First Contact

When the tower appeared in the midst of the city, it was the homeless who made first contact. The evacuations had begun almost immediately, but those who lived on the streets had their own favorite places to tuck themselves away for protection. These were magical places created of a necessity by paranoid imaginings. These unfortunates were abandoned and left to their own devices, hiding under bridges and in dumpsters.

A handful of days passed under a hard gray sky, but nothing happened. The tower sat overlooking the empty city, impassive and brooding, like it had been there for a thousand years thinking its lofty thoughts.

Hunger and boredom eventually brought out the city's forgotten. Resources had become available in the form of abandoned stores and buildings. It was a windfall of sorts, a close encounter of the scavenging kind. They had been rejected by society and felt they had nothing to lose by approaching and even entering the alien structure. Some of them heard voices bidding them to do so. The first to attempt it was Solar Sam and it is his story that I wish to tell.

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Full story can be found *Here*

The New Canadians

When the world ends
families from the first nations
will be gathered
into the Toronto Tower
whose concrete skin
will fall away in
spectacular fashion
revealing an immense
rocket-powered ark
pointed at the nearest
inhabitable planet.
Their children will grow
into adults on the journey,
they will appreciate
the opportunity they have
been given, they will be
fruitful and multiply, and,
most important of all,
they will get along.
They are the New Canadians.  

***

Somewhere in Southern Indiana

Somewhere in Southern Indiana
a basketball floats on a rain puddle
at the bottom of a rusty wheelbarrow.

High grass swallows it up on a long
fence line separating house from
farm fields rolling into the distance.

Patches of forest can be seen just
past the fields where deer roam and
small mammals live out short lives.

These are the scenes that formed
my childhood and put the firm stamp
of melancholy on my personhood.

But also provided a buffer from
things that can wither the soul and
may compromise the man to be.


***

The Passing of Fr. Roman Braga

[Spring 2015] - I learn of his death.

What can one say of the passing of Fr. Roman?  

He suffered terribly in a notorious prison camp as a young man during the time that Romania was ruled by the Communists.  The camp in question was known for its experiments in stripping people of their identity, their personality, even their humanity, and trying to rebuild them as “The New Communist Man”.  What it inadvertently did was strip him of his false self and facilitated the development of a new life in Christ.  He assured us he was grateful to his tormentors for their help in discovering the “inner universe” which he found to be more expansive than the external one.  His suffering was transfigured in imitation of Christ and brought forth a love for all things, creation and creatures without exception, in union with the Creator.  He spent his first year in solitary confinement of his eleven years of imprisonment and shared about his experience of befriending a cockroach as the only other living thing to visit his cell.  

He told us on one occasion when we visited the monastery that “we monks are heretics.  We love everyone and everything, even the demons and hope for their salvation."

The first time I visited the Holy Dormition monastery in Rives Junction, Michigan I was a confused college student being pulled in many contradictory directions.  The college group at my small parish went there on a retreat where he was the spiritual father to the nuns.  An opportunity arose for me to have confession with him on a Saturday evening before Vespers.  He welcomed me into the small room beside the chapel and said, "Before I hear your confession, let's just have a little talk."  He learned I was a medical student which led him to pull out his two heart medications and show me the bottles.  He had a very sweet self-deprecating humor, confiding in me that these medications made him feel poorly, “but my doctor says to take them, so I take them.”  He asked a few basic questions and then told me of something to watch out for and how to understand it so as to not be deceived.  He then heard my confession.  

Sunday morning I found myself standing in the chapel where Fr. Roman was chanting the Akathist to Our Sweetest Lord Jesus Christ and noticed a bright light emanating from the altar where he stood.  I turned to a fellow college student who had been my roommate for the night and asked him in an awed tone “Do you see that?!”  As the light grew I felt tears welling up in my eyes blurring my vision.  The next thing I knew the world began to come back into focus and I was looking at sunlight coming through the window and falling onto my roommate’s empty bed.  I’d overslept.  I jumped up and ran to the chapel feeling a kind of buoyant exhilaration propelling me.  Hearing him chant this particular Akathist before the Divine Liturgy was an experience like no other.

A few weeks later at college I went through the very thing Fr. Roman had foreseen in the small talk before confession and I did not handle it as I had been lovingly instructed.  It did not turn out well and only too late did I remember the words of fatherly love that he had spoken to me.      

May his memory be eternal.

[Fall 2025] - He is proposed for sainthood.

***