Is Lying Ever Justified? →

“The problem is not that we are sinners: the problem is not repenting of sin, not being ashamed of what we have done.” In his homily at his daily Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae on May 17, 2013, Pope Francis was discussing, and commending, the example of Saint Peter, who, having denied Christ, was now (in John 21:15-19) reaffirming his love for his Lord and Savior. It is a moving yet painful scene; as Christ asks Peter three times if he loves Him, Peter’s shame over his earlier threefold denial of the Truth envelops him. Yet it is that shame, Pope Francis says, that ultimately allows Peter to repent, to return to the Lord in love, to embrace once again the Truth that he had so fervently denied.

First published on CrisisMagazine.com on June 6, 2013.

#RealityIsReality →

On May 2, 2013, Rhode Island, the most Catholic of these United States, joined the rest of New England in declaring that the sky is green and the grass is blue—or, rather, that a man can marry a man, and a woman can marry a woman, which amounts to the same thing.

First published on CrisisMagazine.com on May 6, 2013.

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.

The United States of Generica

The scents of lilacs, fudge, and horse manure mingle to form the distinctive aroma of Mackinac Island in early June.  The tourist season is not yet in full swing; it starts in earnest with the Lilac Festival, the first day of which will be our final day on the island.  A mild winter and an early spring encouraged the lilacs to bloom early; two days before the festival opens, they are already slightly past their peak.  The scent of the fudge will peak about the time the scent of the horses does, in the hottest days of July and August.

When the Grand Hotel first opened its doors on July 10, 1887, July and August were the entire season.  During the summer, life in the cities, as Bob Tagatz, the resident historian, points out, was unbearable.  It wasn’t simply the lack of air conditioning, or a dearth of lilacs and fudge shops to mask the scent of the horses, but the smoke and the heat from the foundries and factories, and, in such railroad hubs as Chicago, the stench of blood and guts from the slaughterhouses.  The railroads had helped to make city life in the summer unpleasant, but they offered relief to those who could afford it.  The Grand Hotel, constructed and owned by the railroads, quickly became the premier destination for the children of the Gilded Age.  The sons and daughters of robber barons and rising Midwestern industrialists spent not two nights, but a full two months on Mackinac Island, the crown jewel of the Great Lakes.

The history of the Grand Hotel is fascinating, from its construction in 93 days through its years as a speakeasy during Prohibition, to 1951, the first year it ever turned a profit, down to today, as it enters its third generation as a family-owned business.  A few days each week, Bob Tagatz regales guests with tales of the past 125 years on one end of the famous porch of the Grand Hotel, the world’s longest at 660 feet.

My wife and I are on Mackinac Island to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.  We have been to the island a number of times—we spent two nights at the Chippewa Hotel, down on the harbor, on our honeymoon—but this is only our second stay at the Grand Hotel.  As we had two years ago in September, when we were able to bring our entire family (“infants” 11 and under stay and eat free), we spent much of our three days on the island on the porch, enjoying the breeze and the conversation with each other and with our fellow guests.  When the weather is perfect (as it was every day we were there) the view across the Straits of Mackinac is breathtaking; when the storms roll in and the seas rise, it is even more so, at least for a boy who grew up on the shore of Lake Michigan and who still thrills at the sight of giant ore boats making their way through the darkened straits, guided by the beacons of lighthouses that are more than romantic relics of a distant past.

When I was a boy, summer lasted forever; now, it is over in the blink of an eye.  This is not simply a function of age; our three days at the Grand Hotel feel more like ten, and an entire summer season, back in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, must have seemed like a year in itself, to young and old alike.

The porch of the Grand Hotel has a civilizing effect on its guests.  The occasional cellphone or iPad makes its appearance, but laptops are few and far between, and newspapers and books are more than decoration for the tables placed between the rockers.  People who have built houses without porches will sit contentedly for hours, holding the kinds of conversations with strangers that their grandparents once held with their neighbors.

Bob Tagatz’s most amusing tales concern the activities that various social directors at the hotel dreamed up to keep their guests occupied, and the Grand still provides a full slate of activities.  But many are looking for what Amy and I have come here to find—not exactly peace and quiet, because a hotel this size is always brimming with life (and there is always live music playing somewhere in the Grand), but an atmosphere that acknowledges, contrary to what even Christian authors tell us today, that life isn’t all about the journey: The destination matters, too.

Much of Europe shuts down for the entire month of August; this, some Americans remark with scorn, is what separates us from our European cousins.  They are correct, but not in the way they think.  With all of our “labor-saving” technology, we work more hours than ever before, and we fill up what little leisure is left with premeasured entertainment that keeps us constantly aware of the passage of time.  When I was a boy, summer lasted forever; now, it is over in the blink of an eye.  This is not simply a function of age; our three days at the Grand Hotel feel more like ten, and an entire summer season, back in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, must have seemed like a year in itself, to young and old alike.

But back in what Bob Tagatz calls “the United States of Generica,” time rushes on.  And to what end?  To work all year, and to pile up debt, to fill our lives with Chinese-made contraptions that soon will clutter landfills, and our bodies with fast food that will preserve us in our early graves.  All of this seems self-evidently right to most Genericans today; yet to work all year to spend a month on Mackinac Island would be dismissed as the height of frivolity.

Such thoughts, however, belong to a different day.  For now, on the porch, time slows to a crawl.  

First published in the August 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.