JFK Nearly Takes the Count

Three months before his third birthday Jack Kennedy came down with scarlet fever. There wasn't much the medical profession could do for him; it was 1920 and there were no antibiotics to help him fight it. His mother had just given birth to his second little sister, Kathleen, and had Joe, Jr. and Rosemary to look after, as well. Scarlet fever is highly contagious and in those days it was often fatal. His parents were frantic to get Jack away from the other children and to get him such medical treatment as was available. The only nearby hospital that would take scarlet fever patients was already overcrowded and anyway, the Kennedys didn't live where they would be eligible to send Jack there. His maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz, came to the rescue and used his influence to get the boy admitted.

The hospital staff placed Jack in isolation and when the doctors and nurses cared for him, they wore masks. His mother couldn't visit him for fear of carrying the disease back to the other children and the baby. His nanny couldn't visit him for the same reason. His father left work a little early every day and stopped to see him and sit beside his bed for a while. Jack was very sick. He was so sick that he nearly died. After a month he began to get just a little better. He gradually got stronger and healthier and after another month his parents decided he was well enough to leave the hospital. So they hired a trained nurse, another stranger, and sent Jack with her to Maine, where the fresh, brisk, pure air would bring the roses back to his little cheeks. After two weeks in Maine he was deemed well enough to go home.

I've not seen much made of this event in the biographies of John Fitzgerald Kennedy but surely it merits close attention. Such a small boy to be sent to spend two months in a strange place where the strange people -- who didn't even have faces, just eyes that peered at him over white cloths -- did strange things to him. Besides his extremely young age, there was the fever that kept him from seeing anything clearly or being able to assess his situation realistically. The only familiar thing in this weird new world was his father who came to sit with him every evening. Many barbs have been flung at Joe Kennedy, some of which were deserved, but he was the only constant in Jack's life and he was there when literally no one else was. Biographers sometimes profess themselves at a loss to explain Jack's loyalty to his father. I see nothing puzzling about it.

Abigail Adams, Femme Formidable

Abigail Adams went to France when John was there as a minister of the new United States of America. She was a middle-aged, provincial housewife and mother of three sons and a daughter. During John's many and prolonged absences, she managed the farm, raised the children, and worried about her husband and her marriage. Although she knew herself to be a very intelligent and capable woman, she also knew she was provincial. She was afraid that John would fall prey to a cosmopolitan beauty and/or find her too mundane to be interesting.

At the time of the revolution, farming in Massachusetts was very hard work. John reveled in it and gave it up as his primary livelihood only at his father's insistence. He went reluctantly to Harvard and, to his surprise, found that he liked intellectual work almost as much as farming. Abigail enjoyed intellectual pursuits, too, but she was kept at home by the customs of the time and the demands of child rearing.

Thus, John and their son, John Quincy, were in France attending the theatre, the opera, concerts, and all the socializing of the diplomatic corps. They traveled to England and to Holland. Johnny even went to Russia with the first U.S. Ambassador to the Court of Catherine the Great. John was making history, doing important work for the new nation, arranging loans for fabulous sums, crafting treaties of enormous portent. John and Johnny lived in a mansion with servants to wait on them. They wore fine clothes, ate dainty meals, and drank fine wines. They had become cosmopolitan.

Abigail and their daughter, Nabby, lived in a farmhouse and did all the housework themselves. In addition, Abigail directed the hired man in plowing and planting and harvesting. She raised her two younger sons and supervised their schooling. She cooked and preserved food for the winter. She bartered the surplus and often bargained with dressmaker's pins to obtain necessities because actual money was in short supply. She farmed with oxen and had to make sure there was sufficient fodder to see them through the winter. She had to make sure that the oxen and other farm animals were well kept and healthy. Abigail had to know every detail of the farm work, no matter how dirty or disagreeable, and she had to be prepared to do most of the chores herself, if necessary. As for entertainment and socializing, she visited back and forth with her sisters and went to church.

Now imagine this woman dropped suddenly into the maelstrom of French society. Lafayette and his wife made the Adams family welcome and introduced them to many of the nobility. He even obtained for them an invitation to the christening of the Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Into the Catholic Cathedral of Notre Dame, with its rich furnishings and royal splendor of voluptuous fabrics and exquisite fashions, comes Puritan Abigail Adams, fresh from a little colonial backwater.

She was equal to the challenge. She adjusted quickly to her new environment and soon had the hang of court manners and customs, at least enough to be comfortable among the diplomats and their families. Truly, our Founding Mothers are to be admired and revered along with their more famous spouses. They are gutsy ladies.

Civilization, or Not

Civilization, or Not. Most citizens of the United States consider that with us/US, civilization has reached its highest peak. Many consider that it has progressed as far as possible and that any further developments must necessarily be regressive. Civilization, to modern Americans, means consumer goods more than anything else. I am not speaking of academia, but of the citizenry in general. We are accustomed to denigrate every culture that does not have or does not value designer clothing, automobiles, atomic weapons, television, video games, personal computers, and those cheaply built, expensive to buy homes known as "McMansions."

When Americans think of other cultures, either contemporary or historical or prehistorical, their principal concern is for the lack of material goods. Underlying that is a smug arrogance in the knowledge that "we" have come so far and "they" have not. We call them third world or second rate powers or cave men, secure in the knowledge that we are so much better off than they are or were. Yet the passionate resistance of Autralian Aborigines, American Indians, and Iraqi Arabs to accepting our way of life for themselves ought to give us pause. Is our way better than theirs?

Take cave men, for instance. Research now shows us that the people who lived as hunter gatherers lived longer, healthier lives than those who first settled down to farm. The farmers lived longer, healthier lives than those who first lived in cities. There is a reason that our early presidents and their colleagues preferred to live on their farms most of the year and only live in New York or Washington, D.C. for brief periods. Their farms were more pleasant, more healthful places to live. Those trapped in the cities have defended themselves by portraying farmers and other rural residents as bumpkins, ignorant country people with buck teeth and limited intelligence. This is merely a self-protective ploy designed to hide the fact of their own less desirable accommodations.

There is another consideration in the contemplation of our denigration of the savages of the neolithic period. We are so puffed up with our own cleverness that "we" claim the credit for inventing nearly everything. Stainless steel cooking utensils, computers, literature, accounting practices, architecture, crop irrigation, animal husbandry, the Mona Lisa. Yet, consider how little any one of us knows about any of these things, all of which are rooted in prehistory, invented by those despised cave men and women. Each of these builds on what went before and all can be traced many millenia back, some as far back as paleolithic times. All have obvious roots in prehistory, except the computer. But Stonehenge is a computer. It is constructed so that certain stones align with specific astronomical events -- the solstices, among others -- so that these events become predictable by using the smaller "bluestones" to keep count. Anyone who has seen the paintings at Lascaux can readily see that it is the precursor of all great art since.

How many of us, vaunted children of civilization, can even comprehend how our technology functions, much less reproduce it? We have to have specially trained technicians and engineers in order to keep our infrastructure going. Most of us cannot even deal with our own plumbing fixtures, much less build a bridge, a skyscraper, or a tipi. We feel extremely superior to those cave men and women but in reality we are no more knowledgeable than they as to how our civilization works. Most of us don't even know where to find food, aside from grocery stores and restaurants. Cave men would find us pathetically ignorant, incapable of sustaining life without major contributions from people we disdain.

What we call civilization and are so proud of is merely consumerism constructed on the backs of the few who know how to make things work and the even fewer who know how to exploit us all.

The Nature of Worship

The word "worship" puzzled me for years. My birth family was not particularly religious and I only remember going to church once with my mother. But I used to go to church with my friends. One Sunday I would be with the Mormons, another with the Presbyterians, then with the Baptists. I never went to the Catholic Church, I guess I didn't have any Catholic friends. I had the desire to worship but I had no idea how to do it. As I got older, I thought about it and remained puzzled. I couldn't see that prayer -- asking for peace, hearts open to love, an end to a famine half a world away -- constituted worship. The hymns were possibly worshipful, some of them at any rate, but I couldn't see why God would need people to tell him "How Great Thou Art." The sermons I heard were certainly not worshipful. Mostly they were all about people and how we could make ourselves acceptable to God. They mostly seemed irrelevant to me. Churches were called houses of worship but I couldn't see the connection. Gradually, I lost interest in church services.

Well into adulthood I discovered Edgar Cayce's work. This was spiritual, this was about God. I was excited. I joined the A.R.E. and read and studied diligently. Finally, one day I ran across a reading that said worship consists of being kind to one another. The Golden Rule. I was astounded! That's worship? I thought about it. Yes, that's worship. People are God's creatures. He gave us free will so that we might be companions to him. Without free will, we wouldn't be much better than robots. With free will, with the power to make our own choices, we would be worthy of His companionship. He gives us guidance, if we choose to accept it, but He doesn't force us.

God is a god of love, therefore, He takes no pleasure in the pain we inflict on one another. He does not enjoy suffering and death. Thus the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It sounds so simple but it is very complex. It is much more than refraining from doing harm, it implies the doing of good. If you were starving, you would want someone to feed you. If you were homeless, you would want someone to take you in. If you were in a six-car pileup on the freeway, you would want someone to pull you to safety and tend your injuries. If you were confused and distraught, you would want someone to soothe you and help you understand.

Worship isn't always hard. In fact, it's usually very easy. Worship is taking your dog for a walk; changing your infant's diaper; showing your child the stars and pointing out the constellations; giving your seat on the subway to an elderly person; holding the door for another to enter; putting a dollar in a beggar's hand; cooking a meal for your family. Sometimes worship is refraining from doing something: not passing along a juicy bit of gossip; not losing your temper when your child disobeys you for the sixteenth time today; not laughing at someone else's embarrassment; not running over that silly squirrel who stopped in the middle of the street right in front of your car.

Anything and everything that we do for other people and animals (we are all God's creatures) is the worship of God. Church has much to offer, even many opportunities for worshipping God, but most of those opportunities arise outside of church, simply because such a small portion of our time is spent in church. Opportunities for worship are all around us, at home, at work, on the commute, among family, among friends, among strangers. Thank you, Lord.