Pappy

I'm in an airline lounge at LAX 18 hours into a 25 hour trip back to Arkansas to see my grandfather before he dies. His name is Rufus Elton Cassidy, but we call him Pappy. He's 96 years old. He grew up in Arkansas before the depression. He told me once that all he remembered of his mother was that she "got the cancer" when he was 6 years old, and they took her away in mule-drawn wagon and he never saw her again. In 96 years on this earth he never had a credit card, never borrowed money, only took an airplane once, never drank coffee, tea, or alcohol. It wasn't a religious thing, there was just no money for that sort of thing when Pappy was young. He became a boilermaker and a union man during The War and he travelled all around the south putting the hearts in great buildings. I remember when I was a little boy he would come home in his hard hat. He must have been tired, but loved us so, it never showed. He went to the Hazel Street Baptist Church every Sunday. He never went to school, taught himself to read and write and do arithmatic and only ever read the Bible, his Sunday School lesson and the Arkansas Gazette. He was married to the same woman for 60 years, and he was never the same after she died. He gave up driving at the age of 83. Last Christmas, he could still lift my 8 year old son over his head, just like he used to do with me. Now he can't stand up. He's tired and he wants to be with my grandmother.


I love you Pappy.

Merry Christmas

That's right, Merry Christmas. None of that denatured Season's Greetings crap. On this Christmas Day, as we survey the terrain from Cold Mountain, we are appalled at the religious bigotry that has taken over swaths of my ancestral homeland. Quite so, you say, how beastly Americans are to those poor Muslims. WRONG. Wrong and stupid.

I'm talking about the subtle bigotry and outright discrimination against Christians in the United States. From shysters imposing anti-Christian litmus tests on potential jurors, to the Ten Commandments forcibly removed from a courthouse, to store clerks required to use the grotesque "Happy Holidays" as a greeting, to the disappearance of Nativity scenes from village commons and shopping malls, Christians in America today find themselves belittled and their beliefs treated with contempt. The cheap cynicism that passes for a world view in the salons of the left requires no wisdom, no reflection, no introspection; nothing more than a bit of low cunning and a college freshman's vocabulary. It's a poor substitute for either reason or faith. Can it be that the acid contempt the left show for Christians comes from the little peeks they take into their own empty souls in the dark night? Can it be that under the slick post-modern banter, they have measured themselves against a man like Pope John Paul and found themselves badly lacking? Can it be that I give them too much credit and that all their words are really just echoes of empty minds and empty hearts?

This Christmas let us think of the Pope, whose back is now bent with the literal weight of the world and remember that he once marshaled the moral authority of the Church and the reflected power of the risen Christ to smash the locks on the gates of Hell on earth. Let us also think of Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable faith in America's destiny brought down the walls as surely as did Joshua's horn. Let us pray that we see their like among us again soon.