An apocalyptic beginning of the End of Days? Make my solar eclipse a chance to sing again Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ from 1972

Is today’s partial 38 per cent solar eclipse over Thompson, Manitoba, under clear blue skies and balmy 16°C temperatures (the normal April 8 daytime high is 4°C), a sign of a premillennial Rapture signalling the beginning of the End of Days, as today’s total eclipse crosses two towns in the United States named Nineveh in Ohio and Indiana, as well as Rapture, Indiana? The original Nineveh, the oldest and most-populous city of the ancient Assyrian empire, is situated on the east bank of the Tigris River and encircled by the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. Interestingly, today’s solar eclipse is not visible in Mosul.

Not being either a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, I probably wouldn’t even be contemplating such a question about the April 8 solar eclipse if it hadn’t been for my old Left Coast friend Ron Graham posting on Facebook today, “To those religious nutcases that believed the upcoming solar eclipse would be ‘the rapture’, be sure to check in with us on Tuesday. It quite possibly did happen for some, but appears that Jesus overlooked you and your friends for some reason.”

While it is true that Christian scripture records that Jesus preaching on the Mount of Olives, a mountain ridge in East Jerusalem, east of and adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City – in what is called the Olivet Discourse, found in Matthew 24 – talks about the end times and says the sun will be darkened, belief in apocalyptic happenings portended by solar eclipses are not proprietary to Christianity. Throughout history, eclipses have been interpreted by many cultures and religions as a disruption of the natural order.  

Hindu beliefs involve demons swallowing the sun. In ancient China, the etchings discovered in Anyang depicted solar eclipses as celestial dragons attacking and devouring the sun. In South America, ancient Incans believed solar eclipses were a “sign of wrath and displeasure” from Inti, the “all-powerful sun god.” Choctaw Indians from the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States believe a mischievous black squirrel gnawing on the sun causes solar eclipses, and legend holds the squirrel must be frightened away by the clamor and yells of the event’s human witnesses. In West Africa, the Tammari people, also known as Batammariba from the northern regions of Togo and Benin, believe the celestial bodies intersecting during an eclipse represent human feuds on Earth.

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

I have always loved Carly Simon’s 1972 song “You’re So Vain.” In the early 1980s, many of us thought the song was about singer James Taylor, who was married to Carly Simon from 1972 to 1983. But in a 1983 interview with the Washington Post, Simon said, “”It certainly sounds like it was about Warren Beatty, He certainly thought it was about him – he called me and said ‘thanks for the song. ‘” Later, she said two other men, who so far remain unidentified, along with Beatty, also inspired elements of the song. So who knows?

As I said, I am neither a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, so perhaps it is not surprising my interest in solar eclipses is anchored elsewhere.

In the 1980s, I spent a too short part of many a summer at the Dell family’s summer home on the Atlantic Ocean in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where my mother-in-law, Carol Dell, a Vineyarder by both birth and disposition, would tell me stories of Carly Simon and James Taylor, who were also both in many ways Vineyarders themselves. Stories about Island events such as live performances at the Hot Tin Roof, opened in 1979 by Carly Simon, George Brush and Herb Putnam. Close your eyes, and you were transported back a few years in time and were there, so it seemed. Magical. The full lyrics to “You’re So Vain” go like this:

Son of a gun

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they’d be your partner
They’d be your partner and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you, don’t you?

You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair and that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and
You’re so vain

You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain, you’re so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you?

I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

Well you’re where you should be all the time
And when you’re not, you’re with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you, don’t you now

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
Probably think this song about you
You’re so vain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGQ2DJ65-ok&t=6s

You can also follow me on X (formerly Twitter) at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

‘Repair my house, which is falling into ruin’: The legacy of Father Guna at St. Lawrence

Photos by Jeanette Kimball                        

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” it is written in Ecclesiastes. And so it is that on this day, the Feast of the Epiphany, Father Guna Pothula, the pastor who has shepherded St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church here in Thompson, Manitoba since July 2012, making him the longest-serving clergy here, said his last Sunday mass and said goodbye to parishioners before departing home to India this week to be closer to his ageing mother, and begin a new mission. Godspeed, Father Guna.

The presence of the Catholic Church in the Thompson area dates back to 1958 when visiting priests from Thicket Portage, Pikwitonei, Wabowden and The Pas attended Thompson to celebrate mass at least once a month. At first masses were celebrated in a private home on Poplar Crescent. Later masses before a church was built were celebrated at Juniper School, the Inco camp, the Midwest Drilling Camp, the Patrick Harrison Camp, and at the Strand Theatre. The rectory and the present-day parish hall (which served as the first church) were built in 1960, while the new adjacent church on the Cree Road site opened six years later.

Churches have a season where they, too, must be rebuilt and repaired, both physically and spiritually. As Father Guna departs, St. Lawrence ends such a season of renovation and renewal to the church and parish hall, which has taken almost a decade and cost about a million dollars to complete. While his spiritual legacy as pastor and confessor is written privately on the hearts and souls of parishioners, past and present, his public legacy will be the rebuilding of St. Lawrence, a process planning began for in 2013, the year after his arrival, and concluded with the reopening of the church last June and the parish hall today. No small achievement during a global pandemic that has stretched on now for three years.

“I wasn’t going to leave until the renovations were complete,” Father Guna said today, “The roof was leaking when I arrived and it was raining in God’s house.” He noted the generosity of St, Lawrence parishioners, who “never grumbled” about years of monthly “second offertory collections” to make the roof repairs, along with donations in time and money from Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961, a Catholic fraternal benefit organization chartered locally with 59 members on May 6, 1967, the 31st council in Manitoba to receive its charter. Among the other funding sources was grant money from the Thompson Community Foundation, as both the church and hall serve larger public needs beyond Thompson’s Catholic community, and insurance proceeds to renovate the parish hall.

Rebuild. Fix where needed. This is our Catholic way. In 1205, Francis was  praying in front of a crucifix at the abandoned San Damiano chapel near Assisi. There he had a vision in which God said, “Francis, repair my house, which is falling into ruin.” Francis listened, looked around at the crumbling chapel, and then sold some of his possessions in order to help rebuild it. He was canonized as a saint just two years after his death, on July 16, 1228, by Pope Gregory IX. Today, we know him as Saint Francis of Assisi.

More than 800 years later, another St. Francis – St. Francis de Sales – would be integral here on the other side of the world in rebuilding God’s church in a place that stands at the centre of Canada – north to south, east to west – St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson, Manitoba.  

Francis de Sales was born in France and lived at the time of the Protestant Reformation, becoming Bishop of Geneva. He had lots of exposure to Calvinism and predestination and was noted for his diplomacy in the volatile, heated religious climate of the day in Switzerland. He’s honoured as one of the doctors of the Catholic Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales was founded by Father Peter Marie Mermier from Vouray in the parish of Chaumont en Genevois and the Diocese of Annecy in the Savoy region of France in October 1838 for parish mission, foreign mission and youth education. They are also known as the Fransalians. Pope Pius XI proclaimed St. Francis de Sales in 1923 as the patron saint of writers and journalists.

After more than 11 months without a parish priest, in July 2012 two priests from India, Father Guna, and Father Subash Joseph – both members of the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales, also known as the Fransalians, travelling two by two – arrived, and would be soon tasked, as Francis of Assisi was, with repairing God’s house both physically and spiritually here in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, a vast land, which takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and stretches across the northern parts of three provinces – Saskatchewan, Manitoba and a small portion of Northwestern Ontario, and whose past includes Indian residential schools, while our present and future calls to us to bear witness in acknowledging and speaking often painful truths in the ongoing work of reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples here on the traditional treaty territory and homeland of the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, who have existed here since time immemorial, as well as later becoming home to other Indigenous peoples, including Métis.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, in Thompson in particular, is on the cutting edge of a trend that is likely to dominate the missions field in the Canadian North for perhaps the remainder of the 21st century: The re-evangelization by those once colonized, as priests from countries the church in Canada sent missionaries to in the 19th and early 20th centuries, now send their missionaries here as vocations to the priesthood in the western world have been nowhere near the necessary replacement rate since shortly after the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965.

A very different story in terms of vocations to the priesthood, however, has played out in places like Africa, parts of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, and other areas of what are sometimes referred to as the “Global South.” There, vocations have boomed over the last 50 some years; hence the arrival of Father Guna and Father Joseph in Thompson in 2012.

Father Guna, from the village of Chennamanayunikota in Andhra Pradesh in southeastern India in the Archdiocese of Kurnool, was ordained on Feb. 10, 2007 by Bishop Paul Maipan of the Diocese of Khammam. He attended ATPM High School in Gunter in Andhra Pradesh until he joined the seminary at the age 16 in 1996. Seminarians remain in seminary for 12 years if they decide to pursue their full studies and call to ordination, Father Guna said, although some decide to leave the seminary along the way, discovering holy orders is not their calling.

After ordination, Father Guna was appointed as the assistant pastor of Nunna, in the Diocese of Vijayawada from June 2007 to May 2008. He was then appointed to the Fransalian Vidya Jyothi, Nidadavole as the procurator and was asked to teach the seminarians from June 2008 to May 2010. He also held appointments at the St. Francis de Sales High School in the town of Pamidi in the Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh, teaching and serving as the administrator and procurator of the school.

Father Guna’s paternal grandfather was Hindu before converting to Catholicism and he still has many Hindu relatives.

Father Joseph, at his request, in 2015 was transferred to the also repair-challenged Church of St. Gertrude in Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan, located 120 kilometres northwest of Flin Flon; 388 kilometres northeast of Prince Albert and 525 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon, and the Church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows in Sandy Bay, at road’s end for the gravel winding road, 72 kilometres north of Pelican Narrows.

And, as the seasons once again change, Father Joseph now returns here to St. Lawrence, as pastor.

Goodbye, and our eternal thanks, Father Guna. Welcome, home, Father Joseph. Our fishing rods await your return!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gostrArMqM

John Barker has been a member of  the Parish of St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson, Manitoba since July 2007 and a member of Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 since April 2013.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

My nuclear childhood: H-bombs, ICBMs, and cork-lined pop bottle caps as the surreal backdrop to 1961-62 tricycle adventures on a small planet

On Monday, Oct. 30, 1961, the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed was set off in an airburst test over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Russian Arctic Sea. The Soviet ‘Tsar Bomba’ had a yield of 50 megatons, or the power of around 3,800 Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously. The mushroom cloud from the Soviet detonation of “Tsar Bomba” was so large that the photographers had a hard time capturing its full dimensions.

A Tu-95V bomber was modified to carry the weapon, which was equipped with a special parachute that would slow its fall, allowing the plane to fly a safe distance from the blast. The aircraft, piloted by Andrey Durnovtsev, took off from the  Kola Peninsula on October 30, 1961. It was joined by an observer plane. At approximately 11:32 a.m. Moscow time, Tsar Bomba was dropped over the Mityushikha Bay test site on the deserted island of Novaya Zemlya. It exploded about 2.5 miles (4 km) above the ground, producing a mushroom cloud more than 37 miles high; the flash of the detonation was seen some 620 miles away. The resulting damage was equally massive. Severny, an uninhabited village 34 miles from ground zero, was leveled, and buildings more than 100 miles away were reportedly damaged. In addition, it was estimated that heat from the blast would have caused third-degree burns up to 62 miles distant.

I lived on Church Street in Oshawa, Ontario. I was 4½ years old and riding my tricycle illicitly up to St. Gregory’s church, rectory, and school parking lot with my friend Paul Drumm, who lived around the corner on Elgin Street. We were usually scouring the pavement, a block or two from our home bases and stay-at-home moms, for cork-lined pop bottle caps, which sometimes listed prizes under the crumbly cork – a variation somewhat of Tim Hortons’ Roll Up the Rim to Win® coffee contest, introduced 25 years later in 1986, and which has become one of the world’s largest customer rewards programs. In the early 1960s, pop bottle caps were still made of fluted metal with a natural cork liner that formed a seal on a glass bottle. Cork was phased out as a sealant in later in the decade.

Flash-forward to Oct. 27, 1962 – three days short of a year later. I was 5½ years old now in kindergarten and it would be more than a year still until JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“There was a chill in the air in Washington, D.C., at least for the mid-fall season, on that autumn Saturday. The high only made it up to 12°C ( 54°F) instead of the normal 18°C (64°F ) and a record low of -1 °C (30 °F) that still stands for the date was set in 1962.

“It was also Day 12 of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Day on the Brink. The day that it almost all spun out of control…

“By Oct. 27, 1962, the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC), based at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, had increased its readiness level to defcon 2 – one step short of nuclear war – and nearly 3,000 American nuclear warheads were aimed at targets in the Soviet Union. United States Air Force Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr. was flying Mission 3127, his sixth foray over Cuba as part of Operation Brass Knob. Anderson was in his U-2 reconnaissance spy aircraft 14 miles sky-high at an altitude of about 72,000 feet. He had already made one pass over Cuba and was approaching the island shoreline when the Soviets, who had just selected American mainland targets and moved their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to a firing position 15 miles from the U.S.-leased naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and fearful that Anderson’s mission would discover the fact, fired two SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at his U-2. One exploded behind Anderson and sent shrapnel into the cockpit, puncturing his pressure suit, probably killing him instantly. His U-2 broke apart, plummeted at least 60,000 feet, and crashed in Cuba…

“We can thank Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov for our date with doomsday dispensation on Oct, 27, 1962. The launch of the B-59’s nuclear torpedo required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Arkhipov held the rank of captain and was aboard but not captaining B-59 that day. Savitsky was. But that still left Arkhipov as second-in-command. Rounding out the senior trio of executive officers was political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov. While Savitsky and Maslennikov gave their consent to the submarine-based nuclear torpedo launch targeting the USS Randolf, Arkhipov, who died in 1998, refused, citing lack of confirmation that a nuclear war had started. He wanted B-59 to surface, which it did, refusing assistance from U.S. destroyers, and making its way slowly home to the Soviet Union.”

The final electronic link needed for pairs of land or sea-based missile operators to launch a nuclear strike is a row of randomly arranged numbers and letters for the Sealed Authenticator System code, one of the most closely-held secrets in the United States government, as the launch operators have to be confident that the emergency-action message actually comes from the President. The Air Force’s land-based Minuteman III missiles and the Navy’s submarine-based Trident II missiles require the eight-character Sealed Authenticator System code in order to be launched.

The National Security Agency produces the Sealed Authenticator System codes. Agency machines stamp the same computer-generated code of randomly arranged letters and numbers on two plastic cards. The machine then seals each card in a shiny metal foil. The code cards are nicknamed Sealed Authenticator System cookies because they look like wafer bars wrapped in tinfoil. The machine was specially built to do all the stamping and sealing itself, so no human eyes ever see the numbers and letters printed on the cards.

Some U.S. nuclear missiles are kept in a state of readiness that allows them to be launched within minutes after a decision to launch and are commonly said to be on “hair-trigger alert.” The military sometimes refers to this status as “high alert,” “ready alert,” “day-to-day alert,” “launch-on-warning status,” or “prompt-launch status.”

The exact number is classified, but experts estimate that the United States keeps a total of about 900 nuclear warheads on high alert. That estimate includes nearly all of the nation’s 450 long-range land-based missiles, each carrying one warhead, plus approximately 100 of its long-range submarine-based missiles, each carrying four or five warheads.

U.S. land-based missiles can be launched within five minutes of a presidential decision to do so, and submarine-based missiles within 15 minutes.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the barren plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range.

Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. During the Manhattan Project, he was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and responsible for the research and design of an atomic bomb. He is often known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Said Oppenheimer after the blast: “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Humbled by nature: 600,000 dead in U.S from COVID-19

“Fully vaccinated.”

Today’s the day. Wednesday, June 16, 2021. Two weeks have passed since my second dose of Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was administered.

Our parents generation had V-E Day or Victory in Europe Day, the public holiday celebrated on May 8, 1945 to mark the end of the Second World War in Europe, while V-J Day or Victory over Japan Day was celebrated Sept. 2, 1945 in the United States, Aug. 14-15, elsewhere by our Allies. But as he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad Gita ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Our generation now has its own individual V-Day: Vaccinated against COVID-19 Day.

Some 675,000 Americans died over three years between January 1918 and December 1920 during the three waves of the Spanish Flu pandemic when the country’s population was 103.2 million. Today, the population of the United States is more than 331 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today.

COVID-19 is the second-deadliest plague in modern history, having killed as of June 15 more than 600,000 people in the United States in slightly more than 16 months. The COVID-19 death toll stands at about 3.8 million case fatalities worldwide. It’s unusual clinical course of unpredictability in patients, ranging from an asymptomatic infection the person isn’t even aware of to death in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU), often with no good explanation available even after age and comorbidities are accounted for, makes it all the more terrifying. Some diseases are so deadly death is almost certain. COVID-19 is not like that. Rather it is like playing a macabre viral version of Russian Roulette. Maybe. Maybe not.

At the same time, effective messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) and viral vector vaccines offering full protection against COVID-19, some of which were relegated to the scientific research backburner since their initial discoveries and on-again, off-again preliminary work in the mid-1980s, were brought to fruition in warp speed in 10 months rather than the normal 10 years it takes to bring a new vaccine to market. Despite the COVID-19 vaccines impressive efficacy and good safety record to date, I’m under no illusion that we the vaccinated are not all part of a population level experiment. We surely are. Not something I would have said in advance I’d be anxious to sign up for, but as the Scottish philosopher James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quotes in 1777 the latter to say: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

And, of course, as the last 18 months have unfolded, all of this has been accompanied by an “infodemic” of social media and real life (if there is still that separation for some) sometimes accidental misinformation but more often deliberate disinformation from modern-day armchair Barbarian Visigoths, who revel in the propagation of their anti-mask and/or anti-vax propaganda. Until they die of COVID-19. It’s not like we didn’t have a heads-up of what to expect on this front in the battle against COVID-19. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioural regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.

All pretty remarkable, since the name COVID-19 didn’t exist prior to Feb. 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) named what had been provisionally known as Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV and first reported from Wuhan, China on Dec. 31, 2019. In terms akin to chaos theory, think of it perhaps as the as the Wuhan butterfly effect, regardless of whether the origins of COVID-19 should someday prove to be natural or the result of a gain-function experiment gone awry resulting in an accidental lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is the entity within the International Union of Microbiological Societies, founded in 1927 as the International Society for Microbiology, and responsible for developing the official classification of viruses and taxa naming (taxonomy) of the Coronaviridae family, proposed the naming convention SARS-CoV-2 for what would become known as COVID-19. The World Health Organization, perhaps finding the recommended name a tad too resonant politically to SARS from the not-so-distant past, opted instead for the official name COVID-19.

Human beings live in the realm of nature, they are constantly surrounded by it and interact with it. Man is part of nature, a humbling reminder for all of us to what we so quickly forget 15 minutes after the last pandemic ends. Until the next one begins.

The first time I wrote on what would soon be characterized as the current pandemic was on Jan. 23, 2020. A week later on Jan. 30, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian biologist, following the recommendations of the WHO Emergency Committee, declared that the Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). On March 11, the WHO elevated the viral outbreak to the status of full-blown pandemic.

The headline to my Jan. 23, 2020 post wondered, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ (The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ | soundingsjohnbarker (wordpress.com) In a matter of weeks, there was no question the question mark could be dropped and the sentence turned into a categorical statement; it was indeed the fire this time, and the “big one” had arrived as an unwanted New Year’s Eve 2019 guest.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22