Dear old and new friends,
 
     If a cosmic stranger from another solar system visited Planet Earth this coming weekend of October 31st, he/she or it might surmise Earth folk were celebrating some kind of a Festival of Fear. Stores and homes are decked out with a variety of scary images of death, flying witches and bats. Children and adults parade around dressed up in frightening masks and costumes. But far from being afraid, all seem to be having fun.
 
     Halloween is a fun holiday, but those fears haunting many aren’t funny! Halloween—the Eve of All Hallows, all holy ones—challenges us to live the words the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary, “Do not be afraid”; the same words often used by Jesus of Nazareth. The admonition to “fear not” appears over and over in Christian scriptures! If you repeat those affirming words aloud to yourself daily as your morning prayer, imagine the consequences!
 
     Being afraid (something adults are ashamed to admit) can be attached to a particular threat…some authoritarian person, snakes, flying, growing old, the dark, being a failure, or that most common fear of having to stand up alone and speak to a large audience. Fears can come and go as we move from one age to another, or grow into toxic worry.
 
     As a Catholic looking back at my youth, I believe I suffered from the disease of Toxic Worry. The psychiatrist Edward Hallowell (and no, that’s not a play on Halloween) describes it as a disease of the imagination that is insidious and invisible like a virus that worms its way into your consciousness where it actually dominates your life. Toxic worry shrinks your enjoyment of life, cripples your creativity and your ability to love. I picked up the virus of this disease from the Baltimore Catechism and its moral teachings. Back in those days I feared the occasions of sin, and that could include motion pictures, magazine photos, your thoughts, meat on Friday, even your friends, it seemed. Really, just about anything.
 
     The toxic (meaning poisonous) worry like all infections spreads to life itself, and while it continues to involve religion, it moves beyond it to anxiety about yourself and how you appeared to others, your popularity, your failures or successes. Marvelously miraculous is the human body in its self-healing abilities to mend wounds, and so too the mind which, with maturity, causes some fears to disappear. However, there can be those deeply embedded fears that remain. I was fortunate to find a mentor who helped me resolve my toxic worry by simply having me meditate on these liberating words: “Perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18)
 
     So if you are burdened with some fear, I suggest you slowly love and accept whatever worries you, along with all of life’s problems and threats. Strive to truly love yourself; all your body, your mind, talents and inabilities, blunders and attainments, as you daily pray with zeal, “Do not be afraid!”

Dear old and new friends,

     Humans have a marvelous built-in emotional capacity to be empathetic, to be able to share in another's emotions and sufferings, and so to take some action to help them. Empathy seems innate and not a learned behavior, and is experienced by animals as well as humans.
 
     Bullying, the humiliating done by the bigger stronger kids, male or female, over the weaker and often somehow “different” schoolmates, is an acknowledged problem. With negative empathy we identify with the victims of abuse, empathetically sharing in their desire for vengeance against their abusers. Until I came upon the idea of this negative empathy I never understood (always striving to be a man of nonviolence, peace, love and compassion) why I took such delight when, near the end of old Western movies, the “bad guy” (almost demonic in his evilness) in a fair fight was fiercely beaten up and disgraced by the good guy before whole the town.
 
     Today, we can add to the positive and negative a third form of empathy…empty empathy. From seemingly endless agencies, all wonderful and worthwhile, by mail and television come graphic photographs of cleft palate afflicted children and crippled, hungry, sick and homeless ones. The result of this continuous over-exposure is empty empathy; we see but don’t feel. Oh, there may be a flicker of sympathy but it soon is dissipated. Modern media can and does dehumanize us by taking us beyond what is humanly possible! We should strive to maintain a wholesome, holy empathy as an expression of our growth in love. A possible solution to these mass marketing solicitations is to choose one or more agency or group to support, and forget about the others.
 
                                                       WARNING
 
     An authentic threatening danger exists that can even do away with empathy! Watch your children! Watch yourself! Ceaseless, incessant use of digital technology is eating away at our humanity. Recent studies, as reported by sociologist and author Sherry Turkle, show a steep decline in empathy as measured by psychological testing among college students of the smartphone generation! For her these amazing digital technological creations are capitalism in hyper drive, pouring its logic of consumption and efficiency into our every waking moment. As more and more of the population of all ages become addicted to their smartphones, watch for a consequential communal decline in empathy in others—and in yourself.
 
     Along with smartphones we need smart people…those who schedule frequent times to be “disconnected,” and so be refreshed and rehabilitated by quiet separateness and visits to their inner-world. Mysterious, silent times in your inner-world reinforces a secure sense of self that sends you back into the greater world’s crazy hubbub renewed in peacefulness and with a Good Samaritan’s affluent empathy.

Dear old and new friends,
 
     I like Shakespeare’s epithet for envy: Green Sickness. Envy, like a cold or any sickness, can be mild; as in a desire to be like another person or the hard feelings of resentment toward an affluent neighbor with a yearly new flashy car. And Green Sickness can also be severe; like lusting, unwholesome rivalries in athletics, and old-fashioned greed. Part of our fascination with stars like Tom Cruise or Tina Turner is a secret green wish to be like them, a longing to have their physical talents. This envy towards others, be they stars, athletes or any perceived gifted person, exists because we only know the outside of their lives, not their hidden fears, phobias, physical or emotional disabilities. If we knew these we wouldn’t envy them!
 
     Mahatma Gandhi was adored by India’s poor and lower castes as a saint for his austere lifestyle and spirituality. Gandhi the political leader was acclaimed for his unyielding peaceful non-violence against militant British rule and became a heroic example to be imitated. His many disciples loved him and longed to be like him, but the non-public Gandhi was not a man of peace! He lived deeply tormented by unshakeable feelings of guilt and unworthiness. The people called him a Mahatma, a “great soul,” when a better name would have been a “tormented soul”! The next time you feel the creeping Green Sickness to be like another, remember Gandhi.
 
     Another example is Ira Hayes, a 22-year-old Pima Indian from Arizona, who was a U.S. Marine and Navy pharmacist…and how a World War II photograph ruined his life. Ira had been chosen to be one of a group of Marines to be photographed raising a large American flag on February 23, 1945, over the battle bloodied island of Iwo Jima. That classic photograph instantly became famous, making heroes out of its flag raisers. The propaganda hungry military sent these men touring the country where at each stop they were welcomed and praised as glorious heroes.
 
     The Pima Indian Ira Hayes, like Mahatma Gandhi, felt inwardly unworthy of the adulation and praise cascaded on him. Ira’s Native American spirituality stressed modesty and humility, and denounced self-glorification. He told the press he wasn’t a hero; that the real heroes were his brother marines who had died sacrificing their lives in the intense fighting on Iwo Jima. But the praise continued and he suffered the piercing pains of personal embarrassment by being elevated to a heroic pinnacle, even though this was the dream ideal of all youth, including the Pima Indian young.
 
     Embittered by his hidden inner turmoil, for relief he resorted to that ancient pain medicine…alcohol. Drifting now as an anonymous hobo from city to city he was arrested over 50 times for public drunkenness. On a bitter cold January 24th in 1955, returning to the Pima Indian reservation a drunken 32-year-old Ira Hayes stumbled into a ditch of water that served as the water supply for the reservation and froze to death.
 
     To understand and be sympathetic about the shame that ate away at Ira Hayes let us go back to 1945 and to the facts of the raising of that large American flag over Iwo Jima. The first, original raising of the United States flag on Iwo Jima was not very picturesque. Simply two marines in muddy, battle-dirty fatigues reaching a hilltop and then sticking into the earth an old, twisted piece of pipe to which was attached a small American flag!
 
     The second raising of the flag seen in that famous photograph known to all of us was spectacular but devoid of heroic action. The hilltop scene had been carefully staged with an appropriate wind to unfurl the large American flag. Those U.S. Marines positioned along the extended flag pole, including Ira Hayes, were carefully choreographed so as to appear that they were struggling to raise the victorious Stars and Stripes!
 
     Every youth dreams of being a hero on the sports field or in war. When youth ends, that powerful dream continues to live on well into old age…so beware of what you dream about. The author of The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, said, “Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.”

Dear old and new friends,

     Once upon a time, a son texted his mother, “Mom. I met a great guy this afternoon and he said he was really hungry for a home cooked meal…so I invited him to supper. Don’t do anything fancy, just your usual. Oh, his name is Tom Mapother. Love U.”

     His mother shook her head. “So typical of Jimmy, without any warning to invite someone over for supper,” she thought to herself as she took some meat out of the refrigerator. A few hours later a neighbor called her, “Margie, what do you think about those television news trucks going up and down the street; has something happened or about to happen in our quiet neighborhood?” Margaret looked through the curtains and saw a couple of TV news vans going slowly up the street. She shrugged her shoulders and returned to the kitchen. Later the sound of the garage door going up, and then down, signaled Jimmy and his new friend Mapother had arrived. She straightened her apron and walked to the garage entrance door. Jimmy came in first, and behind him a slightly shorter man wearing large sunglasses which he removed, as Jimmy said, “Mom, meet Thomas Mapother,” as she screamed, “Oh, my God. Tom Cruise!”

      The studios instantly saw a future movie star in the 19-year-old, handsome Thomas C. Mapother when he arrived in Hollywood. Only there was one big problem: his family name of Mapother. So the studio executives dropped it and chose to replace it with his middle name, Cruise. Now, in a similar story, Annie Mae Bullock had a more radical change. She was renamed Tina Turner! “Stories are designed to force us to consider possibilities,” said William Bausch. “Stories hint that our taken-for-granted daily realties may, in fact, be fraught with surprise.” Our opening story-parable of Thomas Mapother held a surprise—and so does your name. Yes, your name!

     Hollywood’s name changes imply you can’t be both mortal with a common name and also an immortal star whose name reflects the brilliance of being famous. Our Hebrew ancestors gave new names to those whose destiny had been changed by an encounter with God; Jacob after wrestling all night with God becomes Israel. Nuns and monks, like Hollywood actors and actresses, are given new names that imply new possible identities. Betty Lou Koeington entered a convent and became Sister Mary Joaquin Baptista, and Larry Schillenburg entered a monastery and became Father Thomas. Did their new names transform their personalities into those of potentially saintly stars, or did their original basic jealousies, emotional needs and anxieties, now simply wear a religious habit?

     Every name no matter how common is important. Among primitive peoples there is a reluctance to disclose their name less an enemy might learn of it and work evil magic upon them. The Greeks particularly were careful with uncomplimentary names and disguised or reversed them. When it comes to names, you and I had no voice in the ones bestowed on us at birth by our parents, and there may be some who like the Greeks wish today they could disguise their unflattering name.
 
     I want anyone presently reading this reflection to know that you don’t have to change your name or possess any particular genius to be a star, a luminary and a leading light, for you already are one! William Wordsworth captured the divine truth about each of one of us when he wrote,
 
                                    “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
                                    The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
                                    …cometh from afar…trailing clouds of glory we come
                                    from God, who is our home:
                                    Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”

      Awaken: Remember those clouds of glory that streaked behind you like a shooting star as you entered this world. That splendor of heaven that encircled you as an infant has now receded within you; pause and acknowledge its hidden presence. Artistic Love delights in creating stars, be they in the cosmos or on earth. Whatever your name, with each deed of kindness, every gift donation, each act of empathy and expression of affection, consciously let your inner radiance shine in your eyes and on your face.

     Your name will never be famous. You will never be canonized. No shining halo will appear, but you will be that unique star you were destined to be when you came from God.