps, which looked like the sledding hill at Aldeen Park. I had walked to work; Aaron’s car was buried in snow halfway up the doors. As he shoveled it out, I headed down the drive between The Rockford Institute and the Howard Center to scope out the situation. Before I got to the front of the two buildings, the snowdrifts were up to my waist.

Defeated, we headed back up to Aaron’s office, where we texted Amy and Lorrie to let them know we were OK but we weren’t coming home. Neither of us had eaten since breakfast, so we took stock of our supplies: Aaron found a couple of ancient pieces of venison jerky in his tobacco drawer; I dug up an old protein bar; and we stole a half-empty can of mixed nuts from Cindy Link’s desk.

To wash our great feast down, we cracked open a bottle of my homemade cherry liqueur. As I poured us each a glass, we realized that, in our aborted attempt to return home to our families, we had forgotten to toast the successful completion of another issue.

Every month, that toast consisted of the same five words—words a colleague had uttered with a resigned sigh one month as he pulled the latest issue of Chronicles from his mailbox. We raised our glasses high and said in unison: “It just keeps coming out.”

And then we poured another glass, and another, and yet another, until sleep took us.

When I woke up in Aaron’s office the next morning, the sky was completely blue, and the sun was glaring down on an arctic landscape. Aaron was already awake. “Good news!” he cried. “Punxsutawney Phil says it’s going to be an early spring!”

No offense to our former colleague, but Chronicles didn’t just keep coming out. For all of us who dedicated our lives to it, Chronicles was a labor of love. Between April 5, 2017, when Aaron and I toasted the successful completion of my final issue of Chronicles, and June 11 of that year, when I departed Rockford for our new home in Huntington, Indiana, I often passed by 928 North Main and saw the light in Aaron’s second-floor office shining like a beacon in the night.

That light has been extinguished, but Aaron’s light still shines. It shines in every word he wrote, every speech he gave, every one of the 220 or so issues of Chronicles that he shepherded to conclusion. His light shines in Lorrie and Gus and Kati and Carl and Nora and Josie and Peter. It shines in every one of us gathered here whose own faith was strengthened as we watched the faith that Don and Carol had passed on to Aaron grow ever deeper as he suffered trials, trials worthy of Job. As Aaron would be the first to point out, that light is nothing less than the reflected glory of the Risen Christ, Who died for Aaron’s sins, and for the sins of us all.

May the God Who makes all things new in Christ grant Aaron D. Wolf blessed repose and eternal memory.

Meet Me at Mary’s Place

I got a picture of you in my locket
I keep it close to my heart
A light shining in my breast
Leading me through the dark . . .

The fog outside the window glows in the moments before dawn.  The sun will soon rise, but I won’t be able to see it.  The fog is so thick that the river, 80 yards or so from me, is lost in the mist.  I laid my sleeping bag here last night so I could watch the sunrise through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but now I might as well get up.

Mary Elizabeth Richert (photo by Scott P. Richert)

The cold air draws me out of my slumber as I head for the basement.  I know the sound every stair will make before my foot touches it, though each groans with greater intensity these days, a function of their age and mine.  Grandpa descended these stairs every day to shave and to shower in the downstairs bathroom, even when the years and his hereditary bowleggedness had made it hard to do so.  The two bathrooms upstairs had their uses, but in the morning this one was his.

He designed this house and built it 51 years ago, on 25 acres of the best farmland in the entire Midwest.  Nestled in curves of the Grand River, the soil enriched by centuries of silt, his small farm brought forth a cornucopia of food that fed children and grandchildren nearly every Sunday, and visitors throughout the year, and during harvest time everyone went away not only full but carrying tomatoes and peppers and corn and okra and potatoes and cucumbers and cabbage and green beans—the staples of my grandmother’s table, lovingly canned or frozen and made into pickles and kraut, so that the harvest lasted through the long winters here along the Lake Michigan shore.

Twenty years ago, Grandpa passed away in this house, while taking a nap after one of those meals.  Grandma knew that something was wrong when the snoring that had been the background music of her life for over 60 years finally ceased.  For the next 20 years, she hoped that she too would breathe her last breath in the home they had built together.  In the end, God had different plans.

Last night was the first Jacob had spent at his great-grandparents’ house, and it will likely be our last.  We gather our sleeping bags, stop in the kitchen to make coffee and to sit for a few minutes with my aunt and uncles, then load everything in the car to head back to my parents’ house to prepare for the funeral.  As we wind our way back to Leonard Road, steam still rises from the river, but the sun is burning off the fog.  The sky is as blue as it ever has been; it will be a perfect day for a party.

Familiar faces around me
Laughter fills the air
Your loving grace surrounds me
Everybody’s here . . .

My cousins and I had planned this celebration of Grandma’s life fully expecting her to be here with us.  She always had been; yet eight days before her 100th birthday, and four days before the party, she no longer was.  And now she lies next to Grandpa, in silence this time, awaiting the day when our Lord will tell them both to arise and to join Him in a world made anew.

Back at the farm, cars pull into the pasture, and her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren and even one great-great-great-grandchild walk the ground that Grandma had trod for 51 years.  Last night, these 25 acres and this house had suddenly seemed small to me.  When I was a child, they were a world unto itself.  I baled hay in these fields and fished in the river, harvested potatoes and sledded down the big hill with my cousins, celebrated birthdays and weddings and anniversaries and funerals, met aunts and uncles and cousins and more distant relatives for the first time.  Some I only ever knew here.

Today, however, this house and these fields no longer seem small, but too big ever to grasp and to hold in memory the way they deserve to be held.  I walk slowly from place to place, from room to room, trying to drink in every detail, so that I can remember it as it is, as it was, and as—I know—it will no longer be.  There’s not enough time.  There never will be, until, God willing, we’re all together again.

We talk for hours, eat the best roast pig my uncle and his sons and grandsons have ever made, and raise glasses of beer until most of the crowd drifts off, the sun disappears from the sky, and the chill creeps back into the air.  Those of us who are left head inside, to sit around the kitchen and dining-room tables as we have so many times before.  It’s an election year, but there are no heated discussions of politics, as there were when I was young.  Only memories.

Time slips away from me, and I have one glass too many.  In the walk-out basement where my grandparents used to retreat from the winter cold and the summer heat, there’s an empty couch facing the windows that look down to the river.  One more night here, and perhaps, tomorrow, one last sunrise.

First published in the November 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

America has lost one of her best novelists and writers of short stories, and perhaps the last chronicler of a world that can no longer be found: the early 20th-century Midwest, a world of small towns and small farms, of hot summer days and bitter winter nights, of swimming holes and traveling shows, of Main Streets and gas lights and front porches. Bits and pieces of that world remained in the smallest of small Midwestern towns for almost 50 years after Bradbury’s family left his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, for the last time, settling in Los Angeles, California, in 1934. But all that remains now is what Bradbury, and a few other writers like him, captured in such novels and collections of short stories as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer.

To those today who still remember his name, Ray Bradbury was, as the New York Times declared in a lackluster obituary, “a master of science fiction whose imaginative and lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America.” But while Bradbury worked in a variety of genres—horror, fantasy, and crime stories among them, as well as science fiction—what bound all of his writing together, as his friend Russell Kirk well understood, was the moral imagination. The best elements of his most famous work, The Martian Chronicles, had nothing to do with the future and technology, and everything to do with memory—imagination operating historically. (Bradbury insisted that The Martian Chronicles was not science fiction but fantasy, something that ”couldn’t happen,” while Fahrenheit 451 was science fiction because it could—and, indeed, he believed it had happened, before 1960.)

Bradbury’s moral imagination was born, as was Kirk’s, in a particular time and a particular place. For almost 70 years, his imagination ran free in the hot Midwestern summer of 1934. Like meter in poetry, the constraints of his past allowed Bradbury to transcend the increasingly chaotic and immoral present.

The Waukegan, Illinois, of 1934 is gone, never to return; yet all is not lost. There are many forces competing for the imagination of a new generation, and most of them look like Mr. Dark. But there was a reason Ray Bradbury had Charles Halloway work in a library, and if you don’t know what I am talking about, you need to get a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes and read it to your children, before it is too late.

First published on ChroniclesMagazine.org on June 9, 2012.

A Good and Faithful Servant

Pete MacKay. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

“MacKay.”  I struggled for some time with how to render those six letters, in a vain attempt to convey some sense of what it was like to hear Pete pick up the other end of the phone line.  I could never do justice to the experience.  Somehow, Pete managed to stretch the two short syllables of his last name out over several seconds and to turn them into a summary of his whole being: from the low and humble muh to the crescendoing kAY, following by the falling Ay, which the person making the phone call might have mistaken for a syllable in itself, had he not known better.

His was a voice so deep and rich and, outside of the Winnebago County Board meeting room and other political venues, so soft-spoken that it was sometimes hard for me to make out what Pete was saying over the phone.  But I never had any trouble understanding his name.  If a man’s word is his bond, Pete’s family name was his honor.

Peter M. MacKay passed into eternal life on December 13, 2011, at the age of 78.  He was among the last of a certain generation of public servants—no politician, Pete—who were born early enough to remember the hardships of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II, but late enough to come of age during the middle of the “American Century.”  Those experiences helped make him the man that he was: Frugal and patriotic were among the words that always sprang to mind when Pete’s name was mentioned.

There were other words as well: principled and loyal chief among them.  At Pete’s funeral on December 17 at Saint Edward’s Catholic Church in southeast Rockford, Frank Manzullo, one of Pete’s two oldest friends and brother of longtime U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, read a letter that he had written to Pete during the final hours of Pete’s life.  (He wrote the last sentences after learning that Pete had passed away.)  In it, Frank recalled Pete’s first heart attack, on a day when Frank and Don were supposed to have dinner with then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.  Instead, Frank was there at the hospital when Pete arrived by ambulance, because, he said, “You taught me the value of loyalty.”

Pete was the kind of man who inspired loyalty, because he was so loyal himself.  First elected to the Winnebago County Board in 1978, he served his district until 2009, with only one interruption.  The voters of his district—even those who didn’t entirely agree with him—trusted Pete because they knew where he stood.  Too often politicians convince themselves that they need guile in order to advance their principles, and eventually end up full of guile and devoid of principle; but there was no guile in Pete MacKay.  He knew what he believed; he told the voters what he believed; and he voted his conscience, every single time.

Pete still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.

With his handlebar mustache and his increasingly white beard, Pete looked like a man out of time—and, in a sense, he was.  He still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.  For Pete, the Constitution didn’t require interpretation; it was perfectly clear, and anyone who couldn’t see that didn’t want to see it.  Not without reason was Pete occasionally called Winnebago County’s Ron Paul, and, indeed, Ron Paul was the public servant he admired the most (followed closely by Ronald Reagan).

But if he was a man out of time, Pete was never a man out of place.  He was born in Rockford and lived here all of his life, with the exception of a stint in the Army (where he rose to the rank of drill sergeant) and a few years as a police officer in Chicago.  Other local elected officials (especially Pete’s bête noire Kris Cohn) saw their offices as stepping stones to something greater.  But Pete was happy right where he was.  For him, politics wasn’t about promoting Pete MacKay; it was about advancing policies in the best interests of his constituents.

Pete wasn’t just the first winner of The Rockford Institute’s Good and Faithful Servant Award; he was the man for whom we created it.  The event caused a bit of a stir, because between the time that we had notified Pete of our desire to honor him with the award and the public announcement of the same, Pete had decided to jump into the Republican primary for Winnebago County Board chairman, in an attempt to unseat the incumbent Republican holder of the office, Kris Cohn.  A number of local dignitaries declined to attend the award ceremony, or even to send a note of congratulations to be read, ostensibly because they thought The Rockford Institute was trying to influence the race.  The chain of events was proof enough that we weren’t, though after Pete’s announcement, Aaron Wolf and I (in a personal capacity) worked hard on his campaign.  Though Pete lost (and by a fairly large margin), I never had so much fun working on an election.  Pete was a signmaker by trade (he took over his father’s business), and the one minor transgression of the law that he was willing to tolerate concerned the placement of campaign signs.  The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.  The sign stayed up almost until the day of the primary, because Cohn and the other professional politicians approached the restaurant from the north—the side closest to the county administration building—while the sign was on a fence to the south side of the restaurant, a direction from which only normal people would approach.

The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.

During his campaign for county-board chairman, Pete trusted me to write the text of his radio commercials, and a small band of happy warriors who have appeared in this column over the years, including Aaron Wolf, Mark Dahlgren, Mary Hitchcock, Ward Sterett, and Art Johnson, recorded them.  Pete insisted, though, on ending each with his own tagline: “I’m Pete MacKay, and when I’m elected county board chairman, I’ll drive my own car.”

Writers’ memories aren’t always the most reliable, because over time we tend to remake events as they should have been rather than exactly as they were, a tendency exaggerated when writing about Pete because his personality lent itself so easily to mythmaking.  Still, if Pete didn’t flub one of the takes of that tagline by saying, “ . . . I’ll drive my own damn car,” he should have.  The fact that the county provided Chairman Cohn with a tricked-out SUV was, for Pete, the perfect symbol of the corruption that had led to the creation of a separate elected county-board chairmanship to begin with.  (Most other county boards in Illinois elect their chairman from among the members of the board.)

Many years before, when the position was first created, Pete gave the voters of Winnebago County one last chance to undo the damage, by running for county-board chairman on a platform of abolishing the office as soon as he was sworn in.  Alas, after Pete lost that race, everything he predicted came true: County government (and, consequently, county taxes) increased dramatically under the elected county-board chairman, and the residents of Winnebago County lost a number of their freedoms—and too many lost their property, as the county (especially in the Kris Cohn years) aggressively used an especially virulent form of eminent domain known as “Quick Take” to pursue unnecessary public projects.

Pete was a man of few regrets.  The stupidity and mendacity of local politicians angered him, and he was disappointed when the voters rejected his attempts to do what he knew to be right on their behalf, but as much as he liked to recount the stories of past defeats (and occasional victories) Pete saw no sense in complaining about things that could not be undone.  He focused instead on what he could do, which led him, in the last phase of his public life, to combine his service on the county board with two terms as Rockford Township Highway Commissioner, where he lowered the road tax levy for four years straight, while providing the same level of service.

That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

Pete’s example of efficient local government was not appreciated by other local politicians, especially his fellow Republicans, who, in January 2009, while Pete’s beloved wife Rosie lay dying of cancer, held a caucus rather than a primary in order to try to deprive him of the Republican nomination for highway commissioner.  Even though Pete wasn’t at the caucus, his old friend Frank Manzullo placed his name in nomination, and Pete emerged victorious, on the saddest day of his life: Rosie had passed away while the caucus was taking place.

Foiled briefly, those same Republicans quietly threw their support behind the Democratic candidate in the general election, and Pete suffered his final defeat.  That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

The few things Pete did regret were those over which he had had some control.  He and Rosie had dated in the 1960’s, but they drifted apart only to reconnect in 1978 and get married in 1980.  They had two daughters, Margo and Meredith, in rapid succession (13 months apart), but age prevented them from expanding their family further.  Every time we spoke, no matter how recently we had previously talked, Pete asked about my children, and told me how blessed Amy and I were to have had such a large brood.  Similarly, when he finally entered Rosie’s Catholic Church in the last years of her life and they had their marriage blessed, his only regret was that he had waited so long.  He embraced the Faith with a joy reminiscent of St. John Chrysostom’s Easter Homily: “For the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first.  He giveth rest unto him who cometh at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who hath wrought from the first hour.”

Well done, Pete, thou good and faithful servant.  May God grant you eternal rest. 

First published in the February 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Remembering Joe

For many Catholics of a certain age, Joseph Sobran will forever be remembered as one of the greatest literary defenders of the Catholic Church’s teaching on life over the past 40 years. From contraception to abortion, from euthanasia to just-war doctrine, Joe was an eloquent voice in the popular press for the teachings of the Catholic Church, and, in fighting for the truth, he wore himself out a few decades too early, dying at 3 P.M. on Thursday, September 30, 2010, at the age of 64.

For other Catholics, somewhat younger, Joe Sobran will be remembered, if at all, as the chief villain (along with Pat Buchanan) of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s 1991 National Review article “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” The attack of his boss, mentor, friend, and virtual foster father left Joe a broken (and worse for the country at large, virtually ignored) man, and the last 17 years of his life (from the time of his firing from National Review) were not nearly as happy as the previous 21 (from the time of his hiring at National Review). But they were equally productive, in the pages of his newsletter, Sobran’s, the national Catholic weekly The Wanderer, and, of course, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Much of Joe’s best writing on life issues appeared in Human Life Review. Indeed, one might say that, for almost two decades, Joe Sobran was Human Life Review. As J.P. McFadden, the founding editor of HLR, wrote in his Introduction to Single Issues, a 1983 collection of Joe’s best essays from the Review, “we never dreamed how much he would have to say, or that he would become our most faithful contributor: his sharply-honed essays would have appeared in every issue over the past eight years [from the Review’s founding in 1975 until 1982, when McFadden was writing], but for a few missed deadlines.”

Joe’s status as the preeminent literary defender of life in the latter half of the 20th century did not arise simply from what Joe had to say, or the number of words he wrote, but how he said it. For Joe, the most beautiful prose flowed from his fingers with incredible ease. McFadden was not exaggerating when he wrote that Sobran’s name “on anything whatever—article, review, commentary—was the guarantee of fine writing, sharp wit, and a most distinctive style which . . . made one think of nobody else so much as G.K. Chesterton.”

Such beauty flowed not only from his fingers but rode the waves of his splendid baritone voice. There are few people that one does not at least begin to tire of hearing after an hour or two, but those of us who had the pleasure of knowing Joe never wanted him to quit talking. Shakespeare was his academic major and his lifelong obsession; if he did not know every line of Shakespeare by heart (and I am not certain that he did not), then he had at least committed more of them to memory than any man alive today. He had a similar command of the writings of P.G. Wodehouse, whose easy humor shaped Joe’s, as well as of much of the writings of G.K. Chesterton. One could tape a Sobran soliloquy, transcribe it verbatim, and publish it without editing, and it would still be better than the best work of most writers today.

In the pages of Human Life Review and elsewhere, Joe was one of the first, and by far the best, critics of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment” approach to Catholic social teaching. Yet Joe, better than any other Catholic conservative, argued forcefully for a truly consistent ethic of life, regarding the Church quite properly as Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher). He believed the Church’s just-war theory to be as important as Her teaching on abortion, but rather than using that belief to minimize the horror of abortion, he opposed the Reagan-era military actions, the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the same passion and eloquence that he devoted to arguing on behalf of the unborn. In this, he followed the example of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, men he gladly accepted as his shepherds.

In his final years, Joe provided an example of Christian fortitude that should be an inspiration to us all. His health failing from complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally kidney failure, Joe publicly admitted that he occasionally had doubts and fears. Yet he always turned his eyes toward Christ, and found in his Savior the comforts of faith and of hope.

As I type these words, there are so many passages in Joe Sobran’s work that come to mind that would give readers some measure of the man. But the piece that rises to the top is “Jesus’ Simple Message,” the January 2008 installment of his Chronicles column, The Bare Bodkin.

Halfway through, the column switches from a general meditation to a very personal one:

The loveliest argument I know against unbelief was made by a woman whose name I have forgotten, quoted by the theologian John Baillie in Our Knowledge of God; it boils down to this: “If there is no God, whom do we thank?”

The force of this hit me on a mild November evening when I was oppressed by woes; I prayed for a little relief and tried counting my blessings instead of my grievances. I’ve long known that a great secret of happiness is gratitude, but that didn’t prepare me for what happened next.

Joe writes that, “as I munched a cheeseburger,” “I could hardly think of anything in my life that couldn’t be seen as a gift from God”:

As one of the characters in Lear tells his father: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Of whom is that not true?

The more we reflect on the sheer oddity of our very existence and, in addition, of our eligibility for salvation, the deeper our gratitude must be. Amazing grace indeed! To call it astounding is to express the matter feebly. Why me? How on earth could I ever have deserved this, the promise of eternal joy?

And given all this, in comparison with which winning the greatest lottery in the world is just a minor fluke, how can I dare to sin again, or to be anything less than a saint for the rest of my life?

And yet the true measure of Joe’s faith, and the lesson his life offers us all, lies not in those words, but in the lines that end the piece. If only we could all be so frank about how far short we have fallen of the glory of God, there might be hope for us:

Yet I know that my own horrible spiritual habits will keep drawing me downward every hour. Like most men, or maybe more than most, I am my own worst enemy, constantly tempted to repay my Savior with my self-centered ingratitude. When I think of my sins, the debt of thanksgiving itself seems far too heavy to pay. No wonder He commands us to rejoice. It’s by no means the easiest of our duties.

Rest in peace, Joe.

(A version of this article first appeared on About Catholicism on October 4, 2010.)