Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
The Last Of The Iron Lungs
I remember the Drs looking down on me on the gurney saying I had about 45 minutes before suffocation, they had to work fast. No freeways, ambulance following police car on, eventually, Garvey Blvd. from Claremont/Pomona to LA County General (now styled LAC+USC Medical Center), which was founded by a friend of the family, Dr. de Sabichi, California Spanish as in Spanish, not Mexican, Spanish.
Two kinds of polio in those days’ terminology: bulbar and spinal. Spinal was rarely fatal but left one with the tell-tale leg braces and crutches. Bulbar was usually fatal, shut down breathing, but had less visible but present physical effects if survived. I had bulbar. Some had both, usually fatal. Many nurses and Drs lost.
1949, the last straw, last national epidemic that forced feds to hire Salk to put a stop to it, which happened quickly.
In my neck you can see the indent where was the tracheotomy. Through that and with the pressure of the iron lung I breathed for three months. Then six more months in two rehab hospitals in SoCal. Casa Colina was one, still there, in Chino, I think, but with a changed mission. I forget the name of the other. I have a vivid memory of the Headmistress at Casa Colina trying to make me eat my vegetables before I could have dessert. Still brings a chuckle to my mind. We all ate at one table, she at the head, very traditional for those days.
March of Dimes paid the whole bill. My parents were poor, father a clergyman, mother a housewife. They tried to not make a case for my illness because they knew the cost of care would ruin them. Thus the very late decision to take me to the hospital, barely averting a fatality. My mother, she reported years later when she and my father were trying to have me committed for insanity (actually, for not following him into the parish ministry), wanted to abort me and went to the Dr in Manhattan who did that in 1943 but backed out after she sat in the waiting room for a while.
Do I share ECUSA’s enthusiasm for abortion? Or queers (see below)?
Epidemiologists later traced polio to human fecal material in public pools. Probably true. So in 50s and onward we had lots of chlorine in the pools.
But there was a deeper spiritual cause: light paralysis. As a 6-year-old I saw my parents as enemies (he was queer and she was nymphomaniac), my younger sister as more important to them than I was (which she has lately admitted they did) and the churches as ending their fidelity to reason, tradition and the Bible. That is how I got paralysis, which is what polio is.
One who has not experienced paralysis cannot grasp what paralysis is or how it affects one. It is a sadness beyond description. Paralytics recognize one another by the abyssal sadness they perforce embody and bear. There is no comfort for it. It is simply a fact, a reality, a there-ness, an is-ness.
I was brought to India for repairs, and to be put back out on station, fixed for duty, where I have been ever since.
I think the Church just got bigger, not smaller, more affective, not less so. We think small, God thinks big, we think we got it, God thinks … just thinks.
Life is fun when you don’t have a mark to make. What’s not fun is getting sucked into thinking you have to make a mark because then you only make a fool of yourself. The Franciscans (Anglican) said I was more Franciscan than they were. They were right about that.
No one needs to be healed. Esse qua esse bonum est. Most need repairs of some type or another. Everyone needs to be protected, but only if they are where they should be. If one is somewhere one should not be, no one can protect one nor should anyone do so. That is the meaning of extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The exception is when, if one is in the water instead of the boat, someone in the boat finds a way to fish you out of the water. That is called redemption. It is undeserved and not required of anyone to do. It just happens sometimes.
As I look around the world I see frantic hair-on-fire know-it-alls racing hither and thither, as in a madhouse, and to me it looks like the reason is they are, so vastly many of them, out of their duty-area. Thus they demand safe spaces, an impossibility for anyone not absolutely at home in the duty sense, but a quite reasonable demand considering they are not where they should be. But no one can give a person who is not where they belong a safe space. For such a one every place imaginable is toxic to them. They are not the problem. Their location in life is the problem. It truly is not personal. It is strictly business.
The world has inherent structure. Try to live outside it and no place is safe. Even then, though, you don’t need healing, you need re-placement, restored to your divinely-inspired conditions in life. Where you locate, who you are with, etc., the nitty-gritty. God is so intensely practical! Where one is supposed to be in order to carry out the duty God gave one as the purpose of the birth one was vouchsafed. There is telos here and getting outside it is lethal.
Starting early in the 20th Century, churchmen got progressively outside their telos. They started asking government to take over many of their duties. That’s when the membership lost interest. Billy Graham’s appearing with Richard Nixon, that uniting of civil and religious authority, was the last straw. Federal funding of faith-based communities — an odious euphemism for direct violation of the first clause of the First Amendment — lit the pile. The union of religious and civil authority is the most destructive power known to man. Its name is slavery. And how many billions of federal taxpayer monies are churchmen of all the big and some small denominations rolling in? Talk about out of telos!
The church is not declining. She’s just not following churchmen onto the beds of venality.
And I need to stop writing sermons on the fly. Seems like I do little else these days, however.
I have no memories of this place beyond the pool and a very pretty, patient therapist, which I think saved me physically. But when I was released home from it after three months there, and six months into the entire institutionalization, I was not able to maintain. So March of Dimes sent me back to rehab, this time Casa Colina, for another three months. So nine altogether institutionalized. A great expense for some little one with no apparent deservedness.
The Chino building, its foundations crumbling, was beyond repair and further expansion. Stephen Zetterberg, a Pomona Valley attorney, chairman of the Casa Colina Board, and Dr. Ralph Perry, medical director, led the planning for a new building in Pomona, on land that once belonged to the Smith family. The new hospital building was designed as a facility for children with five-bed wards.
Zetterberg’s son had a mild case of polio and was my high school classmate. And while he, the son, was at Columbia Law, I was across the street at Union. One of Zetterberg the elder’s nephews had spinal polio and occupied the iron lung next to mine at LA General Hospital, as it was styled then. He stayed in it longer than I did and was terribly brainy. That nephew’s mother tutored me after I returned home from Casa Colina, enabling me to avoid being set back a grade.
I am guessing that the head matron who denied me dessert unless I ate my vegetables was Frances Eleanor Smith, founder of Casa Colina as a rehab facility for polio patients. In any case, a formidable lady that head matron was, whoever she was. I remember glaring at her, standing up and walking my way back to my room. One did not leave table in those days without permission. Then a nurse chasing me with uniform in a torrent, pushing an empty wheelchair and yelling that I cannot walk, that I am too weak to do that which I was doing. Long interior hall, as in a cloister, Spanish Colonial architecture, which I so love as to this day.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: This British Vicar has figured it out: Christian Life In Exile
Update 2: Abortion at the Core of Both Left and Right
Update 3: In 1965 Life Magazine Showed That Life Begins At Conception
Update 4: How Far Should Churches Go to Appeal to Men?
Most successful way to appeal to both men and women: Male only church leadership.
Men love to belong to male dominated organizations. On the other hand, women love to belong to male dominated organizations. Don’t believe me? Have you ever thought it was odd that women always want to belong to men’s business organizations, men’s career fields, men’s social clubs, men’s athletic clubs, etc., but men avoid women’s organizations.
I once attended a large and rapidly growing conservative Lutheran congregation which had a male-only leadership. I was astounded by two things. First, board and congregational meetings were more calm, to the point and productive than any church meetings I have ever been to. In three years, I never heard someone said, “Well, I feel . . .” Second, it had the strongest bunch of women I have ever known in any church I’ve ever attended. Having men in visible, public leadership roles and the women in deeply influential, behind the scenes roles worked very well for that congregation.
I suspect the church’s acquiescence to feminism in the sixties and seventies badly damaged it. As men fled the church, the church did not become larger. It did not even get more women members because as the men left, the women follow them out the door. The more women want to be in charge, the more men leave. The more men leave, the more the women leave because an organization is only valuable to them if there are lots of men in it. It’s deeply ironic, isn’t it?
Update 5: The Babylon Bee: Episcopalians Confused By Strange Book Trump Brought To Church
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
Second hospital, Rancho Los Amigos, in Downey, I believe. Still there about 13 years ago, for sure. Still in the rehab business.
Yes, your sister may have also told you how she loathed her father because he seemed to prefer her over you. She did not want his attention. He was vicious to her, physically violent, frequently hitting her head so hard it hurt neck and back in addition to head. Throwing entire glasses of orange juice or milk at her, soaking her clothing through to skin. She would become furious when he treated her brother badly, and there was NOTHING she could do to stop it. Any of it. Much like now.