“Life’s not just being alive, but being well.”

-- Martial AD c.40-c.104: Epigrammata

I’m feeling healthy as I write this. The cat just crept up behind me. I’m sitting next to some “Cowboys of the Silver Screen” stamps. Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, William S. Hart and Gene Autry. The images are of strong, sure, men, handsome and with purpose.

What prompted me to write is rather vague but important, at least for me. We’re heading north soon, and I’ll be seeing my close bud. He’s not healthy as I write this.

A recurring theme in all illness involves what kinds of assumptions we should make about the afflicted. I suppose a loose analogy might see a connection between perceptions on disability versus illness, and in some cases the two are coexistent. For instance, we imply a degree of unhappiness to the physically handicapped that oftentimes has no basis in reality. Why dangerous? Because cultural perceptions shape public policies on issues having to do with medical ethics, like euthanasia.

Perhaps the same might be said of health and sickness. We assume illness and diminishing health precludes the possibility of happiness, and maybe it does. And why wouldn’t we think to be unhealthy is to be unhappy?

The catch 22 in all of this is that there are degrees of pain, disability, and suffering. And that the extent to which each of us encounters the breadth of these dire calculations delimits our ability to define that threshold where happiness no longer applies, if indeed it exists, and I fear it does, dear friends. Maybe.

We may have attended different schools back in the day (St. Pete and St. John), but the message was the same: suck it up and offer it to Jesus.

Jesus changed nature. He provided an alternative to the nature of things. He said, build me a cathedral and you’ll go to a better place. Sweat it here and you’ll relax in paradise.

Trouble is, nature was here before God. They never told us to render onto God what is god’s, and onto Nature what is nature’s.

As the story goes, man is the pinnacle of God’s creation.

If this is so, it may be that man’s most self-damning invention, beyond all earth fouling gushers, is the concept of god.

Can you have grace without religion?

What is the connection between grace and happiness?

What is the point in suffering gracefully?

Do our families appreciate it?

Should we do it for them?

Do they want us to?

Who knows?

I’m not sure how he’s going to feel.

Should it matter?

Certainly.