Faith in the Military: Reading Expands the Universe

In November of 1979 I left the active duty Army.  In January I started college at Penn State's Capitol Campus in Middletown, Pa.  The campus was a former Air Force Base and was set up for only for Junior and Senior years of college and graduate school.

Since I was starting in 2nd semester in a trimester system, one of the courses I took in my first semester was Western Traditions II, taught by Theodora Graham.  It was one of the two courses that most influenced my thinking for the rest of my life.  One of the first books we read was Inferno by Dante Aligheri, book one of the three-part Divine Comedy.  I was in love almost from the first page.  Dante created an entire world based on the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.  The world was coherent, beautiful, terrifying and orderly from the very bottom of Hell to highest Heaven.  Dante wrote the book in the late 1200s in exile from his home in Florence, Italy.

Later in the semester I read another book by a Florentine political exile.  Niccollo Machiavelli wrote a short book on politics called The Prince trying to get back into the good graces of the prince who ruled Florence.  Dante gave his readers a tour of the cosmos and pointed to the wonder of Heaven.  Machiavelli never took his eyes off the Earth.  At about 70 pages in most translations, The Prince is an evening read and easily the most concise book on how to go to Hell every  written.  Machiavelli says the only job of a prince (leader) is to take power and keep power.  Otherwise the prince can do nothing.  And Machiavelli makes no recommendations as to what to do with power--only that it is the first goal of a prince.

I felt like a butterfly crawling out of a cocoon.  So much of the world made sense, in good and bad ways, through just these two books.  In the years since these two books have been at the top of my re-reading list.  I read The Prince every four years in January of the years in which we elect presidents.  Machiavelli reminds of the goals and the limits of politics.  

Currently, I am re-reading the Divine Comedy for the seventh time in a new translation by Clive James.  I have read The Prince nine times.  

And while I was in Heaven in Western Traditions II, the world seemed to be going to Hell and Machiavelli showed me just how that was happening.

Faith in the Military: Another Friend For Life

In 1979, I was assigned to the Wiesbaden Military Community Headquarters.  For the first few months of the year I shared a room with Air Force Sgt. Cliff Almes.  His discharge date was May 2, 1979, my 26th birthday.  He did not go home like everyone else.  On that day I drove Cliff from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt in my 1969 Renault TS with a 4-speed shifter on the column. 

Also on that day, Cliff began 10 months in the novitiate of the Franciscan Brotherhood at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt.  He later became Bruder Timotheus. He is still there. He is also an American so he fixes things at the monastery and for the last 15 years has been the network administrator for Kanaan Ministries. 

Every week from May until I left for America in November, I visited Cliff in Darmstadt.  I worked for the base newspaper at that point.  It was printed in Darmstadt so I volunteered to go to the printer each week.  I would have lunch at Land of Kanaan and eat with the novices.  Kanaan was created in the rubble of Darmstadt after World War 2 by two women who ministered to bombing victims during the war.  

Seeing these young men from all over the world training for a life of poverty, chastity and obedience opened another world to me beyond America.

Bruder Timotheus is another friend who I have kept in touch with and occasionally visited since our time together in Wiesbaden.  It is one of the stranger aspects of modern life that Abel and Cliff, two men I consider the best friends I have, are a continent and an ocean away in Germany and San Diego.  But the modern life that allows us to be so far apart also lets us keep in touch no matter where we are.  Going to Iraq in 2009 was no interruption in our monthly phone calls.  

I visited Cliff in Germany twice in the past 15 years.  I hope to do it again someday.