from her mother who was quite dramatic she had a sense
of the drama of life and she had to get each voice just right.
She had to keep still voices that would lead to strife and friction
and to strengthen the sweet tone of her voice of reconciliation.
I.3.9 Third Holy Child and Sacred Community
And big changes took place a mile a minute as we moved
to a farm we rented and my dad milked eighteen Holsteins
and grew hay and hunted and fished and visited Ketchum.
Uncle El lived with us and we took the school bus together
as I was in the first grade and he was a sophomore in high school.
And our new little baby brother, Bobby Brian, was born
and named after uncle Bob and my dad’s friend Brian
who was a gambler up in Ketchum and found us a house
right across the street from his. And the war ended and
I washed baby diapers in the irrigation ditch with mother
just as she had with her mother up Iron Mine. And we
did move to Ketchum and Whitey Hirshman and my dad
bought a little nightclub together called The Rumba Club
and their gambling was very successful and we paid $3,500
for our little old house and I started second grade in Ketchum.
We had Catechism school once a week and mother and I learned
the answers together as we had the book propped up on
the window-sill over the kitchen sink as we did dishes together.
She had watched as my dad taught me the Angel of God and
Hail Mary in Carey and now she learned them too and she
decided to become a Catholic when I received first communion.
What William James said about getting down on your knees
and praying if you want to receive faith describes good acting.
We can cultivate the whole network of right attitude, right
mood, right sensing, right feeling, right thoughts, words
and deeds if we are good actors and keep acting out the way
we want to be in sacred reflection that cultivates holy living.
Mother was strongly motivated to live the most excellent way
she could imagine because her children would follow that way too.
Father Dougherty in the reflective standing back of his sacred
celibacy inspired her to focus on sacred communion and love.
II. Søren Kierkegaard
II.1 Reconciling the God-Man and Socrates
II.1.1 The Paradoxical Logic of Erotic Inspiration
On May 19, 1838, at 10:30 a.m., the Existential Movement
was born when Kierkegaard wrote in his journal:
There is such a thing as an indescribable joy
which grows through us as unaccountably
as the Apostles’ outburst is unexpected:
“Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice!:
Not a joy over this or that, but full jubilation,
“with hearts, and souls, and voices.”
I rejoice over my joy,
of, in, by, at, on, through, with my joy,
a heavenly refrain, which cuts short,
as it were, our ordinary song;
a joy which cools and refreshes like a breeze,
a gust of the trade wind which blows from
the Grove of mamre to the eternal mansions.1
Kierkegaard as a young student in his mid-twenties
suffered from a sort of genetic depression.
He moved out of his beloved father’s home
and became estranged from the melancholic old man.
He thought of himself as no longer religious.
He experimented with alcohol and prostitution.
He could not write his Master’s thesis.
He found that he had a secret thorn in the flesh.
But then he fell in love with Regina Olsen,
a beautiful young girl of fourteen.
With the above outburst of existential joy he
realized what had happened as he became reconciled
with his father, with his God and with himself.
His erotic love made of him a celibate religious genius
and his celibacy increased the passion of his eros.
Kierkegaard discovered the paradox of Socratic reconciliation.
II.1.2 The Logic of Socratic Irony
Kierkegaard’s father was a lonely, wretched shepherd boy
on Denmark’s Jutland heath where one day he cursed God.
Then as a teenage orphan he went to Copenhagen to live with
his uncle who employed him in his fine clothing store.
His father married, but his wife died and soon thereafter
his first child was born of the servant girl whom he married.
After a few years his father inherited the store and became wealthy.
Several other children were born and then came Søren who,
as a hunch-back cripple, became his father’s favorite.
The father and the
