Tag: faith

Too Tired to Live, Too Busy to Die

August 5th, 2025

I have a t-shirt with a picture and quotation on it from Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I have always been a fan of Thompson, especially since I did a short stint in the Las Vegas jail back in 2017. I won’t describe that episode in this essay. I have written extensively about it elsewhere in my blog. You can find those articles if really look for them. Instead, look at the quote on the t-shirt. (See above).

I was wearing this t-shirt a couple days ago. I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife, Karin. We were both exhausted from a busy day. She stared at the t-shirt for a while, and then she said,

” ‘Too tired to live, too busy to die’. That’s us.”

Indeed it is.

We care fulltime for our grandson, Asher. He’s four-and-a-half years old. He is smart, active, and bursting with energy. Karin and I are not. Karin is seventy years old. I am sixty-seven. There are many days when we feel our age quite clearly, especially if we have been chasing Asher around nonstop. We can keep up with the boy, but just barely. As is fitting for his age, Asher is headstrong, and he tends to oppose our wishes. We grow weary of fighting with him. We were able to deal with willful kids thirty years ago, but now it can be an overwhelming challenge.

I pray each day. I don’t long recite prayers from a book. My petitions are straight and to the point. God literally placed the Asher in our home. As far as I am concerned, God gave us the job of raising him. Karin and I made an open-ended commitment to do just that when Asher was just a little baby. It is our spiritual calling. We have been conscientious about fulfilling our duty as his guardians, but it gets tough at times. I figure if God wants us to do the work, He/She better give us the strength to do so. When I pray for strength, it is often more of a demand than a request. I need the resources to keep going.

I also need the gift of discernment. I am a mere mortal. I can only do so much. I need to know my limits. God is only going to give me the strength that I need, and maybe not even that. If what I think I need exceeds that allotment, then I have a problem. I have to understand what I need to do, as opposed to what I want to do. I have to know how hard I can push myself.

I have a friend, Ken, who I know from the synagogue. He’s an Orthodox Jew. I go to his house almost every week for beer and conversation. We discuss our respective struggles. Ken likes to say that each person has a “peckla” (that’s a Yiddish word that could mean a backpack or a burden. Imagine a “peckla” as a load that a person carries on their back). Each person has a particular peckla that is specific to them. God knows every person’s strength and each individual carries a load that only they can manage. The burden I carry might crush another man, and the load he bears might be beyond my strength. I sometimes think of this load as a cross that I carry. Ken probably would not use that analogy.

The peckla that I carry is like my wife’s. We bear the burden of caring for Asher and bringing him to adulthood. We carry this weight voluntarily. We could set it down and say, “That’s enough. No More.” But we don’t. We won’t get rid of the peckla until we are unable to walk any further with it. We carry it because we love Asher, and he needs us. Love gives us the power to continue the journey with the peckla on our backs.

Love is sacrifice, and it is also strength.

Pray Boldly!

July 27th, 2025

The three of us went to Mass this morning, like we do almost every Sunday. Karin, Asher, and I sat in a pew near the altar at the front of the church. We always sit there. Asher needs to see what is going on during the liturgy. We brought along some things to keep Asher busy during the Mass: snacks for him to eat and crayons for him to draw. Karin and I want to get something out of the service, so we do what we can to make sure our four-year-old grandson does not become bored and restless. He does anyway, but we have to try.

The priest who celebrated the Mass was relatively young. He was enthusiastic and clearly loved the old school ritual. This priest is new to our parish. He’s only been with our congregation for five weeks, which is not enough time to get to know hardly anyone. He definitely knew nothing about our family when the service started. Things were different by the end of Mass.

My wife and I are raising our grandson. We are his legal guardians, and we have an open-ended commitment to care for him in a fulltime capacity. We expect to be involved in his growth and development as long as we live. Asher is a wonderful little boy, but he is a little boy with a plethora of needs. Caring for him is an all-consuming endeavor. We haven’t had a day off since he got out of the NICU at the end of 2020. Things may change, but for right now, Karin and I are his sole support. The responsibility is at times intense, at least for me.

In addition to that, we also have other crises that flare up. I find it all difficult to handle. It’s overwhelming. They say that God never gives you more than you bear, and I have found that to be utter nonsense. I have known people to be crushed like Job by their burdens. I often wonder if God cares. The evidence of his love and mercy seems kind of iffy.

The priest gave a homily (sermon) at Mass about the power of prayer. One of the scripture readings was from the Book of Genesis. It was the part where Abraham haggles with God for the lives any innocent people in Sodom and Gomorrah. I’ve always liked that passage. Abraham had chutzpah. Somehow, the priest tied that Bible reading to the topic of prayer. He used the story of Abraham as an example of a person praying with confidence. In fact, he exhorted us,

“Pray boldly!”

One thing he mentioned was that congregants sometimes approached him saying that they were angry with God. He would always ask them ,

“So, have you told God about this?”

The point was that God already knows if you are angry with him, and He apparently can deal with that. God doesn’t necessarily want somebody to flatter him. He wants a person to be completely open and honest in prayer. He wants a relationship more than anything else. Relationships can be rocky.

The priest spoke about other aspects of prayer, but his words concerning honesty and authenticity resonated with me. I don’t recite long, involved prayers. I cut to the chase. For a long time, I have been angry with God. Mostly, I have upset that innocents suffer, that kids like Asher suffer. I don’t mind him hurting me that much. I’m an asshole, so I probably deserve it. But why allow kids in Gaza to starve? Why let children in Ukraine get killed? That sort of thing pisses me off.

After Mass, I approached the priest to talk about prayer. He was busy gladhanding congregants. I don’t think he wasn’t expecting somebody to actually talk to him about his sermon. He gave a great sermon, and I really did listen to it. I suspect priests sometimes assume that everybody in church suffers from amnesia as they head for the parking lot.

I had Asher with me. I tried to quickly explain our situation and what a struggle it is. He listened. I said to him,

“Regarding prayer, my prayer to God is simple: ‘Stop fucking with me and give me the strength to do this.”

I am sure he thought I was unhinged. I probably am. So be it. I spoke from the heart.

He looked at me and said, “Keep praying! Reach out to me if you want to talk.”

Pray boldly.

Do the Right Thing, if There is One

June 24th, 2025

“And I divvied up my anger into 30 separate parts
Keep the bad shit in my liver, and the rest around my heart
I’m still angry at my parents, for what their parents did to them
But it’s a start” – from Growing Sideways by Noah Kahan

Sometimes people like to talk about making a fresh start. I don’t think that such a thing is possible. We are always in the middle of a story, one that has been going on for decades or millennia or even longer. When somebody comes into the physical world as an infant, he is she is not a tabula rasa. That person already carries the history of all life in their DNA. Every human arrives as a unique version of a history book. We are never at the beginning, and we are never at the end.

As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

I have spent the last couple weeks fighting with ghosts and inadvertently wounding the living. The evil that I have done or that others did a quarter century ago has come back to the forefront, and there has been hell to pay. I am not done paying, not by a long shot.

There are three people whom I love dearly. They hate each other. I cannot help one of them without hurting the others. I found that out quite clearly a few days ago. I had to make a decision to do something that was essential for the health and wellbeing of one of the three. I knew when I made the decision that it would devastate one of the others. I also knew that more individuals, outside of those three I mentioned, would be affected negatively. It was, and still is, an impossible situation. It makes me angry.

I think about the story in Genesis when Abraham haggles with God to get Him to show mercy to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. As God is planning to nuke those two cities, Abraham asks Hashem,

“Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?”

I have a similar question. If God wants me to do the right thing, then why put me in a position where there is no right thing?

I am at a point where I do not ask, “How can I make things better?” I ask, “How can I keep from making things even worse?”

I am blind to many things. I understand the consequences of my actions far too late. I have made people angry with me. They’re right to be angry. Maybe I am right to be angry too. At some point I will apologize and try to make amends, but not now. I’m not sorry yet, or not sorry enough.

Everybody is wounded. We all bear the scars of the past, and as long as we live, the sins of the past live within us. The good that was done to us or for us lives there too. It helps if I can see the suffering of others. I may still harm them, but perhaps not as much.

Sometimes, I am tempted to despair. But that is a luxury I cannot afford. Too many people depend on me. My wife needs me. Our grandson, Asher, needs me. I have to keep going.

For them.