Flashback 2007: Venturing among the ascended masters

     Maybe because I'm a non-believer, all religions seem pretty much the same to me. So if you are the pope, or a feathered chief in the Amazonian jungle leading a group of tortoise-worshippers, well, it's more a matter of popularity and personal style than validity. In fact, I have a soft spot for marginal cults and oddball beliefs, ever since I worked in Wheaton, and headed over to the Theosophical Society to see what the acolytes of Madame Blavatsky had going.
     The other day I passed the I AM Temple on Washington Street. Someone had broken their front window, and I was glad to see it repaired, and took a photo of the weird paintings they have in it. On one hand, this is not the join-the-cult-and-uncover-the-secrets-the-place-must-hold treatment they deserve. But at least I tried.

     There has never been, as far as I can tell, an article in a Chicago publication attempting to explain the organization that has, since 1948, owned the elegant white 12-story building at 176 W. Washington. And now that I've been looking into it a bit, I can understand why, because it defies easy summarization.
     For years, I was intrigued by the building and the displays in the windows — most recently a framed copy of the U.S. Constitution, illuminated like a medieval manuscript; a portrait of a pale Christ, arms spread; marble busts of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington; an enigmatic tableau mixing patriotism and faith.
     Over the doorway is carved, in gold letters: "I AM Temple."
     I AM is not a church or a religion but, to use their term, an "activity." The I AM Activity was started in Chicago in 1932 by Guy W. Ballard, based on dialogues he had on California's Mt. Shasta with someone he believed to be St. Germain, a figure who is, to quote I AM literature, "one of the Great Beings from the Spiritual Hierarchy who governs this planet . . . the Purifying, Cleansing Power that is helping to raise the Earth into its permanent Golden Age."
     There is a 7-foot-tall photograph of Ballard and his wife, Edna, in the lobby of the temple, both dressed in white outfits. There is a reception desk and a reading room. I've stopped by several times — the place is always staffed by older ladies, clad in lovely white or ivory dresses.
     "We are here to offer instruction to those who are interested," said one woman, asking that her name not be used because she is not a spokesperson and has only been with the I AM Activity for 12 years. "We do not advertise. Rather, we offer instruction in the laws of life as they are conveyed through these materials, through divine beings we refer to as the Ascended Masters."
     I asked about the portraits of Washington and Lincoln.
     "This is also a patriotic activity, which may seem unusual," she said. "It is our understanding that the Constitution is divinely inspired."
     They believe St. Germain is an immortal figure who not only had a hand in our nation's founding, but the French Revolution, the writing of the Magna Carta, and other noteworthy historical events.
     "He was referred to as 'the wonder man of Europe,' " she said. "It may seem highly implausible to many people, and I don't want to create a misimpression. But it is our understanding that he worked for many centuries in Europe."
     There are other I AM centers around the country, though the organization's headquarters, the St. Germain Foundation, is based in Schaumburg.
     They have meetings, she said, but not services in the traditional sense.
     "It is not for everyone, and we respect that."
     The lady seemed quite concerned that I would scoff at or ridicule the I AM Activity, even after I assured her that it was not my practice to mock a belief just because it is unusual, and that I differentiate between religions that go around bullying people and those that simply wait and offer inspiration to anyone who decides to embrace them.
     Which this woman has obviously done.
     "This Activity instructs us with a right relationship with the power of God that is in our hearts," she said. "It manifests our lives."
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 4, 2007

Cicada sex show says something about human life, and it's not good

 

Hard to plant your eggs in a tire. 

     So the cicadas are having an orgy, right? Pop out of the ground, fly around, singing their whirring love song, meet, mate, lay their eggs and promptly expire. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking chitinous nymphal exoskeleton behind, stuck to a tree branch.
     The circle of life. Yet the double dose of cicadas in Illinois right now seem to leave the media focusing on their strangeness, the exotic red-eyed bug pageant, while willfully ignoring the larger implications they offer to us. Charles Darwin, prompted by an ancient plow to consider the plowing done by earthworms, certainly saw it, writing: "Man with all his noble qualities, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
     Does he ever. The cicadas are not exactly an advertisement for the deep spiritual meaning of earthly existence. They're here to procreate and die. We are too, more or less. Pop out of a dark place, mature in a moment, flap around, do the deed and vanish — though humans do have midnight feedings and help with homework to kick-start the next generation, which cicadas manage in a few strands of DNA.
     The cicadas arrive by the trillions since a good percentage are gobbled by squirrels and trampled underfoot. People populate the earth by the billions to make sure there's a partner for just about everybody. Our gravestones and photo albums and memorial halls barely conceal the fact that we're here for only a little bit longer than cicadas. A mumbled sentence or two versus an eye blink.
     This central place that procreation holds in the scheme of existence has to be a real bummer for the childless. They won't like the suggestion that the only purpose of being alive is to pass on your DNA, and the rest is distraction.
     Not that I'm saying this, mind you. Don't get mad at me. I don't care what you do, or don't do. It's nature sending this horde of winged monsters to frolic under our noses, reminding us, subtly, of our primary job. I'm just the messenger. Ditto for those who believe their purpose on earth is so their eternal soul can eventually sit cross-legged in heaven, smiling up at Jesus. I wouldn't dream of arguing with you. Which is not the same as saying you're right.

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C'mon Everlast, do better.

   

     "Mere puffery" is a legal term to describe advertising language that the public understands is an empty boast. "The world's best cup of coffee" comes to mind. Nobody expects that to mean anything other than their coffee tastes pretty good, supposedly. The cafe owner isn't expected to have done a global survey.

     Of course the courts have hashed out the details, in cases such as Pizza Hut Inc. v. Papa John's International, where the former sued the latter claiming their slogan, "Better ingredients. Better pizza," was an untrue slur that undercut Pizza Hut's market position. (Papa John's lost the case, and an appeals court found that while the slogan indeed "epitomizes the exaggerated advertising, blustering, and boasting by a manufacturer upon which no consumer could reasonably rely" the campaign was nevertheless misleading). 

     So I suppose the "Everlast" brand of boxing equipment falls under the rubric of mere puffery. Despite their notable pedigree — the company got its start making equipment for Jack Dempsey — the stuff isn't supposed to last forever. Though I still have the boxing gloves that my father bought so my brother and I could go at each other, and they still seem new, because I don't believe we ever used them for that purpose — though I do recall my father and I trying them out a time or two.
     He had boxed, briefly, while a teen in New York City. There are photographs I could dig up were I so inclined. We had a speed bag and a heavy bag, at home, though nobody ever used them. I certainly didn't.     
     That changed a few years back. My younger son was whaling away at the speed bag at the YMCA, putting up a satisfying machine gun clatter. I expressed interest, and he showed me the proper technique.
     Once I learned that, I enjoyed the exercise. Now whenever I work out, I put in 20 or 25 minutes at speed bag — or at the Y, the heavy bag, which is really a good workout.
     The YMCA speedbag kept breaking, as things that are repeatedly hit tend to do, and eventually they stopped replacing it. I missed the bag, so bought my own at Dick's — it wasn't a lot, under 100 bucks — and put it in the garage. The bag that came with it was cheap, red faux leather, and got pounded flat fairly quickly. So I hung that up, as a kind of trophy, replacing it with a black leather Everlast PowerLock speed bag. 

     Except, well look. I don't think that's due to wear — it's too high up the bag, and seems to have happened all at once. It's like the skin just gave way. Might be my fault — I like to inflate the bag so it's hard, and comes back fast — easier to work up a rhythm that way. But I bought the bag in March, 2023. So it lasted 14 months. A long way from forever. And I'm not exactly Mike Tyson. Plus over the year I hit it, what, maybe 24 hours total. It strikes me that their bags should do better than that. Or start calling them "Daylast."
    I'm not even mentioning the swivel, which also broke — it was a cheap eye hook in a plastic socket. So I replaced it with something better.
     In Everlast's defense, the gloves I use must be 50 years old. A little frayed around the edges, but holding up just fine. Maybe the new stuff isn't made as well. Either way, I'm still brand loyal. There are lots of other lines of boxing equipment now, but I'm sticking with Everlast, just because I find the logo cool. The name too. I only wish it were a little more accurate.

Flashback 2010: Honor our war dead by doing your share

Honor Flight, 2015

      My editor asked if I'd be writing a Memorial Day column and I surprised us both by saying no. First, I'm tired. Second, I think I've already done my best to honor the holiday 10 years ago, writing about Wyatt Eisenhauer, and anything I'd write now wouldn't be half as good.          
    But the holiday is still here, and I thought I'd mark it by sharing this 2010 Memorial Day column, which asks a question even more relevant today. To take you back, the Tea Party movement had begun the year before, and I was amazed to see common-sense, vastly-beneficial government programs, like ObamaCare, drawing these shrieks of quivering right wing outrage. It was a portion of the column, back when it filled a page and had several items. A reminder that Donald Trump wasn't inflicted upon the United States. Rather our country conjured him up, like a beast from hell. 

     When we honor the war dead on Memorial Day, we naturally assume that we are doing something for the fallen. By our remembering those who gave their lives for this country, it implies that they somehow benefit, when of course they are dead, and beyond either benefit or harm from the living world.
     No, it seems clear, if you think about it, that though we are honoring them, it is not the fallen, but we, the living, who benefit. They are helping us. How? I believe we benefit by being reminded that, despite our conflicts and divisions, we are still, as the pledge says, "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
     One nation that people gave their lives to support. While there are pacifists opposed to war, the general opinion is that it is good that young Americans serve their country, and noble that they fight and sometimes die to ensure its security.

     So here's my Memorial Day question: if we approve of the idea that some Americans sacrifice their lives for their country — they willingly give all they have and all they might ever have — then why are so many Americans so broken up because the government asks them to make some far smaller sacrifice, such as pay taxes? Why do they gather in public to shudder in unashamed outrage that part of their bounty is siphoned away to benefit the same nation that other people are asked to die for?
     Not to inject a political note into the summer fun and sober reflection of the day. But it hardly seems fair. Do your part.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 31, 2010.

The Old State House

 

     Was I a little uncertain about writing a Sun-Times column about taking the Boston subway? Sure. Because it seemed off point — literally, by a thousand miles.  
     But I was interested in the process, and excited, and figured that enthusiasm would carry over and make the thing work. And it did, I think. The paper was excited about it — the audience engagement folks imagined some kind of eyeball grabbing feud with Boston. I did hear from people in Boston, including the couple I had quizzed on the Silver bus as to whether I was going the right way, who turned out to be Sun-Times subscribers. Small world. 

      And I talked about the column with John Williams for 1o minutes on WGN — always a lot of fun, first for the pleasure of conversation with the radio icon. Second, if I catch his attention, well, that means the column has grabbed the brass ring on its whir past the readership. 
     The column didn't mention my return journey, since it took place the day the column ran. But it also went smoothly. I gave myself plenty of time — that's key — setting out for a 12:20 p.m. American flight at 7:15 a.m., when my cousin's wife drove me to the West Concord station, where I had a very pleasant cup of coffee and cinnamon crumble muffin, reading my book, "The Winter Fortress," and enjoying the perfect spring day. 
     There was no ticket agent at the station, so I downloaded the app and bought my ticket online. Easy. Then took the Fitchburg line in, got off at North Station, caught the Orange Line to State, where it connected to the Blue Line.I followed the signs. Only instead of finding myself on the Blue Line platform, I was shunted up a staircase and outside.
     Unexpected. On the way in, I had stayed within the subway. But okay. Technology to the rescue. And here's where having three hours to spare helped. Google Maps told me I had to walk three blocks to get to the Blue Line station.
     No problem. Still a lovely day. And I walked directly past the building above — the Old State House. More than 300 years old. Where the seeds of our nation germinated, watered by atrocity — the Boston Massacre took place in 1770 out front. Five people died, a slaughter that shocked the soon-to-be nation. Our dormant sense of outraged, alas, now takes a lot more blood to germinate. You can murder 20 1st graders in a classroom and half the country yawns and mumbles about thoughts and prayers. 

      I'd been here before. But somehow, happening upon the Old State House by accident, taking public transportation ... well, one of the advantages, right? Sealed in the back of an Uber, you hardly notice your surroundings, never mind interact with them. You can't reach out and caress a brick that had been in place for over three centuries, and remind yourself of the depth of our history, the solidity of our nation's foundations. This tradition of freedom won't be so easy to undermine, not completely. Though God knows people are trying.

Out to Sea

      My parents' move from a one bedroom apartment in a assisted living facility to a single room in what is basically a staffed private home meant even more stuff sloshing into my possession. More piles of papers and albums of photographs. I added them to what I had already taken, unsure of when I'd ever get a chance to figure out what to do with it all, or even whether that was humanly possible. 

     At one point, I pulled open a filing cabinet draw and noticed a brown photo album with black pages, from the days when you positioned your photos inside with little gummed corners. I don't think this was from the most recent culling — more likely the one two years ago, if not before. I flipped through it — my parents as newlyweds, my sister as an infant. 
     And the above, which took my breath away. In some ways, it's unremarkable. Me, newly five — the margin says July 65, in that helpful way that old photos used to have their development month stamped in the margins.
     I'm sitting on an overturned tub in the barrel of a wheelbarrow in a square wading pool.
    So why highlight this photo?
    Because it's the moment that opens "Don't Give Up the Ship," the book I wrote about my father's time as a radio operator in the Merchant Marine, and the voyage on his old ship we took from New York to Naples in the summer of 1999. The book begins this way: 

                                                         BOOK ONE: Out to Sea. 

             "Being on a ship is being in a jail with a chance of being drowned."                                                          — Samuel Johnson 

     My father made me a boat. It wasn't a real boat, just the bed of a wheelbarrow unscrewed from its frame, with a red plastic tub overturned in the center as a seat. On a bright, hot summer day. We had a small wading pool in the backyard of our raw suburban tract and he set the craft in the center of the square of water. I might have been four. Excited and amazed at my good fortune, I climbed aboard the boat. And sat, carefully balancing on the unsteady vessel. There was a single moment of pleasure.

     But my father hadn't considered the holes from the screws in the wheelbarrow bed. Four of them. The water jetted up, in gentle, dome-topped fountains, and within a few seconds the wheelbarrow boat sank to the bottom of the pool, which was less than a foot deep. I looked down at the water around my knees, then up at my father, who looked back at me.
     This was not how the voyage was supposed to go.   

     I didn't realize there was a photo. Seeing it, I wondered if I had been recounting the memory of the event itself when writing that little scene-setter, or or just remembering the photo. Is there a difference? Maybe I was combining the two, the photo embellished by recollection. But I must not have directly referenced the photo — I would have gotten the age right — I was only a month past four. And I remembered the bucket being red, which I wouldn't have know from the photo alone.

     I tried to do a Lucy Sante and pull all the data I could out of this frozen shard of 1965. In the lower left corner part of the aluminum folding chair, the seat and back a web for green and white nylon fabric, that everyone had in the 1960s. A bit above it, a discarded penny loafer — my father's certainly, removed for the purpose of getting me settled in my precarious vessel. The photo so artlessly framed that the stick of a tree in our backyard seems to be sprouting directly out of my head.The kind of indignity that would follow me my whole life, quacking like a pull toy duck.

     I'm not fat — I thought of myself as a fat kid. But that must have come later. My hair, bleached from the sun, blond-looking. Lots of time playing outside. And that expression? Squinting up at my father, not smiling so much as trying to smile. That missing front tooth. Before Phillip Flanigan's mother stopped short while driving her Ford Falcon and put my mouth into the top of the front seat, taking out the rest. 

     "Trying to smile." That sums me up pretty well, doesn't it? I could use that as a title for an autobiography. 

Ghost of Adam Toledo hovers over ShotSpotter debate

"Ofendra for Adam" (National Museum of 
Mexican Art)

     In 1983, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted a big exhibition of Vatican treasures. My brother and I went but split up at one point. "I'll meet you under the picture of Jesus," I said, and he laughed, the joke being: They're all pictures of Jesus. (OK, plus a few cherubs and lions and popes thrown in.)
     I thought of that quip when Brandon Johnson announced hiring a liaison to the progressive movement. Really? Isn't his administration already one big prance around the progressive maypole?
     Speaking of progressivism, can we think about ShotSpotter? Somebody should.
     Walk through the process. You hear a loud bang. You think, "Fireworks?" A few more and experience tells you: "Gunshots."
     What do you want to happen next? I suppose that would depend on several things. Are you shot? Are you the person shooting? Do you live in a neighborhood where this happens all the time? Where it never happens? Do you welcome the police? Or fear them?
     The gunshot detection technology that Johnson, through characteristic ineptitude, has bungled into an ongoing issue prompted the City Council to try to snatch the issue out of the mayor's hands Wednesday, the way you'd take something away from a bungler saying, "Here, let me do it."
     Over this flutters, like a Vatican cherub, the ghost of Adam Toledo. Three years ago, the seventh grader was walking at 2:30 a.m. in Little Village when his companion shot several times at a passing car. ShotSpotter alerted police, who rushed over. Officer Eric Stillman chased Toledo into an alley. He fired a split-second after Toledo dropped a handgun, turned and raised his hands.
     If you watch the body cam video ... here's how I described it at the time:
     "The footage makes for sickening viewing: the jumpy chase through an alley; the barked, ignored commands; the boy’s hands going up followed instantly by the gunshot. The red blood. Watching it once, I can’t imagine ever watching it again. Once is too much."
     Opinion immediately fractured — Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) lauded Stillman's "amazing restraint" — I guess for not firing the traditional 16 shots. Former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez called it "an execution."

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